It's been one year since I released Wizard School Dropout to the public!

It's come a long way since then. Since the release, I've added two new magic types, level 4 spells, two new location types, the entirety of the tower management system, the trespassing/disguise system, and curses and corruption. Plus a number of new items, creatures, factions I haven't kept a good enough count of, and many many bugs fixed and minor improvements made.

Thank you for your support to everyone who's played it, reported bugs, and offered feedback or suggestions!

Overview

A grab bag of changes this time. A lot of smaller balance changes, but highlights for new stuff:

• Three new factions.
• The Vampires now offer some missions.
• A new Room screen to let you manage your tower rooms more easily, including deconstructing old rooms you no longer want.
• A "Trading Post" room that can be built outdoors that brings random valuable traders each day.

Old saves shouldn't crash, but there are changes to most factions and I can't promise everything will be clean. Items sold and recruits offered by faction will change the morning of the next day. Updated spells will still have their old stats if you've already learned them.

Rooms

• Upkeep has been removed from rooms that have no passive benefits, and been reduced for all rooms that do offer passive benefits.
• Vineyards, orchards, and greenhouses, like fields, no longer produce anything if not worked.
• Field's build cost is now based on its size, like most rooms.
• Smoking Room now requires hookahs to build, but fewer construction materials.
• Construction materials are no longer automatically bought if you don't have enough. Instead, they're sold by Forging Destiny and Wizmart.
• Rooms disabled because you couldn't afford the upkeep no longer require construction materials to repair, just money.
• Disabled rooms' repair costs will increase by their upkeep every day until they're repaired.
• Orchards and vineyards will replace destroyed trees and trellises when you return home.
• New Room: Trading Post. A random merchant will appear at the trading post each day. These merchants buy or sell a limited selection of items, but they pay more and charge less than the factions and stores available through the scrying orb.

Factions:

• Factions will now consider you an enemy if:
  • You have enough reputation to be friends with one of their enemy factions.
  • You have low enough reputation with one of their allied factions to be considered an enemy.
• Three New Factions:
  • Pirates. They work a little different from other factions we've seen so far. You can only sell to them on Sunsdays, and then they set out to sea. Based on how much you sold to them, they'll send you treasure when they return next Sunsday.
  • Champions of Peace. They buy weapons. Intelligent guards belong to this faction and can be ransomed back to them. They don't get as mad at you killing guards as other factions do for you killing their members, but also get mad at you for killing nobles and wizards.
  • A new discoverable faction I'll leave you to discover on your own.
• The Vampires now offer missions.
• Specialized workers (farmers, brewers, hunters, etc.) have been moved to the Villagers faction. One random worker will be available to recruit a day, but befriending the Villagers will increase the number available.
• There's no longer a 50 reputation requirement to recruit apprentice wizards from the Wizard faction. Only one random apprentice will be available per day at game start, but befriending the faction will increase this number. Recruitable apprentices of the appropriate arcana can now be birds/lizards/frogs.
  • Recruiting apprentices (or anyone else) at locations directly is unchanged.
• Recruited warrior nobles can now train in the tower, but quickly become unhappy working other jobs. (Warrior nobles can also now only be taken home if you're friends with the nobility)
• Selling booze or drugs to Epicurean Nobles at a mansion gives you the same amount of money selling it to the Dorian Club via the faction screen would.

Items and Crafting:

• Non-artifact enchanted equipment is now more valuable, and is flagged as magical for things that care about that (eg the wizard faction buying them).
• Damage values for most weapons and armor values for most armor has been increased.
• You may have run across the not-fully-implemented "Bandolier of Holding" item I forgot to comment out. It's now actually implemented, and grants extra Utility slots when worn.
• Many brewing recipes now produce yeast, and take yeast as an optional ingredient.
  • Adding yeast reduces the brew time for these recipes by a day, and the base brew time has been increased.
• New mechanical recipe (and item): Revolver. One handed ranged weapon that uses bullets as ammo and deals less damage than a rifle.
• Ingredient costs for rations, construction materials, and anti-mutation serum have been increased.

Spells:

• Charges for most spells have been decreased, especially for incapacitating (eg freeze, blinding flash) and summoning spells.
• The initial duration for most incapacitating and vision-blocking cloud (eg smoke, fog) spells has been increased.
• Create Wall now initially lets you create 3 walls instead of 5.
• Deathly Healing now requires a Level 4 upgrade to heal from ally damage. Deathly Healing's healing value also no longer increases from anything other than the actual upgrades on the spell itself.
• Channel Spirits' charges increased by a large amount, but it now consumes 1 charge every turn it's active.
• Absorb Flame now grants more charges, and the number of charges granted can be upgraded. When cast on a fire creature, it doesn't grant charges, but instead grants the Fired Up condition, which boosts your fire spells.
• Freeze Weapon, Electrify Weapon, and Enflame Weapon are no longer learnable. They can still be found as scrolls that will apply permanent enchantments to your weapons. (Similarly, the Elemental Weapon scroll now applies a permanent random elemental enchantment)
• They have been replaced with new spells: Freezing Strikes, Shocking Strikes, and Flaming Strikes respectively. These spells are toggled, and when active deal flat elemental damage when you hit someone in melee. This damage DOES stack with elemental enchantments on weapons (as well as with the other Elemental Strike spells).

NPC Behavior:

• Dragging around a tied-up creature causes their friends to be come hostile to you, same as if you'd attacked them.
• Your followers should no longer target tied-up enemies.

Other:

• Things that give a % bonus/malus to melee damage now apply to the total damage done, rather than just the strength of the wielder.
• Added multi-attack penalty when wielding more than one weapon that makes it harder to hit and reduces damage.
• When wielding more than one weapon, your strength is divided between them rather than being applied to all of them individually.
• The mutant ancestry's "remove mutation" option now replaces one of the 3 gain mutation options, and removes a random mutation rather than a specified one.

UI:

• Added a new Tower Room management screen, which shows you more details than previously available for rooms, lets you see what the details would be for potential built rooms, and offers the highly-requested feature of letting you mark rooms for deconstruction.
• Resident management screen changes:
• Recruitable creatures are now listed (and recruitable) on the resident management screen.
• Residents and prisoners are in separate collapsible sections.
• Fixed some display issues with multi-slot items on the inventory screen.
• Fixed some display issues with long-named items for sale on the faction screen.

Bug Fixes

• All home maps are now marked as “safe,” so you can’t die in them and won’t attack features when moving by default
• Training Hard while tired no longer makes you both Exhausted and Tired.
• When wielding multiple weapons, if a target is destroyed before all attacks are done, the other attacks are cancelled.
• Tied-up creatures out of your line of sight would be automatically recruited as non-prisoner residents.
• Rock swarms are no longer Incorporeal.
• You were unable to buy anything from factions if your Reputation was negative but not at the hostile level yet.

What's Next?

The plan right now is to add a new location type related to the discoverable faction added to this update.