Dear Lords:
Due to some issues encountered during the review process, we are unable to release Pennon and Battle Standard Edition and Enjoy Edition as originally planned. Therefore, we have adjusted the release method.

The originally planned two versions will be included in one game, and you can choose the following ways to experience the two modes:

• Standard Mode: You will need to purchase Pennon and Battle and select "Standard Mode" on the start page to play this mode.
  
• Enjoy Mode: You will need to purchase Pennon and Battle and select " Enjoy Mode" on the start page, then pay to unlock Enjoy Mode in the pop-up window to play this mode.

The store page for Pennon and Battle: Enjoy Edition will be delisted soon. If you haven't added Pennon and Battle to your wishlist, feel free to add it so you can receive subsequent game-related information in time.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2915660/_/

Differences between Standard Mode and Enjoy Mode:



About "Standard Mode" Recharge Gems

• All players can reach the same limit in the out-of-game development part;
  
• Players can reach the limit through regular playing, regardless of whether they recharge Gems;
  
• Recharging Gems can only speed up the out-of-game development progress.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused. Thank you for your love and support for [Pennon and Battle]. We will expedite the follow-up work to bring you a better gaming experience.

We will also send notifications to the community and official channels below as soon as possible. At the same time, we sincerely hope to listen to your voice. Please provide your feedback through our community and official channels. It would be a great help for the continuous improvement of our game.

More details:
Pennon and Battle official website: https://pb.luckycalf.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61559585273902

X: https://twitter.com/Pennon_Battle

Discord: https://discord.gg/mBCbquM34D

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfufH0dBn6P7Vj1p86QdTSQ

After a few days without major issues, most of the team started feeling relieved and enjoying a fresh start to the week. However, tech issues also know about Mondays, and a little mistake can create huge problems. This is our third Story from the War Room, and we call it the DNS Debacle - yeah, the title spoils it a bit, but as some people would say, ‘It is always the DNS’.

-------

At 16:45 UTC, some players began to encounter login issues. They were abruptly disconnected and found themselves unable to log back in. As the affected players were scattered across various regions, shards, and zones, our monitoring systems only detected a slight decrease in user activity and did not sound an alarm. Keeping a watchful eye on our active Discord community, one of the Mainframers spotted the troubling trend and quickly decided to raise the alarm and activate the War Room.

------

By 17:00 UTC, we were in diagnostic mode. The issue was with logins, and it was affecting a significant (and growing) portion of our player base. Although we still had a large number of active players, the curve was flatlining or starting to decline—right when it should be on the rise.
Our initial investigation through monitoring, metrics, graphs, and alerts pointed to a couple of potential smoking guns. One of our central services that handles logins was seeing increased CPU load, and our main authentication system logs were spewing errors. Additionally, we noticed issues with the system handling entitlements (determining who owns the game and what type of license they have) and decided to keep an eye on it while focusing on the most likely offenders.

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By 17:20 UTC, we decided to restart the authentication system, which seemed to be at the heart of the issues. In hindsight, this was a mistake. With players already facing login problems and constantly retrying, restarting the system exacerbated the issue. We ended up needing to close off all authentication requests temporarily to allow the system to stabilize, and as the game needs to refresh its authentication tokens regularly, this meant that over time all players were unable to continue playing.


Users playing across our three regions.
Troubles started at 16:45 UTC, and were subsequently made much worse by ourselves at 17:20 UTC

----

With our authentication system back on its feet, we decided to re-allow all requests to the system. As we now had all our players attempting to log in simultaneously, the previously noticed problem with the entitlement system became glaringly obvious. The system was overwhelmed and went completely offline, meaning even those users who managed to connect appeared as if they no longer owned the game. At this point, we knew that we needed to fight on two fronts at the same time. The issue with the entitlements system couldn’t wait for the root cause behind the disconnections to be resolved. Thankfully, we were on the verge of solving this one.

---

So, what triggered this bombardment you will ask? Unfortunately, it was a self-inflicted wound. During our diagnosis, we found that some DNS hostnames were not resolving correctly. One of the engineers on the call had identified the problem - a missing DNS record, specifically a critical NS delegation record. Another engineer immediately realized what had happened.
Earlier in the day, a cleanup task involved removing unnecessary infrastructure, and this crucial record had been mistakenly deleted. The last commands in the cleanup had been issued around 16:40, and it so happens that the default TTL (time-to-live) for many DNS records is exactly 5 minutes. A few manual steps later, the record was recreated, and we had to wait patiently for DNS caches around the world to update.

--

The root cause, however, is only the triggering moment, and with the on-call staff in our War Room assessing the situation and a couple of senior backend engineers ready for action, we still needed to tackle the entitlement service issue. We decided to fight it from two fronts at the same time:

• The escalation and support route. We contacted and escalated the issue up the support chain of the provider responsible for our entitlement storage. They confirmed they were overwhelmed and promised a solution to be deployed soon. The clock started ticking at 17:40 UTC.
  
• The hotfix path. We modified our entitlement code to include a fallback method favoring our players. If we had issues resolving entitlements, but the player had previously owned a certain license type, we would assume they still did and let them pass. We already had a code path similar to this one, but it was handling the case of being rate-limited. Adding the case to have a similar result for when the entitlement service was unresponsive was an easy task, and the hotfix was reviewed, compiled, built, and rolled out within 10 minutes.

-

We now had three racehorses competing in the same race: our hotfix letting players in while the service suffered, the entitlement service itself stabilizing with fewer requests coming in and fixes being deployed, and the DNS caches worldwide updating to recognize the recreated record.
By 18:35 UTC, the situation had vastly improved. Our players were logging in successfully, the entitlement system was catching up, DNS propagation was nearing completion, and the War Room team had turned a dire situation around.

The DNS Debacle had been resolved, and we were ready for the next challenge on the horizon.

Hey Lightbearers!

Thank you all for not just playing Into the Emberlands right after release (you’re the best!) but also giving us a ton of feedback and pointing out issues you’ve encountered.

We’re actively working on resolving bugs as quickly as we can, and have tackled the following ones in this patch:

• Fixed achievements not triggering
  
  • Heavy breathing
    
  • To new horizons
    
  • Prep time!
    
  • How many Knacks do you need to…

(Sadly, the achievements will not trigger retroactively, meaning you will have to reach them again to unlock them. We are sorry for that and hope for your understanding)

• Adjusted the buttons in the game over character selection screen as their previous layout caused an issue with the savegame
  
• Removed a pointless trade with the Village Shaman (previously gave you an ember crystal for an ember crystal)
  
• Fixed an issue where items couldn't be placed on the ground in specific biomes
  
• Fixed items changing or becoming invisible after placing them on the ground
  
• Fixed a bug where players could use the metro station in the village to travel to the previous worlds metro station position after a game over.
  
• Butter no longer spawns in the village (don’t ask.)
  
• Music now changes based on the amount of Lost Ones following the player
  
• Everything in the village is now saved and restored reliably

The best way to let us know what you think of the game and to inform us about bugs is to join our Discord server – if you’re not there yet, we’d love to have you!


Tiny Roar & Daedalic Entertainment

Collision fixes

Dear Community,

We regret to inform you that the game's release, originally scheduled for today, has been delayed. The build did not pass all the approval steps required by Steam. The new release date is set for July 18th.

During the TeaTime this Thursday, we'll explain what happened.

Thank you for your understanding and patience.

— Gameplay —

- Monsoon level 4 & 5 switched
- New Monsoon levels added:
- 6: Healing disabled
- 7: 30% Additional enemy health
- 8: 25% Reduced EXP
- 9: Bosses attack 50% more often
- 10: No vision outside the light radius
- Reroll & Banish System added

— Characters—

- Azami, the Rogue:
- Base weapon damage increased: 8 → 10
- Max Ammunition: 12 → 14
- Base attack speed reverted: 3.25 → 3.5
- Charon, the Grim Reaper:
- Summon damage modifier increased: 125% → 135%
- Summon attack speed modifier increased: 120% → 125%
- Fang, the Alchemist:
- Spider amount increased: 6 → 8
- Summon damage modifier increased: 110% → 120%
- Helios, the Lord of Ashes:
- Orb burn chance increased: 30% → 40%
- Orb damage increased: 10 → 12
- Max Ammunition increased: 8 → 10
- Base weapon damage increased: 8 → 9
- Lilly, the Blade of Death:
- Base weapon damage increased: 10 → 12
- Attack speed modifier increased: 100% → 110%
- Stefanie, the Trigger-happy:
- Reload time decreased: 2.2s → 1.9s
- Base weapon damage increased: 6 → 7

— Achievements —

- Monsoon Level 6:
- Survive the rain on monsoon level 6
- Monsoon Level 7:
- Survive the rain on monsoon level 7
- Monsoon Level 8:
- Survive the rain on monsoon level 8
- Monsoon Level 9:
- Survive the rain on monsoon level 9
- Monsoon Level 10:
- Survive the rain on monsoon level 10
- Winds Have Changed:
- Survive the rain on monsoon level 10 with Azami, the Rogue
- Death Claims Another
- Survive the rain on monsoon level 10 with Charon, the Grim Reaper
- Intoxicated
- Survive the rain on monsoon level 10 with Fang, the Alchemist
- Rekindled
- Survive the rain on monsoon level 10 with Helios, the Lord of Ashes
- Breaking The Shackles
- Survive the rain on monsoon level 10 with Lilly, the Blade of Death
- Pulling The Trigger
- Survive the rain on monsoon level 10 with Stefanie, the Trigger-happy

— Bugs —
- Charon, the Grim Reaper price updated to the correct value

Fixed crash when background is unknown


Fixed some other small things relating to the update of the game, during the next week i will be migrating the database and moving the server to the new version, there may be downtime during this if i mess it up. Hopefully all goes smoothly.

I will post on Steam and Discord within the hour if I mess something up.

Settings page expanded
Snow and desert terrain added
Levels generated automatically
Win condition set to surviving 30 levels
Pending buildings improved with Under Construction model and build effect
Ctrl + Z now sells the last placed towers
Minor bug fixes

Say hi to Moss, the new NPC in Winter Burrow. They are a part of a hedgehog couple who live a nomadic life collecting different types of animal fur tufts to use for exquisite woolen yarn for their beautiful knitwork full of patterns and colors. 🧶🦔

They have come to your area to find the highly insulating white fur of the snow hare. 🐇 Their partner, Pinesap, is the one who does the exploring and searching for fur tufts left behind on branches and bramble by a passing animal. When we meet Moss they are awaiting their partners return.

When we did some research on animal sizes, it surprised us that the hedgehog was so big compared to the birch mouse. At first we though it could pose a problem having an NPC that much bigger than the main character, but we realized it could be an advantage. 🐁🦔

Our Lead Artist Lucy puts it this way:
"We really wanted to show some different animals in the game and Moss is the first one you come across. With our birch mouse hero being so small, we wanted to give context by showing you how you compare to other creatures you will be encountering in your adventure.

What we also wanted to show in the character design was Moss' personality, being dependant on their partner and a little bit unsure how to spend their time alone, keeping to their tea and knitting."

A tiny bit of story spoiler below:
We won't spoil the whole story about Moss and Pinesap here, but as Lucy brushes upon, there is an unbalance in their relationship that has made Moss very dependant on their partner and where Pinesap might have exploited that to some degree.

All NPCs in the game has something they can help you learn to better survive the wilderness. Moss will love to pass on their knowledge of knitting, yarn and all the stuff you can make with that. Moss and Pinesap have made knitting into an artform.

As Lucy writes:
"The clothing is inspired by the Sami people, showing off the intricate patterns and beautiful designs Moss and their partner dedicated their lives to."

We look forward to show you Moss in the game and to tell you the story about Moss and Pinesap and to show you how it all ends.

Ancient Sacrifice is a real-time card battle game. Players build their own unique deck of cards and battle against each other based on the cards they obtain as the story progresses.

Ancient Sacrifice is being developed by jag games, a solo game developer. The game uses a lot of AI for images and music, and has a UI with a different taste from existing games.



Real-time card battles
Dark fantasy storyline
Full use of AI (images, background music, scenario, etc.)
Deck-building is possible; you only need to select 10 cards for your deck.
More than 100 types of cards, more than 40 types of various skills
Skills are simple and easy to understand


Other
You may use any of the materials on the Steam page and information in this document.
All distribution on Youtube and other sites, as well as live performances, are acceptable.