Crashlands 2 Update 1.2: The Hardcore Scramble
WELL HELLO, intrepid explorers of Woanope! We’ve been cooking up a storm since Update 1.1, and HOT DANG do we have a fresh new batch of tasty changes coming to Crashlands 2! Let’s crack it open! The TL;DR Go Roguelike, Godmode, or Creative with the new Mutators and Custom Modes N
WELL HELLO, intrepid explorers of Woanope! We’ve been cooking up a storm since Update 1.1, and HOT DANG do we have a fresh new batch of tasty changes coming to Crashlands 2! Let’s crack it open!
The TL;DR
Go Roguelike, Godmode, or Creative with the new Mutators and Custom Modes
New creature in the Aquadunes, plus robotic pets
New docks, dockable garden plots, Bureau Buildings, and creature statues
Armor crafting skill-ups to increase your RNG power
Recipes auto-craft needed compounds, and better display craftability when tracked
Map expanded and game intro streamlined
New Feature: MUTATORS!
One of our main goals for Update 1.2 was to add lots of replay value to Crashlands 2 by coming up with ways for your second, third, and ninetieth playthroughs to stay fresh and interesting. So we added two new MUTATORS: Scramble and Hardcore! These mutators are meant for more experienced players, so most tutorial quests and UI elements are disabled when playing with any mutators active.
The Scramble Mutator
The Scramble Mutator takes all the special items, Jems, pets, InfiniSuit Infusions, bombs, and traps, and SCRAMBLES them all around, resulting in an unpredictable playthrough where you aren’t quite sure what your loadout is going to be, what pets you’ll get, or even where to find Jems! Here’s how it works:
Scrambled Equipment
Most gadgets and trinkets are rearranged. For example, normally you can craft the Sluggarang right away as your first gadget within the first few minutes of playing the game. But in Scramble, you may be crafting an Abyssal Boops, a Six-o-Clock, or even a Hot Hive instead! You might fish Giga Blaster bombs right out of the waters of the Mantle where Voltslugs once slugged, or maybe you'll find a Ten Foot Pole just lying on the ground where you’d normally find a Scroll of Burning!
Scrambling equipment in this way means you’re never quite sure what’s coming next and what your combat loadout options will be. The end result? A weird playthrough with surprises around every corner.
Scrambled Jem Locations
We’ve added over a hundred new potential Scramble Locations for Jems to the world map. When you start a new Scramble save, every Jem in the world has a 50/50 chance to get scrambled to a random one of these new locations. Better get to exploring if you want to find them all!
Scrambled Infusions
In Scramble, the Infusions for your InfiniSuit are mixed around to new locations in the tree. Sometimes you’ll get a bunch of cheap Juke Recovery in the first row, or maybe a bunch of extra crit right off the bat! In Scramble, you’ll have to adjust your Jem spending strategy on the fly as you uncover your Infusions.
Scrambled Eggs
This is where things get a little wild. Pets are an important part of Crashlands 2, and they augment your gameplay in a whole bunch of different ways. So it only made sense to scramble them as well!
When you find an egg in Scramble, it will be... A SCRAMBLED EGG! It’ll look different than before and contain an unknown pet. You’ll have to hatch it to find out what’s inside!
Once hatched, your new pet will have the Life Lessons of the pet it replaced. So if you get a Wurgle as your first pet instead of a Sluggabun, your Wurgle can be embiggened via the same Life Lessons that would normally be required to embiggen a Sluggabun. This approach lets us ensure that you can always embiggen your pets at the normal pace.
Scramble-Handling Quests
We had to adjust A LOT of quests to handle the fact that in Scramble, we have no idea what items or pets you will have at any point in the game. So when you have the Scramble Mutator active, there are a whole bunch of tweaks to conversations, quest objectives, and storylines so the game still makes at least SOME amount of sense. For example, what happens if your first pet is a Wurgle instead of a Sluggabun? It seems like Baani and Clood at Baan-a-Gaan Raanch should have some opinions about that. SO THEY DO!
Scramble Seeds
Last, to make sure you can share a Scrambled world with the community if you have a particularly fun run, we added a seeding system. The same seed will always scramble the world in the same way.
Note: Scramble Seeds may not give consistent results across major updates as new items get added to the Scramble pool, but they will give consistent results within the same major update.
The Hardcore Mutator
Want to challenge yourself and strive to be the best Flux you can be? Try the Hardcore mutator - just DON’T DIE!
When playing in Hardcore, you’ll earn points toward a total Hardcore Score as you progress through your adventure. Once you die, your score is locked in on your personal Hardcore Scoreboard, and you’ll no longer accumulate points on that save. Playing on higher difficulties nets you more points, so if you want a really big score, you gotta push yourself!
The Hardcore Mutator also introduces a few tweaks to the game’s mechanics to keep things moving and ensure your Hardcore Score is well-earned. In Hardcore:
Research progresses faster. Since you may end up starting over somewhat frequently in Hardcore, we didn’t want research times to be such a bottleneck.
You can’t teleport for a few seconds after taking damage. So no more cheesing the Arbiter build by taking a trillion damage and then teleporting away to clear your Pact!
You can’t change the difficulty. If you want to be Hardcore, you gotta COMMIT!
Time no longer slows down in the Equipment UI. So if you want to swap equipment around mid-combat, you’d better do it fast!
Go Roguelike with a Hardcore Scramble!
Mutators can be mixed together, so if you want to experience Crashlands 2 as a roguelike, go ahead and flip both Hardcore and Scramble on. It’s the team’s new favorite way to play (since we’ve been playing this for years) and provides plenty of fun comparisons with friends, too.
New Creature: The Swoggle
The Aquadunes is a cold and lonely place. A little too lonely, honestly. When we created the Aquadunes, we wanted it to feel like a wasteland whose ecology had been decimated by the Bureau of Shipping. Mission accomplished! Though since the only living creature in the Aquadunes was the Yola, we might have swung a little too far in that direction. We heard your feedback and lo, a new creature has been born!
Update 1.2 adds a whole new creature type to the Aquadunes: the SWOGGLE! These little cat-like laser piranhas hang out in large packs, primarily near Volbs, brawling with the bots that have overtaken their habitat.
Several Aquadunes recipes have been updated to include the new components dropped by Swoggles, so don’t be surprised if you load into a late-game save and see some recipes asking for items you’ve never heard of!
Oh, and naturally we added a Swoggle Egg as a rare drop from the larger Swoggles, so you can have your very own Swoggle pet!
New Robo-Pets
Speaking of pets, Update 1.2 also introduces two new robotic pets: the SC4MP and the FL1T! As Flux adventures across the Aquadunes, she may come across defective versions of these robots, which opens up a small quest chain to find a way to reboot and reprogram them to accompany Flux as pets!
New Base-Building Items
Speaking of taking the Bureau’s assets for yourself, we opened up a WHOLE bunch of new recipes so you can craft your own Bureau-style buildings! Once you’re able to collect Bot parts, Bureau building recipes have a chance to drop from bots throughout the Aquadunes. Now you can make a sterile soulless home for yourself, like a true corporate drone!
Lots of players told us they wanted more styles of docks. WELL, SO DO WE! So we added them. Now, you can craft Grumblestone, Tendraam-style, and Bureau-style docks — a dock for every occasion!
But why stop there? What good is a dock anyway? You can’t even grow a tree on it, RIGHT? WRONG. In Update 1.2, every type of Garden Plot now comes with a dock variant! Build your gardens out onto the water like your hydroponic heart desires!
Last, if you ever wanted to make a trophy room of the wild beasts of Woanope, now you can! We added luxurious statue versions of each creature, which have a chance to drop from the most powerful versions of each.
New Custom Mode
When we make games, we spend a lot of time on balance — that is, giving the game the right level of challenge so it’s fun for everyone. But sometimes it’s fun to just throw balance out the window and transform yourself into an immortal god who runs at mach 20 and one-shots everything in your path. Or perhaps you’re a masochist who wants to give yourself a ludicrous challenge, like making everything in the game one-shot you and see how far you can get. Or maybe you missed the original game’s Creative mode — now you can just set the price of buildmode items to nearly 0!
Grab the sliders and play around with a whole bunch of variables to change how the game feels and plays! Make stuff turbo fast, turbo slow, way too hard, way too easy — it’s up to you! When playing in Custom Difficulty, you can even change the sliders during gameplay, and the game will dynamically adjust on the fly.
Armor Crafting Skillups
Now that armor is randomized, it felt a little weird that no matter how many times you crafted the same piece, you'd never get better at producing high-quality items. So we fixed that!
Update 1.2 introduces a new “Armor Crafting Skill” system, whereby your chance of crafting higher-quality pieces of armor increases each time you recraft that same item. This is particularly useful when playing in Hardcore, where every stat point matters and you want to be fully kitted out in Legendary equipment as much as possible.
What we found with our internal testing is that once this system was added, we ended up wanting to recraft A LOT more armor pieces, which meant we were out harvesting quite a bit more materials than before. So...
Map Expansions
We expanded the world map! We combed through all the various parts of the world and fleshed them out quite a bit. Some zones are now more filled in, others were expanded to be larger, and most had their layouts tweaked and updated to be a little easier to traverse with fewer dead ends. It’s subtle in some areas, while others have been changed quite dramatically.
A few of the map expansions shown overlaid on top of the original map.
We also added a bunch more Juice Jems to the world, now that there are three new pets to spend those Jems on!
Quality of Life Changes
Aside from all the big new features and changes from above, we wanted to spend a little time on some QOL improvements to make the game feel just that little bit better.
Rollup Compounds
Crashlands 2 has a lot of recipes that contain what we call “compounds” — that is, craftable components that are required to craft other items. These compounds can make it fairly tricky to determine whether you can actually craft something, because you need to go craft the compounds first. So in Update 1.2, we added a new “rollup” system for craftable compounds.
With this system, your crafting page takes into account the whole stack of components necessary to make something and crafts them automatically, so you no longer have to manually create the individual components before making a downstream item. For example, if you wanted to make some Grumblestone Tiles, previously you’d have to first craft a bunch of Grumble Slabs manually, and then go craft your Grumblestone Tiles. Now, you can just directly craft the Grumblestone Tiles, and the necessary Slabs will be crafted automatically.
The Tracker UI also handles rollups, so you will always be able to tell how many of something you can actually craft.
As part of this change, we revisited ALL of the game’s recipes that use compounds and found a handful of spots where recipes were double-dipping in components — that is, they’d use a compound, AND they’d use some of the same ingredients that the compound required. This made some items particularly tedious or expensive to craft. Well, NO MORE! We adjusted all recipes so that double-dipping is no longer a problem.
Note: Are you a weirdo who still wants to craft everything by hand? No problem! You can disable this new feature in the game’s settings menu.
Streamlined Opening
After collecting player feedback and reading reviews, we think that our new player experience still has plenty of room for improvement. So in Update 1.2, we revisited the first hour of gameplay and trimmed a bunch of conversations, removed a few quests, reduced some crafting costs, chopped out and merged a few Insights, and generally enslickened the progression flow to get the player right into the action! Oh, and you no longer have to craft your first weapon — Graal will hand you a Rayblade Shanker as soon as you get floors slotted into their cabin!
Unarmored Movement
Flux now has a built-in "Unarmored Movement" bonus, which grants you a little bit of run speed (2.5%) for every empty armor slot you have. This is intended to make world navigation and combat a little smoother and easier at the early game when you're still running around in your birthday InfiniSuit, and as you gear up, you'll be able to replace that early boost with run speed from other sources.
Compendium Improvements
We’re continuing to expand the Compendium in Update 1.2 to provide more information about your adventures. Now, you’ll be able to see whether you’ve harvested the Shiny version of a plant, like so:
And you’ll be able to see whether you’ve picked up the Special Items that are rare drops, such as the Hot Hive or the various Boops fish!
With these changes, completionists and gardeners alike will be able to triangulate what they might be missing.
Misc Changes, Fixes, and Improvements
Aside from everything mentioned above, we’ve got a smattering of smaller tweaks coming in Update 1.2. Here they are!
Settings
Added a new setting in the Graphics tab that lets you disable the Low Health Overlay.
Added a setting to disable the new Compound Rollup system.
World
Added a workbench next to Oowee on the Haarlipol docks, so completion of Pop Boots may be faster.
Fixed a gap in the fence containing Wurgles in the Preserver's JEF.
Bots at the Fabricator Entrance can now respawn, to compensate for scenarios where somehow the player's kill of the bots doesn't count.
Fixed an issue where some equipment pickup items would draw vertically offset weirdly when out in the world.
Quests
Added a map marker for the Haarlipol teleporter quest.
Maarlo is now marked on the map when you get the Sluggabun Egg and have a quest to go talk to him.
Fixed an issue where the quest to infuse a Jem wouldn't complete, depending on which infusion within the first row you chose.
After meeting Matt in Haarlipol, you should now only get an Emblaa map marker if you haven't yet started Emblaa's quest chain.
Added a quest for completing Oowee's first insight, Lovely Gloves, so players don't accidentally delay their acquisition of the Toothpick.
Economy & Crafting
Increased crafting cost of Grumblestone building parts, as the new Rollup feature exposed how ludicrously cheap they were.
Reduced number of items required to complete Baarli’s Dead Ends quest to avoid economy pinching.
Simplified Wilderness Kebab recipe so you can actually make them.
Increased drop rate of Phanta’s Flight Bladders.
Increased the drop rate of Chargestones from Ampy Chargers, and adjusted recipes that require them to require a bit less.
Voltslugs no longer require an insight to fish up, so you can have fun blasting stuff as soon as you get your fishing pole!
Combat Balance
Sticky Trap, Giga Blaster, and Chillcore Bomb now scale with the player’s level.
Increased Bola damage slightly, and it no longer requires Focus to use.
Increased Strained Boops’ damage by 40%.
Your "player level," used to determine the strength of your gadgets, trinkets, bombs, and traps, was previously determined by the average level of all the armor and weapons you had equipped. Now, it is based on the highest level of armor and weapons that you have ever owned. This way, if you craft a higher level armor piece but want to continue wearing a lower level piece due to its stats, you still go up in level and you don't miss out on your combat items becoming stronger.
Interface
The Feedback button now serves a confirmation window to inform players that diagnostic info is copied to their clipboard.
Increased the space allowed to show stat names in the random stats UI, so the text doesn't shrink in some languages.
Fixed an issue where the loading tips on the loading UI would cause the loading bar to move up and down, depending on the size of the loading tip.
Quests that require crafting items, such as the SC4MP's Alive Wire quest, now properly show the infostream counter even if crafting pushes you past the maximum required.
If you pick up a schematic that's a variant of a recipe that you don't yet have, you will no longer see the primary recipe in the schematic pickup celebration UI.
Audio
If you have music disabled in the settings, you will no longer hear Kleewik's theme song when turning in Kleewik's notes to Greebl during the "Reengineering a Problem" quest line.
Fixed the issue where critter sounds would play super loudly in some interfaces (like crafting).
Fixed an issue where the epilogue music would keep playing in some areas of Break Point after the epilogue party finished.
Miscellaneous
The game is now smarter about deciding whether to refresh quest availability as world elements move across area thresholds. Now, quest checks should only be triggered if the type of world element changing areas has quests associated with it being in (or out of) the area.
The game now uses GPU compression on mobile to reduce texture memory usage and improve performance.
Harvested plants from your garden now always count toward your Compendium's stats and achievements, even if they are blown up by another plant or are self-exploding.
