Dear Queens and Kings,
This update brings tons of balancing changes, Eternal Trials Season 3, a progression system rework, a tutorial and onboarding rework, seamless UI scaling as well as many small fixes and improvements.

Weapons, mutators and building upgrades are now unlocked by completing campaign levels. For example in order to unlock the Spear you now have to beat Nordfels. With each level you beat (except for the last) you’ll unlock the next weapon. Perks continue to be unlocked through XP leveling the same way as before.

We also removed the level-cap. There is no more content to unlock after you’ve got all the perks, but for each additional level you earn a trophy (they don’t do anything special besides filling you with pride and joy).

With this change we try to strike a good compromise between making the game more approachable and less grindy for new players while also rewarding those who stick around to get deeper into the weeds. Thank you for all your feedback on this! We feel like we found a good middle ground with this now.

This has easily been one of the most requested and wished for things. We increased the number of perks you can pick from three to five. This allows for more complex and creative strategies as well as making the later stages of the game more accessible for casual players.

Many player units, perks and building upgrades have been tweaked in an attempt to improve the overall balance of the game and to give every tool a well defined place in your tool box. For a full list of balance changes check out the balance patch notes at the bottom of this post.

While we won’t have regular recurring seasons in a traditional sense, we’re adopting the model to allow for bigger balance changes such as this one. Your eternal trials save file and highscore have been archived. Everybody can start with a clean slate. If you’d like to finish your existing season 2 run, you should be able to roll back to the previous version of the game using the rollback branch (Right click Thronefall in your Library / Properties / Betas / select previousversionrollback).

We used this opportunity to also implement another request from you: Adding more of the new buildings to the older maps in the Eternal Trials game mode. Every map in this mode has a Blacksmith and a few Shrines now as well as some other buildings where we managed to find some good spots for them. Happy exploring!



The tutorial has been reworked to include some of the newer quality of life features. There is also a new tip system that essentially continues the tutorial after the tutorial by teaching you some more advanced features at a later point for example how to select only an individual unit type using the smart command hotkey.

This means even if you’ve already completed the tutorial you’ll receive a short series of tips to get you up to speed with all of the new features of the game. No worries, it’s just a few and they’ll be out of your face in no time.

We implemented seamless UI scaling to the game. You can now scale the UI between 50% and 150% of its original size in the gameplay settings, affecting all UI elements in the game. This *greatly* improves the experience on small screens and handheld devices such as the steam deck! :)



There is a very clear answer this time: Full Release!

We’re pretty happy with where the game is now. The biggest thing we’re lacking for a full release is some more content, so that is exactly what we’re gonna do next. We will leave Early Access later this year. There won't be any major updates until then, but we plan to celebrate with 2-3 extra maps on launch day.

It’s always our priority to be transparent with you, so we’d also like to share that we don’t plan to roll out any additional content after the official release of the game. We’re a very small team of two people. Thronefall is what is, is because we follow our passion and put all our heart into our projects. After two years of dedicating our lives to making Thronefall the best game it can be, the truth is we really need a break and are keen for new adventures.

Thanks for all the continued love and support. Developing Thronefall alongside you was and continues to be an absolute blast!

Cheers,
Paul & Jonas

—

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[EDIT July 10th, 2024]
• Added WASD, Ctrl and Q back to the default keyboard map as hidden key bindings. We wanted to optimize the keyboard layout for new players. The changes that happened to existing players were unintentional. If you're playing with the default key bindings, it should all work the way you're used to again. We appologize for the inconvenience.

Some minor balancing changes while we were at it:
• Chaos God Mutator: Does no longer apply to exploding enemies at all (they just spawn in normally). Attack delay after spawning decreased to 3 (down from 5). Score bonus decreased to +45% down from +50% (as the attack delays etc in recent patches made this mutator a bit easier).
• Golem Hero: +20% health and +10% attack damage to make the hero a bit more competitive with the other hero options in Eternal Trials
• Support Mage Hero: +200% health to make the hero a bit more competitive with the other hero options in Eternal Trials (this is intentionally a rather safe / minor buff as the risk of healing becoming too overpowering is quite large)
____________________

• FIRE ARCHER: Health reduced to 20 (down from 30). Movement speed reduced to 3.5 (down from 5). Damage against fast enemies reduced by 50%. Fire archers should remain equally useful in most situations while giving them some more pronounced drawbacks.
  
• HUNTER: -15% Damage against non-monster units. Damage against monsters remains unchanged. A small but probably necessary nerf.
  
• CROSSBOW: Damage bonus against ranged units increased to +125% (up from +100%). Health increased to 45 (up from 35). Range increased to 21 (up from 13). Hopefully better fulfilling its role as your anti-ranged unit.
  
• LONGBOW: Health increased to 25 (up from 15). Damage against humanoid enemies increased by +60% (up from +0%).
  
• SPEARMAN: Movement speed increased to 9.5 (up from 8). Attack range increased to 5.5 (up from 4.5). Overall damage increased by +10%. Damage against fast enemies additionally increased to +100% (up form +75%). Health increased to 66 (up from 63). Already had a good niche, bu was too weak to shine compared to other options.
  
• BERSERK: Has 2 seconds of invulnerability after performing a jump (up from 0). Additional fire and explosion resistance: Now only takes 15% damage from explosions (previously 33%) and 25% damage from fire (previously 50%).

• ARMOR TOWER: Shield duration increased to 6.5 seconds (up from 5)
  
• BUNKER TOWER: Attack speed decline when enemies are out of range reduced by 60% (making it easier to maintain a high rate of fire)
  
• SNIPER TOWER: Targeting changed to focus on the unit with the highest max health instead of current health. This is to ensure it actually finishes enemies off instead of just leaving each of them wounded.
  
• FIRE SPIRE: Projectile splash damage increased by +50%.
  
• HEALING SPIRE: Strength bonus increased to +110% (up form +90%). Projectile speed increased by +50%.

• SWORD: Active ability is no longer directional but deals splash damage in a large circular area around the player (this is a big buff as the area of effect is much larger and easier to aim). Passive health and health regeneration bonus increased to +30% (up from +20%). Active ability cooldown reduced to 8 (down from 9). Auto attack damage +5%.
  
• SHADOW CODEX: Passive damage per shot decreased by 50%. Auto attack cooldown reduced to 1.3 seconds (down form 1.5). Active ability damage increased by 50%. This should keep the power level of the weapon roughly the same while making the active ability more interesting and useful.
  
• FALCHION & TRAPS: Falchion now automatically prefers monster targets when in range.
  
• LIGHTNING STAFF: Active ability area of effect increased by +20% and damage increased by +10%.

• MAGIC ARMOR: Damage reflection against melee enemies reduced to 1 (down from 3.3). Damage reflection against ranged enemies increased to 7 (up from 3.3).
  
• BUILDERS GUILD: Immediately upgrades one of your houses in addition to the existing benefits.
  
• CASTLE-UP: Discounts ALL tower and wall upgrades for the entire match by -1 for level 2 upgrades and by -4 for level 3 upgrades.
  
• GODLY CURSE: Effect replaced. The first time your character attacks an enemy it loses 25% of its max health. This keeps the role of the upgrade unchanged, but makes it a bit more versatile and useful as well as easier to use. (Exact numbers here will likely need some more tweaking.)

• MELEE DAMAGE: Melee damage bonus increased to +25% per upgrade (up from +20%)

• WIND SPIRITS: +50% attack speed

• SACRIFICE: Level 1 unit respawn speed increased to +250% (up from +175%). Level 2 unit respawn speed increased to +275% (up from +225%).
  
• OVERLOAD: Tower health reduction speed reduced by 50% for temple level 2 and 3.
  
• ICE RAIN: Level 2 bold damage increased to 40 (up from 35). Level 3 bold damage increased to 60 (up from 50).
  
• PRAYERS: Level 1 shrine range bonus increased to +100% (up from +70%). Level 2 range bonus increased to +200% (up from +150%). Level 3 range bonus increased to +300% (up from +200%).
  
• WISDOM: Health reduction speed of all buildings decreased by 50% (so buildings survive twice as long).

• Pray to the War Gods: Removed as it caused more confusion than it did good. The additional perks, the buffs and other difficulty decreases in this patch should make up for it.
  
• Turtle God: Enemies only have +60% more health (down from +75%)
  
• Challenge the Elite God: Only every fourth spawn is an elite spawn (down from every third) and score bonus is increased to +75% (up from +60%)
  
• No Towers Pact: Now allows you to build towers but they are very expensive.
  
• No Units Pact: Now allows you to build units but they are very expensive. (Makes it possible to play with no tower and no unit pact at the same time if you so desire.)
  
• Challenge the Chaos God: All spawned enemies have an additional delay of 5 seconds before they can perform their first attack to prevent them from instantly taking down your economy buildings when spawning next to them. Score bonus increased to +50% (up from +40%)
  
• Challenge the Phoenix God: Now limits the amount of healing per enemy to a maximum of 15 per second to avoid ridiculous regen speeds for very high health enemies.

• Durststein: Enemy count in the first and second wave decreased so that you can more easily beat them without the "correct" counters.

• SEASON 3: Highscore reset due to the massive amount of balance changes.
  
• Spiky Giraffe: Difficulty budget increased by +10% (so less of them will spawn at the same time)
  
• Big Spider: Difficulty budget increased by +10% (so less of them will spawn at the same time)
  
• Nordfels: Added 6 shrines and a blacksmith to the map (for eternal trials only)
  
• Durststein: Added 5 shrines, a blacksmith, a temple and a royal forge (for eternal trials only)
  
• Frostsee: Added 5 shrines, 2 hero quarters and a temple (for eternal trials only)
  
• Uferwind: Added 5 shrines (for eternal trials only)

• Treasure Hunter: grants 15, 25, 40 gold in the last 3 waves (up from 10, 20, 30).
  
• Loan: The first 10 (up from 9) gold dropped by enemies disappear.
  
• War Horse: Damage to enemies reduced to 2.4 (down from 2.7). Self-inflicted damage increased to 0.35 (up from 0.25). No worries, the perk is still very very strong.
  
• Daredevil: Maximum damage bonus increased to +115% (up from +100%)
  
• Lighter Materials: Reduces your auto-attack cooldown by -33% (previously -25%)
  
• Melee Damage: Increased to +35% (up from +30%).
  
• Interest: The amount of gold received is rounded up instead of down (e.g. if you have 4 coins in your chest you will receive 2 coins in interest instead of 1) but your interest is now capped at a maximum of +20 gold per night.
  
• Sustainable Mining: Effect replaced. Gold mines produce +1 gold and when a gold mine is destroyed its income is reset back to its initial value of 7 per night (but its income for the current night is still denied of course).
  
• Gladiator School The unit respawn bar can now fill up while all units are still alive (on top of existing benefits).
  
• Ice Magic: Riding over enemies applies a short slow effect to them (on top of existing benefits).
  
• Emergency Repairs: Health transfer speed between walls increased by +25%.
  
• Timber Scaffolding: Reduces the build cost of towers by 1 (on top of existing benefits).

• You can seamlessly scale the size of all UI elements between 50% and 150% now

• Allowed perk count increased from 3 to 5
  
• Weapons, mutators and building upgrades are now unlocked by completing campaign levels. This ensures new players get important upgrades and weapons when they need them. Perks continue to be unlocked by XP leveling.
  
• Removed level cap and added infinite XP leveling (mostly so you get to keep your current level)

• Tutorial has been reworked to include new quality of life features.
  
• New tip system that shows some quality of life features and tips after completing the tutorial. (This is both to help new players but also to ensure existing players are made aware of features they might not know about. They only show up once or till you try them and there is only a limited amount of them so in case you're an experienced player already they should stop bothering you rather quickly.)

• tweaked the colors on wildbach to be easier on the eyes
  
• physical coins in your chest cap at 200, preventing crashes caused by an overflowing chest. We might find a more satisfying solution for this in the future
  
• fixed exploit that made it possible to change loadouts mid run by canceling out of the restart run screen
  
• tutorial, tips and control rebind menu now show glyphs for controller buttons instead of their names
  
• removed double negatives from the localization (e.g. “-60% slower” is now just “60% slower”)
  
• improved save-load system safety with automatic backups
  
• probably a bunch more

Quick fix to prevent the incorrect scenes during Adelaide's frisking scene showing during certain conditions

• Fixed the incorrect message after arresting a smuggler.
  
• Fixed the inability to enter the car of an arrested driver at the checkpoint.
  
• Fixed enemies not getting out of the car when attacking the police station.
  
• Fixed the seat lock in the police car after one of the prisoners dies in it.
  
• Fixed the bug related to leaving a location where civilians have died.
  
• Fixed the bug related to shooting at civilians getting up from benches and chairs.
  
• Fixed the Kill Camera on the Convoy mission.
  
• Fixed the companion being stuck in combat mode after killing a civilian in any location.
  
• Fixed issues related to the position and rotation of companions after fast travel.
  
• Fixed the bug related to exiting a high-speed moving car with companions.
  
• Fixed the bug related to the lack of interaction with companions.
  
• Fixed the disappearance of following companions after multiple save loads and game restarts.
  
• Fixed the behavior of a companion taking damage in a blocked car.

v.2.3.8 (July 9, 2024)

• Improved: Tiles will have vertices aligned more precisely and with less floating point errors when placed into the scene. This should reduce the likelihood of small gaps forming.
  
• Fixed: Baking lights would crash the app if the scene constisted of just a plane of tiles or lacked dimension in one or more axis.
  
• Fixed: Sticky brush wouldn't be angled correctly when holding Shift key in some cases.
  
• Fixed: Sticky tool should size tiles more appropriately if "Sticky Edge Proportionate" is enabled.

Remember to report any bugs you may encounter!

Check the Gallery to see creations by Crocotile users: http://www.crocotile3d.com/gallery
Also, there is a Discord server where Crocotile users can chat: https://discord.gg/fmtJdUb
Watch youtube videos demonstration Crocotile 3D: Youtube channel
Consider supporting via Patreon!

Hello Garfield lovers,




🎮 Join us for the Garfield Kart Furious Racing Time Trial Garf Challenge #2! The event runs from July 12th (10am ET / 7am PT / 4pm CEST) to July 15th (10am ET / 7am PT / 4pm CEST).

⏱️ Race on our first track, Sneak-a-Peak, and aim for the best time. After completing the race, take a screenshot of your time and username, and upload it in the Screenshots section. Make sure your whole screen is visible in the screenshot to qualify. Only screenshots taken during the event period will count.

🏆 The top racer will win a Garfield Lasagna Party key. Plus, we’ll randomly select another participant to win a key as well! Winners will be announced shortly after the event ends, so stay tuned!

Ready your engine, the challenge is about to start!

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Thank you for playing with us, reporting problems, etc.

→ver1.02
・Fixed a problem in which the bouncing shimeji mushrooms became too large if they were stepped on continuously.
・Fixed the rotation behavior when placing a mechanism that grants mobility on a mechanism that can rotate.
・Attribute-imparting mechanism cannot be set on a mechanism that already has that attribute.

I will be changing the game's development studio. The developer studio will no longer be AZUR_ GStudio; it will now be The Grand Street Studios (sounds like a movie studio name, lol). I'm still the sole developer, but I might get some extra help now.

In the course of the game, Star Masters are tracking you. You need to gather fuel and move your base before it gets discovered.

Each location you move to has different biomes, and the soldiers that appear in missions vary accordingly.

You can recruit new soldiers through missions, or hire merchants and visitors.





Considering real-time combat wasn't as enjoyable as expected and didn't blend well with unit management and command, it switched the combat to turn-based.

The balance includes tactics such as destroying enemy cover with explosives and then dealing damage with shots, or blocking enemy charges with close combat units.

Pikes have a skill to attack moving enemies within 3 tiles, and two-handed swords have highest melee defense chance.



The game will be updated as soon as a playable temporary version is created. The final version, which will include additional story and characters, will be released in a few months

Update 10/07/24 : We've just added Cloud Saves, so you should have no trouble playing on PC or Steam Deck now.

Hey Folks,

If you wondered how Session: Skate Sim plays on Steam Deck, you can rest easy! Session is now fully compatible with Steam Deck!



You can take your skateboarding experience on the go, enjoying the game wherever you are. At the park, the beach or on your toilets. Whether you're perfecting tricks or exploring new spots, Steam Deck ensures a seamless and portable gameplay for Session.



Peace,
crea-ture Studios

Friends and Soon-To-Be-Friends,

We’ve been working on our big August update (our roadmap is here), but we felt that a few smaller features are already ready to be showed off and added to the game now! These are primarily quality of life features, a little bit of rebalancing, and some bugfixes that weren’t breaking the game.

It’s a big list for version 0.1.S20573, so we’ve tried to make it a little easier to read. Let’s talk about all of it properly.

We’ve added a Trash Slot! You can get it by unlocking it from the village monument, it becomes available from Tier 2. You'll be able to retrieve the last trashed item, in case you accidentally threw away something important, and in general, it tries to keep a single stack of items.

(Basically, if you throw away 5 logs and then 10 logs, you can actually get all 15 logs back. If you then add 5 stone, all of the logs are gone though.)


It’s an inventory slot, and it’s BIG.
Big Slots are a new type of inventory slots that can hold ten stacks of a single item!

When you get one, it replaces one of your standard inventory slots. You'll get them by unlocking it from
the monument. For now, you can get three of them and they become available tier 3, tier 5 and tier 7.


We've added two new inventory shortcuts to go along with Sort, “Move All” and “Transfer Same Type”.

• “Move All” just moves all items from one inventory to another and exists in both your primary inventory and other storage inventories.
  
• “Transfer Same Type” only exists in other storage inventories, and basically pulls items that already exist in the storage.

So if you have some wood and some bark in your inventory, and one piece of wood in the storage inventory, you can press “Transfer Same Type” to pull only the wood in your inventory to the storage inventory.


Running out of resources is not what the game is about, but clearly, harvestables such as trees, stones, etc have been respawning a little too fast. Harvestables now take 20 minutes before they roll the 20% chance to respawn.

Enemies will respawn roughly the same as before.

It’s now a little faster for the callback to change from targeting individual sparks to the bigger spark circle. It should feel a little better when you need to get all of your Sparks back.

So for some quests we require you to manually harvest stuff or require parts from enemies. Sometimes it’s because you’ve just unlocked something new and we want you to use some new tools, sometimes it’s to give you an excuse to explore further, sometimes it’s to get you into the combat part of the game. We’ve gotten the feedback that the overall balancing for this has been too tedious and that’s not our aim, so we tried to change that.

To that end: We’ve tried to explain and communicate a bit clearer when we’re trying to encourage you to use new tools. We’ve balanced a few of the quests to need less items. We also swapped when two quests unlock - you now unlock Limestone Harvesting first and then Quartz Harvesting, so you don’t need to manually harvest so much.

If you wanna see the full details, they're here:
[expand type=details]

• Bark Harvesting (Tier 3 - Woodsman) now asks for 15 Loamy Sparks instead of 20 Loamy Sparks.
  
• Vertical Logistics - 2 (Tier 4 - Quartermaster) now asks for 150 Rope instead of 200 Rope.
  
• Delivery Chests (Tier 5 - Quartermaster) now asks for 15 Aetheric Pellet instead of 20 Aetheric Pellet.
  
• Supply Chest (Tier 5 - Quartermaster) now asks for 10 Aetheric Chunk instead of 20 Aetheric Chunk.
  
• Limestone Harvesting and Quartz Harvesting quests (Tier 5 - Mason Sisters) have been functionally swapped - Limestone Harvesting now unlocks first and asks for 200 Pebbles and 40 Path Tiles, while Quartz Harvesting asks for 400 pebbles and 80 Path Tiles.
  
• Mountain Spark R&D - 2 (Tier 6 - Divine Researcher) now asks for 80 Hauling Sparks instead of 120 Hauling Sparks.
  
• Miasma Capture (Tier 6 - Divine Researcher) now rewards you with one Frowl Sac to help you build your first Miasma Collector.
  
• Spark Pen - 2 (Tier 6 - Quartermaster) now hints at using the Boomy Spark and Puffy Spark to help you collect the Coral.

[/expand]
We buffed the cannon, elevator and zipline, we noticed that you had to build a few too many. Cannons and Ziplines will now bring approximately 60 items per minute instead of 30 and 50 items per minute respectively, and the Elevator will bring approximately 90 items per minute instead of 60.


We’ve done two changes to the quest flow. Number one, NPCs will let you hand in quests that you are able to complete before they give you a new quest. We’ve seen a few people get distracted because they have to accept a quest before handing in an old one, and it’s clear to us now that this is too disruptive. So now you can always hand in a ready to be completed quest before the game tries to give you a new one.

We also have made now made sure that the villagers will always give you “older” quests first - there was a specific instance where your quest log can have a quest that you are technically not able to do, and while the quest is available in the quest giver, but that can be missed. So now, that can’t happen and the villagers will give you the quests they are able to give you in a linear order.

There’s a lot of stuff to learn in the game and we missed out on some glossary entries that could’ve had a bit more clearer stuff.

We now have an actual clarification on how you equip Sparks. We have a better Hauling Spark explanation. Did you know you can toggle the Aim Mode button instead of the holding the Aim Mode button? We didn’t realise it was so easy to miss, so we added info about the Aim Mode Toggle and Hold in the little popup you get when you first get a Spark.

We saw on social media that someone lost their 40 hour save. They completed the early access content in a single save, only using the autosave. They then started achievement hunting in a new world, but of course, since they only used the autosave, their 40 hour save was deleted.

We want to prevent that, so we’ve added a “save and quit” button that hopefully encourages people to manually save more often, and also streamlines that process.

It’s the lightning round! Here are some bugfixes.

• Fixed build menu not updating if you’ve unlocked something while the menu is open.
  
• Fixed Hauling Spark pick up AI where it would hang around instead of picking up items.
  
• Fixed the build menu not remembering what type of path you used last.
  
• Fixed “Full Inventory” showing up when it shouldn’t be.

We do want to specifically shout out that we've fixed two major desyncs and thank folks who helped us out by playing multiplayer in the Beta branch!

We also squeezed in a Pride flag pattern - as a diverse team with queer people, we wanted to add this one in for ourselves and for all the other queer folks out there. Fun fact: In Germany, Christopher Street Day is what we call pride parades, and it happens all throughout summer! We're based in the Cologne area, a historically queer city, and our pride parade is in late July.


Alright, and now, we're going to go back into working on the August update. If you're looking for more WIP stuff, you can join us in our Discord! We told them a little earlier about when this update would be ready and showed off some of the features there!

Little sneak peek on this month's devlog... We're gonna properly show off our trains! Choo Choo! Look forward to it!