Crab Champions The Anvil Update Beta

[Noisestorm]

I’m settling in for about a month of daily beta updates so there’s still lots of content to add here. If you want to try the latest version out early, here are the current patch notes! There's been a huge focus on balance and QOL in this update, the new content is now being added on top of the changes

HOW TO GET THE BETA

The beta will likely have bugs and be unstable so if enabling the beta branch it's extremely important to back up your save file.

You can do that by copying the following folder to a safe location on your computer: %USERPROFILE%/AppData/Local/CrabChampions/ (if you are having trouble finding this location, press Win+R and paste it in there instead).

This folder contains your save files so if something goes wrong on this beta branch you can revert to your backed up save. Please note that the beta branch and the main branch share the same files so if you don't back up your saves you may lose permanent progress.

With that out of the way, you can download the beta branch by right clicking Crab Champions in your Steam library, clicking "properties" and then enabling the beta branch under the Betas tab

PATCH NOTES

GENERAL

Anvil Portal (Enhancements 2.0)

• I think enhancements were a good addition to the game but they had a few issues: there wasn’t enough control over which enhancements you got and you weren’t able to target a specific mod to enhance. In this update I have added an Anvil portal reward which spawns 3 enhancement choices after clearing the island. You can then choose to enhance a specific mod from your inventory, allowing you to make much more specialized and targeted builds centered around one main mod. The random enhancement totem in the shop is unchanged as it’s a fun alternate way to get enhancements, rolling the dice in the hopes of getting something good
  
• Increased enhancement limit per mod from 3 to 9
  
• You can now apply the same enhancement multiple times for stronger effects
  
• Many more enhancement types will be added over the course of this beta now that the new framework is in place
  
• KNOWN ISSUE: DON'T GET MORE THAN 8 ENHANCEMENTS ON A SINGLE MOD OR THE GAME WILL CRASH: I AM WORKING ON A FIX

Health 2.0

• A Regeneration Chest that only contains healing loot now spawns in addition to the guaranteed damage chest on island 1. I want there to be a nice balance between using health as a currency (on things like Spiked Chests) and being able to recover from small mistakes (like taking several hits from an easy enemy on island 1). Previously it felt a bit frustrating if you took a lot of damage early on in a biome and didn’t happen to find any health loot to recover. It’s also much more exciting when you have a smaller health pool that you can skillfully recover rather than a large health pool that just gets whittled down over time until you get eliminated unceremoniously. The danger zone is when you are constantly a few shots away from death while also being able to recover health by playing a certain way. I strongly believe that the danger zone is where the fun lies and the changes in this update will make playing especially the early game more enjoyable and consistent, rewarding skill and reducing the impact of small mistakes.
  
• Base max health reduced from 150 to 100 for the reasons above (remember you get the extra regeneration chest so you have guaranteed healing starting every run now)
  You can no longer die to a single hit that deals damage greater than 80% of your max health at once. This should prevent frustrating situations where you are eliminated instantly out of nowhere. Note that this only applies if you have a max health of 10 or higher and when the One Hit challenge modifier is not active
  
• Max health loot has been reworked and simplified: no more hard to understand behavior when picking up Glass Cannon where future max health gains were reduced by an unknown amount! The new system makes ALL max health related loot affect one of two stats: Base Max Health and Max Health Multiplier. Hearts have been replaced by the perks below as I want to remove as much consumable loot in the game as possible (it’s just more fun to be able to salvage later instead of it being a one off buff)
  
• Bananas have been re-added to the game since hearts are no longer a thing- even though they are consumable, it’s nice to get a big heal after an elite fight
  
• Regenerator now heals 5 times per second compared to the previous once per second to make it more satisfying to build into. This change makes it the most effective healing perk in the early game: as a tradeoff it also reduces max health multiplier by 25% which gives it more identity- effective healing but lower max health pool to work with
  
• Endurance now heals at the start of each island instead of at the end and it has been buffed to heal 80 health (up from 40)
  
• Fortitude max health increase per island decreased from 25 to 20 to bring it in line with the other max health increasing perks
  
• The Limited Heals difficulty modifier has been removed as it made healing perks in general more confusing (why am I not healing the amount advertised?) and could be canceled out with a single Amber Resin which made it a weak / boring modifier
  
• Added new “Healing” loot tag. Amber Resin will now only show up if you already have a healing perk (this helps reduce useless options from health chests in the early game)
  
• Since recovering health is much more reliable, Spiked Chests health cost has been increased from 33% to 40% of max health and totems that cost health are a bit more expensive
  
• Removed Big Hearts (it’s no longer relevant as hearts aren’t in the game anymore)

• Added new weapon mod: Beam Shot: Chance to fire damaging beams along with your shots
  
• Added new perk: Elemental Specialist: Damage increased to enemies if they have exactly one debuff (fire, poison, lightning etc.) applied to them
  
• Added new perk: Mango: Max health increased
  Added new perk: Ambrosia: Max health multiplier increased
  Added new relic: Ring Of Vigor: Max health multiplier increased by 4% after clearing each island
  
• Added new relic: Upgrade Ring: All chests are guaranteed to contain duplicate loot where possible but the amount of loot choices in chests is reduced by 1
  
• Added new Greed relic: Overspill Goblet: Critical hit chance is halved but also added to critical hit damage multiplier. Sharpshooter and Hot Shot now scale linearly (can go over 100%) to synergise with this which is a significant buff to critical hit chance as there used to be diminishing returns as you got closer to 100% critical hit chance
  
• Added new enemy: Elite Beam Skull
  
• Added new enemy: Barrage Skull
  
• Added new difficulty modifier: Ambushing Elites: An elite spawns on the third island of each biome

• Sliding now naturally happens when you land after dashing or jumping. The end result here is that movement should feel exactly like it did before but without having to hold a key down every time you land to slide- it’s now way more comfortable to play the game for long periods of time! For those worried that they won’t be able to land precisely when platforming, don’t hold a directional key when landing and you won’t slide (just like it worked before) or just press the inverse direction when landing to cancel the slide. You can still manually slide at any time when on the ground
  
• Sliding length has been doubled (so you can slide for longer before slowing down)
  
• Sliding is 10% slower than before to make movement feel a bit less out of control and more deliberate
  
• I’ve made it so that main weapon damage calculations can happen separately again while keeping the optimizations for other types of damage (things like Drill Shot etc.). This mean Money Shot, Health Shot, critical hits as well as elemental damage will now roll PER PELLET on shotguns and other multi projectile weapons as well as spawn individual damage numbers which just feels way better
  
• Enemies no longer spawn in a boring and predictable way (one by one, easy enemies then hard enemies after), they now spawn in randomized packs which makes fights feel much more interesting and dynamic
  
• Rebalanced enemy spawn weights and counts for more variety between waves and to make biomes feel less linear. Also some harder enemies will show up slightly later into a biome to allow for more contrast between early and late biome spawns
  
• Rarities have been renamed to make more sense: Common (replaces the old Rare as it didn’t make sense for the loot you find all the time to be called “Rare”), Rare (replaces the old Epic), Legendary (same as before)
  
• The Waves island type has been removed as it wasn’t distinct enough from Arena islands while also having a “don’t get hit” gimmick already covered by the Flawless blessing or the One Hit challenge modifier. Each island type should be distinct and this really wasn’t doing enough to feel different + wasn’t a popular choice with players
  
• The Regenerating Enemies difficulty modifier has been removed as it was just not fun to be spectating the last player alive as they chip away at enemies that regenerate health, often resulting in a softlock. I have moved the same functionality to a “Regenerating” buff that can apply to enemies if you have the Buffed Enemies modifier active, this way it affects at most one or two enemies on an island making it much easier to focus on them and clear away the non regenerating enemies first
  Improved various lighting presets (like the dawn and sunset ones on the Tropical biome) to be much brighter and more colorful to match the mood
  
• Added night time lighting to the Desert biome
  
• Added enemy hit reaction animations
  
• Added skull death sound
  
• Added new more responsive crosshairs with consistent outlines regardless of the spread value
  
• Added a reload UI animation
  
• Added a low ammo sound
  
• Made a big visual pass on all VFX to be much less busy. This makes combat situations feel much easier to read (plus less random bright sparks constantly on screen!). For people streaming or making videos about the game this should also heavily help with compression and generally make the game more enjoyable to play / watch on smaller screens
  
• Removed the old high score system that was in previous versions of the game- there are more interesting metrics to show off when you complete a run (difficulty, islands survived etc.) and there were too many inconsistencies to make the old system be an actual indicator of skill and it was more a test of patience + luck than anything else. This removal allows for some nice cleanups in the game and UI codebase. The only noticeable side effect this change has is that the formula for the number next to your medal in game (the Player Level) is now much simpler: the number of islands cleared multiplied by the challenge level

[NotSoNamelessNerd]

when are you planning on releasing this update? big fan of a lot of the changes!

[NotSoNamelessNerd]

When does Tony wake up. LOL

[Dopey Shepard]

Diposting pertama kali oleh NamelessNerd:

When does Tony wake up. LOL

already spoke about it some weeks ago. Don't think Noise has said anything about it. I think having different individual icons for all mods and perks is a more pressing issue, and Tony stuff is gonna come out right at 1.0 release. Maybe there's some mini game involved where you can win a random purchase from a shop, dunno.

[Captain Kalob]

the amount of scaling after the 2rd loop is not balanced, fighting increasing numbers of extremely bullet sponge bosses while doing a combined total of several hundred million damage a second, and finally getting through each loop just to hit the same brick wall again and again rendering all your scaling nearly useless isnt fun.

[Noisestorm]

THE ANVIL UPDATE BETA 30 PATCH NOTES

• Money shot feels good to trigger on each shot but there was some confusion on how it worked with faster firing weapons as it took a few levels for the crystal gain to go from 1->2 per hit. To make this work I’ve shifted the entire economy to have 3x larger numbers so you’ll now see larger numbers on all crystal gain perks and higher crystal rewards from enemies but also higher shop prices. This change is purely a global adjustment and shouldn’t break any actual balance, just allows Money Shot to scale nicely on all weapons
  
• Shops having a guaranteed piece of health loot on each reroll was making them feel a bit limited with often the same piece of loot spawning twice or the same boring armor plate spawning on multiple rerolls or things like Health Is Power being weirdly common and consistent to find. Shop pedestals are now completely random again (this might also fix the bug where pedestals can spawn with 0 cost and no pickup). Since both the regeneration chest and the guaranteed health chest after each Elite have been introduced in this update, I don’t think this’ll have much effect on finding health loot reliably
  
• Doubled the radius of the flamethrower fire areas to more reliably hit floating enemies but slightly reduced the chance of spawning these fire areas- overall it should just feel more consistent
  
• Adjusted all weapon mod trigger roll multipliers to be more in line with their fire rate after feedback that it felt bad for sniper to max out chance based mods after like 2-3 levels
  
• Enemies get +15% (up from +5%) more health per wave on Horde islands to make them feel a bit more challenging in comparison to other islands
  
• The low ammo sound now plays on at least the last 3 shots before a reload (there were cases with small clip sizes where it would only play on the final bullet which wasn’t very helpful)
  
• The Maxed Out achievement now checks melee mods since it’s possible to max out your melee mod slots
  
• Updated Shrapnel projectiles to have visuals that match their hitbox and made them decelerate faster
  
• Fixed enemies becoming invincible after a certain point in a run so I think truly endless runs are now possible. A side effect of this is that the target dummy can now get eliminated with enough damage (I’ll be making an achievement for this). This change MAY fix the sometimes invincible enemy bug and also will improve performance on late game runs when there are a lot of damage events happening at once
  
• Fixed enemies giving Double Edged Sword crystals on taking very high damage even if players didn’t have the perk in their inventory
  
• Fixed players losing control of their character when venturing extremely far from the island that they are on
  
• Fixed healing still working while poisoned (poison is meant to prevent healing)
  
• Fixed desert island cheese spot where you could survive by landing on the pillars below the island
  
• Fixed Power Punch increasing critical hit damage by 50% instead of the 25% advertised. I’ve buffed it to now increase critical hit damage by 40% (technically a 10% nerf since the previous incorrect calculation was giving double the value intended)

[Limdood]

TIL there's a low ammo sound...

[Clutz4k]

Can we get a rework on assassin? Maybe move it down a tier in rarity, it's the worst scaling damage perk.
Not enjoying having to take streamer loot to scale, it was a good idea but ruins runs if you don't find it early.

Infinite loop is a huge W

[Dopey Shepard]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Clutz4k:

Can we get a rework on assassin? Maybe move it down a tier in rarity, it's the worst scaling damage perk.
Not enjoying having to take streamer loot to scale, it was a good idea but ruins runs if you don't find it early.

Infinite loop is a huge W

Both Assassin and Bullseye perks (1shot requirement) are underwhelming for a couple of reasons
1) Only used on Sniper Rifle, or Rocket Launcher, but only after RL's buff to 75 base dmg. It used to be 50 and even then, it's AOE makes it so that you don't proc those perks that much. It's only used on Sniper Rifle

2) Enemies that cannot be killed in 1 shot, and there will be plenty of enemies like that cannot contribute. Also, any enemies in ARMOR also will not work with it, unfortunately. So even if I launch like 10 projectiles with X shot, Triple Shot etc, I'm gonna need 2 shots to kill an armored enemy which is annoying because otherwise I'd kill it in 1 shot to proc the perks. In this regard, a rework could be necessary

3) Can't take anything that does AOE damage even slightly. All these Orbiting Scythes and Crimson Hazes are a no-go. Can't take Lightning Shot cuz of its aoe properties, can't take Firefork/Mace/Pumpkin/whatever shot because all your potential 1 shots will be gone if you do that

4) You need a very dedicated build to keep 1 shotting everything. You can try doing it with MELEE too, but it's hard to build all the appropriate perks. Either you need to be very lucky, or you just won't succeed. Early on I like doing Economy/Luck Islands. If I do either, and not damage/skill rounds, I will stop 1 shotting stuff

At this point, even with nerfs to Fortitude/Valued Customer, which I hope will be reverted back to their previous state, it's better to take anything than Bullseye. And basically everything else will be inevitably better than Assassin, except for Collector, but Collector is only used after Loop where it's god

[marsseth]

I have to agree with the 1 shot perks. The game feels like you want to be stacking as many alternate damage effects just to keep up with the damage output needs. Maybe add a perk that lowers enemy health in to help with those perks or a perk that increases the first shot damage of the magazine, but don't mess with the fifth shot perk cause that one is phenomenal. With the criticism though the game is the best roguelike FPS out there. Its a top genre of mine. Only developer out there actually listening to the community as well.

[Dopey Shepard]

Diposting pertama kali oleh marsseth:

I have to agree with the 1 shot perks. The game feels like you want to be stacking as many alternate damage effects just to keep up with the damage output needs. Maybe add a perk that lowers enemy health in to help with those perks or a perk that increases the first shot damage of the magazine, but don't mess with the fifth shot perk cause that one is phenomenal. With the criticism though the game is the best roguelike FPS out there. Its a top genre of mine. Only developer out there actually listening to the community as well.

Even if there's a perk that guarantees me 1 shot on the first bullet of the magazine and I can line up 3 regular crabs for a proc, I'm still not doing it. Not worth reloading the gun every time I can get some meager amount of max hp especially when Fortitude already gives you a guaranteed amount with no extracurricular work

[Limdood]

Just got offered assassin as my totem perk. Went sniper, and still, I'd have been better off getting a collector island 1.

I managed to build into it, but I also had to work so much harder to do so than with almost any other build (as Dopey Shepard said, so many mods/perks are "off limits" if you want Assassin to work).

Not only is my build limited though, but my playstyle as well, since I have to be careful what I kill and when, so that a lightning slug doesn't graze a big group of enemies or something similar. Island hazards, such as red rocks, fire rocks, lightning rocks, and barrels all screw with it too. Shot a slug? it exploded a barrel and now the 2 dozen crabs following it got touched with fire.

And all this for....mathematically more than double the scaling of checklist, but in actuality, it's probably closer to only 1.5x the scaling of checklist, and that's with massive concessions and adjustments (and specifically sniper) to play into it, since armored enemies are NEVER countable, and environmental damage happens whether you want it to or not with slugs/puffers.

I would take checklist over it ANY day, even on sniper, since I could get near the same scaling but without any of the restrictions.

[Dopey Shepard]

I'd suggest taking that kind of stuff as secondary, and only if you are running Hammer. Sharp Claws with its huge base damage- and you will be clearing regular crabs/ grubs in 1 hit for a couple of biomes easily. Once it's outlived its usefulness, sell it, and that's all. Free max hp but still have to be somewhat careful around your AOE damage. I'd also suggest taking Horde Islands since enemies can spawn like crazy over there, easy 1 shots, and very lucrative to take those 2 perks, but that's about it. I build my Sniper differently

[Noisestorm]

THE ANVIL UPDATE BETA 31 PATCH NOTES

• Money Shot was still feeling too super broken (many people breaking the economy early on) with the large AOE from weapons like Arcane Wand giving crystals for every single enemy in the explosion so it now has a 0.1 second cooldown between triggers allowing it to still be useful on piercing and multi hit projectiles but just more balanced overall
  
• With the Money Shot change above, the economy has been brought back to a respectable 2x multiplier (compared to the 3x multiplier in the previous patch) which allows Gold Coating to be nicely “buffed” to 100% of healing gained as crystals which is easier to understand especially when healing small amounts
  
• Health Shot also had the weird issue of upgrades on fast weapons appearing to not increase the healing amount so it has a 0.2 second time between triggers but the healing numbers now scale properly so on the fastest firing weapons you’ll go from healing 1->2 health when picking up level 2 Health Shot. Slower firing weapons have larger healing bonuses. This 0.2 seconds and the 0.1 seconds above for Money Shot feel pretty invisible but just help round out the extreme cases that were breaking these mods
  
• Increased the time window that the game counts as a “one shot” elimination from 0.1 seconds to 0.25 seconds
  
• Fixed a niche bug that would cause certain damage types to heal enemies, making them effectively invincible. This should mean that infinite runs are possible with no roadblocks
  
• Elite enemies now use the same health bar as bosses to make them stand out more and I’ve also added their current and max health as a number under their name- it’s cool to see the big numbers go down
  
• Removed the “no healing while poisoned” mechanic: poison has enough identity in it increasing damage taken
  
• Enemies now drop a set amount of visual crystals depending on their size regardless of the island count which will greatly improve performance on late game runs
  
• Starfish are now as common as other medium enemies (they were previously only 33% as likely to spawn)
  
• The maximum number of Starfish allowed to be spawned at once increased from 3 to 6
  
• Reduced Ultra Chaos elite and boss enemy spawn costs and weights slightly so that more small enemies have a chance to spawn
  
• The amount of extra elites that spawn per loop now caps out at 2 on the 3rd loop
  
• Slightly toned back the enemy health and damage difficulty scaling on loop 3+ as it was a bit too unforgiving / extreme for non-expert players
  
• The increased enemy density has been making Checklist feel quite powerful so the amount of eliminations required for each damage increase has been raised from 12 to 16
  
• Reduced Rush elimination requirements by 15% (higher if playing multiplayer)
  
• Removed the Ringing enhancement as it went against the spirit of enhancements being things that modify your lesser projectiles in cool ways and started going down the road of “why not make a macifying enhancement that shoots little maces when your projectiles expire?” which starts getting too inception-y considering you are already enhancing Mace Shot. Ringing in particular also heavily reduced clarity and added a lot of visual clutter so it’s best left to the Energy Ring ability mod instead
  
• Fixed locked slot price scaling not matching the new boosted economy (it is doubled to match the new economy but the more expensive slots work out a bit cheaper than before)
  
• Fixed issue where non-host players sometimes didn’t save their autosave at the start of each biome
  
• Fixed issue that caused continue run portal max health to be larger than you had when autosaving

[Clutz4k]

I play true nightmare and true nightmare only. Money is impossible to come by without money shot, which is almost impossible without streamer loot. Therefore, I am always weak since I can't buy hardly anything or open slots. On top of that, Mangos are almost never around. Why did we remove guaranteed health options from the shop?

I went from multiple loops to not being able to beat the game because I lack damage and health scaling since the first 15 islands are spent trying to find money shot, health shot and streamer loot. These changes are frustrating and limiting to the builds I could do just 6 months ago.

[Dopey Shepard]

Diposting pertama kali oleh Clutz4k:

I play true nightmare and true nightmare only. Money is impossible to come by without money shot, which is almost impossible without streamer loot. Therefore, I am always weak since I can't buy hardly anything or open slots. On top of that, Mangos are almost never around. Why did we remove guaranteed health options from the shop?

I went from multiple loops to not being able to beat the game because I lack damage and health scaling since the first 15 islands are spent trying to find money shot, health shot and streamer loot. These changes are frustrating and limiting to the builds I could do just 6 months ago.

I've just played the new update and it's great. Maybe you're doing something wrong but I don't see how runs are necessarily over with lack of money

Also, money shot wasn't even there for what, months now of this beta, it only just came back, so how can you say it's unplayable without money shot when it's totally winnable without it?

Also, I just did a run with Arcane Wand and the new (latest patch) Money Shot. It barely did anything, and I was supposed to be getting 6 crystals per shot. Granted, it was on Loop 1 but still. I basically sold the thing and moved on

If you want money I suggest taking Epic Bigger/More Crystals (the one with 75%).

Mangoes are there, it's just that they will not drop in the shop as often if you don't have them. In many cases the loot you see in the shop by re-rolling is the one you have

Just get Coral Amulet, and go for Health Islands - pick up Valued Customer/Fortitude/Mango and then you will have plenty of those available in the shop

Also, Streamer loot is not a necessity to beat the game. Just a good perk. I deliberately sometimes avoid picking really good perks/mods so I don't faceroll my runs and I only ever play on True Nightmare