Crab Champions News

The Island Update Hotfix #3 / #4

[p]After spending the last few weeks reading as much feedback as possible on the new update, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two types of players when it comes to the feedback I was getting of “I’m bored, make the game harder!”[/p][p]
A) Players that were finding Diamond runs too easy and wanted a fun (but still attainable) new challenge to grind
B) Players that want the most overtuned difficulty that I could possibly muster up no matter how unfair it was[/p][p]
I made the mistake of trying to satisfy both groups with a single medal so I have made a bunch of changes in this patch to make the game more enjoyable for both groups of players.[/p][p]
Firstly, I have made a new completely optional (doesn’t affect medals or achievements) set of difficulty modifiers called Flex Modifiers. These are unlocked when reaching Diamond account rank and are purely for those players looking to create the most unfair situations possible in the game (group B as mentioned above).

Secondly, I have made a lot of changes for group A to make attaining the Prismatic medal FUN and not a tedious / frustrating grind which it clearly was for many players. There are also some nice QOL and balance changes that should round out particularly annoying edge cases or situations that felt like they depended too much on RNG to succeed.

HOTFIX #3 PATCH NOTES[/p]

[p]Countdown and Manual Collection have been moved to be completely optional Flex modifiers. These two modifiers were by far the least fun modifiers reported in feedback and I totally get it- they both force a specific playstyle and add stressful elements to the game so they don’t belong in the core medal difficulty modifier pool.[/p]
[p]Ultra Chaos red modifier now grants +50% chance to find higher rarity loot in chests[/p]
[p]Lucky green modifier chance to find higher rarity loot in chests reduced from +250% to +200%[/p]
[p]Discounted Shops green difficulty modifier discount increased from 30% to 35%[/p]
[p]Added new green difficulty modifier: Loot Goblin: Start with the Bounty Hunter and Driller perks[/p]
[p]Widened the infamous narrow arctic corridor island[/p]
[p]Gold and Greed totem spawn chances increased by 50%[/p]
[p]Scavenger health drop lifetime increased from 10 to 15 seconds[/p]
[p]Enemy damage scaling per island reduced by 20%. Enemies were dealing noticeably too much damage when looping so this should help things feel a bit smoother[/p]
[p]Enemy damage multiplier with the Ultra Chaos modifier active decreased from +33% to +25%[/p]
[p]Enemy health scaling when looping reduced by roughly 15%[/p]
[p]Enemy movement and attack speed bonus per loop reduced by 25%[/p]
[p]Enemy bonus density when looping reduced by 25%[/p]
[p]Hard enemies now drop 100% more crystals[/p]
[p]Elite and boss enemies now drop 150% more crystals[/p]
[p]Shop prices globally decreased by 12%[/p]
[p]Shops now spawn 2 more pedestals by default[/p]
[p]Shop Reroll Totem chance to explode reduced by 20%[/p]
[p]When I say “cost” in the points below: each enemy in the game has a cost to spawn so if an enemy has a higher cost it will mean that fewer other enemies can spawn on that island if they get spawned[/p]
- [p]Elite and Boss enemies cost 20% more to spawn[/p]
- [p]Hard enemies cost 13% more to spawn[/p]
[p]Athletic Enemies jump around 50% less. It was just too spammy in general which made using the Poison Cannon feel especially frustrating as enemies were constantly leaping out of the poison clouds[/p]
[p]The Fiery Enemies and Poisonous Enemies challenge modifiers now give enemies roughly 50% fewer fire and poison stacks as these felt unreasonably strong compared to other challenge modifiers[/p]
[p]Enemies that naturally leap a lot (like the Elite Lightning Crab) now leap 33% less[/p]
[p]Elite Fire Crab is less likely to use his launch slam attack (especially back to back which was creating some unfair situations)[/p]
[p]Elite Poison Grub has a limit of 1 alive at a time per island[/p]
[p]Elite Beam Skull has a limit of 1 alive at a time per island to prevent taking unfair damage when multiple did their circular attacks at the same time[/p]
[p]Elite Beam Skull shotgun beam attack damage reduced by 20%[/p]
[p]Elite Barrel Skull now is a bit less spammy with barrels[/p]
[p]Elite Barrel Skull barrel health reduced by 25%[/p]
[p]Angered enemies now deal 50% more damage (down from 100% more damage)[/p]
[p]Frenzied enemies now attack 50% faster (down from 100% faster)[/p]
[p]Speedy enemies now move 100% faster (down from 150% faster)[/p]
[p]The number of bonus enemies that spawn when you choose a 2x chest island has been reduced from +25% more enemies to +20% more enemies[/p]
[p]Reduced the Rush blessing goal per player influence by 33%[/p]
[p]Reduced the Relaxed green difficulty modifier cost from -10 to -6 so you can still earn some medals with it on[/p]
[p]Reduced the Ultra Luck green difficulty modifier cost from -50 to -10 so that you can still earn some medals with it on[/p]
[p]Removed the “damage when going out of bounds is doubled” part of the No Safety Net difficulty modifier (it can be found as part of the new optional “Handle With Care” flex difficulty modifier if you wanted to keep it enabled)[/p]
[p]Chance totem success % increased from 25% to 33% but health cost increased from 10% to 15%[/p]
[p]Gamble totem success % increased from 25% to 33% but cost increased from 10% to 15% of the price of a common pickup[/p]
[p]Flamethrower base damage increased from 1 to 2 and weapon mod trigger roll multiplier increased by 15%[/p]
[p]Big Shot speed reduction reduced from -50% to -40% to make it feel better in general[/p]
[p]Removed the cooldown from the Shockwave perk entirely[/p]
[p]Ability and Melee mods are 50% less likely to spawn in chests- this is because generally they are less sought after and could cause players to get frustrated over poor loot RNG when opening an Epic chest and seeing 3 ability mods appear. Since there are 50% less ability and melee mod slots available compared to weapon mod / perk slots this change should feel fine but I'll be keeping an eye on it! I'm planning on adding some kind of "Trinket" system in the future that will let players influence their chest loot a bit so players that like doing melee builds will be able to skew the odds in their favor![/p]
[p]Heavy Crab movement speed penalty reduced from -30% to -25% and gravity penalty halved so it should feel a lot less punishing[/p]
[p]Immortal Snail now has a larger and purple health bar to more easily keep track of it next to groups of enemies[/p]
[p]Some players mentioned that Horde islands were feeling a bit boring / autopilot since I nerfed per wave enemy health scaling so their initial starting health has been buffed to 50% of the normal value (up from 33% of the normal value)[/p]
[p]Demolition nests no longer spawn 3 additional nests per player as instead of making it harder in multiplayer as intended, it made it far easier with most islands ending as soon as the first nest was destroyed. Now the same amount of nests spawn as in solo play but nests gain 100% more health per player in the lobby[/p]
[p]Manual Collection crystal lifetime decreased from 12 to 8 seconds (since Manual Collection is now a completely optional Flex modifier I can restore it back to its former glory for those that enjoy this kind of playstyle)[/p]
[p]The “Ultra Chaos Champion” challenge has been changed as there are no longer 14 red modifiers. The new challenge is: “Get a win with all red difficulty modifiers, no green difficulty modifiers and the Random Loadout flex difficulty modifier active”. This is the only achievement in the game involving flex modifiers but since all it does is randomize your loadout I felt it was still reasonable for most players to complete[/p]
[p]Reduced the intensity of the lights when opening chests- especially on darker lighting scenarios this made opening chests a bit uncomfortable[/p]
[p]Fixed XL Totems actually spawning 250% more enemies instead of 200% more enemies per use[/p]
[p]Fixed locked difficulty modifiers staying enabled with no way to turn them off in cases where a multiplayer host had enabled modifiers that you hadn’t unlocked yet[/p]
[p]Fixed High Roller random rolls not being accurate (it was rolling 33% twice instead of rolling a number once and checking that number at 33% and 66%)[/p]
[p]As per popular demand I have removed the volcanic biome whistling song from the desert gameplay music playlist. It now only plays in the volcanic shop as Tony intended[/p]

[p]
HOTFIX #4 PATCH NOTES[/p][p]After playing a bunch of runs on Hotfix #3 and observing feedback I’m happy with where things are at other than two things that were pushed too far into the easy category: shop prices and the Lucky modifier- these both made it possible to break the game in the first shop which made runs feel pointless and laughably easy super early on (for example I got level 9 Ultra Shot in my first shop and was able to comfortably melt through the rest of the run with no resistance from enemies).

I still want Prismatic to feel like an engaging and satisfying difficulty to overcome (it is the hardest medal in the game after all) so these tweaks are purely for that reason.

Keep in mind that the game is still drastically easier / less RNG based than before, all of the Hotfix #3 changes combined made a huge impact![/p]

[p]The -12% to shop prices change that was made in Hotfix #3 was actually a much larger decrease than it seemed as it affected exponential scaling and was the main cause of players being able to buy out shops and break the game in the first biome so it has been reverted. Since hard enemies drop way more crystals than before it was an unnecessary change, there is still a big net increase in economy compared to before even with this change reverted[/p]
[p]Since the outliers that made the game feel too RNG based to succeed were significantly toned back in Hotfix #3, the Lucky and Discounted Shops modifiers became noticeably overpowered so they have been toned back to maintain the new more “flat” balance of the game (less need to counter the extreme difficulty spikes that are no longer present)[/p]
- [p]Lucky luck bonus reduced to +100% chance to find higher rarity loot in chests which is still probably the strongest green modifier in the game that is allowed on Prismatic runs[/p]
- [p]Discounted Shops shop discount reduced to 20% but it now only costs -1 difficulty level instead of -2[/p]
[p]I hear you on the -50% chance for Ability and Melee mods to spawn in chests being too much so I have lowered it to just a -25% chance which should feel a lot more balanced while still enabling you to go for ability and melee builds[/p]
[p]Added missing secret chest spawn point on one of the circular floating arctic islands[/p]
[p]Added some more cliffs to the victory island to try and prevent cases where players were getting stuck while exploring and couldn’t get their victory crown[/p]

The Island Update Hotfix #1 / #2

[p]HOTFIX #1 PATCH NOTES[/p]

[p]Changed the Nightmare red difficulty modifier to be +4 difficulty level so this gives you an additional difficulty point to spend on either a green modifier or disabling another one of the 1 point red modifiers. This should give enough flexibility to still get Prismatic while running the least annoying modifiers to you personally (everyone seems to have different opinions on which they prefer / hate so this new modular system seems to be working well to allow people to have more agency)[/p]
[p]Greatly expanded out of bounds trigger zones on all islands so the out of bounds warning should pretty much never pop up accidentally when near a wall anymore and also it should feel a lot less restrictive to move a bit away from the main arena areas now. In general out of bounds warnings should feel much more invisible now and only show up when you are REALLY pushing it[/p]
[p]You now get teleported from out of bounds even when an island is over (you only take damage when this happens on an active island) to prevent getting softlocked on distant areas of the map[/p]
[p]Made the super narrow Desert and Volcanic horde islands much wider[/p]
[p]Made Immortal Snail purple for better visibility especially in the Volcanic biome[/p]
[p]Decluttered that one arctic island with a lot of trees running through the middle of the arena[/p]
[p]Made better Prismatic reward skin[/p]
[p]Darkened the background of the difficulty UI and doubled the opacity of deselected modifiers to make them easier to read[/p]
[p]Fixed not being able to navigate the difficulty UI with a controller[/p]
[p]Fixed Prismatic medal being in grayscale when viewing weapons in the lobby and on the game over UI[/p]
[p]Fixed a one off bug that caused a weapon rank to go into an invalid state: there is now a failsafe to reset it back to bronze[/p]
[p]Fixed the “Attempts” stat not being increased as expected[/p][p][/p]

[p]HOTFIX #2 PATCH NOTES[/p]

[p]I’ve gotten a great response to this update but also have been reading some very valid feedback mainly around Prismatic modifiers. Ideally the Prismatic grind is fun and some of the modifiers especially at their extremes definitely could feel more unfair than fun. I’ve tried to address all of the worst feeling scenarios in this hotfix without diminishing the satisfaction of overcoming the new mastery curve that Prismatic adds to the game[/p]
[p]Immortal Snail can no longer randomly jump at you: this was enjoyable for me during the beta as it created some really unpredictable moments but ultimately losing your entire run due to this feels bad (do note that it can still jump if the “Jumpy Enemies” modifier is active on an island but at least that only lasts for one island rather than the entire run). Also slightly reduced its movement speed to just help smooth out the worst case scenarios of this modifier[/p]
[p]Removed the “no more one shot protection” aspect of the No Safety Net modifier: it was just too punishing to get completely one shot by the Immortal Snail at full health. This functionality may come back as a completely optional “orange” modifier in a future update for those looking to add challenge (it won’t influence the difficulty rank)[/p]
[p]Countdown difficulty level reduced from +2 to +1 so it is much easier to turn off and not feel like you are forced to run it. Many people rightfully felt like they needed to have it on which took away from the fun of the game for them so reducing the points here makes it much less significant / no longer feel mandatory to earn Prismatic. The Ultra Chaos modifier has been increased from +3 to +4 to compensate (this doesn't change difficulty it just makes sure one less difficulty level will meet the Prismatic threshold)[/p]
[p]Initial Countdown timer increased from 45 seconds up to 60 seconds to help smooth out cases where it felt like bad luck would make runs impossible[/p]
[p]The Lucky green modifier (+250% chance to find higher rarity loot in chests) cost has been reduced from -3 to -2. This means with the change above you can run it while also turning off Countdown, mimicking the previous True Ultra Chaos experience that players liked in previous updates[/p]
[p]Reduced the unlock requirements for ALL green and red modifiers by one medal. This means a modifier that previously required Ruby to unlock will now require Emerald[/p]
[p]Fixed the Countdown modifier ticking down time on Crab Island[/p]
[p]Fixed some weapons not respecting the new limited loot system and offering mods like Double Shot or Homing Shot even when at 100%[/p]
[p]Fixed broken textures on the Immortal Snail and made its shell brown for better contrast / visuals[/p]
[p]Made a fix to prevent certain previously unlocked challenges from re-locking when more weapons / achievements are added to the game in the future. These challenges are: Silver, Gold, Sapphire, Emerald, Ruby, Diamond, Prismatic, Gunslinger and Crab Legend. Unfortunately this fix isn’t retroactive so if you have launched the game and lost your previously unlocked Crab Legend skin, this will be the last time you have to unlock it and from then on it will be permanently unlocked even if more challenges / achievements get added and you technically no longer satisfy the unlock requirement[/p]
[p]Fixed large enemies getting stuck on trees on the arctic island with the stone spire in the middle[/p]

The Island Update (Early Access Update 11)

[p][/p]

Patch Highlights

[p][/p][p]ALL NEW ISLANDS[/p][p][/p][p]NEW WEAPON: POISON CANNON[/p][p][/p][p] DIFFICULTY SYSTEM REVAMP WITH NEW RANK: PRISMATIC[/p][p][/p]

Patch Notes

[p] NEW ISLANDS + VISUALS[/p]

[p]Added all new visuals and brand new islands to the game. These have all been designed with much more consistent enemy spawns in mind so less enemies sneaking up from behind you! Many of the islands have been designed to keep the spirit of the older islands but with a fresh coat of paint[/p]
[p]Added completely new lighting setups for all biomes to give them a more distinct look[/p]
[p]Enabled reflections (most noticeable on water) and added ripples to lava[/p]
[p]The static blue boundary walls seen in previous updates has been updated to be a new freeform out of bounds system allowing me to design much more open islands and prevents clunky situations that used to happen by bumping into blue walls unexpectedly. You can also knock enemies out of bounds and cause them to take big damage[/p]

[p]DIFFICULTY SYSTEM REVAMP[/p]

[p]Completely revamped the difficulty system- with the introduction of new modifiers for Ultra Chaos there were people wishing to play with certain modifiers off (such as Locked Slots or Manual Collection) that were baked into Ultra Chaos by default so I’ve done my best to consolidate and streamline the difficulty system to be both easier to understand but also allow for more player choice. I’ve taken this opportunity to add a small selection of fun and helpful green difficulty modifiers (more to be added soon): these can range from a mild starting bonus to being extremely overpowered but it is all factored into the difficulty system: if you want to do a chill run with hugely boosted luck- go ahead! It won’t earn you a Diamond medal but sometimes you just want to blast and not care about difficulty. Alternatively if you want to go full tryhard, you can also do that too with the best medals requiring most difficulty modifiers on with minimal / no helpful modifiers allowed. This allows the game to cater to all playstyles and moods without specific modifiers to gameplay built into the baseline difficulties as before. This is just a start and I’ll likely be expanding both green and red modifiers with fun new options in the future[/p]
[p]Added 6 new difficulty modifiers for challenge enthusiasts: Wandering Elites, Countdown, Slow Recovery, Athletic Enemies, Manual Collection and Immortal Snail[/p]
[p]Existing difficulty stats for the old system (attempt / win / winstreak / highest island reached) have been ported over to the new system: Easy -> Bronze, Normal -> Gold, Nightmare -> Diamond and Ultra Chaos -> Prismatic[/p]
[p]Added a bunch of new difficulty modifiers for the new Prismatic rank: difficulty enthusiasts should expect a fresh challenge to overcome with all of these modifiers enabled![/p]

[p]LIMITED LOOT SYSTEM[/p]

[p]Introducing limited loot- this is a feature that prevents mods that you have maxed out numerically from polluting the loot pool. An example: Double Shot level 1 gives you a 56% chance to fire 2 shots when using the Sniper. Level 2 gives you 100% chance. There is no reason for this mod to show up again. With this change it will no longer show up in reward chests and in the shop (if everyone on your multiplayer team has also maxed out Double Shot)[/p]
[p]The following Weapon Mods now have this feature enabled and scale linearly instead of hyperbolically (+10% per level instead of +10%, +8%, +6% etc. per level) so this is both a nice buff and QOL improvement: Arcane Shot, Arc Shot, Double Shot, Double Tap, Fire Shot, Homing Shot, Ice Shot, Lightning Shot, Poison Shot, Random Shot, Scatter Shot, Split Shot, Square Shot, Targeting Shot, Triple Shot, X Shot[/p]
[p]The following Ability Mods now have this feature enabled and scale linearly instead of hyperbolically: Triple Ability, Layered Explosion, Split Ability[/p]
[p]The following Perks now have this feature enabled and scale linearly instead of hyperbolically: Crystal Asteroids, Efficiency, Mega Crit, Performance Bonus[/p]

[p]NEW CONTENT[/p]

[p]Added new weapon: Poison Cannon: Bursts into poison clouds that wear your enemies down over time. Increases to weapon damage also affect the poison cloud damage. Slow fire rate- choose your shots wisely![/p]
[p]Added new island type: Gauntlet. Clear up to 5 waves of enemies while choosing a stacking challenge and reward modifier for each wave. Choose to end early and take what you have earned so far or push it to the limit and get the best rewards if you can survive- It is a test of attrition so the No Healing modifier is always chosen on the first wave![/p]
[p]Added new totem: Upgrade Totem: Costs crystals to upgrade a specific mod or perk. Appears in shops similar to the Enhancement Totem. This has the potential to be very powerful but the goal is to give players a bit more agency over what they want to upgrade (at a greater cost than happening to find that mod or perk in shops) and allow for more min-max builds. The cost is a 20% increase per level compared to that same mod or perk if it was found in a shop[/p]
[p]Added Randomizer to the lobby: this allows you to quickly randomize your starting loadout without having to walk around and manually choose loot from the different areas[/p]
[p]Added new enemy: Floating Skull[/p]
[p]Added new weapon mod: Double Shot: Chance to fire in a double shot formation[/p]
[p]Added new weapon mod: Knockback Shot: Shots knock enemies back, causing them to take knockback damage[/p]
[p]Added new perk: Magnify: Area of effect increased (affects all damage sources and is multiplicative with other increases to damage radius)[/p]
[p]Added new perk: Bounty Hunter: Large enemies have a small chance to drop loot when eliminated. (I really love Rare Treasure but barely ever get to see it so this gives the same feeling but in the common loot pool)[/p]
[p]Added new perk: Totem Enthusiast: More totems spawn[/p]
[p]Added new perk: Survivor: Block chance increased and incoming damage reduced[/p]
[p]Added new perk: Anti Crit: Damage increased but critical hit chance reduced[/p]
[p]Added new relic: Ring Of Potential: Secret chests are 5 times less likely to spawn but are replaced by Legendary chests[/p]
[p]Added new challenge modifier: Fiery Enemies: All enemy attacks ignite you,[/p]
[p]Added new challenge modifier: Poisonous Enemies: All enemy attacks poison you,[/p]
[p]Added new challenge modifier: Freezing Ground: Patches of icy ground appear on this island,[/p]
[p]Added new challenge modifier: Burning Ground: Patches of burning ground appear on this island,[/p]
[p]Added new challenge modifier: Thick Skin: Enemies spawn in with heavy damage reduction that decays over time,[/p]
[p]Added new challenge modifier: Heavy Crab: Movement speed reduced by 50%,[/p]
[p]Added new challenge modifier: Starfish Party: a bonus pack of starfish spawn with the other enemies[/p]
[p]Added a new stat to the inventory: Block Chance: this is what Bulletproof and Ring Of Deflection use but exposing it as a stat allows me to build a few new cool perks to trigger when blocking and also make building your layers of defense a bit more enjoyable as you can see them all together in the inventory screen[/p]
[p]Added 4 new songs[/p]

[p]GENERAL BALANCE CHANGES[/p]

[p]Relic slots increased from 8 to 10[/p]
[p]Fire no longer melts ice and ice no longer extinguishes fire. This mechanic was “oh that’s neat” the first time you see it but it just ruined too many builds especially in multiplayer or with a fire / ice randomizer combo[/p]
[p]Hot Steam has been reworked to apply a burst of fire damage every time an enemy gets ignited[/p]
[p]Lightning stacks now only decay if lightning damage is actually dealt. This means you can “charge up” a tanky enemy with lightning stacks and then it will discharge them when pathing near another enemy[/p]
[p]Knockback damage dealt to enemies has been globally increased by 1000%[/p]
[p]Doubled the chance for relics to naturally show up in chests / the shop[/p]
[p]Secret Chest spawn chance increased from 10% to 15% per island[/p]
[p]Slide speed has been increased by approx 10%. This is purely a “game feel” thing I’ve noticed after playtesting heavily the last few days- sliding just felt a bit sluggish and this game is all about that smooth movement. Interested to see if you notice a difference[/p]
[p]Air Control (how much your crab is influenced by movement keys while in the air) has been increased by 20%. This is subtle but you should feel a bit more in control of your crab while airborne[/p]
[p]Totem spawns have been made more consistent with each island having a specific area where totems can spawn. Multiple can now spawn in a row in that location. This change fixes frustrating cases like where fuse totems could spawn behind you and explode before you noticed them[/p]
[p]XL Totems are now 20% more common[/p]
[p]Health Totems are now 500% more common (it was too rare before)[/p]
[p]Improved enemy spawn variety to reduce the feeling of every island feeling like “a bunch of small crabs / slugs and a few larger enemies”[/p]
[p]Elite / Boss islands now use the same island pool as Arena islands for more variety and no more repeated island layouts on the same biome[/p]
[p]Resurrecting Enemies difficulty modifier has been removed and Resurrecting is now an enemy buff[/p]
[p]Expensive Shops difficulty modifier has been removed (this is what I’ve been balancing the game around for a while so it is on by default now)[/p]
[p]The Flawless blessing is now 50% more likely to be chosen over the other blessing types as it is generally more rewarding / fun[/p]
[p]Armored Enemies challenge modifier has been removed and instead replaced with an “Armored” enemy buff. The reason here is that as a challenge modifier it was either really not fun (using a weapon like the sniper) or extremely broken (using level 1 of ANY armor perk) with very little in between. As a buff you’ll now be able to make better use of Armor perks (which are still super underrated IMO)[/p]
[p]Barrel Rain as a challenge modifier didn’t really feel like it was threatening so barrels now have a 25% larger explosion radius and enemies are less affected by hazard damage while this modifier is active[/p]
[p]Landmine Rain landmines now explode much more quickly but deal 50% less damage and also don’t leave behind a damage area anymore. They were in a weird place before where they never really felt threatening but often clogged up the island with AOE bubbles[/p]
[p]Barrel Rain and Landmine Rain challenge modifiers spawn half as many destructibles for better performance and to be less spammy[/p]
[p]Removed knockback from enemy spikes when the Spike Strikes modifier is on as it was annoying[/p]
[p]While rebalancing Ultra Chaos, I found the “all enemies can jump” feature of the difficulty to be more annoying than fun on smaller enemies so it has been moved to be part of the “Athletic Enemies” difficulty modifier (only for large enemies) and new challenge modifier “Jumpy Enemies” (for all enemies) instead[/p]
[p]To solve a few edge case issues with the Explosive Enemies modifier it has been changed from “Only explosive enemies spawn” to “Explosive enemies are much more likely to spawn, explode with great force and have greater resistance to hazard damage”[/p]
[p]Increased Manual Collection crystal pickup radius by 25%[/p]
[p]I added a guaranteed health pedestal to every shop in the previous hotfix but quickly realized that most people were still getting used to the new health system and this likely wasn’t needed as it often made shops have very few damage choices and duplicate health loot. Since there is a guaranteed Regeneration Chest on island 1 and a guaranteed Health Chest after elite islands, I think this is enough consistency for health in a run[/p]
[p]Reduced cactus explosion radius by 50% to prevent players taking unfair damage[/p]
[p]Random Portals are slightly less common as they were 2.5 times more likely to be spawned compared to other portal types[/p]
[p]Rush elimination goals were laughably easy so they have been increased a bit to be more in line with the intended challenge level[/p]
[p]Removed Gold and Silver armor from the game- it just felt terrible any time you would get them instead of a legendary / epic mod or perk[/p]
[p]Renamed Bronze Armor to just Armor and increased the number of plates it gives from 1 to 2[/p]
[p]Removed Medium and Large crystal bundles from the game for the same reason as above and renamed Small Crystal Bundle to Crystal Bundle and increased the payout by 33%[/p]
[p]Ice stacks from ice rock damage areas has been reduced by 60% as it was super overtuned[/p]
[p]Removed Autoloader to de-bloat the luck loot pool a bit and since Efficiency is a very similar perk but with more utility (can trigger from any damage)[/p]
[p]Uppercut has been removed from the game temporarily. It will be re-added in a revamped state with a fist that hits enemies in a future update[/p]
[p]Aerial Shot has been removed as it was just quite invisible and boring. I might rework it to give bonus damage based on your height so actually playing differently would make it work better which is much more interesting[/p]
[p]Light Shot has been removed from the game and has been replaced with a Greed relic: Trigger Ring: Fire rate increased by 250% but weapon damage reduced by 90%[/p]
[p]Accelerating Ability has been removed from the game[/p]
[p]Sonic Boom is now a weapon mod instead of a perk[/p]
[p]Enhancement Totem chance to explode on use increased from 50% to 75% (there is more planned to make this feel better in the future but currently they felt a bit too easy to spam enhancements on a single mod with no increases in cost- a lot of power for a single totem)[/p]
[p]Booming enhancement reduced from 200% to 100% (as it is multiplicative with Magnify and was due a tweak anyhow as it was very strong)[/p]
[p]Efficiency is now a weapon mod called Efficient Shot instead of a perk[/p]
[p]Icebreaker is now a relic instead of a perk[/p]
[p]Lingering Fumes is now a relic instead of a perk[/p]
[p]High Roller is now a relic instead of a perk (33% chance for 2 extra chests to spawn, 33% chance for no extra chests to spawn, 33% chance for no chests to spawn at all when clearing islands)[/p]
[p]Split Shot is now Legendary instead of Epic and the trigger chance has been increased by 20%[/p]
[p]Epic and Legendary loot is 15% more likely to spawn in shops (just to make shops in the first loop a bit more fun and exciting)[/p]

[p]Auto Rifle fire rate decreased slightly but projectile damage increased from 9 to 10[/p]
[p]Rocket Launcher fire rate increased by 20%[/p]
[p]Auto Shotgun trigger roll multiplier increased by 16.6%[/p]
[p]Crossbow damage increased from 5 to 12 and weapon mod trigger roll multiplier slightly increased (makes Fire Shot go from 12% to 15% per projectile) but fire rate reduced by 20%[/p]
[p]Marksman Rifle damage increased from 12 to 15[/p]
[p]Cluster Launcher fire rate decreased by 15% and mag size reduced from 10 to 8 but projectile damage and radius has been doubled. This makes it feel more like a hard hitting launcher with splash damage than something too similar to the Auto Shotgun[/p]
[p]Flamethrower fire damage area radius increased by 20%[/p]
[p]Sniper Rifle hipfire spread reduced by 400% (it is now much more accurate when firing without aiming down sights)[/p]
[p]Lightning Scepter weapon mod trigger roll multiplier reduced by 20%[/p]
[p]I’ve made some improvements to make the number of debuff stacks applied by Blade Launcher, Flamethrower and Lightning Scepter feel much more consistent (especially on the Flamethrower)[/p]

[p]WEAPON MOD BALANCE CHANGES[/p]

[p]Wind Up damage increase per shot increased from +2% to +5% but the bullet cap per level has been reduced from 100 to 40. This should make it feel better on weapons that have smaller mag sizes[/p]
[p]Mag Shot damage increase per bullet in the mag increased from +2% to +3%[/p]
[p]Aura Shot now requires you to have Glue Shot before it can show up as it is pretty useless on most weapons without Glue Shot and was bloating the Epic loot pool[/p]
[p]Damage over time mods have been commonly reported as feeling like the obvious choice over other similar mods as the increased damage is always a net positive. Rather than nerfing these mods to be in line, I have made damage over time apply over a 2x longer time period so it takes longer for the entire damage amount to get applied. Crits also were happening on DOT builds really often as a single shot that normally would roll a crit once was able to roll a crit 30+ times! This has been normalized to only roll crits once per second on DOT damage which is still an increased crit chance compared to doing a single shot as DOT lasts for several seconds. The only DOT outlier that had to be rebalanced was Time Ring, it was way too free and could single handedly carry builds- it has had the bonus damage reduced from +400% to +250% which is much more reasonable while still staying strong[/p]
[p]Heavy Hitter damage increased from +75% to +150% but the fire rate downside increased from -10% to -20% to make it feel like a more distinct mod[/p]
[p]Bouncing Shot damage increased from +100% to +150% damage per bounce to encourage a playstyle where you are bouncing shots on the floor before hitting enemies and sacrificing on hit mods[/p]
[p]Reload Arc damage increased from 40 to 75, damage radius increased by 33% and projectile speed increased by 33%[/p]
[p]Ultra shot damage increased from 25 to 40[/p]
[p]Time Bolt damage increased from 40 to 60[/p]
[p]Big Shot and Big Ability now have a 50% speed reduction by default but they don’t get slower with more levels as previously they would quickly get to the point where projectiles would just spawn in place and barely move at all[/p]
[p]Big Shot and Big Ability now scale up with diminishing returns as one of the main sources of performance and clarity drops were from big projectiles covering the entire screen. The first few levels are similar to before but the size falls off with more levels compared to before[/p]

[p]ABILITY BALANCE CHANGES[/p]

[p]Air Strike radius increased by 20%[/p]

[p]ABILITY MOD BALANCE CHANGES[/p]

[p]Increased the number of projectiles spawned by Firework Explosion from 3 to 6[/p]
[p]Spike Strike / Strike Explosion damage increased from 500 to 1000 and damage radius increased by 25%[/p]
[p]Increased the radius of all Strike mods as it felt like they were underperforming[/p]
[p]Turrets were feeling a bit too “the game is playing itself” and while I do want to support the automation playstyle, it should take a bit more effort to scale. I’ve reduced the damage increase of Enhanced Turrets from +100% to +50%: this change is justified as it affects ALL turrets at once and it made little sense that a common perk scaled more effectively than picking up multiple of an epic or legendary turret perk[/p]
[p]Barrel Explosion explosion radius increased by 33%[/p]
[p]Imploding Explosion damage buffed from 50% to 100% but the radius is reduced from -15% to -20%[/p]

[p]MELEE WEAPON BALANCE CHANGES[/p]

[p]Dagger damage radius increased by 25%[/p]
[p]Claw melee damage doubled and knockback strength increased by 33% but cooldown increased from 1 to 3 seconds to make timing a melee with the Claw a bit more important (at least at the start of each run) and to help it lean into the “knock enemies away” role to differentiate it a bit more from the Dagger[/p]
[p]With the new heavily increased knockback damage, Hammer is by far the strongest melee weapon in terms of effective damage so the cooldown has increased from 5 to 6 seconds[/p]

[p]MELEE MOD BALANCE CHANGES[/p]

[p]Vampire base heal per elimination increased from 4 to 5[/p]

[p]PERK BALANCE CHANGES[/p]

[p]Bulletproof moved from Epic to Common rarity and chance to block damage reduced from 8% to 6%. Also moved from the Luck loot pool to the Health loot pool[/p]
[p]Damage Reduction now works as a flat subtraction to the Incoming Damage stat (the opposite of what Hot Shot does) instead of multiplying AFTER other Incoming Damage increases which gave it much more value than intended[/p]
[p]Hard Target damage reduction reduced from 10% to 8% but it now scales linearly (so it gains exactly 8% each level instead of falling off to lesser values with each level as before). This means it can now scale higher than 75% to counter increases to incoming damage such as from Hot Shot so instead of Hard Target being capped at 75%, incoming damage is now capped at 25%, allowing you to get more value out of damage reduction[/p]
[p]Exploding Enemies moved from Legendary to Epic rarity[/p]
[p]Silver Lining damage bonus per trigger doubled[/p]
[p]Reworked Shockwave to instead trigger on taking damage instead of on reloading. Also increased the knockback when it triggers by 250% and decreased the cooldown from 6 to 2 seconds[/p]
[p]Flammable Armor moved from Common to Epic rarity and fire stacks reduced from 40 to 30[/p]
[p]Sonic Boom and Shockwave moved from the Damage chest to the Skill chest loot pool[/p]
[p]Icebreaker, Explosive Armor, Poisonous Armor, Flammable Armor, Exploding Enemies, Lingering Fumes, Freezing Enemies, Flammable Enemies, Electric Enemies and Poisonous Enemies no longer gain AOE per level but instead start with a 100% larger radius (you can scale further with the new Magnify perk)[/p]
[p]Efficiency chance to gain ammo reduced from 20% to 15%[/p]

[p]RELIC BALANCE CHANGES[/p]

[p]Turbo Ring fire rate increased from 2% to 3% after clearing each island[/p]
[p]Ring Of Defense damage reduction reduced from 40% to 30%[/p]
[p]Overspill Goblet was feeling underwhelming it so now acts as a bonus multiplier instead of just adding to the critical hit multiplier as before[/p]

[p]ENEMY BALANCE CHANGES[/p]

[p]New enemy health scaling: it is roughly the same as before except all scaling gets applied on the elite island of each biome instead of gradually over each island which often felt like you were always just barely keeping up- now you should be able to enjoy a mini snowball in each biome before the next biome kicks in. This is a direct buff to the first biome in each run as no scaling applies until hitting the second biome which should allow more room for your build to take off especially on the harder difficulties[/p]
[p]All enemy ranges increased (notably the Elite Beam Skull who had a short range that would just not reach the player on most of the larger islands)[/p]
[p]Reduced the amount of poison stacks inflicted by Elite Poison Grubs by 50%[/p]
[p]Added height variance to floating enemies which actually makes a big difference in how fighting them feels[/p]
[p]Enemy spawns have been greatly sped up when looping to prevent situations where you are clearing islands faster than enemies can spawn, resulting in boring waiting around[/p]
[p]Increased the speed of Horde island enemy spawns[/p]
[p]Horde islands now have a set time of 30 seconds (+30 seconds per XL totem) instead of having different time limits depending on when in the biome you chose them. This improves early biome horde rewards substantially as they could be as short as 20 seconds previously[/p]
[p]Enemy movement speed on the first loop of Ultra Chaos has been reduced a bit to allow it to ramp up to even faster speeds when looping- I want there to still be contrast in UC runs in terms of steadily rising intensity and also wanted the first few biomes to be a bit more enjoyable in terms of fighting enemies with your baseline loadout before your build comes online[/p]
[p]Added new line of sight checks to prevent hammer crabs doing their line attacks through walls[/p]
[p]Enemy homing thorns projectile lifetime increased from 2 to 3 seconds[/p]
[p]Elite Barrel Skull projectiles now have less gravity and more speed for more interesting encounters. Reworked some of the attack formations to be more interesting also[/p]
[p]Elite Barrel Skull attacks now all use homing barrels (sorry)[/p]
[p]Elite Barrel Skull barrel explosion radius increased by 25% as they didn’t feel threatening[/p]
[p]Scorpion armor plates reduced from 3 to 1[/p]
[p]Laser Crab projectile damage area radius reduced by 50%[/p]
[p]Grenade Crab projectile speed increased to be more threatening- he now really hurls that thing![/p]
[p]Hornet / Elite Hornet dash from side to side 50% less[/p]
[p]Hornet / Elite Hornet energy rings have a much shorter lifetime but move faster- this reduces spam and makes them more engaging to fight / dodge[/p]
[p]Elite Hornet projectile speed slightly increased[/p]
[p]Resin Hornet destructibles are 50% less likely to spawn (they were a bit tedious to constantly fight)[/p]
[p]Ice Ant projectile explosion radius increased by 33% as they were fairly non threatening before especially for a Hard enemy[/p]
[p]Poison Skull projectile speed increased, poison strength increased and their projectiles now leave behind little poison areas. Fire Ant got a similar treatment- both of these enemies are supposed to be in the “Hard” category (next to things like Sniper Crabs) but were fairly harmless even in large numbers[/p]
[p]Lightning Skull attacks reworked to be more interesting (before they were just basic single projectiles that didn’t match the “Hard” enemy category)[/p]
[p]Added melee attack to Homing Grub as they would just completely miss all of their projectiles when trying to attack you up close[/p]
[p]Poison damage areas spawned from enemies no longer deal damage and just apply poison[/p]
[p]Enemy spawn variety doubled when looping (this should make looping feel a bit more distinct and chaotic)[/p]
[p]XL islands double the variety of enemies spawned to prevent tediously fighting 10x of the same hard enemy[/p]
[p]Reduced the amount that explosive enemies knock back other nearby enemies when eliminated by 50%. The exception to this is when the Explosive Enemies modifier is active as increased knockback is part of the chaos of that modifier[/p]
[p]Enemies gain 38% less health per Horde wave as it felt like enemies got too tanky too fast into Horde islands[/p]
[p]Increased the maximum number of enemies allowed to be spawned at once in the Arcade minigame from 80 to 100[/p]

[p]QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES[/p]

[p]Heavily improved Air Strike on islands with low ceilings or caves- it should now consistently hit where you want it to hit and deal damage as expected[/p]
[p]Temporary invulnerability (triggered after being respawned when falling into a pit or when being revived) increased from 2 to 3 seconds to help cases where you would spawn back in a big group of enemies and needed a bit more time to get to safety to prevent taking unfair damage[/p]
[p]Revival zones now spawn in a safe area if a teammate gets eliminated by falling off the map (previously this spawned the revival zone out of bounds which made it impossible to revive)[/p]
[p]Enhancement Totems no longer show up in the shop if you have nothing to enhance in your inventory[/p]
[p]Totems that take health / max health now display the exact amount of health that they will take in addition to the percentage for more clarity[/p]
[p]Added some long overdue extra info about what Poison / Fire / Lightning / Ice and Arcane Shot mods actually do to their descriptions[/p]
[p]Enemies now take a small amount of damage while in lava so that their health bars show up and they are easier to locate. Before there would often be one straggling enemy slowly walking deep in the lava and this was especially frustrating with the Countdown modifier active where every second counts![/p]
[p]Enemies can no longer resurrect if there are less than 5 enemies remaining in a wave. This prevents frustrating situations where you just about clear an island before the countdown expires but the game decides to resurrect these enemies and you lose. It also fixes a few edge cases where enemies would spawn after clearing a Gauntlet wave[/p]
[p]Added a 3 second delay after an island starts before Leap Of Faith can deal damage[/p]
[p]You now maintain horizontal momentum when getting knocked back from enemy projectiles which means no more getting stun locked in place by a chain of enemy projectiles as it used to be frustrating to lose all momentum and take multiple unavoidable hits because of this. Also reduced the amount of vertical knockback by 50% to help with this[/p]
[p]Made various improvements to the backup save system to further protect against losing data if your main save becomes corrupted (including adding 2 more backup save layers)[/p]
[p]Improved Steam Cloud save filtering to not sync backups[/p]
[p]Shielded enemies are no longer targeted by aim assist or homing projectiles[/p]
[p]Improved performance in situations where there were a lot of enemies affected by lightning at once[/p]
[p]Optimized various projectiles like Link Shot, Drill Shot, Piercing Wave, Mace Shot and Firework Shot which could cause noticeable FPS drops in some cases[/p]
[p]Adjusted projectile hitboxes to better match their visuals. This results in much better performance when a lot of projectiles are onscreen at once[/p]
[p]Extended physics object out of bounds areas so crowns can be launched further and while underwater[/p]
[p]Reduced the radius that the game checks for nearby players when spawning enemies to fix cases where multiplayer lobbies with many players were blocking enemy spawn points, causing them to spawn slower than intended[/p]
[p]Improved stars being very bright when playing on Low graphics settings[/p]
[p]Audio no longer pauses when the game loses focus (assuming you have the “Pause When Losing Focus” option set to off)[/p]
[p]Enlarged the UI numbers of all buffs and debuffs on the player health bar to be easier to read and notice[/p]
[p]Optimized the water ripples system and enabled it even on low graphics settings since I didn’t realize how bad the ocean looked on low settings previously without it[/p]
[p]Switched shadowing method on crabs and enemies to be higher quality (less flickering and blurriness)[/p]
[p]Made several optimizations to improve performance when many enemies are on screen at once[/p]
[p]Improved shadow quality and performance on environmental assets[/p]
[p]Added fade in animations for gameplay and game state UI so that you don’t see them “pop” from their default to initialized states[/p]
[p]Chests and anvils no longer have collision (this was to fix a bug but it actually feels nice to not have them get in the way while you are trying to loot)[/p]
[p]Bounty Hunter and Rare Treasure now track how many pickups they have spawned (you can see this number in the inventory)[/p]
[p]Destructibles (like explosive rocks or Ultra Mushroom) now get destroyed when in the way of a chest spawn to prevent them hanging in the air and making them annoying to loot[/p]
[p]Because of the difficulty changes a few challenges have new completion conditions. Some of the original challenges made very little sense as beating the game on Nightmare would just complete 3 tiers of challenges at once so the changes have been made to account for the new mastery ceiling in the game with Prismatic difficulty. If you have already completed these challenges / achievements you will not have to redo them:[/p]
- [p]CRAB CHAMPION II: Get 3 wins total on Sapphire or higher difficulty[/p]
- [p]CRAB CHAMPION III: Get 5 wins total on Ruby or higher difficulty[/p]
- [p]PRO: Get 3 wins in a row on Ruby or higher difficulty[/p]
- [p]MASTER: Get 2 wins in a row on Prismatic difficulty[/p]
- [p]CHALLENGER I: Get a win with 5 or more red difficulty modifiers and 0 green difficulty modifiers active[/p]
- [p]CHALLENGER 2: Get a win with 10 or more red difficulty modifiers and 0 green difficulty modifiers active[/p]
- [p]CHALLENGER 3: Get a win with all red difficulty modifiers and 0 green difficulty modifiers active[/p]
- [p]FLAWLESS: Get a win on Gold or higher difficulty without taking any damage[/p]
- [p]FRUGAL: Get a win on Gold or higher difficulty with 5 or less shop purchases[/p]
- [p]FLEX III: Clear the first biome on Ruby or higher difficulty without taking any damage[/p]
- [p]ULTRA CHAOS CHAMPION: Get a win with at least 14 red modifiers active and only the Random Loadout green modifier active[/p]

[p]BUG FIXES[/p]

[p]Fixed enemies being able to shoot through walls in certain rare circumstances[/p]
[p]Fixed Elemental Specialist and Elemental Expert not working with Ice damage[/p]
[p]Fixed Ring Of Power not applying damage if you have zero weapon mods in your inventory[/p]
[p]Fixed Meteor Shower not scaling damage per island, it should be more threatening on later islands now![/p]
[p]Fixed being able to float indefinitely with the Lightning Scepter if firing it before entering a portal[/p]
[p]Fixed Streamer Loot “upgrading” Legendary loot to… Legendary[/p]
[p]Fixed cases where players would jitter on the spot and rotate back and forth when on slopes which could also throw off your movement when sliding over uneven surfaces[/p]
[p]Added a short delay before the game over UI can be skipped which fixes several bugs where non-host players didn’t get medals for weapons when finishing runs[/p]
[p]Fixed a bug when continuing a run that could cause “ghost” armor plates to appear to be active but you’d still take damage directly to your health[/p]
[p]Fixed a rare bug where you could get stuck in trees (for real this time!)[/p]
[p]Fixed revived players not seeing active challenge modifiers or blessings[/p]
[p]Fixed fall damage being based on current health instead of current max health as intended[/p]
[p]Fixed enemy homing barrels homing to other enemies instead of the player in some cases[/p]
[p]Fixed being invulnerable to fire damage that you created yourself (like from exploding fire rocks and standing in the fire puddle) even with fire stacks visible on your health bar[/p]
[p]Fixed UI not showing the current level of melee mods when picking them up[/p]
[p]Fixed the Looper achievement completing without actually getting through an entire loop[/p]
[p]Fixed enemy projectiles not firing from weapon muzzles[/p]
[p]Fixed enemies that fire delayed homing projectiles from completely missing when up close[/p]
[p]Fixed Ice Shot not applying consistent debuff stacks on Blade Launcher and Flamethrower[/p]
[p]Fixed chests and anvils spawning under steep terrain in some cases[/p]
[p]Fixed being able to take damage from explosive enemies at great distance with Slugger equipped and the Explosive Enemies modifier active[/p]
[p]Fixed Marksman Rifle and Lightning Scepter not adding formation mods like Double Shot or X Shot to the base projectiles (the formations were being replaced which was a nerf to default fire patterns in the case of Double Shot)[/p]
[p]Fixed crowns sometimes spawning on active islands instead of only in the lobby[/p]
[p]Fixed Starfish indefinitely rising upwards if they got interrupted while winding up for an attack[/p]
[p]Fixed armor UI notifications not playing when taking damage on a One Hit island[/p]
[p]Fixed exploit that allowed players to get multiple uses of the key totem by leaving and rejoining the same lobby which was unintended[/p]
[p]Fixed Meteor Showers being invisible in rare cases where a lot of VFX were visible at the same time[/p]
[p]Fixed bug where on reload perks such as Sonic Boom would weirdly sometimes trigger when a reload had finished instead of on starting to reload[/p]
[p]Fixed bug where on reload perks weren’t guaranteed to trigger in rare cases when a non hosting player was reloading[/p]
[p]Fixed bug that caused high levels of Blender on the Claw to stop dealing damage[/p]
[p]Fixed the classic “Island 50” bug where sometimes a joining player would have their UI frozen in a default state until rejoining the lobby[/p]
[p]Fixed chests and other meshes looking really bad when using Low graphics settings[/p]
[p]Fixed Accelerating Shot and Boomerang Shot not working together- projectiles now boomerang as expected. This also fixes the same problem with the Accelerating and Returning enhancements on the same projectile which previously had a workaround to just not make the projectile move much at all which wasn’t intended[/p]
[p]Fixed Elite Hornet resin hornet destructibles being able to spawn infinite loot with Driller[/p]
[p]Fixed chests spawning in much later than intended for non hosting players in multiplayer games[/p]
[p]Fixed text going off screen when picking up certain pickups with long descriptions[/p]

[p]OTHER NOTES[/p]

[p]I will be releasing some kind of news / roadmap post in the next few months detailing my plans as the game shapes up towards 1.0 as I know this is something many people are curious about (when will Tony get added to the shop, what content is still planned for the game etc.)[/p]
[p]Parkour islands have been temporarily removed for this update while I work on a new fully procedural parkour system which will allow for fresh parkour courses each time you play as well as an infinite parkour minigame![/p]
[p]As part of my big cleanup of the game assets and code I have removed the Duel minigame for many reasons: it had essentially zero player engagement / interest (understandable as it was barebones to begin with), there are no servers or anti cheat to support matching against random players (the main reason to play PvP) and it has cluttered the code / lowered performance even when not playing it due to how the game is set up. I had explored options to expand it such as supporting more weapons but the game simply just isn’t built for fun PvP- players move too fast and hitboxes are too small to make any weapon other than the rocket launcher viable. Changing movement speeds and creating special weapons with large hitboxes just felt like a janky workaround rather than a fun layer that complimented the main game mode and speeds that players are used to. It feels like a growing trend in gaming lately where games are adding lots of different modes from different genres trying to be “something for everyone” and I want to do the opposite and put all my efforts into making a really good main mode (since that is what people are actually playing) without trying to cater to both PvE and PvP and doing a poor job. All that said, I’ll be adding an endless parkour minigame (the systems there will be used to create unique parkour islands in the main mode) as well as a target practice minigame to round out the total number of minigames to 4 in future updates as both of those fit the actual core game loop a lot better and don’t rely on inviting others to your lobby to play [/p]

[p]HOTFIX #1 PATCH NOTES[/p]

[p]Changed the Nightmare red difficulty modifier to be +4 difficulty level so this gives you an additional difficulty point to spend on either a green modifier or disabling another one of the 1 point red modifiers. This should give enough flexibility to still get Prismatic while running the least annoying modifiers to you personally (everyone seems to have different opinions on which they prefer / hate so this new modular system seems to be working well to allow people to have more agency)[/p]
[p]The Lucky green difficulty modifier now costs -3 (previously -4) and the bonus luck reduced from -300% to -250%. This means you can run this modifier while still going for the Prismatic medal- just another fun strategy to consider[/p]
[p]Greatly expanded out of bounds trigger zones on all islands so the out of bounds warning should pretty much never pop up accidentally when near a wall anymore and also it should feel a lot less restrictive to move a bit away from the main arena areas now. In general out of bounds warnings should feel much more invisible now and only show up when you are REALLY pushing it[/p]
[p]You now get teleported from out of bounds even when an island is over (you only take damage when this happens on an active island) to prevent getting softlocked on distant areas of the map[/p]
[p]Made the super narrow Desert and Volcanic horde islands much wider[/p]
[p]Made Immortal Snail purple for better visibility especially in the Volcanic biome[/p]
[p]Decluttered that one arctic island with a lot of trees running through the middle of the arena[/p]
[p]Made better Prismatic reward skin[/p]
[p]Darkened the background of the difficulty UI and doubled the opacity of deselected modifiers to make them easier to read[/p]
[p]Fixed not being able to navigate the difficulty UI with a controller[/p]
[p]Fixed Prismatic medal being in grayscale when viewing weapons in the lobby and on the game over UI[/p]
[p]Fixed a one off bug that caused a weapon rank to go into an invalid state: there is now a failsafe to reset it back to bronze[/p]
[p]Fixed the “Attempts” stat not being increased as expected[/p][p][/p]

[p]HOTFIX #2 PATCH NOTES[/p]

[p]I’ve gotten a great response to this update but also have been reading some very valid feedback mainly around Prismatic modifiers. Ideally the Prismatic grind is fun and some of the modifiers especially at their extremes definitely could feel more unfair than fun. I’ve tried to address all of the worst feeling scenarios in this hotfix without diminishing the satisfaction of overcoming the new mastery curve that Prismatic adds to the game[/p]
[p]Immortal Snail can no longer randomly jump at you: this was enjoyable for me during the beta as it created some really unpredictable moments but ultimately losing your entire run due to this feels bad (do note that it can still jump if the “Jumpy Enemies” modifier is active on an island but at least that only lasts for one island rather than the entire run). Also slightly reduced its movement speed to just help smooth out the worst case scenarios of this modifier[/p]
[p]Removed the “no more one shot protection” aspect of the No Safety Net modifier: it was just too punishing to get completely one shot by the Immortal Snail at full health. This functionality may come back as a completely optional “orange” modifier in a future update for those looking to add challenge (it won’t influence the difficulty rank)[/p]
[p]Countdown difficulty level reduced from +2 to +1 so it is much easier to turn off and not feel like you are forced to run it. Many people rightfully felt like they needed to have it on which took away from the fun of the game for them so reducing the points here makes it much less significant / no longer feel mandatory to earn Prismatic. The Ultra Chaos modifier has been increased from +3 to +4 to compensate (this doesn't change difficulty it just makes sure one less difficulty level will meet the Prismatic threshold)[/p]
[p]Initial Countdown timer increased from 45 seconds up to 60 seconds to help smooth out cases where it felt like bad luck would make runs impossible[/p]
[p]The Lucky green modifier (+250% chance to find higher rarity loot in chests) cost has been reduced from -3 to -2. This means with the change above you can run it while also turning off Countdown, mimicking the previous True Ultra Chaos experience that players liked in previous updates[/p]
[p]Reduced the unlock requirements for ALL green and red modifiers by one medal. This means a modifier that previously required Ruby to unlock will now require Emerald[/p]
[p]Fixed the Countdown modifier ticking down time on Crab Island[/p]
[p]Fixed some weapons not respecting the new limited loot system and offering mods like Double Shot or Homing Shot even when at 100%[/p]
[p]Fixed broken textures on the Immortal Snail and made its shell brown for better contrast / visuals[/p]
[p]Made a fix to prevent certain previously unlocked challenges from re-locking when more weapons / achievements are added to the game in the future. These challenges are: Silver, Gold, Sapphire, Emerald, Ruby, Diamond, Prismatic, Gunslinger and Crab Legend. Unfortunately this fix isn’t retroactive so if you have launched the game and lost your previously unlocked Crab Legend skin, this will be the last time you have to unlock it and from then on it will be permanently unlocked even if more challenges / achievements get added and you technically no longer satisfy the unlock requirement[/p]
[p]Fixed large enemies getting stuck on trees on the arctic island with the stone spire in the middle[/p]

[p][/p][p]Thanks for playing, see you in the next update!

I plan on releasing a game news post with an updated roadmap going over what to expect in the future so stay tuned for that! As always I'll have a beady eye out reading any and all feedback so feel free to ping me anywhere 🦀

[/p]

The Anvil Update Hotfix

Thank you all for the amazing feedback on the last update- I have spent the last while absorbing it and made this hotfix to smooth out the most common pain points 🦀

Lightning Scepter now only makes you fly while already in the air so you can fire it while on the ground without getting lifted up
Removed the velocity cap when floating with the Lightning Scepter. This should make it easier to air dodge
Added a delay before the floating happens in the air with the Lightning Scepter. This should make your initial jump / launch feel much smoother instead of jankily losing all momentum as soon as you fired which felt jarring
Lighting Scepter no longer lifts enemies into the air as it could actually create more dangerous situations for you as they were able to still fire in that position
Improved Lightning Scepter projectile visuals to make it harder to lose track of them when a lot is going on or against bright backgrounds
Reworked the lob shot formula (used on Arcane Wand and Lightning Scepter) to make it easier to hit targets that are nearby rather than projectiles sailing over their heads
Increased Lightning Scepter and Arcane Wand projectile speeds by 25% (this combined with the lob change above should make these weapons feel much more comfortable to use)

[h3]General Changes[/h3]
Shop prices were feeling too high and have been reduced across the board: Legendary cost reduced by 23%, Epic cost reduced by 32% and Common cost reduced by 10%. Greed loot now costs the same as Epic loot (previously Greed cost more than Epic)
Added a guaranteed health related piece of loot to every shop
Increased the amount of fire stacks before rapid stack falloff happens from 100 to 250 (this makes early game fire builds much more effective as the rapid falloff takes more stacks to activate)
Reduced the speed at which fire and poison stacks rapidly fall off by 50%. This is a nice buff to late game fire builds and poison builds in general as the stacks won’t be reduced as fast
Scavenger pickup radius increased by 33% and lifetime increased from 8 to 10 seconds
Chance for enemies to resurrect with the Resurrecting Enemies modifier active reduced from 15% to 10% to reduce tedium
Enemy damage was feeling too high on islands past the diamond victory threshold (Island 56+) so it has been reduced by 50%
Enemy projectile prediction is once again less accurate while you are aiming. This is in response to a common bit of feedback that enemies were feeling frustratingly accurate and the previous aiming tech used to dodge attacks was much harder to pull off
Most enemies that leap horizontally do so 33% less in order to feel less random and more grounded when fighting them
Significantly reduced the amount of music volume reduction that happens when certain other sounds play (like explosions or gunshots)
Made several changes to improve quickplay search variety and to prevent stalemates when joining invalid sessions repeatedly
Added optimizations and limits to how many air strike explosion VFX can be visible at once to improve framerate and visual clarity. Also shortened the length of these VFX so they aren’t blocking your view for as long
Added an extra explanation to the Anvil portal description explaining why sometimes players in multiplayer get Random chests instead of anvils as there was some confusion there (they need to have an enhanceable piece of loot, otherwise getting an anvil would be useless for them)
Crystals now get auto collected 1 second faster- just makes the game feel more responsive instead of the double take of “wait do I need to collect them myself?” happening

[h3]Balance Changes[/h3]
All ranged enemies cost 33% more to spawn. This means fewer situations where you are getting spammed by too many projectile enemies at once
All large enemies move 25% slower (other than Elites as you are often facing them in a 1v1 situation)
Grubs cost 100% more to spawn. This means less Grub spam!
Pumpkin and Elite Pumpkin projectile speeds reduced by 20%
Sniper Crabs now have a longer time between shots to feel less spammy
Lightning Ant health reduced by 15%
Critical Blast damage increased from 35 to 40
Power Armor damage per plate increased from +12% to +15% to bring it in line with Damage Combo
Imploding Explosion damage increased from +33% to +50% and the downside reduced from -20% radius to -15% radius
Big Ability downside increased from -3% ability movement speed to -8%. This is still way lower than it was before, it was reduced drastically to iron out a bug and I forgot to increase it again during the beta
Heat Sink and Ability Ring now apply multiplicatively (similar to Blender). This is a nice buff especially in combination with Iron Explosion
Streamer Loot is now 25% less likely to upgrade from Common all the way to Legendary as it was happening quite often. Chance to upgrade from Common to Epic is unchanged
Air Strike was outclassing most other abilities in terms of damage so the base damage has been reduced from 750 to 600 (this is still the equivalent damage of throwing 4 grenades at once!)
Black Hole tick damage increased from 4 to 8
Electro Globe tick damage and ending explosion damage increased by 500%
Marksman Rifle projectile spacing slightly adjusted

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]
Fixed Leap Of Faith dealing fall damage after hammer slams
Fixed lag that could happen with spark and homing blade projectiles when enhanced with targeting or expanding enhancements
Fixed Overspill Goblet not calculating damage correctly (it now calculates multiplicatively like Critical Thinking meaning a big buff compared to before which was accidentally additive)
Fixed not being able to parry energy rings or barrel explosions

If you missed it, you can check out the trailer for the Anvil Update here: https://youtu.be/tMuKFIoe5IE?si=MfWoBWh5w_yD4P0z

The Anvil Update (Early Access Update 10)

Patch Highlights

NEW WEAPON: LIGHTNING SCEPTER

NEW ABILITY: AIR STRIKE

NEW MELEE WEAPON: KATANA

ARCANE WAND REWORK

ANVILS

NEW ENEMIES

Patch Notes

Anvil Portal (Enhancements 2.0)

I think enhancements were a good addition to the game but they had a few issues: there wasn’t enough control over which enhancements you got and you weren’t able to target a specific mod to enhance. In this update I have added an Anvil portal reward which spawns 3 enhancement choices after clearing an island. You can then choose to enhance a specific mod from your inventory, allowing for much more targeted builds centered around one main mod. The random enhancement totem in the shop is unchanged (other than not being guaranteed anymore) as it’s a fun alternate way to get enhancements, rolling the dice in the hopes of getting something good
Added new enhancements: Returning, Orbiting, Chipping, Growing, Endangering, Expanding, Persisting, Doubling, Booming, Tripling, Zigging, Accelerating, Spiraling and more!
Increased enhancement limit per mod from 3 to 8
Enhancements now work on Turrets
You can now apply the same enhancement multiple times for stronger effects
Salvaging enhanced pickups now gives you more crystals per enhancement (higher rarity enhancements also give more crystals)

Health 2.0

A Regeneration Chest that only contains healing loot now spawns in addition to the guaranteed damage chest on island 1. I want there to be a nice balance between using health as a currency (on things like Spiked Chests) and being able to recover from small mistakes (like taking several hits from an easy enemy on island 1). Previously it felt a bit frustrating if you took a lot of damage early on in a biome and didn’t happen to find any health loot to recover. It’s also much more exciting when you have a smaller health pool that you can skillfully recover rather than a large health pool that just gets whittled down over time until you get eliminated unceremoniously. The danger zone is when you are constantly a few shots away from death while also being able to recover health by playing a certain way. I strongly believe that the danger zone is where the fun lies and the changes in this update will make playing especially the early game more enjoyable and consistent, rewarding skill and reducing the impact of small mistakes
Base max health increased from 150 to 250
You can no longer die to a single hit that deals damage greater than 85% of your max health at once. This should prevent frustrating situations where you are eliminated instantly out of nowhere. Note that this only applies if you have a max health of 10 or higher and when the One Hit challenge modifier is not active
Max health loot has been reworked and simplified: no more hard to understand behavior when picking up Glass Cannon where future max health gains were reduced by an unknown amount! The new system makes ALL max health related loot affect one of two stats: Base Max Health and Max Health Multiplier. Hearts have been replaced by the Mango and Banana perks as I want to remove as much consumable loot in the game as possible (it’s just more fun to be able to salvage later instead of it being a one off buff)
Regenerator now heals 4 times per second compared to the previous once per second to make it more satisfying to build into. It also heals for 60 seconds per island (up from the previous 45 seconds)
Endurance now heals at the start of each island instead of at the end and it has been buffed to heal 125 health (up from 40)
Slippery Slope now triggers before Endurance to allow for a nice synergy
Grim Reaper no longer heals a % of your max health and instead heals a flat amount per elimination but medium enemies heal 2x more, large enemies heal 5x more and Elite + Boss enemies heal 10x more. This is a necessary change due to the new health system as it was just way too easy to become basically invincible on most islands with a decent max health pool and Grim Reaper
Vampire now works the same way as Grim Reaper: healing reduced for small enemies and increased for large enemies, removing the underwhelming feeling of meleeing a large enemy and getting 3 health (you now heal 30)
The Limited Heals difficulty modifier has been removed as it made healing perks in general more confusing (why am I not healing the amount advertised?) and could be canceled out with a single Amber Resin which made it a weak / boring modifier
Amber Resin is now Epic rarity. Since it scales ALL healing sources it was extremely powerful compared to just leveling up one source of healing over and over so it deserves to be a rarity higher
Added new “Healing” loot tag. Amber Resin will now only show up if you already have a healing perk (this helps reduce useless options from health chests in the early game)
Healing Chests that spawn after clearing Elite islands have been replaced by Health chests and armor has been re-added to the Health chest loot pool
Removed Big Hearts (it’s no longer relevant as hearts aren’t in the game anymore)
Added a “Total health healed” stat in the inventory UI for Grim Reaper, Regenerator, Health Shot, Vampire, Scavenger and Endurance

GENERAL

Added multiplayer revive system
Added new weapon mod: Beam Shot: Chance to fire damaging beams along with your shots
Added new ability mod: Time Explosion: Abilities deal more damage but damage is dealt over time
Added new ability mod: Iron Explosion: Abilities deal much more damage but have a longer cooldown
Added new ability mod: Targeting Explosion: Abilities that directly hit enemies spawn copies that target nearby enemies
Added new ability mod: Split Explosion: Chance for abilities to split into 4 copies while in the air
Added new ability mod: Accelerating Ability: Abilities deal more damage but start slow and accelerate over time
FMJ (perk) removed and replaced with Full Metal Jacket (relic): All damage penetrates enemy armor
Added new melee mod: Time Claws: Melee damage increased but damage is dealt over time
Added new melee mod: Arcane Claws: Melee arcanifies enemies
Added new perk: Elemental Specialist: Damage increased to enemies if they have exactly one debuff (fire, poison, lightning etc.) applied to them
Added new perk: Mango: Max health increased
Added new perk: Banana: Max health multiplier increased (this replaces the consumable banana in previous updates)
Added new Relic: Blacksmith Ring: You can choose 2 enhancements on Anvil islands
Added new Relic: Blacksmith Amulet: Gain 2 more anvil choices on Anvil islands
Added new relic: Ring Of Vigor: Max health multiplier increased by 3% after clearing each island
Added new relic: Upgrade Ring: All chests are guaranteed to contain duplicate loot where possible but the amount of loot choices in chests is reduced by 1
Added new relic: Arcane Ring: Arcane strength and max arcane stacks increased by 250% (no downside yet until more elements are added, Arcane is underperforming a bit anyway so why not!)
Added new greed relic: Ring Of Favoritism: If you have exactly 1 chance based enhanceable weapon mod in your inventory, it is 1000% more likely to trigger
Added new Greed relic: Overspill Goblet: Critical hit chance is halved but also added to critical hit damage multiplier. Sharpshooter and Hot Shot now scale linearly (can go over 100%) to synergize with this which is a significant buff to critical hit chance as there used to be diminishing returns as you got closer to 100% critical hit chance
Added new relic: Time Ring: Damage dealt over time is increased by 400%
Added new enemy: Elite Beam Skull
Added new enemy: Elite Landmine Limpet
Added new enemy: Barrage Skull
Added new difficulty modifier: Ambushing Elites: An elite spawns on the third island of each biome
Elites and Bosses now use a new health bar with their current and max health as a number under their name
Added a new tropical island with deep water
Added an Auto Slide feature that makes sliding happen automatically when you land which makes the game more comfortable to play for long periods of time! You can still manually slide at any time when on the ground and can disable the auto slide functionality in the settings menu if you want
Slide distance has been doubled
I’ve made it so that main weapon damage calculations happen separately again while keeping the optimizations for other types of damage (things like Drill Shot etc.). This means Money Shot, critical hits and elemental damage will now roll PER PELLET on shotguns and other multi projectile weapons as well as spawn individual damage numbers which just feels way better
Rare rarity has been renamed to Common rarity: it didn’t make sense for the loot you find all the time to be called “Rare”
The Waves island type has been removed as it wasn’t distinct enough from Arena islands while also having a “don’t get hit” gimmick already covered by the Flawless blessing or the One Hit challenge modifier. Each island type should be distinct and this really wasn’t doing enough to feel different + wasn’t a popular choice with players
Harvest has been removed from the portal pool and has been reworked as a blessing for Horde islands
Added new Blessing: Harvest: Capture zones to earn bonus crystals on this island
Added new Blessing: Knives Out: Enemies drop 5x crystals if eliminated by melee weapons on this island
Added new challenge modifier: No Healing: Healing is disabled for this island
Removed the Healing Enemies challenge modifier as it was more tedious than challenging
The Regenerating Enemies difficulty modifier has been removed as it was just not fun to be spectating the last player alive as they chip away at enemies that regenerate health. I have moved the same functionality to a “Regenerating” buff that can apply to enemies if you have the Buffed Enemies modifier on
Added new mango and banana icons / visuals
Improved various lighting presets (like the dawn and sunset ones on the Tropical biome) to be much brighter and more colorful to match the mood
Added enemy hit reaction animations
Increased the visual size of most Hard enemies to make them more obviously stand out as being tanky and scary enemies
Added skull and crab death sounds
Added new more responsive crosshairs with consistent outlines regardless of the spread value
Made a big visual pass on all VFX to be much less busy. For people streaming or making videos about the game this should also help with compression and generally make the game more enjoyable to play / watch on smaller screens
Added new turret visuals
Removed the high score system as it was more a test of patience + luck than an indicator of skill. There are better metrics to show off when you complete a run (difficulty, islands survived etc.)
Added 6 new achievements and 2 new skins

GENERAL BALANCE CHANGES

Note that I reached the character limit and couldn't list every single balance change: there has been a comprehensive balance pass across the entire game. I have tried to list the most interesting / notable balance changes here. If interested in the smaller changes you can see detailed patch notes from the beta on this forum post: https://steamcommunity.com/app/774801/discussions/0/596261560284901413/

Elemental damage is now affected by the global damage multiplier
Damage falloff no longer affects elemental damage so this is a nice buff especially for mods that create elemental areas under flying enemies like skulls as those were very ineffective previously
Expensive Shops price increase reduced from +100% to +50%
Eternal Punishment max health penalty reduced by 50% (so taking damage at 200 health will now only remove 1 max health instead of 2 previously)
An arena island is now guaranteed on islands that previously only offered horde portal choices (this makes speedrunning much less luck based)
Increased the time window that the game counts as a “one shot” elimination from 0.1 seconds to 0.25 seconds
Large islands are now chosen for the 5th island on each biome for more variety
Since it’s much easier to regenerate health, Spiked Chests now take 25% of your base max health instead of 40% of your current health to balance this out. The upside of this change is that you’ll be able to open any number of spiked chests on a single island
A common ask was to make post diamond looping (Island 57+) more enjoyable by having steeper scaling to really test the limits of your build instead of steamrolling everything without any challenge. I’ve greatly increased scaling here so ideally the game will be able to keep up for longer and make late game runs more enjoyable
Armor now clears all debuffs when broken so a large amount of fire can no longer burn through your 6 precious plates one by one
Combo is no longer reset on the hit that breaks armor, only hits after that when you have no armor
I didn’t realize how completely broken the key progression is if playing on Nightmare as a new player: you get 56 keys minimum on a looped victory and that isn’t counting things like double or quad keys dropping from chests. Since a new unlock at the key totem is only 3 keys, this kind of kills the satisfying unlock progression that was originally intended so I’ve made an adjustment: the +1 extra key per key pickup buff now only applies when playing Ultra Chaos (as you are likely to burn through a lot of keys) and bosses spawn 2 keys instead of 3. As a buff for long runs, keys now drop for 2 more loops since loop scaling is more challenging
Shops are now 50% cheaper on Easy difficulty as the reduced amount of enemies made it actually quite hard to make meaningful purchases at shops especially in the early game
Removed per player shop price scaling in multiplayer. This makes prices in solo and multiplayer consistent and should make shops feel much more fair in multiplayer runs
Reduced Reroll Totem cost by 50% and chance to explode from 20% to 15%
Health Rocks can now only be destroyed with melee to make it less likely for enemies to break them (this is meant as a buff to the Ring Of Healing so you can more reliably play around them). Max Health Rocks do not have this protection as they are more valuable
There have been a lot of discussions about how discounted infinite pedestals instantly break the balance of the game since you could sell all of your existing inventory and invest into a powerful mod at a heavy discount. While fun, I do agree that this was too much: you scaled on two powerful axes at once: many levels of a good mod AND a discounted price on each of them = too much of a power spike at once. The solution is pretty simple: infinite pedestals can no longer be discounted!

WEAPON BALANCE CHANGES

Arcane Wand reworked: it now lobs a projectile to feel a bit more distinct from the Rocket Launcher
Arcane Wand damage increased from 20 to 25, radius increased by 20% and starting Arcane Shot level increased from 1 to 2
Reduced recoil on most weapons- I did a lot of A/B tests and the game just feels better with less external forces moving the camera since you are already moving around and turning the camera constantly. This also reduces motion sickness and makes aiming feel more consistent
Dual Shotguns damage increased from 6 to 8, base spread reduced by 40% and projectile range increased by 25%
Rocket Launcher damage increased from 50 to 75 but radius reduced by 10%. This should make it more consistent in the early game especially against tanky single targets
Blade Launcher fire rate reduced by 15% to start at a more natural feeling cadence but damage increased to compensate (the damage buff ended up increasing the DPS from about 75 to 100 DPS overall)
Cluster Launcher base max ammo increased from 6 to 10
Flamethrower mod trigger chance multiplier increased by 18%
Doubled the radius of the flamethrower fire areas to more reliably hit floating enemies but slightly reduced the chance of spawning these fire areas- overall it should just feel more consistent
Made various improvements to how Orbiting works- faster orbit and more consistent height. It also works much better with the Ice Staff and nicely floats down to ground height instead of being useless in the sky not hitting anything

WEAPON MOD BALANCE CHANGES

Link Shot, Drill Shot, Targeting Shot, Proximity Barrage and Homing Blades can now trigger even if no other enemies are nearby as this mechanic was confusing before. It also makes Homing Blades feel way better as they homed to the original enemy anyway so it didn’t make sense to require multiple enemies to be nearby for them to trigger
Boomerang Shot and the Returning enhancement now will return to the location that the projectile spawned rather than homing to the player that fired the shot. This means lots of interesting combinations are possible like Rocket Launcher + Boomerang Shot + Split Shot: the split shots will fly off and then turn around and rain back down on the original explosion like artillery
Orbiting Shot and the Orbiting enhancement now orbit around their spawn locations. This makes them much more viable choices in general, not requiring you to be close to enemies to deal damage
Ice, Fire, Lightning, Poison and Arcane Shot now all have the same chance to trigger
Firework Shot / Firework Explosion fireworks now home towards enemies making them finally useful
Increased Pumpkin Shot projectile lifetime and added slight homing to make it much more consistent
Improved Homing Blade, Thorn Shot, Spinning Blade and Torpedo Shot homing logic to be much more reliable
Health Shot no longer has a cooldown and scales the heal amount with base weapon fire rate
Spike Strike weapon mod damage increased from 200 to 500 but cooldown increased from 1 to 3 seconds (this is a buff to the Spike Strike ability mod which uses the same spikes as the weapon mod but has no cooldown)
Proximity Barrage projectile pattern reworked and damage increased from 50 to 75
Homing Blades projectile count reduced by 2 but damage increased by 100%
Ultra Shot projectile speed increased by 40%
Piercing Wave trigger chance increased by 100%
Accelerating Shot no longer requires Bouncing Shot before it can spawn
Increased the starting speed and doubled the max speed of projectiles affected by Accelerating Shot or the Accelerating enhancement to make them more reliably hit targets and not feel like the range is too short
Reload Arc added way too much visual spam so I’ve moved it to use a smaller arc of projectiles but with double the damage to compensate
All projectile pattern mods (Zig Zag Shot, Spiral Shot etc.) now have a fixed pattern that doesn’t get larger per level as this caused them to be practically unusable even if it looked funny. This should make pattern mods a more reliable way to scale weapon damage
X Shot rarity decreased from Legendary to Epic
Gold Dice is now a weapon mod called Dice Shot. It's unchanged in function other than it only affects weapon mods (since there were only 2 ability mods that were chance based and both had already high starting chances)
All Strike and Storm mods have been heavily buffed as they didn't feel Legendary
Reduced the amount of recoil added by Recoil Shot by 75% per level and also added a max cap of 200% to keep it usable in long runs

ABILITY BALANCE CHANGES

Rebalanced Laser Beam to be more competitive with the other abilities (much faster damage tick rate of the laser bubble but shorter duration)
Black Hole damage tick rate doubled

ABILITY MOD BALANCE CHANGES

Replaced Fire Turret with Wave Turret and Poison Turret with Beam Turret since any turret can be enhanced with fire and poison now
Damage Explosion damage increased from +150% to +250%
Crystal Strike damage increased from 300 to 400
Energy Ring damage increased from 10 to 20
Big Explosion movement speed penalty reduced from -15% to -3% per level

MELEE WEAPON BALANCE CHANGES

Dagger damage range increased by 20%
Pickaxe cooldown reduced from 6 to 5 seconds but the line explosion damage radius also reduced by 15%

MELEE MOD BALANCE CHANGES

Added a lenient 3 second period after dealing melee damage for eliminations to still count as being melee eliminations. This makes Vampire and the Knives Out blessing work on mods like Time Claws or Fire Claws
Ice, Fire, Lightning and Poison Claws now scale their debuff stacks differently depending on the melee weapon used. For example the Dagger is unchanged but the Hammer now deals 5 times more debuff stacks than before to compensate for the longer cooldown

PERK BALANCE CHANGES

Increased Scavenger chance to trigger from 5% to 10% and healing increased from 25 to 40 but the pickup lifetime has been decreased by 40% as there was little reason to play aggressively to get the pickups previously. Scavenger is also now guaranteed to trigger on Hard and Elite enemies (10% as usual for other enemies)
Removed Second Wind (increased damage when at low health). It’s not fun to have to be at low health for something to activate and it was just bloating the damage loot pool
Gold Coating (Gain crystals when healing) has been re-added to the game but with a change: it no longer works in shops due to a few strategies that would break the game very early on with it previously
Slippery Slope crystal gain increased by 250% but the amount of health removed at the start of each island has been increased from 20% to 33%
Increased Toxic max poison stack limit from +25% to +40% (so it adds a nice clean +100 max stacks per level)
High Roller is now correctly affected by the Ring Of Luck
Removed the 2 second cooldown from Dagger Dash
Crystal Asteroids trigger chance increased from 5% to 25%
Paycheck crystal amount increased by 33% to be competitive with other economy options
Removed the cooldown from Exploding, Freezing, Flammable, Electric and Poisonous Enemies perks- they should feel more legendary now!
As it was one of the most reported overpowered perks (especially in combination with Time Shot), Critical Blast damage has been reduced from 50 to 35
Since the meta of the game has shifted less from “never get hit” and more towards “get hit but heal back up”, I’ve buffed a few of the flawless related perks
Performance Bonus chance for 2 chests when flawlessly clearing an island increased from 25% to 30%
Damage Combo and Crystal Combo bonuses increased from +10% to +15%
Vitality high health threshold reduced from 85% to 75%
Powerslide fire stacks and damage doubled
Lingering Fumes rarity increased from Common to Epic
A sound and visual effect now plays whenever higher rarity loot spawns directly because of Streamer Loot. There is also now a message that pops up whenever Streamer Loot triggers as well as a stat saved in the inventory showing how many pickups it has affected this run
Driller now only spawns loot for teammates that also have the Driller perk in their inventory which should nicely balance things out. Previously only one teammate needed to have Driller in order to spawn loot for every teammate every time it triggered which was super unbalanced in comparison to solo runs. Note that if a player that doesn’t have Driller breaks a destructible rock, the game will still try and spawn a pickup using the team’s Driller chance
Tony’s Black Card now works similarly to Driller in multiplayer: instead of choosing the player with the highest discount, it adds up the total discount of all players combined and then divides by the total number of players that have Tony’s Black Card in their inventory
As per community feedback, Gold Coating has also been moved to be Epic rarity. It was one of the strongest ways to balloon your economy especially with strategies like deliberately dropping Mango to heal back the rest and get extra income. I am keeping this strategy in the game as it’s a fun way to optimize your build
Silver Lining now only triggers on damage that exceeds 5% of your max health to avoid being able to farm huge amounts of global damage by standing in low damage areas and outhealing the damage

RELIC BALANCE CHANGES

Relic Chests now contain 3 choices
Increased Relic Portal spawn chance by 20%
Ring Of Reinforcement now triggers whenever you gain armor (including gaining armor from other relics), not just when you explicitly pick it up from the ground
Hoarder has been moved from a perk (that already worked similarly to Double Vision) to be a more unique relic: You can pick up all loot in chests but can no longer drop pickups from your inventory or salvage loot
Poison Ring now also affects the max poison stack limit
Ring Of Rocket Jumping now only triggers when you deliberately rocket jump by exploding something at your feet- distant explosions will no longer knock you back so it’s now a much more purposeful mechanic
Combo Ring can now only show up when you already have a combo perk to avoid bloating the loot pool
Reworked Ring Of Healing from fully healing in shops to spawning guaranteed health rocks on each island
Ring Of Fury rarity increased from Common to Epic
Ring Of Wisdom rarity increased from Common to Epic and critical hit chance per island increased from +1% to +2%
Turbo Ring was hugely outperforming other fire rate mods so it has been moved to Epic rarity and the fire rate increase per island decreased from +3% to +2% (Previously it was giving +120% fire rate after 40 islands which is the equivalent of 10 Rapid Fire mods for the price of 1. The new value gives +80% which is more in line but still powerful)

ENEMY BALANCE CHANGES

Enemies no longer spawn in a boring and predictable way (one by one, easy enemies then hard enemies after), they now spawn in randomized packs which makes fights feel much more interesting and dynamic
Rebalanced enemy spawn weights and counts for more variety between waves and to make biomes feel less linear. Also some harder enemies will show up slightly later into a biome to allow for more contrast between early and late biome spawns
Increased the maximum amount of spawned enemies allowed at once from 45 to 50 on Normal difficulty and from 60 to 100 on Nightmare and Ultra Chaos difficulties
Enemies no longer have a 50% resistance to elemental debuff stacks when armored (players still have this resistance)
Elemental enemies no longer have a 25% resistance to their element
XL totems now double the amount of enemies instead of tripling them: with the new mixed enemy spawns mentioned earlier this should mean that XL islands will still be intense without feeling tedious. This change makes XL Horde islands take twice as long instead of three times as long
Enemy health increase per wave on Horde islands decreased from +25% to +5%. This should make XL hordes feel way more enjoyable to play instead of enemies becoming bullet sponges
Slightly reduced the amount of bonus enemy spawns on 2x challenge islands to improve pacing
Starfish launch attack hitbox + animation has been improved to be more consistent and fair
Pufferfish are larger, healthier and have a larger explosion radius to help differentiate them from regular small slugs
Pumpkin health reduced by 25% and time between attacks increased by 33%
Shotgun Crab projectile lifetime reduced by 50% and projectile speed reduced by 25%
Sniper Crab projectile has less gravity and slightly more speed in order to perform better at range and be more “snipery”
Minigun Crab projectile speed reduced
Minigun Crabs now have a spawn limit of 2
Laser Crabs and Hammer Crabs now have a spawn limit of 4
Ice Pumpkin attack is no longer affected by damage falloff but the attack radius is 40% smaller
Elite Ramming Grubs deal less damage and have better telegraphing of where their AOE damage is coming from
Elite Lightning Crab attacks have been reworked
Elite Hornets now have a spawn limit of 2 to prevent situations where the entire ground is covered in hornet energy rings. I’ve also reduced the chance of them spawning resin hornet destructibles for the same reason
Hornets now fly at a lower height to make them take damage from damage areas on the ground
Removed the Healing Enemies challenge modifier as it was more tedious than challenging
Removed randomness from many enemy attacks (I had originally designed some enemy prediction features with a range of values so that they might sometimes aim higher or lower than usual to make them “feel more alive” but I think making all enemies as consistent as possible is much better for the gameplay and skill ceiling)
Rewrote homing projectile logic to allow for many more interesting enemy attack formations as well as smoother projectile movement when using Homing Shot or other homing mods
Grubs no longer hide from the player which slowed down the pace when trying to clear islands fast
Increased crystal amount rewarded for defeating elites by 300% and for defeating bosses by 200% to make them more rewarding especially in the case of those new Island 3 elites
Decreased the chances of enemies jumping / dashing by 25% in Ultra Chaos just because it is more annoying than fun to throw a grenade and see the enemies leap 3 times in a row out of the way (this can still happen, it’s just less likely)
Reduced the time between bursts of the Elite Fire Skull X projectile attack and changed the formation to be a vertical line so projectiles are more focused in a smaller area and less likely to carpet the entire island in fire
Removed the Elite Ice Skull launch slam attack as it rarely hit and felt cheap when it did hit
Reduced the speed of all enemy launch slam attacks (Starfish, Elite Fire Crab) to make them easier to dodge
Elites and Bosses were often a complete joke and melted in seconds due to the power spike from going to the shop. To make this feel a bit more balanced and like a proper duel that tests your build I’ve moved the biome enemy health scaling back one island so the jump in enemy health that normally would happen on the first Desert island now happens on the final Arctic island and so on for the other biomes. To be clear this only affects the last island in each biome (it doesn't happen on the first Tropical Elite island for fairness) and enemy scaling is otherwise unchanged
Limited the amount of bounces many enemy projectiles have as they could be quite unpredictable and cause cheap damage
Fixed large grubs often performing their attacks hidden out of sight at the back of an island, slowing down the pace

QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES

You can now ping owned pickups (including unchosen loot in chests) to allow teammates to pick them up without you having to make space in your inventory just to remove the ownership and immediately drop the loot
Rewrote interaction logic to never allow a portal to be interacted with while there are chests or pickups in front of you (this prevents annoying situations that could happen where you’d try to open a chest and accidentally choose a portal behind it before you took your loot!)
Added unique player colors in multiplayer which affect your nametag and ping to make it easier to identify teammates
Crystals dropped by enemies in Ultra Chaos difficulty now get auto collected when the island ends if they haven’t already expired to prevent tedious backtracking
Many improvements have been made to portal spawns preventing multiple of the same portal type from spawning (like 4x of the same Waves or Elite portal) and increasing the variety of portal choices that can appear
Salvaging happens twice as fast to improve pacing / responsiveness
Improved the positioning of the red energy rings that spawn from rocks to be more visible and less likely to be hidden in the ground
Improved portal VFX to appear faster as previously it could take over a second before the 2X / Flawless icons showed up
No more than one elemental damage area can overlap at the same time to improve visual clarity, performance and overall consistency (it was possible for enemies to layer 10 of the same damage area on one spot which resulted in players getting melted out of nowhere)
Elemental damage areas can no longer spawn underwater
The Mirrored Projectiles challenge modifier now works on damage over time and ability damage but there’s a minimum time between mirrored projectile spawns to prevent extreme amounts of projectiles spawning on frequently ticking damage
You can now move backwards and sideways on ice but it still should feel slippery and hard to change directions quickly
Glass Cannon and other greed perks that negatively impact max health now correctly restore the max health that they took if interacting with a Random Totem
Landmines have a shorter fuse time to make them much more likely to hit enemies and be more fun to use in general
Landmines spawned from the Landmine Rain modifier can now be destroyed much more easily and are less easily knocked around by your shots
Added a separate ammo counter for dual wield weapons
Added an upwards force when knocking back enemies to make it easier to knock them off ledges and generally make melee knockback a bit more consistent
Disabled enemy ragdoll physics for now- it was lowering performance, obscuring vision and causing crashes in some cases
Fixed ultrawide monitor field of view being too zoomed in and not positioning the crab correctly
You can now spam the infinite pedestal much faster than before
Rerolling the shop now has less of a delay before pickups / new prices are visible
Improved UI text legibility by adding a consistent drop shadow. This should make it much easier to see on bright surfaces like sand, snow or the sky
Added a Speed tag to Speed Demon and Ring Of Swiftness and made it mandatory to have at least one speed tagged piece of loot before Speed Is Power will show up
Resin Hornet destructibles can now spawn loot with Driller
All chance based mods now accurately show their actual chance to trigger in the inventory UI so no more guessing when you pick up Gold Dice!
Text chat now respects uppercase and lowercase typing so you aren’t always SHOUTING LIKE THIS
Added a sound when a chat message is received
Exploding slugs no longer deal damage to you when eliminating them at close range in Ultra Chaos difficulty
Entering water no longer cancels your slide- this just felt clunky and annoying. The movement speed penalty is enough by itself
Weapon spread now resets on reloading so no more high spread right after reloading
Added free look to the spectating camera so you can finally look around at what is going on while spectating
Rewrote spiraling projectile logic to not completely break when under 60 FPS. It may look a bit different to before but at least shouldn’t brick builds on lower FPS anymore
Increased the minimum distance that an enemy can spawn (including resurrected enemies) from a player to prevent situations where slugs would appear to spawn under players and make them take unfair damage
Adjusted player spawn points to make sure that they aren’t next to barrels
The game now autosaves on island 4 of each biome (as well as island 1 as before) to make restarting a biome after a disconnect or crash less punishing
Crystals are now auto collected from enemies that get eliminated by fall damage in Ultra Chaos difficulty
Crystals are now auto collected for convenience on shop islands on Ultra Chaos difficulty
Improved Paycheck description to be less confusing (it now mentions that it is based on 20% of the current price of a Common pickup)
Added a low ammo sound
Improved various interactions with accelerating projectiles. Shooting the Flamethrower or Cluster Launcher with Accelerating Shot no longer results in the projectiles falling uselessly to the ground right in front of you

BUG FIXES

Fixed enemies becoming invincible after a certain point in a run so truly endless runs are now possible
Fixed homing barrels staying active and getting in your way when clearing an island
Fixed projectiles fired in formations (like arcs) “leaning” left and right depending on the direction you were moving in. They are now aligned horizontally with your crosshair, improving consistency
Fixed launching enemies winding up for too long and bouncing off the ground before dealing damage from the launch
Fixed Bouncing Explosion not working properly (slow projectiles would appear not to bounce at all). This has also fixed many inconsistent enemy attacks that bounced when they shouldn’t have
Fixed Bouncing Shot giving 3 bounces at level 1 when it should be 1 bounce
Fixed Bouncing Shot not giving a damage bonus to weapons that deal proximity damage such as the blade launcher
Fixed shield VFX being difficult to see on certain enemy types like Blocker Skulls
Fixed many enemy burst attacks doing more damage than intended- enemies can now deal max one of their projectile’s worth of damage in a short timeframe (previously they could sometimes deal damage that counted multiple projectiles at once which felt like unfair damage was dealt)
Fixed teammates being able to set off friendly landmines
Fixed greed loot that wasn’t specifically a perk from being auto looted
Fixed the slow motion effect that happens when a player gets eliminated only happening when the host was eliminated- it now works on all players
Fixed Clone Explosion not having visuals for mods like Aura Explosion
Fixed health rock / max health rock healing areas spawned from the secondary shards that fly out not giving the same amount of health as the main healing area spawned by the rock
Fixed the Streak Shot buff being reset by indirect projectiles such as Scatter Shot or Split Shot missing
Fixed poison stacks on enemies being limited by teammates that didn’t have Toxic equipped- the enemy will now always stay at the highest poison stack limit from all players that have hit it
Fixed crosshair spread not updating on dual wield weapons
Fixed enemy projectiles often completely missing if fired at you while aiming down sights
Fixed enemies sometimes shooting at the ground below them instead of at the player
Fixed certain mod combos (like a few levels Big Shot and Glue Shot on the crossbow) not dealing damage in some cases due to the projectile collision being larger than the explosion radius: this has resulted in an AOE buff for Big Shot on weapons with larger projectiles
Fixed elemental damage from the fire and ice pools created by the Ice Staff and Flamethrower scaling with weapon damage which wasn’t intentional- the goal with these weapons is to spec into Firestarter and Ice Cold rather than just building into damage as usual. I’ve doubled their base elemental stacks to compensate
Fixed Elite Barrel Skulls from not appearing in the Holdout minigame
Fixed Homing Thorns dealing inconsistent damage (sometimes sneaking in 2 or 3 hits)
Fixed various menus that could go offscreen on non 16:9 aspect ratios
Fixed loot location UI not showing up if loot spawns while a player is eliminated
Fixed Leap Of Faith not dealing fall damage
Fixed crystals sometimes spawning that had to be manually collected
Fixed not being able to interact or melee properly with high levels of Big Bones equipped
Fixed Rocket Launcher not consistently exploding when aiming directly down
Fixed Starfish flying upwards infinitely, softlocking the game
Fixed Crystal Asteroids not working on Demolition or Parkour islands
Fixed various awkward chest spawn locations and reduced the distance of chests from portals
Fixed inventory slots being blocked by other UI elements at certain resolutions
Fixed issue where non-host players sometimes didn’t save their autosave at the start of each biome
Fixed Aura Shot resetting Streak Shot
Fixed bouncing shot causing massive damage spikes in some cases (there were several bugs here like damage increasing exponentially per bounce on weapons like Blade Launcher or the free bounces you get from Orbiting Shot counting towards Bouncing Shot)
Fixed Level Up sometimes not leveling up anything
Fixed max Blender level not always dealing damage consistently with the Claw and Dagger
Fixed boss keys and health sometimes not spawning at all
Fixed softlock where the island would never end (usually happened on late game runs when you were eliminating enemies as soon as they spawned)
Fixed enemies sometimes not facing the correct player when performing an attack and firing through their own bodies without turning
Fixed Leap Of Faith dealing damage to health through armor, dealing damage on Parkour islands and rewrote the trigger condition to be purely based on how hard you hit the ground when landing rather than the previous one that could trigger at weird moments

Phew that was a lot of patch notes to write up, enjoy the update and see you soon for the next one! I plan on releasing a few smaller updates (Randomizer Mode, Ultra Chaos Modifiers, Tony) more frequently as I add things like unique pickup visuals in the coming months. Thank you so much for playing 🦀