Hi David,

Having come across aground in late autumn I did almost exclusively one large playthrough of the game and thought I'd list here some suggestions that came to mind - maybe some of that might be interesting, be added in QoL update, or go to modding; hope this is useful. There are a lot of facets of the game that I liked, and it's been years since I put that much time into a new game, so here are a few things that I thought would be nice/cool to have that might augment the experience for me (and,hopefully, others) even further:

-one thing that I liked a lot were the one off potions that provided permanent stat boosts. Not only the speed and endurance ones were crucial for any post first island exploration, I liked how they synergized with the character points system - I felt compelled to add to my character's health and stamina stats a lot at the beginning, to the detriment of other traits but having the add stamina and add health options lifted such constraints allowing me to explore the "skills tech tree" quite a bit, especially with the skill resetter available. Given that it takes a while to level up past, say, level 20, and that the number of points available is markedly less than the total sum, after optimizing my build, I pretty much stayed on some empty stats in categories like Cut, Trapping and Fishing (and emptied my Critical category to boost others in late game). Whilst it might be nice to play around with these categories, they feel secondary in an optimized built, yet, sometimes, they can be very useful for certain specific purposes. Thus, it would be nice if there were additional ways to interact with the point allocation system in a similar manner as with potions e.g. having an upgrade item on the fishing rod that could have a +1/X fishing effect; or have an interaction with NPCs (on that a bit later) that , say, boosts one of Cut,Trapping , Fishing or Bargaining for a quest - e.g. the Trader is probably the least utilized NPC after the Market is brought in; what if the player could pay her a (large) sum of gold to upgrade the Bargaining stat (e.g. by "influencing" the traders, or teaching you to bargain better?)? In order to avoid upsetting the economics, it could be that there is a maximum cap for the sum of both such upgrades and investable points (though would that be too complicated to code in?).

-this brings up a second point, about the NPCs - I really like their presence, and others have also noted a liking for this civilization rebuilding scheme, there is even the NPC appreciation mod; yet, there is a lot of content to be created, and clearly additional NPC dialogue is low on the list atm is my understanding. So, having looked at the Miner with the fixed mining speed, I thought it would be cool if one could upgrade the NPCs by doing quests for them which would increase their usefulness by either them executing their tasks better or adding to the player's stats categories. The method of quest completion could be primarily through giving them better items. For instance, if one could give upgraded picks to the Miner, then her mining speed could increase; for the Hunter, giving him the Recurve Bow, then a shotgun will increase the player's trapping skill (thus intelinknig with the idea above); the Trader, apart from helping the Bargain skill, if payed gold, could, for instance, speed up the arrival of new products to the market, which actually would be very helpful in early and mid game as quite often there is a deficiency of some item or other (e.g. traps,seeds); the Farmer....uh... could be given lots of seeds and maybe then he can start allocating fertilizer to the fields (that would be a great automation) or move faster between the fields to collect more items, or get apprenctices/other farmer to come from another island through ads in the market? For the Builder... nothing really comes to mind save increasing the Cut stat and/or decreasing build time of anything on the island in return for, maybe, better axes/chainsaw? Or having a more efficient kitchen fuel usage? Not sure what the Alchemist would need as, in a way, him opening up the Magic Path is great already.

-talking of the Magic path, one of the biggest pleasant surprises on it was the discovery of spells, specifically the Tier II ones - several became critical to the whole experience for me. Thus, I was wondering if Tier III spellbooks might be introduced for the late game; I feel that they need not have to even add much functionality as such, but, rather, introduce convenience.
In that regard I am thinking of a permanent light spell, like inside the portal - since there is precedent for it and the Alchemist knows it, one could use it to extend sight not only for exploration (and I assume at this late stage of the game most people would have extended sight) but also for battle - specifically, I am thinking of the Earth canalization/tube battle on the primary island where having the bot familiar provide extra light at the edge of the screen helped detected the machines and attack the smaller war droids. Other thoughts I had might be too OP, but might be nice to have - the healing spell centred on and moving with the caster;
omnidirectional shield with less of a delay for starting up and/or deflecting some damage back at the attacker (thus being different from the Automated Suit); whilst this may be more for fun, but could also be useful again highly mobile enemies - a spellbook that is modelled after dragon fire and has enemy autotargeting features,etc.


Thank you for doing an awesome job, and I really hope this becomes a financial success as well! Talking of the latter - what's the best way to show at least some more financial support apart from buying the game? Patreon?

Cheers.