Beta Patch: Frontier Patrols, Dwarves, and Economy Balance - v2.0.0-beta.3543

──────────────────────── NEW FEATURES ────────────────────────

• Patrols is now "mostly" done ;) Enjoy the freedom to assign a party to a region and that party will automatically pick up quests that pop-up in that zone. This will become very important when World Events are live and shit ton of goblins show up out of nowhere near the Shallow Sea.

• I have the Deepforge Compact system enabled on Beta, but I will likely turn it off for the Live Patch tomorrow. This is the automated crafting/refining/gearing system that I'm cooking. Once you hit Tier 4, you need to befriend the Deepforge dwarves (complete some quests for them) and complete a story, then you can build the Forge.

• Academy Prospects gains a "Train All Qualifying (N) · Ng" button that applies Special Training (+2 role stats, no downside) to every prospect with an available intervention in one click. It's disabled with the shortfall named when you can't cover the summed cost, and never applies Push Harder.

• Two new Hall of Fame milestones: "The Frontier Remembers" for breaking your first named region threat, and "Saga's End" for breaking one at tier 3 or higher.

• Every frontier region now keeps a permanent record of the strongest threat ever broken there, named on the region panel and untouched by the year-end reset.

• The Year-End Celebration and the Season Chronicle now close the season with your frontier deeds — threats broken, patrol contracts handled, incidents repelled, and your longest hold — shown only if you patrolled at all.

• Taking a rival's home frontier now brings a sealed letter from their guildmaster and costs you 10 trust with them.

• When a protector retakes their own home frontier, they make sure word reaches you — no trust change; losing ground is its own cost.

──────────────────────── QUALITY OF LIFE ────────────────────────

• Constructing a building that unlocks a workshop station now hands you that station at level 1 free instead of an empty slot. Existing saves receive the free level for buildings they have already raised, and a purchased level is never downgraded.

• Refined goods whose real purpose is being crafted with are marked as crafting inputs on Workshop recipe cards and market rows, so a sink good never reads as a trade good.

• Material Processing cards now carry a green/red value-added chip showing output minus input at market rates, matching the number in the detail pane exactly (crafter grade, Artisan output bonus and station yield included).

• Narratively special contracts now read as special at a glance: Party of Heroes, Set Commission, and Faction Exclusive writs carry a loud top banner, an accent frame, and a glow on the quest board, with the required hero or party named in the banner itself. Special raid bounties get the same identity instead of reading as plain bounties.

• Those banner labels and tooltips are translated across all 18 maintained languages.

• Prospects who are on track or excelling now show an emerald ✨ when Special Training is available, count toward the Academy attention badge, sort to the top of the list, and their mid-semester report says so.

• Applying an intervention now prints an inline confirmation of what it did — "+2 STR, END" or "Pushed harder: +3 … · −10% next semester" — instead of the buttons just vanishing.

• A mild rivalry that scores positive chemistry is now labelled "Friendly Rivalry", so the green value no longer reads as a bug.

• The Maverick ambition now states its condition plainly: win 10 quests where your party's power was below the quest rating.

• Gear advice, quick-equip and auto-equip can now steer by class as well as role — a Monk is now pointed at a Staff instead of a heavy sword or mace.

Patrols

• The region panel's patrol block is now a tinted amber card that names its state in the header — "Held 6w", "Patrolling", or "No patrol" — instead of dim ledger text.

• Station a patrol from full party rows: portraits, party name, member first names and OVR, with the captain ringed, and the whole row is the button.

• Standing orders now read in plain language — Cautious, Balanced, Bold, All-out — each with a line stating what it does ("Takes on even fights, but backs off from ones it would likely lose"). The same one-tap control appears on the picker and on the stationed card, so changing orders never means hunting for a setting.

• Unsurveyed regions now show supply routes as a goal: clear the required number of quests to survey the region and open caravan routes, with a progress bar, instead of a cost-and-risk sheet behind a "survey first" blocker.

• A rival protector fights harder for home ground: while your patrol is stationed in their home frontier, their presence accrues 1.3× faster. Taking a tier-8 protector's home drops from roughly 68% to 56%, tier 9 from 49% to 42%, and tier 10 remains a fortress.

──────────────────────── BALANCE ────────────────────────

• Refining now depends on your workstations: advanced recipes need the profession's station at level 1, exotic recipes at level 2, and standard recipes need no station at all. Blocked recipes name the station and level required, and auto-refine, provision planning and quick-craft all skip them. Stations whose unlocking building you can't yet build never gate, and the Deepforge crew works from its own forges regardless.

• Hardwood Frame and Reinforce Stone now require a Construction Yard.

• Commissions pay a per-item premium for specificity: ×1.50 when a base item type is named, ×1.25 when a stat class is named.

• Letting a Crown or rival commission expire now costs favor and trust respectively, instead of being free while rejecting it charged half.

• Auto-refine now runs the best-margin recipe you can actually work for a material instead of the first one on the list — essence, scrolls, and codices no longer quietly refine down the losing route.

• Routes to the same refined good now sit within 15 points of each other, so picking a chain is a choice about inputs rather than a hidden trap.

• Commodity refining margins are standardized by band: about +10% for standard goods, +15% for advanced, +25% for exotic.

• No crafting-input recipe loses more than 20% of its input value any more; the deep money-losers are gone, while a mild loss on a good that pays off downstream is left intact by design.

• Refined material prices and recipe ratios were retuned as one coherent set, and a few refining runs now return a byproduct alongside their main output.

• Gear material bills were re-cut across 71 recipes and four arcane recipes moved up to the Advanced tier, so crafting at matched skill turns a profit at every tier and higher tiers pay more in absolute gold.

• Rendering meat into oils is a deliberate ~-5% loss and is now marked manual-only: it never gets auto-refined, never gets suggested by a one-click craft, and the recipe card says so plainly.

──────────────────────── BUG FIXES ────────────────────────

• A Commander's Briefing no longer praises a member in the same breath it tells you to cut them — a keep-or-praise follow-up about the flagged troublemaker is held back while the morale crisis names them.

• Rivalry and grudge feed cards no longer say the opposite of what happened: a successful quest reads "tensions easing", a failure reads "intensified after failure", and only the deepening case is flagged as notable.

• Cloaks now equip to an accessory slot instead of eating the body-armor slot. Owned cloaks move to a free accessory slot on load, or return to the pool if both are taken, freeing the armor slot for real armor.

• A stationed patrol that takes a region quest no longer reads as plain "Questing" on the Front Desk party dashboard — it reads "On Patrol" with its region, weeks held, and what it's currently doing.