Thanks for all the community feedback on the last update- I've made some fixes and improvements based on it! 🦀

General
• Added cactus destructibles to the Desert biome
  
  
  Balance Changes
• Double destructibles (both combat and reward) spawn in the Desert as most islands there are quite open and bare
  
• Totems are both more likely to initially spawn AND are more likely to spawn in groups
  
• Shop prices have been decreased by 25% but scale a bit more sharply when looping (so building into economy becomes more important in the late game but shops are more accessible in the early game). Greed loot now is worth exactly the same as Epic loot
  
• Slippery Slope now scales with each island similar to the Paycheck buff in the previous patch. It gives more than double the amount that Paycheck does so I’ll keep an eye on it in terms of balance. Also added total crystals gained stat for Slippery Slope in the inventory UI
  
• A lot of players have mentioned that they are seeing too many duplicates (loot with a + over it that is something you already have in your inventory) too early on in a run which pollutes chest choices so the initial chance for finding duplicates has been lowered
  
• Armor now gives enemies less health and reduces elemental damage by 50% instead of 75%. This should make fighting heavily armored enemies with elemental builds feel much less tedious
  
• Elemental enemies now take 50% less debuff stacks of that matching element (down from 75% less stacks). This means Fire Crabs or Poison Ants now will feel more consistent to fight with fire / poison builds
  
• Elites now have 25% resistance to elemental debuffs (previously 0% resistance) and Bosses now have 50% resistance (previously 75%). These changes will make elemental builds much more consistent across elite and boss fights, notably the armored ant boss which could take forever if relying on an elemental build
  
• Elemental enemies matching element resistance decreased from -50% to -25%
  
• Previously, enemy attack and movement speed increased by 1% with each island. This didn’t really end up feeling very noticeable so it now is applied per loop instead for a more noticeable jump in challenge (the values are unchanged from before, just applied at a different time)
  
• Scorpion health buffed by 25% (for such an intimidating enemy, they were blown away too fast by most builds- the previous nerf hit them a bit too hard)
  
• Scorpions no longer spawn on the Volcanic biome as there were some islands that felt unfair for them to be on
  
• Scorpions can no longer be shielded
  
• Fire Pumpkins now have a longer time between attacks, making it less likely that the entire floor gets covered with fire
  
• Grub health reduced by 25%
  
• Removed smaller Desert islands from the elite island pool as these could create unfair fights in cramped spaces
  
• Vitality and Second Wind now show if their damage bonus is active or not in the inventory UI
  
• Hitmarker audio lowered further as it was still quite grating when a lot was going on
  
  
  Buffs
• Explosive Armor radius doubled
  
• Flammable Armor radius doubled but fire stacks reduced from 75 to 25 (since the previous patch allowed it to damage the armor owner, it became a bit too strong)
  
• Fire Shot fire stacks increased from 25 to 30
  
• Dual Shotguns damage increased from 5 to 6
  
• Auto Shotgun damage increased from 3 to 4
  
• Rocket Launcher damage increased from 30 to 35
  
• Burst Pistol number of shots per burst increased from 4 to 5 and clip size increased from 24 to 30
  
• Auto Rifle fire rate increased to be more balanced with the other starting weapons
  
  
  Nerfs
• Starting health reduced from 400 to 300 (the mega buff to starting health ended up removing the danger of the first biome, making the early game feel a bit free and making building into health less important)
  
• Similarly, hearts had gotten buffed too much which often made choosing health perks feel like a waste. New values:
  
  
  1. Bronze Heart: From 150 max health down to 125 max health
     
  2. Silver Heart: From 400 max health down to 250 max health
     
  3. Gold Heart: From 1000 max health down to 650 max health
• Due to the way that the Ring Of Precision was calculated, it actually added more critical hit damage than intended so has been reduced from +250% to +150% critical hit damage
  
• Ring Of Defense damage reduction reduced from 50% to 40%
  
• Coral Amulet extra chest pickups reduced from 3 to 2
  
• Tony’s Amulet extra shop options reduced from 6 to 5
  
• Grappling Hook damage reduced by 50% as it was dealing double the damage of the Grenade ability while also providing big movement gains- this melted through elites in the early game and wasn’t intended to be so strong for single target damage
  
  
  Bug Fixes
• Fixed annoying bug that caused Limpets to become invulnerable whenever frozen, leading to dragged out fights in certain cases
  
• Fixed Giant Ant homing attack that could go invisible but still deal damage
  
• Fixed Bouncing Shot incorrectly calculating damage that could lead to millions of damage out of nowhere
  
• Fixed bug that occasionally prevented the Burst Pistol from firing when using Autoloader
  
• Fixed non hosting players not seeing Nest health bars updating correctly
  
• Fixed Glass Totems being destroyed by Aura perks or Powerslide
  
• Fixed Ring Of Rocket Jumping not working with the Cluster Launcher
  
• Fixed issue that could prevent the game launching with Steam correctly which would break multiplayer invites
  
• Fixed various cases where UI text was getting cut off
  
• Removed broken Demolition nest UI counter
  
• Fixed several rare crashes
  
• Fixed longstanding bug that caused totems that dispensed loot or secret chests in shops to have a far greater luck value than intended, leading them to constantly spawn Epic and Legendary loot which could create broken power spikes. Also fixed Driller and Rare Treasure loot drops being influenced by Streamer Loot which only should affect chest loot

RELICS
ENHANCEMENTS
SNIPER REVAMP
NEW WEAPON: MARKSMAN RIFLE
DESERT BIOME
NEW ISLAND TYPE: DEMOLITION
INVENTORY STATS

GENERAL

• Added 30 Relics to the game. Relics are a new loot category that are found under Perks in your inventory. They can only be picked up once (can't be leveled up like perks) and have powerful effects such as being able to rocket jump. There were quite a few perk ideas that weren't fun to level up but were fun as a once off pickup so this loot category nicely fills in that gap.
  
• Added new mechanic: Enhancements: In Tony's shop you'll find an Enhancement totem which allows you to randomly roll powerful enhancements on mods and perks that previously only could be leveled up in a linear way (Dagger Arc, Mace Shot, Bubble Blast etc.). This allows for a fun new layer of buildcrafting and experimentation when at the shop: choosing to buy new loot or instead going for an enhancement
  
• Added new biome: Desert. This has now been added to the biome list per run so the amount of islands per biome has been reduced by 2: 8 islands per biome and 4 biomes per run. 32 islands for a regular victory and 64 islands for a Diamond victory. There are many more unique islands, enemies and songs planned for the desert that'll get added in future updates
  
• Added new enemy: Scorpion
  
• Added new evolved enemy variant: Elite Pumpkin
  
• Added new island type: Demolition: Destroy all enemy nests to complete the island
  
• Added inventory stats (both core stats like Critical Hit Chance and Global Damage as well as per-loot stats for certain perks like Assassin to show how much extra damage has been added by this perk overall)
  
• Added 2 new songs
  
• Added 4 new skins: Kaleidoscopic, Fake Gold, Vibrations and Focus
  
• Added 6 new rank related achievements: Silver, Gold, Sapphire, Emerald, Ruby and Diamond. These correspond to your account rank which is based on the average rank of your weapons (so if you have mostly Gold weapons, you’d most likely have a Gold account rank). There have been a lot of requests to add a long term goal to work towards and while the account rank system has been in place for a while, there was no real incentive to get Diamond other than for bragging rights
  
• Added new weapon: Marksman Rifle: A hybrid triple barreled scoped rifle
  
• Revamped Sniper with scope, improved visuals and audio and rebalanced stats to feel more powerful. More than doubled damage and increased explosion radius but reduced fire rate. Increased hipfire spread but aiming with the scope is pinpoint accurate
  
• Added new sounds and VFX for the Seagle
  
• Some perks have been moved over to Relics:
  
  
  1. Clearance has been replaced by the Ring Of Value: Shops always contain a pedestal that is 75% discounted
     
  2. Repelling Dash has been replaced by the Ring Of Repulsion
     
  3. Fast Claws has been replaced by the Ring Of Reloading
• Increased base walk movement speed slightly to make traversal when not sliding feel less sluggish
  
• As per player feedback, sliding is now more immediate (less acceleration), faster and wears off more quickly so it is much more effective as a short dodge and is more responsive in general
  
• Added the island progression UI to the main gameplay UI so you can now easily check how far into a biome you are
  
• Added Banana consumable that heals for 75% of your max health
  
• Hearts now heal for the amount of max health that they give
  
• Healing chests now contain a minimum of 2 loot choices to prevent situations where you’d get a banana with full health
  
• Added new weapon mod: Boomerang Shot: Shots deal more damage and fly back towards you (Try lining up shots with the sniper to hit the same enemy twice!)
  
• Added new weapon mod: Orbiting Shot: Shots deal more damage but orbit around you
  
• Added new grenade mod: Scythe Vortex: Grenades explode into scythe vortexes
  
• Added new perk: Orbiting Scythe: Gain a short lived orbiting scythe after each elimination
  
• Each “Luck” perk / relic has a specific purpose to build into:
  
  
  1. Rigged Totems = Totem Luck
     
  2. Streamer Loot = Loot Rarity Luck
     
  3. Gold Dice = Mod Trigger Luck
     
  4. Ring Of Luck = Perk Trigger Luck (perk luck was the most broken in the early beta builds but since this is a relic and can only be picked up once, it’s now a fun power spike without completely breaking the game). This does affect critical hit chance- the only perk it doesn’t affect is Bulletproof to prevent being able to become invincible
• Added a new placeholder weapon model for the Cluster Launcher
  
• Added FX and a sound when you block damage successfully by dashing (this mechanic was quite hidden in general so now it’s more obvious when you intentionally block damage this way)

BALANCE CHANGES

• Lots of pacing + loot balance improvements: the gap between experienced players getting easy snowball runs and inexperienced players being frustrated by RNG was too high and balance was a common complaint. There are now far fewer cases where simply being lucky will be enough to win a run, I’ve done my best to make each run feel much more consistent and power well earned instead of coming down to being randomly very lucky
  
• The Random Islands difficulty modifier is now baked into the game by default (as the variety it brings makes the game more fun and it doesn’t actually add difficulty) and has been replaced with the new Strategic Enemies modifier: More challenging formations of enemies spawn. The main thing you’ll notice from this being enabled is medium enemies sometimes showing up on the first wave of arena islands instead of the usual small easy enemies- lots of new interesting combinations of enemies possible now. This also makes ranged enemies slightly more likely to spawn on Horde islands
  
• Shops now only spawn on the 7th island of each biome
  
• For simplicity, the game now only saves on the first island of each biome rather than halfway through which led to confusion and also opened up a few cheesy ways to get achievements by frequently reloading saves which isn’t the intended design
  
• Waves islands have been revamped: there are now 5 waves total and no small enemies spawn, only medium and hard enemies. The next wave will not start until the previous wave has been fully cleared. This change makes Waves islands feel more distinct from other island types and players should be less likely to take damage from a randomly spawning small enemy and instead take it in a more fair way
  
• It’s now less likely for both portal choices to be Horde islands
  
• I’ve adjusted many specific enemy health pools to better match their type- in general champion enemies (sniper crab, shotgun crab etc.) have a bit more health to better match their category- previously they’d get blown away in seconds along with the regular enemies and this felt like they didn’t live up to their intimidating names. There are now much more varied and enjoyable fights past the first biome instead of aiming at the center of the island and destroying everything in 1 second (don’t get me wrong, this can still happen but just a bit less often)
  
• Key totem cost increased back from 2 to 3 (with more biomes and more ways to get keys it’s more balanced at a slightly higher cost)
  
• Gold Totems now cost 66% of your max health (up from 50% of your max health): it was possible to come across multiple gold totems and become extremely powerful early on- this should smooth out some of those unbalanced scenarios and make choosing to go for a gold totem a bit more impactful
  
• Totems are very slightly less likely to appear (clumps of totems appearing at once could create unbalanced power spikes early on that were completely based on luck)
  
• The Healthy enemy buff has been reduced from +200% health to +100% health
  
• Enemy movement speed on ice has been reduced by 33% as there were situations where enemies could outrun you
  
• Poison Slug explosion damage increased by 33%
  
• Sniper Crabs now have a melee attack to prevent them choosing to snipe at very close range which made taking damage unavoidable in some situations
  
• Grenade Crab projectile explosion radius reduced slightly
  
• Ice Pumpkin wind up speed and damage radius increased by 25% (the previous nerf just made them a free enemy- remember you can block their attacks by being out of line of sight even if you are within their damage sphere)
  
• Ice Pumpkins now start with 3 armor plates
  
• Ice Pumpkin AOE radius has been reduced and they must get closer to begin attacking
  
• Enemies now have less delay between spawning and first attacking on Nightmare difficulty (previously they’d stand around for 2 full seconds after spawning before starting any attacks)
  
• More enemies spawn when looping (once off, doesn’t get added to per loop: it’s the same for loop 1 and loop 50)
  
• Reduced Blocker Crab health but gave them 1 armor plate
  
• Limpets now have a longer vulnerable window but attack twice and have a new arc projectile pattern
  
• Slightly increased Lightning Slug movement speed
  
• Grubs now only have 1 armor plate but move 33% faster
  
• Elite Lightning Crab projectile hitbox slightly reduced and explosion radius reduced by 15%
  
• All elite enemy health slightly boosted to make their fights last a little bit longer and feel a bit more dangerous
  
• Ultra Chaos enemy dash (side jump) chance halved and regular jump chance slightly reduced
  
• Guaranteed more ranged enemy variety (medium and hard enemy waves) to prevent cases where like 20 of the same ant spawn which is less interesting and exciting than an assortment of enemies
  
• Fixed the XL challenge modifier not actually spawning 3x enemies- it now spawns only 2x the amount of enemies to balance as 3x would feel too overwhelming. Also to note: the Explosive Enemies modifier spawns more enemies than before as those islands usually ended super fast without much of a challenge
  
• Regular and Blocker skulls are 25% more expensive to spawn, meaning they’ll spawn in large groups less often
  
• An extra boss now spawns on each Boss island when looping
  
• Ants are less likely to choose far away locations when attacking and will be more close range in general (this is to make clearing islands with a lot of ants less tedious)
  
• Doubled the time it takes for enemies to start regenerating health when the Regenerating Enemies modifier is active
  
• The Armored Enemies modifier now gives enemies 3 armor plates instead of 6 to prevent things feeling tedious in certain situations
  
• The amount of max health lost when the Eternal Punishment modifier is active has been reduced from 2% to 1%
  
• Lightning rocks are less effective as they were able to wipe entire islands almost instantly with very little effort
  
• If playing with all difficulty modifiers enabled on Nightmare difficulty, the difficulty UI text will now indicate that by calling it “TRUE NIGHTMARE”
  
• After lots of playtesting, many mods and perk have had slight “nudges” to their values to get them feeling balanced with all of the above changes: there are too many small changes to list here but you may notice some values being a bit different to before
  
• Since combo can be increased to 8x with a relic, I’ve capped the max combo that affects your score specifically to 5x to prevent high score runs relying on finding a relic

BUFFS

• Base player health increased from 200 to 400 and Nightmare no longer reduces starting health: there were too many situations where I was one shot by the second biome that I’d prefer a larger starting health pool that takes longer to whittle down but also longer to heal back up
  
• Bronze Heart max health gain increased from +50 max health to +150 max health
  
• Silver Heart max health gain increased from +100 max health to +400 max health
  
• Gold Heart max health gain increased from +300 max health to +1000 max health
  
• Added more health pickups in Tony’s garden and increased the healing value from 25 health to 50 health
  
• You now start with 1% crit chance by default (so picking up things like Critical Blast or Critical Arrow aren’t a complete waste without finding more crit perks)
  
• Power Punch now multiplies the 200% critical damage bonus instead of just adding a flat percentage to it. Also Power Punch critical damage increased from +25% to +33%
  
• Fixed Critical Thinking not calculating as expected, it now multiplies the final damage output after a crit is calculated instead of adding or subtracting a flat amount. The level 1 damage amount has been reduced from +50% to +33% as it’s now much more powerful. In the old patch if you had 500% global damage and Critical Thinking level 1, you’d end up with 550% damage when landing a crit. Now (even after the nerf), you’d end up with 665% global damage when landing a critical hit
  
• Landmine Shot landmine now explodes after 1 second instead of 2.5 seconds which felt too long in most cases
  
• The chance for duplicate loot to show up in a chest in the endgame (when looping more than once) has been reduced from 75% to 50% so there will be more chances for fresh loot
  
• Autoloader no longer resets the Escalating Shot bonus AND will also trigger On Reload mods such as Reload Arc or Shockwave
  
• Time Bolt and Ultra Shot now explode even if they didn’t hit anything to prevent rare cases where it looked like they should hit but instead just vanished into thin air
  
• Heavy Hitter fire rate reduction decreased from -15% to -10%
  
• Health Shot and Money Shot now affect all damage dealt to enemies from projectiles (including explosions) instead of only counting direct impacts which made them far less effective on weapons like the Rocket Launcher than they were meant to be
  
• Escalating Shot now only reduces weapon fire rate by -33% (instead of -50% previously) to make it more enticing to use on weapons other than the minigun
  
• Reload Arc cooldown reduced from 5 seconds to 2 seconds
  
• Reload Arc and Proximity Barrage projectiles no longer knock back enemies (this sound like a nerf but is actually a buff because it keeps enemies inside of your own damage areas and stops them attacking unpredictably in mid air)
  
• Shockwave cooldown reduced from 4 seconds to 3 seconds
  
• Freezing Enemies, Flammable Enemies, Electric Enemies and Poisonous Enemies have had their radii doubled as they felt underwhelming as legendaries before
  
• All “Storm” mods have had their cooldowns reduced to allow them to trigger much more often
  
• Grenade explosion damage increased from 50 to 75
  
• Grenade Mods now correctly affect damage dealt by damage areas such as the red area left behind by Laser Beam or the Black Hole area while active
  
• Damage Aura damage increased from 2 to 3
  
• Big Hearts has been moved from Epic rarity to Rare rarity
  
• Ice Strike damage increased from 25 to 200 and ice stacks increased from 25 to 75
  
• Fire Strike damage increased from 25 to 200 and fire stacks increased from 100 to 250
  
• Lightning Strike damage increased from 25 to 200 and lightning stacks increased from 50 to 200
  
• Poison Strike damage increased from 25 to 200 and poison stacks increased from 25 to 100
  
• Crystal Strike damage increased from 100 to 1000
  
• Increased Arcane Blast projectile lifetime from 0.66 seconds to 1.0 seconds
  
• Projectiles that pierce can now hit the same enemy twice after a 0.1 second delay (previously they could only hit the same enemy once). This synergizes nicely with Boomerang Shot as you can get double the value for your projectiles if you line them up right
  
• Flammable Armor and Explosive Armor now affect the enemy that was hit and not just nearby enemies
  
• Shops were feeling a bit too expensive on Nightmare and Ultra Chaos so the prices have been reduced by 15%
  
• Rigged Totems has had a substantial buff, previously it was only 10% increased chance which meant a 25% chance totem actually only got upgraded to be 27.5% to trigger which felt quite unnoticeable. It’s now a 25% increased chance AND no longer gets capped at 100%
  
• Critical Blast damage radius doubled and chance to trigger increased from 6% to 15%
  
• Reduced Spore Shot mushroom health by 66% so it should be much easier to explode them now
  
• Spore Shot / Spore Explosion mushrooms once again deal poison damage
  
• Fire and lightning damage now is affected by poison bonus incoming damage- new synergy?
  
• Paycheck no longer gives a flat amount of crystals as this quickly fell off in terms of scaling. Instead it now gives 1/5th the cost of a Rare pickup each island (this value increases after each island)
  
• Dual Pistols damage increased from 4 to 5
  
• Burst Pistol damage increased from 5 to 6
  
• Blade Launcher damage increased from 4 to 5
  
• Cluster Launcher damage increased from 3 to 4
  
• Orb Launcher damage increased from 6 to 8 (The slow projectiles often meant that it just didn’t feel good to use the orb launcher compared to other weapons with faster projectiles so this buff should bring it in line to be a more satisfying choice)
  
• Orb Launcher projectiles now have a slightly smaller radius to prevent them getting stuck on nearby terrain instead of reaching the target
  
• Gold max health rocks can now spawn shards that spawn multiple max health bubbles at once (similar to how it already works with regular green health rocks- stand in the venn diagram of health bubbles for max effectiveness!)

NERFS

• Laser Beam ability direct impact damage reduced from 50 to 30
  
• Poison now wears off twice as fast
  
• Link Shot and Drill Shot base trigger chance decreased from 3% to 2.5%
  
• Hot Shot critical hit chance reduced from 15% to 12% (double that of Sharpshooter)
  
• Critical Arrow now is chance based instead of guaranteed to trigger on crit (starts at 12% chance)
  
• Sniper clip size reduced from 10 to 6 and reload time increased from 1.5 seconds to 1.75 seconds (this is due to the sniper revamp making it a much stronger weapon overall so this is more of a rebalance than a nerf)
  
• Health Totems are less likely to spawn and more likely to explode after use
  
• Lava now applies 3x fire stacks in the Volcanic biome (it barely applied 1 stack in the previous update which made landing in lava feel quite free and not a threat at least on the first loop)

QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES

• Improved visibility across all biomes including revamping many overly bright or distracting VFX
  
• Hitmarker sounds are now much quieter for fast firing weapons and slightly louder for slow firing weapons instead of being constantly too loud or quiet depending on the weapon chosen
  
• The portal countdown now only starts when the majority of players have voted for a portal to prevent situations where a single player was choosing a portal before the others were ready
  
• Increased crosshair outline size for better visibility on Arctic islands
  
• The pause when losing focus feature is now optional and can be disabled in the settings menu
  
• Spectating has had a number of improvements such as being able to still see all other players and their health bars and being able to cycle through players to spectate instead of being locked on one until they get eliminated
  
• Made several optimizations to prevent non-hosting players from getting kicked from multiplayer games when a lot was happening at once
  
• Optimized performance heavy islands
  
• Totems that require crystals now display how many crystals you are short by
  
• Barrel Explosion barrels no longer get knocked around as much when shooting them so it should be much easier to line up and get them to explode near enemies
  
• Made several performance improvements for projectiles which should help late game performance when a lot is going on
  
• Increased the minimum distance enemies can spawn from you (this should reduce situations where enemies spawn right under you)
  
• Added a sound when players ping
  
• Added support for 3840x1080, 3840x1440 and 5120x1440 resolutions
  
• Aiming field of view (FOV) now scales with the FOV setting chosen in the settings menu in order to feel more consistent across all FOV ranges
  
• Reduced the interaction radius to prevent accidentally choosing a portal when looting chests. Also tightened up the interaction direction threshold so it’s less likely to accidentally choose a pickup to your left or right when trying to focus on a pickup in the middle
  
• Added 8 total bananas on Parkour islands to prevent situations where not everyone would get a banana when playing in a lobby with more than 4 players :(
  
• Driller now takes into account every player in a multiplayer match so it doesn’t matter who breaks each destructible- if one player has Driller equipped, it’ll roll for a trigger
  
• Enemy anti-camping values have been tweaked to reduce situations where they are constantly flying at you and are hard to hit: they now fly at slower intervals but with greater speed so ideally they’ll get back to a place they can walk faster than before
  
• Fixed Elite portal description mentioning moving to the next biome when you can get random Elite islands mid biome
  
• Chests are now color coded to match the loot category they belong to

BUG FIXES

• Double Tap now shows the correct trigger percentage in the inventory and should deal damage more reliably. The only case where it won’t is on weapons that pierce- it’ll trigger on the last pierce, not on every shot (so on the Sniper this is on hitting the third enemy after piercing two before)
  
• Big Shot no longer reduces Laser Cannon projectile size
  
• Fixed Elite Fire Crab not having his weapon equipped
  
• Fixed incorrect music playing for non-hosting players in shops
  
• Fixed issue that prevented the Quickplay menu being usable when returning to the lobby after being eliminated
  
• Fixed player names sometimes not showing up on the gameplay UI in the lobby after they joined
  
• Fixed some effects not being properly optimized at Low graphics settings: performance should be improved if playing on Low now
  
• Fixed bug that allowed you to pick up armor plates when already full
  
• Fixed bug that showed enemy health bars after they had been eliminated in some cases
  
• Fixed saved abilities and melee weapons not restoring correctly when resuming runs in some cases
  
• Fixed Critical Thinking not applying to some damage types
  
• Fixed the Laser Beam ability often hitting the ground right in front of you instead of your intended target
  
• Fixed Blindfire not affecting spread on some weapons
  
• Fixed bug that granted the Playing With Power achievement after playing the Arcade minigame when it should only be granted in the main mode
  
• Fixed rare softlock that could happen with the Explosive Enemies challenge modifier active
  
• Fixed enemies not taking bonus damage when poisoned from melee or Time Shot
  
• Fixed abilities using weapon hitmarkers which played annoyingly loud hitmarker sounds in many cases
  
• Fixed Strike mods having broken looking FX that didn’t convey the true radius
  
• Fixed Arcane Blast not applying arcane stacks
  
• Fixed Sturdy Totems infinite loot exploit

That's all for now but I plan on releasing some more island variations, enemy types and new songs in a bonus mini patch very soon! As always thank you for playing, I love working on this game 🦀

Difficulty scaling improvements
• Enemy damage bonus when looping has been removed. There was previously a whopping +100% damage multiplier to all enemy attacks when looping from island 33 onwards which created very unfair situations where enemies would melt your entire health bar in a second, especially with fire. Enemy damage should feel much more fair and consistent when looping while still being a challenge- looping is meant to be quite difficult
  
• Enemy spawn bonus when looping decreased from +33% to +20%
  
• Islands 1 and 2 of a biome no longer can spawn two waves of ranged enemies back to back
  
  These changes should make looping feel far less unfair / punishing while maintaining the challenge
  
  
  Scorpion mega nerf + rebalance
• Scorpion projectile damage reduced by 60%, projectile radius reduced by 33%, projectile speed reduced by 15% and removed projectile bounces. Also reworked their attack patterns to be more dodgeable and less spammy
  
• Increased scorpion walk speed slightly: it should now feel like more of a close / medium range threat and less of a run ender
  
  
  Other changes
• Flamethrower buff- now starts with level 2 Fire Shot (up from level 1)
  
• Rebalanced enhancements: pattern enhancements like Chaotic or Spiraling have less intense motion to make them less likely to miss their target. Enhancement damage increases are +50% damage other than Sticky and Damaging which are +100% (previously Damaging was at +400% which was very broken)
  
• Splitting / Scattering bonus projectiles decreased from 3 to 2 (as it was extremely broken with some combos)
  
• Fixed issue that would cause projectiles created by the Splitting and Scattering enhancement to apply ALL weapon mods to those enhanced projectiles, resulting in extreme damage spikes that weren’t intended
  
• Demolition nests now scale health more with the island count as they became far too easy to destroy past the first biome
  
• Scorpions can now spawn from red challenge crystals

ABILITIES: GRENADE, GRAPPLING HOOK, LASER BEAM, BLACK HOLE & ICE BLAST
MELEE WEAPONS: CLAW, DAGGER & HAMMER
NEW WEAPONS: LASER CANNONS & SEAGLE
MINIGAMES: ARCADE, HOLDOUT & DUEL
QUICKPLAY
Matchmake for other players at any of the three main difficulties and communicate via an improved text chat!

SIDE SLIDING
NEW CONTENT

• New island type: Waves
  
• New enemies: Starfish & Limpet
  
• New music
  
• New loot
  
• New island challenge modifiers and a blessing type

BIG BALANCE CHANGES
Reworked economy, enemy and health scaling for a more satisfying experience with less cheap ways to win or lose


GENERAL

• Added new ability system with 5 abilities to equip: Grenade, Black Hole, Grappling Hook, Ice Blast and Laser Beam. This is a big new system with a lot more mix and match potential but it is still being worked on- all "grenade" mods will work on any ability and in The Variety Update Part 2 there'll be plenty of new "Ability Mods" and all current grenade mods will be ported over
  
• Added new melee weapons: Claw, Dagger and Hammer (more are coming in The Variety Update Part 2)
  
• You can now slide sideways and aim while sliding. Also you now slide for twice as long with a more gradual decrease in speed as the slide runs out
  
• Quickplay is now enabled and should finally be working!
  
• Added new weapon: Laser Cannons
  
• Added new weapon: Seagle
  
• Added new minigame: Arcade: Eliminate as many enemies as possible before the time runs out! Enemies spawn faster by eliminating them but if you get hit 50% of the visible enemies will get eliminated, slowing down the pace
  
• Added new minigame: Holdout: No health or loot- survive as many waves as possible until you get hit! Great for warming up or to have some bite-sized crab action without committing to a full rougelike run
  
• Added new minigame: Duel: Face off in a PvP duel to finally find out who is the best crab in your lobby!
  
• Added experimental support for up to 6 players to join a single multiplayer game- the game is still balanced around 4 players max but since many have asked for 5 or 6 player lobbies, it should now be possible!
  
• Added new island type: Waves
  
• Added several new island challenge modifiers and a new blessing type
  
• Added 3 new Tropical biome islands and 1 new Arctic biome island
  
• Added new enemy: Limpet
  
• Added new enemy: Starfish
  
• Added new enemy variant: Mini Grub
  
• Added new weapon mod: Escalating Shot: Fire rate reduced by 50% but increases with each shot fired until stopping fire. The Minigun now starts with this mod by default
  
• Added new perk: Nourishing Salvage: Heal when salvaging pickups
  
• Added new perk: Crystal Fertilizer: More destructible crystals and health rocks spawn
  
• Added new perk: Bonus Chests: Get additional reward chests after every 100 eliminations
  
• Added new perk: Sturdy Totems: Totems have more guaranteed uses before they explode
  
• Added new perk: Equalizer: Damage increased if the number of equipped weapon mods, ability mods and perks are even (so having 0 Weapon Mods, 4 Grenade Mods and 10 Perks equipped would activate the damage bonus)
  
• Added new perk: Slugger: Explosive enemies deal more damage in a greater radius to nearby enemies when eliminated
  
• Added new perk: Crystal Dividends: Gain a percentage of your total crystals as a bonus after clearing each island
  
• Added new perk: Amber Resin: Healing is more effective
  
• Added new greed perk: Big Bones: Max health and damage increased but you grow larger
  
• Added new greed perk: Hoarder: Chance for an extra chest to spawn after each island but you can no longer drop pickups from your inventory
  
• Added new destructibles: Mega Crystal and Mega Challenge Crystal
  
• Added a santa hat cosmetic
  
• Enemies generally have smoother overall movement with less sudden stops and turns especially after getting knocked back or frozen
  
• Some enemies can now dash from side to side
  
• Enemies now slide on icy surfaces and crab enemies slide when moving quickly
  
• You now slide infinitely and automatically on icy surfaces
  
• Added 6 new achievements and 4 new cosmetics
  
• Added new music!
  
• Music no longer fades out after interacting with the victory crown
  
• Added many new sounds (destructibles breaking, crystal collection, slug explosions)
  
• Hitmarker audio can now stack, making hitmarkers more satisfying on shotguns and other weapons that hit multiple times at once
  
• The lobby now has random lighting presets instead of being always sunny
  
• Volcanic lighting has been reworked along with some texture and skybox improvements
  
• Night time lighting has been reworked to be actually dark
  I’m a big fan of being in a flow state while playing games and not being interrupted by loading screens or other things that make you wait for the game. While the loading times between islands were quite short in previous versions of the game, they blocked gameplay and the feeling of constantly being able to move forward and do something. Some of the changes below help remove this feeling and (sometimes subconsciously) make the game feel more satisfying to play. Please let me know if you notice any issues with these faster loading times especially related to multiplayer games but ideally it should be the same as before, just faster!
  
• Optimized level load times significantly (loading screens between islands should be almost instant)
  
• Increased the pace of some gameplay events like how quickly chests spawn after clearing an island or how fast you can read loot UI after it spawns
  
• The Duplicate symbol on loot now shows up more quickly
  
• Improved the pacing of how loot spawns from chests: all loot now spawns at once to prevent having to wait around for each pickup to appear one by one (this used to be especially tedious with a high level of Big Chests)

BALANCE CHANGES

• When the Random Islands modifier is active, Elites defeated on any island other than the final island of each biome will no longer drop healing and key chests. This is to make Elites more of a risk instead of being able to chain elite islands together and come out of it with MORE health than you started with due to all the healing chests
  
• Added new difficulty modifier: Expensive Shops: Shop prices are doubled. The reasoning behind this modifier is that even on the highest difficulties, players were easily breaking the game by buying out shops with economy builds. This modifier should make each purchase count
  
• Removed the Surging Enemies difficulty modifier as it took away from the pacing of each island and made them all blur into the same kind where all enemies were visible almost right away after spawning. The enemy spawn speed for islands later into each biome has been adjusted to prevent large amounts of enemies spawning taking a long time
  
• Hordes have been reworked to have more easy enemies and less projectile enemies as they are meant to be a fun AOE island type more focused on a horde of small enemies. This change helps differentiate them from other islands which felt similar before
  
• Enemies now get +10% more health after each wave on Horde islands. Since waves happen as fast as you can eliminate enemies, this can create an interesting opportunity to gain more crystals (since enemies drop crystals based on their max health) at the cost of a greater challenge
  
• Elites and Bosses are now immune to black holes and gain more health per player in multiplayer lobbies as it was very common for these fights to be quickly over in 4 player matches with 4 distinct builds set up, especially when looping
  
• Added dynamic damage reduction to Elites and Bosses when looping to make fights a bit more exciting without getting tedious. Here’s how it works: Elites and Bosses spawn with 50% damage reduction which reduces itself automatically over time to 0% damage reduction after 30 seconds
  
• Rebalanced many enemy minimum start islands: this means more crabs and slugs in the early islands with the more difficult enemies appearing later in a biome. This also makes biomes feel less samey as there are a wider range of enemies introduced over time instead of pretty much every enemy appearing by island 3 in a biome
  
• Laser Skulls, Laser Crabs, Ice Pumpkins and Fire Pumpkins are more likely to appear
  
• Rare loot is 20% more likely to shop up in shops as it often was hard to scale your lower tier loot the later into a run you got due to shops being full of Epic or Legendary loot
  
• Burst Pistol and Dual Pistols no longer can be tap fired faster than the actual fire rate (no more tired fingers from constant clicking) and the Burst Pistol has had a slight fire rate buff
  
• “Reward” destructibles (crystals, health rocks etc.) and “Combat” destructibles (fire rocks, energy ring rocks etc.) now spawn separately so that it’s possible for more reward destructibles to spawn on an island without flooding it with combat destructibles
  
• The global projectile limit has been increased from 400 to 500
  
• You no longer get greed perks when using the Random totem as there were many bugs with greed perks not applying correctly when acquired this way. This also acts as the only way in the game to remove a greed perk from your inventory
  
• Fire damage from stepping in lava now scales per island (previously it was threatening for the first volcanic biome encounter but became trivial when looping)
  
• Arcane Blast has been moved from the Damage loot pool to the Elemental loot pool
  
• Bigger Boom has been moved from the Damage loot pool to the Skill loot pool
  
• Wind Up now stops working on stopping fire rather than on reloading
  
• Some low value / fun weapon mods have been removed including: Knockback Shot, Ghost Ammo,
  Heavy Shot and Accelerating Shot will no longer show up unless you have Bouncing Shot (as this was the main time those mods were useful)

BUFFS

• Weapon formation mods (like Arc Shot or Square Shot) are now additive and can both be triggered in a single shot. Dual Shotguns, Auto Shotgun, Crossbow and Cluster Launcher now fire any extra shot modifiers (like Arc Shot or Square Shot) IN ADDITION to their normal projectiles. Additive shot formations now also take the weapon spread into account so high spread weapons will now shoot wonky formations. This means that Grip Tape and Blind Fire will directly influence the spacing and spread of the additive shot formations
  
• Enemies can now be frozen for 50% longer and players can only be frozen for 0.5 seconds max (as this was a common cheap death cause in previous updates: being frozen for multiple seconds unable to do anything)
  
• Flammable Armor, Explosive Armor, Exploding Enemies, Freezing Enemies, Flammable Enemies, Electric Enemies and Poisonous Enemies start with half as much radius as before but get a +25% increase in radius for each level of the perk that you have, allowing them to scale in a much more interesting way
  
• Flammable Armor and Explosive Armor have been moved from Epic to Rare rarity. These perks were previously a bit too situational to be worth it for their rarity but these changes should make them much more worthwhile to take in general
  
• Key Totem cost reduced from 3 to 2
  
• You now get +1 key per key pickup when playing on Nightmare difficulty or higher
  
• Enemy damage increases (including their debuffs) when looping has been reduced by 25% as it was too sharp of a power spike, leading to the “I’m one shot” feeling when looping no matter how much max health you had
  
• All fire enemies deal half the fire stacks as before which should make fire a much less common source of death when looping
  
• Reduced Ice Pumpkin AOE radius and damage
  
• Fire Pumpkins now have a longer time between attacks
  
• Homing Grubs, Enraged Grubs and Minigun Crabs can no longer have the Shielded buff as there were some situations that felt unfair as breaking the shield meant taking almost guaranteed damage
  
• Pufferfish explosion damage reduced by 15%
  
• Launcher Crabs projectile explosion radius reduced to match the radius of the Grenade Crab projectile
  
• The Auto Rifle always seems to be quite underwhelming so I’ve doubled the bullet velocity and greatly reduced the amount of random spread it has to establish it as a pinpoint accurate and responsive long range weapon. It should now be noticeably easier to track moving targets and not feel like you are missing shots that should hit
  
• Auto Rifle damage increased from 4 to 5
  
• Dual Shotguns damage increased from 3 to 5 and base firing spread slightly reduced
  
• Auto Shotgun damage increased from 2 to 3 and base spread slightly reduced
  
• Auto Shotgun mag size increased from 12 to 16 and range reduced by 33% (the range was absurd for a shotgun) and spread becomes wider than before with sustained fire
  
• Auto Shotgun trigger roll multiplier (the thing that makes chance based mods and perks trigger) increased by 400%
  
• Rocket Launcher explosion radius has been reduced by 25% as it was way too generous
  
• Sniper projectile collision radius (not damage radius) reduced as the projectile would often hit the ground in front of you on slopes instead of the intended target
  
• Sniper damage increased from 35 to 40
  
• Minigun now starts with Escalating Shot level 2 and mag size increased from 125 to 200
  
• Blade Launcher projectile damage radius reduced to more closely match the projectile size but Big Shot now can increase the radius
  
• Burst Pistol mag size increased from 28 to 36
  
• Orb Launcher damage increased from 5 to 6
  
• Arcane Wand projectile explosion radius increased by 25%
  
• Grenade damage increased from 35 to 50
  
• Bigger Boom and Imploding Grenade now affect the size of the damage areas spawned by abilities
  
• Snake Shot damage increased from +33% to +50%
  
• Blind Fire damage increased from +50% to +100%
  
• Blind Fire recoil increase reduced by 50% to allow for Grip Tape to match it and perfectly counteract it
  
• Grip Tape is no longer capped at -100% spread reduction so it can fully offset Blind Fire. Spread related perks now also influence the angle on formations such as arc and triple shot and even secondary projectile mods like Dagger Arc!
  
• Recoil shot recoil added reduced from +200% to +100%
  
• Bouncing Shot now increases projectile lifetimes by 50% and damage per bounce increased from +50% to +100%
  
• Money Shot crystals per hit increased from 1 to 4 (I’ll be watching this- ideally it’s really fun to find on fast firing low damage weapons)
  
• Piercing Wave trigger chance halved but damage increased by 75% and radius increased by 25%
  
• X Shot trigger chance increased by 33%
  
• Spore Shot mushrooms now have 10x health as they would just explode instantly before having a chance to grow
  
• Grenadier now works in a more understandable way: you get +1 ability stack per cooldown but it will keep cooling down while your current stack is less than the max stack
  
• Damage combo damage per combo level increased from +15% to +20%
  
• Healthy Combo healing amount increased from +50 to +100
  
• Endurance healing increased from +50 health to +75 health
  
• Critical thinking critical damage increased from +25% to +75% but non critical damage reduced from -10% to -25%
  
• Checklist eliminations needed per damage increase reduced from 15 to 10
  
• Faulty Chests chance for unchosen loot to not disappear buffed from 10% to 15%
  
• Double Vision has been moved from Legendary to Epic rarity
  
• Removed knockback from Fireworks and increased their radius by 25%
  
• Fire damage in general has been doubled as it felt quite weak on perks in previous updates
  
• Lightning damage has now been buffed by 66% (it now deals the entire lighting stack as damage instead of 33% of the lightning stack)
  
• Damage areas (like the black hole) can now spawn in mid air which will allow for many new synergies with abilities that can explode in the air (like causing Crystal Barrage to trigger in mid air with a black hole also sucking enemies into it)
  
• The Limited Heals difficulty modifier healing reduction reduced from -50% healing to -33% healing
  
• Increased the invulnerability period after taking damage from 0.1 seconds to 0.25 seconds

NERFS

• Shop prices have been increased by 33% as buying out shops was the main source of broken balance in the game (you can still absolutely break shops and get near infinite crystals but some economy changes were needed to make this require a bit more skill and planning, and a bit less random luck)
  
• Shop price increase per loop increased by 25%
  
• Shop prices are slightly more expensive per player in multiplayer to balance out the fact that enemies get a health bonus per player (and therefore pay out more which meant players had less crystals to spend in shops when playing solo compared to in multiplayer runs)
  
• Shop reroll totem base cost is unchanged but cost increase per reroll now increases more steeply
  
• Due to these Shop changes, with the Random Islands modifier active, shops will only be able to spawn on islands 3,4,5 and 9 to better space them out over a biome
  
• Spiked chest open cost increased from 25% to 33% (this is a change that has been reverted from the previous patch as it was too easy to go for multiple spiked chests in a single biome, this way it’s more strategic and has a bigger impact)
  
• Black Holes no longer turn enemy projectiles into your own as this made fighting even the hardest enemies trivial
  
• It’s now half as likely for the flamethrower to spawn fire damage areas on the ground (as it could cause really high fire damage numbers in a very short space of time which made it by far the most powerful weapon in the game). Fire overall has had a buff in this patch though so it should still feel very strong
  
• Big Mag mag size increase reduced from +75% to +50% and renamed “Clip” to “Mag” in the description
  
• Bubble Shot trigger chance reduced by 25% (it’s very powerful but triggered a bit too often)
  
• Splash Damage damage reduced from 25 to 10
  
• The price to unlock slots if playing with the Locked Slots difficulty modifier now scales up slightly more sharply. If this modifier is more annoying than fun then I’ll replace it with another in a future update
  
• Crystal Combo crystal gain per combo level reduced from +20% to +15%
  
• Snatcher close range elimination crystal gain reduced from +50% to +30%
  
• Finishing Move critical elimination crystal gain reduced from +100% to +50%
  
• Gold Coating on heal crystal gain increased from +50% of healing to +100% of healing
  
• Money Is Power damage gain per 1000 crystals reduced from +5% to +2%
  
• Bonus Crystals crystal gain reduced from +50% to +33%
  
• Workaholic, Rising Star and Limited Loot crystal gain reduced from +100% to +75%
  
• Double Edged Sword crystal amount reduced from 100% of damage dealt to 25% of damage dealt and you now lose 20% of your total crystals when taking damage (compared to 10% before as it was way too easy to make a completely broken economy build with it- now it should be in a more balanced place)
  
• A note on max health perks: if getting lucky with a few of these early on, the health pool could go to extreme numbers very quickly. These changes make them still substantial buffs to your health but make them less likely to be one of the key reasons a run succeeds
  
• Bribe max health increase reduced from +500% to +200%
  
• Double Trouble max health increase reduced from +250% to +100%
  
• Leap Of Faith max health increase reduced from +250% to +50%
  
• Health Totem chance to explode after use increased from 33% to 50%. This change is to make it harder to completely break the game early on with many lucky rolls in a row
  
• Loot Totem chance to explode after use increased from 20% to 33%
  
• Gamble Totem and Chance Totem chance to explode after use increased from 8% to 15%
  
• Double Vision chance to get an extra chest after each island reduced from 20% to 15%

QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES

• Finally fixed cases where enemy projectiles could travel through walls leading to situations where you could take unfair damage
  
• Added many new checks for enemies stuck in walls or not moving. There should no longer be any soft lock situations- in the worst case scenarios where enemies are stuck for more than a few seconds in a wall, they will be cleaned up by the game automatically
  
• Projectiles get nullified (deal no damage and instantly expire) when hitting the blue border surrounding islands (which prevents lots of unfair deaths where bouncing enemy projectiles would bounce off or explode on seemingly thin air behind you)
  
• Slugs and Pufferfish can no longer start their explode attack in mid air and must be landed (this prevents unfair situations where a slug could come flying out of nowhere and instantly end the run)
  
• Made many improvements to overall visual clarity with tweaks to enemy health bars, damage numbers, FX and many other small elements that all add up to give a more refined experience
  
• The game now automatically pauses when it loses focus when alt tabbing or when something else (like another installer) pops up over it
  
• You are now invulnerable for 2 seconds after falling off a cliff to prevent taking unavoidable damage when respawning (if respawning near to an already attacking enemy)
  
• You no longer take fall damage once an island has been cleared to be consistent with the other post island damage rules in the game
  
• Auto Loot now staggers chest openings to prevent late game crashes when opening hundreds of chests at once
  
• Auto Loot now behaves correctly and will only salvage if it can't pick up any of the pickups in a chest
  
• Auto Loot will now pick up duplicate Greed perks (previously it would ignore all greed perks in the world)
  
• Added island boundaries to some islands (like the one with 4 high walls) to prevent rare situations where enemies could be launched out of bounds and the island would never end
  
• Improved anti-camping measures to support all enemies, not just the small melee crabs
  
• All homing barrels are cleaned up when chests spawn to prevent situations where they would be annoying and home at you while you were looting
  
• Added options to increase field of view to 115 and 120 (previously the limit was 110)
  
• Improved crosshairs and added a central dot for easier aiming
  
• Clients should no longer accidentally leave to the lobby from the Game Over UI (only the host has the power to do that now, clients can still leave if they wish by using the pause menu instead)
  
• Added visible cooldowns to melee in the gameplay UI
  
• Added cooldown expire animations and sounds for both abilities and melee weapons in the gameplay UI
  
• Cooldowns now reset when picking up new abilities or melee weapons in the lobby to make it easier to audition them without waiting for the cooldowns to expire
  
• Added a system that prevents many of the same enemy from spawning in certain cases (Ice Pumpkins, Laser Crabs, Laser Skulls and Fire Pumpkins spawning in large numbers could create unfair situations)
  
• The maximum amount of combat destructible rocks on small arena islands has been reduced as it often led to unavoidable damage or just too much damage area spam
  
• Improved the audio mix to make important sounds stand out more
  
• Optimized all animated characters for better performance in scene with many enemies visible at once
  
• Arcane Wand projectiles now automatically explode when expiring (they previously vanished if not hitting something)
  
• The slide speed curve has been smoothed out to be less jittery and much more consistent
  
• You now automatically cancel a slide if letting go of directional keys (instead of being stuck in a janky stationary slide)
  
• Island challenge modifiers can now only spawn on one portal max in a selection (to even out unfair situations where you would roll two very difficult challenge portals with low health and not have a choice to take the lesser reward / easier fight)
  
• Improved aiming: it felt a bit clunky to aim especially with the Seagle in some cases so the camera height has been adjusted to be more comfortable to aim as well as a faster aim zoom in time to make it feel more responsive. Also tweaked some weapons that felt like they zoomed in too much when aiming
  
• Reduced fire rock destructible explosion damage and radius (as it was easy to accidentally damage yourself when exploding them while appearing to be out of range of the explosion)
  
• Made various UI outline improvements to make damage text and health bars easier to read across all lighting scenarios
  
• Improved text chat visibility and it should no longer go off the screen when writing long messages
  
• Enemies now spawn much faster from the second loop (Island 61+) onwards to make late game runs less tedious
  
• Auto loot speed doubled to make late game runs less tedious
  
• Added options to disable hitmarkers and damage numbers for those that don’t want them or to help improve visibility in late game runs
  
• Ability and Melee cooldowns are now reset when entering a new island
  
• Improved the Piercing Wave particle FX to be easier on the eyes and more smooth
  
• The Auto Loot keybind has been moved from Q to L as many people had other actions bound to Q already and were confused as to why their chest loot was magically disappearing (you can still change it to whatever you want in the controls menu)
  
• Enemies can no longer spawn from destroyed crystals if the island has been cleared
  
• Increased global bandwidth limits to potentially improve 4 player late game lobbies with a lot going on
  
• Increased connection timeout times to give more time for clients that have temporarily lost connection to recover
  
• Sonic Boom and Shockwave no longer knock back enemies as this could allow them to get stuck in walls (I'll rework these perks in the future)
  
• Clip Shot has been renamed to Mag Shot

BUG FIXES

• Fixed a longstanding bug that caused very laggy clients to load in with no weapons when first joining a lobby
  
• Improved a few islands where chests could spawn down in unreachable areas and couldn’t be opened
  
• Fixed numerous clunky inventory UI bugs like locked slots “stealing” the mouse cursor when clicked
  
• Fixed “sticky” inventory where dropping loot would reset the focus to the first inventory slot instead of the one that you were hovering over, making dropping a lot of pickups needlessly clunky
  
• Fixed issue that would cause you to permanently keep the aimed in field of view of a weapon after choosing a dual wield weapon
  
• Fixed exploit that allowed players to start a run on a much easier difficulty than initially selected
  
• Fixed exploit that allowed players to move around and jump while frozen
  
• Fixed issue where hazard damage (like from barrels or destructible rocks) weren’t respecting the invulnerability period after you take damage (so a bunch of barrels exploding at the same instant were able to eat through multiple armor plates at once)
  
• Fixed issue on arctic island that caused barrels to explode as soon as you load into the island which could lead to taking unavoidable damage
  
• Fixed issue that caused enemies to spawn with half empty armor plates
  
• Fixed various multiplayer health bar bugs that would show players and enemies as having armor when they really didn’t
  
• Fixed issue that caused Piercing Shot to reset reset Streak Shot
  
• Fixed issue that caused the Parkour reward UI to not update on non-hosting players
  
• You can now complete the Flawless and Frugal achievements without needing to be explicitly on Normal difficulty (they now unlock on Nightmare and Ultra Chaos difficulties also, Normal being the minimum)
  
• Fixed issue that allowed friends to join in progress runs via the Steam menu, now they can only join while in the lobby as is intended
  
• Fixed a longterm crash that could happen when joining a multiplayer game
  
• Fixed a longterm bug that could leave invalid multiplayer sessions open which interfered with inviting and joining multiplayer games
  
• Fixed issue where no enemies would spawn after a while on the 1st island of each biome
  
• Fixed being able to get under the map on one of the Volcanic islands
  
• Fixed a number of rare crashes
  
• Fixed issue where challenges were completed in the game but the corresponding Steam achievement stayed locked
  
• Rewrote how account rank is calculated to make it more accurate (as it was possible to have all weapons Emerald rank but still have a Sapphire account rank previously)
  
• Repelling Dash now only affects enemy projectiles and won’t repel teammate projectiles
  
• Fixed issue that caused the Game Over UI to show up in the lobby if leaving a run too soon after getting eliminated
  
• Fixed the crystals and keys icons being cut off in the inventory UI on some wider resolutions like 1920x1200
  
• Improved how music plays: it shouldn’t stop the shop music, play the gameplay music and then switch to the boss music a second or two later as it did previously
  
• Edited arctic tree collision to make it much less likely to get stuck on it

ULTRA CHAOS BALANCE CHANGES
The goal with these changes is to make Ultra Chaos a bit more skillful, fair and fun while still retaining the brutal difficulty spike

• Ultra Chaos is now unlocked when reaching Ruby account rank (down from Diamond in order to give more people the chance to try it out)
  
• Slightly slowed down enemy attack speeds on Ultra Chaos (just because some enemies attacked unreasonably fast especially when shielded)
  
• Reduced the amount of bonus starting luck in Ultra Chaos by 33% (this should make getting rare loot (important for many builds) much more consistent)
  
• Elites and Bosses spawn slightly less often in Ultra Chaos
  
• Bosses no longer spawn champion enemies when damaged and keys when eliminated on non-boss islands when playing on Ultra Chaos difficulty
  
• Extra elites / bosses spawned in Ultra Chaos has been reduced from 2 to 1
  
• Elites and bosses no longer can have the Healthy or Shielded buff
  
• Removed the extremely fast enemy spawn speed (it actually is harder when enemies gradually spawn in while you are already moving around the island than it is for them all to spawn instantly)
  
• Being on Low graphics settings no longer makes totems have no emissive color

JAN 14TH HOTFIX
Removed santa hats

That's it for now but I plan on releasing The Variety Update Part 2 sometime in February to finish off the new ability and melee systems as well as add a lot of new island layouts and loot types to get closer and closer to the "no two runs are the same" feeling 🦀

Here's a teaser for a mechanic that will let you buff specific weapon mods in interesting ways: in the example below, Mace Shot has homing and chaotic buffs that increase damage and allow all 3 mace balls to fly to the target (when previously they'd just miss). This should add a new layer of fun to mods and give more depth and variety when buildcrafting!

If you are enjoying Crab Champions so far, it'd mean a lot to me if you could nominate it for a Steam Award (after polling the community, it looks like either the "Best Soundtrack" or the "Better With Friends" categories are the most suitable for this game). There's still so much to add but I've been blown away by the response to the game since it launched only a few months ago in April!

In other news, the beta for the next big update has been live for the last week or so, bringing lots of new features such as:

- Selectable Melee Weapons (Claw, Dagger and Hammer) and Abilities (Grenade, Grappling Hook, Black Hole, Ice Blast and Laser Blast)
- 2 brand new Mingames to test your skills without committing to a full roguelike run
- Side sliding
- New weapons (Laser Cannons and Seagle) and perks
- New enemies
- New island layouts
- New music
- Much more (quality of life features, massive loot and enemy rebalances etc.)

Anyone that owns the game can opt in, full instructions can be found in the #beta-getting-started channel on the Discord server: https://discord.com/channels/547513194353131530/1095854970189918238


Thanks for being the best community any developer could ask for, see you in the patch notes for the Variety Update once it leaves beta! 🦀

P.S. the game is now on sale (25% off!) for the duration of the Steam Autumn Sale!

NEW WEAPONS: FLAMETHROWER & ARCANE WAND
VFX OVERHAUL
ULTRA CHAOS: NEW EXTREME DIFFICULTY
UNIQUE LOOT VISUALS + ICONS (A START)
Loot is finally getting some identity! While there's a lot of loot to make unique visuals for, I'm happy with the way the first few are turning out. It makes a big difference to be able to start recognizing loot at distance or being able to share your inventory screen and not have to explain what each piece of loot is!
BIG MECHANIC IMPROVEMENTS

• Universal Critical Hits: ANYTHING can now cause a critical hit including your secondary projectiles like Mace Shot or Dagger Arc. This means that there is a single unified critical hit chance stat that affects all of your build at once instead of having to find separate grenade crit and melee crit etc. perks
  
• Damage 10x Lower: As many people were reaching the limits of the game in terms of getting to the point where enemies become invincible due to their health being so high, I've globally scaled down ALL damage sources by 10x (and of course enemy health too). This allows for longer runs, more noticeable power creep and easier calculations in the early game when comparing damage numbers. If comparing to the previous build, something dealing 2500 damage now deals 250 damage!
  
• Better Healing: Especially on the higher difficulties with many modifiers on, health became less and less important with many players opting to go for a "one hit" type build revolving mainly around armor and not health. Since there are so many perks around building health, I wanted to make it much more important and fun to do so. The base health pool for all difficulties has been increased, with the effectiveness of armor slightly reduced. Most health related perks have received a buff so building into health loot should be much more rewarding.

GENERAL

• Remade almost all VFX in the entire game from scratch to be much less blinding and more interesting to look at (there are some that still need to be replaced which will be done in the next update)
  
• Added new weapon: Flamethrower
  
• Added new weapon: Arcane Wand
  
• Added new difficulty: Ultra Chaos (unlocked by getting all weapons to Diamond). This is a difficulty for those looking for the most unfair challenge that I could possibly come up with. There are no unlocks or achievements tied to it, it's purely for extreme challenge seekers
  
• Critical hits are now calculated globally: this means that ANYTHING can crit- dagger arcs, mace balls etc!
  
• Added 2 new Tropical biome islands
  
• Added new evolved enemy: Ice Pumpkin
  
• Added new evolved enemy: Fire Pumpkin
  
• Added new evolved enemy: Laser Skull
  
• Added new debuff: Arcane - damage is dealt once per second equal to the total stacks of arcane currently applied. Each time damage is applied, the total stacks of arcane are halved
  
• Added new weapon mod: Arcane Shot: Shots apply arcane to enemies
  
• Added new weapon mod: Drill Shot: Chance for shots to create damaging drills on impact
  
• Added new weapon mod: Link Shot: Chance for shots to burst into 3 link shots on impact
  
• Added new grenade mod: Giant Drill: Grenades explode into giant drills
  
• Added new perk: Crimson Haze: Enemies create short lived damaging zones when eliminated
  
• Added new perk: Critical Lightning: Critical hits shock random enemies
  
• Added new perk: Potent Magic: Arcane debuff stacks increased
  
• To make it harder to reach the damage limit (and getting negative billions of damage in the game over screen), all damage has been reduced by 10x- this is a global change and all mods and perks that deal flat damage have been adjusted accordingly. This also means all enemies start with 10x less health. The end result should be a more noticeable and satisfying damage increase as runs progress, seeing single digit damage numbers grow into the thousands and eventually millions! Another big benefit is for those that go on long runs, it’ll take much longer to reach the current island limits (where enemies become invincible due to having so much health). During the rebalancing pass, if a mod dealt 25 damage, I’ve rounded it up to now deal 3 damage (after the 10x reduction). While doing this I also buffed the damage of some underperforming mods and perks, mainly the strike and storm mods as well as all damage increasing grenade mods. All of these changes should make it also easier to calculate how effective a mod or perk is relative to the base damage as it’s easier to compare a 50 damage mod to a 8 base damage weapon than it is to compare a 450 damage mod to a 75 base damage weapon (which is how things were before the 10x reduction and rounding)
  
• Greatly improved the smoothness of other players in multiplayer games especially when spectating, it should no longer look like players are lagging when they aren’t
  
• Small enemies no longer collide with each other which should greatly reduce situations where pufferfish get stuck on crabs
  
• Optimized the Shrapnel challenge modifier which could cause lag when many enemies exploded into shrapnel at once
  
• Optimized situations where many projectiles hit lava and created lots of splash FX, causing lag
  
• Added 30 FPS frame cap for those looking to preserve battery life on handheld devices
  
• Improved water ripple visuals to both work in shallow water and also push water foam away
  
• Improved the visuals of the Grid, Flow, Geometric, Purple Tiger, Regal and Void camos
  
• Raised the height of the camera when not aiming to make it feel more comfortable (as the crab is so flat and close to the ground, having the camera also low sometimes felt bad when looking upwards)
  
• Added 4 new achievements (Flamethrower and Arcane wand victory related)
  
• Added new inventory icons for some weapon mods (still lots more to be done)
  
• Added new generic icons for Rare, Epic and Legendary weapon mods (with a matching colored border to easily see what rarity they are at a glance in the inventory UI)

BALANCE CHANGES

• Slugs and Grubs are slightly less common to allow for their presence to be more noticeable (ideally they should be lined up with other enemies for bonus damage rather than half of the map being slugs and clearing itself with chain reactions- this can still happen but just a bit less often)
  
• Fire damage is more effective but all fire mods and perks apply less overall stacks to compensate. This should mean less situations where enemies are taking tiny amounts of damage from fire over a very long period of time and more situations where enemies are taking much more concentrated fire damage over a shorter period
  
• Moved Hot Shot, Sharpshooter, Power Punch and Mega Crit from Weapon Mods to be Perks as critical hits are relevant to more than just weapon shots now
  
• Critical Claws, Critical Grenade, Critical Chain and Streak Shot have been removed
  
• Critical Blast has been moved to a perk as it can trigger from more than just weapon crits now
  
• Precision has been renamed to Streak Shot since that has been removed and the name fits it better
  
• Since “lesser” crits can trigger “on crit” mods (which could lead to an infinite loop), critical hit chance is capped at 50% for “lesser” damage sources (any damage that isn’t directly from your weapon, grenade or melee)
  
• Critical Link has been renamed to Link Shot, has new projectiles and no longer requires a critical hit to trigger
  
• Critical Blades has been renamed to Homing Blades and no longer requires a critical hit to trigger
  
• Mega Crit now multiplies critical damage by 3 instead of adding 300% extra damage to the multiplier
  
• Destructibles now scale up their damage / debuff stacks from +5% per island to +10% per island
  
• Landmines no longer spawn naturally and barrels spawn less (no more chaotic barrels, only regular ones- the chaotic barrels are fun in the lobby but in gameplay situations they mostly just fly off into the sky and do nothing)
  
• Increased physics impulse strength from melee on regular barrels
  
• The Homing Barrels challenge modifier barrels have far less health and no longer can leak which should reduce the messy visuals that can sometimes happen with lots of barrels
  
• Turrets no longer target Shielded enemies
  
• The slowest moving enemies now move a bit faster to prevent situations where you are looking for one last really slow enemy when you’ve cleared all of the others
  
• Basic melee crabs no longer can be shielded as it slowed down the pace of gameplay too much
  
• Lightning has been reworked to last a bit longer and deal less damage (as it wasn’t adjusted for the 10x drop in damage yet). Also adjusted the lightning FX and tint to be a bit more blue to differentiate it from Arcane

CHANGES TO THE DIFFICULTY MODIFIER ROSTER

• Added new difficulty modifier: Surging Enemies: Enemies spawn in much faster
  
• Added new difficulty modifier: Limited Heals: All healing is reduced by 50%
  
• The Eternal Punishment difficulty modifier now only removes 2% of your max health when taking damage (it previously removed 5% which often made runs devolve into a glass cannon situation where max health was ignored)
  
• Resurrecting Enemies now triggers slightly less often as it could cause islands to drag in terms of pacing. In addition to this, enemies can no longer resurrect in a close range to the player as this could often lead to unfair damage from enemies spawning close behind
  
• Volatile Explosions was a modifier that caused understandable frustration: being able to melee groups of slugs and not take damage from it was one of the best feeling mechanics in the game and removing it for the sake of difficulty decreased the fun factor for most. The flow state present without this modifier on got interrupted in a more tedious than fun way. This modifier has been moved up to the new Ultra Chaos difficulty. To make basic slugs still feel threatening with this change, they now explode faster than before, requiring a well timed melee or dash to avoid
  
• Manual Collection has also been replaced as it made the flow of combat more tedious than fun in many cases. Since there are those that still enjoy it, it is active in the Ultra Chaos difficulty
  
• These changes should shift the difficulty more to making good builds and less making zero mistakes

BUFFS

• Auto Rifle damage increased from 3 to 5
  
• Burst Pistol damage increased from 3 to 5
  
• Dual Pistols damage increased from 4 to 5
  
• Auto Shotgun damage increased from 2 to 3
  
• Orb Launcher damage increased from 4 to 6
  
• Sniper damage increased from 30 to 40
  
• Rocket Launcher projectile speed doubled (as the weapon was underperforming slightly before so this should make it easier to hit moving targets)
  
• Rocket Launcher explosion radius increased by 20%
  
• Rocket Launcher damage increased from 25 to 35
  
• Blade Launcher damage increased from 2 to 4
  
• Base starting health increased from 100 to 200
  
• Spiked Chest max health opening cost reduced from 33% to 25%
  
• Loot Totem health cost reduced from 33% to 20%
  
• Crystal Totem health cost reduced from 33% to 10%
  
• Chance Totem health cost reduced from 10% to 5%
  
• Gamble Totem crystal cost reduced by 33%
  
• Critical Blast damage increased from 400 to 500 and is now chance based as intended
  
• High Roller now duplicates Epic and Legendary chests on Elite / Boss islands rather than Healing chests which felt underwhelming
  
• High Roller base downside reduced from 33% chance for no chests to spawn to 20% chance for no chests to spawn
  
• Reload Arc is now part of the Skill loot pool to make choosing skill portals more enticing
  
• Wind Up, Streak Shot and Clip Shot no longer add flat damage and now add percentage damage
  
• Double Trouble enemy health increase reduced from +100% to +50%
  
• Hard Target now applies damage reduction AFTER other incoming damage debuffs (like from Hot Shot or Brute Force). So a 10% reduction is now 10% of the entire incoming damage amount which should make it a more viable option to counter increased incoming damage debuffs
  
• Enhanced Turrets damage increased from +50% to +75%
  
• Crystal Barrage damage increased from 1 to 3
  
• Split Shot now happens sooner in the lifetime of a projectile, making it much more viable for fast moving projectiles
  
• Arcane Blast now applies 8 stacks of the arcane debuff per damage tick
  
• Sharpened Axe damage per second increased from 50 to 125
  
• Barrel Explosion damage increased from 50 to 100 and armor removed on the barrels to make them easier to destroy
  
• Landmine Shot damage increased from 50 to 100
  
• Triangle Shot damage increased from 35 to 100
  
• Torpedo Shot damage increased from 35 to 100
  
• Firework Shot damage increased from 25 to 30
  
• Bomb Shot damage increased from 35 to 75
  
• Proximity barrage damage increased from 30 to 50
  
• Dagger Shot damage increased from 2 to 3
  
• Reload Arc damage increased from 15 to 20
  
• Spinning Blade damage increased from 4 to 5
  
• Time Bolt damage increased from 30 to 40
  
• Ultra Shot damage increased from 25 to 30
  
• Shockwave cooldown reduced from 10 seconds to 4 seconds
  
• Health Shot healing amount increased from 1 to 3
  
• Grim Reaper healing amount increased from 5 to 6
  
• Vampire healing amount increased from 2 to 4
  
• Personal Space max health increase requirement reduced from every 8 eliminations to EVERY close range elimination
  
• Bullseye max health increase requirement reduced from every 10 one shot eliminations to EVERY one shot elimination
  
• Checklist eliminations requirement reduced from 25 to 15
  
• Assassin eliminations requirement reduced from 10 to 5
  
• Tasty Orange damage increase per elimination increased from +1% to +2%
  
• Laser Crab, Poison Skull, Blocker Skull and Lightning Skull projectile damage decreased by 50%
  
• Grenade Crab, Fire Skull and Homing Grub projectile damage decreased by 25%
  
• Slightly reduced the radius of the Grenade Crab grenade to be a bit more fair
  
• Slightly reduced the Minigun crab projectile speed
  
• Reduced the collision radius of the Elite Lightning Crab projectiles as there were some cases that appeared to be a miss that would still hit
  
• Removed knockback on many small enemy projectiles to reduce situations where players could lose momentum and be juggled in the air, taking damage multiple times- not fun!
  
• Frenzied Enemies now doubles the attack speed of enemies rather than setting it to the max value (which could lead to inconsistencies and unfair situations on some enemies)

NERFS

• Crossbow default piercing reduced from 2 to 0 (as the previous update made it one of the best weapons in the game)
  
• Enemy bonus health per alive player in co-op increased from +40% per player to +45% per player and on Nightmare or Ultra Chaos difficulties, the bonus is increased to +66% per player on Elite and Boss islands as the situations where everyone shreds through elites and bosses in 1 second were happening a bit too often in co-op especially in 4 player lobbies
  
• Double Edged Sword crystal gain has been reduced from 250% of damage dealt to 100% of damage dealt as it was far too overpowered before
  
• Hot Shot critical hit chance reduced from 16% to 15%
  
• Sharpshooter critical hit chance reduced from 8% to 6%
  
• There is no longer a 2% base starting crit chance, you start with 0% chance to crit
  
• Mace Shot trigger chance decreased by 1%
  
• Mace Shot damage per second decreased from 125 to 100
  
• Aura Grenade damage per second reduced from 1250 to 500
  
• Armor health per plate reduced from 25% of max health to 15% of max health
  
• Slightly increased the health of most medium enemies (regular skulls, regular ants etc.) but also increased the time before health regeneration on these enemies (if playing with the Regenerating Enemies modifier enabled), allowing for more breathing room between each hit they take
  
• Pufferfish health increased to differentiate them from slugs when prioritizing targets

BUG FIXES

• Upgrade chests no longer contain duplicates of the same loot (you could have 10 mods in your inventory but get the same mod twice)
  
• Fixed issue where ALL strikes that had spawned during a run weren’t getting cleaned up properly which could lead to worse performance on late game runs
  
• Enemy movement now ignores physically simulated destructibles so they should stop being pushed under the ground by barrels
  
• Bouncing Shot no longer resets the lifetime of projectiles which was causing performance issues where projectiles would bounce around for 30+ seconds at high levels
  
• Removed Laser Crab and Minigun Crab from challenge crystals as they were appearing when the Evolved Enemies difficulty modifier was inactive
  
• Enemies that happen to spawn outside of the world bounds should get automatically eliminated
  
• Fixed Critical Blast having a visual cooldown in the inventory while actually having a chance to trigger on each critical hit
  
• Fixed issue that could cause Auras to trigger multiple times when dropping and re-picking back up an Aura perk
  
• Fixed various issues that could cause Auras to stop triggering when multiple Aura perks were equipped
  
• Lava now deals damage when stepping into it as intended
  
• Homing Thorns now deal damage as intended
  
• Fixed various spots where enemies could get stuck
  
• The “Islands Survived” text in the game over UI now shows island 18 if getting eliminated on island 19 (previously it would show 19)
  
• You no longer automatically fire when leaving a portal if you had entered it with the fire button held down
  
• Fixed some jankiness around sliding- when sliding forward and quickly pressing the back key, you no longer change directions while sliding and instead stop the slide which should prevent overshooting when trying to stop a slide
  
• Damage Dealt can no longer be negative on the game over screen
  
• Max health no longer goes to 1 when getting high enough
  
• Fixed issue that would cause players other than the multiplayer host to see blue borders in the lobby
  
• Fixed issue with auto melee that could cause it to continue indefinitely when exiting a portal
  
• Removed the invisible walls around the pillars in some boss islands- this prevents situations where you can seemingly deal no damage to enemies when they are near the pillars but will increase situations where they may be able to shoot through walls. Working on a better fix to this in the future
  
• Fixed issue that prevented the Challenger challenges from being completed
  
• Made several potential fixes for a low percentage of players not being able to join multiplayer games
  
• Fixed the Level Up perk favoring grenade mods over weapon mods when leveling things up
  
• Fixed the Level Up perk leveling up mods and perks that were already level 255
  
• Fixed a soft lock that could happen if knocked out of the Tropical island with the square 4 walls: there’s now a launchpad outside of the wall boundaries to bounce back in!

That's all for this update, thanks for playing! 🦀

Made a few small improvements based on initial feedback from the update!

GENERAL

• Changed lightning to only interrupt your movement initially, not prevent jumping or dashing the entire time you were shocked which felt unfair over the new longer lifespan that lightning has

BUG FIXES

• Fixed Lightning Skulls not having purple projectiles
  
• Fixed a few rare crashes
  
• Fixed Checklist displaying the incorrect amount of eliminations needed in the description

It's been quite a while since the last update- this will most likely be the pace moving forward: larger updates every 1-2 months delivering a nice chunk of new content to explore! As mentioned in previous patch notes, I have been continually updating the Beta branch with changes every few days so if you feel like trying out every little addition (with the possibility of them being unbalanced) then feel free to opt into that branch. There has been an amazing beta community growing on Discord and it's been fun to see the reactions to each element as I add them.

With that said, lets get into all the changes!


DIFFICULTY MODIFIERS
With a surprising amount of players asking for a challenge beyond Nightmare, I have added 12 new difficulty modifiers that can all be enabled at once for the ULTIMATE test of skill! Keep in mind that these are intended for seasoned players and (especially on higher challenge levels) will most likely require a lot of attempts to win.

Each weapon gets a medal when winning (the medal awarded depends on the challenge level) which contributes to your overall account medal (seen next to your name in all games).

NO MORE COOLDOWNS: COMPLETE LOOT REBALANCE!
There have been countless rebalances to loot in this patch (details in the full patch notes below), but the main things to be excited for are:

• Almost all mods that previously had boring cooldowns (meaning you could only trigger them once every few seconds) now are chance based, allowing you to trigger them multiple times in a short timespan. Each additional level of these mods both increases the trigger chance AND the effectiveness of the mod. This should allow for previously underwhelming mods like Dagger Arc or Bubble Blast to scale nicely into the end game
  
• Damage increasing perks now affect the damage of weapon and grenade mods that spawn secondary projectiles (again like Dagger Arc / Bubble Blast) which makes more sense AND again allows for better scaling

These changes mean that finally the more "fun" mods are a viable choice over straight up flat damage boosts as for a long time these mods just couldn't keep up and weren't worth taking. This should introduce far more build variety than before.

PHYSICS BASED DESTRUCTIBLES
These add a new layer of chaos to islands compared to the existing static explosive rocks!

TONS OF QUALITY OF LIFE IMPROVEMENTS
This update is packed full of highly requested quality of life features such as:

• You can now press Q (by default) to Auto Loot every piece of loot and chest on an island without having to manually open and choose each pickup (which could really slow down late game runs especially with perk combos like Big Chests and Faulty Chests)
  
• The same amount of crystals given to all players in multiplayer when eliminating enemies to prevent unlucky players from falling behind in a run
  
• You can no longer be frozen for 2+ seconds, leading to unfair deaths
  
• Many common and frustrating bugs have been fixed such as Key Totems not working if you aren't hosting in a multiplayer game, getting eliminated by totems if you had a perk that increases incoming damage, glue shot not damaging consistently etc.

GENERAL

• Added 12 difficulty modifiers that each add a challenge level to the run to allow you to rank up in exchange for greatly increased difficulty. I tried to make each modifier interesting while keeping the core gameplay loop intact while also trying to avoid "curse" or straight up debuff modifiers like "chests spawn less loot", those never feel very fun to me. If you thought Nightmare was getting too easy, try a few runs with all modifiers active!
  
• In multiplayer, all players now receive an equal share of crystals when enemies are eliminated. This even occurs when a player has been eliminated and is spectating. The main reason for this is to prevent situations where players are left behind due to one overpowered player dealing all the damage and scooping up all the crystals!
  
• Added new “Auto Loot” keybind that will automatically pick up all available loot (if a chest it will pick the highest rarity option) and will salvage all remaining loot- great for late game runs with a lot of loot to sort through that previously took a lot of time per island
  
• Damage line of sight checks now ignore enemies so grenades, explosive weapons and melee will now all damage ALL enemies within the damage radius (before, only a fraction of a group of enemies would take damage, the others blocking the damage entirely)
  
• New XP system: for every 10000 score you get in a run, you level up! This is a permanent account level that can be infinitely leveled up. For each Challenge Level you get 5% more XP
  
• Added physically simulated barrels and landmines
  
• Added new enemies (only seen with the Evolved Enemies difficulty modifier active): Elite Barrel Skull, Laser Crab, Minigun Crab, Homing Grub
  
• Perks that increase damage now also scale the damage of ALL other damage sources (including things like Dagger Arc or Poison Aura). Because of this I have rebalanced the damage numbers of ALL “secondary” projectile weapon mods, grenade mods and perks (too many small tweaks to list here but they have all been rebalanced with this new scaling in mind)
  
• Most mods that had cooldowns are now fully chance based, allowing you to trigger them multiple times in a short timeframe. Grenade mods that do have cooldowns generally have much shorter (around 1 second) cooldowns to allow for grenades to trigger mods much more frequently when using Grenadier or Clone Explosion
  
• Perks that increase or decrease incoming damage (like Hot Shot or Hard Target) no longer have an effect on unblockable damage sources such as from spiked chests or totems. This means you can no longer get eliminated by using a totem or opening a spiked chest!
  
• When aiming with the crossbow, the arc spread is now tightened
  
• Heavily optimized the maximum amount of individual FX instances that can be visible at once which should reduce late game frame drops with a lot going on
  
• Heavily optimized the maximum amount of individual damage text numbers that can be visible at once which should also help late game performance
  
• Projectiles now hit the blue island border walls which means improved performance in cases where lots of projectiles are being spammed (as projectiles that missed enemies and flew out into the distance got simulated for far longer than they were relevant to gameplay)
  
• Optimized the Shrapnel challenge modifier projectiles as it could cause noticeable frame drops when many enemies were eliminated at once
  
• Greatly improved the responsiveness of physics objects in multiplayer
  
• Added new weapon mod: Landmine Shot
  
• Added new Grenade Mod: Barrel Explosion
  
• Added new rideable barrel to the lobby- hop in and find Tony!
  
• Added new challenge modifier: Homing Barrels
  
• Added new destructible rock type: Max Health Rock (gold)
  
• Improved gold skin visuals to be brighter and more vibrant
  
• Dagger Arc, Piercing Wave, Arcane Blast, Shotgun Blast, Mace Shot, Firework Shot, Thorn Shot, Torpedo Shot, Fireball Shot, Sharpened Axe and Triangle Shot are now chance based instead of cooldown based. This should make them far more interesting and fun to choose instead of straight up stat boosts
  
• The maximum ice stacks a player or enemy can ever have at once is 25. This is to prevent extremely long freeze periods on both incoming and outgoing damage which could result in players getting unfairly eliminated
  
• All “bad thing happens when taking damage perks” now won’t trigger when taking constant fire damage and will only happen on direct hits from enemies or other strong one off damage hits like from totems. Your combo will also stay safe here as losing a hard earned 5x combo due to a tick of fire never feels fair
  
• Enemies can no longer change targets while in the middle of an attack and facing another player
  
• Interact cooldown has been removed from portals to prevent situations where multiple players interacting with portals in a short time frame wouldn’t count every player
  
• Improved controller navigation on the Difficulty selection UI to make it easier to see which modifiers are being selected
  
• Added 3 new achievements and skins

BALANCE CHANGES

• The maximum time a Horde island can be has been reduced from 90 seconds to 60 seconds as they could often drag the pace of a run down a bit. Since they are now shorter, I've adjusted the enemy spawn curve to be more intense
  
• Whenever multiple elites or bosses spawn due to looping or difficulty modifiers, they can now be all different types of enemies
  
• Reduced the amount of bounces that Elite Lightning Crab projectiles can do and also increased the time between their attacks
  
• Poison Crab health reduced by 15%
  
• The key totems in the lobby are now much more likely to drop Legendary loot
  
• Auto Rifle damage increased from 28 to 30
  
• Orb Launcher damage increased from 35 to 36
  
• Grenade damage increased from 275 to 350
  
• Bouncing Shot now works slightly differently- each level of Bouncing Shot adds +1 bounce (previously no matter what level it gave +4 bounces)
  
• Made reaching max combo much easier: Combo Level 3 = 50 eliminations (down from 100), Combo Level 4 = 125 eliminations (down from 250), Combo Level 5 = 225 eliminations (down from 500)
  
• Homing Shot now has a much shorter homing range which should prevent it completely breaking the game- it’s still powerful when used on lined up enemies with piercing but it should make situations where all you have to do is fire into the sky to clear an island less common
  
• Scavenger is now fixed at a 5% chance for enemies to drop health pickups but the amount of healing increases with each level so it can scale better into the late game
  
• Poison was extremely overpowered so it no longer affects damage from non direct damage (like fire damage). This makes flat damage mods more consistent and prevents unfair deaths where you get set on fire while also poisoned, leading to insane incoming damage. Poison stacks have also been adjusted to be closer to fire in terms of balance as before landing even a single bullet with the Poison Shot mod active would grant a +25% damage bonus when hitting that enemy again- way too overpowered in comparison to the other elements! All poison based mods and perks have had their poison stacks rebalanced to be more in line with the other elements
  
• Iron Claws negative debuff (melee cooldowns increased) reduced from +100% melee cooldowns to +50% melee cooldowns so it should be more viable to use now
  
• Valued Customer now increases max health instead of just healing, making it much more useful
  
• Fortitude max health gain increased from +20 max health to +25 max health
  
• Personal Space and Bullseye eliminations needed to trigger reduced from 10 to 8
  
• Damage Aura damage increased from 15 to 20
  
• The health of all turrets has been increased from 100 to 10000
  
• Reduced grenade knockback strength to make grenade mods such as Spike Strike or Crystal Barrage more useful (since before it would often knock enemies out of the way, making these mods useless)
  
• Shotgun Blast damage per pellet increased from 125 to 400
  
• Ultra Shot base trigger chance increased by 50% and damage increased from 400 to 500
  
• Time Bolt damage increased from 600 to 1000
  
• Firework Shot damage increased from 500 to 1000
  
• All Aura perks (other than Damage Aura) now have a larger radius which should make them much more useful
  
• Poison Aura cooldown reduced from 5 seconds to 4 seconds
  
• Lightning Aura cooldown reduced from 9 seconds to 6 seconds
  
• Ice Aura cooldown reduced from 12 seconds to 8 seconds
  
• Fire Aura cooldown reduced from 10 seconds to 6 seconds
  
• Fire Shot fire stacks per hit increased from 40 to 100
  
• Random Shot debuff stacks per hit increased from 10 to 25
  
• Critical Chain cooldown reduced from 12 seconds to 10 seconds
  
• Gemstone damage increased from +5% after each island to +6% after each island
  
• Dagger projectiles (used by Dagger Blast / Dagger Shot / Dagger Dash) now move 50% more slowly but have a 50% increased radius so should be far more useful + effective
  
• FMJ damage increased from +50% damage to armored enemies to +100% damage to armored enemies
  
• Ghost Ammo chance to not use ammo per shot reduced from 20% to 15% (to balance it better with Efficiency as that has the same chance but you have to actually hit something for it to take effect)
  
• Bouncing Shot now starts with a few extra bounces to prevent cases where it could get stuck on the ground and appear to not bounce at all
  
• Bribe, Damage Seeker and Double Edged Sword will no longer trigger when stepping into non damaging poison / ice zones
  
• Health Rocks and Max Health Rocks now scale their bonuses by +20% per island
  
• Increased melee knockback strength by 50%
  
• Grave Dodger has been removed for now as it was extremely broken at high levels and basically prevented a run from being lost with 60+ seconds of invulnerability when reaching 1 HP on each island
  
• Melee knockback strength has been toned back slightly as the previous buff caused enemies to get stuck in crevices around the map
  
• Removed Lightning Slugs from the Challenge Crystal enemy pool and added Laser Crabs and Minigun Crabs instead
  
• Ultra Mushroom now has the same spawn weight as other grenade mods
  
• All turret projectiles damage increased by 50%
  
• Mace Ball projectiles have less gravity
  
  There were a few things causing damage numbers to SKYROCKET and make other mods that deal flat damage essentially useless very quickly. I’ve toned these back so that a wider range of build options are viable
  
  Critical hit calculations were unintentionally extremely strong: Power Punch was multiplying the original critical hit multiplier which then got multiplied again by Mega Crit! This resulted in insane inflations to damage when the multipliers should have been additive. This has been corrected now
  
  The adjustments below were made as a balancing response to damage increasing perks now being able to affect secondary projectiles such as Dagger Arc
  
  
• Power Punch critical hit damage increase reduced from +25% to +20%
  
• Critical Thinking damage boost reduced from +100% to +25%
  
• Critical chain active duration reduced from 5 seconds to 4 seconds
  
• Power Armor damage boost reduced from +50% damage per armor plate to +25% damage per armor plate
  
• Damage Combo damage boost reduced from +20+ per combo level to +15% per combo level
  
• Reduced damage bonus for Oil Can, Ice Cube, Metal Rod and Poison Vial from +50% damage to +25% damage
  
• Reduced damage bonus of Red Fury from +50% to +33%
  
• Reduced Brute Force damage increase from +250% to +100% and reduced the incoming damage penalty from +50% to +25%
  
• Reduced Damage Seeker damage increase from +250% to +150%
  
• Reduced Glass Cannon damage increase from +400% to +250% and reduced the max health penalty from -90% to -80%
  
• Reduced Leap Of Faith max health increase from +300% to +250%
  
• Reduced Up The Ante damage increase from +200% to +75%
  
• Money Is Power damage buff decreased from +10% to +5% per 1000 crystals
  
• Fire Aura, Ice Aura, Lightning Aura and Poison Aura damage increased from 50 to 150
  
• All “Strike” mods have had their damage increased from 100 to 400+
  
• All “Strike” mods have had their cooldowns reduced (cooldowns may be removed entirely in the future but since they all last quite a while it feels right to keep them cooldown based for now)

BUG FIXES

• Fixed issue where non-host players in a multiplayer match couldn’t use the key totem to get a free perk before a run
  
• Fixed issue where teammates could be damaged if triggering a damaging mod when eliminated (like crystal barrage) and your damage became “unowned”
  
• Fixed issue that caused Aura perks to not trigger when reloading an autosave unless dropped and picked back up again
  
• Poison now correctly increases damage of lesser projectiles such as Dagger Arc / Bubble Shot etc.
  
• Fixed issue where Glue Shot wasn’t dealing damage on some weapons
  
• Fixed issue where leaking destructible FX weren’t being attached properly
  
• Made many improvements to prevent enemies spawning under the ground (some may remain especially around barrels but I'm working to fix those in the future!)
  
• Fixed keys spawning under the ground when defeating bosses
  
• Fixed Damage Seeker reducing future max health gains from hearts when it shouldn’t
  
• Fixed enemies not calculating debuff damage correctly (Fire Skulls now will apply more fire stacks in general for example but these fire stacks will be far less damaging than before). This fix will make debuff damage consistent with all other sources (such as from fire rocks). Previously a poison skull would apply 10 stacks of poison from a projectile on island 1, and the same 10 stacks of poison on island 100 when they should have been applying far more
  
• Fixed exploit where players could win infinitely in the Game Over UI
  
• Fixed floating rocks on some islands

That's all for now, see you in the next update! 🦀

GENERAL

• Added 5 new Volcanic arena islands and removed the re-used tropical islands from the Volcanic biome
  
• You can now interact with key totems even after unlocking everything to start a run off with a random piece of loot (minimum rarity is Epic)
  
• Added new perk: Critical Claws: Melee critical hit chance increased
  
• Added new perk: Blender: Melee cooldowns reduced
  
• Added new perk: Iron Claws: Melee damage heavily increased but melee cooldowns are also increased
  
• Added new Greed perk: Brawler: Melee damage greatly increased but weapon damage is reduced
  
• Holding down the melee button will now melee automatically after each melee cooldown

BALANCE CHANGES

• Increased the minigun chance based mods trigger chance by 33%
  
• Time Shot damage increased from +50% to +100%
  
• Tony’s Black Card discount reduced from 15% to 8% per perk level
  
• Gold Dice chance increase reduced from 50% to 20%
  
• Blocker Skulls and regular Skulls are now larger and easier to hit
  
• Blocker Skulls projectile speed reduced
  
• Removed random spread on Sniper Crab shots- they lost their scariness and missed way more than intended. With the new telegraphing they should now give enough time to get out of danger before they attack and still be a dangerous force to deal with!
  
• Rigged Totems chance buff decreased from +25% chance to +10% chance (as it was very easy to break totems)
  
• Regenerator heal amount doubled and max duration increased from 30 to 45 seconds
  
• Mace Shot cooldown reduced from 6 seconds to 4 seconds and mace projectiles bounce less while also not expiring when hitting enemies so this mod should be much more useful in general
  
• Grub slam explosion attack radius has been reduced to make the hitbox feel more fair

QUALITY OF LIFE

• Combo is no longer lost when opening Spiked Chests, using damaging totems or falling off the map
  
• High Roller will no longer remove Key Chests even if other reward chests are removed
  
• Added a new “Weapon Effects” graphics setting option which allows you to turn bullet FX and trails down to “Minimal” for better performance and clarity especially in late game runs on lower end machines!
  
• The maximum limit of held crystals is now 4294967295 (double of the previous value) and crystals will no longer reset back to 0 if exceeding that limit
  
• Camera Shake (from explosions) can now be turned off in the settings menu
  
• Totems that drop loot now spread loot over a wider area to prevent loot overlapping and being harder to pick up a specific drop if multiple have dropped in the same location
  
• Autosaves now save the island reward type, challenge modifier, blessing and combo when continuing runs
  
• Optimized bullet FX so that late game combinations such as Arc Shot + Split Shot are less taxing on performance
  
• Energy Ring destructible rocks no longer deal damage when exploding, the only damage comes from the ring itself (so they are safe to stand on top of and explode without taking damage)

BUG FIXES

• Fixed issue that caused keybinds to get reset every time the game got launched
  
• Fixed issue that prevented the inventory UI from being navigable on controllers
  
• Fixed issue that would cause very high damage amounts to appear as -1 billion damage
  
• Fixed issue that would cause continuing runs saved on the Arctic biome to use Tropical biome islands
  
• Perks that increase damage will now correctly affect Time Shot and Time Bolt
  
• Made several more potential fixes for enemies spawning under the ground and getting stuck while moving (including improved enemy pathfinding accuracy)
  
• The Streamer Loot perk now only affects chests as intended- it was previously affecting every loot drop in the world which was unbalanced
  
• Improved some chest spawn locations that were spawning chests off the edges of cliffs
  
• Fixed issue where the inventory UI could be shown in the Game Over screen or when spectating in an invalid state
  
• The list of joined players now correctly updates when a new player joins the lobby
  
• Added a missing animation when firing the left Dual Pistol

Had a great chat with Woolie talking all things Crab Champions and game development in general!

You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/uKyeo6l_pAQ

Meeps, a talented community member has created a site that allows players to quickly find and search up info on all of the mods and perks in the game- descriptions, buffs, cooldowns and other stats are all visible in one place!

Check it out here if interested: https://crabchampions.info/wmods


That's all for now, see you in the next update! 🦀

GENERAL

• Elemental weapon mods are now chance based instead of cooldown based. This has been a heavily requested feature and I will be moving from cooldowns to chance based on many other mods in upcoming updates to allow for even more insane build scaling! The general idea is that it’s boring for a powerful thing to fire only once every 5 seconds max and it’s much more fun for a weaker thing to fire potentially multiple times a second (scaling nicely with fire rate and chance build options).
  
  In order for this to be balanced and considering that a 20% chance to burn enemies would be constantly applied from the minigun (due to the fast fire rate) and would barely be applied at all from the sniper (due to the slow fire rate), the base trigger chance for the certain perks will change depending on the weapon used (with fast firing weapons having a lower base chance and slow firing weapons having a higher base chance).
  
  The following mods use this system and more will follow in the future:
  
  
  • Ice Shot
    
  • Fire Shot
    
  • Poison Shot
    
  • Lightning Shot
    
  • Random Shot
    
  • Ultra Shot
    
  • Time Bolt
    
  • Triple Shot
    
  • Arc Shot
    
  • X Shot
    
  • Square Shot
    
  • Mega Crit
    
  • Split Shot
    
  • Scatter Shot
    
  • Targeting Shot
    
  • Homing Shot
• Overhauled the save system- there are now multiple save backups and a separate save for user settings. This greatly reduces the chance of your save file becoming corrupt (some players were experiencing a NULL bug where they couldn't move after their PC lost power while an autosave was saving) as there are now 2 extra backup saves to try and prevent that from ever occurring
  
• Increased the maximum projectile limit from 300 to 400
  
• Time Shot can now crit which should make it much more interesting and useful
  
• Added new weapon mod: Ultra Shot: Chance to fire high damage bullets along with your shots
  
• Added new weapon mod: Time Bolt: Chance to fire bolts that deal damage over time
  
• Added new perk: Rigged Totems: Chance based totems are more likely to roll in your favor
  
• Added new perk: Streamer Loot: Higher rarity loot has a greater chance to spawn from chests
  
• Changed Green Dice: renamed to Gold Dice, buffed to Legendary rarity and has a more potent effect on chance based mods and perks but no longer provides the higher rarity loot benefit that it had before. A note about wording that may be confusing: it says +50% chance for chance based mods and perks to trigger- this does not mean adding a flat 50% to all chance based things (as this would quickly break many perks), it insteads multiplies the chance by 150%. So a base chance of 20% will be 30% with the 50% extra chance buff that Gold Dice provides
  
• Improved the Tropical biome parkour island layout to have a better and easier flow
  
• Replaced 6 placeholder skins with fresh new ones: Emerald, Glimmer, Jet Black, Ruby, Sapphire and Silver

BALANCE CHANGES

• Reduced enemy damage scaling a bit on Nightmare difficulty especially when looping as it quickly turns into a “lose all your health on one hit” type of situation which I’m not a fan of. Don’t get me wrong- I still want enemies to be extremely damaging when looping on Nightmare but this should just make it feel like you can take an extra hit or two before the run is over
  
• Blocker Skull movement speed reduced by 25%
  
• The Unstoppable challenge (Get a win with over 10000 eliminations) elimination requirement has been reduced down to 7500 eliminations
  
• Regular melee crabs, ants and slugs are slightly larger to make them easier to hit
  
• Ice Shot is now unlocked by default

QUALITY OF LIFE

• Improved cases where enemies could shoot through walls on elite and boss islands
  
• Toned back some more overtuned FX such as on daggers

BUG FIXES

• Fixed many places where enemies could get stuck under the map. Any remaining enemies that do happen to spawn under the map should get picked up by the new anti-softlock mechanics and will get auto eliminated after a short period of time
  
• Fixed a bug that was causing the settings menu to stay active in a hidden state while the game was playing, resulting in frequent stutters as the game saved constantly
  
• Some mod and perk descriptions that were inaccurate have been updated (such as Money Is Power displaying a 1% increased in damage when it is actually a 10% increase)
  
• Fixed issue where enemies would stop spawning if players were far away from any spawn points

For those interested in trying new updates before they go live for everyone, you can opt in to the beta branch. Be warned, this branch will most likely be less stable and have more bugs than the main branch version so if you do decide to use it, make sure you back up your save just in case!

To access the beta branch:

1. Right click Crab Champions in your Steam library and click "properties"
   
2. Navigate down to the "Betas" tab
   
3. Select the beta branch from the dropdown

That's it for this update! Lots to continue working on, see you next time 🦀