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[unormal]

Happy New Year! to folks at Freehold and fellow wanderers.

My suggestion for a NY resolution for unormal: "I will finally sort out the Humble version/store page"

(you promised mate!)

Also, a curious inquiry: in the olden ASCII beta it was possible to get the fonts to display at a super-sharp level. The current one (well, my ancient "current one") is okay-ish, the CRT-look kind of amusing but do you have any plans to add some gfx options, like the "sharp" fonts, and maybe get rid of the letterbox at some stage?

Haha, don't worry, Humble's also bugging me to finish it.

Humble builds are now updated to the latest and I can now self-service builds so I'll keep them updated once a month.

[puke]

*We've replaced the quest, Ripe for the Conflagrating

But do we still get to make bananas foster / flambe?

I so want the quest to be:  "okay, take this flame thrower, and this cart load of brown sugar, and these barrels of rum..."

[getter77]

*We tweaked the Tinker skill.
-Since the Expert Disassemble power annoyingly incentivised you to horde all your items and scrap, we removed it. Instead, we changed Disassemble to give 1 random bit plus a 50% chance for a second random bit.
-You can now learn to mod items! We added a Mod tab to the Tinker screen. Item mods exists as separate schematics. Mods cost 2 bits: 1 bit equal to the tier of the item you are modding (+1 for each existing mod on the item), and 1 bit corresponding to the rarirty of the mod. These costs aren't final; expect some more tweaks to modding in the coming weeks.
-Disassemble is now a prereq for Reverse Engineer.
-Bits are now displayed in alphanumeric form by default.
-Tinker schematics are now sorted alphabetically.
-Fixed the Repair power sometimes having a blank bit cost.
*Added a new, rare item mod: Jewel-Encrusted. This mod can't be tinkered.
*Added some rare jewels that function as currency: rough agate gemstone, rough topaz gemstone, rough jasper gemstone, and rough amethyst gemstone.
*Added a new merchant to the Stiltgrounds: jeweler.
*Fixed the Sound and Music options not being respected.
*Fixed some more grammar errors with generative sentences.

[beorn080]

-You can now learn to mod items! We added a Mod tab to the Tinker screen. Item mods exists as separate schematics. Mods cost 2 bits: 1 bit equal to the tier of the item you are modding (+1 for each existing mod on the item), and 1 bit corresponding to the rarirty of the mod. These costs aren't final; expect some more tweaks to modding in the coming weeks.
 

Minor Bug. Modding stacked items just deletes one copy of the item. So, for instance, if you have 3 muskets, and try to make one scoped, you just lose a musket. Also, you can add elemental to muskets.

[Aquillion]

I, um, uh, geez.  I really really really do not agree with the removal of Expert Disassemble.  For many builds, that skill was not optional, and while modding serves as a substitute, this basically takes a significant portion of what tinkering used to do and makes it unplayable.  Removing Expert Disassemble makes it almost impossible to reasonably get the bits for any of the high-tier items without spending so much time and money that you could have more easily obtained whatever you were trying to create directly.

I mean, this obviously isn't the direction I wanted things to go in, since I preferred tinkers being able to deconstruct / reconstruct things on a whim without losing bits.  Modding should be useful, but it seems to me like removing Expert Disassemble nearly kills the usefulness of any other tinkering -- now that bits, especially higher-class ones, are going to be substantially harder to get, most tinkers aren't going to want to waste them on anything they can get elsewhere.  (Previously, the only reliable way to get high-class bits was to buy things containing them and deconstruct them.  Those things are only offered occasionally, so now you can't really reliably get them at all -- Expert Disassemble was essential for playing any character that wanted to build certain things.)

The game still has the fundamental problem that, for almost all non-consumable recipes, you're likely to only want to build it once ever; data-disks (and, now, high-class bits) are so expensive and hard to find that you'd usually be better off just trying to acquire whatever you're looking for directly rather than spending time tinkering.  I still strongly feel that being able to deconstruct and reconstruct stuff without losing bits is the only way to make the ability to create stuff from scratch ever "feel" tinkery under this system (because then you could quickly pull out whatever you need on the fly) -- right now, it's basically a more complicated and difficult way to produce stuff.

Also...  Expert Disassemble was removed, but Reverse Engineer was left in, though it has the same problem.  I'm not necessarily saying Reverse Engineer should be removed, because right now it's really hard for tinkers to get recipes even without it, but I don't understand why Expert Disassemble (which I thought was extremely important to any dedicated Tinker build, and the main reason to shoot for an otherwise-mostly-overkill Intelligence of 25 in the first place) was removed, when the much less important Reverse Engineer was left in.

More generally, I'll reiterate what I said back when I argued that tinkers should be able to disassemble stuff they built...  it feels like you're too worried about whether stuff incentivizes unfun play.  Yes, that's a concern, but I suspect that the people who actually had their gameplay twisted in unfun directions by Expert Disassemble, or who would have done unfun things with the ability to deconstruct and reconstruct their gear repeatedly using it, are a tiny, tiny portion of the userbase; wheres the restrictions you're putting in place to prevent that problems for everyone across the board.  Removing Expert Disassemble is a severe over-reaction to a very minor problem.  There's always going to be somewhat silly or unfun strategies that players can dig up or convince themselves to focus if they really want to; but I think that beyond a certain point, you have to just let people decide how they're going to enjoy the game, and just try to make sure that an unfun behavior doesn't start to feel necessary.  It's fine if some people want to save stuff to only disassemble it once they have Expert Disassemble; it's only a problem if people feel that they can't play any other way.

(Another example:  The basic ability to sell things -- at all -- incentivizes a far more serious unfun behavior than either of the Tinkering issues mentioned above, since it encourages players to carry every single thing that isn't nailed down back to a merchant and leave it in a pile to trade as necessary.    Anyone who was saving stuff to disassemble later with Expert Disassemble is almost certainly carrying everything that's not nailed down back to pile it up near a shopkeeper.  As far as I can tell, this is not avoidable without removing the ability to sell things to shopkeepers entirely.  Some games have gone that way, but you'd be cutting out part of the scavenging theme of Qud in order to do it, so I don't think it'd be a good idea.)

[unormal]

We're probably going to add some "invention" skills that provide non-disassemble routes to generate bits you need from unwanted bits (tier 0 and otherwise), as well as stuff like data disks; rather than having disassemble be the one true route to generate all resources. Now that disassemble isn't a perfect breakdown, we'll probably re-enable dissembling previously constructed items. Your concerns are totally valid but disassemble on it's own is kind of unfun, and I want to kick the whole system around a little more and see if we can reach a better local maxima in fun.

(P.S. We can always trivially go back to "disassemble gives you all the bits" if our travels around the field of possibilities don't end up fruitful. I'd just ask you to approach the new stabs at system balance with an open mind and give feedback like "I don't have enuf bits, yo!", etc; which you're doing here. We don't have massive spreadsheets for Qud like we would for a newer design, so it's hard to advance without just iterating. I'd rather just do a stepwise build of the changes we can make inside of a week, each week, rather than a single monolithic untested change. So we're gonna iterate!)

[Mephansteras]

Glad you at least have some sort of plan for this. Tinkering in this game is one of the aspects that really make it shine above most other roguelikes, in my opinion, and I love the scavenger feel to the world. So whatever route you end up going I would like to see tinkering be fun.

[Retropunch]

Glad you at least have some sort of plan for this. Tinkering in this game is one of the aspects that really make it shine above most other roguelikes, in my opinion, and I love the scavenger feel to the world. So whatever route you end up going I would like to see tinkering be fun.

I completely agree - this has been one of my favorite bits (ba-dum-tish) of CoQ and definitely puts it above many other RLs. It makes you feel more like you're trying to survive rather than just dungeon delve.

Whilst I agree that I wouldn't necessarily have wanted Expert Dis. taken out, I do think that Invention and more paths to item generation would be great and could lead to a lot more 'fun' ways to play. Maybe just adding a few bits to loot lists would help in the short term.

[Aquillion]

I've been experimenting with tinkering characters again, and these are my thoughts so far (although most of this isn't new):

1.  There is a huge amount of luck involved in an Artifex's start, since their starting disks are random; some are incredibly useful, and some are basically worthless.

2.  If you don't get the ability to craft a basic grenade, you're unlikely to actually do much tinkering early on, even if you're playing a dedicated tinker.  My best successes with tinkers mostly involved building another character with some intelligence, and ignoring tinkering almost completely for the first twelve levels; or raising an Artifex's dexterity to 24 and focusing entirely on that for the first twelve levels.  Currently, there's very little useful tinkering you can do with only the lowest-tier bits, and you're unlikely to be able to afford anything but your starting disks early on.

I would suggest having Artifexes start with more (and less random) tinkering knowledge.  For example, guarantee that they start with a tier 1 grenade recipe,

I'm not sure if it's possible to craft compound bows; I haven't seen a data disk for them.  I'd suggest making them craftable using only tier 1 ingredients, and maybe even ensure that an Artifax starts with the reciple.  The main reason for this is to give them an easy way to turn bits into turrets.  (Granted, this assumes there aren't more dramatic changes to the underlying system, which might be better -- but this seems like an easy way to ensure that an Artifax will play "like a tinker" early on.)

Possibly also give them a third recipe, which is guaranteed to be a hard-to-craft tier 2 weapon (to give them something to shoot for.)

Another semi-related problem I noticed with tinker characters is that there's surprisingly little benefit to having a lot of intelligence.  The difference in skill points between low and high intelligence is nice, but not huge; being able to identify artifacts better is also nice, but it's not something that you can base your character's survival around (and Tinkers actually care less about identifying stuff, because they can repair things and theoretically craft their own items.)  Additionally, as far as I can tell, there are no skills that get better with higher intelligence.  This hurts tinkers indirectly because whereas you can go "all in" as a dex or strength fighter or as an ego esper, getting dramatically more benefits from your heavy investment in that area, you can't really go "all in" as a tinker.  The most basic T1 tinker recipies are the ones you'll use the most often; and unlike a fighter's attacks or an esper's mutations, they're not going to scale as you raise your main stat or go up in level.

Compare to Strength, Dexterity, or Ego, for example; a character built around any of those will become dramatically more powerful when they raise them two points, while also getting numerous side-benefits in addition to their core competence.  My experience is that any tinker really needs to have one of those as their actual primary focus to survive, which means that in practice tinkering becomes a side-thing that your fighter or esper does for minor benefits, rather than something you'd base your character around.

(I mentioned this earlier, but my thinking when building a tinker is often along the lines of "all right, I'll put 24 points in int, and to survive, I'll put 20 in this other main stat...  you know, really, int isn't going to help me aside from getting the high-int preq skills, so maybe I can lower it to 21 and let my level-up stat boosts raise me to the thresholds I need.  In fact, I'll just go for 18 int and learn Tinkering 1 eventually, it doesn't make a big difference to this build."  There needs to be more of a route to surviving with tinkering as your primary thing, which I think requires some way for it to grow dramatically more powerful as you invest heavily in Intelligence the way that physical combat or mental mutations improve when investing in their relevant stats.)

[unormal]

I've been experimenting with tinkering characters again, and these are my thoughts so far (although most of this isn't new):

1.  There is a huge amount of luck involved in an Artifex's start, since their starting disks are random; some are incredibly useful, and some are basically worthless.

2.  If you don't get the ability to craft a basic grenade, you're unlikely to actually do much tinkering early on, even if you're playing a dedicated tinker.  My best successes with tinkers mostly involved building another character with some intelligence, and ignoring tinkering almost completely for the first twelve levels; or raising an Artifex's dexterity to 24 and focusing entirely on that for the first twelve levels.  Currently, there's very little useful tinkering you can do with only the lowest-tier bits, and you're unlikely to be able to afford anything but your starting disks early on.

I would suggest having Artifexes start with more (and less random) tinkering knowledge.  For example, guarantee that they start with a tier 1 grenade recipe,

I'm not sure if it's possible to craft compound bows; I haven't seen a data disk for them.  I'd suggest making them craftable using only tier 1 ingredients, and maybe even ensure that an Artifax starts with the reciple.  The main reason for this is to give them an easy way to turn bits into turrets.  (Granted, this assumes there aren't more dramatic changes to the underlying system, which might be better -- but this seems like an easy way to ensure that an Artifax will play "like a tinker" early on.)

Possibly also give them a third recipe, which is guaranteed to be a hard-to-craft tier 2 weapon (to give them something to shoot for.)

Another semi-related problem I noticed with tinker characters is that there's surprisingly little benefit to having a lot of intelligence.  The difference in skill points between low and high intelligence is nice, but not huge; being able to identify artifacts better is also nice, but it's not something that you can base your character's survival around (and Tinkers actually care less about identifying stuff, because they can repair things and theoretically craft their own items.)  Additionally, as far as I can tell, there are no skills that get better with higher intelligence.  This hurts tinkers indirectly because whereas you can go "all in" as a dex or strength fighter or as an ego esper, getting dramatically more benefits from your heavy investment in that area, you can't really go "all in" as a tinker.  The most basic T1 tinker recipies are the ones you'll use the most often; and unlike a fighter's attacks or an esper's mutations, they're not going to scale as you raise your main stat or go up in level.

Compare to Strength, Dexterity, or Ego, for example; a character built around any of those will become dramatically more powerful when they raise them two points, while also getting numerous side-benefits in addition to their core competence.  My experience is that any tinker really needs to have one of those as their actual primary focus to survive, which means that in practice tinkering becomes a side-thing that your fighter or esper does for minor benefits, rather than something you'd base your character around.

(I mentioned this earlier, but my thinking when building a tinker is often along the lines of "all right, I'll put 24 points in int, and to survive, I'll put 20 in this other main stat...  you know, really, int isn't going to help me aside from getting the high-int preq skills, so maybe I can lower it to 21 and let my level-up stat boosts raise me to the thresholds I need.  In fact, I'll just go for 18 int and learn Tinkering 1 eventually, it doesn't make a big difference to this build."  There needs to be more of a route to surviving with tinkering as your primary thing, which I think requires some way for it to grow dramatically more powerful as you invest heavily in Intelligence the way that physical combat or mental mutations improve when investing in their relevant stats.)

I like this post.

[Aquillion]

Another idea I just had:  Perhaps an Intelligence skill that lets you use your Intelligence mod for accuracy (if it's higher than Dexterity) when using a weapon whose tinkering recipe you know.  This would encourage people to make builds that depend entirely on Intelligence for combat, where their goal is to buy the tinkering recipe for a powerful weapon and craft it early on (or, for an Artifax, craft one of the things whose recipe they start with.)

It wouldn't invalidate Dex + Int builds, since those builds would have high dodging and could learn a bunch of Dex-based combat skills, whereas the int-focused build would have to settle for being able to hit things.  But it'd open up a few more options, I think.

EDIT:  Also, another idea for if everyone else seems to find high-tier bits too rare:  Ensure that when the player deconstructs something, one of the bits they get will always be one of the highest-tier bits in whatever they're deconstructing.

EDIT 2:  Also also, it occurs to me that it is far from obvious to new players that Argyve is a shopkeeper; I remember back when I was just learning how to play, it took me a while to notice this.  I'm not sure how to make it more obvious, though.

EDIT 3:  Another suggestion:  Possibly make Reverse Engineer an inherent power of Disassemble rather than a separate skill.  This would avoid the situation where people are encouraged to wait on disassembling anything with a recipe until they've learned it, and as mentioned above, it ought to be a bit easier for tinkers to get recipes.  Tinkering is already a bit of a skill point sink, which negates some of the advantages of extra skill points that Intelligence gives you.

[unormal]

*We made some more tweaks to Tinkering.
 -When you disassemble an item, you now always get the highest tier bit in that item's schematic. You also get a 50% chance at each remaining bit.
 -You can now disassemble tinkered items.
 -Item and mod descriptions are now displayed on the Tinkering screen. We'll improve the UI for this text box in a future patch.
 -All of your learned mods are now displayed below the list of items on the Tinkering > Mod screen, under 'Known Modifications'.
 -Item schematic bits are now sorted from lowest to highest tier.
 -Modding a stack of items no longer results in the modded item disappearing.
 -We fixed an issue that caused incorrect bit costs to sometimes be displayed on the Tinkering screen.
*When you buy a new mutation, the mutation descriptions are now displayed on the Choose Mutation screen. We'll improve the UI for this text box in a future patch.
-Factions now have preferences for certain types of items. The preferences change per world seed.
-The faction reward for completing one of the branches of The Earl of Omonporch was changed to a faction heirloom. The heirloom is of the faction's preferred item type.
-New book: Heirlooms of Qud.
-We fixed the broken identation for all in-game books.
-Quditor now supports ctrl+left click to paint continuously.
-Quditor now supports ctrl+right to remove an object.
*Fixed some situations where the game would incorrectly delete the Mods folder

[Aquillion]

I'm unable to use the "Repair" skill to repair the broken mechanical wings.  Does it not work on that kind of broken-ness?

In fact, is repair supposed to appear on my character's ability screen?  It's not there at all, and I can't do it through the item interface.  I'm playing an Artifex, so I started with it.

Or am I unable to repair them because they're not identified?

EDIT:  Yes, that was the reason.  I got Argyve to repair it for me.  Perhaps he should have some special dialog if the wings or the flattened remains are brought to him, though, since it's his apprentice (and presumably he'd recognize the wings.)

EDIT 2:  I purchased a pair of ape fur gloves from the hunter in the mushroom town, and can't equip them from the equipment menu (that is, they don't appear in the list of stuff for my hand slot.)  I can equip them fine from my inventory.  Other ape fur gloves seem fine.

EDIT 3:  I found a turret that had converted to the Mechanists in the Six Day Stilt.  That seems odd.  I was able to talk to it, too.  Are turrets sentient?

[Aquillion]

Another tinkering idea I meant to suggest and just remembered:

It'd be neat if there was a way to 'level up' artifacts, upgrading their core capabilities into superior versions by spending increasingly high level bits.  In particular, it'd be nice to be able to upgrade the Mechanical Wings and Helping Hands to provide benefits that correspond to higher-level versions of their respective mutations.  Things like Force Bracelets and Hologram Bracelets could be upgraded to improve their energy efficiency.  Mods are nice, but some artifacts could benefit from a way to upgrade their unique-to-that-artifact core functionality.  This could also be used to let tinker-cyborgs upgrade their cybernetics.

To keep Intelligence vital for Tinkers, the maximum level you could upgrade an artifact to could be capped by your Intelligence modifier.  This would let high-level Intelligence-focused tinkers compete with high-level Ego-focused espers by being able to upgrade a wide range of stuff, while requiring a dedicated Intelligence-focused build to get the really powerful upgrades.

[Aquillion]

A totally unrelated suggestion:

I've never been totally happy with the Phasing mutation; while it works as a decent escape option, it doesn't scale very well as you raise it in level, and most of the time its practical function is a bit too similar to Force Bubble and Teleportation (which overshadow it.)

I suggest making it a toggled ability like the new Adrenaline Control, with a chance of failing each turn (after a few turns of warning, like with Adrenaline Control, so you don't get stuck in a wall.)  Obviously the failure chance would probably have to be a bit higher given what it does.  Leveling it up reduces the failure chance.