We’re a day into this Meat Lab and we are absolutely thrilled to see everyone mixing their meat up again. This update includes a test for our higher difficulty modes. We’ve held this back as we developed a baseline on difficulty and established the building blocks of the campaign, but it’s time to bring it back.
You’ll be able to select a higher difficulty level before starting a run when you select your desired Solar System. These are unlocked as you complete Solar Systems on a previous difficulty. The OMG team is really excited to see how far players can make it. We’ve got a number of higher tiers of enemies that you likely haven’t seen before that were hiding behind these difficulty settings.
Ideally this test will help us understand how far we can push the envelope and how well our dynamically scaling systems... uh... scale.
Thank you for playing with us!
Gameplay
- There are now four difficulty modes supported: Easy, Normal, Hard, Nightmare
- Complete a solar system on any difficulty to unlock the next difficulty for all systems
- The difficulty is selected at the Galaxy Map before jumping into your Bolt Burger
- Hard and Nightmare difficulty solar systems will spawn new tiers of minerals and ancient tech
- Performance improvements
Meta Progression
- The smart meat grid and all weapon grids now can be unlocked all the way up to rank 30
- Ranks 21-30 use the new tier 3, tier 4, and tier 5 minerals and ancient tech found by playing in Hard and Nightmare difficulties
- Trader Mike now offers a 5:1 trade up for all minerals and ancient tech once per mothership visit
Art
- Respawn Fridges now emit a Lil Squishy hologram
- Improved Stellar Chef healing VFX
Animation
- New location of weapons terminal now has a proper camera framing when it’s unlocked.
UI / UX
- Added an “I’m stuck” button in the Esc menu. The button will only be visible in the Debug section of that menu if you are in a game map and alive
Bug Fixes
- Updated some bug detection code that should help keep players and enemies in bounds more often
- The Grub Launcher (slime grenade launcher) had a lower fire rate than intended. It will now fire twice as fast
- Fixed a bug where Observing a player would break until the next map transition if the observed player died
- Fixed a bug where you would spawn into the game dead after disconnect/reconnect if you were alive but had zero respawns remaining at the time of your disconnect
Known Issues
- Playing in native Linux mode on Steam Deck is not yet supported
- No significant performance tuning has been done yet. If you are graphics bound, you can try lowering the quality settings in the Esc menu via Options → Video, but systems with more constrained hardware may struggle
- Not all input buttons and keys have icons in the UI yet. Text descriptions (eg. “J”, or “Button West”) will show up for things that do not yet have an icon in the input glyph map
- When observing other players, some UI bits such as the reload HUD don’t show accurate information for the observed player