Hi folks,
The first DemonCrawl patch of 2023 is now live!
This update includes 10 new items, a new stage mod, several balance changes, and substantially expanded monster drop tables.
Among the new items are 3 unique types of minions. In addition to Minions and Magic Minions, you can now acquire Big Minions, Rabid Minions and Shiny Minions. Each one corresponds to a different item category and has its own strengths and weaknesses.
Many of the remaining items are also minion-oriented. For example, Pact of Nature is a powerful lategame item that rewards you for having a variety of different minion types.
We hope these additions will breathe fresh air into Hunter comps, which haven't received many exciting tools in a while. Actually, Big Minion was planned for inclusion in DemonCrawl's original release, but we hadn't figured out the right niche for him until now.
Speaking of things that haven't changed in a while, there's finally a new stage mod! It's called Stable and it's fairly straightforward: any effect that would modify a cell has a 50% chance to fizzle. That means gleans, reveals, solves, conceals, explosions, and auras may or may not succeed. There are certainly ways this could work in your favor, which is how we like to design negative effects in DemonCrawl.
Finally, the list of monster item drops is quite lengthy now. In fact, we went through the game's 900+ items and tried to assign anything that made sense flavor-wise. It may be a while before some of the rarest drops are discovered by the community, so if you find anything cool or unexpected, we encourage you to share it on our Discord server!
The full patch notes for v1.92 are below. Enjoy!
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New Features
- New stage mod: Stable - "50% chance to negate effects that would modify a cell."
- New legendary item: Shiny Minion - "Each turn you must guess, this will solve a random cell. This Minion will sacrifice itself to deflect fatal damage."
- New magic item: Pact of Nature - "[100 Mana] Solve a random cell for each of your Minions. If you don't have any, gain a Minion instead. Different minion types will cause different effects."
- New passive item: Big Minion - "Whenever you discover a 5 or greater, reveal a random nearby 3x3 area and kill any monsters within. If you're about to take damage, this Minion will sacrifice itself to deflect 10 damage."
- New passive item: Chew Toy - "Every 60 turns, transform a Minion into a Big Minion or gain a Minion if you don't have any."
- New passive item: Book of Husbandry - "Pick up hearts at full life to gain a Minion."
- New consumable item: Dog Food - "Upgrade your Minions, or gain a Minion if you don't have any."
- New consumable item: Knuckle Wraps - "Your next chord becomes a powerchord."
- New omen: Rabid Minion - "When you gain this as well as every 10 turns, reveal and kill a random monster. If you're about to take damage, this Minion will sacrifice itself to increase the damage by 1."
- New omen: Bagman Medal - "Stages have an additional Bagman."
- New omen: Harbinger Medal - "Stages have an additional Harbinger."
- Added some terms to the monster name generator
Balance Changes
- Massively expanded monster drop tables
- A few items that generate Minions can now choose from special minion types
- Effects that depend on your number of Minions, such as Dog Tag, now account for all minion types
- Dove and Raven status duration lowered from 200 to 100 cells
- Bust rework: "Spawners are more common. Strangers are no longer killed when a Spawner breaks."
- Leather Vest change: "[3 Armor] Fortify by 2 whenever a Minion dies."
- Doomcall change: "When you open half of all empty cells, spawn a Harbinger. Harbingers activate an additional time."
- Fake stage mod nerf: a notification will appear above the cells with fake values
- Lofty stage mod nerf: "When you open half of all empty cells, increase the value of all cells by 1 except those with a value of 0."
- Haunted stage mod difficulty increased from 1 to 2
- Educational stage mod difficulty increased from 2 to 3
- Flawless stage mod difficulty increased from 2 to 3
- Overwhelming stage mod difficulty increased from 2 to 3
- Unchained stage mod difficulty increased from 3 to 4
Bug Fixes
- Updated to latest GameMaker runtime
- Fixed missing drop tables for several monsters
- Fixed issue with powerchording
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NOTE: GameMaker's current runtime unfortunately has several bugs preventing us from deploying this version of DemonCrawl to Linux and mobile platforms. We filed a bug report to YoYo Games about the matter on January 2nd but have not heard back. It is likely that they are at least aware of the issue and, with any luck, will have it resolved in time for their next runtime update. We apologize for the inconvenience.