Bugtober Update: Memory, Combat, Dialogues and more

For the whole of October, we paused new content and put everything we had into the problems you run into every day: bugs, broken interactions and rough edges in the systems that are already in Everweave. We called it Bugtober. This update is the result, and it's one of the biggest we've shipped.

Here's what changed, why it took us this long, and what still isn't where we want it to be.

New to Everweave?
Everweave is a text-based roleplaying game, or what we like to call a True Roleplaying Game. Most video game RPGs give you a set of predetermined options and routes. Everweave plays more like a DnD session: you write what your character does, and the story follows. You can abandon a questline, ignore the main plot entirely, or invent your own way to play.

Why now, and not earlier?

The honest answer is the size of our team, the complexity of the project and, frankly, a lack of planning. Most games go through a long pre-production phase, where the team plans the architecture and scope before building anything. Everweave never had that. It started as a prototype written in three days, and it simply never stopped growing.That left us with code written in different patterns, at different times, by different people.
So about half a year ago, after the rough release of Update 15, we started rebuilding our systems around a single shared approach, so they would be easier to fix and maintain. At the same time, we grew the team and brought new people up to speed. By the end of September, we were finally ready to spend a month on fixes alone.

You told us where it hurts

We already had a good idea of the most pressing issues from playing the game ourselves. What we didn't have was hard data on how those issues show up for different players with different playstyles. So at the start of October, we asked you.
More than 5,000 of you filled out our survey.

Most of the results confirmed what we suspected, with two surprises. They told us where to start: memory, combat, dialogue and equipment.

Memory

Memory was the first surprise. It didn't come up nearly as often in community discussions as it did in the survey.

Everweave uses a fairly extensive memory system, built to hold on to the most important details of your adventure even after thousands of messages. When we dug in, the system itself was mostly working as intended, but a number of small bugs could stack up over longer adventures until your DM was holding on to unimportant moments and losing the ones that made your adventure yours.With those fixed, detail recall on our internal benchmark is up by 34%, and that's in Creative mode, which uses the simpler memory system.
Immersive mode, with its separate memory for each character, improved even more.

Combat

Combat, unlike memory, surprised no one. It was one of the first systems we built, and it had barely changed since. Our long-term plan is a tactical combat mode with battlemaps in Immersive mode, but we didn't want to leave Creative players behind.

The Bugtober changes do both: they improve combat for everyone today, and they lay the groundwork for tactical combat later.

• Distance. Until now, distance in combat was a complete abstraction. In practice that meant some classic abilities couldn't give the bonuses they're supposed to, and some classes lost their edge. Combat now tracks distance in a simplified form, including weapon and spell ranges.
• Action economy. Once distance was in, managing your actions and resources became a crucial part of every fight, so combat now tracks them explicitly. Your turn ends only when you press “End Turn”.
• Enemies. A polished combat system means nothing if you're fighting same "Bandit 1" and "Bandit 2". We've added enemy and ally archetypes with their own strengths, weaknesses and behavior, and enemies now differ in power: you might meet a couple of vagrants or a boss with a retinue. There's no auto-leveling, so a fox at the edge of the woods won't take dozens of turns to deal with. Fights also scale to their importance in the story, and enemies can now flee or surrender. Whether you spare or capture them is up to you.
• Companions. Now companions follow your orders in combat, as long as the order doesn't go against their character or goal. On top of that: initiative rolls, surprise rounds, detailed roll breakdowns right in the chat, better combat narration, smarter NPC behavior, a clearer combat interface and an updated combat tutorial. We also fixed a long list of class abilities and spells, from Sneak Attack and Uncanny Dodge to spell saving throws.

Dialogue and companions

Ever since Update 15, we haven't stopped working on dialogue - character personalities, memory, stability, and making the whole experience feel more seamless. Nowadays, most players choose to play Immersive mode, stating in depth stories, narrative immersion, grounded realistic characters and overall more rewarding experience as their reasons and such feedback couldn’t make us happier. However, we still have a long way to go before it matches our vision - and with Bugtober we made another noticeable step toward it.

We fixed a number of bugs that broke context when switching between dialogue and narrative mode. We also gave characters in a dialogue a way to check with the narrator DM behind the scenes, to fill gaps in their memory or help play out the scene. The result should be smoother conversations and a more stable memory of your adventure.

Companions got a lot of attention too:
- When you ask companions to stay somewhere, they now can now actually do so, instead of popping up next to you in the very next scene.
- They should react, speak and form memories more consistently in narrative mode, and their lines can now appear right in the chat.
- Exchanging items with them is more stable, and they're better at using their own gear.
- The DM is now stricter about who counts as a companion, so a guide who walks you to the gate no longer joins your party by accident.

Equipment and merchants

Equipment was the second surprise. But when we looked at the actual survey comments, almost all of them fell into one of two groups: equipment stats not being applied properly in combat, and custom items not working the way players expected.

The first group we've largely dealt with. During the combat rework we fixed a large number of small bugs in how equipment is tracked and used, including weapon proficiency and Armor Class.

About the second one, though, we want to be clear: a proper system for creating and using powerful custom magic items is not in the game yet. We're working on it right now and aiming to release it in December. Until then, the only magic items the game properly supports are weapons with hit or damage bonuses, and consumables: potions, poisons, bombs and scrolls.

Additionally, we made sure merchants now sell what you'd expect them to: armorers sell armor, weaponsmiths sell weapons, alchemists sell potions and poisons. They carry more coin, and their stock refreshes over time.
Both the DM and NPCs now know that the game uses a single currency, silver coins, so buying items and getting rewards should be far less confusing.

New option: Karmic Dice

This one isn't a fix. It's a new option, and it's off by default. Karmic Dice adjust the game's random number generation behind the scenes. They prevent long streaks of failures, or successes, in a row, and slightly improve the odds for characters who aren't fully optimized. It's for those of you who'd rather not have their fantasy ruined by a run of bad luck. If you love the unexpected stories that come out of true random dice rolls, just leave it off.

Karmic Dice apply to your character's rolls outside of combat. Rolls with advantage or disadvantage are never modified, so smart character choices still pay off exactly as they should, and stats for rolls made with Karmic Dice on are tracked separately.

AI Core update

Everything above is a system we build around the AI. In the end, though, all of it runs through the AI itself, and AI, a lot like people, makes mistakes. It can forget a detail, misread a situation, or skip a step it was supposed to take.That's why a constant part of our work is finding the right combination of models and tuning how they work. As part of Bugtober, we replaced some of our models and changed how they're directed:
- Reworked communication between the systems that run your game, for a more responsive DM with fewer hallucinations.
- Reworked planning, for better-designed quests and stronger storytelling.
- Replace few of the underlying models in a number of back systems, for a general bump in stability and quality.

The updated AI Core is switched on only for new characters. Changing the models under an ongoing campaign can shift how NPCs talk and behave and break a story that's already in progress, and we didn't want to do that to adventures you've been building for months.

To be honest with you: no amount of tuning will make the AI perfectly reliable or predictable, not at this stage of the technology. What we can do, and will keep doing, is push the success rate as high as it can go and make mistakes rarer and easier to recover from.

Also in this update
- 5 new "Gleaners' Eve" seasonal starts: Autumn Valley, Crimson Sunset, Grain Stalk Maze, Glowing Turnips and Mirror Storm
- 70+ minor bug fixes
- 10+ UI improvements, including character filtering, AI response reporting, updated character sheet and so on

What's next?

Bugtober was a month of fixing, but the work doesn't stop here. From now on it continues as part of our regular update cycle, and the next update should land in late November. We hope these changes make your adventures a lot more enjoyable and a lot less frustrating.

Thank you for your feedback, for filling out the survey, and for playing.
Feel free to tell us how the update feels on Discord!

Happy adventuring!