Welcome to Don't Die, Collect Loot's next major update!
This patch focuses on adding more to the endgame experience, giving players more of a reason to grind out all of that ridiculous loot. This includes a new "uber" boss, a revamp to the crafting system, a new tier of uniques, and more!
As always, this game is in early access and I'm still (and always will be) the solo developer on it. If these systems don't resonate or if there are any issues, hop onto the Discord (https://discord.gg/35dEhnMQzk) or into the discussion forums and let me know! I'll continue to improve things based on all of your feedback
Once certain conditions are met, you'll be able to use a new portal in the Nexus to access the Uber Boss arena. Once inside, you'll find that you need two keys, a Key of Growth and a Key of Progress, in order to access the fight against Aletheia. It'll be up to you to figure out how to get your hands on those!
Once in the fight, you'll be up against an immortal boss. Each time you deplete her life bar, she comes back stronger with more complex attacks! When you finally succumb to her assault, you'll be rewarded based on how many life bars you depleted. In addition to the usual piles of loot, you might find a special unique exclusive to this boss! Here's two examples:
You may notice something special about that second unique, but more on that later!
Another Uber boss is coming relatively soon, too. This will be a more traditional boss with a fixed health bar, but you'll just have to wait and see!
Don't Die, Collect Loot is, at the end of the day, all about loot! There are uniques of many tiers available, and up until today the rarest tier was the coveted "Tier 0" unique. However, over time, players have become very adept at finding these. In order to add a bit more of a chase, I've added Ultimate Uniques to the game.
Ultimate Uniques are much rarer than regular unique items, and they can't be sacrificed as materials to craft other uniques either. As a result, they tend to be either build defining or absurdly powerful. Let's take a look at a few now:
These items often have special effects you won't find anywhere else, and tend to stand on their own without crafting. There may be ways to modify them a bit, but you'll have to explore and find out...
There are currently 13 new Ultimate Uniques, and more will be added in minor patches over the coming weeks, so don't despair if your favorite archetype is missing one! If you have any cool ideas, let me know as well. The community has supplied a number of fun unique ideas for the game, and that tradition isn't ending any time soon.
In addition to the Ultimate Uniques, 12 new "standard" uniques have been added to the game as well. Most are Memory Crystals, as these were severely lacking. A few uniques, most notably Dennis' Bauble, have been reworked too. Good luck finding that one!
Crafting items is a ton of fun, but sometimes an unlucky streak could really put a damper on that. To help mitigate this issue, I've implemented the "energy" system. Once you've reached a certain level of progression, you'll encounter a special event while playing the game. Once this event concludes, you'll have access to the Forge of Stars in the Nexus. At the same time, Energy tokens will start dropping whenever you encounter the Crafter or special types of treasure chests in a run.
Inside the Forge of Stars, you'll be able to select from most of the crafts available in the game. The catch? They all cost energy!
Energy scales with Chaos, so choose your crafts carefully!
It wouldn't be an update to Don't Die, Collect Loot without another skill tree! I've often felt that there's no real point in choosing which type of area you go to, and I'd like to fix that. As a start, I've added a 5th tab to the Research panel. This focuses on the Forest, Aqueduct, and Volcano (coming later!) areas. These nodes are only active when you're adventuring in the specified Biome, so choose carefully!
The Forest nodes tend to specialize in character growth:
Whereas Aqueduct nodes tend to focus on item and wealth progress:
(Yes, this might be a hint for something, if you've been reading this far!)
The capstone nodes in the trees often result in notable gameplay changes, too:
I'm always looking for other ways to make the game feel more dynamic, so shoot me some feedback if you have any ideas!
A bunch more are on the way, but for now here's a few buffs:
Disc Golfer: Bounces per point 2 → 3; New effect +15% Shield Toss crit damage per point.
Persistent Toss: Shield Toss damage multiplier 15 → 25 per point.
Concussive Trauma: Flat phys per bounce 2 → 15 per point; New effect +10% Shield Toss damage per item level of equipped Shield.
Shield Fan: New effect +7 Physical to Shield Toss per 5 Spirit per point (keeps +2 projectiles).
Shield Toss (base): New effect +3 Physical to Shield Toss per point.
Chaos Theory (Avatar of Vengeance): Extra Butterfly projectiles 1 → 2.
Riftwing Surge: Extra Shock applications by Butterflies 3 → 4.
Rite of Aggression & Rite of Despair: Max Poison Resistance 1 → 2 each.
The Crushed effect now ignores mitigation
The Crushed effect now deals less damage
When getting Crushed, you now get a stacking "Memory Distortion" buff that indicates how much damage the next crush will do. Completing an event will remove one stack. Note that this was always how it worked, but the game hid the functionality from you
Fixed a bug where it was possible to get Crushed multiple times in one frame, causing some strange behavior
The Descent is now a Secret Area instead of a portal. The conditions for spawning it remain the same. There's a reason for this, you'll find out later!
Fixed a bug where you could sometimes find multiple items of different bases with the same rolls
Xul'Phantoq, The Endless Pursuit has broken through the veil
Added one new Anomaly event
Fixed a bug where Beastmasters could sometimes lose count of their pets, making bad things happen. One monster still remains though, and it's probably you
Fixed a bug where Socketable item mods were displaying weirdly in the Codex
Fixed a bug where caching behavior was messing with the stat display in a number of situations
Fixed a number of bugs with stat display calculations
Fixed a number of text color highlighting issues
Fixed a bug where some color highlights would disable when viewing an item's details
Added a Codex entry for Coherence
Fixed mod tags for a few uniques
Fixed a bug where Xbox360 controllers had their X/Y icons swapped
Fixed a bunch of Skill Tree text display bugs
There are now 20 chests in the Glintwood Grove instead of 19
Congratulations on making it this far and reading through all of this! Looking forward to seeing you all check this out, and as always, I'm listening closely feedback and bug reports
-Dan