The server update is already out as you read this; the Steam client is rolling out whenever it gets done rolling out [update: it is out, so it should be downloading to your computers now]. The most major changes are that we’ve taken a balance pass over the player guns and XP awarded for killing enemies.
Let’s talk about XP. Initially, we had a more drastic change, but realized that we could get away with a smaller change and keep things mostly the same. The most important thing we did is smooth out some of the XP required to get to certain levels. It was just a little uneven before — getting to 19 from 18 was harder than 20 from 19. Little stuff like that should make things feel a bit better. Then the enemy XP updates are also a bit of a readjustment and smoothing. One idea here is to increase the XP reward for fighting more dangerous enemies. It’s not an enormous effect, but I think you may notice it in the higher areas.
We decided to try to preserve current plane progress as best we could during this step. During the rollout we are adjusting everyone’s planes’ XP so they’re right for the plane’s level and progress through that level. [this is done as of now] We’re sure people will be scrutinizing XP and plane leveling after this change, let us know if you find any problems! (we know that the XP bars in the client will be wrong until that gets updated on Steam, so hold off noticing any bugs in that until then)
For player guns, we looked at their damage and made changes to bring them in line with their expected DPS for their level. We also moved some of the wackier experimental firing patterns into untiereds. Yes, snipers have been nerfed. ;_; We’re sure that people will be scrutinizing the heck out of gun damage and patterns after this change, let us know how you feel!
In another big change, we’ve redone all of the item icons! So guns look a little different now. The new art style is proving to be quite lovely! The T10 items are gold!
My favorite current bug is the one where chat sometimes inputs backwards. Like you’re typing and all of a sudden sdrawkcab s’ti. Is this some sort of hex that a cat-witch has put upon you? Are you suddenly speaking Parseltongue?
We thought we might try doing a bit more of a traditional changelog style at the end of this post to catch minor changes. All part of the plan to eventually become Dwarf Fortress.
- Player weapons have been rebalanced.
- Plane XP requirements smoothed out.
- XP gained from enemies rebalanced. Higher-tier enemies drop a bit more XP.
- Poison clouds damage stationary enemies for the full duration instead of the first 1 second.
- Damage clouds buff walker even when stationary.
- Elemental damage counts towards the loot contribution.
- Did some work to track elemental and cloud damage better, so we can do more precise balancing.
- Dropped damage threshold to 2%.
- Fixed better/worse arrows on meshed items.
- Added debugging logs to help figure out why folks are unable to spawn a plane in the nexus; or unable to join the island
- Added debugging logs to help figure out why sometimes folks are unable to teleport
- Partial work to improve double-shot exploit
- Fixed sound options not responding to mouse clicks
- Fixed a few exceptions here and there that were causing occasional trouble.
- Restored the gun that fires on player death. Accidentally broke that recently.
- Reduced the number of bullets in death gun but kept the same DPS.
- Meshed all item icons.
- Race Leader racers don’t drop XP so they are not farmable
- Loot can more easily escape walls
- Fixed ammo/fire counts getting reset on sync’d guns during equipment swap
- Options menu-related exception clobbered.
Thanks again to everyone for all the bug reports and feedback, we love it and it’s making the game better every day!