Major Content Update – Dungeons, Climbing, Quests, Masturbation and POIs

If It Bleeds, Male Demis, New NPCs, Character Customization, First Caves, Gameplay Improvements and More!

Hey Everyone!

We’re here with our first UE5 Major Content Update, this comes with some expanded content, much needed bug fixes, engine improvements and Technical Work along with new quests and systems.

Opting in
Don’t miss out! Until there is content parity with the Unreal Engine 4 release, the UE5 Preview will be available via a Beta Branch on Steam, to access this, right click on the game in your library -> properties -> betas -> click “ue5_beta”. You’re in!

‘If It Bleeds’ & ‘Shipwrecked Anubites’

The horrifying creature that roams the south of Medhen Island, slaughtering many of the Anubites, must to be stopped if they are to survive; no longer do the Anubites have to fall to the talons of this abomination – their fate now rests in your hands.

Make your way through the dungeon and learn of it’s past, delve deeper and slay the creature.
at the same time this update has added expanded dialog and quest choices for Shipwrecked Anubites, completing their story and allowing for sex options and new endings to the quest.

Solo Play

Along with this update we’re adding the first set of “solo play” options. These enable players to ‘keep the curse at bay’, even if they don’t feel like getting down to business with a partner. For now other NPCs won’t react, though this won’t the the case for long (I’m sure Damaris will be thrilled if you make a mess on the Taberna floor…).

These can be triggered anywhere in the world from a new radial menu[TAB], for all body types and for male and female genital options. PSA: The world carries on around you, jerk it at your own risk.

Toys will arrive in a subsequent update, allowing additional solo play options.

Pleasure Island Expansion

– More DSS Scenes Available in UE5

Pleasure Island has received an expansion with new NPCs for you to have you way with(or them take advantage of you!) the adepts now have a much more established encampment from which to spread their message of lust.
To this end we have brought multiple DSS scenes over from the UE4 build, along with a boatload of the more basic sex animations to help flavour the environment. The Anubite encampment should finally feel a lot more like the stronghold of a lust-cult!

Points of Interest

Heiffers ReachIt’s not all happy news in Sabu, and there are some tragic new stories to explore in the fallen land of

Heifer’s Reach. These particular quests are only accessible before completing Behold (i.e. on a new game) because they’re in the starting area, but should give existing players a lot more content to discover in the starting zone, setting the scene and fleshing out the world. Your actions in Heifer’s Reach will have consequences in future, so choose wisely.

Tal’Senet

There’s also a new love lust story POI taking place in Tal’Senet not far from the Taberna, giving you the chance to bring a couple together.

Climbing

Climbing has made a comeback! This isn’t exactly the same as in UE4 but we are bringing back climbing more around the world. Don’t expect to be able to climb everything, as we still need to keep some areas off limits for puzzles.

This implementation of the system also introduces the interaction based climbing system for shuffling along ledges, squeezing through gaps, and climbing larger blocks.

Character Customization – Male Demis and New Subtypes

New Customizations are available now! Male Demi-Jackal and Male Demi-Draconid. Girls get a new option as well, in the form of the Temple-Bred Jackal Subtype.

Gameplay OverhaulWe felt that some of the gameplay was feeling a little flat so there are a whole host of new improvments that will ship with the Kravenrook update.

Minor elements such as immersive UI and damage numbers (toggle in menu) complement the new softlock system. We’ve also improved parrying and added dynamic camera effects to execution moves.

Dungeons

In this latest push we’ve included a first taste of caves. Whilst we have made many more than we’ve released, we want to be certain there are no technical issues before we fully set you loose on them.

New Gameplay Settings

New Gameplay Settings are now available:

Difficulty – Reduces/Increases damage received by the player for those struggling with the Boss Fights!
Player voice – Have either player voice with any Form!
Immersive Hud – Automatically Hides the HUD when you’re not in Combat
Motion Blur

Sailing Improvements

There are some major sailing improvements since initial release including the ability to get on the boat while swimming, get off while swimming without issues, some collision fixes and now the punting animations have been completed and implemented.

Expanded World

The World of Sabu has expanded, including an Overhauled North Medhen Island, new farms and islands in the Euphoris river giving you all new places to explore.

There are hundreds of new art assets, large and small. From the entirely new tomb kit, to

the statue of the Bovine fertility demigoddess Hatha, bringing more fidelity to the world than ever before.

Behind the Scenes

– Animation/Mesh UpgradesIn preparation for DSS 2.0 we’ve upgraded our rig, enabling some better deformation out of the box. This new rig takes advantage of the new breast, butt, and tummy jiggle-bones. All of these bones are also enabled for dynamic jiggle effects in-game.

Additionally we’re midway through the process of rebuilding the body morphs from the ground up. This cascades through to clothing and allows “underwear pulled to the side” during scenes, as well as many other essential improvements to our clothing system.

These improvements resolve the long-running issues with cocks not showing when clothing is equipped, and now full “packages” will be visible – bulging beneath any revealing clothing.

You can expect to see some more “dynamic” poses for scenes in future, including the one pictured below, and particular improvements to the scenes involving exotic NPCs (Naga/Centaur/etc).

Behind the Scenes

– Unreal Engine Upgraded from 5.1->5.2 then 5.2->5.3In the lead up to our initial Unreal Engine 5 release, Epic Released Unreal Engine 5.2, which brought some much needed lighting improvements, performance improvements, some new tools and we were hoping it would fix some of our most frustrating bugs with the engine.

We had to wait until our update was out and we had time to release bugfixes. Following the release we decided that we couldn’t pass up the benefits of the new version; we’re happy to report that we’ve now completed the upgrade to 5.2 (after great difficulty and many four letter words directed at epic). We can confirm that this did fix two major bugs with the engine that drove us and you all crazy:

Video Settings & GameUserSettings now Save & Load correctly
UE5 Prerequisite installers are now working and should resolve issues some people had with the C++ distributable (and others).

…Then, because we just love updating the engine so very much, we made the move to 5.3.
All joking aside, it brought through some major improvements we couldn’t miss out on (mainly visual/performance improvements).
The culmination of both of these moves took up a lot of dev time and has contributed to the delay to this update, but we definitely think it was worth it and something we couldn’t keep pushing back to do.

What Next?Lots of work has been going on in the background in addition to all of the above laying the foundations for our plans for 2024. Here’s some of what we’ve been working on and what you can expect in the near future:

Lovense Integration
Prototyping “Paying Tribute” at Shrines (yes it means what you think it means) in return for a blessing
Prototyping “Ambient”/”Quickie” Sex Encounters
New Interactive Gameplay
Adding more enemy types over from the UE4 build
Added new plant types to flesh out the more lush areas of the world and to bring more colour/variety to the environment in general.
Remastering various cocks from the UE4 build
Blocking out the surrounding populated areas near to Mehden/Tal-Senet (we need somewhere to fill with potential partners)
Design passed for various sex poses (blockout, not full animation – Will fold into DSS 2.0 scenes)
Sidequests (Slavers Cabal/Guilded Fold early faction quests are written and Pleasure Garden side-quest is being worked on next)

Roadmap

We’ve updated our Roadmap, this is, as always, a non-exhaustive document of our plans that will be subject to change over time (it’s simply not practical to put every single minor thing on a spreadsheet). It’s in no particular order, but you can see what we’re currently working on with the elements outlined in red.

We’ve decided to trim the roadmap to only the “base game”, this does not touch upon content we may wish to include in any post-release expansions.

Thank you everyone! We hope you enjoy the update and all the new content and from the Team, we hope you all have a Fantastic Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thank you so much for your incredible support!

Team Carnal Instinct

CHANGELOG

ADDED

Added Dungeon System, including cellars, Dungeons and Tombs
Added new Quest – “If It Bleeds”, including the Dungeon and Kravenrook boss fight, adding new choices to “Shipwrecked Anubites” conclusion
Added new Quest NPC to “Behold” – Anubite Captain now walks you through the initial part of Heiffer’s Reach and shows you the way to safety (and the new POIs)
Added new Point of Interest Interactions to Heifer’s Reach (Farak & Ashalia, Frustrated Cursed Villager, Lone Villager, Mother & Father, Trapped Villager, Bickering Fruit Hoarder, Wise Old Woman, Cursed Poet, Couple in search of Lost Pet)
Added new Point of Interest Interactions to Tal-Senet (Lovers Jamilia and Rashan, Fruit Farmer)
Added new Point of Interest Interaction to Mehden Island (Ophyx Farmer)
Added a new UI radial Menu for Masturbation, summoning the Aadi and more in the future
Added Immersive HUD UI mode
Added toggle HUD keybind
Added “new items” icons to the Inventory & Equipment
Added additional dialog and quest options to Shipwrecked Anubites including a new sex scene with Ameni and new endings with If It Bleeds
Added the option for the Player to have any voice on any form, so you can have the Male or Female VA from the start
Added shader pre-compile to improve smoothness as players experienced new content
Added the option for Motion blur to be turned off : NOTE: this does not effect all cutscenes
Added new POI Minimap icon to help you find the Point of Interest NPCs around the world
Added some behind the scenes time tracking for future content
Added climbing system, including mantling and scripted climbing events along ledges, up tall walls etc.

CHANGED

Changed the RIG and Mesh used by every single model in the game to fix issues with movement, scaling, current and future sex scenes
Changed behold to fit with the Anubite Captain walkthrough of the quest
Changed Masquerade to be much better experience with the escort from the house to the Market with new locations and layout
Changed Loading Screen system to work by waiting for all assets to load
Changed player movement while in the air to give better air control
Changed the Player preview in the Inventory & Cosmetic screen to work with Off-hand and Two Handed weapons
Changed minimap indicator code to improve issues with discoverability
Changed campfires so you can’t be attacked while using one or near one
Changed particles during Masqurade boss fight to improve performance
Changed auto-save slots to 5 autosave, 10 quick
Changed item description & Item comparison UI
Changed the boat speed to be faster by 100%
Changed Dialog UI icons for Return, Exit and more
Changed the player UI to add damage numbers to attacks and crits
Changed the equipment system so new consumables picked up will go directly in the use potion slot
Changed the quest reward system
Changed many UI icons including mount
Changed the layout and location of “The Prodigal Son” quest
Changed the combat targeting and lock-on system to aid players based on feedback
Changed the torch Icon
Changed a minor UI font issue on the loading screen
Fixed issues with Chests and Items in Chests and Vendors Duplicating
Fixed issues with Jamila and Rashan not having all Dialog Options Available
Fixed issues with Nenu not having voice lines for some players after save/loading
Fixed issues with players loading in under the map
Fixed issues with “Hide Balls” not saving/loading correctly and I’ve added the option to hide/show in the Equipment Menu same as Flaccid/Not Flaccid – at least Temporarily.
Fixed issues with some new Assets Causing instability/crashes for some players.

FIXED

Fixed issues with Jeivad and Tekem
Issues with performance related item duplication due to level streaming/world partition
Fixed issues with custom waypoint markers
Fixed issues with Hakor’s dialog
Fixed an issue with allowed formless to interact with Adept footjob sex scene
Fixed issues with the custom mouse marker not working
Fixed issues with leaving the campfire
Fixed issues with Stamina depletion on directions other than forwards and backwards
Fixed issues with the pause menu in Dialog
Fixed an issue with being interrupted while dismounting
Fixed issues with Swimming
Fixed issues with the pregnancy shrine
Fixed issues with the Fertility/Pregnancy shrine options
Fixed issues with Hakor’s Presence checks
Fixed issues with Masquerade
Fixed issues with Kemma’s dialog
Fixed issues with chests (NB: 02/12/23 – Dungeons have caused some chest issues under investigation)
Fixed issues with male lipsync
Fixed issues with HFH not auto-completing on all subobjectives being completed
Fixed issues with Nenu & Damaris dialog and interactions
Fixed issues with MyBrother’s Keeper steps
Fixed issues with Samia
Fixed issues with Pregnancy debuffs/buffs
Fixed a number of issues with Sailing
Fixed issues with monitor scaling at higher resolutions/screen aspect ratios
Fixed issues with getting in and out of the boat when swimming
Fixed issues with aadi in deep water, water interactions with the Aadi should now be smoother – Aadis are still deathly afraid of water though
Fixed various issues with swimming and deep water
Fixed speaking animations with Nenu
Fixed various issues with the worldmap
Fixed issues with Asim and Ameni dialog and quest objective steps
Fixed issues with stacking Objective and Quest notifications
Fixed issues with morphs and morph interactions with clothes especially on female models
Fixed issues with the cock tint not working for all forms
Fixed various issues with existing DSS Scenes
Fixed issues with DSS scenes moved from UE4, especially related to Male players
Fixed issues with the Footjob Scene
Fixed issued with Ameni’s Sex Scenes
Fixed issues with various quest objective Markers
Fixed issues with Ambient Lines on four NPCs
Fixed auto-save not working on Dungeon Exit
Fixed an issue the Kravenrook Dungeon Objective step
Fixed an issue with an invisible block being in the way during the Mother/Father cutscene
Fixed an issue with the lever in the Kravenrook dungeon
Fixed various issues with Farak
Fixed issues with Cursed Horny Villager
Fixed various interaction issues with “Behold”
Fixed issues with Jamila
Fixed an issue with World Partition
Fixed an issue with the Camera in Ameni’s Sex Scene

MISC

Performance optimizations throughout
Huge map changes to Heiffers Reach Village
Huge map changes to Medhen Island
Map expansion to areas outside Medhen & Tal-Senet including block-out for future quest locations