EchoQuest: Tavern Games, Crafting Progression & New Maps
This update touches three different corners of the game at once: the tavern just got a lot more interesting, crafting now scales all the way to endgame, and Millhaven is getting bigger.
Gambling in the Tavern
The Millhaven Tavern now has a card table. Walk up to it, place a bet (5–50 coins), and play against an AI opponent. Win and you double your wager. Lose and it’s gone. Draw gets your coins back.
There are two games available at launch:
- Circle of Seven — a territory control game on a 7-point circle. You and the AI take turns playing cards to claim positions. It’s simple to pick up but has enough depth to reward thinking a few moves ahead.
- Founder’s Call — a card game with Hold’em-inspired mechanics. Read your hand, manage your bets, and outplay the dealer.
Both games run as self-contained minigames inside the main client. The server handles wagers and payouts — no client-side funny business. We built the gambling table as a generic system, so adding more games later is just a matter of dropping in a new HTML file and registering it in the seed data.
Crafting Progression to 100
Crafting professions previously capped out around level 20–40 in terms of meaningful content. Migration 111 fills in the rest of the curve with a full tier system:
- Six tiers — T1 (levels 1–10) through T6 (levels 80–100), each with new harvest nodes, materials, and recipes
- 80+ new material items — every one with a hand-crafted pixel art icon, from copper ore and pine logs at T1 to starmetal and dragonwort at T6
- Skill-based gathering — higher-tier nodes have lower base drop rates but scale with your profession level, so investing in a gathering skill genuinely matters
- New harvest nodes — Gold Veins, Cobalt Deposits, Mithril, Orichalcum, and Starmetal for miners. Foxglove, Nightshade, Bloodthorn, Ghostmint, Sunfire, Starbloom, and Dragonwort for herbalists
The crafting endgame is still being fleshed out, but the progression backbone is in place. You can now level mining, herbalism, blacksmithing, and alchemy all the way to 100 with meaningful content at every tier.
New Maps
Two new interior maps have been added to Millhaven:
- Elara’s Home — the quest-giver’s personal residence, a cozy interior you can visit
- Millhaven Barracks — the town guard headquarters, opening up new NPC interactions and quest possibilities
The tavern and town maps also received significant updates pulled from our production map editor — layout refinements, new object placements, and better flow between areas.
Under the Hood
- GitHub Actions CI — automated test runs on every push, plus a legacy deploy workflow for production releases
- Database adapter test suite — five test files covering CRUD operations, JSON field handling, query parity between Postgres and SQLite, SQL translation, and transactions. This is the foundation for the Electron/Steam offline mode
- 11 new NPC sprite sheets — more visual variety for town NPCs
- Tavern ambience audio — background audio for the tavern environment
There’s more to come. Continue reading on the devlog →
— Bruno