Happy September, Explorers! Does anyone else feel like 2021 is just flying by? We won’t mention that it’s just over three months until Christmas…oops. It’s been another busy two weeks here developing Core Keeper, and we’ve spent a lot of time refining some of the core (we’ll never get tired of that pun) features of the game.
We’ve also been having a lot of fun over on social media with our “choose your own adventure” game. This Friday’s video will be the fifth instalment in that 10-part series, so if you’ve not had the opportunity to join in yet, there’s still time.
Outside of Core Keeper, the team spent this week’s game session playing Dark Souls the card game, which gave rise to this quote from our CEO and pixel artist, Sven: “Nearly died, highly recommended, 10/10.” We think that’s enough introductory ramble for now! Here’s what we’ve been working on…
Game Testing
We’re hard at work play testing and balancing the game. Getting the pacing right and making sure that Core Keeper is challenging in all the right places and relaxing in others is something we’ll be focusing on throughout development. We don’t want to make things too easy on you, but we also don’t want you to get murdered by slimes in the first five minutes!
We’re also taking a lot of time to listen to the community and understand what YOU want to see in Core Keeper while we’re making changes to the game. You’ve all done an amazing job of sharing your thoughts in the Discord, and we’d love to hear from anyone who hasn’t already done so – plenty of input from the community will help us make Core Keeper even better!
Oh, and keep an eye out for info on the possibility of a closed alpha sometime in the future; we’ll be sharing more on this in the Discord soon.
Skills
There aren’t classes in Core Keeper, but that doesn’t mean that your character can’t specialise in certain areas of the game. That’s what skills are for! Whenever your character performs an action in game, you will gain experience in the respective skill. Levelling up skills give you a permanent bonus to your character. At the moment, we’ve implemented the following skills in Core Keeper, though these may still be subject to change before we go into Early Access:
There’s no telling what you’ll run into when exploring the underground. That’s why we recommend you take a torch with you rather than mining in the dark…but we know some of you like to live dangerously! While there are plenty of low-level enemies to keep you occupied, there’s always a chance you’ll run into a gigantic monster or a boss. Don’t worry too much, though. Since each game has a procedurally generated world, the risk is slim.
For the more dedicated monster hunters out there, we have added boss scanners. These are artefacts that you can craft yourselves – with the right *special* materials. Using these scanners will help you track down bosses so that you can take them on in a fight. Just make sure you’ve got plenty of healing potions, some strong armour and even stronger weapons.
Finally, we want to confirm that Core Keeper will now be coming to Early Access in 2022. We’d like to thank you for your patience while we work on bringing you the best possible version of the game. We hope you enjoyed this update, and we can’t wait to bring you more soon. Make sure you’re following us on Twitter (@CoreKeeperGame) for even more Core Keeper content!
Right off the bat, all the stuff below is the information we originally intended to tell you in a stream.
The next weeks are however filled with members of the team finally catching up on vacation, now that the release and the big stress periods are behind us and that’s certainly nothing we want to deny them, especially since it’s the first vacation of the year for some of them.
So before we put people in front of a camera who don’t feel comfortable there, or urge anyone to stream from the beach for us, we figured we’d write you a bit of a letter instead!
Even though that means our communication won’t lead us to as direct of exchange as Twitch chat would usually be, we didn’t want to leave you entirely in the dark for a couple more weeks.
While that means that the topics today will be discussed with an unusual lack of stupid hats (which might arguably be a relief to some of you), we definitely want to do further streams in the future.
Now without further ado, let’s talk!
Battle Pass Season 2
Most of you will have guessed it, given the end date of Season 1: The second iteration of our purely cosmetic Battle Pass starts on September 2nd!
Going through all the items in there was planned to be one of the topics of the stream, but alas, here we are. While there will be a separate post for the shop update, we wanted to mention it quickly.
Season 2 will be less thematically tied together (e.g. Summer themed), but still, feature a handful of new and exciting shinies. Personal highlights are the “Mechanical Warrior’s Arm”, a big armored limb floating over your shoulder, as well as “Little Emberjaw”, an adorable cat pet. …arm-ored, hehe.
The pass will be priced at 1900 Crimson Coins again and follow the same “10 tokens a day, 320 points, 6 weeks” system that the last one did. There’ll also be another free track for everyone, which earns you materials and equipment pieces if you complete the tasks.
Raid Droprate
We’ve gotten quite a few inquiries about raid drops, or moreso lack thereof. How does the system work? Does the system work? I only got 1 drop and my friend got 12! Why do Koalas eat exclusively Eucalyptus even though it’s bad for them?
The short answer to all of those questions is: It’s complicated. Though we have to stay a bit vague here still, as we confirmed on Discord before there is a system in place that guarantees you a drop every now and then. Whether or not you get more than this guaranteed minimum of drops is then dependent on RNG, meaning lucky players will finish their raiding week with more drops than their unlucky counterparts.
All of this logic aside, however, it is obvious that the system currently feels bad to players only ever getting the minimum amount of drops and we have noticed some outliers in our monitoring of the drops throughout the last weeks, which is why we continue to discuss this topic and potential ways to improve the drop experience with the developers, to make this more satisfying for players.
The Test Team
If you’re totally out of the loop on this one, we recently published a post looking for volunteers to help us playtest upcoming content, like new raids, to then identify issues but also give feedback before the release of said content.
Parts of this were clearly not communicated well enough, as shortly thereafter the narrative turned into us looking for professional QAs, which we wanted to work at full time for no pay. We did want to take the time to clarify the specifics here in more detail, as some residual confusion seems to remain.
The intention of the said post was not to find explicitly people with QA experience or even full-fledged QAs but to find experienced and active players, who are able to provide early and meaningful feedback on the content in the pre-release phase. We believe giving users a chance to get involved like this will enable us to improve the game in the best way (and we promise not to take up 40 hours of their time…or anything remotely close to that). As for the NDA that threw some people off, as we are speaking exclusively about non-released content here that is standard procedure to ensure we can still announce upcoming stuff when we feel comfortable doing so.
We hope the explanation above helps to shed some more light on what exactly that program is about. For our side we’ve definitely taken some lessons in communication out of it, to ensure everyone gets a clear grasp of our intentions from the things we say and write. Small victories!
Status of text polishing
We usually incorporate some vague form of “Further translation polishing” in our patch notes, though understandably we’ve gotten questions wondering why we aren’t being more specific and whether we are even fixing anything at all.
The reason we don’t point to specific fixes is that these polishing rounds are usually applied all over the game, not just targeted at one specific system or UI element each time. Additionally, the amount of retouching is simply too high and what is being done is rarely exciting. Most fixes here have been focused on resolving inconsistencies, be that in dialogues, names or item descriptions.
Overall the localization team has reviewed about 800k words across 3 languages since launch and continues to do so and implement those adjustments on a regular basis. Similarly, missing or unsatisfactory VOs are constantly worked on and improved upon.
While it can be hard to see the actual effect or even existence of those changes at first glance, we do believe to have made significant progress here, even if we are not yet fully satisfied.
Roadmap
We’ve made some updates to the roadmap we shared around the release! As that one was fairly cryptic regarding the last third of the year we fleshed that part out. Additionally, quite a few of you have reached out to us with concern over more difficult content, specifically the harder difficulties and when they will be coming to the game.
In an effort to provide our dedicated players with the challenging content they yearn for, we’ve pulled the “Extreme” difficulty for our existing dungeons ahead in the schedule and plan to implement it in 2 patches in the early and mid of September, respectively, so that our players can enjoy these challenges sooner than originally planned.
We’re then looking into bringing you the “Hard” difficulty for the existing Raids, to make sure that those of you who have already mastered the bosses are able to take it to the next level with some greater difficulties and gear.
Next to extreme raids and more seasonal events you can then look forward to a big update in November, bringing GvG and some other features to the game. As for 2022…well let’s just say it might be time to open pandora’s fox.
We’re fully aware that there are topics out there we didn’t touch upon today.
The ones we chose here were points of discussion we figured were either most exciting from an upcoming content standpoint or issues that were discussed quite vocally throughout the last weeks.
Even if something isn’t mentioned here, it’s likely we have or are currently discussing it with our partners over at Wangyuan Shengtang. Realistically we won’t be able to change everything at once, but we continue to be committed to the idea of implementing improvements according to player feedback.
As for right now, we’ll get back to working on the patch for next week…or the beach, for a lucky few of us. Do let us know what you think about posts like this one! Does it help you gain some insights? It’s not a perfect replacement for streams, but we do hope to have it bridge the gap a little.
We’ve heard your pleas and are happy to bring you harder challenges ahead of time – two extreme dungeons with Patch 1.0.8 on September 2nd, 2021!
Extreme Difficulty Dungeons
The extreme difficulty is unlocked for two of our existing dungeons first – the Yemo City in Wuzhao (entrance in the Heavenly Ridge) as well as the Nightmare Temple of Mercy (entrance in the District of Chang’an).
The remaining 3 dungeons will follow in a patch later in September, while Extreme Raids are scheduled for October – more on our roadmap here: Swords of Legends Online – Community Update
What’s Extreme about this?
The two dungeons are expecting to have equipment with an average gear score of 70 – players going above this GS will automatically be adjusted to count as 70, so you can’t outgear these difficulties!
Next to this, the following limitations will also apply to assure difficulty remains constant:
Maximum talisman level is capped at tier 2
The maximum gear upgrade level is capped at 6
Socketed jades are capped at tier 3
Soulforce effects won’t be applicable
On the plus side – giving the extreme modes a try won’t cost you any durability, as you’re not taking any penalties for it in them!
So it’s all about my gear being capped?
Next to making sure that nobody can outgear the dungeon, there’s also a variety of novelties in them to spice up the fights!
New enemies can be found on your way to the bosses – as well as new mechanics being available when fighting the bosses. You’ll need to learn how to defeat these bosses with their extended set of attacks to be able to clear these dungeons!
Heroic War Souls
While your Soulforce-Sockets are disabled, you will be able to select one of eight possible buffs while in the dungeon. You’ll start out with a total of 6 “Heroic War Souls” in the temporary inventory and can exchange one for a buff of your choice with the special “Wanderer of the Great Battle”-NPC.
You can combine multiple buffs if you so wish or stack the same buff a couple of times.
Your loot
As rewards for your troubles, you’ll get Hero Tokens (tracked in your “Currency”-tab in the inventory) that can be exchanged at the already known Qin League Merchant “Zou Qi” in Cloudrise (Yaotian Palace).
Get yourself a unique title or moon pendant, or the “Treasure Book of the Steady Surge”, which you can use later to upgrade the fortune level of your level 75 or level 90 (available later in September) gear!
Various Details
Dungeons open starting Sunday, September 5th at 12:00 AM (server time)
One weekly drop per boss (same as hard mode dungeons).
The weekly reset for extreme dungeons is on Sundays at 06:00 AM (server time)
Other Patch Content
Items
Item Level 70 Accessories were added to the Battle of the Continents Jewellery Shop.
Miscellaneous
Battle Pass
Battle Pass Season 1 (Summer Theme) will end with this patch release – make sure to claim all your unlocked rewards before the maintenance start!
Season 2 will start with the release of patch 1.0.8, and it will require a new unlocking voucher. Further details about this new season will be provided in a separate announcement during the maintenance.
Summer Event
The summer event will end with server maintenance. Please note that the respective activities and reward NPCs will stop being available at that time.
Note: The Shop NPC is still available and Tokens can be used till September 9th, 2021.
Bugfixes
The Land of Emerald Clouds Merchant incorrectly sold appearance items from the ‘Sand Island Inhabitan’ series, which were unusable. The shop now sells the correct item set ‘Flowing Waves’ and any purchases of the wrong set have been replaced with the correct one.
Adapted Shop content in the Prestige Menu for “Heaven’s Children – White Crane Temple” and “Mysticism - Jiahe Ancestral Temple” to only display available items.
Astral Blessings are now correctly displayed in Garden of Blades.
Fixed a client crash that could happen when exiting Character Copy while using a controller.
Fixed a number of crash issues.
Fixed an issue that would cause the game to stutter on consoles.
Fixed an exploit in regards to the chat window.
Added new server setting to control the use of font formatting in the chat window. DisableChatFormatting=True/False
Removing any item from inventory while having a “Craft All” command queued should no longer cancel the crafting queue.
Fixed an issue where using Character Transfer would cause issues when playing in French, Russian or Italian.
Our international #spellchekker team sent us a list of fixes for localized text strings before heading into a marketing meeting. Lest we forget. #stillhiring
Addressed an issue that caused the “Map name” filter in the server browser to not show any results in localized versions of the game.
Update: Maintenance has ended as of 11:00 am EDT We are currently (Sept 1 at 8am EDT) going into maintenance to prepare for today’s update! We expect the maintenance period to last for about 2 hours. During this time, players may not be able to join a game session but won't be removed from one.🐺 In the meantime, here are today's update notes!
Content
- Available with the wolf-1.10 update
A R4VEN.MK.III Pet has found its way into your collection of Cosmetics. Navigate to the Pets section of the Customize menu to take a look for yourself!
This mysterious device arrived bearing an encrypted runic sequence that reads: "To all of our Einherjar, I am sending you this raven drone to celebrate the official launch of our glorious mission on July 27th of Midgard Year 2021. We thank you for your patience while we continuously improve the game and your experience. May it watch over you and your tribe. Your support is worth more to us than the Nine Realms combined." - Sincerely, Techno Oðinn.
Gameplay Changes
Saga Mode
Added Bomblings and Sirelings to Helthing attack waves during Fimbulwinter
Norsfell: This change should make the continuous night defenses of Fimbulwinter more challenging and more interesting for those who wish to brave Saga Mode’s late game.
Survival Mode - Easy
Increase to Creature, Helthings and Jötunn Difficulty
Survival Mode - Medium and Hard
Moderate increase to Creature, Helthings and Jötunn Difficulty
Slight increase to Jötunn HP, Armor and Attack Multiplier as they level up
Norsfell: We are putting additional efforts into fine-tuning the difficulty of Survival Mode to make it a bit more engaging and challenging for players, both in early game and as the Days progress.
Bosses
Decreased the amount of Souls granted for defeating Fenrir by 30%
Decreased the amount of Souls granted for defeating Jötunn by 6% overall
Norsfell: The Souls economy is integral to the game and we’re continuing to fine-tune the yield from all sources for a more balanced experience. We felt the very high amount of Souls awarded for defeating Fenrir, for example, were supplying late-game players a little too well as they prepared for the attrition of Fimbulwinter.
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Quests
Adjusted the rewards and increased the number of them granted for completing Quests
Souls awarded for completed Quests are now adjusted based on the labelled Difficulty of the Quest, with Hard awarding the most and Easy awarding the least.
Completed Quests will now respawn after 10 Days
Slight increase to the amount of Helthings required to be defeated to complete the “To Hel with You” Quest.
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Bug Fixes
Fixed some instances of Players being unable to claim their Challenge Rewards. We will continue to monitor the situation for further fixing
Fixed some instances of Players not earning any XP after joining a Matchmaking session. We will continue to monitor the situation for further fixing
Fixed an issue where the number of Golden Horns would sometimes inaccurately display well above the maximum of 99 after taking the Bifröst
Fixed an issue where an error message and a loss of Golden Horns could occur when taking the Bifröst at 99 Golden Horns
Fixed an issue in which the Golden Egg Rune would not stack correctly 🤫
Fixed an instance of a crash that could occur when fighting Fenrir in Multiplayer
Fixed an instance in which a crash could occur when leaving through the Bifröst from a Matchmaking game
Fixed an instance in which multiple players in a session could crash after defeating a Jötunn in a Matchmaking game
Fixed an issue in which donating Souls to Yggdrasil could affect the Soul Powered Rune
Fixed an issue in which spamming the Kill Your Viking button would trigger multiple instances of the Last Laugh Rune’s explosions
Fixed some rare occurrences in which players would be booted from the session after using the Golden Altar
PS4: Fixed an issue in which slight framerate drops and graphical issues could sometimes happen when picking up Golden Horns
PS4/PS5: Fixed an issue in which latency spikes could sometimes occur when Jötunn are spawned or slain during prolonged Multiplayer sessions (Day 30+)
Fixed some instances of the Baldr Greaves clipping into Feet and Chest Armors
Fixed some instances of the Fenrir’s Hinds clipping into Chest Armors
Fixed some instances of the Hersir Pants clipping into Chest Armors
Fixed some instances of the Raider Pants clipping into Chest Armors
Fixed an issue where some characters’ hands were clipping through Hammers
Fixed some instances of text overlap in the UI in multiple languages
Fixed an issue that caused Yggdrasil’s leaves to flicker on and off when toggling Windowed Mode
Fixed an issue in players might lose out on the contents of their Loot Chest if they manually attempt to exit the session just as they die and are respawning
Fixed an issue that caused loot bags to be seen floating in the air in Fenrir’s Lair
Fixed some instances in which Járnsaxa’s lightning fist attack would sometimes not cause damage if the player was directly under it
Fixed an issue in which defeating a Jötunn with an Enchanted Tripwire would wrongfully attribute the glory to Oðinn
Fixed an issue in which destroying Barricades with an Enchanted Tripwire would not grant any loot
Fixed an issue in which the Hunter’s Decoy wouldn’t despawn gracefully with VFX
Fixed an issue in which the petting prompt for your Pet could interfere with other interactions, like opening Chests. Now your Pets will have to wait their turn.
Fixed an issue in which the visual effects on the temperature gauge would not show in Survival Mode whenever a Heatproof or Coldproof Elixir was used
Fixed an issue where the Beyond Repair Rune inaccurately stated that it reduced Souls cost by 20% and now correctly reflects 15%
Fixed an issue in which the Display Resolution wouldn’t always save correctly when setting to 4K resolutions
Fixed an issue in which the crafting of Fortifications could trigger in the Tutorial if you let the Jötunn destroy the default ones
Fixed an issue with the Spell icons of the Seidr Hammer I and II
Fixed an issue in which the Warden would lose their 6th Rune slot after Saving and Quitting then returning
Fixed an issue in which the Toggle Headgear input could stop working throughout a session when attempting to toggle it without any Headgear equipped
Fixed an issue that could cause Fenrir’s health bar to appear in the Village if you use your Waystone from the Lair at the start of the fight
Fixed an issue in which Village NPC’s names might not display correctly when fighting Helthings
Fixed an issue in which Fortifications could return to full health upon re-entering a World
Fixed inconsistencies in the Warrior’s Blessing descriptions across some languages
Fixed an issue that could cause a Player to get stuck at the edge of Fortified Gate after it’s destroyed
Minor performance improvements on all platforms. We will continue to optimize with future updates.
Known Issues
We are keeping an eye on player feedback and investigating some known issues that have been reported. You can visit our discord at: http://www.discord.gg/tribesofmidgard for a list of some of the things seen by the community!
This time we would like to discuss with you one of the superweapons that no one has ever seen, and there is little information about its existence - DIE GLOCKE! 🔔
Die Glocke was allegedly a top-secret scientific technological device - a secret weapon. First described by Polish journalist and writer Igor Witkowski in the book "Prawda o Wunderwaffe", later popularized by military journalist and writer Nick Cook, who associated it with occultism, anti-gravity, and free energy research.
The Polish writer claims in his books that in the 1990s he was contacted by a man who informed him about the existence of documents according to which super-secret types of propulsion were developed during World War II. One of the inventions was to be Die Glocke.
Meanwhile, British military and aviation journalist Nick Cook in his book "The Hunt for Zero Point" described Die Glocke as a scientist-constructed "luminous rotating device" that reportedly had "some anti-gravity effect" or even " a time machine. Cook claimed that SS officer Hans Kammler had secretly sold the technology to the US.
Construction of Die Glocke The main part of the bell were two massive cylinder drums, one meter in diameter, which was spun in opposite directions at high speeds during the experiment. The drums were made of silvery metal and rotated around a common axis. It was a rather unusual core with a diameter of a dozen or twenty centimeters, attached with its lower end to the massive bell plinth. It was made of heavy, hard metal. Before each test, a kind of oblong ceramic container with walls covered with a layer of lead about 3 cm thick was placed inside. It was about 1-1.5 meters long and filled with a strange golden-purple metallic substance that kept the consistency of slightly curdled jelly at room temperature.
Assuming the Die Glocke project actually existed, you might wonder what it might have been. If it was to be an anti-gravity drive, it was definitely not a successful project. The theory that Die Glocke was a project related to atomic energy is much more likely - it could have been a particle accelerator (cyclotron), known since the 1930s.
Die Glocke is a popular example of legends and speculation, some theories circulating on conspiracy websites claim that Die Glocke is in a golden train buried in a tunnel under a mountain in Poland.
How do you think Die Glocke could exist and what role could it play ...?
That's it for the game development update. Make sure you have Project Wunderwaffe added to your Steam wishlist so you don't miss the latest information on the game development progress. Make sure you listen to the second soundtrack of the game - SABOTAGE. 🎶
After a summer break (which is not much of a break for me since it means working 40+ hours a week in the service industry) I've managed to put together a little update!
Changelog:
Chaos mode! - Enable this in the options, and let chaos ensue! For obvious reasons, this mode will not upload to the highscores tables
2 new palettes and styles! A desert themed Sandy block style and palette A bee-themed hexagon block style with an appropriately orange palette
And, subsequently, 2 new other new options in the menu: Shuffle Palette Shuffle Style
These do exactly what they say on the tin and shuffle between your unlocked palettes and styles every game!
Any issues at all please let me know and I will do my best to resolve ASAP.
Fix the bug that the Ranger cannot enter the game after teleporting with an error Fix a bug that causes items to disappear after being picked up due to filtering settings Fix the problem that the consumption text in the reinforcement interface is not translated
4.31
Added 6 new scenario rooms in the Wetlands Fix the bug that the rune unification attribute is not working Repair the problem that the game cannot continue due to the error reported when teleporting to the camp scene Repair the problem that the game crashes when the backpack is full and the temporary backpack is activated. Repair the problem that the game crashes when the backpack is full and prayer-bound equipment is activated. Repair the bug that the soul-bound equipment can also be dragged to the prayer bar. Repair the bug that the achievement cannot be completed after restarting the game 50 times. Repair the problem that the equipment worn and taken off disappeared when the game was closed abnormally. Repair the problem of saving the archive data instantly when putting on and taking off equipment (saving will lag) Modify and optimize the widening of all rooms in the wetlands Modified the druid to be able to switch forms freely even in floor rooms Modified the archive to no longer automatically replace the backup archive after a power outage due to a save and write process, only prompting the archive to be corrupted when entering the game Changed the text description of the normal equipment suffix "Chosen" to "Blessed" (to differentiate it from the Chosen suffix) Modified the interaction range of treasure chests to be expanded by 100% Modified removal of decorative objects from initial rooms Modified soul field effects Adjusted backpack compartment from 36 to 49 compartments Adjusted leggings and gloves to also have the Chosen word for summons Adjusted the number of multiple arrow projectiles in the Gem talent to 2 Adjusted Ranger Talent Replenish (melee hits increase arrow) to Ranger Talent Split Arrow (+2 arrow projectiles) Added Ranger Gem Compound Archery, max 4 word effects. Deerskin arrow pouch: maximum number of arrows increased Sharp Mane: Increased damage to arrow projectiles Burst Arrow: Increased range of arrow projectiles Shockstring: +2 to the number of arrows thrown New Helmet Chosen entry: +2 arrow projectiles and 50% increase in damage
1. Fix the BUG of the lowering of the mount after the return of Yavin, resulting in lower movement. 2. Fix the attribute cap bug after Veldor entered the matrix form. 3. Fix the problem that "Holy Shield Block" cannot be triggered correctly after Asnan joined. 4. Add a new gun "Nigal", obtained in Chapter 21. 5. Modify the enemies in the north in chapter 21. Reset the attributes, skills and AI logic of Hathorus Army.