The Anacrusis News

We just released update 43, which allows players to reconnect immediately following a disconnect or crash.

We've also identified the issue causing high performance PCs to crash between level transitions, and are working on a solution now. It's going to require an engine update, but we're hoping to have that fixed in the next patch.

We wanted to get a quick hotfix out before the weekend to solve a handful of issues introduced with the Matchmaking update and several Versus mode exploits that we discovered with the help of the community. We have a follow-up patch in testing now that will be out early next week that solves many of the situations that cause players to be unable to reconnect after a crash, disconnect, etc.

• Alien players on four-player teams are less likely to have back-to-back spawns of the same Alien now. This is just the first phase of this fix, but we have more coming in future updates
  
• When you enable Alien AI in Versus mode, the Alien AI players won’t spawn directly in front of human-controlled players anymore
  
• When an Alien player falls out of the world, they’ll respawn as the same alien they were before. Players won’t be able to exploit this so they can select the alien they play every time
  
• Players will no longer be able to recover health as alien players when they use the warp option to move closer to the Survivors. When an Alien players moves closer and respawns, they’ll return with the same health they had before they warped
  

Big news everyone! You can choose your Survivor preference (in all games) and team preference (in Versus games) from the main menu. Click the portrait next to your name to select a team and/or choose the survivor you’d like to play as. Note: this will let players create unbalanced teams in the lobby so they can play with their friends. When new players are added, the game will balance the teams.

If you see the dreaded “No public lobbies found” message, try creating a new public game and sitting in the lobby for a few moments. Someone else will join! It just takes a minute. And if you’re worried about starting a public game and playing with strangers, know that our game is designed to play really well with strangers. We do it every day! Communication is minimal, so voice is optional, and if your game goes well, you might make a new friend 🙂

[h2]Balance Changes and QOL Improvements[/h2]

• For the folks who like to play Intenser Mode solo, bots will no longer trigger Matter Compilers for you. You’re welcome
  
• Survivor bots shouldn’t pick up health in Versus games anymore. That means players are responsible for healing the bots now. Remember that every bot is a fragile little bag of points.
  
• Survivor bots should be more likely to help an incapacitated player than defend themselves
  
• The new lobby system will now respect the campaign difficulty setting. That means you can play Intense or Intenser mode again. Intense and Intenser mode lobbies are not in the matchmaking pool for Campaign games, so you’ll need to bring your own teammates to play those difficulties
  

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• Host players should now go AFK correctly, after 90 seconds of inactivity
  
• Players will no longer go AFK if they don’t shoot a gun at the start of a level for 90 seconds
  
• Fixed several disconnect bugs. We’re still on the lookout for these, so if you encounter one, please grab the relevant log files and post them on the Steam forums or the Discord. They’re in %localappdata/Anacrusis/Saved/Logs on Windows
  
• Fixed a couple of crash bugs that happen on level transitions. Please press submit on crash dumps if you have one. We can’t fix crashes without those dump files! (Leaving a nice message for Dan is optional, but encouraged.)
  
• Adjusted the public game settings to encourage more players to choose public games. Steam players can now use modded content in public games in all queues. If you’d rather not see the modded content, then you can disable it in the Settings menu
  

Matchmaking into pre-game lobbies has arrived. Here’s how it works:

When you press the Choose Mode button from the home screen, you first have to select the mode you want to play then select whether you want to Find a Game or Start a New Game. If you choose Start a New Game, you’ll be prompted to select an Episode and then you can choose between hosting a public game, which will be available for anyone searching to join, or private games, where you can adjust further settings and play with your friends.

If you choose Find a Game, you’ll first look for available joinable lobbies. If the game doesn’t find a suitable lobby, it will look for a joinable game in-progress. If it doesn’t find a suitable game-in-progress, it will ask you if you’d like to start your own game and take you to the Start a New Game flow. If you set that to public, other players will be able to queue with you.

A couple of notes. When you choose to leave a match or lobby, the game assumes you don’t want to be in that game anymore, so you won’t queue into the lobby you were previously in. If you want . We assume if you leave a match, you don’t want to matchmake into that game again. If you left accidentally, you need to close and re-open the game in order to match back into a previous game.

If you are kicked from a game, you won’t be able to rejoin that game until it’s over. If you kick your for lulz, you’ll have to restart your game. It’s hilarious to threaten to kick your friends, but it’s a pain in the ass for everyone if you actually do it.

[h3]Bugs[/h3]

• Vote kick now works properly in 8-player games. You’re able to see all players in the game and can vote to kick all of them but the host. You can still initiate a vote kick against the host, but it won’t succeed. If it did, it would end the game
  
• Fixed several bugs related to vote kicking
  
• Made some adjustments to bot task priority that should help them be better contributors to humanity’s survival
  

Up next in Update 41: Team and character selection are coming! Bots that don’t steal health kits from players!

Just wanted to let you all know that The Anacrusis is on sale during the Steam Summer Sale for 50% off! Grab it now and get in on the Versus mode craze, experience the beautiful majesty of Summer Lance (available exclusively in Steam Workshop), and save the Isolode from the Alien hordes.

We'll also push Update 39 live tomorrow morning, with the following bugfixes and adjustments to Versus mode.

• Downed players are now properly rooted in place. Once you are down, you can’t be knocked off of ledges by Brutes or Gooper explosions
  
• A reduction to Flasher melee knockback. The flasher’s melee should be a harrying attack, not something that will knock Survivors off a ledge from 10 feet away
  
• When you’re spawning as an Alien in Versus, you can press crouch to increase gravity and make yourself land more quickly. If you use Toggle crouch, you’ll have to hit crouch a second time in order to jump again
  
• Players knocked at the moment the episode ends should now count as alive for the ending bonus scoring, but will show up as skulls on the progress bars
  
• Aliens in Ghost mode who are looking for a spot to spawn will now warp between elevator endpoints. This should prevent the “Alien ghosts get stuck in the ceiling” problem
  
• Removed inadvertent duplicate item spawns in the first level of all episodes in Versus mode
  
• Friendly fire against bots is turned off in Versus mode. You don’t have to worry about accidentally knocking Liu-bot if you’re a bit overzealous when she gets gooed
  
• We’re starting the work required to add pre-game lobby matchmaking to The Anacrusis. We’ve added the ability to search for either in-progress games or start a new game to the menu. Next update we expect to have pre-game lobby matchmaking available for players to test
  
• We optimized a visual FX that was being used frequently and had an oversized impact on framerate. The common hordes will always have some impact on framerate, but it should be significantly reduced as a result of this update