Lore Panel
The most obvious update to the game recently is the addition of the Lore panel, accessible by clicking the gold star button in the upper left corner of the HUD.
This new UI covers quite a few new features in the game.
Items and Places
When generating NPCs, the system now detects references to specific items and places and stores records in the DB about them. Items are either given to NPCs or hidden the map. Places are decided to either be a specific hex if it’s a landmark like “The Black Spire” or a group of hexes with similar terrain if it’s a region like “The Sunken Swamp”.
A lot of these things are hidden, but will be revealed if you either stumble upon them or an NPC directly references them when you interact with them. In that case you may see a little green notification in the encounter window that says you discovered something new.
Once discovered, these things will be added to your Lore panel, which includes the name and a hint about where it can be found.
Reputation
You also now have a reputation value with NPCs, which is not displayed in the UI yet but will influence their encounters. This could lead things to be more friendly and helpful, or more likely to land you in combat. And here’s a fun detail - if you end up in combat with an NPC that has a Lore item in their posession, they will drop it as loot!
Non-equippable Items
Some of the Lore items are equipment, but others are just quest items that may become important later in the game. They sit in your inventory and will be used in AI prompts down the road to help drive the story.
Next Up: Quests
The NPCs may seem to be talking about more interesting things now, but there’s still a little hollowness to their words, especially when they ask for favors. That’s because this is all leading me to the next big feature: quests.
Quests will cause the system to plant encounters on the map with specific goals: go find this item, go kill this enemy, etc. Once those are in the player will have some nice short-term goals and hopefully they’ll generate more interesting context for the AI to chew on as it generates more content later in the game.