Magic Arsenal

1.2.3: Beacon Update

I got some great feedback this week, and hopefully this update addresses a lot of the concerns and needed improvements from those discussions.

• Healing Wave renamed to Healing Rain
• Uncarved Stele tooltip clarified to indicate that it boosts EMC surveying range
• Healing Circle now harms undead as expected
• Will O' Wisp lights entities it touches on fire
• A single-target lightning spell, "Lit-Bolt", has been added. This is then upgradeable into Chain Lightning.
• A Stun spell and effect have been added. FX aren't done yet, but it's mechanically complete.
• Frost Shards stamina cost has been lowered to better fit its intended "low, consistent damage at high range" niche.
• Spell Focus items continue their slow migration up to Runic Altar recipes.
• Some ward recipes to turn runestones into stele were missing; they're present now.
• Berkano has been split into Berkano and Jera. Jera surveys for fruitful things, Berkano looks for the simple and sturdy.

Behind the scenes, the Chaos Nexus Crystal is more or less feature-complete. It's uncraftable at the moment because it's late-game content and is too destructive to go without proper explanation, but can be acquired in creative mode. This is a crystal which stores RF by using that RF to drag a small pocket of chaos into the world (amount of chaos that can be acquired and safely contained will depend on a connected altar's Radiance). When the RF is needed, some of the chaos is released and presumably safely, naturally forced out of this plane of existence. During this time, it causes vibrations in a paired crystal which can be converted losslessly back into RF. However, chaos is chaos. it destroys everything that it touches. The more RF you store, the more chaos resides in the prime material plane, and the larger the uninhabitable region becomes.

On a lighter note, the Radiant Beacon is also more or less feature-complete. This is an upgrade path up from a classical beacon. If you're anything like me, your beacon sits atop a pyramid of your most hated metals, and dispenses whatever effect seems least offensive due to particles and FOV. The Radiant Beacon derives its power from your existing temple network's Radiance, and has no other requirement besides being connected directly or indirectly to the altar. It has slots for up to six Sigils, which are flexible trinkets that can often confer a lesser effect to a person portably, or a greater effect to the beacon's area. Sadly, I'm still working out what's a fair cost to craft these, but one of them is Gravity Control!

Finally, hopefully this will be a mostly-invisible change to end-users, but the Codex is now an actual XML document under the hood. I'm hoping that having the context and structure of the book open to translators is going to make a big difference in how easy it is to get into a different language. It certainly makes it a lot easier for me to add pages in the first place! Along with this I've added a small amount of extra information about the mutual exclusivity of runes and getting down to spellcraft on the altar. As the number of pages is no longer fixed, you'll now be able to add tomes beyond "full", but the magenta bar will still show the progress for your current locale. And if you over-fill your codex, and later I release more pages, they'll be unlocked as expected.