A new round of Live Builds are now available with some great new gameplay and mod features to enjoy.

Tavern Rooms, Food & Drink

Thanks to Hazelnut, it’s now possible to rent a room in taverns. And thanks to Allofich, you can also purchase food & drink for RP purposes. During your tenancy, you’ll be allocated a bed and can use that tavern as a home base. Just talk to any friendly bartender across the Illiac Bay.

Rooms are saved with your character, so if you leave town and return later before your tenancy expires, your room will still be available. This all ties in perfectly with Hazelnut’s world persistence. You can leave loot piles in your room and return later to retrieve them. Just don’t forget to pick up your loot before your room expires or those items become property of the house. No refunds!

Custom Loot Containers

Another Hazelnut feature, and something unique to Daggerfall Unity, is the ability to customise your loot containers. You can now click on the loot container icon (shown in red box below) in your inventory UI while interacting with the container to set a custom icon from a much broader set of icons than normally available.

Use left-click for next icon, right-click for previous icon, and middle-click to change icon group. This feature means you now have some minor customisation over things you leave around your properties, ship, or rented tavern rooms. You can make the icons a bit more meaningful than just a random container, and it’s a great way to add more RP to your game.

New Mod Features

This one is impossible to take a screenshot of, but that doesn’t stop it from being any less awesome. TheLacus, our resident mod-master, has added some generic methods (generics are a way to handle data of any kind) to his asset bundle handling. This allows asset bundles to import more types of content in future and use load order on the mod import UI to handle duplicates.

The first new asset type now available to asset bundles is custom music and sound effects. It was already possible to inject custom sound and music into the game, but this means whole new music mods can be added as a single .dfmod package. TheLacus is also working on movie import for this feature, so one day it will be possible to import new movies from asset bundles as well.

This kind of work is critical to Daggerfall Unity having a vibrant mod community, and we all appreciate TheLacus’ work immensely.

Climbing

From Allofich we now have Daggerfall’s infamous climbing feature at long last. This works just like classic Daggerfall – face a wall directly and move slowly forwards. Your climbing skill will be checked as you ascend, so be careful climbing with clumsy characters, as they might come crashing back to earth.

Allofich tells me climbing still has some refinements ahead. For example, it’s not yet possible to climb out of water. But it’s already working exceptionally well and can only improve in the future.

Language Skills

Another Hazelnut gem, and something often ignored by classic players. Language skills give the player a chance to avoid combat with certain monsters based on a language check. If the language check is passed, the monster will become pacified as if you “talked them down”. Unfortunately my character speaks about ten words in Orcish – all of them insults – and is about to get into a fight.

The way Hazelnut has implemented this means that a character with a high Streetwise skill has a chance of avoiding combat with other roguish humanoids. If you encounter a Thief, Assassin, or the like in Daggerfall Unity your Streetwise skill might help you avoid an unpleasant encounter. For characters with a more polite way of handling things, your Etiquette skill might help save you from a tussle with a Knight or other non-roguish humanoid. For monstrous foes, you’ll need to know their exact language to pass.

This also means you might get a chance to land the first blow, if your character is that unscrupulous.

Magic Work-In-Progress

These latest builds also mark the first official step in the 0.5 release line from Roadmap. I have started building the back-end (effect system) and front-end (projectiles, cast animations, UI) of the magic system. This is still a work in progress and nothing is available to players in this round of builds, I’m afraid. But just like quests before it, the magic system will scale upwards in small incremental steps with each release.

I’ll be posting more on the magic system around spells and effects soon. Until then, I hope you enjoy all the other great stuff added to these builds.