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

Lightning Scepter / Arcane Wand Changes
• Lightning Scepter now only makes you fly while already in the air so you can fire it while on the ground without getting lifted up
  
• Removed the velocity cap when floating with the Lightning Scepter. This should make it easier to air dodge
  
• Added a delay before the floating happens in the air with the Lightning Scepter. This should make your initial jump / launch feel much smoother instead of jankily losing all momentum as soon as you fired which felt jarring
  
• Lighting Scepter no longer lifts enemies into the air as it could actually create more dangerous situations for you as they were able to still fire in that position
  
• Improved Lightning Scepter projectile visuals to make it harder to lose track of them when a lot is going on or against bright backgrounds
  
• Reworked the lob shot formula (used on Arcane Wand and Lightning Scepter) to make it easier to hit targets that are nearby rather than projectiles sailing over their heads
  
• Increased Lightning Scepter and Arcane Wand projectile speeds by 25% (this combined with the lob change above should make these weapons feel much more comfortable to use)
  
  
  General Changes
• Shop prices were feeling too high and have been reduced across the board: Legendary cost reduced by 23%, Epic cost reduced by 32% and Common cost reduced by 10%. Greed loot now costs the same as Epic loot (previously Greed cost more than Epic)
  
• Added a guaranteed health related piece of loot to every shop
  
• Increased the amount of fire stacks before rapid stack falloff happens from 100 to 250 (this makes early game fire builds much more effective as the rapid falloff takes more stacks to activate)
  
• Reduced the speed at which fire and poison stacks rapidly fall off by 50%. This is a nice buff to late game fire builds and poison builds in general as the stacks won’t be reduced as fast
  
• Scavenger pickup radius increased by 33% and lifetime increased from 8 to 10 seconds
  
• Chance for enemies to resurrect with the Resurrecting Enemies modifier active reduced from 15% to 10% to reduce tedium
  
• Enemy damage was feeling too high on islands past the diamond victory threshold (Island 56+) so it has been reduced by 50%
  
• Enemy projectile prediction is once again less accurate while you are aiming. This is in response to a common bit of feedback that enemies were feeling frustratingly accurate and the previous aiming tech used to dodge attacks was much harder to pull off
  
• Most enemies that leap horizontally do so 33% less in order to feel less random and more grounded when fighting them
  
• Significantly reduced the amount of music volume reduction that happens when certain other sounds play (like explosions or gunshots)
  
• Made several changes to improve quickplay search variety and to prevent stalemates when joining invalid sessions repeatedly
  
• Added optimizations and limits to how many air strike explosion VFX can be visible at once to improve framerate and visual clarity. Also shortened the length of these VFX so they aren’t blocking your view for as long
  
• Added an extra explanation to the Anvil portal description explaining why sometimes players in multiplayer get Random chests instead of anvils as there was some confusion there (they need to have an enhanceable piece of loot, otherwise getting an anvil would be useless for them)
  
• Crystals now get auto collected 1 second faster- just makes the game feel more responsive instead of the double take of “wait do I need to collect them myself?” happening
  
  
  Balance Changes
• All ranged enemies cost 33% more to spawn. This means fewer situations where you are getting spammed by too many projectile enemies at once
  
• All large enemies move 25% slower (other than Elites as you are often facing them in a 1v1 situation)
  
• Grubs cost 100% more to spawn. This means less Grub spam!
  
• Pumpkin and Elite Pumpkin projectile speeds reduced by 20%
  
• Sniper Crabs now have a longer time between shots to feel less spammy
  
• Lightning Ant health reduced by 15%
  
• Critical Blast damage increased from 35 to 40
  
• Power Armor damage per plate increased from +12% to +15% to bring it in line with Damage Combo
  
• Imploding Explosion damage increased from +33% to +50% and the downside reduced from -20% radius to -15% radius
  
• Big Ability downside increased from -3% ability movement speed to -8%. This is still way lower than it was before, it was reduced drastically to iron out a bug and I forgot to increase it again during the beta
  
• Heat Sink and Ability Ring now apply multiplicatively (similar to Blender). This is a nice buff especially in combination with Iron Explosion
  
• Streamer Loot is now 25% less likely to upgrade from Common all the way to Legendary as it was happening quite often. Chance to upgrade from Common to Epic is unchanged
  
• Air Strike was outclassing most other abilities in terms of damage so the base damage has been reduced from 750 to 600 (this is still the equivalent damage of throwing 4 grenades at once!)
  
• Black Hole tick damage increased from 4 to 8
  
• Electro Globe tick damage and ending explosion damage increased by 500%
  
• Marksman Rifle projectile spacing slightly adjusted
  
  
  Bug Fixes
• Fixed Leap Of Faith dealing fall damage after hammer slams
  
• Fixed lag that could happen with spark and homing blade projectiles when enhanced with targeting or expanding enhancements
  
• Fixed Overspill Goblet not calculating damage correctly (it now calculates multiplicatively like Critical Thinking meaning a big buff compared to before which was accidentally additive)
  
• Fixed not being able to parry energy rings or barrel explosions

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

NEW WEAPON: LIGHTNING SCEPTER


NEW ABILITY: AIR STRIKE


NEW MELEE WEAPON: KATANA


ARCANE WAND REWORK


ANVILS


NEW ENEMIES



Anvil Portal (Enhancements 2.0)

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

Health 2.0

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

GENERAL

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

GENERAL BALANCE CHANGES

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

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

WEAPON BALANCE CHANGES

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

WEAPON MOD BALANCE CHANGES

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

ABILITY BALANCE CHANGES

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

ABILITY MOD BALANCE CHANGES

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

MELEE WEAPON BALANCE CHANGES

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

MELEE MOD BALANCE CHANGES

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

PERK BALANCE CHANGES

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

RELIC BALANCE CHANGES

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

ENEMY BALANCE CHANGES

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

QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES

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

BUG FIXES

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

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

NEW WEAPON: ICE STAFF



NEW ABILITY: ELECTRO GLOBE


NEW MELEE WEAPON: PICKAXE


TURRET REVAMP


INFINITE PEDESTAL


NEW ISLANDS



NEW ENEMY: HORNET


XL TOTEM


NEW ABILITY VISUALS



GENERAL

• Turrets have been reworked, all turret spawning turret perks have been all moved to Ability mods in order to give you agency over when and where to spawn them as in the previous system they often spawned outside the map bounds or far away. Turrets now lose health over time but there are ways to extend their lifetime with perks and create infinite turret builds!
  
• Added new infinite shop pedestal type: one can be found on every reroll and the loot doesn’t despawn when purchasing, allowing you to invest heavily in one particular piece of loot
  
• Added new enemy: Hornet
  
• Added new enemy: Elite Hornet
  
• Added new enemy: Hammer Crab
  
• Added new enemy: Elite Ramming Grub
  
• Grubs lacked identity so have been reworked to have a ram attack and have been merged with mini grubs
  
• Added new island type: Harvest
  
• Added 1 new Tropical island
  
• Added 2 new Arctic islands
  
• Added 4 new Desert islands and reworked some of the least fun ones
  
• Added 1 new Volcanic island and improved some of the least fun / most cramped existing ones
  
• Added unique shop islands for each biome
  
• Added 5 new songs
  
• Added Tony snoring sounds
  
• Reworked Ice: removed max stack limit, enemies now take all stacks as damage when thawing and thawing now automatically happens a short time after freezing
  
• Added 23 new achievements: Abilities and Melee Weapons can now earn medals just like Weapons can
  
• Added new inventory category: Melee Mods
  
• The following Perks have been moved to be Melee Mods: Vampire, Big Claws, Sharp Claws, Iron Claws, Blender, Ice Claws, Fire Claws, Brawler
  
• Added new Melee Mods: Lightning Claws and Poison Claws
  
• Added new weapon mod: Pumpkin Shot: Chance to lob explosive pumpkins along with your shots
  
• Added new ability mod: Bounce Explosion: Abilities gain bounces and explode on each bounce
  
• Added new ability mod: Heat Sink: Ability cooldowns reduced
  
• Added new ability mod: Landmine Explosion: Abilities spawn landmines when exploding
  
• Landmine base damage increased from 33 to 75 (as it is affected by damage falloff)
  
• Added new perk: Lingering Fumes: Enemies apply existing poison stacks to nearby enemies when eliminated
  
• Added new perk: Poisonous Armor: Poison nearby enemies when breaking enemy armor
  
• Added new perk: Health Is Power: Damage increased by 1% for every 50 health you have
  
• Added new perk: Speed Is Power: Damage increased by 1% for every bonus movement speed % you have
  
• Added new perk: Silver Lining: Damage increased each time you take damage
  
• Added new perk: Lightning Dash: Dashing shocks and knocks back nearby enemies
  
• Added new relic: Turbo Ring: Fire rate increased by 2% after clearing each island
  
• Added new relic: Ring Of Healthy Turrets: Turret health increased by 400%
  
• Added new relic: Twin Ring: All turrets spawn in pairs
  
• Added new greed relic: Ring Of Tankiness: Max health hugely increased but movement speed heavily reduced
  
• Added new relic: Ring Of Wisdom: Critical hit chance increased by 1% after clearing each island
  
• Added new challenge modifier: Icy Enemies: All enemy attacks freeze you
  
• Added new challenge modifier: Twinned Enemies: Enemies spawn in pairs
  
• Added new challenge modifier: Healing Enemies: Enemies heal nearby enemies when eliminated
  
• Added new challenge modifier: Landmine Rain: Landmines rain down from the sky at random
  
• Many new VFX and sounds added to replace placeholder content
  
• The number of physics crowns in the lobby now match the wins of the hosting player
  
• Added 3 new skins: Chrome, Vampire and Heat
  
• Greatly reduced bandwidth when there is a lot going on in multiplayer games by combining damage events that happen in a short space of time together. This has the side effect of crits behaving slightly differently- if you land a shotgun blast on an enemy all at the same time, critical hits will be rolled on the total damage dealt, not per pellet. With this change you should no longer get kicked from a game due to too much going on. Also cases where you go down to 1 FPS due to a lot happening at once should be much rarer
  
• Enemies get knocked around less in general: I’ve made many tweaks here but in general you’ll notice enemies feel more “solid” and in place, allowing for more consistent and focused damage to be dealt to groups of enemies especially with abilities
  
• Perks like Juggernaut or Up The Ante now affect Elite and Boss islands- each 100% extra enemies reached spawns an extra boss / elite
  
• Hazard damage areas (fire, ice, poison) now only apply their effects when actually landed on the ground and stepping in them to prevent less cases where damage is taken in mid air which could often feel cheap. Lightning damage areas function the same for now as they don’t deal damage and just slow you down
  
• AOE explosions now have damage falloff to deepen the combat feel. Previously if an enemy was even slightly touching the outer radius of an explosion, they’d receive full damage so there was no real incentive to aim your abilities- it’s now much more satisfying to line up and directly hit enemies with your grenade and other explosions. This in turn also makes incoming damage from enemies more fair- if you dodge an enemy attack but are very slightly still in the hitbox, you’ll receive far less damage than before. The only AOE damage type that does not get affected by this falloff is melee as it felt bad to lose damage if not right next to an enemy
  
• Salvaging pickups now always gives 50% of the pickup cost even when the Expensive Shops modifier is active (previously it only gave 33% of the value)
  
• Shop prices on all difficulties are now closer (as on Easy they were cheaper than intended and on Ultra Chaos they were a bit too expensive)
  
• Shop prices are 5% cheaper per player in multiplayer (previously they were 20% more expensive per player, now are 15% more expensive per player)
  
• Added new “Arcanifying” enhancement (I will find a better name for this later)
  
• Added new “Targeting” enhancement (works like Targeting shot but for enhanced projectiles)
  
• Added rarities to Enhancements and removed Spiraling and Chaotic enhancements as they were pretty much debuffs
  
• Improved enhancement filtering to make it impossible to roll freezing on Fireball Shot or homing on Homing Shot for example
  
• Enhancement Totem price decreased and is 50% less likely to explode on use
  
• Valued Customer now works when using the Enhancement Totem

GENERAL BALANCE CHANGES

• 3 portals spawn by default on multi choice islands making it easier to counter the feeling of bad RNG
  
• Runs are now counted as wins even if you get eliminated when looping- this means you can see how far your build can go without risking losing a victory stat / rank
  
• The number of islands per biome has been reduced from 8 to 7 for pacing reasons (5 combat islands, 1 shop and 1 elite / boss)
  
• Turret spawning perks have been moved from the Damage to the Skill loot pool (other than Fire Turret and Poison Turret which are staying in the Elemental loot pool)
  
• Sentry Turret fire rate doubled
  
• Mortar Turret damage doubled
  
• Poison Turret poison stacks increased from 10 to 100
  
• Enhanced Turrets turret damage increased from +75% to +100%
  
• Turrets no longer block projectiles which means no more situations where you have a big cluster of turrets that are all blocking each other and end up dealing no damage
  
• All damage dealing greed perks are now multiplicative instead of additive: this is indicated by the “global damage multiplier” keyword being used. This includes Brawler which previously only added a flat damage % rather than multiplying the total melee damage multiplier
  
• Crystal scaling has been rebalanced to scale up way less sharply (which means shops break much later and prices in general are lower and easier to memorize)
  
• Crystals visually dropped by enemies matches the amount you pick up (so bonus crystals are much more satisfying visually)
  
• The Rush blessing goal is now shared by teammates to make it easier to achieve in multiplayer
  
• Reroll totem cost has been halved in the first shop you visit
  
• Totems now only explode when you’ve gotten a buff from them at least once (excluding Glass and Fuse totems being destroyed by damage or time)
  
• Loot totems now cost 25% of your health (up from 20%)
  
• Crystal totems now cost 25% of your health (up from 10%)
  
• Crystal bundles can no longer be salvaged (only because it didn’t make sense to do it)
  
• Starting health reduced from 300 to 150. Keeping the early game feeling dangerous is part of what makes these kinds of games fun- having 300 health just meant that the first biome often felt overly safe especially now that I've made the early game easier
  
• Reduced demolition nest starting health and loop health scaling
  
• Bananas have been removed from the game for now (in the beta I tried removing the heals from hearts (so they only gave max health) and people still chose them over bananas so now hearts just heal AND give max health)
  
• Gold totems can no longer spawn hearts or armor
  
• Crystal totem chance to explode increased from 25% to 50% as it was possible to go on very long streaks of gaining crystals which could break the balance of the game- still possible now but less likely
  
• Mirrored Projectiles no longer trigger from damage over time damage or ability damage as they could spam projectiles
  
• Increased elimination requirements for the Rush blessing on Horde islands so that they are an actual challenge
  
• Bronze Hearts now give 100 max health (down from 125) and Gold Hearts now give 500 max health (down from 650). Silver hearts are unchanged
  
• Adjusted locked slot unlock cost scaling to be cheaper
  
• Halved the amount of fire stacks applied to you when stepping in lava on the Volcanic biome

WEAPON BALANCE CHANGES

• Auto Rifle damage increased from 5 to 8
  
• Auto Rifle projectile speed increased by 400% to feel more “hitscan” and responsive
  
• Dual Pistols damage increased from 5 to 6
  
• Burst Pistol damage increased from 6 to 8
  
• Orb Launcher weapon mod trigger multiplier increased to match what the Auto Rifle has
  
• Orb Launcher mag size increased from 36 to 42
  
• Sniper fire rate increased by 25%
  
• Minigun damage increased from 2 to 3
  
• Flamethrower spread heavily reduced
  
• Flamethrower range increased
  
• Flamethrower level of the starting Fire Shot mod has been increased from 2 to 4, making it much more consistent to fight flying enemies instead of relying on the fire areas below
  
• Rocket Launcher damage increased from 35 to 50 (to help counter the new radial damage falloff a bit- direct hits will now be more rewarding)
  
• Arcane Wand explosion radius increased by 75%
  
• Laser Cannons damage increased from 2 to 3
  
• Marksman Rifle was feeling underwhelming to many people so I made a few changes: no more scope, new crosshair, damage increased from 8 to 12 per bullet and fire rate reduced slightly

WEAPON MOD BALANCE CHANGES

• Targeting Shot now acts as a copy of your main shot and can trigger on hit weapon mods
  
• Torpedo Shot damage increased from 100 to 250
  
• Triangle Shot damage increased from 100 to 200
  
• Steady Shot damage increased from +50% to +75% when aiming
  
• Money Shot crystal gain per shot hit reduced from 4 to 1 (still a big buff due to new crystal scaling)
  
• Rapid Fire fire rate buffed from +10% to +12%
  
• Light Shot fire rate buffed from +15% to +20%
  
• Health Shot cooldown increased from 1 to 2 seconds
  
• Spike Strike damage increased from 50 to 300 and cooldown reduced from 4 seconds to 1 second
  
• Firework Shot / Explosion projectile damage increased from 30 to 50 and I’ve made them move 50% less chaotically so you can more reliably aim them
  
• Spore Shot and Spore Explosion mushroom damage increased from 25 to 75
  
• Shotgun Blast damage increased per pellet from 10 to 32 and projectile lifetime increased by 33%
  
• Ice Strike cooldown reduced from 10 to 5 seconds
  
• Removed unused debuffs so Random Shot will be more effective

ABILITY BALANCE CHANGES

• Grenade damage increased from 75 to 150
  
• Ice Blast direct impact damage radius increased from 0 to 7.5m
  
• Ice Blast ice stacks per tick increased from 25 to 40
  
• Ice Blast projectiles themselves now freeze enemies (not just the lingering damage area)
  
• Since ability damage mods scale ice stacks on Ice Blast, I’ve reduced the ice stacks it applies from 40 to 25
  
• Ability Ring cooldown reduction reduced from -75% to -50% (now that Heatsink is a thing)
  
• Black Holes no longer knock landmines and barrels away (making them an anti synergy) and instead suck them in along with the other enemies
  
• Improved Black Hole suction logic so that enemies will no longer overshoot the black hole center, making it hard to actually aim at them
  
• Increased Black Hole damage per tick from 3 to 5

ABILITY MOD BALANCE CHANGES

• Clone Explosion now properly triggers ALL ability mods as if you had thrown another grenade leading to much more fun combos (especially when building into turrets)
  
• Removed cooldowns from ALL ability mods other than Ultra Mushroom (cooldown reduced from 9 to 4 seconds) and Crystal Barrage (cooldown reduced from 4 to 1 seconds)
  
• Firework Explosion cooldown reduced from 8 seconds to 3 seconds
  
• Bomb Explosion cooldown reduced from 6 seconds to 3 seconds
  
• Energy Ring damage per hit increased from 3 to 10
  
• Ultra Mushroom damage increased from 50 to 200
  
• Removed boring / underwhelming ability mods (Heavy Grenade, Spiral Grenade, Snake Grenade)

MELEE WEAPON BALANCE CHANGES

• Hammer now works as expected and won’t deal damage until hitting the ground rather than always dealing damage after a set delay
  
• Hammer damage increased from 100 to 125
  
• Dagger now slightly knocks back enemies
  
• Claw damage increased from 30 to 50 and knockback strength doubled
  
• Melee damage now triggers sooner in the claw and dagger animations, allowing them to be reliably spammed with high levels of Blender (you should now be able to actually turn into a blender)
  
• You are now briefly immune to damage when on a downwards slam with the hammer or pickaxe
  
• Melee VFX now uses the correct tint of the melee weapon / debuff used

PERK BALANCE CHANGES

• Ice Cube, Oil Can, Metal Rod and Poison Vial (perks that increase damage to enemies with a specific debuff active) have now all been consolidated to a new perk: Elemental Expert: Damage increased to enemies based on the number of unique debuffs (fire, poison, lightning etc.) applied to them
  
• Reworked Icebreaker: Ice damage is dealt to nearby enemies (each level increases radius)
  
• All ice perk debuff stacks buffed (mostly doubled from their previous values)
  
• Amber Resin healing amount buffed from +25% to +50% to make it a more reliable way to scale healing
  
• Grim Reaper now heals for a % of your max health instead of flat healing
  
• Hot Steam damage increased from 50 to 300
  
• Critical Thinking damage reduced from +33% to +25% (as this is a global crit damage multiplier it is still very effective)
  
• Sonic Boom knockback increased by 250%
  
• Sonic Boom damage radius increased by 50%
  
• Sonic Boom damage increased from 20 to 200 but cooldown increased from 2 to 5 seconds
  
• Shockwave damage increased from 15 to 50 but cooldown increased from 3 to 8 seconds
  
• Slugger damage and radius increased from +33% to +100%
  
• Damage Aura damage increased from 3 to to 25 and radius doubled but damage falloff means you need to get close to enemies to deal that full 25 damage
  
• Exploding Enemies, Freezing Enemies, Flammable Enemies, Electric Enemies and Poisonous Enemies base radius increased by 20% and cooldowns reduced from 3 to 1 seconds
  
• Exploding Enemies damage increased from 50 to 300
  
• Fire Aura, Ice Aura, Lightning Aura and Poison Aura damage increased from 15 to 50
  
• Crystal Combo and Damage Combo now count 1x combo so you get a benefit from them even if you aren’t currently at a higher combo than 1x
  
• Power Armor damage per armor plate increased from 10% to 12%
  
• Big Hearts max health gain decreased from +100% to +75%
  
• Bonus Crystals crystal gain increased from +33% to +40%
  
• Sharp Claws damage increased from +50% to +100% to bring it more in line with Damage Shot / Damage Explosion
  
• Sturdy Totems has been moved up to Epic rarity but now works PER totem rather than a confusing per island limit. There’s one caveat here: in multiplayer the totem will compare number of times it has been used to your sturdy buff so if 4 players all have Sturdy Totems level 5 and one teammate uses the totem 5 times, you won’t be able to use it another 5 times. Also this change fixes Sturdy Totems not working on totems when you find it in a chest on the same island as a totem and try to get the extra use
  
• Rigged Totems has been removed (as it only affected 3 totem types (Health, Chance and Gamble) and wasted a perk slot) but these totems are now affected by Ring Of Luck to compensate
  
• Poison on enemies has been capped at 250 stacks but they decay half as fast and this cap can be increased by the Toxic perk
  
• Cursed Lottery has been removed for now as it is an easy win due to the infinite shop pedestals
  
• Double Edged Sword / Gold Coating have been removed from the loot pool for now as they break the game due to the new crystal scaling
  
• Up The Ante damage increased from +20% to +25% but additional enemies spawned increased from +15% to +20%
  
• Juggernaut max health increased from +50% to +75% but additional enemies spawned increased from +15% to +20%
  
• Powerslide damage increased from 2 to 5 and fire stacks per hit doubled
  
• Driller chance to spawn bonus loot increased from 4% to 5%
  
• Equalizer simplified as the wording was confusing
  
• Iron Claws damage increased from 150% to 300% and the downside reduced from -50% to -40%
  
• Removed perks that were bloating the loot pool / not unique enough to be interesting: Nourishing Salvage, Finishing Move and Healthy Combo

RELIC BALANCE CHANGES

• Relic slots increased from 6 to 8
  
• Relic chest portals have double the chance to show up compared to before
  
• Ring Of Power is now multiplicative instead of additive
  
• Ring Of Precision is now multiplicative instead of additive
  
• Ring Of Destruction no longer works on friendly destructibles (mushrooms, barrels, landmines etc.)
  
• Crystal Dividends has been moved to a relic: Ring Of Dividends: Gain 10% of your total crystals as a bonus after clearing each island
  
• Red Fury has been moved to a relic: Ring Of Fury: Global damage multiplier increased by 50% for 5 seconds after eliminating an enemy (Note that previously it was a non global damage multiplier so this is a big buff and will scale with your run)
  
• Adrenaline has been moved to a relic: Adrenaline Amulet: Fire rate increased by 33% for 5 seconds after eliminating an enemy
  
• Reinforced has been moved to a relic: Ring Of Reinforcement: Gain two extra armor plates each time you pick up armor
  
• Regenerating Armor has been moved to a relic: Ring Of Regenerating Armor: Gain an armor plate at the start of each island
  
• Ring Of Luck trigger chance reduced from 100% to 75% (so that Health totems won’t be guaranteed due to the change to how Sturdy Totems works)
  
• Ring Of Gravity rarity increased from Epic to Legendary

ENEMY BALANCE CHANGES

• Simplified Ant attacks so that you can reliably predict what they will do: Red Ants now always do single projectile attacks and Poison Ants now always fire in an arc
  
• Simplified Purple Skull attacks so that they always do a triple shot (before they also had a single shot attack that could last longer than anticipated / the animation implied)
  
• Blocker Skulls now shoot a double shot instead of an X shot to reduce projectile spam
  
• Enemies now respect their spawn limits so no more situations where multiple Elite Pumpkins spawn on a single island
  
• Bosses now only reduce debuff stacks (like fire or poison) by 25% instead of 50% previously, making elemental builds more effective against them
  
• Melee crabs are more aggressive up close and swipe more frequently
  
• Ice crabs are now slippy
  
• Purple Skull projectile speed increased by 25%
  
• Scorpion health increased by 33%
  
• Elite Poison Grub now summons mini grubs in addition to the regular lesser grub enemies
  
• Elite Poison Grub slam attack now spawns 3 energy rings instead of 1
  
• Elite Poison Grub projectile damage areas reworked: they now deal no damage but apply more poison stacks when stepping into them
  
• Elite Barrel Skull attacks adjusted to be a bit more varied
  
• Enemy barrels in general were underwhelming so their explosion radius has increased by about 33% to be more dangerous (you can use this increased radius to your advantage too as barrel explosions hurt enemies too, just don’t stand too close!)
  
• Improved homing barrel logic to be able to continue tracking players when losing line of sight
  
• Enemy sizes adjusted (many harder enemies are now larger and easier to hit)
  
• Crabs that do launching attacks have double the wind up time, giving more time to react
  
• Elite Fire Crab / Elite Ice Skull launch attack radius lowered by 20%
  
• Reduced Elite Lightning Crab health slightly to bring it in line with the other elites
  
• Enemy health on Horde islands starts off lower so the first few waves are easier
  
• Damage reduction for elites and bosses when looping with the Unfair Bosses modifier active has been reduced from 30 seconds to 20 seconds (so it wears off faster)
  
• Increased the spawn cost of pumpkins, poison ants and regular red ants so that they’ll spawn in slightly lower numbers
  
• Red Challenge Crystals can now spawn more than 1 type of enemy at once
  
• Enemies now take 200% more damage from hazards (so lining them up around barrels, rocks and explosive enemies is more rewarding)
  
• Fewer enemies spawn on the first 3 biomes (non looping) for better pacing as it could feel like a bit of a slog before runs got going. This also nicely increases the contrast as the runs get more and more chaotic as time goes on
  
• Fire, Ice and Poison Slugs no longer leave trails of their debuff behind when moving as this was the main source of bad performance when multiple were on screen at once. Their on death damage areas now last a bit longer (from 5 to 8 seconds) to compensate
  
• Improved enemy spawns on the ice cave loop island where enemies would often get stuck on the left side
  
• Grenade Crab projectile speed and explosion radius slightly increased (they were overly nerfed before and should be a threatening enemy)
  
• Launcher Crabs now have worse aim but fire a triple shot instead of a double shot
  
• Enemy fire damage area lifetimes have been reduced from 6 seconds to 4 seconds so it should be much less likely to run into situations where the entire ground is covered in fire
  
• Removed damage cap on all Elite and Boss enemies that prevented them taking more than 15% of their max health in a single shot
  
• Enemies that are immune to ice (Elites and Bosses) now take full ice damage but can continue moving and attacking as usual
  
• Enemy health increase per horde wave increased from +10% to +25% (ideally on longer hordes they can actually be overwhelming)
  
• Enemy crystal rewards on Horde islands are based on their original max health to keep Horde islands balanced while still allowing for huge amounts of enemies to spawn
  
• Ants now have a longer spawn animation to give you more time to react before they start attacking
  
• Barrel Skull projectiles that spawn barrels no longer deal 1 damage- no more ruined flawless challenges!
  
• Added new sounds for Starfish to improve their telegraphing and slightly increased their damage radius

QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES

• You can now drop crystals for your teammates (finally!)
  
• Adjusted enemy hitboxes to prevent them getting stuck in walls
  
• Projectiles can now be fired in any location (no more weapons invisibly breaking on parkour islands) and the blue barriers around each island will block projectiles (making bouncing shot builds more effective on open islands)
  
• Added some new placeholder totem visuals for the Random, Glass, Gold and Fuse totems to better identify them
  
• Any crystals spawned AFTER an island has been cleared in Ultra Chaos difficulty no longer need to be manually picked up (to prevent boring backtracking to distant destructible rocks)
  
• Friendly energy rings are now green to make it easier to distinguish between friendly and enemy rings
  
• Made a simplified green health bar for turrets to more easily tell them apart from enemies
  
• Changed the Volcanic biome sand to a lighter color to improve visibility
  
• You no longer collide with turrets as they often just got in the way
  
• Added UI to see how many crystals your teammates have. This replaces the score UI text for now, will decide on what to do with that in the future
  
• Breaking destructible rocks / landmines no longer knocks enemies back (this had an anti-synergy with fire rocks as they’d be knocked AWAY from the fire zone)
  
• Lesser projectiles (like Mace Shot) now update their tint if they have an elemental debuff from enhancement totems
  
• Optimized Crimson Haze VFX as they were causing FPS drops on busy islands
  
• Weapon mastery challenges that required Nightmare difficulty now also work when you win on Ultra Chaos
  
• Landmine Shot / Landmine Explosion landmines are now spawned in a much more stable way- no more landmines flying off in random directions and missing the target!
  
• Removed the camera shake that happened when Critical Arrows hit nearby which was very annoying in combination with Damage Aura
  
• You no longer trigger your own landmines by walking near them
  
• Improved parkour spawns and adjusted banana positions for cases where players were sliding under them
  
• Improved barrel physics to be less unstable
  
• Improved cases where enemies took a long time to spawn on certain islands
  
• Reduced interact radius to prevent situations where you’d accidentally enter a portal while choosing chest loot
  
• Increased global projectile limit from 500 to 750 and projectiles are cleaned up 66% faster so it should be harder to reach the projectile cap
  
• You can now stand on top of enemies

BUG FIXES

• Finally fixed the issue that caused non-hosting players to get kicked from multiplayer games when too much was going on at once
  
• Fixed dual wield weapons canceling Pickaxe and Hammer damage when firing at the same time. This will be improved in the future to also work consistently on claw and dagger
  
• Fixed issue that caused you to get eliminated when interacting with spiked chests while poisoned
  
• Fixed some perks exploding barrels when you spawned into an island, dealing unavoidable damage
  
• Fixed issue that caused shop loot to cost 0 crystals when going far enough into a run
  
• Fixed issue that could cause less pickups than usual to appear in chests
  
• Fixed issue that allowed the same relic to spawn in multiple chests on the same island even if you had just picked up that relic in a previous chest
  
• Fixed bug that prevented Auto Loot from working on Rare Treasure / Driller / Boss key pickups when no chests spawned (due to High Roller or similar)
  
• Fixed Steam achievements not completing even if you had the corresponding in game challenge completed already
  
• Fixed auto melee not working when melee cooldown reduction perks were equipped
  
• Fixed big lag spikes that could happen when firing at teammates with piercing weapons such as the flamethrower
  
• Fixed Aura perks not working after you respawned in multiplayer games
  
• Fixed issue that caused terrain to change shape at high FOVs
  
• Fixed Thorn Shot not dealing the full amount of damage advertised as they expired too soon after hitting enemies
  
• Fixed various holes in the borders of different islands that could create softlocks
  
• Fixed not all barrels getting destroyed when islands are cleared
  
• Fixed flickering / disappearing chests when at the edge of the screen
  
• Fixed spore mushrooms not aligning to enemies correctly
  
• Fixed Driller not calculating correctly in multiplayer games- you should see it trigger more consistently now
  
• Added the correct Driller % chance to the inventory UI for multiplayer games (previously it didn’t show the scaled value- shared Driller chance divided by the number of players * 0.5)
  
• Fixed issue that allowed you to parry (block) your own damage areas which made healing trivial with the Ring Of Parrying
  
• Fixed visual bug that prevented turrets from rotating correctly for non hosting players
  
• Fixed Elite Barrel Skull barrels spawning under the ground
  
• Fixed bug that allowed Arcane to crit and deal huge bonus damage in certain situations
  
• Fixed demolition nests having inconsistent amounts of armor plates
  
• Fixed Amber Resin not working with perks like Grim Reaper
  
• Fixed explosions being invisible on Minimal weapon effects setting
  
• Fixed some destructibles like spore and ultra mushrooms being immune to turret damage
  
• Fixed auto looting keys also giving you the salvage crystals for them
  
• Fixed the difficulty UI being cut off on some screen resolutions
  
• Fixed incorrect aura perk inventory descriptions (they now all deal the correct debuff amounts)
  
• Fixed turrets not targeting shielded enemies even after the shields had been broken
  
• Fixed turrets not visually aiming at enemies properly
  
• Fixed issue that caused circular crosshairs to disappear when aiming
  
• Fixed exploit that allowed non-hosting players to farm wins at the victory crown island
  
• Fixed several rare crashes
  
• Fixed several Relic inventory description values not matching up with their actual values
  
• Removed the > 100% resolution quality graphics setting options as they were lowering performance with little to no visual gain

As always thank you so much for playing my game, it's the reason that I'm still here working on it 🦀

Thanks for all the community feedback on the last update- I've made some fixes and improvements based on it! 🦀

General
• Added cactus destructibles to the Desert biome
  
  
  Balance Changes
• Double destructibles (both combat and reward) spawn in the Desert as most islands there are quite open and bare
  
• Totems are both more likely to initially spawn AND are more likely to spawn in groups
  
• Shop prices have been decreased by 25% but scale a bit more sharply when looping (so building into economy becomes more important in the late game but shops are more accessible in the early game). Greed loot now is worth exactly the same as Epic loot
  
• Slippery Slope now scales with each island similar to the Paycheck buff in the previous patch. It gives more than double the amount that Paycheck does so I’ll keep an eye on it in terms of balance. Also added total crystals gained stat for Slippery Slope in the inventory UI
  
• A lot of players have mentioned that they are seeing too many duplicates (loot with a + over it that is something you already have in your inventory) too early on in a run which pollutes chest choices so the initial chance for finding duplicates has been lowered
  
• Armor now gives enemies less health and reduces elemental damage by 50% instead of 75%. This should make fighting heavily armored enemies with elemental builds feel much less tedious
  
• Elemental enemies now take 50% less debuff stacks of that matching element (down from 75% less stacks). This means Fire Crabs or Poison Ants now will feel more consistent to fight with fire / poison builds
  
• Elites now have 25% resistance to elemental debuffs (previously 0% resistance) and Bosses now have 50% resistance (previously 75%). These changes will make elemental builds much more consistent across elite and boss fights, notably the armored ant boss which could take forever if relying on an elemental build
  
• Elemental enemies matching element resistance decreased from -50% to -25%
  
• Previously, enemy attack and movement speed increased by 1% with each island. This didn’t really end up feeling very noticeable so it now is applied per loop instead for a more noticeable jump in challenge (the values are unchanged from before, just applied at a different time)
  
• Scorpion health buffed by 25% (for such an intimidating enemy, they were blown away too fast by most builds- the previous nerf hit them a bit too hard)
  
• Scorpions no longer spawn on the Volcanic biome as there were some islands that felt unfair for them to be on
  
• Scorpions can no longer be shielded
  
• Fire Pumpkins now have a longer time between attacks, making it less likely that the entire floor gets covered with fire
  
• Grub health reduced by 25%
  
• Removed smaller Desert islands from the elite island pool as these could create unfair fights in cramped spaces
  
• Vitality and Second Wind now show if their damage bonus is active or not in the inventory UI
  
• Hitmarker audio lowered further as it was still quite grating when a lot was going on
  
  
  Buffs
• Explosive Armor radius doubled
  
• Flammable Armor radius doubled but fire stacks reduced from 75 to 25 (since the previous patch allowed it to damage the armor owner, it became a bit too strong)
  
• Fire Shot fire stacks increased from 25 to 30
  
• Dual Shotguns damage increased from 5 to 6
  
• Auto Shotgun damage increased from 3 to 4
  
• Rocket Launcher damage increased from 30 to 35
  
• Burst Pistol number of shots per burst increased from 4 to 5 and clip size increased from 24 to 30
  
• Auto Rifle fire rate increased to be more balanced with the other starting weapons
  
  
  Nerfs
• Starting health reduced from 400 to 300 (the mega buff to starting health ended up removing the danger of the first biome, making the early game feel a bit free and making building into health less important)
  
• Similarly, hearts had gotten buffed too much which often made choosing health perks feel like a waste. New values:
  
  
  1. Bronze Heart: From 150 max health down to 125 max health
     
  2. Silver Heart: From 400 max health down to 250 max health
     
  3. Gold Heart: From 1000 max health down to 650 max health
• Due to the way that the Ring Of Precision was calculated, it actually added more critical hit damage than intended so has been reduced from +250% to +150% critical hit damage
  
• Ring Of Defense damage reduction reduced from 50% to 40%
  
• Coral Amulet extra chest pickups reduced from 3 to 2
  
• Tony’s Amulet extra shop options reduced from 6 to 5
  
• Grappling Hook damage reduced by 50% as it was dealing double the damage of the Grenade ability while also providing big movement gains- this melted through elites in the early game and wasn’t intended to be so strong for single target damage
  
  
  Bug Fixes
• Fixed annoying bug that caused Limpets to become invulnerable whenever frozen, leading to dragged out fights in certain cases
  
• Fixed Giant Ant homing attack that could go invisible but still deal damage
  
• Fixed Bouncing Shot incorrectly calculating damage that could lead to millions of damage out of nowhere
  
• Fixed bug that occasionally prevented the Burst Pistol from firing when using Autoloader
  
• Fixed non hosting players not seeing Nest health bars updating correctly
  
• Fixed Glass Totems being destroyed by Aura perks or Powerslide
  
• Fixed Ring Of Rocket Jumping not working with the Cluster Launcher
  
• Fixed issue that could prevent the game launching with Steam correctly which would break multiplayer invites
  
• Fixed various cases where UI text was getting cut off
  
• Removed broken Demolition nest UI counter
  
• Fixed several rare crashes
  
• Fixed longstanding bug that caused totems that dispensed loot or secret chests in shops to have a far greater luck value than intended, leading them to constantly spawn Epic and Legendary loot which could create broken power spikes. Also fixed Driller and Rare Treasure loot drops being influenced by Streamer Loot which only should affect chest loot

Difficulty scaling improvements
• Enemy damage bonus when looping has been removed. There was previously a whopping +100% damage multiplier to all enemy attacks when looping from island 33 onwards which created very unfair situations where enemies would melt your entire health bar in a second, especially with fire. Enemy damage should feel much more fair and consistent when looping while still being a challenge- looping is meant to be quite difficult
  
• Enemy spawn bonus when looping decreased from +33% to +20%
  
• Islands 1 and 2 of a biome no longer can spawn two waves of ranged enemies back to back
  
  These changes should make looping feel far less unfair / punishing while maintaining the challenge
  
  
  Scorpion mega nerf + rebalance
• Scorpion projectile damage reduced by 60%, projectile radius reduced by 33%, projectile speed reduced by 15% and removed projectile bounces. Also reworked their attack patterns to be more dodgeable and less spammy
  
• Increased scorpion walk speed slightly: it should now feel like more of a close / medium range threat and less of a run ender
  
  
  Other changes
• Flamethrower buff- now starts with level 2 Fire Shot (up from level 1)
  
• Rebalanced enhancements: pattern enhancements like Chaotic or Spiraling have less intense motion to make them less likely to miss their target. Enhancement damage increases are +50% damage other than Sticky and Damaging which are +100% (previously Damaging was at +400% which was very broken)
  
• Splitting / Scattering bonus projectiles decreased from 3 to 2 (as it was extremely broken with some combos)
  
• Fixed issue that would cause projectiles created by the Splitting and Scattering enhancement to apply ALL weapon mods to those enhanced projectiles, resulting in extreme damage spikes that weren’t intended
  
• Demolition nests now scale health more with the island count as they became far too easy to destroy past the first biome
  
• Scorpions can now spawn from red challenge crystals

RELICS


ENHANCEMENTS


SNIPER REVAMP


NEW WEAPON: MARKSMAN RIFLE


DESERT BIOME


NEW ISLAND TYPE: DEMOLITION


INVENTORY STATS



GENERAL

• Added 30 Relics to the game. Relics are a new loot category that are found under Perks in your inventory. They can only be picked up once (can't be leveled up like perks) and have powerful effects such as being able to rocket jump. There were quite a few perk ideas that weren't fun to level up but were fun as a once off pickup so this loot category nicely fills in that gap.
  
  
• Added new mechanic: Enhancements: In Tony's shop you'll find an Enhancement totem which allows you to randomly roll powerful enhancements on mods and perks that previously only could be leveled up in a linear way (Dagger Arc, Mace Shot, Bubble Blast etc.). This allows for a fun new layer of buildcrafting and experimentation when at the shop: choosing to buy new loot or instead going for an enhancement
  
• Added new biome: Desert. This has now been added to the biome list per run so the amount of islands per biome has been reduced by 2: 8 islands per biome and 4 biomes per run. 32 islands for a regular victory and 64 islands for a Diamond victory. There are many more unique islands, enemies and songs planned for the desert that'll get added in future updates
  
• Added new enemy: Scorpion
  
• Added new evolved enemy variant: Elite Pumpkin
  
• Added new island type: Demolition: Destroy all enemy nests to complete the island
  
• Added inventory stats (both core stats like Critical Hit Chance and Global Damage as well as per-loot stats for certain perks like Assassin to show how much extra damage has been added by this perk overall)
  
• Added 2 new songs
  
• Added 4 new skins: Kaleidoscopic, Fake Gold, Vibrations and Focus
  
  
• Added 6 new rank related achievements: Silver, Gold, Sapphire, Emerald, Ruby and Diamond. These correspond to your account rank which is based on the average rank of your weapons (so if you have mostly Gold weapons, you’d most likely have a Gold account rank). There have been a lot of requests to add a long term goal to work towards and while the account rank system has been in place for a while, there was no real incentive to get Diamond other than for bragging rights
  
• Added new weapon: Marksman Rifle: A hybrid triple barreled scoped rifle
  
• Revamped Sniper with scope, improved visuals and audio and rebalanced stats to feel more powerful. More than doubled damage and increased explosion radius but reduced fire rate. Increased hipfire spread but aiming with the scope is pinpoint accurate
  
• Added new sounds and VFX for the Seagle
  
• Some perks have been moved over to Relics:
  
  
  1. Clearance has been replaced by the Ring Of Value: Shops always contain a pedestal that is 75% discounted
     
  2. Repelling Dash has been replaced by the Ring Of Repulsion
     
  3. Fast Claws has been replaced by the Ring Of Reloading
• Increased base walk movement speed slightly to make traversal when not sliding feel less sluggish
  
• As per player feedback, sliding is now more immediate (less acceleration), faster and wears off more quickly so it is much more effective as a short dodge and is more responsive in general
  
• Added the island progression UI to the main gameplay UI so you can now easily check how far into a biome you are
  
• Added Banana consumable that heals for 75% of your max health
  
• Hearts now heal for the amount of max health that they give
  
• Healing chests now contain a minimum of 2 loot choices to prevent situations where you’d get a banana with full health
  
• Added new weapon mod: Boomerang Shot: Shots deal more damage and fly back towards you (Try lining up shots with the sniper to hit the same enemy twice!)
  
• Added new weapon mod: Orbiting Shot: Shots deal more damage but orbit around you
  
• Added new grenade mod: Scythe Vortex: Grenades explode into scythe vortexes
  
• Added new perk: Orbiting Scythe: Gain a short lived orbiting scythe after each elimination
  
• Each “Luck” perk / relic has a specific purpose to build into:
  
  
  1. Rigged Totems = Totem Luck
     
  2. Streamer Loot = Loot Rarity Luck
     
  3. Gold Dice = Mod Trigger Luck
     
  4. Ring Of Luck = Perk Trigger Luck (perk luck was the most broken in the early beta builds but since this is a relic and can only be picked up once, it’s now a fun power spike without completely breaking the game). This does affect critical hit chance- the only perk it doesn’t affect is Bulletproof to prevent being able to become invincible
• Added a new placeholder weapon model for the Cluster Launcher
  
• Added FX and a sound when you block damage successfully by dashing (this mechanic was quite hidden in general so now it’s more obvious when you intentionally block damage this way)

BALANCE CHANGES

• Lots of pacing + loot balance improvements: the gap between experienced players getting easy snowball runs and inexperienced players being frustrated by RNG was too high and balance was a common complaint. There are now far fewer cases where simply being lucky will be enough to win a run, I’ve done my best to make each run feel much more consistent and power well earned instead of coming down to being randomly very lucky
  
• The Random Islands difficulty modifier is now baked into the game by default (as the variety it brings makes the game more fun and it doesn’t actually add difficulty) and has been replaced with the new Strategic Enemies modifier: More challenging formations of enemies spawn. The main thing you’ll notice from this being enabled is medium enemies sometimes showing up on the first wave of arena islands instead of the usual small easy enemies- lots of new interesting combinations of enemies possible now. This also makes ranged enemies slightly more likely to spawn on Horde islands
  
• Shops now only spawn on the 7th island of each biome
  
• For simplicity, the game now only saves on the first island of each biome rather than halfway through which led to confusion and also opened up a few cheesy ways to get achievements by frequently reloading saves which isn’t the intended design
  
• Waves islands have been revamped: there are now 5 waves total and no small enemies spawn, only medium and hard enemies. The next wave will not start until the previous wave has been fully cleared. This change makes Waves islands feel more distinct from other island types and players should be less likely to take damage from a randomly spawning small enemy and instead take it in a more fair way
  
• It’s now less likely for both portal choices to be Horde islands
  
• I’ve adjusted many specific enemy health pools to better match their type- in general champion enemies (sniper crab, shotgun crab etc.) have a bit more health to better match their category- previously they’d get blown away in seconds along with the regular enemies and this felt like they didn’t live up to their intimidating names. There are now much more varied and enjoyable fights past the first biome instead of aiming at the center of the island and destroying everything in 1 second (don’t get me wrong, this can still happen but just a bit less often)
  
• Key totem cost increased back from 2 to 3 (with more biomes and more ways to get keys it’s more balanced at a slightly higher cost)
  
• Gold Totems now cost 66% of your max health (up from 50% of your max health): it was possible to come across multiple gold totems and become extremely powerful early on- this should smooth out some of those unbalanced scenarios and make choosing to go for a gold totem a bit more impactful
  
• Totems are very slightly less likely to appear (clumps of totems appearing at once could create unbalanced power spikes early on that were completely based on luck)
  
• The Healthy enemy buff has been reduced from +200% health to +100% health
  
• Enemy movement speed on ice has been reduced by 33% as there were situations where enemies could outrun you
  
• Poison Slug explosion damage increased by 33%
  
• Sniper Crabs now have a melee attack to prevent them choosing to snipe at very close range which made taking damage unavoidable in some situations
  
• Grenade Crab projectile explosion radius reduced slightly
  
• Ice Pumpkin wind up speed and damage radius increased by 25% (the previous nerf just made them a free enemy- remember you can block their attacks by being out of line of sight even if you are within their damage sphere)
  
• Ice Pumpkins now start with 3 armor plates
  
• Ice Pumpkin AOE radius has been reduced and they must get closer to begin attacking
  
• Enemies now have less delay between spawning and first attacking on Nightmare difficulty (previously they’d stand around for 2 full seconds after spawning before starting any attacks)
  
• More enemies spawn when looping (once off, doesn’t get added to per loop: it’s the same for loop 1 and loop 50)
  
• Reduced Blocker Crab health but gave them 1 armor plate
  
• Limpets now have a longer vulnerable window but attack twice and have a new arc projectile pattern
  
• Slightly increased Lightning Slug movement speed
  
• Grubs now only have 1 armor plate but move 33% faster
  
• Elite Lightning Crab projectile hitbox slightly reduced and explosion radius reduced by 15%
  
• All elite enemy health slightly boosted to make their fights last a little bit longer and feel a bit more dangerous
  
• Ultra Chaos enemy dash (side jump) chance halved and regular jump chance slightly reduced
  
• Guaranteed more ranged enemy variety (medium and hard enemy waves) to prevent cases where like 20 of the same ant spawn which is less interesting and exciting than an assortment of enemies
  
• Fixed the XL challenge modifier not actually spawning 3x enemies- it now spawns only 2x the amount of enemies to balance as 3x would feel too overwhelming. Also to note: the Explosive Enemies modifier spawns more enemies than before as those islands usually ended super fast without much of a challenge
  
• Regular and Blocker skulls are 25% more expensive to spawn, meaning they’ll spawn in large groups less often
  
• An extra boss now spawns on each Boss island when looping
  
• Ants are less likely to choose far away locations when attacking and will be more close range in general (this is to make clearing islands with a lot of ants less tedious)
  
• Doubled the time it takes for enemies to start regenerating health when the Regenerating Enemies modifier is active
  
• The Armored Enemies modifier now gives enemies 3 armor plates instead of 6 to prevent things feeling tedious in certain situations
  
• The amount of max health lost when the Eternal Punishment modifier is active has been reduced from 2% to 1%
  
• Lightning rocks are less effective as they were able to wipe entire islands almost instantly with very little effort
  
• If playing with all difficulty modifiers enabled on Nightmare difficulty, the difficulty UI text will now indicate that by calling it “TRUE NIGHTMARE”
  
• After lots of playtesting, many mods and perk have had slight “nudges” to their values to get them feeling balanced with all of the above changes: there are too many small changes to list here but you may notice some values being a bit different to before
  
• Since combo can be increased to 8x with a relic, I’ve capped the max combo that affects your score specifically to 5x to prevent high score runs relying on finding a relic

BUFFS

• Base player health increased from 200 to 400 and Nightmare no longer reduces starting health: there were too many situations where I was one shot by the second biome that I’d prefer a larger starting health pool that takes longer to whittle down but also longer to heal back up
  
• Bronze Heart max health gain increased from +50 max health to +150 max health
  
• Silver Heart max health gain increased from +100 max health to +400 max health
  
• Gold Heart max health gain increased from +300 max health to +1000 max health
  
• Added more health pickups in Tony’s garden and increased the healing value from 25 health to 50 health
  
• You now start with 1% crit chance by default (so picking up things like Critical Blast or Critical Arrow aren’t a complete waste without finding more crit perks)
  
• Power Punch now multiplies the 200% critical damage bonus instead of just adding a flat percentage to it. Also Power Punch critical damage increased from +25% to +33%
  
• Fixed Critical Thinking not calculating as expected, it now multiplies the final damage output after a crit is calculated instead of adding or subtracting a flat amount. The level 1 damage amount has been reduced from +50% to +33% as it’s now much more powerful. In the old patch if you had 500% global damage and Critical Thinking level 1, you’d end up with 550% damage when landing a crit. Now (even after the nerf), you’d end up with 665% global damage when landing a critical hit
  
• Landmine Shot landmine now explodes after 1 second instead of 2.5 seconds which felt too long in most cases
  
• The chance for duplicate loot to show up in a chest in the endgame (when looping more than once) has been reduced from 75% to 50% so there will be more chances for fresh loot
  
• Autoloader no longer resets the Escalating Shot bonus AND will also trigger On Reload mods such as Reload Arc or Shockwave
  
• Time Bolt and Ultra Shot now explode even if they didn’t hit anything to prevent rare cases where it looked like they should hit but instead just vanished into thin air
  
• Heavy Hitter fire rate reduction decreased from -15% to -10%
  
• Health Shot and Money Shot now affect all damage dealt to enemies from projectiles (including explosions) instead of only counting direct impacts which made them far less effective on weapons like the Rocket Launcher than they were meant to be
  
• Escalating Shot now only reduces weapon fire rate by -33% (instead of -50% previously) to make it more enticing to use on weapons other than the minigun
  
• Reload Arc cooldown reduced from 5 seconds to 2 seconds
  
• Reload Arc and Proximity Barrage projectiles no longer knock back enemies (this sound like a nerf but is actually a buff because it keeps enemies inside of your own damage areas and stops them attacking unpredictably in mid air)
  
• Shockwave cooldown reduced from 4 seconds to 3 seconds
  
• Freezing Enemies, Flammable Enemies, Electric Enemies and Poisonous Enemies have had their radii doubled as they felt underwhelming as legendaries before
  
• All “Storm” mods have had their cooldowns reduced to allow them to trigger much more often
  
• Grenade explosion damage increased from 50 to 75
  
• Grenade Mods now correctly affect damage dealt by damage areas such as the red area left behind by Laser Beam or the Black Hole area while active
  
• Damage Aura damage increased from 2 to 3
  
• Big Hearts has been moved from Epic rarity to Rare rarity
  
• Ice Strike damage increased from 25 to 200 and ice stacks increased from 25 to 75
  
• Fire Strike damage increased from 25 to 200 and fire stacks increased from 100 to 250
  
• Lightning Strike damage increased from 25 to 200 and lightning stacks increased from 50 to 200
  
• Poison Strike damage increased from 25 to 200 and poison stacks increased from 25 to 100
  
• Crystal Strike damage increased from 100 to 1000
  
• Increased Arcane Blast projectile lifetime from 0.66 seconds to 1.0 seconds
  
• Projectiles that pierce can now hit the same enemy twice after a 0.1 second delay (previously they could only hit the same enemy once). This synergizes nicely with Boomerang Shot as you can get double the value for your projectiles if you line them up right
  
• Flammable Armor and Explosive Armor now affect the enemy that was hit and not just nearby enemies
  
• Shops were feeling a bit too expensive on Nightmare and Ultra Chaos so the prices have been reduced by 15%
  
• Rigged Totems has had a substantial buff, previously it was only 10% increased chance which meant a 25% chance totem actually only got upgraded to be 27.5% to trigger which felt quite unnoticeable. It’s now a 25% increased chance AND no longer gets capped at 100%
  
• Critical Blast damage radius doubled and chance to trigger increased from 6% to 15%
  
• Reduced Spore Shot mushroom health by 66% so it should be much easier to explode them now
  
• Spore Shot / Spore Explosion mushrooms once again deal poison damage
  
• Fire and lightning damage now is affected by poison bonus incoming damage- new synergy?
  
• Paycheck no longer gives a flat amount of crystals as this quickly fell off in terms of scaling. Instead it now gives 1/5th the cost of a Rare pickup each island (this value increases after each island)
  
• Dual Pistols damage increased from 4 to 5
  
• Burst Pistol damage increased from 5 to 6
  
• Blade Launcher damage increased from 4 to 5
  
• Cluster Launcher damage increased from 3 to 4
  
• Orb Launcher damage increased from 6 to 8 (The slow projectiles often meant that it just didn’t feel good to use the orb launcher compared to other weapons with faster projectiles so this buff should bring it in line to be a more satisfying choice)
  
• Orb Launcher projectiles now have a slightly smaller radius to prevent them getting stuck on nearby terrain instead of reaching the target
  
• Gold max health rocks can now spawn shards that spawn multiple max health bubbles at once (similar to how it already works with regular green health rocks- stand in the venn diagram of health bubbles for max effectiveness!)

NERFS

• Laser Beam ability direct impact damage reduced from 50 to 30
  
• Poison now wears off twice as fast
  
• Link Shot and Drill Shot base trigger chance decreased from 3% to 2.5%
  
• Hot Shot critical hit chance reduced from 15% to 12% (double that of Sharpshooter)
  
• Critical Arrow now is chance based instead of guaranteed to trigger on crit (starts at 12% chance)
  
• Sniper clip size reduced from 10 to 6 and reload time increased from 1.5 seconds to 1.75 seconds (this is due to the sniper revamp making it a much stronger weapon overall so this is more of a rebalance than a nerf)
  
• Health Totems are less likely to spawn and more likely to explode after use
  
• Lava now applies 3x fire stacks in the Volcanic biome (it barely applied 1 stack in the previous update which made landing in lava feel quite free and not a threat at least on the first loop)

QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES

• Improved visibility across all biomes including revamping many overly bright or distracting VFX
  
• Hitmarker sounds are now much quieter for fast firing weapons and slightly louder for slow firing weapons instead of being constantly too loud or quiet depending on the weapon chosen
  
• The portal countdown now only starts when the majority of players have voted for a portal to prevent situations where a single player was choosing a portal before the others were ready
  
• Increased crosshair outline size for better visibility on Arctic islands
  
• The pause when losing focus feature is now optional and can be disabled in the settings menu
  
• Spectating has had a number of improvements such as being able to still see all other players and their health bars and being able to cycle through players to spectate instead of being locked on one until they get eliminated
  
• Made several optimizations to prevent non-hosting players from getting kicked from multiplayer games when a lot was happening at once
  
• Optimized performance heavy islands
  
• Totems that require crystals now display how many crystals you are short by
  
• Barrel Explosion barrels no longer get knocked around as much when shooting them so it should be much easier to line up and get them to explode near enemies
  
• Made several performance improvements for projectiles which should help late game performance when a lot is going on
  
• Increased the minimum distance enemies can spawn from you (this should reduce situations where enemies spawn right under you)
  
• Added a sound when players ping
  
• Added support for 3840x1080, 3840x1440 and 5120x1440 resolutions
  
• Aiming field of view (FOV) now scales with the FOV setting chosen in the settings menu in order to feel more consistent across all FOV ranges
  
• Reduced the interaction radius to prevent accidentally choosing a portal when looting chests. Also tightened up the interaction direction threshold so it’s less likely to accidentally choose a pickup to your left or right when trying to focus on a pickup in the middle
  
• Added 8 total bananas on Parkour islands to prevent situations where not everyone would get a banana when playing in a lobby with more than 4 players :(
  
• Driller now takes into account every player in a multiplayer match so it doesn’t matter who breaks each destructible- if one player has Driller equipped, it’ll roll for a trigger
  
• Enemy anti-camping values have been tweaked to reduce situations where they are constantly flying at you and are hard to hit: they now fly at slower intervals but with greater speed so ideally they’ll get back to a place they can walk faster than before
  
• Fixed Elite portal description mentioning moving to the next biome when you can get random Elite islands mid biome
  
• Chests are now color coded to match the loot category they belong to

BUG FIXES

• Double Tap now shows the correct trigger percentage in the inventory and should deal damage more reliably. The only case where it won’t is on weapons that pierce- it’ll trigger on the last pierce, not on every shot (so on the Sniper this is on hitting the third enemy after piercing two before)
  
• Big Shot no longer reduces Laser Cannon projectile size
  
• Fixed Elite Fire Crab not having his weapon equipped
  
• Fixed incorrect music playing for non-hosting players in shops
  
• Fixed issue that prevented the Quickplay menu being usable when returning to the lobby after being eliminated
  
• Fixed player names sometimes not showing up on the gameplay UI in the lobby after they joined
  
• Fixed some effects not being properly optimized at Low graphics settings: performance should be improved if playing on Low now
  
• Fixed bug that allowed you to pick up armor plates when already full
  
• Fixed bug that showed enemy health bars after they had been eliminated in some cases
  
• Fixed saved abilities and melee weapons not restoring correctly when resuming runs in some cases
  
• Fixed Critical Thinking not applying to some damage types
  
• Fixed the Laser Beam ability often hitting the ground right in front of you instead of your intended target
  
• Fixed Blindfire not affecting spread on some weapons
  
• Fixed bug that granted the Playing With Power achievement after playing the Arcade minigame when it should only be granted in the main mode
  
• Fixed rare softlock that could happen with the Explosive Enemies challenge modifier active
  
• Fixed enemies not taking bonus damage when poisoned from melee or Time Shot
  
• Fixed abilities using weapon hitmarkers which played annoyingly loud hitmarker sounds in many cases
  
• Fixed Strike mods having broken looking FX that didn’t convey the true radius
  
• Fixed Arcane Blast not applying arcane stacks
  
• Fixed Sturdy Totems infinite loot exploit

That's all for now but I plan on releasing some more island variations, enemy types and new songs in a bonus mini patch very soon! As always thank you for playing, I love working on this game 🦀

Difficulty scaling improvements
• Enemy damage bonus when looping has been removed. There was previously a whopping +100% damage multiplier to all enemy attacks when looping from island 33 onwards which created very unfair situations where enemies would melt your entire health bar in a second, especially with fire. Enemy damage should feel much more fair and consistent when looping while still being a challenge- looping is meant to be quite difficult
  
• Enemy spawn bonus when looping decreased from +33% to +20%
  
• Islands 1 and 2 of a biome no longer can spawn two waves of ranged enemies back to back
  
  These changes should make looping feel far less unfair / punishing while maintaining the challenge
  
  
  Scorpion mega nerf + rebalance
• Scorpion projectile damage reduced by 60%, projectile radius reduced by 33%, projectile speed reduced by 15% and removed projectile bounces. Also reworked their attack patterns to be more dodgeable and less spammy
  
• Increased scorpion walk speed slightly: it should now feel like more of a close / medium range threat and less of a run ender
  
  
  Other changes
• Flamethrower buff- now starts with level 2 Fire Shot (up from level 1)
  
• Rebalanced enhancements: pattern enhancements like Chaotic or Spiraling have less intense motion to make them less likely to miss their target. Enhancement damage increases are +50% damage other than Sticky and Damaging which are +100% (previously Damaging was at +400% which was very broken)
  
• Splitting / Scattering bonus projectiles decreased from 3 to 2 (as it was extremely broken with some combos)
  
• Fixed issue that would cause projectiles created by the Splitting and Scattering enhancement to apply ALL weapon mods to those enhanced projectiles, resulting in extreme damage spikes that weren’t intended
  
• Demolition nests now scale health more with the island count as they became far too easy to destroy past the first biome
  
• Scorpions can now spawn from red challenge crystals

ABILITIES: GRENADE, GRAPPLING HOOK, LASER BEAM, BLACK HOLE & ICE BLAST


MELEE WEAPONS: CLAW, DAGGER & HAMMER


NEW WEAPONS: LASER CANNONS & SEAGLE




MINIGAMES: ARCADE, HOLDOUT & DUEL


QUICKPLAY
Matchmake for other players at any of the three main difficulties and communicate via an improved text chat!

SIDE SLIDING


NEW CONTENT

• New island type: Waves
  
• New enemies: Starfish & Limpet
  
• New music
  
• New loot
  
• New island challenge modifiers and a blessing type

BIG BALANCE CHANGES
Reworked economy, enemy and health scaling for a more satisfying experience with less cheap ways to win or lose


GENERAL

• Added new ability system with 5 abilities to equip: Grenade, Black Hole, Grappling Hook, Ice Blast and Laser Beam. This is a big new system with a lot more mix and match potential but it is still being worked on- all "grenade" mods will work on any ability and in The Variety Update Part 2 there'll be plenty of new "Ability Mods" and all current grenade mods will be ported over
  
• Added new melee weapons: Claw, Dagger and Hammer (more are coming in The Variety Update Part 2)
  
• You can now slide sideways and aim while sliding. Also you now slide for twice as long with a more gradual decrease in speed as the slide runs out
  
• Quickplay is now enabled and should finally be working!
  
• Added new weapon: Laser Cannons
  
• Added new weapon: Seagle
  
• Added new minigame: Arcade: Eliminate as many enemies as possible before the time runs out! Enemies spawn faster by eliminating them but if you get hit 50% of the visible enemies will get eliminated, slowing down the pace
  
• Added new minigame: Holdout: No health or loot- survive as many waves as possible until you get hit! Great for warming up or to have some bite-sized crab action without committing to a full rougelike run
  
• Added new minigame: Duel: Face off in a PvP duel to finally find out who is the best crab in your lobby!
  
• Added experimental support for up to 6 players to join a single multiplayer game- the game is still balanced around 4 players max but since many have asked for 5 or 6 player lobbies, it should now be possible!
  
• Added new island type: Waves
  
• Added several new island challenge modifiers and a new blessing type
  
• Added 3 new Tropical biome islands and 1 new Arctic biome island
  
• Added new enemy: Limpet
  
• Added new enemy: Starfish
  
• Added new enemy variant: Mini Grub
  
• Added new weapon mod: Escalating Shot: Fire rate reduced by 50% but increases with each shot fired until stopping fire. The Minigun now starts with this mod by default
  
• Added new perk: Nourishing Salvage: Heal when salvaging pickups
  
• Added new perk: Crystal Fertilizer: More destructible crystals and health rocks spawn
  
• Added new perk: Bonus Chests: Get additional reward chests after every 100 eliminations
  
• Added new perk: Sturdy Totems: Totems have more guaranteed uses before they explode
  
• Added new perk: Equalizer: Damage increased if the number of equipped weapon mods, ability mods and perks are even (so having 0 Weapon Mods, 4 Grenade Mods and 10 Perks equipped would activate the damage bonus)
  
• Added new perk: Slugger: Explosive enemies deal more damage in a greater radius to nearby enemies when eliminated
  
• Added new perk: Crystal Dividends: Gain a percentage of your total crystals as a bonus after clearing each island
  
• Added new perk: Amber Resin: Healing is more effective
  
• Added new greed perk: Big Bones: Max health and damage increased but you grow larger
  
• Added new greed perk: Hoarder: Chance for an extra chest to spawn after each island but you can no longer drop pickups from your inventory
  
• Added new destructibles: Mega Crystal and Mega Challenge Crystal
  
• Added a santa hat cosmetic
  
• Enemies generally have smoother overall movement with less sudden stops and turns especially after getting knocked back or frozen
  
• Some enemies can now dash from side to side
  
• Enemies now slide on icy surfaces and crab enemies slide when moving quickly
  
• You now slide infinitely and automatically on icy surfaces
  
• Added 6 new achievements and 4 new cosmetics
  
• Added new music!
  
• Music no longer fades out after interacting with the victory crown
  
• Added many new sounds (destructibles breaking, crystal collection, slug explosions)
  
• Hitmarker audio can now stack, making hitmarkers more satisfying on shotguns and other weapons that hit multiple times at once
  
• The lobby now has random lighting presets instead of being always sunny
  
• Volcanic lighting has been reworked along with some texture and skybox improvements
  
• Night time lighting has been reworked to be actually dark
  I’m a big fan of being in a flow state while playing games and not being interrupted by loading screens or other things that make you wait for the game. While the loading times between islands were quite short in previous versions of the game, they blocked gameplay and the feeling of constantly being able to move forward and do something. Some of the changes below help remove this feeling and (sometimes subconsciously) make the game feel more satisfying to play. Please let me know if you notice any issues with these faster loading times especially related to multiplayer games but ideally it should be the same as before, just faster!
  
• Optimized level load times significantly (loading screens between islands should be almost instant)
  
• Increased the pace of some gameplay events like how quickly chests spawn after clearing an island or how fast you can read loot UI after it spawns
  
• The Duplicate symbol on loot now shows up more quickly
  
• Improved the pacing of how loot spawns from chests: all loot now spawns at once to prevent having to wait around for each pickup to appear one by one (this used to be especially tedious with a high level of Big Chests)

BALANCE CHANGES

• When the Random Islands modifier is active, Elites defeated on any island other than the final island of each biome will no longer drop healing and key chests. This is to make Elites more of a risk instead of being able to chain elite islands together and come out of it with MORE health than you started with due to all the healing chests
  
• Added new difficulty modifier: Expensive Shops: Shop prices are doubled. The reasoning behind this modifier is that even on the highest difficulties, players were easily breaking the game by buying out shops with economy builds. This modifier should make each purchase count
  
• Removed the Surging Enemies difficulty modifier as it took away from the pacing of each island and made them all blur into the same kind where all enemies were visible almost right away after spawning. The enemy spawn speed for islands later into each biome has been adjusted to prevent large amounts of enemies spawning taking a long time
  
• Hordes have been reworked to have more easy enemies and less projectile enemies as they are meant to be a fun AOE island type more focused on a horde of small enemies. This change helps differentiate them from other islands which felt similar before
  
• Enemies now get +10% more health after each wave on Horde islands. Since waves happen as fast as you can eliminate enemies, this can create an interesting opportunity to gain more crystals (since enemies drop crystals based on their max health) at the cost of a greater challenge
  
• Elites and Bosses are now immune to black holes and gain more health per player in multiplayer lobbies as it was very common for these fights to be quickly over in 4 player matches with 4 distinct builds set up, especially when looping
  
• Added dynamic damage reduction to Elites and Bosses when looping to make fights a bit more exciting without getting tedious. Here’s how it works: Elites and Bosses spawn with 50% damage reduction which reduces itself automatically over time to 0% damage reduction after 30 seconds
  
• Rebalanced many enemy minimum start islands: this means more crabs and slugs in the early islands with the more difficult enemies appearing later in a biome. This also makes biomes feel less samey as there are a wider range of enemies introduced over time instead of pretty much every enemy appearing by island 3 in a biome
  
• Laser Skulls, Laser Crabs, Ice Pumpkins and Fire Pumpkins are more likely to appear
  
• Rare loot is 20% more likely to shop up in shops as it often was hard to scale your lower tier loot the later into a run you got due to shops being full of Epic or Legendary loot
  
• Burst Pistol and Dual Pistols no longer can be tap fired faster than the actual fire rate (no more tired fingers from constant clicking) and the Burst Pistol has had a slight fire rate buff
  
• “Reward” destructibles (crystals, health rocks etc.) and “Combat” destructibles (fire rocks, energy ring rocks etc.) now spawn separately so that it’s possible for more reward destructibles to spawn on an island without flooding it with combat destructibles
  
• The global projectile limit has been increased from 400 to 500
  
• You no longer get greed perks when using the Random totem as there were many bugs with greed perks not applying correctly when acquired this way. This also acts as the only way in the game to remove a greed perk from your inventory
  
• Fire damage from stepping in lava now scales per island (previously it was threatening for the first volcanic biome encounter but became trivial when looping)
  
• Arcane Blast has been moved from the Damage loot pool to the Elemental loot pool
  
• Bigger Boom has been moved from the Damage loot pool to the Skill loot pool
  
• Wind Up now stops working on stopping fire rather than on reloading
  
• Some low value / fun weapon mods have been removed including: Knockback Shot, Ghost Ammo,
  Heavy Shot and Accelerating Shot will no longer show up unless you have Bouncing Shot (as this was the main time those mods were useful)

BUFFS

• Weapon formation mods (like Arc Shot or Square Shot) are now additive and can both be triggered in a single shot. Dual Shotguns, Auto Shotgun, Crossbow and Cluster Launcher now fire any extra shot modifiers (like Arc Shot or Square Shot) IN ADDITION to their normal projectiles. Additive shot formations now also take the weapon spread into account so high spread weapons will now shoot wonky formations. This means that Grip Tape and Blind Fire will directly influence the spacing and spread of the additive shot formations
  
• Enemies can now be frozen for 50% longer and players can only be frozen for 0.5 seconds max (as this was a common cheap death cause in previous updates: being frozen for multiple seconds unable to do anything)
  
• Flammable Armor, Explosive Armor, Exploding Enemies, Freezing Enemies, Flammable Enemies, Electric Enemies and Poisonous Enemies start with half as much radius as before but get a +25% increase in radius for each level of the perk that you have, allowing them to scale in a much more interesting way
  
• Flammable Armor and Explosive Armor have been moved from Epic to Rare rarity. These perks were previously a bit too situational to be worth it for their rarity but these changes should make them much more worthwhile to take in general
  
• Key Totem cost reduced from 3 to 2
  
• You now get +1 key per key pickup when playing on Nightmare difficulty or higher
  
• Enemy damage increases (including their debuffs) when looping has been reduced by 25% as it was too sharp of a power spike, leading to the “I’m one shot” feeling when looping no matter how much max health you had
  
• All fire enemies deal half the fire stacks as before which should make fire a much less common source of death when looping
  
• Reduced Ice Pumpkin AOE radius and damage
  
• Fire Pumpkins now have a longer time between attacks
  
• Homing Grubs, Enraged Grubs and Minigun Crabs can no longer have the Shielded buff as there were some situations that felt unfair as breaking the shield meant taking almost guaranteed damage
  
• Pufferfish explosion damage reduced by 15%
  
• Launcher Crabs projectile explosion radius reduced to match the radius of the Grenade Crab projectile
  
• The Auto Rifle always seems to be quite underwhelming so I’ve doubled the bullet velocity and greatly reduced the amount of random spread it has to establish it as a pinpoint accurate and responsive long range weapon. It should now be noticeably easier to track moving targets and not feel like you are missing shots that should hit
  
• Auto Rifle damage increased from 4 to 5
  
• Dual Shotguns damage increased from 3 to 5 and base firing spread slightly reduced
  
• Auto Shotgun damage increased from 2 to 3 and base spread slightly reduced
  
• Auto Shotgun mag size increased from 12 to 16 and range reduced by 33% (the range was absurd for a shotgun) and spread becomes wider than before with sustained fire
  
• Auto Shotgun trigger roll multiplier (the thing that makes chance based mods and perks trigger) increased by 400%
  
• Rocket Launcher explosion radius has been reduced by 25% as it was way too generous
  
• Sniper projectile collision radius (not damage radius) reduced as the projectile would often hit the ground in front of you on slopes instead of the intended target
  
• Sniper damage increased from 35 to 40
  
• Minigun now starts with Escalating Shot level 2 and mag size increased from 125 to 200
  
• Blade Launcher projectile damage radius reduced to more closely match the projectile size but Big Shot now can increase the radius
  
• Burst Pistol mag size increased from 28 to 36
  
• Orb Launcher damage increased from 5 to 6
  
• Arcane Wand projectile explosion radius increased by 25%
  
• Grenade damage increased from 35 to 50
  
• Bigger Boom and Imploding Grenade now affect the size of the damage areas spawned by abilities
  
• Snake Shot damage increased from +33% to +50%
  
• Blind Fire damage increased from +50% to +100%
  
• Blind Fire recoil increase reduced by 50% to allow for Grip Tape to match it and perfectly counteract it
  
• Grip Tape is no longer capped at -100% spread reduction so it can fully offset Blind Fire. Spread related perks now also influence the angle on formations such as arc and triple shot and even secondary projectile mods like Dagger Arc!
  
• Recoil shot recoil added reduced from +200% to +100%
  
• Bouncing Shot now increases projectile lifetimes by 50% and damage per bounce increased from +50% to +100%
  
• Money Shot crystals per hit increased from 1 to 4 (I’ll be watching this- ideally it’s really fun to find on fast firing low damage weapons)
  
• Piercing Wave trigger chance halved but damage increased by 75% and radius increased by 25%
  
• X Shot trigger chance increased by 33%
  
• Spore Shot mushrooms now have 10x health as they would just explode instantly before having a chance to grow
  
• Grenadier now works in a more understandable way: you get +1 ability stack per cooldown but it will keep cooling down while your current stack is less than the max stack
  
• Damage combo damage per combo level increased from +15% to +20%
  
• Healthy Combo healing amount increased from +50 to +100
  
• Endurance healing increased from +50 health to +75 health
  
• Critical thinking critical damage increased from +25% to +75% but non critical damage reduced from -10% to -25%
  
• Checklist eliminations needed per damage increase reduced from 15 to 10
  
• Faulty Chests chance for unchosen loot to not disappear buffed from 10% to 15%
  
• Double Vision has been moved from Legendary to Epic rarity
  
• Removed knockback from Fireworks and increased their radius by 25%
  
• Fire damage in general has been doubled as it felt quite weak on perks in previous updates
  
• Lightning damage has now been buffed by 66% (it now deals the entire lighting stack as damage instead of 33% of the lightning stack)
  
• Damage areas (like the black hole) can now spawn in mid air which will allow for many new synergies with abilities that can explode in the air (like causing Crystal Barrage to trigger in mid air with a black hole also sucking enemies into it)
  
• The Limited Heals difficulty modifier healing reduction reduced from -50% healing to -33% healing
  
• Increased the invulnerability period after taking damage from 0.1 seconds to 0.25 seconds

NERFS

• Shop prices have been increased by 33% as buying out shops was the main source of broken balance in the game (you can still absolutely break shops and get near infinite crystals but some economy changes were needed to make this require a bit more skill and planning, and a bit less random luck)
  
• Shop price increase per loop increased by 25%
  
• Shop prices are slightly more expensive per player in multiplayer to balance out the fact that enemies get a health bonus per player (and therefore pay out more which meant players had less crystals to spend in shops when playing solo compared to in multiplayer runs)
  
• Shop reroll totem base cost is unchanged but cost increase per reroll now increases more steeply
  
• Due to these Shop changes, with the Random Islands modifier active, shops will only be able to spawn on islands 3,4,5 and 9 to better space them out over a biome
  
• Spiked chest open cost increased from 25% to 33% (this is a change that has been reverted from the previous patch as it was too easy to go for multiple spiked chests in a single biome, this way it’s more strategic and has a bigger impact)
  
• Black Holes no longer turn enemy projectiles into your own as this made fighting even the hardest enemies trivial
  
• It’s now half as likely for the flamethrower to spawn fire damage areas on the ground (as it could cause really high fire damage numbers in a very short space of time which made it by far the most powerful weapon in the game). Fire overall has had a buff in this patch though so it should still feel very strong
  
• Big Mag mag size increase reduced from +75% to +50% and renamed “Clip” to “Mag” in the description
  
• Bubble Shot trigger chance reduced by 25% (it’s very powerful but triggered a bit too often)
  
• Splash Damage damage reduced from 25 to 10
  
• The price to unlock slots if playing with the Locked Slots difficulty modifier now scales up slightly more sharply. If this modifier is more annoying than fun then I’ll replace it with another in a future update
  
• Crystal Combo crystal gain per combo level reduced from +20% to +15%
  
• Snatcher close range elimination crystal gain reduced from +50% to +30%
  
• Finishing Move critical elimination crystal gain reduced from +100% to +50%
  
• Gold Coating on heal crystal gain increased from +50% of healing to +100% of healing
  
• Money Is Power damage gain per 1000 crystals reduced from +5% to +2%
  
• Bonus Crystals crystal gain reduced from +50% to +33%
  
• Workaholic, Rising Star and Limited Loot crystal gain reduced from +100% to +75%
  
• Double Edged Sword crystal amount reduced from 100% of damage dealt to 25% of damage dealt and you now lose 20% of your total crystals when taking damage (compared to 10% before as it was way too easy to make a completely broken economy build with it- now it should be in a more balanced place)
  
• A note on max health perks: if getting lucky with a few of these early on, the health pool could go to extreme numbers very quickly. These changes make them still substantial buffs to your health but make them less likely to be one of the key reasons a run succeeds
  
• Bribe max health increase reduced from +500% to +200%
  
• Double Trouble max health increase reduced from +250% to +100%
  
• Leap Of Faith max health increase reduced from +250% to +50%
  
• Health Totem chance to explode after use increased from 33% to 50%. This change is to make it harder to completely break the game early on with many lucky rolls in a row
  
• Loot Totem chance to explode after use increased from 20% to 33%
  
• Gamble Totem and Chance Totem chance to explode after use increased from 8% to 15%
  
• Double Vision chance to get an extra chest after each island reduced from 20% to 15%

QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES

• Finally fixed cases where enemy projectiles could travel through walls leading to situations where you could take unfair damage
  
• Added many new checks for enemies stuck in walls or not moving. There should no longer be any soft lock situations- in the worst case scenarios where enemies are stuck for more than a few seconds in a wall, they will be cleaned up by the game automatically
  
• Projectiles get nullified (deal no damage and instantly expire) when hitting the blue border surrounding islands (which prevents lots of unfair deaths where bouncing enemy projectiles would bounce off or explode on seemingly thin air behind you)
  
• Slugs and Pufferfish can no longer start their explode attack in mid air and must be landed (this prevents unfair situations where a slug could come flying out of nowhere and instantly end the run)
  
• Made many improvements to overall visual clarity with tweaks to enemy health bars, damage numbers, FX and many other small elements that all add up to give a more refined experience
  
• The game now automatically pauses when it loses focus when alt tabbing or when something else (like another installer) pops up over it
  
• You are now invulnerable for 2 seconds after falling off a cliff to prevent taking unavoidable damage when respawning (if respawning near to an already attacking enemy)
  
• You no longer take fall damage once an island has been cleared to be consistent with the other post island damage rules in the game
  
• Auto Loot now staggers chest openings to prevent late game crashes when opening hundreds of chests at once
  
• Auto Loot now behaves correctly and will only salvage if it can't pick up any of the pickups in a chest
  
• Auto Loot will now pick up duplicate Greed perks (previously it would ignore all greed perks in the world)
  
• Added island boundaries to some islands (like the one with 4 high walls) to prevent rare situations where enemies could be launched out of bounds and the island would never end
  
• Improved anti-camping measures to support all enemies, not just the small melee crabs
  
• All homing barrels are cleaned up when chests spawn to prevent situations where they would be annoying and home at you while you were looting
  
• Added options to increase field of view to 115 and 120 (previously the limit was 110)
  
• Improved crosshairs and added a central dot for easier aiming
  
• Clients should no longer accidentally leave to the lobby from the Game Over UI (only the host has the power to do that now, clients can still leave if they wish by using the pause menu instead)
  
• Added visible cooldowns to melee in the gameplay UI
  
• Added cooldown expire animations and sounds for both abilities and melee weapons in the gameplay UI
  
• Cooldowns now reset when picking up new abilities or melee weapons in the lobby to make it easier to audition them without waiting for the cooldowns to expire
  
• Added a system that prevents many of the same enemy from spawning in certain cases (Ice Pumpkins, Laser Crabs, Laser Skulls and Fire Pumpkins spawning in large numbers could create unfair situations)
  
• The maximum amount of combat destructible rocks on small arena islands has been reduced as it often led to unavoidable damage or just too much damage area spam
  
• Improved the audio mix to make important sounds stand out more
  
• Optimized all animated characters for better performance in scene with many enemies visible at once
  
• Arcane Wand projectiles now automatically explode when expiring (they previously vanished if not hitting something)
  
• The slide speed curve has been smoothed out to be less jittery and much more consistent
  
• You now automatically cancel a slide if letting go of directional keys (instead of being stuck in a janky stationary slide)
  
• Island challenge modifiers can now only spawn on one portal max in a selection (to even out unfair situations where you would roll two very difficult challenge portals with low health and not have a choice to take the lesser reward / easier fight)
  
• Improved aiming: it felt a bit clunky to aim especially with the Seagle in some cases so the camera height has been adjusted to be more comfortable to aim as well as a faster aim zoom in time to make it feel more responsive. Also tweaked some weapons that felt like they zoomed in too much when aiming
  
• Reduced fire rock destructible explosion damage and radius (as it was easy to accidentally damage yourself when exploding them while appearing to be out of range of the explosion)
  
• Made various UI outline improvements to make damage text and health bars easier to read across all lighting scenarios
  
• Improved text chat visibility and it should no longer go off the screen when writing long messages
  
• Enemies now spawn much faster from the second loop (Island 61+) onwards to make late game runs less tedious
  
• Auto loot speed doubled to make late game runs less tedious
  
• Added options to disable hitmarkers and damage numbers for those that don’t want them or to help improve visibility in late game runs
  
• Ability and Melee cooldowns are now reset when entering a new island
  
• Improved the Piercing Wave particle FX to be easier on the eyes and more smooth
  
• The Auto Loot keybind has been moved from Q to L as many people had other actions bound to Q already and were confused as to why their chest loot was magically disappearing (you can still change it to whatever you want in the controls menu)
  
• Enemies can no longer spawn from destroyed crystals if the island has been cleared
  
• Increased global bandwidth limits to potentially improve 4 player late game lobbies with a lot going on
  
• Increased connection timeout times to give more time for clients that have temporarily lost connection to recover
  
• Sonic Boom and Shockwave no longer knock back enemies as this could allow them to get stuck in walls (I'll rework these perks in the future)
  
• Clip Shot has been renamed to Mag Shot

BUG FIXES

• Fixed a longstanding bug that caused very laggy clients to load in with no weapons when first joining a lobby
  
• Improved a few islands where chests could spawn down in unreachable areas and couldn’t be opened
  
• Fixed numerous clunky inventory UI bugs like locked slots “stealing” the mouse cursor when clicked
  
• Fixed “sticky” inventory where dropping loot would reset the focus to the first inventory slot instead of the one that you were hovering over, making dropping a lot of pickups needlessly clunky
  
• Fixed issue that would cause you to permanently keep the aimed in field of view of a weapon after choosing a dual wield weapon
  
• Fixed exploit that allowed players to start a run on a much easier difficulty than initially selected
  
• Fixed exploit that allowed players to move around and jump while frozen
  
• Fixed issue where hazard damage (like from barrels or destructible rocks) weren’t respecting the invulnerability period after you take damage (so a bunch of barrels exploding at the same instant were able to eat through multiple armor plates at once)
  
• Fixed issue on arctic island that caused barrels to explode as soon as you load into the island which could lead to taking unavoidable damage
  
• Fixed issue that caused enemies to spawn with half empty armor plates
  
• Fixed various multiplayer health bar bugs that would show players and enemies as having armor when they really didn’t
  
• Fixed issue that caused Piercing Shot to reset reset Streak Shot
  
• Fixed issue that caused the Parkour reward UI to not update on non-hosting players
  
• You can now complete the Flawless and Frugal achievements without needing to be explicitly on Normal difficulty (they now unlock on Nightmare and Ultra Chaos difficulties also, Normal being the minimum)
  
• Fixed issue that allowed friends to join in progress runs via the Steam menu, now they can only join while in the lobby as is intended
  
• Fixed a longterm crash that could happen when joining a multiplayer game
  
• Fixed a longterm bug that could leave invalid multiplayer sessions open which interfered with inviting and joining multiplayer games
  
• Fixed issue where no enemies would spawn after a while on the 1st island of each biome
  
• Fixed being able to get under the map on one of the Volcanic islands
  
• Fixed a number of rare crashes
  
• Fixed issue where challenges were completed in the game but the corresponding Steam achievement stayed locked
  
• Rewrote how account rank is calculated to make it more accurate (as it was possible to have all weapons Emerald rank but still have a Sapphire account rank previously)
  
• Repelling Dash now only affects enemy projectiles and won’t repel teammate projectiles
  
• Fixed issue that caused the Game Over UI to show up in the lobby if leaving a run too soon after getting eliminated
  
• Fixed the crystals and keys icons being cut off in the inventory UI on some wider resolutions like 1920x1200
  
• Improved how music plays: it shouldn’t stop the shop music, play the gameplay music and then switch to the boss music a second or two later as it did previously
  
• Edited arctic tree collision to make it much less likely to get stuck on it

ULTRA CHAOS BALANCE CHANGES
The goal with these changes is to make Ultra Chaos a bit more skillful, fair and fun while still retaining the brutal difficulty spike

• Ultra Chaos is now unlocked when reaching Ruby account rank (down from Diamond in order to give more people the chance to try it out)
  
• Slightly slowed down enemy attack speeds on Ultra Chaos (just because some enemies attacked unreasonably fast especially when shielded)
  
• Reduced the amount of bonus starting luck in Ultra Chaos by 33% (this should make getting rare loot (important for many builds) much more consistent)
  
• Elites and Bosses spawn slightly less often in Ultra Chaos
  
• Bosses no longer spawn champion enemies when damaged and keys when eliminated on non-boss islands when playing on Ultra Chaos difficulty
  
• Extra elites / bosses spawned in Ultra Chaos has been reduced from 2 to 1
  
• Elites and bosses no longer can have the Healthy or Shielded buff
  
• Removed the extremely fast enemy spawn speed (it actually is harder when enemies gradually spawn in while you are already moving around the island than it is for them all to spawn instantly)
  
• Being on Low graphics settings no longer makes totems have no emissive color

JAN 14TH HOTFIX
Removed santa hats

That's it for now but I plan on releasing The Variety Update Part 2 sometime in February to finish off the new ability and melee systems as well as add a lot of new island layouts and loot types to get closer and closer to the "no two runs are the same" feeling 🦀

Here's a teaser for a mechanic that will let you buff specific weapon mods in interesting ways: in the example below, Mace Shot has homing and chaotic buffs that increase damage and allow all 3 mace balls to fly to the target (when previously they'd just miss). This should add a new layer of fun to mods and give more depth and variety when buildcrafting!

If you are enjoying Crab Champions so far, it'd mean a lot to me if you could nominate it for a Steam Award (after polling the community, it looks like either the "Best Soundtrack" or the "Better With Friends" categories are the most suitable for this game). There's still so much to add but I've been blown away by the response to the game since it launched only a few months ago in April!



In other news, the beta for the next big update has been live for the last week or so, bringing lots of new features such as:

- Selectable Melee Weapons (Claw, Dagger and Hammer) and Abilities (Grenade, Grappling Hook, Black Hole, Ice Blast and Laser Blast)
- 2 brand new Mingames to test your skills without committing to a full roguelike run
- Side sliding
- New weapons (Laser Cannons and Seagle) and perks
- New enemies
- New island layouts
- New music
- Much more (quality of life features, massive loot and enemy rebalances etc.)

Anyone that owns the game can opt in, full instructions can be found in the #beta-getting-started channel on the Discord server: https://discord.com/channels/547513194353131530/1095854970189918238


Thanks for being the best community any developer could ask for, see you in the patch notes for the Variety Update once it leaves beta! 🦀

P.S. the game is now on sale (25% off!) for the duration of the Steam Autumn Sale!

NEW WEAPONS: FLAMETHROWER & ARCANE WAND




VFX OVERHAUL


ULTRA CHAOS: NEW EXTREME DIFFICULTY


UNIQUE LOOT VISUALS + ICONS (A START)

Loot is finally getting some identity! While there's a lot of loot to make unique visuals for, I'm happy with the way the first few are turning out. It makes a big difference to be able to start recognizing loot at distance or being able to share your inventory screen and not have to explain what each piece of loot is!




BIG MECHANIC IMPROVEMENTS

• Universal Critical Hits: ANYTHING can now cause a critical hit including your secondary projectiles like Mace Shot or Dagger Arc. This means that there is a single unified critical hit chance stat that affects all of your build at once instead of having to find separate grenade crit and melee crit etc. perks
  
• Damage 10x Lower: As many people were reaching the limits of the game in terms of getting to the point where enemies become invincible due to their health being so high, I've globally scaled down ALL damage sources by 10x (and of course enemy health too). This allows for longer runs, more noticeable power creep and easier calculations in the early game when comparing damage numbers. If comparing to the previous build, something dealing 2500 damage now deals 250 damage!
  
• Better Healing: Especially on the higher difficulties with many modifiers on, health became less and less important with many players opting to go for a "one hit" type build revolving mainly around armor and not health. Since there are so many perks around building health, I wanted to make it much more important and fun to do so. The base health pool for all difficulties has been increased, with the effectiveness of armor slightly reduced. Most health related perks have received a buff so building into health loot should be much more rewarding.

GENERAL

• Remade almost all VFX in the entire game from scratch to be much less blinding and more interesting to look at (there are some that still need to be replaced which will be done in the next update)
  
• Added new weapon: Flamethrower
  
• Added new weapon: Arcane Wand
  
• Added new difficulty: Ultra Chaos (unlocked by getting all weapons to Diamond). This is a difficulty for those looking for the most unfair challenge that I could possibly come up with. There are no unlocks or achievements tied to it, it's purely for extreme challenge seekers
  
• Critical hits are now calculated globally: this means that ANYTHING can crit- dagger arcs, mace balls etc!
  
• Added 2 new Tropical biome islands
  
• Added new evolved enemy: Ice Pumpkin
  
• Added new evolved enemy: Fire Pumpkin
  
• Added new evolved enemy: Laser Skull
  
• Added new debuff: Arcane - damage is dealt once per second equal to the total stacks of arcane currently applied. Each time damage is applied, the total stacks of arcane are halved
  
• Added new weapon mod: Arcane Shot: Shots apply arcane to enemies
  
• Added new weapon mod: Drill Shot: Chance for shots to create damaging drills on impact
  
• Added new weapon mod: Link Shot: Chance for shots to burst into 3 link shots on impact
  
• Added new grenade mod: Giant Drill: Grenades explode into giant drills
  
• Added new perk: Crimson Haze: Enemies create short lived damaging zones when eliminated
  
• Added new perk: Critical Lightning: Critical hits shock random enemies
  
• Added new perk: Potent Magic: Arcane debuff stacks increased
  
• To make it harder to reach the damage limit (and getting negative billions of damage in the game over screen), all damage has been reduced by 10x- this is a global change and all mods and perks that deal flat damage have been adjusted accordingly. This also means all enemies start with 10x less health. The end result should be a more noticeable and satisfying damage increase as runs progress, seeing single digit damage numbers grow into the thousands and eventually millions! Another big benefit is for those that go on long runs, it’ll take much longer to reach the current island limits (where enemies become invincible due to having so much health). During the rebalancing pass, if a mod dealt 25 damage, I’ve rounded it up to now deal 3 damage (after the 10x reduction). While doing this I also buffed the damage of some underperforming mods and perks, mainly the strike and storm mods as well as all damage increasing grenade mods. All of these changes should make it also easier to calculate how effective a mod or perk is relative to the base damage as it’s easier to compare a 50 damage mod to a 8 base damage weapon than it is to compare a 450 damage mod to a 75 base damage weapon (which is how things were before the 10x reduction and rounding)
  
• Greatly improved the smoothness of other players in multiplayer games especially when spectating, it should no longer look like players are lagging when they aren’t
  
• Small enemies no longer collide with each other which should greatly reduce situations where pufferfish get stuck on crabs
  
• Optimized the Shrapnel challenge modifier which could cause lag when many enemies exploded into shrapnel at once
  
• Optimized situations where many projectiles hit lava and created lots of splash FX, causing lag
  
• Added 30 FPS frame cap for those looking to preserve battery life on handheld devices
  
• Improved water ripple visuals to both work in shallow water and also push water foam away
  
• Improved the visuals of the Grid, Flow, Geometric, Purple Tiger, Regal and Void camos
  
• Raised the height of the camera when not aiming to make it feel more comfortable (as the crab is so flat and close to the ground, having the camera also low sometimes felt bad when looking upwards)
  
• Added 4 new achievements (Flamethrower and Arcane wand victory related)
  
• Added new inventory icons for some weapon mods (still lots more to be done)
  
• Added new generic icons for Rare, Epic and Legendary weapon mods (with a matching colored border to easily see what rarity they are at a glance in the inventory UI)

BALANCE CHANGES

• Slugs and Grubs are slightly less common to allow for their presence to be more noticeable (ideally they should be lined up with other enemies for bonus damage rather than half of the map being slugs and clearing itself with chain reactions- this can still happen but just a bit less often)
  
• Fire damage is more effective but all fire mods and perks apply less overall stacks to compensate. This should mean less situations where enemies are taking tiny amounts of damage from fire over a very long period of time and more situations where enemies are taking much more concentrated fire damage over a shorter period
  
• Moved Hot Shot, Sharpshooter, Power Punch and Mega Crit from Weapon Mods to be Perks as critical hits are relevant to more than just weapon shots now
  
• Critical Claws, Critical Grenade, Critical Chain and Streak Shot have been removed
  
• Critical Blast has been moved to a perk as it can trigger from more than just weapon crits now
  
• Precision has been renamed to Streak Shot since that has been removed and the name fits it better
  
• Since “lesser” crits can trigger “on crit” mods (which could lead to an infinite loop), critical hit chance is capped at 50% for “lesser” damage sources (any damage that isn’t directly from your weapon, grenade or melee)
  
• Critical Link has been renamed to Link Shot, has new projectiles and no longer requires a critical hit to trigger
  
• Critical Blades has been renamed to Homing Blades and no longer requires a critical hit to trigger
  
• Mega Crit now multiplies critical damage by 3 instead of adding 300% extra damage to the multiplier
  
• Destructibles now scale up their damage / debuff stacks from +5% per island to +10% per island
  
• Landmines no longer spawn naturally and barrels spawn less (no more chaotic barrels, only regular ones- the chaotic barrels are fun in the lobby but in gameplay situations they mostly just fly off into the sky and do nothing)
  
• Increased physics impulse strength from melee on regular barrels
  
• The Homing Barrels challenge modifier barrels have far less health and no longer can leak which should reduce the messy visuals that can sometimes happen with lots of barrels
  
• Turrets no longer target Shielded enemies
  
• The slowest moving enemies now move a bit faster to prevent situations where you are looking for one last really slow enemy when you’ve cleared all of the others
  
• Basic melee crabs no longer can be shielded as it slowed down the pace of gameplay too much
  
• Lightning has been reworked to last a bit longer and deal less damage (as it wasn’t adjusted for the 10x drop in damage yet). Also adjusted the lightning FX and tint to be a bit more blue to differentiate it from Arcane

CHANGES TO THE DIFFICULTY MODIFIER ROSTER

• Added new difficulty modifier: Surging Enemies: Enemies spawn in much faster
  
• Added new difficulty modifier: Limited Heals: All healing is reduced by 50%
  
• The Eternal Punishment difficulty modifier now only removes 2% of your max health when taking damage (it previously removed 5% which often made runs devolve into a glass cannon situation where max health was ignored)
  
• Resurrecting Enemies now triggers slightly less often as it could cause islands to drag in terms of pacing. In addition to this, enemies can no longer resurrect in a close range to the player as this could often lead to unfair damage from enemies spawning close behind
  
• Volatile Explosions was a modifier that caused understandable frustration: being able to melee groups of slugs and not take damage from it was one of the best feeling mechanics in the game and removing it for the sake of difficulty decreased the fun factor for most. The flow state present without this modifier on got interrupted in a more tedious than fun way. This modifier has been moved up to the new Ultra Chaos difficulty. To make basic slugs still feel threatening with this change, they now explode faster than before, requiring a well timed melee or dash to avoid
  
• Manual Collection has also been replaced as it made the flow of combat more tedious than fun in many cases. Since there are those that still enjoy it, it is active in the Ultra Chaos difficulty
  
• These changes should shift the difficulty more to making good builds and less making zero mistakes

BUFFS

• Auto Rifle damage increased from 3 to 5
  
• Burst Pistol damage increased from 3 to 5
  
• Dual Pistols damage increased from 4 to 5
  
• Auto Shotgun damage increased from 2 to 3
  
• Orb Launcher damage increased from 4 to 6
  
• Sniper damage increased from 30 to 40
  
• Rocket Launcher projectile speed doubled (as the weapon was underperforming slightly before so this should make it easier to hit moving targets)
  
• Rocket Launcher explosion radius increased by 20%
  
• Rocket Launcher damage increased from 25 to 35
  
• Blade Launcher damage increased from 2 to 4
  
• Base starting health increased from 100 to 200
  
• Spiked Chest max health opening cost reduced from 33% to 25%
  
• Loot Totem health cost reduced from 33% to 20%
  
• Crystal Totem health cost reduced from 33% to 10%
  
• Chance Totem health cost reduced from 10% to 5%
  
• Gamble Totem crystal cost reduced by 33%
  
• Critical Blast damage increased from 400 to 500 and is now chance based as intended
  
• High Roller now duplicates Epic and Legendary chests on Elite / Boss islands rather than Healing chests which felt underwhelming
  
• High Roller base downside reduced from 33% chance for no chests to spawn to 20% chance for no chests to spawn
  
• Reload Arc is now part of the Skill loot pool to make choosing skill portals more enticing
  
• Wind Up, Streak Shot and Clip Shot no longer add flat damage and now add percentage damage
  
• Double Trouble enemy health increase reduced from +100% to +50%
  
• Hard Target now applies damage reduction AFTER other incoming damage debuffs (like from Hot Shot or Brute Force). So a 10% reduction is now 10% of the entire incoming damage amount which should make it a more viable option to counter increased incoming damage debuffs
  
• Enhanced Turrets damage increased from +50% to +75%
  
• Crystal Barrage damage increased from 1 to 3
  
• Split Shot now happens sooner in the lifetime of a projectile, making it much more viable for fast moving projectiles
  
• Arcane Blast now applies 8 stacks of the arcane debuff per damage tick
  
• Sharpened Axe damage per second increased from 50 to 125
  
• Barrel Explosion damage increased from 50 to 100 and armor removed on the barrels to make them easier to destroy
  
• Landmine Shot damage increased from 50 to 100
  
• Triangle Shot damage increased from 35 to 100
  
• Torpedo Shot damage increased from 35 to 100
  
• Firework Shot damage increased from 25 to 30
  
• Bomb Shot damage increased from 35 to 75
  
• Proximity barrage damage increased from 30 to 50
  
• Dagger Shot damage increased from 2 to 3
  
• Reload Arc damage increased from 15 to 20
  
• Spinning Blade damage increased from 4 to 5
  
• Time Bolt damage increased from 30 to 40
  
• Ultra Shot damage increased from 25 to 30
  
• Shockwave cooldown reduced from 10 seconds to 4 seconds
  
• Health Shot healing amount increased from 1 to 3
  
• Grim Reaper healing amount increased from 5 to 6
  
• Vampire healing amount increased from 2 to 4
  
• Personal Space max health increase requirement reduced from every 8 eliminations to EVERY close range elimination
  
• Bullseye max health increase requirement reduced from every 10 one shot eliminations to EVERY one shot elimination
  
• Checklist eliminations requirement reduced from 25 to 15
  
• Assassin eliminations requirement reduced from 10 to 5
  
• Tasty Orange damage increase per elimination increased from +1% to +2%
  
• Laser Crab, Poison Skull, Blocker Skull and Lightning Skull projectile damage decreased by 50%
  
• Grenade Crab, Fire Skull and Homing Grub projectile damage decreased by 25%
  
• Slightly reduced the radius of the Grenade Crab grenade to be a bit more fair
  
• Slightly reduced the Minigun crab projectile speed
  
• Reduced the collision radius of the Elite Lightning Crab projectiles as there were some cases that appeared to be a miss that would still hit
  
• Removed knockback on many small enemy projectiles to reduce situations where players could lose momentum and be juggled in the air, taking damage multiple times- not fun!
  
• Frenzied Enemies now doubles the attack speed of enemies rather than setting it to the max value (which could lead to inconsistencies and unfair situations on some enemies)

NERFS

• Crossbow default piercing reduced from 2 to 0 (as the previous update made it one of the best weapons in the game)
  
• Enemy bonus health per alive player in co-op increased from +40% per player to +45% per player and on Nightmare or Ultra Chaos difficulties, the bonus is increased to +66% per player on Elite and Boss islands as the situations where everyone shreds through elites and bosses in 1 second were happening a bit too often in co-op especially in 4 player lobbies
  
• Double Edged Sword crystal gain has been reduced from 250% of damage dealt to 100% of damage dealt as it was far too overpowered before
  
• Hot Shot critical hit chance reduced from 16% to 15%
  
• Sharpshooter critical hit chance reduced from 8% to 6%
  
• There is no longer a 2% base starting crit chance, you start with 0% chance to crit
  
• Mace Shot trigger chance decreased by 1%
  
• Mace Shot damage per second decreased from 125 to 100
  
• Aura Grenade damage per second reduced from 1250 to 500
  
• Armor health per plate reduced from 25% of max health to 15% of max health
  
• Slightly increased the health of most medium enemies (regular skulls, regular ants etc.) but also increased the time before health regeneration on these enemies (if playing with the Regenerating Enemies modifier enabled), allowing for more breathing room between each hit they take
  
• Pufferfish health increased to differentiate them from slugs when prioritizing targets

BUG FIXES

• Upgrade chests no longer contain duplicates of the same loot (you could have 10 mods in your inventory but get the same mod twice)
  
• Fixed issue where ALL strikes that had spawned during a run weren’t getting cleaned up properly which could lead to worse performance on late game runs
  
• Enemy movement now ignores physically simulated destructibles so they should stop being pushed under the ground by barrels
  
• Bouncing Shot no longer resets the lifetime of projectiles which was causing performance issues where projectiles would bounce around for 30+ seconds at high levels
  
• Removed Laser Crab and Minigun Crab from challenge crystals as they were appearing when the Evolved Enemies difficulty modifier was inactive
  
• Enemies that happen to spawn outside of the world bounds should get automatically eliminated
  
• Fixed Critical Blast having a visual cooldown in the inventory while actually having a chance to trigger on each critical hit
  
• Fixed issue that could cause Auras to trigger multiple times when dropping and re-picking back up an Aura perk
  
• Fixed various issues that could cause Auras to stop triggering when multiple Aura perks were equipped
  
• Lava now deals damage when stepping into it as intended
  
• Homing Thorns now deal damage as intended
  
• Fixed various spots where enemies could get stuck
  
• The “Islands Survived” text in the game over UI now shows island 18 if getting eliminated on island 19 (previously it would show 19)
  
• You no longer automatically fire when leaving a portal if you had entered it with the fire button held down
  
• Fixed some jankiness around sliding- when sliding forward and quickly pressing the back key, you no longer change directions while sliding and instead stop the slide which should prevent overshooting when trying to stop a slide
  
• Damage Dealt can no longer be negative on the game over screen
  
• Max health no longer goes to 1 when getting high enough
  
• Fixed issue that would cause players other than the multiplayer host to see blue borders in the lobby
  
• Fixed issue with auto melee that could cause it to continue indefinitely when exiting a portal
  
• Removed the invisible walls around the pillars in some boss islands- this prevents situations where you can seemingly deal no damage to enemies when they are near the pillars but will increase situations where they may be able to shoot through walls. Working on a better fix to this in the future
  
• Fixed issue that prevented the Challenger challenges from being completed
  
• Made several potential fixes for a low percentage of players not being able to join multiplayer games
  
• Fixed the Level Up perk favoring grenade mods over weapon mods when leveling things up
  
• Fixed the Level Up perk leveling up mods and perks that were already level 255
  
• Fixed a soft lock that could happen if knocked out of the Tropical island with the square 4 walls: there’s now a launchpad outside of the wall boundaries to bounce back in!

That's all for this update, thanks for playing! 🦀

Made a few small improvements based on initial feedback from the update!

GENERAL

• Changed lightning to only interrupt your movement initially, not prevent jumping or dashing the entire time you were shocked which felt unfair over the new longer lifespan that lightning has

BUG FIXES

• Fixed Lightning Skulls not having purple projectiles
  
• Fixed a few rare crashes
  
• Fixed Checklist displaying the incorrect amount of eliminations needed in the description

It's been quite a while since the last update- this will most likely be the pace moving forward: larger updates every 1-2 months delivering a nice chunk of new content to explore! As mentioned in previous patch notes, I have been continually updating the Beta branch with changes every few days so if you feel like trying out every little addition (with the possibility of them being unbalanced) then feel free to opt into that branch. There has been an amazing beta community growing on Discord and it's been fun to see the reactions to each element as I add them.

With that said, lets get into all the changes!


DIFFICULTY MODIFIERS

With a surprising amount of players asking for a challenge beyond Nightmare, I have added 12 new difficulty modifiers that can all be enabled at once for the ULTIMATE test of skill! Keep in mind that these are intended for seasoned players and (especially on higher challenge levels) will most likely require a lot of attempts to win.

Each weapon gets a medal when winning (the medal awarded depends on the challenge level) which contributes to your overall account medal (seen next to your name in all games).



NO MORE COOLDOWNS: COMPLETE LOOT REBALANCE!
There have been countless rebalances to loot in this patch (details in the full patch notes below), but the main things to be excited for are:

• Almost all mods that previously had boring cooldowns (meaning you could only trigger them once every few seconds) now are chance based, allowing you to trigger them multiple times in a short timespan. Each additional level of these mods both increases the trigger chance AND the effectiveness of the mod. This should allow for previously underwhelming mods like Dagger Arc or Bubble Blast to scale nicely into the end game
  
  
• Damage increasing perks now affect the damage of weapon and grenade mods that spawn secondary projectiles (again like Dagger Arc / Bubble Blast) which makes more sense AND again allows for better scaling

These changes mean that finally the more "fun" mods are a viable choice over straight up flat damage boosts as for a long time these mods just couldn't keep up and weren't worth taking. This should introduce far more build variety than before.

PHYSICS BASED DESTRUCTIBLES
These add a new layer of chaos to islands compared to the existing static explosive rocks!





TONS OF QUALITY OF LIFE IMPROVEMENTS
This update is packed full of highly requested quality of life features such as:

• You can now press Q (by default) to Auto Loot every piece of loot and chest on an island without having to manually open and choose each pickup (which could really slow down late game runs especially with perk combos like Big Chests and Faulty Chests)
  
  
• The same amount of crystals given to all players in multiplayer when eliminating enemies to prevent unlucky players from falling behind in a run
  
• You can no longer be frozen for 2+ seconds, leading to unfair deaths
  
• Many common and frustrating bugs have been fixed such as Key Totems not working if you aren't hosting in a multiplayer game, getting eliminated by totems if you had a perk that increases incoming damage, glue shot not damaging consistently etc.

GENERAL

• Added 12 difficulty modifiers that each add a challenge level to the run to allow you to rank up in exchange for greatly increased difficulty. I tried to make each modifier interesting while keeping the core gameplay loop intact while also trying to avoid "curse" or straight up debuff modifiers like "chests spawn less loot", those never feel very fun to me. If you thought Nightmare was getting too easy, try a few runs with all modifiers active!
  
• In multiplayer, all players now receive an equal share of crystals when enemies are eliminated. This even occurs when a player has been eliminated and is spectating. The main reason for this is to prevent situations where players are left behind due to one overpowered player dealing all the damage and scooping up all the crystals!
  
• Added new “Auto Loot” keybind that will automatically pick up all available loot (if a chest it will pick the highest rarity option) and will salvage all remaining loot- great for late game runs with a lot of loot to sort through that previously took a lot of time per island
  
• Damage line of sight checks now ignore enemies so grenades, explosive weapons and melee will now all damage ALL enemies within the damage radius (before, only a fraction of a group of enemies would take damage, the others blocking the damage entirely)
  
• New XP system: for every 10000 score you get in a run, you level up! This is a permanent account level that can be infinitely leveled up. For each Challenge Level you get 5% more XP
  
• Added physically simulated barrels and landmines
  
• Added new enemies (only seen with the Evolved Enemies difficulty modifier active): Elite Barrel Skull, Laser Crab, Minigun Crab, Homing Grub
  
• Perks that increase damage now also scale the damage of ALL other damage sources (including things like Dagger Arc or Poison Aura). Because of this I have rebalanced the damage numbers of ALL “secondary” projectile weapon mods, grenade mods and perks (too many small tweaks to list here but they have all been rebalanced with this new scaling in mind)
  
• Most mods that had cooldowns are now fully chance based, allowing you to trigger them multiple times in a short timeframe. Grenade mods that do have cooldowns generally have much shorter (around 1 second) cooldowns to allow for grenades to trigger mods much more frequently when using Grenadier or Clone Explosion
  
• Perks that increase or decrease incoming damage (like Hot Shot or Hard Target) no longer have an effect on unblockable damage sources such as from spiked chests or totems. This means you can no longer get eliminated by using a totem or opening a spiked chest!
  
• When aiming with the crossbow, the arc spread is now tightened
  
• Heavily optimized the maximum amount of individual FX instances that can be visible at once which should reduce late game frame drops with a lot going on
  
• Heavily optimized the maximum amount of individual damage text numbers that can be visible at once which should also help late game performance
  
• Projectiles now hit the blue island border walls which means improved performance in cases where lots of projectiles are being spammed (as projectiles that missed enemies and flew out into the distance got simulated for far longer than they were relevant to gameplay)
  
• Optimized the Shrapnel challenge modifier projectiles as it could cause noticeable frame drops when many enemies were eliminated at once
  
• Greatly improved the responsiveness of physics objects in multiplayer
  
• Added new weapon mod: Landmine Shot
  
• Added new Grenade Mod: Barrel Explosion
  
• Added new rideable barrel to the lobby- hop in and find Tony!
  
• Added new challenge modifier: Homing Barrels
  
• Added new destructible rock type: Max Health Rock (gold)
  
• Improved gold skin visuals to be brighter and more vibrant
  
• Dagger Arc, Piercing Wave, Arcane Blast, Shotgun Blast, Mace Shot, Firework Shot, Thorn Shot, Torpedo Shot, Fireball Shot, Sharpened Axe and Triangle Shot are now chance based instead of cooldown based. This should make them far more interesting and fun to choose instead of straight up stat boosts
  
• The maximum ice stacks a player or enemy can ever have at once is 25. This is to prevent extremely long freeze periods on both incoming and outgoing damage which could result in players getting unfairly eliminated
  
• All “bad thing happens when taking damage perks” now won’t trigger when taking constant fire damage and will only happen on direct hits from enemies or other strong one off damage hits like from totems. Your combo will also stay safe here as losing a hard earned 5x combo due to a tick of fire never feels fair
  
• Enemies can no longer change targets while in the middle of an attack and facing another player
  
• Interact cooldown has been removed from portals to prevent situations where multiple players interacting with portals in a short time frame wouldn’t count every player
  
• Improved controller navigation on the Difficulty selection UI to make it easier to see which modifiers are being selected
  
• Added 3 new achievements and skins

BALANCE CHANGES

• The maximum time a Horde island can be has been reduced from 90 seconds to 60 seconds as they could often drag the pace of a run down a bit. Since they are now shorter, I've adjusted the enemy spawn curve to be more intense
  
• Whenever multiple elites or bosses spawn due to looping or difficulty modifiers, they can now be all different types of enemies
  
• Reduced the amount of bounces that Elite Lightning Crab projectiles can do and also increased the time between their attacks
  
• Poison Crab health reduced by 15%
  
• The key totems in the lobby are now much more likely to drop Legendary loot
  
• Auto Rifle damage increased from 28 to 30
  
• Orb Launcher damage increased from 35 to 36
  
• Grenade damage increased from 275 to 350
  
• Bouncing Shot now works slightly differently- each level of Bouncing Shot adds +1 bounce (previously no matter what level it gave +4 bounces)
  
• Made reaching max combo much easier: Combo Level 3 = 50 eliminations (down from 100), Combo Level 4 = 125 eliminations (down from 250), Combo Level 5 = 225 eliminations (down from 500)
  
• Homing Shot now has a much shorter homing range which should prevent it completely breaking the game- it’s still powerful when used on lined up enemies with piercing but it should make situations where all you have to do is fire into the sky to clear an island less common
  
• Scavenger is now fixed at a 5% chance for enemies to drop health pickups but the amount of healing increases with each level so it can scale better into the late game
  
• Poison was extremely overpowered so it no longer affects damage from non direct damage (like fire damage). This makes flat damage mods more consistent and prevents unfair deaths where you get set on fire while also poisoned, leading to insane incoming damage. Poison stacks have also been adjusted to be closer to fire in terms of balance as before landing even a single bullet with the Poison Shot mod active would grant a +25% damage bonus when hitting that enemy again- way too overpowered in comparison to the other elements! All poison based mods and perks have had their poison stacks rebalanced to be more in line with the other elements
  
• Iron Claws negative debuff (melee cooldowns increased) reduced from +100% melee cooldowns to +50% melee cooldowns so it should be more viable to use now
  
• Valued Customer now increases max health instead of just healing, making it much more useful
  
• Fortitude max health gain increased from +20 max health to +25 max health
  
• Personal Space and Bullseye eliminations needed to trigger reduced from 10 to 8
  
• Damage Aura damage increased from 15 to 20
  
• The health of all turrets has been increased from 100 to 10000
  
• Reduced grenade knockback strength to make grenade mods such as Spike Strike or Crystal Barrage more useful (since before it would often knock enemies out of the way, making these mods useless)
  
• Shotgun Blast damage per pellet increased from 125 to 400
  
• Ultra Shot base trigger chance increased by 50% and damage increased from 400 to 500
  
• Time Bolt damage increased from 600 to 1000
  
• Firework Shot damage increased from 500 to 1000
  
• All Aura perks (other than Damage Aura) now have a larger radius which should make them much more useful
  
• Poison Aura cooldown reduced from 5 seconds to 4 seconds
  
• Lightning Aura cooldown reduced from 9 seconds to 6 seconds
  
• Ice Aura cooldown reduced from 12 seconds to 8 seconds
  
• Fire Aura cooldown reduced from 10 seconds to 6 seconds
  
• Fire Shot fire stacks per hit increased from 40 to 100
  
• Random Shot debuff stacks per hit increased from 10 to 25
  
• Critical Chain cooldown reduced from 12 seconds to 10 seconds
  
• Gemstone damage increased from +5% after each island to +6% after each island
  
• Dagger projectiles (used by Dagger Blast / Dagger Shot / Dagger Dash) now move 50% more slowly but have a 50% increased radius so should be far more useful + effective
  
• FMJ damage increased from +50% damage to armored enemies to +100% damage to armored enemies
  
• Ghost Ammo chance to not use ammo per shot reduced from 20% to 15% (to balance it better with Efficiency as that has the same chance but you have to actually hit something for it to take effect)
  
• Bouncing Shot now starts with a few extra bounces to prevent cases where it could get stuck on the ground and appear to not bounce at all
  
• Bribe, Damage Seeker and Double Edged Sword will no longer trigger when stepping into non damaging poison / ice zones
  
• Health Rocks and Max Health Rocks now scale their bonuses by +20% per island
  
• Increased melee knockback strength by 50%
  
• Grave Dodger has been removed for now as it was extremely broken at high levels and basically prevented a run from being lost with 60+ seconds of invulnerability when reaching 1 HP on each island
  
• Melee knockback strength has been toned back slightly as the previous buff caused enemies to get stuck in crevices around the map
  
• Removed Lightning Slugs from the Challenge Crystal enemy pool and added Laser Crabs and Minigun Crabs instead
  
• Ultra Mushroom now has the same spawn weight as other grenade mods
  
• All turret projectiles damage increased by 50%
  
• Mace Ball projectiles have less gravity
  
  There were a few things causing damage numbers to SKYROCKET and make other mods that deal flat damage essentially useless very quickly. I’ve toned these back so that a wider range of build options are viable
  
  Critical hit calculations were unintentionally extremely strong: Power Punch was multiplying the original critical hit multiplier which then got multiplied again by Mega Crit! This resulted in insane inflations to damage when the multipliers should have been additive. This has been corrected now
  
  The adjustments below were made as a balancing response to damage increasing perks now being able to affect secondary projectiles such as Dagger Arc
  
  
• Power Punch critical hit damage increase reduced from +25% to +20%
  
• Critical Thinking damage boost reduced from +100% to +25%
  
• Critical chain active duration reduced from 5 seconds to 4 seconds
  
• Power Armor damage boost reduced from +50% damage per armor plate to +25% damage per armor plate
  
• Damage Combo damage boost reduced from +20+ per combo level to +15% per combo level
  
• Reduced damage bonus for Oil Can, Ice Cube, Metal Rod and Poison Vial from +50% damage to +25% damage
  
• Reduced damage bonus of Red Fury from +50% to +33%
  
• Reduced Brute Force damage increase from +250% to +100% and reduced the incoming damage penalty from +50% to +25%
  
• Reduced Damage Seeker damage increase from +250% to +150%
  
• Reduced Glass Cannon damage increase from +400% to +250% and reduced the max health penalty from -90% to -80%
  
• Reduced Leap Of Faith max health increase from +300% to +250%
  
• Reduced Up The Ante damage increase from +200% to +75%
  
• Money Is Power damage buff decreased from +10% to +5% per 1000 crystals
  
• Fire Aura, Ice Aura, Lightning Aura and Poison Aura damage increased from 50 to 150
  
• All “Strike” mods have had their damage increased from 100 to 400+
  
• All “Strike” mods have had their cooldowns reduced (cooldowns may be removed entirely in the future but since they all last quite a while it feels right to keep them cooldown based for now)

BUG FIXES

• Fixed issue where non-host players in a multiplayer match couldn’t use the key totem to get a free perk before a run
  
• Fixed issue where teammates could be damaged if triggering a damaging mod when eliminated (like crystal barrage) and your damage became “unowned”
  
• Fixed issue that caused Aura perks to not trigger when reloading an autosave unless dropped and picked back up again
  
• Poison now correctly increases damage of lesser projectiles such as Dagger Arc / Bubble Shot etc.
  
• Fixed issue where Glue Shot wasn’t dealing damage on some weapons
  
• Fixed issue where leaking destructible FX weren’t being attached properly
  
• Made many improvements to prevent enemies spawning under the ground (some may remain especially around barrels but I'm working to fix those in the future!)
  
• Fixed keys spawning under the ground when defeating bosses
  
• Fixed Damage Seeker reducing future max health gains from hearts when it shouldn’t
  
• Fixed enemies not calculating debuff damage correctly (Fire Skulls now will apply more fire stacks in general for example but these fire stacks will be far less damaging than before). This fix will make debuff damage consistent with all other sources (such as from fire rocks). Previously a poison skull would apply 10 stacks of poison from a projectile on island 1, and the same 10 stacks of poison on island 100 when they should have been applying far more
  
• Fixed exploit where players could win infinitely in the Game Over UI
  
• Fixed floating rocks on some islands

That's all for now, see you in the next update! 🦀