Hi everyone! Apologies for how quiet it has been for the last two months (and for how slow the queue has been the last couple of weeks).

As mentioned in the last update, I have been dealing with some IRL stuff that has eaten up all of my time for these couple of months. It ended up being much more time-consuming than I had anticipated, and I went from ~20 hrs/wk to work on the game to less than 3 hrs/wk to work on the game. (Nothing bad happened! I just had to move IRL and the place I was moving to needed extensive work/repairs.)

The good news is that I am almost finished with all of the stuff I need to do and I will be returning to my normal development cycle soon! I'm expecting to have at least half the day this Saturday and Sunday, and then will return to having full weekends and select evenings to work on the game the weekend after this.

Not being able to work on the game has been truly dreadful and I feel like a puppy that hasn't been allowed outside to play in months - so I'm really scratching and pawing at the door ready to get moving again.

What's next?

I am currently working on some substantial clean-up, especially on adventuring, but in other places too. Here is a selection of some of the things that are either done on the local copy of the site or actively in progress:

• A re-brand of conditions to make them easier to understand (both front-end for you and back-end for me) (this is done)
  
• Health stat mitigates weather effects in gathering and weather health-penalties in adventuring (this is done)
  
• Ability for me to add automatic-success chips to an an ability so that certain abilities like healing cannot miss (in progress)
  
• Adjustments to the less-used abilities to make them more beneficial (this includes giving conditions durations, so that certain conditions can be made better by having them last, for example, 5 rounds instead of 1) (in progress)
  
• Adjustments to the thief class that re-categorize thief attacks as "stealth attacks" instead of "melee attacks" so that thieves can get improved dice on their own skills - especially relevant for their attacks that are beyond level 4 (in progress)
  
• No animations adventuring will be truly 100% no animations whatsoever so that it can be used as a screenreader-friendly version (will be accompanied by a page-refresh mode toggle since I've found some screenreaders really don't like the no-refresh thing) (in progress)
  
• You will be able to go faster (this is done)
  
• You can choose the transparency of the battle background image so that you can provide more contrast between the icons and the background if you need the icons to be more visible - this also serves double-purpose as the ability to decrease contrast between the backgrounds and the site as a whole (for example, setting winter backgrounds at 50% on dark theme to make them darker) (this is done)

(This list does not include everything to get cleaned up in the next update, I have a lot more that hasn't been started yet.)

The ability to purchase essence fragments is also likely to drop in the next update - prior to the end of beta / mercat release. I'd like to get you all testing it to make sure it's working properly before everyone goes wild getting fishy kitties.

And of course... mercats are well underway!

That’s amazing, thank you for everything you do, Squid!
Good luck with the IRL stuff so that you can have your cat time- you deserve it more than all of us!!

ooo so exciting!

Congratulations on moving! Anyways, I'm wishing you luck on getting updates done!

Sounds awesome! Thanks for keeping us posted. This is the only game I'm really playing anymore, and I love to see it getting better and better! <3 <3

i am going to throw so much money at you

congrats on housey !!! take the time you need, and the breaks you deserve !! super excited to see the updates!

thank you for the update. grats on moving.

Thank you so much Squid!

Thank you for the update, Squid! I hope you like your new living space!

I'm so excited for the upcoming updates. I am seeing mercats in my dreams at this point