Major Update 1 — New Content, Improvements, Fixes & Optimization and Public Demo

 

Dear Merchants,

First and foremost, we want to address the recent silence and sincerely apologize for keeping you waiting. We know so many of you have been eagerly asking when the next update would drop. Rather than rushing out minor patches, we chose to keep our heads down and pour every ounce of our energy into making sure this update was massive, rock-solid and truly transformative.

Our goal for this first major update wasn’t just to add new content but we also wanted to inject real soul and life into the town, polish existing mechanics and address the invaluable feedback you’ve shared with us since day one. We are immensely grateful for your incredible patience, passion and continued interest in our game. We truly believe these improvements will make a world of difference and we remain 100% committed to relentlessly refining your shopkeeping experience.

UPDATE AVAILABLE ON OCTOBER 29, 2026, 10:00 AM PST / 5:00 PM GMT

Here is the complete breakdown of everything packed into Major Update 1:

1. NEW CONTENT

To make the town feel more alive, vibrant and immersive, we focused heavily on community requests and key vision items that we couldn't originally squeeze into our initial release timeline:

Reimagined Tutorial: Created a much more comprehensive, intuitive and immersive tutorial flow to provide a far better onboarding experience for new shopkeepers.

Introductory Lore & Narrative Flow: Added an opening backstory to give context to the world, alongside core narrative progression, character dialogues and endgame goals.

Town Vault & Passive Perks: Constructed an all-new Town Vault featuring dedicated tidy up and collection mechanics. Depositing into the vault unlocks collectible cards that grant your character unique passive perks.

46 Brand New Items: Expanded the item catalog with 46 new items. To solve the Mage vs Warrior item imbalance highlighted by the community, the vast majority of these new items are specifically tailored for magic lovers.

Living Customer Dialogue: Customers now actively share their thoughts! You’ll hear from them while they walk the streets, browse your shelves, wait at the register or after completing a purchase.

Customer Satisfaction & End-of-Day Stats: Implemented an end-of-day performance system and satisfaction metrics, providing clear visual feedback and direct consequences for how you manage your store.

New Steam Achievements: With all of the above new contents, we didn't forget to add Steam achievements!

2. GAMEPLAY, QOL, UI & CONTROL IMPROVEMENTS

Phased Town Progression: Town shops now unlock gradually based on your overall progression rather than all at once.

New Guide Book: Info panels are now fit into a guide book that players can navigate from an index page and focus on reading the desired ones easily.

Layered Decoration: You can now place decorations directly on top of other decorative objects.

Smarter Stockers: Stockers now prioritize picking up smaller/lower-tier crates first to optimize warehouse management.

Dynamic Price Spikes: Drastically lowering the price of an item will now generate heavy, sudden customer demand for it.

Partial Griffin Rewards: The Griffin now awards partial gold payouts for partial quest item deliveries.

Griffin Shelf Respect: The Griffin will no longer request items placed on display shelves that are marked as "Not for Sale."

Smelly Customer Interventions: Guards will now stop bad smelling customers from entering, right alongside thieves.

Audio Polish: Complete overhaul and balance pass on global sound effects and ambient audio.

Hero Potion Stacking: Heroes can now stack up to 9 identical potions in a single inventory slot, consuming only 1 per mission.

Cleanliness Rebalance: Customers will only begin giving up on shopping if cleanliness drops below 50%. The dirt notification chime now only plays at 100% filth.

Research Rebalance: Adjusted several research node requirements to ensure a smoother, better-paced progression curve.

Beastmaster Capacity Indicator: Added a "MAX" label to assistants on the Beastmaster screen once their capacity is filled.

Enhanced Quest Markers: Redesigned quest markers with added glow effects so they are easily visible from a distance.

Minimised Quest Tracker: Closing the quest list now leaves a subtle "C" indicator on the edge of the screen for quick toggle access.

Clean Currency Display: Rounded gold values to whole integers across the HUD and save/load screens.

Full Keybinding Support: Fully custom rebindable keys are finally here! You can now customize your control layout exactly how you like. Thank you for your patience while we built this out.

Toggle Sprint: Added a "Toggle Sprint" option to the control settings.

Expanded Graphic Settings: Added options for Shadows, Render Scale and Field of View (FOV).

Shop Threat Toggle: Instead of choosing between Cozy or Normal mode at the start of a run, you can now freely toggle "Threats" on or off anytime inside the Settings menu.

Consistent Market Sorting: Reorganized market item lists to sort consistently by item type, rarity and research order.

Active Research Highlights: Available research nodes in the Tree are now clearly highlighted with a green ring indicator.

HUD Reminders: Added a persistent Hero Status Indicator to the top-right HUD along with a Available Research prompt whenever new tech is ready.

UI Animations & Audio: Added new animations and sound feedback across buttons, menus and popups to make navigating the UI feel crisp and responsive.

3. BUG FIXES & OPTIMIZATION

Collision Cleanup: Smoothed out rough collision boundaries across various store areas, including upper rooms and tight wall corners.

Memory Leak Fixes: Resolved memory leaks that caused performance drops during extended play sessions.

Artifact Weapon Bug: Fixed an issue where equipping Artifact items caused heroes to lose their primary weapons.

Mouse Settings Persistence: Fixed mouse sensitivity and inverted mouse options resetting back to default upon restarting the game.

Hotbar Scroll Direction: Fixed an inverted mouse wheel navigation bug on the hotbar.

Gamepad Polish: Fixed L2/R2 rotation issues in decoration mode, grid alignment bugs and unresponsive 'A' button inputs on select panels.

Customer Navigation: Fixed pathfinding stutters where customers would stumble or wobble on small steps.

Grid Placement Precision: Improved snapping precision and stability when placing items on the build grid.

4. PUBLIC DEMO IS BACK (WITH SAVE TRANSFERS!)

As many of you know, we previously took our old demo offline because it no longer reflected the actual state of the game. We are thrilled to announce that the Public Demo is officially back online and updated to match our latest build!

Even better: Demo save files now fully carry over to the full game. If you play the demo and decide to grab the full version later, you can pick up your trading empire exactly where you left off.