This update isn't on the scale that the last few have been, but there's still a decent chunk of new content, a few quality of life improvements and all important bug fixes. As always, bears repeating: previous saved games won't work after the update. Finish your current game first! Also, if you haven't grabbed other patches previously, do that first, because you either need to download the full game anew or every patch you've missed!
You can get the game (or just the latest patch if you prefer) here:
https://virtua-sinner.itch.io/caverns-of-xaskazien-iiHere's what you can expect this time around:
Major Improvements:- 14 New Spells: X-ray Vision, Phantom Treasure, Grave Protection (monsters can cast, too), Wall of Fog, Darkness, Epicentre, Conjure Potion, Conjure Food, Whirlwind (monsters can cast, too), Lock Door, Spirit Guardian, Disintegration (monsters can cast, too), Shrink, Create Undead.
- 2 New Map Tiles: Message in a Bottle, Anti-Magic Aura.
- 1 New Potion: Potion of Diminution.
- 2 New Mundane Items: Jury Rigged Alarm, Lavender.
- Major Quality of Life Improvement: The game will no longer allow any form of armour to be damaged in combat if that armour wasn’t necessary to lower the odds of an enemy hitting you to 10% or less. When determining which armours get you to this point, it checks all armour you’re wearing in a random order, to make sure no specific armour type is consistently the one spared or the one to get degraded. What this means is it’s no longer optimal strategy to remove overkill armour pieces before combat - most of us didn’t do this anyway, but we were all playing sub-optimally. Now you can and should just wear your best armour proudly at all times (unless facing a Rust Monster, or something...)
Minor Improvements:- Auto-walk will no longer trace a path through known Mystery Doors.
- Lowered cost of Jug of Infinite Potions from 100 Gold Pieces to 50 Gold Pieces, to more accurately reflect its usefulness.
- Baloraasin’s Curse trap has been toned down - instead of destroying a number of items in your Inventory between 0 and the total you possess, it will now destroy a number between 0 and half the total you possess. This should still keep it a devastating, even potentially game-ending trap, but at least be twice as merciful as it was before.
- Wandering Monsters and NPCs will no longer be dumb enough to approach Steam Vents where they may get scalded.
- When calculating damage reductions due to elemental resistances, damage should round off to the nearest whole number more accurately than before.
- Illusory Walls will now query as if they were regular walls until the first time you enter their square. At that point you’ll be played the “wear off” sound effect, and if your Text Prompts are set to Basic, you’ll then be given a text output explaining the situation. After Illusory Walls have been entered, and revealed to be Illusory, on the mini-map they’ll display with an “I” atop and will query as Illusory Walls. Having your map erased will revert their status to undetected. Before detected by entering, you will not be able to auto-walk through to the other side of Illusory Walls. They’ll still flicker as normal either way, to give a clue as to their nature.
- Befouled Potions prior to now could only look like select potion types - now they can resemble any potion in the game.
- All Befouled Potions found on a given map used to look like the same potion as each other - now each can resemble different potions.
- Echinacea, Flax Seed, Prim Rose, Gingko and Wolfsbane have all been buffed to each cure 4 separate diseases instead of just 1. This was done to make the items more useful, as well as to make sure herbs exist that can cure the newer diseases.
- If you lose the game because you turn into a werebeast of some sort, the game will no longer display your dead body, but will instead display you as a living version of whatever werebeast you turned into.
- The manual has been updated to include pertinent new information that arose from this release.
Bug Fixes:- Fixed major bug causing spells or miracles or anything else you use on the same turn that you change levels to be immediately reactivated upon reaching the new level, if you pressed your Use or Use (Alternate) button to answer the question about whether or not you want to change levels.
- Fixed major bug that could mess up your Inventory if you Reorganized your Inventory while carrying a Major Restorative Potion.
- Fixed major bug that would stall out the game during map generation of Sky Glider lairs and certain other lairs that are guaranteed to have Frozen Lakes.
- Fixed bug that could sometimes mess up what items were equipped if you clicked the Reorganize button when you had already scrolled the inventory view down.
- May or may not have fixed bug that could allow you to impale yourself by sliding in Grease when standing next to a Stalagmite. Fingers crossed on this one.
- Fixed text overwrite in query of Poison Augmenter.
- Fixed text overwrite and typo in query of Physical Augmenter.
- Fixed bugs with broken Physical Augmenters and Cold Augmenters, and Doused Poison Augmenters, still graphically animating them as if they were functioning normally.
- Fixed bug that could have scrambled the duration of an Ogre Strength effect if that number climbed too high.
- Fixed typo referring to a “Corpse Form” effect as a “Corpseform” effect when the effect is extended by eating Bread.
- Fixed bug not outputting text in the Situation Panel if you spring an Erasure Trap but it fails to erase any Spells for whatever reason.
- Fixed typos in the text outputs whenever you gained or improved the Glide or Nullify Enchantments Perks.
- Fixed error that could have you accidentally casting a spell if you’ve scrolled a given spell list down below the starting point and then click above the spell list.
- Fixed bug that could occur when you cast Vestonian Gift and were gifted a Curative Potion, revealing to you the nature of the Potion, even if your Alchemy Skill was Untrained.
- Fixed bug during character creation not automatically labelling a Dryad Swordsman as “Swordswoman”, a Dryad Axeman as “Axewoman”, a Dryad Tribesman as “Tribeswoman”, a Dryad Militiaman as “Militiawoman” or a Dryad Spearman as “Spearmaiden”, even though the race is automatically female.
- Fixed small typo when you would find a Writ of Bounty. (Where it would say, for instance, “You found +14 Writ of Bounty!” instead of “You found a +14 Writ of Bounty!”)
- Fixed bug messing up the text output of a query of a Staff of Instant Bridges.
- Fixed text overwrite in query of Disarming Beauty perk.
- Fixed error not letting Gem of Locking work on Barred Doors.
- Fixed graphical bugs creating small seam gaps between rough edged cave walls and any Empty Space with Rounded Archway or Empty Space with Square Archway.
- Fixed minor error that could occur when you found a Dwarven Map, telling you the map is illegible, when what it should have been telling you is that your Cartography Skill is too low to read it.
- Fixed text overwrite in query of Temperature Raising Wand.
- Fixed spacing error in query of Treacherous Mineshaft.
- Fixed error that could occur when trying to cast an Instant Bridge spell in a place without adjacent appropriate terrain to bridge, where it could give you multiple, confusing text outputs.
- Fixed bug outputting gibberish for a moment when you first trigger a Net Filled Pit Trap.
- Fixed error treating deaths caused when you splash a monster with a Flask of Acid as if you had killed them by Spell (and thus pleasing Dorallas).
- Fixed bug incorrectly taking into consideration any character’s Sex when listing that character’s Class in the high score list.
- Fixed scrambled and incorrect text output when querying Rod of Divine Wrath.
- Fixed bug outputting “Arc Volt!” if you killed a monster with Divine Wrath, and “Divine Wrath!” if you killed a monster with a level 3 Arc Volt.
- Fixed text overwrite in query of Sludge Rat variants and uniques.
- Fixed error awarding player experience if a monster is killed by an Insect Swarm summoned by another monster.
- Fixed bug not concealing previously revealed Zones of Hatred when your map gets erased.
- Fixed errors causing starting inventory items of Botrom’s Salve and Devil Salt to be treated as Mundane Items for Warlocks rather than Low Power Magic Items.
- Fixed minor spacing error in text output of Xaskazien’s Hatred event.
- Fixed bugs playing the sound effects for monsters missing other monsters in combat at full volume, regardless of distance, as long as that volume should have been above 0.
- Fixed bugs with Fireball and Flamestrike spells, allowing you to cast them in prohibited squares (like Temples or Water squares).
- Fixed multiple errors with Concealed Makeshift Doors making them impossible to detect, but also passable as if they were Illusory Walls.
- Fixed bug no longer letting you query things after death.
- Fixed errors with certain events (like White Stag Sighting and Fay Induction) where under certain circumstances the player wasn’t gaining the benefits they should have.
- Fixed potential problem (uncertain if it was a problem or not) with monsters still being able to see you when you’re invisible.
- Fixed bug preventing Cave Crickets, Cave Octopi and Fachans from drowning in quicksand.
- Fixed minor bug shattering any Evil Mirror twice, if you use History Skill to avoid it.
- Fixed typo in query of Evaporation Spell Book.
