The Popcorn Update (Early Access Update 12)

Patch Highlights

NEW WEAPON: POPCORN SHOTGUN

NEW MELEE WEAPON: BASEBALL BAT

NEW ABILITY: BOOMERANG

NEW ABILITY: TORNADO

20 ALL NEW ISLANDS

NEW ENEMY: ANCIENT ROCK

Patch Notes

NEW CONTENT

• Added 4 new songs to the soundtrack
• Added new weapon: Popcorn Shotgun: Fires popcorn kernels that explode into buttery goodness
• Added new melee weapon: Baseball Bat: Sends enemies flying! Starts with level 3 Knockback Claws and enemies are always guaranteed to get knocked upwards when hit
• Added new ability: Boomerang: A chaotic boomerang that returns... sometimes
• Added new ability: Tornado: Lifts enemies into the air. Your projectiles orbit it
• Added new enemy: Ancient Rock
• Added new weapon mod: Popcorn Shot: Chance for shots to create explosive popcorn on impact
• Added new weapon mod: Tornado Shot: Chance to fire damaging tornados along with your shots that lift enemies into the air
• Added new weapon mod: Full Focus: Critical hit chance increased when aiming
• Added new ability mod: Orbiting Ability: Abilities deal more damage but orbit around you
• Added new ability mod: Fast Ability: Abilities move faster and deal more damage
• Added new melee mod: Crystal Claws: Enemies drop more crystals if eliminated within 3 seconds of them taking melee damage
• Added new melee mod: Knockback Claws: Melee knockback strength increased
• Added new melee mod: Hard Landing: Chance for enemies to explode when taking knockback damage. Explosion damage scales with melee damage increases
• Added new melee mod: Potent Claws: Melee damage doubles all debuff stacks on enemies (9 second cooldown per enemy, cooldown is reduced per level)
• Added new melee mod: Prismatic Claws: Melee freezes, ignites, shocks, poisons and arcanifies enemies
• Added new perk: Liquid Core: Heal when destroying destructible rocks
• Added new perk: Weightlifter: Damage increased but movement speed reduced
• Added new perk: Giant Slayer: Damage increased after clearing elite or boss islands. This increase is doubled if an XL totem was active
• Added new perk: Charger: Chance for 1-3 charge zones to spawn (stand inside to charge: loot spawns for every player with Charger when fully charged)
• Added new perk: Minimalist: Damage increased for each empty inventory slot that you have
• Added new perk: Golden Hammer: Higher rarity anvils are more likely to spawn
• Added new perk: Quality Shipments: Chests have a chance to be upgraded to Big (2x loot choices) or Gigantic (4x loot choices) variants
• Added new perk: Powerslide: Sliding damages nearby enemies (the old Powerslide has been renamed to Fireslide)
• Added new perk: Heavy Impact: Knockback damage increased
• Added new relic: Thrusters: Using your melee weapon boosts you forward
• Added new relic: Sweet Spot: Damage no longer has falloff with distance to the target (it will deal max damage to any enemies within the damage radius)
• Added new relic: AOE Ring: Area of effect doubled (affects all damage sources and is multiplicative with other increases to damage radius)
• Added new relic: Lucky Lock: Loot rarity is rolled twice when opening chests for luckier outcomes
• Added new relic: Barter Ring: 20% chance for shop purchases to not cost any crystals
• Added new relic: Corrupt Stocktaker: 2 random pickups are 99% off after each shop reroll. Shop rerolls cost 4x more
• Added new relic: Blessed Ring: Blessings are 250% more likely to appear on portals
• Added new relic: Overcharge Ring: Doubles the number of Charger zones and increases the chance for them to spawn higher rarity loot (only spawns if you already have Charger)
• Added new relic: Ammo Cache: Mag size doubled
• Added new relic: Sand Shield: Incoming damage reduced by 40% when sliding
• Added new relic: Ring Of Confidence: Block chance doubled against nearby enemies
• Added new relic: Ring Of Deceit: You and enemies are always considered to be at high health (more than 75% of health remaining) even if it is not actually the case. Only spawns if you have Vitality or Crushing Blow
• Added new greed relic: Crushing Blow: Damage quadrupled to enemies with more than 75% of their health remaining but halved otherwise
• Added new greed relic: Mega Greed: Mega crystals are 5000% more likely to spawn but 500% more enemies spawn from challenge and purple crystals
• Lingering Fumes has now actually been added to the loot pool (it was listed as a new relic in the last update but never made it into the game)
• Added new Common enhancement: Repeating: 50% chance for this projectile to explode twice. Getting multiple of this enhancement will roll the 50% multiple times until it succeeds
• Added new challenge modifier: Buffed Enemies: All enemies spawn with a random powerful buff
• Added new challenge modifier: Immortal Snails (2x portals only)
• Added new enemy buff: Jumpy
• Added a new stat to the inventory: Movement Speed
• Added 8 new achievements for the Popcorn Shotgun, Boomerang, Tornado and Baseball Bat
• Added 2 new skins: Butter and Nebula
• Added nice little sound that plays when you launch the game

NEW ISLANDS + VISUALS

• Added 20 brand new islands across all four biomes
• Reworked my least favorite islands: several islands have been revamped completely
• Elite and Boss islands now have their own island pool per biome to prevent cheesy endings where all the elites and bosses just jumped off the map. Note that this ONLY affects the last island of a biome: bonus elite islands chosen mid biome still use the full pool of islands for variety (maybe you'll get lucky and they'll still all fall off the map!)
• Added new lighting variations: a rare sunset for the Tropical biome, blizzard and purple skies (just like the OG Arctic lighting) for the Arctic biome and 2 new Volcanic variations
• Improved Tropical biome lighting and visuals to better match the vibe of earlier versions of the game (some of the lighting came out a bit flat in the last major update)
• Improved the default Arctic lighting and made the Desert skybox less washed out
• Improved ocean visuals to be more stylized (I spent far too long chasing the perfect shade of blue)
• Added physics coconuts back into the game
• Added new cactus visuals
• Improved enemy elimination VFX
• Improved launch pad visuals: they are now blue to match speed chest color coding, have more noticeable VFX and your crab does a little flip when launching
• Added slide VFX back to the game for more charm (only visible on High graphics quality)
• Made many small improvements to the overall look of the game (materials, lighting and VFX)

KNOCKBACK CHANGES

• Knockback is a big theme of this update: there's the Baseball Bat, new mods, perks and relics built around it and a bunch of under the hood fixes so knocking enemies around feels consistent and satisfying
• Melee knockback strength now scales with your distance to the enemy: you get a stronger knockback when very close and a weaker one (down to 40%) when far away. I got lots of great feedback about skillful positioning being more rewarding than just pressing the melee button and knocking the entire screen into the sky, so this should increase the skill gap and encourage "perfect" hits to send enemies as far as possible
• Larger enemies now have knockback resistance (Medium, Hard and Elite / Boss enemies each resist knockback progressively more). Sniper Crabs will no longer get knocked around like they are made of paper, but larger enemies can still be knocked back and into pits
• Fixed a good chunk of enemies (mainly elites) being completely immune to knockback and knockback damage. All enemies are now equally affected by knockback damage
• Removed the cap on the amount of knockback damage that can be dealt to an enemy in a single hit (it was set to 40% of their max health for some reason)
• The Energy Ring ability mod now knocks enemies back to work with all the new knockback synergies
• Slugger now also increases slug explosion knockback strength by 5% per level. There is no cap on this so presumably it's possible to send enemies through the skybox with enough levels of it
• Added new sounds for knockback hitmarkers and knockback damage numbers are now yellow

DAMAGE FALLOFF SYSTEM

• Added distance damage falloff to bullet (non AOE) weapons. Each weapon has its own tuned min and max range and damage bottoms out at 40% at max range. The main goals are to give each weapon a bit more identity and depth as well as rewarding more aggressive gameplay, without turning the game into a slog for anyone playing at medium / long range
• Sniper and Ice Staff have no damage falloff at all
• Dual Shotguns damage has been doubled but they have heavy damage falloff to give them a more distinct playstyle: devastating up close. Auto Shotgun and Orb Launcher have received similar treatment
• Fast Shot now extends the falloff range of bullet based weapons and the new Sweet Spot relic completely removes falloff on both bullet and AOE damage
• Reduced the threshold for when the game switches from distance based to AOE based damage falloff by 20%. This greatly boosts the damage of mods like Drill Shot, Link Shot and Proximity Barrage at distance
• Improved how AOE damage falloff works so that large enemies and destructible rocks no longer take less damage when hit far from their core location

DIFFICULTY SYSTEM CHANGES

• Removed all green difficulty modifiers. Instead you now gain +12.5% loot luck per red modifier active (this bonus can only affect one pickup per chest; Streamer Loot is rolled separately and is unaffected). The main goal here is to make Prismatic feel like a consistent thing players aim to beat rather than a "build your own difficulty" sandbox which, while cool, did take away from the feeling of overcoming a carefully curated difficulty. The luck bonus also adds a nice incentive for newer players to try out the harder difficulties
• Red difficulty modifiers have been condensed from 13 down to 8 so that each one feels impactful without a lot of extra text / bloat in the difficulty menu. They have also been reordered and reworded to be easier to read. All red difficulty modifiers are now unlocked by default
• The Prismatic medal now requires all red modifiers to be on. Diamond medals no longer require a looped victory: only Prismatic does
• The Nightmare difficulty modifier now active by default in fresh saves as I saw a lot of feedback that the game was too easy by default as a new player (you can of course still disable it)
• Enemies move 25% slower when not playing with Ultra Chaos to ease new players into the pacing
• Ultra Chaos no longer randomizes the biome order to keep the Prismatic run structure consistent. Random biome order is still available when playing with all Flex difficulty modifiers active
• Decaying damage reduction for elites and bosses when looping is now on by default (previously it required the Unfair Bosses modifier to be on)
• Triple Challenge has been removed: 2x portals now have 2 challenge modifiers by default and 30% more enemies spawn on islands with challenge modifiers
• Athletic Enemies has been removed. There were too many janky situations where enemies were doing big wind up attacks while leaping around, which made it impossible to design fun telegraphed attacks. The fun parts live on in the new Jumpy enemy buff and the Elite Lightning Crab :D
• Buffed Enemies chance for enemies to spawn with a buff increased from 20% to 25%
• Slow Recovery health healed has been doubled to make it less punishing as you grow your max health
• Wandering Elites, Immortal Snail and Eternal Punishment have been moved from red to flex modifiers. Immortal Snail has been merged into the new Snailed flex modifier. You can still run into Immortal Snails without it via the new "Immortal Snails" 2x portal challenge modifier
• Wandering Elites reworked: elites and bosses are now more likely to spawn on normal islands (including island 1 of each biome) and there is no longer a limit of 3 bosses on normal islands. It no longer adds an extra elite / boss to elite and boss islands as this was too spammy
• Impossible Mode III reworked: Elites and bosses have a chance to spawn with a random powerful buff. Elite and boss islands have 3 random challenge modifiers
• Impossible Mode I now increases enemy health scaling by 40% (down from 100%) and also increases per player enemy health scaling by 40% in multiplayer lobbies. The previous Impossible Mode III has been merged into Impossible Mode I
• The "harder enemies are more likely to spawn" part of Impossible Mode II is now more balanced (fewer situations where you only see minigun crabs and barely any small or elite enemies). The "enemies spawn faster" part has been removed as Ultra Chaos now covers this
• Removed the "Enemy damage scaling increased by 50%" flex modifier as it made every run feel like you were constantly one hit
• Removed the Random Loadouts flex modifier as it's generally less fun to play an extremely hard difficulty with a loadout you don't enjoy and players were just rerolling until they got a favorable loadout. You can still use the Randomizer in the lobby for extra challenge
• Removed the Handle With Care flex modifier
• The Countdown flex modifier now starts at 75 seconds (up from 60) to help counter first biomes that felt impossible due to loot luck
• Full Flex now requires all red modifiers active and randomizes the biome order for more variety
• The game over UI now displays "Flex" and "Full Flex" if you had flex modifiers on
• Since you can no longer play on Bronze difficulty (it is now the default starting rank), previous Bronze stats (attempts, wins, win streak, highest island reached) have been merged into Silver
• Updated the Ultra Chaos achievement to require 3 or more flex modifiers (green modifiers are no longer in the game so it needed to be updated). This serves as a fun way to introduce flex modifiers to endgame players
• Flex modifiers now unlock at Ruby rank (down from Diamond rank)

BLESSINGS REWORK

• Blessings can now appear on any island. This should add a bit of spice to portal choices and hopefully result in a few situations where you choose a portal you wouldn't normally pick just for the blessing attached. Blessings are also guaranteed to be unique across portal choices and the Flawless and Rush blessings are Horde exclusive
• Added new blessing: Fuse Totems: All totems are replaced by short lived fuse totems that dispense loot if you interact with them before they explode!
• Added new blessing: Crystallized: 10 more random crystals spawn on this island
• Added new blessing: Glasshouse: All destructible rocks are replaced by max health rocks that can be destroyed by any damage source (can't roll on Demolition islands)
• Added new blessing: Bountiful: All enemies have a 3% chance to drop loot when eliminated on this island (roughly 1% on Horde islands for balance)
• Added new blessing: Forged: A bonus anvil spawns with your reward chests on this island
• Added new blessing: Gilded: Higher rarity loot drops are much more likely on this island (can't roll on Greed portals as it does nothing there)
• Added new blessing: Death Wish: Get a bonus legendary chest but 10 random challenge modifiers are active on this island and an elite enemy is guaranteed to spawn. Death Wish is rare, can't roll the One Hit challenge modifier and can't show up on Demolition portals. If it rolls on a 2x portal, the 2x portal challenge modifiers are added on top of the Death Wish ones
• The Knives Out blessing was a bit underwhelming so it has been moved to be a new melee mod: Crystal Claws, with rebalanced values

ARMOR REWORK

• Armor has been reworked: instead of each plate always being worth 15% of your max health, each plate now has a base value of 100 health which can be increased with the new Tempered perk. This makes armor more valuable in the early game while providing less automatic scaling as your health increases. Enemy armor works the same as it did before
• Added new perk: Tempered: Armor health increased by 100%
• Tempered and Power Armor can now only show up if you have a relic that generates armor (to prevent loot pool bloat)
• Added new relic: Nourishing Salvage: Gain an armor plate each time you salvage loot
• Ethereal Armor has been reworked to be more valuable: it now grants 3 armor plates at the start of every elite or boss island
• Ring Of Armor now repairs your first armor plate at the start of each island if it is partially damaged (repairing every plate was too powerful)
• Silver Lining no longer works on armor

PACING + ENEMY SPAWNS

• I wanted to improve the pace of the early game so it feels less like you are forced to go straight into damage to avoid drawn out elite fights. Enemy health has been reduced by roughly 30% in the first biome, 20% in the second biome and 10% in the third biome, and the enemy spawn budget has been reduced by 25%, 10% and 5% respectively. The goal is to keep the overall difficulty but let you breeze through the first few islands and get a build going without hitting an instant damage wall
• New enemy spawn logic: enemies now spawn in clusters around a smaller number of spawn points rather than on every spawn point. This creates natural "packs" of enemies rather than every island just being super spread out. Enemies use double the amount of spawn points when looping for more variety
• Slightly reduced the baseline delay between enemy spawns
• The maximum number of enemies that can exist at once has been increased from 50 to 75 so islands feel like the intended mega wave rather than a long stream of enemies trickling in
• XL islands (and runs with more than 100% bonus enemy spawns from perks like Rising Star) are now slightly less likely to spawn small enemies and more likely to spawn hard enemies, so they feel like a scary spike in challenge rather than a long slog. Similarly, large enemies can now appear early on in biomes when looping
• Per loop enemy movement speed bonus reduced by roughly 25% as enemies were constantly moving out of AOE zones and felt too fast in general
• Enemies now die much faster when out of bounds: 20% of their health gets removed per out of bounds damage hit (up from 2.5%) to reduce boring situations where you are waiting around for enemies to get cleaned up
• Lowered enemy anti-camping trigger requirements: there should be far fewer situations where you are running around a seemingly empty island to find one enemy stuck in a corner somewhere
• Chests now spawn in faster after an island is cleared to waste less time
• Horde islands now last 35 seconds (up from 30 seconds) and use all enemy spawn points for more variety
• Enemy health scaling per wave on Horde islands reduced from +5% to roughly +2.1% as enemies got too tanky too fast, but enemies now gain +0.25% movement speed and +1% damage per wave (this adds up!) to keep long Horde islands scary
• Gauntlets now only spawn medium and higher enemies (previously small enemies could spawn which made them feel like a normal arena). Ability and melee cooldowns are instantly reset and you instantly reload when starting a new Gauntlet wave, and crystals are auto collected after each wave if playing with Manual Collection
• Red challenge crystals and crystal asteroids are now automatically destroyed when an island ends. Normal crystals and health rocks are left intact as it's nice to get a bit of downtime after combat
• Crystal destructibles have a 25% lower spawn weight

GENERAL BALANCE CHANGES

• Destructible rock spawning logic improved so even if there are no valid spawn points left, the game will still spawn them. Enjoy creating big towers of rocks!
• Movement speed increases now correctly multiply movement speed instead of adding to it (speed builds are much faster than before)
• Increased the duration of invincibility frames when taking damage by 33% to make situations where you take a lot of damage in a short window feel less punishing
• Shop prices increased by roughly 25%: player economy had been feeling too forgiving without any need to build into economy perks: ideally each pillar of your build requires a bit of investment / consideration
• Shops have 1 less pedestal but the number of extra pedestals per player in multiplayer increased from +1 to +2
• The first shop now has a 0% chance for duplicate loot (to help counter poor early game RNG where you take things you don't want to the shop to salvage) and can no longer spawn Legendary loot (it was too expensive to buy in most cases and wasted shop slots)
• The chance for chest / shop loot to be an upgrade to something you already have has been halved. The game heavily "cheated" in favor of the player here which made scaling some builds a bit too easy and lowered the amount of strategy required to craft a good build
• Increased the likelihood that natural loot luck will upgrade to a Legendary by 25%
• Tripled Mango and Banana spawn weight relative to other pickups so there are fewer situations where bad RNG denies you core max health scaling
• Greed relics now have the same chance to spawn as greed perks (previously they were much less likely to spawn, like most other relics)
• Greed loot can now spawn from the key totem
• You can no longer salvage keys (gaining in run power from meta currency wasn't intended- there will be more uses for keys in the future even if you have unlocked everything!)
• Upgrade Totem cost increase per level reduced from 20% to 12.5% so very focused builds are still possible without getting impractical after the first few levels
• Shop reroll totem break chance increased from 25% to 33%. A one in three chance to break the totem makes you consider each thing in the shop a bit more instead of just spam rerolling until you get duplicates
• Gold totems are now more common but only start to appear from the third biome onwards (island 15 onwards)
• Greed totems can now spawn greed relics (also new tech: you can force a greed relic to spawn if you use a greed totem with no free perk slots)
• Greed portals are 20% more likely to appear and Upgrade portals are slightly more likely to appear
• Health and Damage portals are 15% less likely to appear, Luck portals are slightly less likely to appear and Spiked Chest portals now have the same spawn weight as Greed portals
• Pending healing and overheal are now capped at the value of your total max health (regardless of how much health you are currently missing). Previously it was possible to bank 10K+ pending health from boss health shards with the Slow Recovery modifier on, which trivialized what was meant to be a tense fight. Excess healing from a single healing event now also goes into overheal instead of being lost, which makes things like Endurance more valuable when you're already at high health
• Max Health Rocks can now only be broken with melee damage for consistency with Health Rocks
• Enemies can no longer damage or destroy reward destructibles (Challenge Crystal, Crystal, Health Rock, Max Health Rock, Crystal Asteroid) which caused you to get no rewards from them
• All damage types can now knock physics destructibles around
• Lightning rocks no longer spawn in the Arctic biome and now spawn in the Desert biome instead
• Mega Challenge crystals now guarantee a minimum of 3 challenge crystal spawns (previously anywhere from 1 to 6) and the minimum number of secondary shards from all other destructibles has been increased
• The amount of enemies that can spawn from breaking purple and red crystal rocks has been increased by 33%, but enemies no longer spawn from purple crystal rocks if there are less than 5 normal enemies remaining on an island (prevents islands dragging and unfair situations with Countdown on)
• Rush requirements are now 1.4x higher when playing with Ultra Chaos as it doubles enemy spawn speed
• Harvest area charge time reduced by 33%
• Lightning rock lightning stacks reduced by 50%
• Large enemies no longer have a reduction to debuff (like fire or poison) stacks which was making debuffs feel inconsistent
• Melee damage, player damage to destructibles (like destroying your own landmines or barrels near enemies), all enemy AOE perks (Flammable Armor, Exploding Enemies etc.) and slug explosions no longer do line of sight checks. This means better performance and more consistent damage (if enemies are in the AOE, they take damage even if slightly behind a rock)
• Default max multiplayer lobby size increased from 4 to 6
• Eliminations are worth 5x more in the experience gained calculation (the number next to your name)
• Dash horizontal velocity increased by 25% to make it feel more impactful when you dodge enemy attacks at the right time
• Default slide speed increased by 10% and max slide duration increased from 1 to 3 seconds (you can slide 3x as long as before)

WEAPON BALANCE CHANGES

• Tuned recoil and spread on all weapons to better match their feel (maybe Grip Tape will be less niche now!). You now have +200% spread when sliding, similar to how you have less spread when aiming. This only affects your main weapon projectiles (not lesser projectiles like Shotgun Shot) and should make choosing when to aim vs when to slide away feel more important
• Doubled aim down sights speed
• Auto Rifle damage increased from 10 to 15 and mag size increased from 35 to 40. Base spread and spread per shot slightly reduced but recoil slightly increased. Also removed its camera shake, improved its firing animations to point more towards the crosshair and improved its bullet and impact VFX (Auto Rifle should feel smooth and fun to play as it's the starting weapon)
• Dual Pistols damage increased from 6 to 8
• Burst Pistol damage increased from 8 to 10, base ammo increased from 30 to 35 (one more burst) and vertical recoil reduced by 30%
• Seagle now fires a powerful blast on reload that knocks you back (probably busted but definitely fun!). Damage increased from 25 to 28 but reload duration increased from 1.25 to 2 seconds and base / max spread increased, making positioning and aiming more important
• Rocket Launcher damage increased from 75 to 125 but fire rate decreased by 25%. This should make it feel more hard hitting and impactful as intended. Its projectiles are now coconuts
• Orb Launcher damage increased from 8 to 10 and explosion radius doubled, but aiming spread multiplier increased from 40% to 60% (it's meant to be more of a "spray and pray" weapon than a tactical aim at distance one)
• Crossbow damage increased from 12 to 15 and base AOE increased by about 40%
• Lightning Scepter damage increased from 2 to 3
• Laser Cannons damage increased from 3 to 4
• Cluster Launcher damage increased from 8 to 9
• Blade Launcher damage increased from 9 to 10 and it now uses a quieter hitmarker sound
• Marksman Rifle base ammo reduced from 16 to 12 and vertical recoil slightly increased
• Poison Cannon poison cloud damage doubled but damage interval also doubled as it quickly got out of control applying poison stacks. Also turned down its audio as it was uncomfortably loud
• Improved Ice Staff default explosion visuals (they were way too big)
• Improved crosshair animations to be more responsive and better show your current spread (no more comically large crosshairs at high spread). The circular crosshair used on weapons like the Ice Staff is also now size limited

WEAPON MOD BALANCE CHANGES

• Orbiting Shot now orbits around you like it did a long time ago instead of circling where you shot the projectile- blender builds are back on the menu! Projectiles that spawn at the impact point (like Spark Shot, Link Shot and Proximity Barrage) orbit their spawn point instead. Orbiting projectiles now also ignore static geometry like walls, which fixes the frustrating feeling of your orbiting projectiles exploding on the ground near you before reaching enemies
• Orbiting Shot moved from Common to Epic rarity and now has the same spawn weight as other weapon mods (it was previously less common as a niche choice). It also now allows Aura Shot to show up (previously only having Glue Shot did)
• Double Shot trigger chance slightly reduced (level 2 is exactly 100% trigger chance on Sniper and Rocket Launcher)
• Square Shot trigger chance increased by 16.67%
• Steady Shot and Trick Shot no longer have a downside. Steady Shot (and the new Full Focus) can no longer show up on weapons that cannot aim
• Damage Shot damage increased from +150% to +200%
• Mace Shot damage increased by 33%
• Reload Arc damage increased from 75 to 100 and AOE radius doubled. Since it goes off quite infrequently I want to make sure it's fun to build around
• Bomb Shot damage increased from 75 to 100 and explosion radius increased by 40%
• Spark Shot AOE radius increased by about 25% (this moves it from distance based falloff to AOE falloff, which is a buff)
• Splash Damage radius doubled as it was feeling a little underwhelming for a legendary. Also improved its VFX on weapons with a small default explosion radius (like Auto Rifle or Laser Cannons) so it doesn't take up the entire screen
• Targeting Shot now targets 2 nearby enemies (up from 1) when triggering and has been moved to the Luck loot pool
• Spike Strike is now Epic (down from Legendary) but cooldown increased from 3 to 4 seconds
• Efficient Shot chance to gain ammo slightly reduced (from 12% to 10% on the Auto Rifle). It still naturally scales better with more projectiles but it was a bit too easy to get infinite ammo with a single level
• Recoil Shot recoil penalty doubled per level and the recoil cap increased from 200% to 500%
• Fast Shot no longer affects gravity as this was actually making some weapons harder to use (Arcane Wand / Popcorn Shotgun especially)
• Firework Explosion fireworks now lazily home towards enemies so they do more than just fly up in the air. Firework Shot no longer has built in homing so it works nicely with Orbiting Shot
• Piercing Shot moved from Epic to Common rarity and from the Speed to the Skill loot pool
• Double Tap moved from Epic to Common rarity
• Spore Shot damage doubled and health quadrupled, and it has been moved from the Luck to the Elemental loot pool
• Shotgun Blast now applies 50% fewer debuff stacks per pellet (it was a huge outlier, often applying 6x more debuff stacks per trigger than other enhanceables)
• Dagger Arc damage increased by 66%
• Lightning Strike damage increased from 500 to 750 and lighting stacks doubled from 500 to 1000
• Ice Storm damage per tick increased from 10 to 100, cooldown increased from 6 to 7 seconds

ABILITY BALANCE CHANGES

• I want abilities to feel more impactful than they did before (more oomph, less spam) so most abilities now hit harder but have slightly longer cooldowns
• Grenade damage increased from 150 to 250 and explosion radius increased by 33% but cooldown increased from 5 to 6 seconds
• Grappling Hook damage doubled
• Black Hole damage doubled and duration increased from 3 to 4 seconds but cooldown increased from 9 to 10 seconds
• Electro Globe damage increased by 33%, damage radius increased by roughly 60% and it now pierces through enemies instead of expiring as soon as it hits one, but cooldown increased from 10 to 12 seconds
• Laser Beam damage increased by 40% and damage area duration increased from 3 to 4 seconds but cooldown increased from 6 to 8 seconds
• Ice Blast non ice damage per tick increased from 5 to 40 but cooldown increased from 6 to 8 seconds
• Air Strike damage increased from 600 to 1250 and explosion radius increased by 20% but cooldown increased from 10 to 15 seconds

ABILITY MOD BALANCE CHANGES

• Homing Ability has been re-added and reworked from the version found in old updates: abilities are now guaranteed to be homing and more levels increase homing speed
• Crystal Strike is now Epic (down from Legendary), damage increased from 400 to 500 and radius increased by 25%
• Scythe Vortex damage doubled and time between damage ticks reduced (essentially a 3x buff). Lifetime also increased from 3 to 5 seconds, it now has some mild black hole suction so enemies are less likely to just walk out of it and it sits higher so it's better against flying enemies
• Crystal Barrage damage doubled and radius increased by 50%
• Giant Drill lifetime increased from 4 to 5 seconds, damage increased by 233% and radius increased by 25%
• Barrel Explosion now spawns 3 barrels (up from 1) and explosion radius increased by 16%
• Removed Aura Explosion from the game
• Wave Turret damage doubled
• Sniper Turret damage doubled
• Sentry Turret damage increased from 8 to 10
• Ultra Mushroom and Spore Explosion are now in the Elemental loot pool (as they apply poison when exploding)
• Dagger Blast damage increased by 66%

MELEE WEAPON BALANCE CHANGES

• Claw cooldown reduced from 3 to 2 seconds. Also made various small improvements to the "feel" of the Claw: no more camera shake, faster hit detection and adjusted audio to sound more fluid and nimble
• Dagger damage per tick reduced from 40 to 32
• Hammer damage increased from 125 to 150
• Pickaxe damage increased from 33 to 40
• Katana damage radius increased by roughly 30%
• Increased the Katana debuff multiplier by 33% and the Hammer debuff multiplier by 25% to bring them in line with the other melee weapons in terms of how many debuff stacks they apply (Fire Claws fire stacks for example)
• Reduced the Pickaxe and Dagger debuff multipliers by 33% for the same reason as above

PERK BALANCE CHANGES

• Fortitude max health gained per arena island cleared increased from 30 to 40
• Bullseye max health gained per one shot elimination increased from 1 to 2
• Valued Customer max health gained per shop purchase increased from 25 to 30
• Liquid Core reworked: healing decreased from 30 to 25. Gain 5 max health when at high (more than 75%) health, otherwise heal. The goal here is to make it a bit more interesting as a lower heal perk with a way to scale by playing well
• Liquid Core and Ring Of Destruction now trigger for all players that own them no matter who destroyed the destructible in multiplayer games
• Dagger Dash moved from Legendary to Epic rarity and damage increased by 66%

• Magnify AOE increase raised from +20% to +30% but it now increases area rather than radius. In practice this means the extra AOE you get diminishes as you stack it rather than being linear. AOE is a very fun stat to invest in so it stays a Common perk that you can scale super hard

• Collector has been reworked to increase damage for each mod, perk and relic that you have (previously it scaled on perk levels which made it a huge outlier that scaled exponentially). Damage bonus increased from 3% to 5% per pickup but it has been moved from Epic to Legendary as it was overshadowing the other Epic global damage perks by a large margin
• Exploding Enemies moved from Epic back to Legendary but damage increased from 100 to 150 per enemy explosion. Since every single enemy explodes and enemies now spawn in packs, it was feeling too powerful as an Epic
• Performance Bonus moved from Epic to Common rarity but trigger chance reduced from 30% to 20% per island and it now scales hyperbolically. It was far too easy to max out and get a lot of extra free chests from just 4 perk levels
• Double Vision now DOUBLES all chests (including Bonus Chests, XL chests and Care Package chests) instead of just adding +1 chest
• Bonus Chests eliminations required per bonus chest increased from 200 to 250
• Sharpshooter is now Limited (once it goes over 100% it will stop appearing in chests to prevent clogging up loot pools)
• Bounty Hunter chance for large enemies to drop loot reduced from 5% to 4% (it was a bit strong for a Common)
• Rare Treasure has a 66% lower chance to drop loot on Horde islands due to the greatly increased enemy spawn density (a single level resulted in way too much loot on any given Horde island)
• Checklist now counts large enemies as 8 eliminations (previously all enemies counted as 1)
• Assassin now only requires 8 eliminations (down from 10) and the one shot window has been extended from 0.25 to 0.5 seconds (this also buffs Bullseye)
• Anti Crit critical hit chance downside reduced from -20% to -10%
• Speed Demon bonus movement speed reduced from +20% to +15% to account for movement speed now multiplying correctly (this is still faster than previous updates)
• Regenerator healing increased but the total duration reduced from 60 to 45 seconds (from 240 health healed in 60 seconds to 225 in 45 seconds)
• Scavenger healing reduced from 40 to 35 per drop and large enemies now have a 50% chance to drop healing instead of a guaranteed drop (it had been the best in slot healing perk for a while)
• Endurance healing increased from 125 to 250
• Grip Tape is now a final multiplier to spread and recoil rather than a subtractive one. At level 5 (the new max) recoil and spread are completely nullified (including the spread of secondary popcorn projectiles). Should make it a tempting pick for some builds
• Powerslide has been renamed to Fireslide and reworked slightly: it now deals only fire stacks as damage but fire stacks have been doubled
• Level Up can once again level itself up
• Sturdy Totems once again works on XL totems
• Faulty Chests chance for unchosen chest loot to not disappear increased from 15% to 20%
• Driller and Liquid Core descriptions now mention that they only work on active islands (this is not a nerf, Driller has worked this way for a long time)
• Electric Enemies lightning stacks applied to all nearby enemies when eliminated reduced from 200 to 50 (it was far too strong and just auto chain cleared islands)
• Crystal Combo bonus reduced from 20% to 15% per combo level and combo levels 4-8 now take 10% - 40% more eliminations to reach
• Orbiting Scythes now orbit the player rather than their spawn point

RELIC BALANCE CHANGES

• Ring Of Wisdom, Turbo Ring, Ring Of Vigor, Fortitude, Paycheck and Gemstone now only trigger on arena islands rather than every single island. This gives some extra depth to island choice rather than just always happening which was a bit boring. To compensate, Ring Of Vigor max health multiplier per arena island increased from 3% to 4%, Fortitude max health per arena island increased from 25 to 30, Paycheck reward per arena island increased from 20% to 25% and Gemstone damage increase per arena island increased from 4% to 5%
• High Roller now DOUBLES all chests instead of just adding +1 chest
• Crystal Fertilizer now additively guarantees +2 crystals / health rocks per level (previously it just multiplied the amount of crystals / health rocks the game decided to roll which could result in no extra crystals spawning)
• Ring Of Potential: Secret chests now have a 33% chance to be replaced by Legendary chests (previously secret chests were 5 times less likely to spawn but always replaced by Legendary chests)
• Ring Of Potential now rolls per player that has it in a multiplayer game instead of just once
• Ring Of Favoritism trigger chance reduced from 1000% to 500% as it was a free win button and not really a greed
• Overspill Goblet reworked: Critical hit chance is reduced by 25% but critical hits are rolled 3 times
• All You Can Eat is now a relic instead of a perk and the amount of time without consuming ammo has been increased from 2 to 3 seconds
• Coral Amulet extra loot choices per chest reduced from +2 to +1
• Tony's Amulet extra shop pedestals reduced from 5 to 4
• Adrenaline Amulet fire rate increase reduced from +33% to +25% but it now also grants that bonus to reload speed and the duration has been increased from 5 to 6 seconds
• Ring Of Reloading moved from Common to Epic and reload speed bonus reduced from +75% to +60%
• Ammo Ring moved from Epic to Legendary
• Ring Of Swiftness movement speed multiplier reduced from +300% to +150% (it's still super fast with the new movement speed logic)
• Ring Of Tankiness movement speed downside decreased from -60% to -50%
• Hoarder Backpack now has a movement speed penalty of 1% per mod, perk and relic that you have to feel more greed themed
• Ring Of Protection now also grants immunity to getting frozen by ice and stunned by lightning. Also updated the description to clarify that it works on all debuffs like poison, not just fire
• Ring Of Luck no longer affects critical hit chance to be consistent with its wording (critical hit chance perks add to the critical hit chance stat and don't have a chance to trigger themselves)
• You can now fire instantly after reloading even with Ring Of Power equipped (previously it would remember the time between shots even after reloading)- maybe some new tech here to get around the downside of the ring?
• Ring Of Deflection moved from the Luck to the Health loot pool where it belongs
• Ring Of Rocket Jumping moved from Epic to Common rarity and from the Skill to the Speed loot pool
• Blacksmith Amulet, Blacksmith Ring and Ring Of Favoritism can no longer spawn until you have an enhanceable piece of loot equipped

ENEMY BALANCE CHANGES

• I've been working on making elites more scary and a spectacle to fight. Elite islands now have 2 elites at once (1 elite if not playing with Unfair Bosses on) instead of 3, allowing for more focused and engaging battles, so elites have a bunch of new and reworked attacks and should demand a certain amount of respect when you see one spawn in

• Elite and boss health increased by roughly 8% and movement speed increased by roughly 20% (slight differences per elite)
• Elites on the first biome's elite island deal 33% less damage to ease players into the run
• Elite Barrel Skull barrels now have stronger homing and explode on contact with you, but barrel health has been reduced by 66% to make them easier to destroy before they reach you. It also has a new telegraphed circular attack
• Elite Ramming Grub movement speed doubled, projectile speed increased by 25% and projectile attack duration doubled. It also has new movement to create more natural ramming which should feel less janky (this also applies to regular grubs)
• Chaotic Grub and Elite Poison Grub slam attacks now do 3 more slams. Chaotic Grub can now move while doing its ring attack and its projectile explosion radius has been increased by 50%
• Enraged Grubs can now move while attacking
• Elite Lightning Crab now jumps and dashes more often (replicating the old Athletic Enemies behavior). Its square formation attack lasts longer but its formation attacks are less spammy overall, and it no longer stands still during some attacks (which often caused them to completely miss)
• Elite Fire Crab now has a flamethrower instead of a shotgun (which didn't really make sense). It fires single projectiles in a predictable pattern that mainly threaten with fire stacks rather than direct damage, and only has a 20% chance to create burning ground when they explode
• Elite Fire Crab arc attack has been reworked as it was too similar to regular Fire Crab attacks: he now throws a well telegraphed circle of projectiles that explode into fire on the floor. Time between its attacks increased by 33%, its launch attack damage increased by 25% and it now occasionally summons a single Fire Crab as a lesser enemy instead of regular crabs
• Elite Landmine Limpet has a reworked projectile attack and its landmines now leave behind a fire area when they explode. Its main landmine attack spawns fewer landmines and the landmine proximity trigger radius has been increased by 25% so there is more distance to react before they explode
• Elite Landmine Limpet health reduced by 14% and damage reduction when burrowed changed from 75% to 80%. It now summons 1 minion Limpet at a time and is much less likely to summon them
• Elite Beam Skull pillar beam speed increased, horizontal beam attack radius increased and time between attacks reduced a bit so he isn't hanging around empty handed as much
• Tweaked Elite Hornet and Elite Ice Skull attacks to be a bit more fun
• Reworked the Elite Fire Skull skull projectile attack and removed its spammy fire ground strike attack
• Added a new Elite Pumpkin attack and increased its circle attack projectile speed
• Giant Ant armor plates reduced from 8 to 3 and health adjusted to compensate. Enemy armor health bars now show a max of 3 plates for better visual clarity
• Fire Pumpkin has a new main projectile attack to be more threatening

• Ice Pumpkin damage doubled (the attack is meant to be big and powerful and it was doing less damage than a regular slug) and it can now move while attacking
• Hard enemy (Sniper Crab, Grenade Crab etc.) health increased by roughly 12.5%
• Ice, fire and poison slug health increased by 25%
• Basic slugs now deal 4x more damage to nearby enemies when eliminated by a player, and large slugs and pufferfish deal 5x more. Their damage to players is unchanged. Chain reaction slug explosions are too fun!
• Explosive enemies like slugs and pufferfish now have a short random delay before exploding when eliminated by a player. This adds a nice cascading pattern to exploding a pack of slugs, improves performance and just feels more natural overall. It doesn't affect the timing of slugs exploding naturally as an attack
• Slug explosion knockback has been toned down (especially for large slugs) to prevent enemies scattering too far and being tedious to track down
• Small slugs and small crabs now move 15% faster. Small slug (regular and lightning) explosion radius increased by roughly 44% and their explosion delay after telegraphing increased by 33% to give more time to react
• Basic melee crabs now have a slightly larger damage radius and deal 33% more damage as they felt pretty invisible in many cases
• Minigun Crab jump frequency reduced by 20% and time between attacks increased by 1 second
• Blocker Crab movement speed increased to match regular red crabs as they had been pretty useless at blocking
• Most small Skull enemies now move faster to prevent situations where they would slowly move around caves and slow down the pace of the game
• Laser Skulls are now more threatening
• Limpets, Fire Crabs and Scorpions have been adjusted to be a bit more threatening. Fire Ants have also been adjusted but now only fire 1 fire wave instead of 2
• Enemy damage areas (like the poison areas left behind by enemies) now last 10 seconds (up from 8) to make keeping track of hazards a bit more important, except fire damage areas which now last 6 seconds (down from 8) to prevent the entire floor burning with nowhere to go
• Demolition nests now spawn double the enemies and spawn them on first taking damage, on every armor break and at 75%, 50% and 25% health (previously gated by time, which made them cheesable with low damage hits). Nest explosion radius has been reduced by 25% so chain explosions are slightly less free
• Enemy health bar names are only displayed for enemies with a buff or hard and higher enemies to reduce visual clutter

QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES

• Added new generic icons and pickup visuals for all perk categories (Luck, Speed, Health etc.) to make it much easier to parse your inventory at a glance and find what you are looking for
• Added visual indicators for close and far ranges (visible when you have Personal Space, Snatcher, Danger Close, Ring Of Confidence or Eagle Eye)
• Added FX and UI message when Lucky Lock caused a rarity upgrade when opening a chest
• I was unhappy with players feeling like they had to check every corner of every island to make sure they weren't missing a secret chest, so the game now plays a mysterious sound when an island ends and there is an unopened secret chest somewhere on it

• Made many performance improvements to situations where a lot of damage events are happening at once (including rewriting how the game handles hitmarker and damage number UI animations, which had a surprisingly high impact on performance). This should greatly help with hordes and endgame builds

• Made optimizations to the water ripple simulation along with various other small performance optimizations
• Added a "Total extra chests gained" stat in the inventory for Performance Bonus, Double Vision, Bonus Chests, Care Package and Duplication Ring
• Damage numbers now appear above enemies instead of to the side (which cluttered your vision), critical hit damage numbers are less spammy and critical hitmarkers are now bright red. Hitmarker animations have also been improved so that elimination and regular hitmarkers can both exist at once
• Improved healing VFX to be less noisy and in the way of the crosshair
• Improved initial pickup orientation when dropping loot and when loot spawns in chests
• Improved interact pickup UI readability, especially on smaller screens like the Steam Deck
• Increased text chat font size for better legibility
• Removed a subtle camera shake that was happening after every single elimination
• Windowed Fullscreen is now the default instead of Fullscreen (it feels much nicer to alt tab without the few seconds of black screen)
• The default resolution is now 1920 x 1080 instead of Auto Detect, as on some machines Auto Detect could register clicks off screen causing you to not fire your weapon. Auto Detect is still available as a last resort if your resolution isn't in the settings menu
• Added support for various niche monitor resolutions based on the most popular resolutions in the Steam hardware survey (including 5120 x 2160 and 3072 x 1920). If you have a resolution that you'd like added feel free to ping me on Discord or comment below
• Added Horizontal Look Inversion option to the controls menu
• Audio levels now react instantly when tweaking audio volume sliders instead of having to exit the menu to hear the changes
• Music is now louder by default and the default audio volume is set to 50% on the audio settings menu
• Tried out softer elimination sounds to be less fatiguing on the ears, especially when eliminating large groups of enemies at once. The crystal collection sound is also quieter and lower pitched, hitmarkers are quieter, the revival sound is less annoying and projectile audio now fades out rather than abruptly stopping
• The boss music playlist now only kicks in on the main elite / boss island of a biome (choosing bonus elite islands before the shop kept interrupting the song you were listening to)
• Removed the victory music from the Tropical and Desert biome playlists to make it more special
• Gauntlet wave over audio now has a much larger range so it's easy to hear no matter where you are on an island, and the Gauntlet UI no longer overlaps player names in multiplayer
• Added launch pads to the secret chest location in the shop and to an inaccessible secret chest location on an Arctic island. Also moved a few secret chest locations (like the circular Tropical island with bushes all around and the Desert elite island where you climb the cliff) to be easier to find and reach
• Improved a few areas where out of bounds messages would pop up when climbing to get secret chests
• Moved the Randomizer to make the lobby less confusing / cramped
• Coconuts no longer explode when taking melee damage so you can knock them around the lobby and pass them to friends
• Added several target dummies to the victory island to test your final build at the end of a run! The target dummy also now always floats at a lower height for consistency
• Updated the Persisting enhancement description to signify that it adds a flat 1 second to projectile lifetime rather than increasing it by 75% (it was changed a while back to prevent performance issues with long lasting projectiles)
• High Caliber now says "mag" instead of "clip" for consistency
• Quickplay sessions are limited to 4 players (for a good balanced multiplayer experience) but private lobbies can still go up to 16 players
• Made some additional improvements for Quickplay behind the scenes (sorts by best ping first, fixes against joining lobbies in progress and fixes against joining the same lobby twice in a row)
• Improved flex modifier vertical alignment next to the red modifiers
• DirectX and Visual C++ Redistributables are now included via Steam by default, which fixes rare issues where players launched the game without installing them. This also removes the need to click "Yes" on the installer the very first time the game launches, so the game has now graduated from Partial to Full Controller Support

BUG FIXES

• Fixed controllers firing dual wield weapons from the opposite triggers than expected
• Fixed a long list of small bugs in the codebase: this should result in better stability, fewer edge case crashes and better performance
• Fixed enemies that had multiple debuffs (like an ice enemy with the Fiery Enemies challenge modifier active) only applying a single debuff
• Fixed enemies with the Resurrecting buff only resurrecting 10% of the time
• Fixed Sonic Boom not working since the last update
• Fixed Beam Turrets not increasing damage or being affected by Enhanced Turrets
• Fixed Shockwave dealing damage on the hit that killed you, which caused a rare softlock where players couldn't spawn back in to loot their chests until the next island
• Fixed the enemy attack speed increase from the Ultra Chaos modifier speeding up enemy animations, which made attack timings inconsistent across difficulties. The Frenzied enemy buff is unchanged and still speeds up animations
• Fixed a bug where anything that had exactly 100% chance to trigger had a very tiny chance of not triggering
• Fixed Limited perks showing percentages over 100%
• Fixed unlockable relics showing up in relic chests before being unlocked
• Fixed players not getting their weapon / account rank challenges marked as complete until starting a fresh run
• Fixed playing with no red difficulty modifiers not granting any experience
• Fixed flex modifiers not displaying their locked UI to players that haven't unlocked them yet
• Fixed cases where you could purchase an expensive locked inventory slot but only the cheapest slot got unlocked
• Fixed a rare case where the Heavy Crab movement speed debuff wasn't getting removed at the end of an island
• Fixed a bug that caused natural loot spawns to sometimes only happen for players that had Driller in multiplayer games
• Made a potential fix for pickups in chests spawning "lazily" after a few seconds in some cases when playing in multiplayer lobbies
• Fixed an issue that could cause the revival area to show 100% complete when it was actually at 99.5% and the revival hadn't happened yet
• Fixed a rare bug where you could be soft locked in the game over UI if you happened to be typing in chat right before it appeared
• Fixed underwater audio persisting if you chose a portal while underwater and then moved to a new biome

• Fixed Leap Of Faith dealing fall damage on Crab Island
• Fixed Double Tap working on all lesser projectiles like popcorn shot which wasn’t intended
• Fixed Icebreaker destroying health and max health rocks
• Fixed a bug that allowed double or even triple strength launch pad launches when spamming dash right before a launch. With parkour being reintroduced to the game soon I wanted this fixed as it allowed people to skip huge segments of parkour courses. One slight quirk of this fix is that you can no longer dash for 0.5 seconds after launching from a launch pad
• Fixed Laser Skulls completely missing when you were stationary
• Fixed cases where enemies very far away had invisible projectiles (Elite Beam Skull especially)
• Fixed enemies taking less damage than intended on late game (Island 500+) islands with the One Hit challenge modifier active
• Fixed armor break animations not being shown to the player when taking damage from an Immortal Snail
• Fixed totems and secret chests being able to spawn on the Holdout minigame. Also made some changes to the Holdout island to feel closer to the original and make the Holdout achievement less difficult to complete
• Fixed crystal shards popping out of existence visually with the Manual Collection modifier active
• Fixed various bugged crosshair visuals and hitmarker / crosshair textures having jagged edges
• Fixed grass being see through on some machines
• Fixed white background around medal icons on the weapon interact UI
• Fixed niche health bar bugs on enemies
• Fixed various tiny gaps where light was getting through between pillars and floors on some islands
• Fixed various places where enemies could get stuck under island geometry or spawn under the terrain, as well as out of bounds cheese spots and overlapping spawn points. Also improved enemy spawn locations on the Arctic horde island with the skull cave and the Volcanic bridge island so there is less downtime and fewer stuck enemies
• Fixed enemies falling out of bounds after being launched from the launch pad on the floating Tropical island
• Fixed a secret chest being in an out of bounds area in the Desert biome
• Fixed some music in the Tropical biome being much more / less likely to play than others
• Improved the wording for the Prismatic medal on the difficulty totem to clear up confusion on what a victory while looping is
• Fixed armor plates being broken on destructibles like nests
• Fixed the Crab Legend achievement being re-locked when new achievements were added, this was unintentional
• Fixed two edge cases where quickplay lobbies could be joined in progress
• Fixed a rare crash when firing your weapon
• Made a potential fix for one of the oldest crashes in the game related to physics crowns in the lobby
• Increased the distance between totem spawns to prevent rare cases where you could get stuck between two particularly wide totems
• The crab eye narrowing animation when aiming no longer resets after a few seconds

Thanks for playing, see you in the next update! I'll write up a news post in the future going over plans for 1.0 and more!