Star Knightess Aura 0.18.0-prerelease-2

Like every week, grab the latest prerelease at:

https://aura-dev.itch.io/star-knightess-aura-prerelease/patreon-access

Pheeew, that was productive week. I took a couple of days off work and got quite a bit further than expected. For those interested in just a short summary: The work this week focused on the Undergroudn area beneath Nephlune. I finished the first dungeon area of the Underground and started early on the second area, the Underground City.

These two areas and their enemies have a couple of gimmicks you will see soon enough when you engage with them. I think the most important one is that each area has an enemy type that is capable of increasing Corruption with their attacks. Luckily, it can be easily avoided by exploiting certain environment advantages or quickly killing the enemy. How these exactly work, I leave to the player to find out. :P

The Underground also brings two new mini boss fights. Well, I say new, but actually one of them is centered around a new constellation of an old boss fight: The Slime Summoner boss makes his return but this time you have to beat him without party support. That's pretty much everything I want to say about this area as not to spoil too much.

The second area, which was scheduled for next week, I got an early start on this week is the Underground City. You can now enter it either by finding the entrance in the Underground or by passing the trust check in Anna's pub. Depending on if you enter it in disguise or without you will see the NPCs as enemies or as talkable NPCs.

For now I would definitely recommend to go there in disguise as the local enemies are fairly tough. :'D

Anyways, among these NPCs, there is one important new NPC - The Drug Dealer! Together with him, there has also been an overhaul of the drug system. In the past, drugs (well rather just Sweet Memories since it was the only drug) would have their negative influence modelled through a flat Corruption increase. Now, drugs also increase Addiction. 

This is a new passive by itself is not so detrimental to Aura, however, after a certain time period passes, the Addiction passive turns into a Withdrawal passive which gives a attribute debuff similar to the Cursed states. Also, note the minimum lewdness decreases. They are even larger for the Withdrawal states and the main reason why I chose the Drug Dealer as the future first Isekai penetration sex target.

The drug dealer sells a variety of drugs, each with their own identity. Originally, I wanted to make them a bit more generic and have more types, but I like this version better. Sweet Memories you all know. Lascivious Coating Drug is an ointment type drug that gives Aura permanent +MDEF whenever she increases her sensitivity stats. Bloodshot Eyes functions like a mini-Star Knightess and gives a massive stat boost, but also increases Addiction. Blue Sugar is just a cheap drug with inifinite supply in case you need to deal with Withdrawal, however, it comes with the drawback of damaging Aura's Max HP.

This might sound a bit much summarized in just one paragraph, but I believe this gives new interesting possibilites for trading off corruption for power ups and allows for quite a few new ways of role play.

Aaaand that's pretty much it. There are some more minor additions and changes, like you can now give drug formulae to the White Priestess in Nephlune to gain Blessed Water. For the complete changelog, including the fixes in today's public patch, see.

Changelog 0.18.0-prerelease-2 (08.04.2022)

• Add resistance calculus to correctly determine resistance from WEAK/RESIST traits 
• Added Addicted and Withdrawal passives
• Added Drug Dealer NPC in Underground City 
• Added item "Sweet Memories Drug+"
• Added item "Bloodshot Eyes"
• Added item "Lascivicious Drug Coating" and "Lascivicious Drug Coating"+ 
• Added item "Blue Sugar Drug"
• Added item "The Art of Fire"
• Added option to give Drug Dealer drug formula
• Implemented option to give White Priestess drug formula 
• Added Phantom enemy 
• Added Cora enemy 
• Added Lamia enemy and boss fight
• Added second Slime Summoner boss fight 
• Added Magistrate Worshipper enemies
• Added Acolyte Worshipper enemy #2164
• Added drug dealer enemy and boss fight #2165
• Added rule for drug dealer restock 
• Added encounters in Underground 
• Implemented Braziers in Underground
• Added loot to Underground 
• Moved end of content points to James mansion entrance 
• Added teleporters between Underground and Underground City
• Disabled drugging companions 
• Updated Hand Of The Kind quest 
• Added first batch of NPCs and encounters to Underground City 
• Added stone tabled to Underground City
• Increased max killable bosses to 48

Balancing

• Changed +2 Corruption of Sweet Memories Drug to +1 Corruption and +1 Addiction 

Bugfixes

• Fixed monster versions of maids sometimes being visible before battle in festival of greed
• Fixed deadlock occuring in Young Merchant Dinner 2 if adult content is OFF
• Fixed superfluous -10 Willpower when confronting Arwin
• Fixed workshop payment applying old payment of 25 Gold extra per Star Metal
• Fixed vine where upwind would cause a fall
• Fixed learning spells at the hermit not increasing learned spells counter
• Fixed Matthias face missing in a dialogue box
• Fixed incorrect pluralization for items ending with "+"
• Fixed "Luciela Candidate" compendium entry using incorrect variable for checking to be shown
• Integrated hand fix for Aura RL standing art