Crab Champions News

Thanks for all the community feedback on the last update- I've made some fixes and improvements based on it! 🦀

[h3]General[/h3]

• Added cactus destructibles to the Desert biome
  
  [h3]Balance Changes[/h3]
  
• Double destructibles (both combat and reward) spawn in the Desert as most islands there are quite open and bare
  
• Totems are both more likely to initially spawn AND are more likely to spawn in groups
  
• Shop prices have been decreased by 25% but scale a bit more sharply when looping (so building into economy becomes more important in the late game but shops are more accessible in the early game). Greed loot now is worth exactly the same as Epic loot
  
• Slippery Slope now scales with each island similar to the Paycheck buff in the previous patch. It gives more than double the amount that Paycheck does so I’ll keep an eye on it in terms of balance. Also added total crystals gained stat for Slippery Slope in the inventory UI
  
• A lot of players have mentioned that they are seeing too many duplicates (loot with a + over it that is something you already have in your inventory) too early on in a run which pollutes chest choices so the initial chance for finding duplicates has been lowered
  
• Armor now gives enemies less health and reduces elemental damage by 50% instead of 75%. This should make fighting heavily armored enemies with elemental builds feel much less tedious
  
• Elemental enemies now take 50% less debuff stacks of that matching element (down from 75% less stacks). This means Fire Crabs or Poison Ants now will feel more consistent to fight with fire / poison builds
  
• Elites now have 25% resistance to elemental debuffs (previously 0% resistance) and Bosses now have 50% resistance (previously 75%). These changes will make elemental builds much more consistent across elite and boss fights, notably the armored ant boss which could take forever if relying on an elemental build
  
• Elemental enemies matching element resistance decreased from -50% to -25%
  
• Previously, enemy attack and movement speed increased by 1% with each island. This didn’t really end up feeling very noticeable so it now is applied per loop instead for a more noticeable jump in challenge (the values are unchanged from before, just applied at a different time)
  
• Scorpion health buffed by 25% (for such an intimidating enemy, they were blown away too fast by most builds- the previous nerf hit them a bit too hard)
  
• Scorpions no longer spawn on the Volcanic biome as there were some islands that felt unfair for them to be on
  
• Scorpions can no longer be shielded
  
• Fire Pumpkins now have a longer time between attacks, making it less likely that the entire floor gets covered with fire
  
• Grub health reduced by 25%
  
• Removed smaller Desert islands from the elite island pool as these could create unfair fights in cramped spaces
  
• Vitality and Second Wind now show if their damage bonus is active or not in the inventory UI
  
• Hitmarker audio lowered further as it was still quite grating when a lot was going on
  
  [h3]Buffs[/h3]
  
• Explosive Armor radius doubled
  
• Flammable Armor radius doubled but fire stacks reduced from 75 to 25 (since the previous patch allowed it to damage the armor owner, it became a bit too strong)
  
• Fire Shot fire stacks increased from 25 to 30
  
• Dual Shotguns damage increased from 5 to 6
  
• Auto Shotgun damage increased from 3 to 4
  
• Rocket Launcher damage increased from 30 to 35
  
• Burst Pistol number of shots per burst increased from 4 to 5 and clip size increased from 24 to 30
  
• Auto Rifle fire rate increased to be more balanced with the other starting weapons
  
  [h3]Nerfs[/h3]
  
• Starting health reduced from 400 to 300 (the mega buff to starting health ended up removing the danger of the first biome, making the early game feel a bit free and making building into health less important)
  
• Similarly, hearts had gotten buffed too much which often made choosing health perks feel like a waste. New values:
  
  
  1. Bronze Heart: From 150 max health down to 125 max health
     
  2. Silver Heart: From 400 max health down to 250 max health
     
  3. Gold Heart: From 1000 max health down to 650 max health
     
• Due to the way that the Ring Of Precision was calculated, it actually added more critical hit damage than intended so has been reduced from +250% to +150% critical hit damage
  
• Ring Of Defense damage reduction reduced from 50% to 40%
  
• Coral Amulet extra chest pickups reduced from 3 to 2
  
• Tony’s Amulet extra shop options reduced from 6 to 5
  
• Grappling Hook damage reduced by 50% as it was dealing double the damage of the Grenade ability while also providing big movement gains- this melted through elites in the early game and wasn’t intended to be so strong for single target damage
  
  [h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]
  
• Fixed annoying bug that caused Limpets to become invulnerable whenever frozen, leading to dragged out fights in certain cases
  
• Fixed Giant Ant homing attack that could go invisible but still deal damage
  
• Fixed Bouncing Shot incorrectly calculating damage that could lead to millions of damage out of nowhere
  
• Fixed bug that occasionally prevented the Burst Pistol from firing when using Autoloader
  
• Fixed non hosting players not seeing Nest health bars updating correctly
  
• Fixed Glass Totems being destroyed by Aura perks or Powerslide
  
• Fixed Ring Of Rocket Jumping not working with the Cluster Launcher
  
• Fixed issue that could prevent the game launching with Steam correctly which would break multiplayer invites
  
• Fixed various cases where UI text was getting cut off
  
• Removed broken Demolition nest UI counter
  
• Fixed several rare crashes
  
• Fixed longstanding bug that caused totems that dispensed loot or secret chests in shops to have a far greater luck value than intended, leading them to constantly spawn Epic and Legendary loot which could create broken power spikes. Also fixed Driller and Rare Treasure loot drops being influenced by Streamer Loot which only should affect chest loot
  

[h3]Difficulty scaling improvements[/h3]

• Enemy damage bonus when looping has been removed. There was previously a whopping +100% damage multiplier to all enemy attacks when looping from island 33 onwards which created very unfair situations where enemies would melt your entire health bar in a second, especially with fire. Enemy damage should feel much more fair and consistent when looping while still being a challenge- looping is meant to be quite difficult
  
• Enemy spawn bonus when looping decreased from +33% to +20%
  
• Islands 1 and 2 of a biome no longer can spawn two waves of ranged enemies back to back
  
  These changes should make looping feel far less unfair / punishing while maintaining the challenge
  
  [h3]Scorpion mega nerf + rebalance[/h3]
  
• Scorpion projectile damage reduced by 60%, projectile radius reduced by 33%, projectile speed reduced by 15% and removed projectile bounces. Also reworked their attack patterns to be more dodgeable and less spammy
  
• Increased scorpion walk speed slightly: it should now feel like more of a close / medium range threat and less of a run ender
  
  [h3]Other changes[/h3]
  
• Flamethrower buff- now starts with level 2 Fire Shot (up from level 1)
  
• Rebalanced enhancements: pattern enhancements like Chaotic or Spiraling have less intense motion to make them less likely to miss their target. Enhancement damage increases are +50% damage other than Sticky and Damaging which are +100% (previously Damaging was at +400% which was very broken)
  
• Splitting / Scattering bonus projectiles decreased from 3 to 2 (as it was extremely broken with some combos)
  
• Fixed issue that would cause projectiles created by the Splitting and Scattering enhancement to apply ALL weapon mods to those enhanced projectiles, resulting in extreme damage spikes that weren’t intended
  
• Demolition nests now scale health more with the island count as they became far too easy to destroy past the first biome
  
• Scorpions can now spawn from red challenge crystals
  

RELICS

ENHANCEMENTS

SNIPER REVAMP

NEW WEAPON: MARKSMAN RIFLE

DESERT BIOME

NEW ISLAND TYPE: DEMOLITION

INVENTORY STATS



GENERAL

• Added 30 Relics to the game. Relics are a new loot category that are found under Perks in your inventory. They can only be picked up once (can't be leveled up like perks) and have powerful effects such as being able to rocket jump. There were quite a few perk ideas that weren't fun to level up but were fun as a once off pickup so this loot category nicely fills in that gap.
  
• Added new mechanic: Enhancements: In Tony's shop you'll find an Enhancement totem which allows you to randomly roll powerful enhancements on mods and perks that previously only could be leveled up in a linear way (Dagger Arc, Mace Shot, Bubble Blast etc.). This allows for a fun new layer of buildcrafting and experimentation when at the shop: choosing to buy new loot or instead going for an enhancement
  
• Added new biome: Desert. This has now been added to the biome list per run so the amount of islands per biome has been reduced by 2: 8 islands per biome and 4 biomes per run. 32 islands for a regular victory and 64 islands for a Diamond victory. There are many more unique islands, enemies and songs planned for the desert that'll get added in future updates
  
• Added new enemy: Scorpion
  
• Added new evolved enemy variant: Elite Pumpkin
  
• Added new island type: Demolition: Destroy all enemy nests to complete the island
  
• Added inventory stats (both core stats like Critical Hit Chance and Global Damage as well as per-loot stats for certain perks like Assassin to show how much extra damage has been added by this perk overall)
  
• Added 2 new songs
  
• Added 4 new skins: Kaleidoscopic, Fake Gold, Vibrations and Focus
  
• Added 6 new rank related achievements: Silver, Gold, Sapphire, Emerald, Ruby and Diamond. These correspond to your account rank which is based on the average rank of your weapons (so if you have mostly Gold weapons, you’d most likely have a Gold account rank). There have been a lot of requests to add a long term goal to work towards and while the account rank system has been in place for a while, there was no real incentive to get Diamond other than for bragging rights
  
• Added new weapon: Marksman Rifle: A hybrid triple barreled scoped rifle
  
• Revamped Sniper with scope, improved visuals and audio and rebalanced stats to feel more powerful. More than doubled damage and increased explosion radius but reduced fire rate. Increased hipfire spread but aiming with the scope is pinpoint accurate
  
• Added new sounds and VFX for the Seagle
  
• Some perks have been moved over to Relics:
  
  
  1. Clearance has been replaced by the Ring Of Value: Shops always contain a pedestal that is 75% discounted
     
  2. Repelling Dash has been replaced by the Ring Of Repulsion
     
  3. Fast Claws has been replaced by the Ring Of Reloading
     
• Increased base walk movement speed slightly to make traversal when not sliding feel less sluggish
  
• As per player feedback, sliding is now more immediate (less acceleration), faster and wears off more quickly so it is much more effective as a short dodge and is more responsive in general
  
• Added the island progression UI to the main gameplay UI so you can now easily check how far into a biome you are
  
• Added Banana consumable that heals for 75% of your max health
  
• Hearts now heal for the amount of max health that they give
  
• Healing chests now contain a minimum of 2 loot choices to prevent situations where you’d get a banana with full health
  
• Added new weapon mod: Boomerang Shot: Shots deal more damage and fly back towards you (Try lining up shots with the sniper to hit the same enemy twice!)
  
• Added new weapon mod: Orbiting Shot: Shots deal more damage but orbit around you
  
• Added new grenade mod: Scythe Vortex: Grenades explode into scythe vortexes
  
• Added new perk: Orbiting Scythe: Gain a short lived orbiting scythe after each elimination
  
• Each “Luck” perk / relic has a specific purpose to build into:
  
  
  1. Rigged Totems = Totem Luck
     
  2. Streamer Loot = Loot Rarity Luck
     
  3. Gold Dice = Mod Trigger Luck
     
  4. Ring Of Luck = Perk Trigger Luck (perk luck was the most broken in the early beta builds but since this is a relic and can only be picked up once, it’s now a fun power spike without completely breaking the game). This does affect critical hit chance- the only perk it doesn’t affect is Bulletproof to prevent being able to become invincible
     
• Added a new placeholder weapon model for the Cluster Launcher
  
• Added FX and a sound when you block damage successfully by dashing (this mechanic was quite hidden in general so now it’s more obvious when you intentionally block damage this way)
  

BALANCE CHANGES

• Lots of pacing + loot balance improvements: the gap between experienced players getting easy snowball runs and inexperienced players being frustrated by RNG was too high and balance was a common complaint. There are now far fewer cases where simply being lucky will be enough to win a run, I’ve done my best to make each run feel much more consistent and power well earned instead of coming down to being randomly very lucky
  
• The Random Islands difficulty modifier is now baked into the game by default (as the variety it brings makes the game more fun and it doesn’t actually add difficulty) and has been replaced with the new Strategic Enemies modifier: More challenging formations of enemies spawn. The main thing you’ll notice from this being enabled is medium enemies sometimes showing up on the first wave of arena islands instead of the usual small easy enemies- lots of new interesting combinations of enemies possible now. This also makes ranged enemies slightly more likely to spawn on Horde islands
  
• Shops now only spawn on the 7th island of each biome
  
• For simplicity, the game now only saves on the first island of each biome rather than halfway through which led to confusion and also opened up a few cheesy ways to get achievements by frequently reloading saves which isn’t the intended design
  
• Waves islands have been revamped: there are now 5 waves total and no small enemies spawn, only medium and hard enemies. The next wave will not start until the previous wave has been fully cleared. This change makes Waves islands feel more distinct from other island types and players should be less likely to take damage from a randomly spawning small enemy and instead take it in a more fair way
  
• It’s now less likely for both portal choices to be Horde islands
  
• I’ve adjusted many specific enemy health pools to better match their type- in general champion enemies (sniper crab, shotgun crab etc.) have a bit more health to better match their category- previously they’d get blown away in seconds along with the regular enemies and this felt like they didn’t live up to their intimidating names. There are now much more varied and enjoyable fights past the first biome instead of aiming at the center of the island and destroying everything in 1 second (don’t get me wrong, this can still happen but just a bit less often)
  
• Key totem cost increased back from 2 to 3 (with more biomes and more ways to get keys it’s more balanced at a slightly higher cost)
  
• Gold Totems now cost 66% of your max health (up from 50% of your max health): it was possible to come across multiple gold totems and become extremely powerful early on- this should smooth out some of those unbalanced scenarios and make choosing to go for a gold totem a bit more impactful
  
• Totems are very slightly less likely to appear (clumps of totems appearing at once could create unbalanced power spikes early on that were completely based on luck)
  
• The Healthy enemy buff has been reduced from +200% health to +100% health
  
• Enemy movement speed on ice has been reduced by 33% as there were situations where enemies could outrun you
  
• Poison Slug explosion damage increased by 33%
  
• Sniper Crabs now have a melee attack to prevent them choosing to snipe at very close range which made taking damage unavoidable in some situations
  
• Grenade Crab projectile explosion radius reduced slightly
  
• Ice Pumpkin wind up speed and damage radius increased by 25% (the previous nerf just made them a free enemy- remember you can block their attacks by being out of line of sight even if you are within their damage sphere)
  
• Ice Pumpkins now start with 3 armor plates
  
• Ice Pumpkin AOE radius has been reduced and they must get closer to begin attacking
  
• Enemies now have less delay between spawning and first attacking on Nightmare difficulty (previously they’d stand around for 2 full seconds after spawning before starting any attacks)
  
• More enemies spawn when looping (once off, doesn’t get added to per loop: it’s the same for loop 1 and loop 50)
  
• Reduced Blocker Crab health but gave them 1 armor plate
  
• Limpets now have a longer vulnerable window but attack twice and have a new arc projectile pattern
  
• Slightly increased Lightning Slug movement speed
  
• Grubs now only have 1 armor plate but move 33% faster
  
• Elite Lightning Crab projectile hitbox slightly reduced and explosion radius reduced by 15%
  
• All elite enemy health slightly boosted to make their fights last a little bit longer and feel a bit more dangerous
  
• Ultra Chaos enemy dash (side jump) chance halved and regular jump chance slightly reduced
  
• Guaranteed more ranged enemy variety (medium and hard enemy waves) to prevent cases where like 20 of the same ant spawn which is less interesting and exciting than an assortment of enemies
  
• Fixed the XL challenge modifier not actually spawning 3x enemies- it now spawns only 2x the amount of enemies to balance as 3x would feel too overwhelming. Also to note: the Explosive Enemies modifier spawns more enemies than before as those islands usually ended super fast without much of a challenge
  
• Regular and Blocker skulls are 25% more expensive to spawn, meaning they’ll spawn in large groups less often
  
• An extra boss now spawns on each Boss island when looping
  
• Ants are less likely to choose far away locations when attacking and will be more close range in general (this is to make clearing islands with a lot of ants less tedious)
  
• Doubled the time it takes for enemies to start regenerating health when the Regenerating Enemies modifier is active
  
• The Armored Enemies modifier now gives enemies 3 armor plates instead of 6 to prevent things feeling tedious in certain situations
  
• The amount of max health lost when the Eternal Punishment modifier is active has been reduced from 2% to 1%
  
• Lightning rocks are less effective as they were able to wipe entire islands almost instantly with very little effort
  
• If playing with all difficulty modifiers enabled on Nightmare difficulty, the difficulty UI text will now indicate that by calling it “TRUE NIGHTMARE”
  
• After lots of playtesting, many mods and perk have had slight “nudges” to their values to get them feeling balanced with all of the above changes: there are too many small changes to list here but you may notice some values being a bit different to before
  
• Since combo can be increased to 8x with a relic, I’ve capped the max combo that affects your score specifically to 5x to prevent high score runs relying on finding a relic
  

BUFFS

• Base player health increased from 200 to 400 and Nightmare no longer reduces starting health: there were too many situations where I was one shot by the second biome that I’d prefer a larger starting health pool that takes longer to whittle down but also longer to heal back up
  
• Bronze Heart max health gain increased from +50 max health to +150 max health
  
• Silver Heart max health gain increased from +100 max health to +400 max health
  
• Gold Heart max health gain increased from +300 max health to +1000 max health
  
• Added more health pickups in Tony’s garden and increased the healing value from 25 health to 50 health
  
• You now start with 1% crit chance by default (so picking up things like Critical Blast or Critical Arrow aren’t a complete waste without finding more crit perks)
  
• Power Punch now multiplies the 200% critical damage bonus instead of just adding a flat percentage to it. Also Power Punch critical damage increased from +25% to +33%
  
• Fixed Critical Thinking not calculating as expected, it now multiplies the final damage output after a crit is calculated instead of adding or subtracting a flat amount. The level 1 damage amount has been reduced from +50% to +33% as it’s now much more powerful. In the old patch if you had 500% global damage and Critical Thinking level 1, you’d end up with 550% damage when landing a crit. Now (even after the nerf), you’d end up with 665% global damage when landing a critical hit
  
• Landmine Shot landmine now explodes after 1 second instead of 2.5 seconds which felt too long in most cases
  
• The chance for duplicate loot to show up in a chest in the endgame (when looping more than once) has been reduced from 75% to 50% so there will be more chances for fresh loot
  
• Autoloader no longer resets the Escalating Shot bonus AND will also trigger On Reload mods such as Reload Arc or Shockwave
  
• Time Bolt and Ultra Shot now explode even if they didn’t hit anything to prevent rare cases where it looked like they should hit but instead just vanished into thin air
  
• Heavy Hitter fire rate reduction decreased from -15% to -10%
  
• Health Shot and Money Shot now affect all damage dealt to enemies from projectiles (including explosions) instead of only counting direct impacts which made them far less effective on weapons like the Rocket Launcher than they were meant to be
  
• Escalating Shot now only reduces weapon fire rate by -33% (instead of -50% previously) to make it more enticing to use on weapons other than the minigun
  
• Reload Arc cooldown reduced from 5 seconds to 2 seconds
  
• Reload Arc and Proximity Barrage projectiles no longer knock back enemies (this sound like a nerf but is actually a buff because it keeps enemies inside of your own damage areas and stops them attacking unpredictably in mid air)
  
• Shockwave cooldown reduced from 4 seconds to 3 seconds
  
• Freezing Enemies, Flammable Enemies, Electric Enemies and Poisonous Enemies have had their radii doubled as they felt underwhelming as legendaries before
  
• All “Storm” mods have had their cooldowns reduced to allow them to trigger much more often
  
• Grenade explosion damage increased from 50 to 75
  
• Grenade Mods now correctly affect damage dealt by damage areas such as the red area left behind by Laser Beam or the Black Hole area while active
  
• Damage Aura damage increased from 2 to 3
  
• Big Hearts has been moved from Epic rarity to Rare rarity
  
• Ice Strike damage increased from 25 to 200 and ice stacks increased from 25 to 75
  
• Fire Strike damage increased from 25 to 200 and fire stacks increased from 100 to 250
  
• Lightning Strike damage increased from 25 to 200 and lightning stacks increased from 50 to 200
  
• Poison Strike damage increased from 25 to 200 and poison stacks increased from 25 to 100
  
• Crystal Strike damage increased from 100 to 1000
  
• Increased Arcane Blast projectile lifetime from 0.66 seconds to 1.0 seconds
  
• Projectiles that pierce can now hit the same enemy twice after a 0.1 second delay (previously they could only hit the same enemy once). This synergizes nicely with Boomerang Shot as you can get double the value for your projectiles if you line them up right
  
• Flammable Armor and Explosive Armor now affect the enemy that was hit and not just nearby enemies
  
• Shops were feeling a bit too expensive on Nightmare and Ultra Chaos so the prices have been reduced by 15%
  
• Rigged Totems has had a substantial buff, previously it was only 10% increased chance which meant a 25% chance totem actually only got upgraded to be 27.5% to trigger which felt quite unnoticeable. It’s now a 25% increased chance AND no longer gets capped at 100%
  
• Critical Blast damage radius doubled and chance to trigger increased from 6% to 15%
  
• Reduced Spore Shot mushroom health by 66% so it should be much easier to explode them now
  
• Spore Shot / Spore Explosion mushrooms once again deal poison damage
  
• Fire and lightning damage now is affected by poison bonus incoming damage- new synergy?
  
• Paycheck no longer gives a flat amount of crystals as this quickly fell off in terms of scaling. Instead it now gives 1/5th the cost of a Rare pickup each island (this value increases after each island)
  
• Dual Pistols damage increased from 4 to 5
  
• Burst Pistol damage increased from 5 to 6
  
• Blade Launcher damage increased from 4 to 5
  
• Cluster Launcher damage increased from 3 to 4
  
• Orb Launcher damage increased from 6 to 8 (The slow projectiles often meant that it just didn’t feel good to use the orb launcher compared to other weapons with faster projectiles so this buff should bring it in line to be a more satisfying choice)
  
• Orb Launcher projectiles now have a slightly smaller radius to prevent them getting stuck on nearby terrain instead of reaching the target
  
• Gold max health rocks can now spawn shards that spawn multiple max health bubbles at once (similar to how it already works with regular green health rocks- stand in the venn diagram of health bubbles for max effectiveness!)
  

NERFS

• Laser Beam ability direct impact damage reduced from 50 to 30
  
• Poison now wears off twice as fast
  
• Link Shot and Drill Shot base trigger chance decreased from 3% to 2.5%
  
• Hot Shot critical hit chance reduced from 15% to 12% (double that of Sharpshooter)
  
• Critical Arrow now is chance based instead of guaranteed to trigger on crit (starts at 12% chance)
  
• Sniper clip size reduced from 10 to 6 and reload time increased from 1.5 seconds to 1.75 seconds (this is due to the sniper revamp making it a much stronger weapon overall so this is more of a rebalance than a nerf)
  
• Health Totems are less likely to spawn and more likely to explode after use
  
• Lava now applies 3x fire stacks in the Volcanic biome (it barely applied 1 stack in the previous update which made landing in lava feel quite free and not a threat at least on the first loop)
  

QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES

• Improved visibility across all biomes including revamping many overly bright or distracting VFX
  
• Hitmarker sounds are now much quieter for fast firing weapons and slightly louder for slow firing weapons instead of being constantly too loud or quiet depending on the weapon chosen
  
• The portal countdown now only starts when the majority of players have voted for a portal to prevent situations where a single player was choosing a portal before the others were ready
  
• Increased crosshair outline size for better visibility on Arctic islands
  
• The pause when losing focus feature is now optional and can be disabled in the settings menu
  
• Spectating has had a number of improvements such as being able to still see all other players and their health bars and being able to cycle through players to spectate instead of being locked on one until they get eliminated
  
• Made several optimizations to prevent non-hosting players from getting kicked from multiplayer games when a lot was happening at once
  
• Optimized performance heavy islands
  
• Totems that require crystals now display how many crystals you are short by
  
• Barrel Explosion barrels no longer get knocked around as much when shooting them so it should be much easier to line up and get them to explode near enemies
  
• Made several performance improvements for projectiles which should help late game performance when a lot is going on
  
• Increased the minimum distance enemies can spawn from you (this should reduce situations where enemies spawn right under you)
  
• Added a sound when players ping
  
• Added support for 3840x1080, 3840x1440 and 5120x1440 resolutions
  
• Aiming field of view (FOV) now scales with the FOV setting chosen in the settings menu in order to feel more consistent across all FOV ranges
  
• Reduced the interaction radius to prevent accidentally choosing a portal when looting chests. Also tightened up the interaction direction threshold so it’s less likely to accidentally choose a pickup to your left or right when trying to focus on a pickup in the middle
  
• Added 8 total bananas on Parkour islands to prevent situations where not everyone would get a banana when playing in a lobby with more than 4 players :(
  
• Driller now takes into account every player in a multiplayer match so it doesn’t matter who breaks each destructible- if one player has Driller equipped, it’ll roll for a trigger
  
• Enemy anti-camping values have been tweaked to reduce situations where they are constantly flying at you and are hard to hit: they now fly at slower intervals but with greater speed so ideally they’ll get back to a place they can walk faster than before
  
• Fixed Elite portal description mentioning moving to the next biome when you can get random Elite islands mid biome
  
• Chests are now color coded to match the loot category they belong to
  

BUG FIXES

• Double Tap now shows the correct trigger percentage in the inventory and should deal damage more reliably. The only case where it won’t is on weapons that pierce- it’ll trigger on the last pierce, not on every shot (so on the Sniper this is on hitting the third enemy after piercing two before)
  
• Big Shot no longer reduces Laser Cannon projectile size
  
• Fixed Elite Fire Crab not having his weapon equipped
  
• Fixed incorrect music playing for non-hosting players in shops
  
• Fixed issue that prevented the Quickplay menu being usable when returning to the lobby after being eliminated
  
• Fixed player names sometimes not showing up on the gameplay UI in the lobby after they joined
  
• Fixed some effects not being properly optimized at Low graphics settings: performance should be improved if playing on Low now
  
• Fixed bug that allowed you to pick up armor plates when already full
  
• Fixed bug that showed enemy health bars after they had been eliminated in some cases
  
• Fixed saved abilities and melee weapons not restoring correctly when resuming runs in some cases
  
• Fixed Critical Thinking not applying to some damage types
  
• Fixed the Laser Beam ability often hitting the ground right in front of you instead of your intended target
  
• Fixed Blindfire not affecting spread on some weapons
  
• Fixed bug that granted the Playing With Power achievement after playing the Arcade minigame when it should only be granted in the main mode
  
• Fixed rare softlock that could happen with the Explosive Enemies challenge modifier active
  
• Fixed enemies not taking bonus damage when poisoned from melee or Time Shot
  
• Fixed abilities using weapon hitmarkers which played annoyingly loud hitmarker sounds in many cases
  
• Fixed Strike mods having broken looking FX that didn’t convey the true radius
  
• Fixed Arcane Blast not applying arcane stacks
  
• Fixed Sturdy Totems infinite loot exploit
  

That's all for now but I plan on releasing some more island variations, enemy types and new songs in a bonus mini patch very soon! As always thank you for playing, I love working on this game 🦀

[h3]Difficulty scaling improvements[/h3]

• Enemy damage bonus when looping has been removed. There was previously a whopping +100% damage multiplier to all enemy attacks when looping from island 33 onwards which created very unfair situations where enemies would melt your entire health bar in a second, especially with fire. Enemy damage should feel much more fair and consistent when looping while still being a challenge- looping is meant to be quite difficult
  
• Enemy spawn bonus when looping decreased from +33% to +20%
  
• Islands 1 and 2 of a biome no longer can spawn two waves of ranged enemies back to back
  
  These changes should make looping feel far less unfair / punishing while maintaining the challenge
  
  [h3]Scorpion mega nerf + rebalance[/h3]
  
• Scorpion projectile damage reduced by 60%, projectile radius reduced by 33%, projectile speed reduced by 15% and removed projectile bounces. Also reworked their attack patterns to be more dodgeable and less spammy
  
• Increased scorpion walk speed slightly: it should now feel like more of a close / medium range threat and less of a run ender
  
  [h3]Other changes[/h3]
  
• Flamethrower buff- now starts with level 2 Fire Shot (up from level 1)
  
• Rebalanced enhancements: pattern enhancements like Chaotic or Spiraling have less intense motion to make them less likely to miss their target. Enhancement damage increases are +50% damage other than Sticky and Damaging which are +100% (previously Damaging was at +400% which was very broken)
  
• Splitting / Scattering bonus projectiles decreased from 3 to 2 (as it was extremely broken with some combos)
  
• Fixed issue that would cause projectiles created by the Splitting and Scattering enhancement to apply ALL weapon mods to those enhanced projectiles, resulting in extreme damage spikes that weren’t intended
  
• Demolition nests now scale health more with the island count as they became far too easy to destroy past the first biome
  
• Scorpions can now spawn from red challenge crystals
  

ABILITIES: GRENADE, GRAPPLING HOOK, LASER BEAM, BLACK HOLE & ICE BLAST

MELEE WEAPONS: CLAW, DAGGER & HAMMER

NEW WEAPONS: LASER CANNONS & SEAGLE



MINIGAMES: ARCADE, HOLDOUT & DUEL

QUICKPLAY
Matchmake for other players at any of the three main difficulties and communicate via an improved text chat!

SIDE SLIDING

NEW CONTENT

• New island type: Waves
  
• New enemies: Starfish & Limpet
  
• New music
  
• New loot
  
• New island challenge modifiers and a blessing type
  

BIG BALANCE CHANGES
Reworked economy, enemy and health scaling for a more satisfying experience with less cheap ways to win or lose



GENERAL

• Added new ability system with 5 abilities to equip: Grenade, Black Hole, Grappling Hook, Ice Blast and Laser Beam. This is a big new system with a lot more mix and match potential but it is still being worked on- all "grenade" mods will work on any ability and in The Variety Update Part 2 there'll be plenty of new "Ability Mods" and all current grenade mods will be ported over
  
• Added new melee weapons: Claw, Dagger and Hammer (more are coming in The Variety Update Part 2)
  
• You can now slide sideways and aim while sliding. Also you now slide for twice as long with a more gradual decrease in speed as the slide runs out
  
• Quickplay is now enabled and should finally be working!
  
• Added new weapon: Laser Cannons
  
• Added new weapon: Seagle
  
• Added new minigame: Arcade: Eliminate as many enemies as possible before the time runs out! Enemies spawn faster by eliminating them but if you get hit 50% of the visible enemies will get eliminated, slowing down the pace
  
• Added new minigame: Holdout: No health or loot- survive as many waves as possible until you get hit! Great for warming up or to have some bite-sized crab action without committing to a full rougelike run
  
• Added new minigame: Duel: Face off in a PvP duel to finally find out who is the best crab in your lobby!
  
• Added experimental support for up to 6 players to join a single multiplayer game- the game is still balanced around 4 players max but since many have asked for 5 or 6 player lobbies, it should now be possible!
  
• Added new island type: Waves
  
• Added several new island challenge modifiers and a new blessing type
  
• Added 3 new Tropical biome islands and 1 new Arctic biome island
  
• Added new enemy: Limpet
  
• Added new enemy: Starfish
  
• Added new enemy variant: Mini Grub
  
• Added new weapon mod: Escalating Shot: Fire rate reduced by 50% but increases with each shot fired until stopping fire. The Minigun now starts with this mod by default
  
• Added new perk: Nourishing Salvage: Heal when salvaging pickups
  
• Added new perk: Crystal Fertilizer: More destructible crystals and health rocks spawn
  
• Added new perk: Bonus Chests: Get additional reward chests after every 100 eliminations
  
• Added new perk: Sturdy Totems: Totems have more guaranteed uses before they explode
  
• Added new perk: Equalizer: Damage increased if the number of equipped weapon mods, ability mods and perks are even (so having 0 Weapon Mods, 4 Grenade Mods and 10 Perks equipped would activate the damage bonus)
  
• Added new perk: Slugger: Explosive enemies deal more damage in a greater radius to nearby enemies when eliminated
  
• Added new perk: Crystal Dividends: Gain a percentage of your total crystals as a bonus after clearing each island
  
• Added new perk: Amber Resin: Healing is more effective
  
• Added new greed perk: Big Bones: Max health and damage increased but you grow larger
  
• Added new greed perk: Hoarder: Chance for an extra chest to spawn after each island but you can no longer drop pickups from your inventory
  
• Added new destructibles: Mega Crystal and Mega Challenge Crystal
  
• Added a santa hat cosmetic
  
• Enemies generally have smoother overall movement with less sudden stops and turns especially after getting knocked back or frozen
  
• Some enemies can now dash from side to side
  
• Enemies now slide on icy surfaces and crab enemies slide when moving quickly
  
• You now slide infinitely and automatically on icy surfaces
  
• Added 6 new achievements and 4 new cosmetics
  
• Added new music!
  
• Music no longer fades out after interacting with the victory crown
  
• Added many new sounds (destructibles breaking, crystal collection, slug explosions)
  
• Hitmarker audio can now stack, making hitmarkers more satisfying on shotguns and other weapons that hit multiple times at once
  
• The lobby now has random lighting presets instead of being always sunny
  
• Volcanic lighting has been reworked along with some texture and skybox improvements
  
• Night time lighting has been reworked to be actually dark
  I’m a big fan of being in a flow state while playing games and not being interrupted by loading screens or other things that make you wait for the game. While the loading times between islands were quite short in previous versions of the game, they blocked gameplay and the feeling of constantly being able to move forward and do something. Some of the changes below help remove this feeling and (sometimes subconsciously) make the game feel more satisfying to play. Please let me know if you notice any issues with these faster loading times especially related to multiplayer games but ideally it should be the same as before, just faster!
  
• Optimized level load times significantly (loading screens between islands should be almost instant)
  
• Increased the pace of some gameplay events like how quickly chests spawn after clearing an island or how fast you can read loot UI after it spawns
  
• The Duplicate symbol on loot now shows up more quickly
  
• Improved the pacing of how loot spawns from chests: all loot now spawns at once to prevent having to wait around for each pickup to appear one by one (this used to be especially tedious with a high level of Big Chests)
  

BALANCE CHANGES

• When the Random Islands modifier is active, Elites defeated on any island other than the final island of each biome will no longer drop healing and key chests. This is to make Elites more of a risk instead of being able to chain elite islands together and come out of it with MORE health than you started with due to all the healing chests
  
• Added new difficulty modifier: Expensive Shops: Shop prices are doubled. The reasoning behind this modifier is that even on the highest difficulties, players were easily breaking the game by buying out shops with economy builds. This modifier should make each purchase count
  
• Removed the Surging Enemies difficulty modifier as it took away from the pacing of each island and made them all blur into the same kind where all enemies were visible almost right away after spawning. The enemy spawn speed for islands later into each biome has been adjusted to prevent large amounts of enemies spawning taking a long time
  
• Hordes have been reworked to have more easy enemies and less projectile enemies as they are meant to be a fun AOE island type more focused on a horde of small enemies. This change helps differentiate them from other islands which felt similar before
  
• Enemies now get +10% more health after each wave on Horde islands. Since waves happen as fast as you can eliminate enemies, this can create an interesting opportunity to gain more crystals (since enemies drop crystals based on their max health) at the cost of a greater challenge
  
• Elites and Bosses are now immune to black holes and gain more health per player in multiplayer lobbies as it was very common for these fights to be quickly over in 4 player matches with 4 distinct builds set up, especially when looping
  
• Added dynamic damage reduction to Elites and Bosses when looping to make fights a bit more exciting without getting tedious. Here’s how it works: Elites and Bosses spawn with 50% damage reduction which reduces itself automatically over time to 0% damage reduction after 30 seconds
  
• Rebalanced many enemy minimum start islands: this means more crabs and slugs in the early islands with the more difficult enemies appearing later in a biome. This also makes biomes feel less samey as there are a wider range of enemies introduced over time instead of pretty much every enemy appearing by island 3 in a biome
  
• Laser Skulls, Laser Crabs, Ice Pumpkins and Fire Pumpkins are more likely to appear
  
• Rare loot is 20% more likely to shop up in shops as it often was hard to scale your lower tier loot the later into a run you got due to shops being full of Epic or Legendary loot
  
• Burst Pistol and Dual Pistols no longer can be tap fired faster than the actual fire rate (no more tired fingers from constant clicking) and the Burst Pistol has had a slight fire rate buff
  
• “Reward” destructibles (crystals, health rocks etc.) and “Combat” destructibles (fire rocks, energy ring rocks etc.) now spawn separately so that it’s possible for more reward destructibles to spawn on an island without flooding it with combat destructibles
  
• The global projectile limit has been increased from 400 to 500
  
• You no longer get greed perks when using the Random totem as there were many bugs with greed perks not applying correctly when acquired this way. This also acts as the only way in the game to remove a greed perk from your inventory
  
• Fire damage from stepping in lava now scales per island (previously it was threatening for the first volcanic biome encounter but became trivial when looping)
  
• Arcane Blast has been moved from the Damage loot pool to the Elemental loot pool
  
• Bigger Boom has been moved from the Damage loot pool to the Skill loot pool
  
• Wind Up now stops working on stopping fire rather than on reloading
  
• Some low value / fun weapon mods have been removed including: Knockback Shot, Ghost Ammo,
  Heavy Shot and Accelerating Shot will no longer show up unless you have Bouncing Shot (as this was the main time those mods were useful)
  

BUFFS

• Weapon formation mods (like Arc Shot or Square Shot) are now additive and can both be triggered in a single shot. Dual Shotguns, Auto Shotgun, Crossbow and Cluster Launcher now fire any extra shot modifiers (like Arc Shot or Square Shot) IN ADDITION to their normal projectiles. Additive shot formations now also take the weapon spread into account so high spread weapons will now shoot wonky formations. This means that Grip Tape and Blind Fire will directly influence the spacing and spread of the additive shot formations
  
• Enemies can now be frozen for 50% longer and players can only be frozen for 0.5 seconds max (as this was a common cheap death cause in previous updates: being frozen for multiple seconds unable to do anything)
  
• Flammable Armor, Explosive Armor, Exploding Enemies, Freezing Enemies, Flammable Enemies, Electric Enemies and Poisonous Enemies start with half as much radius as before but get a +25% increase in radius for each level of the perk that you have, allowing them to scale in a much more interesting way
  
• Flammable Armor and Explosive Armor have been moved from Epic to Rare rarity. These perks were previously a bit too situational to be worth it for their rarity but these changes should make them much more worthwhile to take in general
  
• Key Totem cost reduced from 3 to 2
  
• You now get +1 key per key pickup when playing on Nightmare difficulty or higher
  
• Enemy damage increases (including their debuffs) when looping has been reduced by 25% as it was too sharp of a power spike, leading to the “I’m one shot” feeling when looping no matter how much max health you had
  
• All fire enemies deal half the fire stacks as before which should make fire a much less common source of death when looping
  
• Reduced Ice Pumpkin AOE radius and damage
  
• Fire Pumpkins now have a longer time between attacks
  
• Homing Grubs, Enraged Grubs and Minigun Crabs can no longer have the Shielded buff as there were some situations that felt unfair as breaking the shield meant taking almost guaranteed damage
  
• Pufferfish explosion damage reduced by 15%
  
• Launcher Crabs projectile explosion radius reduced to match the radius of the Grenade Crab projectile
  
• The Auto Rifle always seems to be quite underwhelming so I’ve doubled the bullet velocity and greatly reduced the amount of random spread it has to establish it as a pinpoint accurate and responsive long range weapon. It should now be noticeably easier to track moving targets and not feel like you are missing shots that should hit
  
• Auto Rifle damage increased from 4 to 5
  
• Dual Shotguns damage increased from 3 to 5 and base firing spread slightly reduced
  
• Auto Shotgun damage increased from 2 to 3 and base spread slightly reduced
  
• Auto Shotgun mag size increased from 12 to 16 and range reduced by 33% (the range was absurd for a shotgun) and spread becomes wider than before with sustained fire
  
• Auto Shotgun trigger roll multiplier (the thing that makes chance based mods and perks trigger) increased by 400%
  
• Rocket Launcher explosion radius has been reduced by 25% as it was way too generous
  
• Sniper projectile collision radius (not damage radius) reduced as the projectile would often hit the ground in front of you on slopes instead of the intended target
  
• Sniper damage increased from 35 to 40
  
• Minigun now starts with Escalating Shot level 2 and mag size increased from 125 to 200
  
• Blade Launcher projectile damage radius reduced to more closely match the projectile size but Big Shot now can increase the radius
  
• Burst Pistol mag size increased from 28 to 36
  
• Orb Launcher damage increased from 5 to 6
  
• Arcane Wand projectile explosion radius increased by 25%
  
• Grenade damage increased from 35 to 50
  
• Bigger Boom and Imploding Grenade now affect the size of the damage areas spawned by abilities
  
• Snake Shot damage increased from +33% to +50%
  
• Blind Fire damage increased from +50% to +100%
  
• Blind Fire recoil increase reduced by 50% to allow for Grip Tape to match it and perfectly counteract it
  
• Grip Tape is no longer capped at -100% spread reduction so it can fully offset Blind Fire. Spread related perks now also influence the angle on formations such as arc and triple shot and even secondary projectile mods like Dagger Arc!
  
• Recoil shot recoil added reduced from +200% to +100%
  
• Bouncing Shot now increases projectile lifetimes by 50% and damage per bounce increased from +50% to +100%
  
• Money Shot crystals per hit increased from 1 to 4 (I’ll be watching this- ideally it’s really fun to find on fast firing low damage weapons)
  
• Piercing Wave trigger chance halved but damage increased by 75% and radius increased by 25%
  
• X Shot trigger chance increased by 33%
  
• Spore Shot mushrooms now have 10x health as they would just explode instantly before having a chance to grow
  
• Grenadier now works in a more understandable way: you get +1 ability stack per cooldown but it will keep cooling down while your current stack is less than the max stack
  
• Damage combo damage per combo level increased from +15% to +20%
  
• Healthy Combo healing amount increased from +50 to +100
  
• Endurance healing increased from +50 health to +75 health
  
• Critical thinking critical damage increased from +25% to +75% but non critical damage reduced from -10% to -25%
  
• Checklist eliminations needed per damage increase reduced from 15 to 10
  
• Faulty Chests chance for unchosen loot to not disappear buffed from 10% to 15%
  
• Double Vision has been moved from Legendary to Epic rarity
  
• Removed knockback from Fireworks and increased their radius by 25%
  
• Fire damage in general has been doubled as it felt quite weak on perks in previous updates
  
• Lightning damage has now been buffed by 66% (it now deals the entire lighting stack as damage instead of 33% of the lightning stack)
  
• Damage areas (like the black hole) can now spawn in mid air which will allow for many new synergies with abilities that can explode in the air (like causing Crystal Barrage to trigger in mid air with a black hole also sucking enemies into it)
  
• The Limited Heals difficulty modifier healing reduction reduced from -50% healing to -33% healing
  
• Increased the invulnerability period after taking damage from 0.1 seconds to 0.25 seconds
  

NERFS

• Shop prices have been increased by 33% as buying out shops was the main source of broken balance in the game (you can still absolutely break shops and get near infinite crystals but some economy changes were needed to make this require a bit more skill and planning, and a bit less random luck)
  
• Shop price increase per loop increased by 25%
  
• Shop prices are slightly more expensive per player in multiplayer to balance out the fact that enemies get a health bonus per player (and therefore pay out more which meant players had less crystals to spend in shops when playing solo compared to in multiplayer runs)
  
• Shop reroll totem base cost is unchanged but cost increase per reroll now increases more steeply
  
• Due to these Shop changes, with the Random Islands modifier active, shops will only be able to spawn on islands 3,4,5 and 9 to better space them out over a biome
  
• Spiked chest open cost increased from 25% to 33% (this is a change that has been reverted from the previous patch as it was too easy to go for multiple spiked chests in a single biome, this way it’s more strategic and has a bigger impact)
  
• Black Holes no longer turn enemy projectiles into your own as this made fighting even the hardest enemies trivial
  
• It’s now half as likely for the flamethrower to spawn fire damage areas on the ground (as it could cause really high fire damage numbers in a very short space of time which made it by far the most powerful weapon in the game). Fire overall has had a buff in this patch though so it should still feel very strong
  
• Big Mag mag size increase reduced from +75% to +50% and renamed “Clip” to “Mag” in the description
  
• Bubble Shot trigger chance reduced by 25% (it’s very powerful but triggered a bit too often)
  
• Splash Damage damage reduced from 25 to 10
  
• The price to unlock slots if playing with the Locked Slots difficulty modifier now scales up slightly more sharply. If this modifier is more annoying than fun then I’ll replace it with another in a future update
  
• Crystal Combo crystal gain per combo level reduced from +20% to +15%
  
• Snatcher close range elimination crystal gain reduced from +50% to +30%
  
• Finishing Move critical elimination crystal gain reduced from +100% to +50%
  
• Gold Coating on heal crystal gain increased from +50% of healing to +100% of healing
  
• Money Is Power damage gain per 1000 crystals reduced from +5% to +2%
  
• Bonus Crystals crystal gain reduced from +50% to +33%
  
• Workaholic, Rising Star and Limited Loot crystal gain reduced from +100% to +75%
  
• Double Edged Sword crystal amount reduced from 100% of damage dealt to 25% of damage dealt and you now lose 20% of your total crystals when taking damage (compared to 10% before as it was way too easy to make a completely broken economy build with it- now it should be in a more balanced place)
  
• A note on max health perks: if getting lucky with a few of these early on, the health pool could go to extreme numbers very quickly. These changes make them still substantial buffs to your health but make them less likely to be one of the key reasons a run succeeds
  
• Bribe max health increase reduced from +500% to +200%
  
• Double Trouble max health increase reduced from +250% to +100%
  
• Leap Of Faith max health increase reduced from +250% to +50%
  
• Health Totem chance to explode after use increased from 33% to 50%. This change is to make it harder to completely break the game early on with many lucky rolls in a row
  
• Loot Totem chance to explode after use increased from 20% to 33%
  
• Gamble Totem and Chance Totem chance to explode after use increased from 8% to 15%
  
• Double Vision chance to get an extra chest after each island reduced from 20% to 15%
  

QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES

• Finally fixed cases where enemy projectiles could travel through walls leading to situations where you could take unfair damage
  
• Added many new checks for enemies stuck in walls or not moving. There should no longer be any soft lock situations- in the worst case scenarios where enemies are stuck for more than a few seconds in a wall, they will be cleaned up by the game automatically
  
• Projectiles get nullified (deal no damage and instantly expire) when hitting the blue border surrounding islands (which prevents lots of unfair deaths where bouncing enemy projectiles would bounce off or explode on seemingly thin air behind you)
  
• Slugs and Pufferfish can no longer start their explode attack in mid air and must be landed (this prevents unfair situations where a slug could come flying out of nowhere and instantly end the run)
  
• Made many improvements to overall visual clarity with tweaks to enemy health bars, damage numbers, FX and many other small elements that all add up to give a more refined experience
  
• The game now automatically pauses when it loses focus when alt tabbing or when something else (like another installer) pops up over it
  
• You are now invulnerable for 2 seconds after falling off a cliff to prevent taking unavoidable damage when respawning (if respawning near to an already attacking enemy)
  
• You no longer take fall damage once an island has been cleared to be consistent with the other post island damage rules in the game
  
• Auto Loot now staggers chest openings to prevent late game crashes when opening hundreds of chests at once
  
• Auto Loot now behaves correctly and will only salvage if it can't pick up any of the pickups in a chest
  
• Auto Loot will now pick up duplicate Greed perks (previously it would ignore all greed perks in the world)
  
• Added island boundaries to some islands (like the one with 4 high walls) to prevent rare situations where enemies could be launched out of bounds and the island would never end
  
• Improved anti-camping measures to support all enemies, not just the small melee crabs
  
• All homing barrels are cleaned up when chests spawn to prevent situations where they would be annoying and home at you while you were looting
  
• Added options to increase field of view to 115 and 120 (previously the limit was 110)
  
• Improved crosshairs and added a central dot for easier aiming
  
• Clients should no longer accidentally leave to the lobby from the Game Over UI (only the host has the power to do that now, clients can still leave if they wish by using the pause menu instead)
  
• Added visible cooldowns to melee in the gameplay UI
  
• Added cooldown expire animations and sounds for both abilities and melee weapons in the gameplay UI
  
• Cooldowns now reset when picking up new abilities or melee weapons in the lobby to make it easier to audition them without waiting for the cooldowns to expire
  
• Added a system that prevents many of the same enemy from spawning in certain cases (Ice Pumpkins, Laser Crabs, Laser Skulls and Fire Pumpkins spawning in large numbers could create unfair situations)
  
• The maximum amount of combat destructible rocks on small arena islands has been reduced as it often led to unavoidable damage or just too much damage area spam
  
• Improved the audio mix to make important sounds stand out more
  
• Optimized all animated characters for better performance in scene with many enemies visible at once
  
• Arcane Wand projectiles now automatically explode when expiring (they previously vanished if not hitting something)
  
• The slide speed curve has been smoothed out to be less jittery and much more consistent
  
• You now automatically cancel a slide if letting go of directional keys (instead of being stuck in a janky stationary slide)
  
• Island challenge modifiers can now only spawn on one portal max in a selection (to even out unfair situations where you would roll two very difficult challenge portals with low health and not have a choice to take the lesser reward / easier fight)
  
• Improved aiming: it felt a bit clunky to aim especially with the Seagle in some cases so the camera height has been adjusted to be more comfortable to aim as well as a faster aim zoom in time to make it feel more responsive. Also tweaked some weapons that felt like they zoomed in too much when aiming
  
• Reduced fire rock destructible explosion damage and radius (as it was easy to accidentally damage yourself when exploding them while appearing to be out of range of the explosion)
  
• Made various UI outline improvements to make damage text and health bars easier to read across all lighting scenarios
  
• Improved text chat visibility and it should no longer go off the screen when writing long messages
  
• Enemies now spawn much faster from the second loop (Island 61+) onwards to make late game runs less tedious
  
• Auto loot speed doubled to make late game runs less tedious
  
• Added options to disable hitmarkers and damage numbers for those that don’t want them or to help improve visibility in late game runs
  
• Ability and Melee cooldowns are now reset when entering a new island
  
• Improved the Piercing Wave particle FX to be easier on the eyes and more smooth
  
• The Auto Loot keybind has been moved from Q to L as many people had other actions bound to Q already and were confused as to why their chest loot was magically disappearing (you can still change it to whatever you want in the controls menu)
  
• Enemies can no longer spawn from destroyed crystals if the island has been cleared
  
• Increased global bandwidth limits to potentially improve 4 player late game lobbies with a lot going on
  
• Increased connection timeout times to give more time for clients that have temporarily lost connection to recover
  
• Sonic Boom and Shockwave no longer knock back enemies as this could allow them to get stuck in walls (I'll rework these perks in the future)
  
• Clip Shot has been renamed to Mag Shot
  

BUG FIXES

• Fixed a longstanding bug that caused very laggy clients to load in with no weapons when first joining a lobby
  
• Improved a few islands where chests could spawn down in unreachable areas and couldn’t be opened
  
• Fixed numerous clunky inventory UI bugs like locked slots “stealing” the mouse cursor when clicked
  
• Fixed “sticky” inventory where dropping loot would reset the focus to the first inventory slot instead of the one that you were hovering over, making dropping a lot of pickups needlessly clunky
  
• Fixed issue that would cause you to permanently keep the aimed in field of view of a weapon after choosing a dual wield weapon
  
• Fixed exploit that allowed players to start a run on a much easier difficulty than initially selected
  
• Fixed exploit that allowed players to move around and jump while frozen
  
• Fixed issue where hazard damage (like from barrels or destructible rocks) weren’t respecting the invulnerability period after you take damage (so a bunch of barrels exploding at the same instant were able to eat through multiple armor plates at once)
  
• Fixed issue on arctic island that caused barrels to explode as soon as you load into the island which could lead to taking unavoidable damage
  
• Fixed issue that caused enemies to spawn with half empty armor plates
  
• Fixed various multiplayer health bar bugs that would show players and enemies as having armor when they really didn’t
  
• Fixed issue that caused Piercing Shot to reset reset Streak Shot
  
• Fixed issue that caused the Parkour reward UI to not update on non-hosting players
  
• You can now complete the Flawless and Frugal achievements without needing to be explicitly on Normal difficulty (they now unlock on Nightmare and Ultra Chaos difficulties also, Normal being the minimum)
  
• Fixed issue that allowed friends to join in progress runs via the Steam menu, now they can only join while in the lobby as is intended
  
• Fixed a longterm crash that could happen when joining a multiplayer game
  
• Fixed a longterm bug that could leave invalid multiplayer sessions open which interfered with inviting and joining multiplayer games
  
• Fixed issue where no enemies would spawn after a while on the 1st island of each biome
  
• Fixed being able to get under the map on one of the Volcanic islands
  
• Fixed a number of rare crashes
  
• Fixed issue where challenges were completed in the game but the corresponding Steam achievement stayed locked
  
• Rewrote how account rank is calculated to make it more accurate (as it was possible to have all weapons Emerald rank but still have a Sapphire account rank previously)
  
• Repelling Dash now only affects enemy projectiles and won’t repel teammate projectiles
  
• Fixed issue that caused the Game Over UI to show up in the lobby if leaving a run too soon after getting eliminated
  
• Fixed the crystals and keys icons being cut off in the inventory UI on some wider resolutions like 1920x1200
  
• Improved how music plays: it shouldn’t stop the shop music, play the gameplay music and then switch to the boss music a second or two later as it did previously
  
• Edited arctic tree collision to make it much less likely to get stuck on it
  

ULTRA CHAOS BALANCE CHANGES
The goal with these changes is to make Ultra Chaos a bit more skillful, fair and fun while still retaining the brutal difficulty spike

• Ultra Chaos is now unlocked when reaching Ruby account rank (down from Diamond in order to give more people the chance to try it out)
  
• Slightly slowed down enemy attack speeds on Ultra Chaos (just because some enemies attacked unreasonably fast especially when shielded)
  
• Reduced the amount of bonus starting luck in Ultra Chaos by 33% (this should make getting rare loot (important for many builds) much more consistent)
  
• Elites and Bosses spawn slightly less often in Ultra Chaos
  
• Bosses no longer spawn champion enemies when damaged and keys when eliminated on non-boss islands when playing on Ultra Chaos difficulty
  
• Extra elites / bosses spawned in Ultra Chaos has been reduced from 2 to 1
  
• Elites and bosses no longer can have the Healthy or Shielded buff
  
• Removed the extremely fast enemy spawn speed (it actually is harder when enemies gradually spawn in while you are already moving around the island than it is for them all to spawn instantly)
  
• Being on Low graphics settings no longer makes totems have no emissive color
  

JAN 14TH HOTFIX
Removed santa hats

That's it for now but I plan on releasing The Variety Update Part 2 sometime in February to finish off the new ability and melee systems as well as add a lot of new island layouts and loot types to get closer and closer to the "no two runs are the same" feeling 🦀

Here's a teaser for a mechanic that will let you buff specific weapon mods in interesting ways: in the example below, Mace Shot has homing and chaotic buffs that increase damage and allow all 3 mace balls to fly to the target (when previously they'd just miss). This should add a new layer of fun to mods and give more depth and variety when buildcrafting!

If you are enjoying Crab Champions so far, it'd mean a lot to me if you could nominate it for a Steam Award (after polling the community, it looks like either the "Best Soundtrack" or the "Better With Friends" categories are the most suitable for this game). There's still so much to add but I've been blown away by the response to the game since it launched only a few months ago in April!



In other news, the beta for the next big update has been live for the last week or so, bringing lots of new features such as:

- Selectable Melee Weapons (Claw, Dagger and Hammer) and Abilities (Grenade, Grappling Hook, Black Hole, Ice Blast and Laser Blast)
- 2 brand new Mingames to test your skills without committing to a full roguelike run
- Side sliding
- New weapons (Laser Cannons and Seagle) and perks
- New enemies
- New island layouts
- New music
- Much more (quality of life features, massive loot and enemy rebalances etc.)

Anyone that owns the game can opt in, full instructions can be found in the #beta-getting-started channel on the Discord server: https://discord.com/channels/547513194353131530/1095854970189918238


Thanks for being the best community any developer could ask for, see you in the patch notes for the Variety Update once it leaves beta! 🦀

P.S. the game is now on sale (25% off!) for the duration of the Steam Autumn Sale!