Hello Shopkeepers!

We're very excited to be bringing you some immersion improvements, a better police wave system, and more quality-of-life improvements, including some highly requested features like alternate cosmetic slot overrides!

• Cosmetic Slot Overrides
  
• Police System Overhaul
  
• Option to Allow Customers in Plot
  
• Immersion Improvements to the Dialogue System

Saleblazers is also a part of the Steam Winter Sale which is going on now until Jan 2 at 10 AM PST. So now is a great time to hop in with a friend or two!

The lighting changes we made in update 14.8 have been well received, and we're enjoying them too.

We decided to introduce some updated Steam capsule art to reflect the game's improved look and hone in a little more on the shopkeeping aspects of the game experience.

Also, based on overwhelming player feedback, you can now adjust your appearance separately from your actual equipment.

If you've always wanted to look a certain way while retaining stats from another set of clothing, this is now possible!

You can access these new cosmetic equipment slots by clicking on the eyeball icon above the equipment slots in your inventory menu. A filled Ink Dye icon indicates that the cosmetic slot is active and will override the actual equipment slot.

This will let you not only override an item with another item but also override an item with nothing so you can get the stats from a mask, helmet or jacket without actually looking like you're wearing that item.

In this example, only the hat and jacket slots will be overridden, resulting in a final look of a Samurai Hat with no jacket. Keep in mind that their actual stats will not be applied.

We hope you'll all have plenty of fun with this feature and are excited to see your outfits! Put on some sweet threads!

We heard that the police system left much to be desired and agreed with that.

As a first step towards making this system more fun we've cleaned up some of its inconsistencies, reworked the spawning logic for the Police AI, and created new waves of Police to face off against.

These changes should make dealing with the Police more challenging and more fun!

• Added 2 new tiers of police troops, for a total of 4 tiers
  
• Police will now use ranged weapons more often and more effectively.
  
• Police equipped with higher-tier weapons will now always use them instead of sometimes switching back to a baton. This will mean to get an M4 from the Police, you'll have to actually fight an officer wielding an M4 instead of finding one in the death box of an officer wielding a baton.
  
• Police can now spawn in a radius around the player instead of from fixed locations
  
• You can now speak to patrolling Police to pay your bounty if you have one
  
• Updated the look of the Police to differentiate different tiers of officers better
  
• Balanced police HP and weapons
  
• Balanced the wave spawning for Police

We've been having a lot more fun trying to fight back against the officers trying to bring us to justice and have been finding it a lot more challenging to survive.
This has also made clean crimes where you don't get caught more rewarding, and running away from the law a more enticing option.

Based on player feedback, we've added a new option for when your shop is closed to not allow customers to enter your plot at all.

We hope this can introduce a new level of calmness by stopping customers from constantly leaving trash at your shop's doorstep when you're remodeling or doing other activities in your shop and planning on having it closed for a while.

We've also added some experimental text sound effects and camera head tracking to dialogue for increased immersion. So far, this has made talking to NPCs more engaging and satisfying. Let us know what you think!

This update contains a lot of backend support for dedicated server features.
You shouldn't notice anything different in your normal lobbies, but this patch is helping us gear up to release the beta version of our dedicated server console.

We have found some tricky edge cases with some of the features, so we're working hard to smooth those out before we make the console available.

Here's a preview of some of the things you can do with the system.

We're very excited!

• Added a cosmetics equipment slot feature
  
• Added "Allow Customers in Plot" option to shop sign
  
• Destroying or removing beds now removes your spawn point and saves it to the server (useful for future PVP dedicated servers!)
  
• Customers will no longer close doors that you have manually opened, based on QoL player feedback
  
• Added quest marker to the Snowville trenches keycard quest for better accessibility
  
• Added a new option to prevent customers from coming into the shop plot if the store is closed, based on player QoL feedback
  
• Rebalanced and added more (difficult) types of NPC police based on player feedback
  
• Police now spawn in non-fixed locations similar to night enemies
  
• Players can now interact with Police
  
• Police fine distance increased from 2 units to 5 units
  
• Camera now looks at NPC heads during dialogue to avoid scenarios where the NPC can be out of frame
  
• Dialogue text now plays text audio that is unique to each character
  
• Paper trash can now be turned into charcoal at the kiln to better automate crafting with trash with employees
  
• Adjusted chat and shop sign audio to be more peaceful
  
• Employees can now craft using items located in trash cans - this should help with automating your recyclers
  
• Shop simulations while you're away are slightly more accurate
  
• Loading into the shop via teleportation will now wait for the shop simulation to finish completely, preventing some lag spikes when teleporting to an automated shop
  
• Increased player sprint speed but increased stamina drain per second for more engaging movement

• Fixed a case that could cause items to fall out of chests in your shop plot
  
• Resolved an issue where simulating employees and customers could end up on top of displays or crafting stations and get stuck
  
• Fixed an issue where the barber in Snowville would sometimes fail to spawn
  
• Fixed an issue that caused Tobias not to enable the Guillotine on the first load during his quest
  
• Only your bed will show up on the map and will be visible from anywhere on the map
  
• Added proper translations for several sleeping-related text strings
  
• Renamed Invert Mouse settings to Invert Look settings to better communicate that it will also work as a controller invert
  
• Possibly fixed another case of getting stuck at the register
  
• Fixed Senhi, Mayor Yori's assistant, sometimes saying she was busy instead of playing her dialogue as intended
  
• Fixed an exception that could occur when equipping Airstrafer Sunglasses
  
• Adjusted Small Candelabra LODs to be more accurate
  
• Adjusted the UI for item categories so it doesn't overflow in some languages
  
• Customers and employees during shop simulation should appear less frequently on top of items
  
• Fixed various code exceptions

• The peaceful nights lobby setting currently disables police waves

These should now be resolved in hotfix v0.14.8.16. Thank you for your patience!
We are working on these and will release a hotfix shortly. Apologies for the inconvenience!

• If the Police interrupt a client during item checkout, there is a chance they can get stuck
  
• The quest Guillotine Grease has some mismatched translation keys for other languages
  
• Completing certain cutscenes can get the player stuck (you can still teleport away to fix this for now)

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