We are mostly recovered from the release now. It was stressful, as releases always are - especially when you're reuploading a freshly rebuilt build five minutes before pressing the release button. But we made it through, avoided major bugs, and some of you have played the game quite a few hours.

NET.CRAWL is a peculiar title. You can't really chill your way through it, nor can you brute force it. You've got to give yourself fully to the game, learn its language, and listen to whatever it has to say.

In his 2000s book On Writing, Stephen King describes writing as "telepathy" - a kind of magic where the author transmits thoughts and emotions directly from their mind to the reader's, across any distance. I'm not a writer, and I don't care much about stories or even emotions. But I care deeply about systems and knowledge. The fact that someone on the other side of the planet can complete a run is proof that through some techno-telepathy-magic, we managed to transmit the knowledge about the game's systems. And, maybe there were emotions involved too.

That's pretty cool if you ask me.

But whether we call it telepathy or not, we'd better not waste mana on using it for mundane tasks, such as explaining the reasoning behind this patch's changes. And that's what the rest of the post will be about.

Aspect Matrix

You can now buy hidden aspects for 100 credits.

This solves two problems:

Even though buying a hidden aspect is very fun, it was hard to justify because why would you buy a "cat in the bag" for full price?

In the early game, Crystals are hard to get - and that's exactly when you want to buy two Aspects the most. This change gives more granularity at the price point for two Aspects. Instead of only 3 Crystals, you now get three other options (300 Credits, 1 Crystal + 200 Credits, or 2 Crystals + 100 Credits).

This is objectively a great change that was held back by the fear of making UI more complicated and fruitless attempts to give the game's two currencies more distinct use cases.

+3 Offer Price Increase

This one is hard to be happy about but it feels necessary.

The Aspects change frees up a lot of Crystals, and people were already getting to the final fight with way too much Link. The game is just not fun when you have 20-something Link. I can't put pressure on you if two hearts are enough to chill until the end of turn 4 against 16 Trace.

Trinity Grid

I know a lot of people don't like how hard it is to fit a Trinity piece into the grid. Let's attempt the impossible - make it even harder to fit perfectly, but feel less bad at the same time:

One node in each triplet-piece now gets upgraded. That node alone should be worth the asking price.

I have also lowered the price for the 6-slot option in System Expansion to 1 Crystal and made System Expansion appear earlier and slightly more frequently. You should have more empty slots available when you get to Trinity System and it should make it less frustrating.

Similarly, the "flat" Data Pool now also sells Upgraded Pieces:

Infinite Reboot

There is this post on Steam forums where Blanche got exploited for "unlimited Crystals." I didn't realize it right away, but unlimited Crystals was a bug. However, the fact that certain builds can get infinite actions with infinite reboots too easily is, obviously, a problem. There is no clean solution to this, as most attempts to fix it directly will cripple the game in some undesired ways. And we certainly don't want to declare war on infinites, but we have to be more rigorous about what kind of infinite we want to see in the game.

This particular example raises two questions:

Can we have Reboot effects on system nodes at Express speed?

Can we have +2 Action effects at Express speed?

The easy answer to both of those questions is - no. Which, as we all know, means maybe, which in turn often means - yes. I wish somebody had explained this to me when I was younger. But that's not the point.

The point is that we can't just nerf everything to the ground, remove Express from every scary -looking node, and then wonder why the game isn't fun anymore. But we should at least do something to prevent the most toxic scenarios. The level mentioned in the post above was rebooted 188 times. It's just bad for the environment to let energy go to waste like that.

So here are some steps toward a fix:

0. First of all Blanche should never offer unlimited Crystals. It his case she was bugged and Crystals were reentering the level pool. But you can see how one can "farm" too Crystals per turn even past the turn limit. Something has to be done here, at some point. Not now. Right now, most people haven't figured out how to beat Blanche at all, let alone "farm" her for Crystals.

1. On Hard mode, Home can only be activated once per turn. (and it will be once per level on Max). This is to prevent a scenario where the player can stay in one place hitting Reboot multiple times without ever moving. It's okay to spam reboots if you can find and reach the nodes to do it. It's not okay to do it by staying put.

2. Hot Reset and System Update get the Limited keyword added to their base versions. This barely solves anything, but it might make reaching the exodia-build slightly harder. I like these nodes and I don't want to nerf them further. A long time ago, System Update didn't have Express and had "Complete turn" on it. I don't want to go back to that version of the game.

4. Unstable is introduced to fight unlimited activations of Overclocking+, Call to Action+, and Code Optimization+. We already had Unstable in the game as a measure against another infinite caused by Jumppad. This isn't the cleanest solution, as it relies on RNG. But I don't see a better way to go about it.

Unstable: Has 50% chance to Transform into Null after getting exhausted.

There are some other nodes and aspects that can be problematic. Battery+ (exhaust: gain 2 Actions) is certainly exploitable, and chkdsk (aspect, reboot if moved 3 times over exhausted) can give you access to even more reliable Express-speed reboot. But for now I'd rather don't do anything about it.
Overclocking+/Code Optimization+/Call to Action+ are getting nerfed because there are 3 of them, and their upgraded versions had nasty interaction with +2 Multiuse aspect. (Not to mention Overclocking becoming busted with Heatsink).

Bandwidth

Another keyword meant to fix a particular narrow issue is called Bandwidth. It reads:
This can only generate Data up to your maximum Link

Now that I think about it, I realize it only exists to protect Barry (the boss who wants to get 100 Data) from Home Reading (sets Data to Memory/2 at turn start) and Mirror Copy (collect Data where x is your current Data). I also put it on Police Report for symmetry.

I'm not sure here whether we should revert Barry to his original form (where he didn't modify memory to 100) or keep Bandwidth. Both variants have negatives and positives.

After having implemented Bandwidth, I already started feeling regret, as I don't like the idea of having "artificial" limits on cards. Perhaps Barry is up for a rework but we'll see.
There's also an issue where Blanche needs protection form Security Protocol (drop 2xFirewall Trace).

Item Price

Eventually we need to introduce some kind of dynamic pricing model to the game. The price of an item should grow as you buy it more. But for now, let's just increase the price a little bit. 25 was ridiculously low. But 50 seems just a little too much. So 40 it is.

The 2nd Deeper Run

First of all, we need to come up with a good name for this run already. We can't call it "2nd run" forever. Or can we?

Regardless, this part of the game is clearly in much worse shape (balance-wise and design-wise) than the rest of the game. I don't want to spend too much time talking about problems in a part of the game that less than 10% of players have seen. But I have to mention it in some way because even though that run is fun to complete once or twice, I'm not even nearly satisfied with the design quality of that part of the game (other than the final boss itself).

That being said, I still consider the 2nd Deep a successful experiment. It just needs more tuning, more content (this is easy), and at least a couple of structural changes (this is hard). The main problem with the current variant is that you get a complete wipe of your Aspects and don't get any compensation for it. And the full wipe to aspects is necessary, I think, because for some reason we can accept partial loss of nodes, but can't do the same for aspects.

Anyway, there's a lot more to do with the 2nd Deep, but it won't become a priority for some time, because 90% of players haven't reached that stage of the game yet. But at the very least we should add at least 3 or 4 more corrupted nodes to each color.

The Roadmap

Yeah, that thing. We should have one, sure. But hear me out. Suppose I posted a roadmap at the start of February promising you all kinds of juicy new content for the next update and whatnot. The problem is that not a single thing that made it into today's update would have been on that roadmap. So technically, that would make us already two weeks behind schedule. That's the problem with making plans while you're a tiny indie team working on an experimental game in the most agile way possible.

We just don't know how things are going to happen. And making any promises is a sure way to break them. I hope you can trust us enough without one.

That being said, the next "large" update is planned for March 7th. By then, I should have at least a fresh Kanban board for all the stuff we want for 1.0, just for the sake of my own sanity.

In the meantime, here's a small teaser of something Alex cooked up:

It'd be great to hear if any of you actually care about the skins. It's hard to decide how many we should make, what range of characters to include, etc.

And if you're still here, then you probably care about the game at least a little bit. If you do - then a Steam review might really help us out.

Thank you,
Denis (Obsolete One)

(Full patch notes are in the post below.)