Good Thursday, players! We have another treat for you today. I've received more sprites from Pica and am currently working on another roadmap item: soap and bathing. While the mechanics for making soap are dependent on a few other things on the roadmap, I can still add the item and just spawn it in until those are done. The bathing and hygiene mechanics are still in progress, and Pica still needs to supply some sprites for a few of them, but here's some screenshots to whet your appetite while I work on them.

Soap... whew! Soap is going to be kind of a Big Deal, because you may be wondering, bathing is fun in concept, but why should I? Well, the answer is that your character is going to have hygiene, which will naturally go down faster when you're running around in the forest or beating the tar out of each other or whatever. It's not going to be a meter like hunger and thirst, but like temperature (bad example since temperature will get a special meter in the future), you'll get some subtle hints when your character is getting dirty. Low hygiene will make you more susceptible to disease and parasites, the next feature I'll be adding after this is done, which will be keeping apothecaries and white mages busy in the future. It will also have several other everyday uses, so this item will be in high demand and you'll be able to do all kinds of cool stuff to personalize the kinds of soap you make and sell, like dyeing and probably labeling them.

One of those uses will be for Medicine characters: currently, you're highly incentivized to take Brewing with Medicine to make potions. This is fine, but you can technically drug food too, and while people do that, it's more of a fun thing you can do rather than a real reason to take Cooking over Brewing. However, soap is a Cooking recipe, and you will be able to drug it and create medicinal soaps. As has been previously mentioned, medicinal soap will provide an effect of lower strength, but much longer-lasting, probably separate from and stacking with a potion; ideally, lasting until you'd be ready to take your next bath. This creates a solid niche to specialize in Medicine/Cooking over Medicine/Brewing.

Feel free to imagine what you'll do with these new mechanics, like starting your own line of fancy soaps for side income (just like real life!), or running a bathhouse.