Killer's Hour will take place on December 12 (20:00-21:00 UTC+3) on every game server!

3 players which will kill the most characters/b], will get following rewards:

🎁Gacha-coins x10;
🎁Lucky cube key x10;
🎁Platinum concentration potion (1 Day) x1;
🎁VIP (7 days);
🎁Protective capsule x10;
🎁Lucky stone x5.

Attention! Players caught in fake kills will be removed from the winners list!

The New Life Festival in-game event begins this Thursday, December 16 at 10AM EST, and continues until Tuesday, January 4 at 10AM EST. To join the joyful fete, acquire the New Life Festival quest from the in-game Crown Store and use it to make your merry way to the New Life Herald Breda, found south of the city of Windhelm, Eastmarch. You can also teleport directly to the New Life Festival tent via the portal found at Impresario locations.


Complete the intro quest and you’ll unlock 10 special daily quests (nine from Breda and one from Petronius Galenus) that see you travel across Tamriel and bring cheer to its myriad inhabitants.
Give and Receive
Each time you successfully complete a New Life Festival daily quest, you’ll receive a New Life Festival Gift Box as a reward. Within these cheerful curios, you’ll have a chance to receive some of the following goodies:
• Skinchanger Motif chapters
• New Life recipes
• New Life collectibles (packaged in Runeboxes and tradeable):
o Sword-Swallower's Blade memento
o Juggler's Knives memento
o Fire-Breather's Torches memento
o Mud Ball Pouch memento
o Nordic Bather's Towel costume
o Colovian Filigreed Hood hat
o Colovian Fur Hood hat
o Snowball Buddy pet
o New Powderwhite Coney pet
o New random page for the Nord Carved Armor style

Even better, each time you tear open a New Life Festival Gift Box, you have a chance to also receive one of two types of Charity Writs:
• Deep Winter Charity Writs—Complete to unlock pages from the Skaal Explorer outfit style.
• Imperial Charity Writs—Complete to unlock pages from the Rkindaleft Dwarven Weapon Style.
Complete any 12 of the above Charity Writs and you will also unlock the “Newly Charitable” Achievement and Crystalfrost skin.
Impresario & Event Tickets
During the event period, the first time you complete a New Life Festival daily quest, you’ll receive three Event Tickets in addition to your Gift Box and other rewards. This means you can earn up to 60(!) Event Tickets during this event, allowing you to acquire the following items from the Impresario event vendor:
• All three Unstable Morpholith pet fragments
o Deadlands Flint, Rune-Etched Striker, and Smoldering Bloodgrass Tinder
• All Deadlands Scorcher skin fragments
o Rune-Scribed Daedra Hide, Rune-Scribed Daedra Sleeve, and Rune-Scribed Daedra Veil
• All Deadlands Firewalker personality fragments
o Vial of Bubbling Daedric Brew, Vial of Scalding Daedric Brew, and Vial of Simmering Daedric Brew
• All Dagonic Quasigriff mount fragments
o Smoke-Wreathed Gryphon Feather, Black Iron Bit and Bridle, and Black Iron Stirrups
• All Doomchar Plateau house fragments
o Scorching Pillar, Searing Column, Molten Key, Profane Pedestal, and Unholy Tablet
• Bound style pages for the Nord Carved Armor outfit style
• The Powderwhite Coney pet
• Group Repair Kits
Phew! As you can see, we’re bringing back the fragments for all of 2021’s quarterly event rewards, allowing you to catch up and complete previously available morphs. This is also your first and final opportunity to collect all the fragments for the Doomchar Plateau house.


Learn more about how morphing collectibles and upgrade fragments work in our guide article and keep an eye out for future in-game event news.

Bring Cheer to Tamriel (and Oblivion)
Celebrate the end of another amazing year of adventure and help spread merriment to all four corners of Tamriel during the New Life Festival event and you’ll enjoy bonuses to XP and earn unique rewards while doing so! How are you celebrating New Life this year? We’d love to see your holiday homes and seasonal outfits during the New Life Festival period, so don’t hesitate to share them with us via Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.

The New Life Festival in-game event begins this Thursday, December 16 at 10AM EST, and continues until Tuesday, January 4 at 10AM EST.

EDIT - We need another day to further test out our new patch so unfortunately we'll be delaying it for a day. The good news is that the install size has essentially halved, so expect to shave off a total of approx. 24GB of the install size!

Hello everyone!

It's been a blur of a month since Miner's Mettle left Early Access and launched version 1.0! We had been dropping regular, twice a week updates in November, but have slowed down a bit in the past week or so. The reason for this is we've been working on update 1.1, which is our largest update yet and required a few weeks in the oven before launching.

1.1 will require a large download, as we're changing the structure of the game files to decrease the size of the install on your PC. The game was optimized towards the smallest download sizes possible, at the expense of a large install size, but this doesn't make sense for a single player game and so we're aiming to shrink the install size quite a bit here.

Here's some of the changes you can expect in 1.1:

- Decreased install size of Miner's Mettle - we expect to shave off another ~8GB of install size
(EDIT - This is looking far more sizable, and at least an 18GB of install size reduction)
- New and improved VFX for many of the devices, both in projectiles, and explosions
- New and improved SFX for many of the devices and in general throughout the game
- New level 2 and 3 facility models (all 4 factions), some images of which we'll be sharing with you soon
- A significantly improved Horde Mode, with a fresh bunch of maps to select, as well as many customization options, such as number of waves, amount of time between each wave, number of hostiles per wave, and hostile accuracy are variables you can select
- Quality of Life improvements
- Tweaks to some campaign missions to improve pacing and smooth out difficulty spikes
- Bug Fixes

Our aim is to be done with 1.1 by the 21st of December. We're looking forward to sharing 1.1's improvements with you soon!

Thanks,
Ignatius

Hey everyone,

This patch addresses some final more major issues that are shared across all platforms.

• Trash slot correctly disables when picking up items from equipment slots
  
• Numeric keys no longer swap both player's equipped item
  
• Dead players will no longer be swapped to during platforming sections
  
• Both players are brought back after a successful shrine segment
  
• P2 can now correctly pickup and use magic shards
  
• P2 badges are now serialised correctly and equipped on save launch
  
• Correct d6 entrance to allow for re-acquiring avarn's sword (for real this time)
  
• Prevent trashing untrashable items via right click
  
• Fixed a crash in multiplayer involving fortified soul
  
• Prevent DoT bombs from killing immortal objects, causing crashes

Going forward, we're focusing on PC centric issues as well as balancing updates. Thank you all for playing!

Realmers,

While we are soon going to start the Christmas season, it is already time for some new events!
Since this time of the year is loaded with events, we prepared a calendar for you. It is super festive and jolly, as you can see. For a bigger version follow this link.

For the first time we are able to add Dungeon Mods to our Events! This is going to allow us to spice the events you are playing up. You can already see the first plans for that in the calendar!

Check out all our upcoming events in the blogpost.

Changes

Character Select menu is changed.
Added Camera zoom with mouse wheel.
Character rotation fixed.

Working Progress
New ability system with old and new characters

Hello, pawsome!

Winter has arrived in the world of Catizens, bringing with it a blanket of fluffy white snow. And while all of the kitties are happily throwing snowballs and making snowmen, we are hard at work on a special Holiday Demo of the game!



Just for this season, we are adding festive events to the demo build. We can't wait for you to play it!

Follow us on Steam and social media to join in on the countdown to the demo going live!

Respectfully,
Catizens Team

Greetings, Space Travelers!

It has been over a month since the last development update, and there are a bunch of changes and improvements that happened to Stardeus during the time.

The main areas of focus were:

• UI / UX improvements
  
• Controller support (mainly for Steam Deck)
  
• Graphics and Visual effects
  
• Performance with large maps
  
• Code refactoring

If you tried the demo or alpha builds, you may remember a quirky bottom menu that expanded like a tree and was notoriously difficult to navigate. That menu was removed without a trace, and replaced with a much more intuitive radial menu that can be invoked by clicking the right mouse button anywhere. It is, of course, controller friendly, which brings us to the next subject.




The addition of the Radial menu gave me a strong push to go for a complete rework of controller support. Now Stardeus has first class controller support, complete with input rebinding and button glyphs. I managed to play for hours without even thinking about reaching for a mouse, and I am certain that Stardeus will be very enjoyable on the Steam Deck!




Since the beginning of the project, I have always put gameplay and mechanics above graphics and visual appeal. I would rather create more content and deeper mechanics than spend a significant part of the time creating animations, but don’t get me wrong, I want Stardeus to look and feel great. This is why I have recently shifted my focus to spice things up with beautiful visual effects. They are easy to create, they run on GPU, and the game doesn’t feel that static anymore. Lights will blink, broken devices will emit sparks, you will see oxygen leaks and all devices will have some particle effects when they operate, so it’s easy to tell what’s on and what’s off. I believe it’s a great way to bring the visuals alive without spending months on creating individual animations for everything.

The most noticeable change to visual effects is the new electricity grid lines. They look gorgeous, and the arch layout shows connections in a much more understandable 3D-like way.

To compare how far the game went in terms of visuals, here is how things used to look a bit over a year ago, on September 2020:



So yes, I do believe graphics are important, or it would still look this way today.




I’ve read through tons of your feedback that was collected from demo and alpha playtesting forms, and one of the things that were mentioned quite often was a slow and boring start. To make the early game more exciting, the main scenario will have a bunch of damaged devices and various items scattered across the wreckage. You can repair and relocate those devices to get yourself up to speed a little faster.




You might think that all the new visual effects would give performance a hit, but on the contrary, it’s the opposite! The main reason for this is that the project migrated from Unity’s built-in (a.k.a legacy) renderer to their new Universal Rendering Pipeline, which opened up a couple of very powerful tools - VFX and Shader graphs. The VFX graph is something of a technological marvel, and, for example, the new electricity grid displaying 5000 connections does not have any noticeable FPS drop. Before the VFX graph, when it was rendered with lines, displaying 5000 connections would have a significant performance penalty even on high tier GPUs. Now you can do it on a laptop with an Intel HD graphics card.




With Stardeus development I am going for a long haul, and I did my best to keep everything very tight since the very beginning of the project. But inevitably, over nearly two years of development, some bad decisions were made, and the architecture had its fair share of ugly corners.

The project codebase grew to 112K+ lines (excluding external libraries), which is not small for a solo developer to handle, so I started rewriting parts that I wasn’t happy with. So far it’s going great, and I am getting more and more happy with the state of the overall project codebase. It is becoming more flexible, easier to work with, and more performant.

Since focus is now put on visuals, I am currently reworking the game’s rendering system, which was pretty slow when it had to display several thousands of sprites at the same time. Now I can tell that the refactored system will be able to render tens (maybe even hundreds) of thousands of objects orders of magnitude faster than before, thanks to the access to Unity’s new rendering pipeline tools and to the things I learned over the last couple of years.


This is the last development update this year, and I hope you all are having a great time, and that 2022 will be your best year ever! Last couple of years were really hard on everyone in many aspects, so let's stay strong and persevere!

And let me end with a couple of little things I added to make the game put a smile on your face:













That's all, see you next year!

Spajus

• Join Stardeus Discord
  
• /r/stardeus on Reddit
  
• @StardeusGame on Twitter
  
• @dev_spajus on Twitter
  
• dev_spajus on Twitch (live development streams)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1380910/Stardeus/

Okay... Now the mountain yeti puppy's bouncing ball is fixed forever and should no longer crash people's games haha

Have a lovely Christmas and a great holiday!


Changed

• Systems needed for gameplay no longer run in the title screen (yey for speed and battery time!)

Fixed

• Rare bug where Yeti puppy's bouncing ball would crash the game after a couple of minutes of playtime.
  
• Gameplay systems sometimes throw errors while the game is returning to the title screen

Tune in on the Slitherine Twitch channel at www.twitch.tv/slitherinetv on December 14th at 2 pm GMT for live news on Starship Troopers - Terran Command.

Starship Troopers - Terran Command will be featured at 2.20 pm on that day. We'll have David Sharrock (Game Producer), Kejero (Music Composer) and Lucas Nijsten (Lead Game Designer) talking about the upcoming Starship Troopers real-time strategy game and showing exclusive unreleased footage.

Save the Date! HowLive Plus Winter Edition on 14th December 2021 at www.twitch.tv/slitherinetv