Update: Bloons TD 6 v40.0 - Update Notes!Available now for iOS, Android & Steam please restart your storefront or be patient if it does not appear for you, these updates can take some time to be rolled out to every region due to how the storefronts are set up.
Key New Features
- Events Menu Overhaul
- Our events menu was getting longer and longer, and perhaps a little too reminiscent of our Flash gaming roots. We’ve moved everything over to a new and improved events menu with all active items visible at a glance and estimated countdowns for upcoming events.
- Co-op daily challenges will now last multiple days up until the next challenge cycles around for more time to complete and less downtime between them.
- Boss Challenge
- With more Bosses came more downtime between each Boss appearance. To remedy that and to massively extend the ability to practice different strats and maps, we’re opening up a persistent Boss Challenge system!
- Any Boss Bloons not currently in an active event can now be challenged at any time on a map of your choice, even tougher maps where we won’t generally run Events.
- Boss Challenge can be accessed from the new Events menu, or via the Boss Menu.
- Along with this, we’ve ensured that every map now has a designated Boss Spawn track so that there is no randomness to where they will come from.
New Awesome
- New Hero: Corvus the Spirit Walker
- After months of work developing the complicated balance and technical aspects of a Hero with so many combinable elements, we are so happy to confirm that Corvus will indeed be in Update 40! We’ve seen the community speculation about whether we’d get Corvus released this year, and while it wasn’t easy, not only did the team rally but we’ve had significant time to balance and bugfix. We hope you enjoy playing this very unique Hero!
- Corvus fights alongside his lovable Spirit companion, which will attack Bloons anywhere on the map following his target priority. Corvus harvests Mana from Bloons and uses this to channel powerful energies through his Spirit companion to perform many powerful attacks from his spellbook (which we think isn’t in any way cursed or possibly sentient)
- Corvus himself is able to debuff a single Bloon at a time with his Haunt, which removes regrow and purple properties and enables increased energy damage. When destroyed, Haunted targets are absorbed as Mana and then explode, dealing strong area damage.
- Because much of Corvus’ power comes from Spells, proximity to Bloons for Haunting and Mana generation is essential, and we think it suits Corvus’ personality to be near the frontline, too. At Level 7, Corvus gains the ability to Spirit Walk mapwide, which allows repositioning if other Monkeys start pop stealing too much.
- Corvus can be unlocked for 7000 Monkey Money. To date he is the most complicated and in-depth Hero in BTD6 and as noted has taken months of work and revision. Given this and the high level of strategic understanding involved in playing with him, we feel the higher price both reflects this additional development effort and will defer the unlock until players have additional experience to better understand how and when to use his powers.
- This same price point reasoning also applies to Geraldo, and we plan to raise Geraldo up to this 7000 Monkey Money unlock as well. We don’t want to blindside anyone with this change, however, and won’t be changing the unlock price until Update 41. Anyone who doesn’t have Geraldo unlocked, you have the Holiday season to unlock him at the current rate.
- We also want to note after the last few fairly complicated towers between Geraldo, Beast Handler, Magus & now Corvus we don’t intend to continue a trend of more and more complex designs. We aim to have a healthy mix of simple and complicated new content, and our next planned Hero (who will drop in midway through next year) will step back to a ‘less is more’ design aimed to be unique in its own way but simpler to pick up and with the lower 5000 Monkey Money unlock.
- New Expert Map: Glacial Trail
- We hope you will find this map to be a unique play experience compared to other Expert maps, as Glacial Trail was designed with the goal of bringing in another fun single lane track to the Expert category.
- Glacial Trail features very limited space near to the track, so be very careful and prepare your Mortars and Helis! Warning: May be a little too cold for many Monkeys, so dress warmly!
- New Quests
- We put a lot of work into Quests to give lots to play over the holidays, some instructional and some quite challenging. Please don’t expect this many new Quests every update - this is our Christmas gift!
- Striker Instruction: Discover Striker Jones’ strengths and abilities
- New Dart Just Dropped: Multi-stage tale of two Dartling Gunners
- A Guide to the Book of Spirits: Discover Corvus’ strengths and abilities
- Under a new ‘Experiments’ tab in the Quests section, we have some special feeling missions to play around with
- Fast Upgrades: Very special quest returning from BTD5; survive 6 special action packed rounds on Dark Path with all towers upgrading once for free after each round!
- Intense Bloon Rounds: 30 rounds of concentrated Bloon attack
- New Achievements
- Also a good bunch of new Achievements to chase over the holidays!
- Heavy Investment: Invest EXACTLY $401,626 extra when creating any paragon (or more, that’s also fine)
- 25 to Life: Defeat 5 unique bosses at Tier 5 (in either Boss Events or Boss Challenge mode) - unlocks the hilarious 'Tiny Boss Bloons' Extras option, which can be toggled via the Main Menu Settings
- Community Connoisseur: Win 100 different community submissions
- Life Experience: Earn 5,368,709 experience for any tower
- New Trophy Store Items
- Monkeys: Druid Capybara pet, awwwww!
- Bloons: Pirate Turtle ZOMG skin
- Game & UI: Pinata cash drop skin, Sushi Ben avatar, Mortar Shot avatar, Cyberdart Graffiti banner, Winter is Coming Tonk Mix track
- New Team Store items
- Share a bit of Christmas cheer as your Team ruthlessly dominates all tiles!
- Flying Props: Christmas Cardinal flying prop
- Team Banners: Hero Christmas banner
- Icons: Holly Bell emblem
- Frames: Christmas Bow frame
Game Changes / Additions
- Map Editor
- Over 80 more items available for use in the Map Editor, including a new Dark Terrain/Area (so you don’t have to spam quite so many shadows now) and an entire Winter collection featuring tons of new winter Terrain, Areas, Effects, Paths, Stamps, and Props available for everyone to use!
- New Xmas Pack containing 12 extra special seasonal items that can be unlocked with Monkey Money or via direct IAP
- Added New prop tags for Christmas & Interactable
- Sandbox sending Bloons and placing towers features can now be accessed during map editing
- Enabled more base game props for use in map editor
- Added a ‘Sharp Corners’ toggle for all Areas (so those nice circles you pull out will swap to a square if you wish)
- New tag for interactable props to distinguish them (e.g. Bat, Pigeons)
- Added desktop hotkey support for ‘Sell’ hotkey to delete selected props and CTRL+C to duplicate a selected prop
- Implemented a slider to raise/lower props. Fair warning, due to how 3D renders in the game this may not appear exactly how you would expect, but we believe people will find good uses for this.
- Co-op hosts will now be able to invite friends directly from the co-op lobby. So much better, thanks for continuing to ask for this!
- Pasting entire share code URLs into search fields should now smartly trim the URL and search only for the code
- Game icon changing back to the OG Dart Monkey. Thank you for holding down most of 2023, Beast Handler icon!
Bug Fixes & General Changes
- Hero quests are no longer accessible from the coop, bosses, races or CT menus
- Resolved a number of cases in which the game would display black backgrounds
- Resolved an issue that could prevent Bloons Leaked stat from recording
- Resolved a crash that could occur on loading on networks with limited internet access
- Resolved an issue where towers when obtaining new abilities would not consistently order them correctly in the UI
- Polyphemus no longer spawns extra Pre-game Prep spikes
Event bug fixes
- Phayze’s Camo Debuff Icon should no longer scale in size with effects setting scale
- CT Resolved an issue with the El Dorado relic displaying incorrect reward bonuses
Map Editor fixes
- Resolved a case in which Pat Fusty would not correctly submerge in custom map water terrain
- Opening a map share code should correctly launch the game & navigate to the map
- Dropdown menus in map editor should no longer display on top of 'pause' menu
- Added more Helper Popups to Map Editor
- Entering eraser mode will now un-hide stamps layer
- All custom maps will now follow ‘Intermediate’ difficulty
- Players can no longer still search up and find their own deleted maps for a short time after deleting them
Tower Specific Fixes
Monkey Buccaneer
- Resolved a build order bug that could prevent flagship from applying it’s buff to waterbound Sun Temples
Engineer
- Engineer 410 should no longer 'Pin' Bloons after loading a save
Beast Handler
- Movement icons now match other Tower Special buttons
Hero Specific Fixes
Benjamin
- Benjamin's voice lines for MOAB-Class Bloons being destroyed should play again
Pat Fusty
- Resolved an issue with Pat Fusty's Level 10 grab targeting when it shouldn't be able to
Geraldo
- Lv15 Sharpening Stone should no longer last forever after loading a save
Spirit Walker
Platform Specific fixes
- Android: Resolved an error occurring for players trying to log in with Google Play.
Balance Changes Tower Balance
Dart MonkeyWe bumped up the ceramic a lot along with the paragon rework to highlight Juggernaut path and keep something of a Dreadbloon niche due to the multiple tower category requirement, upon review of this in practice we want to start off bumping that amount up even more.
- Paragon bonus damage to ceramic increased from 75 > 90
Bomb ShooterSlight price reduction to Really Big Bombs, it is meant to be a stepping stone upgrade into Bloon Impact but neither of these upgrades are standout right now. A while ago Frag Bombs was reworked to give Bomb normal type damage however we were not happy with the results of that change in the end, we didn’t want to go back and remove that again without giving back something nice in return so it has taken a while but now we have decided to go ahead with changing that back along with swapping out Recursive fortified damage for raw damage which we hope also improves crosspathing as the damage crosspath isn’t such a large increase over the base damage anymore.
- 3xx Really Big Bombs price reduced from $1200 > $1100
- xx2 Frag Bombs no longer changes damage type of explosions
- 5xx Bloon Crush remains damage type Normal
- xx4 Recursive Cluster Fortified Damage reduced from 1 > 0
- xx4 Recursive Cluster Damage increased from 1 > 2
- xx5 Bomb Blitz damage increased from 5 > 6
Ice MonkeyWe want to try out allowing the Ice Shards sub-projectile to benefit from all sources of damage buff, as currently this path gets nice support use sometimes but can’t do much on its own in the base game - along with this the T5 Ice Shards are also generally being improved. Arctic Wind it feels was heavily underrated before it’s large slow aura increase, with so many players now working out how good it is and how much better an upgrade it leads into than any similar options we feel this aura needs to be reduced again although it will remain the same at T5.
- 3xx Ice Shards shard damage is now uncapped allowing for buffs
- 5xx Super Brittle ice shards damage increased from 2 > 5
- 5xx Super Brittle number of ice shards increased from 3 > 6
- x3x Arctic Wind slow zone reduced from 50% > 40%
- x5x Absolute Zero slow zone unchanged
- xx4 Icicles icicle projectile radius increased 4 > 5
Sniper MonkeyFull auto sniper's 024 crosspath sees a lot of fun/meme use, but not so much more than that. We’re hoping that applying the MOAB bonus that it gains to the shrapnel as well will help improve non-meme use here. (And looking over my notes, it seems this was meant to be included a while ago…But better late than never!)
- 024 Full Auto Rifle shrapnel gains bonus damage against MOABs 0 > 1
Monkey BuccaneerAircraft Carrier is just a little expensive for what it offers over staying at T3, and Flagship high-end strategic value recently became a little harder due to synergies being price nerfed, so we’re doing some small cost cutting between the two of these upgrades mainly to relieve that loss for the T5 slightly but also help T4.
- 4xx Aircraft Carrier price reduced from $7200 > $6900
- 5xx Carrier Flagship price reduced from $25,000 > $24,500
Monkey AceThe homing for Neva-miss darts can cause darts to expire just before they are able to loop around and hit their target, which is unsatisfying to see – we like the pattern this attacks with though so allowing a little extra distance before expiration should mostly solve this.
- xx3 Neva-miss projectile distance increased from 450 > 600
Mortar MonkeyWe’re ecstatic for all the Mortar love after the recent rework, however the two bonuses we left unchanged with the rework in order to leave a buff are… Probably a biiit much now and this has been far too significant an improvement, easily slotting Pop and Awe into an extremely high tier position over the past update. We don’t want to take this away, but are nipping those bonuses back slightly so it doesn't feel broken for our entire holiday break.
- x5x Pop and Awe BAD/Boss damage bonus reduced from 10 > 6
- x5x Pop and Awe damage bonus to stunned reduced from 10 > 8
Super MonkeyWe missed this for a while, but it seems that Robo for how cheap and versatile it currently is just stands out a little much across many stages of gameplay. Shifting up a little pierce to tech terror here to tone it down slightly for now.
- 030 Robo Monkey pierce reduced from 7 > 6
- 040 Tech Terror pierce remains 9
Ninja MonkeyFor an early game Distraction improvement the consistency of blowbacks is being averaged out more with increased minimum distance but reduced maximum, in many cases there would not actually be 250 units of track length in front of defenses to be blown back across anyway so the overall average distance is slightly lower. More at the mid to endgame we are also weakening distraction distance against Ceramics specifically as by this point Ninja have stacked so much speed and projectiles the consistency doesn’t matter anymore. Finally, distraction values for secondary projectiles are being modified, as Distraction chance as it has existed was never balanced around more than the main attack
- 010 Distraction blowback range normalized (all attacks): 10-250 units > 100-150 units
- 010 Distraction distance applies to Ceramics at 0.5x
- 011 Distraction chance of caltrops reduced from 15% > 10%
- 013 Flash Bomb distraction chance of flash bomb increased from 15% > 30%
AlchemistCurrently 031 is the only crosspath that realistically does anything for Unstable Concoction.
- 130 Unstable Concoction crosspath increases concoction pierce 3 > 4
DruidWe enjoyed this change a lot, but it unfortunately seems that to a lot of players this added more frustration than intended. We will look for a better way of accomplishing what we wanted to do here, but until then it doesn't really feel worth keeping the automatic targeting swap when players who do want it could also just change targeting themselves before or after buying the upgrade, and those who don’t want it have no workaround.
- x3x Druid of the Jungle no longer swaps to Strong target prio automatically
Banana FarmThe current power of xx5 Village combined with previous nerfs to Middle Farm have it currently feeling underappreciated for farm profits, some slight price adjustment.
- x3x Monkey Bank cost reduced from 3800 > 3650
- x4x IMF Loan cost reduced from $7500 > 7200
Spike FactorySmall spike pierce reduction for the Spiked Mines as it’s finally coming into a strong spot on its own. Similar to Mortar it’s great to see the fresh love for middle path Spike Factory, however as they are feeling exceptionally good now for the intended pure MOAB damage role we want to cut it back very slightly so it doesn’t stay quite so crazy over our holiday break.
- 4xx Spiked Mines spikes pierce reduced from 20 > 18
- x3x MOAB Shredder bonus moab damage reduced from 9 > 8
- x5x Carpet of Spikes main attack damage reduced from 4 > 3
- x5x Carpet of Spikes all is how it should be
Beast HandlerWe feel Beast Handler balance is setting down nicely overall but it feels like the reposition cooldown increasing was far more impactful and unfun than intended, we still feel the initial delay was silly but are cutting it down again a little. Orca's knockback has the same duration as the T3 so although it does gain a little increased knockback amount already it's very random in what it hits much more expensive than the T3 so this knockback duration is being increased a little for base & merge. Max merged Golden Eagle gaining the ability to grab MOABs made sense at the time although the the pierce and penalties as they were at the time that meant it jumped up from grabbing no MOABs to suddenly 3 MOABs at a time which seemed too far, so the pierce penalty on MOABs is being increased at the T3 so that this reduces from 3 to 2 MOABs at a time.
- Beast Handler reposition cooldown reduced from 5 > 3s
- 4xx Orca knockback duration increased from 0.2 > 0.3
- 4xx Orca knockback merge bonus increased from 0.2 > 0.3
- xx3 Golden Eඞgle MOAB pierce penalty increased from 14 > 29
- xx4 Giant Condor MOAB pierce penalty unchanged
Hero Balance
EziliWe like Ezili as she is and don’t want to mess with her too much, but currently her level 19 does effectively nothing so we thought it would be nice at this level to shift a little of that MOAB bonus damage on the main attack into raw damage instead.
- Ezili Lv19 main attack DoT increased from 3 > 6
- Ezili Lv19 main attack DoT MOAB bonus reduced from 28 > 25
Admiral BrickellWe still want a little more out of Brickell’s single target Revolver attack as it’s the least exciting per of her arsenal so are decreasing the attack cooldown, however her mega mine ability also performs exceptionally well throughout all moab rounds so we want to slightly increase its final cooldown instead
- Admiral Brickell Lv2 Revolver cooldown reduced 0.7 > 0.65
- Admiral Brickell Lv12 Revolver cooldown reduced 0.4 > 0.35
- Admiral Brickell Lv18 Mega Mine cooldown 40s > 45s
GeraldoGerry’s Fire functions in a unique way where it can inherit some self-buffing bonuses of the towers that it’s applied to, although a lot of people have pointed out that since Ninja Monkey always has Camo this means it’s the only non-hero tower that gains a Camo Detection but can never pass it on to the Gerry’s Fire as this doesn’t come from an upgrade. We were hesitant to buff this interaction while Geraldo was much more powerful and his synergy with Ninja was already good, but he’s cooled off enough now that we’re happy to try this out. Additionally with Gerry’s Fire one of our programmers was having some fun with it, and we liked what we saw, so that will also be a thing now.
- Gerry’s Fire now inherits innate camo detection (Including Ninja Monkey, Sauda, Psi)
- Gerry’s Fire follows the actual heli/ace through the air rather than the landing pad
Looking Forward
- 2023 wraps up with a big update and a huge year for the BTD6 team! Six updates including some pretty epic content like Beast Handler, Wizard Paragon, Quests, Phayze Boss, Map Editor, and now the Corvus Hero. We’d like to thank this awesome community for the constant play, feedback, support, and suggestions for how to keep making BTD6 better, and we are ourselves full of ideas for next year and beyond. We remain incredibly motivated by the possibilities, and we’ll have more details to share about 2024 in the Update 41 Looking Forward notes, after we’ve had a chance as a team to refresh our brainstorming, reflect over the holiday, and set ambitious yet achievable plans for next year. Until then here are some updates that we can broadly share:
- Console News: PlayStation has taken significant additional work but is now amazingly close to submission for launch approval. That means it won’t be ready to launch by the end of the year, but we will release it as early next year as possible, playable on PS4 and PS5. Thank you to all of the support for the Xbox launch; between a solid release there and the many requests for Switch, we confirm that we will bring BTD6 to Switch next year. We can’t detail timing for that, as we have to balance Switch release with updating the Xbox and PlayStation versions to be more current, and we have technical planning to do before setting those priorities - both are super important to us!
- Player Content Creators: The Challenges and Odysseys that have been made over the years test our skills and push us in our own thinking about these modes. The maps made since the Map Editor launched last update have absolutely blown our minds. There is incredible talent in our community and we are so thankful for all of the players who share their creativity and time and impressive fence pointillism. But thanks isn’t really enough - to show and share the value of your creativity, we are moving forward with our great partners at Nexus.gg on the player revenue sharing that we have mentioned in the past. Our goal is to have this live in the front half of next year - for players who are signed up to the program, we will be sharing a portion of in-app-purchases made while playing your content, including a mechanism to split that revenue share if a map maker and a challenge maker are different players. In order to make this meaningful to all player creators, at the same time we will introduce “tipping” IAPs, basically a “small thank you” and a “big thank you,” as a way for players to share their thanks with the player creators for any reason. While some player content is challenging and gives a reason for players to spend Monkey Monkey IAP for Continues or Powers, many creations are beautiful, clever, funny, whimsical, and any number of awesome creative things, and we think there needs to be an IAP (and some tags that go with it) that celebrates all of those other creative impulses. We hope you agree with this approach, and we’ll share more details on this program next year
- Content: So much we want to do - continue to broaden and strengthen the range of content and challenge in all existing areas of the game, bring out a new Hero and a new Monkey Tower, add new content for Teams, and expand our player content creation to include modding starting late next year and continuing to expand from there. We continue to believe in expanding BTD6 to be bigger and better than ever as opposed to shifting the team to work on “BTD7” - we’re bringing all of the energy and creativity that we would have for a new game into BTD6 every day, so maybe the next time that “when’s the next BTD” question comes up in reddit or Discord, we can all feel like we’re already playing it.
- From all of us at Ninja Kiwi, we hope you can sense the care and dedication and fun that we as a game team put into each update and each community interaction. We’re doing what we love, and that’s our holiday wish for all of you - to have lives as full of care and dedication and fun as possible, and that BTD6 and all of our games can be at least a small part of that. Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for an amazing and awesomer 2024!
