Welcome to the Starship of Terrors update!
This update to Inkbound is absolutely massive and includes new gameplay features, quality of life improvements, bug fixes, and a lot more. Our goal with the update has been to expand what our players love about the game while responding to feedback and also adding in all sorts of other surprises. We hope for both new and returning players you'll find something here to delight you.
We’ve tried our best to capture accurate patch notes from the past three months of development. If you’re interested in all the details, read on!
New Features
New Aspect: Star Captain
With a Blaster on your arm and Drones by your side, lead your allies and defeat your enemies using the power of cold space technology.
The Star Captain is a Frostbite and teamplay focused aspect. If you’re interested in all the gritty details, we have a deep dive available here.
To get access to Star Captain complete the short unlock quest. You can find it in the “Aspects of Lost Binders” quest tab.
New Book: Derelict Starship
The unsealed DARVe, once a lab now a prison.
Uncover the secrets of this new book via quests, meet a new NPC, and fight a brand new set of enemies with unique mechanics.
Trinkets
Trinkets are a new way to customize your run. After unlocking the feature via a quest, you’ll be able to pick from a few trinkets that are unlocked by default. Trinkets are equipped while in the Atheneum and persist across the entire run. Each Trinket gives a different benefit, supports different playstyles, and can help complete quests that have challenging criteria. Trinkets are unlocked by leveling up and earning Trinket Keys. We hope you’ll have fun experimenting with them and finding the Trinkets that suit your playstyle best!
To gain access to Trinkets start a run and complete the short unlock quest found at the start of any book.
Daily Challenges and Leaderboards
Calling all competitively-minded players! We’ve added the ever-popular Daily Challenge with rotating mutators that change core game systems to keep things fresh. Each Daily Challenge dictates the classes to play, the books you’ll visit, the Villain, and the mutators you’ll have to deal with. A new run scoring system feeds into competitive leaderboards.
Because you can also play Inkbound co-op, to keep things fair there are actually 4 separate Daily Challenges each day, separated by party-size. Each challenge has a separate leaderboard. If you wish, you can compete on both the Solo and 2-player leaderboard for example.
You can only upload a score once per day per player count. So make your runs count! Daily Challenges currently update once a day at 10 am PT (GMT-7). Your first challenge each day also offers an XP bonus!
Victory Board
The Victory Board is a new list of seasonal achievements to accomplish with cosmetic rewards tied to completing objectives. While some of the objectives are more straightforward, some are a lot trickier, like “Win a Run without equipping a Vestige.” We migrated the prior Villain kill and ranked run completion tracking into Victory Board objectives.
New Draftable Bindings
We’ve added three new draftable Bindings (abilities) that can show up in runs: Smoke Bomb, Quicken, and Grasp. Each offers new ways to fight with three ascension upgrade paths to explore. We have a deep dive on the new Bindings available here.
New “Anywhere” Enemies
To mix up combat across the entire game we’ve added four new enemies that can appear in any book. The new enemies include Chompy, the grumpy big brother of the existing Biter enemy.
Offline Mode Beta
We heard from you, our players, that you’d love if we supported playing Inkbound in a variety of contexts, including when fully disconnected from the Internet, and we are excited to have been able to get a beta version of this support completed earlier than expected and are rolling it out as a part of this update. While Offline, you can continue to progress your existing character, and then later bring that progress with you when online again. Some features are not available when offline, like multiplayer and Daily Challenges. Please don’t cheat though, when you reconnect we will validate this data and cheaters will be banned!
To learn more about the details, see our detailed announcement about the Offline Mode Beta.
Save & Resume Multiplayer Runs
We have supported saving and resuming single player runs since launch. And now we’ve added the ability to save and resume multiplayer runs in this update! If all players in a multiplayer run quit the game, they can come back on at a later date and resume play. The first person to resume the run becomes the party leader. It’s up to players to coordinate outside of the game for when to resume the run. We see this as a great feature for friend groups who are playing co-op and want to continue their run at a later time.
New Villain Battle Music
Enjoy a pumping new combat music arrangement for your Villain battles. Jordan Chin has done it again.
Reworked Systems and Quality of Life
Player Movement in Combat
We’ve re-built how player movement in combat works. It no longer consumes Will and instead has its own resource that depletes the more you move in a turn. We think it’s significantly more intuitive compared to the prior system and makes combat easier to understand and more fun. We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback. Want to know more? We have a deep dive post on the new movement system here.
Enemy Movement and Aiming in Combat
To reduce intense enemy area attack overlapping we’ve updated the way enemies choose their position and attacks in combat to spread out more. This reduces the chance of “death zones” where many overlapping enemy attacks affect the same area of the arena and also increases the clarity of combat outcomes by reducing overlap of enemy attack UI elements.
Revamped Ranked Mode with Higher Difficulty Tiers
Have you already reached the max rank of “Inkbound” in the Story Begins season? Good news, we’ve added even more challenging ranks. The overall rank system has been reworked to refer to ranks as numbers instead by name. Ranks now go from 0, where you start, to 20. The prior “Inkbound” rank maps to rank 10 in the new system. We have migrated your existing rank into this new system.
Separately, we are now also tracking rank independently for Solo and Group play. We think the experience and challenges feel different enough to track these independently.
Each rank ladder has player nameplate rewards to earn as you rank up.
Quest Multi-tracking
As a small but impactful quality of life feature, we’ve added the ability to track up to 5 quests at the same time. May your questing be successful and easily tracked!
Quest Objective Indicators in Drafts
Need to draft something for a quest? We’ve added indicator pips to drafts that will lead to quest progress to make these easier to keep track of.
Player Stats Visible in HUD
To make it easier to keep track of your stats during the current run we’ve put them on screen in the lower right corner at all times.
Increased Clarity of Class Passive in HUD
Every aspect in Inkbound has a passive ability that you need to utilize to maximize your chances of success. Previously, the indicators for the status of the passive ability were a little bit hidden. We’ve brought it directly into the middle of the HUD so that you can, for example, more easily track how much Heat you have built up as Magma Miner.
Reworked Run Types
When Inkbound launched, we had two types of runs: Unranked and Ranked. Other than difficulty rules, the run types were the same.
In this update, we’ve reworked the two original types of runs. Unranked is now called “Quick Dive”. It’s a shorter run with fewer battles and a faster start, designed for people with limited time or those who are looking to complete quest objectives that don’t require playing at higher ranks.
Ranked is now called “Deep Dive.” These are longer runs and utilize your rank and progressively get harder as you rank up. We’ve simplified how increasing your rank works. Now you must simply win once at your highest rank to progress to the next rank.
Many Vestige Unlocks Moved to Progression Reward Track
We have moved a number of Vestige unlocks from quests into a new progression reward track. These rewards are earned by leveling up. We wanted to simplify how players unlock access to more types of Vestiges and felt that too many were tied to challenging quest objectives. Now many are unlocked by simply playing runs and leveling up naturally. We’ve also moved some previously locked Vestiges to be unlocked by default. We felt new and returning players who didn’t progress very far should have more variety earlier in their journey.
Season Pass Is Now Leveling Pass
The Season Pass feature has been reworked into a new iteration called “Leveling Pass.” Rather than going away at the end of each Season, we now maintain progress in each pass permanently. Your progress in The Story Begins pass has been migrated to the new system automatically. This is targeted at eliminating any concerns about losing access to rewards paid for, or even the opportunity to buy them in the future. Also don’t forget to look for the free Shinies on the top track. If you run the numbers you’ll find with some leveling up that you’ll be able to pick up the pass. These will refresh every season, so make sure to earn them all before then!
Finally, we’ve added a new Leveling Pass for The Starship of Terrors filled primarily with sci-fi and modern cosmetics.
Other Changes
Big Changes
- Added new Starship of Terrors seasonal quests.
- Added new quests for drafting all Bindings and their Augments and Ascensions.
- Added ability to change default server region from the main menu. This is mostly meant for people whose networks block ping and where we can't figure out a suitable default, though it can be used by anyone.
- Added Glyph rewards for picking books with negative mutators.
- Added class icons for players in the top-left Party section.
- Trimmed down the number of ‘task’ style quests in each core quest group. The goal here is to make progression between major story beats happen faster.
- Eat fish off the ground like an animal. You can now ctrl+click consumables on the ground to consume them directly without needing to first add them to your hotbar.
- Renamed “SP” (Season Points) to “XP” to make it more clear what it’s for, especially now that levels are less tied to passes.
- Increased XP gain from runs to help make these contribute more significantly and flattened out XP gain from runs so it's more evenly distributed throughout the run.
- Some daily quests have had their requirements lowered to match the new quick dive mode length.
- Removed "general" chat completely. We still support “lobby” chat (formerly called “local”) to speak to players in the same world you are in and “party” chat for private conversations between your party.
- Updated Fountains to heal 10 down from 15. This is part of an overall goal to have more chip damage and less death zones or big damage turns.
- You can now choose to pass Font of Wisdom drafts to gain HP instead of taking one of the draft rewards. Regaining HP no longer needs to show up as a draft option, giving the player more choice. Common heal 5, Uncommon heal 7, Rare heal 9, Epic heal 12.
- Players no longer automatically move to pickups on clicking, and instead receive a notification if out of range. This prevents accidentally ‘spending’ too much movement or moving to an undesired location when collecting them.
- Some draft choices and your starting class now add some slight tilt towards Vestiges, abilities, or stats with similar attributes. If you draft a burn Binding, you are more likely to see more burn options show up, and so on.
- Shrunk the size of the initial Sea of Ink to make you have to walk less to get to the action.
- Run quests with less generic criteria only show up when you have an Aspect or Trinket that can help complete it.
- The camera can now be dragged further than before.
- Increased speed of draft open and close animations to make drafting snappier.
- Made run quests with more complicated criteria easier to complete in multiplayer.
- Display overkill in overhead UI to see how much damage the player needs to mitigate to survive.
- When re-rolling Vestiges any Vestige you’ve already seen will not be shown again until the full pool of available options are consumed.
- When re-rolling an Ascension it will avoid rolling the same base Binding whenever possible.
- Status Effect keywords are now highlighted on tooltip and card body text to make them stand out more.
- Implemented a more regimented system for restricting what enemies can get what Challenge Buffs. Overall should be more intuitive and less randomly punishing.
- Reworked Shocked. Now when hitting an Enemy with Shocked you deal damage to all other enemies equal to 50% of the damage done, per stack. There were a few problems with the old version of Shocked we wanted to improve upon. The reward for Shocked was to be able to convert strong single target damage to area damage. But we felt Shocked wasn't always clear what it would do, and tracking it across the entire arena was difficult. Also, boosting damage on the target itself by 50% made it a powerful damage booster in its own right, making it hard to balance for what it was intended as.
- Changed the starter vault from Uncommon to Common in order to make Common Vestiges exist again and to counterbalance other changes which otherwise have made the early run easier.
- The cosmetic shop now offers sales on the first page. These change at 10 AM PST on Mondays.
The Changing of the Season
With the launch of The Starship of Terrors certain season change events have occurred, listed below.
- Season level has been reset to 1. We’ve stored your Season 1 level in our database and in the future we will let you see your past season levels earned!
- Milestones have been reset. You can now earn XP from them again!
- The seasonal Villain Defeat rewards have been moved to the shop and a new Victory Board feature and series of rewards now exist (see above).
New in the Starship of Terrors
New season specific Challenge Buffs.
New season specific Challenge Tiers, found at Tier 11, with season specific rewards.
New Vestiges
- Added Uncommon Vestige Scattered Samples: On consuming an item in combat, gain 1 Will.
- Added Rare Vestige Malfunctioning Multitool: On critting, Smite.
- Added Epic Vestige Wit’s Bloodboiler: On dealing Bleed damage, gain 1 stack of Vigor.
- Added Epic Vestige Special-Issue Stabilizer: On hitting an enemy with Frostbite, proc an additional stack of Frostbite. Does not stack.
- Added Legendary Vestige Gavel of the Dam: On hitting, gain 1 stack of Shattered Will.
General Polish and Tuning
- Removed 'pass through ally' mechanics from Mosscloak (Scavenger’s Dash) and Clairvoyant (Telekinesis), since these slow down play in multiplayer, where the optimal playstyle is having your teammates move close together during a turn without them spending their movement.
- All levels now require 70K XP.
- Rarer potions are slightly more likely to show up.
- Movement Per Turn stat and Max HP stat will appear at fonts.
- Updated new player tutorials to explain new movement changes.
- Updated Vigor status effect: "On being hit, restore 1 HP and lose 1. On end of turn lose all stacks. Max 10 stacks." >>> "On hitting, restore 1 HP. Lose 1 stack per Enemy hit. On end of turn lose all stacks. Max 10 stacks.".
- Updated Vulnerable. "Incoming damage from all sources increased by +100% until end of turn." >>> "
- Incoming damage from all sources increased by +50% until end of turn."
- Updated Burn, Poison, and Bleed tooltip to specify it triggering on 'After Enemy attack' instead of 'On turn start'.
- Updated Frostbite base damage from 25 >>> 30.
- Updated potion Bloodthirst Blend: "Left Click Consume: Until end of turn, on being hit, restore 10 HP." >>> "Left Click Consume: Until end of turn, on losing HP, restore 10 HP".
- Updated potion of Alacrity now gives 2 cooldown reduction instead of 3 but also gives 20 Movement.
- Updated OHM quest to be more clear that they can be visited before beating the miniboss.
- Made a change to hide all non-class Upgrade quest objectives until the upgrade has been found.
- Made a change to hide all class Upgrade quest objectives until the upgrade has been found.
- Split the damage over time run quests into two different versions, one that counts either burn or poison, and one that counts either frostbite or bleed. Rebalanced them to take into account that it counts the amount of stacks applied now.
- Reduced XP gain from Milestones by 25% to balance against the other XP increases elsewhere.
- Made Orb pickups higher priority compared to loot on the ground to fix issues where a Vestige could drop in combat, could be right on top of an orb, but then you couldn't pick up the orb.
- Damage Reduction can no longer reduce attacks to 0.
- Streamlined several quests by removing grindier tasks. Shifting over to granting XP instead of Vestiges.
- Swapped Legendary items unlocked for 2 Villain quests to make Vestige-related quests easier to complete without villain kills.
- Increased status effect infliction milestones now that progress is tracked per stack inflicted instead of per instance of infliction.
- Fixed Regeneration healing based on the source's stacks instead of the target's.
- Fixed Resistant being able to be stacked.
- Fixed Frostbite damage wording mentioning 'per stack'.
- Fixed rare potion Unstable Brew not granting -15 AP a turn after granting +15 AP.
- Fixed Frostbite not splitting instances per player.
- Fixed rare fountain magic power and physical power upgrades granting 4 Magic Power or Physical Power instead of 3.
- Fixed a bug where the Theory of Lost Ink quest to defeat Janus before Training Mode could apply Inky
- Might was becoming unachievable too early in multiplayer runs.
- Fixed the issue where, when you had an augment and ascension upgrade available at the same time, an augment would disappear from the options if you ascended the Binding it was referring to.
- Fixed bug with quests related to Hard Combat Encounters not working properly. Either counting progress or blocking progress depending on the quest.
- Fixed issue with Blight dealing damage when spawned during the enemy turn.
- Fixed bug with Treasure Chests not colliding with player after being opened.
- Fixed Blight Ring rarely persisting after combat.
UI
- Added player Rank and Season Level display above the heads of all players in the Atheneum.
- Improved search functionality in Logbook Collections screen; search now will match keywords like 'Will'.
- Resolved issue where Argoloth's tentacles could show their overhead bar while despawned.
- Target selection for bounce/spread targeting types adjusted to account for larger hitboxes.
- Adjusted dropdowns to be more consistently sized.
- In drafts, tooltip text that previews damage amounts are hidden. So certain tooltips don't say "(Total 0 damage)" anymore in a draft context, which we felt was confusing.
- Added keybind for opening the Party Details screen -- defaults to Tab.
- Auras that affect enemies no longer show up on their status effect bar, since the information is otherwise contained on other locations attached to the player. The goal with this change is to reduce clutter on the status effect bar on enemies.
- Fixed visual bug where holding Alt while hovering an enemy would sometimes fail to display the enemy's name.
- Fixed issue where notifications would fail to fire when progressing ability draft quests.
- Renamed the default names for the first two chat tabs from "Global" -> "Chat" and "Party" -> "Party Only".
- Boss Overhead Visual now always shows predicted damage values.
- Updated Party Details art to include trinkets and class passives.
- Adjusted tutorial class select to show all class options, including locked ones.
- Added tooltips to font of wisdom upgrades.
- Hid Binding tooltip details like "(Damage: 123)" when hovering Bindings outside of combat because that information often doesn't make sense outside of combat.
- Improved readability of text on various screens by removing colored text in certain instances.
- Added a bunch of keyword highlighting in various places.
- Added support to show player names in combat when holding Info key (default Alt).
- Fixed Spiked tooltip showing incorrect damage values if the player had damage resist.
- Improved load times of dynamic UI icons, particularly in the Main Menu.
- Resolved issue with overhead attack indicators not showing when reconnecting in combat.
Even More Details
Steam has a limit for how long these posts can be and we ran out of room. Want to see 100% of the notes, including excruciating detail on numeric balance changes? All patch notes connoisseurs are welcome to come and view the rest of the details we couldn't fit in this post.
