It has been an extremely busy 30 days here. As we are getting to the finish line and finding we know precisely what to do to make Endless Dark the best game it can be, that is spurring a huge burst of creativity that is all going into the game. There's a ton to go over, so let's take it at the heading level. That'll hopefully keep it together better.

We've gone through a lot of trouble this patch to make the game generally easier to look at and work with. Firstly, there's the task list. In builds past, every leak, every door, every almost-identical task would generate its own entry on the list, which could make for quite a teetering list, very quickly. Now, tasks will be fairly aggressively grouped up, like so:
You can still end up with a staggering list pretty fast, but you will no longer have a list shooting off the bottom of the screen because you slept on some leaks.

The weather list has also seen a couple huge upgrades:
In addition to the symbols simply being made larger, we have designed and are now using unicons that distinctly identify each hazard. No longer will you have to remember which color is which; a cloud is always dust, a magnet is always EMP, a rad marker is always a radiation belt, and a black hole is always a grav zone. This also moves the weather markers away from the bottom ribbon. Hey, while we're on the topic, let's talk about that bottom ribbon!

The bottom ribbon is now only for systems, and they are always displayed. Highlighting them still pulls up a summary of their status, even if that status is simply "on". The usual accessibility-tested color palate is in use for various states, be it damaged, glitched, disabled, or more.

Also, as you likely already noticed, some of the systems also got their own unicons! The default unicons we've had for a long time have always been a little confusing, so we went back and designed our own for the systems where that was important. Navigation now looks like a compass, shields now looks like a shield, and observation, surprise surprise, appears to be an eye! The UI's fidelity got a giant upgrade from these changes, and we're really happy to have them.

Toasts have also gotten a huge upgrade. They were always nice to have, but sometimes, it would give you an alert without a clear idea as to why something happened. Now, toasts will report a reason in close to every case. This is especially useful when you are seeing you badly-needed overclocks sputter out, and don't understand why. It's helpful to see if it's something you could have avoided with Memories or not.

And hey, what's that last thing we have always made a big deal, but never actually shown you? That's right, the power supply.

Snuggled up next to the bot UI is a power bar, showing you exactly how much power you are generating, how it is being used, and how much you have in reserve. You can also select it to get a full report!

But is that all, no wait, there's more! You know those Decaying Ship faults that act as spoilers for your run? Wouldn't it be cool if you could see them coming?
Now you can. You can even cancel them. Though not without cost:
But we'll get into the specifics of that when we start talking about Doability.


The final Usability note is one everyone can get behind: Pure, raw, frames. We did a lot of tightening up on the game over the last month, and the collective performance increase has been A full 100% over our last release per our benchmarks, even with the other upgrades we've put in. We have also massively improved the way the game handles garbage collection, so the occasional stutters that sometimes happened when the game was cleaning itself up have been almost completely eliminated.

If you were having any trouble at all running the game, please try again. We've worked really hard to get you a lot of extra frames.

In addition to everything above, the game has gotten the first wave of the art facelift we promised in our road to 1.0 post. There is the usual outlay of upgraded doodads, floors, and a few walls. Most notably, though, consoles have been redone to fit the rest of the art. They also now incorporate the new sigils to make their screen match up with the system tray: Oh, and also, they have some particle effects when you smash 'em up:
Consoles also have alternate screens for when they have alternate effects on them, that they will cycle between. So you will now be able to tell, by looking at a console, if it is Glitched, Disabled, Locked, or Hardened. Hardened? Well, we'll get to that with Doability.

Speaking of particle effects, we've added a fair number of them to the game. Certain leaks, in particular, will now kick off stanky fumes that obscure the screen and force you to go digging for the source:

The title screen also got a bit of an upgrade - nothing major, but enough to show you that it's doing something when you load. A few people have said that the stillness unnerves them, so now, the title will print itself out and keep a flashing cursor going.

It also persistently answers the question of what we made the game with. :D

Much more is scheduled for prettying the game up as we march to 1.0, but you can get a good look at where our plans are with the new update.

All this is great, but this game is fundamentally about doing things. About interacting and working. What can you actually DO in this new update?

Well... a lot, and it mostly works into things you already know.

First, everyone's favorite, psychosis tasks. More of the insane tasks that show up in your list can now properly be completed. Swap places with a passenger? Turn a pod into an aquarium? Huff xenon fumes? Sure, why not, we'll do that!

Wait, xenon fumes?

The individual thrusters in the engine bay can now both malfunction, and be sabotaged. Each busted thruster reduces your speed by 5% - so a few thrusters are probably ignorable for some turns, but a lot of them on the fritz is crippling. This is a new minor repair that can happen instead of leaks, breaker surges, etc. And also:
It's an opportunity to get high. Or try to. Robots don't actually breathe, silly. Have you checked your neural net recently?

Next up, the Custodians' personalities now matter when you are making event choices. The loose descriptors in the bot selection screen have been swapped with functional tags. So while Annie is Implosive and Pragmatic, FRANK is Explosive and Selfish. These actually matter in game:

When doing things your Custodian agrees with, the benefits of the decision are increased, while any penalties are reduced. In addition, you keep a personality score that will get you perks: Naturally, there are plenty of things your Custodian will DISLIKE, as well. FRANK, as ever, is not really into the whole "extra work" thing: Doing things your Custodian disagrees with will earn you more fatigue, stress, and psychosis for the choice, or reduce the healing that happens. Also, it's just as easy to get harmful perks if you keep dissociating with your personality!

Nextly, let's get around to talking about those ship faults.

For increasing amounts of Fatigue, you can reveal an upcoming Fault. This will tell you what the fault is, when you can expect it to hit, and also OFFER TO LET YOU COUNTER IT.

These costs are randomized, and generally quite harsh, but it now gives you some agency against these chronic, game-altering events.

Also, there are also now Dilemmas that occur in the final act of the game.

If you've ever felt yourself struggling in the final act, or cruising, this is where you sell out, or cash in. As you limp toward the finish line, you will be offered a choice to screw over Future You in order to finish what you started, or to make the next Custodian's job easier, for a sacrifice now. It is also the first major adjustment to the score that we've added for quite some time. Tired of seeing negative scores? Now you don't have to.

Ah yes, and let's not forget - the Hardened point we mentioned earlier.

You have everything set up the way you want, with overclocks just so, and even had good rolls on the duration? Four turns of overclocked engines! Amazing! Finally going to get caught up to the tension wall!

Next turn, it is practically guaranteed that damage to the engine, or a power failure elsewhere, will rob you of that, right?

Now, there is! You can Harden it!

Hardening takes some Fatigue, and 2 parts. Also, a Hardened system consumes +1 power. But in return, it is immune to most glitches, and is last in line to be shut off due to power shortages for 4-6 turns. As a bonus, a Hardened system, if damaged, will simply become nominal. What does all this mean? It means a Hardened system isn't going to lose Overclocked unless something dire happens, and it'll be even harder to take offline!

Finally - a crunchy Lore update.

Every time you have started a game, you are greeted with a reference to the infamous MC.419. But what are these MCs? And are there really that many of them?

Answer: YES.

This update includes encodings of roughly 300 of the 419 MCs, which will be displayed to you when the ship believes you are in violation of some (rightly or not), or repeated as mantras by your Custodian to hold onto the fraying edges of their sanity. While many seem innocuous, many more give hints to the larger story - the one that came long before you awoke on Contingency.


That, at long last, is all for this update. Please review the game, it TRULY helps. We welcome all bug reports and chat on the forums or in Discord, and if you know a content creator who might be interested in showing off what we've got, please reach out. :)

Now - back to work on 1.0!

This update is relatively small in terms of lines of change, but it includes two new features that have profoundly impactful changes on the game, so we wanted to put a few more words into this update.

The two most chronic antagonists in this game are doors, and the weather. Today's update actually gives you tools to deal with both.

The weather has been something we have been wrestling with for a while. It is critical to the overall challenge and flavor of the game, but also, there are too many edge cases where it is simply too punishing and frustrating to deal with.

After a fistful of design discussions, we came to a deceptively simple solution: Course changes.

Instead of 1 line with guaranteed weather, the ship may now be diverted to one of three allowable courses that you can steer to at Navigation. This lets you pilot around hazards that you don't want to deal with - or steered into the one you hate least. Navigation now also gives you an estimated progress marker when shifting courses. Note it is not ENTIRELY accurate, as the dust weather will slow you down as you enter the area. But it's mostly accurate.

Note that:
1) Navigation still needs to be functional to change course
2) You still will lose the forecast if Navigation is nonfunctional
3) You still can NOT see gravitational anomalies (which will disable Navigation)

There is a hefty Fatigue cost to adjust course, but this can be negated by taking the Solar Sailor memory - in addition to +2 distance traveled at start.

Doors.

There are so many problems with doors. They get in your way. They get stuck by the breakers. They cause so much insanity. Heck, one of those insanities killed a streamer on camera recently as the afraid-of-doors insanity procced too many times in a row and caused a stress break the streamer couldn't handle.

Why can you not take your well-earned vengeance on the hateful things?

Well, now you can.

While very expensive in terms of fatigue and stress, sometimes it's not about what's optimal. Sometimes it's about sending a message. "Destroy Door" does exactly what it says on the tin. If you do it, the door you use it on will be permanently removed from that run. Nobody will miss it, most likely.

In addition, doors can now be forced open, even if they are locked by a closed or broken breaker. This is, again, quite an expensive procedure, but perhaps less expensive than the looming disaster that this one stupid door is about to let happen. But what happens when you force open a door? Well, that too isn't for certain.

Most commonly, it will simply open, to close again about 30 seconds later, when the breaker re-establishes control. However, it can also become wedged open, permanently. Also, obviously, failure is always an option. You can simply jam the door shut.

While not worthy of a major release tag, this update nonetheless brings a huge amount of power to the player. We hope you enjoy it.

This update includes a few new insanities, a new nightmare, and a small fistful of bugfixes revealed on a stream.

- Added more sound to new game screen
- Clarified in tooltips that FRANK loses stress for allowing passengers to die, rather than only when killing them.
- Made overclocked systems immune to glitch - certain glitches could rob a system of overclocked, so this should make it easier to keep engines and/or nav OC'd to catch up to the tension wall
- Chatty memory now gives extra machine parts if you would already start with the Chatbot
- Stopped other modules from showing up on the memory core aug slot
- Fixed progress not being erased if you removed the memory core
- Tracking Failure will no longer allow you to prematurely escape nightmares
- Player robot will now lose coolant when panicking (as per certain insanities)
- Added labyrinth nightmare
- Added 4 new insanities - Cruise Control, Automysophobia, Sciophobia, and Flipped Bits
- Fixed Robbie's emergency repair bonuses not applying to emergency repair on the pods, even though the tooltip claimed they were
- Fixed paperdoll scaling
- Fixed the game timer not setting itself to 0 when a new game is started
- Various tooltip and event fixes

Shoutouts to TheLastRoboKy[twitch.tv] for revealing a lot of the bugs fixed in this patch.

This update includes a ton of customization options and an overhauled new game page, letting you tweak your game in dozens of ways to suit your desired experience. Chief among them is REAL-TIME MODE, which completely changes the dynamic of the game in many ways. This also includes a lot of the meta progression content we want to include, such as ship persistence across games, and more. A lot of these details will be detailed in later updates as we aren't yet done working out how their mechanics will work, but the existing tooltips are all accurate.

* Real-time mode added
* Mono audio mode added in Options menu for those having rare no-audio issues
* 22 customization options for each game are now available
* Overhauled new game page will show you in great detail exactly what your starting position will be

With Arc 9 done and the story complete up to the grand finale, you may be asking yourself: What does that finale look like? And how will this game look on full release? Well, we have some thoughts to share with you on that.

Our Discord has been buzzing a lot more than usual about where the finale is going, and what it might entail. Without spoiling anything about the story, we want to say three things:

1. There is hope.
   
2. You can grasp it.
   
3. It will NOT be easy.

Mechanically, the finale is going to be set up very differently than the chapters up to this point. Each chapter has given the Custodian slightly more agency than the one before it, but even in arc 9, the Custodian's agency is fairly limited. The rules completely change in the finale, and a unique set of mechanics will open up on the order of 25 different ending types. We have always intended for this story to be what you make of it. Endless Dark, from the inception, has been an ode to those of us who work - long, hard, and thanklessly, without anyone telling us what the goal is. The only way we can reasonably end that ode is to give back what the grind has stolen from both us players, and the Custodian: Choice and purpose.

As a much more successful game developer with a similar love for story says: Please look forward to it.

As we briefly touched on in the 0.9.0 update post, we have gotten much better at working with our artists as the overall style and aesthetic of Endless Dark has become more clear during the EA period. We have our early adopters to thank for a lot of that. The genuine feedback and earnest thoughts you give us are more valuable than gold. So, in order to make good on that faith, we will be re-evaluating every tile and graphic in the game, based on our better understanding of our own style. This effort will also touch a few other headings, not the least of which is the next one...

0.9.1 and 0.9.2 have already added a few hints as to what our intentions are for this. Choices should have consequences, even and especially if you don't expect them. Some of these things will require new art, some of these things may require more utility sections of the ship (like the recently added Incinerator). But in general, if something seems like it should have a long term effect, it ought to. Has anyone ever made the rust painting in Creeping Corrosion? What if it left a mural of rust for you?

There will be more examples of mechanical meta-consequences, too, some of which will relate to the progress of your memory core. And then, also, there's the obvious one.

We've teased this when you acquire the memory core since our first release. Do you want the ultimate in consequences? How about being responsible for the Memory Core?

One of the primary things we conveniently forget at the moment is that there are numerous ways to lose the Memory Core, which is the only reason the Custodian is not booted as a blank, naïve clone every game. We intend to keep forgetting that, in general, because it's just not fun to play 15 games and lose all your progress to a combination of inattentiveness and bad luck. Or, even worse, because you dared to challenge yourself in a game designed to be challenging. That's now how we roll. But we've been very diligent about keeping promises, so Roguelite mode is happening, and its implementation is really quite simple.

1. 1.0 will support multiple profiles.
   
2. You can switch between them at will.
   
3. When you create a profile, you choose whether it will be a roguelite profile.
   
4. Endless and Sandbox mode will be exempt from the loss of the Memory Core, as there is no way out of those modes except to "lose".

In addition to the Memory Core consequences, score will also be handled slightly differently on Roguelite mode. But that leads into a bit of our next topic...

Endless Dark was always meant to be a challenging game, and that threads through into the scores you all have been getting for most of your runs. The score is deeply intertwined with the narrative, and the headings we use for the score are very specifically chosen. However, it prompted a larger discussion among the team about difficulty, and how you use it. The discussion ended with trials of the difficulty toggles screen you've already seen in game, which we got tons of great feedback about.

We're getting ready to close that feedback loop. We're going to keep the basic concepts we have in place, and keep expanding on the difficulty toggles we have. Those toggles will have a couple of 'developer recommended' presets so you don't have to think about them too much if you don't want to. But ultimately, we like you being in control of the difficulty, and we like you being able to turn off something that's ticking you off.

And there WILL be some things that will tick you off. The beautiful thing about the toggles we've come up with is that we can make some new and radical changes to the game that you as a player can simply choose not to interact with if you don't like it. As an example: Ever though about Endless Dark, REAL TIME MODE?

Sound awful to you? Good news! You never have to play it like this. Sound awesome to you? Good news! You can play it like this as much as you want!

The added wrinkle: By 1.0, your difficulty decisions will give you a score multiplier, if your score ends up being positive. These positive scores will be persisted on your bot profile, so it will be a matter of record how many points you've accrued as Robbie, Annie, or FRANK. Negative scores will be discarded, in normal mode, for the same narrative reasons that make a positive score so difficult to get in the first place.

In roguelite mode, however, those negative scores will count.

There may be other scoring tweaks that happen on the road to 1.0 as we keep getting feedback from players, but these principles are going to continue to guide what we do.

Also, the visual representation of difficulty kinda rules:
Anyone who's opened up the game recently knows that we have achievements in game. Those will be made into proper Steam achievements, including the negative memories that can make your game harder. It also shouldn't be a surprise that our art team has come up with some outstanding trading card material. So that absolutely needs to happen.

We have spoken off and on about Workshop integration in our Discord. To make a clear statement on it, we firmly believe that Workshop integration is extremely valuable, and really important for a game that, under the hood, has a decent bit of modular design already. Every event we make is the same data structure that a modder could easily copy, most of the functions we use to make them work is in a file we literally named "modapi.lua", and even our main narrative arcs are nothing more than chains of working events, most of which only call functions in modapi.lua.

Despite these early good decisions to make modding easier, adding Workshop support is liable to be a lot of extra work. So for 1.0, we will only be investigating what we can and cannot do with Workshop support, with the hope of adding it after 1.0's launch. In an ideal world, we would give you the keys to pretty much everything we are doing and letting our engine tell dozens of other stories. That is what we are going to strive to deliver. But we don't know enough at this time to promise that.

A decent number of people have asked about the release of our soundtrack. For good reason, too - our composer, Ish Fuseini[ishfuseini.com], is an absolute dean at what he does. Ultimately, this is another Actual Proper Steam Integration thing that we will have sorted out by 1.0. Ish deserves accolades and proper release of his spectacular work bringing the atmosphere to life in Endless Dark.

Seeing all of this, you may be a little stunned. How long will all of this take, with everything that's clearly in the hopper?

Well, the good news is that for most of what we've been talking about in this post, the hardest, slowest work was done in the massive amount of effort we've put in over the last 9 months or so. The finale itself will still be a big lift, but many of the other major points are easier than they might seem, simply because we've spent a ton of time tinkering with what works and what doesn't.

So, the target date (WHICH IS SUBJECT TO DELAYS AND CHANGES), is March 2024.

With all arcs complete, I had some time to sit down and add some features I wanted as well as look at performance improvements. To that end, 0.9.2 brings a huge performance lift - as much as 50% - in framerates. A lot of logic behind the scenes changed, so if you notice unusual behavior, please come join us on Discord [discord.gg] and tell soulmata all about it.

NEW FEATURES:
* NEW ROOM - INCINERATOR. Used for some ship persistence and insanity tasks, the INCINERATOR will need to be fired if your previous run resulted in any number of passengers dying.
* SHIP PERSISTENCE - Certain ship states - particularly system damage states - are now preserved between runs. If you leave a lot of stuff broken, the next Custodian will still have to clean up your mess. This can be toggled on/off as a game setting.
* Spacing yourself by any means will also kill all passengers and reflect such in your scoring

BUGFIXES:
* A wide variety of logic changes to improve performance, boosting framerates as much as 50-60%
* A few typo and continuity fixes

A bugfix and performance update, following issues spotting during live streams.

* Arc selection and game settings are now respected if you change difficulty
* Certain narrative arc tasks will be ignored by scrambled HUD to avoid an arc softlock because you can't read
* Numerous task and progression issues with arc 4 corrected
* Arc 3's secret door will be restored if you choose to replay it, allowing progression again
* A few map fixes, decorations, and changed lighting to better illuminate certain halls
* Large performance issue related to determining the player's map position addressed (about a 10% change)
* Hallucinating that everything is a door will include the tops of the cryo pods
* Observation Window shutter will continue retracting when you open the action menu
* Tooltips no longer render during transitions, showing you old or incomplete data

A big shout out to Tomato "pre-nerf wins" Gaming (https://twitch.tv/tomato) for helping us identify a lot of these improvements.

Today's update is a giant step forward on a lot of fronts; the game has hit a ton of new milestones and we're eager to share them with everyone.

You may have noticed that this is a bump of 2 major versions, not just 1. That's because we got 2 narrative arcs done for you, which brings us to the full complement of 9 out of 9.

Arc 8 - Misjump - is an object lesson on why precision matters. In arc 7, we explored the ship's AI. In arc 8, we explore the ship's mission. Despite everything, the ship is still moving forward, and it still has its orders. How many more lifetimes can your duty possibly span?

Arc 9 - Obsolete - is the arc many of you have been long asking for. As robots, Robbie, Annie, and FRANK should have been built better. Built different. Built above all of these petty struggles and horrors that plague them every cycle of their all-too-short existences. Why were they built to suffer? Who is to blame for this atrocity?

With all 9 arcs complete, all that remains is the finale. You, and the Custodian, will take control of the situation and do precisely what you feel is right. Think long and hard about what that is, until the finale - and 1.0!

Since the launch of 0.3.0, we have been asking: What can change the nature of a machine? This patch, we give you the power to answer - at least to some extent.

When gazing out of observation, you now have the option to begin a mini-arc, focused on one of the flaws of your Custodian. With diligence and commitment, you can help the Custodian recognize and overcome one of their faults. Change is difficult, however, and taking it too quickly can result in permanent damage. But perhaps going a little crazy is worth the payoff? Isn't a little insanity worth Robbie giving himself a break?

Or maybe that's too difficult. Maybe change is simply a bridge too far. Maybe the universe is already too far gone. It CAN be comforting to revel in your flaws, do things the same broken way as you've always done them. The routine can be comforting. During these arcs, you can also refuse to change in order to blow off stress. Maybe this saves you from the last psychotic break that would finish you.

But hopefully you can live with yourself afterward.

Have you ever felt like your actions didn't have enough consequences? Yeah, us too.

Now, every narrative arc you complete will give all of your successor Custodians some sort of bonus, reflecting the state of the ship you left, and the impressions your previous lives leave. What is best? That usually depends on your perspective. Change your mind? No problem - just replay the associated arc, and take the path you didn't travel before.

All the story rewards carry over into Sandbox and Endless mode, and can be optionally disabled by one of the numerous new difficulty selections (which we'll say more about in a minute).

We quietly trialed this feature in the previous patch, and are now rolling it out more fully. At higher levels of psychosis, you will start having terrible visions. Momentary lapses of attention spiraling into, as your Nerve Staplers refer to it, 'cancerous introspection'. Or perhaps you fail to power down entirely, and your trapped consciousness seeks to rationalize its situation. Whatever the cause of these distressing terrors, the first few are properly here.

There will be more.

(But you can also turn them off in the new difficulty selections.)

As we have continued through Early Access, we have gotten much better at working with our art team, in no small part because of the delightfully detailed input everyone has given us. Put simply, we are now capable of making much higher quality assets to represent the ship. You can expect to see more of these upgrades as we march toward 1.0.

As part of the above art upgrades, we are also adding areas to the ship as the writing mentions them, and we get the quality assets they deserve. You can see the first addition like this between Command and Cryo in this update.

Be, uh, be careful in there.

As the game gets closer to complete, we keep listening to things people like, what they don't, and which of those opinions might change from day to day. For all of these last category, we continue to add difficulty options.

These options don't always affect difficulty directly, but all are designed to tailor to the experience you want to see out of the game. New in this patch are:

Decaying Ship - If on, two permanent Decaying Ship modifiers will be added as the game progresses, making each playthrough progressively more complicated. These modifiers are independent of any story actions, and are specifically meant to be flies in your proverbial honey.

Nightmares - If on, the newly fleshed out NIGHTMARES feature will be enabled. Turning this off has no effect on difficulty, as the nightmares do not have mechanical effects.

Bounded Weather - If on, the game will keep track of how many weather zones it randomly rolls for your game, and will reroll the weather map if too many are generated. Turning it off removes this upper limit.

Story Meta Rewards - If on, you will have access to the persistent rewards you earn in narrative arcs, regardless of what mode you are in. Turning this off will remove all of these rewards, as though you have not completed a story arc yet.

You can expect to see more of these as we march toward 1.0, along with a better way to tell exactly how hard you're making the game.


With this update, Endless Dark has broken 200,000 written words across all of its events. While both core team members are published writers, neither of us expected to be writing quite so much for this project. Our inspiration is constantly stoked by those of you sharing your thoughts and experiences with us. Thank you.

In a similar vein, expect to see a news post coming soon detailing all of our thoughts and ambitions for the finale, 1.0, and what comes after 1.0. Thank you again for loving Endless Dark. Quirky indie games like this one exist entirely because of the support of open-minded and big-hearted fans, and we are honored every day by the community we continue to foster and grow.

We keep marching forward, and we're thankful all of you are here with us.

As with every major version release, we have more narrative for you. Act 3 starts with Stop Button Problem. You've learned a lot about the ship that you live in - and supposedly work with. Much more than you knew when you started trying to talk to it in Phasma Ex Machina. Using everything you've learned, can you come to understand your triple-purpose home, prison, and overlord?

Those who have been following us in our Discord and other outlets know that we have been promising a full and satisfying ending to the Endless Dark story. Buckle in - Stop Button Problem is where we begin to deliver that.

YOU ARE OWNER OF ALL THAT OCCURS HEREAFTER.

The 6th - and final - Crisis Arc for endless mode is also in this release. In Hard Reboot, something starts making changes to your workspace without your consent. Is this a malformed initiative that the sleepy ship will eventually handle, or a long-buried rogue process that must be set right? If you don't guess right, glitches might become the rule.

FRANK is strong against this new crisis.

This new crisis arc is another promise kept - the endless mode now can deal 120 different permutations of crises, which unfold over a very different cycle. It was important to us to make Endless Dark not just a compelling story, but also a compelling game. With Endless Mode's own content topping 30,000 words, it is very much its own thing that you can play over and over again.

With the release of act 3, we are again adding another 20 random events. This brings us up to 100 in the game. At an average of 10 or so events per narrative game, you should still be seeing new events all the way through the story.

This is another promise kept - we have always said we believe in having enough content to last the entire game, with minimal redos. Statistically, we are there. We will probably keep adding a few new random events as we push forward, though; the people sending in their contributions have been truly awesome, and the resonance with the Endless Dark universe has been astounding. Keep up with us on our Discord!

Our awesome pixel artist has been hard at work making the ship look more unique and distinguished. The first round of these art updates goes in with this release!

You asked for it - we did it. As your psychosis increases, you will now see new actions appear on several systems. These unhinged actions are generally counter to your initial goals - but, at a certain point, you have to wonder. Are they YOUR goals? Do you CARE?

You know that seductive 1% chance of "something else" happening as you gaze from observation? Well, it just got a lot more interesting. Now, when you hit that rare chance, you will get a part of the deep back story to the Endless Dark tale. Everything is clearly already old when you arrive in your first Narrative Arc. So what happened, in that stretch of time? Why is it like this?

The Deep Lore arc consists of 10 events, and you can unlock each event over multiple games. After you unlock your first one, you will also unlock a Memory that will make unlocking more even easier.

Oh, and we upped that 1% chance to a 5% chance. Playtesting told us it was too frustrating otherwise.

As always, please consider dropping us a review on Steam and joining our Discord[discord.gg]. We love to hear from you!

Major new content:
• Added new narrative arc: Stop Button Problem
  
• Added scenes for Stop Button Problem
  
• Added new Crisis Arc: Hard Reboot. FRANK is strong against this crisis.
  
• Added Deep Lore arc - gazing from Observation can now reveal memories long ago buried.
  
  Player content and balance:
  
• 20 new random events, bringing the total to 100.
  
• Art updates for many walls and floors throughout the ship
  
• Increased base Memory selections from 1 to 2.
  
• Upped rare event chance on Observation from 1% to 5%.
  
• Added Psychosis tasks to many systems for when you start going crazy. Some bots just want to watch the ship burn.
  
• Added a Psychosis event that can happen sometimes on turn start.
  
  
• Usual boatload of typo and small bug fixes.