A Cubed and Dangerous Update is coming very soon. It may be available during the first couple days of the Summer Sale if I can manage it, but there are a few bugs with the update that I don't want to risk destabilizing the game over.
What's Coming
The patch is focused on making the global shop, town map nodes, and vendor in-level spawns more impactful. There might also be some other goodies added along with it if I can get them working in time.
Global Shop
The global shop, and town shops, will be changed to provide a quality and rarity boost to items. You'll still be able to find of the common items in the shops, but they will be compensated with higher quality (star rating) to make even the lower level gear more exciting to see in shops. To compensate for the balance change, the cost of items in the shop may be increased a little after more testing. This should help support shop-based strategies and build-around decisions by giving a higher weighted payout.
Town Map Nodes
Towns are generally too sprawling in space, and vendors are difficult to compare against. Optimal town strategy requires visiting every vendor before buying anything, which can slow gameplay down a bit too much.
To fix this, towns will be changed to relatively fixed sizes (2 to 3 rooms) and vendors will be assigned roles to make it easier to make decisions. eg: A weapons vendor for hand weapons and tacticals, a gear vendor for hats/armor/boots/belts, and a utility vendor for heals or perks.
This should make it easier to target types of items you're looking for, and make town encounters a bit more streamlined.
These vendors will all also receive the weighting improvements mentioned for the global shop, to make their inventories more exciting to browse.
In Level Vendors
These are going to be more rare than they currently are (potentially 33% of their current spawn rate) and will include a larger boost to the rarity weighting. The scarcity plus additional rarity should help make them more exciting when they show up. Additionally this will make it possible to do even more interesting things in the future with rare room spawns.
Next Fest
Thanks everyone for hanging out with me, blasting cubed, exploring the desert, and even checking out Sheep for the Stars during Next Fest. I've been busy trying to get that demo polished up for the event and fixing some feedback coming from it. But the next little while will see some more structured time working between both games.
If you want to follow along with development, or chat about anything, stop by the Steam Community / Reddit / Discord / YouTube.