To start off with we added a brand new enemy type to the game: Skeletons! Enemy variety is something we'll be expanding on more in future updates, but we wanted there to at least be something other that pirates and wildlife to find in the world. Skeletons often hang around ancient ruins and cave shrines. Through lore books and the main story you'll uncover the reason behind these necromantic beings appearing throughout the isles. 

A huge amount of work recently has gone into our crafting system. We've been working on adding literally hundreds of crafting recipes, refined materials, and interesting crafting components to make a robust crafting system. In a recent update we talked about how we were adding a ton of weapons and armor as loot drops throughout the world. Well, we've also added crafting recipes for their counter parts. If you recall, weapons will have random talents based on their rarity tier. One of the main benefits of crafting weapons is increasing the odds you'll get the talent roll you want, since you can craft an item multiple times so long as you have the required components. 

We also want finding crafting components to be a fun part of the game. While exploring you'll be able to find lore books and NPCs that can help point you in the direction of rare crafting recipes. For example, you may find a book that details how a certain mushroom only grows high up in cave ruins. Or an NPC might mention a certain flower that can only be found on particular islands. Either way, we want you to actually learn the world and where to find the items. 

Crafting is going to be a major part of Salt 2 and we are so excited for all the things you'll be able to craft: ship upgrades, weapons, armor, trinkets, meals, fishing lures, tools, and more! 

In the last dev update we detailed how we started adding in skill systems for the various things you do in the game. So if you go mining ore you'll gain skill experience in mining. If you go fishing you'll gain skill experience in fishing and so on. As those skills level up you'll unlock the talents for that particular skill tree. 

Over the last month we've spent a lot of time adding unique talents for each tree. As you can  imagine this is a lot of work but we're making good progress on it. For example we have talents that do certain damage to certain enemy types and talents that cause bleed effects. It's possible not every skill tree will be in at launch but we will be continuing to work on this and add more as we go. 

Currently there are thirteen planned skill trees for Salt 2. We're going to prioritize the ones you will use the most for the time being and update more later as the game progresses. 

We've also recently been making more combat improvements. We added the ability to do a secondary powerful attack with various weapons. We also added in new death animations for certain enemies and new sounds. Now different enemy types have idle sounds and various attack sounds making the combat feel more dynamic. We also added in an effect system. This means certain talents or abilities can cause an effect to occur on an enemy (or yourself for that matter.) For example, the bleed effect talent from the slashing tree uses the effect system. 

We've been developing games now for about seven years and I still think the hardest thing to do is estimate when a game will be ready for release. We're a small team making a fairly large scale game and sometimes things go quicker than you expect, but sometimes things also take a lot longer. At the same time, we don't want to be too ambiguous about when the game will launch and so our goal has been to try to do these dev updates frequently and just let you know what's going on every step of the way. 

I know you all are super to eager for the alpha/beta tests to start, and for the full game to release. I can honestly say we are getting very close! It's important that we have all the major systems in the game and have a fun polished experience for you when the game launches. As of right now it looks like we'll likely be able to start alpha/beta testing in March or April and will probably launch closer to May. It's possible some things get implemented quickly and we actually can launch sooner, but I want to be as conservative as possible. 

Here's the major things we still need to get done before launch.  

- Dialogue System

- Merchants

- Survival Mechanics

- Map

- Finish Quest Implementation

- General expansion of content

Some of these things will go quicker than others and we think we can get these implemented in the next few months. However, we also want to allow time for testing and polishing these systems. So once they are in and we do our first pass, we'll start the alpha tests, fix issues from that, then run the beta test, fix issues, and finally launch. 

Thank you everyone so much for your patience and we couldn't do this without your support.