Hey there, my favorite Pen Pal (Keyboard Pal?)!

We got Crashlands 2 out the door a week ago, so it's time for an update on how that went and what comes next.


The game really exploded out of the gate, climbing to the top of nearly every chart. We hit a peak concurrency of 8500 players, with 1000 reviews, all just on Steam! For a moment there we were even ahead of the mega-hit Blue Prince (a huge congrats to that team for their stellar launch).

Things went fairly smoothly, with only one significant bug falling through the cracks (which we got fixed up a day after launch). Well, and also on Saturday morning our servers totally fell over. I was looking around like, "Who let this happen!?" and then remembered that I'm the only web developer on the team. WHOOPS. That's on me.

Otherwise we've just been handling an absolute flood of feedback, trying to sort out bugs versus suggestions versus people just being confused. While the overall response has been very positive, we have seen a bunch of totally valid critiques. So we've planned out our roadmap for the first two major patches to address a bunch of those. We don't have an ETA, but it'll be a matter of weeks instead of months.


Now, the most fun bit: for the next three weeks (depending on when you read this), and the next two weeks only, you can get your very own (and first ever) Flux + Juicebox (+ Wrenchy) cuddly plushie[www.makeship.com]!

https://www.makeship.com/products/flux-juicebox-plushie

I don't even have one of these myself yet because we only got one prototype to share amongst the team, and that, of course, had to go to my niece. So you better believe I'll be first in line, and no HUMAN CHILD will take it from me! Unless that child is willing to DUEL. I'm a man of principles, after all.

It's one of those enough-people-have-to-order-it-or-it-doesn't-happen things, though. So if you don't get one I might not get one either. And then we'll both be sad.

If all goes well, maybe I can convince the team to let us do a Sluggabun plushie next. I want one SO BAD. If you think something else would be a better next plushie, come fight me in the Discord 🥊🥊.


If you’ve got Crashlands 2 on the brain and you’re looking for some like-minded people, the Discord[discord.gg] has been absolutely poppin' — people helping each other out, sharing strategies, and showing off some incredibly elaborate home bases (like the tiny corner of BowNilver's base in the screenshot below). It really warms my heart to see so many people excited about this game we made.

https://i.imgur.com/9pq7whc.jpg
Thanks to all of you for making this first week a success!

💖,

Adam Coster

Webslinger @Butterscotch Shenanigans

We've gotten a lot of feedback from players that essentially boils down to the feeling that the game opens up too slowly at the beginning. And you know what? That's fair! Also there are some things from the original game that players are bummed about not having in Crashlands 2 (the Compendium in particular). And, well, that's ALSO fair!

We just released Patch 1.0.9, which helps out with a bunch of stuff people were running into in the early game, and we're also ready to announce our plans for the next couple of major patches 👀


✅ Available now!

• Rayblade Shanker is now part of the Rascal set, applies bleeds, and has had its overall damage increased. That should make early combat a lot more fun!
  
• Baarli's letter will no longer end up in your DED dummy when you die. WHOOPS.
  
• Butterpads insight has been sped up a bit. Don't waste the 20 seconds of your life we gave back to you!
  
• Removed Impaala's Staff as a component of the Stalking Stick, so if you never found it, THAT'S OKAY! (This was the only weapon you found on the map instead of crafting, but since it was previously required to craft the next staff then players could only play with staffs if they found the first one.)
  
• Added an additional dock to the abandoned Haarlipol cabin to make it easier to get in from the back.

• Added a 6th loadout slot, for those who really like to experiment with equipment
  
• Buddies will now show an icon over their head if they have available Insights but aren't researching them. Previously there was no way to know they had unresearched Insights unless you opened that menu, so people would sometimes go a long time without pushing their research forwards.
  
• If you open the home UI and there are buddies who aren't researching, the home UI will default to the Insights tab. This also helps keep your research flowing!
  
• The low-health fullscreen effect will now show more visibly as soon as you drop below 40% health. Early players often didn't notice this, so they wouldn't realize they needed to heal to STAY SAFE.
  
• Fixed an issue where placing a nest would sometimes show items in your build mode selector that you normally wouldn't be able to use in Build Mode.

• Jems on the world map are now represented by a Jem icon instead of a yellow circle. A point for THEMATIC CONSISTENCY!
  
• A Space Wok map marker will now show up once you've placed Graal's floors, and it will go away when you pick up the Wok. That should help the newcomers realize it's there in the first place.
  
• There is now a marker on the world map to direct you where to find Jak in the first JEF once you've spoken with Snak. If that sentence made sense to you then you're ON YOUR GAME.
  
• Juicebox is now marked on the map after getting the Raychete until freed. A lot of people forgot why they were supposed to make the Raychete in the first place and wandered off. Poor Juicebox. Trapped in the bushes forever.
  
• Eenid and Meervyn are now shown on the map before you've made your choice of whom to apprentice with.
  
• A map marker for the cabin has been added for placing Graal's floors. Some new players were just sorta wandering off, so this should get them back on track.
  
• Emblaa is now map marked if Matt tells you about her. What, you don't want to just RANDOMLY SEARCH the ENTIRE WORLD? Back in my day we didn't even have maps! Kids these days, I tell ya.
  
• Additional map markers for the cabin have been added after freeing Juicebox. Again with the wandering off.
  
• Soon's planters are now map marked in Threshold.
  
• Oowee is now marked on the map as soon as you enter Haarlipol. Did I mentioned the wandering?

• Moved Oowee's Hearth quest to start after giving Emblaa overpowering stinkbait instead of after fishing up the box.
  
• Emblaa should no longer leave Maarla's Mantle until after you've completed her 'Fishing up the Box' quest, and should fire her Mantle quests only within the mantle.

Whew, 1.0.9 had a bunch of things! But those were all just to make improvements with what is already in the game. We've got some big plans for upcoming patches that we're starting work on RIGHT NOW! We don't have an ETA on these, but we'll keep you informed as we progress.


🚀 In progress!

We've heard you that some stuff in the game is just too hard, or slow, or annoying, or confusing... So we're making some big improvements!


Back by popular demand, we will be adding a new tab to the in-game menu that shows you a list of all the creatures, critters, robots, and resources you've encountered on your adventures. With the power of THE COMPENDIUM, you'll go from being confused and lost to just lost!


Some of our players want an EVEN MORE chill experience than what Chill Mode offers. We'll be adding another difficulty mode that is designed to tone down combat encounters dramatically, allowing you to just vibe and never feel a sense of impending doom.


We got a variety of feedback that all pointed to one thing: early game combat doesn't have enough variety. Once you get into the end of Act 1 and beyond you have tons of ways to mix and match items for different playstyles, but at the beginning there's really just one. So, to open up more build variety earlier in the game and give more choices right off the hop, we'll be backfilling some weapons and items so players can access them much sooner.


A bunch of people noted that nighttime is AWFULLY DARK, especially in Withered areas and in the darker parts of Marlaa's Mantle. Depending on a person's device it could be a lot darker than we even intended, and depending on a person's eyeballs what we intended was often just too dark anyway! So we'll be tweaking some things to make that less of a problem.


We'll be looking at ways to allow more flexibility in controller keybinds so people can finally use the exalted and holy "A" button instead of the disgusting and evil Right Trigger, for certain interfaces.


❌ Not yet started. After 1.1!

Patch 1.2 will add a CUSTOM GAME MODE that allows for customizable difficulty by playing with a whole bunch of different aspects of game balance. Turn knobs, flip dials, and curate your perfect Crashlands 2 experience!

Also other stuff, probably. But we don't want to commit to anything specific until 1.1 goes out.


Thanks so much for you feedback and patience as we get these final coats of paint slapped onto the game. Keep it coming!

💖 Happy Gaming!

P.S. The Discord[discord.gg] is poppin' off with people helping each other out, sharing tips on loadouts, sharing their fancy home bases, etc. It's a great place to hang out!

With version 1.0.5-rc.2, we are adding a few quality of life changes and bug fixes:

User Interface

• NPCs are now shown on the world map in areas you've discovered. They are represented by small colored dots.
  
• NPC names are now visible on the world map when you zoom in. Some of them may overlap, but if you squint real hard and tilt your head, it won't help.
  
• There is now a keyboard hotkey for advancing through dialogue instead of just a mouse click. It defaults to space bar and can be rebound at Settings -> Controls -> Game Moments -> Advance.

Fixes

• Buddies now move faster for scene changes, such as when Graal moves toward the cabin at the start of the game. This should help to prevent an issue where if you left while Graal was still approaching the cabin, they would despawn and be stuck in place outside the cabin until you reloaded your save.

Known Issues

• We are aware of people experiencing crashes along with the error window and message
  ___________________________________________ ############################################################################################ ERROR in action number 1 of Draw Event for object o_dapples: I32 argument is undefined############################################################################################ gml_Object_o_dapples_Draw_0 (line 19)
  We are still investigating the cause of this issue. If you are experiencing this, please share your PC setup information with us at this mega thread[beta.bscotch.net].
  
  
• If you modify the game and gained multiple copies of the same weapon or trinkets, you may see the error message：This is because those items are only meant to be crafted once and multiple copies will cause the game to crash. While you are free to modify the saves to your likings (after all, they are yours!), we strongly recommend backing up a copy before you experiment on them to avoid tragically breaking them.
  As always, we've also been reading through the things that you don't like, or wish the game also had. Keep giving us that feedback as it helps us to identify pain points and figure out what will go into the next game update.
  
  Thank you!
  

A huge thanks to everyone who has played CL2 so far! We've been reading everyone's reviews and feedback, and have just deployed a fix for a few bugs that cropped up:

• Changed how the key is acquired in the JEF in Maarla's Mantle (the "Lead Pipes" quest) to resolve an issue where players couldn't progress due to the key not dropping. If you are stuck on this quest, you can now check the small building in the JEF, and the key will be in there.
  
• Updated the Creepthorns in the Abandoned Grove for the Cultist rituals so they are more visible.
  
• Mouse selection now pioritizes your DED dummy, so you will be able to easily pick it up even if you die behind a teleporter.

We've also been reading through the things that you don't like, or wish the game also had. Keep giving us that feedback! Once things calm down from the launch we'll go through everything to find all the patterns to figure out what will go into the next game update.


People are running into some issues that we can't resolve on our side. Here's what we know:

• If you are seeing an error window with the message mentioning
  Async Event: Save-Load for object o_async_manager
  , this means the game save folder is inaccessible. Please check the properties of the save folder at
  C:\Users\{YOUR_USER_NAME}\AppData\Local\Crashlands2
  and make sure it is not hidden, read-only, or restricted by anti-virus software.
  
• If you are having FPS issues, please check that your Windows and Graphics Drivers are up to date and add your details to our megathread[www.bscotch.net]. We aren't sure if performance issues people are seeing are caused by one thing, or are unique to each person. Our best guess is that it's happening to people who have outdated Windows and/or drivers, or whose antivirus software doesn't like the game. We are still investigating the issue and would appreciate information from you to help us debug the problem!

Otherwise the launch has gone great! Here are some fun stats:

• We've now accrued 30 years of playtime since launch day. That might sound like a lot, but... it is.
  
• Our peak player concurrency on Steam was over 8000! That's WILD!
  
• We're hovering right around 95% positive on Steam. Thanks to everyone who has reviewed the game so far! And if you haven't yet, go ahead and leave a review and it'll help the game's visibility as we head into the weekend. We appreciate it 💖

And our Discord[discord.gg] is really hoppin', so pop in and say hello if you haven't!

We appreciate you all checking out the game and making this launch pop off like it has. It warms our hearts to get such a great response after all these years of work!

I've been waiting to say this for FOUR HUNDRED YEARS:


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1401730/

Cue the air horns! Release the doves! Fire the cannons! (But not at the doves!)

What a journey it's been. The original Crashlands came out in 2016 (9 years ago!), and we've spent nearly the last 5 years working on this sequel. We've put all of our blood (ow!), sweat (ew!), and tears (dew!) into this thing, and I'm incredibly proud of what we've made with our tiny little team of desiccated husks. I hope you love it as much as we do!

We've already got some great early reviews and previews. I'll just plop my favorites here:

• Vice[www.vice.com] calls it "a Crafting/Survival Masterclass" in a review that’s so glowing it made me blush!
  
• Hardcore Gamer[hardcoregamer.com] calls it "a crazy-fun adventure featuring a pair of ridiculously likable characters, set in a world that's usually bursting with humor but is smart enough to know when to take itself seriously"
  
• Wanderbots posted a charming preview video of the first hour of gameplay

We already knew we made something good, but it’s still a huge relief to hear other people agree!

As much as I'd love to spend a bunch of paragraphs bloviating about what it took to make this game and all the great things people are saying about it, I want to let you go actually play it. So I'll just leave you with some pro tips to streamline your first session:

• Explore! Try things! The game doesn't require you to do everything, but you'll have a lot more fun (and things will be better balanced) if you do more than just check off your quests. There are goodies and characters all over the map, so explore every nook and cranny.
  
• Harvest everything! Resources stay useful for quite a while, so you might as well harvest them as you run by. Then you'll already have them when you need them!
  
• Keep your research going! Return to your base often and talk to your Buddies to get your next Insights going. Each Buddy can only research one thing at a time, so returning to them often will let you get new stuff faster.
  
• You can change the difficulty at any time. If it's too hard, make it easier! If it's too easy, make it harder!
  
• You can continue your save across platforms if you get the game on Steam and mobile! Personally, I constantly bounce between my PC, my Android Phone, and the family Steam Deck.

If you run into trouble, there are a few places you can get help:

• Looking for guidance? Check out our help pages[www.bscotch.net], the subreddit, or join our Discord[discord.gg] to see if the community can give you some tips. Do some searches first!
  
• Found a bug (meaning something is BROKEN)? Report it to us[www.bscotch.net]!

I hope you have a blast!

💖,

Adam Coster

Webslinger @Butterscotch Shenanigans

P.S. Please drop a review! Those early reviews can really help a game be successful!

P.P.S. What happens next? Mostly we'll just have to see how the launch goes. But! We do have a couple of things in the pipe: Sam's working on an art book about the design and art of Crashlands 2, and we might even have... SURPRISE MERCH!?

Oh hey there, youngster!

People say that time moves faster and faster as you age. My last Ballyhoo marked 4 weeks to the Crashlands 2 launch, and I was so excited about how close that was. The blink of an eye! But 4 weeks was still an eternity for the youths, who only rolled their eyes and yelled, "That might as well be next century, old man!" as they vaped off into the sunset.

But now we're only 2 weeks away, which is truly Soon™ no matter how old you are! I think?

As the launch approaches, I've been feeling rather nostalgic about the original Crashlands and how far we've come with Crashlands 2. So this issue of the Ballyhoo is a little journey down memory lane.


Back in 2016 my two brothers and I launched the original Crashlands. It was our first game that paid any bills and is still the game we're best known for all these years later. It's been played by literally millions of people, which is both amazing and terrifying. Making Crashlands was a harrowing experience (there's a whole documentary about it), and honestly I'm still amazed we pulled it off!

(If you never played the original, or just want a refresher, someone did a delightfully-narrated 100% playthrough video edited down to a mere 2 hours!)

The success of Crashlands gave us all kinds of cool opportunities. From giving talks at the Game Developers Conference, to getting a tour of the Nintendo of America HQ, to being nominated for GOTY awards alongside juggernauts like Pokemon Go and Clash Royale.


We were super proud of what we'd made with the original game, but we were also quite aware that it wasn't the game we wished we could make. We'd only been making games for a couple of years when we started working on Crashlands, and we frankly didn't have the experience to make the game we imagined.

So we spent a few years retooling our studio, skilling up, expanding our team, and learning through launching another game (Levelhead[www.bscotch.net]). And then it was time to tackle Crashlands again, this time to make exactly the game we'd always wanted Crashlands to be. It still took a few years of research & development to become possible, and then another few years to finish the thing, but we did it!

You can get a sense of just how far we've come between the original and the sequel from some of the videos we put together over the past year:

- The release date announcement trailer shows off the benefits of changing from a procedural world to a hand-built one.
- Base-building probably has the most dramatic upgrade in Crashlands 2. Walls are tall! And buildings have roofs!
- Combat got the biggest experience upgrade. We made sure there's room for more casual play (my own preference) but the ceiling for just how interesting things can get is now a lot higher!
- Pets got more interesting, too!


Crashlands 2 is almost here, and the best thing you can do to support the game right now is to wishlist it ahead of time on your favorite platforms[bscotch.net] to let the stores know that they should be featuring it!

That's it for this Ballyhoo! As always, you can stay up to date with how things are going by listening to our podcast[podcast.bscotch.net] and hanging out in our Discord[discord.com].

💖,

Adam Coster
Webslinger @Butterscotch Getoffmylawnigans

Crashlands 2[www.bscotch.net] comes out on April 10, which is merely 4 weeks away. I want to take a moment from the million wrap-up tasks we have left to give you an update. The most important update is that we're on track for our release date and don't expect any delays!


We'd filtered 900 applicants down to 100 testers, and gave them three weeks to play as much as they could. Three weeks isn't very long for a game of this size but our intrepid testers put in an impressive effort, and a surprising number made it all the way to the end!

We got so much great feedback, and we used it to make *tons* of fixes and improvements. Some fun stats from the beta:

• 100 testers
  
• 360 Pets Hatched
  
• 470 Pet Embiggenings
  
• 3,900 Player "Deaths"
  
• 45,600 Consumables Consumed
  
• 86,800 Items Crafted
  
  
• 2,045 Total hours played
  
  • 20 Hour Average Playtime
    
  • 95 Hour Top Playtime (that's 30 hours per week!)
• How far did people get? (Note that these times are biased towards the fastest players)
  
  • 50% Completed Act 1, taking a median of 14 hours (ranging 8-40 hours)
    
  • 30% Completed Act 2, taking a median of 31 hours (ranging 20-62 hours)
    
  • 20% Completed the game, taking a median of 41 hours (ranging 28-88 hours)
• How well did it go on each platform?
  • People beat the game on PC, Steam Deck, Android, and iOS!
    
  • We had a lot of testing time on every platform
    
  • Rumpus worked perfectly to sync people's saves across devices and platforms
    
  • We had a lot of performance issues on mobile at the start of the beta, but by the end the game was playing well on nearly everyone's mobile devices

We're now at the "String Lock" phase of development, which is the fancy gamedev way of saying, "The text (a.k.a. strings) are not allowed to change anymore."

This is a super important milestone for a game, because translation always lags behind the text. Games always have to go into String Lock a fair bit before launch to make sure translators have enough time. And Crashlands 2 has 148,500 words (!) so there's a lot to translate!


While the game is now "done" except for those last bits of translation, there's still a lot of other stuff to do.

On the game side, most of our time is going into performance boosts, minor bugfixes, and small quality of life improvements. We won't make any major changes because everything in the game interacts with everything else, so each change we make requires a LOT of testing. So that's the other thing we'll be doing until launch: an absolutely bonkers amount of testing!

But game launches require a lot more than just having a complete game. We have to coordinate all kinds of marketing activities, shore up all of our store pages, make plans with business partners, and take care of a billion odds and ends.


And with that I'll leave you until launch, unless I can squeeze in another Ballyhoo in a couple of weeks. I'm SO EXCITED to get this game into your hands after these looooong 4.5 years of development! As always, you can stay up to date with how things are going by listening to our podcast [podcast.bscotch.net]and hanging out in our Discord[discord.com].

💖,

Adam Coster
Webslinger @Buticanfeelit Shenaningintheairtonight

Crashlands 2 is a sci-fi game that takes place on an alien planet, where every character except for Flux (the main character) is an alien or a robot. So the names of nearly everything are fully made up and have no direct translations. And pretty much every piece of text in Crashlands is a joke of some kind, usually a pun, which almost never translates easily across languages.

Take that complexity and multiply it by the 150,000 words in Crashlands 2 and, well, translation is a VERY difficult (and expensive) problem!

Given our limited time and budget we could only manage a few languages for the initial release, with the hope that the game does well enough that we can add more later. We chose the languages we thought would be most popular among people interested in Crashlands 2, but since the original Crashlands had so few languages we couldn't base that on past interest. Ultimately, we just had to guess.

As we've gotten closer to launch we've seen more and more people asking whether or not the game would be in their language. Fortunately, our guesses about player interest were mostly good: we were able to say ""Yep 😄"" more often than ""Nope 😔"". The big exception to that was Russian; it was the most-commonly asked for language that we weren't supporting at launch.

Whoops!

So that brings us to the big news: we'll now be supporting Russian at launch!

Our translation team has a LOT of work to do to get it all done before the April 10 release. So it'll be a close thing, but we're confident we can make it happen.

As players of games ourselves, we're big fans of Steam Deck over here at Bscotch. We wanted to make sure that Crashlands 2 played great on it at launch, because we wanted to play it on Steam Deck ourselves!

We made sure that a few people on our QA team have had Steam Decks since they first came out, and have included the platform in our test suites ever since. Our internal testing has included hundreds of hours of testing just on Steam Deck, and we've been continually improving performance of Crashlands 2 so that it plays like a dream.

While Steam Deck has the advantage of being a standardized platform, there's always the possibility that our QA team missed something. So we made sure that our pre-launch beta (just wrapped up this week) included regular players who wanted to give it a go on Steam Deck. That added another 160 hours of testing time to the platform, and all signs are pointing to it running great when we launch.

Once Crashlands 2 goes live on April 10, we hope you have a blast playing it on the go (or on the couch) on your Steam Deck 💖