Hello! We have an exciting update for you today.
Let's get the big one out of the way first:
Straitjacket is now a beneficial armor item. A new omen called Fig Leaf is taking Straitjacket's old spot, but does not prevent you from picking up loot - Fig Leaf merely stops you from wearing armor.
We originally designed Straitjacket as a "worst case scenario" omen. We liked the idea of having an item in the pool that was universally feared--especially because most other omens can be subverted to your advantage--but players have rightfully argued that Straitjacket's lack of counterplay is bad design. We agree.
Someday, we may introduce a new omen to strike fear in the hearts of all DemonCrawl players, but for now we hope you enjoy the softer side of Straitjacket.
We have also added a new boss to the game. Introducing Baglord:
Yes, it's the lord of bagmen himself!
Baglord will make your life more difficult by spawning cronies throughout the map. If he's in a bad mood, Baglord will slaughter his own men just to intimidate you. This dude's crazy!
BAGLORD, LORD OF BAGMEN:
- Spawn a Bagman whenever a Dark Heart is collected.
- Whenever a Bagman is killed, take damage equal to its empowerment value.
- Bagmen cannot weaken monsters.
To top it off, we implemented an experimental new stage mod called "Fake" that causes three cells to show incorrect values... can you feel the paranoia setting in?
What's Next?
Bug fixes are our highest priority right now - there are still a few important issues we need to address. After that, we would like to run a community poll to determine which features our players are most interested in. We want to make sure we're spending our time on content that people actually care about. 2020 is going to be a great year for DemonCrawl, and it's all thanks to your support!
Full patch notes available below.
New Features
- Added video setting to disable board rumble effect
- Stage particles setting now applies to cell auras as well
- New boss: Baglord
- New stage mod: Fake - "Three cells have the wrong values."
- New omen: Fig Leaf - "Unequip your armor. You cannot wear armor."
Balance Changes
- Straitjacket has been converted to a Body Armor: "[6 Armor] You cannot pick up loot."
- The Timeless mod now deals damage instead of direct life loss
- Stage mods will now take the stage density into account when calculating loot droprate
- Loot scaling is now capped to prevent empty, powerful stages from having Tokens in every cell
- Quest completion XP is now based on the difficulty of all stages, not just the last stage
- The Thrifty award now requires you to skip at least 3 special stages and gives more XP to compensate
- Charitable award XP can no longer exceed Victory award XP
- Bagman no longer increases damage taken from sources other than monsters
- Updated default leaderboard version to v1.31
Developer Notes: We really like the idea of Token-farming builds, but realized it was a little too easy to spawn hundreds of Tokens in a stage if you knew what you were doing. With this balance change, adding mods to stages with very few monsters will have a minimal effect on loot drops. However, adding mods to a dense stage will generate more loot than ever!
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a leaderboard crash when too many results were retrieved
- Improved reliability of "My Score" button
- Fixed rare situation that could cause immutable landmarks to get destroyed
- Frozen aura no longer affects cells with immutable landmarks
- The prestige icon will no longer appear after prestige 10
- Fixed a problem with indefinite-type status effects changing into different items on reload (e.g. Horseshoe)
- Fixed a few more pluralization issues on item effects
- Fixed Fish items not saving aura removal to disk
- Fixed Wishpool not saving to disk
- Fixed a softlock between Magic Dice and Earthblock
- Fixed Beyond Mode token cost not resetting after removing special emblems
- Fixed Cattle Prod not saving some cell properties to disk
- The stage select screen is now capable of showing more than 9 mods
Enjoy!
Hotfix #1 @ 8:40 PM: Fixed a crash related to the final boss.
Hotfix #2 @ 11:30 AM on Jan 9: Fixed a Mystic Statue exploit.