Hey everyone,

first of all, Happy New Year. We made it to 2021 at last.

It's been a while since we posted a devlog entry and we figured that this would be a great time to do so. Today's topic, Dynamic pricing, has been on our minds for a long-long time, and finally, we've decided to pull the trigger on implementing it. To provide a little background on why we need it, let's review what happens in the current build of the game when you go trading.

Opening an indie game dev studio and developing a 100+ hour long, complex game right away comes with a lot of important lessons. One of which has been that we like to dream big and thanks to the abundant positive feedback from our amazing players, we like to make these visions even bigger. Thus we have felt since the end of 2019 that if we ever wanted to realize all the potential Vagrus has, we have to raise our core team's size.

Hey everyone, a quick recap of the patch/fix that went live during the weekend can be found here. Hopefully, the more egregious errors have been squashed, now onto the smaller ones as well as the upcoming content development before the year closes out. :)

New/Updated Features:  

• Exploit leadership perk enabled. Use RF to reroll available Trade Tasks  
• Objective area markers for certain events where you need to scout a larger area [like bounties] so you know, at least roughly, the location  
• Goods category filters on the Market  
• Specify quantity button on the Market - mainly for Steam Remote Play users playing on iPads  
• Goods pilfered by the enemy can be taken back if you destroy them in Crew Combat  - Entering major settlements with a larger armed force now requires a license  
• Vagrus now runs in the background

Bug Fixes:

Hey everyone,

today, we are happy to share the changes we squeezed into this new update! Better yet, we have included two additional features that we managed to implement on top of our initial plans.

A quick recap of what we have added (skip ahead to see the bonus additions):

The Vortex is a prominent point of interest on our chart and takes up a lot of space on our gigantic playable area in game. It has been a static item for a long time but when it came to adding the Deven region, we knew that we had to change that and give players something much better.

So here we are, a little later, looking at the new Vortex, resting our gaze on its forever swirling form. We are very satisfied with the result and hope that you are, too. Let us know what you think!

We have hinted at the rehauling of several Combat Skills recently, and we are happy to announce that these improvements made their way into the next build of Vagrus. Moreover, we ended up with many more skills that now work much better or are completely new than we had initially thought. Here are a few of these with some commentary:

One of the most requested additions by our Early Access players has been Companion progression for a while now, and it's no surprise. Being a party-based RPG at its heart, Vagrus has a roster of unique Companions that are your most trusty lieutenants with their own backstories, skills, and personalities. It is only natural that they can become stronger with time and effort - and we have naturally designed this progression system in the beginning, but we held off on adding it because there were a lot of specifics to work out and the EA experience functioned fairly well without it.

Hey everyone,

and first of all let us thank all of you who shared their views regarding our planned priorities. We took that to heart and worked tirelessly to implement Companion Progression, which includes raising the Prowess cap from two to five, introducing Companion-specific traits that increase stats, and much more.

Fellow vagri! In this video, we touch upon one of the (many) improvements we have added to Companion combat: diminishing returns. In essence, Block and Evade will receive stacking penalties with each successful use. This will prevent some enemies to endlessly avoid damage (as well as players to abuse buffs, heh), drawing out some fights too drastically.

This time, we bring you a little teaser about the next area we are about to add to Vagrus, namely the twin salt basins north of the Crimson Gate and the Hills of Plenty. It includes - among other things - the town of Salum, where the Dragonlands is in control of a faltering salt mining operation and seems to be oblivious to certain issues surrounding it. Is someone hiding something? You'll have to dig deeper to find out. Or just harvest salt and try to get rich in the process.