While there's not going to be a large-scale update this month as we continue to supply new content as soon as it's made, today's drop is more sizable than usual!

First off, we're dropping a new max Rank Level, Cultist! See more than any Captain can with the truth bestowed by the cosmos themselves, complete with a new Cultist Attire (unlocked at the Cultist rank) should you wish to showcase your newfound faith.



Secondly, we're dropping a Final Expedition at the very end of the Final Biome - a lavish yet rusty undersea grave of sorts for those who came before, but a last chance to rest and stock up on supplies before reaching the bottom...



Finally, a minor change, but the Translation Book now has an overhauled look, and now appears in front of players' faces instead of behind it. You know, how books are usually read.



More to come soon! As always, let us know what you think, and mark your calendars for We Need To Go Deeper's 1.0 release on August 1st!

This week we're dropping the last planned Affliction before 1.0, the loop-exclusive Time Plague! This horrendous and deadly illness can only be contracted through a Time Fragment, but will slowly and steadily take its toll on your body once contracted, causing you to take damage every minute you have it, and cough out contagious particles, making it our most deadly affliction to date. Loopers, beware.



In addition, we've tweaked a few other loop-related values.

• Time Devourer's health changed from 60 to 30.
  
• Time Splitter's health changed from 30 to 10.
  
• Time Fragments can now board your ship, and leave behind contagious particles upon death.

This week, we're dropping another enemy into the final biome, little mischievous creatures known as Ghasts. These little things love messing with technology, so if you notice funny things happening to your power distribution, it may just be a Ghast! You'll need to look closely though, they're very sneaky and may be hard to spot from afar...



Also, a semi-important announcement, but as we're working on finishing the final biome throughout the month, we may not have a big-scale content update for the 8th of next month as a result. We're very much focused on delivering content as its made right now, so expect a more regular stream of smaller things like this for a while.

Dr. Moreau's seasonal experiments have once again resulted in the Spring Event, now live for the rest of April! No new hats for seasoned veterans thanks to our hands being full with other stuff, but there's always the thrill of the hunt.

• 6 Special Cosmetics!
  
• Mutant Egg Hunt!
  
• Hopping Abominations!

Spring has sprung, and so has Dr. Moreau's mutant hybrids! Sprung into the ocean, that is! Now, Dr. Moreau's sick experiment is swimming about leaving Mutant Eggs, most of which bear its twisted spawn, but some eggs contain the Festive Heads of Dr. Moreau's previous experiments! Don't ask why.

Dr. Moreau's experiments will expire spontaneously May 2nd.

This week, we're bringing your minds to the brink with the new Madness Affliction for the final biome! With madness, your reality becomes fractured, and you may witness things your fellow crew mates cannot. You can't trust your senses when inflicted with madness!



There's also one extra small change in this drop, you may or may not notice that the strange light that shines at the end of each biome now has taken on a new hue. Don't worry about it, it was always like that!

My dear colleagues, what I have witnessed cannot be described in our finite language. What lurks beyond the deepest threshold are sights that should remain unseen. Writhing horrors, extra-dimensional geometry, and blasphemous designs no benevolent ruler would ever see fit for existence. Turn back while you can.

Full Image Download Available Here




The 10th and final biome has arrived, and we couldn't be more excited to start getting your feedback. Full disclosure, the biome is only partially finished, but we hope to add the rest of the intended content in by the end of the month. We don't want to spoil too much, as a big part of this biome is discovering things for yourself, but here's a few things you'll likely need to know:

• There are no safe spots to park in this biome. That means no caves, no lairs, no civilizations, zip. This is intended to be a sort of final gauntlet/challenge for your crew, so be sure you have everything you need by the end of the 4th biome.
  
  
• The biome has no boss yet, only a placeholder while we work on the more involved encounter which will serve as the game's final boss.
  
  
• Communication is vital. We are designing this biome to really test communication among players, so be vocal and be vigilant. This will of course mean that we may have extra problems with Bot AI in this biome, so bear with us as we bring them up to date with new mechanics.

With that, good luck and have fun, and be sure to leave us plenty of feedback on the new content!


The end of our Early Access road is scheduled to come to an end this Summer, with our full release headed for June! On that note, I figured it might be a good time to recap a few things you can expect for full release and onward:

• The base price WILL increase for full launch. As we've stated since the beginning, the base price of We Need To Go Deeper will indeed increase once we're fully launched. So now is the time if you still want to take advantage of the game at its current price.
  
  
• The game will still be updated! We do indeed want to keep adding content to the game post-launch for as long as is viable, and we're very serious about clamping down on any bugs/issues that happen to persist past launch. You can definitely expect at minimum a few sizable content updates in the full release's future in addition to patches and support! So keep letting us know what you'd most like to see!
  
  
• The full soundtrack will be available FREE! While we already offer the soundtrack via our SoundCloud, many of you have been asking for a full, easily downloadable version of the soundtrack, and you will get just that on launch day!

• Added fail-safe to avoid saving corrupted rank data.
  
• Multiple injection behavior fixed (Narwhals, etc can now again inject their noses more than just once)
  
• Reduced meat boulder damage 60%
  
• Reduced meat boulder falling speed 25%
  
• Increased spawn wait interval for nematodes from 2 seconds to 6 seconds
  
• Reduced nematode sight radius 33%
  
• Added a bunch of new dialog to every civilization!

::: Player of the Month :::

This month's Player of the Month has been with the WNTGD community for nearly two full years, and while they've been POTM once before in the past, we felt with their recent and frequent contributions, feedback, and extreme dedication to maintaining the We Need To Go Deeper Wiki and Forums, on top of their generally fun and playful attitude, that they truly earned the spot again. Congrats again ADcrafter, we're grateful to have you in the community!

::: Community Highlights :::

First off, a big shoutout to Wrzlprnft for his work on the new Discord bot, which now sorts active players when they are in-game, and allows you to flag yourself as looking for fellow crew members! It's super convenient and displays live players in the Discord right in the roles section, so you can jump right into a crew! Thank you Wrzlprnft!

Be sure to join our Discord community if you haven't already!

www.discord.gg/wntgd

Now, we appear to have missed a few awesome art pieces last time we did one of these, so please enjoy the belated showcase of fan art!

These hand-drawn pieces by The Frog Archer capture the hidden beauty of our limb-deficient cephalopods.





Meanwhile, these animations from Sakke take a trip into Eldritch horrors.





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That's all she wrote! Be sure and let us know what y'all think of the new update, and happy diving!

This week we're dropping one of the most major content in some time. This week, we've overhauled the art style from the ground up, bringing you a look we think has never been seen before in games! Many thanks to our brilliant new visionaries GasmaskMacrourus, Fish Fish, Sakke, Natedog251, and Antelope Syrup for their artistic contributions to this overhaul.

Here's a little peak of the new look, see the newest screenshots on our store page proper!




And finally, what you've all been waiting to see, the reveal of our new upcoming final biome, The Messy Abyss!

This week we're dropping a new Time Traveler enemy; the furious and feathery Velociraptor!



Besides their speed and viciousness, be warned that some velociraptors (around 10 percent to be exact) can also be vessels for prehistoric illnesses, such as the Ancient Flu, so try your best to make short work of these creatures should you be unfortunate enough to come across one.

This week we're dropping a brand new affliction for the Ancient Abyss, known as Ancient Flu! Besides making your face break out in nasty green hives, Ancient Flu gives you an extreme case of the sniffles, causing your character to have to stop and sneeze bursts of deadly and contagious acidic phlegm from time to time.

It's also a fairly frequent affair, so tread carefully around infected teammates!




We've been starting work towards fleshing out the final biome recently, and I thought I'd share some snippets of the concept drawings we've been working on for it! As always, I'll leave the details to your imaginations for now.

This month is all about forgotten leftovers, and boy do we have a bundle of them for ya in this month's content update! Asset replacements, camera tweaks, back-end number crunching. Many things we shoulda done but haven't yet!




New Flee Critters!- 3 New fleeing critter types for the Dark Depths, Ancient Abyss and Volcanic Depths have appeared, known as the Macrourus, Glisten Fish, and Skin Fish respectively. What they lack in bite they make up for in cowardice, adding a little extra life to their respective biomes.



Explosion Countdown!- No longer will your submersibles instantly explode when their hull integrity reaches zero, but instead an alarm will sound when the hull is critical, alerting the crew of their imminent destruction, with a 5 second countdown to annihilation once the hull reaches zero. Should you manage to fully repair a leak within that time, however, you may very well avoid death's icy grasp!



2 New Secret Hats!- Two new secret Youtube-inspired hats have been added! This time around, based on two bickering friends who are intimately familiar with nearly all of We Need To Go Deeper's updates... Try their names in the Extras Menu to unlock their respective hats!



Big List of Fixes/Changes! - The bulk of this update went towards more catchup/cleanup of many different elements! Here's the list in its full glory:

• Barnacle Hive legs added, can knock the submarine around if they get too close.
  
• Barnacle Hive now shielded everywhere but it's spawner boils and spine.
  
• Ragdoll negative scaling fixed, hopefully should stop weird disconnected ragdolls.
  
• Contrast boosted in caves/expedition zones to make up for some of the lost contrast/color caused by underwater overlay.
  
• Anti-aliasing added to interior camera to be consistent with exterior.
  
• Caves given extra hand-composed decor clusters for variety.
  
• Camera now centers properly during Dinner Sequence.
  
• Dinner Sequence now repairs the ship, heals all players, and cleans up interior enemies for a fresh start.
  
• Nematode given attack animation, no longer does touch damage.
  
• Ephyra red damage projectile no longer shorts consoles.
  
• Jelly Temple given a new more temple-y exterior asset.
  
• Disabled Ultrawide monitor resolutions to avoid confusion until we can officially support it.
  
• Added refresh rate to monitor resolution dropdown info.
  
• Ephyra boss has a new rotate-y attack pattern and increased projectile size, but now only spawns projectiles from specific spots.
  
• New "faux random" function to clamp down on the limits of bad luck for certain items. Now instead of pure RNG this faux random will only make so many bad rolls before it defaults to the desired outcome, after which it switches back to RNG. Items with faux random: Butcher Knife, Pickaxe, Eldritch Staff.
  
• Player-based "knockback" feedback added for incoming damage. Now you'll really feel the oomph of a crab's claw swipes!

::: Player of the Month :::

This month's Player of the Month is Lock!

Though he's a "lock" of many names, Lock is a frequent and friendly voice among our Discord and Livestreams, always stopping by to liven things up with his variety of topics and banter. Similarly, he's been spotted on the Discord answering questions for new players, and has been known to frequently stream We Need To Go Deeper on his own Twitch channel as well! Thanks for keeping our community lively, Lock!

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Thanks to everyone who's been sticking around to keep giving feedback as we are on our sprint to the finish line! We hope Deeper is slowly but surely shaping up for its 1.0 release!