0.9.0 | Smuggler's Grotto Update

UM2 - Update 0.9.0 Smuggler’s Grotto

Welcome peasants to UnderMine 2’s sixth major update: Smuggler’s Grotto! This update has a lot going on, so let’s get into it.

New Content

Smuggler's Grotto

The tide rolls out in the Undermine, revealing the Smuggler’s Grotto. A new area featuring all new enemies, urchin traps, new encounters, and more.

Orzo

Deep at the bottom of the Grotto, a new aetherling lurks. Orzo is a fearsome sea creature, grown fat on aether. Like all major bosses, Orzo can also appear in the Well.

The Crustacean

As part of the hunt for Beltrame’s cure, you’ll need to collect the Rainbow Shell. Unfortunately the Rainbow Shell is attached to a deadly creature, simply known as The Crustacean.

Beltrame's Cure

Beltrame discovers a cure for her ailment. She does not have the heart to ask for the sacrifice necessary, but Camilla doesn’t have the same proclivity. Aid Beltrame and receive a powerful reward.

Baba's Black Cauldron

Baba has left the Hub and set up her cauldron deep in the Halls of Din. There she practices the occult sciences, a dark and forbidden branch of alchemy. Use the Black Cauldron to curse yourself. Remember, a curse isn’t always a curse.

New Oriv

The Emissary tells you of two new Oriv, each of which need to be secured in the Hub. Unfortunately, like the Thalasa Oriv, each has its own unique properties that may make the journey difficult.

Obliteration

Bush Boy (Our still temporary NPC) now waits in the Well's antechamber and offers to Obliterate you. Obliteration ends your run on your terms and counts as a win.

Lifetime Stats and Run History

The Journal has a new Lifetime Stats page that tracks your runs per character, gold spent, potions consumed, Pilfers defeated, your deepest Well dive, demon visits, and much more. The new Logbook in the Library shows your Run History, and if you're playing as a Peasant, it lets you rename yourself.

Spawn Sources

The Journal now shows you where Items and Enemies can be found within the Undermine. This list is not exhaustive, but should give you some big clues of where to look if you’re hunting for something in particular.

Halloween

Jack-o'-Lanterns are scattered through your runs. Smash one for a Trick (a lit Trickster bomb!) or a Treat (food, gold, or a small chance at a Blessing). Wraiths also haunt the Hub for the season.

New Enemies

• Siren (her song heals allies)
• Silver Siren (her song grants extra armor to allies)
• Urchineer (throws urchins)
• Spiny Urchineer (throws spiny urchins)
• Cranchor (an invulnerable crab with one weakness)
• Bing Bong (becomes armored when near)
• Shockleaf, Duskpetal and Sunflower (variants of the Glimmerweed)

New Items

• Rainbow Shell (Artifact)
• Chromatic Blade (Upgrade): Increases your Elemental damage
• Peasant's Potion: Recovers all of your Health, Armor and Mana, and is named after the peasant who made it possible
• Occultist's Syrup (Potion): Makes a Curse Sticky
• Erebus Oriv (Relic): Adds Curse buildup with all incoming Combat Damage, and your Curse buildup does not decrease over time
• Phanes Oriv (Relic): Increases the Stats and Speed of bosses
• Occultist's Respite (Potion): Opens a portal to the Black Cauldron

New Achievements

• A Loving Sacrifice: Cured Beltrame's Affliction
• Danger Noodle: Defeated Orzo
• Dank: Entered the Smuggler's Grotto
• Skull Crack: Secured the Erebus Oriv
• Shrunk: Secured the Phanes Oriv

Balance Changes

Enemies, Followers, and Difficulty

• The Halls of Din and the Arcane Sanctum were using easier than intended enemy stats. They now use their intended stats
• Lowered the Blackguard's sight radius.
• Shockwaves now deal Physical damage in addition to Shockwave damage
• Follower base HP has been increased.
• Charisma now increases follower HP by 4% per point (up from 2%).

Curses, Blessings, and Tendency

• Ascendant curses are now more common, and even more so once you already have one. This results in your Ascendent stacks naturally getting bigger instead of winding up with a wide smattering of other curses.
• Numerous curses have been marked as “hazards” (such as Ball Lightning and other curses that tend to spawn things). You are very unlikely to see hazard curses if you already have a hazard curse. This is to reduce curse chaos during your run.
• Picking up a skull now lowers your Tendency by 2, increasing your chances of a Sho’guul encounter.
• Apostasy no longer drops unless you have a Blessing, and Nullification no longer drops unless you have a Relic.
• Fixed an unintentional issue with Order's Aether that allowed it to remove Sticky curses.
• Dirty Dishes and Dread now count as gaining a curse when they Ascend, which will lower your Tendency just like acquiring a new curse would.
• Attuning a Blessing now Ascends it directly, rather than dropping a Blessing on the ground. Sorry, Magic Powder!

Players and Items

• Players now take 66% less damage from their own explosives.
• Dirk's Locket now transmutes the items in front of you, rather than the entire room, and now also transmutes food. Its casting cost has been slightly increased.
• Hungry Ghost and Archon no longer trigger on projectiles.
• Waking Light now spawns only one Smidgen at a time.
• Unstable Concoction now triggers only the first time an item lands, so you can no longer juggle gold across the screen to create hundreds of shockwaves.
• Magic Powder now spawns less frequently.
• The Geometric Fetish's choice is now mandatory, preventing you from wasting it by accidentally canceling out of the Chooser.
• Holesome no longer returns Curses and Orivs that fall down a hole.

Rewards and Unlocks

• Rare chests now contain more crowns, and have a 50% chance to also drop 20 Thorium.
• Defeating Cruciferous for the first time now awards 10 bonus crowns.
• Queen now awards 4 crowns for completing her quest, and Portimer awards 3 crowns when you rescue him. Beltrame awards 2 crowns for completing her potion quest.
• Recipes no longer drop until you've discovered the Hub Lab.
• Noxx's egg can't be found until you've discovered the Roost.
• Portimer's encounter now becomes available once you've unlocked Beltrame and Danté, instead of after buying the Duelist's Bangle.
• Respite potion recipes no longer drop from blueprint chests. Each one now appears in its associated Landmark room.

Other Changes

Faster Loading and Better Performance

We've spent a lot of this update on load times and performance optimizations. More assets are now preloaded when the game boots up, trading memory consumption for better runtime performance, reducing FPS hitches during busy fights. We’ve implemented a new system of Behavior pre-warming that should further prevent frame spikes from happening when many entities spawn at once. Load times are generally quicker, especially after you’ve played for a bit and the caches have been fully warmed.

Map and Navigation

• Added many new minimap icons for many new NPCs and encounter types.
• Boss Chests are now labeled correctly in the antechamber, and their minimap icon clears once you open them.
• You can now immediately fast travel to rooms in the Hub that you’ve already been to during a previous run. This should save you some time as you prepare for your current run.
• The off-screen projectile indicator has been reworked. It now shows directionality better and gives you some indication as to how close the projectile is to entering the screen. You can adjust the intensity of these indicators from the Options menu.

Journal

• The follower tooltip now shows your Charisma bonus.
• Follower HP bars no longer overflow so easily when your followers have armor.
• Repeatable Familiar tasks now show how many times you've repeated them.
• Transparent boxes throughout the UI have been darkened to make text easier to read.

Mods

• Mods are now turned on and off for the whole game from the Mods panel, rather than per save slot.
• Items from mods now have a "Modded" tag so you can tell where they came from.
• Mods can now provide a short description for the Mods screen. You can still see their full description in the Workshop on Steam.

Everything Else

• Bookshelves in the Hub Library and Lab are no longer peepable.
• Popups now follow the camera smoothly instead of lagging a frame behind.
• You can now Jump, Dash, Roll, and Blink through a corridor into the next room.
• Projectile hits now knock back and kick along the direction the projectile was traveling.
• Removed the Endless record statue from the Lobby, since the Lifetime Stats page now covers it.
• Rooms have fewer hazards, plants, rocks and props cluttering them up.
• Lamps spawn less often, but now give off twice as much light.

Bug Fixes

Gameplay

• Fixed an issue that would cause the camera to zoom out forever with the right combination of Dwindle and Jawbone.
• Fixed an issue that could cause you to die again immediately after being resurrected if you took damage on the same frame that invulnerability was applied.
• Fixed an issue that would cause Ascend and Descend UI indicators to get stuck while animating.
• Stat kickers now reliably show STAT+ or STAT- when a Blessing Ascends or Descends.
• Spite and Defiance now show their levels in the HUD.
• Wayward and Daemonic Strength have been added to the Journal.
• Wayward now cleans up correctly, and its effects no longer carry over into your next run.
• Queen's Ticker is now better about following you.
• Refreshment Potion now works on Simple Chest slots and on items stolen from bandits.
• Butchers now correctly spawn food from enemies.
• Increased the ambient light level in Cruciferous’ arena so it won’t get so dark when all the braziers go out.
• Fixed some issues with Nicoise's evaluation logic in the Archive.
• Fixed some problems with Order's dialog when you pick up her items.
• Fixed some co-op save and load bugs.
• The Peasant's thrown pickaxe now more reliably returns to their hand when you change rooms.
• Bandit King's Crown now notices when you already have a Bandit when loading a save file.
• Aura buffs, such as Lava Walkers' fire resistance on your followers, no longer drop off when a target briefly leaves play.
• Fixed an issue where Spiders from Lotheb's Egg and Arachnophobia would get stuck on the ground right after spawning.
• Holes and phantom tiles no longer get out of sync if you leave a room while the tiles are appearing.
• Fixed a ton of crashes and exceptions that were reported through the Crash Reporter.

UI

• Advancing multi-line dialog that would end in a question no longer skips straight to the question.
• Item Tooltips in the Journal try harder to always be fully on-screen.
• Legendary Item Cards no longer show the Common background behind them, making their opacity the same as all other Item Cards.
• With two bomb slots, your default bomb no longer shows in the second slot in the Journal.
• Fixed a text wrapping issue when Doom and the High Res Timer are both on.
• The character unlock popup no longer clips its banner for characters with very long names.
• Fixed a few issues with the map when you don't have the Alterra Atlas.
• Reflections no longer disappear when the object casting them moves just off-screen.
• Room transitions no longer show a lighting seam as you transition between rooms with different light levels.
• The camera on the Game Over screen now matches your zoom level in the case that you die while Embiggened or Debiggened.
• The run timer's milliseconds no longer get stuck on long runs.
• The Fast Travel map no longer spills outside its frame on very large floors.
• The Planes Walker achievement no longer shows as incomplete in the Journal, though you might need to re-earn this to get it synced back up with your Steam achievement.

Anvil Changes

Mods

• If a mod fails the security check, the remaining installed mods now continue to load.
• Requirements on an EncounterData that's merged in with the base encounters are now respected.
• If a bundle contains an asset that's already loaded (the same mod installed twice, or two mods sharing an asset), loading now skips the duplicate with a warning instead of crashing.

New Actions and Data Features

• New AscendsItem, SetSticky and Obliterate behavior actions.
• WaitForGainsStatusEffectEvent, WaitForLosesStatusEffectEvent and WaitForStatusEffectChangeEvent can now also trigger when you Ascend or Descend a Blessing or Curse.
• The Spawn action now has an Output List field, so you can get every entity it spawned (for example, from a SpawnTableData).
• SpawnModule spawn events can now have Requirements.
• The Telegraph action can now set an indicator distance to show an off-screen indicator for the length of the telegraph. This lets you warn players of things like Beams that might be about to enter the screen.
• FireBeamCommand can now set an alliance override.
• Encounters can be marked Auto Visit, so they're automatically discovered and visited (and available for fast travel) the next time they load.
• RoomData now has its own Extra Weight, which is multiplied with the encounter's extra weight when placing extras.
• Cutscenes now have a Priority field for when more than one is eligible to run.
• Loc text can now include {capture:guid} to show a captured string.
• The Team stat now goes up to 4 to include Neutral and Trap.
• Encounters can now set several flags when they begin, instead of just one.
• ItemModule has a new Exclude from Holesome flag, for items that Holesome shouldn't recover after they fall down a hole.

Breaking Changes

• ShowStatKickers no longer supports the Automatic transaction type. Use the new StatKickerContext decorator instead: it records the current values before running its AddModifier child, so it always knows which direction the stat changed.
• The inspector no longer lets you change the GUID of a Data object, Encounter or BehaviorTree. This is entirely managed by the GUID Warden.

Editor

• Most module fields now have help text in the inspector.
• The BehaviorModule has a new Clone Behavior button that copies the current behavior into the same folder.
• Added a tool that checks all Data objects, BehaviorTrees and Encounters for duplicate GUIDs.
• Importing lots of assets at once is now much faster.
• Fixed circle and square shadows in Anvil projects.
• Fixed the Install Unity link in the Anvil app.