Beta 0.9.8 is available now. This update tackles several problems reported during testing, including wilderness doors refusing entry, delayed combat sounds, weapons disappearing at larger HUD sizes and trouble with saves. It also brings improvements to spells, artifacts, shops and travel.

Saving and loading

  • Improved save names and save-menu caching when you have multiple slots.
  • Improved cleanup after a failed load so it doesn't leave the next load stuck.
  • Fixed loot references carrying over from the wrong map or game session.
  • Retained the fixes for save overwriting, settings persistence and saved keybindings.

Spells, potions and conditions

  • Damage and healing effects now affect the correct resource: health, fatigue or spell points.
  • Added timing and save support for damage-over-time and regeneration effects.
  • Cure spells and temple services now recognise conditions consistently.
  • Connected disease, poison, paralysis, curses and instant-death effects to their gameplay consequences.
  • Fortify, drain and transfer affect your current stats without overwriting their base values.
  • Magical shields absorb incoming damage.
  • Invisibility and Sanctuary affect enemy detection or attacks where appropriate.
  • Light changes interior lighting, and Levitation's duration was corrected.
  • Open and Wizard Lock affect doors, preserve their state and play the original door sounds.
  • Disintegrate now defeats its target rather than leaving an effect with no outcome.
  • Potions apply their effects and are consumed from your inventory.

Artifacts and equipment

  • Special artifact actions are available through normal inventory use.
  • King Orgnum's Coffer tracks its acquisition and use across saves, with safeguards against duplicate transactions.
  • Oghma Infinium supports allocating its points and consuming the item.
  • Skeleton's Key works with door interactions and saved door state.
  • Connected artifact weapon effects and equipped defenses, with protection against applying an effect twice.
  • Corrected weapon material damage limits and wear.

Shops, temples, taverns and guilds

  • Tavern drinks use the original choices and cause intoxication rather than simply charging gold.
  • Temple blessings affect combat and follow their reset rules.
  • Temple healing and cures use the same conditions as spells without removing unrelated effects.
  • Inns let you choose the length of your stay before bargaining and show the selected duration.
  • Room rentals are tracked separately for each inn and expire as time passes. Recovery requires enough paid time remaining.

Time, holidays and resting

  • Holidays affect the applicable free inn stays, temple healing and cures, blessing donations, and shop and guild prices.
  • Holiday notices appear in settlements.
  • Knights receive their daily equipment repair when the day changes.
  • Timed health and resource effects carry through travel.
  • Fixed rest continuing to heal after lethal damage-over-time.
  • Connected disease progression and death during travel.
  • Corrected rest encounter triggers and their time accounting.
  • Restored date, time and condition feedback where applicable.

Citizens and dialogue

  • Cities, towns, villages and the wilderness retain their different population schedules.
  • Citizen directions use the original game data, and discovered building labels remain on the automap after saving and loading.
  • Building names and profession dialogue use the correct settlement, provincial capital, palace ruler and service names.
  • Fixed profession-specific dialogue and first or repeat conversation handling.
  • Fixed controls for closed-palace messages. Service hours and lockpicking are handled separately.

Wilderness doors and interior exits

  • Fixed missing material requirements when preparing wilderness entrances.
  • Fixed cancelled map loads leaving behind stale data that could interfere with later entry attempts.
  • Pressing interact without a valid nearby wilderness target now gives feedback instead of doing nothing.
  • Kept the current wilderness area active while nearby areas load under cache pressure.
  • Fixed valid entrances being rejected when their source area wasn't available.
  • Failed entrance attempts can be retried without losing the protection against immediately re-entering a door after leaving.
  • Fixed interior exits failing when the surrounding wilderness area needed to be restored, while preserving the correct return position.

Maps and fast travel

  • Repaired controller access to automap actions, map-note editing and world-map controls.
  • Travel checks follow the original rules, with selecting a destination kept separate from confirming the trip.
  • Corrected compass and automap headings.
  • Added loading indicators during startup, save loading and location changes.
  • Fixed the startup loading overlay hiding the settings screen and its Play button.
  • Fast travel closes the world map on arrival and shows your destination, the date and the number of days travelled.
  • Story-location introductions keep focus until you dismiss them.

Controls and the HUD

  • Click an action to rebind it, then press a keyboard key, mouse button or controller button while the prompt flashes.
  • Repaired controller access to interface panels and selected menu rows.
  • Fixed modern-HUD weapons disappearing off-screen at larger UI scales.
  • Added a separate, saved text-scale setting for the modern message box.
  • Restored classic mode's red movement arrows and centre crosshair.
  • Corrected death-sprite scaling, including the undersized rat corpse.
  • Fully looted piles of loose treasure and equipment disappear and stop accepting interaction, including after loading a save. Chests and corpses keep their separate behaviour.
  • Status messages reflect the effects currently on your character.

Combat audio

  • Combat sounds can overlap instead of waiting for the previous sound to finish.
  • Improved sound preparation and discarded outdated cues to reduce hit, attack and death sounds playing late.

Thanks to everyone who has sent in reports and helped test these fixes. This is still a beta, and further testing of the full main quest, spell combinations and save/load edge cases is ongoing.