All Aboard! The Train Defense Express is released!

Here we are, finally at version 1.0!

I'd like to thank everyone to played during the Early Access period. You all helped make the game better in every way, and I'm sincerely grateful for your feedback and bug reports. Thank you!
I'd also like to thank my friends, sargx, Exolun, and SilentWizard, for their extensive testing, and Grisknuckle for helping out with some of the art.

In other news: All Aboard! The Train Defense Express is now Steam Deck Verified! Enjoy, Steam Deck players!

Let's discuss the patch stuff already. Wasn't this supposed to be a small patch...?

New Content

• New Carriage Selection/Swapping View: The old way of viewing and swapping carriages was a little unpleasant, especially if there's a lot of junk on the screen, and especially if you're a controller- or keyboard-only player. Now, a new button appears when the game is paused that opens the new carriage view. The new view is functionally the same as before, but much easier to see what's going on, and it supports drag & drop. The old way of viewing or moving around carriages still works, but with mouse only.
• Loot Fairy: A rare loot fairy may now randomly appear and wander around the map for a couple of minutes. The more you hit it, the more valuable gems it will drop. It's pretty hard to kill, though...
• 5 new boons: The final set of boons have arrived! Two of them cannot be unlocked until you've maxed out every other boon. A special surprise for dedicated players is behind those locked boons. Some placeholder art is still being used for this.
• 10 new relics: This includes more than one relic which requires merging other relics and a new starting relic. Some placeholder art is still being used for this.
• 3 new carriages: However, they don't appear normally. They have something to do with some of the new relics...
• 8 new achievements: Certain things that many players have already done, such as unlocking all basic upgrades, will need to be re-done to get the achievement, since it wasn't being tracked before.
• New Elite Upgrade - Shop Level: I never liked that opening treasure chests was mostly pointless after All-In was unlocked. Now, you can upgrade your shop level! When you open a chest to buy more train carriages, the shop will contain carriages at the level equal to your shop level. For example, shop level 4 means that the carriages that you can buy will all start out at level 4, but the treasure chests will be proportionally more expensive (as if you were buying 3, 9, 27, 81, etc. carriages all at once). This affects All-In, too.
• New Gameplay Option - Mute Ticket Drop Sound Effect: Enable this option in the "Gameplay" tab to disable the little "ding" that plays when a ticket drops.
• New Collections menus - Unlocks and Achievements: Finally, the two missing screens under the Collections main menu item are available. You can view existing achievement and unlock data through these screens. There was a bug with certain items not being internally represented as 'unlocked', so if the unlock time seems wrong, that's why. It will be correct going forward.
• New Collections menu - Carriages: You can now view all of the carriages that you've seen in this menu, preview carriage stats at each level, and adjust each carriages' effect opacity! Note a carriage will not appear in this menu until you've added the carriage to your train at least once.
• After 4 hours of playing, an option to automatically open relic chests and select a random non-unique relic that you already have appears when opening a relic chest.
• ??? secret menu

Changes

• All-In Changes: All-In can no longer be used to buy partial amounts of carriages -- it is exclusively used to upgrade carriages to the next level. The "Estimated Gold Required" is now the exact amount required. If you don't have enough gold, you cannot make an attempt. This lets me remove the 'train space required' calculation since train space doesn't matter for this process anymore. Also, a lot of the jankiness behind the calculation came from trying to figure out exactly how many carriages should be added to the player's train if the attempt fails, so that code can be removed too. It also lets me integrate shop level into All-In without much pain, and let's All-In calculations for very high level carriages become instant.
• The "Satyr" boss's rate limit was adjusted so that it won't spawn so many enemies so frequently. The frenzied state, which activates when you take too long to defeat Satyr, was adjusted to spawn significantly less minions. However, those minions will receive a large bonus to their health and movement speed, and that bonus will gradually increase until Satyr is defeated.
• The "Engineer" turret is a major cause of lag when it reaches high levels due to the number of missiles that each turret can fire. This is being changed: Engineer now only fires at most 2 missiles, but the damage scaling and area of effect scaling of missiles has increased considerably to compensate.
• Greatly improved performance of the "Elemental Mage" carriage, especially in the late game. The elementalist's cast duration has been set to a maximum of 4 seconds.
• Improved performance of the "Cursed Orb" carriage in the late game.
• Improved performance of the "Earthbreaker" carriage, especially in the late game.
• The boons which give more relic rerolls and train carriage free rolls now have a maximum level of 5.
• Flamethrower's tick rate (how often enemies within the flame are damaged) was increased by 31.7%.
• Flamethrower's "Flamer" relic now grants a free upgrade of your best Flamethrower on pick-up, or one will be added if you don't already have one.
• The "Energy Disk" carriage now has a maximum number of disks, a maximum size, and a maximum range from the carriage that each disk can orbit at. Very high levels of Energy Disk would block the entire screen, so this had to change. It's also now subject to low effect mode.
• New 'backups' folder for meta data: the game now backs up the last 5 instances of your meta data file (meta.sav) being saved. If something happens to your meta data, navigate to this folder right away and restore from a back-up file. Save folder: %APPDATA%\Godot\app_userdata\All Aboard The Train Defense Express\save\ Back-ups folder: %APPDATA%\Godot\app_userdata\All Aboard The Train Defense Express\save\backups\ meta.sav.bak0 is your most recent back-up file. meta.sav.bak5 is your least recent back-up file. Back-up files are not subject to Steam cloud storage. If you want to disable back-ups, edit game.cfg and change "create_backup_file" to "false".
• Increased the amount of tickets dropped from the first super boss killed.
• Increased the amount of tickets dropped by ordinary bosses.
• Wise Investment: Buffed mid-late game gold per minute cap scaling.
• Hand of Midas: Buffed mid-late game gold generation.
• The max level for the demo has been increased to 10.
• High amounts of armor can no longer completely nullify an attack from enemy creatures - it will always do a minimum of 1 damage. A bug was also fixed where high amounts of armor can cause enemy attacks to heal the Infinite Power Generator.
• Another adjustment to EXP calculation to reduce the amount of EXP gained in very, very long games.
• The damage per second meter now updates once per second independent of game speed (as originally intended). The update rate can be adjusted by editing the config file and changing the "dps_meter_tick_rate" line. Setting it too low may affect performance.

Bug Fixes

• A couple of users reported their saved meta data being wiped out. There were some rare circumstances where the game might overwrite your saved data with blank data, for example, if your game was closed before it finished loading your meta data. I've put in some protections against this, but let me know if it happens again in the future. If it does happen again, restore from a back-up file right away.
• Fixed a bug where saving the game with a relic chest on the ground gives 255 rerolls.
• Fixed a bug with Machine Gun/Shotgun/Bounty Hunter bullets where the collision box was way too small, causing it to occasionally go through enemies without damaging them.
• Fixed a bug with the "Shrapnel" relic where the burn was not dealing the correct amount of damage.
• Fixed a bug with the "Flamer" relic where the incorrect number of burn stacks were being applied.
• Fixed a bug with the "Sharpened Blades" relic where Saw Blades fired from the carriage were not applying the bleed debuff.
• Fixed a bug where you were prompted to select a carriage even though you already selected one when getting multiple stacks of the same relic.
• Fixed a targeting issue with Laser. When set to "Smart" targeting, it's supposed to disengage from weaker targets when a boss is in range - it now behaves correctly.
• Ticket counter is now properly updated when loading a game.
• Fixed display bug with the "Treasure Trove" relic.
• Fixed a bug where boss kills from damage dealt by Area of Effect damage would not immediately trigger the Assassin relic to update its damage bonus.
• Fixed a bug with Boomerang where the explosion would trigger more than once, causing explosive damage numbers.
• Fixed a bug with the Explosive Overkill relic where it was reporting way more damage dealt than it should.
• Fixed a bug with the "Patience" relic where it would stop generating gold if you spent too long banking gold.
• Fixed a display issue with the gold per minute calculation not updating properly when hovering the mouse over the the number of miners.
• Fixed the game showing you that you've unlocked the hardest difficulty multiple times.
• Fixed the secret starting relic not being immediately unlocked upon achieving the condition.
• Fixed a bug where the ticket drop rate was incorrectly high.
• Fixed performance issues in the game over screen when counting up extremely high scores and gold amounts.

That's all for this patch! But just because the game is released now, it doesn't mean that I'm done with the game yet. I'm not 100% sure if I'll do everything listed, but some of the things I'd like to implement in the future:

• Mobile port (coming next!)
• 1 Hour Challenge mode, a game mode where there's no Wise Investment or other economic carriages, where you just have to beat the 1 hour boss, with significantly harder difficulty in general.
• Use extra tickets to buy advantages in the next run.
• A different map than the green plains, with a differently-shaped train track.
• More bosses, enemies, and relics.

Now that we're out of early access, I won't be sticking to the "major patch every 3 weeks" schedule we've been on for the last 3 months, so I can take my time making the new content good and stable.
I'll be watching for bugs and issues. You can reply to this thread on Steam or use the in-game "Create Bug Report .zip File" button to report any issues. The absolute best way to report a bug is to send me the saved game file - game.sav - which demonstrates the issue.

Please enjoy!
- Likadev