Aug 3, 2021

"Practice makes Perfect" update in alpha phase - training room & superpowers!

Dead Cells - mezzamazza55

Hey everyone,

We're back with another alpha! This time there's no balance changes or new weapons, instead we're focusing on improving the learning curve for everyone (but particularly newcomers & occasional players), without altering the overall difficulty of the game. All the new features are entirely optional and designed to allow you to improve your skills with no ragequits! OK maybe you'll still get a couple...

TLDR

Training room - hone your skills against all the mobs and bosses you've seen, except the spoiler boss of course
Aspects - extremely strong powers to make your run easier (but you can't win the next Boss Cell if you beat the game)
World map - see the paths you can take through the island
When you pick up a scroll you can see the change to your overall damage for each colour
Multi-binding moved to Custom Mode
Lots of smaller quality-of-life changes

How to play the alpha

If you want to jump into the alpha without any more detail, back up your save first (if the worst happens then there’s a save restore hack detailed here), then follow the instructions below to access the alpha:

Go to your Steam game library.
Right click on Dead Cells and click "properties".
Select the tab "Betas".
In the first dropdown box select "Alpha - Not for the faint hearted".
Click close and wait for the upload to finish downloading.
Start playing.

Bear in mind that everything is still being tweaked according to feedback, so some things may break, have strange interactions or just straight up crash the game.

If you want to leave feedback (or bug reports) for the alpha, please fill in this short form.
This lets us collect all the feedback in one place rather than spreading it over Steam, Discord, Reddit etc. If you really don't want to fill in the form then please continue to post in the usual places, we're not going to stop checking them out, but just be aware that we may miss things that are posted there.

The Training Room

The Tutorial Knight returns to help you reach your potential. Well, she'll try at least...

Before you reach Prisoner's Quarters you'll find an entrance to a new training room where you can practise against any enemy that you've already faced. The mobs will start as statues (like in Slumbering Sanctuary) and re-animate only when you press the button at the entrance of the room.
We've even given you some presets that reflect the bestiary of each biome to make your life easier, because we're just that kind.

You can also train against all the bosses in their own environment, except for the spoiler boss. Just go through one of the doors at the back of the main room to train against the big guns.

Special tubes and a training Guillain are also there to provide you with all the tools you need to train, so get cracking!

Aspects

To help players reach new biomes and discover more of the game, we're introducing the Aspects - optional super-strong buffs equippable at the start of a run that make the game a lot easier. There is a catch though: you can’t unlock a new boss cell or flawless boss achievements while an Aspect is equipped, so you still need to rise to the challenge if you want to get to the next level.

Aspects provide a specific buff, centered around a core synergy element. The update features 13 Aspects and new ones could be added in the future, if we manage to have any more ideas that is...

World map

Probably the most self-explanatory part of this update, the world map features all the biomes you've already discovered and displays the connections between each level, but again only the ones that you've seen will be displayed. You can find it in the map screen of your current biome.

Other features

Reminder after killing the Hand of the King to use the Homonculus rune to exit the run (except in 5BC or after the first 0BC kill). No more panicky posts to answer for me, woohoo!
Total damage change is now displayed when picking stats from a scroll, time to retire the calculator...
Incentive (cell drop buff) for picking your least visited biomes. Yep, it's time to go back to the [insert your most hated biome here].
Return stones now teleport you outside their relative Z-door.
A few tidbits of lore hinting at something coming in the near future, found in High Peak Castle and Undying Shores.
Multi-binding is now properly removed from Normal Mode and available in Custom Mode.

That's it for now, feel free to leave feedback or suggestions and we'll be back soon with the beta!

Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT

Community Highlights:

@Zyphexis

u/BoostedButter

@teeparkss

@BizarreRayi

Jun 10, 2021

Dead Cells' What's the Damage? update is here!

Dead Cells - mezzamazza55

Hey everyone,

Our “What’s the Damage? Update” is available to download! Patchnotes are in the normal place for anyone who wants to skip my ramblings.

TLDR:

Balanced items so that historically weaker ones are now viable
Added rooms to Derelict Distillery and Fatal Falls biomes
Weapons that can reflect grenades now reflect all the grenades in range
Integrated Tiled for modders to make custom room design easier

Item balancing

The whole point of this update is to try and avoid a meta with only a small fraction of weapons being viable. We want you to be able to pick up whatever you find and be able to go nuts with it, not just instantly hit the recycle button - this is a roguelite after all goddammit!

So, in short we are mostly buffing all the weaker items (70 items are being buffed with 21 slightly nerfed). You can read the full list below but it might actually be shorter to just play the game.

Melee Weapons:

Buffs:
- Balanced Blade (weapon damage and damage bonus increased)
- Assassin’s Dagger (weapon damage increased)
- Twin Daggers (first two attacks weapon damage and breach bonus increased)
- Broadsword (weapon damage increased + damage slightly redistributed among the 3 attacks)
- Cursed Sword (weapon damage increased + all attacks now crit)
- Shrapnel Axes (weapon damage increased)
- Seismic Strike (wave damage increased)
- War Spear (shorter charge + weapon damage and breach bonus increased)
- Impaler (weapon damage increased)
- Rapier (weapon damage and crit enabler duration increased)
- Hayabusa Boots (weapon damage increased + last hit now reflects all grenades in its hitbox)
- Wrenching Whip (breach bonus increased)
- Torch (weapon damage increased (impact only))
- Flawless (weapon damage and crit multiplier increased)
- Flashing Fans (crit multiplier increased + correctly enables crit upon bouncing a grenade back)
- Tombstone (weapon damage increased + doom now stuns enemies it hits + slow mo reduced + slow mo can now correctly be disabled through the options menu + crit affixes not allowed anymore)
- Oven Axe (weapon damage and breach increased, charge slightly reduced)
- Toothpick (broken duration reduced)
- Sadist’s Stiletto (crit multiplier increased)
- Spiked Boots (crit multiplier increased)
- Oiled Sword (crit multiplier increased)
- Snake Fangs (weapon damage and crit multiplier increased)
- Shovel (damage increased).
- Tentacle (damage increased).

Nerfs:
- Sadist’s Stiletto (poison cloud affix removed)
- War Spear (crit multiplier decreased)
- Katana (invincibility frames removed and forward movement reduced on basic attacks). Please note that the charged attack is unchanged.

Ranged Weapons:

Buffs:
- Bow and Endless Quiver (weapon damage increased + arrows work like other bows)
- Sonic Carbine (weapon damage increased)
- Ice Bow (freeze duration increased)
- Boomerang (weapon damage increased + slightly faster travel speed)
- The Boy’s Axe (weapon damage and breach increased)
- Nerves of Steel (weapon damage increased)
- Firebrands (impact damage increased)
- Pyrotechnics (can now have both Pierce affixes)
- Fire Blast (weapon damage increased)
- Magic Missiles (weapon damage increased)
- Blowgun (added a poison DoT)

Nerfs:
- Quick Bow (crit condition now at 3 arrows instead of 2)
- Alchemic Carbine (DoT duration, cloud duration and dps decreased)
- Hokuto’s Bow (DPS bonus, duration and aoe range decreased)
- Electric Whip (DoT dps decreased)
- Ice Shards (weapon damage, slow duration and crit multiplier decreased)

Shields:

Buffs:
- Front Line Shield (bonus buffed to 50%, was 30)
- Cudgel (stun duration increased)
- Knockback Shield (weapon damage increased)
- Assault Shield (weapon damage increased)
- Greed Shield (weapon damage increased)
- Spiked Shield (weapon damage increased)
- Parry Shield (increased reflected projectiles damage)

Nerfs:
- Punishment (weapon damage decreased)
- Thunder Shield (DoT dps and stun duration decreased)

Skills:

Buffs:
- Infantry Grenade (damage increased)
- Stun Grenade (damage duration and range increased)
- Ice Grenade (freeze duration increased)
- Root Grenade (damage increased)
- Swarm (worm stats increased)
- Tornado (damage increased + cd reduced)
- Corrupted Power (damage buff increased)
- Lightspeed (damage increased on both)
- Lightning Rods (instant damage increased)
- Scarecrow Sickles (damage increased)
- Barnacle (damage increased)

Nerfs:
- Flamethrower Turret (DPS and duration decreased)
- Tesla Coil (DPS, DoT and range decreased)
- Lacerating Aura (DPS and duration decreased)
- Great Owl of War (reactivated version dps decreased)
- Crusher (damage decreased)
- Tonic (duration and bonus health decreased)

Mutations:

Buffs:
- Vengeance (bonus increased)
- Adrenaline (duration increased)
- Scheme (bonus increased)
- Porcupack (starting value increased)
- Ripper (now drops 6 ammos and damage per ammo increased)
- Networking (starting value increased)
- Point Blank (starting value and growth increased)
- Soldier Resistance (starting value and cap increased)
- Blind Faith (starting value and cap increased)
- Counterattack (bonus increased)
- What Doesn’t Kill Me (starting value and cap increased + internal cooldown reduced)
- Extended Healing (duration reduced, for the same heal)
- Spite (damage increased)
- Frostbite (damage increased)
- Instinct of the Master of Arms (internal cooldown reduced)
- Recovery (duration multiplier increased)
- Necromancy (starting value and cap increased)

Nerfs:
- Barbed Tips (DPS and tickrate decreased + no longer causes ammo to drop when combined with Ripper)
- Gastronomy (healing bonus decreased)
- Heart of Ice (starting value and cap decreased)
- Emergency Triage (healing and speed bonus decreased)
- Disengagement (activation threshold decreased and internal cooldown increased)

That's quite a big chunk of changes so please let us know how you find everything!

Item Binding

Item binding. My new most hated phrase…

The original plan was to move this option to custom mode, but then that wasn’t working properly so we were going to remove it from the game completely for this update. There was all kinds of hoo-ha and it was frankly a bit of a mess.

However, as the plans have changed a few times in such a short amount of time, we’re concerned that removing it completely might accidentally mess other things up. Leaving it be for another few months won’t hurt anyone and we wanted to get this update out in the wild, so we’re going to keep it in the game FOR NOW. Expect it to be moved to custom mode in the future though…

Extra rooms

The Derelict Distillery and the Fatal Falls biomes were feeling a bit empty, so we've added some extra rooms to give them more spice. The Distillery in particular has some new sequences in it so be sure to give it a run through...

Room creation for modders

Modders rejoice! We have new room creation support for you lot, in the form of Tiled. You probably know that it’s a free, open-source level editor and I have no idea what I'm talking about here so I’m gonna shut up and just let you read the file written by someone more qualified than me.

Just go to the Dead Cells Library page, then to 'Workshop' then 'About' and there is a Google Drive link on the right hand side under 'Related Links' -> 'View Official Documentation':

That's it for this update, feel free to leave your thoughts about it in the comments, Discord, Reddit, Twitter etc and I'll be back soon with a new alpha :)

Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT

Community Highlights:

@miokce

@MewyFox

@Octrepuss1

@DoodlesDreaming

Jun 3, 2021

"What's the Damage?" update moves to beta

Dead Cells - mezzamazza55

Hey everyone,

Update 24, now officially called the What's the Damage? update, has moved into beta.

There's only a few changes from the alpha so I'll keep this short and sweet and all the changes are listed below so no need to go check out the patchnotes :)
One thing you should do is to check out Derelict Distillery, we've made some decent changes to the room design so it has a different feel to it now - let us know what you think.

Also, we've discovered that moving the multiple item binding to Custom Mode and keeping it isolated there is much trickier than we thought it would be. So, unfortunately it won't be available in Normal or Custom Mode when this update is officially released.
Sorry, I know that's going to be annoying for some of you and if you desperately want to use key binding then there are 3rd party programs out there that can let you set it up manually, but for the moment it won't be an option in-game.

Changes for the beta

Weapons:

Ice Shards weapon now has a 3 second slowdown effect (down from 5).
Parry Shield counter projectiles now deal damage.
Shovel damage increased.
Tentacle damage increased.
Tombstone does not allow crit affixes anymore due to its specific behaviour.
Katana invincibility frames removed and forward movement reduced on basic attacks (we haven't change the charged attack)

Level Design:

Added new extra rooms to Derelict Distillery - the place actually has quite a different feel to it now so check that out.
Fixed some minor visual issues on new rooms for Undying Shores and Fractured Shrines.

Debug:

Preventing softlock when fighting Conjunctivitis boss with Snake Fangs weapon.
Preventing softlock while using the Hunter Grenade weapon on the Giant Tick enemy.
Preventing softlock if a double KO occurs during the true final boss fight.
Preserving active turrets when a multi-forms weapon is evolving.
Removing that damn pink square on the BC selector.
Skull icon for the kill counter is fixed when you get the gold version after reloading the run.
Elite Rampager enemies don’t pause their charge anymore after roaring.
Slashers enemies can’t override the “Cannot be interrupted by an enemy’s attack” affix anymore.
No more messages notifying a malaise tier increase when reducing infection.
Updating the integrated Mod Support documentation.
Some minor bug fixes.

Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT

May 26, 2021

Dead Cells Update 24 now in alpha

Dead Cells - mezzamazza55

Hey everyone,

We’re back with another public alpha! This time around we’re trialling our 24th update, which brings some more item balancing (before the pitchforks come out, check out the extra info below), more rooms for Distillery, Fractured Shrines and Undying Shores, plus some room creation support for modders.

We’re also killing multiple item binding, there I said it. You won't be able to use it in this alpha but you should be able to find it in custom mode when the update is officially released. I’ll expand on this a bit later too.

For the full list of everything affected, check out the patchnotes here.

Item Balancing

So, the idea of this balancing update is to buff the least used items, not to nerf everything powerful into the ground (I think as of right now there are 68 buffs and 20 nerfs, so roughly a 3:1 ratio of buff/nerf).
We’d noticed that a lot of the ‘old’ weapons are just never used after the item pool opens up because theres usually a better option to pick up and hack away with. That takes away from the whole roguelike feature of grabbing whatever the RNG gods give you and rolling with it because it can still kick ass. So, we wanted to give these items some more 'oomph' so you can have more freedom to play around with your build.

As mentioned already, there are a few item nerfs. However, we're not trying to destroy their stats or remove key mechanics, we just want to stop the ridiculous stuff like melting the Giant in 3 seconds flat with Barbed Tips...

Finally, a handful of weapons have had some mechanics tweaked, but these are basically to make things work how they were supposed to work in the first place, like weapons capable of reflecting grenades can now reflect all grenades in range. Let's call it spring cleaning.

Binding

We are also removing the option to bind multiple weapons and skills to the same button and moving it to Custom Mode only. It was a fun bug/feature at the beginning, but now it’s turned into a full on cheese tactic. It seems like a lot of you have a good time using it, which is why we’re going to keep it in the game, but we do need to keep Normal Mode resembling something of a normal game.
For the moment it's disappeared entirely from the game in alpha, but should be brought back in Custom Mode when this update is officially pushed.

Extra rooms

The Distillery and the Fatal Falls biomes were feeling a bit empty, so we've added some extra rooms to give them more spice. Not much else to add here soooo yep, go check them out...

Room creation for modders

If we’re missing instructions in the document or anything doesn’t work then let us know and we’ll get it fixed.

How to play the alpha

So, if you want to play through the changes, back up your save first (if the worst happens then there’s a save restore hack detailed here), then follow the instructions below to access the alpha:

Go to your Steam game library.
Right click on Dead Cells and click "properties".
Select the tab "Betas".
In the first dropdown box select "Alpha - Not for the faint hearted".
Click close and wait for the upload to finish downloading.
Start playing.

Bear in mind that everything is still being tweaked according to feedback, so some things may break, have strange interactions or just straight up crash the game.

If you want to leave feedback (or bug reports) for the alpha, please can you fill in this short form.
This lets us collect all the feedback in one place rather than spreading it over Steam, Discord, Reddit etc. If you really don't want to fill in the form then please continue to post in the usual places, we're not going to stop checking them out, but just be aware that we may miss things that are posted there.

Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT

Community Highlights:

MilkyCook

HorizenDreamer

CobrasPersonal

Dawn1545

Mar 30, 2021

The Whack-a-Mole Update is live!

Dead Cells - mezzamazza55

Hellooo,

The Whack-a-Mole update is ready to download! We're adding 3 new Survival weapons, 3 new mutations, the Collector's Intern and tweaking the difficulty curve.

TLDR of the changes:

3 big, heavy weapons
3 damage-focused mutations
Altered the difficulty curve
The Collector’s Intern - spend your cells in 5BC!
A fix to stop all seed error crashes. We hope...
Malaise balancing and UI
Fatal Falls balancing
UI & QoL improvements
A ton of bug fixes (yes, including the Me, Jealous? Achievement not triggering)
Random diet option

The highlights are explained a bit below, for all the detail you can read the patchnotes here.

New weapons

These are all Survival, one-slot and focus on smashing enemies with something heavy until they stop moving.

Oven Axe - Sweep your way through mobs as you would with any massive axe. The last hit can be chained to relentlessly swing into the sunset forever.

Toothpick - Roleplay as your favourite troll/ogre/giant ugly creature. Smash with the normal attack, or hold the attack button to charge up a ferocious hit over the head of your foe, breaking your weapon in two.

Tombstone - Kill enemies with a heavy dose of irony.
Doom nearby enemies if you manage to kill something with the last hit of the combo.
Doomed enemies have an ethereal tombstone fall on their head.
Each kill starts a new wave of doom (up to 3 consecutive waves).
Doom.

New mutations

Execution (colourless) - Instantly kill enemies with under 15% health when you hit them with a weapon. Works with bosses too, but only when they have under 7.5% health - we can't make it too easy for you after all...

Barbed Tips (Tactics) - Inflict X damage per second to enemies, per arrows stuck in them.

Point Blank (Tactics) - Close range attacks inflict X% bonus damage.

New difficulty curve

We felt that the difficulty curve still wasn't quite where we wanted it to be, so we've tweaked the frequency of health refills to smooth the increase in panic:

BC0: Health fountains in every transition.
BC1: Health fountain every other transition, with one minor flask when the fountain is missing.
BC2: No more health fountain, one minor flask in every transition.
BC3: One minor flask after the first boss and before the second.
BC4: No more health in any transition, enemies teleport to your position.
BC5: No more health, enemies teleport, malaise added.

The Collector's Intern

An enterprising Guillain has decided to put on a cloak and trade cells for blueprints in 5BC, so no more shifting down to 4BC to spend your hard-earned cells or trade in blueprints.

Seed error fix

We've worked some developer magic to maybe™ stop all seed error crashes... FOREVEEERRR!

Essentially, if a seed error occurs when the game is loading the next level, then instead of crashing it will now start loading the level again but with a new seed. So we'll be trading crashes for occasionally longer biome load times, which we think is a pretty decent exchange.

Best of the rest

Legendary items now scale based on the sum of your two highest stats. Also, Legendary status no longer increases the item level.

Malaise no longer increases the movement speed of enemies, plus mobs can no longer spawn or turn into Elites in the first few seconds after an Elite aggros you.
When malaise increases, the changes are now shown by icons in-game to give you a better idea of what's about to hit you.

Bonus scrolls added in Fractured Shrines from BC3+ and Undying Shores from BC4+.

Option to toggle "Hold to chain attacks" added in the Gameplay tab of Options.

Item description and affix list now scroll together in the Pause menu.

Cursed gems require a long press to be picked up.

We hope you enjoy the new update - if you have any feedback then as always just let us know in the comments here, on Discord, Reddit, Twitter, wherever!

Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT

Community Highlights:

@teeparkss

falzelo

Fire_Bay

Hugo_Animey

Roving_Neophyte

leafjuly

Jimmsytree

Krypt0100

Mar 24, 2021

Update 23 moves to beta - Small reworks to Tombstone weapon & Execute mutation

Dead Cells - mezzamazza55

Hey everyone,

The Update 23 alpha has given us loads of opportunity to tweak the new mutations & weapons and to fix the new bugs that inevitably pop up (whack those moles!), so we're moving the update into beta as of now :)

There hasn't been a huge amount of changes to the new content, except a bit of a rework of Tombstone and the Execute mutation.

So, the way Tombstone works now is:

When you kill an enemy with the third hit of the Tombstone combo, you 'doom' nearby enemies
A tombstone spawns above these 'doomed' enemies, dealing damage to them after a moment
If an enemy dies from this doom effect it adds another tombstone above the already doomed mobs (each new tombstone deals reduced damage)
This tombstone of doom combo chain has a cap of 3 and will fail if a wave of tombstones doesn't kill an enemy

The Execute mutation rework is removing the tier scaling and halving the effect on bosses. I did warn you that might happen...
So, before it was "Instantly kill enemies with under 5% health (scales up to 15%) when you hit them with a weapon" and now it's "Instantly kill enemies with under 15% health when you hit them with a weapon. Effect halved for bosses". Much more simple!

We've done lots of balancing on the other weapons like changing charge times, damage, speed etc, but nothing that drastic. If you want to see the full details of the update as of today, then check out the patchnotes.

If you want to try out the beta and don't know how then follow these instructions:

Go to your Steam game library.
Right click on Dead Cells and click "properties".
Select the tab "Betas".
In the first dropdown box select "Beta".
Click close and wait for the upload to finish downloading.
Start playing.

I wanted to add some community highlights but the Steam server doesn't want to play nice with me so I'll add them onto the update release post, which will hopefully be next week!

Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT