Early Access - v0.80.10

Wardens of Wen - Update Notes: v0.78.4 to v0.80.10

This update range focused on multiplayer reliability, enemy navigation and bridge routing, improved world lighting, and the arrival of the Hollow Crown human boss encounters.

Major World Map Expansion and Elevation Changes

• Reinforced Wen's outer walls and expanded the city with a much larger stronghold.
• Replaced the covered forest northwest of Wen with a ruined region and a massive keep where Kalibros resides.
• Replaced the area east of Wen with a mountainous region with new hanging bridges.
• Added new elevation changes throughout the expanded map, allowing Wardens and enemies to travel both over and under hanging bridges.
• Updated bridge, ramp, and elevation routing to support the new multi-level terrain and pursuit paths.

Multiplayer Stability and Parity

Important Multiplayer Note: Multiplayer is still very much under development and may contain bugs, desynchronization, and unfinished parity issues. I apologize for the long wait on multiplayer parity and appreciate your patience while I continue to improve the experience.

• Improved multiplayer authority timing with fixed 30 Hz match ticks and more reliable host/client input synchronization.
• Added clearer network diagnostics, including tick drift, acknowledged input, dropped inputs, and snapshot bandwidth usage.
• Fixed door transitions so both players correctly move between interior and exterior maps.
• Improved shared pickup synchronization, pickup radius behavior, inventory capacity handling, and replicated equipment updates.
• Fixed duplicated combat, healing, and pickup audio on owning clients.
• Improved replicated projectile animation state, including authored effects such as Jade's lightning.
• Enemies now ignore ghosted or defeated Wardens when selecting targets.

Enemy Navigation and Pathfinding Improvements

• Optimized enemy navigation during heavy waves with shared route work, persistent avoidance data, cached blocker checks, and event-driven path updates.
• Added navigation profiler data for blocker queries, shared-route reuse, fallback paths, bridge handoffs, and tracked actor height updates.
• Distant enemies now continue pursuing the Warden every frame instead of waiting for their normal update slot.
• Fixed enemies losing valid shared pursuit lanes during blocker recovery.
• Improved navigation debug overlays so they show the route an enemy actually owns.
• Fixed large enemies getting stuck on bridge ramps and elevation transitions.
• Enemies now hold authored bridge handoff routes until the transition is clear.
• Improved enemy movement around tight corners with collision-checked wall-follow steps.

Additional Living World Lighting

• Added depth and ambient lighting improvements to newly added map crystals.
• Colored ambient lights to reflect their source crystal and they also have stable brightness variation, pulse and twinkle-rate variation, and smoother distance-based fading around the Warden.

Hollow Crown Human Bosses

• Added Eadric Mournhelm and Osric Gallowmere as human boss encounters in Infinite Mode after wave 20.
• The bosses lead escort packs, use telegraphed Warden-inspired abilities, display visible stats, call capped reinforcements, and return stronger after their first two defeats.
• Third defeats permanently vanquish each boss and award jackpot rewards with explicit Unique and Artifact chances.
• Added authored movement and combat animations, boss bars, role markers, active-buff cues, overhead speech, and detailed health, shield, and energy hover cards.
• Improved boss scaling, movement presentation, ability animations, facing, attack follow-through, Dash Strike travel, Consecration damage, and defeat animations.
• Defeated bosses now kneel before despawning.
• Downed bosses visibly recover over two rounds, resist Kaboom and Voodoo, and receive only a capped healer boost (10%).
• Recovering bosses are partially transparent, hide their nameplates, and show a readable recovery timer.

Minimap and Presentation Updates

• Added authored minimap location icons for the Pub, Blacksmith, Trader, Church, and Cave.
• Improved profiler layout and navigation overlay readability around the minimap.
• Refined human boss presentation, mouseover cards, console styling, and combat feedback.

Jasper Animations Fixed

• Fixed Jasper facing opposite direction when firing his arrows sometimes.