Crab Champions News

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!

NEW WEAPONS: FLAMETHROWER & ARCANE WAND



VFX OVERHAUL

ULTRA CHAOS: NEW EXTREME DIFFICULTY

UNIQUE LOOT VISUALS + ICONS (A START)
Loot is finally getting some identity! While there's a lot of loot to make unique visuals for, I'm happy with the way the first few are turning out. It makes a big difference to be able to start recognizing loot at distance or being able to share your inventory screen and not have to explain what each piece of loot is!




BIG MECHANIC IMPROVEMENTS

• Universal Critical Hits: ANYTHING can now cause a critical hit including your secondary projectiles like Mace Shot or Dagger Arc. This means that there is a single unified critical hit chance stat that affects all of your build at once instead of having to find separate grenade crit and melee crit etc. perks
  
• Damage 10x Lower: As many people were reaching the limits of the game in terms of getting to the point where enemies become invincible due to their health being so high, I've globally scaled down ALL damage sources by 10x (and of course enemy health too). This allows for longer runs, more noticeable power creep and easier calculations in the early game when comparing damage numbers. If comparing to the previous build, something dealing 2500 damage now deals 250 damage!
  
• Better Healing: Especially on the higher difficulties with many modifiers on, health became less and less important with many players opting to go for a "one hit" type build revolving mainly around armor and not health. Since there are so many perks around building health, I wanted to make it much more important and fun to do so. The base health pool for all difficulties has been increased, with the effectiveness of armor slightly reduced. Most health related perks have received a buff so building into health loot should be much more rewarding.
  

GENERAL

• Remade almost all VFX in the entire game from scratch to be much less blinding and more interesting to look at (there are some that still need to be replaced which will be done in the next update)
  
• Added new weapon: Flamethrower
  
• Added new weapon: Arcane Wand
  
• Added new difficulty: Ultra Chaos (unlocked by getting all weapons to Diamond). This is a difficulty for those looking for the most unfair challenge that I could possibly come up with. There are no unlocks or achievements tied to it, it's purely for extreme challenge seekers
  
• Critical hits are now calculated globally: this means that ANYTHING can crit- dagger arcs, mace balls etc!
  
• Added 2 new Tropical biome islands
  
• Added new evolved enemy: Ice Pumpkin
  
• Added new evolved enemy: Fire Pumpkin
  
• Added new evolved enemy: Laser Skull
  
• Added new debuff: Arcane - damage is dealt once per second equal to the total stacks of arcane currently applied. Each time damage is applied, the total stacks of arcane are halved
  
• Added new weapon mod: Arcane Shot: Shots apply arcane to enemies
  
• Added new weapon mod: Drill Shot: Chance for shots to create damaging drills on impact
  
• Added new weapon mod: Link Shot: Chance for shots to burst into 3 link shots on impact
  
• Added new grenade mod: Giant Drill: Grenades explode into giant drills
  
• Added new perk: Crimson Haze: Enemies create short lived damaging zones when eliminated
  
• Added new perk: Critical Lightning: Critical hits shock random enemies
  
• Added new perk: Potent Magic: Arcane debuff stacks increased
  
• To make it harder to reach the damage limit (and getting negative billions of damage in the game over screen), all damage has been reduced by 10x- this is a global change and all mods and perks that deal flat damage have been adjusted accordingly. This also means all enemies start with 10x less health. The end result should be a more noticeable and satisfying damage increase as runs progress, seeing single digit damage numbers grow into the thousands and eventually millions! Another big benefit is for those that go on long runs, it’ll take much longer to reach the current island limits (where enemies become invincible due to having so much health). During the rebalancing pass, if a mod dealt 25 damage, I’ve rounded it up to now deal 3 damage (after the 10x reduction). While doing this I also buffed the damage of some underperforming mods and perks, mainly the strike and storm mods as well as all damage increasing grenade mods. All of these changes should make it also easier to calculate how effective a mod or perk is relative to the base damage as it’s easier to compare a 50 damage mod to a 8 base damage weapon than it is to compare a 450 damage mod to a 75 base damage weapon (which is how things were before the 10x reduction and rounding)
  
• Greatly improved the smoothness of other players in multiplayer games especially when spectating, it should no longer look like players are lagging when they aren’t
  
• Small enemies no longer collide with each other which should greatly reduce situations where pufferfish get stuck on crabs
  
• Optimized the Shrapnel challenge modifier which could cause lag when many enemies exploded into shrapnel at once
  
• Optimized situations where many projectiles hit lava and created lots of splash FX, causing lag
  
• Added 30 FPS frame cap for those looking to preserve battery life on handheld devices
  
• Improved water ripple visuals to both work in shallow water and also push water foam away
  
• Improved the visuals of the Grid, Flow, Geometric, Purple Tiger, Regal and Void camos
  
• Raised the height of the camera when not aiming to make it feel more comfortable (as the crab is so flat and close to the ground, having the camera also low sometimes felt bad when looking upwards)
  
• Added 4 new achievements (Flamethrower and Arcane wand victory related)
  
• Added new inventory icons for some weapon mods (still lots more to be done)
  
• Added new generic icons for Rare, Epic and Legendary weapon mods (with a matching colored border to easily see what rarity they are at a glance in the inventory UI)
  

BALANCE CHANGES

• Slugs and Grubs are slightly less common to allow for their presence to be more noticeable (ideally they should be lined up with other enemies for bonus damage rather than half of the map being slugs and clearing itself with chain reactions- this can still happen but just a bit less often)
  
• Fire damage is more effective but all fire mods and perks apply less overall stacks to compensate. This should mean less situations where enemies are taking tiny amounts of damage from fire over a very long period of time and more situations where enemies are taking much more concentrated fire damage over a shorter period
  
• Moved Hot Shot, Sharpshooter, Power Punch and Mega Crit from Weapon Mods to be Perks as critical hits are relevant to more than just weapon shots now
  
• Critical Claws, Critical Grenade, Critical Chain and Streak Shot have been removed
  
• Critical Blast has been moved to a perk as it can trigger from more than just weapon crits now
  
• Precision has been renamed to Streak Shot since that has been removed and the name fits it better
  
• Since “lesser” crits can trigger “on crit” mods (which could lead to an infinite loop), critical hit chance is capped at 50% for “lesser” damage sources (any damage that isn’t directly from your weapon, grenade or melee)
  
• Critical Link has been renamed to Link Shot, has new projectiles and no longer requires a critical hit to trigger
  
• Critical Blades has been renamed to Homing Blades and no longer requires a critical hit to trigger
  
• Mega Crit now multiplies critical damage by 3 instead of adding 300% extra damage to the multiplier
  
• Destructibles now scale up their damage / debuff stacks from +5% per island to +10% per island
  
• Landmines no longer spawn naturally and barrels spawn less (no more chaotic barrels, only regular ones- the chaotic barrels are fun in the lobby but in gameplay situations they mostly just fly off into the sky and do nothing)
  
• Increased physics impulse strength from melee on regular barrels
  
• The Homing Barrels challenge modifier barrels have far less health and no longer can leak which should reduce the messy visuals that can sometimes happen with lots of barrels
  
• Turrets no longer target Shielded enemies
  
• The slowest moving enemies now move a bit faster to prevent situations where you are looking for one last really slow enemy when you’ve cleared all of the others
  
• Basic melee crabs no longer can be shielded as it slowed down the pace of gameplay too much
  
• Lightning has been reworked to last a bit longer and deal less damage (as it wasn’t adjusted for the 10x drop in damage yet). Also adjusted the lightning FX and tint to be a bit more blue to differentiate it from Arcane
  

CHANGES TO THE DIFFICULTY MODIFIER ROSTER

• Added new difficulty modifier: Surging Enemies: Enemies spawn in much faster
  
• Added new difficulty modifier: Limited Heals: All healing is reduced by 50%
  
• The Eternal Punishment difficulty modifier now only removes 2% of your max health when taking damage (it previously removed 5% which often made runs devolve into a glass cannon situation where max health was ignored)
  
• Resurrecting Enemies now triggers slightly less often as it could cause islands to drag in terms of pacing. In addition to this, enemies can no longer resurrect in a close range to the player as this could often lead to unfair damage from enemies spawning close behind
  
• Volatile Explosions was a modifier that caused understandable frustration: being able to melee groups of slugs and not take damage from it was one of the best feeling mechanics in the game and removing it for the sake of difficulty decreased the fun factor for most. The flow state present without this modifier on got interrupted in a more tedious than fun way. This modifier has been moved up to the new Ultra Chaos difficulty. To make basic slugs still feel threatening with this change, they now explode faster than before, requiring a well timed melee or dash to avoid
  
• Manual Collection has also been replaced as it made the flow of combat more tedious than fun in many cases. Since there are those that still enjoy it, it is active in the Ultra Chaos difficulty
  
• These changes should shift the difficulty more to making good builds and less making zero mistakes
  

BUFFS

• Auto Rifle damage increased from 3 to 5
  
• Burst Pistol damage increased from 3 to 5
  
• Dual Pistols damage increased from 4 to 5
  
• Auto Shotgun damage increased from 2 to 3
  
• Orb Launcher damage increased from 4 to 6
  
• Sniper damage increased from 30 to 40
  
• Rocket Launcher projectile speed doubled (as the weapon was underperforming slightly before so this should make it easier to hit moving targets)
  
• Rocket Launcher explosion radius increased by 20%
  
• Rocket Launcher damage increased from 25 to 35
  
• Blade Launcher damage increased from 2 to 4
  
• Base starting health increased from 100 to 200
  
• Spiked Chest max health opening cost reduced from 33% to 25%
  
• Loot Totem health cost reduced from 33% to 20%
  
• Crystal Totem health cost reduced from 33% to 10%
  
• Chance Totem health cost reduced from 10% to 5%
  
• Gamble Totem crystal cost reduced by 33%
  
• Critical Blast damage increased from 400 to 500 and is now chance based as intended
  
• High Roller now duplicates Epic and Legendary chests on Elite / Boss islands rather than Healing chests which felt underwhelming
  
• High Roller base downside reduced from 33% chance for no chests to spawn to 20% chance for no chests to spawn
  
• Reload Arc is now part of the Skill loot pool to make choosing skill portals more enticing
  
• Wind Up, Streak Shot and Clip Shot no longer add flat damage and now add percentage damage
  
• Double Trouble enemy health increase reduced from +100% to +50%
  
• Hard Target now applies damage reduction AFTER other incoming damage debuffs (like from Hot Shot or Brute Force). So a 10% reduction is now 10% of the entire incoming damage amount which should make it a more viable option to counter increased incoming damage debuffs
  
• Enhanced Turrets damage increased from +50% to +75%
  
• Crystal Barrage damage increased from 1 to 3
  
• Split Shot now happens sooner in the lifetime of a projectile, making it much more viable for fast moving projectiles
  
• Arcane Blast now applies 8 stacks of the arcane debuff per damage tick
  
• Sharpened Axe damage per second increased from 50 to 125
  
• Barrel Explosion damage increased from 50 to 100 and armor removed on the barrels to make them easier to destroy
  
• Landmine Shot damage increased from 50 to 100
  
• Triangle Shot damage increased from 35 to 100
  
• Torpedo Shot damage increased from 35 to 100
  
• Firework Shot damage increased from 25 to 30
  
• Bomb Shot damage increased from 35 to 75
  
• Proximity barrage damage increased from 30 to 50
  
• Dagger Shot damage increased from 2 to 3
  
• Reload Arc damage increased from 15 to 20
  
• Spinning Blade damage increased from 4 to 5
  
• Time Bolt damage increased from 30 to 40
  
• Ultra Shot damage increased from 25 to 30
  
• Shockwave cooldown reduced from 10 seconds to 4 seconds
  
• Health Shot healing amount increased from 1 to 3
  
• Grim Reaper healing amount increased from 5 to 6
  
• Vampire healing amount increased from 2 to 4
  
• Personal Space max health increase requirement reduced from every 8 eliminations to EVERY close range elimination
  
• Bullseye max health increase requirement reduced from every 10 one shot eliminations to EVERY one shot elimination
  
• Checklist eliminations requirement reduced from 25 to 15
  
• Assassin eliminations requirement reduced from 10 to 5
  
• Tasty Orange damage increase per elimination increased from +1% to +2%
  
• Laser Crab, Poison Skull, Blocker Skull and Lightning Skull projectile damage decreased by 50%
  
• Grenade Crab, Fire Skull and Homing Grub projectile damage decreased by 25%
  
• Slightly reduced the radius of the Grenade Crab grenade to be a bit more fair
  
• Slightly reduced the Minigun crab projectile speed
  
• Reduced the collision radius of the Elite Lightning Crab projectiles as there were some cases that appeared to be a miss that would still hit
  
• Removed knockback on many small enemy projectiles to reduce situations where players could lose momentum and be juggled in the air, taking damage multiple times- not fun!
  
• Frenzied Enemies now doubles the attack speed of enemies rather than setting it to the max value (which could lead to inconsistencies and unfair situations on some enemies)
  

NERFS

• Crossbow default piercing reduced from 2 to 0 (as the previous update made it one of the best weapons in the game)
  
• Enemy bonus health per alive player in co-op increased from +40% per player to +45% per player and on Nightmare or Ultra Chaos difficulties, the bonus is increased to +66% per player on Elite and Boss islands as the situations where everyone shreds through elites and bosses in 1 second were happening a bit too often in co-op especially in 4 player lobbies
  
• Double Edged Sword crystal gain has been reduced from 250% of damage dealt to 100% of damage dealt as it was far too overpowered before
  
• Hot Shot critical hit chance reduced from 16% to 15%
  
• Sharpshooter critical hit chance reduced from 8% to 6%
  
• There is no longer a 2% base starting crit chance, you start with 0% chance to crit
  
• Mace Shot trigger chance decreased by 1%
  
• Mace Shot damage per second decreased from 125 to 100
  
• Aura Grenade damage per second reduced from 1250 to 500
  
• Armor health per plate reduced from 25% of max health to 15% of max health
  
• Slightly increased the health of most medium enemies (regular skulls, regular ants etc.) but also increased the time before health regeneration on these enemies (if playing with the Regenerating Enemies modifier enabled), allowing for more breathing room between each hit they take
  
• Pufferfish health increased to differentiate them from slugs when prioritizing targets
  

BUG FIXES

• Upgrade chests no longer contain duplicates of the same loot (you could have 10 mods in your inventory but get the same mod twice)
  
• Fixed issue where ALL strikes that had spawned during a run weren’t getting cleaned up properly which could lead to worse performance on late game runs
  
• Enemy movement now ignores physically simulated destructibles so they should stop being pushed under the ground by barrels
  
• Bouncing Shot no longer resets the lifetime of projectiles which was causing performance issues where projectiles would bounce around for 30+ seconds at high levels
  
• Removed Laser Crab and Minigun Crab from challenge crystals as they were appearing when the Evolved Enemies difficulty modifier was inactive
  
• Enemies that happen to spawn outside of the world bounds should get automatically eliminated
  
• Fixed Critical Blast having a visual cooldown in the inventory while actually having a chance to trigger on each critical hit
  
• Fixed issue that could cause Auras to trigger multiple times when dropping and re-picking back up an Aura perk
  
• Fixed various issues that could cause Auras to stop triggering when multiple Aura perks were equipped
  
• Lava now deals damage when stepping into it as intended
  
• Homing Thorns now deal damage as intended
  
• Fixed various spots where enemies could get stuck
  
• The “Islands Survived” text in the game over UI now shows island 18 if getting eliminated on island 19 (previously it would show 19)
  
• You no longer automatically fire when leaving a portal if you had entered it with the fire button held down
  
• Fixed some jankiness around sliding- when sliding forward and quickly pressing the back key, you no longer change directions while sliding and instead stop the slide which should prevent overshooting when trying to stop a slide
  
• Damage Dealt can no longer be negative on the game over screen
  
• Max health no longer goes to 1 when getting high enough
  
• Fixed issue that would cause players other than the multiplayer host to see blue borders in the lobby
  
• Fixed issue with auto melee that could cause it to continue indefinitely when exiting a portal
  
• Removed the invisible walls around the pillars in some boss islands- this prevents situations where you can seemingly deal no damage to enemies when they are near the pillars but will increase situations where they may be able to shoot through walls. Working on a better fix to this in the future
  
• Fixed issue that prevented the Challenger challenges from being completed
  
• Made several potential fixes for a low percentage of players not being able to join multiplayer games
  
• Fixed the Level Up perk favoring grenade mods over weapon mods when leveling things up
  
• Fixed the Level Up perk leveling up mods and perks that were already level 255
  
• Fixed a soft lock that could happen if knocked out of the Tropical island with the square 4 walls: there’s now a launchpad outside of the wall boundaries to bounce back in!
  

That's all for this update, thanks for playing! 🦀


Made a few small improvements based on initial feedback from the update!

GENERAL

• Changed lightning to only interrupt your movement initially, not prevent jumping or dashing the entire time you were shocked which felt unfair over the new longer lifespan that lightning has
  

BUG FIXES

• Fixed Lightning Skulls not having purple projectiles
  
• Fixed a few rare crashes
  
• Fixed Checklist displaying the incorrect amount of eliminations needed in the description
  

It's been quite a while since the last update- this will most likely be the pace moving forward: larger updates every 1-2 months delivering a nice chunk of new content to explore! As mentioned in previous patch notes, I have been continually updating the Beta branch with changes every few days so if you feel like trying out every little addition (with the possibility of them being unbalanced) then feel free to opt into that branch. There has been an amazing beta community growing on Discord and it's been fun to see the reactions to each element as I add them.

With that said, lets get into all the changes!



DIFFICULTY MODIFIERS
With a surprising amount of players asking for a challenge beyond Nightmare, I have added 12 new difficulty modifiers that can all be enabled at once for the ULTIMATE test of skill! Keep in mind that these are intended for seasoned players and (especially on higher challenge levels) will most likely require a lot of attempts to win.

Each weapon gets a medal when winning (the medal awarded depends on the challenge level) which contributes to your overall account medal (seen next to your name in all games).



NO MORE COOLDOWNS: COMPLETE LOOT REBALANCE!
There have been countless rebalances to loot in this patch (details in the full patch notes below), but the main things to be excited for are:

• Almost all mods that previously had boring cooldowns (meaning you could only trigger them once every few seconds) now are chance based, allowing you to trigger them multiple times in a short timespan. Each additional level of these mods both increases the trigger chance AND the effectiveness of the mod. This should allow for previously underwhelming mods like Dagger Arc or Bubble Blast to scale nicely into the end game
  
• Damage increasing perks now affect the damage of weapon and grenade mods that spawn secondary projectiles (again like Dagger Arc / Bubble Blast) which makes more sense AND again allows for better scaling
  

These changes mean that finally the more "fun" mods are a viable choice over straight up flat damage boosts as for a long time these mods just couldn't keep up and weren't worth taking. This should introduce far more build variety than before.

PHYSICS BASED DESTRUCTIBLES
These add a new layer of chaos to islands compared to the existing static explosive rocks!





TONS OF QUALITY OF LIFE IMPROVEMENTS
This update is packed full of highly requested quality of life features such as:

• You can now press Q (by default) to Auto Loot every piece of loot and chest on an island without having to manually open and choose each pickup (which could really slow down late game runs especially with perk combos like Big Chests and Faulty Chests)
  
• The same amount of crystals given to all players in multiplayer when eliminating enemies to prevent unlucky players from falling behind in a run
  
• You can no longer be frozen for 2+ seconds, leading to unfair deaths
  
• Many common and frustrating bugs have been fixed such as Key Totems not working if you aren't hosting in a multiplayer game, getting eliminated by totems if you had a perk that increases incoming damage, glue shot not damaging consistently etc.
  

GENERAL

• Added 12 difficulty modifiers that each add a challenge level to the run to allow you to rank up in exchange for greatly increased difficulty. I tried to make each modifier interesting while keeping the core gameplay loop intact while also trying to avoid "curse" or straight up debuff modifiers like "chests spawn less loot", those never feel very fun to me. If you thought Nightmare was getting too easy, try a few runs with all modifiers active!
  
• In multiplayer, all players now receive an equal share of crystals when enemies are eliminated. This even occurs when a player has been eliminated and is spectating. The main reason for this is to prevent situations where players are left behind due to one overpowered player dealing all the damage and scooping up all the crystals!
  
• Added new “Auto Loot” keybind that will automatically pick up all available loot (if a chest it will pick the highest rarity option) and will salvage all remaining loot- great for late game runs with a lot of loot to sort through that previously took a lot of time per island
  
• Damage line of sight checks now ignore enemies so grenades, explosive weapons and melee will now all damage ALL enemies within the damage radius (before, only a fraction of a group of enemies would take damage, the others blocking the damage entirely)
  
• New XP system: for every 10000 score you get in a run, you level up! This is a permanent account level that can be infinitely leveled up. For each Challenge Level you get 5% more XP
  
• Added physically simulated barrels and landmines
  
• Added new enemies (only seen with the Evolved Enemies difficulty modifier active): Elite Barrel Skull, Laser Crab, Minigun Crab, Homing Grub
  
• Perks that increase damage now also scale the damage of ALL other damage sources (including things like Dagger Arc or Poison Aura). Because of this I have rebalanced the damage numbers of ALL “secondary” projectile weapon mods, grenade mods and perks (too many small tweaks to list here but they have all been rebalanced with this new scaling in mind)
  
• Most mods that had cooldowns are now fully chance based, allowing you to trigger them multiple times in a short timeframe. Grenade mods that do have cooldowns generally have much shorter (around 1 second) cooldowns to allow for grenades to trigger mods much more frequently when using Grenadier or Clone Explosion
  
• Perks that increase or decrease incoming damage (like Hot Shot or Hard Target) no longer have an effect on unblockable damage sources such as from spiked chests or totems. This means you can no longer get eliminated by using a totem or opening a spiked chest!
  
• When aiming with the crossbow, the arc spread is now tightened
  
• Heavily optimized the maximum amount of individual FX instances that can be visible at once which should reduce late game frame drops with a lot going on
  
• Heavily optimized the maximum amount of individual damage text numbers that can be visible at once which should also help late game performance
  
• Projectiles now hit the blue island border walls which means improved performance in cases where lots of projectiles are being spammed (as projectiles that missed enemies and flew out into the distance got simulated for far longer than they were relevant to gameplay)
  
• Optimized the Shrapnel challenge modifier projectiles as it could cause noticeable frame drops when many enemies were eliminated at once
  
• Greatly improved the responsiveness of physics objects in multiplayer
  
• Added new weapon mod: Landmine Shot
  
• Added new Grenade Mod: Barrel Explosion
  
• Added new rideable barrel to the lobby- hop in and find Tony!
  
• Added new challenge modifier: Homing Barrels
  
• Added new destructible rock type: Max Health Rock (gold)
  
• Improved gold skin visuals to be brighter and more vibrant
  
• Dagger Arc, Piercing Wave, Arcane Blast, Shotgun Blast, Mace Shot, Firework Shot, Thorn Shot, Torpedo Shot, Fireball Shot, Sharpened Axe and Triangle Shot are now chance based instead of cooldown based. This should make them far more interesting and fun to choose instead of straight up stat boosts
  
• The maximum ice stacks a player or enemy can ever have at once is 25. This is to prevent extremely long freeze periods on both incoming and outgoing damage which could result in players getting unfairly eliminated
  
• All “bad thing happens when taking damage perks” now won’t trigger when taking constant fire damage and will only happen on direct hits from enemies or other strong one off damage hits like from totems. Your combo will also stay safe here as losing a hard earned 5x combo due to a tick of fire never feels fair
  
• Enemies can no longer change targets while in the middle of an attack and facing another player
  
• Interact cooldown has been removed from portals to prevent situations where multiple players interacting with portals in a short time frame wouldn’t count every player
  
• Improved controller navigation on the Difficulty selection UI to make it easier to see which modifiers are being selected
  
• Added 3 new achievements and skins
  

BALANCE CHANGES

• The maximum time a Horde island can be has been reduced from 90 seconds to 60 seconds as they could often drag the pace of a run down a bit. Since they are now shorter, I've adjusted the enemy spawn curve to be more intense
  
• Whenever multiple elites or bosses spawn due to looping or difficulty modifiers, they can now be all different types of enemies
  
• Reduced the amount of bounces that Elite Lightning Crab projectiles can do and also increased the time between their attacks
  
• Poison Crab health reduced by 15%
  
• The key totems in the lobby are now much more likely to drop Legendary loot
  
• Auto Rifle damage increased from 28 to 30
  
• Orb Launcher damage increased from 35 to 36
  
• Grenade damage increased from 275 to 350
  
• Bouncing Shot now works slightly differently- each level of Bouncing Shot adds +1 bounce (previously no matter what level it gave +4 bounces)
  
• Made reaching max combo much easier: Combo Level 3 = 50 eliminations (down from 100), Combo Level 4 = 125 eliminations (down from 250), Combo Level 5 = 225 eliminations (down from 500)
  
• Homing Shot now has a much shorter homing range which should prevent it completely breaking the game- it’s still powerful when used on lined up enemies with piercing but it should make situations where all you have to do is fire into the sky to clear an island less common
  
• Scavenger is now fixed at a 5% chance for enemies to drop health pickups but the amount of healing increases with each level so it can scale better into the late game
  
• Poison was extremely overpowered so it no longer affects damage from non direct damage (like fire damage). This makes flat damage mods more consistent and prevents unfair deaths where you get set on fire while also poisoned, leading to insane incoming damage. Poison stacks have also been adjusted to be closer to fire in terms of balance as before landing even a single bullet with the Poison Shot mod active would grant a +25% damage bonus when hitting that enemy again- way too overpowered in comparison to the other elements! All poison based mods and perks have had their poison stacks rebalanced to be more in line with the other elements
  
• Iron Claws negative debuff (melee cooldowns increased) reduced from +100% melee cooldowns to +50% melee cooldowns so it should be more viable to use now
  
• Valued Customer now increases max health instead of just healing, making it much more useful
  
• Fortitude max health gain increased from +20 max health to +25 max health
  
• Personal Space and Bullseye eliminations needed to trigger reduced from 10 to 8
  
• Damage Aura damage increased from 15 to 20
  
• The health of all turrets has been increased from 100 to 10000
  
• Reduced grenade knockback strength to make grenade mods such as Spike Strike or Crystal Barrage more useful (since before it would often knock enemies out of the way, making these mods useless)
  
• Shotgun Blast damage per pellet increased from 125 to 400
  
• Ultra Shot base trigger chance increased by 50% and damage increased from 400 to 500
  
• Time Bolt damage increased from 600 to 1000
  
• Firework Shot damage increased from 500 to 1000
  
• All Aura perks (other than Damage Aura) now have a larger radius which should make them much more useful
  
• Poison Aura cooldown reduced from 5 seconds to 4 seconds
  
• Lightning Aura cooldown reduced from 9 seconds to 6 seconds
  
• Ice Aura cooldown reduced from 12 seconds to 8 seconds
  
• Fire Aura cooldown reduced from 10 seconds to 6 seconds
  
• Fire Shot fire stacks per hit increased from 40 to 100
  
• Random Shot debuff stacks per hit increased from 10 to 25
  
• Critical Chain cooldown reduced from 12 seconds to 10 seconds
  
• Gemstone damage increased from +5% after each island to +6% after each island
  
• Dagger projectiles (used by Dagger Blast / Dagger Shot / Dagger Dash) now move 50% more slowly but have a 50% increased radius so should be far more useful + effective
  
• FMJ damage increased from +50% damage to armored enemies to +100% damage to armored enemies
  
• Ghost Ammo chance to not use ammo per shot reduced from 20% to 15% (to balance it better with Efficiency as that has the same chance but you have to actually hit something for it to take effect)
  
• Bouncing Shot now starts with a few extra bounces to prevent cases where it could get stuck on the ground and appear to not bounce at all
  
• Bribe, Damage Seeker and Double Edged Sword will no longer trigger when stepping into non damaging poison / ice zones
  
• Health Rocks and Max Health Rocks now scale their bonuses by +20% per island
  
• Increased melee knockback strength by 50%
  
• Grave Dodger has been removed for now as it was extremely broken at high levels and basically prevented a run from being lost with 60+ seconds of invulnerability when reaching 1 HP on each island
  
• Melee knockback strength has been toned back slightly as the previous buff caused enemies to get stuck in crevices around the map
  
• Removed Lightning Slugs from the Challenge Crystal enemy pool and added Laser Crabs and Minigun Crabs instead
  
• Ultra Mushroom now has the same spawn weight as other grenade mods
  
• All turret projectiles damage increased by 50%
  
• Mace Ball projectiles have less gravity
  
  There were a few things causing damage numbers to SKYROCKET and make other mods that deal flat damage essentially useless very quickly. I’ve toned these back so that a wider range of build options are viable
  
  Critical hit calculations were unintentionally extremely strong: Power Punch was multiplying the original critical hit multiplier which then got multiplied again by Mega Crit! This resulted in insane inflations to damage when the multipliers should have been additive. This has been corrected now
  
  The adjustments below were made as a balancing response to damage increasing perks now being able to affect secondary projectiles such as Dagger Arc
  
  
• Power Punch critical hit damage increase reduced from +25% to +20%
  
• Critical Thinking damage boost reduced from +100% to +25%
  
• Critical chain active duration reduced from 5 seconds to 4 seconds
  
• Power Armor damage boost reduced from +50% damage per armor plate to +25% damage per armor plate
  
• Damage Combo damage boost reduced from +20+ per combo level to +15% per combo level
  
• Reduced damage bonus for Oil Can, Ice Cube, Metal Rod and Poison Vial from +50% damage to +25% damage
  
• Reduced damage bonus of Red Fury from +50% to +33%
  
• Reduced Brute Force damage increase from +250% to +100% and reduced the incoming damage penalty from +50% to +25%
  
• Reduced Damage Seeker damage increase from +250% to +150%
  
• Reduced Glass Cannon damage increase from +400% to +250% and reduced the max health penalty from -90% to -80%
  
• Reduced Leap Of Faith max health increase from +300% to +250%
  
• Reduced Up The Ante damage increase from +200% to +75%
  
• Money Is Power damage buff decreased from +10% to +5% per 1000 crystals
  
• Fire Aura, Ice Aura, Lightning Aura and Poison Aura damage increased from 50 to 150
  
• All “Strike” mods have had their damage increased from 100 to 400+
  
• All “Strike” mods have had their cooldowns reduced (cooldowns may be removed entirely in the future but since they all last quite a while it feels right to keep them cooldown based for now)
  

BUG FIXES

• Fixed issue where non-host players in a multiplayer match couldn’t use the key totem to get a free perk before a run
  
• Fixed issue where teammates could be damaged if triggering a damaging mod when eliminated (like crystal barrage) and your damage became “unowned”
  
• Fixed issue that caused Aura perks to not trigger when reloading an autosave unless dropped and picked back up again
  
• Poison now correctly increases damage of lesser projectiles such as Dagger Arc / Bubble Shot etc.
  
• Fixed issue where Glue Shot wasn’t dealing damage on some weapons
  
• Fixed issue where leaking destructible FX weren’t being attached properly
  
• Made many improvements to prevent enemies spawning under the ground (some may remain especially around barrels but I'm working to fix those in the future!)
  
• Fixed keys spawning under the ground when defeating bosses
  
• Fixed Damage Seeker reducing future max health gains from hearts when it shouldn’t
  
• Fixed enemies not calculating debuff damage correctly (Fire Skulls now will apply more fire stacks in general for example but these fire stacks will be far less damaging than before). This fix will make debuff damage consistent with all other sources (such as from fire rocks). Previously a poison skull would apply 10 stacks of poison from a projectile on island 1, and the same 10 stacks of poison on island 100 when they should have been applying far more
  
• Fixed exploit where players could win infinitely in the Game Over UI
  
• Fixed floating rocks on some islands
  

That's all for now, see you in the next update! 🦀

GENERAL

• Added 5 new Volcanic arena islands and removed the re-used tropical islands from the Volcanic biome
  
• You can now interact with key totems even after unlocking everything to start a run off with a random piece of loot (minimum rarity is Epic)
  
• Added new perk: Critical Claws: Melee critical hit chance increased
  
• Added new perk: Blender: Melee cooldowns reduced
  
• Added new perk: Iron Claws: Melee damage heavily increased but melee cooldowns are also increased
  
• Added new Greed perk: Brawler: Melee damage greatly increased but weapon damage is reduced
  
• Holding down the melee button will now melee automatically after each melee cooldown
  

BALANCE CHANGES

• Increased the minigun chance based mods trigger chance by 33%
  
• Time Shot damage increased from +50% to +100%
  
• Tony’s Black Card discount reduced from 15% to 8% per perk level
  
• Gold Dice chance increase reduced from 50% to 20%
  
• Blocker Skulls and regular Skulls are now larger and easier to hit
  
• Blocker Skulls projectile speed reduced
  
• Removed random spread on Sniper Crab shots- they lost their scariness and missed way more than intended. With the new telegraphing they should now give enough time to get out of danger before they attack and still be a dangerous force to deal with!
  
• Rigged Totems chance buff decreased from +25% chance to +10% chance (as it was very easy to break totems)
  
• Regenerator heal amount doubled and max duration increased from 30 to 45 seconds
  
• Mace Shot cooldown reduced from 6 seconds to 4 seconds and mace projectiles bounce less while also not expiring when hitting enemies so this mod should be much more useful in general
  
• Grub slam explosion attack radius has been reduced to make the hitbox feel more fair
  

QUALITY OF LIFE

• Combo is no longer lost when opening Spiked Chests, using damaging totems or falling off the map
  
• High Roller will no longer remove Key Chests even if other reward chests are removed
  
• Added a new “Weapon Effects” graphics setting option which allows you to turn bullet FX and trails down to “Minimal” for better performance and clarity especially in late game runs on lower end machines!
  
• The maximum limit of held crystals is now 4294967295 (double of the previous value) and crystals will no longer reset back to 0 if exceeding that limit
  
• Camera Shake (from explosions) can now be turned off in the settings menu
  
• Totems that drop loot now spread loot over a wider area to prevent loot overlapping and being harder to pick up a specific drop if multiple have dropped in the same location
  
• Autosaves now save the island reward type, challenge modifier, blessing and combo when continuing runs
  
• Optimized bullet FX so that late game combinations such as Arc Shot + Split Shot are less taxing on performance
  
• Energy Ring destructible rocks no longer deal damage when exploding, the only damage comes from the ring itself (so they are safe to stand on top of and explode without taking damage)
  

BUG FIXES

• Fixed issue that caused keybinds to get reset every time the game got launched
  
• Fixed issue that prevented the inventory UI from being navigable on controllers
  
• Fixed issue that would cause very high damage amounts to appear as -1 billion damage
  
• Fixed issue that would cause continuing runs saved on the Arctic biome to use Tropical biome islands
  
• Perks that increase damage will now correctly affect Time Shot and Time Bolt
  
• Made several more potential fixes for enemies spawning under the ground and getting stuck while moving (including improved enemy pathfinding accuracy)
  
• The Streamer Loot perk now only affects chests as intended- it was previously affecting every loot drop in the world which was unbalanced
  
• Improved some chest spawn locations that were spawning chests off the edges of cliffs
  
• Fixed issue where the inventory UI could be shown in the Game Over screen or when spectating in an invalid state
  
• The list of joined players now correctly updates when a new player joins the lobby
  
• Added a missing animation when firing the left Dual Pistol
  

Had a great chat with Woolie talking all things Crab Champions and game development in general!

You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/uKyeo6l_pAQ


Meeps, a talented community member has created a site that allows players to quickly find and search up info on all of the mods and perks in the game- descriptions, buffs, cooldowns and other stats are all visible in one place!

Check it out here if interested: https://crabchampions.info/wmods


That's all for now, see you in the next update! 🦀

GENERAL

• Elemental weapon mods are now chance based instead of cooldown based. This has been a heavily requested feature and I will be moving from cooldowns to chance based on many other mods in upcoming updates to allow for even more insane build scaling! The general idea is that it’s boring for a powerful thing to fire only once every 5 seconds max and it’s much more fun for a weaker thing to fire potentially multiple times a second (scaling nicely with fire rate and chance build options).
  
  In order for this to be balanced and considering that a 20% chance to burn enemies would be constantly applied from the minigun (due to the fast fire rate) and would barely be applied at all from the sniper (due to the slow fire rate), the base trigger chance for the certain perks will change depending on the weapon used (with fast firing weapons having a lower base chance and slow firing weapons having a higher base chance).
  
  The following mods use this system and more will follow in the future:
  
  
  • Ice Shot
    
  • Fire Shot
    
  • Poison Shot
    
  • Lightning Shot
    
  • Random Shot
    
  • Ultra Shot
    
  • Time Bolt
    
  • Triple Shot
    
  • Arc Shot
    
  • X Shot
    
  • Square Shot
    
  • Mega Crit
    
  • Split Shot
    
  • Scatter Shot
    
  • Targeting Shot
    
  • Homing Shot
    
• Overhauled the save system- there are now multiple save backups and a separate save for user settings. This greatly reduces the chance of your save file becoming corrupt (some players were experiencing a NULL bug where they couldn't move after their PC lost power while an autosave was saving) as there are now 2 extra backup saves to try and prevent that from ever occurring
  
• Increased the maximum projectile limit from 300 to 400
  
• Time Shot can now crit which should make it much more interesting and useful
  
• Added new weapon mod: Ultra Shot: Chance to fire high damage bullets along with your shots
  
• Added new weapon mod: Time Bolt: Chance to fire bolts that deal damage over time
  
• Added new perk: Rigged Totems: Chance based totems are more likely to roll in your favor
  
• Added new perk: Streamer Loot: Higher rarity loot has a greater chance to spawn from chests
  
• Changed Green Dice: renamed to Gold Dice, buffed to Legendary rarity and has a more potent effect on chance based mods and perks but no longer provides the higher rarity loot benefit that it had before. A note about wording that may be confusing: it says +50% chance for chance based mods and perks to trigger- this does not mean adding a flat 50% to all chance based things (as this would quickly break many perks), it insteads multiplies the chance by 150%. So a base chance of 20% will be 30% with the 50% extra chance buff that Gold Dice provides
  
• Improved the Tropical biome parkour island layout to have a better and easier flow
  
• Replaced 6 placeholder skins with fresh new ones: Emerald, Glimmer, Jet Black, Ruby, Sapphire and Silver
  

BALANCE CHANGES

• Reduced enemy damage scaling a bit on Nightmare difficulty especially when looping as it quickly turns into a “lose all your health on one hit” type of situation which I’m not a fan of. Don’t get me wrong- I still want enemies to be extremely damaging when looping on Nightmare but this should just make it feel like you can take an extra hit or two before the run is over
  
• Blocker Skull movement speed reduced by 25%
  
• The Unstoppable challenge (Get a win with over 10000 eliminations) elimination requirement has been reduced down to 7500 eliminations
  
• Regular melee crabs, ants and slugs are slightly larger to make them easier to hit
  
• Ice Shot is now unlocked by default
  

QUALITY OF LIFE

• Improved cases where enemies could shoot through walls on elite and boss islands
  
• Toned back some more overtuned FX such as on daggers
  

BUG FIXES

• Fixed many places where enemies could get stuck under the map. Any remaining enemies that do happen to spawn under the map should get picked up by the new anti-softlock mechanics and will get auto eliminated after a short period of time
  
• Fixed a bug that was causing the settings menu to stay active in a hidden state while the game was playing, resulting in frequent stutters as the game saved constantly
  
• Some mod and perk descriptions that were inaccurate have been updated (such as Money Is Power displaying a 1% increased in damage when it is actually a 10% increase)
  
• Fixed issue where enemies would stop spawning if players were far away from any spawn points
  

For those interested in trying new updates before they go live for everyone, you can opt in to the beta branch. Be warned, this branch will most likely be less stable and have more bugs than the main branch version so if you do decide to use it, make sure you back up your save just in case!

To access the beta branch:

1. Right click Crab Champions in your Steam library and click "properties"
   
2. Navigate down to the "Betas" tab
   
3. Select the beta branch from the dropdown
   

That's it for this update! Lots to continue working on, see you next time 🦀