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Update #17 - Vault Security - Week of February 21st

After the mysterious chests in the crown vaults, we've now added Crown Guardians to your high-level Vault Runs! These Guardians are not only very dangerous, they also bring a couple of changes to the ways Crown Vaults & Crowns work. They even have their own music!

To help you fight these giants, we've got a brand new mutation: Stress. Stress improves your rate of fire as your health lowers. As you might imagine, 1HP Y.V. with Rhino Skin and Stress is a glorious thing. Other than that, you'll run into more I.D.P.D. after the Crystal Caves, a lot of bugs have been fixed, fire traps now shoot slower fire, energy weapons now receive more ammo, and the Sewers are now covered in a smelly fog!

    Features
  • Crown Guardians! These dangerous foes will be found in Crown Vaults after the first one.
  • A great new track for the Crown Guardians.
  • Stress. This brand new mutation gives you a higher rate of fire when your health is lower. A great match for characters such as Rebel and Chicken!
  • Stinky fog in the sewers. Balancing
  • Drops now give you more energy ammo. The ammo cap is still the same, so this should work well with the high ammo use nature of energy weapons.
  • Fire from the Traps has been made a bit slower.
  • You no longer take damage when big enemy corpses bump into you.
  • Sight range in dark levels has been reduced, but Eyes now sees even more. Fixes
  • Grenades, slugs, and shotgun pellets are now deflectable.
  • The Proto Chest should no longer spawn on top of the Crown.
  • Fixed the way levels are loaded, so that it no longer rains in the secret level.
  • Big Weapon Chests no longer appear in the secret level.
  • New collision masks for the plasma weapons.
  • The Proto Chest no longer gives an error when the player dies.
  • You can no longer walk past Trap fire. Can't believe we didn't find out about this earlier!
  • Made some small fixes to the way Big Health Chests spawn.
  • Labs should no longer start with an activated portal.
  • Chests sometimes spawned with a bit of wind next to them, this should no longer happen.
  • Cursed Chests no longer turn into Big Weapon Chests when opened. Misc
  • Some minor changes to the enemy shooting code.
  • Allies now show a heal effect when healed.
  • Chests after the Crystal Caves now spawn with I.D.P.D. Grunts instead of Bandits.
  • The secret level music has been updated.
  • The ambient tracks for Laboratory and Scrapyard have been updated.
  • Freaks now sometimes fly through portals heading to the Laboratory.

Next week is going to be the last big update for a while. It will be followed by a minor update, and then we'll have to take a break while we're visiting the Game Developers Conference.

We want to use this big update for two thing: Performance, and the IDPD. Hopefully we can get the game to run a bit better, so that you can fight those new and improved I.D.P.D. soldiers in glorious 320x240 at 30fps!

Enough future talk. For now, enjoy this week's update!