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

[Dopey Shepard]

Messaggio originale di Noisestorm:

Messaggio originale di Dopey Shepard:

Latest beta update is absolutely most broken

Enemies exploding out of nowhere, Horde Island or not. I made sure I don't have excessive levels of Slugger/Explosive Armor perks, they explode regardless

I take no damage whatsoever, like 10 hp per shot at Island 25+ which obviously can't be real

And yeah, starting hp is 150, not 200

Can you get a clip of this happening? I haven't seen any other similar reports. Thanks 🦀

Starting hp bug has been fixed in tonight's update

Yeah idk what happened but right now it all seems to be fixed, which is strange. Either way, good job fixing all the bad stuff

[Limdood]

The notes say that Health shot now rolls per pellet on multi-pellet weapons.

That sounded pretty neat, so I went with the dual shotguns and my island #1 regen chest dropped a health shot.

It doesn't work. point blank hitting enemies with all fired pellets and I still only regain 3 health, so health shot does not roll per pellet....it just rolls IF a pellet hits, and then the cooldown is active and multi-pellet weapon don't have any difference in function with health shot.

-------------

unrelated, but wild...

king skull retains its collision/hitbox when doing the death animation. This means if you're in contact with it, say, around eye socket level, the crab will get caught on the spinning king skull and be flung across the map.

EDIT: I suppose it's possible that WASN'T the spinning death animation, but that I just happened to be killing it as I was in its face while it was doing its spinning attack animation. It was still hilarious to get yeeted across the entire map though.

[Dopey Shepard]

Messaggio originale di Limdood:

The notes say that Health shot now rolls per pellet on multi-pellet weapons.

That sounded pretty neat, so I went with the dual shotguns and my island #1 regen chest dropped a health shot.

It doesn't work. point blank hitting enemies with all fired pellets and I still only regain 3 health, so health shot does not roll per pellet....it just rolls IF a pellet hits, and then the cooldown is active and multi-pellet weapon don't have any difference in function with health shot.

it actually DID work like a couple of days ago, 100%, I tried it with crossbow, duals. Felt rather op considering crossbow is already a top tier weapon in my opinion. Other guns will not benefit from health shot as much as some making it somewhat unbalanced

It still needs polishing for sure

[Noisestorm]

THE ANVIL UPDATE BETA 16 PATCH NOTES

• Added new melee weapon: Katana: This is still experimental and I’m not happy with how it works / the animation yet so further tweaks will be made, it could be revamped completely
  
• Since the meta of the game has shifted less from “never get hit” and more towards “get hit but heal back up”, I’ve buffed a few of the flawless related perks
  
• Performance Bonus chance for 2 chests when flawlessly clearing an island increased from 25% to 30%. This will be converted into a relic in the future: Get an extra chest when flawlessly clearing non elite or boss islands
  
• Damage Combo and Crystal Combo bonuses increased from +10% to +15%
  
• Increased the time between Laser Crab attacks by 33%
  
• Pufferfish explosion radius decreased by 10%
  
• Removed the trails on Mace and Dagger projectiles for performance and visual clarity reasons
  
• Reduced the Persisting enhancement lifetime extension by 50% as it was causing performance issues
  
• Fixed Accelerating Shot / Accelerating enhancement causing projectiles to stay in place
  
• Fixed Proximity Barrage and other homing projectiles taking too long to activate homing and flying off

[Noisestorm]

Messaggio originale di Limdood:

The notes say that Health shot now rolls per pellet on multi-pellet weapons.

That sounded pretty neat, so I went with the dual shotguns and my island #1 regen chest dropped a health shot.

It doesn't work. point blank hitting enemies with all fired pellets and I still only regain 3 health, so health shot does not roll per pellet....it just rolls IF a pellet hits, and then the cooldown is active and multi-pellet weapon don't have any difference in function with health shot.

-------------

unrelated, but wild...

king skull retains its collision/hitbox when doing the death animation. This means if you're in contact with it, say, around eye socket level, the crab will get caught on the spinning king skull and be flung across the map.

EDIT: I suppose it's possible that WASN'T the spinning death animation, but that I just happened to be killing it as I was in its face while it was doing its spinning attack animation. It was still hilarious to get yeeted across the entire map though.

That's my bad on mentioning Health Shot when it actually has a cooldown (so even if 10 hit on the same frame, only the first will count and then trigger the cooldown). It is working on all other cases though like crit or elemental damage.

[Dopey Shepard]

Fixed Accelerating Shot / Accelerating enhancement causing projectiles to stay in place

I wonder if this fixes the issue with Accelerating Shot that I had just yesterday, I think I was using Auto Rifle and it basically created a vortex of projectiles around me, kind of like orbiting shot, but it was very janky, and really off-looking

Also, Accelerating Shot chance of dropping needs to be buffed. It's like one of the rarest things you can find if you have weapons that actually suit it like Orb Launcher/Auto Rifle/LCs/Minigun

[Rukrio]

Messaggio originale di Noisestorm:

• Added new melee weapon: Katana: This is still experimental and I’m not happy with how it works / the animation yet so further tweaks will be made, it could be revamped completely

if you ever do rework it into something else, you could easily bring this version back as a "Chopping Top" (or some form of legally distinct Beyblade) because that's the vibe this version gives me.

[AethonWalker]

Messaggio originale di Noisestorm:

THE ANVIL UPDATE BETA 16 PATCH NOTES

• Added new melee weapon: Katana: This is still experimental and I’m not happy with how it works / the animation yet so further tweaks will be made, it could be revamped completely

ay, we can fly now, sick

[buzboy5665]

Katana is broken but 2 levels of Brawler and 2-3 levels of damage and range up got me instant diamond on it so keep it where it is please

[Dopey Shepard]

Messaggio originale di buzboy5665:

Katana is broken but 2 levels of Brawler and 2-3 levels of damage and range up got me instant diamond on it so keep it where it is please

Isn't your post contradicting itself? You said it's broken, and you want it to be kept where it is? Shouldn't he balance it out? Besides, the animation is really long. Blender perk isn't as good on it unless you are heavily building Iron Claws to prolong the cooldown

[Noisestorm]

THE ANVIL UPDATE BETA 17 PATCH NOTES

• Katana was busted so I’ve made a few adjustments
  
• Katana cooldown increased from 1 to 4 seconds
  
• Katana movement speed impulse reduced by 15%
  
• Toned back the speed of homing enemy attacks that speed up when close to the player (Homing Grub, Ice Ant) to feel more fair and dodgeable
  
• The Ringing enhancement will probably be removed in a future update but for now reduced the damage by 50% and moved it to Legendary rarity as it was very strong
  
• Fixed Beam Shot with the Expanding enhancement having a strange delay before the expanded projectiles appeared
  
• Fixed issue that allowed enhanceable loot at max enhancements to consume an anvil but not gain the enhancement
  
• Fixed the Persistent enhancement actually reducing instead of increasing projectile lifetime
  
• Fixed being able to pick up bananas twice by finishing parkour islands very quickly

[Noisestorm]

Messaggio originale di Dopey Shepard:

Fixed Accelerating Shot / Accelerating enhancement causing projectiles to stay in place

I wonder if this fixes the issue with Accelerating Shot that I had just yesterday, I think I was using Auto Rifle and it basically created a vortex of projectiles around me, kind of like orbiting shot, but it was very janky, and really off-looking

Also, Accelerating Shot chance of dropping needs to be buffed. It's like one of the rarest things you can find if you have weapons that actually suit it like Orb Launcher/Auto Rifle/LCs/Minigun

It should have but if not let me know and I'll fix.

Yeah accelerating is a bit of a niche pick but I'll buff the spawn chance a bit in a future update.

[buzboy5665]

Messaggio originale di Dopey Shepard:

Messaggio originale di buzboy5665:

Katana is broken but 2 levels of Brawler and 2-3 levels of damage and range up got me instant diamond on it so keep it where it is please

Isn't your post contradicting itself? You said it's broken, and you want it to be kept where it is? Shouldn't he balance it out? Besides, the animation is really long. Blender perk isn't as good on it unless you are heavily building Iron Claws to prolong the cooldown

Just because something is broken doesn't mean it isn't fun. Like yeah, it "should" be balanced.....but man I would love to see a joke version of the game where Noisestorm just put the most broken version of each weapon in it.

[Noisestorm]

THE ANVIL UPDATE BETA STATUS UPDATE

I was originally going to release the full Anvil Update today but have decided to take more time to add new content (new weapon, ability, loot, music etc.) and get the new enhancement system feeling really solid and polished since it is the main focus. I'll also be able to make a proper trailer / do a nice marketing push this way. In general I think it's best to spend the extra time to make the update really worth returning for 🦀

That said, I have some IRL commitments for the next week or so and won't be posting beta updates. It'll be a good opportunity to let the update sit for a bit and get a better perspective on where it's at. I'll still be reading the discussions and tracking feedback so feel free to keep playing or take a nice break from the game- thanks to everyone who has been playing this beta so far, it's been the best community turnout yet!

[Dopey Shepard]

Yeah, good idea, better polish it fully before releasing as a full patch

Maybe do something about Tony? He's still there....looking at us....his eyes stone cold. Maybe you could liven him up a little and make us interact with him to a certain degree, maybe even have a mini-game where you can get a random mod/perk? Just throwing around ideas

As for the feedback part, Anvil stuff is all good, no complaints there

Katana's nerf was too harsh imo. To have such a long cooldown, I personally feel like it's not even worth using it anymore over Pickaxe/Hammer/Claw. Maybe loosen the cooldown by a 0.5-1 second and do a faster animation so you could benefit from Blender (CDR) mod a bit more? It has no pushback like Claw, only doing multi-hit which also forces you to travel forward. On one hand, it's a great tool to create lots of speed that you wouldn't normally have without Ring of Gravity/Speed Demon but on the other hand, trying to maximize your arsenal's damage by spamming your melee while backing away from enemies only to have this troll katana propel you forward and making you lose the backwards momentum can really HURT you. Maybe address that issue as well. No other melee propels you forward like that, they properly work even when walking backwards

p.s. Also, I believe Fire dmg has now been buffed way too much. Just single Fire Shot makes such a huge difference on fast-firing Auto Rifle etc.
It's not like that on live patch
Also, likewise, Flamethrower that comes with Fire Shot lvl 4 right off the bat is way too overtuned with fire dmg.

p.s.2. And could you please do smth about Tasty Orange ? I mean, it just sucks, it always has. There are no changes done to it, it stays as an epic drop but it doesn't deserve its epic rank. Heck, I wouldn't be picking it if it was a blue rare drop. 1% damage increase for killed enemy? That is only useful during horde or harvest islands and the damage resets every single island when we have amazing stuff like Gemstone or even weaker Checklist is already much better than TO. Either buff it really hard or rework it so that it has some kind of permanent effects. Maybe it like Money is Power so its good after Looping when you will always have 10k on hands

p.s.3. One other thing - regarding Checklist/Tasty Orange and stuff, could you make it so that they don't spam my right side of the screen every time they increase? It makes picking TO even less incentivised than it already is, having to deal with such a distraction. Make it proc every 10-25 kills or in case of Checklist, at the end of an active Island only, like Gemstone and other things