Black Reliquary News

Happy New Year! We hope you've had a good start to 2024.
We ended up taking the holiday season a bit easy, but we're back in the saddle now and have been grinding out content.

In this Captain's Log, we'll be going over an intermediary update that we'd like to ship within the next several months, difficulty transparency, and a bit about our 1.0 progress.

[h2]Upkeep Mini-update[/h2]
As we went over balance issues and content blindspots from the previous big update, we worked out a sufficient number of noteworthy improvements and additions that we'll be ready to release in the near future.

We've been developing things not related to the final region, which we'd like to pass along to you all. These would include features such as retuned resistances and skill chances for heroes and enemies to make them more consistent and reasonable, additional enemies to even out the rosters (particularly in the different difficulty brackets), adjustments to various trinkets, both small and very large, some important revisits to ship progression (especially side decks), and other miscellaneous tweaks. Notably, we are heavily rebalancing stress throughout the game. Looking at virtue stacking, enemy stress output, stress distribution, stress healing sources, buffs and debuffs, several districts, and so on!

Initially, we planned to hold off on releasing any updates until the 1.0 release, but due to the prolonged nature of its development, we've opted to release a set of balance adjustments, bug fixes, and new content that the community can enjoy and provide any feedback on. However, some of the new content requires some extensive polish before it's ready to go live, so expect the update in a couple month's time. Due to these changes being wholly separate from the Reliquary, they should make for an entertaining experience.


The Amber Crasftsmen side deck will be replacing the Expeditionist's Workshop. In the interest of incentivizing the player to invest in premium supplies while also making them even more valuable, the Crafsmen's deck will be available, but for a comparatively high price. The Expeditionist's Workshop is being dropped for how powerful it made arch kits as supply items and discouraged their use as curio items. As for disease kits, a technical limitation was in place, preventing their added benefit from being consistently garnered.


In an effort to put more control in the players' hands, we're adding additional trinkets to the list, which will allow players to drastically reduce the wearer's crit intake.
Other trinket changes are piling up but are too extensive to go into here.


The Levantine will now deploy the Sarcophagus enemy, which is chiefly a stress caster that will self-revive once per combat. Persistence will be crucial when taking down this undead sorcerer. The Levantine Sarcophagus will only appear in Champ+ missions.


Deep within the Caverns, the Troglodytes keep their breeding grounds filled with eggs and larvae. Some such larvae possess great potential and are carefully guarded by their kin. If agitated for long enough, these eggs will hatch and reveal whatever horror is gestating within. The Troglodyte Prodigy will only appear in Champ+ missions.

Please note that everything we're sharing here is still in active development, so consider exact values a WIP. Numerous other changes are planned for this mini-update, including much of the content showcased in previous Captain's Log entries, with far more in store for the final 1.0 release.

[h2]Difficulty Clarity[/h2]
Moving forward, we're going to try to be a bit more transparent about the planned difficulty of the mod.
For reference, the only difficulty mode we've added so far is "Reliquary" mode. While this is the "original" setting of Black Reliquary, we intend for the difficulty of this mode to be comparable to Stygian/Bloodmoon with the time and death limitations removed. Black Reliquary was designed for more experienced Darkest Dungeon players. More specifically to provide new challenges and make use of some of the more underutilized aspects of the base game. While this level of difficulty has always been our goal, we have not done a very good job of communicating that in our messaging. Moving forward, we'll be updating our Steam descriptions and some minor game tooltips to hopefully get the message across.

Now, with all that being said, we do plan to release two more difficulty modes for the 1.0 release. One being a "hard mode" for our most dedicated players, and another being something more akin to a "Darkest" mode. The specifics of these mode differences are still being decided as we continue, as these adjustments will not be simple or quick to test.

[h2]1.0 Progress[/h2]
We're still making steady progress towards our 1.0 final release, but it's safe to say it's still a ways out. We are currently wrapping up the common enemies that will be exclusive to the Reliquary region and will be moving on to bosses and quest-related assets. It would be nice to share more about the final region, but we're going to need to keep as many surprises as possible to truly make the end experience worth the wait.



Thanks again for your support and patience,
-Team Reliquary

We're looking for closed testers to help provide feedback on the Black Reliquary Dungeon!
Testers must have a Discord account, Steam account, be highly active and open about feedback, and able to communicate in English.

This will likely be our last recruitment of closed testers.

Application Form: https://forms.gle/YwQXZ3qWmSWkRNff8

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[h3]Happy Holidays![/h3]
The Captain has decided to answer some more community questions, this time with some holiday flair.

Just like last time, we posted a form asking for community questions on our Discord and our Twitter, and the Captain answered a selection of them.

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We hope you have a happy holidays!
-Team Reliquary

We hope you've been doing well! It's been a few months since our last Captain's Log, so we wanted to give an update here before the Holiday season.

This post, in particular, will be going over some larger balance changes, some new Wildlander enemies we'll be adding, and one of the Champ-exclusive enemies. A lot of this stuff is in active development, so not everything here may stay the same.

We're also going to be creating another holiday-themed Captain Q & A video!
You can find the question submission form here:
https://forms.gle/163wYFjAL1bHCfkr7

We were quite pleased with the reception to our last video, and they don't impede the progress of the mod, so we're going to continue to do these every once in a while.

[h2]Ready when it's Ready[/h2]
We've been seeing several rumors/speculations about when our 1.0 release date would be. Most of these speculations are either hopelessly unrealistic (six months or less) or hilariously optimistic (before the end of the year). In our last Captain's log, we listed off all of the features we planned to include and clearly stated that this will be our largest update to date. In addition to this, we also stated that we planned to hold off on giving an official release date until everything in the update was ready to prevent crunch on our end. To meet those standards and expectations, the next update will take a VERY LONG TIME to develop, internally test, and polish, much longer than the aforementioned speculated timeframes. We want Black Reliquary and its conclusion to be a memorable experience, hopefully even as memorable as Darkest Dungeon's ending itself. To accomplish that, this update will be Ready when it's Ready, and we encourage our community to reiterate that message when asked.

[h2]New Wildlander Enemies[/h2]
We're pleased to announce that we'll be including two new Wildlander enemies to the Exposed Interior. These enemies are not difficulty exclusive and look to diversify the threats of Wildlander Faction as a whole.

The first enemy we'll be including is the Wildlander Hecatomb:

The Wildlander Hecatomb was a concept from our previous Wildlander enemy poll. He functions as frontline stress-caster primarily but can apply some hefty defensive debuffs.

When his HP gets low, the Wildlander Hecatomb will make a pact with a member of the ancient pantheon, offering his life to bolster the rest of his team. During his next turn, the Hecatomb will sacrifice himself to provide a strong heal and offensive buffs to his team and may deal a large amount of stress to the hero party (details are still being sorted out).


The second enemy we'll be including is the Wildlander Powderclaw:

This ursine menace is as much of a ranged threat as it is a melee one, firing the cannon strapped to his back during the prep round and launching a payload far into the air.

A couple rounds later, this cannonball will land dealing tremendous damage and applying a stun to the target hero.


[h2]New Champion Exclusive Enemy[/h2]
In addition to the two new Wildlander enemies, we're also ready to introduce the Bristleback Baboon.
This will be a new Champion-Exclusive Wildlife enemy, found only in the Treasury.
The Bristleback Baboon primarily feeds on Cactonids, using its sensitive nose to pick up on Cactonid blossoms to track and hunt its prey.

When found with Cactonids, the Baboon may choose to attack and devour one of them, bolstering its defenses and improving his blighting capabilities.
However, when found with other wildlife, the Baboon may fall into a hungered frenzy and release a blood-curdling howl, debuffing the hero party's DODGE/SPD, and buffing up its DMG/CRT.

[h2]Balance Adjustments - Toning Down Power Creep[/h2]
Overall, we've noticed that many aspects of the mod have steadily power crept (heroes more steadily over time, and monsters a little with each dungeon patch), and we're going to be making some larger balance changes in an attempt to even out the balance a little.

[h3]Resistance Changes[/h3]
A lot of people will be glad to hear this, but we're going to be toning down the scaling on enemy resistances to match hero scaling, having it match Vanilla Darkest Dungeon. We'll be toning down extra status chance on select skills that had their status chances increased specifically to deal with this.
Obviously, we'll likely be heavily rebalancing status trinkets/heroes that were already strong before this nerf.

[h3]Other Changes[/h3]
Of course, we'll still be doing the usual balance to heroes, monsters, trinkets, ship decks, quirks, etc, but we're definitely more focused on nerfing overperformers rather than buffing underperformers this time around.
That being said, balance adjustments overall will take a back seat to the development of the rest of the mod.

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Just a reminder, a lot of what we're showing here is in active development so keep in mind that things may change.

We've also been hard at work sorting out the closed testing for the Black Reliquary dungeon, but as we've mentioned before in our previous post, we're not planning on sharing any details directly related to the Black Reliquary itself before the 1.0 Release goes live.

Thank you all for your support and patience,
-Team Reliquary

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[h3]The Captain has answered questions asked to him by the community![/h3]
We posted a form asking for community questions on our Discord and our Twitter, and the Captain himself answered a selection of them.

Please let us know if you'd like to see more content like this.