Valley 1:Post-Launch Series 3 Release Notes

Beta 1.205

(not released yet; we're still working on it!)

Beta 1.204

(Released August 3rd, 2012)

• Fixed a bug where region 0,0 was being considered passable to deep-sea-ships. This wasn't generally a problem (as that region and all bordering it are always land) but if some bug dumped you into deep-sea-ship state and onto region 0,0 (a default position if it gets really confused) you could be stuck as a landship for eternity.
  • Any character already stuck this way will be changed to non-deep-sea-ship state upon loading in this or a later version.
  • Thanks to kbullseye for the report and save.

• Fixed a room map (I think) that was able to keep players from progressing.
  • Thanks to mardor and Fill for reporting this.

• Another 106 rooms added to the game.
  • Yeah, this one's thanks to Benmiff again.

• Fixed a minor typo in the description of Umbra Vortex missions.
  • Thanks to Maledictus for reporting.

• Fixed an issue in multiplayer where if one player sent an NPC on a dispatch mission, that the dispatch interface for the other players would not be updated until they closed the dispatch menu.
  • Thanks to doubtful for reporting.

• Put in a couple of changes to prevent mood exploits:
  • NPCs that have lower than a 20% chance of success can no longer be sent on dispatch missions. This also helps make the dispatch interface less cluttered if you have a lot of NPCs with low chances of success for a given mission.
  • Previously, if an NPC was under-skilled and failed a dispatch mission, they would still get a mood bonus. Now they get the normal mood penalties unless they actually succeed in the mission.
  • Thanks to jruderman for reporting the mood exploits.

• Fixed a minor typo in the description of Wind Shelter Scrolls.
  • Thanks to Maledictus for reporting.

• 10 More rooms added
  • Thanks to Lavacamorada for those!

Two New Spells: Campfire and Rising Bubbles

• New red spellgem: Campfire
  • Deployable fire trap that burns for four seconds and then goes out.

• New blue spellgem: Rising Bubbles
  • Deployable water trap that rises into the air, allowing you to ride it if you wish.

Beta 1.203

(Released July 19th, 2012)

• Reverted the "make destroyed rooms not run the insert-special-objects logic" fix from 1.201 because it may be responsible for some of the doors-not-seeding situations in destroyed rooms.
  • So, for now, these may rarely get bosses again. Better than them not getting doors.

Beta 1.202

(Released July 19th, 2012)

• Fixed a rather critical bug in the prior version that was causing all sorts of things not to seed indoors: enchant containers, NPCs in rescue missions, spikes in freefall missions, etc.
  • Thanks to doubtful, Varone, Serasin, SerratedSabre, and Tydrian for reporting.

Beta 1.201 Entropic Leap

(Released July 19th, 2012)

• Fixed an outdoor boss room that was too long, and was throwing errors.
  • Thanks to vadatajs and GauHelldragon for reporting this.

• Five new really cool, really different staircases added.
  • Thanks to vadatajs for these.

• Mossy Barrel death shrapnel strength-per-shrapnel from 8 => 2.
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox for showing us what a raging fox looks like after receiving 600+ damage from a barrel it could not see.

• Player Mossy Barrel strength-per-shrapnel from 8 => 4.

• Small typos fixed in two of the mystery clues.
  • Thanks to jruderman, doubtful and lavacamorada for reporting.

• Small typos fixed in pop-up messages.
  • Thanks to blahness for reporting these.

• There's now a "Build Farms" item on the things-you-should-do list if the continent's food production is less than the settlement's food usage.
  • Thanks to Ipkins for the suggestion.

• Extended the apply-conditions-to-target logic to affect all parts of a multipart target entity.
  • This logic is used for stuff like the bear trap slowing effect, spells with debuffs-applied-to-target, etc.
  • So this fixes problems like urban mechs not being slowed down by bear traps because the "leg" part did the hitting (the body actually does the movement, in code terms).
  • Thanks to Pyrrhic for reporting the bear trap vs multipart-entity problem.

• Bear Traps now cause affected targets to instantly stop rather than just killing their acceleration.
  • Thanks to Pyrrhic for the suggestion.

• Command Flare spellgems now only give 1 shard when incinerated (they were free at certain missions, making it kind of silly that they could be burned for shards).
  • Thanks to jruderman and Pyrrhic for the report.

• Storm Dash and Fire Touch now only give you 1 shard when incinerated since they can otherwise be farmed from the intro mission.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where building a new windshelter was not always recomputing all the distance-into-windstorm variables, causing it not to update properly.
  • Thanks to jruderman for the report.

• Fixed a bug where the clinging fetor projectile's strength was not being set when cast, and thus the damage calculation was following another code path and generally doing around 1 damage.
  • Thanks to Misery for the report.

• Added in 84 more room maps.
  • Thanks to Benmiff (again) for these!

• Fixed a bug with the citybuilding-difficulty-based scaling of the danger/difficulty of dispatch missions: those values were supposed to be _multiplied_ by 2 on Empire difficulty. Instead, Empire was _setting_ them to 2. Thus making them trivially easy for anyone, basically.
  • Thanks to Ulrox for the report.

• Fixed a bug in computing dispatch mission survival chance where the mood points where an intermediate result of mood/danger was being squared. This was fine for positive mood values as the idea was that if the ratio was 9:10 the actual result would be 0.9*0.9 = 0.81. The problem is that -0.9*-0.9 = +0.81, too (math class strike back!). Now it won't go below zero before that, so squaring is fine.
  • Thanks to Ulrox for the report.

• Fixed a bug where loot-goals lists were keeping entries from older worlds that were no longer valid (for example, a color-seeker enchant, which are no longer in the game), causing fatal errors if the player opened the escape menu (and thus the loot-goals display).
  • Thanks to Leafy Greens for the report and save.

• Will-o-wisp gravity now only affects you if it has "full" line-of-sight on you, meaning a straight-line (of tiles, not a literal line) has to exist from its center of mass to your top-center-point, bottom-center-point, left-center-point, and right-center-point.
  • Thanks to AlexxKay for reporting and providing a screenshot of getting stuck against a wall due to a wisp getting line-of-sight on the character's pinky toe.

• Fixed a couple longstanding bugs where destroyed rooms were still considered for the "insert special objects" (including chests and certain boss types) and "seed monster nests".
  • Thanks to Yiab for the report and save.

• Gold Boomerang is now ineligible for the increase-time-to-live and decrease-time-to-live spell modifiers because they have unintentional side effects when working with the boomerang's unique way of handling time-to-live (it waits until the time-to-live value is past a certain threshold before it's allowed to return, etc).
  • Thanks to Matthew Carras for the report.

• The mouseovers on the windows that tell you what a mission's rewards would be no longer tell you which modifiers the spell would have.
  • Believe it or not, this is by player request. A lot of them, actually.

• World map missions now have a 50% chance of rewarding (in addition to the spellgem) a building scroll. There's an even chance of a "basic" building or a "personality" building; if it can't find a valid power in the selected category it just doesn't add the extra reward.
  • Note that this will not retroactively add these to the reward list of missions that spawned in earlier versions (because it can't tell at that stage whether it was an earlier-version mission or a current-version mission that didn't make the 50% roll when it was spawned).

• In singleplayer, opening the escape menu now pauses the game. Exiting it via the "back to game" button will unpause it (even if the game was paused before opening the escape menu, and thus it wasn't the menu that paused it), but exiting any other way will leave the game paused. Added a note to the "local chunk is paused" message about what key to press to unpause, to compensate.
  • Thanks to binaryfruit for expressing a desire that we, well, MAKE ESCAPE PAUSE THE GAME.

• Added a new toggle to the settings window: "Disable Escape Menu Auto Pause".
  • When this toggle is enabled (by default it is not), the game will no longer pause when you open the escape menu (note that this is always disabled in multiplayer).
  • This also disables the auto-unpause when exiting the escape menu through the "back to game" button.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for the suggestion... before we even released the auto-pause behavior!

• Fixed a bug where picking up a stack containing over 10000 total items would only pick up the first 10000 and the rest would disappear in a puff of logic.
  • Thanks to Lthesaurus for the report.

• Greatly improved the generation logic for both underground anachronism and journey to perfection missions so that monsters will tend to bunch up less in most cases as there are now more pillars and troughs and divides in these.
  • Thanks to Misery and Pyrrhic for reporting.

• Interior journey to perfection and anachronism missions have now been updated to also be a bit more labyrinthine and difficult to traverse. For the former this makes it less easy for the player to just run and gun, and for the latter this makes it so that the monsters don't clump up so much as they otherwise were.
  • Thanks to Pyrrhic for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue with a specific room map that made it so that the exit portal didn't appear in some Boss Towers.
  • Thanks to Cinth, jruderman, Echomaster21, Kemeno, and DarkWasp for reporting.

• Previously there was an exploit whereby Greater Teleport could be used to move you around while you were still invincible. Fixed so that using it now makes you non-invincible.
  • Thanks to Omosh, khadgar, and Pyrrhic for reporting.

• A variety of the more complicated rooms designed by players will now work better thanks to the following no longer seeding on tiles marked as "blocked to bosses" in the map editor: vents, doors, mission portals and similar, warp gates, mission signposts and tombs and similar, any sort of item pickup that a stash room might have, etc.

• Fixed a bug where mission expiration timers would roll into negative numbers.
  • Thanks to wyvern83 for reporting.

New Monster: Entropic Esper

• New monster: entropic esper.
  • This monster is very much like the water esper, except much stronger and with a different graphic. It haunts The Deep and provides a more varied style of threat there now.
  • This also solves the issue of anachronism missions not having native monsters in The Deep in some cases.
  • These espers also show up during the Time of Magic forests, adding for a really uneven threat from them compared to other espers (which is actually pretty interesting). This is consistent with those forests basically being a haven for every type of esper that exists in the game regardless of what region type it would otherwise normally be associated with.

Two New Spells: Leaping Death and Flower X

• New Spell: Leaping Death
  • Offensive spell that is 10x less expensive than Creeping Death in casting cost and cooldown, and which also does 6x less damage, but also moves 5x faster and lasts 5x less time.
  • This spell requires iron ingots instead of clay in order to craft, and umbra micro vortexes instead of umbra embers. It also requires that you unlock it by killing all the monsters in a surface chunk of The Deep at at least level 10. So this is solidly a late-second-continent-and-onward type of spell.
  • The idea with this one is that it provides a more satisfying type of ranged spell in the purple entropy element -- one that is really easy to hit targets at range with, but which overall does less damage than its creeping death counterpart since it has the other advantages of movement and speed.

• New Spell: Flower X
  • An X of flowers bursts out of you, dealing area damage to anything it touches, including background entities. Cannot be aimed in any way; it is entirely based on your position.
  • This requires iron ingots, and also requires that you unlock it by destroying all the monsters in a level 6 (or higher) evergreen forest surface chunk, so this doesn't become available until early in continent 2.

Previous Release Notes

AVWW - Post-Launch Series 2 Release Notes