Shadow of the Wyrm v1.9.0

This one took longer than expected, and probably falls somewhere between a minor update and a major release. The biggest change is to one of the classes, Apothecary, which is now fully implemented and useful: Apothecaries can learn to brew potions using common and uncommon items, things such as wildflowers, magici shards, essence of were-light, and others. Brewing with were-light causes items to glow with an unearthly light. Finally, one of the original classes I envisioned for the game is implemented. (It only took fifteen years.)

Implementing Brewing required adding a bunch of new items: wild grain, hops, and others. All characters can brew beer at cauldrons, and make potions of juice. But besides brewing, there are other small changes: at a wheel and loom, you can now make scarves. Snakelings are now canonically bald. Followers can see their hidden leader, so they no longer stumble about blindly, looking for you, and ignoring instructions. And many other such things. Kelp on the coastlines. Wet rooms in dungeons grow mushrooms. Jelly-type creatures drop slime. Hermits will teach you to forage.

It's probably been too long since the last release, but there's still a good amount of stuff in this one. I hope you enjoy it! And, on to the next one. We're coming up, version-number-wise, to 2.0.0. I have some ideas that might make the next release special.

Full changes:

Shadow of the Wyrm v1.9.0 "de Cabezon"

- Version started June 28, 2025. Version finalized January 25, 2026.

- Updated the name combinations and various messages.

- Added a pause when the user chooses to dump their character on death so the  message isn't cut off before showing the high score screen.

- Followers now always see their leader, so being hidden doesn't prevent  followers from following you around (RelicWraith).

- The backstab flag is now removed every two hours on a map.

- Snakelings are now specifically bald (RelicWraith).

- Updated the Linux build instructions.

- The Spelunking skill (never implemented) has been removed.

- The Lore skills now grant bonuses to hit and to damage when travelling on  applicable terrian.

- Wet rooms in the dungeon are now likely to have mushrooms.

- Skinning corpses may now also produce the creature's bones.

- When skinning a corpse, the corpse weight is reduced somewhat and the  excess weight becomes the weight of the skin and bones.

- Will o' the Wisps and were-light now drop essence of were-light.

- Jelly-type creatures may now drop slime, and leave it as they move.

- You can now move diagonally NW/NE and SW/SE via shift/control+left/right  arrow (stutonk).

- Hermits will now teach you Foraging if you don't know it, as will Glich.

- Spell affects that affect items (fire, acid, holy, cold, etc) will now also affect features like altars, barrels, etc in similar ways.

- Dungeons can now have beehives, as can most overworld maps.

- Coastlines can now generate kelp.

- Kelp generation on aquatic vegetation tiles is now much more common.

- Sheep now generate in fields, hills, mountains.

- There is now an option to exclude specific items from autopickup (Krom).

- Ammo that targets a tile with a feature that doesn't have a creature present will strike that feature. For the most part this will just generate flavour text, but this will also trigger desecration for altars and agitate hives.

- Stone ammo (rocks, etc) now have a much higher survival rate.

- NPCs with ranged weapons may now decide to target terrain features such  as hives.

- Added a new "unstable" flag (to were-light and antimatter shot) that causes  it to vanish when dropped or thrown.

- Juniper berries will generate in fall, wild hops in summer.

- If The Smith decides to give antimatter shots, he now gives more.

- Dropping were-light can impart the glow flag on other items on the tile.

- Items that are glowing, but not artifacts, will now show as yellow.

- Added a section to the guidebook on the game's configuration for players  who want to change settings, game data, or behaviours (loren schmidt).

- Shrines can now place multiple relics.

- There is now a way to get to Telari without explicitly talking to Ead,  allowing passage without breaking the no-speaking conduct.

- Scarves can now be created at a wheel and loom.

- Added a new conduct, jewelryless (broken when you wear rings and amulets). 

- Converted the project from Visual Studio 2022 to 2026.

- Added cauldrons to Isen Dun, Yew, Carcassia, Atua-Elar, Gnordvar.

- Apothecaries now also start with a couple antidote potions, speed potions,  unstoning potions, and a gain attributes potion.

- Created general recipes for all in-game potions, and tied these to specific  Brewing skill values.

- The glowing flag now has a chance to allow weapons to flare up, inflicting  heat damage, and adding additional damage and an additional chance to inflict  blindness.

- New items: slime, essence of were-light, juniper berries, wild hops, honey,  honeycomb, ale, scarf. 

- New terrain features: cauldron, insect hive.

- Bowyer, Fletchery, and the use of pulpers will now set the base item status  based on the item used for crafting.

- Bug fixes:

  - Fixed a crash issue in String::clean with unexpected input that caused an  assert in lower-level libraries.

  - Dragon Breath (the spell) was using the wrong colour compared to Dragon  Breath (the wand).

  - The setting to ignore items over a certain number of pounds was  incorrectly using ounces.

  - The magic to-hit calculations was using an incorrect value for one of its  components, making magic a little harder to hit with.

  - The code to aggressively merge currency was too aggressive and was merging  currencies with different base IDs.

  - Newer versions of Boost removed the boost_system library, which was a  stub after an earlier version of boost made the library header-only. The  linker references to this in the premake files have been removed (Larzid).