Hello all you lovely AIs out there!

The end of the year again came blazingly fast, especially after so many good games made their debut this year and had time flying by like life was running on x8 speed...

So we want to close this year with a quick preview of the next Update that's currently in progress. We still don't have an ETA as it got a bit bigger then we initally intended, but hopefully that's a good thing in the end. ːsteamhappyː

Currently the very rough "feel" is, that it'll be finished around the end of February/March, but we'll try to keep you more up to date with the progress next year.

Till then, here are some of the stuff that'll come with the next update besides the new/missing levels:

(Please note that all the screens, numbers etc. may still change or are work in progress yada yada yada)

We finally found the time to add many more LODs to the game, especially the factory parts.

For those of you who don't know what this means: LOD stands for "Level of Detail" and is a technique used in games to improve the rendering performance, when many objects are on the screen or if they are very far away.

Basically what it does is, it reduces the amount of details of any object, the further away it is from the camera. You may've noticed this in games when for example a city far away looks like a bunch of blurry blocks but the closer you come, the more detailed the buildings.

So, we've added that for the game and managed to cut our Verts count in half and the Tris count was even reduced by roughly 3/4. Basically this means, that your GPU has a lot less to render and it should drastically improve the performance especially when zooming out on larger factories.

Before:
After:
Look at those shiny numbers in the upper right, that most people don't find interesting at all ːlunar2020hearteyesrabbitː

One of the new features is the new "Data Nexus" which replaces the old Questbook.

You'll still find the old Quests there, but now there are many, many, maaany more. Basically for everything you can do in the game, there is now a "Data Item" which requires you to do a certain amount of something. Mostly Crafting or Defeating Enemies.

Each Data Item has different difficulties, it's basically something like "mini achievements" in other games, but you'll get rewarded with skillpoints for each finished Item.

Wow so many Skillpoints... what should I do with them?

Oh I'm glad you ask, here's the next change that'll come with the update:


We are overhauling all the skilltrees to make them more interesting, make spending skillpoints a little bit more of a "strategic decision" and also to bring some new features.

One of these changes for example is, that the costs for a skill now increase with it's level. So you now may have to consider a bit more if you want to spend those 15 points on a 3% dmg increase for the Vulcan Tower, or if you'd rather upgrade another one.

We'll also introduce "endless upgrades" for each tower. There are 3 in total that are at the end of each of the 3 "Sub Skilltrees". Their cost also increase with each level so you have an incentive to still put points into other towers :)

Also we are overhauling the Tower UI, to hopefully make important stats more visible.

Here are some small previews, with a lot of placeholder icons :D

But maybe you can spot another 1 or 2 upcoming features that we'll talk more about in an upcoming news post ;)

That's all from us for this year!

Let us know what you think of these upcoming changes and we from Snob Entertainment wish all of you a merry christmas and a happy new year!

See you in 2025

- Snob Entertainment -

Just a small bugfix update while we are still working on the next content Patch, stay tuned! :)

• Fixed the Cosuna Portal level still using Post Processing on the UI (That's why everything there looked darker than the rest of the game)
  
• Reduced Camera Move Speed in all Saitoris levels a bit as it was way faster than other levels.

Don't mind me, just a small update passing through...

• The Loot Window inside a TD Level is now shown as a more compact grid and the wiggle animation is disabled by default (You can still click the button on the top left beside the "loot" title to toggle the animation on/off).
  
• Fixed some UI Scrolling Speeds that were to high.
  
• Adjusted the lighting of the factory.
  
• Some minor UI fixes and improvements.

As always hit us up on Discord or in the Steam discussions and let us know what you think or miss!

- Snob Entertainment -

Hey there!

The game will be off by 50% from today till Monday the 28th October!

But wait there's more!

We also want to let you know that after the sale, the price for the game will be permanently reduced from 14,99$ to 9,99$ (And respectively in other currencies).

We want to thank everyone who has supported us and bought the game till now and hope you have/had fun playing it <3

- Snob Entertainment -

Hello all you lovely AIs out there!

While we are currently still working on the next bigger update (and you all are probably busy playing the new Factorio DLC anyway ;), we wanted to put out another small one in between, as it contains some important fixes that we'd like to put out rather early.

First of all, we've updated to the latest 2022 LTS Unity version, which should hopefully fix some reported crashes or compability issues and also somewhat improve the overall performance.

The other big change is actually a "bug", that we finally found by coincidence and that has bugged us from the early access on.

We always had a mismatch between how the UI looks in the editor vs. how it looks ingame and couldn't figure out why. This also meant more effort for making the UIs as we had to switch and test out a lot... For comparison take a look at this nexus upgrade screen for example:

How it looked for us in Unity:
How it looked in the game:
As you can see, it's much darker and elements tend to glow much more etc. We found out, that this was simply the post processing of the UI Camera and now that we've disabled it, the game actually looks like it does for us in the editor. *yay*

This change will make the game UI look a brighter and a bit different overall, but it will also remove a lot of unwanted blurry/over bright UI elements and other stuff that was changed by the post processing.

Let us know, what you think of these changes or if you'd rather see it reverted back to the darker colors!

• Updated Unity to 2022.3.50f1, which should fix some reported crashes, improve compability with some devices/hardware and also increase performance by a small bit.
  
• Disabled Post Processing for the UI Camera and adjusted some UI Colors and Level lighting.

• Added a small animated arrow on the currently selected level.
  
• Fixed MobInfo showing too high or too low resistance numbers (The numbers were still correct for damage calculations, but the display was bugged).
  
• Added additional Tower slots for the Portal mode to "Saitors - Portal" and "Cetazed - Landing Site".
  
• Fixed the Loot window disappearing if you change resolutions. You can now click the loot window button again and the window will be reset if it's last position was outside the window.
  
• The Enemy Loot window is now sorted by rarity and it's performance was slightly improved.
  
• The MobInfo screen now closes, if an enemy died to prevent weird display bugs, if the mob is being reused from an object pool.
  
• Some minor UI polishing and fixes.
  
• Changed the Loading Screen Image.
  
• Changed the default icon for tower weapons.
  
• Fixed enemy heal numbers showing up, when damage numbers are toggled off.
  
• Changed the color for exp kickers from yellow to purple.
  
• Small translation fixes.

Hello all you lovely AIs out there,

we know you are all busy playing Satisfactory, waiting for the next Factorio DLC or slaying Tyranids for the Emperor!

But we still wanted to put out this small patch that should fix some annoying bugs, while we are working on the next, bigger content update :)

• Added a small info about the damage done and enemies killed in the current Level to the Tower Info screen.
  

• Fixed best endless/portal mode stats not being saved.
  
• Fixed the "manual crafting in progress" overlay on the Level Selection screen.
  
• Fixed enemies not being clickable through damage/exp numbers.
  
• Fixed wrong rarity colors of ships inside the Fleet Management screen.
  
• Fixed Tin Ingots showing up for cold element modifications.

As always, thank you for reporting these bugs, hit us up on Discord or in the Steam discussions and let us know what you think or miss!

- Snob Entertainment -

Before anything else: Even though we tried as much as possible to keep this update compatible with older saves, we can't guarantee that some edge cases might still destroy your savegame. So if you don't intend to start a new game, we recommend you backup your old saves first, so in case anything goes wrong we can help you to restore your progress!

To see where your savefiles are stored, have a look here: Savegame locations


Whew! After this shocker introduction, now let's continue more gently and say hello to all you lovely AIs out there!

As we've mentioned in the last development update, we are unfortunately very busy with our private lifes and fulltime jobs, thus the update took us longer as we wanted and also we had to reduce the scope a bit, because we didn't want you to have to wait for another month or so for all the goodies in this.

Mainly there are 10 levels missing for the last 5 planets and the new Equipment recipes (Tier 2 and onwards) - we will bring those with the next update that hopefully won't take as long as this one did, as we will fully focus on adding new content with the next update. (And fix bugs/rebalance things you may report).

Also please note, that due to some changes of internal stats you may have to unlock some achievements for beating levels (respectively planets) again. Unfortunately we don't know how Steam behaves in this regard if you've already unlocked them, we tried our best to migrate your statistics data to keep your achievements.

Okay those are enough downers, let's finally get to the good part!

Here's what's new with this update:

• Added 12 new Levels (10 more to come with the next update).
  
  • Rebalanced enemies, rewards and unlocks of all levels to have a smoother progress and less difficulty spikes. Note however, this may interfer with your existing savegames in that you may be able to collect more skillpoints than you can spend on all towers. (We plan to add more ways to gain and spend Skillpoints with a later update though).
    
  • Completely overhauled the Level Selection screen:
  • Existing savegames should have unlocked all Levels up to their highest one reached. But it is possible, that you may have to play all levels again. We are sorry if this inconvenience applies to you and hope it doesn't annoy you too much :[
    
  • "Cosuna" got a little overhaul and additional portals.
    
  • "Saitoris" now also uses the unity Terrain system and has some Paths drawn.
    
  • Some minor changes to existing levels (mostly cosmetic)
• Added 2 new enemies that you can encounter and each Portal Level of each Planet now has a Boss enemy. All these new enemies can appear in Portal mode aswell.
  
• Added new Resources, Recipes and overhauled their usages and stats in the recipe modification. (See the Item Section below for more on that)
  
• Tower Build Slots now have a new model
  
• Added a new visual toggle to show elemental details of damage done by towers:
  
• Overhauled the enemy info screen a bit to make the most important infos better visible:
  
• Added new Factory/Interstellar Upgrades in the Resource Nexus:
  
  • Legendary Drone Speed (+100%)
    
  • Legendary Drone Capacity (+5)
    
  • Legendary Belt Speed (+100%) now has 1 additional Level
    
  • Legendary Grabber Speed (+100%) now has 1 additional Level
    
  • Legendary Mining Speed (+100%) now has 1 additional Level
• We've changed some parts of the tutorial and also rearranged the tasks, so that setting up your base now comes a bit later. We hope that new players get less overwhelmed this way.
  
• Added new Quests and removed/changed some e.g. winning a level 3 times is now changed to win all levels of a planet.
  
• All these updates also apply to the Demo Version, which now can be played for the first 3 planets instead of the first 3 levels. (So the last demo level is the final Cosuna mission, where you also unlock recipe modifications)

[expand type=details]
All equipment values have undergone balancing changes that we didn't list here. In general all weapons and ammo should now have a wider and higher possible damage roll.

Recipe changes
The following recipes have been removed!
They are still available on existing savegames for compability reasons but won't unlock when you start a new game. With the next update, we want to further give the player control on how ammunition behaves and thus will extend the ammo modification options instead of giving each tower 2 different ammo recipes.

• HE-Ammo Tier 1
  
• EMP-Projectile Tier 1
  
• Titanium Batteries Tier 1
  
• Freezer burn Liquids Tier 1
  
• EMP Shell Tier 1
  
• Ionization Transformator Tier 1

The following recipes are now unlocked by default instead of by beating a level:

• T1 Tower Optics and Hydraulics.
  
• Cable (Copper) & Uncommon Package (Copper Cable)
  
• Steel & Uncommon Package (Steel)
  
• Aluminium & Uncommon Package (Aluminium)
  
• Uncommon Package (Sulfur)
  
• Common Package (Sand)
  
• Convert Stone to Sand

Misc. Recipe and item changes

• Weapon recipes now inherit the base values of the weapon when modified. This means, if you modify a weapon it will have the default base stats + the values you add by modifying.
  
  • For example: Your weapon has (+2) | (+5) physical damage as base stat. If you now modify this weapon recipe and add components that add (+1) | (+2) physical damage, the resulting weapon will now have (+3) | (+7) instead of (+1) | (+2).
• Increased Starting Drones for a new Game from 12 to 15
  
• AP Ammo Tier 1 - Reduced Iron Ingot cost from 8 to 6
  
• Reduced crafting time of Cut Stone from 3s to 2s
  
• Reduced crafting time of Weapon Barrel T1 from 3s to 1s
  
• Reduced crafting time of Tesla Generator T1 from 5s to 3s
  
• Reduced crafting time of Artillery Barrel T1 from 5s to 3s
  
• Reduced crafting time of Conducting Rail T1 from 5s to 3s
  
• Reduced crafting time of Cryo Nozzle T1 from 5s to 3s
  
• Reduced crafting time of Cryo Pump T1 from 5s to 3s
  
• Reduced crafting time of Laser Pump T1 from 5s to 3s
  
• Reduced crafting time of Optical Cavity T1 from 5s to 3s
  
• Reduced crafting time of Plasma Chamber T1 from 5s to 3s
  
• Reduced crafting time of Plate Capacitor T1 from 5s to 3s
  
• Reduced crafting time of Tesla Coil Ring T1 from 5s to 3s
  
• Reduced crafting time of Tesla Generator T1 from 5s to 3s
  
• Reduced crafting time of Targeting System T1 from 5s to 3s
  
• Reduced crafting time of Tower Hydraulics T1 from 5s to 3s

[/expand]


[expand type=details]
Gun Tower

• Increased max Range from 30 to 35
  
• Decreased min RoF from 0.15 to 0.10
  
• Increased base Range from 16/20/24 to 20/22/24
  
• Increased base Damage from 9/15/23 to 11/18/28

Railgun Tower

• Increased max Range from 30 to 35
  
• Decreased base Reload Time from 8/7/6,5 to 7/6,5/6
  
• Increased base Electric Piercing from 0/0/0 to 4%/6%/8%
  
• Increased base Physical Damage from 72/94/125 to 90/115/148
  
• Increased base Electric Damage from 6/11/21 to 21/32/44
  
• The "A.I. Guided Shrapnels" Skill now increases build cost by 5 and upgradecost by 3 per Level.

Laser Tower

• Increased base Range from 14/16/18 to 16/18/20
  
• Increased base Heat Piercing from 0/0/0 to 4%/6%/8%
  
• Increased base Heat Damage from 7/11/16 to 12/17/24
  
• Decreased min RoF from 0.15 to 0.10

Cryo Tower

• Increased base Range from 15/17/19 to 16/18/20
  
• Increased base Cold AoE Piercing from 0/0/0 to 2%/4%/6%
  
• Increased base Cold AoE Damage from 5/9/14 to 12/17/23

Artillery Tower

• Increased base Physical AoE Damage from 9/12/18 to 15/21/28
  
• Increased base Physical AoE Piercing from 0/0/0 to 1%/3%/5%
  
• Increased base Heat AoE Damage from 42/56/73 to 48/65/91
  
• Increased base Heat AoE Piercing from 0/0/0 to 3%/5%/7%

Tesla Tower

• Increased base Electric Piercing from 0/0/0 to 3%/6%/9%
  
• Increased base Electric Damage from 52/70/90 to 74/90/114
  
• Increased base Heat Damage from 9/12/15 to 14/20/28

[/expand]

• Recipes in crafting screens are now ordered by rarity.
  
• Added new portrait images for some enemies.
  
• Added possible bugfix for achievements not being synced with steam.
  
• Improved Animation performance of enemies that are out of sight of the camera.
  
• Slightly improved rendering performance of base buildings.
  
• Slightly improved performance of Miner building Ticks.
  
• Fixed item rarity color of selected resources in the Miner UI.
  
• Rearranged interstellar upgrades a bit.
  
• Added new icons for mining speed upgrades.
  
• Fixed Skybox not rendering correctly. (Mostly can't be seen anyway because of the camera settings, but also had some other, minor impacts.)
  
• Fixed some number formatting on the Outpost and Production overview screens.
  
• Removed the extra hypen for the tower upgrade stats change preview. ( it now is > instead of ->)
  
• Towers and ghosts now rotate correctly with the Tower Build Slot.
  
• Fixed some Tutorial Steps.
  
• Some small Translation fixes.
  
• The Level SelectScreen now selects your last selected planet & level when you open it.
  
• Fixed AoE Splash upgrade being unlocked by the wrong skill in the Resource Nexus.

We will have an eye on your feedback to this update and if you encounter bugs or think we should rebalance things.

Other than that we'll work as fast as we can on the missing 10 levels and new equipment recipes. Then we'll have to look how well the game does, as of now we are very far away from at least having one of us working fulltime on the game - but that's the indie dev life :D

We have ton of ideas and improvements that we would love to still build into this game (like a much better crafting screen for example ^^) but like we've mentioned a few times by now: We do all of this in our spare time besides having fulltime jobs and a family so we have to see what the future brings.

If you would like to help us out, tell your friends who might be into this game about it :) It's also currently 35% off for the duration of the Steam Tower Defense Festival!

Other than that you can help us by leaving a honest review, join our discussions, give us feedback on what to improve or by just enjoying the game <3

As always hit us up on Discord or in the Steam discussions and let us know what you think or miss!

- Snob Entertainment -

Hey there all you lovely AIs, long time no see!

Unfortunately our private lifes still keep us busy, but we are nonetheless working on the next update in every minute of our spare time!

It will still take some time and we currently can't give you an ETA when the update will come, but we aim at mid or end of july.

For this update, we are mainly focusing on adding more content for the Tower Defense Part. We heard you and totally agree that the game would benefit from more levels, so we are in the process of creating them!

This will hopefully allow for a smoother game progression, as we now can spread unlocks/rewards better over more levels and also have a slower difficulty increase. (And besides that, you get more levels to play - yaaaay!)

Currently our idea is, that every planet has 3 Levels (so 22 new Levels in total) which represent different "stages".
The first being the construction and defending of a landing site, the second being the creation of an outpost and the 3rd beating a Portal boss on that planet and seizing the communication artefact.

(There are no new game mechanics or so coming with this, it's just some sort of fluff to "explain" why each Planet has 3 levels ;))

To better showcase this, we are also overhauling the level selection Screen. You now first select a planet and can then click on one of the tree missions there to get more information and start it:

(Please note that all screenshots are still Work in progress and may still have missing features or placeholders!)

We hope this new selection screen adds some more flavour to the game, aswell as more important informations and a better overview of a level.

Together with this update, we'll also bring some fixes and smaller stuff, that we may talk about in a later post. And of course there will be a lot of rebalancing of enemies and towers, so stay tuned for that!


That's it already for today. Like we've said we can't give you an ETA yet and there are still Levels missing, and they need testing and polishing and so on, but we'll keep you updated about our progress!

Till then, we end this news with some screenshots of some of the new levels aswell as an updated version of the old "Cosuna" Level :)

As always hit us up on Discord or in the Steam discussions and let us know what you think or miss!




- Snob Entertainment -

Hello all you lovely AIs out there!

With this small update we bring you some long awaited outposts and with it the ability to finally mine rare resources like silver, tungsten, gold and platinum! ːsteamhappyː
(More Outposts will still be added with future updates)

We've also made stars on the starmap slightly bigger and their names hopefully a bit more readable together with some other minor UI polishing for the miners.

We've also made Steam Leaderboards public, so you can now see how you compare globally and with your friends in Steam yourself. Just click on your Steam Achievements and in the upper right you have a drop down for "Personal/Global Leaderboards" :)

On top of that we took another look at the Cryo Tower GPU Performance and were able to increase their GPU performance further from 30fps with 6 Towers to 60fps with 8 Towers firing their AoE simultaneously.

Before:
After:
As you can see in the lower picture, the performance spikes (those green/blue mountains in the bottom) are much lower and consistent than before.
If you had fps drops from the Cryo Tower AoE before, let us know if this increased the performance for you aswell.

We wish all of you a happy and relaxing easter and hope to see you on the next update!

• Added a new Outpost: Cetazed - Unlocked after beating Level 9 (Glaviros III)
  
• Added a new Outpost: Purtauri - Unlocked after beating Level 10 (Cadesia)
  
• Added a new Outpost: Auridian - Unlocked after beating Level 11 (Karasir)
  
• Public Steam Leaderboards

• The Cable (Gold) recipe now produces 2 instead of 1 cable.

• Improved visibility of planets on the fleet and outpost map.
  
• Polished the Miner building UI a bit.
  
• Some minor translation and button spacing fixes.
  
• Added a small floor to the interstellar building to make better visibile, where to put grabbers.

As always hit us up on Discord or in the Steam discussions and let us know what you think or miss!

- Snob Entertainment -