This update is focused on polish and bugfixing, with just a small amount of new content. Stay tuned in for something big to come very soon! [b][h3]Featured Creator of the Month[/h3][/b] Pedguin - https://www.twitch.tv/pedguin Ped was one of our earliest creators, showing the game before it even hit Early Access as part of the Yogscast Games network. The very first creator code was Ped’s, as the test for the creator code system! [b][h2]Major Features & Improvements[/h2][/b] [b][h3]Difficulty Update v2[/h3][/b] We’ve been collecting feedback on the Difficulty system since its deployment in September, and while it’s met a lot of our goals, there are some drawbacks to it that we hope to alleviate with this update. The primary issue we’ve noted is that it’s generally more fun to have an increased amount of opposing difficulty that you need to tackle using the same general amount of resources as usual, where right now we have many difficulty options that take away resources, which takes away choice. Taking away choice means, for most people, less enjoyment of the game. So, we’re removing resource-related difficulty options and adding more that affect the core tactical gameplay and enemy difficulty scaling. REMOVED the following difficulty modifiers: Starvation (Less SP in combat rewards) Paleless (Removes starting Pale Hearts) Tough Start (Lower starting SP) De-levelled (Lower starting XP) REWORKED the following difficulty modifiers: Hardcore: Now reduces starting Max Lives. Cursed: Now adds curse when you slay a Boss instead of at the start of the run. MOVED the following Unlocks into the Difficulty system: Into the Void Devil’s Deal (now with 2 curse as the penalty for skipping the Deal) As usual, your Mastery will be automatically refunded if you purchased these. ADDED the following new Difficulty nodes: Leader Armory: Adds items to the Leader Shadowstrike: Adds negative Hexes to your board each combat ADJUSTED the following Difficulty nodes: Small Pack: Now is a Unique modifier, and only reduces the pack size by 1. As a result of these changes, which modifiers appear where in Challenge Climb has shifted greatly. The association of which Run Modifiers are associated with Difficulty nodes has also changed for Recommended difficulty. [b][h3]Winter Legends[/h3][/b] Three new Legends have been added to the Bonus Legends feature! You can find them in the Unlocks panel, next to the first set of Bonus Legends. When added to your game, each run will randomly choose a Common, Uncommon, and Rare Bonus Legend to have on offer, adding even more variety to the runs. Hinkle - A frosty snowman (common Magician) who combos with Crowd Controlling units. Any time a foe is stunned, knocked up, or interrupted, they’ll receive an icicle to the face! Hugo - An abominable yeti (uncommon Vanguard) who excels at slowing the opposing Units it is tanking. If those Units are already Slowed, instead they are dealt massive Spell damage and are stunned! Combo with other Units who can Slow to bring the enemy army to a crawl. Frost - An icicle golem (rare Skirmisher) who starts as a melee bruiser, but upon casting, teleports away and transforms into a ranged Spell damage dealer who scales damage based on Armor. Load up on armor and attack speed for this very unique hybrid carry. Now that we have a true reference character, the FrostPrime character code now grants Frost instead of Adalon. [b][h3]Other Content Updates[/h3][/b] Legends have been altered - you can now only have one Legend in your team. We want Legends to stand out and be powerful, but it has been proven that the stats required for them to do so means that they compound when using multiple Legends. If your team is all Legends, it overshadows the power of Trait effects, and we don’t want to nerf the individual Legend power any more than we already have. However, the Level 2 Perk ‘Living Legend’ now also removes this rule and lets you have as many as you want. Living Legend also unlocks all Bonus Legends for the run. When you sell a Unit that is not in the standard pool (such as most Legends), if it is your last one of the same name, that Unit will stop appearing in future store rolls. [list] [*] Community Request - Completing a Contract (from a Bounty Tale) no longer destroys the unit forever! The Unit will now disappear for one combat while they go perform the task, but return afterwards. Also cleaned up the terminology here as there were a few different terms in use. A Bounty Tale now grants a Contract that you need to complete. There should be no references any more to “a bounty” or a “side quest”. [*] Community Request - The Vault of the Void now gives full-scale Void Portals throughout the progression instead of lesser Void Portals leading up to full ones. [*] Community Request - The Oasis Act Modifier now uses two Sun Stones rather than one, mirrored and firing less often. This should mean less ‘randomly decided to strike down my team’ moments and more balanced tornado shots. We also fixed an issue where Sun Stone movement speed varied based on framerate, leading to inconsistent motion. [*] The Engineer Turret no longer cares about proximity unlike most Units. It will fire at the lowest health target (as all Units do), but will do so regardless of range. It will not care about distance. [*] Community EVENT - The Black Market event in Hexad City has been refreshed with a whole suite of new specialty items! While the original two remain, eight more have been added as a result of the Community Challenge #3! Look forward to the following items in the Black Market - 3 will be randomly selected from the total pool of 10 choices on any given visit to the Market. [*] Devil's Dagger - Wearer loses 20 Attack Speed and Attack Damage. Then gains +10 Attack Speed and Attack Damage per Curse. Submitted by sn0wy & SturmSang & SheepOfTheNight [*] Catnip - +40% Attack Speed, +10 Armor. The wearer starts combat Silenced for 30 seconds. Submitted by Akheon & Sturmsang [*] Thor's Thunder Ticklers - Wearer loses 50% Attack Damage but gains 30 Attack Speed and 30 Spell Power. When the wearer attacks, 1% chance to stun ALL foes for 1.5s. Submitted by sn0wy [*] Patchwork Banner - The wearer benefits from all active Traits, but does not contribute to any. Submitted by Flame & Kyn [*] Vigilant Vessel - 25 Spell Power, 2 Mana Regen. When the wearer heals or shields another ally, that ally gains +20 Attack Speed (stacks up to 3 times). Submitted by SheepOfTheNight [*] Basket of Unlimited Eggs - At the start of combat, the wearer steals 200 Maximum HP and 20 Attack Damage and Spell Power from each other ally. Submitted by Doomsday [*] Tungstivor - +40% Max Health, +20 Armor. The wearer starts combat Rooted for 30 seconds. Submitted by Akheon & Doomsday [*] Bonded Rings - Two items, the Giving Ring which sends all incoming damage to the wearer of the Receiving Ring. Submitted by FoxMan [/list] [b][h3]Polish[/h3][/b] Community Request - Added a player-facing “Purge” button to the Unlocks screen. This allows you to remove all Unlocks and reset your Mastery to 0, effectively deleting the save file. More than a few players have requested this, and deleting the save file manually in a way that Steam Cloud won’t automatically restore it is a little tricky, so we’ve made an exposed option for it. Community Request - Updated the Draft Mode UI to show Unit and Item previews for character features that use them, so you can preview exactly what the Unit or Item does. Community Request - Improved the missile tracking logic such that it can track vertical changes, such as when a Unit is knocked up. This doesn’t actually impact gameplay as even a unit in flight only moves their model, their collision always stayed on the ground, but it looks nicer now seeing missiles be able to track airborne targets. Updated the End of Run sequence, both for defeats and for victories. Victories in particular have a new celebratory animation and have a placeholder stub for an end-of-run comic panel! We’re in progress on making the art for these panels, so for now they remain a bit of a preview, but eventually these will have your character shown celebrating their victory, earning their Aspiration, and returning home. The End of Run sequence now awards “medals”, based on various things you did during the run such as number of tier 4 units, number of bounties completed, devil’s deals taken, perfect fights (fights where you never lost a Unit), and many more. These each have an associated point value, and Mastery is now derived from your end of run medals rather than being strictly based on the floor reached. The art for these medals are temporary and will be replaced soon. On average, the Mastery gained from Medals is roughly TWICE that of the previous system! With our updates to difficulty, better onboarding, and ability to turn off unlocked features, we’ve decided our gain rate for unlocking things was a little slower than what we expect most players would like. The Unlock system is intended to be a bit of an extended tutorial, ramping up complex systems and features. At the End of Run screen, there are now a few additional buttons: Recap (you can now bring up the Recap for the final fight optionally, instead of it always being there) Run Summary (brings up the Run History screen for this Run) Unlocks (end the run by going to the Unlocks screen, which is now no longer mandatory) Main Menu Quick Restart (restarts a run with the same settings as this run, same character and difficulty) Fixed the Fight Button / top panel having mismatched opacity in the black UI elements behind it, creating an unpolished appearance. The Shop UI’s scroll bar is now once again visible, and is no longer default white. It matches the color scheme of the UI. During the end of combat animations, the Hearts in the top panel no longer fly out and scale up. Instead, a duplicate set of Hearts are shown. The Hearts flying out has never worked fully in resolutions other than 16:9, they don’t come anywhere near the center of the screen, and adds a little bit more motion to that animation flow than we would like. The duplicate Hearts are cleaner. Community Request - We have added some QoL surrounding which Unlocks are associated with and automatically also unlock each Difficulty node. Locked difficulties will now state which Unlock you need to activate it instead of stating just “Locked”, and Unlocks in the unlock UI will state in their tooltips if they unlock a new difficulty node. The Mastery Gain animation in the Unlocks panel now no longer plays if you gained no Mastery in that run. It will also no longer play if you’ve already unlocked everything that is currently available. This includes abandoning a run from the main menu or pause menu, this will know to not switch to the Unlock screen or play the animation if there is nothing to show or do there. When the animation does need to play, it does so now at double the speed. Adjusted the Cavern’s Act Modifier visual effects to not be quite so bright and more transparent. Fixed one of its visuals not appearing at all, which connects the pulses after the first to the crystal by way of a projectile that fires towards the center of the board. [h3][b]Bugfixes[/b][/h3] Fixed a long-standing issue where our Bug Reporter was not able to process Chinese characters. We still would receive the reports, but had to use the screenshot and game log only to find the issue instead of the written description. Fixed the Unlucky Lass being able to select traits that require 3 Units. This was the case in previous builds, but broke recently. Fixed a major issue where the Unit Store could be stuck not fully animated up in a very specific circumstance - if you enter a Rest Site while not having just gained a level, and entered by rapidly clicking Travel as soon as the panel appears (while the Unit Store is still animating up), which could only happen in Ultrafast mode. This will no longer stop the Unit Store from finishing its animation. Special thanks to Twitch Creator ThatPinguino for a VOD which showed the exact situation in which this happened (go give him a follow!) Fixed an issue where Fast Mode when enabled would cause the progression of the Tutorial issues. Fixed an issue where the Reroll button would sometimes re-enable itself in the first step of the tutorial, causing you to reroll out of the Mikki the game demands you purchase (thus softlocking the Tutorial). Added a safeguard to the tutorial’s first step which brings up the Unit Store. We got a lot of reports of this not working, but we could not reproduce this ourselves. There was some mildly suspicious code that we have added a workaround to in the hope this resolves the issue. Fixed the Cursed Shovel item losing its icon again. Also fixed why this was getting reset in the first place so it shouldn’t happen again. Fixed the Shift hotkey only counting Left Shift, not Right Shift. Fixed several small typos in various Events. Fixed a display issue with the Invest button while at max Vault level. Fixed an issue where if you, in one session: Played a run, made some progress, died, started a new run, then abandoned that new run at floor 1, then returned to the main menu - you would end up being able to continue the previously ended run. Thanks to an anonymous player for a very specific bug report on this process to help identify this. This also fixed a related Mastery gain exploit using this process. Fixed Teak’s skill explosion radius not being large enough to actually hit adjacent enemies in most setups. Added a safeguard to traveling. We’ve seen a couple reports where the log indicates a room got skipped, which almost guarantees something catastrophic happening with the run. You can now no longer pick up units that are in the process of being merged. There was a very brief window where, after buying a unit, you could pick up one and manipulate it. Depending on the actions taken, it could get your units into a bad state. Also reduced the time it takes for the merge detection to happen. Fixed an issue where units could not gain buffered Mana while casting - in particular, this prevented Deadhead from activating his skill’s Mana bonus trigger and the Trickster items from having some effects. Fixed an issue where the unlocks adding new Combat Modifiers actually removed them from the pool, while they were active while not unlocked instead. Fixed an issue where the Quencher’s Quill item would not Manalock foes. Fixed an issue where it was impossible to get the ‘Put a Hat on Lord Malady’ achievement. Fixed an issue where the Power Suit item wasn’t actually filling all Item Slots. Added temporary art for Skye’s Ballista so the default white square doesn’t appear. Enjoy it while you can - a wonderful high-quality replacement will arrive soon! Fixed an issue where the Blood trait could cause units with full Item Slots to lose one of their equipped Items. Now, Blood will simply not grant an item to any units with full Item Slots. Fixed an issue where the Glorp and Slogurk units granted by the Maiden of the Mire event would not appear in the Unit Store after being obtained, leading to difficulty increasing their tiers. Fixed being able to click on Difficulty preset options that were already clicked, doing nothing, but making the button look disabled. Fixed an issue where Recovery Necklace would not heal allies, only the caster. Fixed an issue where, after using a Void Portal item, the item count would become desynced. Fixed several issues with Into the Void difficulty not triggering, or not properly displaying Voided units at the start of combat. Fixed an issue where Aquatic would not heal for the proper amounts. Fixed several outdated unlock descriptions. Fixed an issue where a fully charged Brim would also cause the Engineer Turret to gain near-infinite Ammo. Fixed an issue where it was possible to unlock Coming Soon Coming Soon blessings now properly display Coming Soon as their reason for not being unlockable, rather than referring to a prerequisite. Fixed Bogdar’s charge having much larger VFX than intended, and showing a debug display sphere for 3 seconds after charging. Fixed the Compendium showing some traits that are unattainable, such as the [REDACTED] trait on the future Unit, [REDACTED], found in the [REDACTED] region. Fixed traits that are added through items or other secondary means not marking the trait as Seen for purposes of the Compendium (leading to the other 2 Hydra heads and the Leader trait not being able to be marked as seen.)