Some new features this week 
New home deployable decor (armor stands)
Rain masking on the new cobblestone material for much better road visuals
New trees (Plum trees) in the Demo city, Gravenstaad
New road masking logic which will keep procedural grass from spawning where it shouldn’t (i.e., on cobblestone, on dirt, etc.).
This week, there’s a big update with new gameplay areas, new game mechanics, new enemies, and more
As well, there’s now an Official Combat Guide!
There’s now an official Fast-Travel guide for the Game Demo as well!
A major gameplay update for the Hermit Demo is coming in the next week or two!
Permanent Spellcrafting is on its way, with the first spells already implemented.
Summary from this week’s patch notes on Steam:
The next major update will include significant changes to spellcrafting, and many spells will no longer be consumed each time they are used (i.e., craft once, use forever)
The April Development Newsletter is now out 
This week’s update brings new visual updates to the Cave Spider area of the demo and some new magic / items that will make it into the full release
This week, some more QOL changes are coming as well as a new look and feel for the game (including a new Logo and Key Art!)
There’s also an updated Combat trailer out now showcasing some of the new gameplay:
Some quick updates for June
A major re-work of the in-game houses is underway for the main game release:
The modular building components are all being made in blender and texture painted with layers of plaster, wood, and stone.
I’m working on the new June Newsletter, but for the moment some quick recent updates:
Hello all -
It’s been a while, so today I thought I’d do a quick post showcasing the latest game changes. There have been a number of major content updates released (some currently only on the Public Beta branch on Steam).
The July Newsletter for the game is also out! 
You can read about it on Steam below, but some quick highlights are in this post as well.
The main objective of this month’s update was to significantly raise the bar for the quality of 3D art in the game, with a specific focus on improving the towns and villages.
This was a significant effort that has been underway behind the scenes for more than two months. Finally, late this month the 3D Production of the new building assets was completed and they were added to the game demo (replacing all of the old building structures in Gravenstaad, as the area has now been completely re-structured).
The result is a much more appealing look and feel for towns, with Gravenstaad in the Hermit Demo serving as the testing ground for the new look.
All houses have been rebuilt using a completely new set of modular housing static meshes, created in-house with Blender
Details were added to various other interior static meshes as well, including rugs and furniture
Other, older art assets have now been removed from the game
Gravenstaad has been re-built from the ground up with new buildings in every area
In addition to this, the new modular building components allowed for supporting much larger structures in towns and villages. Inns and Taverns are the main objective for these larger structures, and a new Inn appears in the Demo.
Finished work on 3D Production for building components of Inns, Taverns, and Distilleries
Added the Gravenstaad Inn to the Hermit Demo (already in today’s Beta build release)
On top of this, several other new buildings have been added. This includes new sizes and shapes of storefronts (some of which do not appear in the Demo).
Finished adding new abandoned building model templates
Using the new modular building materials, two new abandoned building prototypes were added to the Hermit Demo: One on the main road, and one near the river
Added new item spawns to support the two new abandoned house locations
Fixed an bug that could cause Interactable NPC UIs to sometimes become stuck on screen permanently
Interactable NPC widgets have been completely re-worked with new look and functionality
All conversational and vocalizing NPCs now have widgets, not just traders / quest-givers
Interactable NPC widgets now support showing character names or titles
Interactable NPC widgets are now colour coded, and support showing Icons for jobs/roles (e.g., for traders, quest-givers, etc.) as well
Added bear traps to the game
Bear traps are heavy, expensive metal traps that deal damage and cause negative status effects
They can be purchased or found, and are deployed from the inventory by right clicking, or from the satchel by using the Tab quick-use wheel or hotkeys
Added a new scroll to the game: Recitation of Storage
The recitation of storage will summon a Donkey Totem to your location that allows you to access and put loot into the donkey while inside of dungeons or other restricted areas
The totem lasts for 120 seconds and then vanishes, and the scroll is consumed when used
For now, until a crafting recipe is available, it can be obtained from static dungeon spawns or loot chests/urns
Added a new location/encounter: City gate
The Gravenstaad city gates on the main road are now locked when a new game is started
Unlocking the city gate to access the city can be achieved in various ways
Isolated the cause of the long-standing bug ‘clicking items drops them immediately’
To address this bug, alt+click to quick-drop items has been temporarily removed from the game until a permanent solution is implemented (it turns out this bug is caused by alt-tabbing, and is related to the interaction between this Windows functionality and the Game Engine)
In older builds of the Hermit Demo, the issue can be fixed immediately by just pressing L-Alt
Fixed more potential causes for the Donkey getting stuck in certain locations
Improved the functionality of skin tone selection in the character creator, with more options for hair colour, eye colour, etc. planned in the near future
Added a codex creature entry for Spectres
Spectres are now extremely resistant to physical damage
Renamed the game project files
SaveGames will now be saved in a new location (on windows, this will be in %appdata%\Local \HermitDemo)
One quest billboard poster has now been moved to the billboard at the Gravenstaad Inn
Finished work moving new building modules into streamed sublevels for performance optimization
Added a small Prison area beneath the Gravenstaad keep, to be expanded upon in a near-future update
Improved the load time of the Load Game menu by restricting the number of displayed savegames
A ‘show all saves’ button has been added in case players do want to view the full list of available save games
Added new obstacles, loot, and wind SFX on the ruined bridge
If you’ve been enjoying the Hermit Demo and want to help support the game, some things you can do to help support the project:
Consider leaving a positive review for the Demo Page if you enjoyed the game! It helps a lot, and allows me to focus more of my time on development rather than having to divert that time and energy toward marketing
Share the game Demo with friends, forums, Discord servers you know might enjoy it
Submit bug reports using the reporting tool: if you find an issue, let me know. I can’t reply to every report, but I do read them all and I make an effort to fix every issue that I can reproduce on my end
A new Gameplay Guide is out for the game today as well 
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Fun lil thing I added to the game a while back You can push these skeletons around, and if you do, they sometimes drop loot 
the Hermit Demo is now 5-10 hours of gameplay - you can check it out on Steam: Hermit on Steam
