Finding Color in the Ashes is a fantasy dating sim where you rebuild an inn and hang out with a witch named Lucy.
It’s a mostly cozy management game where you slowly rebuild a ruined inn, choosing how you spend your time. The day is divided up into mornings, afternoons, evenings, nights – and weekends have their own events as well.
You also need to keep the surrounding area clear of monsters, equipping yourself with weapons and spells and engaging in turn based dice-combat. There are a variety of weapons, armors, and spells to buy, learn, and upgrade.
You earn experience points by talking with Lucy, the guests at your inn, crafting potions, fighting monsters, etc. Spend experience on abilities to improve your combat effectiveness, learn new spells, or make changes to the inn.
The Game takes place over a year, and starts in the summer. Each season is about 90 days long, and has its own gameplay associated with it.
The Setting
A long time ago, there was a calamity that occurred and stole all color from the world. The source is a massive rip in reality in the faraway Ashlands. It’s a land filled with strange monsters and stranger anomalies. Adventurers from all over head into that cursed land to try and find a solution – but to no avail.
You play as a young adventurer who’s just inherited a run-down inn located on the road between the Capital and the Ashlands. Recently a mage named Lucy has moved in as well. She spent too much time in Ashlands, and has been cursed as a result. She’s doing her best to overcome it, while helping you to rebuild the inn.
Those cursed by the Ashlands are called Fractured – and they exhibit a variety of strange effects, but notably, they are some of the few in the world who carry color with them.
The Content
There are over a dozen different sex scenes in the game right now, with more on the way. Each has several variations, and some include more interactions.
There are quests, events, and plenty of dialog centered around Lucy. Progressing your relationship with her will unlock more content.
There are plenty of weapons, armors, spells – and ways to upgrade all of them. The turn based combat is dice driven with plenty of ways to spend experience and unlock new abilities.
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v3.13
We’ve got some system updates here – namely spell crafting and a revamp to how guests are handled. Both are in preparation to guild management.
The spell crafting is a way to choose which spells will get upgrades instead of relying on the RNG of the tower experiments. Now you can break down spell components, spell tomes, and fey blooms to gain Insight. This new resource can be spent to get spells up to level +5, and with the right ability upgrade from Ellie, up to +10.
There are also a variety of adjustments and other changes and fixes. Finally the first pass of Eleanor’s interactive sex scene is included. It’s not feature complete but will get more animations in future updates.
Adjustments
- Hired Patrol completion screen improved
Fixes
- Change to how player’s health is calculated made them un-killable in combat
Alpha 3.12 patch notes
Added
- Missing pixel art for some of the army guests (clerics, sappers, veterans)
Adjustments
- Increased EXP costs of final tier Army abilities from 750EXP to 1000EXP
- Increased EXP costs of middle tier Army abilities from 500EXP to 750EXP
Fixes
- Missing menu button sound effects
- Sometimes the companion hangout option wasn’t showing up
- Energy recovery wasn’t rounding up correctly
- Spellcrafting menu not updating properly
- Scout’s rapid wardrobe change before heading into the first dungeon
- Mis-aligned Lucy fracture art under specific circumstances
- Army training temporarily raising max hp too high
- Selling nightstalker tea to the army was selling sleep tea instead
- The wrong buttons were getting disabled on the Army barter screen, allowing you to go into debt buying from them
- Tooltip Typo
v3.11
Added
- New conversation topic with lucy
Adjustments
- Lucy’s fracture once again prevents guests from staying in the inn (though they can still camp outside)
- If guests are all camping outside the inn, the companion hangout option is available in the evenings
- The option to heat the inn was removed from the evening action menu (the option is always available from the inn menu at the bottom of the screen)
Fixes
- Buying supplies from merchants wasn’t updating the army meals screen
v3.1
Added
- Spellcrafting has replaced experiments in the Tower
- Spend Spell components, Spell Tomes, and Fey Blooms to gain Insight. Insight can be used to level up spells and companion abilities.
- Brand new guest system! You only need to have enough rooms to bring guests in for the night.
- Guests who can’t get a room will camp outside the inn, and can still be interacted with
- Guests can seek out a variety of supplies, and are a little more varied in their interactions
- Pick your inn’s door chime in the sound options menu. 4 different doorbells to pick from to announce visiting guests
- Some new panel art
- New interactive sex scene (Eleanor)
Adjustments
- Army guests will now be mixed in with regular guests during the fall – it is no longer either / or
- Army guests will now pay full price for potions
- Inn condition loss rework: The inn no longer loses 1 condition every night. Instead, it will lose 1 condition for each guest who pays for rooms.
- Stasis Ritual: If you inn would lose condition, condition loss is limited to 1 per night.
- Redid how spell bonuses are handed out and calculated – this required a reset of existing spell bonuses (sorry!)
- Place of Power Event modified to interact with new spellcrafting systems
- Giving Lucy Spelltomes no longer effects spell modifiers – instead it provides spell crafting resources
- Companion screen UI colors given more contrast
- Increased cost of spell components and spell tomes from merchants
- Ellie’s first skill now doubles the insight gained from spending materials during spellcrafting
- Ellie’s Guided Experiments replaced with Guided Spellcrafting: Allows spells to be increased to +10 instead of +5
- Improved potion crafting UI readability: Ingredients you don’t have enough of will be highlighted red
- Consolidated a lot of tooltip descriptions for consistency
- Game will remember which companions are included in meals so you don’t have to keep re-selecting them every evening
- Small dialog adjustment in Lucy’s observations about Scout
Fixes
- Soft lock with first Dryad event
- Trigger conditions for ellie+lucy event
- Ailis’ dialog showing up in the wrong color
- Conditions for dealing with Ailis’ injury using Scout
