Valley 1:Post-Launch Series 1 Release Notes

Beta 1.029

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

Beta 1.028

(Released May 22nd, 2012)

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where unhandled exceptions would be thrown when you tried to view the enchants inventory.

Beta 1.027 Lieutenants In Freefall

(Released May 22nd, 2012)

• New infestations will now seed half as many of the dangerfalls as they previously did -- thus saving your GPU/CPU from quite so much overload.

• Spike Traps and Blade Traps:
  • Damage now scales by platforming difficulty:
    • "I Have No Desire To Be The Guy": 0.125 * the previous damage.
    • "I Am Afraid Of Heights": 0.25 * the previous damage.
    • "I Can Jump, Thank You": 0.375 * the previous damage.
    • "They Mistake Me For a Certain Plumber": 0.5 * the previous damage.
    • "I Am Not The Guy But I Am Close": 1.0 * the previous damage.
    • "I Am Already The Guy": 2.0 * the previous damage.
  • Can now be passed through by players (it's gonna hurt, of course).

• Infestations now don't happen until continent 2.

• The "startup" (formerly "catchup") enchant containers seeded into the very first settlement on an Expert start are now seeded on Normal and Advanced starts too.
  • Why? To give you more interesting customization options right as soon as you reach that first settlement.

• World Map missions will no longer seed in windstorms.
  • Why? Because windstorms are now really brutal, and seeding the world map missions there is just mean at this point. Also: if you really want to do missions in windstorms, the secret missions are now practically the same as world map missions. So you still have the flexibility if you want it, but your key building on the world map won't accidentally seed in some stormy region anymore, etc.

• Fixed a bug where secret missions could give higher-than-continent-tier tier orbs.
  • Thanks to jruderman for the report.

• Fixed a bunch of typos regarding the achievements.
  • Thanks to lavacamorada for reporting.

• The icon for the "scan for resources" guardian power scroll has been improved.

• Previously, the player micro rexes were unable to jump onto top-solid platforms. Whoops! Fixed.

• The base stamina of the possessed ancient lion statues has dropped from 800 to 250, making them far quicker and less annoying to kill.
  • The amount of health and shards they drop has also been reduced from 2x to 1.5x.

• A few of the existing elemental strengths/weaknesses of monsters have been tweaked around, and then an absolutely enormous number of additions have been made so that monsters that previously had only an elemental strength now also have an elemental weakness to a lesser degree.
  • The idea is to further encourage use of different spell elements not just via the stick but also with the carrot.
  • A lot of times the opposite spell elements are used (strong to red fire, then weak to blue water), but this isn't universally true depending on what feels thematically appropriate for the monster in question.

• Previously, all of the dangerfalls were dealing red fire damage rather than their appropriate color's damage. Fixed.
  • Thanks to GauHelldragon for reporting.

• The "Kill 100 Explosive Espers" unlockable (which unlocks boomstick) has now been reduced to killing 10 explosive espers.
  • It used to be that espers were all over the place so this was easy to hit, but lately as espers have become more rare this was suddenly very hard.
  • Thanks to Nanostrike for suggesting.

• The "Kill 40 Lightning Espers" unlockable for the double jump unlock has been replaced by a new "Win 3 Freefall Missions" instead.
  • Thanks to Nanostrike for inspiring this change.

• Instead of starting out with only one mission available on the world map when you first start the game, now 4 missions are available. This lets there be some choice between mission types right from the start, as well as missions in different areas and with differing rewards.

• Some various changes to when specific spell components are required on specific spells based on when you can comfortably unlock a spell component:
  • Charred amber is not required by ball lightning until tier 3 now, rather than tier 2.
  • Sea essence is not required by launch ice block until tier 4.
  • Sea essence is not required by tidal pulse until tier 4.
  • Sea essence is not required by splash back until tier 4.
  • Cherry is not required by miasma whip until tier 3.
  • Cherry is not required by leafy whip until tier 3.
  • Cherry is not required by circle of fire at all anymore, but an extra magma is now required at tier 1 for it.
  • Cherry is not required by ice cross at all anymore, but an extra two welkin gel are now required at tier 2 for it.
  • Cherry is not required by cleft smoglet at all anymore, but an extra two welkin gel are now required at tier 2 for it.
  • Thanks to Chthon, lavacamorada, Remliel, and Magestic Inspired for suggesting a bit of a smoother flow for new players.

• The progression of required quartz and plums on the higher-tier shields are now a lot lower, making those easier to get.
  • Thanks to LayZboy for suggesting.

• The dimensions of spike traps have been narrowed somewhat so that they now fit better along the ground and are less likely to stack up inappropriately.

• The base damage from spike traps has been halved for every difficulty, making them not nearly so lethal as they were.

• Put in some pretty massive CPU performance improvements for various collision and melee checks, particularly relating to things like traps or dangerfalls or so on. On a latest-generation "sandy bridge" Intel i7, the difference in performance in a Freefall mission filled with about 600 enemies/spikes/mines and 800 entities overall was 100fps due to these changes.

Lieutenant Tower Renovations

• Rather than being a scaled-down version of the overlord keeps with multiple wings and switch-rooms and all that sort of thing, the lieutenant towers now are structured extremely differently:
  • Each tower now has precisely two rooms: a very tall and narrow "climbing room" and then the same lieutenant boss room at the top that you've always fought them in.

• The climbing room in lieutenant towers is pretty open-ended and involves you climbing about 400 tiles upwards to a door at the top. These rooms are filled with various special properties, however:
  • There are n number of microbosses (where n is # continents + 1) in this room that you have to kill on your way up before you can get into the lieutenant's room.
  • Once infestations are unlocked in the game, there is always a severe infestation inside these rooms.
  • There is always an Area Enchantment on these rooms (see below for details on these).
  • All monsters in the tower are upgraded automatically to the most-elite versions of themselves that have been unlocked (if there are unlockables gating them) regardless of what is broadly chosen by the overlord on the continent at the current time.

• The overall idea here is to make these towers go a lot faster while still providing a new and concentrated sort of challenge.

Area Enchantments, And A New Disjunction Guardian Power Scroll

• Currently these are used only in the climbing rooms in lieutenant towers, but they are basically a way to apply a chunk-wide rules-change outside of a mission.
  • Most of these are recycled ideas from missions (which players actually asked us to do), and likely these will grow in number with time same as the missions do and the infestations do and all that.
  • We're keeping these particularly limited to lieutenant towers specifically so that these towers have some mechanics that you don't see all over the place elsewhere in the game. Since lieutenant towers are something you must do periodically, we figure that making them more unique and interesting is a very good thing.

• So what the heck do these area enchantments do? Currently there are 4:
  • Infinite Jumping (so basically like umbra vortex)
  • Monsters More Powerful, Glyphbearer Very Stealthy (so basically like stealth assassination)
  • Everyone Takes More Damage (kind of like risktaker except moreso, also a bit like JTP)
  • All Shots Cause Recoil (a lot like boomstick)

• With the lieutenant towers, there is currently a 30% chance of a climbing room getting one of those area enchantments.

• A new guardian power scroll has been added for Technozoologists: Disjunction.
  • The Ilari will break any Area Enchantment on the chunk you are currently in (you can see it labeled "Area Enchantment: (something)" in the chat log). If no such effect is present in the chunk you are in, you cannot use this power.
  • The idea is that if an Area Enchantment is making a lieutenant's climbing room just impossible for you, then you can use a disjunction scroll to have your NPCs help you solve that problem!

• The Area Enchantments also provide yet another tie from the NPCs in your settlement to helping you with your

New "Freefall" Mission Type

• This new mission type is now available right from the start of the game. It has two variants, both of which are the same general idea, but which play out pretty substantially differently from one another.

• Note that the balance on this mission is really preliminary; it's a lot harder in the current version than we ultimately plan for it to start out as, so just bear that in mind when you're testing it right now.

• Freefall (Building)
  • A hidden stash has been discovered in a building in this region, but access is blocked by a strange devce at the bottom of an improbably deep pit. The good news is that there's no falling damage and you fall at a reduced rate. The bad news is that the chasm is filled with spiky platforms, floating mines, and flying monsters.

• Freefall (Underground)
  • A hidden stash has been discovered in a cave in this region, but access is blocked by a strange devce at the bottom of an improbably deep pit. The good news is that there's no falling damage and you fall at a reduced rate. The bad news is that the chasm is filled with falling rubble, floating mines, and flying monsters.

• You can't use bat scrolls or any deployed items (including wood platforms, crates, etc) during freefall missions.

• Thanks to BenMiff for suggesting!

Beta 1.026

(Released May 19th, 2012)

• Fixed an issue in the prior two versions where the magma blobs in trap rooms were causing extreme CPU/GPU slowdown.
  • Thanks to TrentonZero for reporting.

• "Immune To Windstorms" was understandably confusing terminology. The enchants in question now say "Cannot Be Blown By Windstorms," which is a more accurate description. There are no enchants that prevent windstorm damage.
  • Thanks to jruderman for reporting.

• The "choose new character" stats now shows the time period that each type of character is from, and it also only shows abilities that they actually have -- being heat tolerant or cold tolerant, etc.

• Neutral skelebots are now inherently immune to falling damage, unlike any other kinds of characters (other character types will be getting special abilities of their own).
  • Thanks to Bluddy for suggesting the skelebot immunity.

• The bronze age characters are now considered "fast runners" and can move twice as fast as other characters.

• The neutral draconite characters can now see in the dark without need of lights -- at least, their darkvision cuts through 70% of the darkness. So you'll still notice a bit of help from light sources, but nothing terribly substantial with these characters.

Beta 1.025

(Released May 19th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug where the player could not jump off top-solid platforms in the background in the prior version.
  • Thanks to Kazmahu, Cinth, Psyren, and AdJOffCourse for reporting.

Beta 1.024

(Released May 19th, 2012)

• Put in a few general performance improvements with regard to collisions in particular.

• Fixed an issue with waterfall-heavy rooms where the CPU would get pegged and sit at 1fps.
  • Thanks to FrostDragon, NyQuil, and Coppermantis for reporting.

Beta 1.023 At The Foot Of Urban Renewal

(Released May 18th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where light snake was no longer revealing the minimap properly unless you were on a different client in multiplayer.
  • Thanks to Corvo for reporting.

• Fixed bug with the "deploy_item_in_settlement"-permission-related admin commands where they weren't working in multiplayer. Which is kind of where they need to work.
  • Thanks to Lokas for the report.

• On the Enchant Categories screen in the Big Honkin' Encyclopedia, the current quality tier for each enchant is now shown. As the "Next Quality" goes up, the enchants that any player on the server gets from that category will be better; given a lot of folks didn't know this, that makes this information actually available in the game.
  • Thanks to Andrew Whipple III for inspiring this change.

• Shields have been a bit abusable, as some players found:
  • Therefore shields now have a maximum duration of 12 seconds (most players would run out of mana far before that point anyhow; it was just with mana-reducing enchants that the shields would not last this long).
  • And also shields now take damage just as you do when you are in a windstorm or ambient cold/heat or acid/lava, etc.

• 8 new hallways added into the game.
  • Thanks to Sexyvortigaunt for these rooms.

• Fixed an issue with blade traps sometimes jumping around unpredictably instead of moving smoothly.
  • Thanks to Bluddy for reporting.

• Previously, all forms of infestations were not reacting to the size of their containing rooms/caverns/etc at all.
  • This meant that even heavy infestations would be trivial in huge rooms/caverns, but that even light ones could be incredibly over-deadly in very small rooms. Talk about frustrating if you ran into it! Sorry about that.
  • Thanks to Buccee and Ipkins for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where eagles were getting stuck unable to move.
  • Thanks to Andrew Whipple III and Ipkins for reporting.

• Fixed an issue from the prior couple of versions where switching texture packs would not actually swap out all the images anymore.
  • Thanks to Nethellus for reporting.

• Monsters that grow and shrink (like the sea worms) now do less damage and take more damage when they are smaller. The percentage less and more is dependent on their scale at the time.
  • Thanks to Bluddy for suggesting.

Leg Enchant Overhaul, New Feet Enchant Slot, New "Elven Boots" Enchant Base Type

• Leg Enchants have been split into two slots: Legs and Feet
  • Legs still have:
    • Power Legs (first effect is +Movement Speed)
    • Featherweight (first effect is Immunity to falling damage)
    • Stone Legs (first effect is Immunity to being blown back by windstorms)
    • Powerslide
  • Feet have:
    • Niche Air (first effect is +Jump Power)
    • Double Jump
    • Triple Jump

• Leg enchants no longer grant +Jump or -FallingSpeed effects, and existing effects of those types have been removed from existing enchants.
  • Yea, that's messing with your gear; sorry, but it was necessary to avoid tons of problems with "legacy gear" causing old worlds to have a (possibly very) different balance than newer worlds. And you're still gaining more than you're losing due to the ability to equip both a leg enchant and a feet enchant.

• To add some variety back:
  • Power Legs enchants now can have moderate +YellowDamage as an optional effect.
  • Featherweight enchants now can have moderate +WhiteDamage as an optional effect.
  • Powerslide enchants now can have moderate +RedDamage as an optional effect.
  • (note: Stone Legs enchants could already have moderate +GreenDamage as an optional effect.)

• Feet enchants no longer grant -IncomingDamage effects, and Double Jump and Triple jump no longer grant +Move effects (Niche Air still grants that), and existing effects fo those types hve been removed from existing enchants.
  • Double Jump and Triple Jump can now grant moderate +ShotSpeed effects.

• Added a new enchant base type: "Elven Boots"
  • Go in the Feet slot.
  • 3 innate effects: +Move, -FallingSpeed, +Jump; all very modest in magnitude but the 3 together are fairly good.
  • Optional effects include... well now, that would be telling ;) No new effect types, but a fairly wide variety of the existing effects, including one some of you min-max'ers will probably appreciate.

• To make a long story short: Feet enchants are now the "all about mobility" enchants and Legs enchants are now... well, sort of a middle ground between Torso and Feet. Odd how that works out.

• Thanks to a variety of players for weighing in on these changes, including Bluddy, TechSY730, Nanostrike, BenMiff, MouldyK, lavacamorada, IIE16 Yoshi, Martyn van Buren, LintMan, Jerebaldo1, Vinraith, omegajasam, zebramatt, and Tallgeese.

Two New Enemies For Abandoned Towns

• New enemy for abandoned towns: Urban Sniper Balloon
  • These fly around kind of like espers but faster, and they actually chase you. They also have about twice as much health as an esper.
  • Their shots are kind of like those from the explosive esper except that they move about twice as fast (really feeling like a sniper here), do knockback on you, and do about half as much actual damage. Oh, and their shots have no telegraphing period to warn you of the incoming attack (0.3 seconds on explosive espers by contrast), but these also only fire every 3 seconds instead of every 1 second.
  • These also have no form of melee against you whatsoever, like all of the other urban mechanical monsters. So you can literally leap onto these as a form of platform to climb to higher areas if you find yourself inclined to do so and can time it right with their shots against you.
  • These are earth-elemental themed in both their resistance element and in the shots they fire against you.
  • Oh, and watch out for the small explosion when they die. It's not enormously damaging, but you don't want to be riding on them when it happens.

• New enemy for abandoned towns: Crude Urban Sentinel
  • These fly around kind of like espers but faster, and they actually chase you. They also have about twice as much health as an esper. All same as the sniper balloons, basically.
  • Their shots work very differently, however -- they are basically like the cleft smoglet of the player, firing straight to both sides an unable to target you directly.
  • These also have no form of melee against you whatsoever, like all of the other urban mechanical monsters. So you can literally leap onto these as a form of platform to climb to higher areas if you find yourself inclined to do so -- and since they only can fire to the side, if you can get right under them or above them you can attack them with literal impunity. Hooray
    • That's assuming that one of the other kinds of enemies doesn't knock you off, and that you're able to get into good position.
  • These are light-elemental themed in both their resistance element and in the shots they fire against you.
  • Definitely watch out for the small explosion when they die. If you're standing right under or above them and killing them with ease, that explosion is going to get you as payback.

• Together, these two new enemy types really change up the feel of the abandoned town areas. Their mechanics combine in some pretty interesting ways to make them more challenging together than either one is alone.

• And now that we've got a good selection of enemies for the abandoned towns, the espers have finally been removed from this region type -- hooray again! One less region type with espers in them.

Beta 1.022 Dangerfalls And Other Hazards

(Released May 17th, 2012)

• Fixed an issue in previous versions where some of the logs, like most notably ArcenDebugLog.txt, could have unrestricted file growth. That was bound to be problematic in a variety of ways.

• Fixed an issue with some recent versions where some log data were mistakenly being written to the Unity Debug Log again, causing unity to then leak that memory if you played over a really long session.

• Made it so that a lot of the logging that does occur is now more brief; some information-only messages simply don't need to include stack traces but were doing so, causing the files to grow faster than they needed to.

• Fixed a rare bug where the overlord keep was not seeding.
  • Thanks to Garde for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where those sources of enchants that did not increment world "enchant quality progress" were also not being counted for purposes of achievements.
  • Thanks to lavacamorada for the report.

• Made the seeding of vases in hallways more frequent. Clay should be pretty easy to get.
  • Thanks to IIE16 Yoshi, timtim, and Brandon402 for letting us know it wasn't as easy as it should be.

Substantial Minimap Scouting Improvements

• Greatly altered how the scouting of a chunk's minimap works. Rather than it revealing stuff based on where you are standing, it's now based on what is on your screen at the time. This makes exploration of caves a lot faster and less tedious, and in general gives a better correlation between the minimap and what is on your screen at the time.
  • Thanks to wigglestick for suggesting this way back at the start of beta, and Procyon, shinseitom, stblr, oobleckthegreen, BobTheJanitor, Archonsod, Nenad, huw, Enrymion, Shadowsand, lujan22, rjblackwolf, paramime, ShadowSirius07, Rices, jinksy, lisa107b, kof91, and Xeph for supporting it.

Further Journey To Perfection Extensions

• The basic version of the Journey To Perfection missions are now a bit too easy -- which is great! They are meant to be something that can start easy and then get harder as you go. So, with that in mind:
  • After you win 3 JTP missions: Invincible Monster Spawners
    • Until this mechanic unlocks, there are no monster spawners at all, but after you unlock this game mechanic there are instead invincible monster spawners that keep you on your toes.
  • After you win 10 JTP missions: 1.5x Monsters From Spawners
    • Monster spawners in these missions now have 1.5x as much "budget," so they spawn more and/or larger enemies.
  • After you win 20 JTP missions: 2x Monsters From Spawners
    • Monster spawners in these missions now have 2x as much "budget," so they spawn more and/or larger enemies.
  • This keeps the missions combat-focused in a really intense fashion, while at the same time letting there be a ramp-up period so that players can get used to the idea of the missions in general before getting faced with their full brutality.
  • Thanks to Bluddy for helping to inspire these changes.

More Infestation Types: Blade Traps, Spike Traps, and Dangerfalls

• A new kind of infestation type has been added for both undergrounds and interiors in any region: blade traps. These traps simply move horizontally or vertically, and the chunk might have a larger or smaller number of these. Be ready to be nimble when dealing with these -- and it actually makes lesser teleport even more valuable since if you run into a trap in a really narrow space this might prove one of the only ways to get past unscathed.
  • There are actually six variants of these in all: three speeds each of both horizontal and vertical movement.

• Another new kind of infestation has been added for undergrounds and interiors in any region: spike traps. These traps come in three variants. One that just sits there and hurts you if you bump them. Another that bounces a little when you try to jump over them, and another that bounces a lot when you try to jump over them.

• There is also a mixed traps new infestation type that mixes both the blade and spike trap types.

• There are now four different variants of "Dangerfalls" that can spawn as infestations in various regions. Each of these is a themed fluvial mass coming out of a hole in a cave wall.
  • Waterfalls -- these slow you down as you move through them, but not enemy spells or enemies. They also damage you lightly as you are caught in them. You'll find these most places except The Deep, or really hot or cold areas.
  • Lavafalls -- these slow you down the same as waterfalls, but do a lot more damage. You'll run into these really deep underground, or in lava flats.
  • Miasmafalls -- these slow you down an incredibly high amount, and do a huge amount more damage. You'll run into these in swamps and The Deep.
  • Icefalls -- these slow you down an incredibly high amount, but do damage roughly halfway between a regular waterfall and the lavafall. You run into these in really cold areas.
  • The timing of the dangerfalls (how long of a gap there is between one burst of deadly-stuff and the next) is based around the platforming difficulty. The higher you crank the difficulty, the smaller the gaps and thus the more precise your jumps have to be.
  • In general, there are three variants of each kind of dangerfall: a short, medium, and long duration version. You'll find a mix of these in each infestation.

Beta 1.021 Combat Journeys

(Released May 16th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug from the last three versions where ice burst, fire touch, and death touch were iffy with their collision boxes in the last few versions. As were any of the other "quick poof" type spells. They didn't work well with the quickly-scaling-up logic that is so useful for other kinds of spells.
  • Thanks to 7foot_sativa, Zem, and techsy730 for reporting.

• Fixed a bug from the prior version where the Difficulty Shrine would not actually save your changes to the Strategic Difficulty Level unless you also changed one of the two other difficulty levels at the same time.
  • Thanks to NyQuil and Brandon402 for reporting.

• It is now possible to buy the four most-vital settlement structures through the opal guardian's store: Aquaurgist's Well, Lumbermancy Focal Station, Residential And Storage Tower, and Stonebinder Tri-Tower.
  • These are all really super expensive at 20,000 consciousness shards; the ideal way to find these is definitely still through missions. But if these now do provide an outlet for times when the random number generator simply hates you and you would otherwise get completely stuck in your progression.
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

• The balance of the leg enchants is now intertwined with your max mana, making a wider array of choices more attractive rather than triple jump and double jump just being the always obvious go-to enchants for everyone to use.
  • All of the non-jumping legs-related enchants now add to your max mana pool.
  • The amount of mana increase is based on the base type of the enchant (what the icon of it is), and does not vary at all with the extra stats that the enchant might have based on its other attributes.
  • The specific amounts of mana changes for each base enchant type (again, solely based on the icon) are:
    • Power Legs Enchant: +20 mana
    • Featherweight Enchant: +20 mana
    • Stone Legs Enchant: +30 mana
    • Powerslide Enchant: +30 mana
  • Thanks to Bluddy, nanostrike, and lunarknight64 for inspiring these changes.

• Guardian Power Scrolls that create a continent-wide buff now last for 10 minutes instead of 5.
  • Thanks to Misery for this one.

• Two boss rooms added.
  • Thanks to Sexyvortigaunt for these rooms.

• Two new music tracks have been added to the game.
  • The first is "an ambient, kind of terrifying theme" as Pablo describes it. This track is now what is used throughout the Ocean regions, as those are dark and dangerous. The ocean shallows continue to use the more upbeat tracks that they were previously using.
  • Again in Pablo's words, we also have the Warp Stage Theme "for when you jump into the warp area. It's only 1ish minute long (since you're not in that stage very long before you leave to warp), however... if you sit and listen to the whole theme, there's a nice little surprise in the second half."

• Made it so that diluter enchants once again work regardless of what your current tier is. Since you're no longer getting tier orbs at the same time as you get CP (since CP no longer exists), you can't shoot yourself with the foot with this anymore. It's just a minor annoyance at worst. However, given the recent changes, if you were to kill two lieutenants at once before getting enough intermediate tier orbs you really could shoot yourself in the foot with diluters only working at tier 5 -- yikes! So we changed this back.
  • Thanks to largesock for reporting.

• Lots of additions have been made to the terrain/interior/cavern generation logic in order to allow us to do a number of new things.

Frequency Of Puzzle Rooms And Plums

• Player reports were that puzzle rooms (with mystery clues in them) were frustratingly few and far between -- or always behind a bunch of maze rooms. Well, this should help:
  • There is now a 100% chance of finding puzzle rooms in pyramids instead of an 80% chance.
  • There is now a 100% chance of finding puzzle rooms in lava towers instead of a 10%, 20%, or 40% chance.
  • There is now a 100% chance of finding puzzle rooms in windmills instead of a 10% chance.
  • There is now a 100% chance of finding puzzle rooms in dark gatehouses instead of a 10% chance.
  • There is now a 30% chance of finding puzzle rooms in houses in The Deep instead of a 0% chance.
  • Thanks to a variety of players for commenting on this.

• Plum trees are now more common in the regions that house them.
  • Thanks to Brandon402 for pointing this one out.

Journey To Perfection Alterations

• Transmogrifying Into A Bat is now disallowed inside all three of the journey to perfection mission types, and the anti-air towers have now been removed from them.

• The interior, underground, and exterior journey to perfection terrains have been massively redone. They all now emphasize more linear horizontal movement and combat without a substantial platforming element.
  • The combination of the platforming elements in with the combat elements in such a perfectionist type of mission was really messing with people previously. These missions are now a heck of a lot more fun and also don't require cheap tricks to win.
  • There are probably still more changes that we'll make in the short term to make these even better, but we want to get feedback on this evolution of them before we go too crazy with changes to them.

• Thanks to a great many players for commenting on these mission types and how they could be improved.

• The frequency of enchant containers in interior JTP missions was also toned down to a reasonable level.
  • Thanks to Ipkins for reporting.

Beta 1.020

(Released May 15th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where the death of any entity (including shots fired) were monsters to spawn as if a non-anachronistic monster had been killed.
  • Thanks to PDerp for reporting.

Beta 1.019 Streamlined Continental Progression

(Released May 15th, 2012)

• Added in a new Graphics Compression option in the Graphics tab of the settings menu.
  • This allows players to choose from several compression schemes that will reduce RAM use over long play sessions. The new default, Normal, is slightly more compressed than the old default of Low (which is basically no compression at all). You can crank it up to Semi or Heavy if you want to really have very low RAM use from the game, but that comes at a cost of reducing visual quality and increasing load times of the affected assets.
  • Unless you're having a marathon play session in one sitting this is unlikely to even come up, but for a couple of players in that situation (or who don't meet the minimum system requirements for RAM but still want to play the game anyway), this provides new options.
  • Thanks to LintMan, FAButzke, and Platypus for inspiring this addition.

• Put in a number of internal graphics pipeline changes so that the unity materials are now pooled rather than created as-needed for specific graphics.
  • This doesn't seem to harm performance any, but we haven't tested this on a wide array of machines. And in fact this should actually improve loading speed slightly on most machines, as well as provide a slightly lower memory footprint; particularly over long play sessions where we suspect the engine may have been leaking small amounts of RAM when materials are disposed and recreated many times.
  • Thanks to LintMan, FAButzke, and Platypus for inspiring this search.

• Fixed a longstanding issue where if the game tried to draw some text before the font's image was loaded, the game would instad just draw a lot of blankness even after the font's text was loaded. This rarely happened, but was confusing and annoying when it did.

• Consciousness shards drops from enemies now have a smaller collision box so that they are less likely to get stuck in invalid positions or similar.
  • Thanks to quinton, ZCaliber, Quaix and Kazhmahu for telling us about this.

• Also fixed an issue where items dropped on death (including the rare consciousness shards and otherwise) often would not work right in a variety of circumstances (monsters near walls, monsters indoors sometimes, etc, etc). If you see any more strangenesses with monster drops on death please do let us know.
  • Thanks to quinton, ZCaliber, Quaix and Kazhmahu for telling us about this.

• Fixed a bug where the stats of characters would be incorrectly set after loading from a savegame if they were wearing a suit or transmogrified into some other entity type.
  • Thanks to Nethellus and Zem for reporting.

• Fixed a display bug where characters who were transmogrified or wearing suits would not show up as having a time period in the escape menu.
  • Thanks to lavacamorada and Zem for reporting.

• "Distance Into Windstorm" is now shown in the escape menu's stats about the area you are in -- this is useful information for knowing what kinds of rewards and such you can expect from the enemies you kill, same as it is with tier-inflated enemies.

• Fixed a bug where the distance you were into a windstorm was not being properly calculated if you had never visited the world map in your current play session (or if buoys had been placed since your last visit to the world map).
  • Thanks to Nethellus for reporting.

• "Small Chests" that you find in random buildings no longer drop consciousness shards (the amount they were dropping was seriously lame in recent version anyhow).
  • Now there is a new "Small Rare Enchant Container" that these drop, which grants a weaker rare enchant compared to the full Rare Enchant Containers dropped by lieutenants and overlords. These tend to be more in the Uncommon enchant color range rather than the Rare or higher enchant range (but there is a chance of higher).
  • Thanks to SerinityFyre for suggesting we do something revise these.

• Previously it was possible to get stuck where a deep sea port was permanently in storms because it was next to land that was not stormy but it still wasn't in range of a wind shelter.
  • This has been fixed by making it so that deep sea ports are now always considered to be non-stormy if they are next to any non-turbulent water or non-windy land.

• Previously if you opened a number of different sections of the planning menu while out in the deep sea, exceptions would get thrown. Fixed.
  • Thanks to khadgar and ironunseenone for reporting.

• Previously, the whips used by possessed lion statues could strike various background objects that they should not have, as well as having trouble in water and in certain caves. Fixed.
  • Thanks to quintron for reporting this.

• The effects of storm dash, ride the lightning/rocket, and the four kinds of shields are now automatically removed from your character whenever you switch chunks. This prevents a variety of issues with states being out of sync of actual stats versus visuals, of players carrying these effects over to new continents or into JTP missions, or otherwise.
  • Thanks to MaxwellDemonic, tbouge, and timesend for reporting this.

• Previously, icicle leapers worked pretty poorly in umbra vortex missions based on how their AI combined with the altered physics of those missions. Now icicle leapers simply won't appear in those missions at all.
  • Thanks to lavacamorada for reporting.

• Non-regularly-seeded monsters like the possessed statues, the wall slimes, crashed landspeeders, etc, are all now considered native to any time period they are in for purposes of anachronism missions. So you can't kill them without more regular monsters popping out (which might actually be a good tradeoff, depending), but at the same time you're not going to be forced to be out looking for some statue that is supposedly anachronistic.
  • Thanks to jruderman for reporting.

Strategic Difficulty Settings, Removal Of Civilization Progress (CP), Revised Lieutenants, Buffed Secret Missions

• The long-missing Strategic Difficulty option has been reintroduced to the game, now that we are moving back in the direction of having variable-difficulty long-form thinking challenges. Currently this affects:
  • Number of tier orbs (spells you can craft) available at each tier. The limits per difficulty are:
    • Forgiving: 50 tier orb limit per tier
    • Restless: 35 tier orb limit per tier
    • Wily (default): 25 tier orb limit per tier
    • Vicious: 15 tier orb limit per tier
    • Absurd: 8 tier orb limit per tier
  • When more tier orbs would be added than the settlement stockpile can hold, it instead shows a chat message telling you how many were not added because of the limit.
  • As with the other difficulty levels, players can change the strategic difficulty level around at any time. If they wind up with more tier orbs in their stockpile than they are supposed to have for the current difficulty, it simply won't let them have any more; it won't remove any that they already have accumulated.
  • Thanks to Bluddy and others for inspiring this change

• Non-destroyed overlord and lieutenant locations are now marked on the world map with red text in the same way that the missions are marked with yellow text.
  • The tier of the region that the overlord or lieutenant is in is now shown as part of this as well, adding to the clarity of when you can go attack them.

• Lieutenants are no longer all tier 4. Instead, their region is Continent Tier + 1. This makes it so that you can go and attack any of the lieutenants as soon as you are ready, rather than being forced to target a specific one or waiting all the way until you are tier 4 or 5.

• The entire concept of Civilization Progress (CP) has been removed. Instead, the continent tier is based on how many lieutenants are currently alive. The more lieutenants you kill, the higher the continent tier goes. This puts you in the driver's seat and does not require you to avoid world map missions in favor of secret missions just because of the CP-factor (as used to happen).

• The lieutenants no longer physically move to help the overlord in the overlord's throne room. That was filled with various problems, and among them it was something that some clever players were exploiting.
  • Instead, the aid that the overlord receives from the lieutenants is now indirect: each living lieutenant causes the overlord's tier -- which is normally 5 -- to get inflated by 2.
  • So as you kill lieutenants, you're literally seeing the overlord weaken on the world map and become more attempt-able, even while the general monsters throughout the land are getting stronger due to the continent tier increasing.

• There are now always exactly four lieutenants per continent, rather than it generally being 3 but occasionally varying to 2 or 4. Given the way that the continent tier now increases based on killing the lieutenants, this is pretty important.
  • Old worlds will be upgraded so that this is true, and new continents will also gain this. For most old worlds this means you'll have a new lieutenant on every continent, and your continent tier may be much lower than it was previously -- a bonus for you, since your spells will still be powerful.

• Old worlds that happen to have more than 4 living lieutenants now will have all of them get killed except for 4; making it so that some of the ancient giant continents won't suddenly become a giant pain to finish.

• The internal "overlord escalation points" that were mentioned a few releases back and which are what control when the elites start showing up are now based solely on shifts in tier (and when the overlord is killed) rather than being based on increases in CP (since that no longer exists).
  • This means that rather than elites showing up gradually as you complete missions, you'll have them in larger bursts after you kill lieutenants. And then you'll have another burst after you kill the overlord as well, which previously didn't happen at all.

• The differences between secret missions and world map missions are shrinking away to almost nothing:
  • Previously, world map missions granted CP but secret missions did not. Now that CP doesn't exist, of course neither do.
  • Previously, world map missions granted tier orbs but secret missions did not. Now they both do.
  • Previously, secret missions granted less than half of the arcane ingredients and half the guardian power scrolls that world map missions did. Now they all grant the higher amount, helping to avoid a sense of grinding when players are using secret missions.
  • There are still some sorts of missions that are secret-mission-only (rescue missions, mainly, at the moment) or guardian-power-only (wind shelter missions, etc). Those still grant no resources or tier orbs or anything beyond the special reward of those missions (a rescued NPC or an erected wind shelter, etc).
  • There are still some missions (like lava escape) that only show up as secret missions unless you play several of them (after which it assumes you like them well enough to see them in the general circulation).
  • The purpose of the secret missions always was and still is to give players flexibility in their choices of what missions to do, as well as a way of shoring up missing resources when the random number generator was being unkind on the world map. Despite world map missions and secret missions becoming a bit more similar, this vital role of the secret missions is still very much served and needed.
  • And before anyone asks, the reason for the world map missions are twofold: first, it provides a focal point for new players that random exploration does not. But secondly, even for extremely experienced players it provides a quick way to evaluate several missions and make a choice quickly and easily, rather than having to explore at length for secret missions; so these still have very much a needed role as well, and also aren't going anywhere.

• There is no longer a special popup for secret missions, since they are so similar to world map missions now that there's not a compelling reason to bother the player with yet another popup anymore.

• A great many tooltips and popups have been updated to reflect the new mechanics for lieutenants and continent tiers.

• Thanks to all of our players and forum members for helping to steer us in this direction of removing CP, but in particular to Bluddy and Terraziel for really codifying some of the issues and some potential solutions.

Several Typo Fixes

• Removed a "1" from the list of possible NPC names.
  • Thanks to Izumi5 for pointing this out.

• Changed tutorial message to reflect that some monsters can occasionally have more than one resistance.
  • Thanks to Kazmahu for this one.

• Fixed a typo in the description of the junkyards.
  • Thanks to zem for pointing this out.

• Fixed a small typo in the descriptions of shields.
  • Thanks to jruderman for this one.

• Fixed a couple typos in achievements.
  • Thanks to lavacamorada for pointing it out.

Beta 1.018 Turn Yourself Into A Tiny Dinosaur

(Released May 11th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug where the rename commands were looking for the wrong strings in the localization file for some of the "why this did not work" messages that they use.
  • Thanks to Zem for the report.

• Sea Worms are now able to scale up and down as part of their behavior patterns, making them more interesting and more able to get through small cracks.
  • Thanks to many players for pointing out that sea worms were particularly prone to getting lamely stuck.

• Put in a change so that spells and explosions now start out tiny and then scale up very quickly. This makes it so that even when an enemy or character is right up against a wall (or an exploding missile is the same), the shots/shrapnel/etc that gets emitted from this comes out anyhow.
  • The one worry with this is a performance drain on the CPU. We saw this quite a bit in internal testing when we first were doing this today, but then put in a number of optimizations and now it seems quite fine. But if you're able to get a performance drop in some scenario in this version that you wouldn't have gotten in a past version, we definitely want a copy of your world folder with you in the affected chunk so that we can profile that down.

• "Kill Enemy" and "Kill Enemy Of Tier" unlockables are no longer affected by killing non-boss entities in missions.
  • The reason for this change is that either this was exploitable for positive rewards (aka Journey To Perfection Missions) or it was too punishing for negative enemy unlocks (aka Battlefields, etc). It made more sense for regular monsters to just have their unlockables triggered via free exploration only.
  • Killing bosses still works the same, however, since most bosses you fight are actually in missions.
  • Thanks to Izumi5, khadgar, and Bluddy for suggesting.

• "Reach Cave System Of X Depth," "Find Stash In Building X," and "Destroy All Monsters In Surface Chunk Of X" unlockable types no longer get unlocked in missions as that was too exploitable as well.
  • Thanks to Bluddy for suggesting.

• If your town already has one NPC of each profession, then rescue missions no longer seed as secret missions at all; instead making it so that you can get more focus on resources.
  • Thanks to Izumi5 for inspiring this change.

• The strength of the miniaturize spell normally makes your character 25% of their full size. However, depending on the form of your character that can be pretty... crazy.
  • Player bats and male neutral skelebots (the pink ones) are now capped at 80% of their normal size instead.

• A new continent-wide guardian power buff can now be unlocked by killing 20 T-Rexes. There are still 19 others that we need later-continent monsters for, but we'll get to those as we go!

• Instead of using the (over-used by this point) dragon-breath homing attack, the Elder T-Rex now has a new ability in place of that: spawn micro-rexes. These things are super fast, can jump really high, come in a great swarm, and ultimately die to just a shot or two.
  • However, they also block piercing shots so they can't just be all slammed in one big batch. If you can get to higher ground or behind some sort of cover, they'll die after 20 seconds. You can also fool them into jumping early if you're careful with what you do, same as with the utahraptors (just on a much more ridiculous scale here).

• Instead of using the (over-used by this point) dragon-breath homing attack, the Elder T-Rex now has a new ability in place of that: spawn micro-rexes. These things are super fast, can jump really high, come in a great swarm, and ultimately die to just a shot or two.
  • However, they also block piercing shots so they can't just be all slammed in one big batch. If you can get to higher ground or behind some sort of cover, they'll die after 20 seconds. You can also fool them into jumping early if you're careful with what you do, same as with the utahraptors (just on a much more ridiculous scale here).

• Espers no longer seed in the pre-industrial forests.

• Elder T-Rexes are now only unlocked once you've killed one regular t-rex.

• The way that minibosses are divided up is now into just two groups rather than trying to segment them by region type (as that just made them seem to repetitious in boss towers and such in particular): magical and robotic.
  • There are also underground-based minibosses which get added anywhere, too.
  • The robotic minibosses start in the industrial revolution time period and move forward.
  • The magical minibosses start in the industrial revolution time period and move backward.
  • A few outlier region types like the oceans and ocean shallows still do their own thing; right now those are the only two, however.

• The Elder Black Bulls and the larger Deepwoods Gargans must be unlocked via killing 5 of their smaller counterparts. This isn't meant as serious gating, but is mainly there so that you get some familiarity with the smaller entity's mechanics before running into their larger cousins.

• Previously, if you were set on fire by multiple sources, the damage would stack (as would the particle effects). This made fire-damage-over-time really overpowered.
  • Now the fire damage from the last source just overwrites the fire damage from any prior sources. So if you had 4 seconds of being-on-fire remaining prior to being hit with fire again (out of a total of 5 seconds), then it just resets you to 5 seconds and keeps you burning.

• Player bat scrolls now only cost 300 mana instead of 400, making them available to more characters.

• The amount of mana gained from each upgrade stone improvement is now about 1.3x more than it was in prior versions, helping to ease too-low mana woes that have bothered a number of players. Let us know what you think on the new balance -- remember, mana is mainly about gating off powerful spells that will start at around 400 mana, so we don't want all characters to be able to reach that too easily.

New Spell Scroll

• Added a new kind of spell scroll: Transmogrify Into Micro-Rex Scroll
  • Single-use magic scroll that transmogrifies you into a micro-rex. As a miniature T-Rex you can do everything as normal as well as run really fast and jump really high -- you can even block piercing shots from enemies. However, as a rex your magic is only 80% as powerful, you're unable to use most jumping-related enchants, and the crazy-high jumping can be pretty hard to master (tip: pair it with Ride The Lightning to ease falls). Must have another scroll available to transform back -- or you'll be stuck as a rex!
  • Only found in stashes in buildings in the lava flats.

New Enemy And New Miniboss

• New Enemy: Tiny Deepwoods Gargan
  • Zippy little ground-based things that can melee you but really don't hit very hard.
  • They have a fairly fast-moving ranged fire shot that also hits for very small damage but does additional damage over time.

• New Miniboss: Deepwoods Gargan
  • Totally non-zippy ground based thing that can melee you like a pickup truck (compared to the Elder Black Bull's freight train).
  • Their ranged attack is a long-cooldown large slow-moving earth-elemental shot that is a good signal to either get a lot of distance between you and it or get behind cover (or _make_ cover, somehow), because after about 3 seconds of flying it bursts into a couple of other projectiles, which after about 3 seconds burst into still more, and so on for a few more generations until you're in a veritable storm of the things. Don't stand in the storm.

Beta 1.017

(Released May 11th, 2012)

• Fixed the description of the Ocean Shallows region to reflect that they are now from the Time of Magic.
  • Thanks to lavacamorada for pointing this out.

• Fixed the elemental multipliers on the possessed lion statues to not be so annoyingly high.

• Halved the damage from the possessed lion statues since they were a bit on the extreme side to say the least.
  • Thanks to MouldyK, nanostrike, and Misery for inspiring this change.

• Halved the damage of the wall slimes.
  • Thanks to Finndibaenn for inspiring this change.

• The formulas for calculating the percentage chance that no infestation on a chunk will happen has been dramatically altered:
  • Note: in these new formulas, currentTierIndex starts from 0 and moves up, rather than starting from 1; and it's also capped at 4. continentIndex starts at 0 for whatever your first continent is (even if you start on the second continent) and moves up, and is also capped at 4.
  • Previously, most chunks had a flat 90% chance: now the formula is 95 - ( 2 * currentTierIndex ) - ( 1 * continentIndex )
  • Previously, most underground boss chunks had a flat 50% chance: now the formula is 80 - ( 8 * currentTierIndex ) - ( 4 * continentIndex )
  • Previously, underground boss chunks in missions had a flat 70% chance: now the formula is 95 - ( 4 * currentTierIndex ) - ( 4 * continentIndex )
  • Thanks to nanostrike, Misery, and Finndibaenn for inspiring this change.

• Fixed an issue in the prior version where T-Rexes were showing up inside and underground when they should not have been.
  • However, Elder T-Rexes can still show up inside.
  • Thanks to Penumbra for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the monster elemental whips (from the possessed statues) were not working right in multiplayer and were throwing exceptions.
  • Thanks to GauHelldragon for reporting.

Beta 1.016 Slimy T-Rex Infestation

(Released May 10th, 2012)

• Red Slimes and Red/Yellow slimes are now actually healed by the shots they are resistant to, rather than just being 99% resistant to those kinds of shots. For the players who still found that they wanted to try to attack those slimes a jillion times with the wrong element in the intro mission, hopefully this will send a clearer message of "look for something else, don't just sit here and spam an attack 500 times."

• Added new admin commands:
  • grant_player_deploy_item_in_settlement_permission
  • revoke_player_deploy_item_in_settlement_permission
  • set_default_player_deploy_item_in_settlement_permission
  • This are like the other grant|revoke|set_default trios, and this one simply controls whether or not a player can deploy items (platforms, crates, moon lamps, bear traps, grow gems, etc) in a settlement chunk.
  • These have also been added to the in-game tips section.
  • Thanks to Lokas for the suggestion.

• Added new chat-line commands:
  • rename_my_character
  • rename_my_profile
  • Usage example:
    • cmd:rename_my_character Dead Meat
  • These should be fairly self-explanatory; "profile" is the username you enter when starting or first joining a world, and is displayed when you chat.
    • Please note: changing your profile name in a world only changes it in that world; if you then go log into some other world where you'd used that profile name before it will not have been changed there (and you may need to pick it from a list when logging in as your local currently-in-use profile name may be different now).
  • Thanks to Chthon and others for the suggestion.

• Nightmare Octopi can no longer seed in supply depot missions, since they have a tendency to then just hang around way up in the sky.
  • Thanks to nanostrike for reporting.

• When the game has logged an achievement locally but Steam failed to log it for whatever reason, the game was supposed to resubmit those achievements to Steam every time it loads. And that was happening -- but too early. It was doing the resubmission before the status of the local achievements themselves were loaded, meaning that nothing was ever sent. This came about because of some unrelated changes we made to our initialization order of operations in the game, which impacted this without our realizing it. It's now fixed, and any old achievements that you have locally but not on Steam should now resubmit.
  • Thanks to xyroclast, Lokarin, Lalyth, and TentacleMayor for reporting.

• Improved the clarity of the descriptions of cooldown-modifying and incoming-damage-modifying enchant effects, calling them "Haste Rating" and "Deflection Rating" instead. So instead of "-20% Cooldown Duration (Active Total Reduction: -17%)" it says "20 Haste Rating (Active Total Cooldown Modifier: -17%)", etc.
  • Thanks to Quaix for the suggestion, and others for similar feedback on the recent enchant changes.

• Fixed a whole raft of bugs relating to multi-part enemies in multiplayer. This made it so that all sorts of strange things would happen with enemies like the urban mechs in multiplayer in past versions.
  • Among the issues were that clients were wholly uninformed of the parent/child relationship between the parts and the main body of the entity, and so lots of things then didn't work right.
  • Another issue was that for entities that pass the damage from themselves to their parent, that was not being synced properly in multiplayer from the client to the server or the server to the client, so that could lead to all sorts of oddities of a different sort.
  • Thanks to Remliel for reporting.

• The Ocean Shallows are now considered to be from the Time Of Magic rather than the Contemporary time period. This means that you can actually get the Time Of Magic folks before reaching the third continent.
  • The Medieval and Wild Garden NPCs still can't be rescued until the second continent; but since having high-mana characters as an option from early in is really useful, we wanted to make sure that right from the first continent there was a way to get Time of Magic NPCs.

Making It Easier To Find Early NPCs And Critical Structures

• Previously, the guardian power scrolls for "critical structures" that you don't already have in your settlement inventory would only have an inflated priority for seeding on one world map mission, and then that was it. This meant that if players were trying to avoid CP increases and just went looking for secret missions, that their chances of finding those critical buildings were pretty low.
  • Now their chances of finding those critical buildings via secret missions is also inflated. This can lead to players accidentally picking up duplicates of a type of building scroll through secret missions if they aren't careful, but so it goes -- better than wandering around for hours not finding what you need.

• Previously, NPC Rescue Missions were never available as regular secret missions -- only as the one-off rescue mission rooms (which work sort of like secret missions but give you a 100% chance of getting a rescue mission no matter how many mission types have been unlocked -- regular secret missions can get pretty diluted).
  • However, this made it pretty hard for some people to find NPCs because they would just look for secret mission spots and never find any, and it also meant that on the second continent you could get into situations where there were few and far between NPC rescue missions in general.
  • Now NPC rescue missions seed as normal interior and underground secret missions in addition to their regular rescue mission rooms.
  • Additionally, if the local continent's settlement does not yet have a lumbermancer, stonebinder, aquaurgist, and apothokineticist, then the frequency of those missions seeding will be greatly inflated (proportionate to the number of mission types currently unlocked to you) to help you get to that first step more easily.
  • Note that it should only be seeding lumbermancers until you have one of those, and then only stonebinders until you have one of those, and then only aquaurgists and then only apothokineticists. So if you're just running past all the lumbermancers while waiting for an apothokineticist, you're going to be perpetually disappointed (and that would be pointless anyhow, because you can't get an apothokineticist to skill level 3 without first having a lumbermancer anyhow).

Three New Enemies And One New Miniboss, As Well As "Infestations"

• New Enemy: Tyrannosaur
  • Ground-based melee enemy for the lava flats, a little help for that poor lonely Utahraptor.
  • Pretty tough to kill, try headshots.

• New Miniboss: Elder Tyrannosaur
  • Not any bigger (the normal one is already huge), but a lot tougher and stronger.
  • Has a couple different ranged fire attacks to make your life (and living) difficult.
  • Note that the homing dragon breath attack is placeholder, we have something cooler coming for that hopefully tomorrow. The rapid-shot fire attacks are the real deal, though (and boy are those intense).

• New Enemy: Possessed Ancient Lion Statue
  • This actually comes in 4 variants (like the regular lion statues do), each one with a different element of whip attack (fire, leafy, lightning, and miasma).
  • Until you damage them, these are disguised even in the pause menu to look like a regular lion statue; so there's no way to tell if a given lion statue will attack you now unless you get near enough that it attacks you (and that really hurts) or unless you manage to damage it first.
  • These are now mixed in with regular lion statues anywhere that you previously would see such statues (The Deep, Lava Flats, most underground caves, etc).

• New Enemy: Wall Slime
  • This actually comes in 18 variants of different elements and element-pairs.
  • Similar to the red and red/yellow slimes in the intro mission, but are background rather than foreground objects and thus can't be hit by most spells but also don't block your movement.
  • Generally the best approach is to just get by these, trying to kill them isn't very efficient.
  • The colors of these slimes vary by the type of region you're in; one of the colors of the slime will match the "primary element" of that region.

• Added concept of a chunk having an "infestation" of some sort of hostile typically-unmoving entity type. Only about 1 out of 10 chunks will have any kind of infestations, and they range in intensity (though a smaller chunk will tend to have denser populations).
  • Current infestations include severe to mild versions of: stinging nettles, the new wall-slimes, or possessed lion statues.
  • The reason for this new concept is basically for us to be able to seed a lot of environmental hazards or traps or whatever in a single-chunk fashion rather than having it be something that is global throughout a type of region or cavern system or whatever. This gives us enormous flexibility for more environmental hazards moving forward as well.
  • This is the only way to get wall slimes right now (and probably it will stay that way).
  • Entities spawned during chunk-generation due to an infestation do not "repop" if killed, so if you really want to go through the trouble of eradicating the stuff, it will stay gone.
  • Underground boss rooms that are not part of a mission have a higher chance of an infestation: 50%; while underground boss rooms that are part of a mission have only a 30% chance.
  • Fix The Anachronism and Journey To Perfection missions never have infestations at all.

Beta 1.015

(Released May 10th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug where if you had unlocked a time period whose NPCs are all of one gender, you could wind up having a very large selection of robots to pick from on the new character screen. The less known, the better.
  • Thanks to many players for reporting this.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where occasionally unhandled exceptions could be thrown when generating certain chunks. We couldn't duplicate it, but we found the likely culprit in the code.
  • Thanks to GauHelldragon for reporting.

Beta 1.014

(Released May 10th, 2012)

• Fixed an issue that could cause exceptions if the TexturePacks folder was somehow missing.
  • Thanks to shoukanjuu for reporting.

• Fixed an issue in the prior version where it was seeding "passages to lower dungeons" all sorts of places it was not supposed to be. This was part of the fix for the goodies seeding better; but now the goodies just seed and not those passages.
  • Note that this won't fix existing buggy rooms, but just don't use those passages down. The only ones that were particularly buggy (aside from giving you way more cave systems that you needed) were in mission instances, so those will get erased anyhow.
  • Thanks to Underfot, CodexArcanum, greyslayer, MouldyK, 7foot_sativa, quinton, kuliksco, mrhanman, and nflftw for reporting.

• Previously, if you tried to go into a door where the way was blocked for whatever reason, it would have you hang around in the darkness for a while saying "Waiting on chunk-gen" before popping back in to let you play more. But monsters could still attack you and such. Now it properly just fades you back in immediately.
  • Thanks to greyslayer and MouldyK for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where warp gates in the ocean regions didn't lead anywhere. This won't fix existing broken warp gates in oceans you've already visited, but it will prevent new ones from spawning.
  • Thanks to greyslayer and MouldyK for reporting.

• Previously, there were a wide variety of bugs with the mossy barrels that you could find in stashes. They didn't collide properly, they didn't have any falling physics, the graphics on the bottom of them were clipped off, they didn't have a proper icon in the ability bar (not a horrible one, but not the best either), they didn't show up in the "Where To Find Supplies" section of the planning menu, they didn't have a description or info on where to find them, and there was thus also no way to set them as one of your loot goals. All fixed.

• Previously, the shrapnel from various exploding objects (or exploding missiles from enemies) could damage the supply stashes in meteor storm missions. This made some enemies ridiculously extra difficult to play with in those missions. Fixed.
  • Thanks to nflftw for reporting.

Beta 1.013 Nightmare Octopi

(Released May 9th, 2012)

• The larger Urban Mechs were erroneously being treated as a regular enemy before, and showing up everywhere. Now they are properly treated as a miniboss and just show up in boss rooms. They are allowed to show up inside and outside buildings, and in underground caverns.
  • Thanks to MouldyK and nanostrike for reporting.

• Previously the central body of the urban mechs had different elemental resistances than the arms. This is normally fine but in this case it was unintentional. Fixed so all parts take -50% from Fire and +50% from Water.
  • Thanks to Zem for the report.

• Black Bull resistance to Entropy from 75% => 200% (so now it absorbs the full amount as healing).
  • Thanks to conductorbosh for the suggestion.

• The "wind shelter must be placed in a stormy-land tile next to a non-stormy-land tile" rule has been changed to "wind shelter must be placed in a stormy tile next to a non-stormy-land OR non-turbulent-water tile".
  • Thanks to FrostSabre for pointing out that it was physically impossible to put a wind shelter on an ocean shallows tile that's surrounded on all sides by water.

• Put in some improvements to the "Failed to find index!" message so that it now logs more data about what it failed to find, as well as not repeating itself a bunch of times (and thus causing massive lag) if it happens.
  • Thanks to GauHelldragon for inspiring this change.

• MP: Fixed bug where settlement NPCs would not show up in the settlement resident list on the client unless the client connected after the NPCs were generated (which happens when the settlement is first entered by someone).
  • Thanks to GauHelldragon for the report.

• Enchant rebalancing:
  • Mana-Cost-Reduction effects from enchants (and guardian power buffs) now affect mana regen instead (so if you had a -20% mana cost enchant, it's now +20% mana regen)
    • This should have a roughly identical effect in terms of how much you can sustain fire (except at very high percents; +99% regen is by no means as good as -99% costs), but it doesn't have the side-effect of breaking the purpose of max-mana as the gate on usage of high-cost spells (which became much more the main purpose of mana in general in the last few weeks of the beta, but the mana enchants weren't changed at that time).
  • Cooldown-Reduction effects are now scaled non-linearly, so X cooldown reduction no longer results in (100-X)% cooldowns, it results in (100/(100+X))% cooldowns.
    • Yea, this is a nerf, but it was too easy to get 60+% cooldown reduction and just turbo-burn even overlords. That's still possible, because it's cool, but it takes a lot more concentrated stacking and guardian buffs (150% raw reduction = 60% scaled reduction, for instance).
    • Note: this change does not apply to cooldown-increase: that would be pretty brutal as each point would be significantly worse than the previous. So that's still done linearly.
  • Incoming-Damage-Reduction effects are now also scaled non-linearly in the same way as cooldown reduction.
    • The need was less acute here but it was still too easy to get really high damage reduction. If this is too severe, a gentler non-linear scaling could be used for this stat.
    • Note: this change does not apply to incoming-damage-increase: that would be pretty brutal as each point would be significantly worse than the previous. So that's still done linearly.
  • As a happy side effect of all this, listed enchant effects now show your total active percent (counting enchants, guardian power buffs, and most other effects from missions, monster debuffs, etc).
  • Thanks to lavacamorada for pointing out that linear percent reduction makes each point count more than the previous, and that in practice this was causing serious imbalances.

• Removed restriction that prevented missions from seeding in ocean shallows regions until 30 missions had been completed, because other factors now prevent common seeding of missions in ocean shallows until a suitable time without that.
  • Thanks to MouldyK for inspiring this change.

• Fixed an issue in the surface tunnels of some ocean shallows regions where it was possible for an all-underwater cavern to not be connected to the surface. This won't fix already-generated chunks, but it will prevent the issue from happening again even in existing worlds.
  • Thanks to Penumbra for reporting.

• Mission entrances now display a fairly large "Mission Entrance" text that floats up for 3 seconds, disappears, reappears a short moment later, repeat.

• Previously, there were still warp gates sometimes showing up on the dungeon map inside of mission areas even though they were not supposed to (but the warp gates were properly absent from in the actual chunks themselves). Fixed so that now the warp gates no longer have their icons on the map either.
  • Thanks to greyslayer for reporting.

• Fixed a pretty nasty bug where players could block each other (or themselves) by placing wooden crates at the direct entrance to outdoor chunks. Now the players properly get shifted upwards as much as is needed, or get bumped elsewhere into the chunk if someone makes a solid line of crates to the top of the sky. This will let some players back into their settlements who had literally been locked out by either themselves or other players who discovered this in the last few days.
  • Thanks to Lunarknight64, khadgar, and henwen for reporting.

• Fixed an oversight where you would not gain access to the draconite playable characters in the character select screen after having rescued one of them (in other words, like all the other time period NPCs already worked).
  • Thanks to vadatajs, GauHelldragon, greyslayer, and r 1 for reporting.

New Enemy And New Miniboss

• New Enemy: Nightmare Octopus
  • Encountered in the oceans and ocean shallows.
  • Fairly slow moving and not that strong flying/swimming enemy.
  • Shoots insanity burst capsules that seek after you at a fairly low rate and then explode into insanity burst shrapnel. Careful there!
  • Possibly our freakiest-looking enemy, depending on what's swimming around in your backbrain. ;)

• New Miniboss: Elder Black Bull.
  • Similar to the normal Black Bull, but:
    • A lot meaner.
    • A lot tougher.
    • Spawns more vengeful thoughts when hit.
    • Leaves a trail of entropic flame behind it.
    • Switches between the normal "charge in direction until I hit a wall" behavior and a "pursue the player" behavior.

Ocean Exploration Improvements

• Fixed a bug that were causing "goodies" to not seed in the surface tunnels of outdoor areas as much as they should have been. This was most apparent in the ocean chunks.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Fixed a bug that was causing the oceans to have really high and annoying walls at both sides of their chunks, making you ride boxes way up to get anywhere. This wasn't an intended change, it was something that happened when we fixed another bug affecting other region types.
  • Thanks to Ipkins, khadgar, and Omosh for reporting.

• Fixed a really longstanding issue where you would always enter oceans at the top of the water rather than at the bottom.

• Previously, entering an ocean tile on the world map worked differently from all other tiles in that it dropped you out in the middle of the ocean. That was annoying and required an opt-out popup to tell you about it to boot. We've now changed it to work like any other region, as well as not bothering new players with that sort of popup anymore.

• Previously ocean regions could seed secret mission entrances and rescue mission entrances even though they would never actually have available missions. Fixed to no longer seed the entrances at all.
  • This will correct any existing dungeons in which you haven't yet been into the secret mission node yet.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor, greyslayer, Underfot, Nypyren, Penumbra, and MaxwellDemonic for reporting.

Beta 1.012

(Released May 9th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug that was causing exceptions to be thrown in some worlds when missions were completed in the prior version; it had to do with the changes to how we were checking for diluter enchants, but only showed up under certain character conditions.
  • Thanks to Chthon, Finndibaenn, FShunftSr, Asterai, terrycloth, Slayne Lonewolf, nanostrike, Misery, conductorbosh, GauHelldragon, Penumbra, Arturia, lavacamorada, Barty, and freykin for reporting.

Beta 1.011 The Dread Mechanical Bull

(Released May 8th, 2012)

• Fixed the description of Consciousness Shards to reflect the store.
  • Thanks to Izumi5 for pointing this out.

• Fixed a typo about acid gills.
  • Thanks for huw for pointing this out.

• In Journey To Perfection missions the chat log now displays the distance between you and the goal.

• Deployable explosive barrels (mossy barrels) can now be found in stash rooms.

• Barrel explosions (and other on-death shrapnel) no longer happen in settlements.
  • This obviously has nothing to do with the previously mentioned change, of course.

• Bear traps now apply a 10 second -100% movement speed debuff (so, immobilization) to the thing that hits them.

• Fixed a fairly rare (but exceedingly annoying) bug with the "worm tunnels" algorithm for underground cavern generation where very tiny rooms could be generated.
  • Thanks to Purlox, momomo, kuliksco, and Calli for reporting.

• Lightning Rocket plus all four variants of shields are now not usable in journey to perfection missions.
  • Thanks to Nethellus for the report of the exploit with the shields.

• Added new Explosive Bear Trap deployable, which can be found in stash rooms.
  • Basically the same as the bear trap, but with an on-trigger explosion that hits everyone and background objects (of course, you wouldn't be so mean to the enemies as to use this in conjunction with a bunch of deployed explosive barrels, naturally).

• The "Ocean (Continental Shelf)" areas have been renamed to simply "Ocean." The shelf bit was confusing a lot of people with the shallows.

• Changed the way Diluters are checked for on mission success to try to prevent the strange issues people have been seeing in MP where the diluter effect was persisting after taking the diluter off.
  • Thanks to Zem for the report and thorough investigation.

• Snowsuits, Heatsuits (not advanced ones), Diluter enchants, and Seeker enchants are now available through the store, and are no longer seeded into stashes.
  • Thanks to GauHelldragon for suggesting the diluter enchants be available this way.

• Added more multiplayer server commands to the in-game help section.
  • Thanks to GauHelldragon for pointing out the need for this.

• The "multiple entity" bosses (fairies which spawn in clusters of 5, as well as shadow bats which spawn in clusters of 2, etc) were previously individually dropping as many shards or enchant containers as a single boss of their type would. Fixed so that now it is equivalent for the group.
  • Thanks to jerith for reporting.

• Urban Crawler's top armor plating now blocks piercing shots.

• Players no longer collide with urban crawler's top armor plating, which thus keeps players from getting trapped inside urban crawlers.
  • Thanks to Toll, CodexArcanum, Spork, LintMan, Quaix, steelstiletto, Hyfrydle, and Eagleheart for reporting.

• The urban crawler graphics now draw at a better draw depth relative to your character so that things look more proper when you are riding on top of it.

• Espers no longer are considered native to the industrial revolution time period, now that there are enough monsters unique to that time period to omit them. Espers will be further pushed out of other time periods as more monsters are added.

Four New Enemies, Two New Minibosses

• New Enemy: Clockwork Wasp.
  • Flying melee enemy.
  • Moderately durable.
  • Has a static charge that hits all players in a short range every 5 seconds.
  • Is resistant to Air damage and weak to Earth.
  • Is seeded in Industrial Revolution time shards.
  • Has an elite upgrade called the Clockwork Zapper whose static charge has a wider range.

• New Miniboss: Giant Clockwork Wasp.
  • A much larger clockwork wasp.
  • Static charge hits a much wider range than the wasp's, and triggers every 3 seconds.

• New Enemy: Dread Gazebo.
  • Stationary Ranged enemy; cannot be damaged by most spells, since it's counted as a background object. You need to get close with something like ice cross or miasma whip to damage it at all.
  • Fires a homing green-elemental shot that splits into a bunch of shrapnel when it hits you or expires due to time.
  • Seeds in Abandoned Town and Grasslands regions. Beware the Gazebo!
  • Thanks to Richard Aronson, Eric Sorenson, and Ed Whitchurch for inspiring this enemy, and to Nalgas for suggesting it directly all the way back in last June during alpha.

• New Miniboss: Urban Mech
  • Mobile multi-part ranged enemy, with a relatively small central body and two large legs to either side.
  • Fires homing fire-elemental shots that buzz around like fireflies from its top gun.
  • Fires light elemental shots from one central gun.
  • Fires air elemental shots from the other central gun.
  • Both legs provide 90% shielding for the main body, and so you want to attack this thing from the top if at all possible. The shielding of the legs also blocks piercing shots.
  • Seeds in Abandoned Town regions.

• New Enemy: Small Urban Mech
  • Similar to the Urban Mech but is much smaller and lacks the homing attack.

• New Enemy: Black Bull
  • Ground-based melee enemy, similar to the Rhino.
  • When hit, spawns a "Vengeful Thought" flying melee entity that goes after you until killed or expires (about 10 seconds).
  • Seeds in Grasslands regions, and in interior boss rooms (but not interiors in general, and never underground).

Beta 1.010

(Released May 5th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug where purchasing an enchant could give an enchant that doesn't have optional conditions (like the enchants that only emit light). Those would be bad deals and cause errors in the enchant-generation process anyway.
  • Thanks to Wanderer for the report.

• Fixed an array-index-out-of-bounds error in the last version by caused a mistake in the fix to make environmental threats able to fire more than one shot per salvo.
  • Thanks to GauHelldragon for the report.

• Put in a couple of extra error checks that may or may not help with a rare issue on a specific multiplayer server.
  • Also split one of our largest AI logic processing methods into several smaller methods so that when future bug reports come in without a world file we can more easily narrow down where the problem lies (since we have no line numbers to work by).
  • Thanks to Lokas for reporting.

• "Minor" monsters like dragon fire, tiny fairies, green amoebas, black/blue whale spawn, and so forth no longer drop consciousness shards.
  • Thanks to Izumi5, Lokarin, MouldyK, Quaix, and khadgar for reporting.

• Fixed a null exception that could happen on the server upon connection of a player whose character had been in a chunk that became invalid/corrupted in a particular way. Now those players will be dropped back to the world map in such a case.
  • Thanks to Lokas for the report and save.

• In the prior version, it was very confusing because "general loot drops" looked like green consciousness shards when in fact they were just a general loot drop. This was compounded by the fact that enemies were dropping empty loot drops when they should not have been,
  • First of all, the graphics have been made more clear so that general loot drops no longer look anything like consciousness shards -- they now look like a bag of stuff instead.
  • Secondly, fixed the bug that was causing those useless drops to happen in the first place.
  • Thanks to Izumi5, Misery, GauHelldragon, dboyle92, TechSY730, and Purlox, for reporting.

• Journey To Perfection missions were previously impossible the last few versions in windstorms because you'd immediately take damage and fail.
  • Now your health is no longer damaged by windstorms when you are in a JTP mission, but instead your mana recharge rate is halved or worse (depending on how far into the windstorm areas you are on the map). Your recharge rate cannot drop below 10%.
  • Thanks to Penumbra for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue where sometimes if consciousness shards could not spawn due to lack of room when an enemy died, they would appear way up in the corner of the minimap.
  • Thanks to Quaix and khadgar for reporting.

• The purchase interface walk-by popup is now a lot more clear as well as being color-coded like all the other ones.
  • Thanks to Izumi5 for suggesting.

• In addition to L-Click and R-Click, M-Click is now shown on the ability bar to make it clear that you can middle-click for your third ability. Since middle mouse buttons are so common.
  • Thanks to zebramatt for suggesting.

• In the prior version, boss music would get overridden by the general mission music. Now boss music always overrides anything else.
  • Thanks to Izumi5 and TechSY730 for reporting.

• The auto-pause function of the game no longer kicks in when you alt-tab out of the game (or accidentally click out of the game) when there are no monsters in your current chunk. That way you're not bugging other people in settlements or cleared-out stash rooms or whatever.
  • Thanks to GauHelldragon for inspiring this change.

• The auto-pause function now only submits itself once per loss of focus. So if you alt-tab out and the game pauses, and then someone else unpauses it while you are still alt-tabbed out (meaning in MP here), then the game won't keep spamming the pause function at the others.
  • Thanks to khadgar for suggesting.

Beta 1.009 The Opal Guardian's Store

(Released May 4th, 2012)

• In the prior version, it was possible for a low-health character to get instantly killed by the windstorms. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Penumbra for reporting.

• In the prior version, we forgot to update the opt out popup message that explains windstorms when you enter one for the first time. That's now been updated.

• Fixed a bug where monster nests were not properly spawning in ocean shallows regions -- either in boss rooms or in rescue missions.
  • Thanks to khadgar, and Ipkins for reporting this.

• Fixed a bug where you could run into dead-end caverns in ocean caves that should have led you further down but would not actually do so.
  • Thanks to Toll, freykin, and vadatajs for providing us a save on this one.

• Finally figured out how to fix a longstanding bug where vents could spawn behind crates and players would get stuck inside them upon entering the chunk.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle, Toll, GUDare, and Dino for reporting this one.

• A brand-new music track now plays during Umbra Vortex and Fix The Anachronism missions. It's called "Angsty Pants." Don't ask. :)

• The missions in general had hit or miss music previously, as they would often pick themes that were great for their region but inappropriate for the activities of the mission at hand (something really relaxed and soothing during an intense mission, etc).
  • Now the game keeps a list of appropriate generic mission music tracks for each region type, and uses those whenever the mission type in question doesn't have its own specific music track.
  • Thanks to RetroNutcase for reporting.

• The maps for the exterior journey to perfection missions have in general really been improved so that they are not starkly hill-valley-repeat.

• A new "How Multiplayer Works" section has been added to the Tips & Advice section of the Big Honkin' Encyclopedia to answer common questions that players otherwise would have had to use the wiki to find.

• Fixed a bug where the "is the mouse cursor inside a GUI window?" logic was actually looking at an interior rectangle that did not describe the visual boundary of the window's border. Now it pads that by 30 pixels in all directions, which in our tests matches the actual boundary extent perfectly.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for the report.

• Microbosses now drop 5 upgrade stones each, while minibosses now drop 25 upgrade stones each.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where warp gates could spawn in front of Ilari stones or workbenches.

• For supply items that have an unlock condition, the specific unlockable is now shown when you click into their details.

• There is now an Enchant Categories section in the Big Honkin' Encyclopedia, which lists the 38 current categories of enchants.
  • Details are not really shown about any of the ones that you find through enchant containers -- it just tells you that this is how they are find and that you can later examine them for details in that fashion.
  • However, for those enchant types that require an unlockable to be completed before they start appearing (such as double jump, triple jump, and boomstick), the unlockable that must be completed is now able to easily be found; previously that was really difficult information to come by, and for double jump in particular it's very nice to have on hand.

• Inside warp gates, you now get infinite jumps like you do in umbra vortex missions; falling damage is also completely negated in these rooms.
  • Thanks to khadgar for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug in prior versions that could very occasionally lead to outdoor chunks that didn't have a proper entrance and which would spawn you somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
  • This won't fix existing chunks that were messed up in this way, but it will prevent new ones from forming.
  • Thanks to kitsuneyurka for reporting.

• Player bats no longer have their attack power reduced to 5% of their former values. Now their mana recharge rate is reduced to 10% of its normal value instead.
  • This makes player bats more viable for combat in most ways, but it also means that they still have a huge disadvantage to go along with their greatly-increased mobility.
  • Thanks to khadgar for suggesting.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where having previously used glyph transplant scrolls on your character could lead to double-fast movement and animation for them on the world map.
  • Thanks to kitsuneyurka for the world file that finally helped us track this down.

• If you manage to somehow get stuck out at sea without a boat, or some other craziness that gets your character literally stuck on the world map, the game now automatically take you back to the origin point and makes sure you are not in a ship.
  • Thanks to yotohan and khadgar for reporting.

Consciousness Shards, Enemy Loot Drops, And The Opal Guardian's Store

• Outside of missions, non-boss non-vengeful-ghost enemies (aka trash mobs) now drop consciousness shards.
  • The default is for them to drop between 25-30 shards, but that amount gets increased based on the scale of the enemy (in the same way that it's increasing how many health drops they have).
  • Playing in windstorms also multiplies their drop rate by 1.4 times the distance into the windstorm areas on the world map you are.
  • Playing up in tiers above the continent tier also gives you a boost of 0.4 extra multiplier per tier up. So play up one tier and it's 1.4x, two tiers up and it's 1.8x.
  • The rationale here:
    • This gives increased rewards for taking on increased risks, which is something that players have wanted for quite some time.
    • It also gives a reward for killing trash mobs (bosses already had drops of their own), which is something that a large part of the playerbase clearly wanted with some desperation.
    • It also provides an alternative to just pure exploration as a way to get enchants and other goodies (see below for exactly how), which some players wanted.
    • And finally, since this doesn't apply inside of mission areas, it does all this without violating our "monsters need to be obstacles to a reward rather than an obstacle and a reward rolled into one."
      • Aka, trash mobs inside missions are either health sources or obstacles, but never something you can or should farm. When you're in the mission, focus on beating the mission. But while you're outside the mission, killing trash mobs gives you some long-term benefit that players clearly desired to have.

• A new guardian stone can now be found in settlements: the white opal guardian stone.
  • Interacting with this guardian stone brings up a store where you can buy various things with the consciousness shards.
    • Some of it is very expensive and is better found through exploration. However, even the expensive stuff is quite attainable and basically provides a "safety valve" for when the random number generator is being unkind to you.
  • The wares that you can currently get from the store include:
    • Guardian Power Scrolls:
      • Create Buoy (6,000 shards)
      • Create Wind Shelter Mission (9,000 shards)
      • Seek Survivors (12,000 shards)
    • Spell Scrolls:
      • Glyph Transplant Scroll (500 shards)
      • Transmogrify Into Bat Scroll x2 (1000 shards)
      • Elusion Scroll (4,000 shards)
    • Deployable Items:
      • Wooden Platform x500 (100 shards)
      • Crate x500 (200 shards)
    • Single-Use Items:
      • Upgrade Stones x100 (1,000 shards)
      • Upgrade Stones x250 (2,000 shards)
    • Enchants:
      • Random Leg Enchant (1,000 shards)
      • Random Jump-Augmenting Leg Enchant (2,000 shards)
      • Random Left Arm Enchant (1,000 shards)
      • Random Right Arm Enchant (1,000 shards)
      • Random Right-Arm Enchant In The Elemental Color Of Your Choice (8,000 shards)
      • Random Torso Enchant (1,000 shards)
      • Random Acid Gills Torso Enchant (4,000 shards)

Supply Depot Meteor Storm Overhaul

• Fixed a bug where an environmental threat (the ice pirate patrol ships or the supply depot meteor storms) was only firing 1 shot per salvo even if the salvo was supposed to multiple shots.
  • So this was making the supply depot missions longer than intended.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for the report.

• Supply Crates in these missions have been replaced by Supply Stash structures that:
  • Only seeds one where a whole stack of the crates used to seed.
  • Is in the background (can be walked through, can't be stood on, is ignored by monsters except the meteors, etc).
  • You lose if any of these die.

• Meteors now spawn significantly more frequently, but are about 1/3rd as powerful when hitting players.

• Thanks to many players for general and specific feedback about the meteor missions :)

• Supply Depot missions now only spawn 40 meteors instead of 100, and each meteor only comes with a 10% chance of spawning a monster rather than a 20% chance. They also only spawn the meteors every 6 seconds now rather than ever 8. It was getting a little TOO crazy before.

Beta 1.008 Windy Boomstick

(Released March 3rd, 2012)

• Added new enchant base type: "Boomstick".
  • Unlocked by killing 100 Explosive Espers.
  • Goes on the left arm.
  • Always includes 30% Recoil and 12% Attack Power effects.
  • Optional effects more recoil include stronger-than-average attack power, shot speed, and cooldown reduction.
  • There are probably more uses folks will figure out as time goes on, but there are two basic uses that come to our minds:
    • Swimming; like storm fist, this lets you get altitude in water without using up extra jumps.
    • Tradeoff heavy-damage builds; it's not as obviously dangerous as the Risktaker, but it's another one where you can take something that gives you stronger-than-usual attack-power (and goes in the left-arm slot, which normally doesn't get much +damage) but makes it harder to survive (unless you get really good at compensating for the fact that your spells knock you back, in which case good for you!).

• There's also a new achievement that goes along with Boomstick.

• The Tips & Advice section of the Big Honkin' Encyclopedia now has a Settlements & Buildings Tips subsection which explains a lot of the common construction-related questions that players have.
  • We recognize that even more should be done in order to really make these things clear to players, but this strikes us as a necessary addition no matter what, and it was a straightforward first step to making this part of the game as easy to get into as we ultimately want it to be.

• Put in a fix for a floating 1-pixel line that would show up for some folks under their minimap. We never could duplicate it, but we've got things set up now such that the texture should definitely clamp and not have this happen.
  • Thanks to Nypyren and dorenthas for reporting.

• Added a new "Laptop Keyboard" option to the load-preset dropdown on the view/edit controls screen.
  • Special thanks to Bluddy for submitting this set of bindings.

• After yet more wrestling with the underlying Unity 3D engine, we've finally managed to work around yet another of the engine bugs that really annoy people a lot. This one was related to keys not properly getting cleared when (for instance) you alt-tab out of the game. The alt key would usually remain stuck on until you tapped it again.
  • Previously we were unable to solve this at all because we could not detect loss of focus, but we discovered a hack to get around that shortly before 1.0 (to everyone's joy, ours most of all).
  • The next problem was that, even knowing when we had lost focus, the problem was that the Unity 3D engine's Input.GetKey and Input.anyKeyDown and so forth were the things returning the wrong results. Not being able to fix their code directly, we were fortunate to find a Input.ResetInputAxes method that lets us just clear all the input state in their engine when we detect the resumption of game focus using our aforementioned hack.
  • And there was much rejoicing! This will be coming to AI War as well, before anyone asks.
    • Thanks to a bunch of players for this, including: Rednax, SteelStilletto, ColdPrototype, Smiling Spectre, FallingStar, farrout000, Procyon, goodgimp, Essobie, DesiQ, UnavoidableFate, plus others, yeah, this was a pretty popular issue!

• Previously, bringing up the Steam overlay with Shift-tab would be prey to the same stuck-keys effect as would happen with alt-tabbing. This is now also detected and should be fixed.

• When the game is minimized from fullscreen, it now decides that it has lost focus about 20x faster than it previously did. This helps to slow the memory leak in unity that results from alt-tabbing in and out a lot (see prior release notes in very late beta for details).

• When the game is minimized from fullscreen, and your character is in a chunk and is not currently invincible, it now pauses the local chunk. This should at least help with people with multiple monitors who click out of the main monitor and thus accidentally cause the game to minimize during a fight.
  • Thanks to many players for making requests along these lines.

• Clinging fetor is no longer capped at 0.5 seconds for its max casting speed. Now it can go as low as 0.1 seconds, like other combat spells.
  • Thanks to Terraziel for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where accumulated enchant quality was not being properly cleared with the rest of world-state.

• Fixed a bug in the previous version where parts of the Loot Goals window were drawing (sometimes in the upper-left corner) even when the window decided not to draw.

• Fixed a bug where the recently-added direct-ability-use keybinds (like Use Platform, Use Crate, etc), if bound to a mouse button, could fire on a mouse click inside a GUI window.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for reporting.

• Now when you enter a surface chunk that is supposed to contain an overlord lair or lieutenant outpost but (for whatever reason) does not, it displays the same "temporal flux, press E to destroy this and regenerate it" message as it does if you enter a chunk that has somehow has nowhere for a player to stand.
  • Thanks to Admiral Tolwin, Liliengrund, and Artymchoket for reporting situations where the overlord was apparently ruling from a moon outpost, with no handy ventilation system to reach it from the surface.

• Previously, the game would throw warnings if players ever managed to reach an area with monsters greater than tier 10. Now it goes all the way up to tier 15 just in case (not that anyone has come remotely close, but still).
  • Thanks to khadgar for making us think of this.

• Fixed a bug where a couple of windows could incorrectly overlap one another when first connecting to a multiplayer server.
  • Thanks to Penumbra for reporting.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where some patrolling enemies that were not actively chasing you indoors would get indecisive next to walls and just sort of flip around uselessly for a long while.
  • Thanks to MaxwellDemonic for reporting.

• Consciousness Shard Overhaul:
  • Shards are no longer required for any guardian powers (the building powers that had no non-shard cost now cost cedar and granite).
  • Now only have one kind, instead of six colors.
  • Are no longer stored in the settlement stockpile, but are carried directly in the player's inventory.
    • When a world created before this change is loaded, it adds up all the shards stockpiled in the settlements of the world, clears all shards out of settlement stockpiles and gives each player that total amount (which is nicer than it needs to be, but just trying to handle the transition logically).
  • So right now there's nothing to spend these on; still working on that.

• It is now possible to have animated icons in the ability bar.

• The consciousness shards now have an updated animated graphic that they use in the game world and in the ability bar.

Revised Windstorm Mechanics

• The presence of windstorms was previously increasing the tier of a region by 1 or 2 tiers depending on the difficulty level. There is no longer any tier buff from windstorms, meaning that enemies are no longer any tougher or more dangerous inside windstorms than they would otherwise normally be.

• When you venture into a region being affected by a windstorm, the negative effect of the windstorm is now felt as a constant drain on your health.
  • This drain varies by difficulty and by whether or not the chunk is a higher tier than you, as well as by how many regions' depth into the windstorms you are on the world map.
  • In other words, the drain doesn't go up when you go further into the chunks of a given region, but rather when you go into regions on the world map that are further from non-stormy areas.
  • The drain is something that also scales downward the lower your health gets, and finally it stops all together once your health has reached 1. So the windstorm by itself won't ever kill you outright -- however it will put you on the teetering brink of death for sure.
    • This makes it increasingly dangerous to venture into windstorm areas that are further from your wind shelter network, but it doesn't make it instantly lethal like it could be before with the supercharged enemies.
  • Also, it is important to note that you can keep your health up either by coming in with a high-health character or by simply making efficient use of killing "trash mobs" fast for health, thus keeping yourself going even in such a hostile climate.
  • Unlike ambient cold or ambient heat damage, no popups show right on your character (because that would be incredibly annoying), and there are no suits or other magical means that will ever protect you from the wind -- aside from expanding your wind shelter network, of course!
  • Thanks to zebramatt, Bluddy, Misery, khadgar, and Penumbra for suggestions that helped lead to these changes.

• Previously there were some issues with when the windstorm sound effects would play, most specifically in mission areas. Fixed.
  • Thanks to khadgar for reporting.

• Previously there was an issue with outdoor areas having their "ceiling" set too low. This caused problems most notably in the wind shelter missions where there could easily be almost no room to maneuver because of this.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting the difficulty with the windshelter missions which helped lead to finding this, and Underfot for reporting the specific issue.

• The number of microbosses in each outdoor section of a wind shelter mission has been reduced from 3 to 2 so the player is not so easily swarmed.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting the difficulty with the windshelter missions.

• To prevent "cheesing" of the wind shelter missions (among other benefits), the player now takes 20x more damage from windstorms when they are transmogrified into a bat. If that tradeoff works for you in terms of the extra maneuverability in windstorms then feel free to use those scrolls in those situations; but it's certainly a lot more dangerous now!

• Fixed a bug where wind shelter placement previously considered oceans and deep sea ports to be "non-stormy land."
  • Thanks to khadgar for reporting.

• Previously swamps, the deep, and the lava flats could not contain wind shelters. This could cause literal stalemate situations in the game, so that restriction has been removed.

• Deep Sea Ports are now affected by windstorms. You can exit a sailing ship at any port, but you can only get into a sailing ship when that ship is not in a storm.
  • This means that you are required to expand your wind shelter network at least somewhat in order to get to the second continent in most cases.
  • It also means that once you arrive at the second (or later) continents you are likely to be marooned there for at least a little while until you build up enough to drive the windstorms back from the ports there.
  • Thanks to lots of players for suggesting that they wanted to have the ports be a little more involved; this idea just happened to fit really well with the other windstorm-related changes we were making today.

Re-Rejiggering Anachronism Missions

• Another overhaul for Fix-The-Anachronism missions:
  • No more damage reflection (and there was much rejoicing).
  • Now, when a native monster is killed in one of these missions, two other monsters are spawned:
    • The same logic for the initial spawns is used: these could be native monsters, or non-native.
    • It tries to put the new monsters near the location of the just-killed native monster, but if it has any real difficulty with this it doesn't try hard at all and the spawn could happen anywhere valid.
    • A floating text message and chat-log message are also shown, to help make it clear what happened.
  • Thanks to many players for ongoing feedback on these missions. We're definitely looking for logical arguments and consistent feedback rather than emotional responses that go all over the place, but we're grateful that largely we're getting the former and we can work with that.

New And Improved Multiplayer Features

• Now when a new player account is created and picks its first character in a world where there's more than one continent or the first continent is above tier 1, the new character is given 1 "catchup" enchant per each of the 4 main slots per continent (max 3 per slot, to keep this from getting too spammy).
  • The catchup enchants (and any enchant from a rare-enchant-container drop from an overlord or lieutenant, or from a catchup-enchant-container in the first settlement of an expert-start world) use the current enchant quality levels achieved in that world, but do not increase those quality levels the way getting an enchant through charge-buildup would.
  • This happens in both SP and MP; it's mainly for MP but it's also helpful if you're handing a world around or having multiple people play it on the same machine in serial fashion, or simply create a new player account for some other reason, etc.
  • Thanks to Wanderer, nanostrike, Toll, and others for the feedback leading to this change.

• Added new admin commands:
  • grant_player_kick_and_ban_permission (followed by player number)
    • This gives a player account the rights to use the kick_player, ban_player, and unban_player admin commands without them having to use claim_admin_rights first (so they don't have to know the admin password, and you don't have to give it to them).
    • You still need to be really careful who you give this to, but you don't have to give them full access this way.
  • revoke_player_kick_and_ban_permission (followed by player number)
    • Removes the permission given by the previous command (if it had been given).
  • echo_list_of_connected_players
    • The server sends you a chat message listing all connected players (username and player number, same as displays if they chat).
    • This command does not require admin rights.
  • echo_list_of_all_players
    • The server sends you a chat message listing all players (username and player number, same as displays if they chat), whether they are currently connected or not.
    • This command does not require admin rights.
  • Thanks to Wanderer and Agent Propagandi for the suggestions.

• MP: Added Action Difficulty and Platforming Difficulty to the server list.
  • Thanks to huw for the report.

• MP: made the server name column on the server list about twice as wide.

• MP: fixed a bug where the client would count a unit of progress on a "kill X of Y" unlock as if it were 50 units. Why was it doing that? Because I (Keith) told it to during testing a fix to another bug, and never changed it back. Ah well, fixed now.
  • Thanks to Aklyon for the report and save.

• Added new admin commands:
  • grant_player_rename_permission
  • revoke_player_rename_permission
  • set_default_player_rename_permission
  • These work basically like the other grant/revoke/set_default groups, except that these control whether rename-settlement and rename-npc operations by a player will succeed.
    • (why? Well, with some people, if you give them a blank wall, they see a canvas. In multiplayer.)
  • Thanks to Lokas for the suggestion.

• New keybinds (not that these don't work in solo, but we can't think why you'd ever need them except to share items in co-op):
  • Force Drop Quantity To 1/2
    • Defaults to LeftShift.
    • While this is active, dropping an item will drop half of the items in the origin inventory slot, rather than just 1 item.
    • If combined with the "Force Drop Quantity To 1/3" keybind, about 1/6th of the amount will be dropped.
  • Force Drop Quantity To 1/3
    • Defaults to LeftAlt.
    • While this is active, dropping an item will drop one third of the items in the origin inventory slot, rather than just 1 item.
    • If combined with the "Force Drop Quantity To 1/3" keybind, about 1/6th of the amount will be dropped.

Beta 1.007 Now Where Did I Put That Grocery List?

(Released May 1st, 2012)

• Fixed the spelling of assassination.
  • Thanks to Andrew Whipple III for pointing that out.

• Removed a small but pointless warning message that could be written to the debug log on loading of existing chunks.
  • Thanks to GUDare for reporting.

• Fixed a longstanding issue where lesser teleport would wind up causing you too much or too little falling damage based on how you used it. Now when you teleport it puts you out at the other end at zero vertical velocity so that you start falling from that location fresh (for better or for worse, and rather like you'd expect with teleporting).
  • Thanks to Penumbra and Terraziel for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where leafy whip was doing purple damage instead of green.
  • Thanks to freykin for reporting.

• Diluters only work on Tier 5 orbs now, because people were getting into situations where they had no tier 3/4 orbs due to diluting them all into tier 2 orbs.
  • There may also be an elusive bug in there somewhere that's causing the diluter effect to happen or persist where it should not, but we've not been able to reproduce that.
  • Thanks to Nuck and several other players reporting various weird unintentional dilution cases.

• New admin command: set_worldwide_enchant_progress_sharing
  • Syntax to turn it off (defaults off): cmd:set_worldwide_enchant_progress_sharing 0
  • Syntax to turn it on: cmd:set_worldwide_enchant_progress_sharing 1
  • When it is on, enchant progress is done normally.
  • When it is on, when someone gains enchant points all player accounts on the server (connected or not) get those enchant points and check for enchant generation.
    • These gains have no impact on player accounts that are created later.
  • Basically this just makes MP easier, and there's no attempt to balance it, it's simply provided as a courtesy to those MP groups who specifically want the shared-enchant-progress mechanic (it used to be similar to this, but was changed).
  • Thanks to Tyrain for pointing out that some groups really do like the shared progress in MP.

• Fixed a bug where the rename-settlement and rename-NPC functions were not limiting input length (it's now limited to 20, since the textbox is about 20 capital W's long).
  • Thanks to khadgar for the report.

• Fixed a bug where normal game input (including the pause key, etc) would keep happening while the rename-settlement or rename-npc windows were open.
  • Thanks to Wanderer for the report.

• Fixed a bug where players getting kicked out of a mission area (due to someone abandoning the mission or someone dying in the mission if it was fail-on-death) were not having their "respawn in mission ID #" flag cleared.
  • This won't retroactively fix situations where that flag was erroneously set (it's impossible to know when loading a world whether it was validly set or not, and just clearing it from all older worlds would lead to other edge-case bugs), but once it's been correctly set or the mission you were respawning in goes away or something like that it should be fine from then on.
  • Thanks to Partisus for the report.

• Server: the main window now draws under the messages window in the upper-right.
  • Thanks to Wanderer for the suggestion.

• When starting a server, it now displays an explanatory popup if either no world name was specified or the specified world could not be found or could not be successfully loaded.
  • Thanks to Greccen for pointing out that previously it would just sit there and look like there was a network problem or whatever.

• In addition to Clinging Fetor, now Storm Dash and Ride The Lightning are disallowed in Journey To Perfection missions.
  • Storm Dash made it far too easy to game the system while playing as a bat, while Ride The Lightning made it far too easy to kill yourself unintentionally with the anti-air missile launchers.
  • Thanks to freykin for the tip on storm dash.

• Fixed a bug where the coffers and structures for viewing the settlement and changing the difficulty were not on the right collision layer (they're now on the same layer as the crafting benches and guardian stones.

• Pablo composed an awesome "Graveyard" track back in February, and it's been distributed with the game since then, but it never did actually get implemented into the game.
  • This track is now used for The Deep, both inside buildings, underground, and outside.
  • The track actually titled "The Deep" is used solely for the Swamp areas now (which it already was; it had been doing double duty). In the end that was a much better fit for the swamps given how those two region types diverged.

• MP: Fixed a bug where picking up crafting ingredients from the ground only had an impact on settlement stockpiles on the server and on the client that actually picked up the item (and, probably most of the time, clients who happened to be in the same chunk as the client picking up the item). Now it is synced to all connected players.
  • Thanks to LintMan for the report.

• Fixed a bug where resistances over 100% were not causing the target to be healed by the damage.
  • Thanks to Quaix for the report.

• When an image fails to load, it will no longer log copious errors to the debug log about that (which would damage the stability and framerate of the game until restart).
  • Thanks to Ipkins for reporting.

Loot Goals (aka "Shopping Lists")

• When you're looking at spells in the Big Honkin' Encyclopedia, there is now an "Add To Loot Goals" button whenever you click into the details for a spell.
  • By adding spells to your Loot Goals, they will show up in a little sidebar whenever the escape menu is being shown. On your main loot goals listing you can then quickly see a list of all the remaining components you need to find in order to craft the spells you were interested in.
  • This can save you valuable time in opening up the Big Honkin' Encyclopedia, as well as give you a constant reminder of the goals that you set for yourself. Hovering over items in your Loot Goals list shows you lots of information such as where to find the needed loot.

• When looking at supply-type enchants in the Where To Find Stuff You Want or Big Honkin' Encyclopedia, there is now an "Add To Loot Goals" button whenever you click into the details for an enchant.
  • By adding supply-style enchants to your Loot Goals, they will show up in a little sidebar whenever the escape menu is being shown. On your main loot goals listing this will show the enchant in question until you acquire it.
  • This can save you valuable time in opening up the Where To Find Stuff You Want section, as well as give you a constant reminder of the goals that you set for yourself. Hovering over items in your Loot Goals list shows you lots of information such as where to find the supplies.

• When looking at general supplies in the Where To Find Stuff You Want or Big Honkin' Encyclopedia, there is now a slider that lets you choose how many of that type of item you want to have on hand, ranging from 1 to 9999.
  • Using this slider, you can set for yourself how many of this kind of supply item you wish to have in your inventory. Whenever your supplies fall below this value, your Loot Goals list will remind you to get more.
  • This can save you valuable time in opening up the Where To Find Stuff You Want section, as well as give you a constant reminder of the goals that you set for yourself. Hovering over items in your Loot Goals list shows you lots of information such as where to find the supplies.

• Once you have added stuff to your shopping list, you can see the details simply by hitting the Escape key to bring up the escape menu. We don't have it showing all the time in your HUD because frankly that would just be clutter and it's only a keypress away anyhow, now.

• Thanks to many players for suggesting shopping lists, including KDR_11k, zebramatt, Dizzard, TyberZann, Moonshine Fox, Kemeno, mathemagician, Professor Paul1290, DesiQ, and Hyfrydle. This was definitely a most-requested feature!

Texture Pack Support

• There is now a dropdown in the Graphics tab that allows you to select from any installed Texture Packs, if any are installed.
  • Thanks to many players for requesting texture pack support, including eRe4s3r, Pseurai, and TheGodofCruelty.

• Here are the instructions for how to create texture packs if you have an interest in doing that:

To add a texture pack, simply add a folder here in the AVWW/RuntimeData/TexturePacks folder.

The name of the texture pack in the game will be the name of the folder. So if you make a folder called BobsTextures, that's what it will show up as in the game.

---

HOW TO REPLACE A TEXTURE USING THE TEXTURE PACK:

Inside your texture pack folder, simply duplicate the contents of the Images folder that you want to replace. Don't bother moving over images that you aren't doing custom versions of -- the game will first look into the active texture pack folder and then will look into the base images folder if nothing was found.

So, for instance, if you want to replace the keyboard cursor (normally located at AVWW/RuntimeData/Images/Misc/KeyboardCursor.png) you would add AVWW/RuntimeData/TexturePacks/BobsTextures/Images/Misc/KeyboardCursor.png.

That would alter the keyboard cursor, but no other parts of the game. You can do that for as many or as few images as you like.

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HOW TO REPLACE A PARTICLE EFFECT USING THE TEXTURE PACK:

Inside your texture pack folder, make a Configuration folder. Then make a Particles.xml file that is a copy of the main Particles.xml file in AVWW/RuntimeData/Configuration/Particles.xml.

Simply make <g pattern="Fireball"></g> entries for particle effects that you wish to change. Don't worry about trying to do them all -- just do the ones you're actually making changes to. The others will load from the main Particles.xml file just fine, but your custom particle definitions will selectively override whatever you wish.

Did you know? When you have the game open, you can hit Ctrl+F4 to reload the Particles.xml files at will. That way you can make a small tweak, hit that key combo, and then test your change immediately without having to restart the application.

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TIPS:

Generally speaking, you need to keep the images to the same size and dimensions as the original. Any wildly different image sizes won't look at all correct in-game, especially when it comes to sprite dictionaries (animations).

That said, when it comes to things in the Backdrops and Ground folders, those can be set to pretty much whatever size since they are repeating tiled graphics.

Mission Seeding Changes

• The recently-added rule that a world map mission would not pick a mission type if that type is already accounting for at least 1/3rd of the currently available world map missions has been extended to ignore whether the particular mission type is an interior, underground, or surface mission. So if there are 9 available world map missions and 1 is a Journey To Perfection (Surface), another is JtP (Interior), and a third is JtP (Underground) and it's time to seed a 10th mission it will not pick any of the JtP variants.

• Newly-generated missions that reward crafting materials now have a 70% chance of rewarding only very commonly required ingredients (welkin gel, magma, etc) and a 30% chance of only rewarding the less commonly required ingredients.

• Newly-generated missions that reward guardian powers:
  • First power reward previous had a 100% chance of trying to be a city-building power, and would randomly pick from all eligible-to-seed building types. Now it has a 50% to try to be a city-building power, and it always tries to get a "basic" (non-personality) building first. If it tries and cannot get a basic building type it has a 20% chance at that point to try for a personality buiding (so 10% chance overall for that). If it doesn't pick a building power for the first slot, it picks the same way as the second power reward would (has a 50% chance of picking a strategic power and a 50% chance of picking a buff power).

Beta 1.006

(Released April 28th, 2012)

• MP: Added suppression of the "Rejected S_SendUpdateOnLocalClientPlayerEntity because fromPlayerAccount == null" message because it can arise in legitimate circumstances and tends to cause a ton of logging when that happens, causing lag on the server.
  • Thanks to Wanderer for the report.

• Balance: the base attack of Forest Rage is now 16 instead of 13, bringing it's DPS a bit higher than it otherwise would have been to compensate for the lower DPM.
  • Thanks to Terraziel and others for suggesting.

Beta 1.005

(Released April 28th, 2012)

• Further changes to spell "maximum distance to live" are as follows:
  • Most long-ranged spells now travel for 1600px instead of 800px.
  • Splashback and flameout still travel for 600px (they always did).
  • Miasma Whip: 224 (same as always)
  • Leafy whip: 320 (same as always)
  • Meteors, rocks, and ice blocks: 1800px instead of 1000px.
  • Thanks to fairly much everyone for complaining about this.

• MP: Fixed a bug in the prior version with spells not traveling for other players anymore.
  • Thanks to GUDare for reporting.

Beta 1.004

(Released April 27th, 2012)

• Put in a fix that was causing unhandled exceptions in the prior version when guardian powers were attempted to be used.
  • Thanks to AirstrikeIvanov for reporting.

Beta 1.003

(Released April 27th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug in the last version that broke loading old worlds that had progress towards the unlocks that were tied to elites and are now no longer used.
  • Thanks to psychogears, Omosh, and freykin, and several others for the report.

Beta 1.002 Upgraded Elitism

(Released April 27th, 2012)

• An echoing, melancholy new track has been added to some of the underground areas of the game. It's called Sad Cave. :)

• Fixed bug where it was possible to warp out of a boss chunk (with the boss still alive) by standing in front of the warp gate (it was already preventing actual entrance into the warp gate).
  • Thanks to Penumbra for the report.

• Added New Elite upgrade to Eagle: Eagle Diver.
  • These have a higher maximum speed, always use the diving attack pattern (normal eagles only do it when tier 5), hit a bit harder, and have a bit more health.
    • Normally we aren't making the elites "tougher" stat-wise (relying on continent scaling for that), but we actually defined the Eagle Diver months ago and it just hasn't been in the game for a long time. So here it is, mind the beak! :)

• The dungeon and region maps can now be resized based on a new "Dungeon And Region Map Scale" slider in the game tab of the settings menu. It allows you to adjust them from 50% to 400% of normal size.
  • Thanks to Revannefarious, Nypyren, mathemagician, dis astranagant, Zaggeh, and DesiQ for suggesting.

• The wind shelter missions no longer include a miniboss in each of their outdoor chunks. Instead each chunk includes three microbosses, which tend to be far easier to avoid.
  • Thanks to Professor Paul1290, Terraziel, Penumbra, Toll, Hyfrydle, zebramatt, Misery, Wanderer, and Quaix for weighing in on this one.

• Previously, the mission text on the world map in windstorms would flicker. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Hyfrydle for reporting.

• Previously, monster health bars behind the chunk map or inventory would flicker. Now they are drawn on top of both.

• Previously, the tier increase from windstorms in regions was applying only to monsters on the ground level. Now it applies to interiors and undergrounds as well.
  • As an added note, this means that the overlord likely starts out as tier 6/7 and you have the choice of whether or not you want to build a wind shelter to lower his threat level.
  • Thanks to Bluddy for suggesting all of the above.

• Now whenever a settlement's chunk is loaded off disk it:
  • If there is no hearth guardian stone, adds one.
  • If there's more than one hearth guardian stone, strips out the extras.
  • If there is no adviser guardian stone, adds one.
  • If there's more than one adviser guardian stone, strips out the extras.
  • If there is no crafting bench, adds one.

• All existing hearth guardian stone NPCs have been removed (but as noted above, a hearth guardian stone is added to the settlement chunk when it is first loaded, but it is not an NPC). There wasn't anything in the game left that cared about these being NPCs, so there shouldn't be any impact on the player, but the stone may be in a somewhat different place now.

• Crafting benches and guardian stones no longer collide on the same layer as some background objects (like trees or fences, couldn't tell which, probably both).
  • Thanks to jabrazelle for reporting and providing a save where there was literally nowhere to seed a crafting bench in the settlement.

• The damage of forest rage has gone down from 23 to 13, bringing its power more inline with other basic ranged spells (thanks to its recently increased firing rate it was definitely overpowered).
  • Thanks to AlexxKay for unintentionally inspiring this change.

Overhaul to Enchant-acquisition and Enchant-inventory-management

• The "quality progress" of enchants (the number of each enchant type that have been generated for you, which controls how many extra effects the next enchant of that same type can have) is now tracked globally for the world, not individually for each player.
  • Older worlds being loaded will start with the highest progress for each enchant type found among the existing players in that world.
    • So if one player has gotten 20 Cooldown-reducing enchants and 10 Jump-increasing enchants, and the other player has gotten 10 Cooldown-reducing enchants and 20 Jump-increasing enchants, after loading in this version everyone will move forward as if they had previously generated 20 of both of those types.

• "Enchant charge" is now tracked individually for each player.
  • Picking up an enchant container grants points to you and each other player in the same chunk (as opposed to everyone in the same world like it previously did).
  • However, picking up an enchant container also now gives a check for a new enchant to everyone in the chunk (as opposed to previously, when only the player actually picking up the container had any chance of getting an enchant right then).
  • Older worlds being loaded will start with all players having 0% progress to the next enchant, but this is a pretty minor inconvenience compared to the temporary advantage gained (in MP at least) from the quality-progress-tracking change.
    • Happily, this lets us clear out the 1000s of percent accumulated enchant charge that was piling up on some players in multiplayer, and that looked really weird (it's still possible to pile up extra charge by collecting containers.
  • Thanks to silverhound, hyfrydle, Terrazeil, Bluddy, and Martyn van Buren for providing feedback on how enchant charges should work in multiplayer.

• Most enchants, when dropped, are instead (after player confirmation) "reabsorbed":
  • Reabsorbing an undroppable enchant gives you 10% progress towards the next enchant, but this process completely and irrevocably destroys the reabsorbed enchant. There is no way to undo this, and so should only be done with enchants you'll never need again.
  • The basic light-emitting enchants, seeker, and diluter enchants can still be dropped (and cannot be reabsorbed).
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor, zebramatt, Rx09, AlexxKay, Bluddy and others for suggesting this.

Overhaul to Upgrade Stone Mechanics

• Previously, the first health upgrade cost you 16 and then it would go up by a power of 2 from there for each further upgrade (32, 64, 128, etc). Mana and Attack were the same, except starting at 8 (so then 16, 32, 64, 128, etc).
  • Now the fee is flat for all upgrades: it's 20 stones for a health upgrade, and 10 for attack or mana.
  • After much discussion on this subject, it became clear that being able to apply 10 upgrades to your character is an important avenue for player choice, but not something that should be prohibitively time consuming to do. Even if the upgrades past the 8th were a "bad value" to encourage players to consider conserving stones, some players would push all the way to 10 upgrades no matter what and then be encouraged to save-scum to protect that character.
  • Further, not having 10 upgrades on the primary character was creating a disincentive to create a stable of other characters for various purposes.
  • Lastly, it was tricky to balance the game because if players used a full 10 upgrades then things could be far to easy; but with no upgrades it could be far too hard. Now we can balance around the general expectation of roughly 10 upgrades being on most characters; and these upgrades being more about choice than they are about a long-term slog through getting thousands of stones.
  • The reason for keeping a cost to the upgrades at all is to maintain that sense of loss on death of characters; aside from the vengeful ghosts, upgrades are the one thing that is lost when your character dies. That has seemed a very popular thing (and in fact upgrades were originally added when beta players felt there was not enough of a penalty for death), but we have been aiming to balance it so that the penalty is noticeable but not harsh.

• Previously, each upgrade that you applied in the health, mana, or attack categories would give you a flat bonus every time you used an upgrade. That made sense when the costs of each upgrade went up exponentially. However, now that the costs are flat (not even linear, but literally flat), we chose to instead make the bonuses from each upgrade decay so that they remain balanced.
  • Applying 10 health upgrades now gives a maximum 5.57x bonus (so 20% decay) compared to 10x previously (0% decay).
    • With a character of base health 141, that gives the following progression: 141,282,395,485,557,615,661,698,728,752,771,786
  • Applying 10 attack upgrades now gives a maximum 1.65x bonus (so 10% decay) compared to 2x previously (0% decay).
    • With a character of base attack 85, that gives the following progression: 85,93,100,107,113,118,123,127,131,135,138,141
  • Applying 10 mana upgrades now gives a maximum 2.63x (so 30% decay) compared to 6x previously (0% decay).
    • With a character of base mana 100, that gives the following progression: 100,150,185,210,227,239,247,253,257,260,262,263
  • Cumulatively, these changes do help to encourage players to choose characters with base stats that somewhat mirror what they want the final stats to be -- because the changes you can make to a given character are somewhat less extreme, although still really notable. The penalty for diversification is also a lot less now compared to what it was, but the penalty for stacking everything into one stat is now a penalty of effectiveness rather than of cost.

• Mana upgrades have been the least useful of the three kinds of stat upgrades for a while. Part of that is because most of the really high-mana-cost spells that we have planned are not yet in the game. So some of that is just a matter of intent for later stuff.
  • However, to address this imbalance in general, we made it so that mana upgrades also simultaneously upgrade mana regen rates. Normally all characters have a flat 83.3 regen rate for mana unless they have had some mana upgrades via upgrade stones; given that upgrade stones are the only way to increase mana regen, that makes this suddenly a lot more interesting.
  • Applying 10 mana upgrades now gives a maximum 1.3x bonus to mana regen (so 10% decay on 1 5% boost per increase) compared to 0x previously.
    • So the progression for any character is: 83.3,87.3,91.3,94.3,97.3,100.3,103.3,105.3,107.3,109.3,110.3,112.3.

• The logic for how you find upgrade stones has been changed up somewhat:
  • Places that previously dropped 8 upgrade stones now drop 5. Places that dropped 16 now drop 10.
    • Except in the intro mission, where the caches of 8 are now caches of 50, and the caches of 16 are now caches of 100. This lets players explore these mechanics a lot more right in the intro mission.
  • Places that previously dropped 4 upgrade stones now drop 5, and those that previously dropped 3 now drop 1.
  • Now when you kill a miniboss, you get 5 upgrade stones. When you kill a microboss you get 1.

• Thanks to Purlox, TechSY730, Terraziel, martyn_van_buren, khadgar, GUDare, Penumbra, MouldyK, zebramatt, madcow, jordot42, Drjones013, KingIsaacLinksr, LintMan, and bvchaosinc for weighing in on how upgrade stones should be balanced. Ultimately we pulled something a bit out of the hat on this one, but it incorporates ideas from a lot of things being tossed around in the (long) discussions. Thanks all!

Overhaul to Elite Monsters

• Elites are no longer associated with any unlocks.

• Instead, the game starts with no elites being eligible for seeding, but as CP increases the overlord gets "escalation" points which can then be spent on "elite upgrades". Right now that means randomly picking an elite type for which the prequisite base monster type (and, for higher elites, the preceeding lower elite type) are already eligible for seeding.
  • These picks only apply to that specific continent.
  • Each overlord starts with 800 * (continent's number - 1) escalation, so the "overall complexity" doesn't go down as you go to the next continent, but the elite picks are "reshuffled" so you won't see the same elite types there (unless there's enough points to pick all of them, but that will become increasingly unlikely as we add more elite types).

• Elite upgrades no longer cause 100% of the base monster type to be seeded as the highest available elite upgrade for that monster type.
  • Instead, if an upgrade is available, there's a random chance of it being applied per monster, according to tier:
    • Tier 1: 20%.
    • Tier 2: 30%.
    • Tier 3: 40%.
    • Tier 4: 50%.
    • Tier 5: 60%.
  • If the upgrade happens, and a higher upgrade is available, the roll is made again. So on tier 1 with both Frost Leaper and Frost Hurler available an Icicle Leaper has an 80% chance to be an Icicle Leaper, a 16% chance to be a Frost Leaper, and a 4% chance to be a Frost Hurler. On Tier 5 the chances are 40%, 24%, and 36%.

Clamping The Ranges Of Player Spells To Avoid Abuse

• Player spells now have a "maximum distance to live" as well as a maximum time to live.
  • This means that spells can only travel so far before disappearing, as well as only lasting so long (since some spells can sit near one location for a while if they are moving slowly against a wall, the time to live is also still important).
  • This also means that enchants that improve the speed of spells don't also increase the distance the spells are able to travel -- it just improves the speed of how fast the spell gets to their maximum distance.
  • In general, being able to kite enemies from very far off screen was something that some of our new players were taking extreme advantage of; and it also created a major disadvantage for those playing on smaller monitors. Now the playing field is more level.
  • Thanks to Bluddy and bvchaosinc for suggesting.

• Specific changes to spell "maximum distance to live" are as follows:
  • Most long-ranged spells now travel for 800px.
  • Splashback and flameout now travel for 600px.
  • Miasma Whip: 224
  • Leafy whip: 320
  • Meteors, rocks, and ice blocks: 1000px.

• The effective range and time to live of the gold boomerang have both been toned down.

Beta 1.001 Arrival Of The Elites

(Released April 25th, 2012)

• Updated the Left-Handed controls preset to correct some duplicate bindings.
  • Thanks to Drjones013 for submitting these.

• Fixed bug where bear traps were not colliding with monsters (and thus weren't good for much).
  • Thanks to freykin for reporting.

• Changed all previous uses of Unity's built-in debug logging to our custom logging to avoid the consequence of Unity's build-in debug logging where the logged strings stay in the program's unmanaged memory until the program closes, and thus can eventually cause out-of-memory errors. This was really rare but it could happen, and now it will be less likely (there are still things that Unity logs itself using its own logging method, we can't change that).
  • Thanks to LintMan for reporting one of the rare cases where this actually became a problem.

• MP: fixed a null exception that could occur on the server if a mission's time-to-expire had elapsed and one of the connected players was in the deep-sea between continents at the time.
  • Thanks to Wanderer and Toll for reporting.

• World map mission seeding (no effect on or consideration for secret missions or missions spawned by powers) now won't seed the exact same mission type if it already accounts for 1/3rd or more of the currently available world map missions on that continent.
  • The idea is to keep your from being stuck too much with a type of mission you don't like as much and then having to wait.

• The Use Mouse Ability 1-7 keybinds are now again visible on the Abilities tab of the View/Edit Controls window so that you can change them (this is necessary if you want to unbind mouse button 4 or 5 or something like that).
  • They can only take mouse buttons, and cannot take keyboard or gamepad input.
  • The keybinds for mouse ability 8-10 are still gone because Unity can only recognize the first 7 mouse buttons in any event.
  • Thanks to Precog for pointing out a case we had missed where rebinding these is actually necessary.

Rejiggered Anachronism Missions

• Now in anachronism missions you don't lose if you kill a native monster, but if they take damage that damage is redirected to you instead (they take none).
  • If you attack a monster and it reflects damage to you, it also starts pulsing red so that you have a constant reminder not to attack it again.
  • This makes the anachronisms a lot less "black and white" in terms of losing the puzzle of them. If you attack the natives too much then you'll wind up killing yourself with your own damage; but aside from that you can't accidentally lose the mission by attacking the wrong enemy anymore.

• To ease new players into the Fix The Anachronism missions more, the following opt-out popup now appears when you go into the staging area of any such mission:
  • You've just entered a "Fix The Anachronism" mission. Kill all monsters from other time periods while the natives whale away at you; if you attack the natives, they'll start flashing red and reflect your damage back at you.
  • This mission isn't about memorization! You can see how many anachronistic monsters remain, and you can test monsters to see if they reflect your damage back at you.
  • Combine those two facts with your powers of deduction to solve the puzzle instead. Deduction is always more fun than memorization, anyway!

• "Fix The Anachronism" missions: Fixed a bug where a monster from the same time period but not "native" to that particular region type would not be counted in the "remaining monsters to kill" total but would also not cause mission failure if killed. They now count as native in both cases (though killing a native no longer causes failure, as noted above).
  • An example of that abandoned-town regions are from the same time period as ocean shallows (not ocean, though), so a sea worm is actually "native" in an abandoned-town anachronism mission.
  • Thanks to Kemeno for the report.

• Fixed a bug that was preventing proper death-processing for non-native monsters in anachronism missions.

Two New Enemies

• New Enemy: Explosive Esper.
  • Like other espers, but fire-elemental.
  • Shoots a smaller, faster fire-shot compared to what most other espers do. This one still pierces, but explodes on impact with grounds and walls instead of sliding along them, which is helpful.
  • Massive explosion on death, which is not so helpful.

• New Enemy: Ice Esper.
  • Like water esper, but hurls chunks of ice instead (faster, but arc with gravity).

Twelve New Elite Enemies

• New Elite Enemy: "Frost Leaper":
  • Unlocked by killing 80 Icicle Leapers.
  • Once unlocked, newly generated Icicle Leapers become Frost Leapers instead.
  • Are like Icicle Leapers except that they apply a slowing frost effect (like Ice Bats) when they hit you.

• New Elite Enemy: "Frost Hurler":
  • Unlocked by killing 160 Icicle Leapers (note that killing a Frost Leaper or any other elite monster "counts" as if you'd killed one of the "base" monster).
  • Once unlocked, newly generated Icicle Leapers become Frost Hurlers instead.
  • Are like Frost Leapers except that they can periodically hover in midair briefly and then throw a lump of ice at you.

• New Elite Enemy: "Skelebot Brawler":
  • Unlocked by killing 80 Skelebot Grunts.
  • Once unlocked, newly generated Skelebot Grunts become Skelebot Brawlers instead.
  • Are like Skelebot Grunts except that they can periodically fire a longer-ranged version of the player's Ice Cross.

• Added New Elite upgrade to Skelebot Sniper: Skelebot Tri-Elementalist.
  • Unlocks when 80 Skelebot Snipers have been killed.
  • In addition to the normal sniper's Flame Pulse spell, these can cast Water Drill and Lightning Cloud.

• Added New Elite upgrade to Skelebot Sniper: Skelebot Hex-Elementalist.
  • Unlocks when 160 Skelebot Snipers have been killed.
  • In addition to the Skelebot Tri-Elementalist's spells, these can cast Luminance Sine, a green-elemental burst, and Miasma Missile.

• Added New Elite upgrade to Rhino: Magma Rhino.
  • Unlocked when 80 Rhinos have been killed.
  • Has 75% Fire resistance instead of 75% Earth resistance.
  • Leaves a huge trail of explosions behind it (like Urban Predator flame).
  • Explodes when killed.

• Added New Elite upgrade to Skelebot Dwarf: Skelebot Kneecapper.
  • Unlocked when 80 Skelebot Dwarves have been killed.
  • Instead of always firing a single ring of explosions at a roughly 300-unit radius, it fires either 2 rings at 300-radius and 200-radius, or 2 rings at 200-radius and 100-radius.

• Added New Elite upgrade to Bat: Sonic Bat.
  • Unlocked when 80 Bats have been killed.
  • Has a ranged sonic (air-elemental) attack.

• Added New Elite upgrade to Bat: Sonic Screamer.
  • Unlocked when 160 Bats have been killed.
  • Has the Sonic Bat's sonic attack.
  • On melee-hit, increases the target's cooldowns by 10% for 10 seconds (stacks as separate effects).

• Added New Elite upgrade to Fire Bat: Flame Bat.
  • Unlocked when 80 Fire Bats have been killed.
  • Has a ranged fire attack (that has the same fire-damage-over-time effect as the bat's melee attack).

• Added New Elite upgrade to Ice Bat: Frost Bat.
  • Unlocked when 80 Ice Bats have been killed.
  • Has a ranged ice attack (that has the same movement-slowing effect as the bat's melee attack).

• Added New Elite upgrade to Dust Storm: Repulsive Dust Storm.
  • Unlocked when 80 Dust Storms have been killed.
  • Repels nearby projectiles (basically it's the inverse of the will-o-wisp's gravity well, but only applies to spell projectiles).

Previous Release Notes

AVWW - Beta Series 3 Release Notes