Hey everyone,

Welcome to patch #4, my favorite one by far! There'll only be so many more of these for you beta testers till we reach the public launch! This patch aims to VASTLY improve the overall experience playing chains of reality, as the demo, and possibly early access launch will not have difficulty options yet implemented, so these changes should be of major benefit. And of course, dozens of new additions and mechanics await your exploration.

Additions:

• Expanded The Office even more (and removed the poolrooms area, was rather unfitting), also added a locked room which requires a lockpick

• Expanded The Attic a little bit more, also added a decontamination node with the items added to the level needed to craft the kit

• Sanity overhaul part 1: Sanity UI bar completely removed, can only be shown with new sanity watch item. Visual aberration now occurs at 65% sanity, and will become stronger overtime. Various audio and visual hallucinations will now also continuously occur at lower sanity levels. This is only part 1, but is a good baseline.

• Health now has visual effects when becoming lower and lower, starting at 50% health, such as lens flares, a vignette, heavy motion blur, and overall darkens the environment

• Added a full cooking system. For now, only has the ability to use the stove to boil water in The Office for clean drinking water, and a fruit boil. Will have more recipes in the future, as well as more levels with the stove, and more ways to cook stuff.

• Added more X-0RANS0MEWARE encounters

• Added a new skill in the skill tree: Sharp minded, 10% extra sanity

• Added credits (not changing these)

• Added a cooler in each level that has food and water inside of it, similar to the wooden chests. Also added more stuff to the shops in each level

• Added something new in the intro..

• Added animation + sound to The Office's emergency exit doors

• Added new items: New items:

  • X-0RANS0MEWARE Document

  • Sanity Watch

  • Atomic dose of fentadryl

  • Serenobar

  • Grapes

  • Fruit boil

Changes:

• All movement animations have been redone and smoothed out for much better gameplay (i.e walking left or right keeps your flashlight facing forward, locomotion is way less snappy)

• Replaced the rusty key with the lockpicker tool, same functionality.

• Lowered the craft times on all items

• Updated dealmakers intro animation a little bit, still cleaning stuff up, im not the best animator

• Startup menu has been finished, also no longer need to click to skip

• Decreased the stat drain of food and water by about 10%

• Increased the amount of food you get from: muffin, apple, croissant

• Increased the amount of water you get from: water jug, coffee

Performance Improvements:

• Lowered the texture sizes of dozens of materials all throughout chains of reality. Hopefully VRAM usage is helped at least by a little bit, on high settings.

• Optimized a lot of the lights in The Office as best as I could without ruining visuals, including draw distances on everything, and removing shadows on smaller lights 

• Improved the performance of the first otherworld by like 3x. Should get like triple fps now

Bug fixes:

• Fixed collision issues in The Office’s decontamination node room

• Fixed The Office’s bathroom doors not having doorframes

• Stat regaining zones have had some tweaks to hopefully ensure they always regain your stats now (cutscenes, Aether Otherworlds, etc)

• Fixed introduction level being super washed out (and also made it foggy)

• Fixed being invincible in Level 5

• Fixed skill points not saving

• Fixed some movable props in The Office being static props (couldnt move them)

• Fixed first X-0RANS0MEWARE encounter from constantly glitching even while the power is out