Is it the non-patron version meant to be barely playable or is the actual game like that?

You run out of food after 8 encounters, the only way to get more is either by getting lucky and finding a dryad or buyng meat at the store. But since there's no way to get money, you can only buy enough to last for 4 more encounters.

I can understand if that's made on purpose since the non-patreon version is just a demo, but I've went through the character creation menu so many times I can distribute my stats and my skill points in literally 15 seconds. Maybe you could add a feature to save a character "preset" and chosing continue after a game over skips the tutorial and character creation and just puts me in the game right away.

From what little I've been able to see so far despite the constant game-overs and the poorly explained combat system (Don't get me wrong, the combat itself is good. But the tutorial kinda sucks. I spent 3 hours trying to figure out how to make an enemy fall down to get the "sit on it" action) this looks really good.

PS if any (perhaps all) of these problems are exclusive to the patreon version, then sorry for wasting your time

I think it's intentional since there isn't much content past those 8 encounters. (there's 9 total if you include dryad, merchant and count unicorn as separate.) You can make it to the fortresses though there isn't anything there for non-patreons. If you want to go for longer I suggest going thief since they get 40 extra food and with 1 point into charisma and/or erotic perk you can get food from dryads. I've been able to reach level 2 and likely 3 on a good run as thief.

Hey - actually, we have already (in the patron version of the game) implemented a quick save option, so you can save at character gen, although that will also save your map seed, so you'll end up with the same map each time you load. We'll definitely add the ability to use the last character configuration, and eventually let you save character creation.

The tutorial is just a placeholder; the game is very unfinished, as we only started dev a few months ago. As we fill out the combat system, we'll start to introduce tutorials - right now we're trying to make sure things are explorable, for instance giving info on hover, although things like when it's possible to use contextual moves like "Sit on It" or "Grab It" are still opaque.

We've increased the amount of starting food, and there are a few other ways to get food, including spending time at the inn, which is somewhat "free" if you run out of gold in the latest patron build, defeating the Centaur in combat, or camping with the Orc after defeating her in combat.

Eventually you'll run out of food as is - since there's no end goal (or even the first in-game milestone goal!), we haven't added the ability to play infinitely. We might create that option in the patron version for messing around.

Sorry to Majalis if I'm overstepping my bounds here by stating this considering it's kind of cheating, but if you're really desperate to extend your gameplay as of now, you can also edit the save file using a text editor such as Notepad++ to give you some more food. Regular Notepad should work too, but I haven't tested this personally.

Find the save.json file in the "data" folder and open it with your text editor. Then hit CTRL+F on your keyboard to run a word search and type in "food" to find the line showing the amount of food you carry and edit the number it shows (just don't accidentally delete the comma proceeding the number by mistake, that could break the save file and the game may not be able to load it). Don't put a number in that nuts or extremely high: something like 500 seems to work just fine in my tests and doesn't break the UI in anyway or seem to cause glitching anywhere that I saw.

Unless you know exactly what you are doing and how to do it, I wouldn't recommend changing anything else as these sort of save files will only work when they are set up, formatted, and structured a particular and exact way. Any missing or improperly placed characters, lines, spacing, etc. will invalidate the file and render it useless unless those errors are corrected manually. Even then it might not fix the issue. Even a number value too high or too low can muck it up. Backing up your save is highly recommended if you insist on editing the file either way.