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Bloons TD 6 - Update Notes! Version 25.0

Bloons TD 6 - Update Notes! Version 25.0
New Awesome
  • New beginner map Resort
  • New ETn skin for Etienne
  • New non-trophy Music Track Sails Again, playable anytime via the Jukebox. Spice Islands, Off the Coast & Lotus Island also now rock this awesome track by default.
  • New Trophy Store Items
    • Heroes: Sauda Crane Pet, Pat Super Jump Placement
    • Monkeys: Banana Farm Chicken, Monkey Village Brazil Flag, Monkey Village USA Flag (whoever makes the most noise gets their flag next, and by noise we mean youtube and twitch views!)
    • Bloons: BTD4 Retro MOAB Skin, BTD4 Retro BFB Skin
    • Co-op: Player Numbers Emote, Trophy Winner Emote
    • Game & UI: Sharp Sauda Avatar, Portable Lava Lake
    • Game & UI: 2 Community designed Competition Avatars
      • u/ReconScoutTeemo Penguin Friend
      • u/Cyliia Gloo Gunner
    • Limited Time: It’s a surprise, but keep your eyes out for a new item that first weekend in May
Key Features
  • Mini-Races - for granular ad hoc competition and more rewards! Don’t worry - you don’t have to race twice! Instead, all Racers now submit their scores to 2 leaderboards. The Mini-Race leaderboard (look for the tab button on the leaderboard screen) will segment players into smaller groups of 100 on a first come first added basis when your first time is recorded.
    • We love the fierce competition at the very top of the full leaderboard, but for players unable to compete for those wickedly fast times, we wanted to offer the chance to shine on their own more granular leaderboards and enjoy the excitement of shaving just a fraction of time from your score to move up the standings.
    • Yes, there’s a little Contested Territory (Bloons Monkey City, and Adventure Time TD) thinking here but we wanted to greatly expand the range of competition within those pools so 100 players per Mini-Race made sense for that.
    • No, there are no badges for the Mini-Races, as it is incredibly important to us to not dilute the prestige of the main board rankings and badges.
  • Veteran Levels have been added to the game! After reaching max level, players can now continue to earn additional Veteran Levels. Every one of these requires a substantial amount of experience, but that per level requirement stays flat.
    • We have been listening to the feedback on this topic - ranging from requests to increase the Player Level Max, adding stats that would track total xp, or create a paragon-style system.
    • We will raise the Player Level Max at some intentionally non-committal time in the future but only after we have further narrowed the delta between the available Monkey Knowledge Points including achievements and the total MK Points that can be spent.
    • Veteran Levels allow the awesome number of super dedicated players to keep earning XP and compete for bragging rights on an upcapped scale, but without unbalancing the Monkey Knowledge system.
    • And don’t worry about your Veteran Levels when we do raise the Player Level Max. At that time any Veteran Level player will start earning XP toward the new Player Max, and when that is hit, they will pick up their Veteran Level number and XP count right where they left off.
Big Changes / Additions
  • Player avatars have been added to in-game leaderboards. Because of course you want to show off your cool avatars in as many places as possible. We’ll keep thinking about more ways to do so.
  • New rewards screen popup for Races to explain the Mini-Races
  • For more challenge consistency in high rounds, the standard roundset has been extended up to round 120. Now in game modes with standard roundsets the freeplay rounds from 101-120 will be predetermined. This is a big deal for us and we plan to do more custom rounds past 120, so we do want to hear feedback from the community here. BTD6 reddit is the best place for that - if you haven’t signed up, please do! https://www.reddit.com/r/btd6/
  • A large damage type and Bloon type rework has been made to optimize performance, and this will resolve a number of issues with incorrect damage types dealing damage where they should not.
  • Players may now always attempt daily challenges & races even on maps that are currently locked for them. In the initial design we thought this was important to push players to unlock more maps than the first few, but as we have grown our map count it is now more important to give players a chance to sample maps they haven’t unlocked.
  • Added deep link share buttons for co-op games and custom challenges, which can be used to launch the game directly into a co-op lobby, or custom challenge screen! To create one, simply select the clipboard and share that link with your friends, and they will tunnel right into your game.
    • One important note on Steam - due to issues that we haven’t yet been able to resolve with Unity, the deeplink will only launch the game on Steam if BTD6 is not open. If BTD6 is already open, please copy and paste the code as normal. We’ll keep working to make it smoother with each update, but for now if you play on Steam please pay attention to the two options on the link page - if your game is open, copy the code; if your game is not open, choose the Launch Game button.
Bug Fixes & General Changes
  • Various localization & UI text fixes
  • Tower UI in co-op should now refresh when viewing a tower that is being upgraded by another player
  • Strong target priority again picks Fortified Blimps over their standard variants
  • Added a first-time trigger to explain recent changes to map unlocks
  • Information on lobbies that cannot be made public has been moved from the corner of the screen to a popup over the public button
  • Player XP bar now has comma separators
  • Optimization to Bloon pop fx
  • Resolved some issues with hero placement/upgrade effects
  • Updated share icons within Challenge Editor
  • Resolved a crash with entering Races or Daily Challenges too fast
  • Drop & Lock placement mode now works with nudge state
  • Resolved a UI issue with towers not correctly displaying locked upgrades
  • Added [X] close button to race pass pop-up and hero bundle pop-ups in addition to them closing when tapping out of the menu
  • Resolved a bug with Blowback which could cause a Golden Bloon to remain immune to damage forever
  • Chutes co-op vertical split has been centered

Ice Monkey
  • As a part of the damage & types rework above, basic Ice damage can no longer damage Golden Bloons without the correct upgrades / buffs
  • 020 Deep Freeze and higher upgrades should correctly play sound again

Monkey Buccaneer
  • 4xx Aircraft Carrier planes should no longer play extra spawn sounds
  • x4x MOAB Takedown ability ‘tiebreakers’ picking incorrect targets has been resolved

Dartling Gunner
  • 3xx Laser Cannon path once again has a sell animation

Wizard Monkey
  • x2x Wall of Fire visual issue resolved where tower attack animation would not be correct under some cases

Alchemist
  • As a part of the damage types rework mentioned above, Acidic Mixture Dip will now correctly allow Ice attacks to damage Lead Bloons
  • As a part of the damage types rework, Acidic Mixture Dip will now correctly allow sharp towers to damage Golden Bloons
  • As a part of the damage types rework, Acidic Mixture Dip will no longer allow Explosive attacks to damage DDTs

Monkey Village
  • 101 and higher upgrades should correctly play sound again

Striker Jones
  • As a part of the damage & types rework, Lv5 will no longer allow energy attacks to damage DDTs

Etienne
  • Level 8 ‘camo’ unlock visual correctly displays at this level again, not level 9
  • Level 10 UCAV no longer creates a secondary ice platform when etienne is placed on frozen water

Achievements
  • Sapper achievement description has been clarified; the important note here for players chasing that achievement is to not one shot or strip the fortified state, so unstable concoction, shattering shells, and insta kills like moab takedown in particular should be avoided
Desktop Version
  • Unity has updated to allow cursor size to match system size so it is now possible to scale this up on Steam! We do not have a solution (still working with Unity on this) to scale the desktop cursor in game, so it must be done with system settings. On Windows this can be found by searching in the Windows search function “Mouse pointer size”. Also note the cursor resolution might become crusty due to the image size being scaled up.
Balance Changes

Dart Monkey

For new players, camo is the first real game mechanic that presents a wall for new players. To combat this we have swapped the initial unlock costs of Spike-o-pult & Crossbow to nudge new players more towards upgrading down the camo path for Dart Monkeys first.
  • 3xx Spike-o-pult XP unlock cost increased from 1900 -> 2100
  • xx3 Crossbow XP unlock cost reduced from 2100 -> 1900

Bomb Shooter

In some cases the effort to make upgrades feel powerful eclipsed the need for monkey tower weaknesses to be supported by path or other tower synergies. Reviewing the state of White compared to Black Bloons we feel it no longer makes sense for Bomb stall path to ignore inherent Bomb weakness compared to Ice, which can’t fully get around it’s weakness until T5. MOAB Maulers have been a very strong meta spam for a while now, so we are chipping off most of its ceramic bonus at T3.
  • 4xx Bloon Impact damage type Normal (All) changed to Explosive
  • 5xx Bloon Crush remains Normal type
  • x3x MOAB Mauler ceramic damage reduced from 3 -> 1
  • x4x MOAB Assassin ceramic bonus unchanged

Tack Shooter

Inferno Ring is priced high for a low single-target damage pierce based tower when pierce isn't as important at high rounds, so price has been reduced. We liked Maelstrom’s pierce change, however want to ease off a little as higher density rounds feel a lot more position & timing dependent now than they need to be. Similar to Bomb, Tack Zone’s innate popping of Lead with obviously sharp projectiles no longer feels fitting and so along with a large price reduction the damage type stays Sharp.
  • 5xx Inferno Ring price reduced from 50,000 -> 45,500
  • x4x Maelstrom ability pierce increased 100 -> 200
  • xx5 Tack Zone price reduced from $24,000 -> 20,000
  • xx5 Tack Zone damage type changed Normal -> Sharp

Ice Monkey

By buffing Snowstorm to have the same cooldown as Absolute Zero we unintentionally ruined a certain style of player-made challenge based on Absolute Zero timing. We have reworked the buff from v24 in order to keep the same freeze uptime but allow this type of challenge to be possible once again.
  • x5x Absolute Zero ability cooldown reduced from 30s -> 20
  • x5x Absolute Zero ability duration reduced from 15s -> 10

Monkey Buccaneer

Most cases for Buccaneer currently find you better off sticking to Destroyers and adding other buffs, so we have made a couple slight nudges to this top path
  • 2xx Double Shot price increased from $500 -> 550
  • 4xx Aircraft Carrier price reduced from $7500 -> 7200

Dartling Gunner

Dartling Gunner’s Rocket Storm is currently overperforming versus Buckshot, so we made slight adjustments to the price of these upgrades.
  • x4x Rocket Storm price increased from $4800 -> 5100
  • xx3 Buckshot price reduced from $3800 -> 3400

Wizard Monkey

Wall of Fire has been reworked in order to cut down on cases of frustrating randomness as well as the initial cooldown on the attack being reduced. Additionally at the highest tier all fire attacks will be further enhanced in damage
  • x2x Wall of Fire now targets ‘closest’ track position by default
  • x2x Wall of Fire initial cooldown reduced from 5.5s -> 1
  • x5x Wizard Lord Phoenix, Fireball damage increased from 9 -> 27
  • x5x Wizard Lord Phoenix, Wall of Fire damage increased 1 -> 3
  • x5x Wizard Lord Phoenix, Breath damage increased from 2 -> 6

Super Monkey

As Super Monkey’s range crosspath is too often considered unnecessary for Sun Avatar & Dark Knight we have chosen to move some of Robo Monkey’s pierce down into a lower tier again
  • 010 Super Range now also increases Super Monkey pierce by 1
  • 030 Robo Monkey pierce remains at 6

Ninja Monkey

Ninja’s Bloon Sabotage is often used in tricky rounds as a powerful slow with a long duration, so we have made a gentle price increase here to reflect that support strength.
  • x4x Bloon Sabotage price increased from $5000 -> 5200

Druid

Druid’s top path Storm & Ball Lightning upgrades needed a value boost versus other options versus other paths of other tower choices, so these have been given a small price buff for now.
  • 3xx Druid of the Storm price reduced from $2000 -> 1850
  • 4xx Ball Lightning price reduced from $5500 -> 5100

Monkey Village

Monkey Village’s range at Primary Expertise has been increased slightly to open up downstream strategies by fitting additional Primary towers within range
  • 5xx Village influence radius increased from 48 -> 55

Engineer

Engineer XXL trap is extremely powerful but too expensive for backline dps and we’d like to see it more viable for frontline engineer builds
  • xx5 XXL Trap price reduced from $60,000 -> 54,000

Sauda

Yes, here it is the nerf you’ve all been waiting for. But as some in the community predicted, it’s not that much of a nerf. Sauda’s range has been tightened up as her role is specifically about high damage in a small, focused area.
  • Attack range reduced from 25 to 23
  • Lv6 Attack range bonus reduced from 4 -> 3
  • Lv15 Attack range bonus reduced from 4 -> 3

Monkey Knowledge

Hypothermia’s benefits have been made redundant so the MK now has a brand new effect.
  • Hypothermia now instead increases the duration of snowstorm by 1 second

Powers

Thrive has been one of the least understood Powers in the game, and that misunderstanding has only added to the use case delta vs Cash Drops. To improve balance Thrive has been upgraded.
  • In addition to increasing the Cash Generation of towers that generate cash, Thrive will now also increase the amount of Cash gained from Bloon pops for its duration
  • New visual fx have been added to Thrive to show that it is currently active

Bloons TD 6 becomes $2, hits an even more ridiculous player count record

I look at the Steam charts to see what's hot on Valve's platform. And every day, I am once again surprised to see Bloons TD 6 hanging among Steam's most popular titles. The colourful tower defense game suddenly exploded in popularity late last year after a substantial sale and some big Twitch streams, and now another discount has brought the game to even greater heights.


Bloons TD 6 went 80% off over the past week (sorry, the sale just ended), which isn't even the biggest sale in the game's history. Nevertheless, it brought the game to a peak of 53,943 concurrent players yesterday, as SteamDB shows, up by over 10k from the previous peak in January, which happened after a 90% discount.


Tower defense is a venerable subgenre of strategy games, and the Bloons series has plenty of nostalgia built up from its days as a free Flash game, but it's still wild to see Bloons TD 6 in comparable standing to Steam games as massive as Destiny 2 and Civilization VI.


Read the rest of the story...


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Steam's latest hit is… Bloons TD 6?

Bloons TD 6 - Update Notes! Version 24.0

Bloons TD 6 v24.0 - Update Notes!
New Awesome
  • New Melee hero - Sauda the Swordmaster, to hack, slash and slice your way to victory.
    • Melee towers have a long history of discussion by both dev team and community. We’ve enjoyed adding them to the mix with Pat Fusty, and several characters in BATTD. The design concept for Sauda has been around for a few years, and we truly hope the many, many players who have asked for a “sword hero” over the years will enjoy!
  • New Intermediate map Balance. You can play it in CHIMPS right now using this challenge code: ZMUHSGK
  • New Benjamin skin Sushi Bento - treat him nicely or else there’s NO SUSHI FOR YOU!
  • The Golden Bloon has returned! A chosen map in each difficulty will now contain an extra Golden Bloon every 10 rounds, these Golden Bloons can get tricky to pop on the higher rounds but do not cost any lives when they escape. If popped successfully every Golden Bloon will reward a small monkey money bonus. (Gold Bloons will not spawn in Deflation or CHIMPS modes)
    • Golden Bloon is another design item we’ve had on the “add this” list since BTD6 was launched. We had fun adding the Golden Bloon to BTD5 and even more frustrating fun when it went into BSM2, so for BTD6 we wanted to take elements of each and make it work even better with the scaling power of BTD6. And who doesn’t love-hate treasure gobliny things!
    • We’ve felt it ourselves and had feedback from players that they like chasing the Collection Reward bonuses on different maps and that they’d like to have a way to earn a bit more Monkey Money each game. Adding the Golden Bloon helps address those items, and making it evolve and stay relevant as late round power grows feels good to us from a design side. We hope you enjoy!
  • New Trophy Store Items
    • Heroes: Benjamin Matrix Placement
    • Monkeys: Ninja kiwi ninja pets for Ninja Kiwi fans (yes, we finally put a kiwi in the game!)
    • Bloons: Flowers Pop FX
    • Co-op: Dancing Monkey emote, Blooming Flowers emote
    • Game & UI: 3 Community designed Competition Avatars
      • u/mutamarkl: Tack Monkey - Congratulations!
      • u/Kuzuyku: Powerful Sentai - Congratulations!
      • u/Concilliabule: Intense Wizard - Congratulations!
      • To the other 7 winners and the many contributors and voters - thanks so much for your patience. We didn’t want to flood the Trophy Store or profile inventory all at once, and we want each group of winners to have some time in the sun. The others will be coming in the next updates!
  • Limited Time only: Obyn Bunny Pet, Obyn’s Eggs Avatar, Chocolate MOAB, Chocolate BFB, Bunny Ear Bloons, Dartling Easter Eggs projectiles for Buckshot & Hydra Rockets
  • Race Pass IAPs have been added to the game (in a block of 4, or a discounted block of 12). Each Race Pass will grant unlimited Race Entries for one entire Race Event.
    • Races have been a locus of some of the most dedicated BTD6 play in the game, and we’ve been putting a lot of effort into keeping Races challenging and working with community race ideas. Our goals since launch have been to keep Races challenging, fair, leaderboard policed, and practical to play over and over for dedicated players.
    • We’ve recently had feedback from the community that the practical repeat play has not been achieved. The idea of a pay to play over and over was raised and that is what the Race Pass seeks to address. Making this IAP keeps the system extra secure, and we chose to make it a per use rather than time-based system so players could skip races by choice or if they can’t play on any given weekend.
    • We’ll keep listening to feedback on Races and on these Race Passes, and we will also do more discounted Race entry weekends as we’ve done in the past for players who want to stick with Monkey Money entry.
Key Features
  • The experience reduction for continuing into freeplay has been reduced from 90% to 70%. Whatever the game mode, rounds beyond 100 remain at 90% reduction. As players are having more fun going into freeplay, especially in co-op, we agree that the rounds up to 100 should have this additional xp value.
  • New Challenge Info information button has been added to all custom user challenges. Open this panel to view some detailed stats for any challenge including Attempts, Wins, Fails, Unique Players, Victorious Players as well as the First & most recent players to win the challenge.
  • Some of the last few Bloons that cause you to lose in any game will now be displayed on the defeat screen. We’re hoping this will help new and experienced players both - helping underscore whether you are missing a certain damage type or deep damage ability, and whether you were close to beating it, or still hundreds of lives off!
Big Changes / Additions
  • Advanced Challenges should now count towards most player stats.
  • Those daring should now attempt to take on the challenge of Ravine CHIMPS.
  • Map unlocking system has been reworked. Instead of unlocking in the same order for all players when you beat a map from a lower difficulty, you will now gain the option to choose a map from the next higher difficulty to unlock. This is in response to watching many new Twitch streamers wanting to choose the look of a later map in the list but having to go one by one, and we like the flexibility to choose within each difficulty much better.
  • As they do not spawn until after round 80 naturally, DDT and BAD Bloons will now spawn in sandbox with at least the minimum level of freeplay ramping they would normally have in regular game conditions.
Bug Fixes & General Changes
  • Upgrade description and localization fixes and tweaks - each update it’s important that we capture balance changes, as well as crosspath functions that players might otherwise miss (more info below)
  • Regrow Rate icon now correctly displays on Odysseys when rate has been modified
  • Many behind the scenes optimizations & removing of some unused art assets
  • Heroes no longer play level 20 audio when they hit level 20 if hero audio is disabled
  • Resolved some issues in sandbox freeplay with MOABs leaking incorrect amounts of lives
  • Due to past corruption issues, loading cloud data will no longer load challenge creation saves
  • Resolved a Crash/UI break caused by cycling through instamonkey pages too fast
  • Monkey Meadow modified slightly to allow for Juggernaut bounces off new trees near the map entrance. We’ve watched too many players try the Juggernaut for the first time on this map with good placement but not see the value of object rebounds.
  • Spike Factory pineapples skin description has been updated with more detail
  • Fancied up the save conflict screen
  • Resolved some layering of UI popups

Dart Monkey
  • x4x Super Monkey Fan Club description has been updated with more detail

Boomerang Monkey
  • 5xx Glaive Lord description has been updated with more detail

Bomb Shooter
  • 3xx Really Big Bombs description has been corrected
  • x4x MOAB Assassin description has been updated with more detail
  • xx5 Bomb Blitz description has been updated with more detail

Tack Shooter
  • 4xx Ring of Fire description has been updated with more detail

Ice Monkey
  • 4xx Embrittlement description has been updated with more detail
  • x3x Arctic Wind description has been updated with more detail
  • x5x Absolute Zero description has been updated with more detail

Glue Gunner
  • 410 Bloon Liquifier can now correctly pierce through 3 Bloons, not just 2.
  • 4xx Bloon Liquifier description has been updated with more detail
  • x4x Glue Storm description has been updated with more detail

Sniper Monkey
  • x4x Supply Drop description has been updated with more detail
  • xx4 Full Auto Rifle description has been updated with more detail

Monkey Sub
  • 3xx Submerge and Support description has been updated with more detail

Monkey Buccaneer
  • 1xx Faster Shooting description has been corrected
  • x5x Pirate Lord description has been updated with more detail
  • xx1 Long Range description has been corrected
  • xx4 Favoured Trades description has been updated with more detail

Monkey Ace
  • x1x Exploding Pineapples description has been updated with more detail

Heli Pilot
  • xx1 Faster Firing description has been updated with more detail
  • xx3 MOAB Shove description has been updated with more detail

Mortar Monkey
  • xx2 Burny Stuff description has been updated with more detail

Dartling Gunner
  • 3xx Laser Cannon description has been updated with more detail
  • x3x Hydra Rocket Pods description has been updated with more detail
  • x4x Rocket Storm description has been updated with more detail
  • x5x M.A.D description has been updated with more detail

Wizard Monkey
  • x3x Dragon’s Breath description has been updated with more detail
  • xx3 Shimmer description has been updated with more detail

Super Monkey
  • xx3 Dark Knight description has been updated with more detail

Ninja Monkey
  • x2x Counter-Espionage description has been updated with more detail
  • 004 Sticky Bomb should work correctly now and not break with DoTs - please tell us if not because we’ve spent so much time on this, but hopefully we won’t hear from anyone on this!

Alchemist
  • 2xx Acidic Mixture Dip description has been updated with more detail
  • xx3 Lead to Gold description has been updated with more detail

Druid
  • x5x Spirit of the Forest vine visuals should correctly layer over split tracks now

Spike Factory
  • 042 Spike Storm now correctly works on splitting tracks

Monkey Village
  • x4x Call to Arms description has been corrected

Engineer
  • x2x Deconstruction description has been updated with more detail
  • x4x Overclock description has been updated with more detail
  • x5x Ultraboost description has been updated with more detail
  • xx1 Oversize Nails description has been updated with more detail

Adora
  • Level 3 The Long Arm of the Light description has been updated with more detail

Etienne
  • UCAV should no longer have a footprint slightly below Etienne that blocks towers from being placed in that area

Monkey Knowledge Force vs Force
  • Description has been corrected
Desktop Version
  • Improved integration with discord - now shows a variety of game and menu states
    • We are working on improved integration with Steam and Twitch for future updates, we appreciate your patience on these!
  • Resolved an issue that could occur on Steam causing the game to hang at step 3 of 8
Balance Changes

Dart Monkey

The previous sharpshooter rework caused more trouble than intended in setups without much other cleanup by popping Black Bloons into large clusters of reds which then clogged up the pierce. We decided to keep the buffed attack speed value as well as adding back the stronger damage value.
  • xx4 sharpshooter damage increased 5 -> 6

Boomerang Monkey

Rotating Glaives aren’t quite enough for higher tier rounds, and especially struggle against Fortified Super Ceramics so we have added a small bonus to combat these.
  • 5xx Glaive Lord’s rotating glaives now deal bonus damage to Fortified Bloons +2

Tack Shooter

Maelstrom upgrades are in a good spot overall, but specifically for the low cost of this tower with such a rapid cooldown it was able to hit too many targets under race conditions. This targeted nerf is to the value of it under those race conditions and should be negligible in other game areas.
  • x4x Blade Maelstrom pierce per blade reduced to 100
  • x5x Super Maelstrom pierce per blade reduced to 500

Ice Monkey

Small tweaks to the benefit of still under-utilized T5 Ice Monkey upgrades.
  • 5xx Super Brittle price reduced from $30,000 -> 28,000
  • x5x Absolute Zero Ability & buff duration increased from 10s -> 15

Glue Gunner

More tweaks with the intent of viable stepping stones toward The Bloon Solver. Due to quirks with game state interactions temporarily preventing more nuanced changes, we have decided to leave MOAB Glue’s slow amount on MOABs as it was previously, coming back to Relentless later. However xx4 Relentless Glue will still layer over the top of it.
  • 3xx Bloon Dissolver price reduced $2600 -> 2500
  • 4xx Bloon Liquifier price reduced $5500 -> 5000
  • xx3 MOAB Glue MOAB slow effectiveness changed from 0.75x back to 0.625x

Monkey Ace

Similar to Tack Shooter Maelstrom upgrades, we have targeted a nerf to Ground Zero for race conditions by amounts which are not relevant outside of those conditions. Additionally Tsar Bomba has received a much smaller version of this nerf along with a reduced cooldown to increase its relevance.
  • x4x Ground Zero ability pierce reduced to 1000
  • x5x Tsar Bomba ability pierce reduced to 5000
  • x5x Tsar Bomba ability cooldown reduced from 40s -> 35

Heli Pilot

Razor Rotors doesn’t synergize well with it’s own T2 and is kinda the dunce of T3 Helis
  • 3xx Razor Rotors blade damage increased from 1 -> 2

Mortar Monkey

As an expensive high-layer T5 DPS tower lurking behind a mainly support path on path 3 Mortar it’s not easy to save for, so Blooncineration has had a fair price reduction.
  • xx5 Blooncineration price reduced from $45,000 -> 40,000

Dartling Gunner

Base Dartling performance doesn’t quite offset the handholding necessary to use it well, so base price has been reduced to make those first couple upgrades come a little faster. Plasma Accelerator attack delay has been buffed so that now the beam ‘tic rate’ matches the attack speed at tier 3, overall giving it a 20% buff to all DPS which carries on up to the Tier 5. Finally Bloon Exclusion Zone’s price has as well been reduced slightly for edge case balance.
  • Base Price reduced from $1000 -> 850
  • 4xx Plasma Accelerator attack delay buffed from 0.25s -> 0.2
  • xx5 Bloon Exclusion Zone price reduced from $60,000 -> 58,000

Super Monkey

While not considered an issue on the same level for Races, the Bloon Annihilation ability has preemptively had pierce reduced under the same reasoning as Ground Zero and Maelstrom, but by amounts that still likely won’t be noticeable even under most Race conditions - but we’re keeping an eye on it. Additionally the price of this upgrade has been reduced by a fair amount.
  • x4x Tech Terror price reduced from $22,000 -> 19,000
  • x4x Tech Terror ability pierce reduced to 2000
  • x5x Anti Bloon ability pierce reduced to 10,000

Alchemist

Alchemist has been given a small push towards the current underused Brew crosspath. Previously this crosspath only applied a benefit to Brew & Stimulant but now along with a buff to that, Acidic Mixture Dip will also gain a slight benefit from the crosspath.
  • 220 - Acidic Mixture Dip charges per stack increased from 10 -> 13
  • 320 - Berserker Brew charges per stack increased from 35 -> 40

Spike Factory

Spiked Balls are used quite a lot, but we like their overall position right now so they have had only a slight bump up in price, along with a bigger decrease to the price of T4 Spiked Mines. In addition, Permaspike’s neglected crosspath has had a small pierce increase as currently their only real use is under custom challenge rules.
  • 3xx Spiked Balls price increased from $2200 -> 2300
  • 4xx Spiked Mines price reduced from $12,000 -> 11,000
  • 105 Permaspike pierce increased from 70 -> 80

Obyn Greenfoot

To cut down a little on the RNG aspect of Obyn strategies, his abilities will now be able to target Bloons in the same fashion as Gwendolin’s Cocktail, and only place randomly while none are within radius (yay!).
  • Obyn’s level 3 Brambles will now target Bloons in radius unless there is none
  • Obyn’s level 10 Wall of Trees will now target Bloons in radius unless there is none

If you are visually attuned and missed it above, we’d like to shout out the winners of the avatar competition again! You can find the full list here.

These will be added into the next few updates in no particular order!

Bloons TD 6 - Update Notes! Version 23.0

We’re back from holidays mini-update!
New Awesome
  • New Expert Map, Ravine!
  • New Trophy Store Items
    • Monkeys: Pineapple projectiles for Spiked Ball factory
    • Bloons: Trucker Hats, Lantern BFB skin, Pow Pop FX
    • Game & UI: BMC Street Party music track, Kabuki Ninja avatar, Heli Pilot avatar
Challenge Browser changes / additions
  • Challenges now allow users to toggle between Player Completion Rate (current number, which displays % of players who have beaten the challenge) & Win Rate (displays the total % of wins against losses)
  • Challenge Browser now supports an option to “hide” challenges from searches if you have already completed them
  • Added a ‘follow user’ option & ‘Following’ search to the challenge browser
  • Challenges that have been greyed out in searches from a previous version of the game will now update to blue again if they are passed on a newer version without using double cash by enough players
  • Challenge browser now supports filtering challenges by maximum number of rounds & minimum number of rounds. This filter will unfortunately not work on existing challenges.
  • Challenge browser win rates now support displaying >99% &
  • Challenge browser has had some general improvements & optimization to filters, sorting, searching & returning from a challenge
  • Added an option to disable Double Cash in challenge creation
Big Changes / Additions
  • Added warnings to some screens which had started to be blocked from loading under certain settings in VPN’s & other 3rd party DNS based filters.
  • Reworking of tower upgrade UI when hovering/holding over upgrades
  • Added a first-time pop-up for targeting priorities
  • First ever continue to be used is now free
  • Added a ‘customized rounds’ icon for when rounds are changed in Odyssey/ Race
  • Improved sorting of race leaderboard scores
  • Apopalypse screen will now display a victory at round 60
  • Some new profile stats have been added, Most Experienced Monkey & its XP, Insta Collection progress, & Collection Chests opened (This stat begins tracking now)
  • Center lanes widened on the intermediate map Bazaar to allow Medium placement.
Bug Fixes & General Changes
  • Resolved some map specific FX not speeding up their animations when in 3x speed
  • Resolved an issue that would cause pets to continue playing their SFX after being sold
  • Resolved some issues causing Bloons to choose path inconsistently when tracks split off in multiple directions
  • Fixed login prompts which had stopped working for guest users
  • Login page should correctly load in the webview
  • A number of localization issues resolved
  • Improved tutorial to feel less clunky
  • Resolved some collision on Flooded Valley
  • Snap of Your Fingers achievement correctly works again for players with Double Cash
  • The corner of some random Heli can no longer be spotted in the corner of Chutes
  • Resolved an issue with Techbots linked to engineers not remembering to trigger Overclock after loading a save
  • Resolved an issue with Odyssey wins getting mixed up with regular wins sometimes
  • Restarting apopalypse will no longer pause the game
  • Resolved an issue with Flooded Valley blocking vision on some towers at times when it should not
  • Added some instruction for how to unlock locked maps
  • Minor UI fixes and optimizations in a few places
  • Some general minor cleaning up of UI in challenge creation
  • Changing hero skin right before a co-op game should no longer cause a desync
Monkey Sub
  • 2xx Advanced Intel no longer gains camo detection from Lvl 1 Etienne or Dartling
  • 3xx & 4xx Subs have had some optimizations to unnecessary code
  • 4xx Sub correctly layers assets onto regrow Bloons again
  • 5xx Sub inconsistencies resolved with how buffs were applying
Monkey Ace
  • No longer locks in place after enabling wingmonkey and then disabling knowledge
Mortar Monkey
  • xx4 Shattering Shells removing fortification should now reflect the children Bloons losing their fortification as well towards the damage counter
Wizard Monkey
  • 110 Fireball now correctly ignores blockers with Guided Magic
  • xx4 Necromancer no longer depletes grave from current round before previous
Alchemist
  • 3xx Berserker Brew no longer closes open UI panels when buffing selected tower
Monkey Village
  • x1x Regrow Blocker has had some inconsistencies fixed
Engineer
  • 5xx Paragon Sentry “can always sell” property on sentries has been fixed to work in challenges as well
Dartling Gunner
  • Can no longer shoot over walls when locked on top of them
  • Lock Targeting Reticle now scales in size to reflect accuracy changes
  • 4xx Plasma Accelerator no longer creates Plasma Pools when beams are obstructed but would be crossing streams if they were not
Striker Jones
  • Is no longer so terrified of MOAB Class Bloons that he is occasionally rendered speechless by the mere sight of them
Obyn Greenfoot
  • Track items should once again always be retained when loading saves
Ezili
  • Lvl 11 description updated to reflect interaction with Necromancers
Pat Fusty
  • Visual effects should all work correctly again while Pat is placed in water
  • Resolved a crash caused by chinooking Pat under specific circumstances
Knowledge
  • Backroom Deals knowledge once again works
Balance Changes
Dart Monkey

While we’re happy with Dart Monkey being a more niche or early use tower, too many people were finding Juggernaut itself even further niche or lackluster on first impression. While retaining the overpower power potential we’ve added a beefy impact to each individual target hit, and we’ve tweaked sharpshooter slightly to provide similar power but with more of a speed focus to enable more distinct crosspath choice between speed and pierce.
  • 4xx Juggernaut damage increased from 1 -> 2
  • 4xx Juggernaut pierce reduced from 100 -> 50
  • xx4 Sharpshooter attack rate increased from 0.85 -> 0.75
  • xx4 Sharpshooter damage reduced from 6 -> 5
  • T5's both remain the same
Boomerang Monkey

Small price adjustment to push when you get this tower a little closer to when it’s useful.
  • 5xx Glaive Lord price reduced from $40,000 to $35,000
Bomb Shooter

Small nerf to the regular-Bloon power of MOAB Mauler’s domination.
  • x3x MOAB Mauler bonus to Ceramic reduced from 4 -> 3
  • x4x MOAB Assassin unchanged
Tack Shooter

With pierce and range on the base Tack Zone so high that increases weren’t noticeable the middle crosspath was underserved. To balance crosspathing we have reworked the base Tack Zone around lower values then improving them greatly for the crosspaths.
  • xx5 The Tack Zone damage increased from 1 -> 2
  • xx5 The Tack Zone range reduced from 46 -> 30
  • xx5 The Tack Zone pierce reduced from 9 to 4
  • 025 The Tack Zone range increased to 50
  • 025 The Tack Zone pierce increased to 10
Ice Monkey

Ice Monkey power is currently too bottom heavy and mid-to-higher tiers are neglected, so some tweaks to mid-tier upgrades have been made.
  • 4xx Embrittlement price reduced from $3000 -> 2200
  • x3x Arctic Wind price reduced from $3200 -> 2900
  • xx3 Cryo Cannon price reduced from $2000 -> 1750
  • x4x Snowstorm ability cooldown decreased from 60s -> 30
Glue Gunner

Adjustments to top-path upgrades to make each step more noticeable. Very small nerf to the slow amount on MOAB Glue as it has for a long time held a dominating spot in MOAB support, but this same amount has been returned to the previous value at Tier 4. We are still looking at future improvements here, including reworking the priority tree of glue stacks.
  • 3xx Bloon Dissolver price reduced from $2700 -> 2600
  • 4xx Bloon Liquifier pierce increased from 1 -> 2
  • xx3 MOAB Glue slow amount on MOABs reduced from 0.625x -> 0.75x
  • xx4 Relentless Glue slow amount on MOABs remains 0.625x
Sniper Monkey

Small improvements for underloved sniper upgrades with respective path specialties intact. As bottom path sniper has proven superiority for group damage dealing in many situations and middle T4 on the group-damage path has only offered a farming option, the pierce of shrapnel has been doubled at this T4 to add offensive value as well..
  • 5xx Cripple MOAB damage increased from 60 -> 80
  • x4x Supply Drop’s shrapnel pierce increased from 3 -> 6
Monkey Sub

As Bloontonium Reactor rarely uses up enough pierce that the pierce crosspath would ever matter, a large chunk of this has been moved into the middle crosspath.
  • 400 Bloontonium Reactor pierce reduced from 70 -> 50
  • 410 Bloontonium Reactor pierce reduced from 84 -> 70
  • 420 Bloontonium Reactor pierce increased from 50 -> 100
Monkey Ace

Monkey Ace was never intended to be a great starting tower and instead come into power at mid- and high-tier upgrades, but since the base tower feels lacking to new players (and some of us old timers) we decided to rework low tier power into the base tower. In addition to this we are experimenting with adding a small amount of homing to the spectre upgrade as rapid fire missing is not the intended design.
  • Monkey Ace projectile size increased from 2 -> 3
  • Monkey Ace attack cooldown reduced from 2.1s -> 1.68
  • 1xx Rapid Fire attack rate buff reduced from 40% -> 25%
  • x1x Exploding Pineapple attack cooldown reduced from 3s -> 2
  • 104 Spectre which always gained 25% from Rapid Fire is unchanged
  • xx5 Spectre now has a very slight seeking effect on the dart projectiles
  • xx5 Flying Fortress price reduced from $105k -> 100k
Heli Pilot

Further small buff to Comanche as prior balancing has not felt sufficient.
  • xx4 Heli reinforcements duration increased from 12s -> 15
Wizard Monkey

Despite ranking low overall, Wizard Lord Phoenix has dodged balance changes because of its extremely popular place as a challenge tower. With the rise of other towers in challenges, we’ve decided to start off buffing it based on its own merits in general gameplay. We’ve also added some previously intended minor changes to Prince of Darkness which were held back due to bugs that have now been resolved.
  • x5x Wizard Lord Phoenix price reduced from $60,000 -> 54,000
  • x3x Dragon's Breath, x1x Fireball radius increased from 10 -> 14
  • x3x Dragon's Breath, x1x Fireball damage increased from 1 -> 3
  • x5x Wizard Lord, x1x Fireball damage increased from 1 -> 9
  • x5x Wizard Lord Dragon's Breath damage increased from 1 -> 2
  • xx5 Prince of Darkness pops retained in graveyard increased from 2 -> 3 rounds
  • xx5 Prince of Darkness grave required for damage stacks increased from 200 -> 300
Alchemist

Lead to Gold hasn’t been a competitive 3rd tier outside of special game modes and challenges, so we’ve added some more uniqueness by allowing it to truly live up to its description and deal enough damage to instantly ‘convert’ a Lead Bloon, children layers and all, also carrying on some value here in the later game by allowing this bonus to deal extra against DDTs as well.
  • xx3 Lead to Gold attacks deals +9 damage to Lead & DDT
Druid

The most recent buff to Superstorm was great fun, but when spending pierce so quickly we wouldn’t see many extra Ball Lightnings. Since many find Superstorm lacking in pierce overall, the ‘extra’ pierce consumptions for hitting larger targets have been reduced to make it more effective and more lightningey.
  • 4xx Ball Lighting price reduced from $6000 -> 5500
  • 5xx Superstorm pierce consumptions buffed: MOAB 20 -> 5
  • 5xx Superstorm pierce consumptions buffed: BFB 50 -> 20
  • 5xx Superstorm pierce consumptions buffed: ZOMG 200 -> 50
  • 5xx Superstorm pierce consumptions buffed: DDT to 50 -> 10
Banana Farm

Monkey Bank is just too stonks even without Benjamin. This nerf shouldn’t hurt it too much, but will make it snowball a little bit slower and balance with the other paths better.
  • x3x Monkey Bank price increased from $3300 -> 3500
Spike Factory

Like a few other towers before it, the attack speed crosspath for Spike Factory has outshined the others. We have reworked the lower Spike Factory tiers to distribute this power more evenly while keeping high tier factories at a similar level of power.
  • Spike Factory price increased from $800 -> 1000
  • x1x Faster Production price reduced from $700 -> 600
  • x2x Even Faster Production price reduced from $900 -> 800
  • Spike Factory rate increased from 2.2s -> 1.75
  • x1x Spike Factory rate increase reduced from 40% -> 20
  • x2x Spike Factory rate increase increased from 25% -> 30
  • x5x Carpet of Spikes price reduced from $42,000 -> 40,000
Monkey Village

Call to Arms didn’t last enough in some critical situations where it could have made the difference, so this duration has been increased slightly.
  • x4x Call to Arms duration increased from 10s -> 12
  • x5x Homeland Defense unchanged
Engineer

Sentry Expert has underperformed for a while, so we’re adding solid crosspathing buffs to all Sentries. We’ve added a pierce & speed boost to Overclock’s base upgrade and lowered the cooldown on Ultraboost to allow the possibility for it to achieve full uptime as a freeplay tower and get its stacks up faster. Finally last update we allowed Bloontrap to be set multiple times per round, and we wanted to stay on the side of caution with a long cooldown, but after seeing it in the wild we are happy to make this cooldown faster.
  • 120 Deconstruction now gives all Sentries +1 damage to Fort & MOAB
  • 401 now increases sentry pierce by roughly 25% instead of +1
    • 401 Crushing Sentry pierce increased from 22 -> 28
    • 401 Bomb Sentry pierce increased from 30 -> 38
    • 401 Cold Sentry pierce increased from 15 -> 19
  • x4x Overclock projectile speed increased 375 -> 750
  • x4x Overclock base pierce increased from 3 -> 15
  • x5x Ultraboost base pierce increased from 3 -> 30
  • x5x Ultraboost ability cooldown reduced from 45 -> 35
  • xx4 Bloontrap rate increased from 20 -> 15
  • 204 Bloontrap rate buff increased from 0.8x -> 0.6x
Dartling Gunner

As our most recently added tower we are very happy with all the excitement surrounding this beloved monkey tower and the general middleground play position. We’re happy enough with its time in the wild to make some first impression changes here which we hope you’ll continue to enjoy.
  • 4xx Plasma Accelerator can now apply Laser Shock with the beam as well as focal point
  • 5xx Ray of Doom price reduced from $110,000 -> 95,000
  • 140 Rocket storm ability spread reduction increased from 30% -> 60%
  • x5x M.A.D price reduced from $65k -> 60k
  • xx3 Buckshot price reduced from $4000 -> 3800
  • xx3 Buckshot now knocks back non-MOAB class Bloons a small amount on hit
Gwendolin

The last Gwendolin change didn’t come through as well as intended for a number of reasons, so while keeping true to the intention behind this change it has been improved across the board to properly buff this again
  • Lv4 Heat it Up should trigger roughly 30% more at all levels
Adora

Ball of Light’s power before level 20 has been improved to scale through the mid game better
  • Lv10 Ball of Light damage increased from Adora Damage +1 to +2
  • Lv15 Ball of Light damage increased from Adora Damage +1 to +3
  • Lv20 Ball of Light remains at Adora Damage +18
Etienne

Etienne’s main power through mid-to-endgame intentionally comes from his UCAV, however it still overperforms and needs to be pulled back a bit.
  • Level 10 UCAV duration reduced from 20s -> 18
  • Level 15 UCAV duration reduced from 25s -> 20
Some Known Issues
  • 'Ghost' MOAB Class Bloons visible briefly during Pat Fusty Big Squeeze ability
  • Tower UI may break if too many actions are taken during garbage collection
  • Save integrity of any current Odyssey progress may have issues updating if not already completed

Steam's latest hit is... Bloons TD 6?

I like to browse the Steam charts sometimes. It's partly for fun, just to see what weird games are climbing up the rankings, but it's also partly for work, as I now get to tell you that Bloons TD 6 is suddenly one of the top games on Valve's platform. Yes, that's the latest entry in the Bloons Tower Defense series, those games you probably remember playing in your browser over a decade ago.


Bloons TD 6 peaked at 43,629 players today, as SteamDB shows. That makes it the 23rd-biggest Steam game for the day, sandwiched right between venerable hits like Terraria and Civilization 6. The game's daily highs have been steadily rising just before Christmas, when the Steam Winter Sale brought the price down just under one dollar.


What can I say? Tower defense is fun, Bloons is cute and nostalgic, and one United States dollar is a fine price to pay for any videogame. A number of Twitch streamers, including xQc, picked the game up during its sale period, which certainly added to the popularity, as well.


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