Stonewards Early Access – Hotfix 0.2.3

Hello everyone!

Update 0.2.3 is now live! This update brings new ways to coordinate with your team, more Daily Quests, improvements for several classes, better controller support, and another round of fixes across digging, combat, and multiplayer.

Thank you for continuing to share your feedback and bug reports. They help us keep improving Stonewards!

New Features & Quality of Life

• Calling Bell: Added a new Shop upgrade that unlocks a bell. When your team is ready, hold the interact button to ring it and shorten the countdown to the next wave to 5 seconds!
• Friends Leaderboard: Added a Friends tab where you can compare your all-time best scores with your Steam friends.
• Horn: Blowing your Horn now marks your position on your teammates’ compasses for 10 seconds. The marker follows you as you move.
• Temporary Buffs: Added icons above the Health bar showing active temporary buffs and their remaining duration.
• King & Wall Health: Added Health bars to the HUD during combat. They appear when the King or Wall has taken damage.
• Crafter: You can now hold the interact button to collect multiple crafted items.
• Miner: You can now hold right-click to chain charged Pickaxe attacks while you have enough Stamina.
• Digging: Improved resource detection to make visible ore easier to mine, especially where veins blend into the surrounding terrain.
• Chest Loot: Added missing Mace, Double Small Axe, Big Staff, and Small Staff variants to the Chest loot pool.
• Leaderboards: Large scores now use shorter, more readable formatting.
• Audio: Added sound cues when charging spells with the Mage and Healer, and when readying Artificer Bombs.

Controller Improvements

• Added controller support for navigating the Inventory, inspecting items, moving them between slots, and dropping them.
• Added a dedicated controller input and prompt to start a run from Map Selection.
• Fixed Reroll and Skip buttons not working correctly with a controller.
• Fixed navigation and selection issues in the Crafting screen.

Balance & Progression

• Rogue: Increased base Health and base Attack multiplier.
• Warrior: Increased base Movement Speed and reduced charged attack preparation time.
• Miner: Increased base Attack multiplier.
• Mage: Reduced base spell Mana cost.
• Healer: Reduced healing spell Mana cost and charge time.
• Companion Damage: Increased the upgrade’s base damage bonus.
• Gold Ring: Reworked scaling to use diminishing returns instead of compounding multiplicatively.
• Quest Rewards: Increased Gold rewards for several quests.
• Level-Up Gold Option: Increased the base amount of Gold granted by the Gold reward option.
• Blocking Missions: Reduced the number of blocks required to complete these missions.
• Enemy Kill Missions: Reduced the number of enemy kills required to complete the mission.
• Resources: Extended the spawn depth of the deepest resource layer on both maps.
• Daily Quests: Increased the number of Daily Quests available.

Leaderboard Fairness

• Added initial mod-loader detection. Leaderboard score submissions are now disabled when a mod tool is detected in your game.

Bug Fixes

Digging & Environment

• Reworked cave boundaries on Bastion and Dungeon to reduce cases where players could dig outside the playable area.
• Improved cave generation and terrain loading speed.
• Corrected the placement of several ruins, Chests, and resource items on both maps.
• Fixed mining cracks not updating correctly after nearby terrain was dug away.
• Fixed bright visual flashes that could occur on dug terrain.
• Fixed stair collision on the Bastion Wall.

Combat, Classes & Visuals

• Fixed weapon hitboxes sometimes remaining active after switching weapons or starting to block.
• Frozen enemies now correctly stop their laser attacks.
• Fixed Catapult projectiles incorrectly colliding with players.
• Fixed errors affecting bouncing projectiles when a previous target had been destroyed.
• Added damage visual feedback when allies are hit.
• Fixed Crossbow animations and Horn hand positioning.
• Fixed Staff visual effects and pickup collision.
• Magic impact visual effects now scale with Magic Range.
• Fixed player damage sounds playing twice.
• Fixed held items jittering when the frame rate fluctuated.
• Adjusted third-person camera behavior near obstacles.

Multiplayer & Interactions

• Improved Chest movement synchronization in multiplayer.
• Fixed initialization issues affecting enemies and dropped items for connected players.
• Fixed a run-infinite issue when the King died while a player was being revived.
• Fixed rapid interaction inputs breaking the revive state in the Hub.
• Added safeguards around carrying and reviving downed players, including when a carried player disconnects.
• Carriable object names now use each player’s selected language instead of the host’s.
• Placing a wooden sign now consumes it from the selected Inventory slot.

UI & Stability

• Fixed a possible input lock when closing the Lore screen as an upgrade screen opened.
• Fixed Inventory dragging becoming stuck when switching input devices or losing window focus.
• Fixed damage numbers overflowing at very high values. Positive damage below 1 now displays as 1.
• Fixed leaderboard refresh and avatar display issues.
• Fixed a possible startup crash when a backup save could not be accessed.
• Fixed upgrades attempting to read save data before loading had finished.
• Improved stability when applying display settings, when Steam is unavailable, and when no mouse is connected.

Thank you all for your feedback and support. Have fun mining and defending, and see you in the caves!

We're also making progress on a major update planned for the end of the year! We'll have more details to share with you soon, so stay tuned!

Banana Tiger Studio

P.S. Enjoying Stonewards? Taking a moment to leave a Steam Review helps more players discover the game and means a lot to our small team!