First off, there's a bugfix I uploaded right before this post which I don't want to get buried, so go grab that if you haven't already!

Anyway, as I mentioned in the release post, Elemental Chosen are a lot simpler than Mechanical Chosen.  I expect the hardest part of the coming release to be finishing all the new portraits in time, so that's what I'm focusing on now.  It was pretty fun to come up with which elements should be represented by which personality types.  I was mostly able to wrangle them so that opposing personalities also have opposing elements (e.g. Core Morality/Minor Confidence = Water Elementals, Minor Morality/Core Confidence = Fire Elementals).

There's not a whole lot more to say about portraits, so I suppose I can use this chance to talk in a bit more detail about what Elemental Chosen do.  Their weaker trait is a very simple damage reduction.  I'm still figuring out where exactly the numbers should be, but they'll have resistance to both trauma and circumstance damage, and (unlike the other species so far), the trauma resistance will be greater.  Getting T1 and T2 Breaks will be fairly easy for a developed Forsaken roster, but hitting 100M trauma will be quite a bit more difficult.

Their stronger trait is more interesting.  When Elemental Chosen go through a battle without suffering any Breaks or Distortions, the next day will be *skipped*, and when there are multiple Elemental Chosen at once, multiple days will be skipped at once.  This is a direct attack on the player's most fundamental resource, time.  It's this trait which made me want to adjust how Mechanical L3 and L4 Operations were triggered, just in order to make the two species more distinct.  Against Elemental Chosen, you actually *do* need to worry about running out of Breaks, and even a fully-broken Elemental Chosen can ruin your plans.

Where Mechanical Chosen demand planning around which of the extreme conditions of their Operations you can deal with, Elemental Chosen demand slow, steady, reliable corruption progress.  Fighting against both of them at once will be quite challenging, but it won't even be possible for Mechanical and Elemental Chosen to show up together until both Judgment and Love have been defeated, which won't even be possible before Loop 26.

This is a pretty hefty collection of bugfixes which deals with a couple of crashes that could happen during both combat and custom sex scenes, along with a few gameplay mechanics which weren't working properly and a couple of cosmetic issues.
Click here to download.  Mirror.

This is an update which takes care of a bunch of minor things that were slated to be done before the introduction of the final advanced species, Elemental Chosen.  It includes a few final bugfixes and tweaks to Mechanical Chosen along with some additions to custom sex scenes.

The tweaks to how Mechanical Chosen work could be pretty significant depending on your playstyle.  Previously, it was possible to "run out of Breaks" before the Mechanical Chosen had progressed all the way to one of the Level 4 Operations.  Once the Mechanical Chosen had suffered Total Break in all Vulnerabilities, it wouldn't be possible to progress her to another Operation, and the only way to win the loop would be to have the final battle before the Operation's deadline.

In order to fix this, there are now alternative conditions to make the Mechanical Chosen progress directly to a later Operation level.  Mechanical Chosen who have suffered at least two T3 Breaks will progress directly to a Level 3 Operation, and Mechanical Chosen who have suffered at least two Total Breaks will progress directly to a Level 4 Operation.  This makes them easier in some ways, but more difficult in others.  It's now harder to farm energy from Mechanical Chosen for an early Imago Quickening while keeping them stuck in the easier Level 1 or Level 2 Operations.  But at the same time, you don't need to worry about running out of Vulnerability Breaks, because every fully-corrupted Mechanical Chosen will progress directly to the much easier Level 4 Operations.

The custom sex scene additions are mostly focused around making the different species feel unique.  Most of the changes are just to the number balance, but there are also a couple of new actions.  The first action, "Hack," can only be targeted at Mechanical bodies, and only by other Mechanical bodies or by the Demon Lord.  Mechanical Chosen now innately feel much less pleasure during custom sex scenes, but the Hack action multiplies their bodies' sensitivity, and it can be stacked multiple times.  The other action, "Tentacle Bondage," allows non-player participants to tie each other up for the first time.  So, if you want one of your Forsaken to be able to tie the others up during custom sex scenes, just customize her body to give her tentacles and see what she does!

Next month will be the introduction of Elemental Chosen.  Their gameplay mechanics are actually quite simple, and their Forsaken counterparts don't have anything nearly as complicated as the Mechanical Forsaken basebuilding system, so I expect that there won't be any need to split them across two releases this time.  The bosses associated with Mechanical and Elemental Chosen, however, are another story.  They're going to push the gameplay system of Corrupted Saviors to its limits, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Click here to download.  Mirror.

Currently, I'm taking a brief break from adding flavor text in order to lay some groundwork for the coming Elemental Chosen species and ensure that both the Chosen and the Forsaken mechanics will fit into a single update.  Elemental Chosen are overall much simpler than Mechanical Chosen, so I think the odds are pretty good that I won't need 2 separate releases to fully implement the species this time.

I don't want to spoil too many details about Elemental Chosen right now, since I prefer to save that for the month of the release.  But because it's what I'm working on right now, I can talk about it a little.

In contrast to the flexibility which Mechanicals demand as Chosen and offer as Forsaken, Elemental Chosen and Forsaken are all about simple brute strength.  So, they're probably most similar to Animalistic Chosen and Forsaken, but elevated to an endgame level of power.  As with Mechanical Chosen, you'll be able to face them in Loop 16 at the earliest by beating Victory in Loop 10 and then Love in Loop 15.  And this boss sequence is generally a lot easier than beating Splendor in Loop 10 and then immediately Judgment in Loop 15 in order to unlock Mechanical Chosen.  But the simple brute strength of Elemental Chosen will leave much less room for creative counterplay, so you might not want to do that.

I'm also planning for every single Elemental Chosen subspecies to have a species-specific portrait, so despite the gameplay simplicity of the species, there will be a bit more work for me in that regard.  I'll keep you all updated on how it's going as we get closer to R69.

First off, a bugfix was released earlier today, and I don't want that to get buried by the status report here.  It fixes an issue that would definitely cause issues for a player trying to make heavy use of Mechanical Forsaken in a campaign mode run, so I'd recommend downloading it!

As for the status report itself, my goal for this month is to focus on flavor text improvements, particularly for custom sex scenes, and particularly related to Mechanical Chosen.  Mechanical Chosen subspecies fall into four rough categories: those who are human with technological enhancements, those who are built to replicate humans almost exactly, those who are basically "hard light" holograms, and those with fully robotic bodies.  I want to make all of them feel much more distinct from each other and from the more "biological" Chosen types.

Related to this, I also want to pave the way for nonstandard "body plans" (for lack of a better term).  The code which tracks participants of custom sex scenes was designed to be extremely flexible about stuff like the number of limbs and the possibility for inhuman appendages.  However, right now, all of the Chosen, Forsaken, and Demon Lord bodies still have the standard 2 arms, 2 legs, one of a small number of sex organ configurations, and so on.  It makes sense for cyborgs and robots to potentially be a little different, and eventually, it should also be possible for the Demon Lord to participate in sex scenes using a tentacled form.  We'll see how much progress in that direction I can make this month.

This fixes an issue which was causing Mechanical Forsaken to not generate Corrupt Capacitors, as well as some flavor text issues.
Click here to download.  Mirror.