Welcome, Scribes!
We've loved all the feedback and discussion after Chapter VIII: Hard Cover and the addition of the Teal Signature Ink! We continue to gather feedback and have been working on making improvements, with the next step being today's Interlude Patch: Feast.
On today's menu: some community requests in the form of Page Omission, dramatically improved enemy Hit Reactions, and major strides in Game Performance! We've also continued to expand content to add variety to your adventures with new Vignettes and Player Pages.
As always, you can check the in-game roadmap to see what's coming up. But for now, let's jump into the additions!
Performance Improvements
Like the Scribes and Torn - Performance is an evolving battle. Little wins here and there get pushed back by crazier combos and new features. Interlude Patch: Feast makes huge strides in winning back framerate with two major areas.
The first is a new way of handling game actions (projectiles, explosions, arrow rains, etc.) by re-using old copies so we don't need to create or destroy effects each time they're used. This should give a sizable performance boost, particularly later in Tomes within the Appendices when hundreds of effects are happening every second.
The second big improvement is in how we handle the Torn and their stats and behavior. With some aggressive data caching, multi-threaded logic, and more optimized code flow - we've seen huge performance gains when there are many enemies on the battlefield.
While there is still plenty of room for improvement, these two major performance overhauls have increased performance in general combat by a significant degree. And in late game runs, we've easily seen 100x improvements, going from 'seconds-per-frame' to 60fps in many cases!
New Vignettes
Deep within the Tomes, Scribes can find themselves in three new Vignettes! Scale the fungal depths of Mycellum Quarry, take in the view in Overlook, and dance with Radiance.
New Lore pages have appeared in the Vignettes of Pride and Profit, further detailing the paths of Myriad, Verse, and Horizon.
Hit Reactions
Another element of feedback we've seen echoed a number of times is wanting more feedback when you deal damage to the Torn.
This update adds two new interactions - Damage Animations and Hit Flash. Now, Torn will physically react to the damage they take, giving better feedback and making damage feel more impactful. Additionally, Torn you damage will flash the color of your Signature Ink, for some visible, thematic interaction.
If you find the Hit Flash distracting, you can disable it in the General Settings menu!
Pages of Power
This update expands the Codex with over 20 new Pages of Power to help you push back the Torn! This time, we're focusing on build expansion and collaboration, with new interactions between your spells, as well as a bunch of new multiplayer Ink Combinations (for example: your Orange Atlas might apply Blot if a Blue Scribe is standing nearby)!
Page Omission
Sometimes, you might pick up a page that doesn't quite cooperate with your build - now you can do something about it! By popular request, we've added the ability to Remove Pages of Power you pick up during your run - just hold right click on the page in the Tab menu, and you can Omit it from your book!
There might be a couple of odd interactions that need ironing out (omitting pages that give you stacking stats doesn't remove what you've already built up, etc.) - but we'll resolve them as we go, and we definitely think it's better to have the feature with a few quirks than not at all!
Epilogue
Interlude Patch: Feast also brings a smattering of bug fixes, adjustments, and some light tuning! We called this update 'Feast' for a few reasons: to allude to the sheer amount of stuff, the Thanksgiving holiday, but more importantly - the communal nature of this update!
In each post here, we make a point to write out how thankful we are for the enthusiasm and generosity of our players. Today's patch truly embodies the joy of our Early Access process; nearly every aspect of Feast has been directly influenced by feedback and discussions in the community.
For those who celebrate it, have a superb Thanksgiving!
For everybody, thank you for making Vellum better with us!
- The Vellum Team
Interlude Patch: Feast - Full Patch Notes
Features
Performance Improvements
- Action Pooling: Massive improvements to performance of long games
- Improved AI animation cost
- Improved AI targeting and vision costs
- Improved AI power scaling cost
- Improved Status Effect costs
Page Omission
- You may now discard selected Pages from the Tab menu
- Some Pages may not applicable
3 New Vignettes
- Mycellum Quarry, Overlook, Radiance my now appear in Tomes
- New Lore Pages for these Vignettes (also added Lore Pages to Pride and Profit)
Hit Reactions and Feedback
- Torn should now be more expressive when taking damage
- Torn hit flashes now match the Signature Ink color of the attacking Scribe
- Hit flashes may be toggled in Settings Menu
Pages, Inks, Players
- Signature Ink: Orange should no longer improperly override Signature Spells after dealing with Dark Wall
- Signature Ink: Teal now generates 3 Barrier from attacks (was 4)
- Signature Ink: Teal now has an associated Steam Achievement
- Scriptorium: Teal now shows the correct bonuses from Resolved
- Spell: Eclipse should spawn the correct number of Drafts
- Font Power: Sense of Urgency will properly work again
- Page of Power: I'm Rubber should now only damage enemies
- Page of Power: The New Author will no longer trigger unintended effects
- Page of Power: Nuclear Meltdown will no longer trigger unintended effects
- Page of Power: Knockoff will no longer appear when using Weave
- Page of Power: Deep Breaths progress will now persist through death
- Page of Power: Pick 6 should only activate in combat
- Page of Power: Father of Quill no longer has a cooldown and should properly function for the intended duration
- Page of Power: Best Offense now reflects scaling on "Max Barrier"
- Page of Power: Check and Recheck text now indicates that Natural 1 rolls are unaffected
- Page of Power: Copper Coating II now generates Barrier equal to 3% of damage done (was 5%)
- Page of Powers: Dirty 20 text now indicates that Natural 1 rolls are unaffected
- Bonus Objective: Escort will now spawn at more reasonably-completable distances from The Font
- Teal Mana now has the appropriate tooltip
- Spell Selection interface will now indicate the tab that contains the Spell with a Recommended bonus
- Blot should no longer affect Scribes. Please.
- Yellow's "Biggest Flourish" stat no longer requires 2500+ damage before appearing
- In Solo Play, the correct prompt should appear when waiting for a Font Power pick
- In Appendices, the Font Power interface will be skipped more smoothly
- Fixed a bug allowing Rewrites to grant extra Pages
Tomes, Torn, Misc
- Tome: Rivals will now display a visual effect around Elites while they still have damage reduction
- Tome: Rivals now has additional unique Font Powers
- Tome: Rivals should no longer reduce damage dealt in Vignettes
- Vignette: Crystal Divination should now sync results better in Multiplayer
- Binding: I Have The Power text has been slightly adjusted
- Binding: Explosive explosion size will once again match the visual indicator
- Elite: The Wringer now ha a limit to how much attack speed benefits Erupt (rings and rings and rings)
- Torn: Crab will now be properly named in Death Recaps and tracked in the Codex
- Codex: Run Records should now properly continue to update
- Codex: Run Records will now properly show Teal
- Parry effects from the Torn are now more accurately displayed and appear in the Death Log
- Reworked Binding & Appendix scaling (Dev Note: this is internal, but please tell us about any difficulty areas that feel off)
- Tomes will no longer continue to drop after being unlocked
- Various typo fixes