The last post talked about some major gameplay changes coming in KeeperRL, but the upcoming Alpha 34 patch will also feature some nice, ordinary improvements to your everyday dungeon life.

Equipment restrictions

A major annoyance experienced by probably every KeeperRL player was that equipment made for your front-line fighters would be grabbed by workers or low value minions, and you’d have to manually reassign everything. I’ve added a simple feature that should hopefully help with this, which is the option to restrict certain types of equipment for whole minion groups. So with a few clicks you’ll be able to stop all your zombies from equipping anything or tell your healers to only use wooden and leather stuff, and leave everything else to the fighters.

On a related note, I’ve also made AI not equip infernite weapons by default unless the creature has fire resistance. This is made in such a way that modders can set new, custom safeguards if their modded equipment can potentially hurt its owner.

Help system

KeeperRL’s help tab has been a bit empty for a looong time, and I’ve finally decided to change this, especially that a number of mechanics in the game is routinely hard to understand for new players. I’ve created a simple and easy system to add pages that feature text, images and even links. I’ve used it to add a few short tutorials for things that people often ask about in the forums, and I’m planning to extend it with anything that is ever unclear. This is much easier than adding new tasks to the main tutorial, and also lets me keep it relatively short, which gets people more quickly in the game.

The added bonus is that the new help system is fully moddable, so modders can add their own tutorials or lore, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see entire mods just adding content to the help section. There is even an effort to port the wiki content to a mod. If you’d like to get involved in that, please get in touch with Soft Monster on discord.

Automaton crafting

The Necromancer update featured a new, sleek UI for adding upgrades to crafted undead, and I realized that it mostly duplicates the automaton assembling system. Since the latter is rather complicated and cumbersome, I decided to remove it, and adapt the new crafting upgrades UI instead. The added bonus is that you can now easily schedule production of identical automatons en masse, which wasn’t possible before. As far as I can tell, all functionality has been replicated, except automaton paints, which I can add back in the future if there is popular demand (I’ve never used them personally).

Animal farming

I’ve made some changes to pigsties to make them fully moddable, and added constructing animal fence as a requirement for them to operate. Using this opportunity, I’ve extended the farming mechanic to chickens and cows, which are new farming tiers used for increasing your max population. Not a huge change, but hey – this is not a farming simulator! At least not yet :).