[Demo] Patch Notes — v1.0.4129

Themes

The hundred numbered tiers are gone. In their place are three themes, each with three places of its own: The Underkeep (Hollow Steps, Fungal Deep, Bone Reliquary), The Gilded Waste (The Gypsum Glare, The Cobra Wadi, The Hall of Two Truths) and The Drowned Bells (The Ebbing Shallows, The Drowned Nave, The Mother Bell). Each place is a run of 100 stages. Clearing a place's stage 100 opens the next place, and the last place's opens the next theme. Pick a place on the new THEMES tab, the first under RUN.

• The Gilded Waste and The Drowned Bells are new: six places with their own monsters, elites, wardens and boss fights.
• Within a theme, each next place opens with monsters three times as tough as the stage before it.
• Your record carries over: each theme opens as far as your old tiers reached in monster toughness. Weapons and blade skins you have won are kept.
• WILD HUNT keeps its hundred hunts.

Open caves

Every place is now one open cave that widens as you go deeper and never shrinks. The crowd pours over the rim and bursts out of burrows, a different way each stage, then walks round ruins, walled camps, isles past chasms and two great living landmarks in every place. The horde batters barricades down, and the first monster out of a lidded burrow smashes the lid.

Laws

Each new theme lays one law over all its floors:

• SCORCH (The Gilded Waste): sunlight burns ordinary monsters for 1% of their health a second. Only the long shadows of the place's monuments shelter them.
• BELLTIDE (The Drowned Bells): every 10 seconds the drowned bell tolls, and ordinary monsters stand still for a second.

Sign towers

Signs now raise towers. A sign stands where you draw it for a full minute and strikes on its own: NOOSE's thorned post throws its ring out and draws it shut, SNARE's stakes keep their wires cutting, TOMB's headstone drops a slab on the thickest crowd, CROWN's blades circle the crystal, and SPIRAL's stone bursts again and again. One of each can stand; draw a sign again to move its tower. Every sign's cooldown is now 10 seconds.

AUTO-RAISE (SETTINGS > AUTO > SIGNS) raises ready signs where the crowd is thickest: OFF, only while AUTO-CUT has the blade (the default), or ALWAYS.

Gear, remade

• Sixteen slots, up from six: SCABBARD, TASSEL, FULLER, SIGIL, TALISMAN, CHARM, CIRCLET, BRACER, SIGNET and HEARTSTONE join the old six.
• Every slot has its own two stats. RUNED pieces and better add one to three extra lines from that slot's own list, out of 70 new kinds.
• Every kill rolls the same rarity ladder on every stage, from COMMON at 1 in 10,000 to MYTHIC at 1 in 10 billion. An elite, a boss or a warden counts as ten kills. The ODDS sheet shows each rung.
• 18 uniques, and rarer EXALTED ones, lend copies of an awakening card while you wear them.
• What you wear shows as tiles with a running total. The total opens a full page grouped by kind, and pointing at a total shows which piece gives it.

Your bag is kept: every piece gets new lines, grades above RUNED come down to RUNED and are paid back in ash, and GRINDSTONEs become POLISHING CLOTHs. MASTER'S SEAL now stops at KEEN, the ETCHING NEEDLE rerolls one line, and stages a leap skips hold their pieces until you clear the next stage you fight.

CASCADE

• You now see the other floors' fights: every player's and bot's sword, trail and skills, and their damage numbers, a little smaller and dimmer than yours. Turn it off in SETTINGS > SIGHT > OTHERS' EFFECTS.
• Everyone sees what the Heart loses and gets back, as red and green numbers over it.
• Every floor is an open cave that grows with its own player's stage, and the floors spread out as the table fills.

Changes

• The game now opens in the isometric view. TOP-DOWN is one press away on the view coin and in SETTINGS > SCREEN > VIEW.
• In the isometric view, damage numbers, dropped loot, light columns, sparkles and many weapon and card effects stand up and rise up the screen instead of lying flat on the floor.
• Look around at any zoom: the arrow keys slide the view at every zoom, and holding the new LOOK key (E) leans the view toward the cursor. The view stays over the floor.
• The HUD names the place you are in under the stage.
• ADD TO WISHLIST opens the store page cleanly: in the Steam app on a Mac, in the overlay elsewhere, and as Steam's own controller page on Steam Deck and in Big Picture.
• An account banned from online play is told so on the title and RANKS, with where to appeal.

Performance

• The isometric view holds its frame rate in big hordes.

Fixes

• Monsters no longer get stuck on a wall corner on their way to the crystal.
• Damage numbers from a fight you looked away from no longer pile up along the top of the screen.
• Elite brackets and damage numbers no longer show through the view switch's blink.
• The VIEW coin guide and the weapon-keys notice no longer count each other as seen.
• An updated game is no longer turned away by the update check right after updating.
• CASCADE: friends idling on an end page are still there for SAME TABLE AGAIN, a boss's warning and arrival no longer wait behind a shared pause, the awakening card's countdown no longer refills when AUTO lights, and a table's last moments play at full speed behind other windows.