Added minor text tweaks to account for the player having premises at the Royal Bethlehem in Ambition: Heart’s Desire.
‘Back to the Palace Cellars’ can now be removed from the Opportunity Deck.
You can no longer get a steamer to Polythreme or Apis Meet (and then take your own magically repaired ship home again) if your ‘Demise at Zee’ quality is >0.
Corsair
Plunder is now banked in ‘A Return to Zee’ following a death at zee.
Piracy options will now be correctly locked during a zee journey started as part of an Exceptional Story.
Added some extra explanatory text to ‘A Piratical Primer’ explaining that checks become easier in less perilous zee locales.
Replaced Making Your Name Watchful stages 1–3 with a new design.
Raking the Muck of the Neath and the Fighting Rings now knock the player back less if they fail the key check.
Second Chances are now tutorialised for all four skills at appropriate points.
Added a new branch to ‘Preparing for a Big Score’ which should offer comparable Casing gain for lower-skilled players to stealing paintings for his Topsyness.
Added more opportunities for players to earn Scraps of Incendiary Gossip for Getting to the Ball.
Added some new roleplaying options in the tutorial, and a further visit from the Unlucky Devil.
Slaying the general during the war at your lodgings in A Name Scrawled in Blood now rewards you with boots rather than a rifle.
General quality of life improvements around a few early MYN storylets.
‘Playing with Soul’, the story of the Sallow Spirifer and Blind Pianist, now pauses for a while before ‘A Resumption of Hostilities’. Perhaps for not quite as long as it once did, but still, you must wait for them to get in touch once more to continue the story.
Now I wonder if I should use an alt to replay the other MYN stories and another to play the newer ones in the future.
Changed the eventual consequences of being repeatedly crushed to death by glim-fall at zee
Hearts’ Game: Day 1 adjustments
Fixed various bugs
Fixed the Ivory Organza option in ‘Rewards from the Page’ not costing an action
Fixed the ‘bonus’ Exploit gained from winning a round
Obtaining a S&C Long-Box can now only be done once
Recruiting accomplices now grants an exploit
This is intended to take away incentives to make runs as long as possible for economic efficiency; we might further adjust the rate of exchanging exploits or the cost of abandoning a run later
Downtuned the difficulty of KataTox checks to 12 (was 14)
It’s the other way round: another user linked to this post over in the HG thread.
Whenever you link to another forum post, that post gets a little addendum basically saying “Hey, this is so cool people are linking here from elsewhere!”
And then people can click on that addendum to see precisely who has done the linking and where.
Example: the OP of every single Exceptional Story thread on here has a little addendum showing that it’s been linked from my Exceptional Story Archive. I did not put them there, the forum software does that all by itself (which I think is quite cool!).
Fixed an instance of a KataTox check still having 14 difficulty.
Forfeiting your last round should now correctly end the run.
Removed change messages from Poisoner’s Progress.
Due to an underlying issue with how change messages work, these would sometimes produce misleading messages about Elusiveness affecting results when it didn’t.
New feature: email yourself a copy of any Messages that you want to keep.
Fixed a bug where some players who use ‘Log in with Google’ couldn’t manage their email preferences.
Fixed a layout issue on mobile where checks that don’t qualify for second chances (e.g., Luck) were still leaving space on the screen to display second chance information.
Adjusted some text in ‘A Conversation on the Road’ to reflect certain Ambition outcomes, if those have happened.
Updated the lodgings header, which shows up in Your Lodgings and a few other areas in London. You may need to force reload images in your browser to see this change.
Evolution:
During the relevant step in Evolution, a duplicate of ‘The Fleet of Truth’ can be drawn from the zee deck; that duplicate has 5x frequency, as opposed to the original’s 0.8x frequency.
The various ‘Ebb and Flow of Regret’ cards now have 5x frequency (was 2x)
The Mudlark’s Lament
Adjusted the eccentric behaviour of checks in the sewer section to be (slightly) less eccentric. The initial behaviour was intentional, but it was commonly perceived as a bug in ways that detracted from the overall experience.
(My apologies for missing last week’s; it is my intention to get back into the habit of posting these weekly here myself.)
Lowered the difficulty on ‘Transcribe your draft with your Coolflame Quill’ a touch, to make it more relevant.
Uncoupled the Hunter’s Keep activity from Dramatic Tension. It functions the same as before, but is now governed by a new quality. Docking at or leaving from Hunter’s Keep no longer resets Dramatic Tension.
Changed the reward for the Percipient Egg lab experiment if you do not have a Parabolan Base-Camp.
The previous reward – Parabolan Orange-apples – allowed for edge cases where players without access to Parabola were nonetheless able to start some research that required access to Parabola to complete.
Clay Highwayman: Made it so it’s impossible to raise A Tale of the Clay Highwayman above 3 too early in the story, which could cause some conversation text to be skipped.
Implemented a fix to how Distance Behind / Ahead is calculated on the Moonlit Chessboard to prevent a bug that led to the values sometimes being incorrect.
Hearts’ Game:
Poisonous Preparations are no longer pyramidal
Poison Tolerance of Your Target now reduces Progress gain, rather than Elusiveness.
Assorted number tweaks associated with these changes.
Week Ending 2 June
Early Game Improvements
There is a revamped tutorial for brand new accounts that introduces key gameplay concepts when they reach London.
New players still start in New Newgate, and the existing tutorial there broadly plays out the same, with a few updates to support the new tutorial.
Various elements of the game’s UI – such as access to the Possessions or Bazaar tabs, and travelling via the map – are locked for new accounts, and will be gradually unlocked as their concepts are introduced via the tutorial.
Starting an Ambition now requires a small amount of progress in two different Making Your Name storylines.
A small number of equipment items at the Bazaar have changed in price, with a mind to making them more accessible for early-game players.
Added a way to accelerate some early Renown gain.
Players can get a boost, raising their renown to 10 with up to three factions. New accounts can learn more in their Social Engagements. Existing accounts who still have one or more Renowns below 10 can find it there after they next raise Renown.
Misc. Changes
The Blemmigan Tourist is now unlocked later in the game, requiring the player to have completed some early milestones via the new tutorial, and to have reached a late stage in either A Name Scrawled in Blood or A Name in Seven Secret Alphabets.
We have retired several access codes which have had their time – specifically, the Mask of the Rose Kickstarter items, Sunless Skies items, and 10th Anniversary items.
The items previously available via these access codes can now be obtained in game in exchange for economy items. They can be found in the Medusa’s Head by any player with Highway stats of at least 25.
The Cloven Seal, which was once obtainable via access code but has been unavailable for some time, can be obtained in the same place, at exorbitant cost.
When choosing a zailing destination, safe ports now have meta-text explaining that docking there will clear Troubled Waters.
A bumper crop, partly due to my being out of office last week, and partly due to changes being few in number in preceding weeks!
Week Ending 9 June
Fixed an erroneously hidden branch on The Dubiously Shrewd Rat’s Guide to Fallen London, part of the new onboarding experience.
Week Ending 23 June
New players now have the Fate tab unlocked by default. Fate and Exceptional Friendship subscriptions remain tutorialised in the same place.
Week ending 30 June
Added a Promissory Note to Yourself requirement on various Destiny branches in Irem. This is not a functional change (you need the Note to see those branches in the first place), but should better signpost that those branches will consume the Note.
Both endings of Theological Husbandry (A Brazen Fate) now grant the Instrument destiny.
Irem exacerbated the mechanical imbalance that already existed between those options.
Appetite is still broadly available to all players whether or not they played any given story.
Week ending 7 July
The quality that unlocks activities in Your Social Engagements as part of the new onboarding experience is now visible, and offers additional guidance on how to proceed.
The Noise menace, which was never fully implemented, has been retired and hidden.
Menace reduction items have been extensively mechanically changed; see our last roadmap blog for details.
Being arrested after gaining some Criminal Record is now much less punishing.
No longer reduces Casing, Favours, or Notability.
No longer reduces Rostygold.
In London, being arrested at max Criminal Record now takes 10% of your Echoes, capped at 70e, and reduces Suspicion by up to 10 change points based on the amount of Echoes consumed.
In the Upper River, does the same with scrip, capped at 140 scrip.
Greeting the Merry Gentleman now dismisses his card until Time, the Healer, among other effects.
Added some additional options to ‘On the Ice’ to make menace manipulation in the Hurlers a little easier.
Uptuned various common or low-value menace-reducing items.
The change message for acquiring a new pyramidal quality now properly displays the level description.
For now they are unobtainable, but we may use them again in future seasonal content. It was worth noting the changes now so that people aren’t surprised by their new stats if/when they next pop up!
Hello! After a couple of weeks without any patch notes (we had an Estival cookin’), I am back.
Week ending 4th August
Players who pursue a friendship with the Cloistered Diatomist are no longer prompted to ‘Recall Their Past Indiscretions’ when arriving at the Shuttered Palace.
Successful scheduled maintenance to improve stability and capacity.
Maybe be able to trade two moods.