Captain's Log: The Upkeep Mini-update, Closed Testing, and more!

Attention Crew!

Happy New Year! We hope you've had a good start to 2024.
We ended up taking the holiday season a bit easy, but we're back in the saddle now and have been grinding out content.

In this Captain's Log, we'll be going over an intermediary update that we'd like to ship within the next several months, difficulty transparency, and a bit about our 1.0 progress.

Upkeep Mini-update

As we went over balance issues and content blindspots from the previous big update, we worked out a sufficient number of noteworthy improvements and additions that we'll be ready to release in the near future.

We've been developing things not related to the final region, which we'd like to pass along to you all. These would include features such as retuned resistances and skill chances for heroes and enemies to make them more consistent and reasonable, additional enemies to even out the rosters (particularly in the different difficulty brackets), adjustments to various trinkets, both small and very large, some important revisits to ship progression (especially side decks), and other miscellaneous tweaks. Notably, we are heavily rebalancing stress throughout the game. Looking at virtue stacking, enemy stress output, stress distribution, stress healing sources, buffs and debuffs, several districts, and so on!

Initially, we planned to hold off on releasing any updates until the 1.0 release, but due to the prolonged nature of its development, we've opted to release a set of balance adjustments, bug fixes, and new content that the community can enjoy and provide any feedback on. However, some of the new content requires some extensive polish before it's ready to go live, so expect the update in a couple month's time. Due to these changes being wholly separate from the Reliquary, they should make for an entertaining experience.

The Amber Crasftsmen side deck will be replacing the Expeditionist's Workshop. In the interest of incentivizing the player to invest in premium supplies while also making them even more valuable, the Crafsmen's deck will be available, but for a comparatively high price. The Expeditionist's Workshop is being dropped for how powerful it made arch kits as supply items and discouraged their use as curio items. As for disease kits, a technical limitation was in place, preventing their added benefit from being consistently garnered.

In an effort to put more control in the players' hands, we're adding additional trinkets to the list, which will allow players to drastically reduce the wearer's crit intake.
Other trinket changes are piling up but are too extensive to go into here.

The Levantine will now deploy the Sarcophagus enemy, which is chiefly a stress caster that will self-revive once per combat. Persistence will be crucial when taking down this undead sorcerer. The Levantine Sarcophagus will only appear in Champ+ missions.

Deep within the Caverns, the Troglodytes keep their breeding grounds filled with eggs and larvae. Some such larvae possess great potential and are carefully guarded by their kin. If agitated for long enough, these eggs will hatch and reveal whatever horror is gestating within. The Troglodyte Prodigy will only appear in Champ+ missions.

Please note that everything we're sharing here is still in active development, so consider exact values a WIP. Numerous other changes are planned for this mini-update, including much of the content showcased in previous Captain's Log entries, with far more in store for the final 1.0 release.

Difficulty Clarity

Moving forward, we're going to try to be a bit more transparent about the planned difficulty of the mod.
For reference, the only difficulty mode we've added so far is "Reliquary" mode. While this is the "original" setting of Black Reliquary, we intend for the difficulty of this mode to be comparable to Stygian/Bloodmoon with the time and death limitations removed. Black Reliquary was designed for more experienced Darkest Dungeon players. More specifically to provide new challenges and make use of some of the more underutilized aspects of the base game. While this level of difficulty has always been our goal, we have not done a very good job of communicating that in our messaging. Moving forward, we'll be updating our Steam descriptions and some minor game tooltips to hopefully get the message across.

Now, with all that being said, we do plan to release two more difficulty modes for the 1.0 release. One being a "hard mode" for our most dedicated players, and another being something more akin to a "Darkest" mode. The specifics of these mode differences are still being decided as we continue, as these adjustments will not be simple or quick to test.

1.0 Progress

We're still making steady progress towards our 1.0 final release, but it's safe to say it's still a ways out. We are currently wrapping up the common enemies that will be exclusive to the Reliquary region and will be moving on to bosses and quest-related assets. It would be nice to share more about the final region, but we're going to need to keep as many surprises as possible to truly make the end experience worth the wait.

Thanks again for your support and patience,
-Team Reliquary