Continuing our rework of the weapon skill trees, this overhaul changes several abilities and introduces 8 new unlocks for the Staffs tree.

Staffs are designed to support a variety of builds: a glass-cannon mage, a front-line battle mage, or a pure bludgeon bonker. Our goal was to accentuate these styles and give you meaningful tactical decisions for each.

The centerpiece of this update is a new mechanic: Movement Advantage. This is the first instance of a "turn action" bonus, which allows for multiple actions on the same turn.

These bonuses appear in their own dedicated area above the hotbar on the right:

As part of this shift, we've retired the "Retreat Chance" mechanic on Low Grip (which was always a bit clunky) and replaced it with Movement Advantage.

When attacking in the Low Grip stance, you now have a chance to gain a free tile of movement. You can use this to safely create distance after a strike (perfect for mages) or to aggressively close the gap for your next hit.

This mechanic also paves the way for some fancy stuff we have planned for upcoming magic skills. For now, it's a powerful tool that makes Staff combat feel significantly more fluid. We'll leave the rest of the tree for you to explore!

Need to reset your skill tree?

The Staff skill should reset automatically upon loading any v0.5.20 save, refunding your focus points.

If necessary, you can manually reset this (or any other) skills using cheats:

• enable debug mode in Options -> General.
• open console commands using F8 or ~, and enter the command "skillreset <skill>" (e.g., "skillreset staffs") to refund your spent focus points.
• it's recommended to turn off debug mode afterwards.

In previous versions, once you joined a battle there was no escape: you either won or you died. My intention with this was to prevent cheesing by entering and exiting the same fight, and to ensure joining a battle was a commitment with some weight.

As it turns out, being locked into battles is kind of lame! Feedback received. Now, you can step off the map edge to escape, assuming no enemies are in view. This also works for escaping normal wilderness tiles.

All placeable furniture can now be rotated, using the [Tab] key or right-click. Decorate your houses without limitation.

Added language support for 8 new languages:

• Polish
• Turkish
• Thai
• Ukrainian
• Italian
• Czech
• Hungarian
• Dutch

• Targeted melee and ranged ability ranges now scale based on the player's current attack range. In other words, weapons with +1 range, such as Zweihander, grant +1 range to targeted abilities.
• Status effect icons can now be hidden via right-click; hidden icons remain hidden until removed and can be made visible again by clicking the text at the top of the screen.
• Introduced smaller UI scaling options (down to x0.75) and smaller world scaling options (x0.75 and x0.5).
• Added a right-click context menu to lootable items, to allow bulk item operations ("Take 50", "Take 100", etc).
• Buying a house in a settlement now causes its prosperity to rise, with the amount of the increase depending on the cost of the house.
• Gremlin Researcher quest giver will now accept unidentified potions (if they are the correct type).
• Implemented background improvements in memory handling and caching to reduce garbage collection frequency (better performance).
• Limited the size of notification log text history to 100 messages to prevent excessive memory consumption.
• Ability cost reductions now apply to additional movement and attack costs incurred by specific toggle abilities like Low Grip.
• Updated the description of Overcome the Odds to better reflect that it cleanses all disabling effects, including sleep and various combat debuffs.
• Tumbling and Sprint tooltips now display their respective XP rewards.
• Item weight reduction is now capped at 100% to prevent equipped item weight from being calculated as negative.
• Added honey item to various shops and loot tables to make the Forest Tea medicine recipe more accessible.
• Black Bears now have a chance to spawn in forests and plains.

• Added a new Audio option "Audio Latency", along with audio changes to help address sound delay issues on Steam Deck (investigation into this issue is ongoing and will continue). For PC users it is recommended to use leave Audio Latency on the default setting.
• Fixed enchantments which apply a status effect missing an icon.
• Fixed some quest dialogue topics greyed out prematurely, despite player not having selected them.
• Fixed "Blurring Speed" and "Swift Economy" upgrade abilities not functioning while High Grip 2 or 3 were active.
• Fixed the starting town of Nerton occasionally having multiple bandit hunt quests simultaneously (these quests are intended to be spread out).
• Fixed a potential crash occurring when loading save games containing mutated creatures.
• Fixed selected text log group resetting to 'World' upon loading a save game.
• Fixed error screen text appearing as undisplayable characters for certain localizations, such as Chinese on Windows.
• Fixed defending faction always displaying as Verdant Guard in settlement defense battles due to incorrect guard captain spawning.
• Fixed Nyris Maw creature spawning partially out of bounds when its seed was adjacent to the map edge.
• Fixed Gremlin Terror quest dungeon name not matching the quest log description.
• Fixed game option changes sometimes triggering a "Restart Required" pop-up even when no changes were made.
• Fixed items stacking too eagerly in creature, NPC, and player inventories, which could result in lumping different item types together and losing unique items.
• Fixed player stats not updating immediately after enchanting an equipped item.
• Fixed dungeon floor visual artifacts in OpenGL mode that left black tile borders on certain floor types.
• Fixed Pyromancer and Fulminar backgrounds not receiving ascension checkmarks.
• Fixed invisible obstacles appearing in town squares where travelling merchant stalls were previously located.
• Fixed UI missing title text in overworld army battle infoboxes.
• Fixed legendary enchantments being usable without the Legendary Enchanting passive ability.
• Fixed "Requires N Focus Points" notification incorrectly displaying the required skill level instead of the focus point amount.
• Fixed ammo recovery triggering for abilities that do not use ammunition, such as Mark Prey or Renew.
• Fixed crossbow abilities failing to recover bolts, despite ammo recovery stat.
• Fixed player ability debuffs failing to apply if another debuff was already present on the target.
• Fixed Lingering Wounds not functioning with the Debilitated status applied by Debilitating Slash upgrades.
• Fixed error calculating estimate battle completion time when additional attackers joined an ongoing battles.
• Fixed supplies provided by Sagohai becoming unidentified upon interacting with a storage UI.
• Fixed pixel misalignment in ground rendering that caused visible lines depending on camera position.
• Fixed world rendering and centering not responding immediately to window resizing or maximization.
• Fixed killed creatures in some situations not being completely removed from the map, which could lead to various issues, particularly with summoned creatures.
• Fixed multistrike damage dealing full damage instead of partial damage to secondary targets.
• Fixed Flame Aura failing to log reflected fire damage and reflecting damage against non-melee attacks.
• Fixed ability XP rewards unintentionally lowering when an ability was upgraded.
• Fixed Cripple Defense not being unlockable after unlocking Exploit Weakness, despite the displayed upgrade path in the Maces skill tree.
• Fixed game getting stuck in a "moving" state when attempting to keyboard-move into an immobilized ally.
• Fixed potion Purifying Elixir unintentionally cleansing curses, marks, and item-based effects.
• Fixed mouse cursor not refreshing its icons when attack range was modified via keyboard hotkeys.
• Fixed town lamp posts spawning on top of other town features like job boards.
• Fixed path highlighting flickering during keyboard movement while the mouse stayed still on a UI element.
• Fixed unable to use keyboard shortcut keys to trigger actions while the action menu was open.
• Fixed ability Precision Flourish not requiring any weapon; it now requires a Blade type weapon (and works with any multi-target weapon ability usable with Blades).
• Fixed ability Noble Steel Resonance missing weapon requirement.

The coming new magic faction is well into in development and will be released as soon as possible. We have much planned for this year and thank you for your patience!

• Fixed workbenches and enchanting tables becoming invisible upon loading save games from previous versions.
• Fixed UI and World scale settings incorrectly defaulting to values other than x1.
• Fixed overworld quest markers vanishing on mouse-over.
• Fixed a potential crash occurring when exiting a map.

• Fixed a potential crash occurring when Sand Wyrm used its area-of-effect ability near the map edge.

• (likely) fixed sound effects becoming delayed over extended play sessions on Steam Deck OLED. This involves several changes to better sync audio buffer cycles with SteamOS's PipeWire audio timing.
• (likely) fixed a crash affecting macOS users. When newer Macs simulate Intel-based hardware repeated rapid audio requests would overtax the system's native memory allocator. To fix, we added smarter caching & reuse of audio resources to reduce hardware calls.