Stoneshard Update #62 – Tweaks & Changes

Prior to launching their crowdfunded roguelike RPG Stoneshard into Steam Early Access, the Ink Stain Games team brings us this Kickstarter update detailing some of the recent tweaks and changes they introduced to spice things up. These include a placeholder cooking system, expanded map, new items and more. Have a look:

Hello everyone!

This devlog is dedicated to a variety of small tweaks and improvements, which have accumulated over the last few weeks.

Cooking

Ever since the old Prologue, many players have been cowmplaining that there are no uses for raw meat. In fact, we do have a fairly complex cooking and ingredient system planned, but implementing it is a very complex task, so it won’t be coming any time soon. Nevertheless, there is already a need for some option to cook meat acquired from hunting – that’s why we’ve added a small placeholder system, which will allow roasting it. To do it, you will need to find a campfire or an oven, start a fire, and cook raw meat through the context menu. Simple, fast, filling.

Expanded Map and More Dungeons

With the addition of a new village (we’ll tell you more about it in the next devlog), the necessity of expanding the map became rather apparent. As a result, the map is now almost twice as large. Every village is also surrounded with its own dungeons, which are repopulated with enemies after a certain amount of time.

New Items

The amount of available equipment has been increased with the addition of new, regular gear, as well as some special, unique items. Unique items can only be acquired in a single copy and are often gained in a very specific way – during certain encounters or as a rare drop after killing an appropriate miniboss. These are not legendary items, so they don’t have any unique properties, but they are generally better than the alternatives of the same level. All preset characters also start the game with two unique items, unobtainable in any other way.

Purses & Bags

During the closed beta, many players complained that inventory space is too limited and is too fast to get cluttered with gold. We’ve fixed this problem with the addition of purses – special containers, which can only hold crowns. A purse only takes up two inventory spaces, while being able to hold up to 2000 coins, saving lots of space.

Backpacks are equipped in the cloak slot, adding 12 extra spaces, which increases your inventory capacity by almost 25%. Why just 12 spaces? Because that’s the exact amount of space taken up by a backpack if you put it in your inventory. We wanted to avoid the situations when players fill their inventories with many backpacks to maximize their inventory capacity. In our game the small inventory size is vital for balance and is an important tactical element, meant to encourage players to plan and optimize their equipment.

We don’t plan to add item stacks, as they interfere with the sense of size for each individual item. However, we plan to add more bag types for different items, such as tubes for storing scrolls, alchemy pouches for potions and ingredients and so on.

Geomancy Tweaks

Geomancy is the most unique magic school in the game at the moment. However, it had many problems: it was fairly independent from gear, and it could become an absolute weapon from level one.

Our goal was to fix it without affecting other well-loved abilities. As a result, Runic Boulder, the cornerstone of the skill tree, was the only ability which got significantly rebalanced. Its problems included overly strong bonuses, lack of cooldowns, and no adverse effects of using the spell. These factors resulted in preventive boulder spam before each battle instead of placing boulders tactically.

To fix this, we’ve rebalanced the effect of Runic Empowerment, making it less versatile. We’ve also added a small 2 turns cooldown between raising boulders, as well as introduced energy cost for maintaining them. Each boulder now drains 2 energy points per turn. If your character’s energy runs out, the summoned boulders crumble. On top of this, boulders crumble if the caster loses sight of them, so it’s no longer possible to lure enemies into rooms with pre-casted boulders.

Some other geomancy spells also had their numbers tweaked: for instance, stone spikes and stone armor durations have been reduced. To compensate for that, energy costs for all geomancy spells are lower as well – it’s now possible to create more complicated spell combinations without running out of energy. Thanks to these combined changes, geomancy now feels way more tactical, while still being very powerful in skilled hands, remaining just as fun to use as before.

That’s all for now. Until next time!