Wildkeepers Rising News

Our BIGGEST Update Yet!

[p][/p][p][/p][p]Greetings Wildkeepers,[/p][p][/p][p]Welcome to 0.4. I know it's been a while since the last update, but that's only because this is by far the biggest update we've shipped yet![/p][p][/p]

Gear Up

[p]The main star of this update, as promised in the roadmap, is the introduction of Gear. [/p][p]Here's how it works.[/p][p]As you play missions, you'll collect pieces of gear. Those are permanent, so you keep them after the mission is over. In the village, you can examine your gear, upgrade it and equip it to both Wildkeepers and Guardians. [/p][p][/p][p]Each piece of gear can be equipped to every Wildkeeper and every Guardian simultaneously, so nobody is going to miss out.[/p][p][/p][p]Gear pieces fit in a single slot, either a helmet, a chest slot, boots, a weapon, ring, necklace, or even some food, a book, a potion and a trinket. Wildkeepers and Guardians have different slots.[/p][p]Gear combines with the previous Meta-Upgrades system to provide you with more choices than ever to strengthen your team as you progress through the game. Most gear pieces can be made stronger by upgrading them with the appropriate currency. Where will you spend it?[/p][p][/p][p]At this time, there are a total of 76 different pieces of gear, each with its own functionality. [/p][p]And if you've been playing a while and worry about having to go back and farm for gear, worry not. The game will award you some gear when you open 0.4 based on your existing progress, so you're all ready to go![/p][p][/p]

Quality of Life

[p]Working on Gear, we've had to play the game a lot to make sure it feels fun and balanced, and that has also led to the introduction of a few Quality of Life and polish updates:[/p]

[p]Difficulty selection is now presented upfront, and all difficulties are unlocked from the start. You get to decide what level of challenge is right for you.[/p]
[p]In spite of adding power with the introduction of gear, the first two difficulty levels remain almost unchanged, but we've made Ridiculous and Ludicrous difficulties even harder, and levelling up will also be slower.[/p]
[p]The tutorial for using Supers has been updated, to ensure nobody misses it[/p]
[p]Upgrades (both individual and team upgrades) can be enhanced, increasing their rarity. You can get enhancements by equipping the right gear.[/p]
[p]DPS numbers no longer include the damage dealt by Sigils, now it's only direct damage by the Wildkeeper or Guardian. You can still see Sigil damage in the tooltip for each weapon Sigil.[/p]
[p]Wildkeepers will grunt when hurt, so it's easier to tell when you're taking damage.[/p]
[p]The icons in the minimap are bigger and sorted properly, so they're easier to see.[/p]
[p]Guardian icons in the minimap look red when the Guardian is fainted.[/p]
[p]We improved gamepad controls a lot:[/p]
- [p]A visual cursor is now drawn over buttons and other UI elements, making it clear what the selection is[/p]
- [p]Added acceleration when using the analog stick to move the cursor[/p]
- [p]Button prompts are presented contextually right next to the UI element they affect, besides also appearing in the bottom right of the screen[/p]
[p]Polished the UI with the introduction of stat icons, making it more visual[/p]
[p]Guardians in the inventory will look red when fainted, and you'll be able to see the revive timer.[/p]
[p]The map screen can be scrolled by dragging with any mouse button (besides moving the cursor to the edges)[/p]
[p]Infested Mounds will no longer show up as an objective arrow unless they are, in fact, a mission objective.[/p]
[p]The Infested Mounds mission has been moved to the right side of the bridge. It's better for players to focus on releasing Guardians at the beginning, and now the mounds can be anywhere in the level.[/p]
[p]Wildkeeper collision is now disabled while dashing[/p]

[p]And a few balance changes:[/p]

[p]Buff Kerpi:[/p]
- [p]He received 20 block, to make him more durable[/p]
- [p]His ball drops a heart on every bounce when thrown[/p]
[p]Nipper's revive upgrade has been made stronger[/p]
[p]Kiraboom will no longer try to pick up hearts[/p]
[p]Grampth will stay a bit closer to you[/p]
[p]Devouring Tree's health has been cut in half[/p]
[p]The Sacrifice Sigil has been nerfed to only absorb 50% of the damage[/p]

[p][/p]

Some Technical Stuff

[p]Up until now, we had been running on version 5.4.4 of Unreal Engine. It was time for an update, and we upgraded it to the very latest version 5.6, released just a few short weeks ago.[/p][p]This version should introduce bug fixes and performance improvements, and make it easier to port the game to console as we approach full release.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Another change we decided to implement is to go back to using DirectX11 for rendering. While DX12 offers an opportunity for better performance in some cases, this is mostly true if you use all the latest features in Unreal (Nanite and Lumen), which we don't really need for this game - and which would negatively impact the overall framerate, especially on older hardware.[/p][p]With the rollback to DirectX11 we also hope to remove hitches due to PSO caching which, even with the mitigation approaches provided by Unreal Engine, seemed to be causing problems for some players.[/p][p][/p][p]As with any technical changes, there's always risk something can go wrong, so let us know in our Discord if you encounter any issues. [/p][p][/p][p]And with this, we're deep into the next update, which we expect to be even BIGGER than this one, if you can believe it. Which is why it might take a while, but until then we hope you have a chance to experiment with gear and put together some crazy powerful combinations. I know we have.[/p][p][/p][p]Sergio.[/p]

Hotfix 0.3-1655 patch notes

Hotfix 0.3-1655
- Fixed Goblin King's name in Sanctum Endless mode
- Fixed typo in Spanish translation

0.3 Update - Endless mode and Accessibility

Greetings Wildkeepers,

These are exciting times: on Monday we're participating in Steam's Creature Collection Fest, with our largest discount ever, 20% off - make sure to let your friends know!

And this is the absolute best time to play Wildkeepers Rising, as we just released an update that adds a new mode, some necessary accessibility features and a bunch of bug and balance fixes. Let's dig in.

Endless Mode

Did you finish the campaign and hunger for a new challenge? This new mode is for you.

After beating the boss in each environment, a new mission will unlock, that lets you play for as long as you can stay alive. And the rules are a bit different:

Monsters get stronger over time, receiving periodic upgrades to both their health and damage.
After a warm up period of 3 minutes, you play a 10 minute run, then fight the boss, and the cycle repeats, indefinitely.
The max level cap of 10 is gone, you can continue to level up and upgrade your Wildkeeper and your Guardians as much as you want. Keep in mind though that some specific upgrades do have limits.
You can equip 3 sigils per character, so all of the sigils you collect (at levels 1, 5 and 10) can be equipped simultaneously.
Chests also replenish after beating the boss, so you can keep piling up team upgrades.

A side effect of working on Endless mode has been a redesign for how Block and Dodge work internally, so we can scale them infinitely. Previously, the game would simply add the % for block/dodge, as you got upgrades. The issue is that once you reach 100%, you become invulnerable - no good. Now, there is a block value that is not a percentage, but is used by the game, with a non-linear transformation, to calculate a % that keeps increasing, but never quite reaches 100%. We're also using the same logic for other stats, like chance to freeze.
You'll see both numbers in the pause screen and in any upgrades, so hopefully it's both clear and detailed enough.

As part of our testing we also found that certain status effects become too powerful when faced against monsters with large damage and health, so we scaled them down a bit, as enemies get stronger:

Freeze chance is lower
Stun and hypnosis duration is also lower

In practice, we've found that in Endless mode you can end up with an extremely powerful team - but the monsters also become more and more challenging, providing an interesting back and forth. As usual though, as we play more and we hear from you guys, you can expect many more balance changes and tweaks.

And of course, this mode also supports harder difficulties, that you can unlock by reaching 24 minutes in normal difficulty (which will also award you an achievement per environment).

We feel Endless mode is perfect for experimenting with team compositions and synergies, and also for challenging yourself not only to see how long you can survive, but also to do it under weird circumstances (we know some of you want to try solo runs, so I'm curious to find out how those will turn out).

Accessibility

Just as important as a new mode (and for some people even more) is making the game accessible, so that as many players as possible can enjoy it.

Already in version 0.1 we added some basic options for remapping controls, but we've taken it to the next level with 0.3. That said, we haven't been able to implement every accessibility feature that we considered, so this is a topic we might revisit in the future (do let us know if there is something we missed).

First, if you just want to enter a zen state while monsters fight in an explosion of color, but don't want to worry about challenge, we have added "Accessible Difficulty". Once selected, all other difficulty options disappear, and monsters get severe health and damage handicaps, letting you enjoy the game without worrying about losing.

Visually, we realize the game is extremely fast and busy, and that might make it unplayable for some people. So we added some options to try to tame down what's going on:

Camera shake can now be completely disabled.
White Guardian outlines can be enabled to make it easier to keep track of your Guardians
Monsters flash white when hit - this can be toned down or disabled.
The screen also flashes red when the player receives damage - you can control the intensity now.
The big one is all the visual effects: explosions, beams, magic indicators, etc. We spent a lot of time adding controls so you can adjust the opacity to make them much fainter, improving the visibility of everything else. We didn't go as far as disabling them completely, because some of them are used to indicate critical information (like sigils auras) - this is something we may revisit in the future.

The last accessibility area we touched in 0.3 is color. Let me start by saying that we designed Wildkeepers Rising from the ground up to not rely on color exclusively for any of the information you need. Even so, some things might blend too much for people with color blindness, so we took advantage of the excellent support that Unreal Engine provides to adjust the colors of the game. You select a type of color correction and then you can adjust the intensity to match your preference. We don't have the bandwidth to create bespoke versions of each of the items that might be hard to see for each type of color blindness, so we hope this solution can provide enough of a benefit to include most people - especially on top of our initial design to avoid color information in critical areas.

There is one area that we didn't have time to include in 0.3, but has been frequently requested: automatically triggering supers. We consider this an accessibility issue, and one we'll deliver in a future update - together with a longer post with a comprehensive explanation of our rationale for this feature.

Lastly, all of the accessibility features are available as well in the demo.

Others

Well, that was a lot of stuff, but wait, there's more.
Here's a long list of fixes and tweaks in 0.3:

Double Super fills Volcoy to 1, instead of 3 (so you can wait a bit longer if you want a stronger pack member)
Increased Wally's super cooldown from 15s to 24s
Maximum area bonus increased from 100% to 150% for all Wildkeepers
Ophelia's base damage reduced from 12 to 10, dash cooldown increased from 2s to 3s
Ophelia's Critically Active crit chance reduced
Double Super chance lowered from 50% to 25%
Fix bosses taking advantage of meta-upgrades like Block and Dodge %
Fix how aura's size bonuses are applied
Fix Shiver's aggro max value
Carn's damage increased from 30 to 35
Fix Volcoy's pack count after teleporting to the boss

The final update I want to mention is visual improvements to the results screen. We've also added information about the mission you just played, so you can get a screengrab and brag to your friends about your epic run in Endless mode:

[h2]The Road to 0.4[/h2]
I'm going to let you in on a secret. What's in 0.3 is not everything we've been working on since 0.2. The truth is that a lot of the work has gone towards our upcoming "gear" feature, that we hope will give you with a lot more options and variety for the meta-game. Stay tuned, as we're continuing to develop it at a rapid pace and we hope to release it for 0.4.

In the meantime, let us know what you think about 0.3, what you'd like to see in 0.4 or anything else in our Discord channel.

See you all there.

Sergio.

0.2 Update - New Playable Character

Greetings Wildkeepers,

It's been a bit over a week since we launched in Early Access, and we couldn't be happier with how the game has been received.
Many of you have written to say you're enjoying the game, and many others have come forward with excellent ideas and suggestions. Please keep them coming!

Today, we're releasing our first update, and it's a big one.

[h2]Milo Ironjaw[/h2]
With this update we introduce our fourth Wildkeeper, Milo Ironjaw.
He'll become available after beating the second boss, and if you have done that already you should have seen his silhouette in the Village, and you'll be able to play with him immediately.

As you can tell from his image, Milo is a melee character with a big hammer for AoE damage. We designed him to be rewarding to play, every time that hammer crushes monsters!

Milo's presence also means you can complete the current set of 80 achievements - but we'll certainly add more in the future.

[h2]Feedback Implemented[/h2]
We pay very close attention to every piece of feedback that comes our way, be it from the Steam forums, our Discord, the feedback forms or even content creators uploading videos on YouTube.

It's not always possible to fix everything immediately, as we're just a small team of two. So these are the areas we've prioritized for this update:
[h3]Slime Horror boss fight[/h3]
We collect anonymous data from the game, and we knew that this fight was a bit too easy. Also, people were reaching the level cap quickly and running out of chests, and it wasn't as exciting as we had hoped. So we've decided to shorten it. For now on, it will be only 10 minutes long, but it's all compressed, so you get to fight the same waves, only they're ramping up more quickly.
[h3]Difficulty[/h3]
It's very hard (no pun intended) for us to figure out what to do with difficulty. Overall, we try to make the baseline difficulty fairly accessible, with options to ramp it up if desired, and we think that's working fairly well. That said, we've made a couple of adjustments to missions in the Sandsea, where our data was showing that there were too many attempts being failed, and hopefully that will smooth things out a bit.
[h3]Smack and Friends[/h3]

Ah, the health-poopers. Either you love them or you hate them, they don't leave anybody indifferent.
Again using our data we saw that in general they have low pick rates, and there were suggestions to combine them in a single choice, so we've done exactly that. Once you unlock Spark, Fleck and Tweak, they'll join Smack in the Guardian selection, and if you pick the group you'll then be able to choose which of them you want.
[h3]Murkle[/h3]

So a bit of background on this one.
One of our original design goals with the game was to make you have to think about the space around you, in part to push back a little against the auto-playness that bullet heavens tend to have. That's why we designed Murkle's super to shoot only to the left - in many runs having Murkle means that I always try to keep the enemy to my left, if possible, and that adds some spice to the gameplay.
However, many of you feel cheated that he can't use the super to shoot everywhere, and you have been vocal about it, so we changed it. Starting with this update Murkle's super can go in either direction - depending on where he's facing when you trigger it.

[h2]Others...[/h2]
Besides everything you've read so far, there are a few other smaller updates in this version:

Korin's Steady upgrade has been replaced with a simpler Attack Size upgrade, with no condition. This should help make him more powerful.
The Sigil/Guardian selection screen had an exploit where if you clicked quickly to either Reroll or another option you would get both. No more.
We implemented some fixes to the Simplified Chinese translations.
The anonymous analytics package has been updated, to fix some issues. This will allow us to get some extra data that we'll use to further balance the game.
The email checkbox in the Crash Handler is off by default now. Frankly, we saw someone complain about this but it's not even our doing - we're just using what comes with Unreal Engine, and we have no access to any email addresses, either through this or any other means.
The combo box in the Settings menu can now scroll, so you should be able to select a Fullscreen resolution properly.

[h2]What's Next?[/h2]
We're already hard at work on the next update. We do have some ambitious plans though, so that may take a while. In the meantime, we'll probably release an interim update with some more fixes and quality of life improvements.

And if you're enjoying the game, I would ask that you leave us a positive review here on Steam. It really helps us, this game is only possible because of your support.

Sergio.

Wildkeepers Rising blends survivor-like bullet-heavens with creature collection for lots of chaotic battles

Available now in Early Access on Steam, Wildkeepers Rising is one of the latest to attempt to put a new spin on the popularity of whatever genre we're calling things like Vampire Survivors today.

Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/04/wildkeepers-rising-blends-survivor-like-bullet-heavens-with-creature-collection-for-lots-of-chaotic-battles/