Beastieball News

Another BIGMOON BASH is coming soon in Beastieball! During Bigmoon Bashes, coaches can challenge each other in open matchmaking for a limited time. This Bash will be the first one to go for 48 hours!
It also is the first Bash to have select Beasties banned from participation.

When: April 19, 2025 00:00 UTC to April 21, 2025 00:00 UTC (equivalent to Friday, April 18 @ 4PM PST to Sunday, April 20 @ 4PM PST) Theme: Bandicraft, Illugus, Noizard, Surgus and Hopra are BANNED!

During the event you'll have a Bash Rank, which will improve based on your performance. After it's over, you'll receive in-game rewards based on your participation, such as Social Battery and Sports Points.

Players of all skill level are invited! All you need to do to participate is to play the game on that day and join the Bash on SportNet! SportNet is typically unlocked within the first 2 hours of your adventure, after beating your first Ranked boss. And if you aren't confident in your own Beastie team, you can use a randomly generated one instead - just go to Team Setup and set "Random Team" as your current team.

NOTE: We will not be recognizing individual players' results after this Bash. You should play as much as is fun for you, but please take time for rest and breaks as well. There is no special prize for playing more games than others! Update: Player results will be shared, testing out of new Bash Scoring changes. You can read about those in patch notes here.

[h3]Official Game Rules:[/h3]
First to 2 Points wins
Standard time limit on move selection
No Undos allowed
No duplicate Beastie species allowed
Relationship Combos are disabled
All Beasties are set to Level 50

If you're wondering about why some Beasties are banned, we chose the top 5 most used Beasties from the most recent Bash! These Beasties aren't statistically overpowered, and the ban is temporary only for this event. Take the opportunity to try out some new strategies!

[h2]New Features[/h2]

• Text log added to the 'info' menu! This records all dialogue so that you can review something you've missed. This was a frequently requested feature.
  
• A few new shoes and accessories added! Every clothing store in the game should have a new item for sale.
  
• Controller rumble implemented!
  
• Some new settings menu items for adjusting rumble intensity, as well as disabling text animation
  
• Draft Challenge redesign!
  
  This post-game challenge has generally been the least popular of the bunch. But it's my personal favorite, at least in concept, so I want to rework the idea to help more players find the joy of this mode.
  
  In the new iteration, you're given full information on upcoming teams, and must trade a Beastie from your team onto the team of your next opponent. It creates some brain-bendingly hard puzzles, but ultimately it feels a lot less random. You have much more control over the matchups you have to play, while still forcing you to constantly adapt your strategies and combinations.
  
  I think it's strictly an improvement over the previous gameplay, so I'm setting it live for everyone, but I would still consider this rework to be experimental. I'll be curious to hear how players are enjoying it. After changes to this mode have solidifed, I will probably re-work how we track completion of this mode (30 rounds to count as "100%" may be too high).
  
• Still in progress: story encounter adjustments. We're still working through encounters in the game to tweak playbooks and strategies to reflect new tools we've added in recent balance patches. The build we uploaded today doesn't have any changes yet, but we may be periodically updating builds with encounters changes alongside other bug fixes in the coming days/weeks.

[h2]No Major Balance Changes![/h2]
We're experimenting with ideas in the background, but keeping balance stable for the upcoming Bigmoon Bash. We'll continue assessing PvP data and community feedback for now.

• *Adjusted some move effects to consiolidate 2-type boosts into one effect. This impacted Challenge, Jeer and Meditate. The moves are effectively identical but have cleaner interactions with other triggers, like the Defiant trait.

[h2]Other Fixes & Changes[/h2]

• *Adjusted price of Spa Salts to 60 SP (from 90)
• *Fixed issues with opponent AI using Flight
• Fix for a crash that could occur when finding a shiny starter Beastie in the tutorial (we're not sure if any player ever found this, but it came up in testing...)
  
• Fix for player character clipping through bench in the tutorial
  
• Fix for online game desyncs frequently occuring when a previous game ended with a disconnection
  
• Fix for online opponents not showing their selected vibe
  
• Fix for text sizes being too small in endgame cinematics and other menus
  
• Fixed blurry text on the numbers that pop up when the player volleys a ball in the overworld
  
• Standardized how Coached % displays so that it will always consistently show the same value in different menus (previously it was possible to see 100% in one place and 99.9% elsewhere).
  
• Fix for yearnings not working in Clown Mode
  
• Fixed an issue where rapidly clicking in the Academy Points Shop could cause your Beastie to learn the same play multiple times
  
• Adjusted layout of a couple areas with bad geometry/out of bounds
  

This update is a bit on the small side... most items we've been working on in the last couple weeks are still in progress & will be added in builds later down the line.

*Added in an edit; these things were in the initial patch release but I forgot to note them initially.

We owe our players an apology. We released Beastieball with a critical issue. In the version we launched with, Beasties played sports and humans coached them. But everyone knows animals can’t play sports… humans do! We’re very sorry for leaving this issue unaddressed for so long. Thankfully, it’s finally fixed.

We’d strongly encourage you to take the time to check out the game or the free demo today and enjoy Beastieball as it always should have been.

* NOTE: This update is purely cosmetic. The game looks different, but the underlying data is still the same as before. Your save data is safe and sound!

* If you want to play the unmodified game, you can access the experimental branch by right clicking the game in your library > select "Properties" > go to the "Betas" tab > select "experimental" from the dropdown menu.

* If you want to enjoy this modified version of the game after today, it will be available in the same menu as above in the "april-fools" branch.

This weekend we hosted yet another BIGMOON BASH in Beastieball, a timed PvP event! This particular Bash was special for a couple reasons. One, we just released a pretty big balance patch adjusting a lot of Beasties’ statistics, traits and playbooks. Two, this Bash had no teambuilding theme - players were allowed to use any combination of unique Beasties they wanted! We collected a ton of data from this Bash, and we’re going to share more here than we ever have before!

But first—let’s honor the coaches whose Bash Scores shined brightest.


1. Ket (Bash Score: 3835)

2. Dino (Bash Score: 3681)

3. Figgy (Bash Score: 3365)

4. Zonk (Bash Score: 3276)

5. Satoros (Bash Score: 3273)

6. Arc Tech (Bash Score: 3198)

7. Pyopyo (Bash Score: 3149)

8. Wallmonger (Bash Score: 3123)

9. Litt (Bash Score: 3017)

10. Venn (Bash Score: 2979)

It’s exciting to see some old and new names in this list! I played in this Bash too, but I could barely crack a score of 2300… Looks like I have a lot to learn from our players.


I know that some players really, really, really like to look at stats after every Bash. So do we! And rather than just report on the top or bottom few Beasties, I figured I may as well just let you all pick through all of it. (Note: Stats are not collected from players who have analytics disabled.)

[h3]Click here for ALL THE STATS![/h3]

There’s a few things I want to highlight, reflecting on how this compares to previous Bashes and reflects our recent changes.

1. Spirit offense is on the rise! We saw a surge in usage for Beasties like Skulkapi, Opposur and Cherrily this time around. With lots of new spirit offense added to the game, it makes sense that players were excited to try out the shiny new toys. But it’s always exciting to see past-neglected Beasties suddenly getting more attention and play.

2. Team diversity is higher than ever. If you compare the top usage stats to our first Bash just 2 months ago, you’ll notice that usage is less centralized around the top most popular ones. Of course some Beasties like Bandicraft, Illugus and Noizard are here to stay, but it’s nice to see a closer race between the most popular species.

3. Trat, Blitzwift, Musselbound and Grazada are being neglected. At this point we shouldn’t be surprised to see Blitzwift and Grazada here, but seeing Trat at the bottom of usage was quite surprising. Perhaps all the Trat fans were on vacation this time. Also, interesting to see Hydrolm drop from top 10 in the first Bash to the bottom 5. But 2.74% isn’t dire usage by any means—in Hydrolm’s case, it may just be a sign of how much usage has spread out among many other species.


We’re going to try something a little bit different. There won’t be any Guilds, but the top 5 most-used Beasties from this Bash are going to be banned! That means these 5 species:

Bandicraft, Noizard, Surgus, Illugus, Hopra

The date for the next Bash will most likely be April 18-19, in 3 weeks. But I will delay officially announcing the date for a little while, in case anything comes up we need to address on the development/update side. I’m giving you all an early heads up so that you’ll have time to rethink your teams, since this theme is going to impact a large portion of our players. It may be challenging, but I hope it inspires even more creativity :)

Happy Bigmoon!

We're back with a few more things squeezed in before the Bigmoon Bash! This update is going live on PC now, and will be live on Mac in 12 hours or so in time for the Bash to begin. This update includes a fixes for existing game mechanics. As such, PC and Mac players won't be able to play together online until the Mac version updates. We will leave the previous version on experimental, so if a PC and MAc player want to play together, the PC player can do it by switching to experimental for now.

[h2]Beastie Art Updates[/h2]
Note: Much more is in production than what is reflected here.

• Wottle: Cleaned up design and sketch poses added. (Also update to Visual Studies)
  
• Platypulse: Finalized in-game design.
  
• Conjarr: Alternate pose when found in the wild
  

[h2]New Features[/h2]

• Challenge Mode Playbook Updates: We updated playbooks on many Beasties in post-game challenge modes to reflect recent balance changes!
  
• Settings Menu Update: Settings are now re-organized into tabs for easier browsing.
  

[h2]Fixes and Other Changes[/h2]

• Adjusted the size of the "End Defense" button when in "Detail View," so Beastie stats are obscured less often.
  
• Fixed an issue with clothing display colors in the outfit change menu
  
• Plays which require a target on the player's bench are no longer selectable if the player has no benched Beasties
  
• Fixed an issue where Angry applied from an ally Beastie during offense would be ignored (this is now possible using Trait Dance on an allied Clamor-trait Beastie)
  
• Fixed an issue with post-game dialogue in Crown Farms
  
• Fixed an issue with blurry team titles text on Away Team Beasties
  
• Conditioning passes are now unselectable in the Gym if the Beastie is 100% coached
  
• The player can no longer receive phone calls while in a post-game challenge, reducing the chance of strange interactions/bugs.
  
• Captain Beasties using Juggle now move their ally to the net, as intended
  
• Fixed issues with the play "Juggle" not showing a proper pass animation
  
• Fixed issue with highlighted text covering a large section of a textbox, such as when displaying team titles, or "Platinum Sponsor"
  
• "Hold to Run" option is now a global setting, like other controller config settings, rather than a per-savefile setting.
  
• Updated some player hair assets
  
• Fixed issues with ranking calculation in the story if the player defeats additional Ranked Bosses after completing a certain story event. Also fixed obscure issues with post-boss scene orders related to this.
  
• A sound is now played when a player joins a private lobby
  
• Fixed a couple potential issues where AI processing could cause a Beastie to become visually highlighted during their selection/processing.
  
• Fixed an issue where multiple Squimages in the player's party could have a certain event occur to them when only one accomplished the conditions for it