Welcome to Waste Land, Commanders!
Our first major Early Access update has arrived with a new map, new boss, and a ton of adjustments and improvements.
New Map: Waste Land
A giant landfill appeared as a target location in your Operations room. Intel says, it serves as an illegal dump for the mega-corp's waste. It is heavily guarded, so expect very strong resistance when trying to infiltrate the "recycling plant" that houses a new weaponized drone, codename GriftLift.
The operations report for Waste Land hint at new rare building components that can be looted from the map. This may finally enable you to further upgrade many rooms in your bunker HQ.
Of course, Waste Land also has spooky decorations during our Halloween special, and the map comes with a new, unique music theme.
New Boss: GriftLift
If you survived long enough in Waste Land, you will encounter the newest boss, a flying drone that sends a small army of mini-drones to hunt you down while the mothership is evading you. But the reports on GriftLift say, there is a way to force it to the ground in order to attack it.
Defeating GriftLift will also grant a new Steam Achievement.
You will encounter the mini-drones already throughout your operation, so be prepared to take down fast moving, swarming targets.
All Additions, Fixes, Adjustments & Improvements
Highlights:
- Unlock a new map "Waste Land" in the Operations Room.
- Encounter a new boss on the Waste Land map, GriftLift.
- Face a new enemy on the battlefield, Mini-Drone, currently exclusive to the Waste Land map.
- Every map has now its own enemy waves. This means Arctic Storm now becomes more challenging, and future maps will also offer different challenges and ways to play.
- Each map now has some special conditions that encourage different squad builds. This feature will be expanded with more interesting conditions in the future.
- Mercs received a first targeting overhaul and prioritize stronger enemies or groups of enemies, depending on their personal armament. You will find it easier to attack the objective sentries now, or find that you squad shoots more reliably at more dangerous enemies. Further improvements will follow.
- You will find new rare resources on Waste Land to further upgrade your rooms in the bunker HQ. This is also recommended to survive the stronger hordes in Arctic Storm or Waste Land.
Everything else:
- Bosses now drop more rare loot components.
- Mercs now contribute an individual amount to Carry Capacity.
- Hail deals slightly more damage per bullet.
- Screws no longer count as 1 capacity, but as 0.1
- Shooting Range now also provides a Crit Damage bonus.
- Magnetron increases your pickup range by 7.5% per level.
- Fixed an issue where, in the bunker, the clone pod in the Clone Bay was empty although you had selected a Commander.
- Researching new traits now immediately adds them to the random rotation. Until now, they were only added after the next run.
- New maps now cost 100 BD to fully unlock, as originally intended.
- Changed the display for the amount of loot you have recovered when dying in an operation.
- Fixed various instances where the amount of BD & DNA you recovered when dying was not correctly calculated based on your Commander traits or Gear items.
- Added various new enemy waves and patterns to make the maps feel more individual.
- Changed Health pickup to heal a fixed amount of HP and slightly increased its drop chance.
- Most ranged attack enemies now shoot a bit earlier.
- Arctic Storm and Waste Land have slightly stronger variants of the Minibosses.
- Increased prices for buying standard components.
- One-Man Army aura does knock-back enemies again. A major update for active abilities is currently in the works.
- Fixed multiple instances where Merc stats were displayed in a wrong format, or incorrectly.
- Increased the invulnerability timer when capturing objectives or during the Boss intro animation.
- Improved the camera behavior for Boss Intros.
- Objective sentries now drop XP and rarely HP pickups.
- Replaced the explosive barrel, slightly increased its activation radius, and shortened its time till exploding.
- Each map now has a unique wave that is defending the Extraction Point, instead of the elite Peashooter.
Moving Forward
This update marks our first major update for the Early Access of Survivor Mercs.
We still have a lot more updates on our roadmap, and we are looking at also releasing this roadmap to the public very soon™.
We appreciate everyone of you who is already supporting us in this early stage of the Early Access. Please don't forget that the game is still under development. Even after this update there are still a lot of rough edges and potentially also some bugs you may encounter. The balancing may be off in some areas. And you may sometimes still find some things not really well-explained.
Please trust us that we are working on all of these things. And this is also a great chance for you to participate in the development of the game by providing us with your feedback, insights, and ideas.
So come and join us on our Discord server, and let's make a great game together!