NOTE: The public release contains the option to turn on "Analytics" in the Options menu, I encourage to turn it on to help me improve the game!

Public release. Just the usual---hey wait the changelog's a bit longer!! So, public release but with a couple more balancing changes than usual. Our mapper was a day late with the map I needed to work for this week, but well, only a bit more than a day so the backup plan of swapping the work load with the next week didn't quite make sense. 

Instead I used the time to do some more test playing on my side as I haven't done any major playtesting since the reverse summoning ritual got finished, and use that to do some balancing adjustments. The focus was mostly on "scaling" effects that matter for playthroughs with 200+ days. Although, there are also plenty of other minor changes. I will just quickly go through them.

Slime Digestion Mechanic

Another slime nerf! :'D Your slime will now no longer be able to stomach slopping down materials on mass. It will need 1 day of digestion time after feeding. This slow-down should prevent slime from escalating too hard too fast. A slime focused playthrough should still be possible but no longer be THE way to clear harder the game for pure runs as it simply takes a bit more time to build giga slimes.

Less Blessed Water, more Blessed Water+

The "high" number of Blessed Water made it really easy to avoid Womb of Lust, even on 200+ day playthroughs if you stretch the use of Blessed Waters. On the other hand, the increased corruption gains in Chapter 2+ make the little -1 Corruption from a single Blessed Water not as meaningful as it was in Chapter 1. I therefore reduced cases post-Festival where you got multiple Blessed Waters and instead gave 1 Blessed Water+. Overall this means more corruption reduction, less Womb of Lust reset.

250 Blessed Water base price but only 2 Gold per day increase

Buying up all the Blessed Water right at the start of the game now incurs more opportunity costs, but on the other hand, delaying buying it is no longer punished as much. On high-day playthroughs this makes buying Blessed Water more viable late-game, but it should still be expensive enough to make it more and difficult to buy them - and instead to leave the corruption for Alicia and give in to Womb of Lust. :)

The 250 Gold was chosen since Blessed Water+ is 1000 gold and -4 Corruption whereas Blessed Water is -1 Corruption. This way the prices match up a bit more. As a small change, Blessed Water+ had its price increase raised to a whopping 8 Gold. Not that this bears any meaning for the purpose of buying Blessed Water+ - as you can't :D - but it raises the incentive of selling it if you don't need corruption reduction.

Other

The remaining changes ar emostly changes that I happened to make as I was doing playtesting and go into various different directions. Doing the Celebration for John Rising now gives +1 Trust for each customer service instance, giving a bit more incentive to hunt for tips for those who didn't upgrade the costume, as that helps with reaching some trust thresholds like learning the Shadowcloack spell from the demon worshipper spellshop. Garuda has THUNDER DRAIN instead of THUNDER RESIST just for some flavor. You don't need 90 Trust to take the books in James quarter - 80 is now sufficient so you don't just get the guy guarding the quarters to move aside at 80. (I playtested getting to 100 Trust on my non-pure by lewd avoiding playthrough :'D) 

Getting defeated in the Entertainment Battle now gives you the Desmond Soul-Contract, so getting punished with the Prostitution Contract is enough punishment and you don't have to try to beat the battle again. Seductive Stance I only needs 4 Exhibitionism so if you need to go to 5 Exhibitionism for Improved Posture, you can learn it for that purpose. At 5, it didn't really enable anything.

Demonic Bats went to 135 HP so you can use Blessed Statis Bomb+ as an alternative to Splash/Web Bombs to defeat the Demonic Mage. And the Encyclopedia Alchemica Vol II went down to 5000k base price (same as the first Volume) since Lumeria has VAT, making it more expensive than Vol I simply for that. I was testing what you could do with it and the Stasis Bombs+ that it unlocked, which lead to the other change I mentioned in this paragraph.

Aaaaand that covers most of it! Now I need to hustle and write the prerelease one. :'D

0.38.3 (19.01.2024)

• None

Balancing

• Implement Slime Digestion mechanic to slowing down Slime growth
• Increase base price of Blessed Water to 250 but decrease price increase per day from 4 to 2
• Added 10 Gold base tips and +1 Trust in John Rising Celebration
• Upgraded THUNDER RESIST of Garuda to THUNDER DRAIN
• Reduced Trust requirement to take books in James Quarters to 80
• Reduced needed number of Poison Coatings to poison food from 3 to 1 
• Replaced Blessed Water x3 in Northern Mountains with Blessed Water+
• Upgraded Blessed Water in Winterfall Church to Blessed Water+ 
• Ugraded Blessed Water in Underwater Dungeon to Blessed Water+ 
• Increased day based price increase for Blessed Water+ to 8 
• Changed losing Entertainment Battle to give you Desmond's Soul Contract while still receiving the penalty 
• Reduced Exhibitionism needed to learn Seductive Stance I to 4 
• Reduced HP of Demonic Bat to 135
• Reduced base price of the Encylopedia Alchemica Vol II to the 5000 as Vol I

Bugfixes

• Fixed typos in public content #5320 (Thanks to Kytt)
• Fixed sell window not properly scrolling if last item in the list sells out 
• Fixed interaction icon glitch in John Rising Celebration 
• Fixed some Winterfall encounters not affected by Food Poison 
• Fixd 50% payment to Entertainment Mage for prostitution work not being rounded creating non-integer gold values 
• Fixed Blessed Statis Bomb+ not having +50% Damage modifier from Blessed tag 
• Fixed Bless menu validity function not checking whether blessed version exists 
• Fixed Blessed Acid Bomb+ missing the plus in the name 
• Fixed Crafting Menu showing non-plus versions of Emerald Tea, Vitality Potion and Stasis Bomb after bringing Encycopledia Alchemica II 
• Fixed Tremor II having the same MP cost as rank I 
• Fixed Curse of Wrath reducing willpower if Aura is knocked out 
• Fixed Humanitas Rune out of bounds description formatting 
• Fixed Nothing But the Truth bugs 
• Fixed scroll arrows in item menu