• Golden prayer bench training limit is increased to 99.
• Added missing church tech descriptions.
• Fixed courtesan and gigolo minions not appearing in the minions menu.
• Improved level generation error descriptions in mods.
• Fixed bogus mod data errors.
• Added missing intro.

1.1.2

• Ghoul will receive temporary, stackable damage and defense bonuses for eating corpses, instead of permanent stat increases.
• Added special handling of a scenario where Black Mass is held after Adoxie he has already been killed.
• Church pews will appear continuous when placed next to each other.

1.1.3

• Coffins will now heal body parts of sleeping undead creatures.
• Scoring critical hits against undead will require that the target has less than 40% of health (which for undead is calculated by counting intact body parts).
• Infernite equipment will damage creatures without fire resistance by using a visible debuff to make the negative effect more visible.
• Added acid damage attribute to Leyak and made it fly.
• Prevented prisoner rebellion from happening in non-player factions.
• Fixed a crash caused by trying to load an incompatible save file.

1.1.4

• The previous patch caused excessive limb injuries required to kill living creatures, which this should fix. Thanks to Tooca for bringing up the issue.

1.1.5

• Made it possible again to cut off hydra’s heads.
• Only up to 20 body parts will count towards Necromancer’s abominations health to avoid them being near invincible.

1.1.6

• Stopped crashing in mods that use the previously removed InferniteEffect() macro.

The KeeperRL team wishes to entertain you this Halloween by releasing a new playable faction called the “Corrupted Church”. Playing either as a Bishop or a Mother Superior, you will build a church for yourself and your congregation, hold Masses, pray, and craft devotional items. However, the KeeperRL world won’t allow you to stay holy. Soon enough you will start to give in to temptations, such as luxury, alcohol, courtesans, and dark crafts. Before you know it, you will perform Black Masses in the name of the Evil God Adoxie, summon his minions, and do other, terrible deeds.

Here are the main gameplay features of the new faction:

• Build and finish a church in order to hold Masses for your minions.
• Write liturgical books to use during Mass to gain protection, faster digging or summoning help.
• Train your minions’ divinity attribute at prayer benches in order to unlock new prayers and increase their combat ability.
• Tempt your minions with alcohol and courtesans in order for them to gain experience by confessing their sins.
• Research unholy ideas in order to perform a Black Mass and use the power of the Evil God Adoxie to summon up to nine new demons with unique abilities.

This update maintains save and mod compatibility, so you can finish your game or keep using your favorite mods without worry.

A few months ago, I was contacted by a company called Elda Entertainment about a possible collaboration on KeeperRL. Elda is a small publisher based in Sweden, comprised of industry veterans who have worked on games such as Cities: Skylines, Surviving Mars, and Magicka.

After a bit of back and forth to understand each other’s needs, we have agreed to start working together. Of course, KeeperRL v1.0 has just recently come out, so this isn’t going to be a traditional developer-publisher relationship. Still, there is a lot of opportunity for them to help me with things such as marketing, community management, product strategy, and all the other things that publishers do.

Personally, I’m excited about this arrangement, as the folks at Elda Entertainment are going to pick up parts of my work where I’ve always fallen short. Because of this, I’ll be able to focus more on the game itself. I’m still going to be involved in the community, but they are also going to pop in on Steam forums and Discord, perhaps helping me stay a bit more in touch with important things going on among the players.

I’m also very happy to have them on the team. For the past eleven years, I’ve had to make all the important decisions by myself, so getting advice from someone with so much experience is going to be a big relief for me. Hopefully, you will also notice the results of our cooperation in the game itself and everything around it.

You can buy KeeperRL on Steam, Humble Store, Itch.io and on GOG. Small note: the free version is not available yet, but will be ready within a week.

I’d like to thank all community members who have been involved in this project over the years. Without your support I wouldn’t have been able to make KeeperRL in its current state. Therefore it’s also your game and I congratulate you for reaching this milestone. We did it!

Even though KeeperRL is an eleven year project, the last year saw very rapid development and big changes. I’ve done my best to test as much as possible before the launch (and so have you), but it’s very possible that there are some bugs and balance issues present. I’m committed to fixing them as soon as they are reported, so that you can have a flawless playing experience.

This is a huge moment, but it’s not the end of our journey together. I’m planning to work on a 1.1 version of KeeperRL and release it later this year. It will contain more content and gameplay that didn’t make it to the 1.0, including another playable keeper faction. I’ll write more about it soon.

I’ll skip the patch notes this time, because they would be way too long for this patch.

Have fun and don’t burn all the elves!

Minor villains

One of the many advantages of the new world map is that it adds lots of space for low-key content. You’ll stumble upon shops, stables, forges, cottages, and various mystery locations. Some of them can boost your game in a major way, some are there just for flavor, and others will get you killed. Overall they add a lot of excitement when you extend your influence and explore new areas.

New workshop tiers

There will be four new workshops available in the game: magma forge, magma jeweler, enchanted workshop and enchanted laboratory.

Building them will be restricted to certain locations: the magma variants will have to be built next to a magma tile, and the enchanted variants next an enchanted pool.

They are not intended as major upgrades, but rather add a small variety of things you can craft, and a bit of excitement when exploring deeper Z-levels. The magma forge and enchanted workshop will produce moderately improved equipment compared to their regular counterparts. In the magma jeweler you will be able to create basic glyphs to improve your weapons and armor. The enchanted lab offers potions of mutation that can be used to add an edge to your army’s power.

In addition to its new tier, the regular forge will continue to offer items made from the rare materials: adamantium, adoxium and infernite. Their stat bonuses will be greatly increased compared to Alpha 36, so finding the ores and craftsmen with appropriate skill will be one of the major quests on your way to world domination.

New items, and item scaling

As the difficulty and power curve got much longer, the game needed to scale all the loot that you can find in high level areas. After all, finding a +5 armor is no longer exciting after defeating a dragon with +150 attack. Therefore I’ve added automatic adjustment of item power to the difficulty of the location. This includes shops, mentioned in the previous paragraph, to ensure that you’ll keep finding nice stuff even towards the end of the game.

Things that you will be able to find will include equipment made from all the available materials in the game, a new tier of longer-lasting potions, new rings and amulets, and a few new, powerful artifacts.

More sound effects

The last time I worked on sound in KeeperRL was almost eight years ago, so it was time for a bit of update. I’ve added UI sounds, ambient sounds made by various animals, as well as water and magma, workshop sounds, the sound of torture, and more. I’m very happy with these additions and hoping to add some more before in the coming weeks.

A small adventurer overhaul

I’ve merged the adventurer and keeper modes together, so the adventurers are actually just keepers that start with a small house as their base. This lets them use more of the game’s features, such as buying horses at stables, and the auto-pillaging feature. They also have a place to come back to and heal, restock their gear, etc.

The old adventurer class was removed, and now you can play as an evil wizard, dark knight or white knight, known from the classic keeper bases.

To make things clear, the adventurer will continue to be a small part of KeeperRL, just an alternative way to experience its universe. Turning it into a fully fledged RPG is beyond the scope of the game, which I know may disappoint some players.

Improved White Knight

I’ve tweaked the population control mechanic of the White Knight to rely on horses, instead of farm animals. After steeds were introduced to the game, horses became almost a necessity for the White Knight’s base, so it made little sense to require two extra animals for every minion. This should reduce clutter and potential lag in highly populated bases.

I also added a simple promotion system to obtain knights. The immigration list now offers squire minions, instead of knights, which can be knighted, one per your Keeper’s level gain.

Duels

Even though I was more focused on balance and content, I couldn’t resist adding one fun feature. For extra entertainment of Your Evilness, some villains (namely – the Duke) will challenge you to a duel. The stake will be your lives as well as automatic conquest of the loser’s base. Accepting will spare you having to slaughter all of his knights, at the expense of the risk of losing your Keeper. Choose wisely!

New world map

Overhauling the world map has been my biggest goal in the past few years. It took a ridiculous amount of effort, especially considering that the end result is so obvious and simple. Here are its main features:

• Bigger: having 40x the area of the old world map, it adds space for much more content and esthetics. It’ll give you an all around better experience when traveling in your conquests.
• Real biomes: the types of tiles on the world map will correspond to the biomes of the actual locations. You’ll find white dragons in snowy areas, lizardmen in the deserts and dwarves in the mountains. Placing your starting position marker will also determine the biome of your home map.
• Fog of war: initially a small area is revealed, where you are free to choose your starting position. As you conquer tribes, more parts will become visible. This is so that players are not overwhelmed with information and all the possible starting locations right at the start of the game. The feeling of exploration and more visual appeal were also big reasons for it.
• Minor villains: in order to make the world feel more alive, the map will contain a lot of minor locations that you can visit that will not be relevant to your progress (or will they???).
• Difficulty increase: since the world will offer way more enemies, their difficulty will scale with the distance from your home map. The most faraway enemies will have their stats increased in the order of +100. This will also require scaling up the player’s strength, which brings me to the next part.

Power scaling

In order to conquer the most difficult villains, the player will need to acquire very powerful units. This will be achieved mainly through two new mechanics:

Uncapped combat experience:

• Minions will become ridiculously powerful as they kill tougher enemies. This is a feature that was once present in KeeperRL, but got removed in the name of balance. Now I say **** balance, as it is immensely fun.
• Ok some balance is still needed. To realize the gains, you will have to provide more and more luxurious quarters to your superhero troops. It will force you to pause your conquest every now and then, and offer the opportunity for some fun dungeon design work.
• To counter the potential scenario of losing a few powerful units and the lack of motivation to continue playing, enemies will now attempt to capture your minions instead of killing them. This always leaves you an option of winning them back in the next attack.
• To keep your regular units from dying in battles of champions, I’ve added the concept of sharing experience between the team, so even a single beefed up team member will make the whole team useful.

Scaling the quality of crafted equipment:

Another avenue for improving your army will be a new ability of crafting high quality items, with up to +100 bonuses. This will require some work: first you’ll have to attract or capture highly skilled craftsmen, and after that provide them with upgraded forges. The highest tier forge will only be possible to build in highly specific, rare and dangerous locations.

Achievements

This is a feature that I’ve left for the end of development. There are currently 31 achievements implemented, ranging from straightforward goals, to finding hidden content and doing tricky challenges. Hopefully they give you some extra fun!

1.0 Release time frame

There are more big features in the plans, but I’ll keep them secret until I have at least working implementations. Besides adding cool stuff, I’m also going to spend a lot of time playtesting and balancing everything. Winning the game now takes dozens of hours, so it’s a pretty daunting task. I regularly update development builds, so you can get an early glimpse if you want. Visit the discord server for details.

All said, the progress has been very good, so I’m hereby committing to the first quarter of 2024. Wish me luck :).

The way I see KeeperRL is, first and foremost, as my job, as it has been my main source of income for the last eight years. Even though there have been swings in the sales, they’ve mostly been stable over the years, affording me a comfortable life. Looking at things financially, it was just a wise decision to keep working on it instead of moving on to something else.

On the other hand working on the same thing for so many years is very tiring, and can hinder your personal growth. I’ve been yearning to start fresh for a long time, and I envy other creative fields, where projects take months instead of years to finish. As some of you may know, I actually have started quite a few projects on the side, but they’ve been much smaller in scope and not really intended to make money.

The financial and creative components have more or less cancelled each other out, leading me to the deciding reason for KeeperRL’s long development time, which is that I’ve always felt it has a lot of unrealized potential. I’ve heard similar comments from many people over the years. Because I’m a very stubborn person with big dreams, I’ve kept going back to the drawing board looking for ways to improve the game and make it more enticing and replayable, aspiring to make it as good as some popular games in the genre, such as Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld.

In the last few months I’ve had some breakthrough ideas on how to improve KeeperRL, and their initial implementation has been very promising. With this in mind I’ve decided that the time to leave Early Access is now or never. There are two reasons for this. The first is that I need to put an end to my “one more feature” mindset and finally reach the goal or admit defeat. The second is that releasing major features in the 1.0 update is important for the game’s promotion, as it brings back old players, and catches the attention of press and influencers, hopefully leading to decent sales on launch day. And it’s unlikely that I’ll ever be able to put out as meaningful an update as this one.

With the big announcement out of the way, I’d like to add some caveats. First of all, I don’t intend to make the 1.0 update final, and it’s very likely that I’ll keep working on KeeperRL to some extent. Of course these won’t be big updates, because I will finally start maintaining save and mod compatibility. I’ll also be 100% committed to fixing bugs, performance, and other issues. The second caveat is that I still have no idea how long releasing the coming update will take, so there is no release date yet. Besides working on new gameplay, I also have to cross off things like proper sound effects, Steam achievements, hiring a marketing specialist, etc. It will very likely be 2024 before everything is done. It may be disappointing that there won’t be any (major) official patches out before then, but this is the way it has to be.

I’m going to write another post soon revealing all of really cool stuff that I have been working on. If you’re impatient, and would like to get more involved, I recommend popping in on Discord, where I often post updates and share development builds.

Update: you can watch the edited stream here:

The live stream went well, even though it was my first time, the volume was too low and my dog puked. You can find a shortened video with the volume fixed below (dog was edited out).

I will be making more live streams in the future, maybe even on a regular basis. If you have comments or special requests as to what should be featured, let me know!