Roguefort 0.5.11

This patch covers both 0.5.10 and 0.5.11 together, as I kept fixing and adding stuff so quickly. So, that's why there's weird jumps in version numbers.

Roguefort Demo 0.5.11 brings a new boss, a new endgame dungeon, a tool harvesting system, a stack of Steam Deck polish, and a fairly long list of fixes.

The Hearthwyrm

The demo now has a proper dragon. Find The Hearthwyrm's Lair southwest of Hearthmere, descend four floors of volcanic cavern and wake it up. It's 4x4 tiles, sleeps until disturbed, and has two breath modes: a sweeping wash that rolls across the floor and a focused bolt straight at you. Tail thwap, scratch, bite. Drop it below 20% HP and it enrages permanently with double damage and double speed. Kill it and you'll get a ... no spoilers!

Huge thank you to ArkHaven who painted the 64x64 sprite. It is genuinely beautiful and made the whole thing come together. The audio is from the LEOHPAZ Hellish Creatures pack and gives the Hearthwyrm a full identity, roar, footfalls, two breath variants, hits, death, you name it, the full audio experience.

The Deepheart

This is the demo's endgame, as we sail ever closer to the next Steam Fest and then to the Early Access release date in August. It has a very roguelike 26 floors, it is far southwest of the starting point in the demo, past the dragon's lair. Good luck...

Tool-based harvesting

Axes for trees, picks for rock and ore. Match the tool and you swing properly. Mismatch (or bare hands) and you'll quarter-strike for half yield. Six craftable tools across common to rare, plus two legendary uniques: the Heartwood Axe (25% chance to fell in one hit) and Earthsplitter (+2 stone yield). Every new game now grants a starter hatchet and pickaxe, and a save migration backfills existing characters who don't already have them.

Community sprite drop

Beyond the Fire Dragon from ArkHaven, the pixel art team have been super busy (Elfie the Explorer, ArkHaven, sometimesihavequestions / Merlin) with over 50 new sprites appearing in this update.

Other stuff worth knowing about

Borderless fullscreen on first launch, plus F11/Alt+Enter to toggle. Instant movement is now the default for new installs, that snappy Caves of Qud-style sprite feel out of the box (requested by hotgar on Steam - existing saves keep your setting).

Multi-floor dungeons got a roguelike polish pass: enemy density down about half, doors at corridor entries, themed vaults stamped into floors (Treasure Shrine, Sarcophagus Hall, Mushroom Grove, etc.), and roving minibosses per band.

First-person viewmodel got a proper retune. Held weapons are now built from true cubic voxels instead of stretched slabs (so swords stop looking like taffy), the hand pose is Skyrim-ish, and shields are centred on the fist like a real grip. There's a bigger 2.5D/3D polish pass underneath: color grading, god rays, dynamic lights, contact shadows, water caustics, foliage sway, with a Deck-Low preset that turns the heavier bits off on Steam Deck.

Pebble bed tiles finally spawn on riverbanks and shingle beaches. Slings get their third ammo source the way they were always meant to.

Loads of Steam Deck work: gamepad-scrollable read-only panels (Codex, Recipe Book, Help, etc.), character creation now fits the Deck screen, gamepad nav across character creation and cosy intro, on-screen keyboard for the seed field, and tighter selection highlights so you can actually see what's selected.

The ye olde bug fix list

Huge thanks to SamV in particular and all the Discord and Steam Community folks for the many excellent and detailed bug reports of late. A few shoutouts here and bug patch notes as follows:

• SamV - your demo save not showing up as Continue after the 0.5.8 update was a migration that only looked for one of three possible legacy filenames. Now probes all three.

• Demo saves taken inside a dungeon were being false-quarantined because the in-dungeon coords looked out of bounds. Now uses a three-tier check, and existing quarantined saves get auto-promoted back.

• SamV - long item names like "Saltcured Mountain Boar Jerky" used to get squashed because lock/pin/split/all buttons lived on every row. Those have all moved to a right-click context menu (Menu key on keyboard, X on gamepad). Shift+A locks everything. Column-aware left/right in equipment. PageUp/PageDown to jump between equipment and backpack.

• SamV (round two) - inventory keyboard scroll wasn't reaching the footer legend; empty backpack slots gave no feedback when navigated. Both fixed.

• ArkHaven - the "pack full" wall at 12+ items when painting or demolishing was four callsites hardcoding 12 instead of asking your actual backpack capacity. Same patch fixed the bookshelf which said 16 slots but only stored 4.

• ArkHaven - paintings going invisible when placed on a harvested flower tile, and 2x1 paintings squishing to 1x1 after reload. Both were chunk housekeeping not recognising custom art. Fixed. (Caveat: paintings squished by the old code are gone and need to be re-placed, sorry.)

• Tools were being routed to off-hand if you had a starter sword in main hand. Same fix fishing rods got a while back.

• Guild-issued staves, bows, spears, longbows and crossbows weren't being marked two-handed properly, which meant a guild staff could share an off-hand with a one-handed weapon.

• Livestock (wild cow, goat, sheep, shore crab) were shape-shifting between community alt skins every frame. Variant pick is now stable per creature.

• Long Systems-tab intros (Terroir Charges, The Deep Frontier) were clipping off-screen. Now scroll properly.

• Player character was vanishing while standing on a custom painting tile.

Thanks as always to everyone playing, dungeon delving, reporting, chopping, mining, farming, cheesemaking, painting, and just being part of this crazy ride.

Timothy Graham