Sigils, Crafters, and a Shop That Flows

Crafting used to be a button. You picked a recipe, the goods appeared, and that was the whole of it. Five weeks later it is a ritual you perform by hand, a station you watch work, and a creature you can pay to do it for you when you would rather be somewhere else.

Here is what changed and how each piece actually works.

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You draw the sigil

Interact with any of the six crafting stations, choose a recipe and how many you want, and the world drops away into a full screen glyph.

You trace it with the mouse, following the guide stroke, against a countdown. Ink wells and dries behind the nib as you go. Linger too long in one place and blood beads and runs from the line. The clock ticks at you the whole time.

Cover enough of the guide before time runs out and the sigil closes, the ingredients are consumed, and the station begins its work.

The important part is what happens when you fail. Running out of time, or backing out with escape, costs you nothing. Ingredients are only spent at the moment the sigil completes, so a botched attempt is time lost and nothing else. Try it as often as you like.

Every station works this way, in all three rooms.

Stations cook where you can see them

A station no longer hands you a finished item. It locks, and it works.

The vessel fills. Liquid moves in the glass and climbs as the batch progresses. A small indicator floats above the bench showing what is being made and how far along it is, so you can read the state of a room from across it.

Finished goods arrive one at a time in a crate on the station's output table. You collect the crate by hand and carry it where it needs to go. A station with a crafter working it handles this differently, which brings us to him.

Hire something with hands

The crafter is the third kind of employee, and he is not a zombie.

He is a creature, and he keeps different terms. He takes a daily wage in gold rather than eating from the trough. He is bound to one room for life, which means there is no assignment decision to agonise over, and he is hired from his own room's board rather than from the hiring head where you take on zombies. Each room has its own.

He owns the two stations in his room. You walk to his cabinet, pick a recipe and a batch size, and he works that order down to the last item and then stops. This is deliberate. He is not a machine you switch on and forget, he is someone you give a job to.

His great advantage is that he does not draw the sigil. He skips the ritual entirely and works while you are doing something else. Per item he is never faster than you are, so he buys you attention rather than raw speed.

He improves. Over five ranks he gets quicker at the bench, learning his room.

And he can be let down. If you cannot cover his wage on the day it falls due, he sets himself idle and paces his room until you can pay him. The wage scales with how much shop you are running, which makes him a cost that grows with you rather than a one time purchase you forget.

Change your mind mid order and you can cancel it. The ingredients go straight back to storage.

Ingredients you have committed stay committed

Placing a crafter order earmarks its ingredients the moment you commit to it.

This matters because your stocker is busy too, and without it he would cheerfully shelve the very components of a batch you had just ordered. Reserved ingredients are invisible to him, and to anything else that draws on storage, until the order is finished or cancelled.

The Library is twice the shop it was

Sixteen items and five recipes now, where there were half as many. New books, demon blood, an idol of the bloated saint, a handbook of necromancy.

More importantly, every recipe in the game now turns a profit when crafted. A good few of them used to quietly lose you money against the cost of their ingredients, which made crafting them an act of faith. That is fixed across all three stations, and prices were rebalanced from the ground up to sit in a sensible relationship to what the goods cost to make.

Two new tiers of rarity sit above the old ones, waiting to be filled by things worth making.

Reading what the village wants

Demand moves. The village warms to an item and then forgets it, and your prices should follow.

The price book now carries a demand reading for each item and a banner when something is having a moment, so the thing that was already driving your sales underneath is finally visible while you are setting prices rather than inferred afterwards from a sales figure.

The floor gets out of its own way

If you have watched your shop at a busy moment you will have seen the problem. Customers walked through each other. A queue at one shelf stretched back across the room and corked the doorway. One customer at a stand could hold it for an uncomfortably long time while a crowd built behind them.

All three are fixed, and they were three different bugs.

Customers now actually avoid one another. The old behaviour asked stationary customers to step aside for moving ones, which sounds right and is impossible, because a customer standing still has no movement to adjust. Now the one who is walking does the avoiding and the one standing still is something to walk around.

A customer no longer claims a shelf from the street. They walk into the shop first and decide once they are inside, so nobody holds a shelf hostage from across the building. Only a couple of people queue at any stand, and the rest wait out of the way rather than forming a line through your door.

And a customer buying several of something takes them in one motion rather than one reach per item, so a big order no longer parks someone at a shelf while everyone else watches.

Everything else

Crafters stopped appearing on the zombie hiring board, where they were never meant to be. Your stocker now carries stray items back to storage instead of leaving them where they fell. Build mode can no longer trap you with a quest restriction.

The volume sliders finally reach the mixer. They had been failing silently since the beginning, which is why the game may sound louder to you now, and why it is worth a trip to the settings screen. Each scene has its own music instead of the menu track following you into the shop.

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Please start a new game

The economy was rebuilt from the ground up in this patch. An old save carries prices set against numbers that no longer exist, which means its stock would sell the instant you opened the door and nothing would feel the way it is meant to.

The game will notice and ask you at the menu. Take the fresh start.

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Grab the demo and see how long you last. If something breaks, or something feels wrong, come and tell me about it in the Dark Workshop Discord.