Cogmind News

Beta 8 is feature complete :D

It's not ready for release just yet, but a feature freeze is in effect as it goes into final testing. The next release is dubbed "Forbidden Science," and you'll be able to get your hands on this science when it releases the morning of February 12th (my time, which means the evening of the previous day for many players :P). I'll also be getting back to streaming that day and/or the day after.

Today I've got a batch of feature demos to share, mostly interface-related, along with art and other news.



The main new content for Beta 8 having been completed a couple weeks back, since then I've been able to turn my attention towards smaller matters, like a collection of UI options and other QoL features to continue improving the experience. Here we go...

Machine hacks now have context help via the usual right-click or A~Z:



This puts the system on par with the item/robot stat info and the robot hacking system in terms of QoL, and could be useful for new players or infrequent players who may have forgotten certain effects :)

By request, the part swap menu includes a remove button:



With that we'll have five different methods of removing a given part, because having options is nice!

The part swap menu also now shows disabled parts in orange, and includes manual tags added to unidentified parts (which originally only showed in inventory and the item info page):



The advanced autoReadyLauncher option has been super useful since introduced in Alpha 12, and now there's its opposite, autoUnreadyLaucher, to reactivate all weapons when a launcher is removed:



It's a common tactic to only attach a launcher to deal with a specific situation, then swap it out after firing--together these options remove most of the other commands involved in that process.

Active streamctrl robot hacks display a range within which you should stay to avoid losing control of the robot:



We've got three different advanced options for how to display Cogmind's part loss directly on the map: blinking red, blinking red `X`, or part's name in red:



Currently there is no explicit on-map display for that information to avoid potentially interfering with other indicators or tactical information nearby (plus we already have that info reflected in the log, sfx, and parts list), but this could be a pretty useful feature for some players, especially given that the majority of the combat focus has been designed to center around the map view.

Countdown timers for fabricator and repair station processes remain visible outside of FOV! \o/



There's also a log message reporting completion if not in view. Originally the machine would only showed this info while in view, but sometimes it could take a while to finish and players often prefer to leave the area and come back later, but would then be forced to calculate out the approximate turn on which it would be finished. Certainly always showing the info is better, though this wasn't done originally because it's a lot more work to separately record and display hypothetical information! I.e., the machine could be disabled or destroyed but you're not supposed to know that unless it's in view, and it has to keep displaying information as if it were still processing.

Quite a few times I've received requests for an in-game real-time clock. I've held off on it for a while since I wanted to be sure of where it could work in the HUD, and now it's found a home:



It's optional (off by default), and there's also a separate option to show a real-time run timer, for the real-time speedrunners out there.

Energy-adjusting utilities now factor into the HUD's net energy readout:



The Scan window also got some updates, including a new option to have it only show what's currently under the cursor (or kb marker), rather than the usual behavior of retaining the last object shown.



This is not default behavior, however, since keeping persistent data visible has the advantage of not losing that reference info simply by moving the cursor to perform other actions. Not to mention persistent robot scan info will update their heat/integrity values as they change, if they're still present in the window at the time, without having to put the cursor back over them or use some other method to check.

Speaking of easier access to object info, you'll no longer have to open solid terrain info to check its armor value, which appears under its name in the Scan window:



I didn't do this originally because constantly updating the Scan window as the cursor moves around would be really distracting, but later realized I could both avoid that annoyance and provide the info by only loading the terrain info after a short delay! So the cursor/keyboard marker has to be stationary for 500ms before it will show armor for that space.

Machines and other props will also show their armor value in the same place! Remember that you'll probably still want to take resistances into account before attempting to destroy something, but this is a good general reminder and should save some time.

The threshold for overweight calculations is now inclusive rather than exclusive, so everyone gets +1 support before going double/triple/quadruple(?) overweight...



Maintenance intel markers were switched from green to gray, so that they can be easily distinguished from Terminal markers:



I originally chose green since all the maintenance bots themselves are green, but Terminals are also green so if you have both types of intel it can be hard to spot the Terminals unless you deactivate the maintenance intel. In any case, gray is also a reasonable color for a neutral party.

The very last thing I did for Beta 8, since I had some extra time, was add a pair of new alien artifacts for fun, and science :)





The last couple weeks of dev also involved some dedicated bug fixing, clearing out all the reports since Beta 7.

None were very difficult, although for one in particular I added a visualizer for the Entity (robot) spawn blocking layer of generated maps to confirm a suspected cause of unintended behavior. Technically, on maps belonging to 0b10, most armed enemies are not allowed to spawn within a certain distance of the starting point, but UlyssesB shared a screenshot of exactly that happening on the very first floor. This occurred right around a special encounter room (the part cache), so I initially thought it was simply not blocking spawns to that room. But the engine blocks all random spawning in those areas, so that couldn't be it... Then I checked the actual spawn order and noticed the patrol spawn location (based on its leader) wasn't even in the room itself as I'd thought, but just outside it. This particular encounter happens to clear away the nearby wall as part of its behavior, so what had happened was it cleared the wall, opening the way for a patrol to spawn right there where the wall had been!

The visualizer showing a patrol spawning next to the player:


(the squad leader spawned as the middle 's' there, and the others appear next to them since they're not constrained by that particular spawning rule)

Anyway, in the end the solution was to just additionally spawn-block any walls that are opened up (normally cells that start as walls don't need to explicitly block spawning since walls block spawning anyway!). For comparison this is the fixed version on that map:



And it's a good thing I had a visualizer because the initial solution I coded worked in this particular case but wasn't implemented well enough and still left a potential hole for different patrols (which I wouldn't have noticed had I not activated the visualizer again to look at the results).

For devs, the less here is that data visualization are super useful :)

In another recent happening in dev land, this isn't a bug but more a development goof, but check out this interesting looking "map"



This looks absolutely nothing like what was supposed to happen, but during my first attempt to enter a new area I was working on, something went wrong and I ended up in that place. It was supposed to be a certain static environment, but instead I got a sparse and windy weird cave system.





@nyrdal shared some really cool fan art depicting my winning ninja melee build streamed back in October:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy3_B8Qg4BY

And Zyalin has graced us with some Beta 8 hype art:



It's based on this song.

Fellow roguelikedev and Cogmind player VedVid pointed out last week that Poland's largest gaming portal did a quick video on "Games without graphics that will consume your life" xD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd_nbgvE-Zg

Cogmind is in there, along with other well-known roguelikes such as ADOM, Dwarf Fortress, and Caves of Qud.

And that's it for today. The next announcement will cover the true meat of this release, as we give you... FORBIDDEN SCIENCE!

A note about SITREPs: These are regular progress updates where I often share features coming to the next release, but aren't actually in game yet. Public releases get their own dedicated news announcement and changelogs/release notes, for example with Beta 6 and Beta 7.

There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums or r/Cogmind.

Welcome to a new year of Cogmind!



It's been so long in the making I've started to have visions of even grander major updates, and we end up getting Cogmind 2019, Cogmind 2020, and so on until my permadeath, ha.

In the New Year's spirit I streamed Holiday Mode last week on January 1st, building around a very specific weapon available that day (and on New Year's Eve), the RPDS. Some very potent fireworks were on display, including plenty of unnecessary carnage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7eXYtwqp-k

It was an interesting time with different challenges from a more regular run.

FYI an RPDS does... this :D



Or in ASCII:



Remember you can turn back your system clock to start a run on one of those days (or any of the other Holiday Mode days--potential drops are described here), and this feature will be available until the next release.

Note that even now that the event is over, the "ELF" variant bot is still in the regular game. That was an oversight while putting together the new build, in that the regular game picked up on that new bot and replaced the usual Saboteur class Imp with the ELF. Oops xD. They have the same loadout anyway, it's just a different name. Don't let their elfish charms disarm you--they're just as deadly and scary as Imps ever were!



For a long time now I've wanted to do a video that demonstrates how to reliably get through the early game, since it's not all that hard but some players have trouble figuring out how to overcome the various challenges there and end up either having to switch to another difficulty mode or playing the majority of their runs in the early game, which honestly is just the very tip of a much more varied Cogmind experience!

Once you're good at it the first few floors only take maybe ten minutes as you prep for the mid-game challenges, so I wanted to share some of the main tactics that ensure you'll make it through. We've had some other early-game tutorials on video before, but I wanted something of my own that I covered what I thought was most important.

Well we can check that off the list :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml0to9JTQqw

I streamed "Pwning the Early Game" this week, and already a bunch of players have been finding it useful, so that's reassuring.

Although I normally talk a lot of strategy in my streams, this was quite different from the usual since it was focused purely on the essentials for the first floors. I first spent about half an hour describing most of the main UI and basic mechanics, essentially an intro to the game, then did a slow run through the first several floors, talking about strategy, combat tactics, and different robots, systems, and AI. After that I concluded with four more quick runs through the early game, putting everything learned into action to reliably reach Factory. (There are time stamps in the YouTube description.)



Well, speaking of the early game... let's talk a bit about Beta 8! Why? Because that's its biggest area of focus :D

I haven't really talked about it yet, and while I want to wait until the main announcement to go into details, it's relevant here so let's go.

With Beta 8, in the the early game you'll often have a way to find unique items, and these items can affect your entire play style, if not for an entire run then at least for a while. I mean I guess even regular items and prototypes (and especially artifacts) can already do that for you, but any time unique items are added this is a chance to provide opportunities like that.

For example, among the new items that are being added, there's the PSU Rigger. As per its name, it can be used to rig any power source to explode like a proximity mine. This one's going to be pretty fun to use :D



I can already smell the cheese connoisseurs approaching now...

(Aside: I've actually teased this item in a couple previous screenshots, that and other Beta 8 features, and it's fun to do this without talking about them to see if/who notices ;))

This kind of stuff has always been part of my long-term plan for Cogmind (because having worked on it for over five years now we're apparently not quite yet in the "long term" xD). Basically expanding the game with new ways to experience and interact with the same world, adding smaller amounts of content with outsized impacts on a run, ableit optional, of course. I have tons more item concepts and avenues for obtaining them in various parts of the world, but these things will be introduced over time, mostly after the actual 1.0 (assuming I can still afford it :P).

Now don't get too excited about the Beta 8 gear--you won't be able to pick and choose items, but I can guarantee there are going to be some fun and interesting new experiences coming.

Work on Beta 8 has been pretty smooth lately, just time-consuming as there are some rather complex additions for this update. Some random dev snapshots...

Visualizing the ambient sound from a new area:



Hm, a curious new UI animation, what could it mean? :)





I was chosen for the "Best Developer" award by Spitball Sessions! You can read about that here, and check out their GOTY 2018 podcast. I am honored, and will continue trying to do my best :D. Thanks to everyone for your support (and reviews! they really keep the game going in Steam's algorithms so that I can add more features rather than having to worry about wrapping it up sooner).

And if you're using Proton to play Cogmind, it'd be great if you could contribute to the database.

I guess this is also a notice for those of you who didn't already know: Although Cogmind isn't marked as supporting Linux on Steam, manually activating it for Steam Play does allow you to purchase and download and play normally! There shouldn't be any issues as I've fixed the few Wine-related bugs on Cogmind's side before it even came to Steam, and have added other QoL features specifically for Linux players. (If you do run into the no audio issue there's a workaround--not sure if they've fixed that in Proton itself yet.)

The biggest "Other News" we've got here is that we'll be going on our annual family vacation next week for winter/Chinese New Year. I really wanted to have Beta 8 out by now, but it's still not there yet. Being out of town for a few weeks I won't be streaming for the next month or so, and although it's a long "vacation," technically it's more of a workcation since I'll still be setting up office and doing a fair bit of regular work on Cogmind as well.

It feels really good to be caught up on all the personal and/or non-Cogmind things that were getting in the way these months, though, and to have the Roguelike Celebration behind us, since that trip and preparing for my talk and all the other related work really ate up a ton of time and resulted in the additional backlog of other chores I had to get out of the way xD

A note about SITREPs: These are regular progress updates where I often share features coming to the next release, but aren't actually in game yet. Public releases get their own dedicated news announcement and changelogs/release notes, for example with Beta 6 and Beta 7.

There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums or r/Cogmind.

Hope you're all enjoying the latest special release! The timed event has been in progress for 9 days now, but there are still 4 more to go. Since the original announcement was cryptic to avoid spoiling it, today I thought I'd cover a bit of what's included.

The original plans for this mode were somewhat different, as I started imagining elaborate possibilities via scripting and new NPCs with dialogue and whatnot. But I didn't want it to siphon off too much time from Beta 8 development, so scaled it all back to something much more manageable--a bunch of new themed items in the starting area. In the end it took just a day and a half to set up Holiday Mode and add 17 new parts, some with completely new mechanics. (There was also a little visit by an NPC on 12/24, which some players apparently noticed ;))

When you wake, the Scrapyard is filled with Presents.



These essentially work like Scrap found in the caves, in that you can step on them to search through (open!) them and see what's inside.



Here's a list of possible unique presents that appear in various combinations on different days, along with their description:

• Vacation Slip ~~ Everyone needs some time off occasionally.
  
• Tree Searcher ~~ Ah, that feeling when you find the perfect tree... then hack it down.
  
• Elven Gift Factory ~~ Unlimited surprises await your enemies.
  
• Gaudy Lights ~~ They can't hit what blinds them!
  
• 5A-N7A's Little Helpers ~~ Very helpful for you. Not so much for everyone else.
  
• 5A-N7A's Bag of Holding ~~ Don't worry, everything gets bigger again when you take it out.
  
• 5A-N7A's Eye ~~ Spot all those naughty bots from afar.
  
• 5A-N7A's GPS ~~ 5A-N7A was using GPS before there was GPS.
  
• 5A-N7A's Snowblower ~~ Ho ho ho!
  
• RD-1PH's Nose Cone ~~ Being nosy is half the battle.
  
• Winter Coat ~~ Warm and fuzzy. But more importantly, immune to all those pesky programmers who are most definitely not on vacation even though they should be.
  
• Striped Cane ~~ Peppermint is good for making friends. Or with a huge amount you can also pound bots into scrap.
  
• Black Coal ~~ Drop this to the ground and run. Don't look back. You have 10 turns to escape the blast radius (8). So naughty.
  
• Propulsion/Utility/Weapon Slot Expander ~~ Yeah you'll get more slots later, but early presents are good presents.
  

There are other cool presents as well, but they're not unique to the holiday build so aren't listed above.

Various gifts in action...














I've arranged it so that during these final four days all the unique event-only items from the previous will also appear again at some point, in case you missed any.

That said, there is also one item which has not yet appeared on any day! It's also probably one of the greatest. This item will appear on both 12/31 and 1/1, to welcome the new year the only way we know how ;)

Although score data from the event is not being included in the leaderboards, since the lore and achievements you collect during the event do contribute to your player history, Holiday Mode can give you a leg up (or offer new strategies) going after some of the really hard achievements, or exploring more challenging areas of the world. So it's a good opportunity for that, in case you're not using it like this already :P

As stated before you can technically access this event later once Beta 8 is released by rolling back to a previous branch, but if the intent is to contribute to your player data you probably wouldn't want to that too far into the future since it could erase other gains you might've made. (On the other hand if the intent is pure fun then yeah, it'll always be accessible for that :D)

Earlier I mentioned the speed with which this release was put together, and there were some funny side effects of the haste... As a special event on a separate branch of the game without a need to future proof the work, adding content was much faster, but also meant that I wouldn't bother to extensively test all the potential related effects. Quality control was limited to testing individual items to make sure they at least performed as advertised.

Well, the game picked up on the ELF being a variety of Saboteur and began dispatching ELFs along with assaults instead of the usual Imps, which is kinda funny but appropriate (as appropriate as being attacked by an ELF during the holidays can be, anyway :P). Vacation Slips allow you to step outside the normal flow of time, but by doing that it turns out there's no energy generation or heat dissipation and you have to manage as best you can like that for 50 "turns" (they're still good, and at least it's interesting trying to take advantage of them with certain builds!)

These are the only two issues I know about, and are the kinds of things that normally would've been caught within a day of public testing, but I wanted to surprise even testers with this build, too :)



This week I streamed Holiday Mode, and my normal stream time happened to fall on December 25th so we got to use a somewhat larger selection of Fun Stuff. I focused on the Elven Gift Factory, essentially creating a hovering "Christmas Trapper Build."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6xuoGI62fo

The end part is spoilery since the run headed into part of the extended game, but there's no spoilers elsewhere, mostly just fun and games :)

Actually, the stream even started out with some fooling around in the Scrapyard. You don't normally get such powerful scanning gear in the starting area, so it was interesting to watch the tunnelers at work, then lay a bunch of traps for our uninvited guests...



I'll be doing another Holiday Mode stream next week at the usual time, this one with a dedicated "RPDS build" :)

Last week the Gunslinger run came to its epic conclusion. The final day was super spoilery, but it was by far my highest scoring run ever (115k!). Many robots were harmed in the making of that video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5ML6Gzrc3E

It was so epic I ended up doing a full writeup anyway (with images).

In People Who Aren't Me Streaming Cogmind, check out this great clip from one of MTF's runs xD. So perfect.

And in the last SITREP I mentioned Gold Plated Games' first playthrough of Cogmind. Audish does an annual review series of various roguelikes called "Roguemas," and he selected Cogmind to try among this year's batch, so it was cool to finally be a part of that. His review is here.

While on the subject of reviews, I should mention that POYLBOT-7, the free Cogmind-like I released earlier this year, made a Best Free Games of 2018 list on PC Gamer, so that was pretty cool :D





There's not as much progress to show now, since I'm working on the main plot of Beta 8 (i.e., spoilers :P), though here are a couple things...

I needed to debug a new mapgen feature, and that required having a visual way to quickly tell one cave from another as far as the generator was concerned (for some special cases where logically separate caves might be directly attached to one another), so I added that in real quick.



I've never done a visualization like this but always wanted to after seeing so many other devs produce pretty color-based ID systems. Doing this is pretty easy: Just use HSV coloring and start with a low hue, then increase the hue for each subsequent object by some static amount for each one. Knowing the number of objects in advance also makes it possible to prevent colors from overlapping, since the hue interval can be set based on that known.

For something else I was working on recently I had to look into historical bug reporting figures, and came up with some stats:



There's the Top 10 earners of "bug points," based on some macros run on changelog data. Since the first release in 2015 there have been 460 total reports (including duplicates and simple things like typos, but also of course some major stuff as well) submitted by 118 unique players. These figures exclude the outstanding issues to resolve for Beta 8, which aren't in the changelog yet but I'll be getting to them all at the end of this dev cycle, as usual. Thanks everyone for helping making Cogmind be the best it can be!

The next SITREP will be on 1/12, when I hope to bring to you... I don't know what since I'm working on secret stuff in the meantime, but I guess I'll have to just do some non-secret stuff so I have at least something to show :P

A note about SITREPs: These are regular progress updates where I often share features coming to the next release, but aren't actually in game yet. Public releases get their own dedicated news announcement and changelogs/release notes, for example with Beta 6 and Beta 7.

There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums or r/Cogmind.

While the great Beta 8 is still under construction, in the meantime I have something else special for you! In fact a lot of special stuff...



Effective immediately through January 1st, 2019, every day Cogmind will feature different new content, much of it with a notably holiday theme. There are 17 new unique parts, among other "gifts" :D

Unlike my normal announcements I won't be listing the content or showing any screenshots/gifs here to spoil it, but there's some really fun stuff (including new mechanics). Some of the content is randomized in case you start more than one run in a single day, though the majority of the brand new stuff is organized and defined by date. All of the special Holiday Mode content is available right from the beginning of a run though, so there's no going out and searching for it--start up and see it right away.

Much of the content for this update is actually special parts that will only exist for this release, accompanied by a number of rare or unique items that can be found elsewhere in the world of Cogmind but that you may not have encountered before. You'll be able to distinguish between the two because the former don't have unique art, instead using a common placeholder (you'll know it when you see it :P). You don't have to worry about collecting the temporary parts for your gallery (since they won't exist in future releases), although you can technically use this opportunity to help flesh out your gallery of other parts, and of course get further or to new areas with the help of some of these amazing new toys.

Technically you can skip ahead in this event by changing your system date, but in the manner that we normally treat spoilers in the community, if you do this please don't openly share advance info on future content with others in case they don't want to know yet.

• This version's saves are not compatible with the original Beta 7.2 (the save version had to be increased in order to allow this update to add a bunch of content). As usual you can just finish your current run before updating, or if on Steam and it automatically updated yours you can use the legacy branches to roll back and finish your previous save/run first if you like (or do it later).
  
• You CAN earn achievements while this mode is active! This might be another reason to play it ;)
• Holiday Mode does not upload scoresheets (these runs will therefore not appear on the leaderboards).
  
• Holiday Mode is incompatible with challenge modes (if any are active, the challenge takes precedence).
  
• Holiday Mode ignores the advanced quickStart option.
  
• Holiday Mode will automatically activate for new runs started in this 12/20~1/1 period, but requires that you've played at least 10 runs before! We wouldn't want to confuse new players too much :P. If you haven't hit the 10-run requirement and want to force Holiday Mode anyway, you can run Cogmind with the "-forceHoliday" command line parameter. Note that even then it still requires that you've done at one run behind the tutorial mode, having made it to the smaller version of the Scrapyard (technically you can get around this requirement as well by turning off the tutorial in the options, but I wouldn't really recommend jumping right in to the special mode without first having done a few regular runs to learn the basics!)
  
• If it's activating automatically but you want to play "regular Cogmind" during this event period, run the game with the "-noHoliday" parameter to turn it off (or, again, roll back to the previous release via its legacy branch).
  

You may notice the version number is still Beta 7.2. That's because this special release was developed using a completely separate branch of the game, as this allowed me to prepare this for you all very quickly without worrying about taking my normal (internal) steps to future proof the whole thing with good documentation and clean code. Despite the amount of stuff in here, it only took a day and half :) (Don't worry, though, I did test everything and it seems to be in working order!)

So this is technically not the same branch that Beta 8 is being built upon, and this content and other related changes made to the game to support it will disappear with the next release. There is no changelog--as far as future players are concerned, it never happened ;)



The opening area might be a bit overwhelming. To quickly get set up, you could follow these general steps:

• Open up everything you see
  
• Attach any alien artifacts (these are consumables)
  
• Fill your power and propulsion slots (try to avoid using airborne propulsion, though you can stash it away for later)
  
• Attach any Storage Unit(s)--there'll be at least one lying around (and maybe a special one!)
  
• Collect most utilities and weapons (especially any that are clearly new and use the placeholder "holiday art" I mentioned earlier)
  
• Go have fun!
  

Note that a small portion of the items may not be amazing, since those are randomly chosen from among existing items, but a lot of the items for each day were handpicked, especially all the special new ones.

Thanks for being a great community, enjoy the holidays :D

Art, mechanics, streams, IndieDB Top 100, long lost friends... the year ain't over yet!

Quite a few new items coming to Beta 8, still adding yet more:



Most of these were actually appended to the art preview selected for the "Year 5 of the Cogmind" annual review, though one of those is previously unseen.

While we're looking at art, check this out:



Anyone remember what that is? After its removal back in early 2016, it's finally making what is likely to be a much-anticipated comeback among players who've used it before ;)

I've been working on a whole bunch of stuff for Beta 8, though most of the new content is under wraps until the release. Instead I can show this mysterious animation as updated for compatibility in optional low-contrast modes:



But there are also some interesting new mechanical developments to get specific about. Let's dive right in...



I always wanted a simplified propulsion system in Cogmind, which is why from the very beginning (2012!) propulsion itself has had no mass, regardless of whether active or inactive. This makes it much less complicated to juggle even more propulsion considerations on top of all the other parts you have to think about.

Of course it also resulted in the interesting side effect of so-called "propulsion armor," or sometimes attaching useless deactivated propulsion simply for its coverage and integrity. As a pretty unique quirk to Cogmind's systems that you can learn to use to your advantage in some situations, I've never felt a strong need to do anything about it.

Then suddenly some weeks ago I wasn't even thinking about this topic (or even propulsion) at all and for some reason the idea of adding a "drag" mechanic popped into my head. I liked the principle of having inactive non-airborne propulsion slowing down flight and hover, and started to like it even more as I continued thinking about how this could indirectly help further differentiate treads and aid heavy combat builds. With a new mechanic to limit certain kinds of propulsion armor and the potential for temporarily cheesing tread-specific benefits, treads could be buffed such that it's easier to make extremely "tanky" builds with lots of treads, which almost become a build's armor, among other benefits.

So all treads, legs, and wheels will come with a new stat, "drag," which kicks in only when these parts are inactive while airborne. Note the addition of a new stat here doesn't lengthen the item info, just takes the place of the "mod/extra" stat where appropriate ("mod/extra" is only used for airborne propulsion, so that same stat slot for non-airborne propulsion is instead "drag," essentially how some weapons may have a Heat Transfer stat or a Spectrum, but not both). Also note that drag values are not all over the place--they're actually static by propulsion type.

Now, balance-wise, the idea behind drag is not to prevent propulsion armor completely (in which case it could just be blocked!), but instead simply have a speed cost associated with it, one that some players might be willing to pay under certain conditions.

Here's a demo of the mechanic in action:



As with any brand new mechanic, we'll have to see how everyone responds with their builds, but in short, treads will become that much more unique (especially compared to legs, which have always offered similar capabilities), and propulsion armor won't be so common anymore. (Drag will not impact core movement, by the way!)



Drag is liberating. It's introduced a lot of design freedom to make treads shine at what they should do best: Enable you to effectively crush hordes of bots. (Okay well literally crushing them under your treads is already possible, but you know what I mean :D)

To that end, treads will be better putting their generally massive integrity to work protecting your other parts, gaining about 40 coverage each. This pushes average tread coverage much closer to that of light armor, and armored treads will be about on part with light armor in terms of how well they shield other parts.

On the offensive side, each tread slot gives a 2% bonus to accuracy. So the average tread build will have something like 6-8% better accuracy for all weapons, or even 10%+ for those going with a truly tanky build using a greater number of treads defensively as well (or to carry a ton of stuff--we might be seeing more... really heavy stuff in the future ;)).

Treads will also have a reduced overweight penalty (though still not as good as wheels).

In the end there are a lot of strategic implications here. As a combat player I know I can't wait to take a Beta 8 tank out for a spin :P



Over the past couple weeks we've had several people stream their first runs of Cogmind, with the community around to help and enjoy that initial experience all over again.

Tone, a seasoned roguelike player generally found playing NetHack, streamed his very first Cogmind run while myself and a bunch of other Cogmind players were hanging out there for much of it. Here's the first day, and here's the second. (I hear the videos will probably be up on YouTube later, at which point I'll update with more links.)

Although it was his first run he, uh, won :P. Many (most?) viewers had already won before so there was certainly a fair amount of backseating, but it was a fun slow crawl spanning more than 13 hours (unusually long for a Cogmind run, but the whole thing was all streamed, after all, and he was learning on the way). It also got plenty hairy in a few places. First run and all :)

I also continued my ongoing stream run this week, Part 3 of Cogmind the Gunslinger:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJqjn1qOW8E

WARNING: Unlike most of of my streams, the entirety of Part 3 is super spoilery--front to back special late-game events and branches.

The stream actually included a first for me as well, as it headed into one of the few areas of the world I've personally never explored before!

During Part 3 I achieved the bounty set by MTF, who challenged me to confront a certain rare late-game enemy. True to his word, MTF immediately purchased 4 copies of Cogmind to hand out on stream :D (MTF says this might happen again in some future run, I'll just have to keep my game in top shape, unlike my earlier RIF stream which got crushed late in Factory before I could reach the bounty location xD)

While watching the stream, Zyalin drew my combat build, with a twist :P



Zyalin says:

This is Bounty-Bot-7
made up from a recycled sentry core
Upgraded by the powerful KYZ-Guidance-Unit for real-time insider knowledge
and comes with a Backseat-Mounted MTF-Combat suite for maximum bounty potential

Last week Gold-Plated Games also checked out Cogmind for the first time, with both myself and the community in tow (unexpectedly :P). Fun times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cagixNfrTi4



Thanks to all of you who voted, Cogmind is in IndieDB's Top 100 :D (for the fifth year in a row)

Voting for the Top 10 started this week (and votes have been reset), but I don't think it's really worth bothering to compete against the really big mainstream games for those slots. Anyway, you can vote again and/or check out all the other indie games.



Steam's Winter Sale is coming up next week, and as usual Cogmind will be 10% off. (Not 25% like last year--Valve doesn't plan to feature Cogmind on their front page like they did last time, so as per my promise I'm sticking to only 10% discounts during EA.) Of course the discount is mirrored on both Steam and my own site.

The sale isn't the only thing coming up next week though. Stay tuned for something special for everyone ;)

A note about SITREPs: These are regular progress updates where I often share features coming to the next release, but aren't actually in game yet. Public releases get their own dedicated news announcement and changelogs/release notes, for example with Beta 6 and Beta 7.

There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums or r/Cogmind.