The Spark Season has arrived! ⚡
It’s time to say goodbye to the Pre-Season and officially kick off the Spark Season! To celebrate the new season, we are thrilled to announce that we are participating in the Steam Tower Defense Fest!
Starting right now, you can grab the game at a 20% discount. This matches our biggest launch discount, making this the absolute perfect time to hop in and start mining!
👀 Coming Soon: A New Way to Play...
Before we get to the patch notes, we want to leave you with a little tease. We are currently working on a highly innovative, experimental beta game mode where you will be able to conquer other players' mines. We’re keeping the details under wraps for now, but expect more news on this very soon!
For now, check out the massive performance overhauls, balance tweaks, and completely new Augments in the Spark Season update!
Spark Season Update 1.010
Season & System Changes
The Spark Season Begins: Leaderboards have been wiped and updated to support the new Spark Season. There are now leaderboards for the highest wave in Endless Mode!
Run Save Data Reset: Please note that due to the season change, old Pre-Season saves are incompatible with the new version (the main menu will now tell you why incompatible saves cannot be loaded).
Massively Optimized Save Files: Save file sizes have been dramatically reduced by 70-95%.
Endless Mode Adjustments: To reduce clutter on deep Endless runs, damage numbers and augment triggers are now disabled by default. We've added 3-state toggles in the settings so you can still force them on if you prefer!
New Content & Balance Changes
NEW Augment - Refresher: Grants a Miner Ability to replenish all ability uses for a target Gem! (One use each wave).
Opalite Rework: Its destroy ability has been replaced. It can now absorb buffs from a target Gem and transfer them to another.
Corallium Rework: Max triggers increased from 3 to 6, but the fire rate buff is halved. Trigger chance is now halved for every 50 buffs already on that Gem (the exact chance will be displayed on the confirm popup).
Gem Spawning Changes: Moonstone, Red Beryl, and Labradorite now spawn gems at the end of the wave instead of the start.
Peri(dot)meter Buff: Fire rate buff increased from 2% to 3%.
Spike traps and Azurite traps are now untargetable (making them also unbuffable). Untargetable gems now visually show an "unbuffable" tag.
Reverse Blocks no longer change tiles with gems created by the map (e.g., Toxic Veins).
MASSIVE Performance Optimizations
This part gets a bit technical, but here you go! Did the game need these optimizations? Not really. But I love squeezing every bit of performance out of the game, especially if it helps keep your Steam Deck battery alive longer.
Huge Physics Rework: We’ve completely removed Rigidbody2D and active colliders from all projectiles. Collision detection now uses highly efficient, single manual CircleCasts. Enabled Physics2D multithreading, reduced solver iterations, and eliminated per-frame GC allocations!
Rendering & Draw Call Optimizations: SetPass Calls on absolute maximum giga load have been slashed from 800 down to 270! Projectiles and AoE effects now use SRP batcher compatible shaders for significantly better CPU performance.
UI Optimization: The Damageboard and Boss Damage Tracker now update 5 times a second instead of every single frame, saving massive amounts of CPU on big waves. Damageboard also no longer heap-allocates by constantly showing/hiding UI objects.
Enabled dynamic batching for renderers to drastically reduce draw calls, especially on damage numbers (which also received increased pool sizes).
Greatly optimized projectile and effect shadow rendering by sharing static materials, static layer masks, and sorting layers.
Bug Fixes & QoL
Fixed an Int32 overflow bug with the score. Scores and victory screens are now properly formatted across the game and leaderboards.
Fixed unlimited ricochet projectiles with high movement speed getting stuck inside walls or when hitting exact corners.
Fixed rotating projectiles (Malachite, Serpentine) losing their rotation upon bouncing to the next mob.
Projectiles now start their homing logic instantly, rather than waiting until they are "grown" to full size.
Fixed "Planned Speed" being incorrectly applied on restart when it was disabled.
Fixed Untargetable gems incorrectly triggering the Lone Wolf augment.
Augments that grant Miner Abilities and the Weighted Dice augment now correctly show synergies.
Wave-end effects that create gems no longer instantly force the mergeboard to show up.
Booster Package now has a slick "fly-to" effect towards its target.
Added a safeguard preventing full version maps from being accessed in the Demo version.
Thank you for all the support, stay tuned!
-iFeral