Soulstone Survivors News

Hey everyone!

After the Scorching Sands update this last Friday (you can read the full list of changes here), we received a few reports of new bugs and issues that we wanted to address as soon as possible. Today we are rolling out a new hotfix update that addresses the following:

- Minerals now spawn relative to the progression of a match, so the amount of minerals you are able to gather in a single cycle should be more consistent, rewarding faster playthroughs rather than longer playthroughs;
- Increased the chance of Uncommon ores spawning during a match;
Developer notes: The previous system would spawn minerals at a fixed time interval, and based on how far along you were in a match (for example, how many bosses you had killed), the game would favour spawning rarer and rarer minerals. However, this functionality caused a problem, where the most efficient way to farm for materials would be to eliminate 4 out of 5 bosses, and keep running around, avoiding to kill the last boss, in order to farm as many high grade minerals as possible. Now, minerals spawn based on the percentage progression of a map, so if you manage to finish a level in 5 minutes, you will get the same amount of minerals as if you completed that level in 30 minutes, rewarding faster playthroughs which are way more interesting than just running around and trying NOT to kill enemies. In addition to that, Uncommon Gems were rarer than intended, making crafting new weapons challenging for new players.

- New in-game achievements were not properly syncing with Steam Achievements (this was fixed a few hours after the update);
- Fixed an issue where summoned units with a timer such as the Summon Infantry skill did not have their timers reset when they were to be re-summoned in the new system;
- Added more error logging to try and help detect the error around not being able to craft a weapon when you already have all the materials and resources to craft it (if you run into this issue again, please do let us know!);
- Fixed a very rare occurrence where it might have been possible for your own Rot stacks to spread to you, causing massive damage on yourself;
- Fixed the count of negative effects on Bosses not showing on Mac OS;
- Fixed issue with the Elite Snake projectile not interacting properly with the visibility slider;
- Fixed Ice Bomb and Lightning Bomb from Colummeth and Keythaiz having no name or icon on Death Recap interface;

And that's it! While those are relatively small changes, we expect that the Mineral gathering rate will be greatly improved all across the board, and should incentivise a more interesting playstyle than it did before.

As always do let us know if you run into any issues with the game,
Best wishes,
- The dev team

Hey everyone!

I am very happy to announce that we have just released a new update for Soulstone Survivors, the Scorching Sands update! This time around we are adding the remaining rare weapons to the game, offering new play styles for many characters, in addition to a complete refactor of the enemies of the Scorching Valley map, and finally a one-hand only control scheme using the mouse which has been a long time coming, among many other changes!











As with the last update, this time around our focus has been in not only adding new content in the form of a lot of new enemies, weapons and skills, but to also work on some areas that have been pending for a while. A big one is having a mouse-only control scheme to support playing the game with one hand only, which we have promised a long time ago and finally managed to get it in! This update also brings some other quality of life improvements such as the Death Recap screen, UI improvements and overall should make the game experience even smoother!

We are already working hard on some bigger features that will be coming with the next few updates, and as always, we will talk a little bit about what is coming and an overall update on the game and where we are as a team, so if you are interested, check the end of this post! But first... here is the full list of changes!

[h3]New content and features:[/h3]
- 7 New craftable weapons:
Chaoswalker: Firewalker's Spire
Beastmaster: Bonecrusher
Assassin: Grenadier's Mark
Elementalist: Scepter of Flame
Legionnaire: Fang of Vipernus
Necromancer: Noxious Reaper
Death Knight: Last Sentence

- 14 new active skills:
Chaoswalker: Orbs of Destruction, Volcano Eruption
Beastmaster: Brutal Slam, Summon Cave Bear
Assassin: Debilitating Bomb, Fan of Bombs
Elementalist: Ray of Fire, Heat Explosion
Legionnaire: Corrosive Spear, Purging Slam
Necromancer: Plague Rats, Putrefy
Death Knight: Ravaging Strike, Carnage

- New enemies:
The Scorching Valley enemies have been completely revamped and it now has 17 new enemies between regular and elite versions! As mentioned in our last update, all other maps will also be reworked over the next updates until all enemies are unique per map.

- New feature - Mouse Only input:
Now it is possible to control your character only with your mouse if you so wish! Just go into the General Settings menu and turn on "Mouse Only", so you can click to move and dash.

- New feature - Death Recap:
If you are defeated, you can now view the Death Recap window, which shows the last few damage sources you received before being eliminated, which should make it easier for you to understand what caused your demise and prepare for it next time;

[h3]Rune changes:[/h3]
- Synergetic rune now increases the chance of finding synergy type of effects considerably more than before, and has had its extra chance increased from 20% to 25%;

[h3]Skill changes:[/h3]
- Summoned units now receive your power-ups instantly whenever you level up, as opposed to only when they spawned;
- Skills that summon units will no longer kill the units in order to summon new units. They will now fully heal the existing units instead, which should considerably improve the interaction between Cast Frequency and Summon skills;
- Summoned units now inherit the character attributes, skill tree nodes and runes selected by the player (previously they only inherited your in-game power-ups);
- Fixed issue where synergy power-ups were not scaling properly with your damage modifiers, dealing considerably less damage than expected;
- Bear Trap, Explosive Trap, Mine Field, Shrapnel Mine and Void Trap have had their triggering area increased by 100%;
- Acid Rain rot damage increased from 100 to 150;
- Arcane Orb now fires 25% less additional projectiles;
- Arcane Slash cooldown reduced from 1.4 to 1.1 seconds;
- Avalanche damage reduced from 90 to 80;
- Bladed Chakram cooldown reduced from 6 to 4 seconds;
- Camor's Arrow damage increased from 3000 to 4000;
- Camor's Arrow bleed damage increased from 600 to 800;
- Carnage damage reduced from 450 to 350;
- Carnage bleed damage reduced from 720 to 500;
- Chaos Bolt random negative effect potency increased by approximately 60%;
- Chaos Bolt main projectile now also applies negative effects;
- Chaos Totem random negative effect potency increased by approximately 30%;
- Chaos Totem main projectile now also applies negative effects;
- Chromatic Bolt cooldown increased from 6 to 7 seconds;
- Combustion burn damage increased from 70 to 140;
- Demolish now sends its shockwaves in predetermined angles instead of random angles;
- Demolish shockwave damage increased from 100 to 150;
- Demolish shockwave hemorrhage damage increased from 150 to 250;
- Double Slash bleed damage increased from 100 to 200;
- Fire Wall's cooldown reduced from 10 to 8 seconds;
- Fire Wall's burn damage increased from 680 to 1200;
- Flamethrower's cooldown reduced from 11 to 7 seconds;
- Flamethrower's melting damage increased from 75 to 150;
- Flame Wave's cooldown reduced from 8 to 4 seconds;
- Holy Fire damage reduced from 500 to 450;
- Light Beam cooldown increased from 10 to 11 seconds;
- Light Beam total damage reduced from 280 to 200;
- Meteor's cooldown reduced from 6 to 3 seconds;
- Obliterate cooldown increased from 1.5 to 1.7 seconds;
- Poison Bolt poison damage increased from 180 to 300;
- Poison Bomb periodic poison application damage increased from 150 to 250;
- Poison Bomb area increased by 33%;
- Ravaging Strike cooldown increased from 1.3 to 1.6 seconds;
- Reap cooldown increased from 6 to 7 seconds;
- Reap Doom damage increased from 200% to 250%;
- Scent of Blood cooldown increased from 34 to 38 seconds;
- Scent of Blood duration reduced from 10 to 8 seconds;
- Severe Cold now travels a total of 40 meters, down from 60;
- Shadow Bolt doom damage increased from 210 to 300;
- Shadow Grasp area increased by 20%;
- Shadow Orb now fires 25% less additional projectiles;
- Shadow Spike cooldown reduced from 6 to 5 seconds;
- Shadow Spike damage increased from 230 to 250;
- Shockwave damage increased from 250 to 400;
- Shockwave Totem hemorrhage damage increased from 200 to 300;
- Suction Bomb's area increased by 25%;
- Threshing Blast cooldown reduced from 6.5 to 5.5 seconds;
- Throw Axe hemorrhage damage increased from 300 to 500;
- Thrust bleed damage increased from 120 to 200;
- Thrust tooltip no shows the correct damage, from 90 to 120 (actual damage unchanged);
- Thundering Slash extra damage per stack reduced from 25 to 20;
- Venomous Strike damage increased from 120 to 150;

[h3]General changes and fixes:[/h3]
- Proper controller support added to the Curses interface;
- 14 new achievements, related to the new weapons and skills introduced in this update;
- New soundtracks for the Scorching Valley map;
- End Game interface has received multiple visual changes in addition to the Death Recap button;
- Dashes no longer accumulate with your current speed, having a more stable and predictable travel distance;
- Fixed an issue where in very specific scenarios, when you took an endless portal, certain power-ups would not work as expected;
- Fixed an issue with certain projectile skills both from the player and enemies, where they could incorrectly be causing damage twice in the same target;
- Fixed Ray of Doom not counting properly the number of enemies hit during a match;
- Fixed an issue where certain skills such as Flamethrower, Flurry and Bladestorm were limited by the framerate of the game, meaning they would deal less damage than expected in extreme scenarios;
- Fixed Arcane Blade tooltip displaying the wrong damage number;
- Fixed a few issues with Arcane Shield damage calculations, which in some cases would deal less damage than expected;
- Fixed an issue with Arcane Shield where the health of the shield itself could "critically strike", having considerably more health than intended;
- Fixed Arcane Shield tooltip which had the wrong parameters being affected by the Potency modifiers;
- Increased the visual indicator of Aelfraed's Shield Bash skill;
- Fixed a visual issue where sometimes a new skill would not show instantly in the Power Up list;
- Fixed a visual issue where some gameplay labels would not appear on Mac OS;
- Multiple localization issues have been addressed;
- Fixed tons of minor issues and polishing touches across the game;

[h3]Community Events:[/h3]
Every couple of weeks we run suggestion events on our Discord (https://discord.gg/5RcXb8attT), where the top community picks make their way into the game, so if you want to help us shape the future of the game, be sure to check these out!

In addition to that, today we are making the first ever Community Build Highlight! We pick a cool build submitted by the community, try it ourselves and showcase it on our official YouTube channel! You can check out the first highlighted build below, the Bear Enchanter!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

If you'd like to see more build highlights, or submit your own build, drop us a comment on the video above and check out the description to see how to participate! And, if you have suggestions how it might be cooler to continue this series, let us know!

[h2]Developer notes[/h2]
As always, in the bottom of every update we like to go a little bit into detail about what is coming to the game, what is going on with our team and what you can expect moving forward!

[h3]Map Diversity[/h3]
This update takes another step into ensuring that each map plays and feels different from each other. We are continuously adding new enemies until all maps have unique challenges and will continue doing so not only with enemies but with bosses and challenges that are exclusive to each map as we continue moving forward.

[h3]But again... what about our excess resouces?[/h3]
As mentioned in the previous update, we do have a system in the works which will allow you to use those precious materials to enhance and customise even more your builds and characters. We were hoping that we would have been able to get this new system implemented into this update, but unfortunately, we still have a few things left to do on our end, and we decided to postpone it until the next major update. It is still our number one priority for new content in the game, and you can rest assured that it is coming!

[h3]New Game Modes[/h3]
Another major feature that we are starting to develop and add into the game are new game modes. We see the current version of Soulstone Survivors as a very solid foundation, but, with soooo many possibilities to explore that it is hard to contain our excitement! We believe that with the basis we have today, one of the coolest ways we can continue expanding the game is adding new ways to play the game, some of them can be simple rule changes, some of them can be considerably different game modes with different objectives, ways to gain power and entirely new ways to build your characters from the ground up with every match. The idea is that you will be able to play only the way you want to, and no game modes would be mandatory, as we believe Soulstone Survivors is all about having a good time and exploring crazy power and builds in just a few minutes.

[h3]New Developers[/h3]
As of the middle of March, we finally finished our hiring process, and I am happy to announce that new developers will be starting with us in the beginning of April! We met a ton of amazing people along this long process that took over two months and literally hundreds of hours of work, and I am super excited to have new folks joining our team! These extra hands will allow us to not only speed up development of new content but also start working on more ambitious features that we had on hold for a while, so expect some big news in the coming months!

[h3]Next Steps[/h3]
I hope that all the above gives a little glimpse about future content and directions we want to go with the game. We will continue releasing major updates not only as we move towards the full release, but honestly, we have so many ideas that we can try and create that we see all we have today as just the beginning. We are in it for the long haul, and we are taking steps to make sure we can keep supporting the game for years and years to come.

And finally, to close off this wall of text haha, I just wanted to once again thank you, very very much for the support so far. We are extremely lucky to have such an amazing community with us and we don't take that for granted even for a moment and will continue working as hard as we can to make the game as good as it can be.

Thank you for inspiring us, we hope you will enjoy this update,
Best wishes,
- The dev team

Hey everyone!

We have just released a minor hotfix update after yesterday's big update Omen of Spring (read more about it here), and in reality it is only to fix 3 issues:

- Crafting the 3rd Spellblade weapon would not grant the achievement on Steam;
- Heartrending Strike would remove all stacks of Bleed, but not convert them into Hemorrhage;
- Lock feature would sometimes work inconsistently, sometimes being consumed, but without locking the item;

And that's it! I thought it was a good idea to make an announcement just in case you find it weird you get a minor update on your side!

As always do let us know if you run into any issues with the game,
Best wishes,
- The dev team

With the release of the newest update, Omen of Spring (you can read all about it here), a new secret has been found. Are you brave enough to disturb the unknown forces of the void in exchange for power?

Enjoy the special decorations of the Ritual of Love event, which runs from Feb 13th until Feb 26th and introduces 3 new unique Seasonal Skills that once unlocked, are available forever!

PS: The secret will be available permanently, even after the event is over!

Hey everyone!

I am happy to announce the newest Soulstone Survivors update, Omen of Spring! It has been a long time coming, but it's finally here, with new skills, weapons, secrets, and a ton of quality of life improvements and features that were in our list for a long time! Here is the highlight of what you can find inside!















The focus of this update is not only adding new content to the game, but start acting on the topics we mentioned previously. First, we continue adding new weapons and skills that offer new playstyles, along with major balance changes and even the redesign of a negative effect. Second, we are starting to build the diversity of enemies per map we have promised for a while, starting with the Whispering Grove but soon expanding to all maps. And then finally, adding new challenges and continuously improving the existing content, interfaces and visuals of the game.

There is still a lot coming and a lot of hard work ahead of us, and we will talk a little bit about next steps at the end of this post, but first... here is the full list of changes!

[h3]New content and features:[/h3]
- Ritual of Love Event: 13 Feb - 26 Feb
Find new secrets in the heart of the woods and unlock unique skills, if you can! Secret will be permanently available in-game.

- 7 New craftable weapons:
Barbarian: Tempest Battle Axes
Pyromancer: Shard of Chaos
Hound Master: Heartseeking Rifle
Spellblade: Icelord's Blade
Arcane Weaver: Benedictio, Staff of Dawn
Sentinel: Misery's End
Paladin: Arcane Scepter of Light

- 17 new active skills:
Barbarian: Thundering Slash, Overcharged Strike
Pyromancer: Chaotic Inferno, Chaos Eruption
Hound Master: Precise Shot, Threshing Blast
Spellblade: Arctic Assault, Frozen Blade
Arcane Weaver: Sacred Orb, Celestial Retribution
Sentinel: Obscure Arrow, Void Trap
Paladin: Radiant Light, Arcane Mace
All characters: Secret 1, Secret 2, Secret 3

- New enemies:
The Whispering Grove now has unique regular and elite enemies, together with a new spawning system that should help bring more variety to each run. Over the next few updates, all other maps will also be reworked until all enemies are unique per map.

- New feature - Lock Power:
You can now purchase from the Skill Tree the ability to Lock power-ups a few times per run, so if you get more than one amazing choice in a single level up, you can lock one, pick the other, and then on your next level up, learn the power-up you locked before;

- Exposed and Vulnerable redesigned:
Increases direct damage taken by up to 8% for 6 seconds. Bonus is proportional to the damage caused by each attack. Vulnerable also multiplies that bonus by 2 on critical strikes.
Developer's note: The intention with these effects was always to focus on heavy hitting, slower attacks, but with the current mechanics they are too unpredictable and hard to use. We believe this implementation will provide a good synergy that can make heavy hitting skills such as Glacier, Savage Strike and others perform much better, while offering virtually no improvement for fast hitting skills such as Beams, Flurry, etc;

[h3]Rune changes:[/h3]
- Mastery runes can no longer grant you skills from weapons you have not unlocked yet;
- Made it so Critical Mastery rune now also considers bonuses from Dazed and Disoriented into its extra critical damage calculation;

[h3]Skill changes:[/h3]
- Made it so you can now cause a multi-critical attack if your critical chance is high enough, applying the critical damage modifier multiple times;
- Fixed an issue where Brittle would not apply to negative effects such as Burn, Poison, etc;
- Brittle is no longer over-influenced by skills that scale with different attributes, such as Shield Bash, and now provides the intended damage bonus;
- Smoke Bomb is no longer affected by Damage and Critical modifiers, since the skill does not cause damage;
- Fire Orb, Ground Slam and Heavy Strike are no longer available and might return officially at a later date;
- Arcane Beam damage per tick reduced from 50 to 30;
- Arcane Beam now applies Exposed with every tick;
- Arcane Blade damage per stack reduced from 50 to 30;
- Arcane Missiles now applies Exposed;
- Meteor damage increased from 400 to 500;
- Meteor Burn damage increased from 200 to 250;
- Meteor cooldown reduced from 7 to 6 seconds;
- Meteor Shower damage increased from 100 to 300;
- Meteor Shower Burn damage reduced from 200 to 180;
- Meteor Shower cooldown reduced from 10 to 8 seconds;
- Fire Wall Burn damage increased from 480 to 680;
- Fire Wall cooldow reduced from 11 to 10 seconds;
- Fire Bolt damage increased from 200 to 250;
- Fire Bolt Burn damage increased from 300 to 360;
- Flame Wave damage increased from 150 to 300;

[h3]Enemy changes:[/h3]
- Made it so the reach of Gammuth's Flamethrower damage area is aligned with its visual area;
- Fixed an issue where the Elite Snake's poison spit might not hit the player when it should;
- Fixed an issue where enemy Void Hunters could become unresponsive if they were stunned by certain skills;

[h3]General changes and fixes:[/h3]
- New additional soundtrack for The Whispering Grove;
- New toggle added to Level Up screen so you can automatically skip Active Skills once you have created your perfect build;
- Added option to disable New Objective Warning messages such as "Eliminate a Lord";
- The game will now let you know how many hidden achievements you still have to complete in the Achievements screen (but not how to complete them);
- Achievements Screen controller navigation now properly implemented, together with other improvements such as filtering for only incomplete achievements;
- You can now purchase skills from the skill tree by double clicking with the mouse;
- Fixed an issue where multiple player skills were not affected by effect visibility settings properly;
- Fixed an issue where Beam and a few other skills in extreme scenarios could become framerate limited, dealing less damage than they should;
- Fixed an issue where the Corrupted Death Knight's Poison Bomb would not show on the ground if you had your visual effects set to the minimum;
- Fixed issue where Bumble's Frost Aura would not appear if you had your visual effects set to the minimum;
- Fixed Scroll area in Crafting panel which was going over the designated area;
- Fixed a few instances where Tooltips could remaing on-screen indefinitely;
- Fixed an issue where if conditions were right, you could pull scenery objects from the Dungeon of Despair that shouldn't be movable;
- Fixed an issue where the Winter Holiday Defeat sound effec would play outside of the event window;
- Multiple UI improvements across the game;

[h3]Community Events in Discord:[/h3]
We are back to running community events in our Discord (https://discord.gg/5RcXb8attT)! These include feedback events where players send in suggestions about a theme for the game, such as new skills, new runes, new characters... and vote on the suggestions they would like to see in the game, and the top rated suggestion gets implemented in the game! We are also planning a Developer Q&A and of course, we are always hanging out, so come and have a chat with us if you got any questions or would like to know more!

[h2]Developer notes[/h2]
As usual, we aim to include a brief section discussing the update's details, so without further ado, let's delve into a few topics!

[h3]Growing Team[/h3]
This update is landing a little bit later than what we had initially planned, but for a good reason! As we have mentioned in our previous update, we are working very hard on expanding our team a little bit more to allow us not only to deliver bigger and better updates, but to start thinking about more ambitious features we might have ruled out at first. Since last update we received over 500 job applicants (which is mindblowing!) and spoke to so many awesome people already, that its hard NOT to get excited about the future of the game! However what that means right now is that we are investing quite a lot of time into finding the right people, but truly believe this time will pay for itself very quickly in the months to come!

Still on this subject, we are happy to welcome our first new team member, Juan Paixao, a brillian programmer that started with us for a little over a couple of weeks and is already responsible for a lot of the improvements in this update! It's great to have you on the team man!

[h3]Map Diversity[/h3]
This update brings the first step towards improving the gameplay diversity between the maps with new common and elite enemies in the Whispering Grove, but our goal is that every map will have a completely unique set of enemies. As we have mentioned before, this is an ongoing work that will be done little by little with every update to the game, so rest assured that these enemies are just the beginning!

[h3]What about our excess resouces?[/h3]
We know that some of you are out there hoarding thousands, even millions of soulstones and materials and thinking... but what do I do with all this stuff? And... we might have something for you, soon! We have a completely new system in the works that will give you a good use for those materials, and... ah you know what, we will talk about it in more details on a post of its own =P but rest assured that we are working on it!

[h3]Next steps[/h3]
As mentioned above, our next big priority for systems is a way for you to spend your excess resources that does not feel grindy, but instead gives you something cool to try and experiment with. We are hoping to officially introduce this system in the next update which we are aiming for some time in March, along with new skills, weapons and enemies as we continue to move towards the completion of our roadmap and more!

There is still a lot we want to add to the game, so many ways we can continue exploring, and you can rest assured that we are still super excited about all that is coming. I know that sometimes we are a bit quiet, and that some people will get nervous about when the next update is going to be... but we are at it! We are growing the team and taking the steps so that we can continuously support Soulstone Survivors for as long as we can, and we are always around, here, on Discord, should you get any questions!

Finally, I just wanted to thank you all for the amazing support once again, developing Soulstone Survivors has been an amazing journey so far, with a lot of hard work and late nights, but just getting all the amazing messages, emails, telling us stories about things you like (or dont like!) about the game... make all the effort worth it a thousand times!

Best wishes,
- The dev team