This patch focuses mostly on improving the old, but I also snuck in some new things for you to check out.

Kobold rebalance

Kobolds were too weak and they were droping some quite expensive items. I addressed this by making them slightly tougher and replacing their current drops with new weapons. These are still quite strong, but they sell for much less.

Skipping cutscenes and game start section

Having to watch cutscenes and the intro section on subsequent playthroughs can be anoying (I tended to avoid the location where you meet Helena for the first time as long as posible, because I don't want to mash through all that dialogue). So I added a feature that allows you to skip both.

You will be unable to skip the intro on your first playthrough. When you get through it once, the game will remember that and the next time you start a new game, you will be able to skip this section.

This is saved in the "Unlocks" file, so if you keep this file around, the game will remember this across future versions. 

Cutscenes can be skipped even on your first playthrough. Basic cutscenes with very simple decisions giving you very little reward will be skipped altogether. Cutscenes with more important choices, like the one with the escaped concubine will skip you to the decision select box. Skipping it after that will skip the rest.

In the future, I will try make topic dialogue skipable, since these can be quite long too. But this should be good enough for now.

This was much harder to do than I expecter and took me several hours to figure out good enough solution. I went through all the cutscenes and they should work properly, but there might still be some bugs left. Be sure to please report them.

Custom music

I will be adding a radio item in the future, which will allow you to play music tracks you can find in the game world, or your own music you put in the correct folders. I don't have any original music yet, so I decided to put a temporary stripped down version of that system into the game for now.

You can put your own music files into the proper game folder and the game will recognise it and play it. You could technicaly do that on older versions, but you had to rename your music to replace existing files and you couldn't actualy add anything new. This system scans the folders for all music files, selects one at random and plays it, so you can delete the default audio, put one file in with whatever name you want and the game will play this one song on a loop. Or you can simply add new songs to existing ones and the game will select one randomly from both the old and new.

Music in "Hideout" folder will play only in your hideout and music in the "Overworld" folder will play everywhere else. Fights, cutscenes and caves will still force their own music to play when apropriate. There is a instructions text file in the "Audio" folder listing all suported formats.

Also, name your music in latin alphabet only. Symbols like "-" , "_" etc. will work fine, but russian, chinese or japanese letters will not work.

!Important! There is a bug that will stop music from playing after a battle. This happens seemingly randomly. You can fight 100 times and music will stay on, or it can stop playing after two fights. I couldn't replicate this bug, but it can be fixed by simply saving your game, quitting it completely and loading your save again. I will look into this in the future, but this bug was happening even in older versions, so it is nothing new.

New haircut

I added one new haircut. Talk to the barber NPC in front of the Riverstone Inn and he will make you switch between them.

 You can dye your hair and there are three length variants just like with the old haircut. It even changes your overworld sprite. There is nothing more to say really. 

Lastly, I've done some minor alterations to several transition. This should make some scene changes appear more smooth and should limit entity pop in / out. Again, if you find anything broken, please report it.

Next update

War update is still in the works. It will take a lot of time so it is possible I will be releasing another small update before the war system is finished.  Here are some things I want to work on.

New farming system

This is something I wanted to do for a long time. Current farming system is very old. I found it on the internet (made by DerVVulfman) and while it can do quite a few things, it didn't really fit the game that well. I had to do quite a few changes to it and it barely holds together. Main issue is the harvesting. The game lags every time you harvest something and audion buggs out. I have some rough plans for a completely new system, which will suit this game much better. However, this will mean that old save files will not be compatible with that version, so bear that in mind.

New character creation

Current system is pretty simple, but it doesn't really offer much freedom and some backgrounds are pretty useless. 

Future version will have a short, linear inro sequence. You will be making quite a few simple decisions, which will give your character traits/perks.  Subsequent playthroughs will simply allow you to select these from a list. 

Intro sequence will be coming much later. After I finish the tilesets for the game. So in the meantime, I will make the creation screen.

It will be a simple affair. If you played CDDA or zomboid, then you will know what to expect. You will get certain number of points. Some traits will cost you points while some, negative ones, will give you points. Can't create your character if they are bellow zero points. This system will give you more freedom with character creation and will make new games play differently. And ofcourse, you will be able to unlock infinite creation points.

Item description screen

Quite important. This screen will show expanded item / weapon / armor description. Things like ATK/DEF values and equip requirements for weapons and armor. Food will show you what values it has for direct eating or storing and so on.

So that's pretty much it for now. See you later.

Full changelog:

• You can now skip cutscenes
• Initial intro section is skipable if you played through it before
• Added system for playing custom music when in proper folders
• Added four new kobold weapons
• Adjusted loot and combat values of kobolds
• Added new hairstyle with three length stages and four colors
• Removed some week initialization parts from events and put them in a script
• Added transition effects to loading and battle screens
• Changed priorities of some events trigering
• Added simple spices to Riverstone trader
• Added vitamin shot. Can be bought from Tadeas. Costs 200, increases wellness by 10