Today’s update introduces a new endgame boss: the Urchin.

The Urchin is quite elusive: to find it you'll need to craft a special item and then use it in a specific place. We recommend that you bring a full fleet of seasoned pilots with you, as the encounter can be quite a handful!

The boss can drop a lot of the usual goodies, but also has a chance to drop 4 different URs and some other unusual items. Good luck!


With this update we are also addressing some balance issues and general improvements, both for new and veteran players. Community-suggested changes are indicated with

• Leader changes on mission selection now let the new leader pick a mission
• Low level ingredients can now be crafted into tradeable bundles.
  
• Players in lower tier missions now get their damage downscaled by a tier appropriate %.
  
• Upscaling of low level players during missions now caps at a mission tier appropriate %.
  
• Revised nanite trading fees to be more consistent with the cost of 5 upgrades of the same type.
• Buffed Merlin's Staff from 12% to 15% dmg.

• Fixed an issue where DK secondaries were missing supercharge/degradation stats.
  
• Fixed the XP Boost item description to properly show 90 minutes.

The team has been toiling away on a new major Steambirds Alliance update for the last few months. We’ve taken the opportunity to take a step back and re-evaluate why we made this game, what we’re trying to do with it, and how well we’re achieving those goals. We’ve written about this before - Steambirds is best when played with others. While we’ve tried to focus on this throughout development, our investigation revealed that a surprisingly small number of players were actually playing with others. Some of that can be attributed to lower-than-expected player numbers, but generally there were many ways that the game failed to bring players together. Sometimes, features inadvertently separated players. This goes against the entire reason we wanted to build Steambirds in the first place.

The More Together Update includes a number of fundamental changes to the game. The majority of changes are designed to actively bring players together in the game and keep them together, but we haven't stopped there; we’ve also included a revamp of the crafting system, the new Boss Arena, and a whole host of other smaller changes.

First thing’s first, we made changes so it is far less likely you’ll start playing new content alone. We asked “What if instead of going on individual quests, players joined shared missions with a clear focus?” As of this update, our revamped missions are multiplayer encounters a lot like dungeons. Each mission has a goal visible to everyone in the mission, shared progress towards the goals, and clear rewards.

You’ll join missions from the Mission Command in the Rebel City. This is a regularly-updating list of missions you can join, and a short list of some upcoming missions. Each mission tells you upfront your goal, the rewards you can earn, and how many other players are actively playing. When you join a mission, you’ll be teleported directly to a squad of players doing the same mission.

All the old great content you’ve come to love has been converted into missions accessed via Mission Command. This replaces the old system of getting missions from the Pilot Pub and then jumping into an overworld carrier. The pub is still there, but now it’s primarily for daily rewards and bounties. We’ll be looking at adding more bounties and similar content to the pub at a later stage.

Now that players are starting with others due to the new Mission Command structure, we’ve made more changes to try keep them together: squads, speed changes, and closing the power gap.

When you join a new mission from Mission Command, you are immediately teleported to a squad of players, all actively doing the same mission. One of the players will automatically be selected as the squad leader, generally the strongest or most veteran player. In most missions, if the squad is far away from a mission target, the leader can instantly teleport much closer, and any player that gets separated from the leader can quickly teleport to join them. Gone are the days of having to travel across a huge world to find that one distant target.

Everyone within a squad will be pointed at the same mission target with the radar indicator. Your radar will only show the other players in your squad, and a prominent indicator of the current squad leader. You should follow your squad around, but if you get too far away from your squad, we start to zoom in your camera a bit, limiting your vision and reminding you that you’re not with your squad. At the same time, we highlight that you can quickly teleport to the squad leader with a button press.

If you’re successful with your current mission, the leader can sometimes also pick some follow-up missions so your squad can stick together and take on more content as a unit!

In our investigations we found that speed engines and other speed modifiers were a big contributor to player separation. If you don’t know exactly where you should be going, you are instantly left behind. Even if you do know exactly where you should be going, players without the top-tier speed engines, upgrades and skills, found it very difficult to keep up with speedy players zipping around. We’ve made the tough decision to remove the speed engines (existing speed engines will be automatically converted to damage engines) and nerf a lot of the other speed bonuses throughout the game. We’ve compensated slightly by giving all players a +15% baseline speed boost. This is quite a significant change, so we ask that you please give it some time to get used to - we’ll also be keeping our eyes on this and adjusting further as needed.

There’s a huge variation in the difficulty of different content in the game. Veterans are not only more experienced players, but their planes also have much stronger gear. This wide power gap makes it almost impossible for new players to join veterans, which is currently unsustainable unless we have a large number of active players. With this update, lower-tier players will get an armor and damage boost to bring them a bit closer to top-tier players. We hope this will make it easier for newbies to contribute and be more valued by veterans.

This update brings the addition of the new Boss Arena. The core is that you’ll be fighting more than 100 different combinations of bosses and minibosses in a small locked room. You’ll find this mission showing up in Mission Command. Check out the exciting new combinations and see if you can overcome the challenges!

Crafting in Steambirds has always had some rough edges. We’ve taken the time to both improve the UI and make crafting a more critical aspect of playing the game.

The biggest change here is the addition of ingredients. Instead of having to juggle various crafting items - a rather clunky affair - most crafting now relies on ingredients. Ingredients don’t take up any cargo or storage space, and can be stacked up to a limit of 100 or more. You can see your list of ingredients from an option at the bottom of the inventory menu.

One big change that crafting ingredients enables: tiered items can be upgraded with copper up to T8. Most enemies in the game now drop varying amounts of copper. Instead of hoping to get lucky and get that much-need T8 weapon, you can now rely on the much more consistent upgrade path to getting there. We’ve also added many different catalysts that drop from different parts of the game and are needed to craft or fuse new SPEC or ELEM items. We’re excited for more changes that the granularity of the ingredients allows us to do - we can slowly give you resources to craft a rare drop, instead of relying on a tiny drop percentage to create rarity.

The addition of ingredients removes the old hack of storing excess items inside crafting recipes, so we’ve removed this from most recipes. We’ve also improved the logic for which recipes are shown/hidden so you aren’t inundated with a huge number of recipes that aren’t relevant. All of your old crafting progress should be maintained and automatically migrated into the new system.

Other crafting improvements:

• Added a confirmation box to crafting
  
• Improved the crafting details panel
  
• Removed the confusing location goal from crafting recipes
  
• Fixed a scroll bug where details can move off the screen

This wouldn’t be a major update without a list of other changes to the game. Community-suggested changes are indicated with

• Tentative fix for the notorious chat bug
  
• Automatic skill loadout switching when changing planes, based on last one used on that plane
  
• Suggest another active flock if yours seems mostly inactive (maximum of once per day)
  
• Adjusted the default camera zoom to show 15% more
  
• Improvements to the flock register
  
• Increased range of T0-T5 machine guns (for newbies playing the Quad)
  
• Fix combat sim bug where stationary enemies spawned on 2 adjacent walls couldn’t be killed
  
• Siege Tank can use flak while in siege mode
  
• When you are idle for too long, kick you to the RC selection menu instead of quitting the client
  
• Apex Military Academy mission is now more granular (more goals so you can see progress)
  
• Prevent spamming of trade requests outside the RC
  
• Fixed dungeon mod descriptions for AMA and HFSC dungeons
  
• Show the teleport effect on other players
  
• Fixed some more small bugs/issues
  
• Probably even more small changes we’ve missed here...

This week we’re shipping our last update of 2019. While it may be last, it’s still packed with some awesome stuff. We’re introducing a new class, the Vampire, a new combat sim mode, and a bunch of other changes!

The vampire class is making its appearance in this update. It uses sword weapons and comes with a new ability “Bite” and a new maneuver “Redline.” Bite lets you take a chomp out of a nearby enemy, giving both you and nearby allies some health. Redline lets you convert your armor into steam. It won’t kill you, but if you play it close to the wire it can give you a big boost to your effective available steam! The vampire of course also has its own set of skills to select from. Give it a spin and see if you can figure out its secrets!

We’ve added a new “survival” combat sim mode with this update. It plays a bit differently to other modes - survival isn’t about clearing waves - it’s just about surviving as long as possible. Killing enemies might help you survive longer, but it’s not required! This will be in the regular rotation of daily combat sim modes, and hopefully add some welcome new variation.

We’ve also made a number of other improvements and changes to the combat sim in this update, including:

• Make sure you always either get all DPS classes or all non-DPS classes (and a choice of single vs double stick if possible)
  
• Vary the number of builds you can choose from between 1 and 5
  
• Fixed a lot of weird/bad enemy behaviour in the combat sim, including: Mystic, Great Pooper, Mecha-Angel, Duelist, Disinfector, Bureaucat, Crowd Control, Retaliator, Poison Convoy, Husky, Augmentation Therapist
  
• Removed all 2-width walls in combat sim so enemies aren't unshootable.
  
• Fixed some issues with treasure chests

Finally, there’s also a whole bunch of other changes in this update:

• Founder can assign different roles to people in the flock.
  
• Clicking on another player's name in chat opens the friend list with them selected.
  
• Changed the Bomb Factory from T2 to T3, and the Laser Playground from T3 to T4
  
• Removed middle row of bullet belt on boss stage of Laser Playground
  
• Nerfed Meowzaghast shots during M2's death phase
  
• Revised trade fees
  
• Reduced plane xp thresholds for levels 16 to 20 (it's now easier to level up)
  
• Titanium rods have new graphics and aren't marked as rare
  
• Fix the broken siege animation
  
• Fix scrolling offset displays for quest-related menus
  
• Renamed "Cubic Gem" to "Arena Gem", so it’s not confused with the new Cube Gem item
  
• Adjusted some AI behaviour to hopefully fix some wandering units

We're shipping our first really big post-launch update to SBA! It includes a healthy combo of new content, new features, plus solutions to major pain points that the community has informed us about in Discord. 🙂

I know this blog post is huge, so let me give you the TDLR: we’ve added: Flocks (aka guilds), a new “combat sim” daily activity, a new dungeon called the “Military Academy“, new Fox allies to help the birbs in their lonely fight against the cats, aaaaand we’ve substantially reduced how much SBA punishes you when you die. PLUS a bunch of other QoL changes and freebies (like free hangar and storage space) that ya’ll have been asking for. Read on for details!

You need a place to organize your peeps…?

Yep, we finally have guilds (which we call “Flocks”) in SBA. To be more precise, we have two kinds of Flocks: leaderless “trainee Flocks” which everyone will be encouraged to join soon after creating a new account, and “professional Flocks” which are created and managed by veteran players.

You receive an XP boost when flying alongside members of your Flock, and your trading fees are lower when trading with members of your Flock (but you can’t trivially hop between Flocks to abuse that discount for mercenary purposes – there’s a cooldown.) And best of all, you can join four other of your guildmates to participate in the daily guild Combat Sim (more on that below.) We’ve also added a Flock chat system, which you can switch to and from freely while playing the game.

You can be a member of up to 3 Flocks at any one time. One of those will be your “default” Flock — you only get bonus XP and trading fees with people in your default Flock. But you can change your default whenever you wish (for example, if you want to participate in all of your 3 Flocks’ daily Combat Sims.)

To create a new “professional” guild and become its founder/leader, you will need to find a Flock Founder Token. These are going to be rare, but tradeable, so worst case if you can’t find one, maybe you can trade for it.

We wrote and shared a big document on our plans for Flocks[docs.google.com] a while back; if you never saw that and are curious to learn more, I encourage you to read it. 🙂

New home of the Combat Sim in the Rebel City

I’ve personally been looking forward to this for a while. There’s a new “Combat Sim” building in the Rebel City, and once you’ve unlocked it, you’ll have access to two new modes of play: the Daily Solo Sim and the Daily Guild (5-person coop) Sim.

Daily sims are randomly generated encounters with unusual conditions and constraints. When playing a sim, you are given a throwaway, virtual plane and equipment, so there’s absolutely nothing to lose by getting shot down (it’s not real!) For example, you might be required to choose between playing with a Level 1 Assault or Level 1 Hog at the start of the sim. You might also start with a Level 20 Raptor equipped with Special Legendary equipment. Either way, it’s all temporary.

Your goal is to survive to the end of the encounter, and to complete it as quickly as possible. The conditions of the encounters are, as I said, somewhat random, but we’ve modified things to make the pacing better (for example, in the Solo Combat Sim, you get a huge damage buff when fighting bosses, and you gain MUCH more XP than normal when starting at level 1, so you can level up extremely rapidly.) You only get one free play of a Sim each day, so you want to make it count!

You get rewarded in two ways when playing Sims. First, you get a simple reward immediately upon completion of the Sim, based on how well you performed. Then you get a second, larger reward the following day, once the leaderboard has been finalized. The higher up you are on the leaderboard, the better that reward will be. And hey, those of you who have been asking for more opportunities to flex, your wish has been granted. Show us all what you’re made of on the leaderboards. 😉

The closer you get to the top of the leaderboard, more likely you are to earn multiple trail gems for our two new trails:

And the closer you get to the top of the leaderboard, the higher your (still small) chance of earning one of our four new Legendary SPEC items:

• Sawed-Off Flakgun: Siege Tank secondary ability SPEC that spams much more flak than normal, but it spews all over the place. Also grants bonus DPS.
  
• Merlin’s Staff: Merlin secondary ability SPEC that has a smaller sized bullet wipe in exchange for +2 HP, +12% DPS, and +10% turn rate.
  
• Spiritual Oasis: Paladin secondary ability SPEC. Its effective radius is much smaller than normal, but it lasts a little longer, heals a bit more than T10, and stays where you put it, so your allies can use it as a safe place to retreat to. For making the sacrifice of not carrying it with you, you also get -10% maneuver cost and +10% camera view.
  
• Hunter Killer: Raptor secondary ability SPEC with a significantly shorter cooldown than regular mines, lower steam cost, and MUCH more damage. Best of all, it rapidly seeks out and blows up enemies like a heat-seeking missile. Downside: it does not slow enemies the way normal mines do.

Content-wise, right now, we have a few different scenarios baked into the Sim. In the future, we intend to add a bunch more, including, for example, a “Pacifist mode” where you have to survive as long as possible WITHOUT killing anything with your guns or secondary abilities. We look forward to adding this additional content in future updates not long from now. 🙂

This is another big one. As we discussed in detail over the past month[docs.google.com], we’ve decided to seriously soften the permadeath aspects of this game. The reasons are pretty simple: a ton of users have told us they don’t like the permadeath bits, and our analytics data show that people — both new users and veterans alike — tend to quit immediately after dying. This game was always supposed to be first and foremost about playing with your friends (and making new friends), but somewhere along the way we became too focused on making it really hard and punishing. Mea culpa. We’re going back to focusing on what really matters now.

So now, when you crash, you don’t lose your plane. You lose some of your upgrades, and all your gear and cargo gets damaged, but your plane remains. The more times you crash, the more damaged your cargo gets. Eventually, it won’t be worth using anymore. But you can repair it, and maybe even supercharge it if you’ve got the right materials, so nothing is truly “lost” anymore.

How do you repair your equipment? You can do it in the Workshop. It’ll require a bunch of materials, but most of all, it’ll require a new currency that you gain by recycling spare equipment that you don’t need anymore.

We’ve called that new currency “Scrap“, because that’s the perfect name for it, and we’ve renamed the old currency “Iron.” I know it’s a bit confusing — hopefully everyone will get used to it soon!

How exactly do you earn this new Scrap currency? Easy. Instead of simply dropping your trash items like you’ve always done, now you’ll use the exact same command to recycle them. You can also select items individually and recycle them at any time. The more valuable the item, the more Scrap you get by recycling it.

The most valuable items (T10, Elem and SPEC) are expensive to repair. Not only do they require a lot of Scrap, they also require an equivalent item (i.e. use a T10 to repair a T10) and several “Nanites”, which are things you can craft by fusing 5 upgrades together. Excitingly, nanites can also be used to Supercharge items, which gives them semi-random bonuses that make them even more powerful than regular, pristine equipment!

Since you don’t die anymore, we had to change the way we give out pilot XP (which was previously awarded ONLY when you die.) Now you get 65% of your pilot XP in real time, while playing. Which means you can rank up at any time. We know you’ve all wanted something like that for a long time, so we were happy to have the excuse to do it. You get the remaining 35%, plus Iron rewards, when you voluntarily choose to retire a plane, which you can do from inside the Hangar.

We’ve tested this stuff carefully, but I will be the first person to admit that it’s a huge change, with a lot of complex implications, and I would not be surprised in the slightest if we need to do a bunch more fine-tuning of the economy in the weeks ahead. We have already decreased the droprates of certain items in anticipation to compensate for the fact that people won’t be losing items when they die. We have also reduced the “loot drop multipliers” for dungeon mods to 1x/2x/4x. And lastly, we’ve tuned the repair and supercharging costs of items to help consume many of the resources in the game that might otherwise become inflationary. But I doubt we’ll have perfectly guessed what every number should be, and that’s OK; these numbers are easy to change! Please play for a while — ideally at least a week or so, to get a good feeling for stuff and not be biased by short term RNG — and let us know what you think needs tweaking. We’ll be listening carefully to you, as always.

Wait, why do those drones have beaks??

Before Meowza became the god-leader of the world, she was a promising student in the Cat military regime. Much of her training occured in the Apex Military Academy, an old and well-respected educational institution whose instructors had absolutely no idea what Meowza might turn into someday.

One of the core training rituals at the academy was an unusual “sport” in which teams of students were expected to capture spawn points while fighting off guardian mechs that vaguely represented combat class archetypes (like “the sniper” and “the tank”). Teams that managed to capture enough points would eventually reach the the Control Unit, a particularly tough mech that tended to humiliate less-prepared students.

Design-wise, the Military Academy functions a bit like HFSC. It is accessible to mid-level players, but should still represent a fun challenge (and opportunity!) for higher-level players thanks to some pretty stiff veteran mods. The Military Academy is also home to two of our newest SPEC items:

• Pet Turret: extremely powerful turret SPEC that follows the Engineer around like a (somewhat erratic but very loyal) pet.
  
• Sledgehammer Shield: Dagger Knight secondary ability SPEC that significantly improves your DPS even more than usual in exchange for much lower superSpeed during the times when you are shielded.

It turns out that the Cats haven’t subjugated every race other than the birds. At least one other race has resisted Meowza’s yoke. I refer, of course, to the Foxes! (Come on, you knew it had to be them.)

Yes, you can now select a Fox portrait for your pilot – just dive into the Options Menu to bring up the portrait selector, and you’ll find 9 new portraits alongside the usual birbs. You’ll notice that the Combat Sim building is staffed by a Fox as well. We look forward to doing more with the Foxes (lore-wise) in the months to come. 🙂

There’s a bunch of other good stuff in this update that isn’t covered above. And hey, we’ve got a new system for identifying and celebrating changes that were a direct result of community feedback — any such change will be preceded by an SBA salute graphic: It means a lot to us that ya’ll are willing to patiently explain what you think the game needs and give us time to address those concerns. You deserve multiple salutes for that. 🙂

• Major update to Elder Arena, in response to player complaints tha it was too long / too boring:
  
  • Made it so waves only go up to 15, with 2 miniboss phases
    
  • Shortened time between waves by 2 seconds
    
  • Spotters move faster after initial shot, making their time spent offstage a lot shorter.
    
  • Reduced spawn radius of enemies by 20% so they don’t spawn far off-screen.
    
  • Improvements to harasser enemies that weren’t very interesting.
    
  • Fixed bug with miniboss battle ending prematurely
    
  • Art fixes: Updated VFX, added more warnings to enemy attacks, reduced art model overuse
    
  • Added 2 room variants to the encounter
    
  • Fixed issue where enemies would spawn over each other
    
  • Added basic aimed gun to boss
• Damage boosts to the following weapons:
  
  • Almost all Blasters: +15%
    
  • Void Prism: +28% damage
    
  • Quantum Reach: +15% damage
    
  • Frost Dagger 1, 2 and 3: +18% damage
    
  • Tiger Whisker 1, 2 and 3: +5% damage
• Now only half the rooms in the Crypt are locked (the “setpiece” rooms) instead of 100% of the rooms. Should speed up progress.
  
• You can now earn cool new stuff when you hit certain pilot ranks.
  
  • For example, at rank 12, you’ll earn another free hangar slot, and at various ranks, you earn a free storage slot. This is on top of what you already start with for free.
    
  • You can see graphics representing stuff you have earned / will earned in the timeline on the left side of the pilot skills UI.
    
  • We’re definitely planning to add more unlocks in the future; things like emotes and trails and other goodies that you cannot acquire any other way. We just ran out of time to do more in this update but we look forward to surprising you with more soon!
    
  • All unlock rewards will of course be granted to you retroactively if you’ve already surpassed any given rank prior to this update.
• It is now possible to enter “/t UserName” to private message other players in game.
  
• When you filter the Pilot Skills UI by class, we now condense the previously-huge blocks of empty space in between skill groups at higher ranks. No more pointless scrolling.
  
• You can “favorite” items in your cargo, so they won’t ever be accidentally recycled. (People have been asking for this forever; it seemed particularly worth doing now that “drop” has been replaced with “recycle”.)
  
• We’ve rebalanced Iron (aka “old scrap”) rewards. You get less from things like the login bonus and beating M1 & 3 Brothers, and we’ve made that up via the Combat Sim rewards.
  
• There are fewer quests available per hour, but they give a LOT more XP than they used to. We’ve also made copper rewards from quests more valuable by letting you use them to craft T9s and Nanites.
  
• We’ve also made collection quests less unpredictable/subject to bad RNG. (More improvements to quests will come in updates soon.)
  
• Various minor bugfixes not worth mentioning individually.
  
• Ongoing server improvements.
  
• A boatload of other minor changes that I’m probably forgetting but what the heck, this blog post is long enough already!

Hello fellow pilots! Now that the launch insanity has finally quieted down a little bit, we're getting back to our regular schedule of weekly updates. ːsteamhappyː Here's what this update has in store for you:

• The Temple now contains Altar Rooms. On your way to the boss, you'll find two new rooms with an altar, which will trigger a horde of minions plus an evil curse, such as:
  • +50% greater damage received
  • -90% steam
  • Zero health and steam regen
  • +50% greater susceptibility to burn damage
• New enemies: The Altar Rooms have several new unique enemies.
• Small improvements to existing enemy movement

Both the Engineer's turrets and skills have been significantly revamped:

• Turrets fire much more rapidly now, have higher base damage, and their bullets are faster too.
• The turret gun has a cooldown now; it fires for 2 seconds and pauses for 1 second.
• Engineer Skill 1A still causes turrets to lay down covering fire around you, but now the turrets turn more quickly and have MUCH more health when using this skill, in addition to +5% damage.
• Engineer Skill 1B eliminates the turrent gun's 1s cooldown (so it fires 33% more bullets - aka lots more damage.)
• All other Engi skills (2X through 4X) have also been altered significantly, in order to hopefully present more interesting choices.

• Converted Blaster Skill 1A into a powerful stacking maneuver that can give you up to +60% DPS for a limited time.
• Blaser Skill 2B ice burst now has piercing.
• Rebel City anti-lag and anti-grief changes which include disabling maneuvers, projectiles and secondary abilities, both to speed things up and also to prevent hackers and griefers from attempting to use those things to harm an entire RC.
• Reduced visual intensity of new Epic Paladin VFX.
• Imperial zone Sentinel: Lower DPS, larger vulnerability window, and lower spawn rate will hopefully make these less impossible-feeling.
• Lowered DPS of all elemental swords by 10%.

As you can imagine, the vast majority of our engineering time just went into making sure the servers were working OK. We look forward to doing more polish/feature engineering work (plus bugfixes of other types) in the coming weeks!

By the way, in case you were wondering if its "simple" to create and operate an MMO like this one, I thought I'd share the engineering dashboard that we built from scratch in order to help us monitor and improve server health. While we were getting rate-limited by Amazon AWS last week and going nuts trying to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it, we ended up enhancing this dashboard a bunch to help with the troubleshooting process (which it did.) Check it out:

This dashboard is just one of approximately half a dozen tools that we use to maintain this game's backend (others include our database administration system, our anti-cheat system, etc.) The backend to Steambirds has cost us, conservatively, at least several hundred thousand dollars in addition to a few years of our lives. So, yeah, it's not easy.

The next few weeks will have similar updates to this one with nice new (not huge) polish / feature / balance improvements, and then at the end of September we'll do a major update. The contents of that update are still a secret but you can be sure it'll include some exciting, entirely new content! And then, a month after that update, we're hoping to be able to ship the guild system (Flocks) that we've been talking about for a few months now.

Thank you again to all of you who played this week; ya'll are the best! ːsteamhappyː

We are launching Steambirds Alliance out of beta today (August 22). After almost six years of development, it has become a full-fledged MMO with lots of polished content, unique bosses, and a kind of heavily-cooperative gameplay that is rare in today’s world. We couldn’t be prouder to see it finally, officially released!

OK, so that’s what Steambirds is. But this post is about why we made Steambirds. Specifically, why this game? Spry Fox has been making games for a decade. Heck, Daniel has been designing games for over 25 years. We could have chosen to make any number of games, including many that would have been significantly less effort. So… why?

Steambirds was born from a very basic belief: Games can bring people together.  An online game like an MMO is more than just a brief consumed experience like a book or a movie. It’s a shared space where like-minded people can meet up, get to know each other, and ultimately form meaningful friendships. 

The truth of the matter is that in this modern world, there are a lot of people who could use a friend. Or even if they have enough friends, they could use a place to spend more time with them. There’s a ton of research demonstrating that lonely people often suffer from poor health, depression, and/or anxiety. Friendship is the antidote. 

So it occurred to us: what if we made a game that was all about connecting with and cooperating with others? A game with only two teams, and all the players are together on the same side. Many years ago, we had the opportunity to explore that very idea when we co-developed Realm of the Mad God. Our experience making RotMG only strengthened our interest in cooperative games. But then we were forced to walk away from RotMG, well before we’d fully explored all our ideas. And we weren’t prepared to give up just yet. Thus came Steambirds Alliance.

Making SBA a great game where everyone can enjoy time with friends is easier said than done. Online games can easily become toxic places dominated by trolls and cheaters if you don’t make enough effort to prevent that.

So we’ve spent a lot of time building pro-social mechanics and tech into the very foundation of Steambirds. Things like:

• Jump in and play: There’s no minimum amount of time you need to play Steambirds per session. You won’t ruin it for anyone else if you pop in and out in 15 minutes. We want Steambirds to be like a club room (or the bar “Cheers”, if you remember that) where it’s easy to hang out for 5 minutes or for an entire evening. 
• Shared XP and Loot: No kill or loot-stealing. No dividing up limited XP– everyone gets 100% of the pie. We don’t want this game to make you angry at others.
• Ad Hoc grouping: Teleport instantly to other players. There’s no real waiting and arbitrary gating. 
• ‘Better together’ game balancing: You almost always benefit from playing with another player. Even if they are playing “selfishly”, there’s a decent chance that they will end up helping you accidentally. And eventually, there’s also a decent chance that they will realize they’ll be more successful if they stop playing selfishly!
• Trade: You can trade most of the things you can find in the game. You can even trade gold, the game’s “hard currency.” Trade has brought people together for thousands of years – it shouldn’t be a surprise that it can do so in games as well.

This is just the start. We’ve got big plans to expand the social features of Steambirds in future releases. We’ll be experimenting with new ways to have fun with the people you care about. Helping people build and enjoy friendships is the most important point of the game from our perspective. 

You often hear a common complaint on forums across the Internet that game developers are greedy; that they just want to make money. But money isn’t what defines success for us on this project. For us, it goes back to the ‘why’ of building Steambirds.

Every single member of the Steambirds team could be earning a lot more money doing something other than making games. You don’t become an indie game developer because you love money (unless you really don’t understand probability!) You become an indie game developer because you love games, and hopefully the people who play them too.

We’ve funded Steambirds out of our own pockets. There’s no “evil publisher.” There’s no venture capitalist demanding a return on their investment. It’s just us and our life savings.

We could have taken our earnings from our previous games and put them in the stock market and retired a little earlier. Instead, we took that money and we made you this game. Because we want you to have a fun place to be with your friends. We want to reduce the loneliness in the world a little bit if we can. 

For Spry Fox, success to us means achieving three big goals: 

• Earning enough to pay for hosting and ongoing development. We want SBA to keep running for a long time. In-game purchases go towards making SBA self-sustaining. There is very little chance that it will make us rich, but we hope that it will at least pay our bills, take care of our teammates, and let us keep this game alive for you. 
• Entertaining our players for years to come. We want SBA to be a joyful place for you to hang out! You probably have a lot going on in your life. SBA should be a place where you can take a break, have a laugh and feel welcome. And maybe blow up a giant cat mecha while you’re at it.
• Helping players build and enjoy friendships. This also means we’ll try to have low tolerance for toxicity.
  
  • Please help us with this. If you see someone being toxic, ask them politely to cut it out. If they won’t, you can report them. Spry Fox will do everything we can, but we’re just a handful of people and we can only do so much.
  • In general, try to be the best and kindest person you can be. Everyone has a bad day (or week, or month) sometimes and they could use our understanding and support too.
  • TLDR: if we want this community to stay awesome, we have to work together to do it. Everyone plays their part!

We’ve been building towards a game like SBA our entire careers. From the very first day we started Spry Fox, we’ve tried to live up to our motto of ‘Making Happiness’. 

And part of that is making a fun game. So we’ve spent a bunch of years learning to make polished, fun games. Games that at this point have been played by tens of millions of people.

But that isn’t enough. We also want to make the world a better place. Not just provide a few minutes of hedonistic pleasure, but an actual, positive change in the world. 

We learned how to build MMOs. We started with RotMG, and Steambirds is built off a similar design philosophy. But building MMOs, especially real-time bullet hell MMOs, is very hard. Probably the hardest type of game development by an order of magnitude. The sort of thing that big companies — like EA or Bungie — still struggle to pull off with teams and budgets massively larger than ours. MMO development can kill a company. 

It took us much longer than we thought it would, but we persevered. We don’t always get everything right, but we care enough to at least try as hard as we can. And we are going to keep trying, and keep improving, for as long as the world allows us to. We can imagine no better way to spend our time on this planet than growing a positive, low toxicity community with all of you. Because you matter to us more than you can possibly know.

So here we are. Steambirds is on the verge of launch. Let’s see what the future brings!

With all our love, 
Spry Fox

The moment has arrived! In the next couple hours, we will be shipping our first major update of the open beta. You already know about some but not all of it… we wanted to surprise you!


Let’s start with what you already know: the Meowza 2 (M2) encounter. As previously announced, when Meowza’s infamous mech is defeated, there is a large (but not 100%) chance that Rebel spies will successfully lock onto Meowza’s signal in her inner sanctum. If this happens, a special Rebel carrier will appear which leads to Meowza herself! (Note: it is not currently possible to proactively increase the chances of the special carrier appearing, but in a future update it will be possible to actually help the Rebel spies lock onto Meowza’s signal. We’d love to hear your ideas/suggestions for how this could work, please share your thoughts in our Discord[discord.gg]!)

Sarge will not allow pilots onto the special carrier unless they have sufficiently upgraded their planes or have reached a pilot rank of 90. This is to prevent over-eager Rebel recruits from throwing away their valuable aircraft in a completely futile (if courageous) assault against M2 in her ultimate place of power.

Inside the M2 encounter, you will first be confronted by upgraded versions of the Three Brothers. Some of their individual attacks have been upgraded to be more deadly, and they also have new joint attacks that they inflict at key moments in the battle. Those who survive this battle will need to fight their way through a hallway filled with elite unites before boarding a final carrier, which takes you to Meowza’s secret temple.

You’re not fighting a remote-controlled mech at this point. You’re fighting Meowza herself, who’ll be wielding ancient technologies against you that are so powerful, they might as well be magic. I could tell you more, but you might as well just watch the encounter play out:

Meowza currently drops one new Special Legendary weapon (at the usual very low rate) and has a guaranteed T10 drop. There is a small but significant chance that the T10 drop will be a modified T10 armor, called “M2 Armor”, that is stronger than normal and/or has special stat buffs.


This part’s the surprise! In addition to M2, we’ve also added what we’re calling “dungeon mods” to this update. These mods are being applied to all of the hardest (T10) dungeons in the game (except The Dig, which will also be getting mods of a slightly more complex variety in the future.)

Mods can be “normal”, “difficult” and “lethal”. 60% of the time when a dungeon spawns, it will spawn as a “normal” dungeon, which has mods which are intended to make you play a bit differently than you normally do, not necessarily to make the dungeon more difficult. For example, the normal “In Your Face” mod, which significantly reduces the cost of your maneuver but also makes you take a bit more damage from enemy bullets.

30% of the time that a dungeon spawns, it will be a “difficult” dungeon. Difficult mods definitely make a dungeon harder, but also reward you with double the upgrade drops as well as **3x** the drop chance for all other major rewards from the boss. For example, the rare “Nearsighted” mod significantly zooms in the camera, making the dungeon feel claustrophobic, while the “Rush Hour” mod increases your superspeed by +50% while making you take +30% more damage from enemy bullets.

10% of the time that a dungeon spawns, it will be a “lethal” dungeon. Lethal mods make a dungeon extremely dangerous; unprepared players should probably bail on them immediately. Those who brave the dungeon are rewarded with double the upgrades and a **7x** drop chance for all other major rewards. For example, the lethal “Dead to the World” mod completely disables your Steam so you can’t use maneuvers or abilities while also increasing the damage you take by +20%.

At the current time it is not possible to intentionally spawn a lethal dungeon, but in the future we intend to make crafting lethal dungeon keys a possibility.
Other Changes

There are quite a few other changes in this build as well, some of them quite significant:

• Menu buttons have been shrunk a bit so that you don’t have to needlessly scroll a lot.
  
• Teleporting to a player who subsequently enters a portal will leave you at the spot right outside the portal instead of nullifying the teleport or putting you inside a dungeon without warning.
  
• All new Meowza battle music!
  
• Pilot Skills UI can now be filtered by aircraft class.
  
• Grand Lion is no longer susceptible to water damage and no longer drops T9s but its Stiffener drop rate has been increased to compensate
  
• Machine Gun skill 4B (aka “Social Agility”) has been changed to: +20% turn rate, +5% superspeed, and +5% camera view
  
• Hog skill 1B (aka “Stoic”) has been renamed to “Fast Exit” and changed to: On maneuver: +30% superspeed for 3s duration
  
• Sword skill 3B now uses “postAdd” instead of “Add” math.
  
• The max distance you can be from a quest target or a boss when it dies in order to qualify for quest completion and/or XP has been increased by 50%. This should eliminate the complaints we’ve been getting about not getting credit when you should.
  
• Reduced the delay on teleporting to the Rebel City from 3s to just 1s. (The delay for player-to-player teleport remains 3s.) The old 3s delay didn’t seem to impact veteran players, it just hurt new players. Not much point in that. Also, a 1s delay will make M2 a little less terrifying.
  
• The Re-ed dungeon miniboss no longer shoots misleadingly tiny, deadly projectiles.

And of course, we did a lot of work on the servers and our backend tools, as usual. That never stops.
Last Word

We hope you enjoy this update! We look forward to your feedback on it and will plan to address any bugs or balance issues that may have escaped our attention in testing over the next couple weeks. Aside from that, we’ll be focused mainly on improving server performance and stability for the next several weeks, plus any balance changes that are needed to the game overall, as we prepare to officially launch SBA on Steam in the very near future. 🙂

Hi folks! Sorry its been quiet on the blog; we’ve been focused mainly on communication via Discord, but will try to be better about communicating here as well in the future. 🙂 That said, if you haven’t already joined our Discord community, you really should. We even have a nifty vanity URL[discord.gg] now!

This upcoming beta build has a first rough pass at rebalancing elemental attributes. It is *NOT* complete, but is a large part of the way there and we figured might as well start testing it sooner rather than later. What’s missing is a rebalance of several elemental dungeons (mostly the fire and lightning ones). What we *have* rebalanced is: Frozen Owl Monastery, Super Secret Base, Temple of Bast and Venom Compound.

Things that have changed for the aforementioned elements & dungeons:

• Halved the # of elemental upgrades to max. Applies to both damage and defense.
  
• Decreased the droprate of upgrades by something like 40% give or take across all sources.
  
• Doubled the strength of elemental attack upgrades.
  
• Tripled the strength of elemental resistance upgrades.
  
• Enemies in rebalanced dungeons no longer do combo elemental/physical damage. It’s 100% elemental now.
  
• Enemies in rebalanced dungeons are inflicting 50% more damage.
  
• Enemies in rebalanced dungeons effectively have 50% more health.

Other, unrelated changes:

Content:

• Assault’s bash now reduces damage from enemy bullets by 40% for the duration of the maneuver
  
• Quad/Paladin’s maneuver is shielded (temp for Paladin, as we hope to change its maneuver someday)
  
• Duster’s base health reduced by 10%
  
• Dagger Knight: Shorter shield phases on T0-T9 Shield Blasts (lasts longer as you tier up)
  
• Bomb Factory: Many new rooms (which won’t all spawn in any given run)
  
• Bomb Factory: New “bomb fuse” unit, tweaks to enemies to make them work better with bombs
  
• Reeducation Camp: Many new rooms & new “heat vent” traps
  
• Reeducation Camp: Added “anti-rushing barricades” in various places.
  
• Removed XP farm exploit on Soul Collector quest
  
• Made requirements for Vault quest less error prone.
  
• Raised “Prison Box” quest item drop rate
  
• Removed all T2-T6 dungeon keys from store

UI:

• Show item info when you mouseover an item in the trade screen
  
• Only show damage number fly-ups for the local player
  
• Added option to control whether clicking a radar icon initiates a teleport. Defaults to disabled.
  
• Tweaked visuals of item equip popups
  
• Raw dungeon names no longer displayed in friend locations.
  
• Fixed item info panel sometimes sticking around after closing Storage.
  
• Immediately join friends on different servers via the Friend List or /tp or /teleport command.
  
• Mini friends online list displays correct number of online friends total.
  
• When you accept or try hand-in a giver quest, make it your active quest
  
• Don’t show events and news in new user flow

Other:

• Debug information now has a graph for memory usage (managed memory, assets and similar are not included)
  
• Optimized plane outlines; should look nicer and impact perf less
  
• Added graphics settings option to override antialiasing level
  
• Combined mouse and keyboard controls into one keybinding menu (finally!)
  
• Fixed binding modifier keys (CTRL/Alt/Shift) as solo inputs.
  
• Can now bind individual modifiers + keys (CTRL + A, etc.) Note: some existing bindings have been reset.
  
• Gamepad controls only show when a gamepad is connected.
  
• Extend initial connection timeout to 1s to avoid some unnecessary reconnection attempts.
  
• Minor bug fix where some dungeon room orientations weren’t considered
  
• Lots of random little bugfixes and changes to help future development
  
• Better logging for quests, to help diagnose crafting cancellation bug

ART EXPERIMENT:

• Higher tiers of machine guns (up to T10) shoot cooler-looking bullets, but only you see them; other players still see the less-noisy versions we’re all accustomed to. If this seems cool, we’ll do this for all the other guns too.

Last but not least, we’re finally starting to showcase our character art more! Check out this sweet new keyart that we’re using as the Discord banner. 🙂

What’s happening in those birdplane filled skies? Let’s talk turkey.

The long foretold moment is nearly upon us, the server wipe. But fear not, those of you with keys to the Steambirds Domain, all is not lost; your gold, hangar slots, RC storage, unlocked planes, and stored crafting materials will not be wiped. Be sure to store items you want to keep in your RC storage! What will be wiped is your planes, your Pilot XP, and scrap. So you better spend that scrap!

This wipe will be happening tomorrow, THURSDAY, so prepare yourself! (originally posted here[steambirds.com])

Following the wipe we will be having weekend (Friday - Sunday, starting 10 AM PST) closed beta tests to keep the game in tip-top shape and make sure that everything is well tested when we finally open the servers to the world at large! If you have a key, this’ll be your chance to explore the skies before the rest of the flock arrives, and gain the knowledge you need to help the Steambirds Alliance defeat the hordes of evil cats lead by Meowza. Eventually, the weekend beta tests will become open to the public, but that’s at least a few weeks away.

In the land of patch notes, here are last week’s changes:

Art:

• New Icons for quest items

Weapons:

• Shotgun: -10% DPS at long range, and up to +55% DPS when fired point-blank (closer to +20% DPS at mid-range). Has not been applied to URs yet.
  
• Phantom Curtain (Nerf): DPS -25%
  
• Scythe of Zed (Nerf): DPS -5%. (Oh, yeah... some items have been named after the Oct Competition winners!)

Skills:

• Hog 1A (Nerf):
  
  • Armor below 50%: Cooldown: -42-50%, Secondary Steam Cost: +10%
    
  • Armor below 20%: Secondary Steam Cost: -60%
• Medic 4A (Buff): Now only -20% armor
  
• Arc skills (Nerf): Reduced range boosts by roughly -15%
  
• Blaster 2A (Buff): Now only -50% damage
  
• Blaster 2B (Buff): Now only -10% armor
  
• Blaster 3B (Buff): Now only -40% turnrate
  
• Blaster 4X (Buff): Now only -10% armor
  
• Machinegun 1A (Complete rework): Range -10%, Cooldown -21-30%
  
• Machinegun 1B (Complete rework): Range +36-45%, Cooldown +10%

Other:

• Nerfed Chariot Judge's race track damage

We’ve also had a few mini-patches since the last blog post, so if you’re not in the SBA discord and missed those details, this is all that happened since the last blog post:

Misc:

• Bigger island: Landmass increased by +50%, setpiece boss population +35%. This is in preparation for open beta, when servers will be fuller.
  
• Super Secret Base: Made non-boss versions of Omega squadron, spawns as normal enemy in.
  
• The Vaults: Removed outdated warnings about X-Mines.
  
• Lowered tier of Drill Sgt to fix cat skull showing bug
  
• Fixed units that were talking too much in Catipede Nest
  
• Added 'return home' states to non-boss Overworld enemies
  
• Updated some crafting material descriptions to include instructions for use
  
• Fixed chat / maneuver exploit.
  
• Fixed more of the keybinding bugs.

Difficulty updates:

• Difficulty parameters tweaked. Intended result is, brand new players find the game a bit easier, and ultra-pros should find the game a bit more difficult.
  
• Negative difficulty scaling nerfed; should in theory stop giving unneeded help to veteran players with lots of skills and items.

Player class/weapon updates:

• Skill: Buffed Old Faithful 3-A and 4-A
  
• Skill: Buffed Machinegun 3-B, now adds steam instead of armor
  
• Skill: Nerfed Machinegun 1-B
  
• Duster spin attack: Now works with Elementals and Ultra Rares. Duster spin attack: Raised low tier damage, lowered high tier damage.
  
• Buffed Engineer's turrets. Stays alive for 50% longer
  
• Fire Orbs I and II: Changed color
  
• Arc guns: Skills that increase arc range have been nerfed by roughly -15%
  
• Engineer turret: Bullet speed increased 2x (range unchanged), turning speed increased +33%.

Boss updates:

• Meowza: Added new attack phase "nuke strike," removed final nuke attack after death
  
• Doomsday: Made it so nuke kills all minions
  
• Overseer Charles: Fixed hitbox
  
• Rei: Nerfed grid nodes that were dealing too much damage
  
• Bomb Maker: Slight buff to armor
  
• Noble Politician: Slight increase movement speed
  
• Phoenix: Adjusted gun mounts
  
• Buff to tutorial bosses armor, added fanfare on kill