Hey Loners,

Creative Director Edu here! Now that we've released the game in Early Access and fixed some of the most urgent issues via hotfixes, we can start doing more meaty updates!

This first one addresses some of the pain points you've been sending us via our Steam Forums and Discord! So, let's do a quick rundown:

What’s New

• Glossary on Level-Up Screen: A handy new glossary is now available on the level-up screen, helping you easily understand game vocabulary.
  • We've received a ton of feedback regarding how specific mechanics work, and while this isn't the final solution, we wanted to do something fast to help players better understand the game! You can expect us to improve on this later on 🙂

Visual Improvements

• Revamped Discovery Screen: The Discovery screen has been polished with new visuals.
  • This is a first pass. We will keep improving this screen so you know what to expect from discoveries!

• New Discovery Unlock Animation: Discoveries now include a fresh unlock animation paired with a detailed textual description.

• Explosive Area Hold VFX: Experience the power with dazzling new effects.
  • We're listening! We heard you loud and clear how the Explosive Area Hold main objective wasn't clear and needed better communication, so we did something about it!

• Updated Loadout Buttons: Fresh button sprites have been added to the character loadout screen for a cleaner, more intuitive interface.
  

Quality of Life Enhancements

• Camille’s Laser Anticipation VFX Improvement: The Laser Anticipation VFX now accurately stops when it encounters the Goop Slime, giving better gameplay clarity.
  • After watching you guys play and reading your comments, we realized we needed to do a better job explaining how Camille's fight works. This improvement addresses the fight's biggest pain point: The Laser attack. We'll keep working to make this a better fight with your feedback <3

Changes

• Audio Adjustments:
  • Skill SFX volume increased for better audio balance.
  • Critical hit SFX and Hani Handyman Charge SFX also have volume boosts.

• Icon Updates: Some discovery icons have been replaced with updated versions.
  
• Discovery Rewards Tweak: Pebble rewards no longer trigger a fanfare.
  
• Level-Up Screen Simplification: Stats for regular curios are no longer shown, focusing only on Cursed Curios.
  • The reason we're hiding this information for now is because the way we had it displayed was causing a lot of confusion for players. When players read that a Curio Level Up gained +2% Probability, they thought that this stat applied to their entire character and not to that Curio only. So, we decided to remove these stats change display for now while we think of a better way of communicating that. This is a temporary change while we find better solutions! So thank you for your understanding 🙏

• Balancing Adjustments:
  • Slight buffs and tweaks for upgrades with underwhelming evolutions.
  • Sniper now shoots faster for a smoother experience.
  • Gold Goblin drops an XP Vacuum reward when escaping with low health.
  • Players can now be revived from greater heights.
  • Chest rewards now vary in probability, with a smaller chance for one-reward chests and better odds for three-reward chests.
  • Night mode bosses got a health boost and only drop cores now, no regular XP.

Fixes

• Gameplay:
  • Gold Goblin now only drops Pebbles after activation.
  • Ghost Story curio (levels 3 and 4) and Explosive Area Hold objective no longer show decimal values.

• End Game Screen:
  • "Send Us Feedback" can now be closed with the gamepad.(Sorry about that gamepad people!)
  • Holding "Continue" no longer affects the "Send Us Feedback" button.
  • Corrected level display issues.

• Tutorial: Fixed "Skip Tutorial" button for clients after completion or skipping.
  
• Camp Display: Text now properly displays after players hold CTRL to ready.
  

Known Issues

• Some discovery trackers (e.g., deposits, devices) are not working as expected.
• Certain enemies might get stuck during Peace Time.
• Unit spawns and movement are glitchy on Train Plateau.
• Dead allies may appear invisible to teammates.
• Inviting friends through Steam may result in joining random lobbies.
• Players with Safeguard, while downed, may encounter gameplay blockage.
• Taka-chan is unresponsive if opened simultaneously with a Mini-Boss spawn.

Snacks Combat Behavior

As I've said before, we've been reading all comments, and this is BY FAR the biggest pain point still in the game. Unfortunately, we haven't addressed it in this update. Still, we are working on improving the Snacks combat so it doesn't feel cheap and frustrating, especially their Teleporting near you and Shooting behind you. We're prototyping some solutions and iterating, this takes a bit more time to do and we want to do it properly, but at the same time I feel we should address this directly so you know what to expect. Again, thank you all for your patience regarding this! 🙏

We're super excited to be receiving so much feedback from the community, and we want to make Atomic the best game we can, so please keep sending your comments, suggestions, bug reports, and more! And if you want to reach me, you can do so in the Forums or Discord, which is where I hang out the most <3

Stay tuned for our following updates because we're cooking!

See you in the Picnic,
- Edu