Well, last two weeks have been one amazing two weeks.
First of all, we reached two thresholds: 1000 wishlists AND 2000 wishlists (just yesterday). I am so thankful to everyone who played the demo and enjoyed it!
We also got covered by few Youtubers which significantly helped this process.
And as a second note, I have made a bit bigger changes to the overall balance of the game and certain reworks have been done.
Reworked planet unlocks - In many playtests I have seen that players were usually not paying that much attention to the fact that they had second planet available to unlock, so they'd sink in hours on first planet, not being able to progress meaningfully without additional resources offered by further planets.
Reworked Quakes - quakes used to be unlocked waay too late in the game and it used to have way too little impact on anything at that point as any other damage source was outclassing it. So I moved it up to be an early game node in skill tree, and reworked it so it affects next depth's beginning instead of just the bottom ore strip of current depth.
COREBREAK has been nerfed - even though it is fun to see people rocking up millions of resources, the moment you unlocked COREBREAKs, the game started to snowball out of control, and this being demo and in full game having access to much more content, i felt that this needed to be toned down. So for that purposes I have reduced run multiplier per broken core of a planet and set a limit of COREBREAKs you can put on a skill to one (from unlimited). This is a very steep change, however I believe much needed one for the current stage of the demo. Full game will offer options to increase/remove this limit. NOTE: This limit will be imposed, but if your current saves already had more than one COREBREAK on a single skill, it will stay as-is and won't be updated.
Node and ore toughness and planet+strip scalings have been rebalanced, so certain places might feel harder to break through at first.
Improved COREBREAK visibility, now it becomes visible in the STOCKPILE if you have any of it available to spend.
To compensate somewhat for the mentioned nerfs and rebalancing, new skills on the tree have been added and some of them have been improved, including buffs in relation with Black Flash, Chain Lightning and Magnet; Whilst on the other hand nerfing some other skills, like Wide Slam, as it felt like an instant single-node solve to most issues you might've had with progerssion.
Skill tree now will also include a new node that unlocks access to Convergence Funnel - an optional setting where you can, for an ore fee, you can force slammers to spawn closer, therefore have a chance to dig deeper. It's a toggle-able feature so you won't be forced to have it always on or off.
Updated the COREBREAK ACCESS sinking timer. Before this the ore acceleration would start from 0 and would accelerate till it could not. For resources under a million this is fine, it does not take much time. But when hitting numbers such as billions or even further than that, it could feel like it takes forever for resources to be sunk.
Added German and Polish as an available languages
Added an ability to now export/import and reset save files, and tightened validation with incorrect data being provided in the existing save files.
And we fixed few bugs, big and small:
Lightning and Black Flash VFX have been improved
THE VOID now reacts to certain things happening in the skill tree
Fixed borderless fullscreen's incorrect behavior
Fixed a case where sometimes it would be difficult for the game to be opened/alt-tabbed into if multiple displays were detected
Fixed ore vanishing during the descent visually if it was not collected
Fixed auto-follow camera setting to be reflected in current run if its enabled during a mining run.
Fixed lightning "hopping" logic. It was bugged and was not hopping more than 1 node range. now it is applied appropriately and results are magnificent
Fixed an issue where auto-play would not continue if you had broken a core.
Fixed some performance-related issues.
Closing thoughts: Hopefully the nerfs won't feel bad. There is always room for improvements and we can do reverse rebalancing as well in the future if it will be needed. Once again, thanks to everyone who played the game!