Hello! This is my HALLOWEEN update!

It’s taken me about 2 months? Give or take? The longest update in Pilgrimage’s history.

Lots of ghost things…and much more…

More Dynamic Ghosts

  • Introduced a system for maintaining relevant ghosts in differnet regions across centuries.
  • Ghost relevance is now influenced by a creatures Tenacity attribute, allowing particularly tenacious historical figures to remain relavent  beyond the century of their deaths.
  • Relevant ghost lists are periodically rebuilt as the world ages.
  • Ghost encounters are now also part of the life simulation, allowing creatures to encounter spirits independently of the player.
  • Added new ghost behaviors.
  • Ghost Fishermen can lure creatures using spectral bait, react to creatures approaching or ignoring their bait, and catch unsuspecting victims.
  • Ghosts that died of old age are generally harmless, although Ghost Fishermen will be sad when their bait is ignored.
  • Added A Mysticism skill, allowing creatures to sense and interact with ghosts.
    • Mysticism influences the likelihood of encountering ghosts, with more experienced mystics having a significantly higher chance of these encounters.
    • It is also part of a new major feature listed below…
  • Ghost encounter frequency is also influenced by the number of relevant ghosts in a region.
  • Nonsapient creatures can develop Mysticism through supernatural encounters, allowing even ordinary wildlife to gradually become mystics lol.
  • Expanded ghost-related combat and death interactions, allowing supernatural encounters to have lasting consequences in the world’s history.
  • These changes allow creatures to develop unusual supernatural histories naturally. Which is fun.

Ghost Sightings and Local Folklore

  • Added ghost sightings that can occur naturally as the world simulates, without requiring the player or another creature to encounter the ghost directly.
  • Regions can develop their own ghost stories, with sightings, unexplained noises, strange apparitions, and rumors appearing as actual dated historical events in the Canon.
  • The likelihood of sightings is influenced by how many relevant ghosts are in a region.The more haunted, the more stories.
  • These events are connected to actual dead historical figures. You can investigate a rumor in a region’s history and then look up the creature whose ghost was supposedly seen, sometimes centuries after its death.
  • Ghostly sounds draw from the deceased creature’s own species-specific vocalizations, with a ghostly distortion effect (Just extra os lol).
  • Added a large collection of narrative sighting templates, mixing firsthand accounts, local rumors, and more unsettling stories about spirits that vanish when approached or appear only in the dark.

Exorcisms and Enlightenment

  • Added a new Exorcise advanced action, allowing players to attempt to put restless spirits to rest rather than simply fighting or fleeing from them.
  • AI creatures can also independently attempt exorcisms during ghostly encounters, allowing exorcists to emerge naturally within the world sim. :3
  • Exorcisms use the new Mysticism skill alongside several attributes, with the exorcist’s Wisdom, Inducement, and Inquiry competing against the ghost’s Tenacity, Concentration, and Misery (With various bonuses).
  • Failed exorcisms are almost invariably deadly and do not guarantee success.
  • Successfully exorcised spirits are permanently laid to rest, preventing them from returning to haunt the living for the rest of the world’s history.
  • Expanded the Enlightenment system, allowing creatures that achieve extraordinary spiritual breakthroughs to gain substantial amounts of Wisdom instead of a flat 250 bonus like how it used to work.It now uses exploding dice, meaning exceptionally fortunate creatures can develop unusually powerful magical abilities.
  • Successful and attempted exorcisms are both recorded as historical events in the Canon, allowing the simulation to produce legendary exorcists/ghost hunters and to preserve their accomplishments.
    • I have seen several very accomplished ones. One even ridding its region of 40% of its ghosts.
  • I also expanded the Canon Viewer with the ability to sort historical figures, regions, and continents by their associated exorcism events, making it easier to discover particularly prolific exorcists and regions with extensive supernatural histories.
  • I also added many names based on actual real life ghost hunters and exorcists to my name generator.

New Player Training Action

  • Added a new Train action, allowing players to deliberately practice their skills instead of relying entirely on experience gained through normal encounters.
  • Players can select a specific known skill to improve or choose to train random skills.
  • Each training action simulates 12 weeks (approximately three months) of practice, with individual training rolls determining how much progress is made.
  • Training uses a new Learning skill alongside Concentration and Inquiry. More experienced creatures have an increasingly difficult time improving their existing skills, representing how people who have been practicing skills for a long time can sometimes become rote in their ways.
  • Training does not guarantee success. You can spend an entire season practicing without making meaningful progress.
  • Training can consume Satiation, with creatures possessing Slow Metabolism receiving a major advantage.
  • Added extensive skill-specific training descriptions. Instead of just telling you that you practiced Fighting, Swimming, or Foraging, the game describes activities associated with how those skills are actually used during gameplay. For example, practicing your Swimming skill involves escaping predators or pursuing fleeing creatures.
  • Training result summaries include improvements to skill levels and experience, accompanied by new sound effects and feedback.

Personal Breakthroughs

  • Added rare personal breakthroughs that can occur during successful skill training.
  • Breakthroughs grant unusually large amounts of experience, allowing creatures to make sudden leaps in their development.
  • Higher skill levels make breakthroughs increasingly difficult to achieve. (Again representing people becoming rote in their ways)
  • Breakthroughs are significant enough to become historical events in the Canon. So even an otherwise unremarkable creature can become a historical figure through an extraordinary personal breakthrough.

Retroactive Creatures

  • Expanded the probability-collapse system so creatures generated with an existing age can have portions of their earlier lives remembered by the canon.
  • This makes the newly encountered creatures more interesting, as they can arrive with experiences and accomplishments that occurred long before the player discovered them. All govered by my probability collapse system.

Custom World Saves and My Middle-earth Experiment

  • I experimented with creating a custom Middle-earth world save, including recognizable figures, creatures, plants, geography, and region-specific ecologies, then let the simulation run for 500 years.
  • I supplied the world’s starting data, and Pilgrimage’s normal systems generated the outcomes. In one timeline, Goldberry overthrew Tom Bombadil, whose ghost later killed her during an attempted exorcism. Durin’s Bane (The Balrog) also defeated a Dwarven hero and exorcised his ghost fourteen years later.
  • This was a great demonstration that a custom world with unique creatures and plants can be used by the game and i encourage all of you to play around with this) , its historical figures develop their own stories, and the resulting history can be explored in the Canon.
    • The experiment uncovered several bugs in custom worlds, which I fixed. World-specific creature and plant definitions are now used correctly in more places, including creature selection, encounter generation, and bait selection, instead of incorrectly falling back to the built-in definitions.
    • I also Improved the authoring schemas and documentation for custom species and historical figures, particularly the distinction between species starting skills/attributes and the statistics belonging to an individual creature.
    • Grab The World Here I also added a new section to my web page for downloading custom pilgrimage world templates.

The Device Updates

  • The Device now treats corrupted or incompatible world saves as inaccessible realms, rather than allowing them to break the world-selection menu.
  • Inaccessible realms remain visible, but cannot be entered or duplicated (Which is also a new feature!). They can still be abrogated.

World Duplication (Mitosis)

  • Added the ability to duplicate a world save directly through The Device, producing a separate copy of the selected realm.
  • This makes it much easier to preserve a world’s history while branching off into alternate timelines, or to keep an especially interesting world around before simulating hundreds more years.
  • The duplication button has several possible names and reactions in keeping with The Device’s weirdness.

Better procedural Creature Naming

  • Massively updated my name generator, there are now over 29 trillion possible creature names, thanks to expanded fantasy, Roman, and descriptive naming systems. Common names remain relatively simple, while rare combinations can be extremely elaborate and absurd.
  • Names can range from simple single-word names to elaborate combinations of names, titles, epithets, and suffixes.
  • Added weighted naming conventions to balance ordinary wildlife names against more unusual, memorable names.
  • The basil parts of these generators (word lists) were taken almost directly from my game DR4X. Which I had 6 years to iterate on the word lists you should rarely see duplicates now (except on the basic single word names, and on the special hard coded/pun names)
    • Im still mising most of the names from DR4X, so this is only a curated amount. Which is hilarious to say for 29 trillion.
  • It is also fully moddable. Almost all the lists are in block files. The amount of names comes from combanatorial nonsense.

New Creature Stuff

Four entirely new creature definitions and new creature abilities :3

  • Giant Scorpion
  • Mantis Shrimp
  • Snapping Turtle
  • Mossed Snapping Turtle
  • New Creature Abilities
    • Added hard and soft shells with different defensive and offensive effects.
    • Added Shell Breaker, allowing creatures to counter shelled opponents.
    • Added Nut Cracker, Sharp Eyes, Ferocious, and Determined abilities, providing different advantages in combat, perception, or training.
    • Expanded combat interactions to make individual creatures’ physical characteristics more important.
  • Immune To Natural Causes
    • Added an optional immuneToNaturalCauses creature property, allowing particularly important or extraordinary figures to avoid the simulation’s random natural-cause deaths.
    • This is separate from immortality. It doesn’t protect creatures from combat, starvation, poisoning, drowning, old age, or other independently simulated dangers.
    • Creatures who awaken mysterious powers can sometimes gain this protection, making it possible for certain historical figures to remain active for very long periods without being arbitrarily killed by a freak accident.
  • Old Soul Trait
    • Added the Old Soul trait, allowing certain non-sapient creatures to develop the ability to use the “Ponder” action upon reaching maturity.
    • Mature Old Souls behave differently within the simulation, including being less prone to initiating unnecessary combat.
  • New Vocalizations!
    • I expanded the amount of possible vocalizations creatures can do.
  • Fun Facts!
    • I added an additional fun facts field to creatures (forgot its name) that lets you define unique fun facts for any given creature and added a bunch to all the pilgrimage cretaures

New Encounter Choices

  • Introduced a reusable choice system for encounters.
  • When prey fights back or attempts to eat the player, the player can now choose whether to fight or dodge.
  • Encounter choices provide information about the rolls associated with each action.

Expanded Food Poisoning and Feeding Mechanics

  • Introduced toxin potency dice for plants, making food dangers more varied.
  • Nonpoisonous food can still be deadly to creatures with incompatible diets.
  • Added descriptive toxicity information to plant descriptions.
  • Introduced probability-based feeding outcomes for very small prey.
  • Picking up dangerous plants can now result in suffocation.

AI Creature Training and Progression

  • Creatures in the world simulation can train their existing skills over time.
  • Training uses dedicated rolls influenced by attributes and abilities.
  • Historical creatures that were born before their introduction into the simulation can receive simulated prior training.
  • Wisdom has been integrated into the attribute progression system, allowing it to gain experience through relevant rolls.

Canon Viewer Improvements

  • Added collapsible sections for skills, attributes, fun facts, and detailed historical events.
  • Expanded searching and filtering in the Canon Viewer! You can now search historical figures by name, species, shiny stat
    • Normal search: Type any name to search historical figures by their name or species.
    • species:(species name) eg species:goblin – Find historical figures of a particular species.
    • shiny:true / shiny:false -Find shiny or non-shiny historical figures.
    • sapient:true / sapient:false – Find sapient or non-sapient historical figures.
    • immortal:true / immortal:false – Find immortal or mortal historical figures.
  • Searches are case-insensitive, support partial names, and update automatically as you typeus, sapience, and immortality. Just type one of the following into the search box:
  • Added progressive loading of historical figures to improve performance of large worlds.
  • Added a Hauntedness sorting option for regions and continents in the Canon Viewer, ordered by the number of relevant ghosts currently inhabiting them.
  • Added the ability to sort by the amount of exorcisms a creature or region is involved in (Doing or recieving)
  • The hauntedness view displays ghost counts, making it easier to find supernatural hotspots and compare them with their recorded exorcism histories.

General Improvements

  • Extensive encounter-system restructuring and improvements.
    • This was actually the bulk of the work for the first month I was working on this release, I fully decoupled encounters from Kings Sea III so creatures in the simulation could just run those same encounters and the mode simply presents the result to you. This is a major step towards adding additional modes and increasing the amount of simulation going on. And is how I was able to do all the new cool ghost things. It’s funny that something that took so long to work on is relegated to a tiny note in this changelog.
  • Numerous simulation balancing adjustments.
  • Expanded narrative text and encounter descriptions.
  • Performance improvements, particularly for worlds with extensive histories.
  • Many bug fixes and general polish.

PATENTED UNTRUSTEDLIFE RAMBLE

Well what do i plan on doing for the next update you might be wondering?

To be honest im not fully sure yet myself, which is why I will probably be making another post soon explaining what I plan to do in the next update!

So far, I want to focus on better handling of gods and godlike creatures, as well as giving the player much more agency in the world.

This includes expanding how fish lords are represented in the simulation, giving them more appropriate behaviors, abilities, and interactions with the rest of the world, as well as adding titans, and having the world react when they die.

I also want to give players more control over what they actually can do in the world. For example, being able to travel between regions, or the ability to deliberately seek out ghosts to exorcise, search for specific historical figures, and discover/goto locations rather than relying entirely on random encounters. This would also involve introducing new skills related to exploration, searching, and tracking things down.

Another major area I want to expand is locations themselves, caves specifically, for this update.

Ultimately, I want to move Pilgrimage closer to a proper open-ended thing, where you can choose your own goals and actively pursue them, while the rest of the world continues evolving independently of you.

There’s still a lot to figure out, and I can’t promise all of this will make it into the very next update, but these are the main areas I want to work on next!

We will see how i feel after i make a larger devlog about my thoughts and ideas as im trying to figure this out.