Patch Highlights

ALL NEW ISLANDS

NEW WEAPON: POISON CANNON

DIFFICULTY SYSTEM REVAMP WITH NEW RANK: PRISMATIC

Patch Notes

NEW ISLANDS + VISUALS

• Added all new visuals and brand new islands to the game. These have all been designed with much more consistent enemy spawns in mind so less enemies sneaking up from behind you! Many of the islands have been designed to keep the spirit of the older islands but with a fresh coat of paint

• Added completely new lighting setups for all biomes to give them a more distinct look

• Enabled reflections (most noticeable on water) and added ripples to lava

• The static blue boundary walls seen in previous updates has been updated to be a new freeform out of bounds system allowing me to design much more open islands and prevents clunky situations that used to happen by bumping into blue walls unexpectedly. You can also knock enemies out of bounds and cause them to take big damage

DIFFICULTY SYSTEM REVAMP

• Completely revamped the difficulty system- with the introduction of new modifiers for Ultra Chaos there were people wishing to play with certain modifiers off (such as Locked Slots or Manual Collection) that were baked into Ultra Chaos by default so I’ve done my best to consolidate and streamline the difficulty system to be both easier to understand but also allow for more player choice. I’ve taken this opportunity to add a small selection of fun and helpful green difficulty modifiers (more to be added soon): these can range from a mild starting bonus to being extremely overpowered but it is all factored into the difficulty system: if you want to do a chill run with hugely boosted luck- go ahead! It won’t earn you a Diamond medal but sometimes you just want to blast and not care about difficulty. Alternatively if you want to go full tryhard, you can also do that too with the best medals requiring most difficulty modifiers on with minimal / no helpful modifiers allowed. This allows the game to cater to all playstyles and moods without specific modifiers to gameplay built into the baseline difficulties as before. This is just a start and I’ll likely be expanding both green and red modifiers with fun new options in the future

• Added 6 new difficulty modifiers for challenge enthusiasts: Wandering Elites, Countdown, Slow Recovery, Athletic Enemies, Manual Collection and Immortal Snail

• Existing difficulty stats for the old system (attempt / win / winstreak / highest island reached) have been ported over to the new system: Easy -> Bronze, Normal -> Gold, Nightmare -> Diamond and Ultra Chaos -> Prismatic

• Added a bunch of new difficulty modifiers for the new Prismatic rank: difficulty enthusiasts should expect a fresh challenge to overcome with all of these modifiers enabled!

LIMITED LOOT SYSTEM

• Introducing limited loot- this is a feature that prevents mods that you have maxed out numerically from polluting the loot pool. An example: Double Shot level 1 gives you a 56% chance to fire 2 shots when using the Sniper. Level 2 gives you 100% chance. There is no reason for this mod to show up again. With this change it will no longer show up in reward chests and in the shop (if everyone on your multiplayer team has also maxed out Double Shot)

• The following Weapon Mods now have this feature enabled and scale linearly instead of hyperbolically (+10% per level instead of +10%, +8%, +6% etc. per level) so this is both a nice buff and QOL improvement: Arcane Shot, Arc Shot, Double Shot, Double Tap, Fire Shot, Homing Shot, Ice Shot, Lightning Shot, Poison Shot, Random Shot, Scatter Shot, Split Shot, Square Shot, Targeting Shot, Triple Shot, X Shot

• The following Ability Mods now have this feature enabled and scale linearly instead of hyperbolically: Triple Ability, Layered Explosion, Split Ability

• The following Perks now have this feature enabled and scale linearly instead of hyperbolically: Crystal Asteroids, Efficiency, Mega Crit, Performance Bonus

NEW CONTENT

• Added new weapon: Poison Cannon: Bursts into poison clouds that wear your enemies down over time. Increases to weapon damage also affect the poison cloud damage. Slow fire rate- choose your shots wisely!

• Added new island type: Gauntlet. Clear up to 5 waves of enemies while choosing a stacking challenge and reward modifier for each wave. Choose to end early and take what you have earned so far or push it to the limit and get the best rewards if you can survive- It is a test of attrition so the No Healing modifier is always chosen on the first wave!

• Added new totem: Upgrade Totem: Costs crystals to upgrade a specific mod or perk. Appears in shops similar to the Enhancement Totem. This has the potential to be very powerful but the goal is to give players a bit more agency over what they want to upgrade (at a greater cost than happening to find that mod or perk in shops) and allow for more min-max builds. The cost is a 20% increase per level compared to that same mod or perk if it was found in a shop

• Added Randomizer to the lobby: this allows you to quickly randomize your starting loadout without having to walk around and manually choose loot from the different areas

• Added new enemy: Floating Skull

• Added new weapon mod: Double Shot: Chance to fire in a double shot formation

• Added new weapon mod: Knockback Shot: Shots knock enemies back, causing them to take knockback damage

• Added new perk: Magnify: Area of effect increased (affects all damage sources and is multiplicative with other increases to damage radius)

• Added new perk: Bounty Hunter: Large enemies have a small chance to drop loot when eliminated. (I really love Rare Treasure but barely ever get to see it so this gives the same feeling but in the common loot pool)

• Added new perk: Totem Enthusiast: More totems spawn

• Added new perk: Survivor: Block chance increased and incoming damage reduced

• Added new perk: Anti Crit: Damage increased but critical hit chance reduced

• Added new relic: Ring Of Potential: Secret chests are 5 times less likely to spawn but are replaced by Legendary chests

• Added new challenge modifier: Fiery Enemies: All enemy attacks ignite you,

• Added new challenge modifier: Poisonous Enemies: All enemy attacks poison you,

• Added new challenge modifier: Freezing Ground: Patches of icy ground appear on this island,

• Added new challenge modifier: Burning Ground: Patches of burning ground appear on this island,

• Added new challenge modifier: Thick Skin: Enemies spawn in with heavy damage reduction that decays over time,

• Added new challenge modifier: Heavy Crab: Movement speed reduced by 50%,

• Added new challenge modifier: Starfish Party: a bonus pack of starfish spawn with the other enemies

• Added a new stat to the inventory: Block Chance: this is what Bulletproof and Ring Of Deflection use but exposing it as a stat allows me to build a few new cool perks to trigger when blocking and also make building your layers of defense a bit more enjoyable as you can see them all together in the inventory screen

• Added 4 new songs

GENERAL BALANCE CHANGES

• Relic slots increased from 8 to 10

• Fire no longer melts ice and ice no longer extinguishes fire. This mechanic was “oh that’s neat” the first time you see it but it just ruined too many builds especially in multiplayer or with a fire / ice randomizer combo

• Hot Steam has been reworked to apply a burst of fire damage every time an enemy gets ignited

• Lightning stacks now only decay if lightning damage is actually dealt. This means you can “charge up” a tanky enemy with lightning stacks and then it will discharge them when pathing near another enemy

• Knockback damage dealt to enemies has been globally increased by 1000%

• Doubled the chance for relics to naturally show up in chests / the shop

• Secret Chest spawn chance increased from 10% to 15% per island

• Slide speed has been increased by approx 10%. This is purely a “game feel” thing I’ve noticed after playtesting heavily the last few days- sliding just felt a bit sluggish and this game is all about that smooth movement. Interested to see if you notice a difference

• Air Control (how much your crab is influenced by movement keys while in the air) has been increased by 20%. This is subtle but you should feel a bit more in control of your crab while airborne

• Totem spawns have been made more consistent with each island having a specific area where totems can spawn. Multiple can now spawn in a row in that location. This change fixes frustrating cases like where fuse totems could spawn behind you and explode before you noticed them

• XL Totems are now 20% more common

• Health Totems are now 500% more common (it was too rare before)

• Improved enemy spawn variety to reduce the feeling of every island feeling like “a bunch of small crabs / slugs and a few larger enemies”

• Elite / Boss islands now use the same island pool as Arena islands for more variety and no more repeated island layouts on the same biome

• Resurrecting Enemies difficulty modifier has been removed and Resurrecting is now an enemy buff

• Expensive Shops difficulty modifier has been removed (this is what I’ve been balancing the game around for a while so it is on by default now)

• The Flawless blessing is now 50% more likely to be chosen over the other blessing types as it is generally more rewarding / fun

• Armored Enemies challenge modifier has been removed and instead replaced with an “Armored” enemy buff. The reason here is that as a challenge modifier it was either really not fun (using a weapon like the sniper) or extremely broken (using level 1 of ANY armor perk) with very little in between. As a buff you’ll now be able to make better use of Armor perks (which are still super underrated IMO)

• Barrel Rain as a challenge modifier didn’t really feel like it was threatening so barrels now have a 25% larger explosion radius and enemies are less affected by hazard damage while this modifier is active

• Landmine Rain landmines now explode much more quickly but deal 50% less damage and also don’t leave behind a damage area anymore. They were in a weird place before where they never really felt threatening but often clogged up the island with AOE bubbles

• Barrel Rain and Landmine Rain challenge modifiers spawn half as many destructibles for better performance and to be less spammy

• Removed knockback from enemy spikes when the Spike Strikes modifier is on as it was annoying

• While rebalancing Ultra Chaos, I found the “all enemies can jump” feature of the difficulty to be more annoying than fun on smaller enemies so it has been moved to be part of the “Athletic Enemies” difficulty modifier (only for large enemies) and new challenge modifier “Jumpy Enemies” (for all enemies) instead

• To solve a few edge case issues with the Explosive Enemies modifier it has been changed from “Only explosive enemies spawn” to “Explosive enemies are much more likely to spawn, explode with great force and have greater resistance to hazard damage”

• Increased Manual Collection crystal pickup radius by 25%

• I added a guaranteed health pedestal to every shop in the previous hotfix but quickly realized that most people were still getting used to the new health system and this likely wasn’t needed as it often made shops have very few damage choices and duplicate health loot. Since there is a guaranteed Regeneration Chest on island 1 and a guaranteed Health Chest after elite islands, I think this is enough consistency for health in a run

• Reduced cactus explosion radius by 50% to prevent players taking unfair damage

• Random Portals are slightly less common as they were 2.5 times more likely to be spawned compared to other portal types

• Rush elimination goals were laughably easy so they have been increased a bit to be more in line with the intended challenge level

• Removed Gold and Silver armor from the game- it just felt terrible any time you would get them instead of a legendary / epic mod or perk

• Renamed Bronze Armor to just Armor and increased the number of plates it gives from 1 to 2

• Removed Medium and Large crystal bundles from the game for the same reason as above and renamed Small Crystal Bundle to Crystal Bundle and increased the payout by 33%

• Ice stacks from ice rock damage areas has been reduced by 60% as it was super overtuned

• Removed Autoloader to de-bloat the luck loot pool a bit and since Efficiency is a very similar perk but with more utility (can trigger from any damage)

• Uppercut has been removed from the game temporarily. It will be re-added in a revamped state with a fist that hits enemies in a future update

• Aerial Shot has been removed as it was just quite invisible and boring. I might rework it to give bonus damage based on your height so actually playing differently would make it work better which is much more interesting

• Light Shot has been removed from the game and has been replaced with a Greed relic: Trigger Ring: Fire rate increased by 250% but weapon damage reduced by 90%

• Accelerating Ability has been removed from the game

• Sonic Boom is now a weapon mod instead of a perk

• Enhancement Totem chance to explode on use increased from 50% to 75% (there is more planned to make this feel better in the future but currently they felt a bit too easy to spam enhancements on a single mod with no increases in cost- a lot of power for a single totem)

• Booming enhancement reduced from 200% to 100% (as it is multiplicative with Magnify and was due a tweak anyhow as it was very strong)

• Efficiency is now a weapon mod called Efficient Shot instead of a perk

• Icebreaker is now a relic instead of a perk

• Lingering Fumes is now a relic instead of a perk

• High Roller is now a relic instead of a perk (33% chance for 2 extra chests to spawn, 33% chance for no extra chests to spawn, 33% chance for no chests to spawn at all when clearing islands)

• Split Shot is now Legendary instead of Epic and the trigger chance has been increased by 20%

• Epic and Legendary loot is 15% more likely to spawn in shops (just to make shops in the first loop a bit more fun and exciting)

• Auto Rifle fire rate decreased slightly but projectile damage increased from 9 to 10

• Rocket Launcher fire rate increased by 20%

• Auto Shotgun trigger roll multiplier increased by 16.6%

• Crossbow damage increased from 5 to 12 and weapon mod trigger roll multiplier slightly increased (makes Fire Shot go from 12% to 15% per projectile) but fire rate reduced by 20%

• Marksman Rifle damage increased from 12 to 15

• Cluster Launcher fire rate decreased by 15% and mag size reduced from 10 to 8 but projectile damage and radius has been doubled. This makes it feel more like a hard hitting launcher with splash damage than something too similar to the Auto Shotgun

• Flamethrower fire damage area radius increased by 20%

• Sniper Rifle hipfire spread reduced by 400% (it is now much more accurate when firing without aiming down sights)

• Lightning Scepter weapon mod trigger roll multiplier reduced by 20%

• I’ve made some improvements to make the number of debuff stacks applied by Blade Launcher, Flamethrower and Lightning Scepter feel much more consistent (especially on the Flamethrower)

WEAPON MOD BALANCE CHANGES

• Wind Up damage increase per shot increased from +2% to +5% but the bullet cap per level has been reduced from 100 to 40. This should make it feel better on weapons that have smaller mag sizes

• Mag Shot damage increase per bullet in the mag increased from +2% to +3%

• Aura Shot now requires you to have Glue Shot before it can show up as it is pretty useless on most weapons without Glue Shot and was bloating the Epic loot pool

• Damage over time mods have been commonly reported as feeling like the obvious choice over other similar mods as the increased damage is always a net positive. Rather than nerfing these mods to be in line, I have made damage over time apply over a 2x longer time period so it takes longer for the entire damage amount to get applied. Crits also were happening on DOT builds really often as a single shot that normally would roll a crit once was able to roll a crit 30+ times! This has been normalized to only roll crits once per second on DOT damage which is still an increased crit chance compared to doing a single shot as DOT lasts for several seconds. The only DOT outlier that had to be rebalanced was Time Ring, it was way too free and could single handedly carry builds- it has had the bonus damage reduced from +400% to +250% which is much more reasonable while still staying strong

• Heavy Hitter damage increased from +75% to +150% but the fire rate downside increased from -10% to -20% to make it feel like a more distinct mod

• Bouncing Shot damage increased from +100% to +150% damage per bounce to encourage a playstyle where you are bouncing shots on the floor before hitting enemies and sacrificing on hit mods

• Reload Arc damage increased from 40 to 75, damage radius increased by 33% and projectile speed increased by 33%

• Ultra shot damage increased from 25 to 40

• Time Bolt damage increased from 40 to 60

• Big Shot and Big Ability now have a 50% speed reduction by default but they don’t get slower with more levels as previously they would quickly get to the point where projectiles would just spawn in place and barely move at all

• Big Shot and Big Ability now scale up with diminishing returns as one of the main sources of performance and clarity drops were from big projectiles covering the entire screen. The first few levels are similar to before but the size falls off with more levels compared to before

ABILITY BALANCE CHANGES

• Air Strike radius increased by 20%

ABILITY MOD BALANCE CHANGES

• Increased the number of projectiles spawned by Firework Explosion from 3 to 6

• Spike Strike / Strike Explosion damage increased from 500 to 1000 and damage radius increased by 25%

• Increased the radius of all Strike mods as it felt like they were underperforming

• Turrets were feeling a bit too “the game is playing itself” and while I do want to support the automation playstyle, it should take a bit more effort to scale. I’ve reduced the damage increase of Enhanced Turrets from +100% to +50%: this change is justified as it affects ALL turrets at once and it made little sense that a common perk scaled more effectively than picking up multiple of an epic or legendary turret perk

• Barrel Explosion explosion radius increased by 33%

• Imploding Explosion damage buffed from 50% to 100% but the radius is reduced from -15% to -20%

MELEE WEAPON BALANCE CHANGES

• Dagger damage radius increased by 25%

• Claw melee damage doubled and knockback strength increased by 33% but cooldown increased from 1 to 3 seconds to make timing a melee with the Claw a bit more important (at least at the start of each run) and to help it lean into the “knock enemies away” role to differentiate it a bit more from the Dagger

• With the new heavily increased knockback damage, Hammer is by far the strongest melee weapon in terms of effective damage so the cooldown has increased from 5 to 6 seconds

MELEE MOD BALANCE CHANGES

• Vampire base heal per elimination increased from 4 to 5

PERK BALANCE CHANGES

• Bulletproof moved from Epic to Common rarity and chance to block damage reduced from 8% to 6%. Also moved from the Luck loot pool to the Health loot pool

• Damage Reduction now works as a flat subtraction to the Incoming Damage stat (the opposite of what Hot Shot does) instead of multiplying AFTER other Incoming Damage increases which gave it much more value than intended

• Hard Target damage reduction reduced from 10% to 8% but it now scales linearly (so it gains exactly 8% each level instead of falling off to lesser values with each level as before). This means it can now scale higher than 75% to counter increases to incoming damage such as from Hot Shot so instead of Hard Target being capped at 75%, incoming damage is now capped at 25%, allowing you to get more value out of damage reduction

• Exploding Enemies moved from Legendary to Epic rarity

• Silver Lining damage bonus per trigger doubled

• Reworked Shockwave to instead trigger on taking damage instead of on reloading. Also increased the knockback when it triggers by 250% and decreased the cooldown from 6 to 2 seconds

• Flammable Armor moved from Common to Epic rarity and fire stacks reduced from 40 to 30

• Sonic Boom and Shockwave moved from the Damage chest to the Skill chest loot pool

• Icebreaker, Explosive Armor, Poisonous Armor, Flammable Armor, Exploding Enemies, Lingering Fumes, Freezing Enemies, Flammable Enemies, Electric Enemies and Poisonous Enemies no longer gain AOE per level but instead start with a 100% larger radius (you can scale further with the new Magnify perk)

• Efficiency chance to gain ammo reduced from 20% to 15%

RELIC BALANCE CHANGES

• Turbo Ring fire rate increased from 2% to 3% after clearing each island

• Ring Of Defense damage reduction reduced from 40% to 30%

• Overspill Goblet was feeling underwhelming it so now acts as a bonus multiplier instead of just adding to the critical hit multiplier as before

ENEMY BALANCE CHANGES

• New enemy health scaling: it is roughly the same as before except all scaling gets applied on the elite island of each biome instead of gradually over each island which often felt like you were always just barely keeping up- now you should be able to enjoy a mini snowball in each biome before the next biome kicks in. This is a direct buff to the first biome in each run as no scaling applies until hitting the second biome which should allow more room for your build to take off especially on the harder difficulties

• All enemy ranges increased (notably the Elite Beam Skull who had a short range that would just not reach the player on most of the larger islands)

• Reduced the amount of poison stacks inflicted by Elite Poison Grubs by 50%

• Added height variance to floating enemies which actually makes a big difference in how fighting them feels

• Enemy spawns have been greatly sped up when looping to prevent situations where you are clearing islands faster than enemies can spawn, resulting in boring waiting around

• Increased the speed of Horde island enemy spawns

• Horde islands now have a set time of 30 seconds (+30 seconds per XL totem) instead of having different time limits depending on when in the biome you chose them. This improves early biome horde rewards substantially as they could be as short as 20 seconds previously

• Enemy movement speed on the first loop of Ultra Chaos has been reduced a bit to allow it to ramp up to even faster speeds when looping- I want there to still be contrast in UC runs in terms of steadily rising intensity and also wanted the first few biomes to be a bit more enjoyable in terms of fighting enemies with your baseline loadout before your build comes online

• Added new line of sight checks to prevent hammer crabs doing their line attacks through walls

• Enemy homing thorns projectile lifetime increased from 2 to 3 seconds

• Elite Barrel Skull projectiles now have less gravity and more speed for more interesting encounters. Reworked some of the attack formations to be more interesting also

• Elite Barrel Skull attacks now all use homing barrels (sorry)

• Elite Barrel Skull barrel explosion radius increased by 25% as they didn’t feel threatening

• Scorpion armor plates reduced from 3 to 1

• Laser Crab projectile damage area radius reduced by 50%

• Grenade Crab projectile speed increased to be more threatening- he now really hurls that thing!

• Hornet / Elite Hornet dash from side to side 50% less

• Hornet / Elite Hornet energy rings have a much shorter lifetime but move faster- this reduces spam and makes them more engaging to fight / dodge

• Elite Hornet projectile speed slightly increased

• Resin Hornet destructibles are 50% less likely to spawn (they were a bit tedious to constantly fight)

• Ice Ant projectile explosion radius increased by 33% as they were fairly non threatening before especially for a Hard enemy

• Poison Skull projectile speed increased, poison strength increased and their projectiles now leave behind little poison areas. Fire Ant got a similar treatment- both of these enemies are supposed to be in the “Hard” category (next to things like Sniper Crabs) but were fairly harmless even in large numbers

• Lightning Skull attacks reworked to be more interesting (before they were just basic single projectiles that didn’t match the “Hard” enemy category)

• Added melee attack to Homing Grub as they would just completely miss all of their projectiles when trying to attack you up close

• Poison damage areas spawned from enemies no longer deal damage and just apply poison

• Enemy spawn variety doubled when looping (this should make looping feel a bit more distinct and chaotic)

• XL islands double the variety of enemies spawned to prevent tediously fighting 10x of the same hard enemy

• Reduced the amount that explosive enemies knock back other nearby enemies when eliminated by 50%. The exception to this is when the Explosive Enemies modifier is active as increased knockback is part of the chaos of that modifier

• Enemies gain 38% less health per Horde wave as it felt like enemies got too tanky too fast into Horde islands

• Increased the maximum number of enemies allowed to be spawned at once in the Arcade minigame from 80 to 100

QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES

• Heavily improved Air Strike on islands with low ceilings or caves- it should now consistently hit where you want it to hit and deal damage as expected

• Temporary invulnerability (triggered after being respawned when falling into a pit or when being revived) increased from 2 to 3 seconds to help cases where you would spawn back in a big group of enemies and needed a bit more time to get to safety to prevent taking unfair damage

• Revival zones now spawn in a safe area if a teammate gets eliminated by falling off the map (previously this spawned the revival zone out of bounds which made it impossible to revive)

• Enhancement Totems no longer show up in the shop if you have nothing to enhance in your inventory

• Totems that take health / max health now display the exact amount of health that they will take in addition to the percentage for more clarity

• Added some long overdue extra info about what Poison / Fire / Lightning / Ice and Arcane Shot mods actually do to their descriptions

• Enemies now take a small amount of damage while in lava so that their health bars show up and they are easier to locate. Before there would often be one straggling enemy slowly walking deep in the lava and this was especially frustrating with the Countdown modifier active where every second counts!

• Enemies can no longer resurrect if there are less than 5 enemies remaining in a wave. This prevents frustrating situations where you just about clear an island before the countdown expires but the game decides to resurrect these enemies and you lose. It also fixes a few edge cases where enemies would spawn after clearing a Gauntlet wave

• Added a 3 second delay after an island starts before Leap Of Faith can deal damage

• You now maintain horizontal momentum when getting knocked back from enemy projectiles which means no more getting stun locked in place by a chain of enemy projectiles as it used to be frustrating to lose all momentum and take multiple unavoidable hits because of this. Also reduced the amount of vertical knockback by 50% to help with this

• Made various improvements to the backup save system to further protect against losing data if your main save becomes corrupted (including adding 2 more backup save layers)

• Improved Steam Cloud save filtering to not sync backups

• Shielded enemies are no longer targeted by aim assist or homing projectiles

• Improved performance in situations where there were a lot of enemies affected by lightning at once

• Optimized various projectiles like Link Shot, Drill Shot, Piercing Wave, Mace Shot and Firework Shot which could cause noticeable FPS drops in some cases

• Adjusted projectile hitboxes to better match their visuals. This results in much better performance when a lot of projectiles are onscreen at once

• Extended physics object out of bounds areas so crowns can be launched further and while underwater

• Reduced the radius that the game checks for nearby players when spawning enemies to fix cases where multiplayer lobbies with many players were blocking enemy spawn points, causing them to spawn slower than intended

• Improved stars being very bright when playing on Low graphics settings

• Audio no longer pauses when the game loses focus (assuming you have the “Pause When Losing Focus” option set to off)

• Enlarged the UI numbers of all buffs and debuffs on the player health bar to be easier to read and notice

• Optimized the water ripples system and enabled it even on low graphics settings since I didn’t realize how bad the ocean looked on low settings previously without it

• Switched shadowing method on crabs and enemies to be higher quality (less flickering and blurriness)

• Made several optimizations to improve performance when many enemies are on screen at once

• Improved shadow quality and performance on environmental assets

• Added fade in animations for gameplay and game state UI so that you don’t see them “pop” from their default to initialized states

• Chests and anvils no longer have collision (this was to fix a bug but it actually feels nice to not have them get in the way while you are trying to loot)

• Bounty Hunter and Rare Treasure now track how many pickups they have spawned (you can see this number in the inventory)

• Destructibles (like explosive rocks or Ultra Mushroom) now get destroyed when in the way of a chest spawn to prevent them hanging in the air and making them annoying to loot

• Because of the difficulty changes a few challenges have new completion conditions. Some of the original challenges made very little sense as beating the game on Nightmare would just complete 3 tiers of challenges at once so the changes have been made to account for the new mastery ceiling in the game with Prismatic difficulty. If you have already completed these challenges / achievements you will not have to redo them:

  • CRAB CHAMPION II: Get 3 wins total on Sapphire or higher difficulty

  • CRAB CHAMPION III: Get 5 wins total on Ruby or higher difficulty

  • PRO: Get 3 wins in a row on Ruby or higher difficulty

  • MASTER: Get 2 wins in a row on Prismatic difficulty

  • CHALLENGER I: Get a win with 5 or more red difficulty modifiers and 0 green difficulty modifiers active

  • CHALLENGER 2: Get a win with 10 or more red difficulty modifiers and 0 green difficulty modifiers active

  • CHALLENGER 3: Get a win with all red difficulty modifiers and 0 green difficulty modifiers active

  • FLAWLESS: Get a win on Gold or higher difficulty without taking any damage

  • FRUGAL: Get a win on Gold or higher difficulty with 5 or less shop purchases

  • FLEX III: Clear the first biome on Ruby or higher difficulty without taking any damage

  • ULTRA CHAOS CHAMPION: Get a win with at least 14 red modifiers active and only the Random Loadout green modifier active

BUG FIXES

• Fixed enemies being able to shoot through walls in certain rare circumstances

• Fixed Elemental Specialist and Elemental Expert not working with Ice damage

• Fixed Ring Of Power not applying damage if you have zero weapon mods in your inventory

• Fixed Meteor Shower not scaling damage per island, it should be more threatening on later islands now!

• Fixed being able to float indefinitely with the Lightning Scepter if firing it before entering a portal

• Fixed Streamer Loot “upgrading” Legendary loot to… Legendary

• Fixed cases where players would jitter on the spot and rotate back and forth when on slopes which could also throw off your movement when sliding over uneven surfaces

• Added a short delay before the game over UI can be skipped which fixes several bugs where non-host players didn’t get medals for weapons when finishing runs

• Fixed a bug when continuing a run that could cause “ghost” armor plates to appear to be active but you’d still take damage directly to your health

• Fixed a rare bug where you could get stuck in trees (for real this time!)

• Fixed revived players not seeing active challenge modifiers or blessings

• Fixed fall damage being based on current health instead of current max health as intended

• Fixed enemy homing barrels homing to other enemies instead of the player in some cases

• Fixed being invulnerable to fire damage that you created yourself (like from exploding fire rocks and standing in the fire puddle) even with fire stacks visible on your health bar

• Fixed UI not showing the current level of melee mods when picking them up

• Fixed the Looper achievement completing without actually getting through an entire loop

• Fixed enemy projectiles not firing from weapon muzzles

• Fixed enemies that fire delayed homing projectiles from completely missing when up close

• Fixed Ice Shot not applying consistent debuff stacks on Blade Launcher and Flamethrower

• Fixed chests and anvils spawning under steep terrain in some cases

• Fixed being able to take damage from explosive enemies at great distance with Slugger equipped and the Explosive Enemies modifier active

• Fixed Marksman Rifle and Lightning Scepter not adding formation mods like Double Shot or X Shot to the base projectiles (the formations were being replaced which was a nerf to default fire patterns in the case of Double Shot)

• Fixed crowns sometimes spawning on active islands instead of only in the lobby

• Fixed Starfish indefinitely rising upwards if they got interrupted while winding up for an attack

• Fixed armor UI notifications not playing when taking damage on a One Hit island

• Fixed exploit that allowed players to get multiple uses of the key totem by leaving and rejoining the same lobby which was unintended

• Fixed Meteor Showers being invisible in rare cases where a lot of VFX were visible at the same time

• Fixed bug where on reload perks such as Sonic Boom would weirdly sometimes trigger when a reload had finished instead of on starting to reload

• Fixed bug where on reload perks weren’t guaranteed to trigger in rare cases when a non hosting player was reloading

• Fixed bug that caused high levels of Blender on the Claw to stop dealing damage

• Fixed the classic “Island 50” bug where sometimes a joining player would have their UI frozen in a default state until rejoining the lobby

• Fixed chests and other meshes looking really bad when using Low graphics settings

• Fixed Accelerating Shot and Boomerang Shot not working together- projectiles now boomerang as expected. This also fixes the same problem with the Accelerating and Returning enhancements on the same projectile which previously had a workaround to just not make the projectile move much at all which wasn’t intended

• Fixed Elite Hornet resin hornet destructibles being able to spawn infinite loot with Driller

• Fixed chests spawning in much later than intended for non hosting players in multiplayer games

• Fixed text going off screen when picking up certain pickups with long descriptions

OTHER NOTES

• I will be releasing some kind of news / roadmap post in the next few months detailing my plans as the game shapes up towards 1.0 as I know this is something many people are curious about (when will Tony get added to the shop, what content is still planned for the game etc.)

• Parkour islands have been temporarily removed for this update while I work on a new fully procedural parkour system which will allow for fresh parkour courses each time you play as well as an infinite parkour minigame!

• As part of my big cleanup of the game assets and code I have removed the Duel minigame for many reasons: it had essentially zero player engagement / interest (understandable as it was barebones to begin with), there are no servers or anti cheat to support matching against random players (the main reason to play PvP) and it has cluttered the code / lowered performance even when not playing it due to how the game is set up. I had explored options to expand it such as supporting more weapons but the game simply just isn’t built for fun PvP- players move too fast and hitboxes are too small to make any weapon other than the rocket launcher viable. Changing movement speeds and creating special weapons with large hitboxes just felt like a janky workaround rather than a fun layer that complimented the main game mode and speeds that players are used to. It feels like a growing trend in gaming lately where games are adding lots of different modes from different genres trying to be “something for everyone” and I want to do the opposite and put all my efforts into making a really good main mode (since that is what people are actually playing) without trying to cater to both PvE and PvP and doing a poor job. All that said, I’ll be adding an endless parkour minigame (the systems there will be used to create unique parkour islands in the main mode) as well as a target practice minigame to round out the total number of minigames to 4 in future updates as both of those fit the actual core game loop a lot better and don’t rely on inviting others to your lobby to play

HOTFIX #1 PATCH NOTES

• Changed the Nightmare red difficulty modifier to be +4 difficulty level so this gives you an additional difficulty point to spend on either a green modifier or disabling another one of the 1 point red modifiers. This should give enough flexibility to still get Prismatic while running the least annoying modifiers to you personally (everyone seems to have different opinions on which they prefer / hate so this new modular system seems to be working well to allow people to have more agency)

• The Lucky green difficulty modifier now costs -3 (previously -4) and the bonus luck reduced from -300% to -250%. This means you can run this modifier while still going for the Prismatic medal- just another fun strategy to consider

• Greatly expanded out of bounds trigger zones on all islands so the out of bounds warning should pretty much never pop up accidentally when near a wall anymore and also it should feel a lot less restrictive to move a bit away from the main arena areas now. In general out of bounds warnings should feel much more invisible now and only show up when you are REALLY pushing it

• You now get teleported from out of bounds even when an island is over (you only take damage when this happens on an active island) to prevent getting softlocked on distant areas of the map

• Made the super narrow Desert and Volcanic horde islands much wider

• Made Immortal Snail purple for better visibility especially in the Volcanic biome

• Decluttered that one arctic island with a lot of trees running through the middle of the arena

• Made better Prismatic reward skin

• Darkened the background of the difficulty UI and doubled the opacity of deselected modifiers to make them easier to read

• Fixed not being able to navigate the difficulty UI with a controller

• Fixed Prismatic medal being in grayscale when viewing weapons in the lobby and on the game over UI

• Fixed a one off bug that caused a weapon rank to go into an invalid state: there is now a failsafe to reset it back to bronze

• Fixed the “Attempts” stat not being increased as expected

HOTFIX #2 PATCH NOTES

• I’ve gotten a great response to this update but also have been reading some very valid feedback mainly around Prismatic modifiers. Ideally the Prismatic grind is fun and some of the modifiers especially at their extremes definitely could feel more unfair than fun. I’ve tried to address all of the worst feeling scenarios in this hotfix without diminishing the satisfaction of overcoming the new mastery curve that Prismatic adds to the game

• Immortal Snail can no longer randomly jump at you: this was enjoyable for me during the beta as it created some really unpredictable moments but ultimately losing your entire run due to this feels bad (do note that it can still jump if the “Jumpy Enemies” modifier is active on an island but at least that only lasts for one island rather than the entire run). Also slightly reduced its movement speed to just help smooth out the worst case scenarios of this modifier

• Removed the “no more one shot protection” aspect of the No Safety Net modifier: it was just too punishing to get completely one shot by the Immortal Snail at full health. This functionality may come back as a completely optional “orange” modifier in a future update for those looking to add challenge (it won’t influence the difficulty rank)

• Countdown difficulty level reduced from +2 to +1 so it is much easier to turn off and not feel like you are forced to run it. Many people rightfully felt like they needed to have it on which took away from the fun of the game for them so reducing the points here makes it much less significant / no longer feel mandatory to earn Prismatic. The Ultra Chaos modifier has been increased from +3 to +4 to compensate (this doesn't change difficulty it just makes sure one less difficulty level will meet the Prismatic threshold)

• Initial Countdown timer increased from 45 seconds up to 60 seconds to help smooth out cases where it felt like bad luck would make runs impossible

• The Lucky green modifier (+250% chance to find higher rarity loot in chests) cost has been reduced from -3 to -2. This means with the change above you can run it while also turning off Countdown, mimicking the previous True Ultra Chaos experience that players liked in previous updates

• Reduced the unlock requirements for ALL green and red modifiers by one medal. This means a modifier that previously required Ruby to unlock will now require Emerald

• Fixed the Countdown modifier ticking down time on Crab Island

• Fixed some weapons not respecting the new limited loot system and offering mods like Double Shot or Homing Shot even when at 100%

• Fixed broken textures on the Immortal Snail and made its shell brown for better contrast / visuals

• Made a fix to prevent certain previously unlocked challenges from re-locking when more weapons / achievements are added to the game in the future. These challenges are: Silver, Gold, Sapphire, Emerald, Ruby, Diamond, Prismatic, Gunslinger and Crab Legend. Unfortunately this fix isn’t retroactive so if you have launched the game and lost your previously unlocked Crab Legend skin, this will be the last time you have to unlock it and from then on it will be permanently unlocked even if more challenges / achievements get added and you technically no longer satisfy the unlock requirement

• Fixed large enemies getting stuck on trees on the arctic island with the stone spire in the middle

Thanks for playing, see you in the next update!

I plan on releasing a game news post with an updated roadmap going over what to expect in the future so stay tuned for that! As always I'll have a beady eye out reading any and all feedback so feel free to ping me anywhere 🦀