This patch introduces a lot of new and improved features!
Also, consider catching up on some of our smaller patches and hotfixes as they can also contain substantial content. For example, in the last patch we made melee staggers more consistent which was a pretty big buff to melee weapons: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1419850/view/4205873192593826999
Enemies Can Now Parkour to Kill You
Previously if you climbed up something, enemies would circle around your location and fail to attack you.
Now, enemies are now much smarter and can now climb up towards your location! Fights against Apexes will be a little tougher if you relied on climbing up on rocks to defeat them...
We're really excited to bring you this feature and hope that it'll bring you countless hours of fun moments. With this new mechanic, the game feels even more dynamic and inches us closer to our vision of Saleblazers 1.0!
Sprinklers for Farming
An all new electric sprinkler item is our first step towards automated farming.
You can research and craft it using water and electronics. Once you hook it up to power, it will automatically water all the crops around it. This lets you grow your crops without worrying about coming through to water them every day.
We also updated the water and wet particles with the addition of the sprinkler. We think walking through your farm and listening to the light spray of the sprinkler as the water shines in the sun is pretty nice. We can't wait to see your farm setups with this addition!
New Rain and Water Interactions with Plants
Special thanks to KatVet on https://discord.gg/Saleblazers for the following suggestions that we've now implemented this patch.
Rain Will Water Unroofed Plants
You can now take advantage of rainy weather to forgo the usage of sprinklers or watering cans! Just make sure you build an open roof for your plants.
Planting Rice in Water
Placing plants in water will cause most crops to be destroyed. For Rice, they'll thrive in fresh or dirty water, maxing out their water need so you won't need to water them!
Mannequins
This update introduces mannequins, which you can use to decorate your shop and showcase equipment that you have crafted or gathered.
You can research the 10 available mannequin poses and craft them using plastic. Then, you can craft and dress them however you like. They can even hold items to complete their look.
Armor Stand
This functionality was also added to the armor stand, which many of you have already been using in your shops.
Now that the armor stand wears equipment properly, we've added it to the research tree to make it more available. Existing armor stands should still function, but they will have some extra generic slots that new ones won't have.
Customers will purchase items from the armor stand but not from mannequins, as they are just for decorating.
We look forward to checking out what gear you showcase on your mannequins and what scenes you set up with them to decorate your bases.
Tree Felling Update
We've taken the time to polish our tree cutting mechanic!
- Falling physics have been significantly improved
- Better VFX, SFX, and visual polish
- A lot more resources spawn in with significantly less lag
Also, you can now deal damage to trees to make them disappear faster.
Item Drop Optimization and QoL Rework
You may have noticed in the tree felling GIFs that droppable items look a little different. After seeing some ridiculous tree farms in the Saleblazers community, we've spent a good amount of time optimizing how they work as well as add some highly-requested quality of life changes.
Now, droppables will:
- Float when spawned so you can see them better in tall grass and distinguish them from regular items
- Magnetize to your character when nearby for easy access
- Be much more lightweight in its code which results in a lot less lag, which allows us to have a higher quantity of dropped items across the game!
Stamina Fatigue Mechanic
When your stamina reaches 0, your character will enter a fatigued state where stamina regeneration is briefly delayed.
Increased Melee Damage
The stamina fatigue mechanic now allows us to heavily increase high-stamina weapon damage and melee rarity damage scaling.
This adds on to our previous set of buffs here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1419850/view/4205873192593826999
Our goal is to bring melee weapons up to the power level of guns in a way that is high risk high reward with a dose of strong crowd control.
Melee Weapon Trail Polish
Melee weapon trails also received a polish pass to reflect increased melee power!
Blood Messes
We've also added blood messes that appear when you deal critical melee damage. Blood messes can be cleaned up by employees or through using the Mop.
Enemies Can Now Target Buildings
We'll be monitoring this change closely for balance feedback.
To make things smoother, melee attacks now no longer register through walls and walls are much more resistant to melee attacks.
Improved Airstrafer Base Prologue
We've heard lots of feedback about the prologue and will be continuously polishing it throughout Early Access. In this patch, we've polished several parts of the prologue.
Feel free to leave some of your own in https://discord.gg/Saleblazers or the Saleblazers Steam forums!
What's Next?
We're working on a few things at the same time:
- The usual string of hotfixes post-patch
- Reworked employee UI
- Proper language support
- Map changes
- Optimization
After this, we're planning on adding more content towards 1.0!
We'd appreciate if you left a Steam review for us as it helps development tremendously.
Patch Notes
➡️ Changes
- A.I. are now able to jump and mantle to chase you down dynamically
- Harvested items will now float and magnetize to players
- Added Sprinkler item to the research tree
- Mannequins can now be dressed up with clothing
- Added Mannequins to the research tree
- Increased damage rarity scaling for all melee weapons and decreased crit chance to match power of guns
- Added fatigued mechanic where at 0 stamina you will take longer to regenerate your stamina than usual
- Added weapon trail and blood trail VFX for all melee weapons to better communicate melee attacks
- Added melee critical hit VFX and text
- Enemies can attack player buildings now
- Improved tree felling mechanic
- Improved AI pathfinding
- Melee attacks will no longer deal damage through environments, walls, doors, and floors
- Improved old VFX and added new various VFX across the game
- Added screenshake to Apex footsteps and explosions
- Improved set dressing in prologue in several areas, improved prologue cutscene fidelity, and added XP to its quest steps
- Prologue gulper turret now shoot bullets and will explode if parried back for a better tutorial section, with new added player checkpoints to account for this
- Changed some basic weapon combos to make them less awkward to use
- Ziplines now allow stamina regen and player rotation
- Added loading progress bar to employee simulation system
- Player should face towards camera direction when holding guns
- Added various localization support across the game in preparation for a future localization patch
- Added better fallback behavior for employees dropping items on the ground when canceling a task (original container -> closest return box -> closest player's first available inventory with a notification)
- Added blood splatter messes that spawn when dealing damage to enemies
- Employee simulation will halt if shop vault reaches 0 to prevent scenarios where your shop vault goes extremely negative
- Items given by NPCs that don't fit in the player's inventory and are dropped to the ground will now ping the item's location and be saved despite being in a dropped state
- Added XP reward to quest update notification UI and rune collected UI
- Reduced cancel timers of several melee attack movesets
- Holding the shop vault -100 and +100 buttons will continuously add or subtract money
- Improved some quest marker locations
- Updated quest journal UI
- Quest journal now shows descriptions of completed quests as well
- Improved pick up notification UI logic to behave more consistently
- Added a display of who is still joining during "Waiting for players" screens
- "Waiting for players" screen should no longer allow player input
- Various changes to main menu
- Changed cicada ambient audio for wind ambient audio
- Police will now fire ranged weaponry from farther ranges and shoot more often
- All crops except Rice will die when planted in water
- Rice will maintain a max level of water if planted in dirty or fresh water (but other types of water will kill it)
- Crops will now gain water levels from rain if they are not roofed
- Removed wet effects from fish NPCs
- Added new lockpicking witness dialogue
- Improved dweller pathfinding code
- Added various localization support for Simplified Chinese (still not ready though)
- Improved loading times when building outside the shop plot
- Customers will display empty display emotes after investigating displays instead of immediately when they walk into the plot for better feedback
- Added SFX when applying attributes to items
⚙️ Optimizations
- When items go into "physics mode and you can touch to pick them up" states, it is much more optimized now (you will experience much less lag when blowing up a bunch of trees for example)
- Removed a rogue particle effect that wasn't even visible and was taking up an exponential amount of GPU resources based on screen resolution
🛠️ General Fixes
- Fixed clients being unable to consistently stagger enemies away from them depending on where the host is
- Fixed a few rare case of infinite loading screen when returning to a shop with employees
- Fixed a rare case of infinite loading screen when teleporting to the snow shop plot
- Fixed rare case of being stuck on black screen when sleeping in a shop plot that has employees
- Fixed a rare case of customers being stuck when simulating shop employees
- Removed hunger and thirst cost from recipe books
- Interactable size of Quentin's ID card increased to make it easier to pick up
- Fixed some UI visual artifacts in quest journal UI
- Resolved rare case where some Gulpers had a lot more HP than expected
- Gulper should now animate at the proper framerate
- Fixed a code exception related to enemy spawners
- Turrets can no longer be given to attribute giver NPCs
- Fixed pick up notification not showing up sometimes for client when given an item
- Fixed item destroying FX not playing properly for client sometimes
- Fixed enemy spawn FX in waves not playing properly for client sometimes
- Fixed VFX spawn code not using pooling for boss fight enemy spawns
- Reduced scaling of health bars in ESC menu to prevent overflowing at high HP levels
- Fixed insane velocity gain when dashing off slopes with high FPS
- Fixed Electric Iron Longsword not showing electric visuals
- Fixed rare case where being interrupted by dialogue would cause a currently dragged item to be stuck on the screen
- Fixed bullets "catching" on friendly NPCs, temporarily pausing bullet movement until the friendly NPC got out of the way by having the bullets just disappear when hitting a friendly
- Fixed some terrain seams and adjusted some props throughout the map
- Fixed Desktop Keyboard mesh being invisible
- Fixed Flint not applying Fire attribute to items properly
- Removed electric category from some Mk. 1 turrets that shouldn't have had them
- Fixed map not saving progress for autosaves
- Fixed inconsistency with total wage deduction number in the employee UI when first loading a shop
- Fixed crafting output not being visible for clients when repeat option is selected in certain cases
- Fixed villager NPCs not animating properly after using chairs
- Fixed exceptions relating to electricity and spawning
- Fixed items not being considered submerged underwater when they should be
- Fixed breaking armor sometimes causing the enemy to no longer move