Dear Project Backers,
as summer slowly settles in, it's time to show you what we've been working on in May with another monthly progress update.

During the first weeks of May, the Monster Designer Backers were once again able to vote for the community Monsters that shall be featured in our game. Here are the winners of the 2nd round of our Community Monster Contest:
● 1st place: Kanko, the pipe fox Monster, by Zuty!
● 2nd place: Sycophantom, the phantasmal elephant Monster, by Missing Novice!
● And our Developers' Pick: Thanatos, the clown-masked reaper Monster, by The0neFreeMan! A close candidate that almost won the first two contests by vote and that already caught our eyes from the first contest. We like Thanatos' design, it reminds us of some of the enemies/villains of Snes RPGs, and it seems like a fitting enemy for the later areas that we've got planned for the game. 

Again, we'd like to remind everyone that there are still three more contests left! A lot of Monsters this time just barely missed second place by votes, but there were also a lot of Monsters overall that we could have imagined to have in our game. Both times so far, it was a very difficult choice for us to make our Developers' Pick among so many creative Monster designs. Monster Designers can try again in our next contest that we will start some time around the Early Access release of the game (~late summer).
Together with the winners from the first Community Contest, that makes 7 community Monsters so far that will be featured in our game. If you would like to see the winners of the second round, you can view them in our Discord channel, which is open for all: Join our Discord

With our Backer Beta testing phase officially concluded, we were able to fully focus on new content again:
● New area: Snowy Peaks. This area is linked to the beginning area, Mountain Path. The player will be able to enter Snowy Peaks as soon as they have gotten the Double Jump boots from Blue Caves and a Monster with the flying exploration skill (Vaero, Frosty, etc.) - meaning it's not required to explore Ancient Woods or Stronghold Dungeon first. This area will feature two large mountains that the player will be able to scale, as well as many crystalline caverns within the mountains, and an icy lake that is surrounded by myths and rumors. There will be many vertical rooms with lots of challenging jumps.

● Almost all of the rooms of Snowy Peaks have already been finished. The next test version of the game (Early Access test version) will feature two new areas: Snowy Peaks and another area that we will reveal in the future.

● New Monsters: Ice Blob, Caraglow, Aurumtail

● You may recognize Caraglow and Aurumtail from our first Community Monster contest: Caraglow was one of the winners by popularity vote, while Aurumtail was our Developers' pick. They are the first Community Monsters to be implemented into the game as new collectable Monsters. They will both be found in Snowy Peaks. Caraglow is a unique support Monster that can heal like no other Monster in the game, whereas Aurumtail will require you to build around its Mana-heavy skill kit to fully utilize him. Caraglow will be another Monster able to light up dark areas in the game, and Aurumtail will be the first Monster in the game that the player can mount to travel faster from one place to another.

● Ice Blob will be one of the common frost-themed Monsters of Snowy Peaks. It is somewhat similar to its green cousin from Mountain Path, but it has adapted to the icy climates of Snowy Peaks: It has wind- and water-element attacks, with several Chill (Debuff) synergies, and it is a very tanky Shielder as well.

● The minimap has been reworked. It now features icons for several important NPCs and places in the game (a highly requested feature), and it can now be scrolled - because the world just became too big to fit on the screen without scrolling.
● Adding new skills. Since we will be adding Tier 4 skills (Level 20+ required), we will need a lot of new Monster skills. Skill trees will also be bigger at Tier 4, meaning there will be more skills to choose from at Level 20.

That's it for May's progress update! What do you think of the residents of Snowy Peaks (that have been revealed so far)? Are you excited to explore the upcoming areas of Monster Sanctuary? Let us know in the comments!

With E3 approaching and Hell Let Loose releasing on the 6th of June, it’s fair to say that Team17 has a very busy week ahead! In fact, next week we’ll be unveiling not just one but TWO BRAND NEW GAME ANNOUNCEMENTS!

You’re not going to want to miss these announcements, and we really can’t wait to share the trailers with you. To ensure that you’re the first to hear about these new games right here on Steam, make sure to follow the Team17 Publisher Page.

In the meantime, you can find a couple of cryptic clues in the image above, and if you hop over to the Team17 Twitter account, make your predictions, follow and re-tweet then you’ll be entered into a prize draw to win a copy of these two games, and Hell Let Loose, upon release!

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next week!

Dear Steam Monster Keepers,

here's our monthly Progress Update for April! Here's what's been happening with Monster Sanctuary in April.
As of writing, the submission period for the second Community Monster Contest has ended. Once again, an astonishing amount of amazing Monsters have been entered to the contest! We are excited to see which Monsters will win the voting process this time. As last time, we as the developers of the game will also pick one Monster as our Dev Pick Monster to feature in the game.

From today until the 8th of May, "Monster Designer" backers (50€+) will be able to vote on which Monster they want to see in the game. We will reveal the winners shortly after. All of this is happening on our Discord server, which you may join by clicking on this link: Join us on Discord

A lot of dev time this month went towards fixing the bugs and issues our Beta Testers found in the beta release. We released two Beta Patches with many bug fixes, some new content and some rebalancing - the patch notes can be found here: Beta Patch 0.3.1 and Beta Patch 0.3.2. These will probably be the last patches to the Beta for a long while - look forward to the next test version when we get closer to the Early Access release of the game in late summer.

Here's a list of the things we've added to the game and the things we've changed:

• Added two new Monsters to the Beta: Raduga, a new Champion found in Ancient Woods, and Toxiquus, a new regular Monster in Stronghold Dungeon. As a Beta Backer, you may fight and conquer them now as well! Steam updates your Monster Sanctuary Beta automatically when you log on to Steam.
  
  
• Added a much-needed feature to the Beta: An options menu! Among other things, it includes volume settings, key bindings and a highly-requested feature: a combat speed option! You may set the speed of combat animations to 1.0x, 1.25x, 1.5x and even 2.0x. This feature will be highly useful for all future testing of the game and it has already quite accelerated our own test runs of the game.
  
  
• Enemy leveling system has been revamped (changes also live on Beta now):
  
• Previously, enemy Monsters levels were based on the number of Champions the player had already defeated. This meant that wild Monster levels suddenly rose after beating a certain number of Champions, which penalized players who went directly for Champions, but also made the game quite easy if players skipped optional Champions. Especially since we're planning to make the exploration of the game more open, it seemed unnatural to bind enemy Monster levels to Champions. For instance, players could potentially explore 90% of Ancient Woods without fighting the Goblin King, then go back to Stronghold Dungeon and fight against severely under-leveled enemies.
  
• Instead, enemy leveling is based on exploration now. Whenever the player enters a room with a new Monster encounter in it, the enemy level is slightly raised. At certain thresholds, the enemy Monster levels rises one by one. A particular change with this new system is that wild Monsters will now stay at the level that they were originally encountered at (for instance, it'll be easy to farm Mountain Path Monsters for eggs now). Certain enemy encounters and areas will still have a minimum level.
  
  
• Lots of balance changes and bug fixes. You may find a complete list of them in the patch notes linked above (and found here on the Steam boards).

Dear Monster Keepers,

this is the second patch for the beta and includes a bit more changes this time.



Two new Monsters added
- Raduga, new Champion east most of Ancient Woods (a new room was added for him)
- Toxiquus, encountered in southern parts of Stronghold Dungeon
Also, monster distribution in Stronghold Dungeon and Ancient Woods was adjusted a bit



Options Menu added to the game
Includes Combat Animations Speed, Volume settings, Key Bindings for keyboard and Resolution settings. The game launcher dialogue got removed now.

Enemy encounter levels changed
Enemy levels are no longer raised when the Keeper rank increases, instead, after the first area (Mountain Path) the enemy encounter level increases based on how many rooms with monster encounters were discovered.
This gives a smoother progress instead of the previous difficulty spikes, independent of which areas the player explores first.
Also this way the player isn't incentivized to avoid Champion encounters. If loading an old savegame, the enemy levels will automatically adjust in the order the areas were explored in that savegame.

Combat ranking adjustments
The "Overkill Damage" rating in combat was renamed to "Overkill" and is now also increased by 1% for every buff one of the player monsters have at the end of combat, by 1% for every debuff an enemy had when killed
and by 3% for every poison or burn dot damage that was triggered on them.
This should make compositions that rely on dot damage be a bit more competitive now in regard to getting a good score.

Keeper Lancer rank
It is possible to reach the 'Keeper Lancer' rank now, which enables to buy a couple of +3 Equipment at the shop (Helmet/Wizard Hat/Impact Ring)

New Equipment
Added a new equipment 'Sun Pendant' (dropped by Raduga) that applies a shield to the wielder whenever receiving a buff

Balancing Changes

• 'Lifesteal' reduced to 15% from 20%
  
• 'Bite' lifesteal part reduced to (100 + 50% attack) from (100 + 100% attack)
  
• 'Mad Eye' base mana stat reduced to 4 from 6
  
• Druid Oak's 'Shielding Leaves' replaced with 'Soul Beam'
  
• 'Crit Damage Plus' skill node now increases critical damage by 20% instead of 15%
  
• 'Berry' and 'Grapes' now increase critical damage by 5%/7% instead of 4%/5%
  
• 'Flashfreeze' damage reduced to 75% from 100%
  
• 'Antipode' damage reduced to 125% from 150%
  
• 'Katana' critical damage part increased to 15%(+2% per upgrade) from 10%(+1% per upgrade)

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue that sometimes you weren't able to navigate between the teleporters in the map menu
  
• When evolving a monster that is following the player, it no longer stays in that form following the player
  
• Player can no longer become stuck in the goblin structure that leads to the northern parts with the Goblin King
  
• You can no longer place rocky/mushroom obstacles inside enemies to trap them
  
• Fixed Glowfly not being able to increase mana base stat above 10 (savegames that gained skillpoints this way will have the skills of glowfly resetted)

This is the last patch planned for the beta and we will focus on the new content for the planned Early Access launch in august. People still wanting to get onto the beta train can do so in our Paypal shop.

Balancing changes:
- Wild enemy monster's health scaling lowered a bit, especially the difficulty jump at level 10 shouldn't be as drastic now
- Enemy levels of the western part of blue caves reduced to 9 from 10. Specter's level reduced to 10 from 11.
- Frosty grant more 'Difficulty' score points now when fighting against them
- Fixed wild frosty being able to cast Ice storm even when below level 10
- Slightly increased the exp gained from enemies

Bugfixes:
- Fixed Monster Journal not being available when loading a demo save that completed the blue caves
- Fixed Camera being misplaced rarely in combat
- Fixed possibility to repeatedly evolve the same monster
- Fixed visual glitches occurring when casting Shield
- Fixed player able to land inside or on top of walls when using a vertical room transition
- Fixed bug when switching between actions while having buff info view open
- Fixed not being able to do the second jump while using monster flying ability
- Fixed not receiving exp rewards for all 6 enemies in keeper battles (you only got those for the last 3)
- Multi Barrier description fixed
- It is no longer possible to summon rock obstacle on spikes (and skip to Keeper's Stronghold early in the game with Crystal Shards)
- Fixed following monster possible to get stuck inside the ground in the magic barrier puzzle room in Ancient Woods
- Fixed Level 20 Badge icon
- Fixed possibility to display lore of hidden Monster Journal entries when changing page
- Fixed inability to load a savegame when the first three save slots are empty
- Fixed possibility to place the rock or mushroom inside enemies to prevent them from moving
- Fixed Restore lvl 3 not removing two debuffs
- Some text/typo fixes

We are eager to get your feedback, especially on the current difficulty of the game. After some first feedback, the enemy health scaling was slightly reduced. Also western Blue Caves are now more accessible at around lvl 9.
Its best to post it to our discord into the #feedback subchannel.

There is another bigger patch planned to be released in 2-3 weeks that will include a new Monster, a new Champion, probably the options menu and some more smaller changes/bugfixes.

Dear Monster Keepers,

the Backer Beta for Monster Sanctuary is now live. If you're a 25€+ backer, you will be sent an Email with a Steam Beta key to the Email address associated with your Kickstarter/Paypal account very soon. Please check your spam folder if the Email doesn't arrive soon.
If you wish to participate in the Beta, you can still become a late Backer on our Paypal shop.
The new areas added in the Beta are balanced for Lvl 10-12 Monsters. You may continue your save files from previous demo versions of the game, but if your Monsters are higher than Lvl 12, the new content will be very easy for you. We recommend starting a new save file to experience the modified starting areas.

We added following new content to the Beta:

• New story content that takes you through the Stronghold Dungeon & the Ancient Woods to uncover a terrible plot that threatens the Monster Sanctuary. The story content features three Keeper Battles and two new Champion Monsters. The new areas are larger than previous areas and offer a lot of optional rooms to discover + you may complete the new areas in any order you wish. The new areas are east of the Keepers' Stronghold.
  
• Thirteen new Monsters
  
• New area: Stronghold Dungeon
  
  
• New area: Ancient Woods
  
  
• New feature: Keeper Battles
  
• New feature: Monster Journal
  
• New feature: Monster Evolution (2 evolutions have been added to the game)
  
  
• New feature: Monster Renaming
  
• Monster explore abilities have been reworked
  
  
• Old areas have been modified with some new rooms

• Fungi mana base stat increased to 7 (from 5)
  
• Multi Poison additional stacks only have half effect
  
• Grummy mana base stat increased to 7 (from 6)
  
• Grummy now has "Purify" passive instead of Defense+
  
• Blob now has "Magic Proc" passive instead of Magic+
  
• Steam Golem now has "Tackle" attack instead of "Heavy Punch"
  
• "Improved Regeneration" now gives +10% healing to Regeneration buff (from +5% increased)
  
• All shielding actions now have a base value but reduced defense scaling
  
• All healing actions now have a base value but reduced magic scaling
  
• Health scaling for monsters modified (difference between low base health stats and high base health stats decreased)
  
• The amount by which mana is increased per level was raised slightly
  
• Defense - damage reduction scaling formula reduced
  
• Defense values of many accessories slightly reduced
  
• Critical Chance and Critical Damage values of equipment increased
  
• Some of the other equipment values and some skill values were modified
  
• Infinity Arena is available at 'Keeper Seeker' rank now and enemy monsters start at lvl 15
  
• Infinity Arena stacks damage boost increased to 30%.
  
• Infinity Arena rewards changed
  
• Reward Box Lvl1 contents changed, reduced amount of possible common equipment/egg drops
  
• Player jump physics are now a bit faster / less floaty
  
• Drop chances for rare rewards slightly increased and there is now a 33% chance to receive two rare rewards instead of one.
  
• Resurrected Monsters no longer get to act within the turn they were revived

Hey Monster Keepers,

We’re Team17 and we’re very excited to announce our partnership with Moi Rai Games on Monster Sanctuary.

To celebrate the new partnership we’ve released a trailer that you can watch below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRopvZW6Cr4


Firstly we’d like to say that we think Monster Sanctuary is awesome, it’s great to see such a passionate community already forming around the game.

Secondly, we’d like to reassure you that we’re not here to take over the development of the game or anything like that. Team17 is here to work alongside Moi Rai Games and the community to further enhance the Monster Sanctuary experience.

That pretty much wraps up today’s news! We’re incredibly excited to be here and look forward to chatting with you all as we join in on Monster Sanctuary’s epic adventure.

Now, we must dash, there’s a debate raging in the office about which spectral familiar is the best and why…

Dear Steam Monster Keepers,

here's our monthly Progress Update for February. Apart from our game development progress, we also have two special announcements to make.

We've been pleased to see that beyond our Kickstarter campaign, there has been a steady flow of late backers pledging through our Paypal Store! That means that the game will feature the choice between a female and a male main character as well as character customization. We will present the exact details of those features in a future update.

The Monster Designer backers have voted and the first Community Monster Contest has concluded.

• 1st place: Skorch by Pixelbit!
  
• 2nd/3rd place: A two-way tie for Caraglow by Azaliate and Aazerach by Aurora - meaning that both of them will make it into the game!
  
• And our Developers' Pick: For design and an outstanding amount of effort, Aurumtail by Penumbra! We like some of the new skill ideas, and we have decided to include mountable Monsters in the game. This means Aurumtail will be one of several Monsters that you will be able to ride to move faster from one area to another - so Aurumtail fit into our overall design for the game as well.

To all other Monster Designers, we hope that you don't feel discouraged! Keep in mind that this is the first of five contests, so if your design hasn't made it in yet, we encourage you to keep trying. And the next contest is just on the horizon: We plan to start the second submission period shortly after our beta launch! Remember that this is only the first of five contests with 3 winners each.



Onto the regular part of our Progress Update:

• New area: Stronghold Dungeon. This area can be entered through the Keeper's Stronghold once the player has reached the Keeper Novice rank and has progressed the story far enough. It's connected to the Ancient Woods and there's a path leading back to the Blue Caves. The entirety of the Stronghold Dungeon will feature a dynamic lighting effect with some darker areas.

• New Monsters: Glowfly, Crackle Knight, Mad Eye, Nightwing

• We have reconsidered our original stance on traditional evolution and we have decided to feature an evolution mechanic in the game. In the beta, two of the Monsters from the demo version will be able to evolve into a different form - one of them being Magmapillar. However, the evolved form of a Monster isn't supposed to be strictly better than their first form. The evolved form usually features very different skill trees and higher stats overall, but it might have some of its stats decreased on evolution.

• Most of the mapping has been concluded for the two new areas for beta (Ancient Woods and Stronghold Dungeon).

• Many of the exploration skills in the game have been revamped or changed and new types of obstacles have been added. Some of the older areas have been changed. Blue Caves have received some new rooms.

• The new areas and rooms also feature dark rooms, which have to be illuminated by using certain Monsters.

That's it for this month's Progress Update! As we're closing in on our planned release schedule for the backer beta (late March), we hope that our backers will be enjoying all the new content we have in store for them. Also, we've got another big announcement coming end of march, stay tuned!

If you would like to back our project, you can still do so (even though the Kickstarter is over). Back with Paypal here: Paypal Shop. Please note that the upcoming beta for Monster Sanctuary will only be available to people who have backed the game at the 25€ tier or higher. The first "public" version will be the Early Access version which is planned to be released in late summer.

Also, feel free to join our Discord server if you haven't done that already. That's where we share all of our updates first usually, and you can give us feedback and suggestions there.

Dear Steam Monster Keepers,

sorry for neglecting to post our Kickstarter updates to the Steam channel. From now on we will post all relevant updates on Steam as well. And that's why we decided to retroactively post our December & January Progress Updates here.


These are the things we've been working on in December:

• New Monsters with new skills: Goblin Brute, Goblin Archer, Goblin Warlock & more

• New Area: Ancient Woods

• Modified jump physics (faster jumps, less floaty) for better jump challenges

• Monster Journal texts (all texts for the 18 Demo Monsters + Goblins have been written)

• Changed the Keeper's Tower part of the Keeper's Stronghold visually

This is what we've been working on for January:

• Keeper Duels against NPCs. As you progress through the Monster Sanctuary, you will encounter many enemy Monster Keepers to challenge - most of these will be optional challenges, but there will be a number of Keeper Duels you have to win to progress in the story of the game. The rules of these Keeper Duels will be similar to the official PVP battle rules which will be implemented later: Both Monster Keepers use their whole team of six Monsters to fight. After one of their active three Monsters gets knocked out, they may switch in one of their other Monsters.

• New Monsters: Magmamoth, Druid Oak, Molebear

• Added ingame Monster Journal with Monster texts, where you will be able to view all the Monsters that you encounter in the game.

• Updated the Ancient Woods area visually (as well as added many new rooms to it).

Also, we'd like to give you an overall update on the status of the upcoming Backer Beta for 25€+ backers. We plan to include two new areas for this beta: Ancients Woods and Stronghold Dungeon. A large portion of Ancient Woods (as well as new game features) has been finished so far; still, it will take until the second half of March for us to finish work on both areas. Expect to see the Backer Beta released during that time. We look forward to being able to give you our next big game update then!

If you would like to back our project, you can still do so (even though the Kickstarter is over). Back with Paypal here: Paypal Shop

The next big version after Backer Beta will be the Early Access version on Steam, which is planned to cost 15€ (same as on full game release). Early Access is planned to release in August this year.

For more updates on the game, follow our Twitter account: @moi_rai_

Hey all,

Now that the Kickstarter is over, I'm happy to focus on the game again. I've fixed quite some bugs that were reported in the current demo version and released a 0.2.8 version of the demo:

- Fixed message that the area east of Keeper's Stronghold isn't available not showing up once you reached the second keeper rank
- Fixed player being able to fall through the bridge
- Fixed player able to get to blue cave early with vaero on low framerate
- Fixed being able to re-trigger part of the intro / make first blob encounter reappear by pressing escape
- In Infinity Arena enemy regeneration effects are reduced now
- Fixed graphical bugs with shield skill
- Fixed double impact not working on physica/magical weakness
- Fixed possibility to trigger an empty combat when going into a different scren and trigger a combat on the same frame
- Fixed mana bar going into negative when attacking a monster with snow skin
- Fixed player able to fall through ground in the Minitaur champion room
- Fixed player able to lift in sky indefinitely after switch away a flying monster
- When shielding for 0, the number is displayed as 0 instead of 'miss'
- Fixed the possiblity to not be able to sell some items when low on money
- When donating a monster to the monster army, the player will keep the monsters equipment
- Removed Kickstarter link from the main menu
- Improved monster army visuals and added page functionality, so the UI doesn't break when the player donates too many monsters



Also this is the first demo version that is also available for Mac OS!

This will be most likely the last update on the demo since I'll focus on the beta content for now. Beta will be available to our Kickstarter backers in febraruy/march next year. We are still accepting late backers till then through paypal