We finally continue the development of the final dungeon! This week: Featuring the Sloth Domain. As with the other Domains, it has some new (old) mechanics. While this is the Sloth Domain, it's surprisingly hectic. In addition to regular enemies, you will also have to dodge some roaming zombies similar to the one found in Belphegor's Domain, although this time around touching it won't end your day, but it will inflict you with a lot of debuffs.

To add some more chaos to the situation, you will be slowed down on the grassy tiles, while enmies can move as usual. On the other hand, enemy base speed of most enemies here is slow, most don't even move and the zombies are not the most intelligent chasers. Using sneaking, high level Fire spells, jumping - so the usual tricks - you can avoid a lot of enemies here.

And be careful when you are close to cozy places with blankets while being Drowsy... You will need to pass a Willpower check or end the day.

In the end, you can refight Belphegor if he got the better of you in his story arc or a replacement battle. Since you are always forced to complete Mountrainreach before you can go into Richard's Domain, there were no complicated plot developments to consider like with Sathanas.

Moving on, there are a couple of balancing changes I introduced this week and that are a bit more experimental so they ended up on the prerelease instead of the patch release.

Gold Cost Factor for Blessing an item at the White Priestess goes from 5 to 4

The option to bless an item through the church is kind of meant to be a bit scammy but also to have niche applications. Currently, according to my data, this niche is so small, that I can safely call it too small. :'D So going down a bit with the price factor in order to make the gold cost just a little bit less steeper.

HP Cost for harvesting Base Materials except Ropes goes from 5 to 10 HP

This is mostly a change to make the HP cost scale a bit better into the later game. 5 HP was mostly chosen since it's a fine cost for the early game, but it becomes a bit too irreleavnt a bit too quickly. I did some testing with the increased HP costs and they don't slow down the early game a lot, but they do force just a bit more planning for HP usage.

Low Demon enemies in Northern Mines are no longer all Story Encounters

What this means it that it's possible to perform tricks like Flashbomb -> run behind Low Demon for a backattack. The fact that you couldn't do this was mostly just a fragment from the early times of version 0.3.0 where Flashbombs did not exist. The change is mostly intended to streamline the logic.

Moved Ether and Pyromantium from Nephlune Merchant to Trademond Rope Merchant, unlocking after the completion of Spider Infestation

This change mostly serves two purposes:

• It provides another level of soft-lock prevention making sure that you always have a theoretical source of Ether (-> MP increases) and Pyromantium (-> Bombs) to guarantee overcoming checks such as learning Open Domain or destroying rocks. Of course, they are still over-priced as they are in Nephlune, so it's a very expensive option to buy them, but it exists as a fall-back for fringe cases.
• Lorewise, it just provides a bit more sense of progression, giving the quest for clearing the mines an additional albeit minor sense of impact.

Finally, we also have some progress on Trihan's side, although he was sick during the week, so I don't think a lot as been going on there. He finished the encounter design for the Eastern Clockwork Forest I believed and you can now also enter the related cave and pick up some more Security Chips but I think that's about it.

For the complete changelog, as usual, see below. From my side, I'm done with dungeon crawling content for this update then and next week I will be focusing more on side content such as adding some of the remaining skills and doing some more polish work on the game.

Changelog 0.47.0-prerelease-3 (20.09.2024)

• Added map Richard Domain Level 3
• Clockwork Forest: Added map Hidden Cave
• Clockwork Forest: Added additional enemies
• Added parameter into save menu plugin for increased number of saves in playtest mode
• Added Vice option to steal Pyromantium from crates in Northern Mines
• Added explanation aura for giving info about ground color and crystal color in recollection rooms
• Added marker for Northern Mines Vitality Potion in Hidden Room
• Applied minor refactorings
• Implemented Sloth Domain Mechanics
• Added Sloth Domain encounters
• Added Sloth Domain Belphegor re-encounter
• Added Sloth-Domain Alternate Boss Encounter
• Allowed player to exit Draknor Fortress floor 2 without having to fight door guard

Balancing

• Reduced gold cost factor of blessing an item from the White Priestess from x5 to x4
• Increased HP harvesting cost for base materials except rope to 10
• Streamlined enemy logic in Northern Mines Low Demon Domain by making all battles escapable and giving Low-Demon a Detector tag
• Moved base materials to rope merchant and give Nephlune merchant other materials for restock
• Removed Mark of Justice
• Multiplied Dolus Fixed Damage by difficulty modifier
• Added probability weight 6 Attack choice to Mutated Hydrangea past turn 11, decreased MDEF by 2 and ATK debuff duration of Mind Pollination by 1

Bugfixes

• Fixed prerelease typos
• Fixed Fast Items Stance consuming multiple coatings
• Fixed base pixel costume switching to SK version when using recall or ending day on new game
• Fixed Alicia cheerleader sprite with poms not updated to new sprite
• Fixed Rotten Love listing a 25 EXP reward when it should be 50
• Fixed Greater Salamander in Firestorm Caves 1 not adding a compendium defeat
• Fixed Arwin summon HP tracking not working since variable refactor