Hey guys, this is just going to be a quick update to let you all know we're still alive and working on the last segment of the game - the Deep Caverns. Much has been done, but there's still a considerable amount of work left. It's hard to reveal much about the area without spoiling the surprise of various challenges that will be presented to the player, but here's, at least, a slide show of couple of screenshots with some Deep Cavern music to set the mood.

Hey guys, while the rest of the team is working on wrapping up the remaining content (a few obligatory teaser screenshot included below), I took the time to work on some of the last game mechanic stuff to be implemented.

Most importantly, I implemented a noise system so the player will now have to consider more than just visual perception when handling a hostile area. This system works in a simple manner - certain actions, mostly relate to combat, such as firing weapons, grenade explosions, etc now emit a certain level of noise that travels through the map, with walls and other obstacles dampening their propagation (with certain thick walls doing so drastically). This will cause certain weapons - crossbows, knives and silenced pistols (and to lesser extent sledgehammers), will now have an edge over other weapon types when doing a stealth assassination.

In addition to this, a lot of NPCs will now holler for help on their turn if they are not stunned or incapacitated, so it's important to dispose of them quickly and silently if you want to avoid fighting the whole camp.

These changes will undoubtedly make some encounters more difficult so we will go through most problematic of them to make sure they are not too ridiculous.

In other news:

• Mechanics
• Added hard difficulty (less player health, less healing with longer cooldown)
• UI
• Pathfinding estimation during turn based combat no longer show the path once it gets into the undisovered part of the map
• Added an option to automatically overwrite saves
• Numeric pad cannot be used for dialog choices
• You can now properly target items in your action bar, quick bar, weapon and shield switch buttons (e.g. for recharging, reloading, etc)
• Items
• Cryogas grenade added
• Added one more acid type
• Added five new drugs
• Added two new poisons
• Added silencer enhancement that can be added to 5mm pistols and SMGs
• Added Biohazard suit
• Creatures
• Added two new Faceless types
• Added five new creatures
• Added one new turret
• Feats
• Changed Premeditation - Now also requires 6 intelligence.
• Changed Gun Nut - Upper damage bonus changed to 15% (down from 20%).
• Changed Gunslinger - AP reduction changed to 2 (down from 3) and only applies to firearms now.
• Changed Opportunist - Bonuses changed to 25%/15% (down from 35%/20%)
• Changed Recklessness - Critical damage chance bonus changed to 7% (down from 10%)
• Changed Cerebral Trauma - Damage bonus changed to 20% (down from 25%) and psi burn changed to 10% (down from 15%)
• Changed Quick Tinkering - Cooldown changed to 2 turns (down from 3).
• Changed Steadfast Aim - Bonus crit chance per AP cost changed to 0.5% (down from 1%)
• Changed Mental Subversion - It now stacks up to 75% (up from 50%)
• Changed Snipe - Fixed the bug that caused the attack not to do those base 100% of damage in addition to bonus damage and also changed the bonus damage per stealth point to 1.5% (up from 1%). Feat description also now displays exact numbers. Also now requires 30 stealth to obtain.
• Changed Sharpshooter - Damage changed to 30% (down from 50%).
• Changed Special Tactics - Dexterity requirement removed.
• Added Meditation (Continue from Tranquility) - Maximum psi points increased by 25.
• Added Psionic Mania - (Continues from Psychosis) When activated makes your next offensive psi ability an automatic critical hit. Activating this will remove up to 15% of your health, but cannot kill you.
• Added Neural Overclocking - Critical damage bonus of psi abilities increased by 30%.
• Added Psychostatic Electricity - When you damage a target with your electrical psionics you apply a debuff that increases the chance for the target to be critically hit from all sources by 5% for 2 turns. Stacks 5 times.
• Added Telekinetic Undulation - When you damage a living target by moving your telekinetic proxy, there's 50% chance it will be dazed for 1 turn.
• Added Corporeal Projection - All telekinetic damage increased by 5% for each point of strength above 5.
• Added Elemental Bolts - Increases electrical, acid and heat damage of all special bolts by 100%.
• Added Concussive Shots - When you deal mechanical with your crossbow you have 40% chance to daze living targets for 1 turn.
• Tweaks
• Cryokinesis and Pyrokinesis can no longer be launched through fences and other partial obstacles
• Resolve and fortitude base resist chance increased slightly
• Upper Tornado crossbow damage slightly reduced (not retroactive)
• Electrical pistols now only have 50% chance to trigger the stun on the initial target; this might also affect some electrobolts fired by the NPCs as well
• Pistol damage reduced by ~20% across the board
• Stalkers in the passages near SGS no longer respawn
• Psi Empathy feat will now reduce base health points by 25%
• Psi regeneration now scales with will and intelligence: psi regen = 5 + (will+int)/2
• Ranges of a number of psi abilities have been reduced: Bilocation - 7, Cryostasis - 6, Electrokinesis - 8, Frighten - 3, Mental Breakdown - 5, Neural Overload - 6
• Psi costs of a number of psi abilities have been modified (mostly increased): Cryokinesis - 15, Cryokinetic Orb - 40, Cryostasis - 65, Electrokinesis - 35, Exothermic Aura - 40, Forcefield - 25, Mental Breakdown - 60, Neural Overload - 15, Pyrokinesis - 40
• Psi booster cooldown changed to 3 turns (down from 6 turns)
• Metal plates enhancement will now provide less mechanical resistance
• Metal armor mechanical and energy resistance reduced across the board. Threshold remains the same. Not retroactive.
• Reinforced Fabric Ballistic Panel damage resistance reduced slightly
• Execute can no longer be preformed with electrical pistol. I cannot remove the bonus damage from electrobolt jumps easily without rewriting a good chunk of code so I'm just going to ban the electrogun from the club.
• Throwing knives upper damage range reduced
• Blob Pistol shooting sounds changed
• Increased crossbow max range by 2 and optimal range by 1 (not retroactive)
• Daze debuff now also reduces movement points by 30
• Sniper damage increased by ~20% across the board.
• Plasma sentry laser damage increased
• Made energy core and firearm barrels more easily available from merchants
• Armor penalty of boots reduced (not retroactive)
• Bugs
• Spiked boots will no longer double-trigger things like force emission and fancy footwork
• Taser will no longer consume twice the energy
• Taste for blood will no longer grant a stack when killing machines
• Hopefully fixed all achievements to work correctly
• On kill effects will now properly trigger when target is killed by an on hit effect (such as electrical melee weapons, force emission and special bolts)
• Fixed the bug that caused the game to on rare occasions skip the player's turn
• Premeditation no longer increases the range of pyrokinetic stream (that caused it to bug out).

That's all for now. Concerning the content - there's just one "biome" in Deep Caverns to be done before the "final event" in the game, but after that, as I mentioned before, we have to go back and rework some old areas and sprinkle a bit more flavor across the world.

Before we can do that, however, we'll need to recharge our batteries for the next three weeks by ditching our underground coding facilities and getting some Mediterranean sand in our toes (at least in my case). In the meantime, let us know how you like these changes.

Hey guys, since we got back from vacation we've been developing at a rapid pace. The game is mostly done, save for some dialog and certain amount of visual components for the final event. Once that is in, the game will be playable from start to finish.

Parallel to bringing the main story line to the end, we're doing a final pass through all the areas and updating them visually and adding more flavor dialog. Some of early areas were done ages ago and were badly in a need of a rework. The biggest offenders were SGS and Junkyard, which now both got new looks:

Anyway, the game is really close to completion now and we should be entering close beta phase soon, when we might call upon some of the old dedicated fans to help us test it. There won't be any updates for the public version before full release, though, but that isn't that far off now either. Stay tuned.

Hi guys. It is my pleasure to announce that the game has now entered beta stage and will be released in full on December 21st 2015. As before it will be available on Steam and GamersGate, but now also on GOG.com.

In the following two weeks we will be doing closed beta testing to make sure the game has as few bugs as possible on release.

Also a little heads-up: at some point between now and full release the game's price will be increased from its early access/alpha price to its full price. Those of you who have followed us since the early days know well that the game has since grown in scope and quality far beyond that of the initial release.

Thank you all for being patient with us throughout the years, the long wait is now at an end.

Hi guys. Just a quick update to let you know we're moving release date forward to December 18th. Everything else remains as stated earlier.

Also, we did a much needed new trailer for the release. Enjoy.

Hi guys. As most of you are aware by now, we've finally released the 1.0.0.0 version.

Development of this game has been one interesting 7 year adventure for me. First it was a one man part-time (read: night-time) hobby project where the basis for all that is to come was laid out. Then it was a one man full-time mad scientist sort of operation that gave birth to most of the game mechanics seen today. And then lastly, as a three man project during which the amount and quality of the content expanded far beyond my original intentions and even hopes.

(fan-collage by Blaine)

But all this would not have been possible if there was not a deep-seeded desire for this kind of gaming experience, still echoing from the void left by the departure of classical western RPGs, present in you, the players. So, personally and on behalf of the team, I thank you for patiently supporting us throughout the years and I hope that the final product is to your liking.

We'll still be here, supporting the game by ironing out any remaining bugs and applying some more polish here and there. As for what happens next, we'll discuss that when the dust settles. Stay tuned.

Hey guys. Along fixing the bugs we've been working on some quality of life improvements, so without further ado here they are.

Fonts - We've replaced one of the game's fonts to improve readability and also added more size options.

Outlines - We've added character outlines which should improve visibility and make targeting somewhat easier when things are happening behind walls and other obstacles.

Inventory filters - We've replaced inventory filter combo box with icons and also regrouped item categories in a way we believe will be most practical.

Combat stats tooltips - We've added descriptions for all the different stats in the combat stats window when you mouse over them.

Combat speed settings - Combat movement and action speed can now be adjusted in the game's options.

New save system - This is strictly under the hood thing and nothing is changed regarding how and when you can save or load the game (old saves are compatible with the new version). For those advanced users - we archived the separate zone files to improve save/load performance and also got rid of the temporary current game structure on the disk and moved it to memory.

Other minor stuff

• Critical crossbow hits now also affect elemental damage (acid, shock and incendiary) from special bolts
• When attacking in melee from stealth, target's dodge rating will be ignored if it hasn't detected you yet
• Added more crafting components and ammo to Deep Caverns
• Added a few more hints to certain Deep Caverns dialogs
• Quinton's mushroom growing room is now accessible
• Added a number of Lower and Upper Metro areas to better connect certain places

Bug fixes

• Critical damage modifier from items will now be properly applied to fist weapons (e.g. infused ancient rathound boots)
• You will no longer be able to snipe down certain obstacles that were not meant to be sniped down
• Jawbone will now correctly be considered a crossbow for the purpose of trading
• Nicolas will no longer return from the dead to haunt you
• Cut throat attack will no longer fail if you get detected during the attack itself (the eye wasn't read when you started performing the attack but the attack itself pushed it into red state)
• When incendiary bombs cause a character to burn they will now properly suffer 150% of the original damage as the description says
• You can no longer attempt to burst or rapid fire with an empty weapon
• Fixed Jerre Franz not healing the player in certain instances
• Fixed Fort Apogee zone security settings
• Fixed a certain important woman not properly reacting to a player's response regarding her husband's fate
• Fixed certain responses not appearing when speaking to the Faceless centaur near Foundry
• Fixed being able to start the Find Blaine quest even after certain events took place
• Silas' questline will now properly continue questline after the player pays him instead of doing his initial quests
• Fixed a missing dialog option during Mediant Samuel's second mission
• Fixed the unintended failing of the Kill Rathound King quest after a certain event has taken place
• Crawlers and rathounds are now neutral to each other
• No more free repairs from Mykola
• Nicolas' and Olivia's quests will properly fail upon death
• Fixed Maura's faction id not setting correctly after you've helped her
• Accussing a certain person of comitting a murder and then initiating combat through dialogue will no longer cause the whole station to become hostile
• Fixed the interview cutscene playing even when the player is hostile to the Tchortists; that quest will also properly fail now
• Fixed dialogue options not appearing when asking Oskar and Lt. Stratford about a certain man
• Fixed Arke consoles being hackable even after the player turns off the security system
• Doppelgangers are now immune to Expose Weakness
• All elevators should now properly notify the player when they are unpowered when used
• Shield emitter weight will now be properly calculated when adding optional components
• Various typos and map fixes

Hey guys,

It's been almost eight months since the last formal dev log. That doesn't mean we haven't been busy working on new stuff, however, and now at long last we can announce the first Underrail expansion - "Expedition".

In Expedition you’ll be able to take a break from the usual metro-crawling to take a boat to the infamous Black Sea, a massive underground body of water.

There, among the old and mysterious ruins of an age long past, you’ll face the vicious fauna, hostile natives, cunning pirates, and something far more sinister than all of those.

Your voyage through vastness of the Black Sea will shed new light on the history of the world of Underrail and the forces that shaped it.

Expedition will feature the following:

• A brand new story line that becomes available during the mid-game
• Over a 100 new areas to explore of various types – shores and islands of the Black Sea, mysterious underground facilities, pirate strongholds, and more
• New human factions, as well as wild creatures to combat
• New items and crafting recipes
• New skills and feats
  
• Leveling past level 25 with a special pool of feats to choose from
  

Over time we'll be revealing more details through the dev log, so expect those to once again flow regularly as they did before the game's release.

We expect to release the expansion during the first half of 2017 as a paid DLC.

Hey guys, it's time to start revealing some concrete info on the expansion. Some new game mechanics stuff, to be precise.

First, let's talk about leveling. Once your character levels past level 25, they become a "veteran" character. To gain veteran levels, a character will require significantly more experience (both oddity and classical) than for regular levels.

Veteran characters no longer receive base ability or skill points during leveling and their derived stats such as health, detection and so on do not scale with levels anymore. However, they do get to pick a feat every level and, in addition to regular feats, they can also pick from the veteran feat pool.

Veteran feats, at least in this expansion, tend to be more general in nature, but they can also give you some important bonuses that you cannot otherwise obtain. Here are some examples (in addition to the one on the screenshot):

• Fight Response - When starting a turn below 25% of your maximum health, your action points are increased by 10.
• Improved Dodging - Increases the chance you'll dodge a melee attack by 5% (additive).
• Tempered: Acid/Cold/Electricity/Heat - Reduces all X (depending on feat) damage taken by 30%.
• Major Supplier - Increases the amount of money the merchants are willing to use when trading with you by 2% per mercantile skill.

Keep in mind that these feats might be altered, pending testing.

The reason I decided to prevent certain aspects of character from scaling beyond level 25 is to avoid having the character outscale the content at his current main storyline progression just by raw character power. Because we'll be expanding the game horizontally in this expansion (and probably in the future) we need to take special care to still provide adequate challenge to the player while also allowing them to improve some aspects of their character.

Hi guys,

In the expansion, we'll be adding a new psionic school called “Temporal Manipulation”, which will primarily feature delayed damage and buffing/debuffing abilities.

This psi discipline will, probably more than any other, will function well as a support skill that can be incorporated into other builds, rather than a primary skill around which a build is made, though I have no doubt that some of you will find a way to prove me wrong.

Here are the abilities:

• Temporal Distortion - Places a debuff on the target that lasts 1 turn and deals mechanical and energy damage when it expires. In the case the target is already affected by temporal distortion, its duration will be increased by 1 turn and damage by 25% and the newly applied temporal distortion will have the same duration and damage bonus. Damage dealt by this ability ignores shield and 50% of damage resistance and threshold. This ability cannot critically hit.
• Psycho-temporal Dilation – Reduces target's action points by 15 and movement points by 50. Lasts 2 turns.
• Limited Temporal Increment – Reduces all remaining cooldowns by 1 turn.
• Entropic Recurrence – Repeats the percentage of the last unit of damage taken by the target over 3 turns. This damage ignores shields and resistances. In cases when the original damage was very slight, the recurrence may actually empower it.
• Psycho-temporal Contraction – Increases target's action points by 15 and movement points by 30. Lasts 2 turns.
• Temporary Rewind– Reverses the last damage done to the target, up to certain amount depending on the skill level. After two turns this health is lost and this may cause the target to die.
• Precognition– While this ability is active, your chance to dodge and evade attacks is increased by certain percentage depending on skill level (additively). Drains 25 psi points every turn.
• Stasis– Places the target in stasis for 2 turns, making it immune to all damage and most disabling effects, but also preventing it from acting. While in stasis, the target's status effects will not progress (except the stasis one), but the cooldowns will.

That's about it. Let me know how you guys like the new psi school.

Hi guys, soon we'll be ready to release a new update for the game. For those who wish to help us test it, we've set up "Experimental" branches on Steam and GOG Galaxy.

To play experimental branch on Steam, you right click the game in your library and go to "Betas" tab. To do so on GOG, you select the game and choose More->Settings. Make sure you don't override all your live version saves just in case something goes horribly wrong.

Here are the patch notes:

Feats

• AP reduction from Gunslinger feat will now properly affect only firearms
• Added feats: Bowyer (crossbow crafting)
• Ripper feat will now properly work with serrated knives

Visuals

• Added a new visual model for siphoner, ancient rathound, and super steel armor
• Telekinetic proxies and electrokinetic imprints will now be visible behind walls

Interface

• Added tooltips for empty gear slots
• Forcing the vent with crowbar will now be done through Quick Invoker (once the crowbar is equipped, you'll get the ability there)
• Changed the "Focused" tooltip to be gender neutral (tested for all 99 genders)

Mechanics

• Cats nerfed
• Dreadnoughts buffed
• When a character that has nightvision turned on gets flashbanged, they will also be dazed for 5 turns
• Some of the merchants now have additional mercantile checks which (if passed) will expand that merchant's store inventory

Items

• Borer Gizzard renamed to Metaworm Gizzard and is now also dropped by Latchers
• Most special bullets now also require TNT to craft
• Added blueprints for standard, W2C and JHP bullets
• Mechanical bolt blueprint renamed to Serrated bolt blueprint
• EMP mine case now counts as electronic component
• Added a couple more instances of Black Eye, Loaded Dice, Train Driver Manual and Train Log oddities
• Increased the drop chance of Quad Damage Module oddity
• Changed the Electronic Idol oddity to provide 3 xp for a max of 1 study as it should have been

Bug fixes

• Generated metal armors enhancements will have quality other than 1 now
• Quick load will now work during enemy's turn
• Closing interface help window by right clicking will no longer disable keyboard commands
• Fixed the dialog window option highlighting when there's 10 or more dialog options
• Fixed the cut-off tooltips on smaller resolutions with small font size (on most tooltips; there still might be some that just have too many lines)
• Fixed the bug that caused caltrops to drain action points immediately instead of movement points first
• Fixed the minor glitches with trap detection calculations
• Crawlers and Faceless Gaunts will no longer land on occupied tiles when escaping from sight
• Telekinetic Proxy now properly removes Premeditation when it makes use of it
• Fixed the bug that caused Dreadnought to keep moving if you attempted to dismount during movement
• Fixed the bug that caused the player to receive experience when an NPC was killed by a doppelganger that someone else created
• Expose Weakness will now properly count as a melee attack (it will be affected by Uncanny dodge for example)
• Pyrokinetic Stream and Pyrokinesis should now always properly invoke "heating effect"
• Heating effects should now properly remove Cryo-shield
• Cooling effects should now properly remove Exothermic aura

Quests/Maps

• Fixed a certain zoner appearing later in the game in some cases even if Rista's quest concerning him hasn't been completed
• Fixed positioning problems during the cutscene in which you lead Edgar to RK's lair that might occur when the player has increased his movement speed beyond a certain point
• Fixed the missing train quest bandits not becoming hostile if the player fails a certain skill check
• Fixed killing the old man in GMS crashing the game after the situation has been dealt with
• Fixed a bug which caused a transition error when entering the zone where Duff is supposed to spawn
• Fixed being able to give a certain man a certain helmet more than once and receive more than one reward
• Fixed a few unreachable dialog branches (Old Jonas, Leo and one notable heavily armored commander)
• Fixed some late game Tchortists not recognizing that you are wearing a certain type of robe
• Fixed a dialog bug which prevented the players from telling the Rejects how to escape
• Fixed some items disappearing from Fraser's store inventory after certain events take place
• Fixed a few bugs with the end game slides
• Fixed issues with one of the tunnelers in DC after it has been despawned
• Fixed being able to kill the Gauntlet runners before the event without anyone caring
• It is no longer possible to pay 1 charon to Silas for Grover's debt instead of 100 charons
• Arke cameras and turrets will now properly go offline after being shut down at the main console
• Edgar's quests will now properly fail if you kill him
• The player will no longer be able to start a civil war in Core City by fighting with the burglar in the house opposite to the Praetorian Security headquarters
• Added another option to acquire ICPD from Duff, plus some more flavor if you handle the situation in a certain way
• Added another way to capture hoppers for Bret
• Added another way to obtain Elwood's keycard
• Did some tweaks to the main quest in Foundry, added more dialog options and removed some of the backtracking; also, the miners will now return to the mine at the end of the quest
• Gaining access to Foundry prison security room will also remove protection from the security console there; added another hacking option as well
• Changed so that failing to intimidate Rubin will no longer make him not want to speak to you anymore
• Hathorians will occupy the area north of the camp after it has been cleared
• SGS soldiers and workers will now occupy the outposts after the player has cleared them
• A certain faction in DC will now be handing out better ammo than previously
• Fixed a faulty transition in one of the zones beneath the Mushroom Forest
• Fixed GMS jammed ventilation shaft being incorrectly positioned; also made some minor changes to the vent layout to accommodate this
• The usual minor stuff (map/dialog/quest tweaks and fixes)

Report any bugs you find on the forums and make sure you specify which version you're playing.

Enjoy and have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everyone!

Hi guys. In the past few months we've been working (and we're still working) on a couple of major features for the expansion, but we didn't want to show any of them before they were ready. First of these that are now done are the new weapons, so without further ado I give you the three new weapon types - the spear, the machete and the shotgun.

The choice of spear and machete as new weapons was mostly thematic (you will learn why in some later dev log), but these weapons will also have their own place in the melee arsenal. Spears are meant to be versatile offensive and defensive weapons, while machetes are meant to be high risk-high reward weapons that will rely on the user keeping up the offensive. More on the exact mechanics of this will be revealed later when I get to implementing their specific feats. There are two types of machetes that differ slight in critical chance/damage stats.

Now the interesting one of the bunch is the shotgun. I say this because the mechanics of the shotgun are unlike anything else that we had in the game so far when it comes to weapons. When a shotgun is fired it launches a number of pellets that may hit the intended target, some other target in the attack cone or might miss completely. So the chance to hit with the shotgun is not so much indicative of weather or not you'll inflict damage on the enemy, but how much of the damage you launch their way is going to land on the primary target.

I'm going to give you some random shotgun stats below, but keep in mind that this has not be properly balance tested and that before we get a chance to play around with this new weapon a bit it's hard to gauge it's effectiveness and what the numbers should be in order for it to fit into the role intended for it. There is a lot of factors that come into play here depending on the situation and it will take some time to make sure they perform as expected at different ranges (medium, close and point blank) and against different enemies (low armor/high armor). By the way, pay attention to the interaction with the different ammo types when considering the raw damage stat.

I've also implemented the ability for weapons (and gear in general) to grant you special attacks and abilities so expect more of that in the future.

The process of adding these new weapons took a long time because we had to change the way we handled animations of all the different human models and it required a lot of manual labor to get things in order. However, now that we have done this, it will allow us to add more new weapons in the future (not in this DLC, though), to which we are rather looking forward to. I'm not gonna lie, we already know what weapons we want to add in the future, so just keep that in mind when you're posting your wishes.

Anyway, let us know what you think of the new weapons.

Hi guys. We're all but done with the biggest feature of the expansion and that's the player's ability to ride jet skis.

Since the expansion takes place on Black Sea, naturally you will need a way to travel between all the small islands, bays and between far shores. You will be able to do this on a dozen of different jet skis, ranging from super light racing jet skis to mini-destroyers, which you can further customize under the hood by installing better engines, batteries and suspension systems. The models themselves differ way by the combat cover, durability, stability, speed, damage resistances, as well number of and maximum size of a parts you can install into them; some vehicles can have multiple engines and/or batteries. Also, some jet skis will have special attacks or abilities.

Once you get to the Black Sea it won't take long for you to get a hold of the most basic "junk jet", but to get the quality stuff, both in terms of the jet ski model and the parts, you'll have to spend a fair amount of charons at a specialized shop in Core City. You'll also have to decide what are the most important characteristics of jet ski for you, as no one model will be best at everything.

While riding a jet ski you'll be able to use most of your weapons, abilites and utilities. The most notable exceptions are sledgehammers and sniper rifles, which are not available while driving. Also, short range melee weapons (fist weapons and knives) and unarmed attacks, though still performable, will suffer significant penalties. When an attack is aimed at you, it has a chance of hitting the jet ski instead (or in case of AoE attacks, a percentage of the damage hits the vehicle), depending on the cover it provides, in which case the damage is tested against its resistences and the amount that penetrates those is deducted from the vehicle's durability. If the durability reaches zero, the vehicle is destroyed and you die (you never learned to swim).

That's it for now, guys. Let us know how all this sounds and I hope you're looking forward to some naval battles with pirates and worse things.

Hi guys.

Just wanted to let you all know that, even though we've been quiet, we're working hard on getting all the content for the expansion done, now that all the new mechanics have been implemented. The good news is that the the bulk of the main quest, including all the heavy scripting, c&c, etc, is complete and functioning (for the most part, it needs further testing, of course).

For those who just can't wait to get to explore the Black Sea themselves, here's a short video from the recent internal testing that we've done (this is NOT a trailer). It does contain some spoilers, though we tried to censor the important stuff, so be warned.

Anyway, that's it for now guys. Let us know what you think.

Hi guys. I did some changes regarding veteran levels which I originally introduced back in October.

First of all, player will continue to receive the normal amount of skill points when leveling up even on veteran levels now. Also, dervied stats such as health, detection and such will scale normally on veteran levels as well. However, players will also gain a feat every even level instead of every level when leveling on veteran levels. So basically everything is going to work as with normal levels with the exception of the feat pool being expanded with veteran feats once you hit veteran levels.

Allowing of the further skill scaling beyond the 25th level, however, requires us to provide some use for such high skill levels, particularly in crafting. To address this, the end-game areas and stores will have some of its loot/stock scaled up if the Expedition DLC is installed, particularly when it comes to crafting components. In the future, we also intend to address the problem of other non-combat skill scaling (such as social skills and hacking/lockpicking) by adding high level encounters/opportunities, so while currently it might not make sense to max out these skills, in the future it will have benefits.

However, the second, and more important change, is that on veteran levels you'll also get three specialization points.

You use these specialization points to further improve your non-veteran feats, often across specific dimension, as demonstrated in the GIF above. Your investment of points in any given specialization cannot exceed your veteran level (or the maximum allowed points for that specialization).

That's it for now. Let us know how you like these changes.

Hi guys,

While our development is mostly focused on the expansion there are a couple of issues that we wanted to address before its release as we think that they will greatly influence the experience of playing the DLC as well as the base game.

First of these is the global map. This was a contested issue since the alpha versions and is probably the most frequent complaint we get from the people that have a positive view of the game as a whole. Some people may be wondering if the global map was something that was originally planned for the game and, truth to be told, I don't really remember (original plans for the game were laid almost 10 years ago now), but knowing myself I would probably implement one if I had the (time) resources that I have now. Back when I was at it alone I had to cut corners in both content and feature departments, and map is a bit of both really. Later, when the game has grown monstrously in size, even though I then had the time to add new features, a good amount of geographical inconsistencies made sure that there was no quick and easy way to produce a quality map, but instead some major rearragements were going to have to be made.

But anyway, now that we got around to doing this, here's how the map implementation looks like (new players be careful, there are minor spoilers).

We're going to have separate maps for different depths and some maps for the bigger urban areas. We've only gotten around to SGS, Lower Caves and Lower Underrail so far, but here's how the full list will probably look like:

• Lower Caves (includes Junkyard and Hathor)
  
• Upper Caves
• Lower Underrail (includes Rail Crossing)
• Upper Underrail
• Black Sea
• Foundry
• SGS
• DC

Core City and Institute will not be included, at least not initially, because reasons. We are, also, not going to be making any maps for "dungeon" areas and such (like GMS) unless they are part of geography of existing maps (such as Depot A being part of Lower Caves by being an extension of Junkyard).

As you can see on the screenshots, maps will (usually, but not always) record and display what useful (or not so useful) creatures and plants you've encountered there as well as other points of interest (merchants, doctors, certain quest objects). These will not be updated after the initial encounter and do not always represent the actual state of the map, but are rather meant to be used as useful auto-notes for harvesting organs and plants and such. They will typically not record robotic and human enemies. You can also add your own notes to the map. A lot of static features of the map will also reveal themselves as you explore the map so that you won't automatically know, for example, if there's a power generator on that map immediately after entering.

The map will be available in the next updated which will be released sometime before the DLC which is going to be released when it's ready. But on a serious note, I do hope to release a new update on the experimental branch at least in the near future so you guys can play with all the new stuff that we've added over the months and we can finally get this huge pile of patch notes off of our shoulders (and replace them with bug reports).

Anyway, let us know what you think about the inclusion of the global map and about this particular implementation. In the next dev log I'll probably be talking about another important, but probably less impressive, change to the base game that we're working on.

Cheers.

Hi guys, we are releasing a new major update of the base game on the experimental branch. If everything goes as planned, we'll be releasing it to the main branch as well soon.

To play experimental branch on Steam, you right click the game in your library and go to "Betas" tab. To do so on GOG, you select the game and choose More->Settings. Make sure you don't override all your live version saves just in case something goes horribly wrong.

We have new creatures, items and feats.

Here are the full patch notes:

Interface

• You can now configure transparency of transitions (also increased the default transparency)
• Objects that transition you between areas (transition that requires loading) when you use them should not display the transitioning cursor
• Added transparency to NPC health/psi/shield/cast bars on the map

Items

• Added new high-energy battery type
• Increased the weight of the fishing rod
• Removed cooldown for placing fishing rods
• Increased the damage and critical damage bonus of Quake
• Significantly increased the value of a lot of unique items (mostly weapons)
• Nerfed Power Fist
• Increased the max stack size of scraps to 999
• Trapper's Belt will now increase Traps skill by 15% (up from 10%); it will no longer reduce trap arming cooldown
• Added two new belts that augment chemical pistol attacks
• Regenerative Mixture will now be affected by game difficulty
• Special bolts affected by Elemental Bolts feat will now display the modified damage in the tooltip
• Reduced the infused leather quality slightly overall and also added diminishing returns when making infused leather above 100 quality
• Infused siphoner tabi boots will now give immunity to slow instead to immobilization
• Junkyard surprise can no longer increase perception, will or intelligence
• The following items will have their max stacks increase to appropriate amount: .44 Explosive Round, 8.6mm Incendiary Round, 12.7mm Contaminated Round, 7.62mm Micro-shrapnel Round, Corrosive Acid Vial, Incendiary Vial,
• Halved the move and shoot and action point cost penalties when attaching bipods to assault rifles (not applied retroactively)
• You can now use High Efficiency Energy Converter to reduce the energy cost of firing energy pistols
• Energy Pistols now have two enchancement slots when crafted
• Plasma pistol damage increased by 25%
• Laser pistol base action point cost changed to 15 (down from 22)
• Laser pistol usage energy cost reduced by 20%
• Changed the base value of psi boosters to 275 (down from 350)
• Changed the maximum duration of throwing net entanglement to 3 turns (down from 4)
• Increased the amount of EMP dischargers generated as loot/merchandise
• Changed the number of unsaturated psionic catalyst required to craft a psi booster to 3 (down from 5)
• Fixed the armor description when crafting riot gear and tactical vests from super steel sheets (will not be applied retroactively to the already crafted items)
• Changed the psi regen reduction of Mushroom Brew to 30 (up from 1). The previous value was geared towards non-regenerating psi pool of alpha version.
• Fixed incorrectly set impact speed of unique assault rifles (raised from medium to high, as should be the value for all assault rifles) and corrected the lack of move and shoot precision penalty for those guns
• Fixed Jawbone lacking move and shoot precision penalty (now set to 15%) as well as close quarters precision penalty (now 10%)
• Fixed low durability of armor worn by Tchortist rassophores and recombinants; only applies to npc armor (armor in the player's possession will remain unchanged)

Creatures

• Increased Coil Spider psi points and psi regeneration
• Coil Spiders now have darkvision
• Added Greater Coil Spiders
• Added a new machinegun turret to replace the regular auto-turret in certain places and on certain difficulties
• Increased dodge and evasion of burrower spawns, but also increased their susceptibility to AoE attacks
• Dogs will now attempt to bump you out of stealth when the detection gets into ALERTED state, just like human NPCs (on normal difficulty or higher)
• Added a stronger version of psi beetle
• Increased crawler attack damage a bit; they also regenerate health now (even in combat) and have dark vision
• Added a stronger version of crawler
• Added stronger version of mutants Hunchback mutants

Mechanics

• Added the global map
• Added DOMINATING difficulty, mechanically it inherits the modifications of hard difficulty and also increased NPC health by 50% and skill levels by 30%.
• Changed the way hit change display handles oscillating lighting or otherwise dynamic lighting. This also should fix some anomalies like the hit chances changing when saving/loading or transitioning.
  
• Removed cooldown for arming traps
• Removed cooldowns from lockpicking and hacking
• Reduced the time it takes for the game to yield the control back to the combatant after he kills the target; it doesn't wait for scrolling text and sounds to end now
• Hostilities will now instantly be triggered when you've been detected lockpicking (instead of at the end of the action)
• Increased the damage of chemical pistols by 50% (will be applied retroactively on exisiting items)
• Ground fire will now remove cryogas
• Starting pickpocketing (opening the pickpocketing window) will now require a certain amount of pickpocketing skill depending on the target's detection so not every character can inspect any NPC's inventory (without killing them!)
• Targets will no longer be able to block (in regular way) if stunned, incapacitated or frozen
• You can now unload chemical pistols
• As long as you haven't been fully detected by a NPC, that NPC's  detection will be reduced back to zero when you get back into an area where you've been sneaking
• Uncanny Dodge will no longer work while you're stunned or incapacitated in some way
• Dirty Kick will now be subject to Uncanny Dodge and other special defense mechanisms
• You can now root turrets (which makes them susceptible to acidic entanglement)
• On normal difficulty and above, transitioning between areas (red transitions) will now cost action points
• Improved NPC pathfinding slightly
• Primary non-mechanical damage (not caused by on-hit effect) on melee weapons will now scale with weapon skill (like the bio damage on The Claw), but will no longer scale with strength
• On hard difficulty EMP will drain energy (and subsequently deal damage to the holder) from all items in the inventory (not just equipped ones)
• Reduced the ranged weapon precision reduction from low light slightly
• Antidote will now randomly choose the order of poison removal, instead of going in the order they were applied

Tweaks                   

• Turn-based mode will no longer automatically end at the end of the turn if there are incapacitated enemies near
• Reduced the alpha on energy shields
• Removed the movement animation reseting when rapidly clicking (there's still a very slight stutter if you click very fast, though)
• You cannot change armor suit while in stealth or while stealth is on cooldown on hard difficulty or above
• Turrets will now drop aggro faster
• Getting additional burning damage will reset the burning debuff remaining time
• New combat taunts for military personnel

Psi

• You can now cast Cryokinetic Orb on any non-obstructing tile (such as water and other regularly non-traversable tiles)
• Improved the shard distribution of Cryokinetic Orb on impact
• Changed the range of Frighten psi ability to 5 (up from 3)

Feats

• Steadfast Aim strength requirement changed to 5 (down from 6)
• Cooked Shot special chemical pistol AoE attack with radius of 1
• Three-Pointer Changed Throwing skill requirement to 50 (up from 45); The crit chance will now scale by 1.5% per ten throwing skill points above 50, instead from dexterity
• Doctor will now also work with Regenerative Mixture as it should
• Expertise changed the max bonus to 20 (down from 25)
• High-Technicalities increases damage with energy pistols by 7% for each point of intelligence above 5

Quests/Maps

• Because of the global map, some areas had to be added and some had to be reorganized (especially around the starting cave areas) in order to achieve geographical consistency
• Added a number of possible random events around the world
• Reworked a lot of encounters to scale with game difficulty (from easy to dominating). Normal was mostly kept as it is, but some encounters (typically mid-late and late game ones) were made more difficult on that level.
  
• Reworked the Free Drone's final mission debriefing dialog with Trenton in order to better handle a certain optional outcome
• DC mindreading will now take into account the number of killed Faceless, which will have negative effects of varying degrees depending on that number; however, kills during certain story-related events where combat is unavoidable will not be counted
• Expanded the Hanging Rat bar and added a base ability check

Bugs

• Corrosive acid bolt crits will now multiply the acid damage done just like the regular acid ones
• Focus Stim will now properly display duration in the item description
• Fixed the Crippling Strike tooltip
• Fossilized Egg Oddity max studies changed to 3 as it should have been from the start
• Spore Turrets marked as ribles, kneeless and immune to critical hits
• Fixed the bug that caused NPCs to not properly react to being alerted (orange eye) to player's presence
• Fixed spelling errors in special ammo hit effect descriptions
• Fixed the bug that caused Eviscerate to do less damage than stated
• Fixed the rounding error with Critical Power feat
• Fixed a sneaky bug regarding status effect stacking
• Black Dragon poison icon fixed
• Fixed the bug that would sometimes cause player to become undead during cutscenes in which he unpredictably dies (this will apply retroactively, RIP)
• Fixed the 8.6mm Incendiary Rounds (they weren't igniting)
• Jookhela should now be immune to stun and incapacitation like the rest of senior raties (will not update for those who already encountered him)
• Removed Gauntlet advertisement from DC
• Crawlers and other NPCs should no longer unwittingly bump their own kind/faction out of stealth
• Suppressive fire will now only be applied to enemies, as intended
• There was a mess up regarding player's increased chance to get critically hit. Contrary to what the game has been saying, there is no universal to-get-crit (TGC) modifier, instead it only applied for weapon and unarmed attacks, which made things like Psychostatic Electricity rather useless. I've now added psi TGC modifier, so recklessness and psychostatic electricity will now apply to psi abilities as well. Everything else will only work for unarmed and weapon attacks. Tooltips have been updated to reflect this.
• Thought control psi abilities can now be properly centered onto non-traversable (but penetrable) terrain
• Disruptive Field will no longer get bugged out by Locus of Control
• You will no longer hear the sound of NPCs stealthing when you enter an area for the first time, unless you can see them already
• Swapping between two energy weapons while recharging the current weapon will now properly cancel the action
• Fixed the bug with plasma sentry when leaving the area while it's deployed in cannon mode
• Fixed an issue with player's house containers (lockers, shelves, etc.) wherein the items from upgraded or changed containers wouldn't transfer to an always-present shelf in the northeastern corner of the ground floor
• Fixed certain quest notes not being set as completed/failed properly
• Fixed a number of skill checks that used base instead of effective required value or had no value set at all
• Fixed Sneaky not registering the death of one important npc
• Expanded or reworked certain parts of npc dialogs (some more, some less) and also added a few new skills checks to some
• Replaced a few windows in fo_prison with solid walls so that the cameras inside the cell block can't see inside the security room. This was done to prevent the cameras from dispatching all the guards into the room even if the player had been granted access to it
• Fixed a minor issue with a certain Hathor Mine-related cutscenes
• Various minor map and dialog fixes

Have fun with the new stuff and please stay patient as we continue to work on the Expedition DLC.

Report any bugs you find on the forums and make sure you specify which version you're playing.

Hi guys, here's a quick update on what we've been up to in the past few months.

In order to wrap up the geographical consistency of the base game, we had to create a number of water maps that connect SGS, Junkyard, Core City, Camp Hathor, and the Black Sea. In the expansion the player will be able to traverse and explore these maps with his jet ski, but he won't be the only one as a number of factions also utilize these waters, such as Protectorate, Black Eels, and Black Sea pirates. Also encounters with random sea bandits are not uncommon.

The most powerful naval faction in the South Underrail is, of course, the Black Eels. Their naval platform The Rig is perfectly positioned to facilitate the trade between different stations as well as their own scrap exporting business. The Rig is also used to control the central body of water of the Lower Caves in order to fend off pirates. This place will be vital for pirate missions that the player will be able to take part in if he chooses to ally with the them in the expansion.

The Rig missions are not 100% complete yet, but will be soon. After that we'll be returning to the Black Sea to wrap up and polish off the maps we made so far and integrate them into the global map. And then we still have two more areas to develop - the villages of the savage natives and the final dungeon.

Let us know how you like the aesthetics of the new areas.

Cheers.

Hi guys,

Just want to let you know that development is going more or less according to plan. After finishing the Rig and the stuff in the old world, we've moved back to the Black Sea and are now polishing up some of the areas and wrapping up quests and the like. You can see some of the interesting areas in the video below as you relax to the excellent atmospheric music of Josh Culler.

We've also started working on the savage natives and their areas, so expect to see some of that in the next dev log.

That's all - just a short update to let you guys know that the development is going more or less according to plan and that you guys should stay tuned for more dev logs in the coming months.

Let us know how you liked the areas showcased in the video.

Cheers.

Hi guys,

We're basically done with the savage natives. You won't be able to join this faction but you'll be able to explore their territory and their lore, and in any case you'll come in contact with them regularly as they are the primary danger facing the expedition.

Now we're taking a two week break to get some sun. After that we'll be putting the final touches on the rest of the Black Sea and preparing the closed alpha that will probably be available in the second half of September. It will be invite only. We'll be turning to the veterans of our community to help us test the massive amount of content we added so far to help us weed out bugs, handle any glaring imbalances as well as provide general feedback as to how to improve the expansion (within reason).

As the closed alpha is taking place we'll move to the final dungeon and the main quest wrap up.

Let us know how you like the new areas and I hope you guys are as excited for the closed alpha as we are. We really added a lot of things to the DLC over these few years, that, at times, we complete forget about them, and we're really interested to see how you guys use and abuse them to kill our precious NPCs before we nerf everything into the ground.

Cheers.