CUDCrawler A6 Has Arrived!

This update adds a shop in Towne, an Auto Combat combat toggle (with per-PC settings available), as well as the beginning parts of the in-game manual called the Game Guide. There's also a small expansion to the Unexplored Mines instanced dungeon and a bit of addition to the tutorial dungeon that explains falls and how ladders work. Alongside all of that, there have been a number of additions across various gameplay elements that can be either discovered through play, or read about below.

As usual, a huge thanks go out to Elanarae and MaeL for their help in testing and hunting down various bugs and UI issues!

How to Install / Update Your Version of CUDCrawler

Installation and updates are simple, simply extract the folder in the CUDCrawler A6.zip into the same location as your other CUDCrawler folder and overwrite all files. Your player preferences and saves from previous versions will be retained. If this is your first version, simply extract the CUDCrawler folder wherever you'd like and use CUDCrawler.exe to launch the game.

Additions (Gameplay)

 + Sin's Sundries has opened in town! Players now have access to a shop where they can buy and sell equipment! For now, items are presented in an alphabetized grid in the shop. Sort options will be added in a future update.

 + With the shop's addition, many new items are available for purchase. Enemy drop tables have expanded to include these items as well, where appropriate.

 + Added daggers as a new weapon class. Daggers do pretty bad damage but get two swings. In the hands of a strong character they can be surprisingly decent at clearing out groups of weaker enemies.

 + PCs can now make multiple swings with weapons which allow them (daggers currently).

 + Players can now move characters around in the party roster by right-clicking their names.

 + Equipment now takes into account level and alignment requirements.

 + Randomly dropped items have a small chance to be dropped with 'plus' bonus (a +1 Bronze Longsword, for example).

 + Player characters now show damage splats when they receive damage in combat.

 + Added a Game Guide which can be accessed at any time from the Escape menu. The Game Guide will contain useful mechanic and general information about CUDCrawler. It's a bit bare for now since most mechanics aren't implemented yet, but will grow with time.

 + Added Auto Combat. Auto Combat can be toggled on during dungeon exploration or during combat. Auto Combat is purposefully pretty simple in what it can do: you can have PCs attack, guard, or cast a single offensive spell. Auto Combat isn't meant to automate the entire dungeon exploration experience, but is meant to allow easy clearing/grinding of areas that are of little to no threat to a party.
   Auto Combat can be toggled on by left-clicking the button in the Command Bar (in dungeon view) or by pressing the spacebar (again, in dungeon view). Party member behaviors can be changed by right-clicking the Auto Combat button in the Command Bar.

Additions (Maps)

 + The Unexplored Mines
 +++ The mines have expanded! A lower level with new enemies to challenge has opened up to brave adventurers willing to risk the area. Overall this area is less difficult than the Old Temple, but should still have some challenge to it for parties unafraid of facing larger groups of enemies.

Balance Changes

 + Rewrote drop tables to be more generic instead of specific to each individual monster. Some monsters do still have unique drops, though!

 + Iron equipment is now more powerful since it's tier 2 gear, iron's previous stats have now been applied to bronze equipment.

 + Buffed armor Defense values across the board.

 + Buffed weapons across the board. Weapons now have more equal average damage values. Numbers will be further tweaked down the line once I get weapon properties added that will let me better differentiate weapon types.

 + Pole weapons (spears and staves) now grant a small bonus to Defense to make up for their lower damage compared to other two-handed melee weapons.

 + Thrown weapons (throwing knives) are now one-handed. They're currently in a pretty bad state, but I'm not going to be able to make them do what I want them to do (hit multiple groups of enemies) until further down the line. Probably best to avoid them for now, but they're there nonetheless.

 + Made the encounters in the Unexplored Mine tamer near the entrance and get more dangerous the further inward the party travels. This is hopefully the goal for instance and quest map balance going forward. Lower difficulty near the entrance, with it spiking ever upwards as the party gets further into a site.

 + Item prices are now determined algorithmically based on their stats. Numbers will be massaged as time goes on, but they feel okay for now.

Bug Fixes

 + Added a save when bodies are dropped off at the morgue. No more character losses if you drop people off and then quit.

 + Fixed a source of substantial slowdown as the message log filled during gameplay.

 + Fixed a bug with the Shared XP difficulty option that both rewarded the XP for an enemy's killer six times, and also improperly showed XP gains when none were actually being had.

 + Fixed a few issues causing filesize bloat in save files.

Incremental Improvements

 + Changed the message color for gold drops in the message log. This should make item drops stand out a bit more.

 + An image of items looted in combat now appears over the portrait of the character that received the item.

 + Clarified weapon tooltips a bit. Now swings and weapon damage multipliers are more obvious.

 + When casting spells, spell points are deducted after spell casting finishes instead of beforehand.

 + Gave enemy mobs a bit more flavor in their attack texts.

 + Added a bit to the tutorial that teaches about falling and how ladders work.

 + Added colored borders to items with Plus values.

 + Incremental UI improvements.

Known Issues

 - When moving the game window from a monitor with scaling to one without (or vice versa) the game window resizes itself. This is a Windows feature, not a bug.

 - When Venturing Forth from town into a new area, the game very, very, very, veeeeeery rarely locks up. The cause for this is unknown as of this update.

 - When changing the display resolution of the game window in windowed mode the window may need to be repositioned by the user. It does not auto-center after resizing.

 - Font spacing in the built version of the game is different than it is in Godot's editor. This is a bug on Godot's side that has been known since 2023. Hopefully it'll get fixed soon. I'm doing what I can to mitigate it in the mean time.

 - The mouse cursor flickers on borders of the screen if it's been resized through Windows properties and the user is running multiple monitors. This is something that I don't think I can fix, or at least I have no knowledge on how to go about fixing it outside of forcing the cursor to stay in the window, which defeats the purpose of borderless full screen display.