Fire & Magic Beta Update 1 Patch Notes

[Noisestorm]

Happy to be finally back on the beta branch with a new update! I've done a lot of work on the VFX visuals for this update but not everything is done yet, I'll be very active in the Discord server (https://discord.gg/crabchampions) for the next week fixing as much as possible so please send any crash reports and let me know if you run into anything that isn't a known issue below!

Just wanted to quickly post the patch notes here for those that aren't in the Discord server and want to try out the beta branch (please back up your save before opting into the beta branch!)

KNOWN ISSUES
- Some FX are not remade yet, namely a lot of the enemy projectiles so if you see something not final or very glowy, it will probably get fixed soon!
- Some projectiles appear to visually go through walls even though they aren’t actually dealing damage (it's just a visual bug)
- Weapon pickups don’t have visible weapon meshes in the lobby
- Not all of the new difficulty modifiers are finished yet so some may not work at all such as Boss Reinforcements. Manual Collection and No Safety Net are visible but will have no effect if turned on or off

PATCH NOTES
GENERAL
- Remade almost all VFX in the entire game from scratch to be much less blinding and more interesting to look at (there are some that still need to be replaced which will be done in the coming days)
- Added new weapon: Flamethrower
- Added new weapon: Arcane Wand
- Added 2 new Tropical biome islands (Still being worked on, many more islands to come in this beta over the next week!)
- Added new enemy: Ice Pumpkin
- Added new enemy: Fire Pumpkin (I don't remember what he does, sorry if OP!)
- Added new enemy: Laser Skull
- Added new debuff: Arcane - damage is dealt once per second equal to the total stacks of arcane currently applied. Each time damage is applied, the total stacks of arcane are halved
- Added new weapon mod: Arcane Shot: Shots apply arcane to enemies
- Added new weapon mod: Drill Shot: Chance for shots to create damaging drills on impact
- Added new weapon mod: Link Shot: Chance for shots to burst into 3 link shots on impact
- Added new grenade mod: Giant Drill: Grenades explode into giant drills
- Added new perk: Crimson Haze: Enemies create short lived damaging zones when eliminated
- Greatly improved the smoothness of other players in multiplayer games especially when spectating, it should no longer look like players are lagging when they aren’t
- Small enemies no longer collide with each other which should greatly reduce situations where pufferfish get stuck on crabs
- Optimized the Shrapnel challenge modifier which could cause lag when many enemies exploded into shrapnel at once
- Optimized situations where many projectiles hit lava and created lots of splash FX, causing lag
- Added 30 FPS frame cap for those looking to preserve battery life on handheld devices
- Improved water ripple visuals to both work in shallow water and also push water foam away
- Improved the visuals of the Grid, Flow, Geometric, Purple Tiger, Regal and Void camos
- Raised the height of the camera when not aiming to make it feel more comfortable (as the crab is so flat and close to the ground, having the camera also low sometimes felt bad when looking upwards)
- Added 4 new achievements (Flamethrower and Arcane wand victory related)
- Made many small improvements to the gameplay UI to be less ugly and more streamlined + minimal

BALANCE CHANGES
- Auto Rifle damage increased from 3 to 5
- Burst Pistol damage increased from 3 to 5
- Dual Pistols damage increased from 3 to 4
- Auto Shotgun damage increased from 2 to 3
- Orb Launcher damage increased from 4 to 6
- Sniper damage increased from 30 to 40
- Slugs and Grubs are slightly less common to allow for their presence to be more noticeable (ideally they should be lined up with other enemies for bonus damage rather than half of the map being slugs and clearing itself with chain reactions- this can still happen but just a bit less often)
- Fire damage is more effective but all fire mods and perks apply less overall stacks to compensate. This should mean less situations where enemies are taking tiny amounts of damage from fire over a very long period of time and more situations where enemies are taking much more concentrated fire damage over a shorter period
- Added new difficulty modifier: Limited Heals: All healing is reduced by 50%
- Armor health per plate reduced from 25% of max health to 15% of max health
- Spiked Chest max health opening cost reduced from 33% to 25%
- Loot Totem health cost reduced from 33% to 20%
- Crystal Totem health cost reduced from 33% to 10%
- Chance Totem health cost reduced from 10% to 5%
- Gamble Totem crystal cost reduced by 33%
- The Eternal Punishment difficulty modifier now only removes 2% of your max health when taking damage (it previously removed 5% which often made runs devolve into a glass cannon situation where max health was ignored)
- To make it harder to reach the damage limit (and getting negative billions of damage in the game over screen), all damage has been reduced by 10x- this is a global change and all mods and perks that deal flat damage have been adjusted accordingly. This also means all enemies start with 10x less health. The end result should be a more noticeable and satisfying damage increase as runs progress, seeing single digit damage numbers grow into the thousands and eventually millions! Another big benefit is for those that go on long runs, it’ll take much longer to reach the current island limits (where enemies become invincible due to having so much health). During the rebalancing pass, if a mod dealt 25 damage, I’ve rounded it up to now deal 3 damage (after the 10x reduction). While doing this I also buffed the damage of some underperforming mods and perks, mainly the strike and storm mods as well as all damage increasing grenade mods. All of these changes should make it also easier to calculate how effective a mod or perk is relative to the base damage as it’s easier to compare a 50 damage mod to a 8 base damage weapon than it is to compare a 450 damage mod to a 75 base damage weapon (which is how things were before the 10x reduction and rounding).
MORE BALANCE CHANGES
-- Some changes to the difficulty modifier roster:
- No Safety Net was a modifier that made the game more frustrating than hard in many cases- part of the fun of the game is getting knocked down to 1 HP and then entering panic mode. Losing the entire run over a small mistake and feeling like you are one shot at all times is something that many players were rightfully frustrated by. This modifier has now been moved up to the new Ultra Chaos difficulty (unlocked by getting all weapons to diamond) for those looking for that experience still, but it has been removed from the base set of difficulty modifiers
- Volatile Explosions was another modifier that caused understandable frustration: being able to melee groups of slugs and not take damage from it was one of the best feeling mechanics in the game and removing it for the sake of difficulty decreased the fun factor for most. The flow state present without this modifier on got interrupted in a more tedious than fun way. This modifier has also been moved up to the Ultra Chaos difficulty. To make basic slugs still feel threatening with this change, they now explode faster than before, requiring a well timed melee or dash to avoid
- Manual Collection is the final modifier that has been replaced as it made the flow of combat more tedious than fun in many cases. Since there are those that still enjoy it, it is active in the Ultra Chaos difficulty
- Slightly increased the health of most medium enemies (regular skulls, regular ants etc.) but also increased the time before health regeneration on these enemies (if playing with the Regenerating Enemies modifier enabled), allowing for more breathing room between each hit they take
-- These changes should shift the difficulty over to making good builds and less reliant on making zero mistakes
- Resurrecting Enemies now triggers slightly less often as it could cause islands to drag in terms of pacing. In addition to this, enemies can no longer resurrect in a close range to the player as this could often lead to unfair damage from enemies spawning close behind
- Frenzied Enemies now doubles the attack speed of enemies rather than setting it to the max value (which could lead to inconsistencies and unfair situations on some enemies)
- Removed knockback on many small enemy projectiles to reduce situations where players could lose momentum and be juggled in the air, taking damage multiple times- not fun!
- Critical hits are now calculated globally: this means that ANYTHING can crit- dagger arcs, mace balls etc!
- There is no longer a 2% base starting crit chance, you start with 0% chance to crit
- Moved Hot Shot, Sharpshooter, Power Punch and Mega Crit from Weapon Mods to be Perks as critical hits are relevant to more than just weapon shots now
- Critical Claws, Critical Grenade, Critical Chain and Streak Shot have been removed
- Precision has been renamed to Streak Shot since that has been removed and the name fits it better
- Critical Blast has been moved to a perk as it can trigger from more than just weapon crits now
- Since “lesser” crits can trigger “on crit” mods (which could lead to an infinite loop), critical hit chance is capped at 50% for “lesser” damage sources (any damage that isn’t directly from your weapon, grenade or melee)
- Critical Link has been renamed to Link Shot, has new projectiles and no longer requires a critical hit to trigger
- Critical Blades has been renamed to Homing Blades and no longer requires a critical hit to trigger
- Mega Crit now multiplies critical damage by 3 instead of adding 300% extra damage to the multiplier
- Destructibles now scale up their damage / debuff stacks from +5% per island to +10% per island

MORE BALANCE CHANGES
- Critical Blast damage increased from 400 to 500 and is now chance based as intended
- Critical Link is no longer chance based, damage increased from 250% to 300% weapon damage but total number of shots reduced from 5 to 4
- High Roller now duplicates Epic and Legendary chests on Elite / Boss islands rather than Healing chests which felt underwhelming
- High Roller base downside reduced from 33% chance for no chests to spawn to 20% chance for no chests to spawn
- Reload Arc is now part of the Skill loot pool to make choosing skill portals more enticing
- Laser Crab, Poison Skull, Blocker Skull and Lightning Skull projectile damage decreased by 50%
- Grenade Crab, Fire Skull and Homing Grub projectile damage decreased by 25%
- Landmines no longer spawn naturally and barrels spawn less (no more chaotic barrels, only regular ones- the chaotic barrels are fun in the lobby but in gameplay situations they mostly just fly off into the sky and do nothing)
- Increased physics impulse strength from melee on regular barrels
- The Homing Barrels challenge modifier barrels have far less health and no longer can leak which should reduce the messy visuals that can sometimes happen with lots of barrels
- Crossbow default piercing reduced from 2 to 0 (as the previous update made it one of the best weapons in the game)
- Rocket Launcher projectile speed doubled (as the weapon was underperforming slightly before so this should make it easier to hit moving targets)
- Turrets no longer target Shielded enemies
- Reduced the collision radius of the Elite Lightning Crab projectiles as there were some cases that appeared to be a miss that would still hit
- The slowest moving enemies now move a bit faster to prevent situations where you are looking for one last really slow enemy when you’ve cleared all of the others
- Basic melee crabs no longer can be shielded as it slowed down the pace of gameplay too much
- Pufferfish health increased to differentiate them from slugs when prioritizing targets
BUG FIXES
- Upgrade chests no longer contain duplicates of the same loot (you could have 10 mods in your inventory but get the same mod twice)
- Fixed issue where ALL strikes that had spawned during a run weren’t getting cleaned up properly which could lead to worse performance on late game runs
- Enemy movement now ignores physically simulated destructibles so they should stop being pushed under the ground by barrels
- Bouncing Shot no longer resets the lifetime of projectiles which was causing performance issues where projectiles would bounce around for 30+ seconds at high levels
- Removed Laser Crab and Minigun Crab from challenge crystals as they were appearing when the Evolved Enemies difficulty modifier was inactive
- Enemies that happen to spawn outside of the world bounds should get automatically eliminated
- Fixed Critical Blast having a visual cooldown in the inventory while actually having a chance to trigger on each critical hit
- Fixed issue that could cause Auras to trigger multiple times when dropping and re-picking back up an Aura perk
- Fixed various issues that could cause Auras to stop triggering when multiple Aura perks were equipped
- Lava now deals damage when stepping into it as intended
- Homing Thorns now deal damage as intended
- Fixed various spots where enemies could get stuck
- The “Islands Survived” text in the game over UI now shows island 18 if getting eliminated on island 19 (previously it would show 19)
- You no longer automatically fire when leaving a portal if you had entered it with the fire button held down
- Fixed some jankiness around sliding- when sliding forward and quickly pressing the back key, you no longer change directions while sliding and instead stop the slide which should prevent overshooting when trying to stop a slide
- Damage Dealt can no longer be negative on the game over screen
- Max health no longer goes to 1 when getting high enough
- Fixed issue that would cause players other than the multiplayer host to see blue borders in the lobby
- Fixed issue with auto melee that could cause it to continue indefinitely when exiting a portal
- Removed the invisible walls around the pillars in some boss islands- this prevents situations where you can seemingly deal no damage to enemies when they are near the pillars but will increase situations where they may be able to shoot through walls. Working on a better fix to this in the future

[Dumpy93]

Looking forward to trying this out later. Any plans to change how freeze is implemented before the full release of this patch?

[frz]

W

[Jokerdad4]

tahnk you for this epic game

[Noisestorm]

Added another patch to fix some issues with the first beta build.

GENERAL
- Added new generic icons for Rare, Epic and Legendary weapon mods (with a matching colored border to easily see what rarity they are at a glance in the inventory UI)
- Optimized flamethrower VFX and made them slightly smaller to make it a bit easier to see through them
- Made the inventory slots 20% smaller just for more visual breathing room
- Fixed some inconsistent font styles in the gameplay UI
- Moved the combo text in the gameplay UI back over to the right to be less distracting

BALANCE CHANGES
- Wind Up, Streak Shot and Clip Shot no longer add flat damage and now add percentage damage (as they weren’t affected by the 10x reduction in damage from the previous patch, making them extremely OP)
- Increased Arcane Wand projectile speed by 25%
- Arcane stacks no longer are reduced by 50% each time they deal damage, instead they are only reduced by 15% which should make the wand a more powerful choice
- Link Shot and Drill Shot damage reduced from 6 to 4
- Slightly increased the total amount of enemies per island in Ultra Chaos
- Added stats for Ultra Chaos (High Score, Win Streak, Attempts etc.)
- Added 2 more elites / bosses per elite / boss island in Ultra Chaos

BUG FIXES
- Fixed launch pads being inconsistent and sometimes not launching at all
- Fixed non-hosting players not being able to pick up health pickups or bananas
- Fixed checkpoints being extremely bright and changed the color to green to make it clear that they aren’t a damage area
- Fixed Ultra Chaos shop prices being at the Normal difficulty rate (they are now higher than Nightmare prices to account for the extra crystals gained from bosses spawning frequently)
- Fixed Ultra Chaos enemy health being at the Normal enemy health multiplier, enemies should now be much beefier and require an insane build to keep up with
- Fixed Ultra Chaos not having the correct enemy cap in the world (it was 35 and is now 50 just like it is on Nightmare), same with the -25% player health reduction found in Nightmare
- Not all of the new difficulty modifiers are finished yet so some may not work at all such as Boss Reinforcements
- Fixed armor plate UI bars not being fully filled when picking up new armor plates

[The People's Elbow]

Just tried running the game but it doesn't seem like it really even attempts to open. Hitting play causes it to sync cloud saves like normal, then immediately goes back to a green play button in steam like it would when the game closes normally. No screen flash, doesn't attempt to open a window or anything. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling, verifying game cache and turned off steam cloud saves and it was the same a every time. Not sure if there's any way to get a crash report out of that though lol.

[Noisestorm]

Originally posted by The People's Elbow:

Just tried running the game but it doesn't seem like it really even attempts to open. Hitting play causes it to sync cloud saves like normal, then immediately goes back to a green play button in steam like it would when the game closes normally. No screen flash, doesn't attempt to open a window or anything. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling, verifying game cache and turned off steam cloud saves and it was the same a every time. Not sure if there's any way to get a crash report out of that though lol.

Really strange, haven't seen that one before.

Maybe try switching back to main branch, seeing if that plays and then switching to beta?

If verifying isn't working possibly manually deleting the game files and then freshly reinstalling may work but this shouldn't really be happening ever. Also a simple PC restart / update and can also sometimes flush these kinds of problems out.

Otherwise potentially it's a false positive from some antivirus software that's stopping it from running maybe?

[The People's Elbow]

Originally posted by Noisestorm:

Originally posted by The People's Elbow:

Just tried running the game but it doesn't seem like it really even attempts to open. Hitting play causes it to sync cloud saves like normal, then immediately goes back to a green play button in steam like it would when the game closes normally. No screen flash, doesn't attempt to open a window or anything. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling, verifying game cache and turned off steam cloud saves and it was the same a every time. Not sure if there's any way to get a crash report out of that though lol.

Really strange, haven't seen that one before.

Maybe try switching back to main branch, seeing if that plays and then switching to beta?

If verifying isn't working possibly manually deleting the game files and then freshly reinstalling may work but this shouldn't really be happening ever. Also a simple PC restart / update and can also sometimes flush these kinds of problems out.

Otherwise potentially it's a false positive from some antivirus software that's stopping it from running maybe?

Thanks for the reply! I tried all of those things and still nothing, it's actually doing this for both the main branch and the beta version which is odd and definitely makes me think it's something on my end.
Update: I tried running the exe directly from the install location and got a system error saying XAPOFX1_5.dll was not found. Got a second error after for X3DAudio1_7.dll as well. Reinstalling direct x fixed the issue. Hopefully this is helpful to anyone else who might have this issue.

[Noisestorm]

Thanks for posting your solution and I'm glad you got things fixed!

Originally posted by The People's Elbow:

Originally posted by Noisestorm:

Really strange, haven't seen that one before.

Maybe try switching back to main branch, seeing if that plays and then switching to beta?

If verifying isn't working possibly manually deleting the game files and then freshly reinstalling may work but this shouldn't really be happening ever. Also a simple PC restart / update and can also sometimes flush these kinds of problems out.

Otherwise potentially it's a false positive from some antivirus software that's stopping it from running maybe?

Thanks for the reply! I tried all of those things and still nothing, it's actually doing this for both the main branch and the beta version which is odd and definitely makes me think it's something on my end.
Update: I tried running the exe directly from the install location and got a system error saying XAPOFX1_5.dll was not found. Got a second error after for X3DAudio1_7.dll as well. Reinstalling direct x fixed the issue. Hopefully this is helpful to anyone else who might have this issue.

[TecHs]

Any idea why it is not updating on steam

[Noisestorm]

Another new patch coming in hot!

GENERAL
- Optimized all FX (most noticeable when on Low graphics settings) and made many performance improvements for situations where there are a lot of FX going off at once
- Improved most “Area” FX that have a radius that can be hard to see (I re-added spheres like in the previous updates so the radius is much easier to gauge). This makes it easy to distinguish friendly fire (no sphere) to enemy fire (sphere)
- Laser Skulls, Ice Pumpkins and Fire Pumpkins are now evolved enemies and won’t show up without the “Evolved Enemies” modifier active
- Increased the size and speed of the duplicate icon that shows up over pickups to make it more noticeable
- Updated Ultra Chaos description to be more accurate

BALANCE CHANGES
- Flamethrower range slightly reduced
- Increased base arcane stacks from 25 to 30
- Clip Shot and Wind Up damage per bullet increased from +1% to +4%
- Streak Shot damage per bullet increased from +2% to +5%
- Double Trouble enemy health increase reduced from +100% to +50%
- Hard Target now applies damage reduction AFTER other incoming damage debuffs (like from Hot Shot or Brute Force). So a 10% reduction is now 10% of the entire incoming damage amount which should make it a more viable option to counter increased incoming damage debuffs
- Double Edged Sword buff has been increased by 10x to account for the 10x reduction in damage
- Reduced the number of lasers the Laser Skull fires with each attack to be less spammy
- Turrets have been nerfed to be more in line with the 10x damage reduction, but they have been balanced to be much more powerful than they were in the current live build to still be a viable choice
- Enhanced Turrets damage increased from +50% to +75%
- Fixed fast enemy spawns on Ultra Chaos horde islands (which got quickly out of control)

BUG FIXES
- Fixed Arcane stacks infinitely triggering when reaching 3 stacks (it now fizzles out when at or below 5 stacks)

[Noisestorm]

Originally posted by TecHs:

Any idea why it is not updating on steam

Have you opted into the beta branch of the game? The full release will happen later this week

[Noisestorm]

Another (almost final) patch incoming for those interested!

GENERAL
- Added new Perk: Critical Lightning: Critical hits shock random enemies
- Added VFX for all weapons in the lobby as well as for heart, armor and crystal bundle pickups that were missing previously
- Lightning has been reworked to last a bit longer and deal less damage (as it wasn’t adjusted for the 10x drop in damage yet). Also adjusted the lightning FX and tint to be a bit more blue to differentiate it from Arcane
- Finalized the roster of difficulty modifiers for this update
- Added new Bubble VFX
- Made the inventory UI closer to how it used to be with more padding between slots and fixed UI elements that had the experimental thin font
- Decreased Arcane Wand aim FOV a bit as it was too zoomed in to be comfortable when aiming

BALANCE CHANGES
- Enemy bonus health per alive player in co-op increased from +40% per player to +66% per player as the situations where everyone shreds through elites and bosses in 1 second were happening a bit too often in co-op especially in a 4 player game
- Base starting health reduced from 400 to 200 (as 400 was too generous, making the game too easy for most). So compared to the live version, base health has still had a net increase from 100 to 200 to give health more utility and be more like a currency with the Limited Heals modifier enabled
- Slightly reduced the radius of the Grenade Crab grenade to be a bit more fair
- Double Edged Sword crystal gain has been reduced from 250% of damage dealt to 100% of damage dealt as it was far too overpowered before
- Hot Shot critical hit chance reduced from 16% to 15%
- Sharpshooter critical hit chance reduced from 8% to 6%
- Critical Arrow damage reduced from 50 to 40
- Rebalanced all Strike, Aura and Storm mods and perks to be more in line with the 10x damage reduction / new lightning changes
- Crimson Haze damage reduced from 5 to 4
- Crystal Barrage damage increased from 1 to 3
- Flamethrower base damage reduced from 3 to 2 (fire damage is unchanged)
- Rocket Launcher explosion radius increased by 20%
- Blade Launcher damage increased from 2 to 4
- Dual Pistols damage increased from 4 to 5

BUG FIXES
- Fixed issue that prevented the Challenger challenges from being completed
- Fixed issue that allowed players to join games that were already in progress
- Made several potential fixes for a low percentage of players not being able to join multiplayer games
- Fixed players going out of bounds and taking damage when jumping too high on launch pads
- Fixed issue that showed players having 0 health while still alive
- Fixed flamethrower not having a visible aura
- Fixed the Level Up perk leveling up mods and perks that were already level 255
- Fixed the Level Up perk favoring grenade mods over weapon mods when leveling things up
- Fixed glowing red boss skull VFX
- Fixed a soft lock that could happen if knocked out of the Tropical island with the square 4 walls: there’s now a launchpad outside of the wall boundaries to bounce back in!

[Nigeist]

I cant get past the loading screen, can hear the sound but it still shows the loading screen, any fixes please?

[dragoonpet]

Just encountered a bug on multiplayer where any one using the new weapons would cause the guest to get kicked. I was hosting and running minigun while my friend was using flamethrower and he would get kicked mid combat. he also hosted with similar setup ( i was wand and he was using flamethrower) I was kicked and then we swapped so i was using flame and he was using wand - same problem. Not sure if Flamethrower is causing the issue or if it is other weapons but multiplayer is not playable while there is the threat of being randomly kicked.

[AidenCharming]

Had this happen but only with the flamethrower and only when he shot the skull after we were upgraded and running level 90 or so.