itch.io

Did I nerf it too hard, do you think? 

I managed to load your save and test the fixes I've put in for the lag problem -- so far, so good. Fingers crossed it holds up for you when I release the patch. By the way, man you have some good gear! I got sucked right in to where you left off here, as you can see.... 

P.S. the save file shows 30,411 turns - impressive :-) 

night! thanks

I'm working on it at a deep level of the code - it's definitely a problem in the game and not user issues or anything. Pls bear with me and thx thx thx for the updates. I'm actually analyzing a save game file that TimBirms shared, which will help me abstract the problem out. SMOOTH roguefort coming soon 

Thanks so much - I can confirm I've been able to access it now and I'll work on it after work today. I've got some routines written that are doing analysis of bottlenecks in the code (I've got a bot that can randomly play the game to test this stuff) so I'll assess the results later on. Really appreciate all the trouble you went to sharing this file - it's really helpful.

Sorry for the lost messages - that really sucks. Rest assured all your bug reports are in transit right now and will appear in the next patch, and in the devnotes. And the quality of life / visual polish stuff too e.g., the floor tiles in dungeons. I'm on it :-) 

woohoo thanks 

Thanks so much Ezzlar! I love to hear that it's coming up Milhouse with the bug fixes - I hope it's smoother sailing for your run! 

I love the questions! Thanks for flagging it - yep good question. That's not intended - the Itch app is re-launching the installer exe each time instead of the actual game. I'll swap the Windows download to the portable exe (no installer needed, just click and play) which should fix it! 

I might ask if you could please report back if it works ok? (This will be for the 0.3.8 version incoming). I note that one Windows user had an issue with the portable exe a few weeks ago so I started uploading the installer exe, which solved it. But yeah, not ideal, especially with so many updates.

Thanks for all this information as always, chief playtester @thesquirrel123. Messages well received and I will work on this as a priority -- I'll report back 

Hey TimBirms, thanks again for all this feedback. I will be working on these changes today. Thanks for sharing the save file - I requested access just now. This will be instrumental for debugging the performance issue, as I have not been able to reproduce it unfortunately yet, which meant I was doing educated guesswork for the fixes. I'll work through each and every bug/issue reported here, and it will all be in the devnotes for the next patch, but I'll keep you posted. If you have any other requests please pop them in the comments below. BTW I still couldn't find your original messages (could you please post them again if possible)?

Thanks so much Ezzlar as always - I'm signing off for the night now as I need to get some actual sleep tonight, ha! But I'll get back to you tomorrow and yes I will sort each and every one of these bugs and issues out, and any feature requests too. 

You're welcome and thank YOU for the bug reports! Without these I'd be blissfully ignorant, much to the dismay of many players I'm sure. Can I ask: has it solved most of the ones you experienced? 

Hey TimBirms! That's great to hear that the nights feel right now and you've having fun with it, although you raise a bunch of critical points that need to be addressed.

First, can I ask what do you mean by 'to be moderated messages' in the main chat? Please forgive me - I don't know where to find the main chat. Is that the comments on the game's main page? I have searched for them but I can't find them! I'm very sorry about this. But when I can figure it out, I'll certainly address all the feedback, and thank you for putting it all together and sharing it. 

I'll be working across both itch.io and Discord, then later on the Steam version too. So don't worry, I won't be going anywhere and will monitor here continuously. Although I just have to solve the issue of the missing messages from you! 

You know what, I've been needing to do this for so long but as I'm so old in my ways I just haven't gotten around to it. So yes, thank you!! This is really necessary and I feel like I should have done this a long time ago. You're not overstepping boundaries at all - I really appreciate this! I'll log into it now.

Thanks so much, Briarios, I really appreciate that. We're only at the very early stages of this game - I have huge plans for it and yeah I'm aiming for it to evolve on Steam so I can make sure it's sustainable. To be honest, what spurs me on is just making a world and sharing it with random people who come along and take an interest. But yeah, I want to really make this into one of the most complex, deep, mind bogglingly epic open world RPG roguelike simulation type games out there. And I couldn't do it without all the bug reports and feedback I've been getting (and yeah the praise is always nice but not why I do it!) so I'm hugely thankful for that!

Re: your question, here's the deal with homesteads. A homestead is a 32 x 32 plot of land that you personally claim in the overworld. It's your pastoral base for raising livestock, milking animals, and making cheese. To get one, you need to buy a Homestead Deed from a general store vendor:

- 200g at Tier 2 general stores
- 150g at Tier 3+ general stores

Once you have the deed, use it from your inventory while standing in the overworld. You'll get a placement cursor to choose where to put the homestead plot. After that, the H key build menu will work for it but only when you're standing inside your homestead bounds. That's why you're getting the "requires a homestead" message. The structures (troughs, milking stools, cheese vats, cheese presses, cheese caves, fences, gates) are all homestead-only buildings. 

I do worry it's too arcane or specific as a feature - that's almost certainly the case actually. So I will need to at least make it more accessible but happy to take suggestions. I might just ditch the homestead plot... I dunno yet. 

Thank you Briarios! I really appreciate the kind words. Oh don't worry, it is being fleshed out and I'll probably have to at some point soon draw a line in the sand for the itch.io version, so the Steam version can become what I always imagined for the game (and also there'll be an incentive to buy it rather than just play on here haha). At the end of the day, I'm here for the praise from randoms - I mean, I just am happy to be making something people connect with and enj

Enjoy! 🙏🙏🙏

Hey @sometimesihavequestions, wow thanks for taking the time to post these - that's really helpful to know. 

OK I went through all of these and a bunch of them are actually fixed in 0.3.7 (the patch that's about to drop), though a few are not, and I will patch them in, so thanks for that!

Shelves / weapon racks / bookshelves - yep you were 100% right, they were just decorative before. OK so I will patch into 0.3.7 so they all have storage now and work like mini chests (4 slots each). You can just right-click them to use them. If you think 4 slots is a little too small pls let me know and I'll change it up 

Pink question mark items is also fixed in 0.3.7. That was a weird desync between how items were being stored in the world vs how they were being drawn, so sometimes they'd show up as placeholder nonsense. A few others noticed that issue so it's hopefully gone for good now 

Lowercase toads hahaha yes. I added a proper marsh toad sprite, so they should look like actual toads now instead of weird little ASCII glyphs. This was an issue for a few creatures actually e.g., yaks and others 

Cooking fish turning into all minnows - great catch. I didn't know about this but I will patch it it in right away. All cooked fish were accidentally sharing the same internal ID, so when they stacked they’d just become whatever was already in the stack. Fixed in 0.3.7 - cooked fish will now keep their own species properly.

Cooked meat / blossom curds not stacking - Fixed in 0.3.7 too. They should stack normally now.

Dungeon walls vs floors - Also in 0.3.7. I made dungeon walls noticeably lighter so they’re easier to read against the floor across the different dungeon biomes. A few people asked for this in the comments and actually it drove me INSANE but I kept putting it off or forgetting. 

Frozen enemies / infinite kills - yeh this one was nasty. There was a race condition where if you attacked while the game was still resolving the previous turn, it could look like you were hitting something but the damage never actually got committed. So enemies could end up stuck there forever while you farmed them. Same root issue for the ranged version where arrows "hit" but didn’t really do anything. Should be properly fixed in 0.3.7.

Recipe drops - This one’s actually working as intended but the rates are just pretty low (roughly 3 to 6% depending on the creature). Maybe that's too low? The frozen enemy bug probably made them feel a lot more common than they really are, since it let you farm way more kills than normal. With that fixed, dungeons / POIs / bosses are the better way to chase recipes. I’ll keep an eye on the balance though and pls let me know if you think it's a bit unbalanced from your perspective. 

Lich King not summoning - that one was very dumb on my part 😅. He was trying to summon adds, but they were basically getting thrown into the void because of a bug caused by mutating an array mid-iteration. Fixed in 0.3.7, so bosses should now actually spawn reinforcements when they say they will. I had a very funny comment from another player about this. 

OK so last thing: I really appreciate you taking the time to write all this up and let me know. It's making the game so much more fun and polished for people, and helps me to get the systems more robust, so I can start to go deeper and crazier with the fun content to come. 

thank you! I’ve got you in the devnotes as official playtester now :-). I’m putting the final touches on the next update. It’s huge 

Ohhh a screenshot - I love to see what people's worlds and bases look like. This is so cool. 

Also, nice find! Golden cows are rare livestock and much more valuable than regular dairy cows. If you have a taming rope (buy from vendors or craft), you can bump into it to attempt taming (20% success chance). Once tamed, it follows you lead it back to a fenced pasture at your homestead and it'll settle in. Then you can milk it with a milking stool for golden milk, which makes premium cheese! If you don't have a homestead yet, you'll need to find a homestead deed from a vendor to claim land first 

Hey ElfieTheEspeon, thanks for the update - and I love that you’ve fully walled off your village with spike walls ha! Sounds like a proper fortress.

On crystals - they’re pretty rare in the overworld right now. They only spawn as mineral outcrops in mountain, volcanic, tundra, and desert biomes, so if you started in plains/forest/glade, it’s totally possible there just aren’t any nearby. That’s something I definitely want to improve.

The crystal miner is actually a Tower Defense mode worker, not an adventure mode NPC. So if you’re seeing something wandering in circles in adventure mode, it’s probably just a normal farmer-type NPC and not anything crystal-related. There aren’t crystal-gathering NPCs in adventure mode at the moment but I plan to change this. it's really a balancing issue as crystals should be special. 

Dungeons currently don’t respawn once cleared. This is to avoid balancing issues and also immersion issues where I am trying to make the world feel more inhabited and real, so if you make a choice or do something, it has a persistent effect, with often far reaching consequences. Your best crystal sources right now are dungeon chests from floor 2 onward (about a 20% shard drop chance), plus enemies like golems and crystal bats in rocky/mineral biomes.

For other settlements - the world is huge (40K x 40K), so they can be pretty spread out. Check your world map (M), and keep an eye out for waystones, signposts, and NPC rumors since those can all help point you toward nearby towns and villages.

Wayfarer’s Whey not bringing companions with you is a bug - they’re probably stuck wherever you used it. I’ll get that fixed so party members teleport properly.

Expandable minimap is a great suggestion - noted.

Raids spawning inside walls is also a known issue as I mentioned in the other comment. Right now they spawn 14-18 tiles from your campfire and only check if the tile is walkable, not whether it’s inside your defenses. I’m onto it right now with the next patch . In the meantime, since raids always come from the same direction, moving your home campfire can sometimes shift where they spawn.

Keep building though - your base sounds awesome! I'll be working hard to resolve these issues and perhaps make some conceptual changes to spawning of crystals and also dungeon resets for people who want to just become the Bane of their local dungeon hahha

Hey, this is a great question and actually you've hit on a legit bug here. Currently, enemies spawn 10 to 15 tiles from your base in a random direction. That was fine for the early development of the game but it's absolutely not intended and is something I've simply failed to spot until now. So I'm sorry about this bug! But I am fixing it right now. If you have an impenetrable base or even just a sprawling base, enemies will come "from the north" (or whatever direction) definitely from outside of it, rather than just spawning unfairly in an immersion-destroying kind of way. This will be in the 0.3.7 patch, coming out very shortly! 

Oh gosh, thank you @Phildjii - this is high praise. I was so stoked to discover your Salmon font - it's absolutely stunning. It's so crisp and just pops so much. You did an incredible job designing it. I would not only not mind, but in fact be honoured to have a screenshot added to the Salmon page. Please go for it - you have my blessing to use the game however you want for promotion, etc. Likewise, if you were able to add any new glyphs, a simple traditional roguelike dev like myself would love that :-). We can always use new symbols for fancy fonts. Thank you so much for the message. 

Good catch - this was a legit bug - the turret/ballista/catapult defense code was looking for your placed structures in the wrong data layer so it literally couldn't see them. Fixed for the next patch, they'll fire properly now. Thank you so sooo much for reporting this 

Hey so that is working as intended! The raid system scales based on how far you've explored from your starting point - so right now you're in the "assault force" tier which has Dominion Soldiers. Your hunch is right, once you push further out you'll start seeing Siege Ogres and bigger war bands. It ramps up pretty steadily so enjoy the relative calm while it lasts haha

Thank you thank you thank youuuu, for all these bug reports and hilarious observations from your travels into the depths of the game. It sounds like you're hitting mid to endgame content which is amazing!!

Just to let you know: I'm tracking all these comments and working on them for the next patch. Really appreciate this feedback - it's so valuable. It's also hilarious to read some of the things that have happened in your travels

Hey Ezzlar! Yep I totally relate to the need for cheese... I guess the game has leaned right into the cheesemaking aspect of DF, that's true haha. My hope is that the game fills a very very specific desire for DF players who want to actually wield legendary cheese and go full cheese kingdom. Well, let's see.

Thanks so much for sharing this bug report - that's absolutely so helpful and I am working through all the bugs right now, with a mega update due to come out later today. So, thank you! It sounds like you're enjoying the game despite the jank and bugs. Rest assured I'm working night and day and I hope to have ironed out all of these in the next update. I'll reply again when it's out. Thank you

You're absolutely right - I messed up and didn't set a cap on NPC lives calculations - your CPU must be so hot. Pls bear with me 

Thanks as always for your intel, thesquirrel123! Pls don't abandon all hope for your save yet - I'm working on it :-) 

Thank you! I've wanted to upgrade the map for a while now but it kept getting pushed down the list. Congrats on discovering your first dungeon! Did you manage to clear it? 

hey Briarios! Ahh I forgot to fix that one - it must have gotten lost in the mix. Should be fairly straightforward - I’ll fix that one up tonight - thanks for letting me know! I hope the rest of the updates have helped a bit 

This sounds absolutely wild - sorry these issues came up! Good news is I’ve addressed them in the patch will be coming very shortly (hours from now or less). Mushroom bloom is a random event but it did have a bug where it could trigger in the wrong biomes. Usually it should happen while you sleep too… but yes the other things, definitely bugs. Thanks for your patience and for letting me know! 

hey! You’re definitely not missing anything - I’ve checked the code and it was bugged. I’m very sorry! The good news is I’ve fixed it and will upload the new build very shortly. Then your farm will grow! Thx for the message and letting me know. I’ll msg again when new build is live 

awww thank youuuu 

haha I love this 

It is coming! Like Melkor in LoTR, a great primordial evil governs the realm of sentient beings in Roguefort - stay prepared, is all you can do 

It's only when you reach victory or die. In adventure mode I haven't wired up a "victory" condition yet so the only way to get a highscore unfortunately is to end your run. I know, that's terrible. I've got plans for adventure mode to have a "Retire" function where you can end your run and then leave your character as an NPC that you can interact with in later runs. That would trigger a leaderboard submission too. 

This is true - maybe later :-) 

Also, really interesting reflections on the gameplay loops that emerge out of the systems in the game. I figured some players would want to just start creating Megafort right from the get go, while others would pack up their stuff and go into the wilds, while others might want to live a city life. So to hear that you can get incentivised into a whole different playstyle is super interesting and I love to hear it!