v0.8.b_4 has been released to beta. Report issues and bugs in the steam forums. GitHub faux roadmap for the brave and foolhardy here. Known Issues: Local currency rewards (the ingame system that replaced gold, not related to the regional pricing updates from a few weeks ago) from Nodes and Explore town Features are still not up to snuff, but they're getting closer, same with mass battles with an uneven number of fighters. Going forward, the plan is to keep the main Steam branch at least the second latest version, and the Beta branch will be no more than one update ahead, if possible. This is more for upload management reasons than stability reasons, but none of the updates have been less stable than the ones preceding them, despite the shocking number of changes. I consider this more revealing of the inherently instability at this point in development than an accomplishment on my part, and am glad I choose to keep Trawel in early access. Expected earliest release of v0.8 has been moved from September 9th to the 17th of that month, but it may still occur even later than that. The intention of v0.8 is to be stable and fully featured landmark to start off post 2022 Trawel with. Actual Patch Notes: Changes from the last beta, in a VERY rough order:

• As always, many small bug fixes that weren't noticeable unless you looked very hard, or were to lesser used mechanics.
• Added 'pouch/bag', which lets you store up to 3 different pieces of backup equipment. Currently there are some issues with clearing up space if the thing you want is of a different type than what you have stored, but it works fine if you don't treat it as a full inventory and just an alternatives system. This may receive full inventory status later, but the goal right now is mostly so you can store more than one weapon. This also comes with the option to examine what you're comparing more closely, and swap what you're comparing with if you had alternatives in your pouch (which immediately equips the new item you're comparing with).
• 'You' menu categorized into different submenus, and is now accessible from Nodes, which you can save within. Saving in a Node will save your location in that node. Many of the options are new or reworked features: [olist]
• Settings menu includes display updates from last updates, and also three 'auto' options: AutoLevel, AutoLoot, and AutoBattle. These allow the player to opt out of those mechanics. AutoBattle does not resolve fights instantly, and instead shows the player what options the AI would pick before it does them. The player currently cannot stop the AI mid battle, and it doesn't instantly complete the battle to discourage fightspam.
• Character skill menu, which now has a list of all the player's current final skills on demand if they want to see the collation of their sources, instead of just telling you that that isn't implemented yet.
• Inventory with pouch, drawbanes, and a Map feature that lets the player learn the path to any town they've been in before, as well as look up lore and other information on each town they've been to.
• Society menu which holds Quests, Faction Reputation, and the revamped title system that has upgradable titles. This makes the Arena Champion titles much easier to parse.
• Saving, which works in Nodes now.
• A stats overview, mostly put in here so it's harder to press the next option instead of saving.
• Quitting to the Main Menu.
• A Glossary of game terms and mechanics. Includes explanations of mechanics and in-game-generated lists of Skills. Archetypes, Feats, Perks, Wounds, Effects, DrawBanes, Seeds, and Weapon Qualities. The scrollable menus implemented in the previous updates are put to good use in some of these. If in a debug testing save, this menu is replaced by a cheats menu. Includes the old Infodump tutorial as well.
• exit, as part of the '9 is back' reworks, many menus were made to have 9 be 'previous menu' or cancel.[/olist]
• Wound/Tactics: Added a 'tactics' mechanic which is closely related to some combat actions which now have secondary non-damage affects tied to them. Previously in Trawel, attacks could only express different mechanics through attached wounds. Wounds were overhauled to better display and handle their random chance to not roll (1/10th chance per attack, unless it uses a Keen weapon; the elementalist skills now do not reroll normal grazes), and some slight behavioral updates, especially to bleeding, which keeps getting reworked in the background every update as goals for it change. More impactfully, the wound internal management changed what wounds will roll on which body parts, and a few were cleaned up. 'Condition Wounds' are now branded as 'Injuries', and apply negative debuffs until the end of the battle, cementing their goal of acting as 'soft hp gates'. Normally HP systems have intense dissonance when a person goes from fully functional at 1HP to completely inactive at 0HP, Injuries help move the combat along by increasing the negative effects they take, and, somewhat uniquely to Trawel, avoid decreasing damage output of the inflicted when thematically possible to prevent combats dragging on forever if both participants have all their bones broken. 'Tactics' follow the same 'on attack' paradigm of wounds, but cover personal buffs or debuffs. Currently, there is a Dodge Roll, a Single Out, and a 'Challenge to attack me' tactic. Tactics are provided by some Skill Sources, but can also be called as part of a normal skill source attack. For example, Daredevils don't know any tactics and can only use them from their skill attacks, but Armor Masters can single out as a 'tactic action' from their battle menu, which doesn't deal damage, but applies the tactic effect without needing to roll an attack option with the tactic.
• 'Yore' boss added to the Dungeon of Fame. Yore's dungeon fight is a mass battle using the newly-detached-from-forts combat conditions, and you must delve his dungeon to disable them if you don't want to fight him at a severe disadvantage. This is meant to be a contrast to the Tower of Fate, which requires you to reach the top to do battle, because Yore's fight room is the first room in the dungeon.
• Cloth separated into Patchwork, Linen, and Cotton. All three, plus silk, have received minor stat changes.
• Terminal and Graphical have (for now) slightly different display options improvements. [olist]
• Graphical got several options to display time passing 'in real time'. In combat, this was already happening a fixed amount after every attack, but an alternative option to tie this the mechanical 'time delay' of actions was re-added (it was in but disabled and with bad numbers prior), instead of a pause after every action. Out of combat, a new option was added and enabled as the default: to show the world state time passing in features/towns. Theoretically this might display weird since the time could pass before or after an option is chosen, but in practice most of Trawel was configured to add time in an appropriate place, and the game just needed to get told to compute it more often. For example: when waiting for a fight in an arena, the game will now attempt to show 6 hours of waiting in 1 second instead of catching up instantly. Towns were changed to use the forest background, and this makes it much more clear when time is passing, and how much. WARNING: In most cases, 6 hours per second is quick enough that you won't be waiting long, but some Arenas only fight once per month, so you'll be sitting there waiting. Considering your character has to wait the time in more seconds conceptually, perhaps this will give you a better sense of scale- having to wait 2 minutes feels like a lot, but for them, that 2 minutes was 43200 minutes.
• Terminal got 'back out', which will likely reach legacy graphical in a later update. This attempts to leave up to 10 menus/cancel 10 options, and uses modern handling of Trawel menus to know when to stop. In most cases, the 10 is just a safety thing, since not all cancellations progress the game state, but many menus do not accept a 'back out' input in that case. You trigger this by entering '10', and '0' will back out once if you wish to do it step by step, as a safer alternative to spamming '9', which is sometimes a real choice.[/olist]