Beyond the Maw - New Encounters, a Walkable Shop & Better Combat

22 Sep 2026Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

There is more waiting beyond the Maw.
Challenge optional guardians, discover strange rifts, battle through Sunken Vault trials, and visit a merchant refuge you can explore on foot. This update also brings clearer combat, more useful build information, better co-op guidance, expanded music, and fixes throughout the game.

More reasons to explore

Oath Shrines: find a shrine on each newly generated map and choose to summon an optional guardian. Its strength takes your party's build and the current difficulty into account when summoned, with limits that let strong builds remain powerful. It does not keep scaling as you upgrade during the fight.
Defeating an Oath Guardian awards a relic offer and an upgrade choice to each living player.
Strange Rifts: each newly generated map has a chance to contain a rare portal, including maps regenerated after a Maw descent. A rift leads to either a combat encounter or a merchant refuge.
The Sunken Vault: face three waves and a final-wave champion before the three-minute deadline. Complete the trial for 50 gold for the party and two upgrade choices per living player.
Vaults come in three varieties: The Hunt, Crossfire, and Pressure Chamber, with different enemy lineups, room details, and encounter mechanics.
Vault fights show remaining enemies, time remaining, wave progress, and the champion's health. Incoming enemies have marked arrival points, and champions have distinct warning and combat markers.
Pressure Chamber hazards give you a warning before striking. Overlapping warnings cannot hit the same player multiple times in one detonation.
You can abandon a vault through its return rift, forfeiting its completion rewards. Unfinished trials now ask for confirmation before leaving, with staying selected by default.
Fixed a last-second victory being lost during the delay after the final kill.
Sealed Hoards and guarded supply caches explain their challenge and rewards before you commit. They show incoming guards and remaining defenders, and required guards no longer disappear before the fight is complete.
Fixed crowded maps allowing guarded rewards to pay out without their full fight. Encounters now wait until their defenders can appear safely.
Statue reward rings and other scenery interactions now sit on reachable ground. Statues remain solid, while blessings, lanterns, crystals, and caches have clearer reward symbols and claim feedback.
Exploration guidance shares one line at the bottom of the screen, keeping objectives from stacking over the action. Your discoveries are also recorded in live stats and the run recap.
The maps retain their existing size; the new encounters give you more reasons to travel through them.

The Gilded Refuge - a walkable shop

Discover a sheltered timber quay with lanterns, a merchant counter, offering tables, a Brinewell, and a return rift.
Walk between three physical offering tables to inspect their items before buying. Stock varies between refuges, with offensive and survival or mobility options.
Offerings can improve damage, attack speed, critical chance, maximum health, movement, protection, Area, or pickup range.
Purchases use banked gold, last for the current run, and are limited to one per player per refuge. Prices, effects, evolution progress, and purchase restrictions are explained before you spend.
The Brinewell offers one free restorative draught per player, separately from their purchase. Being at full health does not waste it, and No Healing restrictions are respected.
Unaffordable or unavailable offerings can still be inspected so you can see what they do and why they cannot be purchased.
The outside map and run clock wait during your visit. Temporary combat boosts also wait, while passive recovery is suspended to prevent unlimited healing in the shop.
Co-op players visit together, have separate purchase and draught allowances, and return to their saved positions on the main map.

The Maw and the Tide

The Maw has a living mouth appearance, with clearer opening, breathing, channeling, and descent effects.
Your first successful descent offers a choice of gift: Current Fins remove the movement penalty from crossing or opposing the current, while Brine Heart grants 20 maximum HP and restores health where the run's healing rules allow it.
Each player can receive one Maw gift per run. Co-op players choose separately.
Maw prompts explain the health toll, channel time, rewards, increased danger, and boss locks more clearly.
Each opening now requires a deliberate approach. Remaining on the Maw through dormancy or a boss lock cannot automatically start the next descent; step out and return when it opens.
Dodging out of an active channel preserves its gradually fading progress.
Maw and current explanation boxes disappear after seven seconds or when you leave, keeping them from covering the action indefinitely.
Conductive Tide: Chain Lightning and Necrotic Storm can jump farther between enemies sharing the same flooded pool. Water cues and the Archive explain the interaction.
Fixed the Maw's health safety floor accidentally healing a player already below it.

Understand your build

Actual damage dealt is now tracked for each weapon, including damage earned before it evolves. Misses, overkill, and hits on defeated enemies do not inflate these totals.
Pause and results screens show damage contribution, finishing blows, current evolutions, and more useful weapon details. Expanded statistics include damage from burn, poison, and bleed.
Co-op damage stays with the correct player, including when both players use the same survivor or weapon. Lingering attacks retain their source after an evolution.
Tab or LB/L1 opens live run stats without pausing the action. The shortcut can be rebound, and the HUD shows your assigned control.
Upgrade cards distinguish bonuses for your character, compatible current and future weapons, and a single specific weapon. A weapon named for evolution progress no longer makes a shared bonus look weapon-specific.
Stat choices show before-and-after values and caps. Cards can also show when a choice will unlock a synergy, including through a weapon pickup or evolution.
Upgrade descriptions are brighter and wrap more clearly. Fixed missing icons and labels disappearing when moving between choices, rerolling, or opening another upgrade screen.
Weapon summaries show relevant information such as blade counts, chain targets, pool ticks, field radius, and beam reach instead of irrelevant stats.

Weapon, evolution, and upgrade fixes

Compatible weapons acquired later now receive previously earned bonuses from Siren's Debt and affected synergies, without receiving them twice when evolving.
Fixed temporary damage boosts reducing permanent damage when they ended, damage upgrades being counted twice, and several evolution bookkeeping issues.
Fixed Area, reach, projectile, and speed benefits being lost or misapplied during evolution. Additional Attack Speed can no longer slow down an already-fast evolved weapon.
Dread Maw keeps its extra blades. Once its visible spin reaches its speed limit, further Attack Speed strengthens contact damage; its stats explain this conversion.
Crushing Depth retains purchased projectile spread and beam reach and receives its intended wider beam. Its first-hit bonus now follows the enemies' positions along the strike.
Pressure Wave keeps purchased reach when evolving into Tidal Crush.
Tidal Pull / Gravity Maw receive their full extra-projectile benefit, and Attack Speed affects their movement cycle. Fixed their return front repeatedly applying the same hit; damage from that bug has been removed while the inward pull remains.
Chain Lightning / Necrotic Storm retain earned extra jumps through evolution. Predator's Focus no longer triggers critical-only extra chains without a real critical hit.
Void Corruption deals steadier damage with controlled spreading. Excess casting speed strengthens its pools, and secondary patches no longer spread indefinitely.
Fixed pools applying critical damage twice, hitting corpses, or creating repeated patches from the same kill. Corrected residue damage ownership and missing Void Wake healing.
Leviathan Tide healing requires actual return movement and respects healing restrictions.
Abyssal Chorus correctly applies vulnerability to its direct target. Leviathan Brood can no longer trigger its death burst twice.
Barb Wire embeds and bleeds the final surviving enemy actually struck on its bounce path, and skips already-defeated targets.
Plague Bloom now retains Caustic Burst's sustained acid pool and adds three delayed bloom bursts. The bursts pause during side-room visits and clear when their room is removed.
Poison evolution's Area bonus now reaches affected projectiles, explosions, fields, trails, and blade hitboxes, including existing blades and later Area upgrades.
Larger harpoons, returning blades, orbit blades, fields, and eels have hit areas that better match their upgraded size.
Depth Charge, Abyss Charge, Crushing Wave, and Tectonic Crush detonate once on impact or expiry. Clearing a room no longer produces unintended explosions or extra status applications from empty shells.
Fixed spent projectiles landing extra hits, fast enemy shots passing through players, and attacks continuing to target defeated enemies.
Frozen ordinary enemies now consistently stop movement and attack decisions until they thaw. Damage over time and knockback still work.
Corrected critical-hit feedback across direct attacks, delayed impacts, pools, and explosions, along with affected Archive descriptions.

Survival and balance

Combat healing now shares a recovery limit per player: up to 4 HP of immediate recovery, replenishing at 2 HP per second. Lifesteal and healing weapons cannot multiply recovery without limit by hitting larger crowds.
Taking actual damage briefly pauses combat healing and regeneration for 1.25 seconds, giving dodging and finding room to recover more importance. Health pickups remain immediate.
Maelstrom heals once per damaging swing instead of once per enemy hit. Healing attacks cannot recover health from misses, zero-damage contacts, or corpses.
Phantom Current requires a damaging swing to trigger protection and has a separate protection cooldown, preventing high Attack Speed from granting permanent invulnerability.
Later ordinary waves contain fewer, tougher enemies. The change builds gradually between minutes three and eight, with increased health, XP, and kill-derived gold per ordinary wave enemy. Kill counters still count actual kills.
Reduced the ordinary enemy limit from 200 to 140. Splitting enemies and summons respect that limit; required bosses have their own spawn rules.
Endless contact-damage scaling now stops at twice its pre-Endless value. Other difficulty modifiers and enemy attacks still matter, and enemy health continues to increase.
Lucky Idols drop less often. Their luck bonus and fourth upgrade choice remain unchanged.
Fixed No Healing challenges allowing health restoration through maximum-health upgrades or Brine Heart.
Corrected stage spawning so the intended stage difficulty applies properly.
Optional encounter strength accounts more accurately for rapid attacks, orbit blades, persistent fields, pools, and critical hits, while remaining fixed when the encounter starts.
Overdue scheduled bosses arrive separately after an optional fight, with a recovery interval between boss encounters. Guardian arrivals also avoid spawning directly on a teammate.

Co-op improvements

Off-screen teammates have P1/P2 direction markers, distance, and a health bar near the edge of the view.
Downed teammates keep a clear rescue marker. Revive range, progress, and remaining time are easier to see once you reach them.
Portal and cave travel bring the whole party, including a downed partner who can still be revived.
Fixed shared level-ups advancing the wrong player or inflating XP requirements.
Fixed overlapping players collecting the same pickup more than once, and downed players consuming pickups.
Improved reward ownership and controller handling so one player's controller cannot dismiss or purchase another player's exploration choice.
Corrected starting health displays and prevented downed health from showing negative values.

Run results, progression, and leaderboards

Redesigned the recap with clearer time, kills, Depth, Ascension, gold, survivor portraits, weapons, evolutions, Maw gifts, and exploration results.
See progress toward alternate starting weapons, including newly unlocked options, with separate co-op build summaries.
Retry starts again with your starting loadout. Change Build returns directly to survivor selection so you can choose a different setup.
Continuing into Endless remains one complete run in recent history and lifetime run counts. Bests and unlock checks use the full run, while gold and lifetime kills only bank what has not already been awarded.
Fixed duplicate Endless achievement progress and corrected alternate-starter progress when co-op players use the same survivor.
New run-history entries include Depth, Ascension, and whether the run continued into Endless.
Results screens pause the battlefield so movement, attacks, pickups, and late enemy events cannot change a finished result.
Restored separate Depth and Ascension leaderboard columns, corrected reading of saved run levels, and preserved depth in retried score submissions.
Long player names no longer push leaderboard information off-screen, and the loading message clears when rankings arrive. A reminder explains that displayed levels belong to that best-kill run.

Menus, selection, and everyday fixes

Fixed survivor previews showing the wrong character or another survivor's move after switching starting weapons.
Fixed Brackish Sprite's overflowing description and improved its Chain Lightning preview. Longer descriptions scroll while action buttons remain accessible.
Updated default and alternate weapon descriptions and previews, fixed missing effects, and improved cleanup when quickly switching characters or weapons.
Map selection remembers the previous map, and the Start button names the map you are about to play. Fixed a controller timing issue and improved clicks on map names and clear badges.
Moved the Depth counter beside the timer and improved low-health feedback.
Improved scrolling, focus, controller fallback, and Back navigation across affected menus and reward screens. Corrected control descriptions and added live-stats rebinding.
Fixed repeated relic confirmations, rewards lingering after a run ends, and unavailable stage modifiers carrying into a new run.
Improved Steam Cloud save protection during synchronization and fixed a crash when quitting after visiting the main menu.

Music and sound

Added Blood Current, Abyssal Pursuit, and Drowned Memories to runs and the Jukebox.
Added Stillwater to the Upgrade Shop, Achievements, and Gilded Refuge.
Fixed normal run tracks being cut off by an early song change. Songs now reach their natural ending before the playlist advances.
Run and boss playlists cycle through eligible tracks before repeating, avoiding an immediate repeat between cycles and respecting Jukebox exclusions.
After a boss fight or refuge visit, the interrupted run song resumes from its previous position. Overlapping bosses no longer repeatedly restart or end boss music early.
Improved Jukebox previews, interrupted-playback recovery, music transitions, and volume behavior.
Important damage, death, boss, and reward sounds are less likely to be drowned out by repeated routine combat sounds.

Performance and reliability

Reduced the cost of busy fights involving Tide Lance, Crushing Depth, Chain Lightning, Necrotic Storm, Brine Pool, Void Corruption, Dread Maw, and overlapping effects.
Reduced repeated work for enemy outlines, crowd spacing, damage numbers, barbed wire, and off-screen scenery while preserving their intended behavior.
Fixed repeated impacts extending combat freezes longer than intended.
Improved cleanup during depth changes, side-room visits, evolutions, retries, and leaving a run, preventing stale attacks and effects from carrying into the wrong situation.
Preserved XP and power-up rewards when large numbers of enemies die near the pickup limit.
Improved Windows fullscreen handling and refresh-rate frame limiting. Further work on demanding late-game performance and hardware-specific Steam fullscreen behavior continues.

The demo has also been updated with the applicable improvements while retaining its existing content limits.
Thank you for playing Mutant Tide and sharing your reports, builds, and suggestions. Your feedback has helped shape these changes. See you in the depths!