[Demo] Patch Notes — v1.0.4721

A fourth road: The Sulfur Caldera

Clearing THEME 9's warden opens the Sulfur Caldera, THEMES 10 to 13: The Tephra Town, The Obsidian Flow, The Blue-Fire Pits and The Crater Throat, each with its own floor, caves, monsters, warden and music. Its law is FUMAROLES: every 8 seconds the vents breathe steam for 2. A hiss warns first, the steam hides the monsters in it from the idle blade, and they come out scalded, walking half again as fast for 2 seconds.

• A new elite power, GEYSER: the Ashfall Augur raises a jet of the same steam where it stands.
• The THEMES page shows all 13 themes as one row of smaller cards.

Thirty new weapons

Forty weapons in all: the claymore, rapier, bow, halberd, nunchaku, sickle, crossbow, war fan, stiletto, flamberge, kusarigama, bo staff, sling, urumi, poleaxe, war club, labrys, crook, falx, tower shield, khopesh, longbow, war wheel, meteor hammer, pitchfork, garrote, seax, mancatcher, glaive and bardiche join the ten. Each cuts its own way: a point that only cuts at its tip, a wire strung from where your hand last stopped, arrows, bolts and stones, a wall, a club that bats monsters away, a collar that catches one and swings it like a club. Each has its own AUTO-CUT and hit sound, and each is won on a boss stage of its own across the first nine themes.

• The FORMS page is now a grid of weapon pictures, five abreast. Pick one to read what it does, where it is strong and weak, and the clear that wins it.
• RUN deals the weapon you wield and two more drawn from all forty, won or not.
• After a run begins, RUN waits a minute before it deals again, so leaving a run is no quick redraw.

A passive for every weapon

From player level 80, each of the forty weapons has a passive of its own, named under its profile on the FORMS page and on its deal card. The sword's STEADFAST stops a body gnawing at the crystal under your edge from biting, the stiletto's STALKER sends AUTO-CUT first for a nearby body standing alone and cuts it three times as hard, and the flamberge's FESTER keeps what it cuts from healing for three seconds. Every passive shows its own effect and plays its own sound the moment it fires.

• Reaching level 80 breaks the padlock off your weapon's picture, and a guide over the level globe names its passive. Until then the FORMS page and the deal cards show each passive behind a padlock.
• At a CASCADE table, a guest's sword guards the crystal with STEADFAST too, and a guest's blade parries lances, a tower shield throwing them back.

ARSENAL: two more weapons

A card page can now deal a weapon card, one card in a hundred. Take it and that weapon joins your ARSENAL, up to two beside the one in your hand, any of the forty, won or not. It casts a skill of its own by itself, on its own clock: forty skills, one for each weapon, each with its own effects and sound. Level cards take it from LV 1 to FORGED, each level bigger and more often, and FORGED adds a twist of its own.

• RETRIEVE: when a cast ends, the weapon stands planted where it came to rest for a moment. Cut it free with your own sweep and its next cast comes one level up. A FORGED weapon's clock jumps ahead instead. Not at a CASCADE table.
• Taking a level card leaves its page up for one of the other cards, and AUTO takes a level card first.
• Each ARSENAL weapon is a column of the HUD's damage strip, named for its skill and level (EARTHSPLITTER III) with its clock, and its damage has its own row on the results page and in run history.
• A full hand still gets weapon cards at a clear. Runs, DAILY RIFT and CASCADE deal them, WILD HUNT does not, and CONTINUE keeps them.
• A SIGNET's "faster weapon skills" and "weapon skill damage" lines now make your ARSENAL weapons cast sooner and hit harder. They did nothing while weapon skills were switched off.

Waves on a run clock

Runs no longer stop between stages. The next wave pours in once half of the newest wave is down, while what is left of it still stands. One run clock pays for it all: it opens on 30 seconds, every wave adds 20 and a boss's wave a minute, and at zero the run ends OUT OF TIME. STAGE reads WAVE everywhere.

• Monsters still standing two waves later straggle: a quarter faster and half again as hard on the crystal.
• A boss's wave opens nothing until the boss falls, and a boss left standing in reach for a minute rages, biting twice as hard.
• The clock reads minutes and seconds, flashes through the last minute and counts the last ten aloud. The count line says how many kills the next wave waits on.
• Each place is a run of its own, so the next place opens on 30 seconds again.
• New FASTEST boards on RANKS, one for THEMES 1-3, 4-6, 7-9 and 10-13, rank the sum of your best clear times of their places. You show on one once you have cleared all of them.
• DAILY RIFT, CASCADE, WILD HUNT and the lab still go stage by stage.

The endless climb

A run no longer ends at the warden. Clearing wave 40 still clears the place, opens the next one and sets your FASTEST time, and then the run goes on: waves 41 to 999, a boss every tenth wave and the warden again every hundredth, until the crystal breaks, the clock runs out or you leave. The HUD reads ENDLESS under the wave.

• Monsters keep getting tougher every wave. Shards and EXP keep growing at half the pace of waves 1 to 40 and never pay less than wave 40, and gear drops at the level normal waves give for monsters as tough.
• Deep monsters move, bite and cast like the next theme's, and the crystal mends slower.
• Elites, bosses and wardens in the endless climb of THEMES 1, 4, 7 and 10 pay 2.5 times as much, so a harder theme's climb never pays less than an easier one's.
• Each place's deepest wave shows on its THEMES card.
• DAILY RIFT, CASCADE, WILD HUNT and the lab still end where they did.

Card pages from an XP bar

Card pages no longer wait for a stage's last monster. Your kills fill an XP bar under the crystal's, and each time it fills, a card page opens over the paused fight. Level n takes as many kills as wave n has monsters, a place's elites add five levels between them, and a boss deals three pages. Kills land on the bar as brass ghosts, elites and bosses throw motes that heat it red, and a full bar bursts into the card fan.

• HOLD, a switch on the card page, keeps pages for later on a badge on the HUD. Click it or press F to open them. A boss's clear opens them anyway.
• At a CASCADE table everyone fills one shared bar, and each player's pages open without stopping the table.

Closer and sharper

The field grows every wave while the monsters and your blade keep one size, so late waves shrank everything to specks. AUTO ZOOM now brings the camera in by itself as the floor grows, from wave 16 on, and when the crystal is off the screen a ring at the screen's edge shows where it is and flashes when it is bitten. Zoom in and the art holds: the monsters of THEMES 1 to 6, nearly all of THEME 7's and THEME 8's common monsters are repainted at twice the detail, each keeping its design, colours and size. The arena is drawn at up to your screen's own resolution, so monsters walk and bob smoothly instead of stepping a block at a time, and every weapon is drawn at screen resolution too, the thirty new ones at four times the detail.

• The mouse wheel and + and - still step the zoom, and every new run starts back on AUTO.
• Fields start closer: wave 1 is half its old size and wave 40 four-fifths, growing the same few rows every wave.
• A one-time ZOOM guide on waves 5 to 10 shows how the wheel brings the fight closer.

Achievements

• Steam Achievements are live: the game's achievements unlock on Steam, and the ones your record already holds unlock the next time you start the game.
• DEPTH achievements count the highest wave you reach in any theme, the number on the HUD: 10, 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 150, 250, 500 and 999.
• WARDENS achievements ask 10, 100, 1K, 5K, 25K and 100K bosses felled.
• Rungs you already earned on the old DEPTH and WARDENS ladders keep their bonus.

Changes

• Every hit now sounds the monster it lands on: each of the 434 monsters has a body sound of its own, bone clacks, crystal rings, slime squelches, under each weapon's hit.
• Every animated guide spotlights what it points at: the screen drains to grey and darkens away from it, and only the thing and its words keep their colour until you answer it. In a fight the spotlight gives the floor back after a few seconds, and with HIGH CONTRAST on it greys without darkening.
• The skill lesson teaches a skill's key with the fight's own cast callout, and a player who had AUTO CAST on is shown the key the first time they fight with it off.
• Weapon skills (the Z, X and C casts), blade skins and the forge's tier pictures are switched off: every weapon fights and looks as its plain self. Everything you had won stays on your record.
• Bosses take 200 grunts' worth of cutting and wardens 1,000, and they pay 3 and 10 times their wave's crowd in shards.
• Cards that can no longer do anything are not dealt: no crit card at 100% crit, no blade, chain or cooldown card at its cap, no Wellspring at the crystal's top regeneration, no Conduit once a jump keeps the most it can. WILD HUNT no longer deals cards that do nothing in a hunt, like Greed.
• An elite's shield is a round, see-through bubble of hex panels that moves with it, instead of a tall bell over its body.
• The pause page has the PAUSE IN BACKGROUND switch (W flips it), and says so when leaving the window paused your run.
• Each forge upgrade's card explains what it does under its name.
• Press I in a fight to open the bag on its consumables. I or Esc takes you straight back.
• The stat sheet's rows can be walked with the arrow keys, Tab or a gamepad, each row's breakdown opening beside it.
• Korean: the reroll button reads 리롤.

Fixes

• Damage and crystal HP no longer read "inf" past wave 40 with WHETTED, which also blacked out a square of floor round the crystal.
• Old records with forge upgrades past their 1,000 cap now load at the cap, so damage and crystal HP no longer read "inf".
• The endless climb no longer pays CONQUEST, TORMENT and DEPTH achievements for places you never cleared. Any it paid that way are taken back when your record loads, and a KEEPSAKE hand gives up only the CONQUEST cards they dealt.
• FEVER bosses no longer burrow forever: anything that burrows, shields, leaps or falls to bones stays in reach for a full second before it can hide again.
• Knockback throws monsters the same distance at every frame rate. Slow machines threw them up to 50% further.
• AUTO on the card draft no longer stops working after a day or more of non-stop play.
• Iron Ledger no longer buys Lucky Cut at 100% crit, or any level that does nothing for the blade. It buys the next cheapest instead.
• Monsters that stopped on the crystal's corner tiles out of reach now walk in and bite.
• CASCADE: guests' hooks draw monsters in, and their knockback, IMPLODE and CLOSED HAND move the shared crowd once and smoothly, without sliding back or flickering.
• The THEMES page's growing map stays centred on the crystal, and the crystal shrinks as the map pulls back instead of growing.