Scattered Evil 1.9 released

Scattered Evil 1.9 is now available on SourceForge and ModDB.

New Armor System

  • Armor now comes in three basic classes. The stronger the armor, the higher percentage of damage it absorbs but there is also more weight to carry.
  • Armor now has resistance slots for Fire, Frost and Poison. Any class of armor can have any combination of these resistances, which absorb up to 99% of the incoming damage without losing any armor durability.
  • Armor can be restored to pristine state by a master blacksmith in a town. You can also purchase or loot an Armorer’s Hammer, which allows you to repair your armor (to what degree depends on the RPG complexity setting).
  • You need to keep an eye on your armor’s degradation as once a piece is completely depleted, not even the best blacksmith can restore it.
  • The old Hexen style armor has been discontinued. You might still find some battered pieces in the wilderness, but besides the metal itself being worth a few coins, there is no use for them any more.
  • There are rumors about an armor worn by ancient kings that is supposed to be better than anything today’s blacksmiths can craft.

New Feature: Carried Weight

  • Inventory items (including money) now have a specific weight and depending on your character’s stats, sooner or later you’ll become Overburdened, a state in which you move slower, tire faster and get hungry sooner.
  • Playing on Old School RPG complexity, with even more weight you become Extremely Overburdened, a state in which these negative effects become crippling. On the flip side, if you keep your carried weight beyond a certain threshold, you gain Lightfooted, a state in which you move faster and take longer to get tired or hungry.

New Feature: Banking and Finances

  • You can now open a bank account at Ocadia’s Counting House and deposit some of your cash in it, both lightening the load in your backpack and earning interest with time.
  • The Journal now includes a financial overview page that lists not only your cash and your current bank account balance, but also your real estate holdings (if any) and the estimated sale value of your more valuable inventory items.

New and modified Class Abilities

  • Cleric: Levitator is a new prayer that allows you to lift all nearby enemies high into the air, then splat!
  • Fighter: Phalanx is a new martial skill that blocks all incoming damage for a short time, but the fighter cannot move during its duration (he can still attack).
  • Mage: once advanced sufficiently in his studies, the mage can now summon monsters to do his bidding (there is a small chance this can backfire).
  • The mage’s Arcane Shield (defensive spell) now only reflects missiles and offers no protection against melee attacks.
  • The cleric’s Healing prayer now costs significantly more and heals somewhat less in the beginning, but scales much better with the player’s Charisma score in later stages.
  • The red haze during the fighter’s Berserker rage now obstructs the view to a lesser degree. A few other class abilities (Phalanx, Arcane Shield) now also have a faint coloring of your view during their effect.

New Dungeons

  • Rebuilt from scratch, The Rift is open once again, connecting The Canyon to the Dark Conclave.
  • Hytesthani Ravine is now the target of Senior Wizard Robert’s quest for the ultimate weapon.

Miscellaneous

  • You can now punch trees.
  • In Thystes Fortress, soldiers can now be pushed out of the way.
  • The Journal now includes a new chapter on Old School RPG complexity, Tasks (the first entry appears as soon as you talk to your order’s representative in the first town).
  • Cost of ability booster potions reduced to a quarter of their previous value.
  • The text-based setup utility now allows you to set the screen ratio along with the resolution and it writes these parameters in a separate text file, making it easier to add your own command line arguments to ScatteredEvil.bat/ScatteredEvil.sh.
  • Added status marks for more conditions (still disabled by default, you can enable them in the Gameplay Options menu).
  • New visuals for the Mage’s Fireball spell cast.

Bugfixes

  • Fixed: gold bars dropped by monsters flying off into the blue wild yonder.
  • Tears of the Gods damage massively increased, bringing it to the level it was meant to have.
  • Fixed Jodisec Mine keys disappearing from inventory.
  • Fixed incorrect player name being shown if multiple characters have been set up.
  • The Fighter’s Journal on Old School RPG complexity now shows the Spellbook chapter as soon as he obtains any of the combat spells.
  • Potential fix for enemies trying to cast a spell on a dead player, crashing the game.
  • Corrected the map scroll coordinates for The Canyon.