Soulash 2 Demo update v0.4.0 - Thievery Skill & Crime System

Greetings fellow gods,

Today is a great day! In celebration of reaching 7,000(!) wishlists, a critical milestone for any indie developer, and to thank you all for taking your time to hunt down bugs and provide great feedback, I've decided to release a major update for the demo and extend its duration until Early Access is available.

Today's update introduces a new skill - Thievery and a new accompanying settlement mechanic, the Crime System.

Thievery is a dagger-related skill primarily focused on utility and criminal activities. It will provide access to unique actions like pickpocketing, robbing, and passing through walls and obstacles, and it has bonuses to a new weapon property - Critical Hit, as well as some unique single-use recipes for usable items in combat. More details will be available in the upcoming Friday devlog, so join us on Discord to get notified when it goes public.

The Crime System is another new addition to the game, introducing bounties for taking someone's property or committing crimes. The bounty applies to the player characters only for now. It allows us to pay off our crimes in the Knowledge Screen's settlement entry to mitigate the aggressive behavior in the settlement we've caused.



Beware that some actions in certain cultures, like cutting down trees in the elven region, may be unforgivable, and the only acceptable outcome for the NPCs would be the character's death.

Criminal activities are marked with a red border around the action icon.

Additionally, the push action from Athletics was replaced with the throw action - it allows throwing heavy objects on the ground and dealing damage depending on the character's strength and weight of the thrown object. It's pretty fun to throw corpses or logs around.



Thank you all for your feedback and bug reports, and please continue to spread the word about the game as the EA release gets closer. Every wishlist counts and will help us reach a broader audience on release. I'll announce the EA release date in November.

Full changelog available below:

Added

- New crime system with bounties placed on player characters for committing crimes. See the Crime tutorial entry for more details.
- Thievery skill.
- Athletics skill now provides access to Throw action, which allows throwing heavy objects at a distance depending on character strength and weight of the object. If the object goes into contact with an entity with health, it will damage it depending on the thrown object's velocity and the target's endurance.
- New weapon property - Critical Hit.
- The world history now continues to simulate during playthrough as days go by.
- Added Swap Weapons action under X (shift + x) hotkey by default.
- Added Rest action button above the ability bar.
- Added a tooltip to the craft button informing of missing tools.
- Added information to item tooltips about which skill will be trained on salvaging.

Changed

- Push action from Athletics has been removed.
- Improved graphics of a few tiles.
- The minimum damage on the successful basic attack is 1 instead of 0.
- Bandage now requires linen and herbs to craft, and it's regeneration rate increased by 50%.
- Family buying discount changed to 25%.
- Reduced base sell prices to 70% from 80%.
- Tools used in an alternative set of wielded items are used automatically, the same as if they were in a backpack.
- Sickle is now a Harvester instead of Cutter.
- Flax from Flax Plants will now be harvestable instead of gatherable.

Fixed

- Fixed invalid skeleton archer portrait.
- Fixed an issue that caused elven tavern to sometimes not generate properly.
- Fixed missing light / extinguish action icon.
- When changing the resolution, the font sizes reset to default values for a new resolution.
- Fixed Sleep Until Dawn / Dusk tooltips in the action selection wheel.
- Fixed an issue that allowed traveling on the world map until starving, which resulted in a crash.
- Fixed trading more units than available.
- Fixed an issue that prevented going down the stairs while standing on top of them.
- Fixed an issue with roofs being set up improperly when starting the game.
- Fixed names in the Knowledge Screen going outside of the list bounds.
- Fixed crash on death.
- When choosing the sleep action on resting place, the character moves on top of it before sleeping.
- Fixed thorns not applying to crafted items from resources.
- Fixed selling prices to family members to be on par with other settlement families.
- Crafted resources, food, and usable items no longer accumulate value from resources used to make it.
- Fixed Scavenge hotkey in the inventory screen.
- Usable items no longer acquire statistics from resources used.
- Fixed the resource filter when selecting a slot in crafting to hide invalid resources properly.
- Fixed drinking milk to incorrectly reduce the liquid source value instead of consuming the stack.
- The quarterstaff recipe from Adventuring is now properly unlocked.
- Fixed an issue that caused history events to sometimes generate with invalid surnames.
- Shoot / Throw hotkey was removed from Keymap.
- Fixed an issue that caused a flickering recipe list when selecting a recipe on the building menu.
- Fixed an issue that caused the unintentional placing of the build object behind the recipe selection menu.
- Fixed an issue that sometimes caused the character to walk to the stairs when attempting to jump down.
- Fixed an issue that caused AI actors to sometimes continue to move each other while in combat.
- Fixed an issue that caused the special location icon to sometimes revert to a question mark after completion.