Hello, Miners!
We know that you’re all excited about Update 35, planned later for this year - but let’s not forget about Update 34! We’re proud to present the official name for this update: Modest Expectations.
It will be released on Steam April 22nd (and 1-2 weeks later on Xbox One/Win10).
Like we’ve mentioned before, this update will be a smaller update on our way to Update 35, which is much larger in scope. But there is still rather a lot to be modestly excited about:
Modding Support
Playing with mods in your game will be a much better experience after this update! Firstly, Save Game Profiles are now a thing, so you can play with mods to your heart’s content without messing up your main save. When joining a game, the serverlist will warn you if it has mods enabled. And, you will have a dedicated menu for mods you play with, so you can easily see what you got installed, read descriptions of them, and enable and disable them with a click. We can’t wait to see what crazy/awesome/frightening/wonderful creations you guys will be cooking up!
Mods and Modding are currently exclusive to Steam and will require a separate savegame. The currently planned implementation will not be based on Steamworks
Weapon Rebalancing
The lads at R&D have been hard at work improving the balance and competitiveness of the weapons, overclocks, and mods in the game. We have gone through lots of player feedback and testing in order to do this rebalancing.
Again, management advises you to keep your expectations modest - we do expect the experience around weapons to improve with this change, but do not expect every weapon build to be changed. We do hope, however, that this change will make the combat feel more fresh and interesting, and we’ll of course be keeping a keen eye on what impact these changes have to the game.
Controller Rebinding
Are you frustrated with the current controller bindings? Do you feel that your mining performance could improve if you could just map the actions differently? Do you want more from your controller experience? Have we got some news for you! With the new option to rebind actions on your controller, you can finally get the unique layout that is just right for you!
We know we asked you to keep your expectations modest, as we did not want to overpromise. However, a couple unannounced surprises have managed to squeeze their way into this update.
Elite Enemies and new Elite Threat Warning
Elite enemies are tougher, faster, more dangerous versions of the standard bugs that you already know and love (to kill). They have a chance of appearing in regular missions at Hazard Level 2 and above. Look forward to having these new, more deadly threats invade your expeditions to Hoxxes!
We have also found new opportunities for you to increase company earnings! It involves missions with a new warning: Elite Threat! Missions with this warning will have a sure-fire chance of you encountering elite enemies. Risk-reward, right?
Double Warnings
An innovation committee assigned by management has tried to answer the following question: ‘What novel and unique new initiatives can we introduce to boost company profit?’ After many ideation sessions, workshops, and off-sites, they finally have the answer: Missions with two Warnings instead of one!
Gather a team of fellow miners and try your hand at this extreme challenge. Prove that you are the toughest among all miners and that you eat regular Single Warning missions for breakfast. Rock and Stone!
Be advised: Missions with double warnings are deemed so challenging that they have been excluded from Deep Dives and Assignments.
Improved Bullet Tracing
How shooting is handled in terms of networking has been remarkably optimized. The result should be a more instantaneous response when firing projectiles. And projectiles now use much less network bandwidth!
We hope that you’ll enjoy this modest collection of new features once Update 34: Modest Expectations lands on April 22nd.
Experimental Branch and Dev-streams
If you want to get in on the fun early, under less stable conditions of course, we will release Update 34 onto the Experimental Branch on Steam April 13th. And If you want to see the new update in action, join our developer streams on the 14th, 15th, and 16th, where we'll dive into the experimental version.
Edit: We updated the planned time for the release of the Xbox One/Win 10 to be 1-2 weeks following the Steam version. We previously communicated one week.