While the great Beta 8 is still under construction, in the meantime I have something else special for you! In fact a lot of special stuff...
Effective immediately through January 1st, 2019, every day Cogmind will feature different new content, much of it with a notably holiday theme. There are 17 new unique parts, among other "gifts" :D
Unlike my normal announcements I won't be listing the content or showing any screenshots/gifs here to spoil it, but there's some really fun stuff (including new mechanics). Some of the content is randomized in case you start more than one run in a single day, though the majority of the brand new stuff is organized and defined by date. All of the special Holiday Mode content is available right from the beginning of a run though, so there's no going out and searching for it--start up and see it right away.
Much of the content for this update is actually special parts that will only exist for this release, accompanied by a number of rare or unique items that can be found elsewhere in the world of Cogmind but that you may not have encountered before. You'll be able to distinguish between the two because the former don't have unique art, instead using a common placeholder (you'll know it when you see it :P). You don't have to worry about collecting the temporary parts for your gallery (since they won't exist in future releases), although you can technically use this opportunity to help flesh out your gallery of other parts, and of course get further or to new areas with the help of some of these amazing new toys.
Technically you can skip ahead in this event by changing your system date, but in the manner that we normally treat spoilers in the community, if you do this please don't openly share advance info on future content with others in case they don't want to know yet.
Technical Points
- This version's saves are not compatible with the original Beta 7.2 (the save version had to be increased in order to allow this update to add a bunch of content). As usual you can just finish your current run before updating, or if on Steam and it automatically updated yours you can use the legacy branches to roll back and finish your previous save/run first if you like (or do it later).
- You CAN earn achievements while this mode is active! This might be another reason to play it ;)
- Holiday Mode does not upload scoresheets (these runs will therefore not appear on the leaderboards).
- Holiday Mode is incompatible with challenge modes (if any are active, the challenge takes precedence).
- Holiday Mode ignores the advanced quickStart option.
- Holiday Mode will automatically activate for new runs started in this 12/20~1/1 period, but requires that you've played at least 10 runs before! We wouldn't want to confuse new players too much :P. If you haven't hit the 10-run requirement and want to force Holiday Mode anyway, you can run Cogmind with the "-forceHoliday" command line parameter. Note that even then it still requires that you've done at one run behind the tutorial mode, having made it to the smaller version of the Scrapyard (technically you can get around this requirement as well by turning off the tutorial in the options, but I wouldn't really recommend jumping right in to the special mode without first having done a few regular runs to learn the basics!)
- If it's activating automatically but you want to play "regular Cogmind" during this event period, run the game with the "-noHoliday" parameter to turn it off (or, again, roll back to the previous release via its legacy branch).
Limited Edition
You may notice the version number is still Beta 7.2. That's because this special release was developed using a completely separate branch of the game, as this allowed me to prepare this for you all very quickly without worrying about taking my normal (internal) steps to future proof the whole thing with good documentation and clean code. Despite the amount of stuff in here, it only took a day and half :) (Don't worry, though, I did test everything and it seems to be in working order!)
So this is technically not the same branch that Beta 8 is being built upon, and this content and other related changes made to the game to support it will disappear with the next release. There is no changelog--as far as future players are concerned, it never happened ;)
Tips
The opening area might be a bit overwhelming. To quickly get set up, you could follow these general steps:
- Open up everything you see
- Attach any alien artifacts (these are consumables)
- Fill your power and propulsion slots (try to avoid using airborne propulsion, though you can stash it away for later)
- Attach any Storage Unit(s)--there'll be at least one lying around (and maybe a special one!)
- Collect most utilities and weapons (especially any that are clearly new and use the placeholder "holiday art" I mentioned earlier)
- Go have fun!
Note that a small portion of the items may not be amazing, since those are randomly chosen from among existing items, but a lot of the items for each day were handpicked, especially all the special new ones.
Thanks for being a great community, enjoy the holidays :D