Update 3.0: Hunter, Agility, Crossbows and More

Hunter and Agility are out, and they are the 22nd and 23rd skills. That completes the skill roster. From here the game grows deeper inside the skills you already train, and it gives me time to go back and polish the art I am not happy with yet.

It is also the biggest update RuneClick has had. Nearly every part of the game got something: Magic, Ranged, Crafting, Cooking, Construction, the economy, the menus and your save file.

Hunter

Pick a creature and every input, keyboard, mouse or controller, is a catch attempt. A catch pays that creature’s experience and its loot. A miss pays nothing. Your chance is 65% at the creature’s own level and climbs 0.6% for every level above it, up to 95%.

There are 32 creatures, and each one is caught its own way. Songbirds go in a snare and give feathers and raw bird meat. Burrowers walk into a deadfall for fur, sometimes dark fur, and bone spikes from the bigger ones. Big cats and antelope drop into a pitfall for three brand new hides and antlers. Pufftails go in a box trap, two of the burrowers come to a falcon on your glove, and the root hog needs no trap at all: you track it, and it digs up unidentified herbs as it goes.

Then there are the clicklings. Eight of them, from level 17 to 89, caught with a clickling net, and each one carries a loot bag of runes, ores, logs, herbs, seeds, feathers and shafts. The rarer ones carry gems, rune bars and magic seeds, and the lucky clickling can carry a very rare onyx.

You need the right trap in your bank for each creature. Traps are sold in a new Hunter section of the shop, or made with Crafting from level 1 to 80. A trap breaks about once every 6,000 catches. The falconer’s glove never breaks.

Raw bird meat cooks, or dries into sinew, and sinew is how you get crossbow strings. Birds are the only source, which matters a lot more once you read the crossbow section further down.

Agility

Agility is your fitness. Every input is a rep, a coach counts the reps into circuits, and each finished circuit pays experience and may drop a Grace token. There are eight coaches, from the Village Drillmaster at level 1 to the Grandmaster Champion at 90, and your character works through leg lifts, squats, half burpees, high jumps, backflips and frontflips as they unlock.

From level 52 the Champion’s Trials open up: five trials at 52, 62, 72, 82 and 92. Each circuit pays a gold purse, from 135 up to 1,560, and a better shot at Grace, for a little less experience than a coach would give you.

Grace buys five perks, four steps each:

• Light Feet: the Thieving stun when you get caught drops from 3 seconds to 1.2.
• Second Wind: the wait after a death drops from 15 seconds to 7.
• Sharp Eyes: a missed gather still rolls the rare table, up to every miss.
• Careful Hands: a finished craft keeps all its materials, up to 35% of the time.
• Hot Pursuit: the next enemy shows up sooner after a kill, 2.5 seconds down to 1.3.

Max out all five and the trial marshal buys any spare Grace for 2,000 gold each.

Spellcraft

Spellcraft is a new entry in the skill row that trains Magic away from combat, from level 7. Enchant spells for every gem, topaz up to onyx, charm your jewelry and gem-tipped bolts. Charmed jewelry keeps its look, picks up a gem shimmer, and gives more experience and rare find in every skill. The charmed onyx bracelet is the top of it: 15% more experience and 45% more rare find.

The rest of the spellbook is about turning things into other things. Low Alchemy (21) turns an item into its sell value in gold, and High Alchemy (55) pays one and a half times that. Superheat Ore (43) smelts the bar you pick without a furnace, and you get the Smithing experience too. Bones to Bananas (15) and Bones to Peaches (60) do what they say, and peaches bake into a peach cobbler.

Crossbows, bolts and bucklers

Six crossbows, bronze to rune, fletched from bars, a log and a crossbow string (Fletching 1 to 85). A crossbow is one-handed, so the ranged loadout gets an off-hand slot, and there are seven bucklers to fill it, one per leather and hide tier.

Bolts come in every metal (Smithing makes the tips, Fletching makes the bolts, no shafts needed), plus bone bolts from bone spikes and gem bolts tipped with topaz up to onyx. Eighty percent of the bolts you fire come back when the enemy dies.

The enchanted bolts are the fun part. Each one has a chance per shot to do something extra, and they only fire from a crossbow.

Topaz hits 10% harder, emerald poisons, ruby takes a chunk of the enemy’s remaining health, diamond ignores armor, and onyx hits harder and heals you. A crossbow fires bolts only and a bow fires arrows only, and the game tells you clearly when your quiver holds the wrong thing.

Salamanders and tar

The net-and-rope creatures from Hunter are salamanders, and every catch is a live salamander weapon. Swamp, orange, red, black and cobalt, wielded at 30, 50, 60, 70 and 80 Attack, Ranged and Magic. A salamander fights in whichever loadout you equip it in, melee, ranged or magic, and it uses no runes or arrows.

It spits tar instead. Every loadout has a new tar slot, tar is brewed with Herblore from level 25 to 76 (15 tar per herb), and better tar adds up to 8% damage.

Three new hide tiers

The pitfall hides go somewhere. Veldhide, prowlerhide and sabrehide sit above dragonhide, crafted from level 60 to 80 and worn at 50, 60 and 70 Defence and Ranged. Each tier has a helmet, chaps, a body and a buckler.

A bigger kitchen, and stone for the Holding

Cooking got a proper middle. Mill wheat into flour, mix bread dough or pastry dough, and bake bread, meat pie (20), fish pie (47), admiral pie (70) and peach cobbler (85). The pies and the cobbler give buffs. Chickens and cows now always drop their meat, and a burnt dish comes out as Burnt Food instead of Burned Fish.

Wheat grows in the allotments from Farming 3. Mining gets two new rocks, limestone at 10 and granite at 45, and Crafting chisels them into limestone bricks and granite blocks. Those feed six new stone pieces for your Holding, from a decorative rock up to an opulent table, and the restoration springs and gilded altars now take some stone too.

Three character slots

Every PC now holds up to three characters, in a new Characters tab in Settings, and you can switch between them without closing the game. Character 1 is the one you already have: it is the one on the leaderboards, with Steam achievements and Steam Cloud. Characters 2 and 3 are sandbox characters. They start from scratch, stay on the PC you made them on, and never touch the leaderboards or achievements, so you can experiment without risking anything.

Safer saves, and a feedback button

If your save cannot be read, for example because antivirus has it locked, the game no longer starts a new character over it. A recovery screen explains what happened, keeps a rescue copy, and lets you try again, load the backup or quit. A damaged main save with a good backup repairs itself, a failed save can no longer wipe both files, and Quit Game now saves before it closes.

There is also a Feedback tab in Settings. Pick Bug or Idea, write up to 2,000 characters, and it comes straight to me. Nothing is sent until you press Send.

The rest of it

• Settings is split into tabs, one Animation speed slider (50 to 150%) covers every animation, and the Equipment panel has an “Eat below” slider for auto-eat right under the food slot.
• The Guide opens like a book, contents on the left and the chapter on the right, rewritten as advice from a fellow adventurer.
• The Leaderboards panel is two columns, every board grouped beside the rankings, and there are two new boards, Hunter and Agility, for 26 in all.
• The economy: rare drops now sell for what they take to find (a dragon chestplate goes for 15.8M), most crafted items sell for at least what their materials cost, and the gold leaderboard counts every coin you earn, not only shop sales.
• Achievements: five new ones, including the Hunter and Agility capes. Completionist now needs total level 2,277.
• Three new pets, each astronomically rare:

Your save upgrades on first load. Hunter and Agility start at level 1 and nothing else moves. All the new text is translated into the eight other languages, and in Korean, Slayer is now 토벌 so it no longer shares a word with Hunter.

And then 3.0.1

A day later, a small patch of fixes, with the two quiet fixes that went out right after 3.0.0 folded in. The ones you would notice: food and potions are no longer used up while nothing is being made, so running out of materials or waiting on the next clickling no longer drains them. Your Spellcraft picks survive a restart. RuneClick notices when a monitor is plugged in or unplugged and resizes itself without a restart, and if the screen your character is on goes away, it moves to your main screen and comes back when the monitor does. The Phoenix Chick is pet-sized again, and Boss Slayer counts all five bosses, the Chaos Elemental included.

Before all that: 2.7.1

One fix between 2.7 and 3.0 deserves a mention. On PCs with a single screen, or laptops showing on only one, the whole desktop could turn black the moment RuneClick opened, with only the character and menus showing. Some graphics drivers were treating the see-through overlay as a fullscreen game. The window now sits one pixel short of the screen, which keeps it out of that path. If you added the launch option from the bug thread as a workaround, you can take it out.

What’s next

The next update is a polish pass: no new skills, just going back over everything that is already here. A balance pass on the skills that never quite added up, easier selling, fewer clicks to switch what you are training, and art for the things that do not have their own yet. More when it is closer.

The full notes for 3.0 and every patch since are on Steam.

— Vosk