Hey everyone,
Hope you're all doing alright!
First things first, we just published a fix to resolve incompatible version issues with save files for Mac, Linux, and Windows. Let us know if stuff's still breaking with our bug report form. Fingers crossed that that link will stay un-clicked...
Anyway, the upcoming Clean Cut update is now in beta, one step closer to arriving for all the wary players avoiding the testing phase. Here's a recap of everything coming, you can skip to the end if you already know what we've stuffed into this one.
New Survival Weapon: Sewing Scissors. Instakills all enemies it hits, as long as at least one of them dies to the weapon's standard damage.
New Brutality Weapon: Giant Comb. Throws your enemies upwards, and deals critical damage to airborne mobs!
New NPC: Tailor's Daughter. Find her in the Tailor's Room, and talk to her to freely change the look of your head.
New Speedrun Mode option: Activate it to track and display the completion time of each biome. Also tracks your previous bests and compares them!
New Boss Rush DIY Mode: Lets you choose whichever bosses you want to face in a run.
The 3 Bosses from Return to Castlevania are also now accessible in Boss Rush.
Training Room reworks: We added a bunch of options to streamline the experimentation process, such as:
- New UIs to spawn a specific weapon with a set Level, Quality and Legendary-ness.
- New UI to choose a certain number of scrolls
- New UI to choose the overall scaling level of the Training Room, based on the values of a selected biome.
- Added the mini-bosses to the mob spawners
- Added a bunch of different traps to the mob rooms.
- Added the Return to Castlevania Bosses.
- Bosses aren't scaled down to level 1 anymore! (no more 20 minute fights)
- Changed the UI to select mobs to a grid-based one.
- Added a Training Dummy for DPS calculation.
Balancing
- Slow effects now stack up to 5 times. Each stack has a greater slowing effect, then the affected enemy is frozen at the fifth stack.
Mutation reworks:
- Berserker: Can now stack, and renders you immune to stuns.
- Combo: Enable a damage increase with every melee hit in a 2.5 sec window (of course the window refreshes after every hit). It scales exponentially, go crazy with it!
- Dead Inside: Doubles your life but prevents ALL healing sources.
- Disengagement: No more cooldown!.. but can only trigger once per biome.
- Frostbite: Now stacks with slow effects and acts as a full stack on frozen targets.
- Necromancy: Also now grants recovery instead of healing. It scales with the max health of the mobs you kill, which means you can get more recovery by killing a stronger enemy. The cap has been removed, but it’s less effective as you get closer to max health.
- Networking: Marks enemies with ranged attacks now, there doesn't need to be an actual projectile stuck in the mob's body anymore.
- Tainted Flask: Can recharge even if your flask is not totally empty. It also adds 1 more elite into every biome when equipped.
- What Doesn't Kill You: Now grants recovery instead of healing.
Return to Castlevania balancing:
- Dracula (Demon), Buer, Werewolves and Medusa are now considered to be Beasts (crits with the Crowbar).
- Dracula (Humanoid)'s fire pillars are now slightly easier to avoid (in terms of intervals) but are not rollable anymore.
- Elite Mermans should now fire 2 big fireballs instead of a big one and a normal one.
- Haunted Armor (the one with an axe) should now activate at a slightly longer range.
- Medusa's flurry attacks should now have a small pause after the end of the attack.
- Holy Water has a bigger vertical hitbox, and the flame now deals damage.
- Bible is now considered to be a heavy weapon.
- Medusa Head deals more damage and bumps further.
- Throwing Axe can no longer roll the Fire Bullet affix.
- Rebound Stone now deals slightly more damage, and has a smaller but longer window before being able to "catch it" (i.e., trigger the crit). Its cooldown now starts upon its destruction.
- Whip Sword - Whip Form now passes through shields.
- Whip Sword's transformation attack hitbox tended to bug, it should now be consistent with its visual FX, which means it won’t only hit one single target anymore.
- Added a long cooldown when the Cat is killed by the Queen.
- Alucard's Shield has better parry windows, and the whole combo will now crit after a parry.
- The ghosts gathered by Death's Scythe now have a slightly smaller explosion radius.
Graphics & UI:
- Added a new Petrification effect icon.
Level design:
- Switched the Dracula's Castle (Hard) Cursed Chest chance to 10%.
- The Mimic can now appear randomly in shops outside of the Bank.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed Agitated Pickpocket being able to hit through Global Shields.
- Fixed Bible's projectile disappearing after a cutscene.
- Fixed Bobby Head's disappearing in the Tailor's Room.
- Fixed Cursed Sword not disabling other inventory items when switched slots.
- Fixed Diverse Deck - Foresight tagging the blocked attacks as if they were blocked by a shield.
- Fixed Gold Plating not protecting against Dracula - Final Form's grab.
- Fixed Heal Flask glow effect also affecting the player's glow effect.
- Fixed Morning Star's chain detaching itself from the base.
- Fixed Pets' behavior being broken in Dracula's opening cutscene.
- Fixed Serenade destroying deployables when activated.
- Fixed a crash in Shipwreck, when a platform is destroyed at the same time as Mushroom Boi is spawned.
- Fixed a crash when an Automaton falls off a platform while using its Dash Attack.
- Fixed a crash when saving a reloading while a Petrified enemy is on screen.
- Fixed a crash when using the Emergency Door during the Queen boss fight.
- Fixed a softlock when falling off the map during_ Dracula - Final Form_, while all platforms were destroyed.
- Fixed being able to duplicate Turrets using the Emergency Door.
- Fixed the Shop Mimic's hitboxes being too big compared to the visual.
- Fixed weapons' crit indicator sometimes not displaying.
That's the lot, if you're interested in playing the beta read the warning and instructions below!
How to access the beta:
NOTE: Playing the beta will lock your chosen save slot to update 34. You won't be able to go back to update 33 with this save slot during the entire duration of the beta. However, your progress in the beta will be automatically merged into the main game when we release update 34 officially.
If you want to try out the beta and don't know how, first BACKUP YOUR SAVE FILE, then follow these instructions:
- Go to your Steam game library.
- Right click on Dead Cells and click "properties".
- Select the tab "Betas".
- In the first dropdown box select "Beta".
- Click close and wait for the upload to finish downloading.
- Start playing.
You can leave any feedback here or on our official Discord - there are two channels called update34-beta-discussion and update34-beta-feedback. We also have a bug report form for issues and bugs.
Next time we'll be back with the official update announcement and hopefully some extra bits of news!
Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT