It’s my pleasure to announce that KeeperRL Alpha24 is out! It’s another big gameplay patch, bringing in many new features:

• Overhauled prisoner system. Enemies are explicitly tagged to be captured, and they retain their identity after becoming prisoners. Read more about the system here.
• Improved full control mode handling. Battles can be played in a proper turn-based manner. Read more here.
• Changes in mining: new challenges, and better progression. Read more here.

As always, the update is already available on Steam, Itch.io, and Humble Store. You can also get the free version from here.

The full change log:
Gameplay

• Prisoners retain their identity and can join your side if tortured.
• Prisoners can be captured outside of player’s dungeon.
• Player must tag specific enemies that are to be captured.
• Prisoners can perform work like crafting, if they have appropriate skills.
• Prisoners can escape if there are too many compared to fighter units.
• Most mineral veins are guarded by enemies like ants, dwarves and golems, who will attack when the player tries to mine the vein.
• As most minerals are guarded, geology tech is removed.
• Changed steel to adamantium, which is mined and not smelted from iron.
• Added ‘quarters’, which can be used to create mini-dungeons for selected minions.
• Added ‘hard rock’ tiles, which take longer to dig out, deeper in the mountain.
• Added iron and adamantine doors.
• Creatures have explicit intrinsic attacks, like fangs or fists that can be chosen via UI when attacking.
• Time system is changed to explicit turns and ‘half-turns’ for easier control during battle.
• Creatures only have 3 speed options: half-speed, normal, and double-speed. (speed attribute is removed)
• Creatures with double-speed perform their second move immediately after the first.
• Boulders don’t wound huge creatures like dragons.
• Some villages have a chance to be generated on the ‘bones’ of others.
• Healer AI prioritizes healing creatures that stand directly next to an enemy.
• Increased spell damage of legendary minions.
• Added maximum range for bows.
• Decreased mana regeneration rate in free mode when mana regeneration option is turned on.
• Kobolds are stronger and have spears.
• Improved eating AI, minions will try to leave the pigsty after having eaten.
• Changed AI code involving swapping positions, creature’s won’t get in each other’s way so much anymore.
• Made cooperative AI assign better positions when mining close to each other.
• Removed tech number limit based on library size.
• Minions respond immediately to the player manually changing their activity (including waking up).
• Minion wakes up when it is assigned new equipment.
• Added hand torches.
• Burning objects emit light!
• Improved logic of injuring non-living creatures, which fixes the problem of killing them taking too long.
• Added caps to how much of the basic stats dopplegangers can inherit.
• Added minimum turn requirement to some higher level immigrants, which causes more low level immigrants to be presented early in the game.
• ‘Prioritize task’ order makes an imp drop their current task immediately.
• Decreased the ‘unavailable zone’ width on the map border to reduce memory usage.
• Reduced amount of stone dropped by boulder to avoid generating free stone.
• Reduced amount of gold dropped by demon dwellers.
• Made minions do other tasks when there is nothing to craft.
• Statues cost gold instead of mana.
• Creatures and items are teleported out of inaccessible tiles.
• Added the ability to push away smaller creatures.
• Removed the ‘stun ray’ spell.
• Added ‘demonology’ tech that unlocks demon shrines.
• Hallucination effect also grants telepathy.
• Added baby spiders and blind children to giant spider’s den.
• Vampire lord drops a scroll of darkness, which causes a creature to become permanently immune to sunlight.
• Ghost gets a ‘touch of insanity’ attack, which causes creatures to be hostile to everyone.
• Succubus gets a ‘touch of love’ attack, which causes creatures to become peaceful.
• Robe gives spell resistance.
• Added invisible alarm trap to castle.
• Added priest to castle.
• Pig corpses don’t emit gas.
• All enemy creatures heal slowly over time.

Interface

• New UI for managing team members: adding and removing from team, changing move order.
• New UI for interacting with other creatures, like attacking, chatting, etc.
• Added creature status (leader/fighter/civilian) highlights and descriptions.
• Added tabs to view team members.
• Added new buttons for toggling and exiting control mode.
• Attribute bonuses from equipment and buffs are visible in the UI.
• Added a simple animation for when creatures are wounded or tortured.
• Limb losses are represented on HP bar for non-living creatures, which don’t have health and have to be chopped into pieces.
• New sprites for the demon tribe.
• New buttons under the minimap to open world map or scroll to keeper’s location.
• Boulders can be pushed using the mouse.
• Summoned creatures remaining ‘time to live’ is explicitly shown in the UI.
• Total inventory weight and maximum capacity is displayed in control mode.

Fixes

• Endless mode highscore takes into account only time spent defending the base, and not wandering around.
• Optimized and fixed various issues with creature pathfinding.
• Optimized field-of-view calculations, which speeds up the game considerably.
• Optimized world generation.
• Stopped doppleganger from being able to consume itself.
• Doppleganger doesn’t inherit effects granted by rings and other equipment.
• Fixed ancient spirit’s spell attack.
• Minions pick up potions of melee, spell and ranged resistance.
• Chests and coffins spawn creatures further away if adjacent tiles are blocked.
• Reinforce wall order is removed when wall is marked to be dug out.
• Disallowed destroying bridges.
• Fixed digging orders persisting when tile was destroyed by someone else.
• Fixed trap removal and building floors under traps.
• Fixed ‘sleep on torch’ UI bug.
• Fixed level generation crashed caused by trying to place a blind creature.
• Fixed marking campaign base map as conquered when village is destroyed.
• Fixed drawing question marks on the main map.
• Fixed red dragon appearing on green dragon’s place in the campaign.
• Increased female keeper spell damage to match the male version.
• Fixed issue with calculating influence area in campaign map.