Crab Champions

Released: Apr 1, 2023
Platforms
Last updated: 16 Sep 2026, 04:04 GMT

Updates & announcements

20 posts

18 Mar 2026Developer post
The Future Of Crab Champions
Hey! It's been a while since the last update and I wanted to let you know what the plans are for the game moving forward! Rather than a big wall of text I've made a mini FAQ to keep things easy to read. WHERE NEXT UPDATE? Great question! I've been hard at work on the next big upd
Hey!
It's been a while since the last update and I wanted to let you know what the plans are for the game moving forward! Rather than a big wall of text I've made a mini FAQ to keep things easy to read.
WHERE NEXT UPDATE?
Great question! I've been hard at work on the next big update: it's still cooking and I like to make sure each update is really worth returning for rather than rushing things out too soon. My wife and I are expecting a baby in the next few weeks so I can't promise a definite timeline, but I'm still aiming for sometime this Spring. If you want to check out some of the new stuff as it gets added, I'm updating the beta branch weekly and keeping a close eye on the #beta-discussion channel over on Discord. Feel free to stop by and chat! 🦀
WHERE TONY?
Great question! As everyone knows Tony has been slumbering in his cave for quite a while now and it really is about time he wakes up....
WHEN 1.0?
Great question! I know the game has been in Early Access for a few years now and I do want to actually finish it up instead of endlessly iterating and changing mechanics. For that reason I've decided to share a list below of the things I think the game needs most to hit 1.0:
More variety in islands and improvements to how they look and play
Parkour 2.0
Tony awakening
More enemies and a big pass on enemy telegraphing and visuals
More interesting and distinct loot especially in the Legendary category
Proper final boss
New music + final soundtrack release
More weapons, abilities and melee weapons (baseball bat?)
Boring stuff (general polish and refinement, QOL features, UI improvements, better controller and Steam Deck support etc.)
When that stuff is done I'll be ready for the game to leave Early Access and fully release. The goal is to get there next year. My idea list is pretty much infinitely long (things like a Companions feature for example) but I do need to make sure that the game both gets finished and doesn't become a bloated mess. With that said feel free to comment below if there's something you'd really like to see added.
CONSOLES?
Great question! I still am planning on porting to consoles once 1.0 is out- it's much cleaner this way and allows me to spend all of my time and energy making sure the Steam version is as good as possible.
SOUNDTRACK?
Great question! Still lots of songs to be added to the game and then I think it's best to release them all together with the 1.0 launch. The soundtrack will be available to stream and also as a download on Steam.
WHAT HAPPEN AFTER 1.0?
Great question! Other than porting to consoles, I would like to release another update with any notable things that didn't make the cut for 1.0! The price of the game might increase a bit when it hits full release to reflect the content added over the years but nothing too crazy (like $5 more expensive at most).
COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT
It has honestly been incredible to see such a strong community develop over the last few years so I wanted to shout out some great people!
Crab Champions Stickers
A few months ago I was contacted by a member of the community that had been printing his own custom stickers. After he kindly sent me out a big care package of stickers, I was really impressed with the quality.

He's super passionate about improving his craft and getting the details right (so many iterations finding the right materials for the prismatic stickers for example) and has been playing the game since launch so it's a genuine project from someone that knows the game, not a random cash grab- there are tons of fun easter eggs related to the game on the sticker site!

I really hate asking people to buy things especially when the game is in early access so I will not be taking any cut from the profits.

The breakdown of revenue received is as follows:

- 50% goes to him for materials
- 50% goes towards sticker giveaways for the community
As a bonus I will be matching ALL revenue made from sticker sales in the next month as a donation to the charity Crustacean Compassion.

Stay tuned for a sticker giveaway over on the Crab Champions X Account in the next week or so.

You can check out the stickers here if interested.

NoScrub's Road To Prismatic Series
NoScrub (one of the OG crab creators) has been releasing videos in an awesome Road To Prismatic series: you can watch all of the episodes so far here. He is one of the most knowledgeable and skilled players around so you are sure to pick up some wisdom!
Lethamyr's New Content
Lethamyr is back making crab content- always love watching his videos and these ones are his best yet, go check out the full playlist here.
ano_rta's Speedrun
Watch on YouTube
Prepare to be impressed by ano_rta's insane Prismatic speedrun using a clever Shockwave strategy.
Time To Grind
Watch on YouTube
The most consistent content creator on planet earth- the legend himself Time To Grind has continued his long running series. Perfect to chill and watch- good vibes only!

TheeFURNAS' Updated Tier Lists
Watch on YouTube
Who doesn't love a good tier list? Furnas has you covered for weapons, abilities and melee weapons. Agree or have any spicy takes on his picks?

Games From Ireland
The game is 30% off as part of the Games From Ireland event. Be sure to check out the other awesome games featured!

That's it for now- see you soon for the next update! 🦀
Original post
22 Nov 2025Developer post
The Island Update Hotfix #3 / #4
After spending the last few weeks reading as much feedback as possible on the new update, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two types of players when it comes to the feedback I was getting of “I’m bored, make the game harder!” A) Players that were finding Diamond runs to
After spending the last few weeks reading as much feedback as possible on the new update, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two types of players when it comes to the feedback I was getting of “I’m bored, make the game harder!”
A) Players that were finding Diamond runs too easy and wanted a fun (but still attainable) new challenge to grind
B) Players that want the most overtuned difficulty that I could possibly muster up no matter how unfair it was
I made the mistake of trying to satisfy both groups with a single medal so I have made a bunch of changes in this patch to make the game more enjoyable for both groups of players.
Firstly, I have made a new completely optional (doesn’t affect medals or achievements) set of difficulty modifiers called Flex Modifiers. These are unlocked when reaching Diamond account rank and are purely for those players looking to create the most unfair situations possible in the game (group B as mentioned above).

Secondly, I have made a lot of changes for group A to make attaining the Prismatic medal FUN and not a tedious / frustrating grind which it clearly was for many players. There are also some nice QOL and balance changes that should round out particularly annoying edge cases or situations that felt like they depended too much on RNG to succeed.

HOTFIX #3 PATCH NOTES
Countdown and Manual Collection have been moved to be completely optional Flex modifiers. These two modifiers were by far the least fun modifiers reported in feedback and I totally get it- they both force a specific playstyle and add stressful elements to the game so they don’t belong in the core medal difficulty modifier pool.
Ultra Chaos red modifier now grants +50% chance to find higher rarity loot in chests
Lucky green modifier chance to find higher rarity loot in chests reduced from +250% to +200%
Discounted Shops green difficulty modifier discount increased from 30% to 35%
Added new green difficulty modifier: Loot Goblin: Start with the Bounty Hunter and Driller perks
Widened the infamous narrow arctic corridor island
Gold and Greed totem spawn chances increased by 50%
Scavenger health drop lifetime increased from 10 to 15 seconds
Enemy damage scaling per island reduced by 20%. Enemies were dealing noticeably too much damage when looping so this should help things feel a bit smoother
Enemy damage multiplier with the Ultra Chaos modifier active decreased from +33% to +25%
Enemy health scaling when looping reduced by roughly 15%
Enemy movement and attack speed bonus per loop reduced by 25%
Enemy bonus density when looping reduced by 25%
Hard enemies now drop 100% more crystals
Elite and boss enemies now drop 150% more crystals
Shop prices globally decreased by 12%
Shops now spawn 2 more pedestals by default
Shop Reroll Totem chance to explode reduced by 20%
When I say “cost” in the points below: each enemy in the game has a cost to spawn so if an enemy has a higher cost it will mean that fewer other enemies can spawn on that island if they get spawned
Elite and Boss enemies cost 20% more to spawn
Hard enemies cost 13% more to spawn
Athletic Enemies jump around 50% less. It was just too spammy in general which made using the Poison Cannon feel especially frustrating as enemies were constantly leaping out of the poison clouds
The Fiery Enemies and Poisonous Enemies challenge modifiers now give enemies roughly 50% fewer fire and poison stacks as these felt unreasonably strong compared to other challenge modifiers
Enemies that naturally leap a lot (like the Elite Lightning Crab) now leap 33% less
Elite Fire Crab is less likely to use his launch slam attack (especially back to back which was creating some unfair situations)
Elite Poison Grub has a limit of 1 alive at a time per island
Elite Beam Skull has a limit of 1 alive at a time per island to prevent taking unfair damage when multiple did their circular attacks at the same time
Elite Beam Skull shotgun beam attack damage reduced by 20%
Elite Barrel Skull now is a bit less spammy with barrels
Elite Barrel Skull barrel health reduced by 25%
Angered enemies now deal 50% more damage (down from 100% more damage)
Frenzied enemies now attack 50% faster (down from 100% faster)
Speedy enemies now move 100% faster (down from 150% faster)
The number of bonus enemies that spawn when you choose a 2x chest island has been reduced from +25% more enemies to +20% more enemies
Reduced the Rush blessing goal per player influence by 33%
Reduced the Relaxed green difficulty modifier cost from -10 to -6 so you can still earn some medals with it on
Reduced the Ultra Luck green difficulty modifier cost from -50 to -10 so that you can still earn some medals with it on
Removed the “damage when going out of bounds is doubled” part of the No Safety Net difficulty modifier (it can be found as part of the new optional “Handle With Care” flex difficulty modifier if you wanted to keep it enabled)
Chance totem success % increased from 25% to 33% but health cost increased from 10% to 15%
Gamble totem success % increased from 25% to 33% but cost increased from 10% to 15% of the price of a common pickup
Flamethrower base damage increased from 1 to 2 and weapon mod trigger roll multiplier increased by 15%
Big Shot speed reduction reduced from -50% to -40% to make it feel better in general
Removed the cooldown from the Shockwave perk entirely
Ability and Melee mods are 50% less likely to spawn in chests- this is because generally they are less sought after and could cause players to get frustrated over poor loot RNG when opening an Epic chest and seeing 3 ability mods appear. Since there are 50% less ability and melee mod slots available compared to weapon mod / perk slots this change should feel fine but I'll be keeping an eye on it! I'm planning on adding some kind of "Trinket" system in the future that will let players influence their chest loot a bit so players that like doing melee builds will be able to skew the odds in their favor!
Heavy Crab movement speed penalty reduced from -30% to -25% and gravity penalty halved so it should feel a lot less punishing
Immortal Snail now has a larger and purple health bar to more easily keep track of it next to groups of enemies
Some players mentioned that Horde islands were feeling a bit boring / autopilot since I nerfed per wave enemy health scaling so their initial starting health has been buffed to 50% of the normal value (up from 33% of the normal value)
Demolition nests no longer spawn 3 additional nests per player as instead of making it harder in multiplayer as intended, it made it far easier with most islands ending as soon as the first nest was destroyed. Now the same amount of nests spawn as in solo play but nests gain 100% more health per player in the lobby
Manual Collection crystal lifetime decreased from 12 to 8 seconds (since Manual Collection is now a completely optional Flex modifier I can restore it back to its former glory for those that enjoy this kind of playstyle)
The “Ultra Chaos Champion” challenge has been changed as there are no longer 14 red modifiers. The new challenge is: “Get a win with all red difficulty modifiers, no green difficulty modifiers and the Random Loadout flex difficulty modifier active”. This is the only achievement in the game involving flex modifiers but since all it does is randomize your loadout I felt it was still reasonable for most players to complete
Reduced the intensity of the lights when opening chests- especially on darker lighting scenarios this made opening chests a bit uncomfortable
Fixed XL Totems actually spawning 250% more enemies instead of 200% more enemies per use
Fixed locked difficulty modifiers staying enabled with no way to turn them off in cases where a multiplayer host had enabled modifiers that you hadn’t unlocked yet
Fixed High Roller random rolls not being accurate (it was rolling 33% twice instead of rolling a number once and checking that number at 33% and 66%)
As per popular demand I have removed the volcanic biome whistling song from the desert gameplay music playlist. It now only plays in the volcanic shop as Tony intended
HOTFIX #4 PATCH NOTES
After playing a bunch of runs on Hotfix #3 and observing feedback I’m happy with where things are at other than two things that were pushed too far into the easy category: shop prices and the Lucky modifier- these both made it possible to break the game in the first shop which made runs feel pointless and laughably easy super early on (for example I got level 9 Ultra Shot in my first shop and was able to comfortably melt through the rest of the run with no resistance from enemies).

I still want Prismatic to feel like an engaging and satisfying difficulty to overcome (it is the hardest medal in the game after all) so these tweaks are purely for that reason.

Keep in mind that the game is still drastically easier / less RNG based than before, all of the Hotfix #3 changes combined made a huge impact!
The -12% to shop prices change that was made in Hotfix #3 was actually a much larger decrease than it seemed as it affected exponential scaling and was the main cause of players being able to buy out shops and break the game in the first biome so it has been reverted. Since hard enemies drop way more crystals than before it was an unnecessary change, there is still a big net increase in economy compared to before even with this change reverted
Since the outliers that made the game feel too RNG based to succeed were significantly toned back in Hotfix #3, the Lucky and Discounted Shops modifiers became noticeably overpowered so they have been toned back to maintain the new more “flat” balance of the game (less need to counter the extreme difficulty spikes that are no longer present)
Lucky luck bonus reduced to +100% chance to find higher rarity loot in chests which is still probably the strongest green modifier in the game that is allowed on Prismatic runs
Discounted Shops shop discount reduced to 20% but it now only costs -1 difficulty level instead of -2
I hear you on the -50% chance for Ability and Melee mods to spawn in chests being too much so I have lowered it to just a -25% chance which should feel a lot more balanced while still enabling you to go for ability and melee builds
Added missing secret chest spawn point on one of the circular floating arctic islands
Added some more cliffs to the victory island to try and prevent cases where players were getting stuck while exploring and couldn’t get their victory crown
Original post
03 Nov 2025Developer post
The Island Update Hotfix #1 / #2
HOTFIX #1 PATCH NOTES Changed the Nightmare red difficulty modifier to be +4 difficulty level so this gives you an additional difficulty point to spend on either a green modifier or disabling another one of the 1 point red modifiers. This should give enough flexibility to still g
HOTFIX #1 PATCH NOTES
Changed the Nightmare red difficulty modifier to be +4 difficulty level so this gives you an additional difficulty point to spend on either a green modifier or disabling another one of the 1 point red modifiers. This should give enough flexibility to still get Prismatic while running the least annoying modifiers to you personally (everyone seems to have different opinions on which they prefer / hate so this new modular system seems to be working well to allow people to have more agency)
Greatly expanded out of bounds trigger zones on all islands so the out of bounds warning should pretty much never pop up accidentally when near a wall anymore and also it should feel a lot less restrictive to move a bit away from the main arena areas now. In general out of bounds warnings should feel much more invisible now and only show up when you are REALLY pushing it
You now get teleported from out of bounds even when an island is over (you only take damage when this happens on an active island) to prevent getting softlocked on distant areas of the map
Made the super narrow Desert and Volcanic horde islands much wider
Made Immortal Snail purple for better visibility especially in the Volcanic biome
Decluttered that one arctic island with a lot of trees running through the middle of the arena
Made better Prismatic reward skin
Darkened the background of the difficulty UI and doubled the opacity of deselected modifiers to make them easier to read
Fixed not being able to navigate the difficulty UI with a controller
Fixed Prismatic medal being in grayscale when viewing weapons in the lobby and on the game over UI
Fixed a one off bug that caused a weapon rank to go into an invalid state: there is now a failsafe to reset it back to bronze
Fixed the “Attempts” stat not being increased as expected
HOTFIX #2 PATCH NOTES
I’ve gotten a great response to this update but also have been reading some very valid feedback mainly around Prismatic modifiers. Ideally the Prismatic grind is fun and some of the modifiers especially at their extremes definitely could feel more unfair than fun. I’ve tried to address all of the worst feeling scenarios in this hotfix without diminishing the satisfaction of overcoming the new mastery curve that Prismatic adds to the game
Immortal Snail can no longer randomly jump at you: this was enjoyable for me during the beta as it created some really unpredictable moments but ultimately losing your entire run due to this feels bad (do note that it can still jump if the “Jumpy Enemies” modifier is active on an island but at least that only lasts for one island rather than the entire run). Also slightly reduced its movement speed to just help smooth out the worst case scenarios of this modifier
Removed the “no more one shot protection” aspect of the No Safety Net modifier: it was just too punishing to get completely one shot by the Immortal Snail at full health. This functionality may come back as a completely optional “orange” modifier in a future update for those looking to add challenge (it won’t influence the difficulty rank)
Countdown difficulty level reduced from +2 to +1 so it is much easier to turn off and not feel like you are forced to run it. Many people rightfully felt like they needed to have it on which took away from the fun of the game for them so reducing the points here makes it much less significant / no longer feel mandatory to earn Prismatic. The Ultra Chaos modifier has been increased from +3 to +4 to compensate (this doesn't change difficulty it just makes sure one less difficulty level will meet the Prismatic threshold)
Initial Countdown timer increased from 45 seconds up to 60 seconds to help smooth out cases where it felt like bad luck would make runs impossible
The Lucky green modifier (+250% chance to find higher rarity loot in chests) cost has been reduced from -3 to -2. This means with the change above you can run it while also turning off Countdown, mimicking the previous True Ultra Chaos experience that players liked in previous updates
Reduced the unlock requirements for ALL green and red modifiers by one medal. This means a modifier that previously required Ruby to unlock will now require Emerald
Fixed the Countdown modifier ticking down time on Crab Island
Fixed some weapons not respecting the new limited loot system and offering mods like Double Shot or Homing Shot even when at 100%
Fixed broken textures on the Immortal Snail and made its shell brown for better contrast / visuals
Made a fix to prevent certain previously unlocked challenges from re-locking when more weapons / achievements are added to the game in the future. These challenges are: Silver, Gold, Sapphire, Emerald, Ruby, Diamond, Prismatic, Gunslinger and Crab Legend. Unfortunately this fix isn’t retroactive so if you have launched the game and lost your previously unlocked Crab Legend skin, this will be the last time you have to unlock it and from then on it will be permanently unlocked even if more challenges / achievements get added and you technically no longer satisfy the unlock requirement
Fixed large enemies getting stuck on trees on the arctic island with the stone spire in the middle
Original post
02 Nov 2025Developer post
The Island Update (Early Access Update 11)
Patch Highlights ALL NEW ISLANDS NEW WEAPON: POISON CANNON DIFFICULTY SYSTEM REVAMP WITH NEW RANK: PRISMATIC Patch Notes NEW ISLANDS + VISUALS Added all new visuals and brand new islands to the game. These have all been designed with much more consistent enemy spawns in mind so l
Patch Highlights
ALL NEW ISLANDS
NEW WEAPON: POISON CANNON
DIFFICULTY SYSTEM REVAMP WITH NEW RANK: PRISMATIC
Patch Notes
NEW ISLANDS + VISUALS
Added all new visuals and brand new islands to the game. These have all been designed with much more consistent enemy spawns in mind so less enemies sneaking up from behind you! Many of the islands have been designed to keep the spirit of the older islands but with a fresh coat of paint
Added completely new lighting setups for all biomes to give them a more distinct look
Enabled reflections (most noticeable on water) and added ripples to lava
The static blue boundary walls seen in previous updates has been updated to be a new freeform out of bounds system allowing me to design much more open islands and prevents clunky situations that used to happen by bumping into blue walls unexpectedly. You can also knock enemies out of bounds and cause them to take big damage
DIFFICULTY SYSTEM REVAMP
Completely revamped the difficulty system- with the introduction of new modifiers for Ultra Chaos there were people wishing to play with certain modifiers off (such as Locked Slots or Manual Collection) that were baked into Ultra Chaos by default so I’ve done my best to consolidate and streamline the difficulty system to be both easier to understand but also allow for more player choice. I’ve taken this opportunity to add a small selection of fun and helpful green difficulty modifiers (more to be added soon): these can range from a mild starting bonus to being extremely overpowered but it is all factored into the difficulty system: if you want to do a chill run with hugely boosted luck- go ahead! It won’t earn you a Diamond medal but sometimes you just want to blast and not care about difficulty. Alternatively if you want to go full tryhard, you can also do that too with the best medals requiring most difficulty modifiers on with minimal / no helpful modifiers allowed. This allows the game to cater to all playstyles and moods without specific modifiers to gameplay built into the baseline difficulties as before. This is just a start and I’ll likely be expanding both green and red modifiers with fun new options in the future
Added 6 new difficulty modifiers for challenge enthusiasts: Wandering Elites, Countdown, Slow Recovery, Athletic Enemies, Manual Collection and Immortal Snail
Existing difficulty stats for the old system (attempt / win / winstreak / highest island reached) have been ported over to the new system: Easy -> Bronze, Normal -> Gold, Nightmare -> Diamond and Ultra Chaos -> Prismatic
Added a bunch of new difficulty modifiers for the new Prismatic rank: difficulty enthusiasts should expect a fresh challenge to overcome with all of these modifiers enabled!
LIMITED LOOT SYSTEM
Introducing limited loot- this is a feature that prevents mods that you have maxed out numerically from polluting the loot pool. An example: Double Shot level 1 gives you a 56% chance to fire 2 shots when using the Sniper. Level 2 gives you 100% chance. There is no reason for this mod to show up again. With this change it will no longer show up in reward chests and in the shop (if everyone on your multiplayer team has also maxed out Double Shot)
The following Weapon Mods now have this feature enabled and scale linearly instead of hyperbolically (+10% per level instead of +10%, +8%, +6% etc. per level) so this is both a nice buff and QOL improvement: Arcane Shot, Arc Shot, Double Shot, Double Tap, Fire Shot, Homing Shot, Ice Shot, Lightning Shot, Poison Shot, Random Shot, Scatter Shot, Split Shot, Square Shot, Targeting Shot, Triple Shot, X Shot
The following Ability Mods now have this feature enabled and scale linearly instead of hyperbolically: Triple Ability, Layered Explosion, Split Ability
The following Perks now have this feature enabled and scale linearly instead of hyperbolically: Crystal Asteroids, Efficiency, Mega Crit, Performance Bonus
NEW CONTENT
Added new weapon: Poison Cannon: Bursts into poison clouds that wear your enemies down over time. Increases to weapon damage also affect the poison cloud damage. Slow fire rate- choose your shots wisely!
Added new island type: Gauntlet. Clear up to 5 waves of enemies while choosing a stacking challenge and reward modifier for each wave. Choose to end early and take what you have earned so far or push it to the limit and get the best rewards if you can survive- It is a test of attrition so the No Healing modifier is always chosen on the first wave!
Added new totem: Upgrade Totem: Costs crystals to upgrade a specific mod or perk. Appears in shops similar to the Enhancement Totem. This has the potential to be very powerful but the goal is to give players a bit more agency over what they want to upgrade (at a greater cost than happening to find that mod or perk in shops) and allow for more min-max builds. The cost is a 20% increase per level compared to that same mod or perk if it was found in a shop
Added Randomizer to the lobby: this allows you to quickly randomize your starting loadout without having to walk around and manually choose loot from the different areas
Added new enemy: Floating Skull
Added new weapon mod: Double Shot: Chance to fire in a double shot formation
Added new weapon mod: Knockback Shot: Shots knock enemies back, causing them to take knockback damage
Added new perk: Magnify: Area of effect increased (affects all damage sources and is multiplicative with other increases to damage radius)
Added new perk: Bounty Hunter: Large enemies have a small chance to drop loot when eliminated. (I really love Rare Treasure but barely ever get to see it so this gives the same feeling but in the common loot pool)
Added new perk: Totem Enthusiast: More totems spawn
Added new perk: Survivor: Block chance increased and incoming damage reduced
Added new perk: Anti Crit: Damage increased but critical hit chance reduced
Added new relic: Ring Of Potential: Secret chests are 5 times less likely to spawn but are replaced by Legendary chests
Added new challenge modifier: Fiery Enemies: All enemy attacks ignite you,
Added new challenge modifier: Poisonous Enemies: All enemy attacks poison you,
Added new challenge modifier: Freezing Ground: Patches of icy ground appear on this island,
Added new challenge modifier: Burning Ground: Patches of burning ground appear on this island,
Added new challenge modifier: Thick Skin: Enemies spawn in with heavy damage reduction that decays over time,
Added new challenge modifier: Heavy Crab: Movement speed reduced by 50%,
Added new challenge modifier: Starfish Party: a bonus pack of starfish spawn with the other enemies
Added a new stat to the inventory: Block Chance: this is what Bulletproof and Ring Of Deflection use but exposing it as a stat allows me to build a few new cool perks to trigger when blocking and also make building your layers of defense a bit more enjoyable as you can see them all together in the inventory screen
Added 4 new songs
GENERAL BALANCE CHANGES
Relic slots increased from 8 to 10
Fire no longer melts ice and ice no longer extinguishes fire. This mechanic was “oh that’s neat” the first time you see it but it just ruined too many builds especially in multiplayer or with a fire / ice randomizer combo
Hot Steam has been reworked to apply a burst of fire damage every time an enemy gets ignited
Lightning stacks now only decay if lightning damage is actually dealt. This means you can “charge up” a tanky enemy with lightning stacks and then it will discharge them when pathing near another enemy
Knockback damage dealt to enemies has been globally increased by 1000%
Doubled the chance for relics to naturally show up in chests / the shop
Secret Chest spawn chance increased from 10% to 15% per island
Slide speed has been increased by approx 10%. This is purely a “game feel” thing I’ve noticed after playtesting heavily the last few days- sliding just felt a bit sluggish and this game is all about that smooth movement. Interested to see if you notice a difference
Air Control (how much your crab is influenced by movement keys while in the air) has been increased by 20%. This is subtle but you should feel a bit more in control of your crab while airborne
Totem spawns have been made more consistent with each island having a specific area where totems can spawn. Multiple can now spawn in a row in that location. This change fixes frustrating cases like where fuse totems could spawn behind you and explode before you noticed them
XL Totems are now 20% more common
Health Totems are now 500% more common (it was too rare before)
Improved enemy spawn variety to reduce the feeling of every island feeling like “a bunch of small crabs / slugs and a few larger enemies”
Elite / Boss islands now use the same island pool as Arena islands for more variety and no more repeated island layouts on the same biome
Resurrecting Enemies difficulty modifier has been removed and Resurrecting is now an enemy buff
Expensive Shops difficulty modifier has been removed (this is what I’ve been balancing the game around for a while so it is on by default now)
The Flawless blessing is now 50% more likely to be chosen over the other blessing types as it is generally more rewarding / fun
Armored Enemies challenge modifier has been removed and instead replaced with an “Armored” enemy buff. The reason here is that as a challenge modifier it was either really not fun (using a weapon like the sniper) or extremely broken (using level 1 of ANY armor perk) with very little in between. As a buff you’ll now be able to make better use of Armor perks (which are still super underrated IMO)
Barrel Rain as a challenge modifier didn’t really feel like it was threatening so barrels now have a 25% larger explosion radius and enemies are less affected by hazard damage while this modifier is active
Landmine Rain landmines now explode much more quickly but deal 50% less damage and also don’t leave behind a damage area anymore. They were in a weird place before where they never really felt threatening but often clogged up the island with AOE bubbles
Barrel Rain and Landmine Rain challenge modifiers spawn half as many destructibles for better performance and to be less spammy
Removed knockback from enemy spikes when the Spike Strikes modifier is on as it was annoying
While rebalancing Ultra Chaos, I found the “all enemies can jump” feature of the difficulty to be more annoying than fun on smaller enemies so it has been moved to be part of the “Athletic Enemies” difficulty modifier (only for large enemies) and new challenge modifier “Jumpy Enemies” (for all enemies) instead
To solve a few edge case issues with the Explosive Enemies modifier it has been changed from “Only explosive enemies spawn” to “Explosive enemies are much more likely to spawn, explode with great force and have greater resistance to hazard damage”
Increased Manual Collection crystal pickup radius by 25%
I added a guaranteed health pedestal to every shop in the previous hotfix but quickly realized that most people were still getting used to the new health system and this likely wasn’t needed as it often made shops have very few damage choices and duplicate health loot. Since there is a guaranteed Regeneration Chest on island 1 and a guaranteed Health Chest after elite islands, I think this is enough consistency for health in a run
Reduced cactus explosion radius by 50% to prevent players taking unfair damage
Random Portals are slightly less common as they were 2.5 times more likely to be spawned compared to other portal types
Rush elimination goals were laughably easy so they have been increased a bit to be more in line with the intended challenge level
Removed Gold and Silver armor from the game- it just felt terrible any time you would get them instead of a legendary / epic mod or perk
Renamed Bronze Armor to just Armor and increased the number of plates it gives from 1 to 2
Removed Medium and Large crystal bundles from the game for the same reason as above and renamed Small Crystal Bundle to Crystal Bundle and increased the payout by 33%
Ice stacks from ice rock damage areas has been reduced by 60% as it was super overtuned
Removed Autoloader to de-bloat the luck loot pool a bit and since Efficiency is a very similar perk but with more utility (can trigger from any damage)
Uppercut has been removed from the game temporarily. It will be re-added in a revamped state with a fist that hits enemies in a future update
Aerial Shot has been removed as it was just quite invisible and boring. I might rework it to give bonus damage based on your height so actually playing differently would make it work better which is much more interesting
Light Shot has been removed from the game and has been replaced with a Greed relic: Trigger Ring: Fire rate increased by 250% but weapon damage reduced by 90%
Accelerating Ability has been removed from the game
Sonic Boom is now a weapon mod instead of a perk
Enhancement Totem chance to explode on use increased from 50% to 75% (there is more planned to make this feel better in the future but currently they felt a bit too easy to spam enhancements on a single mod with no increases in cost- a lot of power for a single totem)
Booming enhancement reduced from 200% to 100% (as it is multiplicative with Magnify and was due a tweak anyhow as it was very strong)
Efficiency is now a weapon mod called Efficient Shot instead of a perk
Icebreaker is now a relic instead of a perk
Lingering Fumes is now a relic instead of a perk
High Roller is now a relic instead of a perk (33% chance for 2 extra chests to spawn, 33% chance for no extra chests to spawn, 33% chance for no chests to spawn at all when clearing islands)
Split Shot is now Legendary instead of Epic and the trigger chance has been increased by 20%
Epic and Legendary loot is 15% more likely to spawn in shops (just to make shops in the first loop a bit more fun and exciting)
Auto Rifle fire rate decreased slightly but projectile damage increased from 9 to 10
Rocket Launcher fire rate increased by 20%
Auto Shotgun trigger roll multiplier increased by 16.6%
Crossbow damage increased from 5 to 12 and weapon mod trigger roll multiplier slightly increased (makes Fire Shot go from 12% to 15% per projectile) but fire rate reduced by 20%
Marksman Rifle damage increased from 12 to 15
Cluster Launcher fire rate decreased by 15% and mag size reduced from 10 to 8 but projectile damage and radius has been doubled. This makes it feel more like a hard hitting launcher with splash damage than something too similar to the Auto Shotgun
Flamethrower fire damage area radius increased by 20%
Sniper Rifle hipfire spread reduced by 400% (it is now much more accurate when firing without aiming down sights)
Lightning Scepter weapon mod trigger roll multiplier reduced by 20%
I’ve made some improvements to make the number of debuff stacks applied by Blade Launcher, Flamethrower and Lightning Scepter feel much more consistent (especially on the Flamethrower)
WEAPON MOD BALANCE CHANGES
Wind Up damage increase per shot increased from +2% to +5% but the bullet cap per level has been reduced from 100 to 40. This should make it feel better on weapons that have smaller mag sizes
Mag Shot damage increase per bullet in the mag increased from +2% to +3%
Aura Shot now requires you to have Glue Shot before it can show up as it is pretty useless on most weapons without Glue Shot and was bloating the Epic loot pool
Damage over time mods have been commonly reported as feeling like the obvious choice over other similar mods as the increased damage is always a net positive. Rather than nerfing these mods to be in line, I have made damage over time apply over a 2x longer time period so it takes longer for the entire damage amount to get applied. Crits also were happening on DOT builds really often as a single shot that normally would roll a crit once was able to roll a crit 30+ times! This has been normalized to only roll crits once per second on DOT damage which is still an increased crit chance compared to doing a single shot as DOT lasts for several seconds. The only DOT outlier that had to be rebalanced was Time Ring, it was way too free and could single handedly carry builds- it has had the bonus damage reduced from +400% to +250% which is much more reasonable while still staying strong
Heavy Hitter damage increased from +75% to +150% but the fire rate downside increased from -10% to -20% to make it feel like a more distinct mod
Bouncing Shot damage increased from +100% to +150% damage per bounce to encourage a playstyle where you are bouncing shots on the floor before hitting enemies and sacrificing on hit mods
Reload Arc damage increased from 40 to 75, damage radius increased by 33% and projectile speed increased by 33%
Ultra shot damage increased from 25 to 40
Time Bolt damage increased from 40 to 60
Big Shot and Big Ability now have a 50% speed reduction by default but they don’t get slower with more levels as previously they would quickly get to the point where projectiles would just spawn in place and barely move at all
Big Shot and Big Ability now scale up with diminishing returns as one of the main sources of performance and clarity drops were from big projectiles covering the entire screen. The first few levels are similar to before but the size falls off with more levels compared to before
ABILITY BALANCE CHANGES
Air Strike radius increased by 20%
ABILITY MOD BALANCE CHANGES
Increased the number of projectiles spawned by Firework Explosion from 3 to 6
Spike Strike / Strike Explosion damage increased from 500 to 1000 and damage radius increased by 25%
Increased the radius of all Strike mods as it felt like they were underperforming
Turrets were feeling a bit too “the game is playing itself” and while I do want to support the automation playstyle, it should take a bit more effort to scale. I’ve reduced the damage increase of Enhanced Turrets from +100% to +50%: this change is justified as it affects ALL turrets at once and it made little sense that a common perk scaled more effectively than picking up multiple of an epic or legendary turret perk
Barrel Explosion explosion radius increased by 33%
Imploding Explosion damage buffed from 50% to 100% but the radius is reduced from -15% to -20%
MELEE WEAPON BALANCE CHANGES
Dagger damage radius increased by 25%
Claw melee damage doubled and knockback strength increased by 33% but cooldown increased from 1 to 3 seconds to make timing a melee with the Claw a bit more important (at least at the start of each run) and to help it lean into the “knock enemies away” role to differentiate it a bit more from the Dagger
With the new heavily increased knockback damage, Hammer is by far the strongest melee weapon in terms of effective damage so the cooldown has increased from 5 to 6 seconds
MELEE MOD BALANCE CHANGES
Vampire base heal per elimination increased from 4 to 5
PERK BALANCE CHANGES
Bulletproof moved from Epic to Common rarity and chance to block damage reduced from 8% to 6%. Also moved from the Luck loot pool to the Health loot pool
Damage Reduction now works as a flat subtraction to the Incoming Damage stat (the opposite of what Hot Shot does) instead of multiplying AFTER other Incoming Damage increases which gave it much more value than intended
Hard Target damage reduction reduced from 10% to 8% but it now scales linearly (so it gains exactly 8% each level instead of falling off to lesser values with each level as before). This means it can now scale higher than 75% to counter increases to incoming damage such as from Hot Shot so instead of Hard Target being capped at 75%, incoming damage is now capped at 25%, allowing you to get more value out of damage reduction
Exploding Enemies moved from Legendary to Epic rarity
Silver Lining damage bonus per trigger doubled
Reworked Shockwave to instead trigger on taking damage instead of on reloading. Also increased the knockback when it triggers by 250% and decreased the cooldown from 6 to 2 seconds
Flammable Armor moved from Common to Epic rarity and fire stacks reduced from 40 to 30
Sonic Boom and Shockwave moved from the Damage chest to the Skill chest loot pool
Icebreaker, Explosive Armor, Poisonous Armor, Flammable Armor, Exploding Enemies, Lingering Fumes, Freezing Enemies, Flammable Enemies, Electric Enemies and Poisonous Enemies no longer gain AOE per level but instead start with a 100% larger radius (you can scale further with the new Magnify perk)
Efficiency chance to gain ammo reduced from 20% to 15%
RELIC BALANCE CHANGES
Turbo Ring fire rate increased from 2% to 3% after clearing each island
Ring Of Defense damage reduction reduced from 40% to 30%
Overspill Goblet was feeling underwhelming it so now acts as a bonus multiplier instead of just adding to the critical hit multiplier as before
ENEMY BALANCE CHANGES
New enemy health scaling: it is roughly the same as before except all scaling gets applied on the elite island of each biome instead of gradually over each island which often felt like you were always just barely keeping up- now you should be able to enjoy a mini snowball in each biome before the next biome kicks in. This is a direct buff to the first biome in each run as no scaling applies until hitting the second biome which should allow more room for your build to take off especially on the harder difficulties
All enemy ranges increased (notably the Elite Beam Skull who had a short range that would just not reach the player on most of the larger islands)
Reduced the amount of poison stacks inflicted by Elite Poison Grubs by 50%
Added height variance to floating enemies which actually makes a big difference in how fighting them feels
Enemy spawns have been greatly sped up when looping to prevent situations where you are clearing islands faster than enemies can spawn, resulting in boring waiting around
Increased the speed of Horde island enemy spawns
Horde islands now have a set time of 30 seconds (+30 seconds per XL totem) instead of having different time limits depending on when in the biome you chose them. This improves early biome horde rewards substantially as they could be as short as 20 seconds previously
Enemy movement speed on the first loop of Ultra Chaos has been reduced a bit to allow it to ramp up to even faster speeds when looping- I want there to still be contrast in UC runs in terms of steadily rising intensity and also wanted the first few biomes to be a bit more enjoyable in terms of fighting enemies with your baseline loadout before your build comes online
Added new line of sight checks to prevent hammer crabs doing their line attacks through walls
Enemy homing thorns projectile lifetime increased from 2 to 3 seconds
Elite Barrel Skull projectiles now have less gravity and more speed for more interesting encounters. Reworked some of the attack formations to be more interesting also
Elite Barrel Skull attacks now all use homing barrels (sorry)
Elite Barrel Skull barrel explosion radius increased by 25% as they didn’t feel threatening
Scorpion armor plates reduced from 3 to 1
Laser Crab projectile damage area radius reduced by 50%
Grenade Crab projectile speed increased to be more threatening- he now really hurls that thing!
Hornet / Elite Hornet dash from side to side 50% less
Hornet / Elite Hornet energy rings have a much shorter lifetime but move faster- this reduces spam and makes them more engaging to fight / dodge
Elite Hornet projectile speed slightly increased
Resin Hornet destructibles are 50% less likely to spawn (they were a bit tedious to constantly fight)
Ice Ant projectile explosion radius increased by 33% as they were fairly non threatening before especially for a Hard enemy
Poison Skull projectile speed increased, poison strength increased and their projectiles now leave behind little poison areas. Fire Ant got a similar treatment- both of these enemies are supposed to be in the “Hard” category (next to things like Sniper Crabs) but were fairly harmless even in large numbers
Lightning Skull attacks reworked to be more interesting (before they were just basic single projectiles that didn’t match the “Hard” enemy category)
Added melee attack to Homing Grub as they would just completely miss all of their projectiles when trying to attack you up close
Poison damage areas spawned from enemies no longer deal damage and just apply poison
Enemy spawn variety doubled when looping (this should make looping feel a bit more distinct and chaotic)
XL islands double the variety of enemies spawned to prevent tediously fighting 10x of the same hard enemy
Reduced the amount that explosive enemies knock back other nearby enemies when eliminated by 50%. The exception to this is when the Explosive Enemies modifier is active as increased knockback is part of the chaos of that modifier
Enemies gain 38% less health per Horde wave as it felt like enemies got too tanky too fast into Horde islands
Increased the maximum number of enemies allowed to be spawned at once in the Arcade minigame from 80 to 100
QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES
Heavily improved Air Strike on islands with low ceilings or caves- it should now consistently hit where you want it to hit and deal damage as expected
Temporary invulnerability (triggered after being respawned when falling into a pit or when being revived) increased from 2 to 3 seconds to help cases where you would spawn back in a big group of enemies and needed a bit more time to get to safety to prevent taking unfair damage
Revival zones now spawn in a safe area if a teammate gets eliminated by falling off the map (previously this spawned the revival zone out of bounds which made it impossible to revive)
Enhancement Totems no longer show up in the shop if you have nothing to enhance in your inventory
Totems that take health / max health now display the exact amount of health that they will take in addition to the percentage for more clarity
Added some long overdue extra info about what Poison / Fire / Lightning / Ice and Arcane Shot mods actually do to their descriptions
Enemies now take a small amount of damage while in lava so that their health bars show up and they are easier to locate. Before there would often be one straggling enemy slowly walking deep in the lava and this was especially frustrating with the Countdown modifier active where every second counts!
Enemies can no longer resurrect if there are less than 5 enemies remaining in a wave. This prevents frustrating situations where you just about clear an island before the countdown expires but the game decides to resurrect these enemies and you lose. It also fixes a few edge cases where enemies would spawn after clearing a Gauntlet wave
Added a 3 second delay after an island starts before Leap Of Faith can deal damage
You now maintain horizontal momentum when getting knocked back from enemy projectiles which means no more getting stun locked in place by a chain of enemy projectiles as it used to be frustrating to lose all momentum and take multiple unavoidable hits because of this. Also reduced the amount of vertical knockback by 50% to help with this
Made various improvements to the backup save system to further protect against losing data if your main save becomes corrupted (including adding 2 more backup save layers)
Improved Steam Cloud save filtering to not sync backups
Shielded enemies are no longer targeted by aim assist or homing projectiles
Improved performance in situations where there were a lot of enemies affected by lightning at once
Optimized various projectiles like Link Shot, Drill Shot, Piercing Wave, Mace Shot and Firework Shot which could cause noticeable FPS drops in some cases
Adjusted projectile hitboxes to better match their visuals. This results in much better performance when a lot of projectiles are onscreen at once
Extended physics object out of bounds areas so crowns can be launched further and while underwater
Reduced the radius that the game checks for nearby players when spawning enemies to fix cases where multiplayer lobbies with many players were blocking enemy spawn points, causing them to spawn slower than intended
Improved stars being very bright when playing on Low graphics settings
Audio no longer pauses when the game loses focus (assuming you have the “Pause When Losing Focus” option set to off)
Enlarged the UI numbers of all buffs and debuffs on the player health bar to be easier to read and notice
Optimized the water ripples system and enabled it even on low graphics settings since I didn’t realize how bad the ocean looked on low settings previously without it
Switched shadowing method on crabs and enemies to be higher quality (less flickering and blurriness)
Made several optimizations to improve performance when many enemies are on screen at once
Improved shadow quality and performance on environmental assets
Added fade in animations for gameplay and game state UI so that you don’t see them “pop” from their default to initialized states
Chests and anvils no longer have collision (this was to fix a bug but it actually feels nice to not have them get in the way while you are trying to loot)
Bounty Hunter and Rare Treasure now track how many pickups they have spawned (you can see this number in the inventory)
Destructibles (like explosive rocks or Ultra Mushroom) now get destroyed when in the way of a chest spawn to prevent them hanging in the air and making them annoying to loot
Because of the difficulty changes a few challenges have new completion conditions. Some of the original challenges made very little sense as beating the game on Nightmare would just complete 3 tiers of challenges at once so the changes have been made to account for the new mastery ceiling in the game with Prismatic difficulty. If you have already completed these challenges / achievements you will not have to redo them:
CRAB CHAMPION II: Get 3 wins total on Sapphire or higher difficulty
CRAB CHAMPION III: Get 5 wins total on Ruby or higher difficulty
PRO: Get 3 wins in a row on Ruby or higher difficulty
MASTER: Get 2 wins in a row on Prismatic difficulty
CHALLENGER I: Get a win with 5 or more red difficulty modifiers and 0 green difficulty modifiers active
CHALLENGER 2: Get a win with 10 or more red difficulty modifiers and 0 green difficulty modifiers active
CHALLENGER 3: Get a win with all red difficulty modifiers and 0 green difficulty modifiers active
FLAWLESS: Get a win on Gold or higher difficulty without taking any damage
FRUGAL: Get a win on Gold or higher difficulty with 5 or less shop purchases
FLEX III: Clear the first biome on Ruby or higher difficulty without taking any damage
ULTRA CHAOS CHAMPION: Get a win with at least 14 red modifiers active and only the Random Loadout green modifier active
BUG FIXES
Fixed enemies being able to shoot through walls in certain rare circumstances
Fixed Elemental Specialist and Elemental Expert not working with Ice damage
Fixed Ring Of Power not applying damage if you have zero weapon mods in your inventory
Fixed Meteor Shower not scaling damage per island, it should be more threatening on later islands now!
Fixed being able to float indefinitely with the Lightning Scepter if firing it before entering a portal
Fixed Streamer Loot “upgrading” Legendary loot to… Legendary
Fixed cases where players would jitter on the spot and rotate back and forth when on slopes which could also throw off your movement when sliding over uneven surfaces
Added a short delay before the game over UI can be skipped which fixes several bugs where non-host players didn’t get medals for weapons when finishing runs
Fixed a bug when continuing a run that could cause “ghost” armor plates to appear to be active but you’d still take damage directly to your health
Fixed a rare bug where you could get stuck in trees (for real this time!)
Fixed revived players not seeing active challenge modifiers or blessings
Fixed fall damage being based on current health instead of current max health as intended
Fixed enemy homing barrels homing to other enemies instead of the player in some cases
Fixed being invulnerable to fire damage that you created yourself (like from exploding fire rocks and standing in the fire puddle) even with fire stacks visible on your health bar
Fixed UI not showing the current level of melee mods when picking them up
Fixed the Looper achievement completing without actually getting through an entire loop
Fixed enemy projectiles not firing from weapon muzzles
Fixed enemies that fire delayed homing projectiles from completely missing when up close
Fixed Ice Shot not applying consistent debuff stacks on Blade Launcher and Flamethrower
Fixed chests and anvils spawning under steep terrain in some cases
Fixed being able to take damage from explosive enemies at great distance with Slugger equipped and the Explosive Enemies modifier active
Fixed Marksman Rifle and Lightning Scepter not adding formation mods like Double Shot or X Shot to the base projectiles (the formations were being replaced which was a nerf to default fire patterns in the case of Double Shot)
Fixed crowns sometimes spawning on active islands instead of only in the lobby
Fixed Starfish indefinitely rising upwards if they got interrupted while winding up for an attack
Fixed armor UI notifications not playing when taking damage on a One Hit island
Fixed exploit that allowed players to get multiple uses of the key totem by leaving and rejoining the same lobby which was unintended
Fixed Meteor Showers being invisible in rare cases where a lot of VFX were visible at the same time
Fixed bug where on reload perks such as Sonic Boom would weirdly sometimes trigger when a reload had finished instead of on starting to reload
Fixed bug where on reload perks weren’t guaranteed to trigger in rare cases when a non hosting player was reloading
Fixed bug that caused high levels of Blender on the Claw to stop dealing damage
Fixed the classic “Island 50” bug where sometimes a joining player would have their UI frozen in a default state until rejoining the lobby
Fixed chests and other meshes looking really bad when using Low graphics settings
Fixed Accelerating Shot and Boomerang Shot not working together- projectiles now boomerang as expected. This also fixes the same problem with the Accelerating and Returning enhancements on the same projectile which previously had a workaround to just not make the projectile move much at all which wasn’t intended
Fixed Elite Hornet resin hornet destructibles being able to spawn infinite loot with Driller
Fixed chests spawning in much later than intended for non hosting players in multiplayer games
Fixed text going off screen when picking up certain pickups with long descriptions
OTHER NOTES
I will be releasing some kind of news / roadmap post in the next few months detailing my plans as the game shapes up towards 1.0 as I know this is something many people are curious about (when will Tony get added to the shop, what content is still planned for the game etc.)
Parkour islands have been temporarily removed for this update while I work on a new fully procedural parkour system which will allow for fresh parkour courses each time you play as well as an infinite parkour minigame!
As part of my big cleanup of the game assets and code I have removed the Duel minigame for many reasons: it had essentially zero player engagement / interest (understandable as it was barebones to begin with), there are no servers or anti cheat to support matching against random players (the main reason to play PvP) and it has cluttered the code / lowered performance even when not playing it due to how the game is set up. I had explored options to expand it such as supporting more weapons but the game simply just isn’t built for fun PvP- players move too fast and hitboxes are too small to make any weapon other than the rocket launcher viable. Changing movement speeds and creating special weapons with large hitboxes just felt like a janky workaround rather than a fun layer that complimented the main game mode and speeds that players are used to. It feels like a growing trend in gaming lately where games are adding lots of different modes from different genres trying to be “something for everyone” and I want to do the opposite and put all my efforts into making a really good main mode (since that is what people are actually playing) without trying to cater to both PvE and PvP and doing a poor job. All that said, I’ll be adding an endless parkour minigame (the systems there will be used to create unique parkour islands in the main mode) as well as a target practice minigame to round out the total number of minigames to 4 in future updates as both of those fit the actual core game loop a lot better and don’t rely on inviting others to your lobby to play
HOTFIX #1 PATCH NOTES
Changed the Nightmare red difficulty modifier to be +4 difficulty level so this gives you an additional difficulty point to spend on either a green modifier or disabling another one of the 1 point red modifiers. This should give enough flexibility to still get Prismatic while running the least annoying modifiers to you personally (everyone seems to have different opinions on which they prefer / hate so this new modular system seems to be working well to allow people to have more agency)
The Lucky green difficulty modifier now costs -3 (previously -4) and the bonus luck reduced from -300% to -250%. This means you can run this modifier while still going for the Prismatic medal- just another fun strategy to consider
Greatly expanded out of bounds trigger zones on all islands so the out of bounds warning should pretty much never pop up accidentally when near a wall anymore and also it should feel a lot less restrictive to move a bit away from the main arena areas now. In general out of bounds warnings should feel much more invisible now and only show up when you are REALLY pushing it
You now get teleported from out of bounds even when an island is over (you only take damage when this happens on an active island) to prevent getting softlocked on distant areas of the map
Made the super narrow Desert and Volcanic horde islands much wider
Made Immortal Snail purple for better visibility especially in the Volcanic biome
Decluttered that one arctic island with a lot of trees running through the middle of the arena
Made better Prismatic reward skin
Darkened the background of the difficulty UI and doubled the opacity of deselected modifiers to make them easier to read
Fixed not being able to navigate the difficulty UI with a controller
Fixed Prismatic medal being in grayscale when viewing weapons in the lobby and on the game over UI
Fixed a one off bug that caused a weapon rank to go into an invalid state: there is now a failsafe to reset it back to bronze
Fixed the “Attempts” stat not being increased as expected
HOTFIX #2 PATCH NOTES
I’ve gotten a great response to this update but also have been reading some very valid feedback mainly around Prismatic modifiers. Ideally the Prismatic grind is fun and some of the modifiers especially at their extremes definitely could feel more unfair than fun. I’ve tried to address all of the worst feeling scenarios in this hotfix without diminishing the satisfaction of overcoming the new mastery curve that Prismatic adds to the game
Immortal Snail can no longer randomly jump at you: this was enjoyable for me during the beta as it created some really unpredictable moments but ultimately losing your entire run due to this feels bad (do note that it can still jump if the “Jumpy Enemies” modifier is active on an island but at least that only lasts for one island rather than the entire run). Also slightly reduced its movement speed to just help smooth out the worst case scenarios of this modifier
Removed the “no more one shot protection” aspect of the No Safety Net modifier: it was just too punishing to get completely one shot by the Immortal Snail at full health. This functionality may come back as a completely optional “orange” modifier in a future update for those looking to add challenge (it won’t influence the difficulty rank)
Countdown difficulty level reduced from +2 to +1 so it is much easier to turn off and not feel like you are forced to run it. Many people rightfully felt like they needed to have it on which took away from the fun of the game for them so reducing the points here makes it much less significant / no longer feel mandatory to earn Prismatic. The Ultra Chaos modifier has been increased from +3 to +4 to compensate (this doesn't change difficulty it just makes sure one less difficulty level will meet the Prismatic threshold)
Initial Countdown timer increased from 45 seconds up to 60 seconds to help smooth out cases where it felt like bad luck would make runs impossible
The Lucky green modifier (+250% chance to find higher rarity loot in chests) cost has been reduced from -3 to -2. This means with the change above you can run it while also turning off Countdown, mimicking the previous True Ultra Chaos experience that players liked in previous updates
Reduced the unlock requirements for ALL green and red modifiers by one medal. This means a modifier that previously required Ruby to unlock will now require Emerald
Fixed the Countdown modifier ticking down time on Crab Island
Fixed some weapons not respecting the new limited loot system and offering mods like Double Shot or Homing Shot even when at 100%
Fixed broken textures on the Immortal Snail and made its shell brown for better contrast / visuals
Made a fix to prevent certain previously unlocked challenges from re-locking when more weapons / achievements are added to the game in the future. These challenges are: Silver, Gold, Sapphire, Emerald, Ruby, Diamond, Prismatic, Gunslinger and Crab Legend. Unfortunately this fix isn’t retroactive so if you have launched the game and lost your previously unlocked Crab Legend skin, this will be the last time you have to unlock it and from then on it will be permanently unlocked even if more challenges / achievements get added and you technically no longer satisfy the unlock requirement
Fixed large enemies getting stuck on trees on the arctic island with the stone spire in the middle
Thanks for playing, see you in the next update!

I plan on releasing a game news post with an updated roadmap going over what to expect in the future so stay tuned for that! As always I'll have a beady eye out reading any and all feedback so feel free to ping me anywhere 🦀
Original post
03 Apr 2025Developer post
The Anvil Update Hotfix
Thank you all for the amazing feedback on the last update- I have spent the last while absorbing it and made this hotfix to smooth out the most common pain points 🦀 Lightning Scepter / Arcane Wand Changes Lightning Scepter now only makes you fly while already in the air so you c
Thank you all for the amazing feedback on the last update- I have spent the last while absorbing it and made this hotfix to smooth out the most common pain points 🦀

Lightning Scepter / Arcane Wand Changes

Lightning Scepter now only makes you fly while already in the air so you can fire it while on the ground without getting lifted up
Removed the velocity cap when floating with the Lightning Scepter. This should make it easier to air dodge
Added a delay before the floating happens in the air with the Lightning Scepter. This should make your initial jump / launch feel much smoother instead of jankily losing all momentum as soon as you fired which felt jarring
Lighting Scepter no longer lifts enemies into the air as it could actually create more dangerous situations for you as they were able to still fire in that position
Improved Lightning Scepter projectile visuals to make it harder to lose track of them when a lot is going on or against bright backgrounds
Reworked the lob shot formula (used on Arcane Wand and Lightning Scepter) to make it easier to hit targets that are nearby rather than projectiles sailing over their heads
Increased Lightning Scepter and Arcane Wand projectile speeds by 25% (this combined with the lob change above should make these weapons feel much more comfortable to use)
General Changes

Shop prices were feeling too high and have been reduced across the board: Legendary cost reduced by 23%, Epic cost reduced by 32% and Common cost reduced by 10%. Greed loot now costs the same as Epic loot (previously Greed cost more than Epic)
Added a guaranteed health related piece of loot to every shop
Increased the amount of fire stacks before rapid stack falloff happens from 100 to 250 (this makes early game fire builds much more effective as the rapid falloff takes more stacks to activate)
Reduced the speed at which fire and poison stacks rapidly fall off by 50%. This is a nice buff to late game fire builds and poison builds in general as the stacks won’t be reduced as fast
Scavenger pickup radius increased by 33% and lifetime increased from 8 to 10 seconds
Chance for enemies to resurrect with the Resurrecting Enemies modifier active reduced from 15% to 10% to reduce tedium
Enemy damage was feeling too high on islands past the diamond victory threshold (Island 56+) so it has been reduced by 50%
Enemy projectile prediction is once again less accurate while you are aiming. This is in response to a common bit of feedback that enemies were feeling frustratingly accurate and the previous aiming tech used to dodge attacks was much harder to pull off
Most enemies that leap horizontally do so 33% less in order to feel less random and more grounded when fighting them
Significantly reduced the amount of music volume reduction that happens when certain other sounds play (like explosions or gunshots)
Made several changes to improve quickplay search variety and to prevent stalemates when joining invalid sessions repeatedly
Added optimizations and limits to how many air strike explosion VFX can be visible at once to improve framerate and visual clarity. Also shortened the length of these VFX so they aren’t blocking your view for as long
Added an extra explanation to the Anvil portal description explaining why sometimes players in multiplayer get Random chests instead of anvils as there was some confusion there (they need to have an enhanceable piece of loot, otherwise getting an anvil would be useless for them)
Crystals now get auto collected 1 second faster- just makes the game feel more responsive instead of the double take of “wait do I need to collect them myself?” happening
Balance Changes

All ranged enemies cost 33% more to spawn. This means fewer situations where you are getting spammed by too many projectile enemies at once
All large enemies move 25% slower (other than Elites as you are often facing them in a 1v1 situation)
Grubs cost 100% more to spawn. This means less Grub spam!
Pumpkin and Elite Pumpkin projectile speeds reduced by 20%
Sniper Crabs now have a longer time between shots to feel less spammy
Lightning Ant health reduced by 15%
Critical Blast damage increased from 35 to 40
Power Armor damage per plate increased from +12% to +15% to bring it in line with Damage Combo
Imploding Explosion damage increased from +33% to +50% and the downside reduced from -20% radius to -15% radius
Big Ability downside increased from -3% ability movement speed to -8%. This is still way lower than it was before, it was reduced drastically to iron out a bug and I forgot to increase it again during the beta
Heat Sink and Ability Ring now apply multiplicatively (similar to Blender). This is a nice buff especially in combination with Iron Explosion
Streamer Loot is now 25% less likely to upgrade from Common all the way to Legendary as it was happening quite often. Chance to upgrade from Common to Epic is unchanged
Air Strike was outclassing most other abilities in terms of damage so the base damage has been reduced from 750 to 600 (this is still the equivalent damage of throwing 4 grenades at once!)
Black Hole tick damage increased from 4 to 8
Electro Globe tick damage and ending explosion damage increased by 500%
Marksman Rifle projectile spacing slightly adjusted
Bug Fixes

Fixed Leap Of Faith dealing fall damage after hammer slams
Fixed lag that could happen with spark and homing blade projectiles when enhanced with targeting or expanding enhancements
Fixed Overspill Goblet not calculating damage correctly (it now calculates multiplicatively like Critical Thinking meaning a big buff compared to before which was accidentally additive)
Fixed not being able to parry energy rings or barrel explosions
If you missed it, you can check out the trailer for the Anvil Update here: https://youtu.be/tMuKFIoe5IE?si=MfWoBWh5w_yD4P0z
Original post
24 Mar 2025Developer post
The Anvil Update (Early Access Update 10)
Patch Highlights NEW WEAPON: LIGHTNING SCEPTER NEW ABILITY: AIR STRIKE NEW MELEE WEAPON: KATANA ARCANE WAND REWORK ANVILS NEW ENEMIES Patch Notes Anvil Portal (Enhancements 2.0) I think enhancements were a good addition to the game but they had a few issues: there wasn’t enough c
Patch Highlights
NEW WEAPON: LIGHTNING SCEPTER
NEW ABILITY: AIR STRIKE
NEW MELEE WEAPON: KATANA
ARCANE WAND REWORK
ANVILS
NEW ENEMIES
Patch Notes
Anvil Portal (Enhancements 2.0)

I think enhancements were a good addition to the game but they had a few issues: there wasn’t enough control over which enhancements you got and you weren’t able to target a specific mod to enhance. In this update I have added an Anvil portal reward which spawns 3 enhancement choices after clearing an island. You can then choose to enhance a specific mod from your inventory, allowing for much more targeted builds centered around one main mod. The random enhancement totem in the shop is unchanged (other than not being guaranteed anymore) as it’s a fun alternate way to get enhancements, rolling the dice in the hopes of getting something good
Added new enhancements: Returning, Orbiting, Chipping, Growing, Endangering, Expanding, Persisting, Doubling, Booming, Tripling, Zigging, Accelerating, Spiraling and more!
Increased enhancement limit per mod from 3 to 8
Enhancements now work on Turrets
You can now apply the same enhancement multiple times for stronger effects
Salvaging enhanced pickups now gives you more crystals per enhancement (higher rarity enhancements also give more crystals)
Health 2.0

A Regeneration Chest that only contains healing loot now spawns in addition to the guaranteed damage chest on island 1. I want there to be a nice balance between using health as a currency (on things like Spiked Chests) and being able to recover from small mistakes (like taking several hits from an easy enemy on island 1). Previously it felt a bit frustrating if you took a lot of damage early on in a biome and didn’t happen to find any health loot to recover. It’s also much more exciting when you have a smaller health pool that you can skillfully recover rather than a large health pool that just gets whittled down over time until you get eliminated unceremoniously. The danger zone is when you are constantly a few shots away from death while also being able to recover health by playing a certain way. I strongly believe that the danger zone is where the fun lies and the changes in this update will make playing especially the early game more enjoyable and consistent, rewarding skill and reducing the impact of small mistakes
Base max health increased from 150 to 250
You can no longer die to a single hit that deals damage greater than 85% of your max health at once. This should prevent frustrating situations where you are eliminated instantly out of nowhere. Note that this only applies if you have a max health of 10 or higher and when the One Hit challenge modifier is not active
Max health loot has been reworked and simplified: no more hard to understand behavior when picking up Glass Cannon where future max health gains were reduced by an unknown amount! The new system makes ALL max health related loot affect one of two stats: Base Max Health and Max Health Multiplier. Hearts have been replaced by the Mango and Banana perks as I want to remove as much consumable loot in the game as possible (it’s just more fun to be able to salvage later instead of it being a one off buff)
Regenerator now heals 4 times per second compared to the previous once per second to make it more satisfying to build into. It also heals for 60 seconds per island (up from the previous 45 seconds)
Endurance now heals at the start of each island instead of at the end and it has been buffed to heal 125 health (up from 40)
Slippery Slope now triggers before Endurance to allow for a nice synergy
Grim Reaper no longer heals a % of your max health and instead heals a flat amount per elimination but medium enemies heal 2x more, large enemies heal 5x more and Elite + Boss enemies heal 10x more. This is a necessary change due to the new health system as it was just way too easy to become basically invincible on most islands with a decent max health pool and Grim Reaper
Vampire now works the same way as Grim Reaper: healing reduced for small enemies and increased for large enemies, removing the underwhelming feeling of meleeing a large enemy and getting 3 health (you now heal 30)
The Limited Heals difficulty modifier has been removed as it made healing perks in general more confusing (why am I not healing the amount advertised?) and could be canceled out with a single Amber Resin which made it a weak / boring modifier
Amber Resin is now Epic rarity. Since it scales ALL healing sources it was extremely powerful compared to just leveling up one source of healing over and over so it deserves to be a rarity higher
Added new “Healing” loot tag. Amber Resin will now only show up if you already have a healing perk (this helps reduce useless options from health chests in the early game)
Healing Chests that spawn after clearing Elite islands have been replaced by Health chests and armor has been re-added to the Health chest loot pool
Removed Big Hearts (it’s no longer relevant as hearts aren’t in the game anymore)
Added a “Total health healed” stat in the inventory UI for Grim Reaper, Regenerator, Health Shot, Vampire, Scavenger and Endurance
GENERAL

Added multiplayer revive system
Added new weapon mod: Beam Shot: Chance to fire damaging beams along with your shots
Added new ability mod: Time Explosion: Abilities deal more damage but damage is dealt over time
Added new ability mod: Iron Explosion: Abilities deal much more damage but have a longer cooldown
Added new ability mod: Targeting Explosion: Abilities that directly hit enemies spawn copies that target nearby enemies
Added new ability mod: Split Explosion: Chance for abilities to split into 4 copies while in the air
Added new ability mod: Accelerating Ability: Abilities deal more damage but start slow and accelerate over time
FMJ (perk) removed and replaced with Full Metal Jacket (relic): All damage penetrates enemy armor
Added new melee mod: Time Claws: Melee damage increased but damage is dealt over time
Added new melee mod: Arcane Claws: Melee arcanifies enemies
Added new perk: Elemental Specialist: Damage increased to enemies if they have exactly one debuff (fire, poison, lightning etc.) applied to them
Added new perk: Mango: Max health increased
Added new perk: Banana: Max health multiplier increased (this replaces the consumable banana in previous updates)
Added new Relic: Blacksmith Ring: You can choose 2 enhancements on Anvil islands
Added new Relic: Blacksmith Amulet: Gain 2 more anvil choices on Anvil islands
Added new relic: Ring Of Vigor: Max health multiplier increased by 3% after clearing each island
Added new relic: Upgrade Ring: All chests are guaranteed to contain duplicate loot where possible but the amount of loot choices in chests is reduced by 1
Added new relic: Arcane Ring: Arcane strength and max arcane stacks increased by 250% (no downside yet until more elements are added, Arcane is underperforming a bit anyway so why not!)
Added new greed relic: Ring Of Favoritism: If you have exactly 1 chance based enhanceable weapon mod in your inventory, it is 1000% more likely to trigger
Added new Greed relic: Overspill Goblet: Critical hit chance is halved but also added to critical hit damage multiplier. Sharpshooter and Hot Shot now scale linearly (can go over 100%) to synergize with this which is a significant buff to critical hit chance as there used to be diminishing returns as you got closer to 100% critical hit chance
Added new relic: Time Ring: Damage dealt over time is increased by 400%
Added new enemy: Elite Beam Skull
Added new enemy: Elite Landmine Limpet
Added new enemy: Barrage Skull
Added new difficulty modifier: Ambushing Elites: An elite spawns on the third island of each biome
Elites and Bosses now use a new health bar with their current and max health as a number under their name
Added a new tropical island with deep water
Added an Auto Slide feature that makes sliding happen automatically when you land which makes the game more comfortable to play for long periods of time! You can still manually slide at any time when on the ground and can disable the auto slide functionality in the settings menu if you want
Slide distance has been doubled
I’ve made it so that main weapon damage calculations happen separately again while keeping the optimizations for other types of damage (things like Drill Shot etc.). This means Money Shot, critical hits and elemental damage will now roll PER PELLET on shotguns and other multi projectile weapons as well as spawn individual damage numbers which just feels way better
Rare rarity has been renamed to Common rarity: it didn’t make sense for the loot you find all the time to be called “Rare”
The Waves island type has been removed as it wasn’t distinct enough from Arena islands while also having a “don’t get hit” gimmick already covered by the Flawless blessing or the One Hit challenge modifier. Each island type should be distinct and this really wasn’t doing enough to feel different + wasn’t a popular choice with players
Harvest has been removed from the portal pool and has been reworked as a blessing for Horde islands
Added new Blessing: Harvest: Capture zones to earn bonus crystals on this island
Added new Blessing: Knives Out: Enemies drop 5x crystals if eliminated by melee weapons on this island
Added new challenge modifier: No Healing: Healing is disabled for this island
Removed the Healing Enemies challenge modifier as it was more tedious than challenging
The Regenerating Enemies difficulty modifier has been removed as it was just not fun to be spectating the last player alive as they chip away at enemies that regenerate health. I have moved the same functionality to a “Regenerating” buff that can apply to enemies if you have the Buffed Enemies modifier on
Added new mango and banana icons / visuals
Improved various lighting presets (like the dawn and sunset ones on the Tropical biome) to be much brighter and more colorful to match the mood
Added enemy hit reaction animations
Increased the visual size of most Hard enemies to make them more obviously stand out as being tanky and scary enemies
Added skull and crab death sounds
Added new more responsive crosshairs with consistent outlines regardless of the spread value
Made a big visual pass on all VFX to be much less busy. For people streaming or making videos about the game this should also help with compression and generally make the game more enjoyable to play / watch on smaller screens
Added new turret visuals
Removed the high score system as it was more a test of patience + luck than an indicator of skill. There are better metrics to show off when you complete a run (difficulty, islands survived etc.)
Added 6 new achievements and 2 new skins
GENERAL BALANCE CHANGES
Note that I reached the character limit and couldn't list every single balance change: there has been a comprehensive balance pass across the entire game. I have tried to list the most interesting / notable balance changes here. If interested in the smaller changes you can see detailed patch notes from the beta on this forum post: https://steamcommunity.com/app/774801/discussions/0/596261560284901413/

Elemental damage is now affected by the global damage multiplier
Damage falloff no longer affects elemental damage so this is a nice buff especially for mods that create elemental areas under flying enemies like skulls as those were very ineffective previously
Expensive Shops price increase reduced from +100% to +50%
Eternal Punishment max health penalty reduced by 50% (so taking damage at 200 health will now only remove 1 max health instead of 2 previously)
An arena island is now guaranteed on islands that previously only offered horde portal choices (this makes speedrunning much less luck based)
Increased the time window that the game counts as a “one shot” elimination from 0.1 seconds to 0.25 seconds
Large islands are now chosen for the 5th island on each biome for more variety
Since it’s much easier to regenerate health, Spiked Chests now take 25% of your base max health instead of 40% of your current health to balance this out. The upside of this change is that you’ll be able to open any number of spiked chests on a single island
A common ask was to make post diamond looping (Island 57+) more enjoyable by having steeper scaling to really test the limits of your build instead of steamrolling everything without any challenge. I’ve greatly increased scaling here so ideally the game will be able to keep up for longer and make late game runs more enjoyable
Armor now clears all debuffs when broken so a large amount of fire can no longer burn through your 6 precious plates one by one
Combo is no longer reset on the hit that breaks armor, only hits after that when you have no armor
I didn’t realize how completely broken the key progression is if playing on Nightmare as a new player: you get 56 keys minimum on a looped victory and that isn’t counting things like double or quad keys dropping from chests. Since a new unlock at the key totem is only 3 keys, this kind of kills the satisfying unlock progression that was originally intended so I’ve made an adjustment: the +1 extra key per key pickup buff now only applies when playing Ultra Chaos (as you are likely to burn through a lot of keys) and bosses spawn 2 keys instead of 3. As a buff for long runs, keys now drop for 2 more loops since loop scaling is more challenging
Shops are now 50% cheaper on Easy difficulty as the reduced amount of enemies made it actually quite hard to make meaningful purchases at shops especially in the early game
Removed per player shop price scaling in multiplayer. This makes prices in solo and multiplayer consistent and should make shops feel much more fair in multiplayer runs
Reduced Reroll Totem cost by 50% and chance to explode from 20% to 15%
Health Rocks can now only be destroyed with melee to make it less likely for enemies to break them (this is meant as a buff to the Ring Of Healing so you can more reliably play around them). Max Health Rocks do not have this protection as they are more valuable
There have been a lot of discussions about how discounted infinite pedestals instantly break the balance of the game since you could sell all of your existing inventory and invest into a powerful mod at a heavy discount. While fun, I do agree that this was too much: you scaled on two powerful axes at once: many levels of a good mod AND a discounted price on each of them = too much of a power spike at once. The solution is pretty simple: infinite pedestals can no longer be discounted!
WEAPON BALANCE CHANGES

Arcane Wand reworked: it now lobs a projectile to feel a bit more distinct from the Rocket Launcher
Arcane Wand damage increased from 20 to 25, radius increased by 20% and starting Arcane Shot level increased from 1 to 2
Reduced recoil on most weapons- I did a lot of A/B tests and the game just feels better with less external forces moving the camera since you are already moving around and turning the camera constantly. This also reduces motion sickness and makes aiming feel more consistent
Dual Shotguns damage increased from 6 to 8, base spread reduced by 40% and projectile range increased by 25%
Rocket Launcher damage increased from 50 to 75 but radius reduced by 10%. This should make it more consistent in the early game especially against tanky single targets
Blade Launcher fire rate reduced by 15% to start at a more natural feeling cadence but damage increased to compensate (the damage buff ended up increasing the DPS from about 75 to 100 DPS overall)
Cluster Launcher base max ammo increased from 6 to 10
Flamethrower mod trigger chance multiplier increased by 18%
Doubled the radius of the flamethrower fire areas to more reliably hit floating enemies but slightly reduced the chance of spawning these fire areas- overall it should just feel more consistent
Made various improvements to how Orbiting works- faster orbit and more consistent height. It also works much better with the Ice Staff and nicely floats down to ground height instead of being useless in the sky not hitting anything
WEAPON MOD BALANCE CHANGES

Link Shot, Drill Shot, Targeting Shot, Proximity Barrage and Homing Blades can now trigger even if no other enemies are nearby as this mechanic was confusing before. It also makes Homing Blades feel way better as they homed to the original enemy anyway so it didn’t make sense to require multiple enemies to be nearby for them to trigger
Boomerang Shot and the Returning enhancement now will return to the location that the projectile spawned rather than homing to the player that fired the shot. This means lots of interesting combinations are possible like Rocket Launcher + Boomerang Shot + Split Shot: the split shots will fly off and then turn around and rain back down on the original explosion like artillery
Orbiting Shot and the Orbiting enhancement now orbit around their spawn locations. This makes them much more viable choices in general, not requiring you to be close to enemies to deal damage
Ice, Fire, Lightning, Poison and Arcane Shot now all have the same chance to trigger
Firework Shot / Firework Explosion fireworks now home towards enemies making them finally useful
Increased Pumpkin Shot projectile lifetime and added slight homing to make it much more consistent
Improved Homing Blade, Thorn Shot, Spinning Blade and Torpedo Shot homing logic to be much more reliable
Health Shot no longer has a cooldown and scales the heal amount with base weapon fire rate
Spike Strike weapon mod damage increased from 200 to 500 but cooldown increased from 1 to 3 seconds (this is a buff to the Spike Strike ability mod which uses the same spikes as the weapon mod but has no cooldown)
Proximity Barrage projectile pattern reworked and damage increased from 50 to 75
Homing Blades projectile count reduced by 2 but damage increased by 100%
Ultra Shot projectile speed increased by 40%
Piercing Wave trigger chance increased by 100%
Accelerating Shot no longer requires Bouncing Shot before it can spawn
Increased the starting speed and doubled the max speed of projectiles affected by Accelerating Shot or the Accelerating enhancement to make them more reliably hit targets and not feel like the range is too short
Reload Arc added way too much visual spam so I’ve moved it to use a smaller arc of projectiles but with double the damage to compensate
All projectile pattern mods (Zig Zag Shot, Spiral Shot etc.) now have a fixed pattern that doesn’t get larger per level as this caused them to be practically unusable even if it looked funny. This should make pattern mods a more reliable way to scale weapon damage
X Shot rarity decreased from Legendary to Epic
Gold Dice is now a weapon mod called Dice Shot. It's unchanged in function other than it only affects weapon mods (since there were only 2 ability mods that were chance based and both had already high starting chances)
All Strike and Storm mods have been heavily buffed as they didn't feel Legendary
Reduced the amount of recoil added by Recoil Shot by 75% per level and also added a max cap of 200% to keep it usable in long runs
ABILITY BALANCE CHANGES

Rebalanced Laser Beam to be more competitive with the other abilities (much faster damage tick rate of the laser bubble but shorter duration)
Black Hole damage tick rate doubled
ABILITY MOD BALANCE CHANGES

Replaced Fire Turret with Wave Turret and Poison Turret with Beam Turret since any turret can be enhanced with fire and poison now
Damage Explosion damage increased from +150% to +250%
Crystal Strike damage increased from 300 to 400
Energy Ring damage increased from 10 to 20
Big Explosion movement speed penalty reduced from -15% to -3% per level
MELEE WEAPON BALANCE CHANGES

Dagger damage range increased by 20%
Pickaxe cooldown reduced from 6 to 5 seconds but the line explosion damage radius also reduced by 15%
MELEE MOD BALANCE CHANGES

Added a lenient 3 second period after dealing melee damage for eliminations to still count as being melee eliminations. This makes Vampire and the Knives Out blessing work on mods like Time Claws or Fire Claws
Ice, Fire, Lightning and Poison Claws now scale their debuff stacks differently depending on the melee weapon used. For example the Dagger is unchanged but the Hammer now deals 5 times more debuff stacks than before to compensate for the longer cooldown
PERK BALANCE CHANGES

Increased Scavenger chance to trigger from 5% to 10% and healing increased from 25 to 40 but the pickup lifetime has been decreased by 40% as there was little reason to play aggressively to get the pickups previously. Scavenger is also now guaranteed to trigger on Hard and Elite enemies (10% as usual for other enemies)
Removed Second Wind (increased damage when at low health). It’s not fun to have to be at low health for something to activate and it was just bloating the damage loot pool
Gold Coating (Gain crystals when healing) has been re-added to the game but with a change: it no longer works in shops due to a few strategies that would break the game very early on with it previously
Slippery Slope crystal gain increased by 250% but the amount of health removed at the start of each island has been increased from 20% to 33%
Increased Toxic max poison stack limit from +25% to +40% (so it adds a nice clean +100 max stacks per level)
High Roller is now correctly affected by the Ring Of Luck
Removed the 2 second cooldown from Dagger Dash
Crystal Asteroids trigger chance increased from 5% to 25%
Paycheck crystal amount increased by 33% to be competitive with other economy options
Removed the cooldown from Exploding, Freezing, Flammable, Electric and Poisonous Enemies perks- they should feel more legendary now!
As it was one of the most reported overpowered perks (especially in combination with Time Shot), Critical Blast damage has been reduced from 50 to 35
Since the meta of the game has shifted less from “never get hit” and more towards “get hit but heal back up”, I’ve buffed a few of the flawless related perks
Performance Bonus chance for 2 chests when flawlessly clearing an island increased from 25% to 30%
Damage Combo and Crystal Combo bonuses increased from +10% to +15%
Vitality high health threshold reduced from 85% to 75%
Powerslide fire stacks and damage doubled
Lingering Fumes rarity increased from Common to Epic
A sound and visual effect now plays whenever higher rarity loot spawns directly because of Streamer Loot. There is also now a message that pops up whenever Streamer Loot triggers as well as a stat saved in the inventory showing how many pickups it has affected this run
Driller now only spawns loot for teammates that also have the Driller perk in their inventory which should nicely balance things out. Previously only one teammate needed to have Driller in order to spawn loot for every teammate every time it triggered which was super unbalanced in comparison to solo runs. Note that if a player that doesn’t have Driller breaks a destructible rock, the game will still try and spawn a pickup using the team’s Driller chance
Tony’s Black Card now works similarly to Driller in multiplayer: instead of choosing the player with the highest discount, it adds up the total discount of all players combined and then divides by the total number of players that have Tony’s Black Card in their inventory
As per community feedback, Gold Coating has also been moved to be Epic rarity. It was one of the strongest ways to balloon your economy especially with strategies like deliberately dropping Mango to heal back the rest and get extra income. I am keeping this strategy in the game as it’s a fun way to optimize your build
Silver Lining now only triggers on damage that exceeds 5% of your max health to avoid being able to farm huge amounts of global damage by standing in low damage areas and outhealing the damage
RELIC BALANCE CHANGES

Relic Chests now contain 3 choices
Increased Relic Portal spawn chance by 20%
Ring Of Reinforcement now triggers whenever you gain armor (including gaining armor from other relics), not just when you explicitly pick it up from the ground
Hoarder has been moved from a perk (that already worked similarly to Double Vision) to be a more unique relic: You can pick up all loot in chests but can no longer drop pickups from your inventory or salvage loot
Poison Ring now also affects the max poison stack limit
Ring Of Rocket Jumping now only triggers when you deliberately rocket jump by exploding something at your feet- distant explosions will no longer knock you back so it’s now a much more purposeful mechanic
Combo Ring can now only show up when you already have a combo perk to avoid bloating the loot pool
Reworked Ring Of Healing from fully healing in shops to spawning guaranteed health rocks on each island
Ring Of Fury rarity increased from Common to Epic
Ring Of Wisdom rarity increased from Common to Epic and critical hit chance per island increased from +1% to +2%
Turbo Ring was hugely outperforming other fire rate mods so it has been moved to Epic rarity and the fire rate increase per island decreased from +3% to +2% (Previously it was giving +120% fire rate after 40 islands which is the equivalent of 10 Rapid Fire mods for the price of 1. The new value gives +80% which is more in line but still powerful)
ENEMY BALANCE CHANGES

Enemies no longer spawn in a boring and predictable way (one by one, easy enemies then hard enemies after), they now spawn in randomized packs which makes fights feel much more interesting and dynamic
Rebalanced enemy spawn weights and counts for more variety between waves and to make biomes feel less linear. Also some harder enemies will show up slightly later into a biome to allow for more contrast between early and late biome spawns
Increased the maximum amount of spawned enemies allowed at once from 45 to 50 on Normal difficulty and from 60 to 100 on Nightmare and Ultra Chaos difficulties
Enemies no longer have a 50% resistance to elemental debuff stacks when armored (players still have this resistance)
Elemental enemies no longer have a 25% resistance to their element
XL totems now double the amount of enemies instead of tripling them: with the new mixed enemy spawns mentioned earlier this should mean that XL islands will still be intense without feeling tedious. This change makes XL Horde islands take twice as long instead of three times as long
Enemy health increase per wave on Horde islands decreased from +25% to +5%. This should make XL hordes feel way more enjoyable to play instead of enemies becoming bullet sponges
Slightly reduced the amount of bonus enemy spawns on 2x challenge islands to improve pacing
Starfish launch attack hitbox + animation has been improved to be more consistent and fair
Pufferfish are larger, healthier and have a larger explosion radius to help differentiate them from regular small slugs
Pumpkin health reduced by 25% and time between attacks increased by 33%
Shotgun Crab projectile lifetime reduced by 50% and projectile speed reduced by 25%
Sniper Crab projectile has less gravity and slightly more speed in order to perform better at range and be more “snipery”
Minigun Crab projectile speed reduced
Minigun Crabs now have a spawn limit of 2
Laser Crabs and Hammer Crabs now have a spawn limit of 4
Ice Pumpkin attack is no longer affected by damage falloff but the attack radius is 40% smaller
Elite Ramming Grubs deal less damage and have better telegraphing of where their AOE damage is coming from
Elite Lightning Crab attacks have been reworked
Elite Hornets now have a spawn limit of 2 to prevent situations where the entire ground is covered in hornet energy rings. I’ve also reduced the chance of them spawning resin hornet destructibles for the same reason
Hornets now fly at a lower height to make them take damage from damage areas on the ground
Removed the Healing Enemies challenge modifier as it was more tedious than challenging
Removed randomness from many enemy attacks (I had originally designed some enemy prediction features with a range of values so that they might sometimes aim higher or lower than usual to make them “feel more alive” but I think making all enemies as consistent as possible is much better for the gameplay and skill ceiling)
Rewrote homing projectile logic to allow for many more interesting enemy attack formations as well as smoother projectile movement when using Homing Shot or other homing mods
Grubs no longer hide from the player which slowed down the pace when trying to clear islands fast
Increased crystal amount rewarded for defeating elites by 300% and for defeating bosses by 200% to make them more rewarding especially in the case of those new Island 3 elites
Decreased the chances of enemies jumping / dashing by 25% in Ultra Chaos just because it is more annoying than fun to throw a grenade and see the enemies leap 3 times in a row out of the way (this can still happen, it’s just less likely)
Reduced the time between bursts of the Elite Fire Skull X projectile attack and changed the formation to be a vertical line so projectiles are more focused in a smaller area and less likely to carpet the entire island in fire
Removed the Elite Ice Skull launch slam attack as it rarely hit and felt cheap when it did hit
Reduced the speed of all enemy launch slam attacks (Starfish, Elite Fire Crab) to make them easier to dodge
Elites and Bosses were often a complete joke and melted in seconds due to the power spike from going to the shop. To make this feel a bit more balanced and like a proper duel that tests your build I’ve moved the biome enemy health scaling back one island so the jump in enemy health that normally would happen on the first Desert island now happens on the final Arctic island and so on for the other biomes. To be clear this only affects the last island in each biome (it doesn't happen on the first Tropical Elite island for fairness) and enemy scaling is otherwise unchanged
Limited the amount of bounces many enemy projectiles have as they could be quite unpredictable and cause cheap damage
Fixed large grubs often performing their attacks hidden out of sight at the back of an island, slowing down the pace
QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES

You can now ping owned pickups (including unchosen loot in chests) to allow teammates to pick them up without you having to make space in your inventory just to remove the ownership and immediately drop the loot
Rewrote interaction logic to never allow a portal to be interacted with while there are chests or pickups in front of you (this prevents annoying situations that could happen where you’d try to open a chest and accidentally choose a portal behind it before you took your loot!)
Added unique player colors in multiplayer which affect your nametag and ping to make it easier to identify teammates
Crystals dropped by enemies in Ultra Chaos difficulty now get auto collected when the island ends if they haven’t already expired to prevent tedious backtracking
Many improvements have been made to portal spawns preventing multiple of the same portal type from spawning (like 4x of the same Waves or Elite portal) and increasing the variety of portal choices that can appear
Salvaging happens twice as fast to improve pacing / responsiveness
Improved the positioning of the red energy rings that spawn from rocks to be more visible and less likely to be hidden in the ground
Improved portal VFX to appear faster as previously it could take over a second before the 2X / Flawless icons showed up
No more than one elemental damage area can overlap at the same time to improve visual clarity, performance and overall consistency (it was possible for enemies to layer 10 of the same damage area on one spot which resulted in players getting melted out of nowhere)
Elemental damage areas can no longer spawn underwater
The Mirrored Projectiles challenge modifier now works on damage over time and ability damage but there’s a minimum time between mirrored projectile spawns to prevent extreme amounts of projectiles spawning on frequently ticking damage
You can now move backwards and sideways on ice but it still should feel slippery and hard to change directions quickly
Glass Cannon and other greed perks that negatively impact max health now correctly restore the max health that they took if interacting with a Random Totem
Landmines have a shorter fuse time to make them much more likely to hit enemies and be more fun to use in general
Landmines spawned from the Landmine Rain modifier can now be destroyed much more easily and are less easily knocked around by your shots
Added a separate ammo counter for dual wield weapons
Added an upwards force when knocking back enemies to make it easier to knock them off ledges and generally make melee knockback a bit more consistent
Disabled enemy ragdoll physics for now- it was lowering performance, obscuring vision and causing crashes in some cases
Fixed ultrawide monitor field of view being too zoomed in and not positioning the crab correctly
You can now spam the infinite pedestal much faster than before
Rerolling the shop now has less of a delay before pickups / new prices are visible
Improved UI text legibility by adding a consistent drop shadow. This should make it much easier to see on bright surfaces like sand, snow or the sky
Added a Speed tag to Speed Demon and Ring Of Swiftness and made it mandatory to have at least one speed tagged piece of loot before Speed Is Power will show up
Resin Hornet destructibles can now spawn loot with Driller
All chance based mods now accurately show their actual chance to trigger in the inventory UI so no more guessing when you pick up Gold Dice!
Text chat now respects uppercase and lowercase typing so you aren’t always SHOUTING LIKE THIS
Added a sound when a chat message is received
Exploding slugs no longer deal damage to you when eliminating them at close range in Ultra Chaos difficulty
Entering water no longer cancels your slide- this just felt clunky and annoying. The movement speed penalty is enough by itself
Weapon spread now resets on reloading so no more high spread right after reloading
Added free look to the spectating camera so you can finally look around at what is going on while spectating
Rewrote spiraling projectile logic to not completely break when under 60 FPS. It may look a bit different to before but at least shouldn’t brick builds on lower FPS anymore
Increased the minimum distance that an enemy can spawn (including resurrected enemies) from a player to prevent situations where slugs would appear to spawn under players and make them take unfair damage
Adjusted player spawn points to make sure that they aren’t next to barrels
The game now autosaves on island 4 of each biome (as well as island 1 as before) to make restarting a biome after a disconnect or crash less punishing
Crystals are now auto collected from enemies that get eliminated by fall damage in Ultra Chaos difficulty
Crystals are now auto collected for convenience on shop islands on Ultra Chaos difficulty
Improved Paycheck description to be less confusing (it now mentions that it is based on 20% of the current price of a Common pickup)
Added a low ammo sound
Improved various interactions with accelerating projectiles. Shooting the Flamethrower or Cluster Launcher with Accelerating Shot no longer results in the projectiles falling uselessly to the ground right in front of you
BUG FIXES

Fixed enemies becoming invincible after a certain point in a run so truly endless runs are now possible
Fixed homing barrels staying active and getting in your way when clearing an island
Fixed projectiles fired in formations (like arcs) “leaning” left and right depending on the direction you were moving in. They are now aligned horizontally with your crosshair, improving consistency
Fixed launching enemies winding up for too long and bouncing off the ground before dealing damage from the launch
Fixed Bouncing Explosion not working properly (slow projectiles would appear not to bounce at all). This has also fixed many inconsistent enemy attacks that bounced when they shouldn’t have
Fixed Bouncing Shot giving 3 bounces at level 1 when it should be 1 bounce
Fixed Bouncing Shot not giving a damage bonus to weapons that deal proximity damage such as the blade launcher
Fixed shield VFX being difficult to see on certain enemy types like Blocker Skulls
Fixed many enemy burst attacks doing more damage than intended- enemies can now deal max one of their projectile’s worth of damage in a short timeframe (previously they could sometimes deal damage that counted multiple projectiles at once which felt like unfair damage was dealt)
Fixed teammates being able to set off friendly landmines
Fixed greed loot that wasn’t specifically a perk from being auto looted
Fixed the slow motion effect that happens when a player gets eliminated only happening when the host was eliminated- it now works on all players
Fixed Clone Explosion not having visuals for mods like Aura Explosion
Fixed health rock / max health rock healing areas spawned from the secondary shards that fly out not giving the same amount of health as the main healing area spawned by the rock
Fixed the Streak Shot buff being reset by indirect projectiles such as Scatter Shot or Split Shot missing
Fixed poison stacks on enemies being limited by teammates that didn’t have Toxic equipped- the enemy will now always stay at the highest poison stack limit from all players that have hit it
Fixed crosshair spread not updating on dual wield weapons
Fixed enemy projectiles often completely missing if fired at you while aiming down sights
Fixed enemies sometimes shooting at the ground below them instead of at the player
Fixed certain mod combos (like a few levels Big Shot and Glue Shot on the crossbow) not dealing damage in some cases due to the projectile collision being larger than the explosion radius: this has resulted in an AOE buff for Big Shot on weapons with larger projectiles
Fixed elemental damage from the fire and ice pools created by the Ice Staff and Flamethrower scaling with weapon damage which wasn’t intentional- the goal with these weapons is to spec into Firestarter and Ice Cold rather than just building into damage as usual. I’ve doubled their base elemental stacks to compensate
Fixed Elite Barrel Skulls from not appearing in the Holdout minigame
Fixed Homing Thorns dealing inconsistent damage (sometimes sneaking in 2 or 3 hits)
Fixed various menus that could go offscreen on non 16:9 aspect ratios
Fixed loot location UI not showing up if loot spawns while a player is eliminated
Fixed Leap Of Faith not dealing fall damage
Fixed crystals sometimes spawning that had to be manually collected
Fixed not being able to interact or melee properly with high levels of Big Bones equipped
Fixed Rocket Launcher not consistently exploding when aiming directly down
Fixed Starfish flying upwards infinitely, softlocking the game
Fixed Crystal Asteroids not working on Demolition or Parkour islands
Fixed various awkward chest spawn locations and reduced the distance of chests from portals
Fixed inventory slots being blocked by other UI elements at certain resolutions
Fixed issue where non-host players sometimes didn’t save their autosave at the start of each biome
Fixed Aura Shot resetting Streak Shot
Fixed bouncing shot causing massive damage spikes in some cases (there were several bugs here like damage increasing exponentially per bounce on weapons like Blade Launcher or the free bounces you get from Orbiting Shot counting towards Bouncing Shot)
Fixed Level Up sometimes not leveling up anything
Fixed max Blender level not always dealing damage consistently with the Claw and Dagger
Fixed boss keys and health sometimes not spawning at all
Fixed softlock where the island would never end (usually happened on late game runs when you were eliminating enemies as soon as they spawned)
Fixed enemies sometimes not facing the correct player when performing an attack and firing through their own bodies without turning
Fixed Leap Of Faith dealing damage to health through armor, dealing damage on Parkour islands and rewrote the trigger condition to be purely based on how hard you hit the ground when landing rather than the previous one that could trigger at weird moments
Phew that was a lot of patch notes to write up, enjoy the update and see you soon for the next one! I plan on releasing a few smaller updates (Randomizer Mode, Ultra Chaos Modifiers, Tony) more frequently as I add things like unique pickup visuals in the coming months. Thank you so much for playing 🦀
Original post
01 Sep 2024Developer post
The Elemental Update (Early Access Update 9)
Patch Highlights NEW WEAPON: ICE STAFF NEW ABILITY: ELECTRO GLOBE NEW MELEE WEAPON: PICKAXE TURRET REVAMP INFINITE PEDESTAL NEW ISLANDS NEW ENEMY: HORNET XL TOTEM NEW ABILITY VISUALS Patch Notes GENERAL Turrets have been reworked, all turret spawning turret perks have been all mo
Patch Highlights
NEW WEAPON: ICE STAFF
NEW ABILITY: ELECTRO GLOBE
NEW MELEE WEAPON: PICKAXE
TURRET REVAMP
INFINITE PEDESTAL
NEW ISLANDS
NEW ENEMY: HORNET
XL TOTEM
NEW ABILITY VISUALS
Patch Notes
GENERAL

Turrets have been reworked, all turret spawning turret perks have been all moved to Ability mods in order to give you agency over when and where to spawn them as in the previous system they often spawned outside the map bounds or far away. Turrets now lose health over time but there are ways to extend their lifetime with perks and create infinite turret builds!
Added new infinite shop pedestal type: one can be found on every reroll and the loot doesn’t despawn when purchasing, allowing you to invest heavily in one particular piece of loot
Added new enemy: Hornet
Added new enemy: Elite Hornet
Added new enemy: Hammer Crab
Added new enemy: Elite Ramming Grub
Grubs lacked identity so have been reworked to have a ram attack and have been merged with mini grubs
Added new island type: Harvest
Added 1 new Tropical island
Added 2 new Arctic islands
Added 4 new Desert islands and reworked some of the least fun ones
Added 1 new Volcanic island and improved some of the least fun / most cramped existing ones
Added unique shop islands for each biome
Added 5 new songs
Added Tony snoring sounds
Reworked Ice: removed max stack limit, enemies now take all stacks as damage when thawing and thawing now automatically happens a short time after freezing
Added 23 new achievements: Abilities and Melee Weapons can now earn medals just like Weapons can
Added new inventory category: Melee Mods
The following Perks have been moved to be Melee Mods: Vampire, Big Claws, Sharp Claws, Iron Claws, Blender, Ice Claws, Fire Claws, Brawler
Added new Melee Mods: Lightning Claws and Poison Claws
Added new weapon mod: Pumpkin Shot: Chance to lob explosive pumpkins along with your shots
Added new ability mod: Bounce Explosion: Abilities gain bounces and explode on each bounce
Added new ability mod: Heat Sink: Ability cooldowns reduced
Added new ability mod: Landmine Explosion: Abilities spawn landmines when exploding
Landmine base damage increased from 33 to 75 (as it is affected by damage falloff)
Added new perk: Lingering Fumes: Enemies apply existing poison stacks to nearby enemies when eliminated
Added new perk: Poisonous Armor: Poison nearby enemies when breaking enemy armor
Added new perk: Health Is Power: Damage increased by 1% for every 50 health you have
Added new perk: Speed Is Power: Damage increased by 1% for every bonus movement speed % you have
Added new perk: Silver Lining: Damage increased each time you take damage
Added new perk: Lightning Dash: Dashing shocks and knocks back nearby enemies
Added new relic: Turbo Ring: Fire rate increased by 2% after clearing each island
Added new relic: Ring Of Healthy Turrets: Turret health increased by 400%
Added new relic: Twin Ring: All turrets spawn in pairs
Added new greed relic: Ring Of Tankiness: Max health hugely increased but movement speed heavily reduced
Added new relic: Ring Of Wisdom: Critical hit chance increased by 1% after clearing each island
Added new challenge modifier: Icy Enemies: All enemy attacks freeze you
Added new challenge modifier: Twinned Enemies: Enemies spawn in pairs
Added new challenge modifier: Healing Enemies: Enemies heal nearby enemies when eliminated
Added new challenge modifier: Landmine Rain: Landmines rain down from the sky at random
Many new VFX and sounds added to replace placeholder content
The number of physics crowns in the lobby now match the wins of the hosting player
Added 3 new skins: Chrome, Vampire and Heat
Greatly reduced bandwidth when there is a lot going on in multiplayer games by combining damage events that happen in a short space of time together. This has the side effect of crits behaving slightly differently- if you land a shotgun blast on an enemy all at the same time, critical hits will be rolled on the total damage dealt, not per pellet. With this change you should no longer get kicked from a game due to too much going on. Also cases where you go down to 1 FPS due to a lot happening at once should be much rarer
Enemies get knocked around less in general: I’ve made many tweaks here but in general you’ll notice enemies feel more “solid” and in place, allowing for more consistent and focused damage to be dealt to groups of enemies especially with abilities
Perks like Juggernaut or Up The Ante now affect Elite and Boss islands- each 100% extra enemies reached spawns an extra boss / elite
Hazard damage areas (fire, ice, poison) now only apply their effects when actually landed on the ground and stepping in them to prevent less cases where damage is taken in mid air which could often feel cheap. Lightning damage areas function the same for now as they don’t deal damage and just slow you down
AOE explosions now have damage falloff to deepen the combat feel. Previously if an enemy was even slightly touching the outer radius of an explosion, they’d receive full damage so there was no real incentive to aim your abilities- it’s now much more satisfying to line up and directly hit enemies with your grenade and other explosions. This in turn also makes incoming damage from enemies more fair- if you dodge an enemy attack but are very slightly still in the hitbox, you’ll receive far less damage than before. The only AOE damage type that does not get affected by this falloff is melee as it felt bad to lose damage if not right next to an enemy
Salvaging pickups now always gives 50% of the pickup cost even when the Expensive Shops modifier is active (previously it only gave 33% of the value)
Shop prices on all difficulties are now closer (as on Easy they were cheaper than intended and on Ultra Chaos they were a bit too expensive)
Shop prices are 5% cheaper per player in multiplayer (previously they were 20% more expensive per player, now are 15% more expensive per player)
Added new “Arcanifying” enhancement (I will find a better name for this later)
Added new “Targeting” enhancement (works like Targeting shot but for enhanced projectiles)
Added rarities to Enhancements and removed Spiraling and Chaotic enhancements as they were pretty much debuffs
Improved enhancement filtering to make it impossible to roll freezing on Fireball Shot or homing on Homing Shot for example
Enhancement Totem price decreased and is 50% less likely to explode on use
Valued Customer now works when using the Enhancement Totem
GENERAL BALANCE CHANGES

3 portals spawn by default on multi choice islands making it easier to counter the feeling of bad RNG
Runs are now counted as wins even if you get eliminated when looping- this means you can see how far your build can go without risking losing a victory stat / rank
The number of islands per biome has been reduced from 8 to 7 for pacing reasons (5 combat islands, 1 shop and 1 elite / boss)
Turret spawning perks have been moved from the Damage to the Skill loot pool (other than Fire Turret and Poison Turret which are staying in the Elemental loot pool)
Sentry Turret fire rate doubled
Mortar Turret damage doubled
Poison Turret poison stacks increased from 10 to 100
Enhanced Turrets turret damage increased from +75% to +100%
Turrets no longer block projectiles which means no more situations where you have a big cluster of turrets that are all blocking each other and end up dealing no damage
All damage dealing greed perks are now multiplicative instead of additive: this is indicated by the “global damage multiplier” keyword being used. This includes Brawler which previously only added a flat damage % rather than multiplying the total melee damage multiplier
Crystal scaling has been rebalanced to scale up way less sharply (which means shops break much later and prices in general are lower and easier to memorize)
Crystals visually dropped by enemies matches the amount you pick up (so bonus crystals are much more satisfying visually)
The Rush blessing goal is now shared by teammates to make it easier to achieve in multiplayer
Reroll totem cost has been halved in the first shop you visit
Totems now only explode when you’ve gotten a buff from them at least once (excluding Glass and Fuse totems being destroyed by damage or time)
Loot totems now cost 25% of your health (up from 20%)
Crystal totems now cost 25% of your health (up from 10%)
Crystal bundles can no longer be salvaged (only because it didn’t make sense to do it)
Starting health reduced from 300 to 150. Keeping the early game feeling dangerous is part of what makes these kinds of games fun- having 300 health just meant that the first biome often felt overly safe especially now that I've made the early game easier
Reduced demolition nest starting health and loop health scaling
Bananas have been removed from the game for now (in the beta I tried removing the heals from hearts (so they only gave max health) and people still chose them over bananas so now hearts just heal AND give max health)
Gold totems can no longer spawn hearts or armor
Crystal totem chance to explode increased from 25% to 50% as it was possible to go on very long streaks of gaining crystals which could break the balance of the game- still possible now but less likely
Mirrored Projectiles no longer trigger from damage over time damage or ability damage as they could spam projectiles
Increased elimination requirements for the Rush blessing on Horde islands so that they are an actual challenge
Bronze Hearts now give 100 max health (down from 125) and Gold Hearts now give 500 max health (down from 650). Silver hearts are unchanged
Adjusted locked slot unlock cost scaling to be cheaper
Halved the amount of fire stacks applied to you when stepping in lava on the Volcanic biome
WEAPON BALANCE CHANGES

Auto Rifle damage increased from 5 to 8
Auto Rifle projectile speed increased by 400% to feel more “hitscan” and responsive
Dual Pistols damage increased from 5 to 6
Burst Pistol damage increased from 6 to 8
Orb Launcher weapon mod trigger multiplier increased to match what the Auto Rifle has
Orb Launcher mag size increased from 36 to 42
Sniper fire rate increased by 25%
Minigun damage increased from 2 to 3
Flamethrower spread heavily reduced
Flamethrower range increased
Flamethrower level of the starting Fire Shot mod has been increased from 2 to 4, making it much more consistent to fight flying enemies instead of relying on the fire areas below
Rocket Launcher damage increased from 35 to 50 (to help counter the new radial damage falloff a bit- direct hits will now be more rewarding)
Arcane Wand explosion radius increased by 75%
Laser Cannons damage increased from 2 to 3
Marksman Rifle was feeling underwhelming to many people so I made a few changes: no more scope, new crosshair, damage increased from 8 to 12 per bullet and fire rate reduced slightly
WEAPON MOD BALANCE CHANGES

Targeting Shot now acts as a copy of your main shot and can trigger on hit weapon mods
Torpedo Shot damage increased from 100 to 250
Triangle Shot damage increased from 100 to 200
Steady Shot damage increased from +50% to +75% when aiming
Money Shot crystal gain per shot hit reduced from 4 to 1 (still a big buff due to new crystal scaling)
Rapid Fire fire rate buffed from +10% to +12%
Light Shot fire rate buffed from +15% to +20%
Health Shot cooldown increased from 1 to 2 seconds
Spike Strike damage increased from 50 to 300 and cooldown reduced from 4 seconds to 1 second
Firework Shot / Explosion projectile damage increased from 30 to 50 and I’ve made them move 50% less chaotically so you can more reliably aim them
Spore Shot and Spore Explosion mushroom damage increased from 25 to 75
Shotgun Blast damage increased per pellet from 10 to 32 and projectile lifetime increased by 33%
Ice Strike cooldown reduced from 10 to 5 seconds
Removed unused debuffs so Random Shot will be more effective
ABILITY BALANCE CHANGES

Grenade damage increased from 75 to 150
Ice Blast direct impact damage radius increased from 0 to 7.5m
Ice Blast ice stacks per tick increased from 25 to 40
Ice Blast projectiles themselves now freeze enemies (not just the lingering damage area)
Since ability damage mods scale ice stacks on Ice Blast, I’ve reduced the ice stacks it applies from 40 to 25
Ability Ring cooldown reduction reduced from -75% to -50% (now that Heatsink is a thing)
Black Holes no longer knock landmines and barrels away (making them an anti synergy) and instead suck them in along with the other enemies
Improved Black Hole suction logic so that enemies will no longer overshoot the black hole center, making it hard to actually aim at them
Increased Black Hole damage per tick from 3 to 5
ABILITY MOD BALANCE CHANGES

Clone Explosion now properly triggers ALL ability mods as if you had thrown another grenade leading to much more fun combos (especially when building into turrets)
Removed cooldowns from ALL ability mods other than Ultra Mushroom (cooldown reduced from 9 to 4 seconds) and Crystal Barrage (cooldown reduced from 4 to 1 seconds)
Firework Explosion cooldown reduced from 8 seconds to 3 seconds
Bomb Explosion cooldown reduced from 6 seconds to 3 seconds
Energy Ring damage per hit increased from 3 to 10
Ultra Mushroom damage increased from 50 to 200
Removed boring / underwhelming ability mods (Heavy Grenade, Spiral Grenade, Snake Grenade)
MELEE WEAPON BALANCE CHANGES

Hammer now works as expected and won’t deal damage until hitting the ground rather than always dealing damage after a set delay
Hammer damage increased from 100 to 125
Dagger now slightly knocks back enemies
Claw damage increased from 30 to 50 and knockback strength doubled
Melee damage now triggers sooner in the claw and dagger animations, allowing them to be reliably spammed with high levels of Blender (you should now be able to actually turn into a blender)
You are now briefly immune to damage when on a downwards slam with the hammer or pickaxe
Melee VFX now uses the correct tint of the melee weapon / debuff used
PERK BALANCE CHANGES

Ice Cube, Oil Can, Metal Rod and Poison Vial (perks that increase damage to enemies with a specific debuff active) have now all been consolidated to a new perk: Elemental Expert: Damage increased to enemies based on the number of unique debuffs (fire, poison, lightning etc.) applied to them
Reworked Icebreaker: Ice damage is dealt to nearby enemies (each level increases radius)
All ice perk debuff stacks buffed (mostly doubled from their previous values)
Amber Resin healing amount buffed from +25% to +50% to make it a more reliable way to scale healing
Grim Reaper now heals for a % of your max health instead of flat healing
Hot Steam damage increased from 50 to 300
Critical Thinking damage reduced from +33% to +25% (as this is a global crit damage multiplier it is still very effective)
Sonic Boom knockback increased by 250%
Sonic Boom damage radius increased by 50%
Sonic Boom damage increased from 20 to 200 but cooldown increased from 2 to 5 seconds
Shockwave damage increased from 15 to 50 but cooldown increased from 3 to 8 seconds
Slugger damage and radius increased from +33% to +100%
Damage Aura damage increased from 3 to to 25 and radius doubled but damage falloff means you need to get close to enemies to deal that full 25 damage
Exploding Enemies, Freezing Enemies, Flammable Enemies, Electric Enemies and Poisonous Enemies base radius increased by 20% and cooldowns reduced from 3 to 1 seconds
Exploding Enemies damage increased from 50 to 300
Fire Aura, Ice Aura, Lightning Aura and Poison Aura damage increased from 15 to 50
Crystal Combo and Damage Combo now count 1x combo so you get a benefit from them even if you aren’t currently at a higher combo than 1x
Power Armor damage per armor plate increased from 10% to 12%
Big Hearts max health gain decreased from +100% to +75%
Bonus Crystals crystal gain increased from +33% to +40%
Sharp Claws damage increased from +50% to +100% to bring it more in line with Damage Shot / Damage Explosion
Sturdy Totems has been moved up to Epic rarity but now works PER totem rather than a confusing per island limit. There’s one caveat here: in multiplayer the totem will compare number of times it has been used to your sturdy buff so if 4 players all have Sturdy Totems level 5 and one teammate uses the totem 5 times, you won’t be able to use it another 5 times. Also this change fixes Sturdy Totems not working on totems when you find it in a chest on the same island as a totem and try to get the extra use
Rigged Totems has been removed (as it only affected 3 totem types (Health, Chance and Gamble) and wasted a perk slot) but these totems are now affected by Ring Of Luck to compensate
Poison on enemies has been capped at 250 stacks but they decay half as fast and this cap can be increased by the Toxic perk
Cursed Lottery has been removed for now as it is an easy win due to the infinite shop pedestals
Double Edged Sword / Gold Coating have been removed from the loot pool for now as they break the game due to the new crystal scaling
Up The Ante damage increased from +20% to +25% but additional enemies spawned increased from +15% to +20%
Juggernaut max health increased from +50% to +75% but additional enemies spawned increased from +15% to +20%
Powerslide damage increased from 2 to 5 and fire stacks per hit doubled
Driller chance to spawn bonus loot increased from 4% to 5%
Equalizer simplified as the wording was confusing
Iron Claws damage increased from 150% to 300% and the downside reduced from -50% to -40%
Removed perks that were bloating the loot pool / not unique enough to be interesting: Nourishing Salvage, Finishing Move and Healthy Combo
RELIC BALANCE CHANGES

Relic slots increased from 6 to 8
Relic chest portals have double the chance to show up compared to before
Ring Of Power is now multiplicative instead of additive
Ring Of Precision is now multiplicative instead of additive
Ring Of Destruction no longer works on friendly destructibles (mushrooms, barrels, landmines etc.)
Crystal Dividends has been moved to a relic: Ring Of Dividends: Gain 10% of your total crystals as a bonus after clearing each island
Red Fury has been moved to a relic: Ring Of Fury: Global damage multiplier increased by 50% for 5 seconds after eliminating an enemy (Note that previously it was a non global damage multiplier so this is a big buff and will scale with your run)
Adrenaline has been moved to a relic: Adrenaline Amulet: Fire rate increased by 33% for 5 seconds after eliminating an enemy
Reinforced has been moved to a relic: Ring Of Reinforcement: Gain two extra armor plates each time you pick up armor
Regenerating Armor has been moved to a relic: Ring Of Regenerating Armor: Gain an armor plate at the start of each island
Ring Of Luck trigger chance reduced from 100% to 75% (so that Health totems won’t be guaranteed due to the change to how Sturdy Totems works)
Ring Of Gravity rarity increased from Epic to Legendary
ENEMY BALANCE CHANGES

Simplified Ant attacks so that you can reliably predict what they will do: Red Ants now always do single projectile attacks and Poison Ants now always fire in an arc
Simplified Purple Skull attacks so that they always do a triple shot (before they also had a single shot attack that could last longer than anticipated / the animation implied)
Blocker Skulls now shoot a double shot instead of an X shot to reduce projectile spam
Enemies now respect their spawn limits so no more situations where multiple Elite Pumpkins spawn on a single island
Bosses now only reduce debuff stacks (like fire or poison) by 25% instead of 50% previously, making elemental builds more effective against them
Melee crabs are more aggressive up close and swipe more frequently
Ice crabs are now slippy
Purple Skull projectile speed increased by 25%
Scorpion health increased by 33%
Elite Poison Grub now summons mini grubs in addition to the regular lesser grub enemies
Elite Poison Grub slam attack now spawns 3 energy rings instead of 1
Elite Poison Grub projectile damage areas reworked: they now deal no damage but apply more poison stacks when stepping into them
Elite Barrel Skull attacks adjusted to be a bit more varied
Enemy barrels in general were underwhelming so their explosion radius has increased by about 33% to be more dangerous (you can use this increased radius to your advantage too as barrel explosions hurt enemies too, just don’t stand too close!)
Improved homing barrel logic to be able to continue tracking players when losing line of sight
Enemy sizes adjusted (many harder enemies are now larger and easier to hit)
Crabs that do launching attacks have double the wind up time, giving more time to react
Elite Fire Crab / Elite Ice Skull launch attack radius lowered by 20%
Reduced Elite Lightning Crab health slightly to bring it in line with the other elites
Enemy health on Horde islands starts off lower so the first few waves are easier
Damage reduction for elites and bosses when looping with the Unfair Bosses modifier active has been reduced from 30 seconds to 20 seconds (so it wears off faster)
Increased the spawn cost of pumpkins, poison ants and regular red ants so that they’ll spawn in slightly lower numbers
Red Challenge Crystals can now spawn more than 1 type of enemy at once
Enemies now take 200% more damage from hazards (so lining them up around barrels, rocks and explosive enemies is more rewarding)
Fewer enemies spawn on the first 3 biomes (non looping) for better pacing as it could feel like a bit of a slog before runs got going. This also nicely increases the contrast as the runs get more and more chaotic as time goes on
Fire, Ice and Poison Slugs no longer leave trails of their debuff behind when moving as this was the main source of bad performance when multiple were on screen at once. Their on death damage areas now last a bit longer (from 5 to 8 seconds) to compensate
Improved enemy spawns on the ice cave loop island where enemies would often get stuck on the left side
Grenade Crab projectile speed and explosion radius slightly increased (they were overly nerfed before and should be a threatening enemy)
Launcher Crabs now have worse aim but fire a triple shot instead of a double shot
Enemy fire damage area lifetimes have been reduced from 6 seconds to 4 seconds so it should be much less likely to run into situations where the entire ground is covered in fire
Removed damage cap on all Elite and Boss enemies that prevented them taking more than 15% of their max health in a single shot
Enemies that are immune to ice (Elites and Bosses) now take full ice damage but can continue moving and attacking as usual
Enemy health increase per horde wave increased from +10% to +25% (ideally on longer hordes they can actually be overwhelming)
Enemy crystal rewards on Horde islands are based on their original max health to keep Horde islands balanced while still allowing for huge amounts of enemies to spawn
Ants now have a longer spawn animation to give you more time to react before they start attacking
Barrel Skull projectiles that spawn barrels no longer deal 1 damage- no more ruined flawless challenges!
Added new sounds for Starfish to improve their telegraphing and slightly increased their damage radius
QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES

You can now drop crystals for your teammates (finally!)
Adjusted enemy hitboxes to prevent them getting stuck in walls
Projectiles can now be fired in any location (no more weapons invisibly breaking on parkour islands) and the blue barriers around each island will block projectiles (making bouncing shot builds more effective on open islands)
Added some new placeholder totem visuals for the Random, Glass, Gold and Fuse totems to better identify them
Any crystals spawned AFTER an island has been cleared in Ultra Chaos difficulty no longer need to be manually picked up (to prevent boring backtracking to distant destructible rocks)
Friendly energy rings are now green to make it easier to distinguish between friendly and enemy rings
Made a simplified green health bar for turrets to more easily tell them apart from enemies
Changed the Volcanic biome sand to a lighter color to improve visibility
You no longer collide with turrets as they often just got in the way
Added UI to see how many crystals your teammates have. This replaces the score UI text for now, will decide on what to do with that in the future
Breaking destructible rocks / landmines no longer knocks enemies back (this had an anti-synergy with fire rocks as they’d be knocked AWAY from the fire zone)
Lesser projectiles (like Mace Shot) now update their tint if they have an elemental debuff from enhancement totems
Optimized Crimson Haze VFX as they were causing FPS drops on busy islands
Weapon mastery challenges that required Nightmare difficulty now also work when you win on Ultra Chaos
Landmine Shot / Landmine Explosion landmines are now spawned in a much more stable way- no more landmines flying off in random directions and missing the target!
Removed the camera shake that happened when Critical Arrows hit nearby which was very annoying in combination with Damage Aura
You no longer trigger your own landmines by walking near them
Improved parkour spawns and adjusted banana positions for cases where players were sliding under them
Improved barrel physics to be less unstable
Improved cases where enemies took a long time to spawn on certain islands
Reduced interact radius to prevent situations where you’d accidentally enter a portal while choosing chest loot
Increased global projectile limit from 500 to 750 and projectiles are cleaned up 66% faster so it should be harder to reach the projectile cap
You can now stand on top of enemies
BUG FIXES

Finally fixed the issue that caused non-hosting players to get kicked from multiplayer games when too much was going on at once
Fixed dual wield weapons canceling Pickaxe and Hammer damage when firing at the same time. This will be improved in the future to also work consistently on claw and dagger
Fixed issue that caused you to get eliminated when interacting with spiked chests while poisoned
Fixed some perks exploding barrels when you spawned into an island, dealing unavoidable damage
Fixed issue that caused shop loot to cost 0 crystals when going far enough into a run
Fixed issue that could cause less pickups than usual to appear in chests
Fixed issue that allowed the same relic to spawn in multiple chests on the same island even if you had just picked up that relic in a previous chest
Fixed bug that prevented Auto Loot from working on Rare Treasure / Driller / Boss key pickups when no chests spawned (due to High Roller or similar)
Fixed Steam achievements not completing even if you had the corresponding in game challenge completed already
Fixed auto melee not working when melee cooldown reduction perks were equipped
Fixed big lag spikes that could happen when firing at teammates with piercing weapons such as the flamethrower
Fixed Aura perks not working after you respawned in multiplayer games
Fixed issue that caused terrain to change shape at high FOVs
Fixed Thorn Shot not dealing the full amount of damage advertised as they expired too soon after hitting enemies
Fixed various holes in the borders of different islands that could create softlocks
Fixed not all barrels getting destroyed when islands are cleared
Fixed flickering / disappearing chests when at the edge of the screen
Fixed spore mushrooms not aligning to enemies correctly
Fixed Driller not calculating correctly in multiplayer games- you should see it trigger more consistently now
Added the correct Driller % chance to the inventory UI for multiplayer games (previously it didn’t show the scaled value- shared Driller chance divided by the number of players * 0.5)
Fixed issue that allowed you to parry (block) your own damage areas which made healing trivial with the Ring Of Parrying
Fixed visual bug that prevented turrets from rotating correctly for non hosting players
Fixed Elite Barrel Skull barrels spawning under the ground
Fixed bug that allowed Arcane to crit and deal huge bonus damage in certain situations
Fixed demolition nests having inconsistent amounts of armor plates
Fixed Amber Resin not working with perks like Grim Reaper
Fixed explosions being invisible on Minimal weapon effects setting
Fixed some destructibles like spore and ultra mushrooms being immune to turret damage
Fixed auto looting keys also giving you the salvage crystals for them
Fixed the difficulty UI being cut off on some screen resolutions
Fixed incorrect aura perk inventory descriptions (they now all deal the correct debuff amounts)
Fixed turrets not targeting shielded enemies even after the shields had been broken
Fixed turrets not visually aiming at enemies properly
Fixed issue that caused circular crosshairs to disappear when aiming
Fixed exploit that allowed non-hosting players to farm wins at the victory crown island
Fixed several rare crashes
Fixed several Relic inventory description values not matching up with their actual values
Removed the > 100% resolution quality graphics setting options as they were lowering performance with little to no visual gain
As always thank you so much for playing my game, it's the reason that I'm still here working on it 🦀
Original post
14 Mar 2024Developer post
The Variety Update Part 2 Hotfix #2
Hotfix #2 (Version 2003) Thanks for all the community feedback on the last update- I've made some fixes and improvements based on it! 🦀 General Added cactus destructibles to the Desert biome Balance Changes Double destructibles (both combat and reward) spawn in the Desert as mos
Hotfix #2 (Version 2003)
Thanks for all the community feedback on the last update- I've made some fixes and improvements based on it! 🦀

General

Added cactus destructibles to the Desert biome
Balance Changes

Double destructibles (both combat and reward) spawn in the Desert as most islands there are quite open and bare
Totems are both more likely to initially spawn AND are more likely to spawn in groups
Shop prices have been decreased by 25% but scale a bit more sharply when looping (so building into economy becomes more important in the late game but shops are more accessible in the early game). Greed loot now is worth exactly the same as Epic loot
Slippery Slope now scales with each island similar to the Paycheck buff in the previous patch. It gives more than double the amount that Paycheck does so I’ll keep an eye on it in terms of balance. Also added total crystals gained stat for Slippery Slope in the inventory UI
A lot of players have mentioned that they are seeing too many duplicates (loot with a + over it that is something you already have in your inventory) too early on in a run which pollutes chest choices so the initial chance for finding duplicates has been lowered
Armor now gives enemies less health and reduces elemental damage by 50% instead of 75%. This should make fighting heavily armored enemies with elemental builds feel much less tedious
Elemental enemies now take 50% less debuff stacks of that matching element (down from 75% less stacks). This means Fire Crabs or Poison Ants now will feel more consistent to fight with fire / poison builds
Elites now have 25% resistance to elemental debuffs (previously 0% resistance) and Bosses now have 50% resistance (previously 75%). These changes will make elemental builds much more consistent across elite and boss fights, notably the armored ant boss which could take forever if relying on an elemental build
Elemental enemies matching element resistance decreased from -50% to -25%
Previously, enemy attack and movement speed increased by 1% with each island. This didn’t really end up feeling very noticeable so it now is applied per loop instead for a more noticeable jump in challenge (the values are unchanged from before, just applied at a different time)
Scorpion health buffed by 25% (for such an intimidating enemy, they were blown away too fast by most builds- the previous nerf hit them a bit too hard)
Scorpions no longer spawn on the Volcanic biome as there were some islands that felt unfair for them to be on
Scorpions can no longer be shielded
Fire Pumpkins now have a longer time between attacks, making it less likely that the entire floor gets covered with fire
Grub health reduced by 25%
Removed smaller Desert islands from the elite island pool as these could create unfair fights in cramped spaces
Vitality and Second Wind now show if their damage bonus is active or not in the inventory UI
Hitmarker audio lowered further as it was still quite grating when a lot was going on
Buffs

Explosive Armor radius doubled
Flammable Armor radius doubled but fire stacks reduced from 75 to 25 (since the previous patch allowed it to damage the armor owner, it became a bit too strong)
Fire Shot fire stacks increased from 25 to 30
Dual Shotguns damage increased from 5 to 6
Auto Shotgun damage increased from 3 to 4
Rocket Launcher damage increased from 30 to 35
Burst Pistol number of shots per burst increased from 4 to 5 and clip size increased from 24 to 30
Auto Rifle fire rate increased to be more balanced with the other starting weapons
Nerfs

Starting health reduced from 400 to 300 (the mega buff to starting health ended up removing the danger of the first biome, making the early game feel a bit free and making building into health less important)
Similarly, hearts had gotten buffed too much which often made choosing health perks feel like a waste. New values:

Bronze Heart: From 150 max health down to 125 max health
Silver Heart: From 400 max health down to 250 max health
Gold Heart: From 1000 max health down to 650 max health

Due to the way that the Ring Of Precision was calculated, it actually added more critical hit damage than intended so has been reduced from +250% to +150% critical hit damage
Ring Of Defense damage reduction reduced from 50% to 40%
Coral Amulet extra chest pickups reduced from 3 to 2
Tony’s Amulet extra shop options reduced from 6 to 5
Grappling Hook damage reduced by 50% as it was dealing double the damage of the Grenade ability while also providing big movement gains- this melted through elites in the early game and wasn’t intended to be so strong for single target damage
Bug Fixes

Fixed annoying bug that caused Limpets to become invulnerable whenever frozen, leading to dragged out fights in certain cases
Fixed Giant Ant homing attack that could go invisible but still deal damage
Fixed Bouncing Shot incorrectly calculating damage that could lead to millions of damage out of nowhere
Fixed bug that occasionally prevented the Burst Pistol from firing when using Autoloader
Fixed non hosting players not seeing Nest health bars updating correctly
Fixed Glass Totems being destroyed by Aura perks or Powerslide
Fixed Ring Of Rocket Jumping not working with the Cluster Launcher
Fixed issue that could prevent the game launching with Steam correctly which would break multiplayer invites
Fixed various cases where UI text was getting cut off
Removed broken Demolition nest UI counter
Fixed several rare crashes
Fixed longstanding bug that caused totems that dispensed loot or secret chests in shops to have a far greater luck value than intended, leading them to constantly spawn Epic and Legendary loot which could create broken power spikes. Also fixed Driller and Rare Treasure loot drops being influenced by Streamer Loot which only should affect chest loot
Original post
05 Mar 2024Developer post
The Variety Update Part 2 Hotfix #1
Hotfix #1 (Version 1999) Difficulty scaling improvements Enemy damage bonus when looping has been removed. There was previously a whopping +100% damage multiplier to all enemy attacks when looping from island 33 onwards which created very unfair situations where enemies would mel
Hotfix #1 (Version 1999)

Difficulty scaling improvements

Enemy damage bonus when looping has been removed. There was previously a whopping +100% damage multiplier to all enemy attacks when looping from island 33 onwards which created very unfair situations where enemies would melt your entire health bar in a second, especially with fire. Enemy damage should feel much more fair and consistent when looping while still being a challenge- looping is meant to be quite difficult
Enemy spawn bonus when looping decreased from +33% to +20%
Islands 1 and 2 of a biome no longer can spawn two waves of ranged enemies back to back These changes should make looping feel far less unfair / punishing while maintaining the challenge
Scorpion mega nerf + rebalance

Scorpion projectile damage reduced by 60%, projectile radius reduced by 33%, projectile speed reduced by 15% and removed projectile bounces. Also reworked their attack patterns to be more dodgeable and less spammy
Increased scorpion walk speed slightly: it should now feel like more of a close / medium range threat and less of a run ender
Other changes

Flamethrower buff- now starts with level 2 Fire Shot (up from level 1)
Rebalanced enhancements: pattern enhancements like Chaotic or Spiraling have less intense motion to make them less likely to miss their target. Enhancement damage increases are +50% damage other than Sticky and Damaging which are +100% (previously Damaging was at +400% which was very broken)
Splitting / Scattering bonus projectiles decreased from 3 to 2 (as it was extremely broken with some combos)
Fixed issue that would cause projectiles created by the Splitting and Scattering enhancement to apply ALL weapon mods to those enhanced projectiles, resulting in extreme damage spikes that weren’t intended
Demolition nests now scale health more with the island count as they became far too easy to destroy past the first biome
Scorpions can now spawn from red challenge crystals
Original post
04 Mar 2024Developer post
The Variety Update Part 2 (Early Access Update 8)
Patch Highlights RELICS ENHANCEMENTS SNIPER REVAMP NEW WEAPON: MARKSMAN RIFLE DESERT BIOME NEW ISLAND TYPE: DEMOLITION INVENTORY STATS Patch Notes GENERAL Added 30 Relics to the game. Relics are a new loot category that are found under Perks in your inventory. They can only be pi
Patch Highlights
RELICS
ENHANCEMENTS
SNIPER REVAMP
NEW WEAPON: MARKSMAN RIFLE
DESERT BIOME
NEW ISLAND TYPE: DEMOLITION
INVENTORY STATS
Patch Notes
GENERAL

Added 30 Relics to the game. Relics are a new loot category that are found under Perks in your inventory. They can only be picked up once (can't be leveled up like perks) and have powerful effects such as being able to rocket jump. There were quite a few perk ideas that weren't fun to level up but were fun as a once off pickup so this loot category nicely fills in that gap.
Added new mechanic: Enhancements: In Tony's shop you'll find an Enhancement totem which allows you to randomly roll powerful enhancements on mods and perks that previously only could be leveled up in a linear way (Dagger Arc, Mace Shot, Bubble Blast etc.). This allows for a fun new layer of buildcrafting and experimentation when at the shop: choosing to buy new loot or instead going for an enhancement
Added new biome: Desert. This has now been added to the biome list per run so the amount of islands per biome has been reduced by 2: 8 islands per biome and 4 biomes per run. 32 islands for a regular victory and 64 islands for a Diamond victory. There are many more unique islands, enemies and songs planned for the desert that'll get added in future updates
Added new enemy: Scorpion
Added new evolved enemy variant: Elite Pumpkin
Added new island type: Demolition: Destroy all enemy nests to complete the island
Added inventory stats (both core stats like Critical Hit Chance and Global Damage as well as per-loot stats for certain perks like Assassin to show how much extra damage has been added by this perk overall)
Added 2 new songs
Added 4 new skins: Kaleidoscopic, Fake Gold, Vibrations and Focus
Added 6 new rank related achievements: Silver, Gold, Sapphire, Emerald, Ruby and Diamond. These correspond to your account rank which is based on the average rank of your weapons (so if you have mostly Gold weapons, you’d most likely have a Gold account rank). There have been a lot of requests to add a long term goal to work towards and while the account rank system has been in place for a while, there was no real incentive to get Diamond other than for bragging rights
Added new weapon: Marksman Rifle: A hybrid triple barreled scoped rifle
Revamped Sniper with scope, improved visuals and audio and rebalanced stats to feel more powerful. More than doubled damage and increased explosion radius but reduced fire rate. Increased hipfire spread but aiming with the scope is pinpoint accurate
Added new sounds and VFX for the Seagle
Some perks have been moved over to Relics:

Clearance has been replaced by the Ring Of Value: Shops always contain a pedestal that is 75% discounted
Repelling Dash has been replaced by the Ring Of Repulsion
Fast Claws has been replaced by the Ring Of Reloading

Increased base walk movement speed slightly to make traversal when not sliding feel less sluggish
As per player feedback, sliding is now more immediate (less acceleration), faster and wears off more quickly so it is much more effective as a short dodge and is more responsive in general
Added the island progression UI to the main gameplay UI so you can now easily check how far into a biome you are
Added Banana consumable that heals for 75% of your max health
Hearts now heal for the amount of max health that they give
Healing chests now contain a minimum of 2 loot choices to prevent situations where you’d get a banana with full health
Added new weapon mod: Boomerang Shot: Shots deal more damage and fly back towards you (Try lining up shots with the sniper to hit the same enemy twice!)
Added new weapon mod: Orbiting Shot: Shots deal more damage but orbit around you
Added new grenade mod: Scythe Vortex: Grenades explode into scythe vortexes
Added new perk: Orbiting Scythe: Gain a short lived orbiting scythe after each elimination
Each “Luck” perk / relic has a specific purpose to build into:

Rigged Totems = Totem Luck
Streamer Loot = Loot Rarity Luck
Gold Dice = Mod Trigger Luck
Ring Of Luck = Perk Trigger Luck (perk luck was the most broken in the early beta builds but since this is a relic and can only be picked up once, it’s now a fun power spike without completely breaking the game). This does affect critical hit chance- the only perk it doesn’t affect is Bulletproof to prevent being able to become invincible

Added a new placeholder weapon model for the Cluster Launcher
Added FX and a sound when you block damage successfully by dashing (this mechanic was quite hidden in general so now it’s more obvious when you intentionally block damage this way)
BALANCE CHANGES

Lots of pacing + loot balance improvements: the gap between experienced players getting easy snowball runs and inexperienced players being frustrated by RNG was too high and balance was a common complaint. There are now far fewer cases where simply being lucky will be enough to win a run, I’ve done my best to make each run feel much more consistent and power well earned instead of coming down to being randomly very lucky
The Random Islands difficulty modifier is now baked into the game by default (as the variety it brings makes the game more fun and it doesn’t actually add difficulty) and has been replaced with the new Strategic Enemies modifier: More challenging formations of enemies spawn. The main thing you’ll notice from this being enabled is medium enemies sometimes showing up on the first wave of arena islands instead of the usual small easy enemies- lots of new interesting combinations of enemies possible now. This also makes ranged enemies slightly more likely to spawn on Horde islands
Shops now only spawn on the 7th island of each biome
For simplicity, the game now only saves on the first island of each biome rather than halfway through which led to confusion and also opened up a few cheesy ways to get achievements by frequently reloading saves which isn’t the intended design
Waves islands have been revamped: there are now 5 waves total and no small enemies spawn, only medium and hard enemies. The next wave will not start until the previous wave has been fully cleared. This change makes Waves islands feel more distinct from other island types and players should be less likely to take damage from a randomly spawning small enemy and instead take it in a more fair way
It’s now less likely for both portal choices to be Horde islands
I’ve adjusted many specific enemy health pools to better match their type- in general champion enemies (sniper crab, shotgun crab etc.) have a bit more health to better match their category- previously they’d get blown away in seconds along with the regular enemies and this felt like they didn’t live up to their intimidating names. There are now much more varied and enjoyable fights past the first biome instead of aiming at the center of the island and destroying everything in 1 second (don’t get me wrong, this can still happen but just a bit less often)
Key totem cost increased back from 2 to 3 (with more biomes and more ways to get keys it’s more balanced at a slightly higher cost)
Gold Totems now cost 66% of your max health (up from 50% of your max health): it was possible to come across multiple gold totems and become extremely powerful early on- this should smooth out some of those unbalanced scenarios and make choosing to go for a gold totem a bit more impactful
Totems are very slightly less likely to appear (clumps of totems appearing at once could create unbalanced power spikes early on that were completely based on luck)
The Healthy enemy buff has been reduced from +200% health to +100% health
Enemy movement speed on ice has been reduced by 33% as there were situations where enemies could outrun you
Poison Slug explosion damage increased by 33%
Sniper Crabs now have a melee attack to prevent them choosing to snipe at very close range which made taking damage unavoidable in some situations
Grenade Crab projectile explosion radius reduced slightly
Ice Pumpkin wind up speed and damage radius increased by 25% (the previous nerf just made them a free enemy- remember you can block their attacks by being out of line of sight even if you are within their damage sphere)
Ice Pumpkins now start with 3 armor plates
Ice Pumpkin AOE radius has been reduced and they must get closer to begin attacking
Enemies now have less delay between spawning and first attacking on Nightmare difficulty (previously they’d stand around for 2 full seconds after spawning before starting any attacks)
More enemies spawn when looping (once off, doesn’t get added to per loop: it’s the same for loop 1 and loop 50)
Reduced Blocker Crab health but gave them 1 armor plate
Limpets now have a longer vulnerable window but attack twice and have a new arc projectile pattern
Slightly increased Lightning Slug movement speed
Grubs now only have 1 armor plate but move 33% faster
Elite Lightning Crab projectile hitbox slightly reduced and explosion radius reduced by 15%
All elite enemy health slightly boosted to make their fights last a little bit longer and feel a bit more dangerous
Ultra Chaos enemy dash (side jump) chance halved and regular jump chance slightly reduced
Guaranteed more ranged enemy variety (medium and hard enemy waves) to prevent cases where like 20 of the same ant spawn which is less interesting and exciting than an assortment of enemies
Fixed the XL challenge modifier not actually spawning 3x enemies- it now spawns only 2x the amount of enemies to balance as 3x would feel too overwhelming. Also to note: the Explosive Enemies modifier spawns more enemies than before as those islands usually ended super fast without much of a challenge
Regular and Blocker skulls are 25% more expensive to spawn, meaning they’ll spawn in large groups less often
An extra boss now spawns on each Boss island when looping
Ants are less likely to choose far away locations when attacking and will be more close range in general (this is to make clearing islands with a lot of ants less tedious)
Doubled the time it takes for enemies to start regenerating health when the Regenerating Enemies modifier is active
The Armored Enemies modifier now gives enemies 3 armor plates instead of 6 to prevent things feeling tedious in certain situations
The amount of max health lost when the Eternal Punishment modifier is active has been reduced from 2% to 1%
Lightning rocks are less effective as they were able to wipe entire islands almost instantly with very little effort
If playing with all difficulty modifiers enabled on Nightmare difficulty, the difficulty UI text will now indicate that by calling it “TRUE NIGHTMARE”
After lots of playtesting, many mods and perk have had slight “nudges” to their values to get them feeling balanced with all of the above changes: there are too many small changes to list here but you may notice some values being a bit different to before
Since combo can be increased to 8x with a relic, I’ve capped the max combo that affects your score specifically to 5x to prevent high score runs relying on finding a relic
BUFFS

Base player health increased from 200 to 400 and Nightmare no longer reduces starting health: there were too many situations where I was one shot by the second biome that I’d prefer a larger starting health pool that takes longer to whittle down but also longer to heal back up
Bronze Heart max health gain increased from +50 max health to +150 max health
Silver Heart max health gain increased from +100 max health to +400 max health
Gold Heart max health gain increased from +300 max health to +1000 max health
Added more health pickups in Tony’s garden and increased the healing value from 25 health to 50 health
You now start with 1% crit chance by default (so picking up things like Critical Blast or Critical Arrow aren’t a complete waste without finding more crit perks)
Power Punch now multiplies the 200% critical damage bonus instead of just adding a flat percentage to it. Also Power Punch critical damage increased from +25% to +33%
Fixed Critical Thinking not calculating as expected, it now multiplies the final damage output after a crit is calculated instead of adding or subtracting a flat amount. The level 1 damage amount has been reduced from +50% to +33% as it’s now much more powerful. In the old patch if you had 500% global damage and Critical Thinking level 1, you’d end up with 550% damage when landing a crit. Now (even after the nerf), you’d end up with 665% global damage when landing a critical hit
Landmine Shot landmine now explodes after 1 second instead of 2.5 seconds which felt too long in most cases
The chance for duplicate loot to show up in a chest in the endgame (when looping more than once) has been reduced from 75% to 50% so there will be more chances for fresh loot
Autoloader no longer resets the Escalating Shot bonus AND will also trigger On Reload mods such as Reload Arc or Shockwave
Time Bolt and Ultra Shot now explode even if they didn’t hit anything to prevent rare cases where it looked like they should hit but instead just vanished into thin air
Heavy Hitter fire rate reduction decreased from -15% to -10%
Health Shot and Money Shot now affect all damage dealt to enemies from projectiles (including explosions) instead of only counting direct impacts which made them far less effective on weapons like the Rocket Launcher than they were meant to be
Escalating Shot now only reduces weapon fire rate by -33% (instead of -50% previously) to make it more enticing to use on weapons other than the minigun
Reload Arc cooldown reduced from 5 seconds to 2 seconds
Reload Arc and Proximity Barrage projectiles no longer knock back enemies (this sound like a nerf but is actually a buff because it keeps enemies inside of your own damage areas and stops them attacking unpredictably in mid air)
Shockwave cooldown reduced from 4 seconds to 3 seconds
Freezing Enemies, Flammable Enemies, Electric Enemies and Poisonous Enemies have had their radii doubled as they felt underwhelming as legendaries before
All “Storm” mods have had their cooldowns reduced to allow them to trigger much more often
Grenade explosion damage increased from 50 to 75
Grenade Mods now correctly affect damage dealt by damage areas such as the red area left behind by Laser Beam or the Black Hole area while active
Damage Aura damage increased from 2 to 3
Big Hearts has been moved from Epic rarity to Rare rarity
Ice Strike damage increased from 25 to 200 and ice stacks increased from 25 to 75
Fire Strike damage increased from 25 to 200 and fire stacks increased from 100 to 250
Lightning Strike damage increased from 25 to 200 and lightning stacks increased from 50 to 200
Poison Strike damage increased from 25 to 200 and poison stacks increased from 25 to 100
Crystal Strike damage increased from 100 to 1000
Increased Arcane Blast projectile lifetime from 0.66 seconds to 1.0 seconds
Projectiles that pierce can now hit the same enemy twice after a 0.1 second delay (previously they could only hit the same enemy once). This synergizes nicely with Boomerang Shot as you can get double the value for your projectiles if you line them up right
Flammable Armor and Explosive Armor now affect the enemy that was hit and not just nearby enemies
Shops were feeling a bit too expensive on Nightmare and Ultra Chaos so the prices have been reduced by 15%
Rigged Totems has had a substantial buff, previously it was only 10% increased chance which meant a 25% chance totem actually only got upgraded to be 27.5% to trigger which felt quite unnoticeable. It’s now a 25% increased chance AND no longer gets capped at 100%
Critical Blast damage radius doubled and chance to trigger increased from 6% to 15%
Reduced Spore Shot mushroom health by 66% so it should be much easier to explode them now
Spore Shot / Spore Explosion mushrooms once again deal poison damage
Fire and lightning damage now is affected by poison bonus incoming damage- new synergy?
Paycheck no longer gives a flat amount of crystals as this quickly fell off in terms of scaling. Instead it now gives 1/5th the cost of a Rare pickup each island (this value increases after each island)
Dual Pistols damage increased from 4 to 5
Burst Pistol damage increased from 5 to 6
Blade Launcher damage increased from 4 to 5
Cluster Launcher damage increased from 3 to 4
Orb Launcher damage increased from 6 to 8 (The slow projectiles often meant that it just didn’t feel good to use the orb launcher compared to other weapons with faster projectiles so this buff should bring it in line to be a more satisfying choice)
Orb Launcher projectiles now have a slightly smaller radius to prevent them getting stuck on nearby terrain instead of reaching the target
Gold max health rocks can now spawn shards that spawn multiple max health bubbles at once (similar to how it already works with regular green health rocks- stand in the venn diagram of health bubbles for max effectiveness!)
NERFS

Laser Beam ability direct impact damage reduced from 50 to 30
Poison now wears off twice as fast
Link Shot and Drill Shot base trigger chance decreased from 3% to 2.5%
Hot Shot critical hit chance reduced from 15% to 12% (double that of Sharpshooter)
Critical Arrow now is chance based instead of guaranteed to trigger on crit (starts at 12% chance)
Sniper clip size reduced from 10 to 6 and reload time increased from 1.5 seconds to 1.75 seconds (this is due to the sniper revamp making it a much stronger weapon overall so this is more of a rebalance than a nerf)
Health Totems are less likely to spawn and more likely to explode after use
Lava now applies 3x fire stacks in the Volcanic biome (it barely applied 1 stack in the previous update which made landing in lava feel quite free and not a threat at least on the first loop)
QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES

Improved visibility across all biomes including revamping many overly bright or distracting VFX
Hitmarker sounds are now much quieter for fast firing weapons and slightly louder for slow firing weapons instead of being constantly too loud or quiet depending on the weapon chosen
The portal countdown now only starts when the majority of players have voted for a portal to prevent situations where a single player was choosing a portal before the others were ready
Increased crosshair outline size for better visibility on Arctic islands
The pause when losing focus feature is now optional and can be disabled in the settings menu
Spectating has had a number of improvements such as being able to still see all other players and their health bars and being able to cycle through players to spectate instead of being locked on one until they get eliminated
Made several optimizations to prevent non-hosting players from getting kicked from multiplayer games when a lot was happening at once
Optimized performance heavy islands
Totems that require crystals now display how many crystals you are short by
Barrel Explosion barrels no longer get knocked around as much when shooting them so it should be much easier to line up and get them to explode near enemies
Made several performance improvements for projectiles which should help late game performance when a lot is going on
Increased the minimum distance enemies can spawn from you (this should reduce situations where enemies spawn right under you)
Added a sound when players ping
Added support for 3840x1080, 3840x1440 and 5120x1440 resolutions
Aiming field of view (FOV) now scales with the FOV setting chosen in the settings menu in order to feel more consistent across all FOV ranges
Reduced the interaction radius to prevent accidentally choosing a portal when looting chests. Also tightened up the interaction direction threshold so it’s less likely to accidentally choose a pickup to your left or right when trying to focus on a pickup in the middle
Added 8 total bananas on Parkour islands to prevent situations where not everyone would get a banana when playing in a lobby with more than 4 players :(
Driller now takes into account every player in a multiplayer match so it doesn’t matter who breaks each destructible- if one player has Driller equipped, it’ll roll for a trigger
Enemy anti-camping values have been tweaked to reduce situations where they are constantly flying at you and are hard to hit: they now fly at slower intervals but with greater speed so ideally they’ll get back to a place they can walk faster than before
Fixed Elite portal description mentioning moving to the next biome when you can get random Elite islands mid biome
Chests are now color coded to match the loot category they belong to
BUG FIXES

Double Tap now shows the correct trigger percentage in the inventory and should deal damage more reliably. The only case where it won’t is on weapons that pierce- it’ll trigger on the last pierce, not on every shot (so on the Sniper this is on hitting the third enemy after piercing two before)
Big Shot no longer reduces Laser Cannon projectile size
Fixed Elite Fire Crab not having his weapon equipped
Fixed incorrect music playing for non-hosting players in shops
Fixed issue that prevented the Quickplay menu being usable when returning to the lobby after being eliminated
Fixed player names sometimes not showing up on the gameplay UI in the lobby after they joined
Fixed some effects not being properly optimized at Low graphics settings: performance should be improved if playing on Low now
Fixed bug that allowed you to pick up armor plates when already full
Fixed bug that showed enemy health bars after they had been eliminated in some cases
Fixed saved abilities and melee weapons not restoring correctly when resuming runs in some cases
Fixed Critical Thinking not applying to some damage types
Fixed the Laser Beam ability often hitting the ground right in front of you instead of your intended target
Fixed Blindfire not affecting spread on some weapons
Fixed bug that granted the Playing With Power achievement after playing the Arcade minigame when it should only be granted in the main mode
Fixed rare softlock that could happen with the Explosive Enemies challenge modifier active
Fixed enemies not taking bonus damage when poisoned from melee or Time Shot
Fixed abilities using weapon hitmarkers which played annoyingly loud hitmarker sounds in many cases
Fixed Strike mods having broken looking FX that didn’t convey the true radius
Fixed Arcane Blast not applying arcane stacks
Fixed Sturdy Totems infinite loot exploit
That's all for now but I plan on releasing some more island variations, enemy types and new songs in a bonus mini patch very soon! As always thank you for playing, I love working on this game 🦀
Hotfix #1 (Version 1999)

Difficulty scaling improvements

Enemy damage bonus when looping has been removed. There was previously a whopping +100% damage multiplier to all enemy attacks when looping from island 33 onwards which created very unfair situations where enemies would melt your entire health bar in a second, especially with fire. Enemy damage should feel much more fair and consistent when looping while still being a challenge- looping is meant to be quite difficult
Enemy spawn bonus when looping decreased from +33% to +20%
Islands 1 and 2 of a biome no longer can spawn two waves of ranged enemies back to back These changes should make looping feel far less unfair / punishing while maintaining the challenge
Scorpion mega nerf + rebalance

Scorpion projectile damage reduced by 60%, projectile radius reduced by 33%, projectile speed reduced by 15% and removed projectile bounces. Also reworked their attack patterns to be more dodgeable and less spammy
Increased scorpion walk speed slightly: it should now feel like more of a close / medium range threat and less of a run ender
Other changes

Flamethrower buff- now starts with level 2 Fire Shot (up from level 1)
Rebalanced enhancements: pattern enhancements like Chaotic or Spiraling have less intense motion to make them less likely to miss their target. Enhancement damage increases are +50% damage other than Sticky and Damaging which are +100% (previously Damaging was at +400% which was very broken)
Splitting / Scattering bonus projectiles decreased from 3 to 2 (as it was extremely broken with some combos)
Fixed issue that would cause projectiles created by the Splitting and Scattering enhancement to apply ALL weapon mods to those enhanced projectiles, resulting in extreme damage spikes that weren’t intended
Demolition nests now scale health more with the island count as they became far too easy to destroy past the first biome
Scorpions can now spawn from red challenge crystals
Original post
25 Dec 2023Developer post
The Variety Update Part 1 (Early Access Update 7)
Patch Highlights ABILITIES: GRENADE, GRAPPLING HOOK, LASER BEAM, BLACK HOLE & ICE BLAST MELEE WEAPONS: CLAW, DAGGER & HAMMER NEW WEAPONS: LASER CANNONS & SEAGLE MINIGAMES: ARCADE, HOLDOUT & DUEL QUICKPLAY Matchmake for other players at any of the three main diffic
Patch Highlights
ABILITIES: GRENADE, GRAPPLING HOOK, LASER BEAM, BLACK HOLE & ICE BLAST
MELEE WEAPONS: CLAW, DAGGER & HAMMER
NEW WEAPONS: LASER CANNONS & SEAGLE
MINIGAMES: ARCADE, HOLDOUT & DUEL
QUICKPLAY
Matchmake for other players at any of the three main difficulties and communicate via an improved text chat!
SIDE SLIDING
NEW CONTENT

New island type: Waves
New enemies: Starfish & Limpet
New music
New loot
New island challenge modifiers and a blessing type
BIG BALANCE CHANGES
Reworked economy, enemy and health scaling for a more satisfying experience with less cheap ways to win or lose
Patch Notes
GENERAL

Added new ability system with 5 abilities to equip: Grenade, Black Hole, Grappling Hook, Ice Blast and Laser Beam. This is a big new system with a lot more mix and match potential but it is still being worked on- all "grenade" mods will work on any ability and in The Variety Update Part 2 there'll be plenty of new "Ability Mods" and all current grenade mods will be ported over
Added new melee weapons: Claw, Dagger and Hammer (more are coming in The Variety Update Part 2)
You can now slide sideways and aim while sliding. Also you now slide for twice as long with a more gradual decrease in speed as the slide runs out
Quickplay is now enabled and should finally be working!
Added new weapon: Laser Cannons
Added new weapon: Seagle
Added new minigame: Arcade: Eliminate as many enemies as possible before the time runs out! Enemies spawn faster by eliminating them but if you get hit 50% of the visible enemies will get eliminated, slowing down the pace
Added new minigame: Holdout: No health or loot- survive as many waves as possible until you get hit! Great for warming up or to have some bite-sized crab action without committing to a full rougelike run
Added new minigame: Duel: Face off in a PvP duel to finally find out who is the best crab in your lobby!
Added experimental support for up to 6 players to join a single multiplayer game- the game is still balanced around 4 players max but since many have asked for 5 or 6 player lobbies, it should now be possible!
Added new island type: Waves
Added several new island challenge modifiers and a new blessing type
Added 3 new Tropical biome islands and 1 new Arctic biome island
Added new enemy: Limpet
Added new enemy: Starfish
Added new enemy variant: Mini Grub
Added new weapon mod: Escalating Shot: Fire rate reduced by 50% but increases with each shot fired until stopping fire. The Minigun now starts with this mod by default
Added new perk: Nourishing Salvage: Heal when salvaging pickups
Added new perk: Crystal Fertilizer: More destructible crystals and health rocks spawn
Added new perk: Bonus Chests: Get additional reward chests after every 100 eliminations
Added new perk: Sturdy Totems: Totems have more guaranteed uses before they explode
Added new perk: Equalizer: Damage increased if the number of equipped weapon mods, ability mods and perks are even (so having 0 Weapon Mods, 4 Grenade Mods and 10 Perks equipped would activate the damage bonus)
Added new perk: Slugger: Explosive enemies deal more damage in a greater radius to nearby enemies when eliminated
Added new perk: Crystal Dividends: Gain a percentage of your total crystals as a bonus after clearing each island
Added new perk: Amber Resin: Healing is more effective
Added new greed perk: Big Bones: Max health and damage increased but you grow larger
Added new greed perk: Hoarder: Chance for an extra chest to spawn after each island but you can no longer drop pickups from your inventory
Added new destructibles: Mega Crystal and Mega Challenge Crystal
Added a santa hat cosmetic
Enemies generally have smoother overall movement with less sudden stops and turns especially after getting knocked back or frozen
Some enemies can now dash from side to side
Enemies now slide on icy surfaces and crab enemies slide when moving quickly
You now slide infinitely and automatically on icy surfaces
Added 6 new achievements and 4 new cosmetics
Added new music!
Music no longer fades out after interacting with the victory crown
Added many new sounds (destructibles breaking, crystal collection, slug explosions)
Hitmarker audio can now stack, making hitmarkers more satisfying on shotguns and other weapons that hit multiple times at once
The lobby now has random lighting presets instead of being always sunny
Volcanic lighting has been reworked along with some texture and skybox improvements
Night time lighting has been reworked to be actually dark I’m a big fan of being in a flow state while playing games and not being interrupted by loading screens or other things that make you wait for the game. While the loading times between islands were quite short in previous versions of the game, they blocked gameplay and the feeling of constantly being able to move forward and do something. Some of the changes below help remove this feeling and (sometimes subconsciously) make the game feel more satisfying to play. Please let me know if you notice any issues with these faster loading times especially related to multiplayer games but ideally it should be the same as before, just faster!
Optimized level load times significantly (loading screens between islands should be almost instant)
Increased the pace of some gameplay events like how quickly chests spawn after clearing an island or how fast you can read loot UI after it spawns
The Duplicate symbol on loot now shows up more quickly
Improved the pacing of how loot spawns from chests: all loot now spawns at once to prevent having to wait around for each pickup to appear one by one (this used to be especially tedious with a high level of Big Chests)
BALANCE CHANGES

When the Random Islands modifier is active, Elites defeated on any island other than the final island of each biome will no longer drop healing and key chests. This is to make Elites more of a risk instead of being able to chain elite islands together and come out of it with MORE health than you started with due to all the healing chests
Added new difficulty modifier: Expensive Shops: Shop prices are doubled. The reasoning behind this modifier is that even on the highest difficulties, players were easily breaking the game by buying out shops with economy builds. This modifier should make each purchase count
Removed the Surging Enemies difficulty modifier as it took away from the pacing of each island and made them all blur into the same kind where all enemies were visible almost right away after spawning. The enemy spawn speed for islands later into each biome has been adjusted to prevent large amounts of enemies spawning taking a long time
Hordes have been reworked to have more easy enemies and less projectile enemies as they are meant to be a fun AOE island type more focused on a horde of small enemies. This change helps differentiate them from other islands which felt similar before
Enemies now get +10% more health after each wave on Horde islands. Since waves happen as fast as you can eliminate enemies, this can create an interesting opportunity to gain more crystals (since enemies drop crystals based on their max health) at the cost of a greater challenge
Elites and Bosses are now immune to black holes and gain more health per player in multiplayer lobbies as it was very common for these fights to be quickly over in 4 player matches with 4 distinct builds set up, especially when looping
Added dynamic damage reduction to Elites and Bosses when looping to make fights a bit more exciting without getting tedious. Here’s how it works: Elites and Bosses spawn with 50% damage reduction which reduces itself automatically over time to 0% damage reduction after 30 seconds
Rebalanced many enemy minimum start islands: this means more crabs and slugs in the early islands with the more difficult enemies appearing later in a biome. This also makes biomes feel less samey as there are a wider range of enemies introduced over time instead of pretty much every enemy appearing by island 3 in a biome
Laser Skulls, Laser Crabs, Ice Pumpkins and Fire Pumpkins are more likely to appear
Rare loot is 20% more likely to shop up in shops as it often was hard to scale your lower tier loot the later into a run you got due to shops being full of Epic or Legendary loot
Burst Pistol and Dual Pistols no longer can be tap fired faster than the actual fire rate (no more tired fingers from constant clicking) and the Burst Pistol has had a slight fire rate buff
“Reward” destructibles (crystals, health rocks etc.) and “Combat” destructibles (fire rocks, energy ring rocks etc.) now spawn separately so that it’s possible for more reward destructibles to spawn on an island without flooding it with combat destructibles
The global projectile limit has been increased from 400 to 500
You no longer get greed perks when using the Random totem as there were many bugs with greed perks not applying correctly when acquired this way. This also acts as the only way in the game to remove a greed perk from your inventory
Fire damage from stepping in lava now scales per island (previously it was threatening for the first volcanic biome encounter but became trivial when looping)
Arcane Blast has been moved from the Damage loot pool to the Elemental loot pool
Bigger Boom has been moved from the Damage loot pool to the Skill loot pool
Wind Up now stops working on stopping fire rather than on reloading
Some low value / fun weapon mods have been removed including: Knockback Shot, Ghost Ammo, Heavy Shot and Accelerating Shot will no longer show up unless you have Bouncing Shot (as this was the main time those mods were useful)
BUFFS

Weapon formation mods (like Arc Shot or Square Shot) are now additive and can both be triggered in a single shot. Dual Shotguns, Auto Shotgun, Crossbow and Cluster Launcher now fire any extra shot modifiers (like Arc Shot or Square Shot) IN ADDITION to their normal projectiles. Additive shot formations now also take the weapon spread into account so high spread weapons will now shoot wonky formations. This means that Grip Tape and Blind Fire will directly influence the spacing and spread of the additive shot formations
Enemies can now be frozen for 50% longer and players can only be frozen for 0.5 seconds max (as this was a common cheap death cause in previous updates: being frozen for multiple seconds unable to do anything)
Flammable Armor, Explosive Armor, Exploding Enemies, Freezing Enemies, Flammable Enemies, Electric Enemies and Poisonous Enemies start with half as much radius as before but get a +25% increase in radius for each level of the perk that you have, allowing them to scale in a much more interesting way
Flammable Armor and Explosive Armor have been moved from Epic to Rare rarity. These perks were previously a bit too situational to be worth it for their rarity but these changes should make them much more worthwhile to take in general
Key Totem cost reduced from 3 to 2
You now get +1 key per key pickup when playing on Nightmare difficulty or higher
Enemy damage increases (including their debuffs) when looping has been reduced by 25% as it was too sharp of a power spike, leading to the “I’m one shot” feeling when looping no matter how much max health you had
All fire enemies deal half the fire stacks as before which should make fire a much less common source of death when looping
Reduced Ice Pumpkin AOE radius and damage
Fire Pumpkins now have a longer time between attacks
Homing Grubs, Enraged Grubs and Minigun Crabs can no longer have the Shielded buff as there were some situations that felt unfair as breaking the shield meant taking almost guaranteed damage
Pufferfish explosion damage reduced by 15%
Launcher Crabs projectile explosion radius reduced to match the radius of the Grenade Crab projectile
The Auto Rifle always seems to be quite underwhelming so I’ve doubled the bullet velocity and greatly reduced the amount of random spread it has to establish it as a pinpoint accurate and responsive long range weapon. It should now be noticeably easier to track moving targets and not feel like you are missing shots that should hit
Auto Rifle damage increased from 4 to 5
Dual Shotguns damage increased from 3 to 5 and base firing spread slightly reduced
Auto Shotgun damage increased from 2 to 3 and base spread slightly reduced
Auto Shotgun mag size increased from 12 to 16 and range reduced by 33% (the range was absurd for a shotgun) and spread becomes wider than before with sustained fire
Auto Shotgun trigger roll multiplier (the thing that makes chance based mods and perks trigger) increased by 400%
Rocket Launcher explosion radius has been reduced by 25% as it was way too generous
Sniper projectile collision radius (not damage radius) reduced as the projectile would often hit the ground in front of you on slopes instead of the intended target
Sniper damage increased from 35 to 40
Minigun now starts with Escalating Shot level 2 and mag size increased from 125 to 200
Blade Launcher projectile damage radius reduced to more closely match the projectile size but Big Shot now can increase the radius
Burst Pistol mag size increased from 28 to 36
Orb Launcher damage increased from 5 to 6
Arcane Wand projectile explosion radius increased by 25%
Grenade damage increased from 35 to 50
Bigger Boom and Imploding Grenade now affect the size of the damage areas spawned by abilities
Snake Shot damage increased from +33% to +50%
Blind Fire damage increased from +50% to +100%
Blind Fire recoil increase reduced by 50% to allow for Grip Tape to match it and perfectly counteract it
Grip Tape is no longer capped at -100% spread reduction so it can fully offset Blind Fire. Spread related perks now also influence the angle on formations such as arc and triple shot and even secondary projectile mods like Dagger Arc!
Recoil shot recoil added reduced from +200% to +100%
Bouncing Shot now increases projectile lifetimes by 50% and damage per bounce increased from +50% to +100%
Money Shot crystals per hit increased from 1 to 4 (I’ll be watching this- ideally it’s really fun to find on fast firing low damage weapons)
Piercing Wave trigger chance halved but damage increased by 75% and radius increased by 25%
X Shot trigger chance increased by 33%
Spore Shot mushrooms now have 10x health as they would just explode instantly before having a chance to grow
Grenadier now works in a more understandable way: you get +1 ability stack per cooldown but it will keep cooling down while your current stack is less than the max stack
Damage combo damage per combo level increased from +15% to +20%
Healthy Combo healing amount increased from +50 to +100
Endurance healing increased from +50 health to +75 health
Critical thinking critical damage increased from +25% to +75% but non critical damage reduced from -10% to -25%
Checklist eliminations needed per damage increase reduced from 15 to 10
Faulty Chests chance for unchosen loot to not disappear buffed from 10% to 15%
Double Vision has been moved from Legendary to Epic rarity
Removed knockback from Fireworks and increased their radius by 25%
Fire damage in general has been doubled as it felt quite weak on perks in previous updates
Lightning damage has now been buffed by 66% (it now deals the entire lighting stack as damage instead of 33% of the lightning stack)
Damage areas (like the black hole) can now spawn in mid air which will allow for many new synergies with abilities that can explode in the air (like causing Crystal Barrage to trigger in mid air with a black hole also sucking enemies into it)
The Limited Heals difficulty modifier healing reduction reduced from -50% healing to -33% healing
Increased the invulnerability period after taking damage from 0.1 seconds to 0.25 seconds
NERFS

Shop prices have been increased by 33% as buying out shops was the main source of broken balance in the game (you can still absolutely break shops and get near infinite crystals but some economy changes were needed to make this require a bit more skill and planning, and a bit less random luck)
Shop price increase per loop increased by 25%
Shop prices are slightly more expensive per player in multiplayer to balance out the fact that enemies get a health bonus per player (and therefore pay out more which meant players had less crystals to spend in shops when playing solo compared to in multiplayer runs)
Shop reroll totem base cost is unchanged but cost increase per reroll now increases more steeply
Due to these Shop changes, with the Random Islands modifier active, shops will only be able to spawn on islands 3,4,5 and 9 to better space them out over a biome
Spiked chest open cost increased from 25% to 33% (this is a change that has been reverted from the previous patch as it was too easy to go for multiple spiked chests in a single biome, this way it’s more strategic and has a bigger impact)
Black Holes no longer turn enemy projectiles into your own as this made fighting even the hardest enemies trivial
It’s now half as likely for the flamethrower to spawn fire damage areas on the ground (as it could cause really high fire damage numbers in a very short space of time which made it by far the most powerful weapon in the game). Fire overall has had a buff in this patch though so it should still feel very strong
Big Mag mag size increase reduced from +75% to +50% and renamed “Clip” to “Mag” in the description
Bubble Shot trigger chance reduced by 25% (it’s very powerful but triggered a bit too often)
Splash Damage damage reduced from 25 to 10
The price to unlock slots if playing with the Locked Slots difficulty modifier now scales up slightly more sharply. If this modifier is more annoying than fun then I’ll replace it with another in a future update
Crystal Combo crystal gain per combo level reduced from +20% to +15%
Snatcher close range elimination crystal gain reduced from +50% to +30%
Finishing Move critical elimination crystal gain reduced from +100% to +50%
Gold Coating on heal crystal gain increased from +50% of healing to +100% of healing
Money Is Power damage gain per 1000 crystals reduced from +5% to +2%
Bonus Crystals crystal gain reduced from +50% to +33%
Workaholic, Rising Star and Limited Loot crystal gain reduced from +100% to +75%
Double Edged Sword crystal amount reduced from 100% of damage dealt to 25% of damage dealt and you now lose 20% of your total crystals when taking damage (compared to 10% before as it was way too easy to make a completely broken economy build with it- now it should be in a more balanced place)
A note on max health perks: if getting lucky with a few of these early on, the health pool could go to extreme numbers very quickly. These changes make them still substantial buffs to your health but make them less likely to be one of the key reasons a run succeeds
Bribe max health increase reduced from +500% to +200%
Double Trouble max health increase reduced from +250% to +100%
Leap Of Faith max health increase reduced from +250% to +50%
Health Totem chance to explode after use increased from 33% to 50%. This change is to make it harder to completely break the game early on with many lucky rolls in a row
Loot Totem chance to explode after use increased from 20% to 33%
Gamble Totem and Chance Totem chance to explode after use increased from 8% to 15%
Double Vision chance to get an extra chest after each island reduced from 20% to 15%
QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES

Finally fixed cases where enemy projectiles could travel through walls leading to situations where you could take unfair damage
Added many new checks for enemies stuck in walls or not moving. There should no longer be any soft lock situations- in the worst case scenarios where enemies are stuck for more than a few seconds in a wall, they will be cleaned up by the game automatically
Projectiles get nullified (deal no damage and instantly expire) when hitting the blue border surrounding islands (which prevents lots of unfair deaths where bouncing enemy projectiles would bounce off or explode on seemingly thin air behind you)
Slugs and Pufferfish can no longer start their explode attack in mid air and must be landed (this prevents unfair situations where a slug could come flying out of nowhere and instantly end the run)
Made many improvements to overall visual clarity with tweaks to enemy health bars, damage numbers, FX and many other small elements that all add up to give a more refined experience
The game now automatically pauses when it loses focus when alt tabbing or when something else (like another installer) pops up over it
You are now invulnerable for 2 seconds after falling off a cliff to prevent taking unavoidable damage when respawning (if respawning near to an already attacking enemy)
You no longer take fall damage once an island has been cleared to be consistent with the other post island damage rules in the game
Auto Loot now staggers chest openings to prevent late game crashes when opening hundreds of chests at once
Auto Loot now behaves correctly and will only salvage if it can't pick up any of the pickups in a chest
Auto Loot will now pick up duplicate Greed perks (previously it would ignore all greed perks in the world)
Added island boundaries to some islands (like the one with 4 high walls) to prevent rare situations where enemies could be launched out of bounds and the island would never end
Improved anti-camping measures to support all enemies, not just the small melee crabs
All homing barrels are cleaned up when chests spawn to prevent situations where they would be annoying and home at you while you were looting
Added options to increase field of view to 115 and 120 (previously the limit was 110)
Improved crosshairs and added a central dot for easier aiming
Clients should no longer accidentally leave to the lobby from the Game Over UI (only the host has the power to do that now, clients can still leave if they wish by using the pause menu instead)
Added visible cooldowns to melee in the gameplay UI
Added cooldown expire animations and sounds for both abilities and melee weapons in the gameplay UI
Cooldowns now reset when picking up new abilities or melee weapons in the lobby to make it easier to audition them without waiting for the cooldowns to expire
Added a system that prevents many of the same enemy from spawning in certain cases (Ice Pumpkins, Laser Crabs, Laser Skulls and Fire Pumpkins spawning in large numbers could create unfair situations)
The maximum amount of combat destructible rocks on small arena islands has been reduced as it often led to unavoidable damage or just too much damage area spam
Improved the audio mix to make important sounds stand out more
Optimized all animated characters for better performance in scene with many enemies visible at once
Arcane Wand projectiles now automatically explode when expiring (they previously vanished if not hitting something)
The slide speed curve has been smoothed out to be less jittery and much more consistent
You now automatically cancel a slide if letting go of directional keys (instead of being stuck in a janky stationary slide)
Island challenge modifiers can now only spawn on one portal max in a selection (to even out unfair situations where you would roll two very difficult challenge portals with low health and not have a choice to take the lesser reward / easier fight)
Improved aiming: it felt a bit clunky to aim especially with the Seagle in some cases so the camera height has been adjusted to be more comfortable to aim as well as a faster aim zoom in time to make it feel more responsive. Also tweaked some weapons that felt like they zoomed in too much when aiming
Reduced fire rock destructible explosion damage and radius (as it was easy to accidentally damage yourself when exploding them while appearing to be out of range of the explosion)
Made various UI outline improvements to make damage text and health bars easier to read across all lighting scenarios
Improved text chat visibility and it should no longer go off the screen when writing long messages
Enemies now spawn much faster from the second loop (Island 61+) onwards to make late game runs less tedious
Auto loot speed doubled to make late game runs less tedious
Added options to disable hitmarkers and damage numbers for those that don’t want them or to help improve visibility in late game runs
Ability and Melee cooldowns are now reset when entering a new island
Improved the Piercing Wave particle FX to be easier on the eyes and more smooth
The Auto Loot keybind has been moved from Q to L as many people had other actions bound to Q already and were confused as to why their chest loot was magically disappearing (you can still change it to whatever you want in the controls menu)
Enemies can no longer spawn from destroyed crystals if the island has been cleared
Increased global bandwidth limits to potentially improve 4 player late game lobbies with a lot going on
Increased connection timeout times to give more time for clients that have temporarily lost connection to recover
Sonic Boom and Shockwave no longer knock back enemies as this could allow them to get stuck in walls (I'll rework these perks in the future)
Clip Shot has been renamed to Mag Shot
BUG FIXES

Fixed a longstanding bug that caused very laggy clients to load in with no weapons when first joining a lobby
Improved a few islands where chests could spawn down in unreachable areas and couldn’t be opened
Fixed numerous clunky inventory UI bugs like locked slots “stealing” the mouse cursor when clicked
Fixed “sticky” inventory where dropping loot would reset the focus to the first inventory slot instead of the one that you were hovering over, making dropping a lot of pickups needlessly clunky
Fixed issue that would cause you to permanently keep the aimed in field of view of a weapon after choosing a dual wield weapon
Fixed exploit that allowed players to start a run on a much easier difficulty than initially selected
Fixed exploit that allowed players to move around and jump while frozen
Fixed issue where hazard damage (like from barrels or destructible rocks) weren’t respecting the invulnerability period after you take damage (so a bunch of barrels exploding at the same instant were able to eat through multiple armor plates at once)
Fixed issue on arctic island that caused barrels to explode as soon as you load into the island which could lead to taking unavoidable damage
Fixed issue that caused enemies to spawn with half empty armor plates
Fixed various multiplayer health bar bugs that would show players and enemies as having armor when they really didn’t
Fixed issue that caused Piercing Shot to reset reset Streak Shot
Fixed issue that caused the Parkour reward UI to not update on non-hosting players
You can now complete the Flawless and Frugal achievements without needing to be explicitly on Normal difficulty (they now unlock on Nightmare and Ultra Chaos difficulties also, Normal being the minimum)
Fixed issue that allowed friends to join in progress runs via the Steam menu, now they can only join while in the lobby as is intended
Fixed a longterm crash that could happen when joining a multiplayer game
Fixed a longterm bug that could leave invalid multiplayer sessions open which interfered with inviting and joining multiplayer games
Fixed issue where no enemies would spawn after a while on the 1st island of each biome
Fixed being able to get under the map on one of the Volcanic islands
Fixed a number of rare crashes
Fixed issue where challenges were completed in the game but the corresponding Steam achievement stayed locked
Rewrote how account rank is calculated to make it more accurate (as it was possible to have all weapons Emerald rank but still have a Sapphire account rank previously)
Repelling Dash now only affects enemy projectiles and won’t repel teammate projectiles
Fixed issue that caused the Game Over UI to show up in the lobby if leaving a run too soon after getting eliminated
Fixed the crystals and keys icons being cut off in the inventory UI on some wider resolutions like 1920x1200
Improved how music plays: it shouldn’t stop the shop music, play the gameplay music and then switch to the boss music a second or two later as it did previously
Edited arctic tree collision to make it much less likely to get stuck on it
ULTRA CHAOS BALANCE CHANGES
The goal with these changes is to make Ultra Chaos a bit more skillful, fair and fun while still retaining the brutal difficulty spike

Ultra Chaos is now unlocked when reaching Ruby account rank (down from Diamond in order to give more people the chance to try it out)
Slightly slowed down enemy attack speeds on Ultra Chaos (just because some enemies attacked unreasonably fast especially when shielded)
Reduced the amount of bonus starting luck in Ultra Chaos by 33% (this should make getting rare loot (important for many builds) much more consistent)
Elites and Bosses spawn slightly less often in Ultra Chaos
Bosses no longer spawn champion enemies when damaged and keys when eliminated on non-boss islands when playing on Ultra Chaos difficulty
Extra elites / bosses spawned in Ultra Chaos has been reduced from 2 to 1
Elites and bosses no longer can have the Healthy or Shielded buff
Removed the extremely fast enemy spawn speed (it actually is harder when enemies gradually spawn in while you are already moving around the island than it is for them all to spawn instantly)
Being on Low graphics settings no longer makes totems have no emissive color
JAN 14TH HOTFIX
Removed santa hats
That's it for now but I plan on releasing The Variety Update Part 2 sometime in February to finish off the new ability and melee systems as well as add a lot of new island layouts and loot types to get closer and closer to the "no two runs are the same" feeling 🦀
Here's a teaser for a mechanic that will let you buff specific weapon mods in interesting ways: in the example below, Mace Shot has homing and chaotic buffs that increase damage and allow all 3 mace balls to fly to the target (when previously they'd just miss). This should add a new layer of fun to mods and give more depth and variety when buildcrafting!
Original post
21 Nov 2023Developer post
Nominate Crab Champions for the Steam Awards!
If you are enjoying Crab Champions so far, it'd mean a lot to me if you could nominate it for a Steam Award (after polling the community, it looks like either the "Best Soundtrack" or the "Better With Friends" categories are the most suitable for this game). There's still so much
01 Sep 2023Developer post
The Fire & Magic Update (Early Access Update 6)
Patch Highlights NEW WEAPONS: FLAMETHROWER & ARCANE WAND VFX OVERHAUL ULTRA CHAOS: NEW EXTREME DIFFICULTY UNIQUE LOOT VISUALS + ICONS (A START) Loot is finally getting some identity! While there's a lot of loot to make unique visuals for, I'm happy with the way the first few
Patch Highlights
NEW WEAPONS: FLAMETHROWER & ARCANE WAND
VFX OVERHAUL
ULTRA CHAOS: NEW EXTREME DIFFICULTY
UNIQUE LOOT VISUALS + ICONS (A START)
Loot is finally getting some identity! While there's a lot of loot to make unique visuals for, I'm happy with the way the first few are turning out. It makes a big difference to be able to start recognizing loot at distance or being able to share your inventory screen and not have to explain what each piece of loot is!
BIG MECHANIC IMPROVEMENTS

Universal Critical Hits: ANYTHING can now cause a critical hit including your secondary projectiles like Mace Shot or Dagger Arc. This means that there is a single unified critical hit chance stat that affects all of your build at once instead of having to find separate grenade crit and melee crit etc. perks
Damage 10x Lower: As many people were reaching the limits of the game in terms of getting to the point where enemies become invincible due to their health being so high, I've globally scaled down ALL damage sources by 10x (and of course enemy health too). This allows for longer runs, more noticeable power creep and easier calculations in the early game when comparing damage numbers. If comparing to the previous build, something dealing 2500 damage now deals 250 damage!
Better Healing: Especially on the higher difficulties with many modifiers on, health became less and less important with many players opting to go for a "one hit" type build revolving mainly around armor and not health. Since there are so many perks around building health, I wanted to make it much more important and fun to do so. The base health pool for all difficulties has been increased, with the effectiveness of armor slightly reduced. Most health related perks have received a buff so building into health loot should be much more rewarding.
Patch Notes
GENERAL

Remade almost all VFX in the entire game from scratch to be much less blinding and more interesting to look at (there are some that still need to be replaced which will be done in the next update)
Added new weapon: Flamethrower
Added new weapon: Arcane Wand
Added new difficulty: Ultra Chaos (unlocked by getting all weapons to Diamond). This is a difficulty for those looking for the most unfair challenge that I could possibly come up with. There are no unlocks or achievements tied to it, it's purely for extreme challenge seekers
Critical hits are now calculated globally: this means that ANYTHING can crit- dagger arcs, mace balls etc!
Added 2 new Tropical biome islands
Added new evolved enemy: Ice Pumpkin
Added new evolved enemy: Fire Pumpkin
Added new evolved enemy: Laser Skull
Added new debuff: Arcane - damage is dealt once per second equal to the total stacks of arcane currently applied. Each time damage is applied, the total stacks of arcane are halved
Added new weapon mod: Arcane Shot: Shots apply arcane to enemies
Added new weapon mod: Drill Shot: Chance for shots to create damaging drills on impact
Added new weapon mod: Link Shot: Chance for shots to burst into 3 link shots on impact
Added new grenade mod: Giant Drill: Grenades explode into giant drills
Added new perk: Crimson Haze: Enemies create short lived damaging zones when eliminated
Added new perk: Critical Lightning: Critical hits shock random enemies
Added new perk: Potent Magic: Arcane debuff stacks increased
To make it harder to reach the damage limit (and getting negative billions of damage in the game over screen), all damage has been reduced by 10x- this is a global change and all mods and perks that deal flat damage have been adjusted accordingly. This also means all enemies start with 10x less health. The end result should be a more noticeable and satisfying damage increase as runs progress, seeing single digit damage numbers grow into the thousands and eventually millions! Another big benefit is for those that go on long runs, it’ll take much longer to reach the current island limits (where enemies become invincible due to having so much health). During the rebalancing pass, if a mod dealt 25 damage, I’ve rounded it up to now deal 3 damage (after the 10x reduction). While doing this I also buffed the damage of some underperforming mods and perks, mainly the strike and storm mods as well as all damage increasing grenade mods. All of these changes should make it also easier to calculate how effective a mod or perk is relative to the base damage as it’s easier to compare a 50 damage mod to a 8 base damage weapon than it is to compare a 450 damage mod to a 75 base damage weapon (which is how things were before the 10x reduction and rounding)
Greatly improved the smoothness of other players in multiplayer games especially when spectating, it should no longer look like players are lagging when they aren’t
Small enemies no longer collide with each other which should greatly reduce situations where pufferfish get stuck on crabs
Optimized the Shrapnel challenge modifier which could cause lag when many enemies exploded into shrapnel at once
Optimized situations where many projectiles hit lava and created lots of splash FX, causing lag
Added 30 FPS frame cap for those looking to preserve battery life on handheld devices
Improved water ripple visuals to both work in shallow water and also push water foam away
Improved the visuals of the Grid, Flow, Geometric, Purple Tiger, Regal and Void camos
Raised the height of the camera when not aiming to make it feel more comfortable (as the crab is so flat and close to the ground, having the camera also low sometimes felt bad when looking upwards)
Added 4 new achievements (Flamethrower and Arcane wand victory related)
Added new inventory icons for some weapon mods (still lots more to be done)
Added new generic icons for Rare, Epic and Legendary weapon mods (with a matching colored border to easily see what rarity they are at a glance in the inventory UI)
BALANCE CHANGES

Slugs and Grubs are slightly less common to allow for their presence to be more noticeable (ideally they should be lined up with other enemies for bonus damage rather than half of the map being slugs and clearing itself with chain reactions- this can still happen but just a bit less often)
Fire damage is more effective but all fire mods and perks apply less overall stacks to compensate. This should mean less situations where enemies are taking tiny amounts of damage from fire over a very long period of time and more situations where enemies are taking much more concentrated fire damage over a shorter period
Moved Hot Shot, Sharpshooter, Power Punch and Mega Crit from Weapon Mods to be Perks as critical hits are relevant to more than just weapon shots now
Critical Claws, Critical Grenade, Critical Chain and Streak Shot have been removed
Critical Blast has been moved to a perk as it can trigger from more than just weapon crits now
Precision has been renamed to Streak Shot since that has been removed and the name fits it better
Since “lesser” crits can trigger “on crit” mods (which could lead to an infinite loop), critical hit chance is capped at 50% for “lesser” damage sources (any damage that isn’t directly from your weapon, grenade or melee)
Critical Link has been renamed to Link Shot, has new projectiles and no longer requires a critical hit to trigger
Critical Blades has been renamed to Homing Blades and no longer requires a critical hit to trigger
Mega Crit now multiplies critical damage by 3 instead of adding 300% extra damage to the multiplier
Destructibles now scale up their damage / debuff stacks from +5% per island to +10% per island
Landmines no longer spawn naturally and barrels spawn less (no more chaotic barrels, only regular ones- the chaotic barrels are fun in the lobby but in gameplay situations they mostly just fly off into the sky and do nothing)
Increased physics impulse strength from melee on regular barrels
The Homing Barrels challenge modifier barrels have far less health and no longer can leak which should reduce the messy visuals that can sometimes happen with lots of barrels
Turrets no longer target Shielded enemies
The slowest moving enemies now move a bit faster to prevent situations where you are looking for one last really slow enemy when you’ve cleared all of the others
Basic melee crabs no longer can be shielded as it slowed down the pace of gameplay too much
Lightning has been reworked to last a bit longer and deal less damage (as it wasn’t adjusted for the 10x drop in damage yet). Also adjusted the lightning FX and tint to be a bit more blue to differentiate it from Arcane
CHANGES TO THE DIFFICULTY MODIFIER ROSTER

Added new difficulty modifier: Surging Enemies: Enemies spawn in much faster
Added new difficulty modifier: Limited Heals: All healing is reduced by 50%
The Eternal Punishment difficulty modifier now only removes 2% of your max health when taking damage (it previously removed 5% which often made runs devolve into a glass cannon situation where max health was ignored)
Resurrecting Enemies now triggers slightly less often as it could cause islands to drag in terms of pacing. In addition to this, enemies can no longer resurrect in a close range to the player as this could often lead to unfair damage from enemies spawning close behind
Volatile Explosions was a modifier that caused understandable frustration: being able to melee groups of slugs and not take damage from it was one of the best feeling mechanics in the game and removing it for the sake of difficulty decreased the fun factor for most. The flow state present without this modifier on got interrupted in a more tedious than fun way. This modifier has been moved up to the new Ultra Chaos difficulty. To make basic slugs still feel threatening with this change, they now explode faster than before, requiring a well timed melee or dash to avoid
Manual Collection has also been replaced as it made the flow of combat more tedious than fun in many cases. Since there are those that still enjoy it, it is active in the Ultra Chaos difficulty
These changes should shift the difficulty more to making good builds and less making zero mistakes
BUFFS

Auto Rifle damage increased from 3 to 5
Burst Pistol damage increased from 3 to 5
Dual Pistols damage increased from 4 to 5
Auto Shotgun damage increased from 2 to 3
Orb Launcher damage increased from 4 to 6
Sniper damage increased from 30 to 40
Rocket Launcher projectile speed doubled (as the weapon was underperforming slightly before so this should make it easier to hit moving targets)
Rocket Launcher explosion radius increased by 20%
Rocket Launcher damage increased from 25 to 35
Blade Launcher damage increased from 2 to 4
Base starting health increased from 100 to 200
Spiked Chest max health opening cost reduced from 33% to 25%
Loot Totem health cost reduced from 33% to 20%
Crystal Totem health cost reduced from 33% to 10%
Chance Totem health cost reduced from 10% to 5%
Gamble Totem crystal cost reduced by 33%
Critical Blast damage increased from 400 to 500 and is now chance based as intended
High Roller now duplicates Epic and Legendary chests on Elite / Boss islands rather than Healing chests which felt underwhelming
High Roller base downside reduced from 33% chance for no chests to spawn to 20% chance for no chests to spawn
Reload Arc is now part of the Skill loot pool to make choosing skill portals more enticing
Wind Up, Streak Shot and Clip Shot no longer add flat damage and now add percentage damage
Double Trouble enemy health increase reduced from +100% to +50%
Hard Target now applies damage reduction AFTER other incoming damage debuffs (like from Hot Shot or Brute Force). So a 10% reduction is now 10% of the entire incoming damage amount which should make it a more viable option to counter increased incoming damage debuffs
Enhanced Turrets damage increased from +50% to +75%
Crystal Barrage damage increased from 1 to 3
Split Shot now happens sooner in the lifetime of a projectile, making it much more viable for fast moving projectiles
Arcane Blast now applies 8 stacks of the arcane debuff per damage tick
Sharpened Axe damage per second increased from 50 to 125
Barrel Explosion damage increased from 50 to 100 and armor removed on the barrels to make them easier to destroy
Landmine Shot damage increased from 50 to 100
Triangle Shot damage increased from 35 to 100
Torpedo Shot damage increased from 35 to 100
Firework Shot damage increased from 25 to 30
Bomb Shot damage increased from 35 to 75
Proximity barrage damage increased from 30 to 50
Dagger Shot damage increased from 2 to 3
Reload Arc damage increased from 15 to 20
Spinning Blade damage increased from 4 to 5
Time Bolt damage increased from 30 to 40
Ultra Shot damage increased from 25 to 30
Shockwave cooldown reduced from 10 seconds to 4 seconds
Health Shot healing amount increased from 1 to 3
Grim Reaper healing amount increased from 5 to 6
Vampire healing amount increased from 2 to 4
Personal Space max health increase requirement reduced from every 8 eliminations to EVERY close range elimination
Bullseye max health increase requirement reduced from every 10 one shot eliminations to EVERY one shot elimination
Checklist eliminations requirement reduced from 25 to 15
Assassin eliminations requirement reduced from 10 to 5
Tasty Orange damage increase per elimination increased from +1% to +2%
Laser Crab, Poison Skull, Blocker Skull and Lightning Skull projectile damage decreased by 50%
Grenade Crab, Fire Skull and Homing Grub projectile damage decreased by 25%
Slightly reduced the radius of the Grenade Crab grenade to be a bit more fair
Slightly reduced the Minigun crab projectile speed
Reduced the collision radius of the Elite Lightning Crab projectiles as there were some cases that appeared to be a miss that would still hit
Removed knockback on many small enemy projectiles to reduce situations where players could lose momentum and be juggled in the air, taking damage multiple times- not fun!
Frenzied Enemies now doubles the attack speed of enemies rather than setting it to the max value (which could lead to inconsistencies and unfair situations on some enemies)
NERFS

Crossbow default piercing reduced from 2 to 0 (as the previous update made it one of the best weapons in the game)
Enemy bonus health per alive player in co-op increased from +40% per player to +45% per player and on Nightmare or Ultra Chaos difficulties, the bonus is increased to +66% per player on Elite and Boss islands as the situations where everyone shreds through elites and bosses in 1 second were happening a bit too often in co-op especially in 4 player lobbies
Double Edged Sword crystal gain has been reduced from 250% of damage dealt to 100% of damage dealt as it was far too overpowered before
Hot Shot critical hit chance reduced from 16% to 15%
Sharpshooter critical hit chance reduced from 8% to 6%
There is no longer a 2% base starting crit chance, you start with 0% chance to crit
Mace Shot trigger chance decreased by 1%
Mace Shot damage per second decreased from 125 to 100
Aura Grenade damage per second reduced from 1250 to 500
Armor health per plate reduced from 25% of max health to 15% of max health
Slightly increased the health of most medium enemies (regular skulls, regular ants etc.) but also increased the time before health regeneration on these enemies (if playing with the Regenerating Enemies modifier enabled), allowing for more breathing room between each hit they take
Pufferfish health increased to differentiate them from slugs when prioritizing targets
BUG FIXES

Upgrade chests no longer contain duplicates of the same loot (you could have 10 mods in your inventory but get the same mod twice)
Fixed issue where ALL strikes that had spawned during a run weren’t getting cleaned up properly which could lead to worse performance on late game runs
Enemy movement now ignores physically simulated destructibles so they should stop being pushed under the ground by barrels
Bouncing Shot no longer resets the lifetime of projectiles which was causing performance issues where projectiles would bounce around for 30+ seconds at high levels
Removed Laser Crab and Minigun Crab from challenge crystals as they were appearing when the Evolved Enemies difficulty modifier was inactive
Enemies that happen to spawn outside of the world bounds should get automatically eliminated
Fixed Critical Blast having a visual cooldown in the inventory while actually having a chance to trigger on each critical hit
Fixed issue that could cause Auras to trigger multiple times when dropping and re-picking back up an Aura perk
Fixed various issues that could cause Auras to stop triggering when multiple Aura perks were equipped
Lava now deals damage when stepping into it as intended
Homing Thorns now deal damage as intended
Fixed various spots where enemies could get stuck
The “Islands Survived” text in the game over UI now shows island 18 if getting eliminated on island 19 (previously it would show 19)
You no longer automatically fire when leaving a portal if you had entered it with the fire button held down
Fixed some jankiness around sliding- when sliding forward and quickly pressing the back key, you no longer change directions while sliding and instead stop the slide which should prevent overshooting when trying to stop a slide
Damage Dealt can no longer be negative on the game over screen
Max health no longer goes to 1 when getting high enough
Fixed issue that would cause players other than the multiplayer host to see blue borders in the lobby
Fixed issue with auto melee that could cause it to continue indefinitely when exiting a portal
Removed the invisible walls around the pillars in some boss islands- this prevents situations where you can seemingly deal no damage to enemies when they are near the pillars but will increase situations where they may be able to shoot through walls. Working on a better fix to this in the future
Fixed issue that prevented the Challenger challenges from being completed
Made several potential fixes for a low percentage of players not being able to join multiplayer games
Fixed the Level Up perk favoring grenade mods over weapon mods when leveling things up
Fixed the Level Up perk leveling up mods and perks that were already level 255
Fixed a soft lock that could happen if knocked out of the Tropical island with the square 4 walls: there’s now a launchpad outside of the wall boundaries to bounce back in!
That's all for this update, thanks for playing! 🦀
Small Hotfix
Made a few small improvements based on initial feedback from the update!
GENERAL

Changed lightning to only interrupt your movement initially, not prevent jumping or dashing the entire time you were shocked which felt unfair over the new longer lifespan that lightning has
BUG FIXES

Fixed Lightning Skulls not having purple projectiles
Fixed a few rare crashes
Fixed Checklist displaying the incorrect amount of eliminations needed in the description
Original post
17 Jun 2023Developer post
The Difficulty Update (Early Access Update 5)
It's been quite a while since the last update- this will most likely be the pace moving forward: larger updates every 1-2 months delivering a nice chunk of new content to explore! As mentioned in previous patch notes, I have been continually updating the Beta branch with changes
It's been quite a while since the last update- this will most likely be the pace moving forward: larger updates every 1-2 months delivering a nice chunk of new content to explore! As mentioned in previous patch notes, I have been continually updating the Beta branch with changes every few days so if you feel like trying out every little addition (with the possibility of them being unbalanced) then feel free to opt into that branch. There has been an amazing beta community growing on Discord and it's been fun to see the reactions to each element as I add them.
With that said, lets get into all the changes!
Patch Highlights
DIFFICULTY MODIFIERS
With a surprising amount of players asking for a challenge beyond Nightmare, I have added 12 new difficulty modifiers that can all be enabled at once for the ULTIMATE test of skill! Keep in mind that these are intended for seasoned players and (especially on higher challenge levels) will most likely require a lot of attempts to win.
Each weapon gets a medal when winning (the medal awarded depends on the challenge level) which contributes to your overall account medal (seen next to your name in all games).
NO MORE COOLDOWNS: COMPLETE LOOT REBALANCE!
There have been countless rebalances to loot in this patch (details in the full patch notes below), but the main things to be excited for are:

Almost all mods that previously had boring cooldowns (meaning you could only trigger them once every few seconds) now are chance based, allowing you to trigger them multiple times in a short timespan. Each additional level of these mods both increases the trigger chance AND the effectiveness of the mod. This should allow for previously underwhelming mods like Dagger Arc or Bubble Blast to scale nicely into the end game
Damage increasing perks now affect the damage of weapon and grenade mods that spawn secondary projectiles (again like Dagger Arc / Bubble Blast) which makes more sense AND again allows for better scaling
These changes mean that finally the more "fun" mods are a viable choice over straight up flat damage boosts as for a long time these mods just couldn't keep up and weren't worth taking. This should introduce far more build variety than before.
PHYSICS BASED DESTRUCTIBLES
These add a new layer of chaos to islands compared to the existing static explosive rocks!
TONS OF QUALITY OF LIFE IMPROVEMENTS
This update is packed full of highly requested quality of life features such as:

You can now press Q (by default) to Auto Loot every piece of loot and chest on an island without having to manually open and choose each pickup (which could really slow down late game runs especially with perk combos like Big Chests and Faulty Chests)
The same amount of crystals given to all players in multiplayer when eliminating enemies to prevent unlucky players from falling behind in a run
You can no longer be frozen for 2+ seconds, leading to unfair deaths
Many common and frustrating bugs have been fixed such as Key Totems not working if you aren't hosting in a multiplayer game, getting eliminated by totems if you had a perk that increases incoming damage, glue shot not damaging consistently etc.
Patch Notes
GENERAL

Added 12 difficulty modifiers that each add a challenge level to the run to allow you to rank up in exchange for greatly increased difficulty. I tried to make each modifier interesting while keeping the core gameplay loop intact while also trying to avoid "curse" or straight up debuff modifiers like "chests spawn less loot", those never feel very fun to me. If you thought Nightmare was getting too easy, try a few runs with all modifiers active!
In multiplayer, all players now receive an equal share of crystals when enemies are eliminated. This even occurs when a player has been eliminated and is spectating. The main reason for this is to prevent situations where players are left behind due to one overpowered player dealing all the damage and scooping up all the crystals!
Added new “Auto Loot” keybind that will automatically pick up all available loot (if a chest it will pick the highest rarity option) and will salvage all remaining loot- great for late game runs with a lot of loot to sort through that previously took a lot of time per island
Damage line of sight checks now ignore enemies so grenades, explosive weapons and melee will now all damage ALL enemies within the damage radius (before, only a fraction of a group of enemies would take damage, the others blocking the damage entirely)
New XP system: for every 10000 score you get in a run, you level up! This is a permanent account level that can be infinitely leveled up. For each Challenge Level you get 5% more XP
Added physically simulated barrels and landmines
Added new enemies (only seen with the Evolved Enemies difficulty modifier active): Elite Barrel Skull, Laser Crab, Minigun Crab, Homing Grub
Perks that increase damage now also scale the damage of ALL other damage sources (including things like Dagger Arc or Poison Aura). Because of this I have rebalanced the damage numbers of ALL “secondary” projectile weapon mods, grenade mods and perks (too many small tweaks to list here but they have all been rebalanced with this new scaling in mind)
Most mods that had cooldowns are now fully chance based, allowing you to trigger them multiple times in a short timeframe. Grenade mods that do have cooldowns generally have much shorter (around 1 second) cooldowns to allow for grenades to trigger mods much more frequently when using Grenadier or Clone Explosion
Perks that increase or decrease incoming damage (like Hot Shot or Hard Target) no longer have an effect on unblockable damage sources such as from spiked chests or totems. This means you can no longer get eliminated by using a totem or opening a spiked chest!
When aiming with the crossbow, the arc spread is now tightened
Heavily optimized the maximum amount of individual FX instances that can be visible at once which should reduce late game frame drops with a lot going on
Heavily optimized the maximum amount of individual damage text numbers that can be visible at once which should also help late game performance
Projectiles now hit the blue island border walls which means improved performance in cases where lots of projectiles are being spammed (as projectiles that missed enemies and flew out into the distance got simulated for far longer than they were relevant to gameplay)
Optimized the Shrapnel challenge modifier projectiles as it could cause noticeable frame drops when many enemies were eliminated at once
Greatly improved the responsiveness of physics objects in multiplayer
Added new weapon mod: Landmine Shot
Added new Grenade Mod: Barrel Explosion
Added new rideable barrel to the lobby- hop in and find Tony!
Added new challenge modifier: Homing Barrels
Added new destructible rock type: Max Health Rock (gold)
Improved gold skin visuals to be brighter and more vibrant
Dagger Arc, Piercing Wave, Arcane Blast, Shotgun Blast, Mace Shot, Firework Shot, Thorn Shot, Torpedo Shot, Fireball Shot, Sharpened Axe and Triangle Shot are now chance based instead of cooldown based. This should make them far more interesting and fun to choose instead of straight up stat boosts
The maximum ice stacks a player or enemy can ever have at once is 25. This is to prevent extremely long freeze periods on both incoming and outgoing damage which could result in players getting unfairly eliminated
All “bad thing happens when taking damage perks” now won’t trigger when taking constant fire damage and will only happen on direct hits from enemies or other strong one off damage hits like from totems. Your combo will also stay safe here as losing a hard earned 5x combo due to a tick of fire never feels fair
Enemies can no longer change targets while in the middle of an attack and facing another player
Interact cooldown has been removed from portals to prevent situations where multiple players interacting with portals in a short time frame wouldn’t count every player
Improved controller navigation on the Difficulty selection UI to make it easier to see which modifiers are being selected
Added 3 new achievements and skins
BALANCE CHANGES

The maximum time a Horde island can be has been reduced from 90 seconds to 60 seconds as they could often drag the pace of a run down a bit. Since they are now shorter, I've adjusted the enemy spawn curve to be more intense
Whenever multiple elites or bosses spawn due to looping or difficulty modifiers, they can now be all different types of enemies
Reduced the amount of bounces that Elite Lightning Crab projectiles can do and also increased the time between their attacks
Poison Crab health reduced by 15%
The key totems in the lobby are now much more likely to drop Legendary loot
Auto Rifle damage increased from 28 to 30
Orb Launcher damage increased from 35 to 36
Grenade damage increased from 275 to 350
Bouncing Shot now works slightly differently- each level of Bouncing Shot adds +1 bounce (previously no matter what level it gave +4 bounces)
Made reaching max combo much easier: Combo Level 3 = 50 eliminations (down from 100), Combo Level 4 = 125 eliminations (down from 250), Combo Level 5 = 225 eliminations (down from 500)
Homing Shot now has a much shorter homing range which should prevent it completely breaking the game- it’s still powerful when used on lined up enemies with piercing but it should make situations where all you have to do is fire into the sky to clear an island less common
Scavenger is now fixed at a 5% chance for enemies to drop health pickups but the amount of healing increases with each level so it can scale better into the late game
Poison was extremely overpowered so it no longer affects damage from non direct damage (like fire damage). This makes flat damage mods more consistent and prevents unfair deaths where you get set on fire while also poisoned, leading to insane incoming damage. Poison stacks have also been adjusted to be closer to fire in terms of balance as before landing even a single bullet with the Poison Shot mod active would grant a +25% damage bonus when hitting that enemy again- way too overpowered in comparison to the other elements! All poison based mods and perks have had their poison stacks rebalanced to be more in line with the other elements
Iron Claws negative debuff (melee cooldowns increased) reduced from +100% melee cooldowns to +50% melee cooldowns so it should be more viable to use now
Valued Customer now increases max health instead of just healing, making it much more useful
Fortitude max health gain increased from +20 max health to +25 max health
Personal Space and Bullseye eliminations needed to trigger reduced from 10 to 8
Damage Aura damage increased from 15 to 20
The health of all turrets has been increased from 100 to 10000
Reduced grenade knockback strength to make grenade mods such as Spike Strike or Crystal Barrage more useful (since before it would often knock enemies out of the way, making these mods useless)
Shotgun Blast damage per pellet increased from 125 to 400
Ultra Shot base trigger chance increased by 50% and damage increased from 400 to 500
Time Bolt damage increased from 600 to 1000
Firework Shot damage increased from 500 to 1000
All Aura perks (other than Damage Aura) now have a larger radius which should make them much more useful
Poison Aura cooldown reduced from 5 seconds to 4 seconds
Lightning Aura cooldown reduced from 9 seconds to 6 seconds
Ice Aura cooldown reduced from 12 seconds to 8 seconds
Fire Aura cooldown reduced from 10 seconds to 6 seconds
Fire Shot fire stacks per hit increased from 40 to 100
Random Shot debuff stacks per hit increased from 10 to 25
Critical Chain cooldown reduced from 12 seconds to 10 seconds
Gemstone damage increased from +5% after each island to +6% after each island
Dagger projectiles (used by Dagger Blast / Dagger Shot / Dagger Dash) now move 50% more slowly but have a 50% increased radius so should be far more useful + effective
FMJ damage increased from +50% damage to armored enemies to +100% damage to armored enemies
Ghost Ammo chance to not use ammo per shot reduced from 20% to 15% (to balance it better with Efficiency as that has the same chance but you have to actually hit something for it to take effect)
Bouncing Shot now starts with a few extra bounces to prevent cases where it could get stuck on the ground and appear to not bounce at all
Bribe, Damage Seeker and Double Edged Sword will no longer trigger when stepping into non damaging poison / ice zones
Health Rocks and Max Health Rocks now scale their bonuses by +20% per island
Increased melee knockback strength by 50%
Grave Dodger has been removed for now as it was extremely broken at high levels and basically prevented a run from being lost with 60+ seconds of invulnerability when reaching 1 HP on each island
Melee knockback strength has been toned back slightly as the previous buff caused enemies to get stuck in crevices around the map
Removed Lightning Slugs from the Challenge Crystal enemy pool and added Laser Crabs and Minigun Crabs instead
Ultra Mushroom now has the same spawn weight as other grenade mods
All turret projectiles damage increased by 50%
Mace Ball projectiles have less gravity There were a few things causing damage numbers to SKYROCKET and make other mods that deal flat damage essentially useless very quickly. I’ve toned these back so that a wider range of build options are viable Critical hit calculations were unintentionally extremely strong: Power Punch was multiplying the original critical hit multiplier which then got multiplied again by Mega Crit! This resulted in insane inflations to damage when the multipliers should have been additive. This has been corrected now The adjustments below were made as a balancing response to damage increasing perks now being able to affect secondary projectiles such as Dagger Arc
Power Punch critical hit damage increase reduced from +25% to +20%
Critical Thinking damage boost reduced from +100% to +25%
Critical chain active duration reduced from 5 seconds to 4 seconds
Power Armor damage boost reduced from +50% damage per armor plate to +25% damage per armor plate
Damage Combo damage boost reduced from +20+ per combo level to +15% per combo level
Reduced damage bonus for Oil Can, Ice Cube, Metal Rod and Poison Vial from +50% damage to +25% damage
Reduced damage bonus of Red Fury from +50% to +33%
Reduced Brute Force damage increase from +250% to +100% and reduced the incoming damage penalty from +50% to +25%
Reduced Damage Seeker damage increase from +250% to +150%
Reduced Glass Cannon damage increase from +400% to +250% and reduced the max health penalty from -90% to -80%
Reduced Leap Of Faith max health increase from +300% to +250%
Reduced Up The Ante damage increase from +200% to +75%
Money Is Power damage buff decreased from +10% to +5% per 1000 crystals
Fire Aura, Ice Aura, Lightning Aura and Poison Aura damage increased from 50 to 150
All “Strike” mods have had their damage increased from 100 to 400+
All “Strike” mods have had their cooldowns reduced (cooldowns may be removed entirely in the future but since they all last quite a while it feels right to keep them cooldown based for now)
BUG FIXES

Fixed issue where non-host players in a multiplayer match couldn’t use the key totem to get a free perk before a run
Fixed issue where teammates could be damaged if triggering a damaging mod when eliminated (like crystal barrage) and your damage became “unowned”
Fixed issue that caused Aura perks to not trigger when reloading an autosave unless dropped and picked back up again
Poison now correctly increases damage of lesser projectiles such as Dagger Arc / Bubble Shot etc.
Fixed issue where Glue Shot wasn’t dealing damage on some weapons
Fixed issue where leaking destructible FX weren’t being attached properly
Made many improvements to prevent enemies spawning under the ground (some may remain especially around barrels but I'm working to fix those in the future!)
Fixed keys spawning under the ground when defeating bosses
Fixed Damage Seeker reducing future max health gains from hearts when it shouldn’t
Fixed enemies not calculating debuff damage correctly (Fire Skulls now will apply more fire stacks in general for example but these fire stacks will be far less damaging than before). This fix will make debuff damage consistent with all other sources (such as from fire rocks). Previously a poison skull would apply 10 stacks of poison from a projectile on island 1, and the same 10 stacks of poison on island 100 when they should have been applying far more
Fixed exploit where players could win infinitely in the Game Over UI
Fixed floating rocks on some islands
That's all for now, see you in the next update! 🦀
Original post
25 Apr 2023Developer post
Early Access Update 4
Patch Notes GENERAL Added 5 new Volcanic arena islands and removed the re-used tropical islands from the Volcanic biome You can now interact with key totems even after unlocking everything to start a run off with a random piece of loot (minimum rarity is Epic) Added new perk: Cri
Patch Notes
GENERAL

Added 5 new Volcanic arena islands and removed the re-used tropical islands from the Volcanic biome
You can now interact with key totems even after unlocking everything to start a run off with a random piece of loot (minimum rarity is Epic)
Added new perk: Critical Claws: Melee critical hit chance increased
Added new perk: Blender: Melee cooldowns reduced
Added new perk: Iron Claws: Melee damage heavily increased but melee cooldowns are also increased
Added new Greed perk: Brawler: Melee damage greatly increased but weapon damage is reduced
Holding down the melee button will now melee automatically after each melee cooldown
BALANCE CHANGES

Increased the minigun chance based mods trigger chance by 33%
Time Shot damage increased from +50% to +100%
Tony’s Black Card discount reduced from 15% to 8% per perk level
Gold Dice chance increase reduced from 50% to 20%
Blocker Skulls and regular Skulls are now larger and easier to hit
Blocker Skulls projectile speed reduced
Removed random spread on Sniper Crab shots- they lost their scariness and missed way more than intended. With the new telegraphing they should now give enough time to get out of danger before they attack and still be a dangerous force to deal with!
Rigged Totems chance buff decreased from +25% chance to +10% chance (as it was very easy to break totems)
Regenerator heal amount doubled and max duration increased from 30 to 45 seconds
Mace Shot cooldown reduced from 6 seconds to 4 seconds and mace projectiles bounce less while also not expiring when hitting enemies so this mod should be much more useful in general
Grub slam explosion attack radius has been reduced to make the hitbox feel more fair
QUALITY OF LIFE

Combo is no longer lost when opening Spiked Chests, using damaging totems or falling off the map
High Roller will no longer remove Key Chests even if other reward chests are removed
Added a new “Weapon Effects” graphics setting option which allows you to turn bullet FX and trails down to “Minimal” for better performance and clarity especially in late game runs on lower end machines!
The maximum limit of held crystals is now 4294967295 (double of the previous value) and crystals will no longer reset back to 0 if exceeding that limit
Camera Shake (from explosions) can now be turned off in the settings menu
Totems that drop loot now spread loot over a wider area to prevent loot overlapping and being harder to pick up a specific drop if multiple have dropped in the same location
Autosaves now save the island reward type, challenge modifier, blessing and combo when continuing runs
Optimized bullet FX so that late game combinations such as Arc Shot + Split Shot are less taxing on performance
Energy Ring destructible rocks no longer deal damage when exploding, the only damage comes from the ring itself (so they are safe to stand on top of and explode without taking damage)
BUG FIXES

Fixed issue that caused keybinds to get reset every time the game got launched
Fixed issue that prevented the inventory UI from being navigable on controllers
Fixed issue that would cause very high damage amounts to appear as -1 billion damage
Fixed issue that would cause continuing runs saved on the Arctic biome to use Tropical biome islands
Perks that increase damage will now correctly affect Time Shot and Time Bolt
Made several more potential fixes for enemies spawning under the ground and getting stuck while moving (including improved enemy pathfinding accuracy)
The Streamer Loot perk now only affects chests as intended- it was previously affecting every loot drop in the world which was unbalanced
Improved some chest spawn locations that were spawning chests off the edges of cliffs
Fixed issue where the inventory UI could be shown in the Game Over screen or when spectating in an invalid state
The list of joined players now correctly updates when a new player joins the lobby
Added a missing animation when firing the left Dual Pistol
Woolie Interview
Had a great chat with Woolie talking all things Crab Champions and game development in general!
You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/uKyeo6l_pAQ
Community Wiki Site
Meeps, a talented community member has created a site that allows players to quickly find and search up info on all of the mods and perks in the game- descriptions, buffs, cooldowns and other stats are all visible in one place!
Check it out here if interested: https://crabchampions.info/wmods
That's all for now, see you in the next update! 🦀
Original post
15 Apr 2023Developer post
Early Access Update 3
Patch Notes GENERAL Elemental weapon mods are now chance based instead of cooldown based. This has been a heavily requested feature and I will be moving from cooldowns to chance based on many other mods in upcoming updates to allow for even more insane build scaling! The general
Patch Notes
GENERAL

Elemental weapon mods are now chance based instead of cooldown based. This has been a heavily requested feature and I will be moving from cooldowns to chance based on many other mods in upcoming updates to allow for even more insane build scaling! The general idea is that it’s boring for a powerful thing to fire only once every 5 seconds max and it’s much more fun for a weaker thing to fire potentially multiple times a second (scaling nicely with fire rate and chance build options). In order for this to be balanced and considering that a 20% chance to burn enemies would be constantly applied from the minigun (due to the fast fire rate) and would barely be applied at all from the sniper (due to the slow fire rate), the base trigger chance for the certain perks will change depending on the weapon used (with fast firing weapons having a lower base chance and slow firing weapons having a higher base chance). The following mods use this system and more will follow in the future:

Ice Shot
Fire Shot
Poison Shot
Lightning Shot
Random Shot
Ultra Shot
Time Bolt
Triple Shot
Arc Shot
X Shot
Square Shot
Mega Crit
Split Shot
Scatter Shot
Targeting Shot
Homing Shot
Overhauled the save system- there are now multiple save backups and a separate save for user settings. This greatly reduces the chance of your save file becoming corrupt (some players were experiencing a NULL bug where they couldn't move after their PC lost power while an autosave was saving) as there are now 2 extra backup saves to try and prevent that from ever occurring
Increased the maximum projectile limit from 300 to 400
Time Shot can now crit which should make it much more interesting and useful
Added new weapon mod: Ultra Shot: Chance to fire high damage bullets along with your shots
Added new weapon mod: Time Bolt: Chance to fire bolts that deal damage over time
Added new perk: Rigged Totems: Chance based totems are more likely to roll in your favor
Added new perk: Streamer Loot: Higher rarity loot has a greater chance to spawn from chests
Changed Green Dice: renamed to Gold Dice, buffed to Legendary rarity and has a more potent effect on chance based mods and perks but no longer provides the higher rarity loot benefit that it had before. A note about wording that may be confusing: it says +50% chance for chance based mods and perks to trigger- this does not mean adding a flat 50% to all chance based things (as this would quickly break many perks), it insteads multiplies the chance by 150%. So a base chance of 20% will be 30% with the 50% extra chance buff that Gold Dice provides
Improved the Tropical biome parkour island layout to have a better and easier flow
Replaced 6 placeholder skins with fresh new ones: Emerald, Glimmer, Jet Black, Ruby, Sapphire and Silver

BALANCE CHANGES

Reduced enemy damage scaling a bit on Nightmare difficulty especially when looping as it quickly turns into a “lose all your health on one hit” type of situation which I’m not a fan of. Don’t get me wrong- I still want enemies to be extremely damaging when looping on Nightmare but this should just make it feel like you can take an extra hit or two before the run is over
Blocker Skull movement speed reduced by 25%
The Unstoppable challenge (Get a win with over 10000 eliminations) elimination requirement has been reduced down to 7500 eliminations
Regular melee crabs, ants and slugs are slightly larger to make them easier to hit
Ice Shot is now unlocked by default
QUALITY OF LIFE

Improved cases where enemies could shoot through walls on elite and boss islands
Toned back some more overtuned FX such as on daggers
BUG FIXES

Fixed many places where enemies could get stuck under the map. Any remaining enemies that do happen to spawn under the map should get picked up by the new anti-softlock mechanics and will get auto eliminated after a short period of time
Fixed a bug that was causing the settings menu to stay active in a hidden state while the game was playing, resulting in frequent stutters as the game saved constantly
Some mod and perk descriptions that were inaccurate have been updated (such as Money Is Power displaying a 1% increased in damage when it is actually a 10% increase)
Fixed issue where enemies would stop spawning if players were far away from any spawn points
Beta Branch
For those interested in trying new updates before they go live for everyone, you can opt in to the beta branch. Be warned, this branch will most likely be less stable and have more bugs than the main branch version so if you do decide to use it, make sure you back up your save just in case!
To access the beta branch:

Right click Crab Champions in your Steam library and click "properties"
Navigate down to the "Betas" tab
Select the beta branch from the dropdown
That's it for this update! Lots to continue working on, see you next time 🦀
Original post
10 Apr 2023Developer post
Early Access Update 2
It's been just over a week since Crab Champions released into Early Access and I still can't believe how amazing the community is already! Since the last update, I've been trying to focus on the most commonly reported bugs and quality of life features to try and get the game into
It's been just over a week since Crab Champions released into Early Access and I still can't believe how amazing the community is already!
Since the last update, I've been trying to focus on the most commonly reported bugs and quality of life features to try and get the game into solid shape before starting on any major updates.
Patch Notes
GENERAL

Due to popular demand, locked inventory slots have returned with a few caveats. No slots are locked on Easy difficulty, 12 slots are locked on Normal difficulty and 16 slots are locked on Nightmare difficulty. The cost to unlock each slot has been reduced as it was one of the main issues with locked slots on previous builds EDIT: There is a lot of community discussion regarding this topic- some people love the locked slots, others hate it and want to just build without having to manage inventory. I think the only real solution here is to add a difficulty modifier system that lets players choose if they want bonus modifiers on their run such as locked slots. Having all modifiers active at once would be virtually impossible but letting players mix and match them without forcing a specific mechanic on them sounds like the best option here. I'm monitoring all of the feedback that's rolling in- since the game is in Early Access there will be some trial and error to find the right balance on mechanics like this. For now, all slots will remain unlocked until I add this modifier mechanic.
Added new enemy: Blocker Skull
Added new Tropical island
Reworked how Combo works (it was pretty invisible / meaningless before and only affected your final score which isn’t relevant until the top 10 runs update (coming soon btw), but it now has direct use in making new build options). In short, combo starts off at 1.0x and:

Increases to 2.0x after eliminating 25 enemies without getting hit
Increases to 3.0x after eliminating 100 enemies without getting hit
Increases to 4.0x after eliminating 250 enemies without getting hit
Increases to 5.0x after eliminating 500 enemies without getting hit
Once you get hit, your combo resets back down to 1.0x. The newly added perks below are designed for those that enjoy the “don’t get hit” style of gameplay without forcing it on everyone as a required mechanic and instead introducing it as a build option
Added new perk: Crystal Combo: Enemies drop more crystals depending on your current combo
Added new perk: Damage Combo: Damage increased depending on your current combo
Added new perk: Healthy Combo: Heal when increasing your combo
Added physics crowns to parkour islands...
BALANCE CHANGES

Orb Launcher damage increased from 30 to 35
Launcher Crabs now only fire 2 projectiles instead of 3 and also have more telegraphing before they are about to fire
Playing With Power has been removed from the loot pool for now as it was causing a lot of accidental deaths. I’ll look into improving and reworking it in the future
QUALITY OF LIFE

Added anti-softlock measures for enemies stuck in weird places on the islands that prevented being able to progress
Fixed lightning FX being extremely bright and making it hard to see
Toned back various bullet trail FX that made it hard to see when doing late game runs, this should also improve performance
Touched up some of the more work in progress island visuals (like the one with all the vertical pillars)
Added support for native Steam Deck resolution (1280 x 800) as well as some missing ultrawide configurations and 720p resolutions
Fixed various out of map spots
Improved hitboxes on many assets including trees and chests that you could get stuck in
Fixed various spawn points that could make chests spawn on trees or rocks as well as some player spawn points that needed adjusting
You can now no longer take damage from lava on Shop islands
Fixed various difficult to understand UI descriptions to make things like the Spiked Chest cost more clear
Spiked Chests now show the exact amount of health that they’ll take when opening instead of always “33” which was confusing
If a Blessing is active, it’ll show up on the UI of the island (the same as a challenge modifier) instead of having to remember if you chose a flawless portal or not
Homing Thorns are now red to not confuse them with the harmless crystal pickups that fly to the player
BUG FIXES

Fixed an issue where aiming down on the ground beside you with certain weapons like the Rocket Launcher wouldn’t spawn projectiles
Fixed an infinite key exploit (keys are no longer saved with an autosaved run)
Fixed an infinite loot exploit (where laggy players could spam the drop button in inventory to drop multiple copies of the same loot)
Fixed an exploit that could let players use spiked chests and damaging totems without taking damage (using the I-Frames when dashing to negate the damage)
Fixed an issue where the blue collision border would persist back to the lobby after a run
Fixed issue where falling off the edge of a completed parkour island that you had enabled a checkpoint for would spawn you back at the checkpoint, stranded
The Target Dummy can no longer be broken in most cases (the most insane builds will still probably manage it)
Bosses should no longer spawn keys under the map or inside cliffs
Fixed issue where bosses would give more keys to certain players
Fixed issue where you could evaporate if you swam too far into the sea in the lobby
Fixed issue where it would be possible to die when spamming interact on totems with certain greed perks equipped
That's it for this update! As the bugs get ironed out I'll have more and more time to put towards completely new content 🦀
Original post
05 Apr 2023Developer post
Early Access Update 1
Thank you all for an absolutely incredible launch! I'm blown away by the amount of people enjoying the game and have been working hard to improve as much as possible. This update adds a few new features as well a bunch of bug fixes. Quickplay was initially working in this build b
Thank you all for an absolutely incredible launch! I'm blown away by the amount of people enjoying the game and have been working hard to improve as much as possible. This update adds a few new features as well a bunch of bug fixes.
Quickplay was initially working in this build but there were issues where players were loading into previously started lobbies and were going past the 4 player limit so I've had to disable it for now while I work on a proper fix.
Now, onto the changes 🦀
Patch Notes
GENERAL

Added backwards sliding and being able to slightly move right or left while sliding (I tested being able to slide left and right at full speed but it was way too OP and made the movement far less skillful)
Added 8 new songs! (most of them are demos but will give more variation to the existing playlists)
Inventory slots are now all unlocked by default- the locked inventory slot mechanic was confusing to many players and was disrupting the flow of grabbing loot so for now you can just take as much loot as your inventory can hold without having to keep stopping to figure out what to drop. I want the game to move as fast as you want and this was a definite blow to the momentum. I'll monitor and see how this change affects gameplay and may introduce locked slots in some way again in the future (such as only the bottom row of each category being locked allowing for more early game freedom)
Added checkpoints to Parkour islands so you don’t have to always start back at the very start when you fall
Grenade Crabs and Sniper Crabs now telegraph their actions better so you have a bit more time to react
Sniper Crabs shoot with a little bit of spread so they have a chance to miss
Tweaked the Speedrun challenges to be actually challenging. Speedrun I is now island 20 in 16 minutes or less, Speedrun II is now island 50 in 40 minutes or less and Speedrun III is now island 100 in 60 minutes or less. I'll monitor to see if these times are too difficult or not!
Fire Shot is now unlocked by default
BALANCE CHANGES

Reduced the amount of keys needed to use the Key Totem down to 3 but bosses now spawn 2 keys instead of 6 keys
Auto Rifle damage increased from 24 to 28
Grenade, Sniper and Launcher Crabs have had their health reduced from 800 to 700
Reload Arc cooldown increased from 1 second to 5 seconds
Bosses and Elites now have a 12 second cooldown in between each unique freeze applied (to prevent being able to easily cheese them with repeated freezing and them never thawing and attacking)
Eagle Eye bonus damage distance threshold reduced by 50% (so it will now be far more useful especially on smaller islands)
BUG FIXES

Fixed ant boss doing the same attack over and over
Fixed ant boss homing projectiles bugging out and moving extremely fast if you were out of line of sight when they were fired
Enemies can no longer be frozen while their spawn animation is playing as it could lead to situations where they’d slide away under the map and be impossible to eliminate
Fixed portal that would spawn in a bush and be hard to find
Fixed the Speedrun I challenge not being completable
Stats pedestals now correctly update your progression when you unlock new weapons or loot with the key totem without having to leave and re-join the lobby
Fixed a crash that could occur under specific circumstances when using a Random Totem
Fixed various rare crashes
Optimized the Boss Skull bullet hell attack so it should be much more performant
Reduced the complexity of the lava splash FX which should increase performance / visual clarity when many projectiles and enemies are hitting the lava at once
Fixed a launch pad that caused you to overshoot a Parkour jump
I made a fix to Quickplay but there were numerous new bugs that appeared when enabling it so I need to revisit and make a proper fix in a future patch
Thanks again for playing, happy crabbing 🦀💥
Original post
30 Mar 2023Developer post
Crab Champions Early Access Roadmap
As the Early Access release drops on April 1st, I thought it would be a good time to share the Early Access Roadmap for those interested! As always, I'll be very active in the Crab Champions Discord server and will do my best to address as much feedback as possible 🦀 I can't wai
08 Jan 2023Developer post
Crab Champions Beta Is Live!
The first Crab Champions beta weekend launched a few days ago and I've been blown away by the amazing response! Things are just getting started with new beta updates dropping every weekend until the April 1st release date. I really didn't expect people to drop so much time into t

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NoScrub's Road To Prismatic Series

Lethamyr's New Content

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Time To Grind

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Scorpion mega nerf + rebalance

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