Second Helpings!

This is a follow-up to Hook, Line, and Sizzle with fixes and some features that didn't make it into the main patch. Since you've been enjoying Hook, Line, and Sizzle so much, enjoy this second helping!

If you were having trouble with customers, employees, or multiplayer syncing, this update should smooth things out!

We’ve also included many new item attributes, new spells, unlockable origins, and cooking improvements!

Cooking Improvements

[c]I am super happy to see all the positive reception to the cooking system! It's my favorite system I’ve designed for Saleblazers so far, and I’m thrilled you like it as much as I do.[/c]

[c]Based on your feedback, I’ve made a few more improvements:[/c]

[c]When repeat cooking on stovetops and fires, you will now skip the minigame's result page after the second cook and just see the finished meal in the bottom-right corner while you keep cooking.[/c]

[c]On ovens, you can now hold 'interact' to quickly cook the last meal again, provided you have the ingredients.[/c]

[c]I also added 16 new signature recipes for you to discover, bringing the total to over 130![/c]

[c]If you have any ideas for future signature recipes, or just want to share screenshots of your favorite in-game meals, let me know in the comments below, on the Steam forums, or on our Discord. I’ll be reading all of them![/c]

[c]Happy cooking![/c]

[c]- Statue, Saleblazers Game Designer[/c]

New Spells and Spell Attributes

[p align="start"]One of the first new story missions we're working on involves the mage faction, so we created new spells to give them more gameplay options, and we're making them available to you now!

[p align="start"]Mage Armor wraps you or an ally in a shield.

[p align="start"]Confusion turns enemies on each other.

[p align="start"]

[p align="start"]Slumber puts the target to sleep.

[p align="start"]

[p align="start"]These new spells also bring 42 new spellbook attributes!

[p align="start"]

[p align="start"]Some, like Twin Cast and Rapid Charging, work on all existing spells. Others, like Thorns for Mage Armor, are unique to the new spells.

[p align="start"]There are even cool support attributes for the light spell! Like Aegis Beacon, which gives armor to the ally the light follows, or Corrosive Beacon, which eats away at an enemy's armor.

[p align="start"]You can now craft all twelve spellbooks, too. For now, you can buy these recipe books from the Meteor and Bellstalker Mountain spell vendors.

Four New Unlockable Origins

These origins were meant to ship with Hook, Line, and Sizzle, but they needed a little more tuning.

[p align="start"]Get a stamped pass into Kazai Village, finish the Desert Shop quest, pull off the Jail Dead Drop and join the Syndicate, or turn in all the current North Star components, and you'll unlock a new origin to use for your next character!

[p align="start"]They dramatically change the feel of your next playthrough. Try them out to see how it feels to start with a stamped pass, mid-game shopkeeping items, or even a golf cart!

The existing origins have also been updated to spawn characters with more food ingredients themed to that origin, so every character can make unique meals from the start!

What Are Story Missions?

We're working on the main quest towards 1.0, which will take the form of new story missions!

Story missions will be very different from the hundreds of existing Saleblazers quests you're familiar with.

Right now, quests are a sandbox experience where you are given a goal and can complete it in your own time as you explore the open world.

Story missions will be more structured, require the entire server to participate, and will challenge you to your limits!

You'll have to use all of your shopkeeping skills to make it through to the end of the game. It won't be easy!

In the meantime, you can listen to some Saleblazers music on YouTube / Spotify!

Thanks for Playing!

(And an extra thank you to everyone who played this update on the Experimental branch and provided feedback and bug reports!)

v0.21.3.0 Patch Notes

✅ Changes

Cooking

• Added hold-to-quick-cook at ovens for faster processing

• Added 16 new signature meals to discover

• Cooking the same dish again now minimizes the results screen

• You can now fill a container with clean water at any drinkable fixture

• Many dishes can now be served in more than one vessel, and the skewer in particular has a lot more signature dishes available

• Updated the Onigiri recipe, which can now be served on a plate or in a bowl

• Recipes you discover are now tied to the character who discovered them, rather than shared across your saves

• Eating a new cooked meal that does not hydrate will now replace the previous meal's effects instead of stacking (if the previous meal included hydration)

• Meals collected from an oven quick cook now use the compact result UI

• Rebalanced unattended oven cook times

• Raw purple mushrooms no longer heal you

• Margherita is now Margherita Pizza, baked in an oven and rendered as an actual pizza instead of loose ingredients

• An oven dish attempted at the wrong station now cooks as something else rather than failing outright

• Cooked meal effect durations now properly scale with your hunger and thirst rate setting, and a meal's effects can no longer outlast how full it made you

• The Kitchen Oven and Stove recipes now need a Shepherd Core

• You can no longer accidentally move the cooking camera during the minigame

Shopkeeping & Employees

• Employees now rest on their own when they run out of energy

• An employee who cannot start a dish will now explicitly tell you the first ingredient they are missing

• **Rebalanced and simplified difficulty tiers **(Veteran Shopkeeper has been decommissioned to streamline options)

• Employees are more forgiving about how close they need to stand to a crafting station

• Road traffic now better reflects what your shop has unlocked

• Raised the delay before a customer waiting at the register speaks up

• Increased the cooldown on NPC bump voice lines

• Traveler customers can now spawn at all valid customer hours

• Customers now eat a cooked meal after purchase more frequently

• Customers purchasing a cooked meal will now sometimes eat it at the register and sometimes on the way out of the plot

• Made small adjustments to the layouts of the starting shops

Combat & Magic

• Added a new set of 42 spell attributes, with unique attributes for healing, following light, slumber, and confusion spell effects

• You can now craft all spellbooks by purchasing their recipes from the spell shops in the Meteor and Bellstalker Mountain

• You can now heal yourself with the healing spell by aiming at your feet

• You can now unlock 4 new character origins by performing actions in-game

• Added a gun-only Armor Piercing affix (with AWP and Deagle weighting) and a shotgun-only Breaching affix for improved armor damage

• Added spell effects for efficiency, charge, projectile behavior, homing, multi-cast, and cast speed

• Rebalanced multi-pellet shotgun damage, and the item UI now shows both total and per-pellet damage

• Hard and Hardcore Airstrafer difficulties are now tougher

• Harder difficulties now increase enemy HP instead of reducing player damage, which plays better with the new damage numbers

• Hardcore hunger and thirst drain has been eased slightly

• Blindness is now harsher, with a stronger vignette and longer swallow gags

• Ragdolls now drag with more force

• Worn equipment keeps its stats no matter how damaged it is

• Tuned the health of many enemies

• Spell hunger costs are ignored when your hunger and thirst drain is disabled in the lobby survival settings

• You can no longer revive hostile NPCs while in combat. Reviving other players is unaffected

• Mage origin starts knowing the Water Bubble Spellbook recipe

• Medium and large holstered items on your back will now show smaller

UI & Quality of Life

• Increased crafting input slots to 6. Unused items will now be automatically returned to your inventory from crafting input slots if you try to trigger a new craft that needs those slots for different ingredients

• Hovering a recipe in the crafting UI now shows the full item panel for what it makes so you can make informed decisions about the stats and price

• Recipe books bought from shops now list what they actually unlock, with each item's description and the station it's crafted at

• The Silver Tongue minigame now starts more quickly after setting a price and won't trigger if you are simply accepting the initial price

• Pressing the first key in the Silver Tongue sequence to start the minigame now counts toward your progress instead of swallowing the input

• With hunger and thirst turned off, the meters are hidden, and you keep both max health bonuses permanently

• Item and meal hover panels have had their UI improved

• Signature meals now clearly indicate their status in the hover UI

• End-of-day level-up summaries now show origin and other registered mastery bonus levels

• Improved the performance of dropped item animations, which now pause while off-screen

• Working characters no longer fall back to the cheaper movement mode, making them move more smoothly

• Difficulty no longer affects woodcutting and mining speed

• Improved the fishing catch chat messages

• Crafting station rarity bonuses now show on the hover UI

• Slightly improved night visibility

• New characters joining after Pop Pop's cutscene will now automatically eat an apple

• The player will now eat some popcorn during the promotional video at the beginning of the legacy start option

🔧 Fixes

Employees & Customers

• Customers will now better form a proper queue instead of deciding to swarm your shop

• Employees gathering while you're away or asleep now respect gather times, gather skill, and plot bonuses

• Improved AI pathfinding recovery. When a route comes back unreachable, the AI retries with widened movement tags, uses navmesh recovery steering, and finally falls back to blind steering before getting stuck

• Employees sent to rest will now actually recover energy across sleeping or skipped time

• Stopped resting employees from being attacked by enemies while hidden

• Gatherers will no longer stall out in situations where one of their possible destination storages happens to be full

• Corrected an issue where customers would sometimes play the wrong voice line for browsing barks

• Police will no longer continue responding to a crime if the criminal has already gotten away

• Tuned AI pathing so customers no longer snap through supporting floors or get stuck on thin gaps on raised colliders

• Prevented customers from occasionally getting stuck after using a needs item

• Customers no longer get stuck when pooling across a map reload

• Customers will no longer incorrectly show as heading to your shop while just walking an ordinary road route, and road customer persuasion now routes correctly

• Customers will now accurately call out the register path they are actually taking, and queued voice lines will properly cancel for other players

• Ernest Stratton and T2 police will no longer sometimes vanish if you leave and return to a village

• Stopped NPCs from playing a hit reaction the very moment they spawn

• Employees no longer have edge cases which cause them to fail to register at cooking stations and fail to move ingredients

• Exhausted employees are no longer forced back to work after sleeping or after shop simulation

• Prevented customers from being handed off to the road before they actually walk out of your plot

• Customers now properly buy by item preference rather than slot order when browsing a display with multiple items

• Fixed a single unsupported crafting station stopping employees from finding any craft tasks

• Fixed the employee equipment preview not updating after equipment changes were applied

• Fixed the Basic Waiting Queue being shoved around by characters on Hardcore difficulties

• Fixed simulated restocking dropping or spilling the items it was moving from

• Off-schedule employees no longer stay visible after loading a shop when they were already resting

• Request customer dialogue can no longer close while they were still browsing

• Departing customers and those walking a road route are no longer left in an alert state

• Fixed a pooled customer that re-commits to a shop still being treated as road traffic

• Fixed pooled customers reusing a stale exit destination

• Customers fleeing inside a shop now head for the plot entrance first, then keep going once they reach it

• Fixed AI switching to the open-world navigation graph while still deep inside a shop, which player structures near the entrance could trigger

• Fixed employee gather selection highlighting

• Wet status particles no longer linger on employees after they leave work

• Fixed legacy employee need data failing to restore across definition changes

• Employee consumption now applies to saved inventory slots before spawning

• Employee replay no longer leaves rejected items in the world

• Employee container filters now work properly with cooked meals

• Fixed customer locomotion animation layer transitions

• Customers no longer teleport across areas while wandering a shop plot

• Fixed employee idle tasks falling through, and simulation pricing running without context

• Fixed the employee vault wallet binding after loading a manual save

Cooking

• Cooked meals will no longer sometimes lose their identity when saved inside an equipped backpack

• Corrected recipe quirks, ensuring known recipes (from v0.21.2.6) carry over properly, though some will have had their names changed or become a signature meal

• Sushi and Poke now properly require fish

• Resolved an edge case where warm meals could fail to apply their "Warmed" attribute to prevent frostbite

• Restored the missing serve phase that triggers when all ingredients have fallen out of your vessel

• Duplicate ingredients now add their visuals properly during known recipe selection

• Employees will no longer leave occasional ghost water surfaces floating behind after a meal leaves the station

• You can now eat food from the right-click menu even if it is nested inside another container

• Unattended cooking stations used by employees will no longer hold onto a stale result

• Held cooking vessels will no longer drop to the floor during a station inventory transfer

• Prevented items hidden by the cooking camera from blocking your cooking vessel from moving

• Corrected Broth meal effects

• Fixed milk and seaweed signature meals

• Ensured cooked meal hover text localization works properly in edge cases

• Plate recipes correctly state they craft one plate instead of two

• Repeat cooking hands off correctly for clients

• Legacy cooked meals no longer arrive with default unlocks attached. Unlocks you have already earned are kept

• Auxiliary character visuals are now hidden during cooking

• Fixed signature meal labels overlapping nearby controls at narrow resolutions

• Fixed broth presentation drifting out of alignment on unattended cooking after the result moves

• Polished interaction UI for oven cook stations

Items, Enemies, & More

• Players will now properly keep their equipped item on death, even if it is holstered

• Raid encounters will no longer accidentally expire and remove enemies you are actively fighting

• Charged spells will no longer randomly detonate directly on top of you

• Fixed collision on storage shelf

• You will no longer accidentally overwrite crop placements when picking up items

• Curse of the Desert now deals the correct amount of damage compared to the Heirloom Staff

• Adjusted the Cultist Screamer's ability cooldown

• Properly clear stuck effects and leftover visuals that would sometimes linger on respawned enemies

• You no longer cast an equipped spellbook when placing items from your inventory

• Large trees planted in crop plots no longer sometimes lose their collision

• Restored the missing roof on the Snowville bank

• Cow and duck models and rigs have been polished to remove visual glitches

• Fixed Hazmat suit resistance

• Corrected water drink and hydration UI prompts

• Fixed the armor stand unlock text

• Smoothed tiling on rock terrain

• Fixed the metal horizontal beam showing as bamboo when first placed and in the menu

• Fixed culling on the damaged stamped pass

• Adjusted texture compression on the Kazai Village walls and bamboo seed

• Fixed the fishing water popup binding to the wrong player

• Fixed a bug in the character creator that could result in floating eyes and skin

• Fixed floating items in Kazai Castle from a deleted building

• Corrected missing colliders in the Kazai Village sword and armor shop

• The modern counter no longer unintentionally gates items by size

• Plant pot research node now properly unlocks the recipes

• The carbon iron fishing rod now correctly has the fishing item category

• The first gulper turret in the legacy start now has less range

• Resolved RGB shader issues for omen items

• Tuned wet character shader

• Fixed the mounted boar gunner's aim, firing, blocking, ammo, and hidden weapon visuals

• Ghouls should no longer bump into you without attacking

• Resolved a case where a Shepherd could spawn missing its rings

• Damage to a stack that consumes a unit no longer counts as healing when resetting durability for the next unit in the stack

• Properly set color for picked up common item name text

• Fixed police wariness being lost for the dying UI

• Walkie talkie summons now perform better in a fight

• Items marked Important are no longer counted or staged by crafting stations

• Crafting ingredient refunds now return to the inventory they came from, then to you, then to the ground

• Trees now need more room to grow, and the space a seed needs scales with the size of what it grows into

• Improved spell vfx and sfx

• Tuned the left-hand pose while charging a spell

• Fixed glowing leaves at night near the castle and in Kazai Castle

• Fixed vehicles being able to drive on top of water

• Fixed throwing an item with no impact effects causing an error

• Fixed Dojo settlement recipe books not granting their recipes, and corrected the stock in existing worlds

• Fixed inventory slots being left empty when their item was still held by a placeholder

• Combo no longer multiplies too fast when casting spells

• Inactive bodies left behind from a shop raid will now be cleaned up in the morning

• The coastal furniture shop will no longer sell mushroom soup that looks like a chair

• Enemies you attack in pacifist mode will now properly defend themselves again

• Fixed the iron horizontal beam thumbnail

• Bellstalkers should now properly drop loot

• Croissants are no longer treated as stolen goods

UI & Menus

• Display containers no longer show ghost items in certain edge cases, and the 'take' prompt accurately checks if your inventory/backpack is full

• The Silver Tongue minigame now properly registers the 'A' key

• The "Hold-to-wear" prompt and related labels are now accurately translated across all languages

• The ESC menu will no longer leave the end-of-day summary stuck on your screen

• Resolved capacity issue with clothing racks so items fit properly

• Added a cancel button to the "Report a Bug" menu, and stopped the menu itself from occasionally getting stuck

• You will now get a proper message when an item is too large for a container or display

• Using 'T' to move items will now correctly place them into displays and containers

• Corrected barter receipts that weren't quite matching and fixed the pricing for stacked Fresh items

• Customer display purchases will no longer occasionally fail due to invalid price data or stale inventory ownership

• Fixed the subtitle on a replicated request customer response

• Polished minor UI bugs, including cut-off cooking ingredient names, off-center filter checkboxes, and the end-of-day summary scrollbar acting up when shop content overflowed

• Fixed take and place prompts appearing on counters that have no display sockets

• Cash values in dialogue now use your locale's number formatting

• Polished money item displays in crafting UI

• Resolved a hitch when crafting counted ingredients across a large inventory

• Limited on-screen shop review cards to three so they stop overlapping the minimap

• Unified floor access for room items, so a lower floor can no longer authorize storage that is actually up above it

Multiplayer, Stability & Backend

• Smoother Multiplayer: Remote clients will experience a much more stable connection, with proper syncing for armor, stats, origins, NPC movement or jitter, and employee equipment swaps

• Client Spawning & Skills: Characters and objects will now arrive with the correct state when spawning for clients, and fixed an edge case where the host would incorrectly see a client level up a skill upon joining

• Network Polish: Voice chat connection bugs on the host have been resolved, and Steam lobbies now clean up properly if a client times out during a kick or non-standard teardown

• Performance Boosts: Resolved stalling issues occasionally caused by over-aggressive cleanup passes, an optimization issue at the employee hiring table, and NPC sensing failures where enemies or characters would stop moving during very long sessions

• Kick Prevention: Fixed various disconnect bugs related to bad inventory slots, bad world map areas, and a specific save-load issue that could stop a save from loading at all

• Client Settings: Late-joining clients now properly receive the host's difficulty settings

• Legacy Start Items: The legacy start respawn logic will no longer occasionally leave you unloaded and block your recovered inventory from saving

You can also read and comment on patch notes on Saleblazers.com!

Follow up hotfix patch v0.21.3.3

• Mage armor will now receive attributes properly

• Resolved some disconnection issues

• Made some small improvements to controller item placement (you can now hit place from the menu without going to your hotbar first)

Thank you for your reports and your support!