Greetings Backlanders,
We are celebrating one month of Hell Clock's release with our third big patch! This time there aren't that many changes, as we focused on the one thing our community has been most vocal about: performance, performance, performance.
We have worked very hard (seriously, type some "o7" for our coder Murilo) to make a performance patch that would actually matter and improve your experience in a meaningful way. We have also drastically reduced Load times after the initial one.
We have recruited some volunteers from Discord to test it out and ensure that we are actually tackling the most pressing problems affecting some high-end builds. So a round of applause to our community members who volunteered their time in the interest of making the game better for everyone: BaZinga, Fatalaris, hardwii, hiragi, Justlfied, Monddoc, Ownage, tetris19023, Tetsuo9999, TheOlBamboozler.
With all that said, a caveat: this patch is not a magical silver bullet that will resolve 100% of performance issues overnight. This is a significant push, and we have seen massive improvements to some users, while others are reporting improvements limited to the 15-20% range. So your mileage may vary, and we will keep working on it.
We have a couple of OG Steam Decks around here, and the performance on the Decks seems to be drastically improved, with the game never dipping below 30 frames, with the exception of some heavy endgame builds that can bring it down to the 15-20 fps range (instead of freezing the game or bringing it down to the "unplayable" 1-2 fps range, as it was before).
Optimizing performance for PC in 2025 is a nightmare as there's such a staggering diversity of devices and setups out there, each with their own quirks. We will keep working on performance during the following months, so please report (respectfully) any lingering issues you might be still experiencing in the Steam forums, Discord, and social media. We don't always reply, but I assure you we read ALL of those in a group effort between myself, Lucy, Carol and Mason.
Lifesteal is dead, long-live Life Leech
The major gameplay change for patch 1.0.3 is a rework of Lifesteal. Originally this was scheduled for patch 1.1 (which will introduce an overhaul of ALL defenses and the enemy damage scaling), but we've seen way too many cases of rookie players equipping a single Lifesteal ring and becoming almost immortal, to the point of accessing areas they were not supposed to yet, and spending 30-60 seconds hitting on a single white mob. It made our eyes bleed, truly.
We decided to scrap the concept of "turning damage into Life" completely, and have introduced something that makes more sense in the broader systems design of Hell Clock. "Life Leech" is now capped at a percentage of your maximum Life every second, and is not cumulative.
In practical terms, it now functions basically as an extra layer of Life Regen per second, but to activate this layer you need to cause damage (at least once every second). It benefits Life stackers more than any other build, and also benefits builds which take advantage of Life Gain and Regeneration bonuses.
Target Dummy is finally here!
You've been asking for this since release, and we've listened: we have added a Dummy to Quixeramobim, allowing you to test your Skills, builds and rotations before descending into Hell.
The Dummy is currently very simple. In the future we hope to increment it with more advanced features such as DPS meters, the ability to spawn multiple dummies, and being able to spawn them as Rares, Uniques or Bosses, as well as adding Resistances and other defensive effects to them.
What's Coming Next?
Patch 1.0.3 should be our last one before our fist Major one: Update 1.1 - Clockmaker's Tools. We are currently on track to hit our September deadline, and we are aiming to land around the time of the Autumn Sale (Sep 29th).
Besides the exciting addition of Crafting, and the much-requested QoL features of Gear Stash, Search/Filter function and Loadouts, we will also introduce a Defenses rework, and a major rebalance of the entire game to increase build diversity and improve the enemy scaling.
Stay tuned to our socials and Steam blogs in the next few weeks for more information on Clockmaker's Tools!
Cheers,
~Mark and the Hell Clock Team
1.0.3 Changelog
Gameplay and UI Changes
Bleed stacks now properly show on HUD
Lifesteal has been reworked to "Life Leech". Now, instead of converting damage dealt to Life, it recovers a % of your maximum Life per second if you have dealt any damage during the last second
Changed the Unique Relic effect of "Banner of Faith" to "Double Knives gives +X% Life Leech"
Reduced the upgrade scaling of the Rare Affix "Critical Hits with Melee Skills recover X% Life"
Reworked and rebalanced all pre-existing Lifesteal tree nodes and gear/relic affixes to Life Leech
Changed VSync to Toggle and added FPS Limiting, Anti Aliasing Quality and Shadows Quality to the Options menu
Moved FPS Limit and Damage View Limit to a new Performance section in Graphics Options
Added Dummy to the Hub. It is unlocked by default in Ascension, and requires defeating the Merchant to be available in Campaign. The Dummy has 1B Life and is considered a Regular enemy.
Added Reliquary candle light fix
Performance
TL:DR - Performance has been drastically improved, especially for builds with lots of projectiles, and Load times have been reduced as well. Here are the nerdy details:
Removed Unity collision system from all projectiles and replaced with our own custom system
Remove Unity collision from all breakables
Some VFXs now can be reused on reaching the max instances instead of creating moreAdded support to reuse poolable objects instead of exceeding the pool limit
Added support to limit damage values on screen
Improved spinning projectile movement function
Improved audio indexing by GUID performance with local cache
Improved responsiveness on pre-load pooling process
Blood splash and holy rosary hit effects now are reusable
Improve FMOD attached instance performance with aux dictionary
Improved projectile update logic performance with speed caching
Made Skill MaxCharges use a cached value instead of calculating everytime
Reduced particle count across the board
Removed unnecessary Cast Shadows on smaller environment objects, especially in Act 3
Moved all pool controllers to a non-destroyable game object, and rework scene loading to support one time pool pre-load only
Remove trailed blood VFX from some environment elements
Added staggered projectile collision across multiple frames to improve performance
Optimized Holy Rosary, Veil of Quills and Splitshot VFX
Enable reuse of damage VFX
Reduced Veil of Quills VFX end animation duration
Reduced Veil of Quills max particles
Changed ProjectileController collider to use shared CollisionResults\[] and increase buffer to 10 instead of 1
Made Target Life View use CanvasGroup.Alpha instead of SetActive to manage state
Removed empty Animators from projectiles
Optimized skill variables / behavior list operations and made Mark of the Vulture area reusable
Converted all Grass objects to static mesh
Made instant damage area effects into reusable poolable objects
Moved Blessed Gear Shop UI slot logic to OnEnable from Awake
Optimized a lot of string indexing to use custom ToHash function
Improved performance to all projectile onhit operations
Improved Mark of the Vulture logic to use sub effects instead of 3 separate triggers
Fixes
Fixed an issue where Blessed Gear would show up less (or not at all) on the Blessed Shop sometimes
Fixed an issue where sometimes Trinkets with lower stat bonuses would replace your better Trinket instead of being auto-sold for Gold
Fixed an issue with Steam Achievements sometimes not triggering on the first try
Fixed some popups not working with gamepad
Fixed charge attack with high velocity getting of bounds
Fixed projectile attack hit fx showing on the wrong position
Fixed our UI not handling extremely big numbers
Fixed BillboardCameraPlaneUVFX using wrong camera
Made ChangeSceneCoroutine use SecondsRealtime instead of Seconds
Made OnChangeQuality respect current VSync, Anti Aliasing, Shadows and Texture quality settings
Fixed Prayer of Vengeance not spending Mana
Removed placeholder VFX from Mark of the Vulture
Fixed Trinkets sometimes being replaced by worse ones in endgame