This is Milestone 7 out of 9! Check out our Road to 1.0 post for info on planned updates and schedule!

🖼️ Beastie Art Updates

• Flowish: Animation COMPLETE!
• Crabaret: Animation COMPLETE!
  • A new variation of Crabarets can now be found in the Tawny Wilds. Their unique diet there resulted in an explosion of diverse shell colors!

• Mudslee: Animation COMPLETE!
  
• Crawlurk: Animation COMPLETE!
  
• Psylusc: Animation COMPLETE!
  
• Froofulks: Animation COMPLETE!
  
• Blitzwift: Animation COMPLETE!
  
• Hydrolm: Animation COMPLETE!
  

  The number of Beasties marked as complete has gone from 77 to 85. One big step closer!
  

⭐New Stuff

• All of Marcy's hangouts are now available in this update!
• This means that it's now finally possible to max out your hearts with every Ranked Coach. There's 54 unique hangout events available in the game now, with tons of surprises to discover within. Phew!... that is a lot.
• NEW MUSIC: Neptune Stadium
  • Enjoy this new haunted BGM, just in time for Halloween!
  • The OST is updated on Steam and Bandcamp!
  

• Environmental improvements
  • Neptune Stadium has been updated with environmental details
  • Tawny Wilds has also been enriched with extra details and some layout tweaks
  • New ambiences have been introduced to Neptune Stadium, as well as to populated city areas

• New Customization Options
  • We've added a ton of new accessories players can adorn themselves with
  • Some are available by default, some are added to existing shops, and some are available only by new secret means.

• PVP Spectating!
  • You can now spectate other players' PVP matches!
  • You can access matches via their 4-letter private lobby code, OR you can hop into public ongoing matches via the "Find A Match" menu!
  • If you have "Continuous Matchmaking" enabled, you can receive challenges even while spectating someone else.
  • We've added options for disabling spectators too, of course!
  

• Japanese Localization!
  • The game is now fully playable in Japanese!
  • Localization was done by 8-4, the same studio behind localizing legendary titles like Undertale and Hades! (And Chicory: A Colorful Tale!)

✨Major changes and improvements

• Mouse Cursor Options
  • We've added custom mouse cursors to the game! Choose your favorite from several options.

• Changes to "Fired Up!" Status
  • Fired Up Beasties get bonus EXP!
  • Beasties get Fired Up if they're brought to many games but seldom taken off the bench. We've now also made it so Beasties get Fired Up much more quickly if their level is below their teammates', even if they're fielded in games frequently.
  • This should help ease the burden of "catching up" a under-levelled new team member to the rest of your crew.

• Alternating serve option for lobbies
  • This was a top-requested feature from PVP players! This lobby options make it so serves alternate between players regardless of the previous match's outcome.

• In-game Bigmoon Bash Results
  • After the conclusion of Bigmoon Bashes that have themed teams, Sy will call you up to announce the results to you!
  • Bash results now also appear in the in-game Leaderboards menu, including historical data from past events.

• Bash Score calculation changes
  • Previously, if your score was very high in a Bash, your starting score in the subsequent Bash would be raised.
  • We've removed this "inheritance" feature so players start on the same footing regardless of past results.
  • Your starting score IS still influenced by your story progress, and also your Tower Tourney record win streak (maxxing out at 30). These adjustments to starting score are only to help benefit matchmaking so that players are more likely to be paired with opponents who have similar game familiarity.

• Live Leaderboards in SportNet
  • Leaderboards in SportNet now update LIVE as events are going. No more need to wait until we post results after an event is over!
  • Player titles in Leaderboards now localize, show their team color, and even update if players change their titles later.

• Seasonal Analytics in SportNet
  • The "Beastie Analytics" menu now lets you browse usage stats for past balance patches, including historic ones we tracked before in-game analytics browsing was added.

• Overhauled playbook and encounter designs across the game to account for balance changes and new traits, including/especially for procedurally-generated teams (Random teams + Tower Tourney).
  

🌱 Grassroots League!

There have been regular Grassroots League events since they debuted this summer, with more events coming soon! Top-level players have been getting a special pin available only through victory at these events. It's a great way to meet tough opponents and challenge yourself. Check out our League page for more details!

🌕 Upcoming Bash

BIGMOON BASH: TREATS, COSTUMES AND SCARES!

A Bigmoon Bash is coming this weekend! Bring your favorite Halloween Beastie and take on other players from around the world!

🔧 Balance Changes

It's been a short time since the previous milestone update, so we aren't aiming to make massive changes this time around. This balance patch is particularly light-touch and is meant to address a few things that stood out to us as potential issues.

⚙️ General Mechanics Changes

🥱 Weariness

• PREVIOUSLY: Beasties take extra "Receive Weariness" damage after receiving multiple attacks in the same point. Each attack dealt +10 damage for each receive after the 7th receive in a point.
• NOW: Beasties have a "Weariness" value which goes up each time they take any action such as Move, Tag In, any Attack or any Play. Double Blocks and Combo plays increase Weariness for both Beasties. Beasties take 8 extra damage from attacks for each Weariness over 15. Weariness resets to 0 at the end of every point.

  Receive Weariness is a mechanic we added to prevent matches from being able to last forever. However, over time, we've felt that it was insufficient for some games. We discussed adding a match timer similar to what's typically seen in competitive Chess, but we're also reticent about introducing new win conditions into the game around timer-based strategy. Instead we're rethinking Weariness to be more impactful in cases that we think it should.

  Similar to the previous design, Weariness applies more to Beasties who spend more time on the field. The new design more directly punishes players for extending matches with many actions. It's also more similar to a timer now in that players must manage their own Weariness, and opponents don't have direct influence over the resource via attack targeting. In practice, as before, our goal is to balance the values such that Weariness never becomes relevant in the vast majority of matches, but does become relevant in exceptional cases.

🍄 Traits

• Performer
  • 🔄 New effect: When landing a SPIRIT attack, summons +2 RALLY. Surgus has seen waning use and waning success over the last few months. One reason for this we've found is that they compete with their own kin, Shloom, for their role as a Rally attacker. Plus, Performer's design felt a bit less exciting after we introduced Stagecraft, which has a similar but more interesting and powerful effect. This represents a new idea to cement Surgus as having a unique role on Rally teams.

• Slippery
  • 🔻 Tweaked effect: Makes adjacent allies receive attacks with base POW 70 or more. While we haven't seen Gremlur vastly overperforming in results, we do feel that Slippery made them a little too easy to pilot - even without focused building, it exerts a lot of pressure on the opponent and closes many lines to them, forcing the game to go at Gremlur's pace. We do think Gremlur represents a fun and unique playstyle in the game, being difficult to target and remove while making the opponent's life difficult. This adjustment still keeps that alive, but gives opponents many more ways to land hits on Gremlur, particularly with low-power disruption plays.

🏃 Plays

• Burnout
  • 🔼 105 POW (from 100)
  • 🔻 -20 STAMINA (from -15) We see Daredillo feeling pretty good with their new Fearless trait, but still slightly overperforming with Acrobat. This change means that Fearless gets one more slight advantage over Acrobat. The changes here also apply to Froofulks and Scauldra, but both Beasties are in an OK spot to receive this small change.

• Flying Kick
  • 🔻 90 POW (from 95) As a new signature play given to Kasaleet in the previous balance patch, we wanted Flying Kick to be something players would want to actually slot in and use. This existence of Thump at 90 POW in Kasaleet's kit complicated this - with an already perfect "default" attack available, we felt Flying Kick needed to establish itself as a different power tier option to differentiate itself. In practice, though, we've seen that Flying Kick's drawbacks and complexities don't entirely make up for its extra power over Thump, and that in fact it fits into Kasaleet's kit in almost exactly the same way. This established a new baseline power for them that was a bit higher than what it was before - something we didn't really intend. We're attempting a correction here by having Flying Kick fully replace Thump in Kasaleet's kit, at the same power level they've always had.

• Hex
  • 🔄 Haunted (the trait applied by Hex) now always feels 3 TIRED (from 4) Hex has always been a contentious play, and we like it that way! But we also appreciate some players' concerns the outsized impact that Hex has on the flow of a match - similar to high-impact like like Demanding Set, it can swing the direction of a game very quickly in either direction, whether it's in favor of the user, or a misplay that gets them severely punished. We want Hex to keep all of its nasty control properties, but this change slightly scales its effect down such that one action can't influence as much of the game all at once.

👹 Beasties

• Kasaleet
  • 🔻 Plays Removed: Thump
  • 🔼 Plays Added: Muscle Memory
  • 🔄 Adjusted level-up set Corresponding with Flying Kick's tweak, we're taking Thump off of Kasaleet, not because it is too good by itself but because it now occupies the same space and isn't interesting to build or play with by comparison. As compensation, Kasaleet can now Muscle Memory, and in fact is one of its best wielders in the game - though they can't quite hit the same peak as Ambush Crawlurk with the same play, they can do some serious damage with it. Between this, Stomp, and Demolish, Kasaleet still has a wealth of hard-hitting standard attacks to supplement their moveset alongside Flying Kick.

• Gremlur
  • 🔻 Plays Removed: Trickspin, Slice, Stinger
  • 🔼 Plays Added: Echo Strike, Nerve Strike, Cornershot
  • 🔄 Adjusted level-up set We're still evaluating Gremlur's capabilities after seeing how dominant they can be in high-level matches. We're experimenting with taking away their front-row targeting sideways tools, so that they can't threaten 50/50 front row scores while also controlling the opponent's targeting with Slippery. We're also taking away one of their most-used attacks, Stinger, which is otherwise still very highly distributed, not particularly on theme for Gremlur, and effective at mitigating the opponent's damage which in turn de-risks Slippery's retargeting. We're curious to see how Gremlur fares with more straight attacking options, giving them new synergies and options to function as a primary attacker themselves. Echo Strike in particular is sure to have some interesting combinations with Adaptability.

• Wottle
  • 🔼 70 MPOW (from 60)
  • 🔼 Plays Added: Rainbow, Roll Shot, Sneak Attack (via level up), Heartbreaker Wottle's unique trait is typically used defensively, but it also has offensive implications that are rarely made use of. There's a careful balance in making sure their offense is not so overwhelming to let their serve attacks dominate games, but we realized there were many mind attacks that would have interesting interactions with it while not rising to excessive power levels, so we're giving Wottle a new main attacking type. A Spirit dominant, Mind secondary mixed attacker is actually a very unique stat spread in the cast, and Wottle is now the only one with this spread whose role is on the support side.

• Mudslee
  • 🔼 Plays Added: Trait Dance This one is just for fun, and because Moist no longer has some game-breaking interactions it used to.

• Bindiva
  • 🔻 100 MPOW (from 108) We're excited to see players exploring Bindiva at a high level, finally! Our changes to their kit in the last patch did the intended job of mitigating general strength while still leaving some nasty offensive lines available, but in practice we're still seeing players get too much value out of Bindiva's offense in the best cases. With this change, Bindiva still has one of the most powerful Dumps in the game and still has all the same easy ways to force them, but can't checkmate out of nowhere quite as easily.

• Daredillo
  • 🔻 94 BPOW (from 95)
  • 🔻 98 SPOW (from 105) With the addition of Dodge Roll, we've seen Daredillo become far and away the most-used Beastie in PvP, and we think that usage has been well deserved; Daredillo can tank some of the strongest hits in the game, support teammates, AND hits about as hard as anything in the game can, too. They seem just a little bit too good at everything, basically. Since we think Dodge Roll is very fun, and makes sense as a staple tool for them, we're cutting their offense down a touch so that their role shifts just a bit more towards support and away from offense. This corresponds with the Burnout change to ensure that Fearless Daredillo still gets a staple hit that's as strong as it's been, while Acrobat Daredillo now has to eat a higher cost to get the same benefit.

• Supilero
  • 🔻 68 BPOW (from 70) We've seen Supilero really come to life since we re-worked Confident, succeeding both defensively and offensively with True Strike. Similar to Daredillo, we're nudging their stats just a bit so that coaches can't rely on their offenses quite as much.

• Beetlback
  • 🔼 70 BPOW (from 68) We've seen Beetlback struggling just a bit in results. They've got some fun attacking options, but virtually never have a reason to use them, and are underwhelming when they do; this tweak trades their offense stat with Supilero's and gives players just one tiny extra reason to consider them over other supports.

🚧Other Fixes and Changes

• Fixed a crash loading/repairing certain corrupt savedata (this reported issue was blocking someone named Mel and the Tiny Wings from loading their savedata... hope you see this!)
• You now have to dress up as a pirate before challenging the Party Pirates.
• Removed the delay where Guardian encounters would ignore you after forfeiting a match. This removes a lot of easy encounter skips that casual players tended to do.
• Adjusted a few guardian encounter placements to be less casually skippable (Troglum at Jasper Mines, Diggum in Rutile Preserve, Musselbound in Neptune Stadium).
• Improved flow when changing languages in settings + fixed spacing on the confirmation message.
• Lowered the "trust" threshold needed for a Jellibat to trigger metamorph conditions.
• Doubled the frequency that the "Find A Match" menu checks for updates on available players.
• Fixed issues with certain items (Tea Leaves, Training Videos) in gym training menus not working as expected - being able to use more on a Beastie when it didn't have any effect, and not being able to reduce the value once it had gone over the max.
• Fixed an issue where 2 spray icons would appear in the UI when an Athletic Spray was active.
• Fixed an issue with certain Marlin interactions not being available until the main story is complete.
• In Captains mode, changed so that the team Captain's trait is reset at the end of each point to mitigate certain cheesy strategies.
• Fixed issue with the Construczone area name not being localized on the map.
• Changed the label for the Hyperlink Terminal Zip Station map icon.
• In the process of refactoring Lobbies for spectator mode, fixed a number of inconsistencies and bugs.
• Fixed an issue where the game would dramatically slow down while displaying online Leaderboards.
• Fixed BGM for Dominic's Damage Challenge to properly use custom music.
• For players who use exploits to escape tutorial areas with advancing the story as intended, we added some checks to automatically update story flags to prevent future softlocks.
• Added very occasional checks for updates on Bash status while the game is running. Previously Bash status was only downloaded on game start, but this meant that if the game was running for a very long time (over the course of days) and a new Bash event is added or changed then updates wouldn't be reflected in-game.
• Added Weepy as a team title word.
• Added the Geo City alleyway and Neptune Stadium ballroom as possible arenas for online matches/replays.
• Fixed an issue where certain traits/fields were processed after a match ended, resulting in a crash in rare circumstances (Randomizer'd tutorial).
• Fixed/improved training investments for certain story encounters.
• Updated description for Gym Token items to better clarify that they can be used to reduce training points as well as increase them.
• AI playing on serve defense now appropriately considers the option of the server's ally serving with Flying Kick (and any hypothetical modded ally-ball play).
• Tweaked how time to the next Bash is measured for the purpose of selecting natural-sounding Sy dialogue.
• Fixed an issue where you'd get an erroneous message indicating increased friendship with Dominic after every attempt of his damage challenge.
• Tweaked layout in Mainframe area so that the alleyway area is harder to miss.
• Localized new Alto Alps sub-location names.
• Fixed bad location names appearing on the file select screen for Alto Alps locations.
• Fixed various typo(s)
• Added safety checks to prevent certain rare crashes --- ⚠️ Fixes applied in hot patches over the first 24 hours after the update released ⚠️ ---
• Fixed crashing issue when forming a new Trade lobby.
• Fixed a crash when joining a lobby as a spectator from certain scenes.
• Fixed issues with certain looping Beastie sounds lingering when the Beastie is no longer in that animation state or visible onscreen.
• Redesigned the "shimmer" sound attached to certain Debugly animations.
• All looping animation state sounds (such as Crabaret's tap shoe walk, Beetlback's buzzing wings, etc) now freeze/mute when any menu is opened. This prevents unpleasant audio lingering behind menus when player aren't expecting it (eg. hearing overworld footstep sounds while browsing the Railhouse menu).
• Updated the list of acceptable Beastie nicknames for online strangers to include new Japanese names.
• Fixed encoding on Japanese store text.
• Fixed issue where Crabaret would appear as their non-dominant hand form when viewed in menus.
• Fixed a small frame timing issue in Hydrolm's idle animation.
• Fixed issues with certain locations not correctly resolving to the Neptune Stadium ballroom when entering PVP or replays.
• Fixed issues with joining lobbies as a spectator when one or more of the lobbied players has mods installed.
• When Marcy is due to hang out near the Pirate Picnic Port, she no longer spawns in her Ballcenter.
• Fixed issues with Marcy appearing in the wrong outfit when visiting as a match spectator.
• Adjusted the encounter placement of one of the gift-guarding Beasites in Neptune Stadium.
• Fixed collision issues with the north wall of the Neptune Stadium ballroom.
• Fixed various inconsistencies/issues with lobbies, spectating, challenges etc. (There may be more edge cases we haven't addressed yet)