Bloodstained Hands has been updated!

The September 17th update includes several quality-of-life improvements, as well as a few minor bug-fixes. Here's a list of each of the added benefits:

• Adjustments to the encounter rates in most dungeons.
• Solo training sessions in New Game Plus - train one party member at a time, or everyone at once!
• Changes to the mission rewards for the "Infiltration" repeatable missions.
• Added a "Recommended Level" to start each mission at in the Mission Log in place of the "Client." - note this may be bugged for already active missions. Read below for details.
• Added a "Ferry Pass" to allow free passage through the Five Islands region as a mission reward.
• Added a Readme file in the root folder of the game to go over controls and button configurations.
• Minor graphical bug-fixes.

While only a few of these updates are strictly "necessary," there are a few that I'd like to go over a little more in-depth, and explain why they are included. There may be some MINOR spoilers below, so keep that in mind if you decide to continue reading. I will do my best to avoid spoiling anything, although you may be able to make some inferences by the descriptions below as to certain parts of the late-game story.

Okay! First of all, the changes to the mission rewards for the "Infiltration" missions. After some rather lengthy testing, it was determined that the original rewards made these missions completely redundant. To be frank, receiving a leveled amount of lockpicks as a reward is not only pointless, it's cheap. The mission would provide 75 gold per level of the party leader, plus one lockpick per level. As it stands, lockpicks only cost 10 gold. Whereas Sanguine would provide 100 gold per level of the party leader upon completion of an "Assassination" mission. By completing a mission for Sanguine and purchasing the leveled amount of lockpicks, you would still come out ahead than if you simply completed a mission for Numbers instead. In addition, the lockpicking system is not so challenging that it requires more than the maximum amount of lockpicks to complete the entire game, for the most part. Receiving more lockpicks for a reward in that sense becomes pointless. So how to rectify this? By changing the reward! Now, when you complete an Infiltration mission, you'll receive 50 gold per level, plus a random leveled weapon. The catch? By the time you reach the level necessary to obtain those rewards, you'll likely already have weapons of that quality. This is still not useless, however, as the weapons can be sold for quite a bit of gold, and certain higher level weapons can be difficult to acquire, especially in New Game Plus. It also isn't broken in the sense that the reward is random. There's no guarantee you'll get what you're looking for, so it's still encouraged to purchase or craft your own weapons.

Next! The solo training sessions. This is a New Game Plus feature, so I won't go too far into depth with it, but I will suffice it to say that this was implemented in an effort to reduce the grind in leveling up your party members skills and spells. Especially in New Game Plus, having high level spells is a necessity, but grinding out a level one spell against high level enemies can be just plain annoying. So, with the new training feature, you can choose to train just one party member at a time, rather than all of them at once and skipping the turns of everyone you don't want to train. This is available in the Sanctuary only by using the training dummies, and only on New Game Plus.

And finally. The updated encounter rate, and the recommended level in the mission log. These go hand-in-hand. The dungeons are somewhat smaller than in the original release of the game, and so to keep a decent number of encounters in each dungeon, the encounter rate was increased. This, unfortunately, turned those dungeons into a bit of a grind. While combat and gaining experience is a necessary part of the game, it should still be fun, and not feel forced. When you're walking through a forest and taking in the atmosphere, it can be hard to enjoy that when you're swarmed by monsters every five steps. So, the encounter rate has been adjusted again to make it much more bearable. This does, however, mean that throughout the game you'll be encountering less monsters on your journey, and as a result you may gain less experience. You may even end up being under-leveled when attempting certain missions. To address this, the mission log has been updated to include a "Recommended Level" in place of the "Client." Basically, before attempting to start a mission, you may want to check your mission log to see what the Recommended Level is, and do a bit of training in the most recent dungeon before getting started. Of course, this is optional, but is implemented to give you a bit of heads-up before charging headlong into a swarm of tough baddies.

Keep in mind, this is the one part of the update that may be bugged out for your currently existing save file. Any new missions you accept will be correctly formatted, but any missions you've already accepted before downloading the updated version may appear somewhat glitched. This is purely cosmetic, and will have no negative impact on your save file. In addition, the missions will be displayed correctly the next time you accept them, whether it is on a new save file, or in New Game Plus.

Well, if you've managed to read through all that, then thank you for your time and your interest! Happy playing!