Roguefort v0.4.9

Hi everyone,

There are two headline features to announce today, plus a long list of fixes, tuning passes, and performance improvements coming out of community bug reports and my own stress-testing.

Thank you as always to everyone in Discord and on the Steam forums who has been sending suggestions my way and helping to test and improve the demo.

The Living Crew

This is the big feature in 0.4.9. Every worker on your homestead now has a full interior life and backstory.

When you hire a worker, they roll a procedurally generated name in the style of their home faction (Thymerock hyphen-clans, Roquelle chamber names, Brinehold dock porters, Grasse-Verdenne pastoral names, Fennmarche nature names, plus survivors from fallen towns, Shardwater exiles, Long Line garrison-kin, and hermit-folk). Each of them also carries a five part backstory drawn from the canon (currently a ~15k word document that keeps growing daily) : the blights, the battles, the fallen towns, and more. You can right-click a worker and pick "View biography" to read it anytime.

Every worker rolls personality traits across 13 possibilities in three tiers (Lazy, Industrious, Glutton, Gourmand, Sickly, Hardy, Hothead, Steadfast, Craven, Brave, Stoic, Hermit, Night-Owl), and those traits genuinely change behaviour. A Lazy worker drains fatigue faster. A Night-Owl works the graveyard shift instead of dawn-to-dusk. A Brave worker doesn't panic when a creature shambles by. A Hermit hates having other workers nearby. Workers also produce flavour "barks" based on their traits - a Craven worker will mutter nervously when a creature approaches, a Hothead will complain loudly when their wages go unpaid, and so on.

Workers have needs (fatigue, hunger, recreation, comfort), which feed into a four-state mood system (content, uneasy, frightened, hostile). If morale drops low enough, they might refuse to work, wander off, or quit outright. During off-duty hours they now seek out leisure anchors - campfires, hearths, taverns, wells, tables - and congregate there.

The workers also have relationships with each other. Every pair of workers carries an intimacy score driven by shared factions, shared archetypes, shared trait clusters, and lived experience. Workers from the same fallen town arrive as lost-home comrades. Workers who spend nights in adjacent bunks grow closer. Workers who survive creature attacks together forge bonds. Six relationship kinds emerge from the numbers: bond, kin, friend, comrade, indifferent, rival, and grudge. When one worker dies, their close friends grieve, and sometimes quit in solidarity, leaving their own obituary line: "...in solidarity with [name]". Walk past two adjacent workers who are close and you'll sometimes overhear them reminiscing. Walk past rivals and you'll catch a muttered complaint.

And when a worker does die or leave, their departure is marked by an obituary drawn from their backstory, written in a weathered, factual tone rather than the old flat "Worker died" line that was in the game to date. You'll now see things like "Dell Ropewater of Brinehold, dock porter, was paid off and sent on their way on Day 42. They walked out without speaking".

A new Crew Roster (press R) gives you the whole living crew at a glance, with heart and cross counts showing how loved or loathed each worker is.

Please note: old saves auto-migrate, so existing workers get names, backstories, traits, and relationships rolled in deterministically on next load.

Full gamepad support

After reports from Steam Deck and Lenovo Legion Go players who found that movement worked but menus didn't, the entire UI should now be fully navigable with a controller, with no mouse needed. Huge thanks to Gizmo for requesting this feature, as the gamepad support was barely half working, essentially. Inventory, quest log, crafting panels, dialogue, companion panel, spell belt, settings tabs, noticeboards, and every other menu now support gamepad input. There's a gamepad tile context menu and a new on-screen keyboard so you can name your character or rename a companion using the D-pad. A handful of other text inputs will get on-screen keyboard support in the next patch, and I'll be doing a big audit ahead of the next patch to ensure the game is fully playable with gamepad only.

Other additions

• Autosave toggle in Gameplay settings, for anyone who prefers to manage their own saves. Thanks Ghost Steelix for this suggestion.

• Salvage materials on destroy. Destroying equipment now has a ~55% chance to yield materials, scaled by item size and rarity (legendary gear yields 1.5x, cursed 0.5x). Flora, consumables, and books stay non-salvageable. Be warned: destroying gear next to a citizen or guard will earn you a public scolding for littering. Shoutout to RaycerzDiSword for this idea.

Tuning

• Whey fonts now restore hunger (+15) and thirst (+20) as well as HP. Thanks to Merlin the Questioner for the suggestion - as they put it, it's a bit odd to drink a liquid and have it do nothing for thirst, and they were right. Fonts are skipped (not consumed) if all three resources are already capped.

• Rest heal now scales with max HP. Endgame characters with around 200 HP were taking 400 turns to full-heal on a bed under the flat 1-HP rate. That's now 2% of max HP per interval (with a floor of 1), so full-heal time is roughly the same whether you're level 2 or level 30. Companions get the same treatment.

Performance

• Merged player line-of-sight and visible field-of-view into a single shadowcast pass, which noticeably smooths frame pacing during movement.

• Dungeon lag fix: particles clear more aggressively, old dungeon floors are pruned from memory, and more.. Deep dungeon runs should feel materially smoother. Massive thanks again to Merlin the Questioner for collaboratively debugging this one with me - they ran the in-game performance telemetry I patched in, generated multiple JSON dumps from the Mossy Undercroft, and crucially pointed out that simply returning to the title screen was enough to clear the lag (not just restarting the app). That detail is what narrowed the cause down to the overworld-to-dungeon transition path rather than anything about enemy density or visuals.

• Hoisted some hot-path lookups in the worker update loop, which was the main culprit for late-game lag on large homesteads.

Bug fixes

• Save & Title Screen were silently failing on some setups and that is now sorted. Thanks to SamV for the clear and detailed repro.

• Campfire heal and Set-as-Home regressions from the last round of changes both now work correctly again. Thanks to RaycerzDiSword for flagging the "always respawn at your house" symptom - the Set-as-Home change wasn't triggering an autosave, so setting home and then reloading before the next milestone would lose the change.

• Rapid-fire ranged attacks during lag no longer duplicate XP, gold, or loot. A narrow timing window during the shot animation was letting repeat F-presses re-damage already-dead targets and re-dispense kill rewards. Thanks to RaycerzDiSword for being disarmingly honest about finding the exploit and reporting it rather than just riding it - as they put it, it's not really a "fun" exploit that rewards mastery, it's a code problem.

• Inventory and chest panel keyboard scrolling: arrow keys past the viewport fold now scroll the selected slot into view, and PageUp/PageDown works the moment the panel opens instead of only after you click the scrollbar.

• Numpad movement now works regardless of NumLock state. Thanks to SamV for flagging that the behaviour was backwards compared to other games.

• "Empty Water Pouch" stuck name. First spotted by Merlin the Questioner and raised separately by shu - a pre-existing code path could leave a pouch at full charges but still labelled "Empty", and because refill and purify both skipped full pouches, the name never self-corrected. Save-load now migrates affected pouches automatically, so your inventory should tidy itself up on next load.

That's all from me for this update.

Medieval Fest has been a nice experience so far, and I'm grateful to everyone who has jumped into the demo, shared screenshots, filed bug reports, and kept the Discord as lively as it's been.

A special shoutout to Officer Briarios for the outstanding work behind the scenes as a moderator organising the bug-report channels, pinning guidelines, and generally making my life infinitely easier so I can focus on the game itself. And an ongoing thank you to Raltay and Yrebrac for their enormous patience and detailed debug assists on the Linux and Steam Deck startup issues, which have been some of the trickiest things to pin down without a device to test on. If I've forgotten anyone please forgive me, but you know who you are, and thanks so much - I really appreciate it.

Please keep the feedback coming and the screenshots and tales from Cantal, and have a nice safe weekend everyone.

Timmy Graham