Star Knightess Aura 0.17.0-prerelease-1

Like every week, grab the latest-- 

Waaaaaaaitttttttt!!! 

Unlike every week, it appears that there are problems in accessing the latest prerelease builds using itch. 

https://itch.io/t/1966940/patreon-connection-for-game-access-resulting-in-error-message-for-our-patrons 

If itch manages to get it back to work, then the usual link below can be used to grab the latest prerelease build:

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

However, until this is sorted out, I will also provide alternative download links using mega.nz. I will follow up this post with further posts containing links that will allow you to grab the prerelease and daily builds.

Okay, with that out of the way, let's have a look at this week's changes! The big focus was a rebalancing to enable womb of lust on all difficulties and to further build up some minor content on top of it. I also finished a bit earlier than expected and managed to include a couple of items scheduled for next week's prerelease as take care of some other minor balancing tasks.

Womb of Lust now like the other major curses, also has a trigger effect when a certain condition is met. Originally, I wanted it to trigger at 0 Willpower on day start, but that could lead some weird interactions down the road if your corruption limit is very high, effectively locking Aura in an eternal lewd cycle of spending all day performing a lewd action.

While funny, still a deadlock, so instead Womb of Lust will trigger once its willpower modifier reaches -100. This will currently trigger a short masturbation scene. In theory, there are 2 new lewd scenes. But in practice the first one is the only real new scene while the second one is just a very brief repeatable generic version of the first masturbation scene. Anyways, once it triggers, Aura will pass the day masturbating, resetting womb of lust and passing the day. In the future, I plan to add further lewd actions that can be chosen here, such as sex with John.

There has been quite some rework regarding Blessed Water restocking to provide a non-lewd way to deal with the curse. Blessed Water now prediodically restocks even before completing the Festival, however, completing the Festival will increase the amount of restocked Blessed Water to the regular 3 per restock, while pre-Festival only 2 Blessed Water will be restocked every 20 days. In exchange for having more stock available, the price per day increase has been slightly increased and the workshop salary increase per Star Metal has been slightly decreased. This should overall make it easier to obtain Blessed Water pre-Festival but make it harder as you go down further into the game. Also, since the supply of Blessed Water was increased, this means also the supply of corruption reduction has gone up. To counter this, there has also been some rebalancing of some corruption requirements for some early mental changes. You can find all the numbers in the changelog.

Also connected to balancing out the difficulty increase from integrating Womb of Lust into the lower difficulties, there have been some minor changes to the Story Mode. The Gold Drop multiplier has been further increased from 5x to 10x to provide extra money so you can easily afford Blessed Water if you need some. Also, on Story Mode, using the Workshop will no longer end the day. This has nothing to do with the new curse, but rather exists to deal with the conceptual problem that the -25% debuff on enemies is significant in the early game, but becomes less significant if you swiftly progress through the game since the number of powerups Aura can get in the shorter timespan is quite limited. Having no time pass to apply a stat powerup from the workshop should deal with this issue. Together with the increase of dropped money so you can afford multiple upgrades per day, this balancing change should better adapt Story Mode for Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 content.

Since the game has been rebalanced to make Womb of Lust (Incomplete) "normal", this means I also had to do some reworking on Hard Mode. Though just like the Story Mode changes, not all changes derive from this, but also on general feedback on Hard Mode. First of all, item prices are no longer generally doubled, only the price of Blessed Water and the Workshop are now doubled. Though, combined with the price increase per day, this already drains quite a lot of money. But it also means that a lot of items have their old cost / value performance and thus give Hard Mode more valid tactical options. The other change is a reduction of the initial corruption limit. I did only a bit of testing, but overall the difficulty should roughly remain the same as before but this time with more playable solutions.

FInally, there are also some minor quality of life improvements. You can now find some stone tablets like the one in the Abandoned Shrine at other locations in Roya. Activating it will allow you to teleport between the stone tablets or end your day. You can find instances of these teleportation terminals in the vault, the church and the eastern forest of runes. Another minor balancing / quality of life improvement is that your unlocked adventurer companions will passively gain 1 EXP per day. So doing quests together will accelarate the time until their level up but is no longer a necessity. This  also means that your companions can get another level up into their pockets before you start Festival of Greed, making your life just a little bit easier. Oh, and you may be wondering how you can check their EXP progress, worry not, if you ask your adventruer companions, they can now show you their stats without being in your party.

Aaaaaaaand that's about it. As usual, find the full list of changes including today's patch in the changelog below.

Changelog 0.17.0-prerelease-1 (04.03.2022)

• Added lewd scenes "Spending Day Masturbating 1"
• Added lewd scenes "Spending Day Masturbating 2"
• Added passive EXP gain of 1 EXP per day for companion characters
• Added trigger Charlotte in jail by visiting Barracks
• Added teleporting ability to stone tablet and added tablets in Trademond: Church, Eastern Forest of Runes, and Northern Mines: Vault
• Added trigger condition for Womb of Lust (Incomplete) to trigger lewd scene at day start if modifier reaches -100

Balancing

• Removed alchemist boss battle in Arwin Cellar
• Enabled Womb of Lust (Incomplete) on all difficulty modes
• Enabled periodically restocking Blessed Water x 2 before the Festival
• Increased Blessed Water cost increase from 2 to 5 gold per day
• Changed Blessed Water restock from defeating Lower Demon into free Blessed Water x 3
• Added initial stock of Blessed Water x 3 to church
• Reduced Workshop salary increase from selling Star metal from 25 to 15 Gold
• Using the Workshop on Story Mode no longer ends the day
• Increased loot multiplier on Story Mode from 5x to 10x
• Increased corruption cost to enter Entrance Chamber from 2 to 4
• Decreased corruption cost to open up Entrance Chamber mind rooms from 2 to 1
• Decreased corruption cost increase for disposition switches to 1 for Rose and Alicia 

Bugfixes

• Removed some repeated lines
• Fixed shoe shelf in Aura's home being shown too early
• Fixed missing increase of total killed bosses variable when killing toll bandit leader
• Fixed swapped unlock messages for Antidote and Poison Coating
• Fixed Explode skill not killing caster
• Fixed Mary tavern costume not using unbraided hair