Finally, it's time for the steam early access game release. In this update, the game will go live to be played on steam from 31-12-2021. There is a lot to do first, with many significant changes and the Winter event. Let me explain a bit what you can expect in-game right now.

There will be one complete region you can play through with dungeon that will lvl you up to max lvl.

Right now, when you reach Lvl 25 and 45, you will be able to change your class to the second rank of your character classes. There will be much more classes in the future that will be added.
Only Warrior and Mage has a class change at Lvl 25 and 45.

Equipment revamp has been added to give you more info on whether one is stronger than the other, and you will be able to craft equipment and armor and your party member's orb.

There are many more changes in the game that I will leave for you all to find out and enjoy. The game will be released Friday 31-12-2021 at 00:00 European time.

- The new game mode "Aeterna" (reduced difficulty and redesign of platforms-puzzles) has been implemented. At the moment, there will be no achievements in this mode but we are working on it.
- The new game mode "Noctis" (Current Difficulty) has been implemented
- It is possible to switch between the two difficulty modes at any time from the pause menu
- A "Skull" indicator has been implemented in the HUD when playing in "Noctis" mode.
- Fixed a bug where some players would lose the fog of war when restarting the game
- Fixed a bug whereby the game was not saved correctly, causing rollbacks to previous points in the game (PS5)
- The performance of volumetric lights has been improved
- Loading between scenes has been improved to optimize the memory used in the transition
- Small visual bugs have been fixed
- Fixed a bug where the King would freeze after resurrecting when he died while attempting to teleport
- Enemies have been balanced in both difficulty modes to better match game progression

- Some King's weapons have been balanced in both difficulty modes to better match game progression

• Damage from Celestial Arrow (Light and Dark) has been reduced by 10%
  
• The damage of the additional wave when equipping the gems "Voice of the Abyss" and "Cry of the Abyss" at the same time has been increased by 50%
  
• Axe load time reduced from 1.5s to 1s without upgrade gem and from 1s to 0.5s with it.
  
• The blood cost of the axe has been reduced from 50 points to 30 points out of 100
  
• The damage of the waves generated by the spear has been increased by 30% without an upgrade gem and by 60% with it
  
• The blood cost of the spear has been reduced from 50 points to 30 points out of 100

- The number of indicators on the map for collectibles and missions has been increased
- Fixed icons not appearing correctly on the map after purchasing the Atlas of the area from "Drake"
- The number of thrones has been increased in both difficulty modes to facilitate exploration

• 1 new throne in "Rest of the Heroes"
  
• 2 new thrones in "Cave of Ascension"
  
• 1 new throne in "El paramo de los caidos" (west)
  
• 2 new throne in "End of the World"
  
• 4 new thrones in "Cosmos"
  
• 3 new thrones in "Royal Stairs"
  
• 1 new throne in "The Palace of Aeterna"

- The gold obtained in the chests has been increased
- Errors in obtaining some achievements have been corrected (Achievements already completed will be given to players when accessing the progress menu)
- Checkpoints have been increased in some sections
- A bug that allowed unlimited money to be obtained through the "collection" has been corrected
- Fixed a bug that modified button actions when using PS4 controller
- The action "Interact" has been included in the remapping of controls, this will not modify the interaction notice prompt.

Full Screen Support (at last!)
Small Fixes

Registration for the SIGILLUM WINTER CUP 2022 Bestiary of Sigillum tournament is open and will last until 18:00 (MSK +3GMT) on January 3, 2022.

Two-stage tournament: participants compete in two groups separately; the winners advance to the final stage.

• Group stage. After registration, the players will be divided into two groups according to their rating (the player with the highest rating goes to group A, the next highest to group B, and so on). Games in groups are played in a circular system - each plays bo3 (up to two wins) with each one. Players who took 1st and 2nd places in each group go to the upper bracket of the final stage, and 3rd and 4th places - to the lower one.
  
• The final stage follows the Olympic system with elimination after two defeats (Double Elimination). The games of the upper bracket are played in bo3 format (up to two wins), in the lower bracket - bo3 (up to two victories), the grand final - bo5 (up to three victories).

All games are played in the «Custom game» mode, time control is rapid, the strength of locks is medium, the ban stage is present, without doubled damage during exile. In the starting game, a participant whose rating is higher at the time of the game plays for the South Castle. In subsequent games, the sides alternate. There are no restrictions on unlocked creatures, the player can take part in the tournament with a free demo.

After the start of the tournament, based on the tournament grid, the players independently contact the enemy via Discord and conduct a series of games. The publication of materials on the tournament, game results, discussion of games takes place on the Discord-server of the tournament. To simplify communication, each participant will have to indicate on the #registration channel their nickname on Steam and their current rating. The winner of each game posts a screenshot with post-match statistics on the #results-games channel, indicating in text the six characters blocked in the match. If desired, players can open the broadcast of their games. Game discussions on the #discussion channel. The winner of the series independently indicates the score of the meeting in the tournament grid.

When agreeing on a date for a match, players should strive for a reasonable timing of the winner of each series. In case of prolonged waiting for an opponent lagging behind in the tournament grid, the referee (Intaglyph) has the right to credit him for a technical defeat.

In case of any unresolved disputes or other questions, the judge can be contacted via Discord.

Dear Agent,
The update is expected to take 120 minutes at 0:00 (UTC/GMT: +8:00) on December 31. This update will restart the server, online agents will be forced to log off, please log off in advance to avoid loss! We will inform you later when the server is open. Sorry for any inconvenience caused to the simulation training!
This update will issue compensation: Spirit coin X10000

Benefits: Weekly free role update
This week free experience roles, agents camp: Su Qing Li, Zhiqiu Yiye, Ao Feng, Wu Qi Zhi, Shang Xiang, Ge Yongming
Simulate hate spirit camp: small rigid, yu Ji, spoon crazy

Function optimization
1. This update will refresh the rewards and reset the number of times you pull
2. Harmony mode is on
3. Added mouse sensitivity Settings


New fitting rooms
Theme treasure box: Small spider - bright star series
Selected Treasure Box: Nangong - Floating butterfly series
Broken Jade Exchange: Nangong - Street Whirlwind (Back ornaments)

Balance adjustment
1. Increased the general attack damage of Yang Qilang
2. Reduced the cooldown of Yang Qilang's ability Changhong Guan Ri
3. Reduced the tail wagging cooldown of Yang Qilang
4. Reduced the cooldown of Yang Qilang's ability
5. Increased the duration of Yang Qilang's sudden Rise

The problem to repair
1. Fixed an issue where all characters falling down while aiming with a stun gun could shoot without using the stun gun count
2. Fixed an issue with the abnormal sound effect when agent Namgong Yizhen was attacked by Little Freeze
3. Fixed an issue where the player could reach an abnormal position by using the main star skill of Agent Namiya Yizhen's Imperial Sword flight in werewolf kill mode
4. Fixed an issue where in-game items could not be used
5. Fixed an issue where agent Namgong Yichen would have three auxiliary star effects when wearing other auxiliary stars
6. Fixed an issue that caused the model display to be abnormal when the agent became small
7. Fixed the abnormal animation of ghost eating when nie Xiaoqian's full level 3 skill was sucked once
8. Fixed an issue where the ghost could not attack when using sanqing bell
9. Fixed an issue with agent Ling Zhengying's absorption animation when absorbing elemental fragments while drawing a sword

- Electricity payment bug is fixed. Visit the mayor, pay all the bills once (even if they are zero!). This will make the system start working properly and the mayor will require payments every 4 months. You can pay every month if you like.
- Item durability was increased. A 'do it yourself' workshop is on its way and will arrive with the next small update.
- Some quests which didn't start properly or didn't become available at all are working properly now.
- Bunker doors opened without a crowbar no longer cause errors.
- Under some circumstances there was no giftbox under the christmas tree after completing event. It shows up now no matter what.
- German translation was updated.

Hello, everyone!

We hope you’ve enjoyed your holidays and the new content from Update 1.

Before we head into 2022, we thought it was a good moment to look back at the most important (and wild) year for Timberborn so far… and maybe catch a cryptic glimpse into the future?

As weird as it sounds, twelve months ago Timberborn was still in the invite-only closed beta that began in June 2020. Exactly a year before Update 1, we added the last missing puzzle to the game’s core gameplay: irrigation mechanics and droughts.



With the patch well received, we officially entered the planned release window of Q1 2021 (heh). The final test and push for Timberborn’s pre-launch visibility were about to happen at Steam Game Festival, the indie-friendly Steam event now known as Steam Next Fest.

To participate, we replaced the closed beta with a publicly available Timberborn Demo. The player’s goal was to survive two droughts. Also, we finally updated the beaver models.



We were not prepared for what would happen at the Festival. Timberborn Demo stayed among the top three played demos, was downloaded close to 100.000 times, and at one point, about 28.000 viewers were watching the beavers on Twitch. Our Discord exploded, and so did our heads.

With the massive amount of feedback and the sudden spike of high profile coverage, we realized that Timberborn had a chance to become the Next Big Thing. We needed more time for that, though, so we decided to postpone the release to “later in 2021” as we wanted more good stuff in.



As the said “good stuff” grew behind the scenes, we updated the demo with better visuals, more music, improved performance, and some QoL features such as the build priorities.

We also added the first in-game translations - sadly, the Asian languages were blocked by a nasty bug in the engine. Back then, we hoped this would be a brief inconvenience. Little did we know - it wasn’t fixed until months later, almost jeopardizing the release.



In the demo, we only had a single temporary faction called Beavers of Demoria. However, unique factions were going to be among Timberborn's key features, and since we felt the game was nearing a shippable Early Access state, it was time to reveal the first faction. Hi, Folktails!



We also wanted to prepare our players for the addition of the districts system. Compared to the beta and demo, districts eliminated many problems often encountered in the early game, made managing large settlements easier, and brought Timberborn a huge performance boost.

By the way, we know that there are areas we can improve here. We’ll be gradually rolling out updates that should make district-wide operations smoother and require less micromanaging.



Bracing for more delays, we kept telling our players that Timberborn was coming “later in 2021”. This finally changed on one hot, crazy August night, at the peak of summer gaming festivals.

Within two hours, at two different Gamescom shows (Future Games Show by GamesRadar and Awesome Indies Show by IGN), we introduced the second playable beaver faction AND announced that the game was releasing… in three weeks. There was no turning back.



Mechanistry is a fully remote team but for the launch week, we all gathered in Gdansk, Poland, to work in one place for the first time. On September 15, at 5 PM, our lead designer Bartek hit the “release” button… and fifteen minutes of horror began. For some reason, the game didn’t go live as expected, and it wasn’t until 5:15 PM that it did (with Steam’s timely intervention). It was probably the most terrifying quarter of an hour in the game’s history.

What followed was a blurred mess of sleepless nights, reading feedback, and rapid hotfixing. Fortunately, players kept flowing in, and we closed the launch week with over 130.000 copies sold. The “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating came right after that. We couldn’t be happier.



After the launch madness and the initial surge of tweaks, we took turns taking some time off, but the work on Timberborn is now an ongoing process. We even squeezed in a little new content patch (yay, fences!) but we were mostly focused on preparing for the first large update.



This is where we are now. Having tested the new content on the newly launched Experimental Branch, we deployed our first major post-launch update. We added infinite metal production, mechanical water pumps, new resources, new attractions, and more - and your feedback made it all better.



The last-minute delay in February, Iron Teeth breeding woes, the bug with Asian localizations, multiple water physics tweaks - this year alone showed that in game development, things happen. Because of that, we’re hesitant to talk big, post roadmaps, and risk breaking promises.

But we understand that many of you came here for this, and we want to let you know that our current plan is to continue bundling changes into large patches that first land onto Experimental Branch, similarly to Update 1. We’re already working on Update 2 which will use Timberborn’s post-apocalyptic setting to make our beavers more futuristic. No spoilers yet but we’ve had this idea for a while now, and we believe it may also result in an interesting late game with a twist.

Other than that, we’re constantly keeping an eye on what the community desires (pro tip: our tracker helps your voices be heard). This applies both to new content ideas and quality of life requests, so keep them coming. We’ll evaluate them and do our best to include as much as possible as the game grows. Update 1 was just the beginning.

Alright, enough with the teasers. We thank you for your amazing support this year, and we’re looking forward to showing you what we have in store for 2022. It’s going to be awesome!



Happy New Year!
Team Timberborn

Sorry for no bug fix yesterday, have a big one today to make up for it!

• Prubble apparently learned how to go through walls and fly above obstacles, meaning whenever he appeared in the house, he would instantly run away out of bounds making it seem like he wasnt there and making it impossible to capture him. Now he obeys laws of physics like a good boy!
  
• Fixed an issue causing the secret boss to freeze the game if he remained in his first phase for too long, effectively making it impossible to kill him if you didn't get him out of phase one as soon as possible. Now he's back in working order!
  
• Fixed an issue causing an eyeball enemy to be missing from Flou's area, making you unable to complete the "Kill all enemies" task due to the eyeball enemy still technically not being dead.
  
• Fixed an issue causing the old background music from the main game to interrupt the post-game music.
  
• Fixed an issue causing a door in the well to permanently lead back to itself, effectively creating an infinite loop until you stop trying to enter that door.
  
• Fixed an issue causing certain mess graphics on the floor to be on the same graphical layer as the player character.
  
• Fixed an issue preventing you from exiting the hideout under the bathrooms, but still letting you enter the hideout from the outer door.
  
• Fixed some enemies who were very very confused about what they should be doing, hopefully enemies should be a bit less dumb from here on out!
  
• Fixed an issue causing a glitch enemy in the bathroom to be unable to shoot glitch projectiles.

Keep reporting, I'll keep squashing! Next update should include more non-bug fix updates to the post-game, such as achievements and returning the dialogue options to the newly recruited shop members.

Bird Princess now has every needed animation but, of course, more will come, as we love her very much!



Size: 930.8 MBs

ːswirliesː Bird SUCC NSFW Animation #1 added
ːswirliesː Reworked monsters' stat growth on NG+

• HP: x2 on NG+, then +10% for every additional "+"
  
• ATK/MAT: x1.6 on NG+, then +10% for every additional "+"
  
• DEF/MDF/AGI/LUK: x1.2 on NG+, then +10% for every additional "+"

ːswirliesː Added Zoom-In effect during battle "encounters"
ːswirliesː Added "RESURRECT" Cheat

ːswirliesː Ambassadors get now correctly replaced when an already conquered Reign gets conquered by someone else
ːswirliesː Fixed NPCs in Dragon Queen's Terrace being recruitable on some occasions
ːswirliesː Fixed wonky positioning in Desert Princess' "Cinder Ribbon" scene
ːswirliesː Fixed rabbits sieging cat-controlled Moth Reign not showing sprites on the map
ːswirliesː Fixed wrong ambassador portrait in Bird's Reign
ːswirliesː Fixed leaving the Swirlies burning menu with some already placed on it causing pictures to remain on-screen
ːswirliesː Fixed wonky Rabbit Princess' rescuing during sieges and it is now consistently possible to move to the Garderie even after the Reign falls
ːswirliesː Removed debug message during Yako animations

With the December update out, most of our team is taking a holiday break and some will take an additional week off in January to recharge after an intense end of the year. We hope that you, too, will have a chance to get some “lazy days” at the start of the year.



We plan to release the next update to the game at the end of January, which leaves 2 weeks to production, and then a few days for testing.

We decided to focus on adding Story Mode to Chapter 2 (Broodmother’s Treasure).



Now, the second chapter is just a “glorified boss fight”: you find the colony, destroy it, and then have a battle with the big monster.

What we’re after is a proper story of an artefact that you will steal from the weavers, supported by a couple of side stories:

• Some of the weavers disagreed with the dictatorship of the Broodmother and left her territory, only to run into trouble with scavengers.
  
• Your party of mages is not the first to approach weavers, and you may find a survivor of the earlier expedition.

We won’t spoil the actual stories here since we want you to have fun exploring them when the update is released. What we can reveal, though, is the redesign of the map: we plan on building a real maze in weaver forest, in parts – impassable, and in parts – passable with a penalty (through hex effects). Navigating such a maze would be a new experience.





Something that was discussed in the community for a while is how the Spire right now is just a functional set of rooms. We agree that this basic design can be improved.

We will start with designing and building a Master Chamber, the central location of the Spire that will hold everything together.

We don’t know if we’ll be able to finish it in time for the January update, but if we will, then this is the place to which you will bring the artefact stolen from the Broodmother, and this is where you will visually see your progress in the campaign.

Those of you who saw the 2019 version of the game will remember a few earlier designs of the Master Chamber. We’ll take one of them and develop fully.



One of the things we’re keen to improve is the spells.



The current direct progression (L1-L2-L3) is functional, but it’s not what we have in plan for the whole campaign.

There are two options that we experimented with:

• Instead of opening new spells, to upgrade the existing spells
  
• To offer a choice of new spells when upgrading

In the end, we decided to combine both approaches, and that’s something for the February update.

At the same time, we’d like to simplify the essence mechanics.

Right now, you can collect 3 different types of essences, depending on the outcome of an encounter. But it doesn’t offer enough fun to justify the split into 3 different types, and so we will progress to having just 1 type of essences that you extract.

Together with this, we plan to change the cost of opening new spells to increased value specifically for each mage. It will cost, say, 10 essences to open mage’s second spell, no matter what that spell is, and it will cost 25 to open their third, and so on.

Which will allow us to bring another thing which was discussed in the community earlier: personal preferences of mages to specific schools of magic. We think that it would be fun to have one mage have a “50% discount” on opening fire-related spells, and another to have the same advantage for acid spells, and so on.

Provided that we allow to see this, and change this, at the start of the campaign, it will give you more control over the initial party – and the way you want to play the game.



Once we started working on the change in spell design, we realized that it’s high time to detail the whole campaign, from start to finish, to broadly understand the needs of the mages towards the end of the game.

Will we have opponents that need 10 fire tokens to burn?

Will we have new tokens, and thus new spell schools?

After discussions, this is how we think the campaign will look like:

ːspellcastingː Into the Wild Lands
The escape into the Wild Lands: low-level inquisitors and soldiers, gigglers, shadows, a few demons.



ːspellcastingː Broodmother’s Treasure
Weavers, splitjaws, crawlers (plus higher-level gigglers and shadows) in the forest.



ːspellcastingː Demon Master’s Bidding
Mushroom-eaters and demons, blackpaws, leafclaws and weepers in the elderwood.



ːspellcastingː A Very Wet Place
Oorls and waterlings, earthleeches and creepers, snarers and drowners in the swamps.



ːspellcastingː At the Palace
Soldiers, inquisitors (and someone else, no spoilers) back at the Empire.



ːspellcastingː The Forgotten City
Ashlings, mutants and monsters in ruins and catacombs.



ːspellcastingː White Peaks
Oremasters, stingtails, panzerlings and fluters in hills and mountains.



ːspellcastingː The Distorted Lands
(No details, as we don’t want spoilers)



There are a few ideas for new kinds of tokens, indeed, especially for the catacomb chapter (electricity?) and the chapter set in hills (vibration?) – we’ll experiment with those once we get there.



With this update, we wrap the year of 2021. Most of this year we spent running weekly sprints, releasing over 30 updates as the game took shape. We thank everyone who trusted us to make it happen, and especially those in the community who took part in the discussions that helped us define what “a game about a party of runaway mages” should play like!

We wish you a happy 2022 – filled with friendship, good conversations, good books, and good games! For us, this will be the year when Spire of Sorcery enters full release, and we look forward to giving you more happy moments with the game’s monthly updates.

Happy New Year!

/ Team CO /