The Variety Update Part 1 (Early Access Update 7)

Crab Champions

Claw your way across exotic islands combining fluid movement with fast paced combat to become a Crab Champion in this third person shooter with roguelike elements.

[img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37274156/ca3c8e7f1605e46d5978a0f470d8f6af260de2da.jpg[/img] [h1]Patch Highlights[/h1] [b]ABILITIES: GRENADE, GRAPPLING HOOK, LASER BEAM, BLACK HOLE & ICE BLAST[/b] [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37274156/281e21db414fefc9152fd4f2156c0f857f66c584.gif[/img] [b]MELEE WEAPONS: CLAW, DAGGER & HAMMER[/b] [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37274156/2fa805ea965c8ee2f8d226851eff5ec42b56e97a.jpg[/img] [b]NEW WEAPONS: LASER CANNONS & SEAGLE[/b] [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37274156/ff40cd54896b3608a2bb2732bb0421bb0aea9cae.gif[/img] [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37274156/efc841a20bda39e011aadb4c51cbdeae060d1ed9.jpg[/img] [b]MINIGAMES: ARCADE, HOLDOUT & DUEL[/b] [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37274156/8405ea6a693256f312e9c708767255387646fa71.gif[/img] [b]QUICKPLAY[/b] Matchmake for other players at any of the three main difficulties and communicate via an improved text chat! [b]SIDE SLIDING[/b] [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37274156/b16bdbce4c6ecf49b03121cc82f2716c77be0d34.gif[/img] [b]NEW CONTENT[/b] [list] [*] New island type: Waves [*] New enemies: Starfish & Limpet [*] New music [*] New loot [*] New island challenge modifiers and a blessing type [/list] [b]BIG BALANCE CHANGES[/b] Reworked economy, enemy and health scaling for a more satisfying experience with less cheap ways to win or lose [h1]Patch Notes[/h1] [b]GENERAL[/b] [list] [*] Added new ability system with 5 abilities to equip: Grenade, Black Hole, Grappling Hook, Ice Blast and Laser Beam. This is a big new system with a lot more mix and match potential but it is still being worked on- all "grenade" mods will work on any ability and in The Variety Update Part 2 there'll be plenty of new "Ability Mods" and all current grenade mods will be ported over [*] Added new melee weapons: Claw, Dagger and Hammer (more are coming in The Variety Update Part 2) [*] You can now slide sideways and aim while sliding. Also you now slide for twice as long with a more gradual decrease in speed as the slide runs out [*] Quickplay is now enabled and should finally be working! [*] Added new weapon: Laser Cannons [*] Added new weapon: Seagle [*] Added new minigame: Arcade: Eliminate as many enemies as possible before the time runs out! Enemies spawn faster by eliminating them but if you get hit 50% of the visible enemies will get eliminated, slowing down the pace [*] Added new minigame: Holdout: No health or loot- survive as many waves as possible until you get hit! Great for warming up or to have some bite-sized crab action without committing to a full rougelike run [*] Added new minigame: Duel: Face off in a PvP duel to finally find out who is the best crab in your lobby! [*] Added experimental support for up to 6 players to join a single multiplayer game- the game is still balanced around 4 players max but since many have asked for 5 or 6 player lobbies, it should now be possible! [*] Added new island type: Waves [*] Added several new island challenge modifiers and a new blessing type [*] Added 3 new Tropical biome islands and 1 new Arctic biome island [*] Added new enemy: Limpet [*] Added new enemy: Starfish [*] Added new enemy variant: Mini Grub [*] Added new weapon mod: Escalating Shot: Fire rate reduced by 50% but increases with each shot fired until stopping fire. The Minigun now starts with this mod by default [*] Added new perk: Nourishing Salvage: Heal when salvaging pickups [*] Added new perk: Crystal Fertilizer: More destructible crystals and health rocks spawn [*] Added new perk: Bonus Chests: Get additional reward chests after every 100 eliminations [*] Added new perk: Sturdy Totems: Totems have more guaranteed uses before they explode [*] Added new perk: Equalizer: Damage increased if the number of equipped weapon mods, ability mods and perks are even (so having 0 Weapon Mods, 4 Grenade Mods and 10 Perks equipped would activate the damage bonus) [*] Added new perk: Slugger: Explosive enemies deal more damage in a greater radius to nearby enemies when eliminated [*] Added new perk: Crystal Dividends: Gain a percentage of your total crystals as a bonus after clearing each island [*] Added new perk: Amber Resin: Healing is more effective [*] Added new greed perk: Big Bones: Max health and damage increased but you grow larger [*] Added new greed perk: Hoarder: Chance for an extra chest to spawn after each island but you can no longer drop pickups from your inventory [*] Added new destructibles: Mega Crystal and Mega Challenge Crystal [*] Added a santa hat cosmetic [*] Enemies generally have smoother overall movement with less sudden stops and turns especially after getting knocked back or frozen [*] Some enemies can now dash from side to side [*] Enemies now slide on icy surfaces and crab enemies slide when moving quickly [*] You now slide infinitely and automatically on icy surfaces [*] Added 6 new achievements and 4 new cosmetics [*] Added new music! [*] Music no longer fades out after interacting with the victory crown [*] Added many new sounds (destructibles breaking, crystal collection, slug explosions) [*] Hitmarker audio can now stack, making hitmarkers more satisfying on shotguns and other weapons that hit multiple times at once [*] The lobby now has random lighting presets instead of being always sunny [*] Volcanic lighting has been reworked along with some texture and skybox improvements [*] Night time lighting has been reworked to be actually dark I’m a big fan of being in a flow state while playing games and not being interrupted by loading screens or other things that make you wait for the game. While the loading times between islands were quite short in previous versions of the game, they blocked gameplay and the feeling of constantly being able to move forward and do something. Some of the changes below help remove this feeling and (sometimes subconsciously) make the game feel more satisfying to play. Please let me know if you notice any issues with these faster loading times especially related to multiplayer games but ideally it should be the same as before, just faster! [*] Optimized level load times significantly (loading screens between islands should be almost instant) [*] Increased the pace of some gameplay events like how quickly chests spawn after clearing an island or how fast you can read loot UI after it spawns [*] The Duplicate symbol on loot now shows up more quickly [*] Improved the pacing of how loot spawns from chests: all loot now spawns at once to prevent having to wait around for each pickup to appear one by one (this used to be especially tedious with a high level of Big Chests) [/list] [b]BALANCE CHANGES[/b] [list] [*] When the Random Islands modifier is active, Elites defeated on any island other than the final island of each biome will no longer drop healing and key chests. This is to make Elites more of a risk instead of being able to chain elite islands together and come out of it with MORE health than you started with due to all the healing chests [*] Added new difficulty modifier: Expensive Shops: Shop prices are doubled. The reasoning behind this modifier is that even on the highest difficulties, players were easily breaking the game by buying out shops with economy builds. This modifier should make each purchase count [*] Removed the Surging Enemies difficulty modifier as it took away from the pacing of each island and made them all blur into the same kind where all enemies were visible almost right away after spawning. The enemy spawn speed for islands later into each biome has been adjusted to prevent large amounts of enemies spawning taking a long time [*] Hordes have been reworked to have more easy enemies and less projectile enemies as they are meant to be a fun AOE island type more focused on a horde of small enemies. This change helps differentiate them from other islands which felt similar before [*] Enemies now get +10% more health after each wave on Horde islands. Since waves happen as fast as you can eliminate enemies, this can create an interesting opportunity to gain more crystals (since enemies drop crystals based on their max health) at the cost of a greater challenge [*] Elites and Bosses are now immune to black holes and gain more health per player in multiplayer lobbies as it was very common for these fights to be quickly over in 4 player matches with 4 distinct builds set up, especially when looping [*] Added dynamic damage reduction to Elites and Bosses when looping to make fights a bit more exciting without getting tedious. Here’s how it works: Elites and Bosses spawn with 50% damage reduction which reduces itself automatically over time to 0% damage reduction after 30 seconds [*] Rebalanced many enemy minimum start islands: this means more crabs and slugs in the early islands with the more difficult enemies appearing later in a biome. This also makes biomes feel less samey as there are a wider range of enemies introduced over time instead of pretty much every enemy appearing by island 3 in a biome [*] Laser Skulls, Laser Crabs, Ice Pumpkins and Fire Pumpkins are more likely to appear [*] Rare loot is 20% more likely to shop up in shops as it often was hard to scale your lower tier loot the later into a run you got due to shops being full of Epic or Legendary loot [*] Burst Pistol and Dual Pistols no longer can be tap fired faster than the actual fire rate (no more tired fingers from constant clicking) and the Burst Pistol has had a slight fire rate buff [*] “Reward” destructibles (crystals, health rocks etc.) and “Combat” destructibles (fire rocks, energy ring rocks etc.) now spawn separately so that it’s possible for more reward destructibles to spawn on an island without flooding it with combat destructibles [*] The global projectile limit has been increased from 400 to 500 [*] You no longer get greed perks when using the Random totem as there were many bugs with greed perks not applying correctly when acquired this way. This also acts as the only way in the game to remove a greed perk from your inventory [*] Fire damage from stepping in lava now scales per island (previously it was threatening for the first volcanic biome encounter but became trivial when looping) [*] Arcane Blast has been moved from the Damage loot pool to the Elemental loot pool [*] Bigger Boom has been moved from the Damage loot pool to the Skill loot pool [*] Wind Up now stops working on stopping fire rather than on reloading [*] Some low value / fun weapon mods have been removed including: Knockback Shot, Ghost Ammo, Heavy Shot and Accelerating Shot will no longer show up unless you have Bouncing Shot (as this was the main time those mods were useful) [/list] [b]BUFFS[/b] [list] [*] Weapon formation mods (like Arc Shot or Square Shot) are now additive and can both be triggered in a single shot. Dual Shotguns, Auto Shotgun, Crossbow and Cluster Launcher now fire any extra shot modifiers (like Arc Shot or Square Shot) IN ADDITION to their normal projectiles. Additive shot formations now also take the weapon spread into account so high spread weapons will now shoot wonky formations. This means that Grip Tape and Blind Fire will directly influence the spacing and spread of the additive shot formations [*] Enemies can now be frozen for 50% longer and players can only be frozen for 0.5 seconds max (as this was a common cheap death cause in previous updates: being frozen for multiple seconds unable to do anything) [*] Flammable Armor, Explosive Armor, Exploding Enemies, Freezing Enemies, Flammable Enemies, Electric Enemies and Poisonous Enemies start with half as much radius as before but get a +25% increase in radius for each level of the perk that you have, allowing them to scale in a much more interesting way [*] Flammable Armor and Explosive Armor have been moved from Epic to Rare rarity. These perks were previously a bit too situational to be worth it for their rarity but these changes should make them much more worthwhile to take in general [*] Key Totem cost reduced from 3 to 2 [*] You now get +1 key per key pickup when playing on Nightmare difficulty or higher [*] Enemy damage increases (including their debuffs) when looping has been reduced by 25% as it was too sharp of a power spike, leading to the “I’m one shot” feeling when looping no matter how much max health you had [*] All fire enemies deal half the fire stacks as before which should make fire a much less common source of death when looping [*] Reduced Ice Pumpkin AOE radius and damage [*] Fire Pumpkins now have a longer time between attacks [*] Homing Grubs, Enraged Grubs and Minigun Crabs can no longer have the Shielded buff as there were some situations that felt unfair as breaking the shield meant taking almost guaranteed damage [*] Pufferfish explosion damage reduced by 15% [*] Launcher Crabs projectile explosion radius reduced to match the radius of the Grenade Crab projectile [*] The Auto Rifle always seems to be quite underwhelming so I’ve doubled the bullet velocity and greatly reduced the amount of random spread it has to establish it as a pinpoint accurate and responsive long range weapon. It should now be noticeably easier to track moving targets and not feel like you are missing shots that should hit [*] Auto Rifle damage increased from 4 to 5 [*] Dual Shotguns damage increased from 3 to 5 and base firing spread slightly reduced [*] Auto Shotgun damage increased from 2 to 3 and base spread slightly reduced [*] Auto Shotgun mag size increased from 12 to 16 and range reduced by 33% (the range was absurd for a shotgun) and spread becomes wider than before with sustained fire [*] Auto Shotgun trigger roll multiplier (the thing that makes chance based mods and perks trigger) increased by 400% [*] Rocket Launcher explosion radius has been reduced by 25% as it was way too generous [*] Sniper projectile collision radius (not damage radius) reduced as the projectile would often hit the ground in front of you on slopes instead of the intended target [*] Sniper damage increased from 35 to 40 [*] Minigun now starts with Escalating Shot level 2 and mag size increased from 125 to 200 [*] Blade Launcher projectile damage radius reduced to more closely match the projectile size but Big Shot now can increase the radius [*] Burst Pistol mag size increased from 28 to 36 [*] Orb Launcher damage increased from 5 to 6 [*] Arcane Wand projectile explosion radius increased by 25% [*] Grenade damage increased from 35 to 50 [*] Bigger Boom and Imploding Grenade now affect the size of the damage areas spawned by abilities [*] Snake Shot damage increased from +33% to +50% [*] Blind Fire damage increased from +50% to +100% [*] Blind Fire recoil increase reduced by 50% to allow for Grip Tape to match it and perfectly counteract it [*] Grip Tape is no longer capped at -100% spread reduction so it can fully offset Blind Fire. Spread related perks now also influence the angle on formations such as arc and triple shot and even secondary projectile mods like Dagger Arc! [*] Recoil shot recoil added reduced from +200% to +100% [*] Bouncing Shot now increases projectile lifetimes by 50% and damage per bounce increased from +50% to +100% [*] Money Shot crystals per hit increased from 1 to 4 (I’ll be watching this- ideally it’s really fun to find on fast firing low damage weapons) [*] Piercing Wave trigger chance halved but damage increased by 75% and radius increased by 25% [*] X Shot trigger chance increased by 33% [*] Spore Shot mushrooms now have 10x health as they would just explode instantly before having a chance to grow [*] Grenadier now works in a more understandable way: you get +1 ability stack per cooldown but it will keep cooling down while your current stack is less than the max stack [*] Damage combo damage per combo level increased from +15% to +20% [*] Healthy Combo healing amount increased from +50 to +100 [*] Endurance healing increased from +50 health to +75 health [*] Critical thinking critical damage increased from +25% to +75% but non critical damage reduced from -10% to -25% [*] Checklist eliminations needed per damage increase reduced from 15 to 10 [*] Faulty Chests chance for unchosen loot to not disappear buffed from 10% to 15% [*] Double Vision has been moved from Legendary to Epic rarity [*] Removed knockback from Fireworks and increased their radius by 25% [*] Fire damage in general has been doubled as it felt quite weak on perks in previous updates [*] Lightning damage has now been buffed by 66% (it now deals the entire lighting stack as damage instead of 33% of the lightning stack) [*] Damage areas (like the black hole) can now spawn in mid air which will allow for many new synergies with abilities that can explode in the air (like causing Crystal Barrage to trigger in mid air with a black hole also sucking enemies into it) [*] The Limited Heals difficulty modifier healing reduction reduced from -50% healing to -33% healing [*] Increased the invulnerability period after taking damage from 0.1 seconds to 0.25 seconds [/list] [b]NERFS[/b] [list] [*] Shop prices have been increased by 33% as buying out shops was the main source of broken balance in the game (you can still absolutely break shops and get near infinite crystals but some economy changes were needed to make this require a bit more skill and planning, and a bit less random luck) [*] Shop price increase per loop increased by 25% [*] Shop prices are slightly more expensive per player in multiplayer to balance out the fact that enemies get a health bonus per player (and therefore pay out more which meant players had less crystals to spend in shops when playing solo compared to in multiplayer runs) [*] Shop reroll totem base cost is unchanged but cost increase per reroll now increases more steeply [*] Due to these Shop changes, with the Random Islands modifier active, shops will only be able to spawn on islands 3,4,5 and 9 to better space them out over a biome [*] Spiked chest open cost increased from 25% to 33% (this is a change that has been reverted from the previous patch as it was too easy to go for multiple spiked chests in a single biome, this way it’s more strategic and has a bigger impact) [*] Black Holes no longer turn enemy projectiles into your own as this made fighting even the hardest enemies trivial [*] It’s now half as likely for the flamethrower to spawn fire damage areas on the ground (as it could cause really high fire damage numbers in a very short space of time which made it by far the most powerful weapon in the game). Fire overall has had a buff in this patch though so it should still feel very strong [*] Big Mag mag size increase reduced from +75% to +50% and renamed “Clip” to “Mag” in the description [*] Bubble Shot trigger chance reduced by 25% (it’s very powerful but triggered a bit too often) [*] Splash Damage damage reduced from 25 to 10 [*] The price to unlock slots if playing with the Locked Slots difficulty modifier now scales up slightly more sharply. If this modifier is more annoying than fun then I’ll replace it with another in a future update [*] Crystal Combo crystal gain per combo level reduced from +20% to +15% [*] Snatcher close range elimination crystal gain reduced from +50% to +30% [*] Finishing Move critical elimination crystal gain reduced from +100% to +50% [*] Gold Coating on heal crystal gain increased from +50% of healing to +100% of healing [*] Money Is Power damage gain per 1000 crystals reduced from +5% to +2% [*] Bonus Crystals crystal gain reduced from +50% to +33% [*] Workaholic, Rising Star and Limited Loot crystal gain reduced from +100% to +75% [*] Double Edged Sword crystal amount reduced from 100% of damage dealt to 25% of damage dealt and you now lose 20% of your total crystals when taking damage (compared to 10% before as it was way too easy to make a completely broken economy build with it- now it should be in a more balanced place) [*] A note on max health perks: if getting lucky with a few of these early on, the health pool could go to extreme numbers very quickly. These changes make them still substantial buffs to your health but make them less likely to be one of the key reasons a run succeeds [*] Bribe max health increase reduced from +500% to +200% [*] Double Trouble max health increase reduced from +250% to +100% [*] Leap Of Faith max health increase reduced from +250% to +50% [*] Health Totem chance to explode after use increased from 33% to 50%. This change is to make it harder to completely break the game early on with many lucky rolls in a row [*] Loot Totem chance to explode after use increased from 20% to 33% [*] Gamble Totem and Chance Totem chance to explode after use increased from 8% to 15% [*] Double Vision chance to get an extra chest after each island reduced from 20% to 15% [/list] [b]QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES [/b] [list] [*] Finally fixed cases where enemy projectiles could travel through walls leading to situations where you could take unfair damage [*] Added many new checks for enemies stuck in walls or not moving. There should no longer be any soft lock situations- in the worst case scenarios where enemies are stuck for more than a few seconds in a wall, they will be cleaned up by the game automatically [*] Projectiles get nullified (deal no damage and instantly expire) when hitting the blue border surrounding islands (which prevents lots of unfair deaths where bouncing enemy projectiles would bounce off or explode on seemingly thin air behind you) [*] Slugs and Pufferfish can no longer start their explode attack in mid air and must be landed (this prevents unfair situations where a slug could come flying out of nowhere and instantly end the run) [*] Made many improvements to overall visual clarity with tweaks to enemy health bars, damage numbers, FX and many other small elements that all add up to give a more refined experience [*] The game now automatically pauses when it loses focus when alt tabbing or when something else (like another installer) pops up over it [*] You are now invulnerable for 2 seconds after falling off a cliff to prevent taking unavoidable damage when respawning (if respawning near to an already attacking enemy) [*] You no longer take fall damage once an island has been cleared to be consistent with the other post island damage rules in the game [*] Auto Loot now staggers chest openings to prevent late game crashes when opening hundreds of chests at once [*] Auto Loot now behaves correctly and will only salvage if it can't pick up any of the pickups in a chest [*] Auto Loot will now pick up duplicate Greed perks (previously it would ignore all greed perks in the world) [*] Added island boundaries to some islands (like the one with 4 high walls) to prevent rare situations where enemies could be launched out of bounds and the island would never end [*] Improved anti-camping measures to support all enemies, not just the small melee crabs [*] All homing barrels are cleaned up when chests spawn to prevent situations where they would be annoying and home at you while you were looting [*] Added options to increase field of view to 115 and 120 (previously the limit was 110) [*] Improved crosshairs and added a central dot for easier aiming [*] Clients should no longer accidentally leave to the lobby from the Game Over UI (only the host has the power to do that now, clients can still leave if they wish by using the pause menu instead) [*] Added visible cooldowns to melee in the gameplay UI [*] Added cooldown expire animations and sounds for both abilities and melee weapons in the gameplay UI [*] Cooldowns now reset when picking up new abilities or melee weapons in the lobby to make it easier to audition them without waiting for the cooldowns to expire [*] Added a system that prevents many of the same enemy from spawning in certain cases (Ice Pumpkins, Laser Crabs, Laser Skulls and Fire Pumpkins spawning in large numbers could create unfair situations) [*] The maximum amount of combat destructible rocks on small arena islands has been reduced as it often led to unavoidable damage or just too much damage area spam [*] Improved the audio mix to make important sounds stand out more [*] Optimized all animated characters for better performance in scene with many enemies visible at once [*] Arcane Wand projectiles now automatically explode when expiring (they previously vanished if not hitting something) [*] The slide speed curve has been smoothed out to be less jittery and much more consistent [*] You now automatically cancel a slide if letting go of directional keys (instead of being stuck in a janky stationary slide) [*] Island challenge modifiers can now only spawn on one portal max in a selection (to even out unfair situations where you would roll two very difficult challenge portals with low health and not have a choice to take the lesser reward / easier fight) [*] Improved aiming: it felt a bit clunky to aim especially with the Seagle in some cases so the camera height has been adjusted to be more comfortable to aim as well as a faster aim zoom in time to make it feel more responsive. Also tweaked some weapons that felt like they zoomed in too much when aiming [*] Reduced fire rock destructible explosion damage and radius (as it was easy to accidentally damage yourself when exploding them while appearing to be out of range of the explosion) [*] Made various UI outline improvements to make damage text and health bars easier to read across all lighting scenarios [*] Improved text chat visibility and it should no longer go off the screen when writing long messages [*] Enemies now spawn much faster from the second loop (Island 61+) onwards to make late game runs less tedious [*] Auto loot speed doubled to make late game runs less tedious [*] Added options to disable hitmarkers and damage numbers for those that don’t want them or to help improve visibility in late game runs [*] Ability and Melee cooldowns are now reset when entering a new island [*] Improved the Piercing Wave particle FX to be easier on the eyes and more smooth [*] The Auto Loot keybind has been moved from Q to L as many people had other actions bound to Q already and were confused as to why their chest loot was magically disappearing (you can still change it to whatever you want in the controls menu) [*] Enemies can no longer spawn from destroyed crystals if the island has been cleared [*] Increased global bandwidth limits to potentially improve 4 player late game lobbies with a lot going on [*] Increased connection timeout times to give more time for clients that have temporarily lost connection to recover [*] Sonic Boom and Shockwave no longer knock back enemies as this could allow them to get stuck in walls (I'll rework these perks in the future) [*] Clip Shot has been renamed to Mag Shot [/list] [b]BUG FIXES [/b] [list] [*] Fixed a longstanding bug that caused very laggy clients to load in with no weapons when first joining a lobby [*] Improved a few islands where chests could spawn down in unreachable areas and couldn’t be opened [*] Fixed numerous clunky inventory UI bugs like locked slots “stealing” the mouse cursor when clicked [*] Fixed “sticky” inventory where dropping loot would reset the focus to the first inventory slot instead of the one that you were hovering over, making dropping a lot of pickups needlessly clunky [*] Fixed issue that would cause you to permanently keep the aimed in field of view of a weapon after choosing a dual wield weapon [*] Fixed exploit that allowed players to start a run on a much easier difficulty than initially selected [*] Fixed exploit that allowed players to move around and jump while frozen [*] Fixed issue where hazard damage (like from barrels or destructible rocks) weren’t respecting the invulnerability period after you take damage (so a bunch of barrels exploding at the same instant were able to eat through multiple armor plates at once) [*] Fixed issue on arctic island that caused barrels to explode as soon as you load into the island which could lead to taking unavoidable damage [*] Fixed issue that caused enemies to spawn with half empty armor plates [*] Fixed various multiplayer health bar bugs that would show players and enemies as having armor when they really didn’t [*] Fixed issue that caused Piercing Shot to reset reset Streak Shot [*] Fixed issue that caused the Parkour reward UI to not update on non-hosting players [*] You can now complete the Flawless and Frugal achievements without needing to be explicitly on Normal difficulty (they now unlock on Nightmare and Ultra Chaos difficulties also, Normal being the minimum) [*] Fixed issue that allowed friends to join in progress runs via the Steam menu, now they can only join while in the lobby as is intended [*] Fixed a longterm crash that could happen when joining a multiplayer game [*] Fixed a longterm bug that could leave invalid multiplayer sessions open which interfered with inviting and joining multiplayer games [*] Fixed issue where no enemies would spawn after a while on the 1st island of each biome [*] Fixed being able to get under the map on one of the Volcanic islands [*] Fixed a number of rare crashes [*] Fixed issue where challenges were completed in the game but the corresponding Steam achievement stayed locked [*] Rewrote how account rank is calculated to make it more accurate (as it was possible to have all weapons Emerald rank but still have a Sapphire account rank previously) [*] Repelling Dash now only affects enemy projectiles and won’t repel teammate projectiles [*] Fixed issue that caused the Game Over UI to show up in the lobby if leaving a run too soon after getting eliminated [*] Fixed the crystals and keys icons being cut off in the inventory UI on some wider resolutions like 1920x1200 [*] Improved how music plays: it shouldn’t stop the shop music, play the gameplay music and then switch to the boss music a second or two later as it did previously [*] Edited arctic tree collision to make it much less likely to get stuck on it [/list] [b]ULTRA CHAOS BALANCE CHANGES[/b] The goal with these changes is to make Ultra Chaos a bit more skillful, fair and fun while still retaining the brutal difficulty spike [list] [*] Ultra Chaos is now unlocked when reaching Ruby account rank (down from Diamond in order to give more people the chance to try it out) [*] Slightly slowed down enemy attack speeds on Ultra Chaos (just because some enemies attacked unreasonably fast especially when shielded) [*] Reduced the amount of bonus starting luck in Ultra Chaos by 33% (this should make getting rare loot (important for many builds) much more consistent) [*] Elites and Bosses spawn slightly less often in Ultra Chaos [*] Bosses no longer spawn champion enemies when damaged and keys when eliminated on non-boss islands when playing on Ultra Chaos difficulty [*] Extra elites / bosses spawned in Ultra Chaos has been reduced from 2 to 1 [*] Elites and bosses no longer can have the Healthy or Shielded buff [*] Removed the extremely fast enemy spawn speed (it actually is harder when enemies gradually spawn in while you are already moving around the island than it is for them all to spawn instantly) [*] Being on Low graphics settings no longer makes totems have no emissive color [/list] [b]JAN 14TH HOTFIX[/b] Removed santa hats That's it for now but I plan on releasing The Variety Update Part 2 sometime in February to finish off the new ability and melee systems as well as add a lot of new island layouts and loot types to get closer and closer to the "no two runs are the same" feeling 🦀 Here's a teaser for a mechanic that will let you buff specific weapon mods in interesting ways: in the example below, Mace Shot has homing and chaotic buffs that increase damage and allow all 3 mace balls to fly to the target (when previously they'd just miss). This should add a new layer of fun to mods and give more depth and variety when buildcrafting! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/37274156/bc8e80d8cbae24bdd6b4cee6d7c71a38fb2adaf5.gif[/img]