Beacon patch 2.2 is finally here! As usual the patch took a bit longer to finish than we hoped, but is full of more features, content, and tweaks than any previous patch. New enemies, weapons, items, and challenge zones have been added expanding the Uncharted faction’s excursions into Prism territory. Beacon is 25% off in the Steam Summer Sale too!
Daily and Weekly challenges are the biggest addition to this build, adding the first community activity into the game. Make your best attempt at completing the challenge run, spawned into a specific level seed with a matching set of items and mutations. When played through Steam your run score will be uploaded to the leaderboard, along with rewarding you research points that will be granted on the following life based on your performance.
The bestiary was also added, allowing you to collect log entries that give you more background information on each faction and displays each enemies strengths and weaknesses. The current patch only includes Prism bestiary entries while we test out the system and finish creating the other entries, but the other factions will be added in future patches.
Many balance tweaks have been made to enemies, weapons, and mutations after playtesting with the new difficulty types. More weapons should feel viable as primary sources of damage now, and enemies will feel a bit more lumbering but with more potent attacks. A lot of improvements were made to some of the older levels in the game as well expanding their terrain, updating their combat and loot balance, and adding a few new randomizations to explore. Levels 1 and 2 were the main focus for this patch, and some similar improvements will be made to levels 3 and 4 eventually.
We’re already well into development on the 2.3 content patch, Corporate Intervention, and will have news on its release in the coming weeks. Until then, check out the full patch notes for 2.2 below to get a full breakdown of the new content, balance tweaks, and fixes released today.
Blighted Stars
New Features
- Daily Challenge Runs Added - Compete for the top spot on the leaderboard in a pre-set seed with a specific set of mutations.
- Weekly Challenge Runs Added - Compete for the top spot on the leaderboard in a pre-set seed with a specific set of items and mutations.
- Difficulty Settings Added - Select base difficulty from options on the Main Menu. Affects the amount of enemies and champions that spawn, the spawn chance of items, and damage taken by the player.
- Bestiary Codex Tab Added - Collect and view codex logs on enemies encountered in the game. Learn their strengths and weaknesses and read Freja's descriptions of their combat abilities. Prism enemy entries added this patch.
New Enemies
- Uncharted: Mirage - A mysterious lifeform recently discovered by Prism, inbetween their relentless melee assault they can replicate themselves to create weaker copies to assist their attack.
- Uncharted: Flauros Bloat - Either the nesting pod of the Flauros creatures or a failed attempt to forge a new one, the Bloats float slowly towards their target and release a group of Flauros Enemies when burst.
- Prism: Golden Security Droid and Golden Containment Droid - Afflicted by a curse in the Flauros Realm, the droids continued to function after being turned into solid gold with emerald flame imbued abilities.
New Items
- Passive: Celestial Clover - So named for the supposedly lucky flora that grew back on Earth. While the subject’s provenance is less clear than its namesake, it does appear that its effects are substantially more concrete. Increases Luck by 100.
- Passive: Gravitational Relocator - PRISM employees assigned this task should locate the highest point in their surroundings and – with the Relocator in their possession – attempt to jump or fall from it. If working correctly, the subject will activate prior to hitting the ground, replacing the Drop Drone and safely teleporting the user back to their most recent stable location.
- Weapon: Helix Repeater - Subject fires a unique interlocking double projectile. Despite the relatively low damage per hit on offer, it manages to remain a viable weapon in lower-intensity confrontations thanks to a high-capacity magazine and very rapid fire rate.
- Weapon: Helix Overcharger - Subject acts like a semi-automatic shotgun, firing a wide spread of projectiles in quick succession, but suffers from a prolonged reload time that could limit its use in high-tempo situations.
- Auxiliary: Laser Port - After careful study and with considerable trepidation, the R&D team was able to dismantle an inactive specimen of the ball-like ‘Icosatron’. On use, a concentrated laser beam fires forwards for 6 seconds.
- Auxiliary: Crystal Matrix - Upon activation, subject emits an unidentified energy signal, passing through and altering the cellular structure of all liquids found within its radius in a process akin to crystallisation. All nearby targets are crystalized on use.
- Passive: Golden Scorched Choker - Imbued with golden power, the Golden Scorched choker releases Flauros when damage is taken by the bearer and also has increased health regeneration.
- Auxiliary: Golden Menhir - Summoned pillar is solid gold, dealing more damage on impact and dropping an item when destroyed.
- Auxiliary: Golden Enflamed Heart - On activation the heart now sends out a giant flame wave, damaging and applying Fire to enemies in a large radius.
- Pickup: Remote Hack - In the unlikely event of a malfunction, the Remote Hack scans for nearby droids, halting any commands currently in their work queues, before allowing manual overrides. On use, Hack a nearby droid to fight for you for a short duration.
- Passive: Hacking Drone - The Hacking Drone orbits its user, continuously scanning all nearby wireless signals for a likely target. Once found, the drone brute forces its way into the local network, taking control of anything it finds inside. Orbits the player and hacks one nearby droid to fight for you.
New Levels
- Act 1: Telemite Mini-Maw challenge zones added - Enter into a random challenge zone by jumping into the mini-maw and collect a bonus piece of loot if you survive, including the Golden Flauros Realm and Mirage Labyrinth. Entrances to the challenge zones have been added to various Level 1 and 2 Landmarks, along with inside the Level 4 Mirage Mega Labyrinth.
- Level 1: New Telemite Maw Mirage Labyrinth zone added - Inhabited by the new Mirage enemy, the labyrinths hold bonus loot if you can outlast the Mirage’s duplicating swarms
- New Level 1 Start Area - Simplified the start level and added a chance for 1-2 crates to spawn giving an early pickup, grenade mod, or 1 handed weapon if lucky. The wrecked ship pods will return in patch 2.3 in new Landmark areas.
- Act 1 and 2 Prism Loot Choice Randomizers Added - Added loot choice randomizers to Prism Loot levels, sometimes giving you the option to choose between 2 Equipments
- Level 1 - Updated Telemite Maw Shipping Overflow variant with a larger and more challenging shipping zone
- Act 1 - Updated Prism Loot Excavation and Turret Bridge levels with improved layouts and encounters
- Level 1 - Updated Hydro Outpost terrain and added a new loot entrance fortress more fitting of the Hydro theme.
- Level 1 - Updated Tritoraptor Nest landmark terrain to be more condensed and have larger combat areas
- Level 1 - Updated Excavation Outpost terrain, expanding upper combat zone and updating level variants
- Level 2 - Updated Excavation Quarry terrain and condensed entrances
- Many other miscellaneous level fixes and updates
Balance
- Increased DNA Mod drop chance on small and medium enemies
- Increased DNA drop chance on medium enemies slightly (All types)
- DNA mutation chance percentages increased: Base - 60%, Fortified - 40%, Volatile - 80%, Paramount - 60%
- DNA Mod: Reload Speed - Changed from 2x to -15%
- Enemy: Icosatron - Decreased duration of lasers to 3 seconds, decreased cooldown between laser bursts, added laser burst telegraph ring, and tweaked movement values to make more agile and able to roll up ramps.
- Enemy: Security Droid - Increased range of sonic shot attack and tweaked their attack values to make it more likely for them to prioritize completing a 3 shot attack. Reduced rotation speed to make dodging against them more effective.
- Enemy: Containment Droids - Increased movement speed, lowered rotation speed, increased cooldown between sonic shot bursts, increased grenade cooldown, and decreased melee cooldown.
- Enemy: Tesla Droid MK1 - Increased cooldown of tesla charge ability, changed charge to only have 1 quicker burst instead of 2, and increased readability of charge effects.
- Enemy: Tesla Droid MK2 - Added shock to melee ability, increased movement speed, increased damage and range of charged Tesla Shot, increased abort range of Tesla Shot, increased Tesla Grenade cooldown.
- Enemy: Tesla Droid MK3 - Added Melee ability that shocks on hit, reduced cooldown of Tesla Pulse Shot bursts and increased fire rate, increased telegraph time of Tesla Strike teleport ability and improved effects, and increased Tesla Dome cooldown so the enemy will fire more Tesla Pulse bursts before doming.
- Enemy: Pyro Droid MK2 - Decreased Pyro Grenade cooldown, increased Flame Shot cooldown, and decreased Flame Charge cooldown.
- Enemy: Pyro Droid MK3 - Increased damage, speed, and knockback of flame cannon projectiles, but decreased amount of projectiles shot. Increased effectiveness of flame pod waves.
- Enemy: Flauros - Increased speed and distance of dodge, but reduced homing.
- Enemy: Flauros Evoker - Increased speed, increased cooldown of Flame Spit and Teleport.
- Enemy: Firefly - Increased speed of basic movement and charge, increased cooldown of charge.
- Enemy: Prime - Removed Poison Touch ability, increased base movement and charge speed, increased radius of Flash ability.
- Enemy: Drone - Decreased Acid Spray cooldown and increased range, increased Burrow cooldown. Should now spray 2 times before burrowing.
- Enemy: Alpha - Reduced max health, increased Acid Bomb cooldown and increased projectile speed, increased move speed.
- Enemy: Ward - Increased cooldown of Burrow ability, decreased cooldown of Scuttle ability. The Ward will now have a longer period of scuttling inbetween quill spray attacks, giving it less invulnerable time.
- Enemy: Warden - Increased movement speed, increased scuttle speed and duration.
- Enemy: Tritoraptor Patriarch - Increased melee swipe range, increased radius of Smash ability, and increased speed. It should land its attacks more reliably now but still be dodge-able with good timing.
- Enemy: Chilopodrae - Reduced max health, adjusted size of reflect and damage hitboxes to make it easier to damage when attacking from the side and back
- Weapon: Starborn Pistol and Snowball (Variant) - Increased projectile speed, increased damage slightly, and increased fire rate on base version to make it more effective with the lowest level shot.
- Weapon: Starborn Sniper - Increased damage of base shot and of splinters, making it more viable as a single target weapon and more effective at clearing groups if charged fully.
- Weapon: Starborn Shotgun and Fractal Death (Variant) - Increased damage of base shot and splinters, and increased max ammo.
- Weapon: Hailshard Condensor - Increased hailshard damage and reduced the charge fire time, allowing it to be fired more quickly and two shot most small enemies now.
- Weapon: Hailshard Generator - Added Frozen debuff to the fully charged Hailshard explosion, increased explosion damage for all shard levels, and increased amount of small shards released from the level 2 Shard explosion.
- Weapon: Quill Revolver and Late Bloomer (Variant) - Increased damage of base quill shots
- Weapon: Globule Lobber and Illuminatus (Variant) - Increased globule explode damage, and reduced detonate time of base version to make more effective as a primary weapon
- Weapon: Globule Cannon and Rapture's Emissary (Variant) - Reduced charge time, reduced detonate time, increased globule explode damage, and removed third wave of globules from the base verison. The changes make filling a specific area with the globules simpler rather than spraying them over the entire arena and damaging yourself.
- Weapon: Magrail Launcher - Increased reload time per shot, decreased fire rate slightly
- Weapon: Rapid Rocket Launcher - Increased max ammo, adjusted rocket burst timings, added slight homing to mini rockets, and reduced missile damage.
- Weapon: Rocket Launcher and Splitshot - Reduced missile damage, changed to single longer reload instead of per shot.
- Weapon: Flame Cannon - Increased base shot damage, improved shot hit detection to prevent projectile stopping too early often when skimming over the ground, increased charge time, and added charge telegraph effect.
- Grenade: Globule Grenade - Increased base globule explode damage to make it more likely for secondary globules to finish off small targets, removed third wave of globules.
- Grenade: Lumens - Increased explosion damage
- Grenade: Rotneedle Popper - Increased speed and homing power of rotneedles, making them much more effective at sticking into enemies.
- Pickup: Quill Spears - Increased spear damage
- Mutations: Stat Tweaks - Adjusted the statistics bonuses on many mutation sets, unifying them more and adding new bonuses to many mutations that had none previously. Bonuses on Back/Chest slots were generally raised and minor bonuses added to feet and arm mutations. Head stat bonuses were mostly removed.
- Mutation: Gaseous Sack - Tweaked boost values and stamina drains to make climbing with the boosts more useful. Boosts can now be chained back to back to climb higher, or held down to float for a longer duration.
- Mutation: Aerodynamic Tail - Increased Speed bonus when stamina is drained
- Mutation: Bracing Scales - Increased Damage Ignore chance
- Mutation: Scuttling Claws - Reduced strafe speed bonus.
- Mutations: Bone Armor - Increased projectile reflect chance.
- Mutation: Bonespike - Increased melee stun duration, decreased melee cooldown
Audio
- Added Act 1 Excavation Boss music (Currently enabled on all boss fights)
- Added new MYCE and Mini-MYCE explosion sounds
- Added Containment Lockdown arena VO sounds to applicable Prism arenas
- Added new Hydro Dam Drain VO sounds
- Added Solus Stomach ambient sfx
Misc
- Enemies - Tweaked many enemies movement values and ability cooldowns/ranges. Most enemies will feel a bit heavier as a result of the movement changes, but their main abilities will overall perform more reliably.
- Lowered boost values on various travel mechanics to prevent over boosting in many areas
- Updated many weapon and enemy ability charging effects with a thicker ring to increase readability.
- Updated Shipping Container trap enemy spawners to fix not spawning and spawn in pairs of more varied enemies
- Added Swampspore fruit packs that randomly spawn on Swamp Ferns, allowing you to shoot them off for a few health pickups similar to the Succulent trees
- Updated Swampspore Lights to be pop-able, breaking the light and throwing out a few Swampspore health pickups
- Removed random swampspores spawned in pools of water
- Updated debuff descriptions to more usefully describe the debuff's function when viewed on the Tab Screen.
- Updated tab screen model preview to more accurately center more object types (Some may appear small until we can discover and fix them)
- Added a blink on the Stamina bar when there's not enough for a melee/dodge
Optimizations
- Optimized Prism Shipping Containers to reduce triangle and vertex counts in areas dense with them
- More Audio optimizations to reduce CPU and memory used
- Garbage Collection optimizations
- Improved performance with large triggers used for music and weather switches
- Reduced amount of gibs spawned by enemies.
Fixes
- Fixed Camera Zooms being multiplied a bit higher than intended
- Fixed Gaseous Sack mutation boosting way too high
- Fixed Solus Guardians passive drone being flammable, causing them to stay infinitely lit on fire
- Fixed some enemies causing a global screenshake if left unkilled
- Fixed some bullet types reflecting when they shouldn't
- Fixed Icosatron enemy lasers leaving behind an invisible impact effect that damaged the player if walked over.
- Fixed camera drifting when the UI was opened during a screenshake
- Fixed health bars not disappearing during some enemies abilities (Flauros Evoker Teleport, Tesla MK3 teleport, etc...)
- Fixed pickup duration cursor indicator lagging behind the crosshair
- Fixed many Prism enemies not increasing their movement or animation speed when the Overclock champion mod was applied
- Fixed some scuttle and strafe abilities not using the correct layer, allowing enemies to strafe over pits