Ultimate abilities, Bottled XP, improved questing, and more
Questing
Quests are now split into acts. Completing the final quest in the act will allow you to move to the next act.
Currently there's only one act, which will culminate in a final boss of this act (which is yet to be released in a future patch). Then, act 2 will begin.
The quest list is now shaped like a tree, which should make it easier to understand the progression path through the act.
Quests can be completed and turned in even if the quest hasn't been unlocked yet - for example, if you manage to defeat a boss without unlocking its quest, then the quest will be completed anyway and you will be able to turn in that quest.
Village invasions
Invasion soundtracks have been replaced with more thematically fitting music.
Invasions last just a little bit longer.
Some enemies during invasions have been improved, and some have been removed completely (and will be re-added after a total rework).
XP Bottler / a way to spend extra talent points
The XP Bottler is a placeable object that can be purchased from the Merchant
You can interact with that device to put a talent point in a bottle
Bottled XP can be sold to the merchant for coins, as a way to make XP useful when all talents have been learned
Bottled XP can potentially be used for crafting in the future (but not yet)
New craftable items
DPS analyser (crafted from AI modules): can be attacked to measure your average damage-per-second. Basically an advanced training dummy.
Portable freezer (crafted from Storm essences): freezes your slime blasts, turning them into shards of frozen slime that have a much longer range and do slightly more damage.
Potion of ultimate power: instantly resets the cooldown of your ultimate abilities, but places a cooldown on all potions depending on the remaining cooldown of your ultimates
Special rewards for challenging mode
In addition to more loot, defeating a boss on Challenging difficulty will now drop a boss-specific crafting station.
These crafting stations can be used to craft all of the items that are crafted from this boss' unique drops.
Some items will have a slightly reduced crafting cost compared to crafting them at NPCs.
(note: Frostfire Pineapple's crafting station is currently useless)
Frozen orb changes
Frozen orb is now considered to be an ultimate ability and shares a cooldown with other ultimate abilities.
It no longer costs mana.
The damage of the ice shards has been increased.
Added an upgrade that allows the frozen orb to be hit twice before it disappears.
Annihilation ray
Channels a powerful beam for 2 seconds that destroys all tiles in its path.
Is an ultimate ability (which means it shares a cooldown with frozen orb).
Various tweaks
Boss health was slightly increased, because the fights still felt way too short
Metal Core's rockets (in phase 2) will have a smoother launch animation, but will reach a much higher velocity over time
Storm elemental will no longer have a permanent rain of bullets on challenging difficulty, as it's challenging enough as it is
Frostfire Pineapple's dagger attack will now give the player more time to react
Slime Jackhammer's jump functionality works much more reliably, and the sound of jumping is a bit quieter
Improved the visual effect of Heal ability
Improved the visual effect of slime blast projectile explosion
Items will now be greyed out on the action bar and will not show a placement preview if you don't have the required item in your inventory.
Two-phase boss fights and reworked combat
Boss fight upgrades
All bosses now have two phases, with slightly different sets of abilities and a different part of the soundtrack playing during each phase
Decomposer and Metal Core have a couple of brand new abilities and have been slightly changed visually
Every boss fight now ends in a results screen where your performance is graded with a rank
Here's a preview of what the updated Decomposer looks like
Combat rework
The combat is currently in the process of being completely reworked, taking user feedback into account
A new ability is now available from the start - Slime Blast
The ability has an upgrade tree that adds extra mechanics to how it's used, with more upgrades to come later
Accessories that previously affected slime spear, will now affect slime blast instead
Other
Mana points will now be shown below the player, in addition to the health bar
Metal Core's summoning item can drop from barrels in underground ruins, if it hasn't been obtained yet
Improved smart cursor / moving to monthly updates
First of all, a small announcement: from this point, the game is shifting from weekly updates to monthly.
The amount of work going into the game will stay the same, but the updates themselves are getting larger in scope and take more time to complete, which makes a weekly schedule way too restrictive.
Starting next month, a new major update will be released at the end of every month.
Moving on to this week's update!
Smart cursor changes
The smart cursor is now much more obvious and intuitive, and can be toggled on and off by pressing CTRL
Trees, gems, plants and mechanical traps will now be targeted by the smart cursor
Underground changes
A new type of enemy will spawn underground: harmless wisps that drop torches on death and make it easier to locate the nearby points of interest
Gem clusters will now immediately drop gems instead of spawning an enemy, which felt a bit weird and out of place
The light from torches will now look less yellow
Boss changes
Decomposer will now shoot a spread of bullets at the end of each "laser fan" attack
UI
The health bar in HUD is now green, to make it more obvious that it represents health
You can now start the game by double-clicking the world in the list
Deleting a world now requires a confirmation
Other
Added a bit of multithreading, which should further help with performance issues on weak PCs. More optimizations coming later.
The "sprint after dashing" ability now works more reliably and won't be canceled prematurely unless you start moving in a different direction
Slightly improved AI spawning and pathfinding
Instant teleportation ability + slight optimization of tile loading
The Dimensional Leap ability now has an upgrade that makes the ability instant, without the need to charge it up first
Dynamic tile loading has been slightly optimized, to somewhat alleviate the issues that some users are having where the world isn't loading fast enough to keep up with the player's speed. This whole system will be completely overhauled in the nearest future, which should solve these issues entirely. But for now, this is a small temporary fix.
Challenging mode / No-hit achievements
From now on, every boss in the game will have three separate achievements:
1. Defeat the boss on any difficulty 2. Defeat the boss on Challenging difficulty 3. Defeat the boss on Challenging difficulty without taking any damage
This should reward players for challenging themselves and potentially give the game a slightly higher replay value.
The new achievements have already been added for all existing bosses, and this pattern will continue for future boss fights.
A bunch of hotfixes
Fall damage has been reduced by 50%, and the "safe" height tolerance has been increased
Boss modifiers should no longer affect invasions
NPCs are no longer affected by gravity
FIxed an issue with automatic sliding doors not being harvestable
Fixed an issue with flamethrower visual effect not being visible if the FPS is low enough
Dimensional Leap ability will no longer work if you try to teleport into solid blocks
Sprinting ability and quality-of-life improvements
This patch consists mostly of boring quality-of-life changes. And one new learnable talent.
New learnable talent - Momentum - that greatly increases your movement speed for 3 seconds after dashing, as long as you keep moving in the same direction
Added a shift-click functionality to quickly move items between your inventory and the village storage
Better sounds of damaging ore blocks with mining skills
Storm Elemental's sprite is now brighter and thus much easier to see
Tweaked the Frostfire Pineapple's attack patterns and made them more challenging, as it was way too easy compared to the other bosses
Village menu will no longer re-open after successfully placing a new village improvement in the world
The "Careless wisp-er" quest now requires only 5 wisps (down from 10), in order to keep it from feeling tedious and drawn out
Slightly improved the boss summon screen
Fixed a visual issue with village storage window being slightly misaligned
Boss improvements
Decomposer's attack patterns have been noticeably changed, hopefully making the fight more engaging and fun.
The Frostfire Pineapple experience has been improved as well. Its dungeon now consists of a single room with a summoning altar, without any of the unnecessary extra rooms.
The pineapplemental's attack patterns have been changed as well, and are a bit more interesting than before.
The boss has a 100% chance to drop an accessory called "A bottle of ice and fire", which summons a miniature version of itself.
On another note, a very subtle bloom effect has been added to the game. The colors should be a bit more vibrant and smooth, the dark environments will be slightly less dark, and light sources will be more effective at providing light.
And lastly, combat abilities have been balanced to be more or less equally viable.
All three base abilities can be unlocked before fighting any boss, and all "secondary attacks" require defeating the Metal Core.
Since Slime spear and Flamethrower are harder to use and have a higher skill ceiling, these skills will have a higher damage output when used correctly - but the slimethrower is still a perfectly viable option if that's your cup of tea.
Mining with explosives
Today's weekly patch is dedicated to new ways to mine ores - with explosives!
Explosive charge is the basic ingredient for all explosives. It can be bought from the Merchant, or crafted by the Engineer using sand and molten ingots.
The most exciting thing to craft is the bomb launcher, craftable right after defeating the Metal Core.
This fearsome weapon will use explosive charges as ammo, firing small bombs that will stick to surfaces and can be detonated by pressing the "secondary fire" button (or they will detonate automatically after 6 seconds).
Another thing that you can craft are explosive blocks, the same ones that you can randomly encounter underground.
Activating explosive blocks by hand might be a bit tedious, but after you defeat the Decomposer, you can craft a wireless detonator to do so remotely!
The device will detonate not only the bombs placed by you, but also the ones that were originally generated underground!
Backpack size has been increased from 28 slots to 36, since the current size feels a bit too small for the number of items in the game. At some point I'm going to add a way to increase it even further.
And finally, lamp blocks have been changed and they now (subjectively) look better than before.
And some minor things:
You can now rapidly buy multiple items from the Merchant by holding the right mouse button, just like with crafting.
Explosion sounds have been moved to a separate audio channel with a volume limiter, to avoid damaging the eardrums of whoever decides to detonate 500 bombs at once.
Ability polish and tuning
Talent tree changes (Again?!)
The ability tree has been reorganized once again!
In addition to that, learning most abilities no longer requires any items - just the talent points.
The only nodes that still require items, are special "gateway" nodes that exist solely to lock certain upgrades behind killing certain bosses.
Hopefully the structure of the skill tree will now be more intuitive and more logical.
Corrosive Slime rework
The "Corrosive slime" ability has been completely reworked into a combat ability called Slimethrower. It seemed to work well as a starting ability, so that's what it now is - with more complex abilties being unlocked later. (if you have already unlocked the later abilities, they will stay unlocked - no need to worry about that!)
This ability also has an optional upgrade that lets you deal twice the damage by using your health as a resource.
Glider rework
The Portable glider accessory has been removed, and instead turned into a learnable perk in the talent tree.
Since there are now less accessory slots, other accessories will inevitably be more optimal than the glider, making it a tough choice between fun and optimization. With this change, you can have both!
Flamethrower tuning
The Flamethrower ability now has a longer reach (as this was an issue on some boss fights), and the beam of fire was made slightly thinner, so that it doesn't block your view as much.
Alchemist's charm
This new accessory can be crafted by the Alchemist, and it might be useful if you rely on using potions often.
Bug fixes
Fixed an issue with biome detection that caused enemies to either not spawn in their biome or spawn in a biome they weren't supposed to spawn in.
Added an upper limit to XP requirements per level, to ensure that the increasing XP requirements don't make unlocking later talents too grindy.
