It is our pleasure to invite you all to participate in the open beta test of World Expansion III for The Riftbreaker. It is by far the biggest update we have made up to this point. In the words of one of our developers: “I’m not sure if there is a single class in the engine we haven’t touched since the last patch.” The update comes with thousands of improvements, hundreds of bug fixes, and dozens of new features. Your feedback, bug reports, and suggestions will be an invaluable help to make this update as good as possible. Let’s now talk about the contents of the open beta.



The Experimental Open Beta of World Expansion III allows you to explore the brand-new Fungal Swamp biome in Survival Mode. The Fungal Swamp is an area with huge variability in terrain formation - sometimes dry land is plentiful, and other times, you are surrounded by water on all sides. This is why there are two Survival Maps to choose from. The Fungal Forest map will take you to a more dry part of the biome, allowing you to test your skills in a more classic setting. On the other hand, the Fungal Swamp map is going to be an entirely new challenge. You will have to build your base on small islands and pay close attention to space management, energy production, and defenses. Luckily, there are plenty of new technologies to help you with that.



The Riftbreaker: World Expansion III comes with 65 new technologies for you to choose from. From advanced power generation setups, to completely alien weaponry, you will surely find something interesting to incorporate into your strategy. The research trees have been updated to accommodate all these items. We highly encourage you to try everything out - especially the new, giant defensive towers you suggested on our suggestion board over at https://riftbreaker.featureupvote.com!



All of this content will come to all our players as a FREE UPDATE when we are ready to release the full version of the World Expansion III.



This Beta does not contain any new Story Campaign content. That will be a part of the paid Heart of the Swamp DLC, and we want to keep it a secret until its release.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2506610/The_Riftbreaker_Heart_of_the_Swamp/
WISHLIST NOW

Please note that this is a beta test. Many things are still unfinished, unbalanced, or use placeholder assets. Errors are expected. The game might crash or break - please report all such instances to us either on the Steam Forum or our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios.




Our ongoing development of the Online Co-Op mode required us to rework our GUI model. For now, the Experimental Version of this update supports only mouse and keyboard controls. Your gamepad will not work with this version. Do not install it on your Steam Deck, either. We will add gamepad controls in one of the maintenance patches before the main release.



This update is (most likely) incompatible with any current mods. Please remove all mods before playing. MAKE SURE TO MAKE A BACKUP COPY OF YOUR SAVE FILES! Make a copy of 'The Riftbreaker' folder from your documents and keep it safe.

This Experimental Release is available to everyone on an opt-in basis. Please be aware that things might not work as intended and you may encounter problems. If you don’t want to take any risks, please wait for the public release of this update.

1. create a backup copy of your save folder (Documents/The Riftbreaker)
   
2. disable Steam Cloud save backup for The Riftbreaker
   
3. go to your Steam Library
   
4. right-click on The Riftbreaker
   
5. select 'Properties,’ then 'Betas,’ and use the following password: IknowWhatImDoing

After that, you will be able to choose 'experimental' from the drop-down menu. Download the update, play the game, and let us know if you encounter any issues. We also have a channel on our Discord: #rb-experimental-feedback - we highly encourage you to join in and share your feedback.

The changelog for this update is truly massive. Please treat it all as a potential spoiler.

The Riftbreaker World Expansion III Experimental Open Beta Test, May 24th, 2024. EXE: 683 DATA: 504 Changelog:

[expand type=spoiler]
FEATURES:

• New Creature: Invigor. It’s a carnivorous plant found in the Fungal Forest biome. It spends most of the time hidden beneath the ground, with only a small antenna sticking out as a lure. Invigor will spring up from the ground if prey gets close and bash it with a powerful melee attack.
  
• New Creature: Carnicynth. Another species of carnivorous plant of Galatea 37. Found in the Fungal Forest biome. Carnicynths disguise themselves as harmless bushes. However, if a suitable target comes close, Carnicynth will reveal its maw, which shoots venomous projectiles.
  
• New Creature: Artigian. A large carnivorous plant found in the Fungal Forest biome. This species does not employ any techniques to camouflage its presence. Instead of relying on stealth, it attacks its targets from a distance by hurling large, explosive projectiles formed within its massive pitcher-like maw.
  
• New Creature: Stickrid. A small insectoid creature. Prefers warm and humid environments. Its elongated, slender body is carried by three pairs of long legs. These legs allow Stickrids to keep their heads above the surface of shallow water pools. If threatened, Stickrid will keep its distance and try to attack the target with an acid projectile. Stickrids are also great climbers and utilize this skill to launch surprise attacks at unsuspecting prey.
  
• New Creature: Plutrodon. Like Stickrids, these creatures are great climbers and can be found on the ground and on tree branches. Plutrodons are very agile despite their bulky bodies being carried on only three legs. Plutrodons attack their targets from a distance. They cause razor-sharp spikes to come up from the ground. This makes them especially deadly against structures stacked next to one another, like walls and defensive towers, for example.
  
• New Creature: Fungor. It is a tall, menacing animal-mushroom hybrid moving around the Fungal Forest with six long tentacle legs. Due to their size, Fungors are quite slow, but they make up for that with their sheer physical strength. They hit like a truck and can make quick work of your defensive structures.
  
• New Creature: Mudroner. The Mudroner is a native species of the Galatean Swamp. These creatures can often be seen in small packs, roaming shallow waters. They bear quite a resemblance to Hedroners, which can be found in similar places around the surface of Galatea 37. They can attack their targets both from a distance and in melee range. When severely wounded, they will try to reposition themselves behind the aggressor.
  
• New Creature: Drexolian. Their bodies resemble a certain species of tree commonly found in forest areas around the planet. Their tall bodies are covered with hardened skin, resembling tree bark. It is quite stiff, which limits the creature’s mobility but gives it incredible resistance to many forms of damage. Drexolians are capable of fighting from a distance and in melee range. They are quite slow but can limit your mobility by raising temporary barriers straight from beneath the ground.
  
• New Creature: Canceroth. The Canceroth is one of the most unique lifeforms you will encounter while exploring the Swamp biome. At first, it looks like a colony of some sort. In the center of the colony, there is a large cell surrounded by several smaller ones, identical to the one in the middle. The colony moves as one, with the central cell controlling the entire group's behavior, rolling over the planet's surface with no regard for anything on its way. Canceroths leave a wake of destruction behind them, annihilating all organisms and structures they encapsulate.
  
• New Creature: Poogret. This large, neutral creature spends its days traveling across the Fungal Forest biome looking for the fruit of the Garlimonium plant. Poogrets are known to leave behind piles of waste filled with unrefined minerals. Digging through them is dirty work, but it will allow you to find bonus resources you can use later.
  
• New Creature: Parabian.
  
• New Creature: Darnot. A neutral flying creature. It resembles a very large moth. It flies around the Fungal Forest biome, pollinating the local flora and collecting nectar and small fruit from plants.
  
• New Alien Structure: Swamp Nest. It is used by multiple species of nesting creatures within the Fungal Forest biome as a home structure. What makes it dangerous is a giant acid-spitting maw located at the very top. It will actively seek out threats, aim at them, and bombard them with a barrage of acidic projectiles from a long distance. All these properties make it very likely that the nest is a living organism, forming a symbiotic relationship with the creatures of the Swamp biome.
  
• New Creature Variants: Gnerot Bosses now appear in previously missing versions: Acid, Energy, and Cryo. They all have damage resistances set to their corresponding elements and deal damage of different types.
  
• New Building: Floating Immolator Tower. This new variant of defensive tower uses liquid ammunition to shoot small fireblasts at the targets within its range. It can only be placed on liquid surfaces. However, the tower does not require any additional power source, making it a great choice for biomes where dry land is at a premium.
  
• New Building: Floating Piercer Tower. This enormous, 3x3 defensive tower is one of the most powerful weapons in The Riftbreaker arsenal. Like the Immolator Tower, it must be placed on water, but it doesn’t require anything but ammunition to operate. It shoots powerful, piercing projectiles that deal cryo damage and works over a very large distance.
  
• New Building: Power Rod Tower. Another massive, 3x3 defensive structure. It launches power rods straight into the air. The rods maneuver mid-air to land in the designated zone. When they do, they deal massive impact damage to everything in the vicinity. The power rod stays operational for a few seconds, dealing continuous energy damage to creatures in its range.
  
• New Building: Heavy Cluster Missile Launcher. The Launcher is the last large defensive structure in World Expansion III. It is a missile silo that shoots rockets filled with cluster bombs straight into the air, allowing the missile to avoid any terrain obstacles. The missile explodes mid-air, leaving cluster bombs free to carpet bomb a very large area.
  
• New Building: Shotgun Tower. It utilizes Large Caliber Tower Ammo to shoot volleys of projectiles at incoming targets. Its relatively short range is offset by the high firepower and fire rate.
  
• New Building: Gas Extractor. This building takes advantage of the naturally-occurring Flammable Gas Vents in the Fungal Forest Biome. When the Gas Extractor is placed on top of such a vent, it collects all the gas escaping from beneath the ground and transports it through pipes for further use.
  
• New Building: Bio-Condenser. This structure can be placed directly on the surface of muddied water pools. It will extract the organic matter from the water to create a concentrate, which is later mixed with water. The result is organic sludge that can be later processed into flammable gas.
  
• New Building: Pipe Junction. The number two most requested feature. Build this to allow two pipelines with different liquids to cross each other and not mix up.
  
• New Building: Vine Walls. These advanced walls cost a little bit more than the regular walls in The Riftbreaker arsenal but come with a range of benefits. First of all, when you come close to the wall, it will automatically lower itself beneath the ground, allowing you to shoot straight through it. Moreover, these walls have self-regenerating capabilities, meaning there is no need to repair them manually if not completely destroyed.
  
• New Building: Grass Floor. Unleash your inner gardener and turn your base into a garden with this perfectly-trimmed lawn.
  
• New Item: Gravity Modulator. It allows you to carry interactive objects from one place to another using your Mech’s arms. The use of this item is contextual - you don’t have to craft it or equip it. Simply use the ‘interact’ button when prompted to do so. You can give Garlimonium fruits to Poogrets this way, for example.
  
• New Item: Mortar Gun. It’s a variation of a Grenade Launcher that shoots explosive projectiles at an even higher arc, allowing you to overcome terrain obstacles more easily. The mortar projectiles deal energy damage.
  
• New Item: Repeater Rifle. This weapon uses Large Caliber Ammo. It is capable of very quick fire rates, limited only by your ability to pull the trigger. If you prefer a salvo instead of continuous fire, try the charged shot mode, which shoots a volley of bullets.
  
• New Item: Trident. It is a long-range melee weapon that attacks like a spear at first but then is separated into three damage-dealing spikes. It is effective against both individual creatures, thanks to its high fire rate and groups of creatures.
  
• New Item: Root Gun. It shoots a column of spikes that deal damage to all targets along the way. It’s as if the gun had infinite piercing! Perfect for reaching targets in the back of a group, while also dealing with the enemies up front.
  
• New Item: Flame Blade.It is a large, bladed melee weapon with a medium attack speed. Additioanlly, when you attack, a wave of flames bursts out in front of you, setting everything in front of you ablaze.
  
• New Item: Wasp Launcher. New research conducted in the Fungal Forest biome allowed Ashely to construct a weapon that works like a portable hive of angry, explosive bees. What’s not to love about this?
  
• New Item: Gas Grenade. It explodes into a cloud of toxic gas in a large area, dealing acid damage to enemies.
  
• New Item: Drone Swarm. This consumable item allows you to call in a couple of drones to aid you in battle. The drones will follow you around for a limited time and disappear when their batteries deplete.
  
• New Item: Charged Bomb. The technology known from the Portal Bomb Tower, now (literally) in your hands. Aim at the place you want to raze to the ground, charge your weapon, and release the trigger. An armed explosive will be teleported to the chosen location. Very useful at sniping high-priority targets.
  
• New Item: Fertilizer. This is a consumable item that you can use to make the flora around Mr. Riggs to regrow at a staggering rate for a limited time. Never run out of plant biomass again!
  
• New Item: Mortar Sentry. This consumable sentry turret lobs explosive projectiles at the enemies in range for as long as the battery allows it to operate.
  
• New Feature: Power Wells. These mysterious objects will grant Mr. Riggs powerful ability boosts when activated. They last only for a short time, but can completely turn the tide of battle in your favor.
  
• New Feature: More Lootables on the Map. When you start a new Campaign Mode run or a Survival run, you will find a lot of small objects similar to Bioanomalies scattered across the map. It might be worth checking them out - you never know where you can find resources.
  
• New Feature: Dynamic World Size. The map area can now expand as your missions progress. You may experience this in certain moments of the World Expansion III additional Story Campaign branch. However, modders may use this feature as well when creating their custom maps and missions.
  
• New Resource: Resin. It can be obtained by attaching a pipe to one of the resin trees growing around the Fungal Forest biome. Resin can be used as a substitute for plasma. It will allow you to take advantage of shield generators and fusion power plants more easily. Heavy Artillery, anyone?
  
• New Weather Event: Firestorm. This causes the wind to pick up significantly. Spontaneous fires start consuming flammable objects around the map and spread uncontrollably. Unfortunate, if you wanted to harvest plant biomass, but great if you relied on wind turbines.
  
• New Weather Event: Fireflies. Thousands of little, bioluminescent insects spark up in the night, flying around for you to marvel at.
  
• New Weather Event: Blooming Air. The air becomes thick with spores released by various plants and mushrooms around the swamp. It reduces solar and wind power production but makes all plants around the biome regrow much more quickly.
  
• New Weather Event: Monsoon. A massive rainfall, accompanied by very strong wind. It only encompasses a limited portion of the map, instead of the entire region. Your Solar Panels might still work if they are located far from the eye of the storm!
  
• New Weather Events: Fire and Acid Tornadoes. Even more devastating than regular tornadoes you have been experiencing on Galatea 37 up to this point. On the bright side - they look quite cool.
  
• New Skins for Mr. Riggs. In this Expansion we bring you a couple of our own designs, as well as skins submitted to the Skin Design Contest a couple of months ago.
  
• New Feature: Prop Sets. This is a feature that we recently incorporated into our Editor Suite that allows us to achieve greater variability when creating maps. In short: we create a base set of props, populate the maps using that set, then select alternative props the game can use to replace them. You can read more about this feature here.
  
• New Soundtrack. Enjoy almost 30 minutes of original soundscapes composed by Marcin Pukaluk. The new tunes accompanying the biome feature ethnic instrumentations and wild rhythms you won’t hear anywhere else on Galatea 37.
  
• Two New Survival Mode missions. Try your skills in the classic, land-based Fungal Forest map, or take on a new challenge in the Fungal Swamp, where dry land is a luxury. Build your base on several islands, solve logistic problems, and make use of new tech in this unique setting.

CHANGES:

• Non-raytraced shadow mapping has been refactored to enable multiple shadow-casting lights without raytracing. Thanks to this improvement, we were able to add shadow casting capabilities to additional scene elements like Power Wells, player skills, high-powered projectiles and more. The overal quality and performance of traditional non-raytraced shadow mapping has been significantly improved. The maximum number of shadow casting lights is currently determined by the Shadow Quality setting.
  
• Creature damage resistance behavior has been changed. The maximum damage resistance for a creature of any type is now 90%. This means that creatures like Gnerots will now suffer a minuscule amount of physical damage when attacked with a small machine gun, for example. However, you will still see the ‘RESISTED’ message appear to let you know that what you’re doing is not very effective.
  
• We changed the appearance and behavior of danger markers, which appear when you’re targeted by the enemy artillery or other dangerous, time-delayed attacks. The markers are now much more visible and give you a proper chance to defend yourself.
  
• The Automated Resource Gathering buildings have had their building speeds and costs changed, since the previous values have been too low. The drones have been buffed to match the new cost.
  
• Lightning Towers now have a significant energy upkeep cost, replacing the previous placeholder value. This change has been made to make them more in line with other energy-based towers.
  
• The Swarm Missile Launcher has been exhumed from the grave we put it in the last time. The missiles are much stronger, and the shooting pattern has been changed to increase the overall DPS. Firing accuracy also depends on firing time i.e. the first missile flies almost straight and the more you shoot the aiming spread becomes wider.
  
• Minigun fire rate has been reduced to make its firepower more in line with the other weapons, especially at the extreme quality level.
  
• Orbital Laser and Orbital Bombardment now have a slight delay between activating the skill and the beginning of the actual attack. Attack delay markers are also visible on the ground before the attack begins. For Liberty.
  
• The maximum amount of damage reflection for boss creatures has been reduced from 20% to 10%, so that they don’t die to their own attacks so easily.
  
• Flashing effect during thunderstorm has been reduced.
  
• Reworked Shegret attacks. Now you will actually be able to see a Shegret Alpha and a Shegret Ultra in the game! The attacks have three difficulty levels that are chosen dynamically depending on the moment of the game you’re in.
  
• Similarly, we’ve added three tiers of Kermon and Phirian surprise attacks that might happen in between regular attack waves.
  
• The weapons display in the inventory has been reworked. The weapon stats now always appear in the same spot on the list. The list itself should be a lot more legible now.
  
• Added grouping to weapon mods. Mods from the same category will now be grouped on the list of available mods, which will save you from scrolling a hundred miles.
  
• Changed the weapon mod design: “X Stat Enabled” mods no longer exist. This means that if you want to add piercing to a weapon that didn’t have this stat before, you no longer need to install a “Piercing enabled” mod, and then another piercing mod on top of that. Just one mod will do the job. This way you can create more fun and powerful combinations of mods.
  
• Main Menu has been reworked to accommodate more options. Let us know how you like the sleek modern design!
  
• Liquid Rendering overhaul. Thanks to Tiled Deferred Rendering upgrade, we finally have the support for transparent materials in The Schmetterling Engine. It allowed us to develop a completely new liquid simulation, with transparency, waves, light shafts and all sorts of cool things! We’ve written an article about it and you can check it out here.
  
• Mudroner material upgrade. Mudroners and Hedroners of all strains have received a visual upgrade - the liquid they are covered with now flows down their backs like in real life.
  
• GUI refactoring and upgrade. Over the years, we have added layers upon layers of new code into our GUI system, making it almost impossible to work with. We decided to rewrite the entire thing from scratch to despaghettify (this is professional terminology) our GUI and allow us to introduce some changes and updates. This rework will allow us to add new screens more easily and make the current ones more functional. Since we reworked all buttons, sliders, pop-up windows, graphs, and text boxes, we need some feedback. If you find any errors, let us know. Fixing things will be much easier with our new, clean code-base.
  
• We’ve introduced major performance optimizations. Initially, we did that to improve the multiplayer experience. However, it turned out that the optimizations we found also benefit the performance when running the game solo. You should see an improvement in performance in most scenarios with this update. For more details, read this article.
  
• Online multiplayer framework changes. We have introduced thousands of code changes, making multiplayer more stable, more playable, and much closer to where we want it to be. We hope to share the results with you soon, but know that the majority of the game’s code base is now adapted to support online play.
  
• Updated creature and item placement for all survival mode missions. Adding the new, smaller Bioanomalies and Power Wells required us to change the placement of in-game curios a little bit. We made sure that you will find something interesting on each of the map tiles, but beware - there are some dangerous creatures guarding these secrets!
  
• New biome tiles. We have added more diverse map tiles to all the biomes from the original release of the game - Jungle, Acid, Desert and Magma. The number of tiles is now on par with those for the World Expansion biomes. This will result in more variability in map generation.
  
• Changed plasma chain bulding costs in survival mode. Fusion power and Shield Generators were not a feasible strategy with their old cost. The new costs should make them a more viable option. Additionally, Fusion Power is unlocked by default in the Fungal Swamp biome.
  
• Various creatures have been given the ability to traverse mud and other liquids. Apart from the native creatures of the biome, you will also encounter Baxmoths, Phirians, Kermons, and Nurglaxes in the Fungal Swamp. This ability will allow them to actually reach your base and be a feasible threat.
  
• Baxmoth balancing changes. The drone’s projectile speed and splash damage have been reduced. This makes them significantly easier to dodge. However, Alpha and Ultra strains now have improved drones that deal more damage. This way, the creature is still deadly for stationary targets, but not unavoidable by the player.
  
• More environmental sounds. We have added ambient sounds playing in the background in various spots on our map tiles. These are subtle sounds - for example, water dripping from the cave walls, crickets chirping, or birds singing. The world will feel more alive thanks to this.
  
• Introduced changes to the research tree - it uses the old, three-tab layout, but it can now be scrolled and zoomed.
  
• Reduced fusion powerplant and nuclear powerplant costs in the survival mode in an attempt to make them more easily accessible.

FIXES:

• Fixed shockwave explosion splash damage falloff.
  
• Fixed memory leaks caused by some particle effects.
  
• Fixed artillery projectile properties.
  
• Fixed many issues with streaming events not working properly.
  
• Fixed Ionizer text description.
  
• Gravity Grenades no longer deal damage to friendly targets.
  
• Fixed problems with fog on DirectX 11.
  
• Fixed memory leaks in TimeDamageSystem.
  
• Fixed memory leaks in DecalSystem.
  
• Fixed issues with Mr. Riggs movement on slopes.
  
• Fixed the math formula for DPS calculations.
  
• Fixed problems with Caverns Sonic Grenades mission.
  
• Fixed problems with the ‘Find Tanzanite’ mission - for real this time.
  
• Fixed problems with skinning on Crystal Gun and Heavy Plasma Gun.
  
• Fixed the Wingmite spawn problem in the last Survival Attack wave. The game spawns 50 Wingmites 2 times now, not 2 Wingmites 50 times.
  
• Fixed light ranges in Bioanomalies.
  
• Fixed problems with recharging traps using the repair tool.
  
• Fixed brutal difficulty save settings for the Caverns campaign outpost.
  
• Fixed wave announcements and difficulty levels for units spawned from Nests.
  
• Fixed crash on resuming sound source that already finished playback.
  
• Fixed objective progress problems in Campaign Mode.
  
• Fixed a crash in the Sound System on game shutdown.
  
• Fixed shadow position mismatch between shadow mapping and lighting.
  
• Fixed Necrodon behavior when running away from danger.
  
• Fixed the ‘Take away all ammo’ stream event.
  
• Fixed the Ion Storm bug that allowed players to get rid of map interference by opening and closing the map.
  
• Fixed entering build mode during the boss fight in DLC2.
  
• Fixed wrong level icons in Acid Spitters.
  
• Fixed upgrade tool calculating cost taking building during an upgrade.
  
• Fixed vegetation lifecycle getting blocked after a plant is burned down.
  
• Fixed a crash on load in TerrainAffectorSystem.
  
• Fixed the cost of Plasma Converter Level 3 (it used to be the same as level 2).
  
• Fixed emissive textures not working on gun barrels.
  
• Fixed description order in the building info window - all stats now appear in the same order in all cases.
  
• Fixed ‘Acid Find New Resource’ mission main objective timer.
  
• Fixed Damage Over Time effect memory leak.
  
• Fixed minimap zone display error in Metallic Valley ‘Investigate the Crater’ mission.
  
• Fixed memory leaks caused by decals.
  
• Fixed decal alpha blending.
  
• Fixed a crash in the Sandbox Menu Panel when spawning Magmoths.
  
• Fixed the Caverns entrance objective marker positions across multiple missions.
  
• Fixed missing progression dialogue in Caverns Exploration mission.
  
• Fixed shadow sharpness in some cases.
  
• Fixed multiple building collision sizes to prevent mech clipping.
  
• Fixed cooldown categories in multiple consumable items.
  
• Fixed a problem with Arachnoid Sentinels not firing their projectiles.
  
• Fixed a problem with melee units not attacking buildings effectively.
  
• Fixed Loot Drones ignoring mods on the ground.
  
• Fixed an issue with lamps not turning on after loading the game.
  
• Fixed a crash when trying to launch the game in safe mode.
  
• Fixed weapons aiming angle after dropping a weapons when the player is killed.
  
• Numerous fixes and optimizations to the pipes system. Compressors and Decompressors should work properly now.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the minimap interference to disappear after opening the large map during the ion storm event.
  
• Fixed status icons missing from buildings.
  
• Fixed a problem that caused light affectors to behave in an unintended way after walking off the screen.
  
• Research Screen: fixed 'Build a Comm Hub' message visibility.
  
• Build menu: fixed upgrades 'prev page' and 'next page' buttons visibility after use.

[/expand]



We're looking forward to hearing what you think about the update!
EXOR Studios

We have often emphasized that adding a multiplayer module to The Riftbreaker is a very difficult task. The game and its engine have been designed as single-player from the ground up. For the past couple of years, we have been redesigning most game systems and refactoring the game’s code to make online coop possible. Introducing such major changes to The Schmetterling Engine does not come easy. Not only do we have to solve brand-new issues, but we also need to manage the game’s performance. We can’t allow anything we add to negatively impact how the game runs on your end. On the contrary, we want to use this opportunity to improve our performance. Today, we would like to show you what improvements and optimizations we found while working on the co-op mode.


Allowing players to build gigantic bases and fight against a sea of creatures both come at a large performance cost. That cost increases even more in multiplayer - which you can see even on the gif above.

Modifying The Riftbreaker to support the multiplayer game mode introduces many performance overheads. We have used quite aggressive optimizations when the game supported only a single player. For example, we packed or entirely deleted some effects that were taking place beyond the visible playing area. For multiplayer purposes, that is no longer possible. The server needs to calculate everything happening around all players in the world at all times to relay the complete gameplay information to all players. Because of this, many of the engine’s components take significantly longer to compute. It is unfortunate, but sometimes there is no way to avoid this additional cost. However, it’s still not hopeless, and there are other areas where we can look for improvements.


Our goal is to allow you to do all the fun things you could do in singleplayer, but together with friends, and at a good performance level.

We decided to make up the losses in performance by doing a massive optimization pass across all the game’s systems. We set an ambitious goal for ourselves - we wanted the performance in multiplayer to match that of singleplayer. This way, we could guarantee a smooth online play experience while significantly improving the game’s performance when running solo. We created a set of new benchmarks with massive bases and enormous attack waves. Then, we got to work.

BENCHMARK ENDGAME IDLE

During this test, the mech stands in the center of an enourmous base for a couple of minutes. During that time, we check the behavior of the game at times of relative peace. We run all benchmarks at minimum graphics settings, so that the GPU is never a performance bottleneck.

Our first assumption was that our players enjoy building large, complex bases with thousands of buildings. We can infer that when a couple of players meet up to play together, they will build even more monstrous fortresses. We have to be ready for that. A map filled with various buildings, factories, towers, and a massive power grid is a great benchmarking scenario for us since it significantly strains all the game systems. Therefore, we created a huge end-game scenario base and started running tests to see what we could optimize.


This graph shows the changes in performance over the course of our work on the multiplayer mode. Sometimes it gets better, sometimes it gets worse - we always keep tabs on our performance markers.

Game logic simulation is running at a constant rate of 30 updates per second so, our target was to reduce the calculation time for all gameplay systems to 33 milliseconds in total. One thing to note here is that game logic simulation is running independently from rendering. For example, a beefy GPU can render the game at fluid 120FPS while the CPU might be struggling to achieve 30 game updates per second. In case the CPU can’t keep up with game logic simulation the game slows down. Another example - if the CPU can simulate only 10 logic updates per second, then a second of in-game time will take 3 seconds in real-time - the game will run three times slower than it normally should. The Riftbreaker has been out for several years now. By this point, we know very well how the game systems relate to one another. We also have a couple more years of experience and knowledge under our belt. That made us confident we could reach our performance target.


Lately, our optimization efforts have resulted in a nice performance improvement - the game runs much better in heavy load scenatios.

As we mentioned in our previous ‘Co-Op When’ articles, separating our game features' logic and visual parts was one of the biggest hurdles. To summarize, we started moving the virtual representation of many effects and events to the clients so that the server doesn’t have to perform irrelevant operations. That gives the server more time to work on the game logic. When we reworked our systems to work this way in multiplayer, we quickly realized that it could also benefit singleplayer. The new versions of our systems could now operate on smaller data sets and stopped colliding with each other so much. Thanks to this, many more operations in the game can now be carried out simultaneously, parallel to each other. When we saw the first results, we started working on removing as many dependencies between our game systems as possible. When game systems can operate independently, we can better saturate the CPU cores and achieve significant performance gains compared to the old architecture.

BENCHMARK ENDGAME ULTRA WAVE

It is rare for a base in The Riftbreaker to stand idle for a long time. The game is really put to the test when a large number of enemies attack you. To test this scenario, we created another benchmark called ‘Endgame Ultra Wave.’ In this scenario, we launch the final attack wave from the Brutal difficulty at a large base. To spice things up even further, we added a couple of thousands of extra enemy units into the mix, spawning at various points during the test. The base is constructed in such a way that it is guaranteed that the creatures will reach the player’s structures and destroy at least some of them. This allows us to test the game’s performance in hardcore combat scenarios. In addition, we created a separate version of this benchmark for each biome, as those significantly affect the game's performance.


In case of the jungle biome, we use the same base as during the 'idle' benchmark, but this time the base is being attacked by a horde of angry mobs. Each biome has a separate test scenario.


The Swamp base atttack scenario features tons of pipes and dozens of Canceroths.

We chose such a high-stress scenario because it is much easier to optimize, contrary to what you might initially think. When we work on performance, we make extensive use of different profiler tools. A profiler is a piece of software that you can attach to the game process and record the activity of the individual systems of the game. Thanks to the profiler, you can clearly see how long the calculations for each system take and which CPU core they utilize. The profiler will also mark those frames where logic calculations took over 33 milliseconds to complete. We can analyze those frames and choose targets for optimizations. After we’re done, we run the process again and again. The tools that we use are:



Tracy: for a general overview of how long system simulation takes, and how various processes are scheduled on CPU cores. This piece of software has been developed by a good friend of ours. You can download it right here: https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy

When we have an overall idea of what takes long to compute, we switch to one of the following depending on the platform:


Visual Studio Diagnostic Tools (PC - shown on the screenshot), Sony Razor CPU profiler (PS5), Microsoft PIX profiler (Xbox Series) - this is where most of the work is done.


Since the Fungal Swamp biome is brand-new, it came with a whole host of performance issues. Luckily, the new benchmarks allowed us to catch them early.

We targeted the most performance-hungry systems and adapted them to become more multiplayer-friendly. The nature of multiplayer gameplay and the need for perfect synchronization of client and server states forced us to detect changes in entities much more efficiently. A combat scenario, where tons of buildings get destroyed, and hundreds of creatures perish, is a perfect scenario to make such optimizations because those changes happen all the time. For example, the ResourceGraph system produced a performance spike for several seconds whenever a factory was destroyed. We have made great improvements in that regard since then. Our systems work with smaller data sets now, they are much faster and free up the resources for other systems that might require computational power. The benefit of that can be seen both in single and multiplayer game modes.


This is what the performance graph should NOT look like. During our tests it turned out that complex pipe systems produced gigantic lag spikes under high stress scenarios. When you're fighting for milliseconds, a six second stall is not what you want to see.

It is also important to note that we prepared a separate benchmarking scenario for each biome in the game. This matters for us since various biomes require players to utilize different building techniques and advanced technologies that might not be viable on other maps. Each of those tech chains might come with its own individual issues. Here’s a fresh example of such an issue. We have recently constructed benchmarks for two Fungal Swamp biome scenarios: a forest map with relatively low liquid density and a swamp map with liquids making up most of the play area. Naturally, the swamp map requires the player to use pipes and buildings associated with liquids extensively. The benchmark for that map ran terribly slow, with the game logic update reaching up to 250 milliseconds instead of the budgeted 33. We were surprised to find out that the main culprit was the PipeSystem, which took 180 milliseconds for each update. Additionally, if any pipes got destroyed, the game hung for between one and seven seconds. It became clear that our pipe code is inefficient, and we should look for optimizations there.


We have already started working on improving the PipeSystem. The performance in this specific scenario is still far from the 33 millisecond target, but it's just the beginning of optimization.

CONCLUSION

Years of working on the multiplayer mode for The Riftbreaker have been a tremendous challenge. We have learned and improved a lot in this time. We strongly believe that the effort we put into this will benefit both the players who like to play solo and those eager to get their hands on the multiplayer version. We’re doing our best to allow you that - we will start a closed beta test as soon as we are ready to take your feedback. We still have a couple of gameplay aspects to figure out, but rest assured - we’re getting there. Join us on www.twitch.tv/exorstudios for previews of our survival runs. If you have any more question, feel free to ask us directly on www.discord.gg/exorstudios and in the comments below.

See you next time!
EXOR Studios

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2506610/The_Riftbreaker_World_Expansion_III/

We thought we covered everything all the topics when it comes to the beasts you will encounter in the Fungal Swamp biome in World Expansion III. However, very attentive viewers on our stream (Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3 PM CEST www.twitch.tv/exorstudios) made us realize that we have yet to tell you about the Plutrodon. Here’s everything you need to know about this creature. WARNING: Please treat this article as a potential spoiler. If you’d rather find out all of this on your own, we recommend waiting for the release of the experimental branch, which should happen very, very soon! Enjoy!


Plutrodon and some of its animations. We changed the creature's default skin from green to... whatever the other one is to make it easier to spot the creature during more hectic moments.

Plutrodon falls into the category of a medium-sized creature. It is instantly recognizable in the wild, as it moves around on three legs only. That doesn’t mean the creature is slow or clumsy (looking at you, Krocoon). In fact, Plutrodon’s legs end with sharp claws that allow it to dig itself into the soft ground of the Fungal Swamp and gain the traction it needs to move around quickly. An additional side effect of this adaptation is the ability to climb almost all surfaces - but more on that later.


Plutrodons usually come in groups. It makes it really difficult to dodge their attacks, but it's not impossible.

Plutrodon will generally try to keep a safe distance from whatever it deems as a threat. Its main, ranged attack somewhat resembles the attack carried out by Morphium Towers. The creature will root itself in the ground and then attack the target with a pillar of spikes rising up from the ground. The attack starts near Plutrodon and travels towards the main target. What makes it especially dangerous is the fact that it damages everything on its path. If the Plutrodon targets your defensive towers hidden behind several layers of walls, all of those structures will be damaged by that attack.


A 'synthetic' situation, showcasing Plutrodon's attack strength. Even though you are behind the wall, you're not safe, as the spikes will reach you and your towers easily.

Plutrodons usually stick around in small groups, usually concentrated around bodies of water. There are three major strains of these creatures out there: the regular ones, the alpha strain, and the ultra strain. Creatures belonging to a ‘higher’ strain get bigger in size, more resilient to attacks, and hit harder. However, what doesn’t change is their general behavior and range of attack. If you figure out how to defeat the smaller ones, you should be able to take down the bigger prey. As with all the other creatures of the Fungal Swamp, Plutrodons do not build their nests. Instead, they utilize the strange living structure we told you about earlier as their hive.


These creatures work really well in conjunction with big tanks, like Fungors. Fungors take the damage from the towers, while Plutrodons try to destroy the defenses with their ranged attacks.

These creatures are hunters. They might not be the apex predator of the biome, but you should not discount their killer instinct. Thanks to their sharp claws, Plutrodons can climb almost any natural obstacle. Rocks, trees, and land formations are not obstacles but opportunities for them. Similarly to Stickrids, Plutrodons can come down from a tree and attack you at a moment’s notice. Always watch your back and pay attention to the radar. If you’ve dealt with Crawlogs in the Crystal Caves region, you had a taste of what’s to come - be prepared for more.


Plutrodons can climb off trees just like Stickrids.

If you have been watching our streams in this preview season, you might have noticed that Plutrodons changed their skin out of the blue a couple of weeks ago. Well, it turns out that if you put camo-green creatures on a background full of mud, leaves, trees, and other such props, the creatures blend in a little too much. In the heat of the battle, it was sometimes quite difficult to spot Plutrodons (and Stickrids, too, for that matter), especially if you defeated an entire wave and just had that one pesky critter left over, attacking buildings. As we know, that always happens. However, games should be fun, not frustrating, so we decided to give these creatures a major evolutionary disadvantage and completely redesigned their color palette. You can see the comparison of the old and new skins below. We hope it will lead to a better experience, but still - let us know what you think!


The dark green Plutrodons blended in a little bit too well.


The new version still matches the color shceme of the biome and blends with the ground, but the creatures are now far easier to spot.

The experimental version of the World Expansion III update is just around the corner. It has been quite a long time since the last patch. Over the course of the past couple of months, we have amassed over 6000 changes that will make their way to you with the Fungal Swamp update. Most of those changes are in the backend and necessary for the co-op to work, but there are a lot of optimizations, bugfixes, and new features we haven’t talked about yet waiting for you. We have been preparing the changelog for the entire last week - it’s going to be massive. If you don’t want to miss it, join www.discord.gg/exorstudios and get notified about the launch of the experimental branch.

See you later!
EXOR Studios

World Expansion II brought many new enemies into the world of the Riftbreaker. The powerful, death-defying Necrodon was one of them. As you might already know, the Necrodon was a creature that we originally planned to include in the base version of the game. However, due to time constraints, we didn’t manage to flesh out the design and program all of its abilities in time. The Necrodon waited on the sidelines, waiting for a good moment to get a new life, which eventually came with the launch of the Into the Dark World Expansion. You will find a lot of parallels to this story while reading about today’s topic - the Drexolian.


Drexolian base model and several of its animations.

Drexolians were initially designed as one of the enemies of the Tropical Zone biome. They are the masters of disguise. Their bodies resemble a certain species of a tree commonly found in forest areas around the planet (huge reveal: Galatea is round, not flat). Their tall bodies are covered with hardened skin, resembling tree bark. It is quite stiff, which limits the creature’s mobility but gives it incredible resistance to many forms of damage. Drexolians also produce false leaves to give their disguise even more credibility. You shouldn’t be surprised if you build your base around one of these creatures only to find out about that fact hours later.


If you want to continue your deforestation practices, you'd better be ready to fight some angry trees.

These strange creatures are usually not hostile towards other species. Most of the time, they can be found simply resting, hidden among real trees. As long as they are not disturbed, you should be able to walk away unscathed. However, if you step too close for their comfort, there will be consequences. There will be no warning signs, and no lengthy ‘wake-up’ period like in the case of Gnerots. Drexolians will attack you immediately, and they have quite an arsenal of defensive techniques to use.


Oh, you wanted to run? It would be a shame if a wall rose up from the ground behind you.

Drexolians might be slow, but they are a deadly threat, both in close-quarters combat as well as from a distance. If you find yourself in the melee range, the creature will try to beat you to a pulp using its long arms disguised as tree branches. Those things might look brittle, but don’t let that fool you - even Mr. Riggs’ armor will have a hard time withstanding a flurry of hits from these. On the other hand - you are considerably faster, so if you notice an incoming attack, you should have no problems dodging it.


This forest looks like a nice source of plant biomass for a power plant... Nevermind, animal biomass will work as well.

If you get away from the angry tree monster, it’s going to try to chase you while simultaneously showering you with a barrage of splinters. Drexolians are able to rip off thin and razor-sharp pieces of their ‘bark,’ which they throw at enemies with great force. Our happy tree friends will also use this technique to wreck your base from afar. Drexolians might be quite passive in the wild, but you can expect literal hordes of them to join the attack waves during your campaign and survival runs in the Fungal Swamp biome.


Learning to spot camouflaged Drexolians will be a crucial skill in the Fungal Swamp.

The cherry on top of Drexolian’s ability set is tied to its slow movement speed. In order to effectively deal with their prey, these creatures can raise up the ground in front of them to form a temporary cage, greatly limiting the target’s movement. Once you’re walled in, you have only two choices - stand your ground and try to destroy the Drexolian before it destroys you, or break through the wall with your sheer firepower. Theoretically, you could wait until the wall sinks into the ground once more, but you’re likely to have experienced an express teleport back to your HQ in that time (i.e., you got wrecked).


Drexolians will gladly join other creatures and come knocking at the gates of your base if you get on their nerve.

The Drexolian had to wait for a while before the time came for its turn in the production pipeline. The Fungal Swamp biome was the perfect opportunity to bring it back. We’re quite happy with how it turned out, and we hope that you will enjoy the unique challenge it’s going to pose. You can see Drexolians in action during our streams on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3 PM CEST at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios. We are also getting ready for an experimental release of the World Expansion III - hop on to www.discord.gg/exorstudios to get notified when that happens.

See you soon!
EXOR Studios

Today, we’d like to talk about the music of The Riftbreaker. Some time ago, we explained what it takes to create convincing sound effects and voiceovers for the game. However, we have not talked much about the music, which is also a huge part of the game’s soundscape. In this article, we will discuss what goes into creating a soundtrack for a game like The Riftbreaker. We will also tell you a little bit about the themes we tried to sneak into the soundtracks of each biome, as well as the Adaptive Music System that rules it all.


We even had a string quartet rendition of The Riftbreaker Main Theme at a side-event to Gamescom 2019. It was probably once in a lifetime opportunities to hear it like that, so we're glad it was caught on tape.

Music for The Riftbreaker is composed by an experienced composer and multi-instrumentalist, Marcin Pukaluk. He has years of experience creating original music scores for movies, games, and other media. Marcin is a one-man army, composing, performing, and arranging all his pieces by himself. However, we couldn’t just come up to him and ask, “Hey mate, could you design a soundtrack for a game you know nothing about”? We needed to provide some context first.

We invited Marcin to have a chat and playtest the game in our office. The project was in its early stages at that point. However, it was already clear that The Riftbreaker combines the themes of heavy industrialization and advanced technology with the exploration of an unknown planet full of wonders of nature. After some discussions, we came to the conclusion that the instruments that emphasized those themes were synths, drums, and strings. This basic set of instruments would be supported with other sounds as necessary.

By analyzing the gameplay from the first playable demos, we came to the conclusion that we can divide each play session into three types of player activities: combat, exploration, and base building. All of these activities are very different from each other. To create a good soundtrack that always fits the mood of the events on the screen, we needed to take that into account. This is why we decided to create separate playlists, each with a slightly different style, for combat, exploration, and base-building. It was a crucial bit of info for Marcin to determine the mood of the tracks to compose.


A typical, calm and steady building piece. Gets you right in the groove of optimizing your supply chain.

The tracks that you can hear during base-building are quite calm and slow-paced but always have a steady rhythm. They are meant to help you focus on the task at hand without jumping into the foreground of the scene. The base instruments are supported by subtle industrial elements, like various ‘computer’ beeps, drones, and machinery clanging. All these elements fit well with what is usually happening within your base.


One of the exploration pieces from the original game. It accompanies the player while exploring the wilderness of Galatea 37.

The exploration playlist creates the feeling of mystery and tension as you explore the Galatean wilderness. Long, steady notes, coupled with additional ambient sounds like wind howling or water dripping, give off a vibe of danger. The rhythm section in these tracks is very limited or even completely absent at times, amplifying the lack of safety.


NO MERCY, DESTROY EVERYONE WHO THREATENS THE PEACE OF THIS PEACEFUL PLANET!

The last ‘main’ playlist in the game is battle music. It is the most dynamic of the three, featuring fast-paced drums and aggressive lead melodies performed on various instruments. We wanted to get your heart racing with these pieces. Listening to them makes you feel like you’re a superhero in a battle against the entire planet.

As the work on the game progressed, we also came up with additional ‘playlists’ that we thought could enhance the experience and make the soundtrack more complete.


The fear playlist can get really spooky at times.

The ‘fear’ playlist is a collection of the most atmospheric pieces in the game. These tracks accompany you when you are out exploring Galatea 37 at night. It is basically the ‘exploration’ type of music, but with the feeling of dread turned up to the maximum. It features an even more creepy ambiance and droning sounds that make you feel uneasy.


The idea behind the adventure playlist was to make you feel like an intrepid explorer. Like a certain copyrighted archeologist uncovering secrets of an ancient city.

Next up, we have the ‘adventure’ playlist. You can hear these pieces whenever you visit a new biome for the first time in the Campaign Mode or when you start a new Survival Mode run. Hopeful and full of joy, it is meant to inspire you on your mission to secure the future home for humanity.


Just wait for the drop. It's nasty.

The last music variant we came up with is the most experimental one - we call it ‘anticipation’ music. We asked Marcin whether he could compose a couple of pieces using the Shepard Tone phenomenon. It’s an auditory illusion that makes the listener believe there is a constant tone in the music piece that is always rising. We use these tracks before the biggest attacks in the game to evoke feelings of danger and uncertainty.


We had to feature some metal-adjacent music in an expansion called Metal Terror.

It is also worth adding that each World Expansion that we released featured new music that fit the theme of the biome added in that expansion. The Metallic Valley music features heavy, distorted guitars and ‘cybernetic’ sounds to match the aesthetic of both the biome and the creatures you can meet there.


It's weird how music can evoke the feeling of space and hollowness of caverns. Special effects work wonders here.

The music of Crystal Caverns is characterized by a huge soundstage. Apart from the main instruments driving the music forward, you can also hear a ton of additional sound effects. Water dripping from the ceiling, wind howling in the distance, rock formations scraping against one another, and echoes of unknown creatures - you can hear all of those elements reverberating across the caverns, building the atmosphere.


While the music from the MEtallic Valley and Crystal Caverns could work in other biomes, the Fungal Swamp is definitely one of a kind.

World Expansion III takes place in a Fungal Swamp, a place teeming with life. We wanted the music to reflect that. However, we also wanted to give the soundtrack of the swamp its own unique character. You can expect to hear a lot of ethnic instruments in this biome - drums, didgeridoos, djembe, and mouth harps. Sounds like it shouldn’t work, but it does, check it out:

The Riftbreaker features more than fifty individual music pieces, totaling up to almost four hours of original music. However, if we just let all of those music pieces play at random, we could end up in the middle of a heated battle with calm and relaxing building music in our ears. Or, quite the opposite - you don’t want the pumping battle soundtrack to keep playing long after you’re done defending your base. This is why we developed the Adaptive Music System.

The system controls the playback of all music in the game. It is an algorithm that analyzes the player's in-game situation and chooses the appropriate music piece to accompany it. It takes into account the current biome, the time of day, the number of enemies on the screen, and the player’s current activities. Based on the information gathered, a random piece from the appropriate playlist is selected. The system performs these checks quite often. It can also change the music on the fly - if you are exploring an unknown region and stumble upon a nest of enemy creatures, it will turn on the battle music for you. Once you’ve eradicated all threats, the music will switch back to the exploration theme.


The full remastered soundtrack for your listening pleasure.

As you can see, creating a soundtrack for a game is quite a complex task that requires a lot of forward-thinking and creativity. If you enjoy the work we put into it together with Marcin Pukaluk, you can listen to it in a remastered version that is available both on Steam and YouTube. Or, you can rip the original versions straight from the game files. Be our guest! (By the way, an updated version of the soundtrack with more remasters is coming. Stay tuned.)

As always, we invite you to check out our streams every Tuesday and Thursday on www.twitch.tv/exorstudios. All our previews, co-op streams, and behind-the-scenes segments happen right there. You can also always catch us on Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios.

See you there!
EXOR Studios

P.S.
Some time ago we published a modding spotlight article about WirawanMYT’s Expanded Arsenal mod. Wirawan has just published a massive update for his creation, featuring dozens of new technologies, challenging enemy variants, and even more complex resource chains. Check out the trailer below and download the mod to give it a try!

As you might have noticed from all the promotional materials we’ve released on the topic of the Fungal Swamp, this new biome is a lot different from the other areas of Galatea 37. Of course, all biomes are unique thanks to their varied fauna and flora, but the Swamp stands out because of something else. The amount of dry land is by far the lowest among the biomes we’ve visited so far. Not only does this present a building challenge to you, but also a visual challenge for us. Liquid pools were never the strongest point of The Riftbreaker’s visual presentation. However, thanks to the improvements in The Schmetterling Engine, this will change with the World Expansion III update.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2506610/The_Riftbreaker_World_Expansion_III/
Wishlist, pretty please?

For a long time, we did not have support for rendering transparent materials in the engine due to the constraints of deferred shading. Last year, we made an effort to switch to a new shading technique called tiled deferred shading, which we described in detail in this article. This change was largely dictated by the fact that an idea for a water-based biome has been brewing in our minds for quite some time. Transparent materials were the first step in order to pull this off properly. After a period of experimentation carried out by the graphics team, we arrived at this result:


Each physical element that comes into contact with water causes waves to appear.

As you can see, the water we created is not perfectly clear. Moreover, the deeper the pool is, the darker the water gets. This way, we can simulate how the light behaves in the liquid without having to carry out the complex math of light refraction. It is done via a shader that controls the color of the liquid material based on the depth of the pool. This way, we can change the appearance of the liquid by adjusting shader properties. It also means that you can potentially create mods with new liquids and custom looks based on what we’ve done.


'Water' in the prologue mission did not look like water at all, however, we did not have the correct tools to make it better.

Naturally, filling a pool with water or any other liquid is not enough to simulate the behavior of a real liquid pool. To make a convincing lake, you need more than water. The bottom of the lake must be filled with various stones and plants, and the formation of the terrain itself must vary as well. Our level designers carefully redesigned every liquid pool on every tile in the game, creating a believable layer of tiny decorations hidden beneath the surface. You might not notice them a lot in-game, but believe us - if they weren’t there, the game simply wouldn’t look right.


After the switch to the new system, the water looks much more convincing. The waves that appear on the surface play a huge role in that. The edges of liquid pools are much more distinct in the new system and easier to notice.

Another aspect of a good looking water simulation is convincingly portraying the waves and ripples on the surface. That’s a job for another custom shader. First, we made sure that each vertex that comes into collision with the surface causes concentric waves to appear. This is visible when Mr. Riggs walks through a lake, for example, but truly shines when you observe a creature with more than two legs. In the case of Stickrids, for example, you can see each of the six legs causing its own ripple effect. In addition, the waves multiply and cancel each other out if they come into contact.


In the previous system we faked waves and ripples by using a 'refract' particle effect, which generally caused chaos on the screen.


The new and improved version. It takes some time for the surface to settle after it's been disturbed.

However, some phenomena can also cause waves to appear on water despite not making direct physical contact with it. Explosions and shockwaves caused by rockets and other projectiles should also have a visible effect and cause a wake to appear. The solution to that required some creativity, but we made that happen. Explosions and large projectiles now have an invisible collision sphere attached to them. The sphere is large enough to come into contact with the liquid surface. Thanks to that, our shader knows that it should cause waves to appear. The effect looks great, especially when you shoot multiple rockets - just check out the new and improved Swarm Missile launcher!


The improved Swarm Missile Launcher is a great tool for testing the 'interactability' of the liquid pools!

Additionally, to give our lakes a more lively and natural look, we decided to sprinkle in some details. Take water lilies as an example. All the vegetation and decorations in lakes are created using our prefab system. The level designer marks the area to be filled with a prefab, and the system spawns various props on the ground. However, we give water lilies a bit of special treatment. The game always spawns them on the surface of the water. This way, you can decorate your lakes, even without the ability to place objects directly on the surface in the editor. We also made sure that whenever a liquid comes into contact with the ground or a prop, you will see delicate foam forming at the point of contact. This allows the ground and liquids to blend in a natural way.


The refraction effect looked quite okay on some liquids, but it wasn't the level we were satisfied with.


Things can always look better. We won't stop improving.

We applied these changes to all the liquids in the game, so all the biomes are going to get a visual boost with the arrival of World Expansion III. Naturally, these changes are not without a performance cost, so if you would rather have a couple of extra frames per second or just do not enjoy these effects, you can simply flick a switch in the options menu to turn the water simulation off. If you’re on the fence - come and see the new liquids live at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios - we’re on at 3 PM CEST on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Drop by Discord to get notified about that: www.discord.gg/exorstudios


See you next time!
EXOR Studios

When designing The Riftbreaker, we wanted each playthrough to be slightly different. Enemy attacks happen at randomized intervals, and you never know what kind of a surprise the Galatean weather is holding for you. This variety is greatly aided by the randomized map generation system that we implemented. In today’s article, we’re going to tell you about the most recent addition to this system, that will expand its capabilities even more - Prop Sets.


The new system allows us to replace decorations in various spots across the level, reducing the rare, but unpleasant repetitions.


You can walk by the same spot many times and not even realize you've seen it before, but slightly different!

We have already written a lengthy article about the map generation system. We encourage you to give it a read, but if you want a quick summary, we have your back, too: maps are constructed from tiles. Each tile is handcrafted by a level designer. They set up the terrain obstacles, place resource deposits, mark spots for player and enemy spawns, and set up all the necessary boundaries. The map is also filled with various props. The bigger props are placed manually, while the large fields of vegetation are handled by our prefab system. This system allows us to mark a flat area to be filled automatically with various grass tufts, shrubs, bushes, palm trees, and many others.


Prefabs work great and save a lot of time, but have their limitations. This is why we decided to introduce prop sets.

The prefab system not only makes designing a level easier but also ensures an even higher degree of variability within a tile. We have many prefabs to choose from, and you never know which one you’re going to see in the game. However, this system also had its limitations - it could only be used on a flat, empty space. This means that if we wanted to place some vegetation on rocks, or create a complex structure by combining several props, it would always be the same and not undergo randomization. For World Expansion III we decided to improve that and developed the Prop Set System.


The prefab system was quite powerful, as it could transform the feeling of an entire tile. But, as always, we wanted more power. MORE POWER!

The idea behind this system is very simple. In order to introduce more variability within the tiles, we decided to group our props into sets that can be exchanged with each other without any hassle. The designer places props on the map as usual. They can set them anywhere they like - on the ground, in canyons, on the rocks - the sky is the limit here. However, some magic happens during the map generation process. The game can exchange the objects that the designer placed on the map with similar ones, using a list that we created. Thanks to this, every time you load a map, you will see quite a different landscape. If this sounds complicated, just check out this GIF, and it will all become clear:


A dozen variations available at a click of a button.

We choose a base set of props for the designers to use during the tile creation process. Then, we create a simple CSV table that lists all the individual props that belong to the base set. After that, we can create as many alternative sets as we want. Let’s use a simple example to portray the process.


In the table above, you can see a simplified version of the base set of props. It contains the tree_01, bush_01, and grass_01 models. The level designer will place these props on the map and the game will use it as a baseline. Then, we can create an alternative set by choosing some other models that are similar to the base props and listing them in the CSV file.


This tells the game that it is safe to replace the tree_01 model from the base set with the tree_02 model from the alternative set. The system will only exchange props from the same table row, so you don’t have to worry about giant trees replacing grass tufts. However, you can specify completely different props. For example:


In this case, if the game decides to choose Alternative Set 02, the original trees, bushes, and rocks will be replaced with mushrooms, rocks, and flowers. You can get really creative here, but you also have to make sure that the lists you create make sense - you don’t want rocks to grow on top of trees, do you?


SURPRISE SPREADSHEET! Working in game development requires more staring at spreadsheets than you imagine. This is a fragment of our Fungal Swamp biome propset. Click to zoom in, if you like spreadsheets.

Additionally, during the map generation process, each tile is divided into four almost equal parts (not all tiles are square or rectangular, hence the almost part). Each part of the tile will use a different prop set if possible, ensuring that you will see as many variants of flora and other decorations as possible.


This feature allows us to have many variations of complex structures without the need for manual re-propping everything each time.

For now, only the map tiles we created for World Expansion III will use this system. Retroactively introducing it to each of our map tiles from other biomes would be a lengthy process. It would require us to create prop sets, remove all existing props from the maps, and replace them with only the base set models. We’re not saying it is never going to happen, but it will need a lot of dedication. Creating a new biome using this system is a breeze, though, so we highly encourage you to use it when creating your custom maps. We will publish an update to The Riftbreaker World Editor suite around the release of the World Expansion itself.


Replacing props in such tightly-packed spaces would be a nightmare. With the new system, it's a breeze.


The right set can completely change the mood of the scene.

We hope that this (relatively) small addition will greatly enhance your experience with the Fungal Swamp biome in the upcoming expansion. Each day we are getting closer to our beta experimental release, so stay tuned for more info on that - www.discord.gg/exorstudios is the best place to stay informed. We’re also quite happy with our progress on the multiplayer front - we even streamed a four-player playthrough of an online co-op run on www.twitch.tv/exorstudios. You can watch it here:



When the time comes, we will for sure have a closed beta release of the co-op version. Sign up for that here:


Have a great weekend, and see you next time!
EXOR Studios

If you see one Canceroth in the wild, there is a good chance that there are more nearby.

Our work on World Expansion III for The Riftbreaker is progressing nicely. We are at the Alpha stage of production—the logic structure for the entire campaign is in place, allowing playtesters to complete the expansion without any tricks or debug options. We have already started conducting early playtests within the company. Tests like these help us identify problems and challenges, as well as the highlights of the campaign. It turns out that we all consider today’s topic to be one of the highlights. Some of you might have seen this creature on our stream already - let’s take a closer look at the Canceroth.


Canceroth testing in a synthetic environment. Take a good look - it's rare to see one in such a calm setting.

The Canceroth is one of the most unique lifeforms you will encounter during your exploration of the Swamp biome. At first, it looks like a colony of some sort. In the center of the colony, there is a large cell that is surrounded by several smaller ones, identical to the one in the middle. The colony moves as one, with the central cell controlling the behavior of the entire group, rolling over the surface of the planet with no regard for anything on its way. Canceroths leave a wake of destruction behind them, annihilating all organisms and structures they encapsulate. If they get inside your base, it is already too late to stop them. You can’t even count on natural protection - Canceroths traverse mountains and canyons with ease.


Canceroth Nests are well protected by other species of creatures and plants. What's their connection? You will have to discover it yourself.

A Canceroth’s body is incredibly resilient, thanks to its unique construction. Each individual cell looks as if it holds some kind of dark energy trapped within it. However, the physical part of the body resembles a ball made of elastic tubes, capable of changing shape according to the organism’s needs. This protects a Canceroth from physical damage, as the body absorbs the energy or changes shape to avoid injury. Acid, energy, and fire also seem to have limited potential against these creatures. What works is cryo damage coupled with area damage. First, you slow the creature down, then bombard it with whatever you have at your disposal for maximum effect.


Canceroths do not only spawn during attack waves. They will also attack you if you touch a Bioanomaly.

Speaking of ways to eliminate the Canceroth, you must do it strategically. The smaller cells can be destroyed to limit the creature’s size and damage output, but this is not very effective in the long run, as the cells can simply regrow. The only way to deal with the colony once and for all is to destroy the central node. Sounds simple at first, but all the surrounding cells are great at soaking up damage and protecting the ‘head.’ Use traps, landmines, and precision-targeting weapons to snipe the central piece.


If you thought battles in The Riftbreaker can get chaotic sometimes, just wait for the Canceroth to appear.

What makes matters even more tricky is that Canceroths usually do not come alone. Sometimes, they will invade your base as a part of an attack wave. However, Canceroths also create their own nests, and when they do, they will simply keep coming after you as long as they stay active. Moreover, Canceroths also come in Alpha and Ultra variants, each even bigger and more powerful than the last. Not a lot can stand in their way, so be on the lookout for those and destroy them before they can reach your base.


Terrain obstacles are nothing for a Canceroth. They can move across the talles peaks and deepest canyons of Galatea 37.

Canceroths are not similar to any creatures in the Swamp biome. However, they do not display aggression towards other species. Still, their destructive nature and ability to destroy and consume everything in their path are not without consequences. Their destructive behavior brings imbalance to the ecosystem and threatens the existence of other creatures. Ashley and Mr. Riggs will have to solve the mystery of the Canceroth’s origin and find out whether its influence threatens the planet. Should they interfere at all? Is Galatea 37 better off without their intervention? What other secrets does the biome hold? You will find everything in the story-driven campaign that’s coming alongside the World Expansion III update for The Riftbreaker.


If you somehow miss a Canceroth rolling through your base, you will definitely notice the telltale trail of destruction.

All our players will be able to face off against the Canceroth and many other new creatures we’ve prepared for you in the free portion of the World Expansion III update. This time it’s going to feature not one, but two additional maps for the Survival Mode, which will give you plenty of opportunities to try out the new weapons and technologies. If you’d like to get your hands on the early, follow us on www.discord.gg/exorstudios not to miss the experimental update, which is going to happen well before the official release. Join our streams on Tuesdays and Thursdays at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios for even more exclusive information and live Q&As!

See you there!
EXOR Studios

This creature/structure/growth/whatever-it-is looks certainly different from all the other nests we've seen so far.

Today, we continue our cycle of articles previewing the new content in The Riftbreaker World Expansion III. We’ve already discussed some of the new technologies that will help you master both the dry land and the waters of the Swamp biome. We have also shown you some creatures that will oppose your expansion into their home turf and destroy their nesting grounds. In fact, you might want to think twice before disturbing any nests - and we’re going to tell you why in today’s article.


You will rarely get this much space to fight the nest. Cherish these moments.

Like the creatures found in other areas of the planet, the inhabitants of the Swamp biome often live in packs. This allows them to hunt together and protect each other from danger. These groups often form large nests, which serve as their makeshift homes and nurseries for the young. However, these nests are different from what we see in other regions of Galatea. In areas such as the Tropical Zone, you will find only one species living in nests - the Canoptrix. The same is true for the Mushbits in the Desert, Morirots in the Volcanic Zone, and Granans in the Acidic Plains. Things are different in the Swamps.


Battling through to the nest itself is a difficult and dangerous process.

Multiple species of nesting creatures inhabit this newly discovered biome, which is not really strange by itself. What makes them unique is the fact that all species in the Swamp biome seem to gather around the same type of nest. It makes it pretty clear that the creatures do not build this structure themselves but find it in the wild and claim it as their home. What makes the Swamp nest even stranger is a giant acid-spitting maw located at the very top of this structure. It will actively seek out threats, aim at them, and bombard them with a barrage of acidic projectiles from a long distance. All these properties make it very likely that the nest is a living organism, forming a symbiotic relationship with the creatures of the Swamp biome.


Luckily most of the natural inhabitants of the Swamp biome absolutely hate fire.

Multiple species of creatures lay eggs both within and around the nests. You will want to clear them out as quickly as you can - otherwise, your base will never get any rest from an endless stream of creatures pouring your way. Fungors, Plutrodons, and Stickrids are not the only creatures that you will face while trying to clear these nests out. The aggressive, carnivorous plants, which we showed you a couple of weeks before, very often grow in the immediate vicinity of the nest. It’s an additional layer of protection for the entire structure and the creatures inside. Combine that with the “turret” on top, and you’ve got a serious siege on your hands.


Energy-based weapons like the Lightning Gun can help you clear out multiple targets at once - which is especially useful when the entire jungle decides to attack you!

Clearing out a Swamp nest is not an easy task. It will require a slow, methodical approach, getting rid of the threats layer by layer. You can, for example, try to lure the creatures out first, then burn the carnivorous plants with fire, and finally blow up your main target with an orbital barrage. However, that’s not the only option, and we’re sure you will find many ways to sweet victory. If you succeed, you will be rewarded with a shower of rare resources and high-quality mods (and perhaps something more!). Most importantly, though, you will enjoy a moment of peace and quiet.


Sometimes you might not even realize how many enemies are around you! Employ hit-and-run tactics to get away from hairy situations like these.

We hope you enjoyed this glimpse into the weird world of the Swamp biome, which is coming to The Riftbreaker in World Expansion III. Remember to add the expansion to your Steam Wishlist and join us on www.discord.gg/exorstudios never to miss any news! We have also started streaming co-op playthroughs of the survival Mode once more, so follow www.twitch.tv/exorstudios and get notified when we go live on Tuesdays and Thursdays!

See you there!
EXOR Studios

While discovering the secrets of the Galatean Swamp, you will have to face several challenges. Apart from the wildlife trying to push you away from their natural habitat, you will have to contend with limited building space. Bases in The Riftbreaker can get pretty huge. All the factories, power plants, and storage buildings take up a lot of space. However, dry land is a luxury in the Swamp, requiring you to change your building habits and make the most of every square meter available to you. You will need to find savings everywhere - and we want to help you with that. Let’s take a look at the floating defensive towers.


All three levels of the Floating Immolator Tower. By the way - they don't get smaller with each level. It's just the perspective and my lack of Photoshop skills.


Perfect protection for your pipelines.


Stumbling upon a row of towers like this one should make your enemies think twice. It should, but it doesn't, which is good, because it means that the twoers will get the chance to get busy.

Resources in the Swamp biome are scattered on small islands with very limited building space. It is quite likely that your new outposts will span across several such islands. Floating towers will help you defend such structures. The first tower you will get access to is the Floating Immolator Tower. It’s a rapid-firing tower that shoots flaming projectiles which explode on impact. Any creature hit by the tower will be set on fire, receiving additional damage over time. The Floating Immolator Tower has three advancement levels, each one more powerful than the last. However, the sheer firepower is not the key feature here.


These towers do not need any additional power sources. Thanks to this, you can set up traps in the middle of nowhere!

What makes the Floating Immolators a prime choice for the Swamp biome is their portability and ease of use. As the name suggests, these towers have to be placed on a liquid pool of any type (yes, even magma will do - though fighting fire with fire is not the best idea). They also need AI cores and a steady supply of liquid ammo, but that is all! No need to provide them with power, no need to build complicated piping networks, or anything else, really. As long as you place them in a liquid pool they are ready to go. This gives you the ability to surround all your islands with a perimeter of powerful defensive towers that are sure to give the creatures of the Swamp a headache.


Always support your Immolators with artillery. Let the fireworks begin!

As great as these towers are, they do not come without drawbacks. The first and the most obvious one is their vulnerability. Their placement on liquid pools, away from walls or any other defenses, makes them a juicy target for enemy artillery and more tanky units, who can take several salvos and actually get up close. Remember to always support your Floating towers with batteries of Artillery back on dry land. It is also advisable to build the Floating Immolators in very large numbers. The sheer number of these towers can make up for their fragility and will keep the damage output steady, even if you lose several towers in an attack. That’s where the second drawback comes in - these towers are quite expensive. Keep your Carbonium and Ironium production up - protecting your base is not going to be cheap.


No one will destroy this pipeline under our watch! By the way, it's a sneaky preview of a new resource - resin. Any guesses what it can do?

The Floating Immolator Tower is not the only one that you will be able to place directly on water. As many of you suggested on our Feature Upvote board, The Riftbreaker needs more heavy-hitting giant towers. We already added a couple on the previous World Expansions. WE III will continue that trend and then some! This expansion will add three truly powerful 3x3 towers. One of them will be a water-based tower, shooting massive, piercing projectiles that deal cryo damage on impact. We don’t have any visuals or a name for that tower yet, but when it arrives, we will definitely preview it on www.twitch.tv/exorstudios during our developer stream. Follow us there so as not to miss it!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2506610/The_Riftbreaker_World_Expansion_III/

That’s it for today. Remember to add The Riftbreaker: World Expansion III to your wishlist and join our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios to get all the latest news and details from development.

See you there!
EXOR Studios