Voices for the Living, a Queue for the Dead

My master, Vladimir de La Ligne, noticed two things on his last inspection. His bar had gone as silent as a crypt, and his servants were wrestling over the same corpse like gulls over a fish. He handed me a candle and pointed at the cellar door. Your staff talk again, your dead wait their turn, and a good many dials that lied have been taught some manners.

🕯️ New Comforts for Your Establishment

• A right click sweeps a minor alert away once you have read it. Stock, coin, panic and blood-shortage notices go quiet and come back only if their cause strikes again. A missing door or a sealed room still refuses to be waved off, as it should.

• The quest tracker now shows the time left on every running side errand, so none of them can expire behind your back. The offer panel threatens you with a deadline only when failing truly costs you something, so Papa Grenier's harmless deliveries have lost their doom-laden warning.

• The storage alerts take you shopping. The full-shelf and full-fridge warnings open the furniture shop straight on Storage, and a stock warning always lands on Buy instead of leaving you on Sell, where a hurried master could unload the very goods he meant to purchase.

• The greyed buttons explain themselves. Each one names its real reason or holds its tongue when the label already says it all, and every reason is finally written in your own language.

• The morgue limit you set is the law. Direct storage orders respect it, and it survives a save and a reload instead of quietly snapping back to nine.

⚖️ Balance & Tuning

• Your bar has its voice back. A mishap last June silenced twenty-five situational lines: nobody remarked on the last Manhole being sold, the fridges filling, hunters at the door or the nightly opening. All twenty-five are back, retuned to land about once a minute in a busy room. The worst offender, the full-fridge complaint, drops from 100% to 15% and now waits 8 minutes between grumbles.

• Every guest rolls his own dice for a chat. A single shy roll, shared by the whole room, used to decide each day whether anyone at all would strike up a table conversation, so one bad throw meant a silent bar until dawn. Each guest now rolls for himself.

• Investigators lose some of their zeal on the early bars. Their odds read your vigilance against a flat hundred, so they peaked while you were only halfway to a raid. They now read it against each district's own raid threshold, so the odds fall by half on the first bar and by less and less through the fourth. From the fifth onward nothing changes at all.

• Elder masters get room to breathe. On bars two through four, the guaranteed investigator visit stretches from every 15 days to every 25.

• Side-quest offers wait for a quiet moment of 2 seconds, with no conversation and no panel in the way, instead of barging in between two lines of story.

• Tooltips have been cut down to size. Titles drop from 40 to 36 and wrap inside their frame rather than shouting across the screen, reasons drop from 36 to 30, a delivery's cargo fits on one line again, and every tooltip now sits 10 pixels clear of the button it describes.

🩸 Bugs Banished

Progression & Quests

• The delivery quests notice your carts again. Blood shortage and Mortal Beverage asked you to receive a delivery, then ignored every crate that arrived and sat at zero forever. They count each cart that truly reaches your cellar, and a game already stuck on that step mends itself the moment you load it.

• Quest tallies stay honest across reloads. A reload could leave a running quest counting some deeds twice, so a tally crept ahead of what you had actually done. Counts advance exactly once per deed now, and a save already touched heals itself on the next load.

• Sleight of Hand waits until you own the means. The errand could be offered before The Dip was even researched, and the sewer drain never counted toward it however many bodies you fed it. It stays out of the rotation until The Dip is researched or standing in your bar.

• The restocking errands notice an already-empty bar. They fired only at the instant your stock ran dry, so a master who loaded a bar sitting at zero, or without a single shelf or fridge, was never offered them.

• An interrupted offer no longer signs in your name. The accept-or-refuse panel could pop while you were still leaving another story panel, then vanish on its own the moment new dialogue began. In the worst ordering it accepted the errand for you, timer and penalty included. An interrupted offer now counts as politely declined and returns to the rotation later.

Minions & Machines

• Two minions can no longer fight over one corpse. Sending a second servant at a body another was already grabbing snapped the corpse across the room and left the first standing idle, deaf to his own needs until you gave him any other order. A body now belongs to the minion handling it.

• A busy Manhole has an orderly queue. No servant hauls a corpse out of the Morgue to parade it around the bar while another occupies the drain, and an order aimed at an occupied sewer is politely declined instead of fought over.

• Selling the Manhole under a walking minion no longer strands him. He used to wander with the bag forever, in full view of your guests. He turns around and lays the body back in the Morgue until you provide a new exit.

• No disposal machine, no abandoned corpses. With every sewer and every The Dip sold, bodies stayed on the floor for good, even with room to spare. The Morgue takes them back, up to its physical capacity, while you rebuild an exit.

• A body carried through a save survives the journey. Saving and quitting while a minion carried a corpse made him drop the bag on load and abandon the errand. He picks up where he left off, body on shoulder.

• Changing chore priorities no longer gives your staff amnesia. Reshuffling the rules made minions forget the bodies they were told to manage and locked the manage button on a corpse forever. Orders survive your changes now, with no reload required.

• Selling an occupied cage frees its prisoner, screaming. Selling or demolishing a cage with a human still inside released them calm as morning, while the cage's own release button caused a proper panic. Both paths behave the same, exactly as that cage intends.

• Capture routines stop dithering in the dark. After a first successful hypnosis, a minion working the capture cell or the discreet kill could silently retry the next one forever, holding his target in an invisible grip. Each attempt starts fresh, and the grip lets go as it should.

Interface & Stability

• Minor stock alerts stop throbbing. The full-shelf and full-fridge notices pulsed with the same urgency as a door left unbuilt or hunters at your gate. They sit quietly in the alert row now; only warnings that block your night keep their pulsing ring.

• The credibility warning wears a skull instead of the manhole icon, which made a body too suspicious for your machines read like a plumbing notice.

• Right click treats a selected machine like any other. With the shop open, right-clicking a machine closed the shop, unless that machine happened to be selected already, in which case the shop stubbornly stayed. And a right click over any window no longer sends your minions marching underneath it.

• The camera answers the Vamp'Hire Agency again. After a blocking alert flew the view to the offending room, opening the agency turned the camera without moving it, leaving you to stare at the bar while the candidates waited off-screen. Holding right click on the way in could also fling the view out of bounds on the return leg.

• Tooltips stay on the screen. The long ones, a guest's credibility breakdown for instance, could slide past the edge of the display and cut their own text off.

🍎 A Word for the Coven on macOS

NB. This build is made for Mac as well. Your coffin had fallen behind the Windows one, so this version also carries everything from the two previous updates.

🦇 Keep the Reports Coming

I sharpen the game's fangs on your screeches and your cursed bug reports. Send them through the in-game report tool, or better, join our Discord coven where I lurk most nights. If you must use the old ways, the scroll reaches me at ludovic@clevertrickster.com.

If the game spared your sanity tonight, leave a review. It feeds the Steam algorithm, and it keeps me out of the coffin a little longer.

In my master's service,

Ludovic

Devoted servant of Vladimir de La Ligne

Praise Vladimir.