I'm kinda on vacation. Emubi's away until end of the month - so only a small one this week. I have been mostly to Gamescom this week mostly trying to do some networking (and not really accomplishing much) but I guess even just meeting a couple of contacts I made over time and making like two new ones is still progress on that front even though it's tiny.

Then, what's new this week is mostly a couple of book things I had been meaning to add but didn't get to when I added the Magic Academy Library Floor.

First of all, you can now see all books you can buy before enlisting. Sadly the Select Item dialogue doesn't contain prices but this should help with making the decision to enroll or not.

Then, there are three new books

• The Art of Heat Up: The ATK increase from Heat Up II becomes drastic (=50%)
• The Art of Pacify: +3 Duration of Debuffs from Pacify II
• Expert Theory Of Magic: +5 MATK but requires 8 Reading Progress.

Adding "The Art of Books" for Rank II support magic feels a bit like cheating since the whole point of "The Art of" skills is that they don't require a linear progression I -> II -> III but can be learned at any point after learning the base skill. Putting them basically in parallel to learning the Rank II version. These here require the Rank II skill and support skills don't have a Rank III so effectively they are the Rank III. A bit weird but this way we maintain the consistency that only damage spells have Rank III versions and we don't have to commit to giving every spell a Rank III version.

Furthermore, Reading Proficiency got two buffs this week:

• Reading Proficiency II now gives +2 Reading Progress instead of +1
• Useless Knowledge no longer fully negates reading speed increases but only halves them!

The latter I imagine could be quite strong but we will have to see. Initially it didn't matter to me that the passive entirely turned off the concept of reading speed increases because we only had 1 instance of it (Reading Proficiency I) but with the addition of the second rank, it kind of felt bad to me that it's completely turned off at a rather early point in the corruption route.

I hope that at -50% it's still a very powerful debuff to reading while not entirely negating the option to picking up the Reading Proficiency skills.

Besides that, just a a bunch of minor things as I did some test playing on the train and after coming home from Gamescom and otherwise just worked on things I kinda felt like since it's vacation week, even if they aren't all that valuable to the game.

Richard has a new throne in his domain, the artist's home in Riverflow looks more artsy, Defensive Stance II is now a bit more tanky, and having Legs of Sloth at 0 Willpower now takes 10 steps to decrease your MP by 1 instead of 1 step (causing MP getting to nuked to 0 very quickly :'D). Finally, with a lot of bugs in Demon-crazy fixed last week, I did some test playing, applied some improvements and generally created work for Trihan. :'D For the full changelog, check as usual below.

Next week, starts the development of Chapter 3-C - meanging we are going back to content production focusing on dungeons. I will be looking into adding a new gamble ("Board Game Dungeon") to the Entertainment Den and our assistant dev Trihan is hopefully through with the Demon-cracy bugfixes and can get started on Clockwork Forest :'D.

Changelog0.46.0-prerelease-4 (23.08.2024)

• Added book "Expert Theory Of Magic"
• Added book "The Art Of Heat Up"
• Added book "The Art Of Pacify"
• Iterated demon-cracy
• Integrated minor tileset improvements into Richard Domain and Artist maps
• Added Nephlune Church marking after opening the Church
• Added difficulty tag to Learned Skill Analystics and Lewd Scene Analystics
• Increased max vice to 30

Balancing

• Decreased potency of Legs of Sloth 0 Willpower effect to only trigger every 10 steps
• Increased DEF bonus from Defensive Stance II from 10% to 25%
• Increased Reading Proficiency II Reading Speed increase from +1 to +2
• Changed Useless Knowledge so instead of disabling all reading speed increases it reduces them by 50%
• Adjusted Trust threshold for support bonus in Special Waitressing event

Bugfixes

• Fixed typos
• Fixed crash in James epilogue scenes if never interacted with Drug Dealer
• Fixed Extra Corruption gain from Orgasms from triggering in Earth scenes
• Fixed Shadow being given immortal by mistake
• Fixed Recall not turning off fog and wind skill switches
• Fixed incorrect progress variable for Art of Feeding Book
• Fixed Persephone not transforming into Core when hit by Acid Bomb
• Fixed missing MP check to Horror demonstration at Black Priestess
• Fixed defeating Shadow not increasing killed bosses in some cases
• Fixed cultist overlapping Fleura in Voting Encouragement
• Fixed heart icons no longer appearing after Voting Encouragement