UPDATE: Hot Fix 2 released! (patch notes at the bottom of this post)
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Upon releasing Update 21 we quickly realized a couple of significant bugs had crept in. The Cryo Cannon wouldn’t freeze enemies as intended (freezing a Praetorian was almost impossible - yikes), and after watching various streams from players, we also saw a need to tone down the frequency of random enemy wave spawns. Please try it out again and let us know what you think. That and multiple other things should also be fixed with Hotfix 1 for Update 21 - check the Patch Notes below for a full overview. Lethal is still Lethal though :-)
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One of our more ambitious gameplay reworks to date landed with Update 21 - a full rework of how we calculate Difficulty in the game. For a long time, we’ve used a relatively simple system for this, and it was simply not living up to our demands any longer. Now we have a bigger and much better system under the hood - we have way more knobs to turn, but it also means that the Difficulty settings currently in the game all have changed - and perhaps in ways we have not yet fixed, tweaked, or even realized.
Some of you have taken to Reddit, Steam, and Discord to write about this. As always, we appreciate your candid and honest feedback about these things, both the positive and the negative. Right now we are hard at work on the first Hotfix for Update 21, and there will be much more balancing, tweaking, and reworking of the numbers coming in the next Hotfixes and Updates.
As usual, do not take anything in the game as final. Numbers will continue to be tweaked on pretty much everything as we go forward. And in that regard, we cannot emphasize enough how much we value the feedback we are getting from you guys. We may not answer every post, but we do our hardest to read all of them.
In short: Constructive criticism is good, and we want all of it, on any aspect of the game. Tell us what you like, what you don’t like, what you feel is awesome or lacking. Do so in as much or as little detail as you want, just remember that more detail means we have more to work with - for instance, when commenting on Difficulty, please state which Difficulty you are playing.
The point of it all is this: We want this game to be awesome. And you Early Access adopters are a key ingredient in making that happen.
Happy digging!
The Ghost Ship Team
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UPDATE 21 - HOTFIX 1: Patch Notes
Overall Difficulty tweaks
- Longer time between random enemy spawns for all difficulties (Lethal not so much)
- Difficulty rating of Mactera Grabber and Bomber increased, so the spawn system spawns them less often.
- Enemy encounters in caves reduced in size
- Less enemy spawning during Salvage and Point Extraction (Please remember that we still want these two missions to be the most hectic missions)
- More Nitra spawning in Egghunt missions
Weapons, Upgrades & Mods
- Naming and Descriptions of Upgradeable Armor Suits updated
- Optimization of Skin Thumbnail material
- Breach Cutter should no longer be framerate dependent
- Tweaks to Breach Cutter damage to match the frame rate dependency fixes
- Fix stat view of all armors
- Fixed issue with health mastery not applying correctly
- Fixed Bosco’s stats for its Upgrades in the APD-Terminal - they will now show different stats depending on what rocket is active and other stats have been fixed to look nicer
- Cryo Cannon and Flamethrower no longer stops after hitting the first enemy
- Charge Blaster hold button functionality
- Driller Armor - Fixed shield mod value
- Driller changes: Double Drills, Lowered initial Mining Rate slightly, Increased base fuel,
- Increased fuel mod values, Drills can now hit multiple targets at once, Drill Speed tweaked
- Fixed drills not being able to hit enemies at point blank
- Velocity modifier for the cryo cannon firing audio is now set up correctly
- Cryo Cannon - The spray goes through enemies so multiple targets can be damaged at once (this change applies to CRSPR Flamethrower too).
- Cryo Cannon - Base pressure drops at a slower pace allowing to hold fire for longer.
- Cryo Cannon - Base direct damage increased
- Cryo Cannon - Base direct cold effect increase (enemies freeze faster)
- Cryo Cannon - Tweaks to some enemies' temperature resistance.
- Plasma Charger - Total ammo increased
- Fix Scout Dual SMG Skins only applied to one weapon
Enemies
- Fixed cave leeches so they no longer spawn during waves when Cave leech mutator is active
- Fanfare not playing double
- BET-C grenade particles significantly optimized
- You can no longer pick flowers and take a leisure ride on the zipline while getting grabbed by a Cave leech
- Crash fix for Shellback
Misc
- Moved Skins icon down a bit
- Layout and font tweaks on a lot of Popup windows
- Mission Bar layout tweaks
- Fixed a bug where downed players would get stuck in the air if the terrain under them gets removed, they will now fall down to the nearest floor instead.
- A lot of difficulty tweaks
- Serverlist ClassLock icon updated
- Mouse Icons added for several missing buttons
- Tweaks to Salvage difficulty
- Potential Fix for a crash related to the intro movie
Update 21 Hotfix 2
- Fixed spiders exploding after having been frozen and then unfrozen now work correctly
- Serverlist tweaks
- Increased Ammo amount in Minehead Sentries
- Increased cost for Mactera and Grabber - they are a bit rarer
- Tweaked Point Extraction a bit easier - longer between big waves and bit smaller end wave
- Minor overall tweak on the difficulty
- Fixed up some grammar issues on the Motivational Quote monitors
- Small tweaks on various enemies sight
- Minor tweaks on overall Haz 4 and 5
- More mission names added
- Poison resistance upgrade icon updated
- Fixed several bugs related to players dying from Iron Will after the droppod leaves, entering and beginning to leave in the droppod with Iron Will active will now block the player from dying.
- Fixed wrong values for Gunner and Driller revive invulnerability mod
- Increased Ammo amount in Minehead Sentries
- Increased cost for Mactera and Grabber - they are a bit rarer
- Tweaked Point Extraction a bit easier - longer between big waves and a bit smaller end wave
- Try to fix Bet-c sound issue where shooting sound gets stuck
- Fixed a bug where the beers would get removed when picked up in the spacerig
- Fix Cave Leech den not spawning more cave leeches.
- Fix bug that could cause slightly more cases of single type waves in low difficulty circumstances
- Fixed a bug where the deposit-bucket would get stuck on the player character