Narrow Echoes update now live!

Hello Cosmorists!

The first major update of 2025 is here, kicking off the perfect square year with the Narrow Echoes update! Let's get to what's been added!

Swaying trees


Is the world feeling a bit static? It will now feel less so with the trees now reacting to the wind, which will occasionally drop their leaves, and those leaves will also blow in the wind! Check out those new tree animations :D

Much smaller worlds!


Exploring the world, only to encounter the same biome for millions of tiles? That will now change with worlds being much smaller for newer saves!Exploring the world will now result in the same biome for a few thousand tiles instead of millions, which will allow exploring biomes once separated by thousands of kilometers much more manageable on foot!There's also a new slider for small, medium, and large world sizes!

Explosives


Tired of mining one tile at a time with your pickaxe? This update offers a way to quickly destroy multiple tiles simultaneously!Explosives!So far, they're only found in treasure chests and barrels in caves, and are great for quickly mining large nodes of ore, but be careful, as they deal lots of damage if you're particularly close to the epicenter of any explosion they produce!

Research Stalkers


The night on Tierra is about to offer a greater challenge to your scientific ambitions! Research Stalkers are creatures that don't care about any cosmorist wandering by. Their passive behavior will change dramatically as soon as it notices that your inventory contains science, where it will stalk you with a passion, trying to rob you of your scientific progress!Once it steals your science, it will run away with your stolen science in an attempt to despawn, and once it despawns, so would the stolen science!Here's how those research stalkers will behave once it tries to steal your science!


Quick Stack


A neat quality of life feature that wasn't initially announced is present in this update!
This feature allows players to move many of the same types of items to and from chests with the click of a single button!

Other notable changes

Steam cloud


This is a feature that wasn't mentioned prior to the launch of the update, but the game now supports cloud saves! If you look at the saves menu, there will now be a cloud icon next to each of them indicating if they're on the Steam cloud. Existing saves won't be uploaded to the cloud when the game starts, but new saves will be uploaded by default. That behavior can be turned off in the settings, or for each individual save!


Autosave


Another feature relating to saves! The game will now automatically save every 10 minutes with a warning at the top of the screen when the game is about to autosave. This feature was added so that in the event of a game crash or freeze mid-session, less progress would be lost. The save interval can be changed in the settings, or can be turned off!

No music at night on Tierra!


The music that used to play at night will no longer play, as the night in this update is more unsettling than in prior versions as the music would suggest. In its place are the idle sounds coming from the new enemies, and the ambient sounds!
If music is playing while the sun slowly sets, it'll fade out as usual, but after that, silence! The lack of music at night is intended to put more emphasis on the idle sounds of the new enemies! The section is added there in case this is reported as a bug :)

And many more!


I could go on, but this list will get too long, now onto to the notable rebalances!

Chemical Science


Prior to this update, Chemical science was easier to obtain than Material science in the early game, but that's going to change!Chemical Crystals, the resource used as a part of the crafting recipe for Chemical science, is now harder to obtain in the early game, no longer spawning in the dirt caves. The only way to obtain it prior to discovering the chemical crystal biome is to kill some research stalkers, which has a 10% chance to drop a Chemical Crystal. This is meant to incentivize early game players to engage with the night to obtain the Chemical Crystals necessary to make Chemical Science!

Magtise items now less common

Ore generation


Magtise ores are now twice as uncommon. It also has a chance to not generate if the temperature it's generated at is between 40°C and 100°C, where lower temperatures in this range further increases the ore's rarity.

Treasure


Treasures in the lava caves will no longer contain magtise tools or weapons, with the only magtise item able to be generated now being magtise spears.

Enemies


All enemies in the lava caves except for the Magtise wanderer will no longer drop Magtise ore.
Magtise wanderers also spawn 4x less frequently, drop 2x less Magtise ore, and will no longer spawn if the ambient temperature is less than 50°C.

Intended effect


Removing all of these options to obtain Magtise ore makes mining it, or fighting Magtise wanderers the best way to obtain it. The deeper the player goes, the more common it gets, but also the more common dangerous enemies are, and the hotter it gets.
This is also intended to increase the value of finding Magtise ore, and the excitement for crafting tools and weapons out of it!

I'll admit, I almost never use Discord myself, and I'm much less familiar with it compared to other platforms, which is mainly why the game didn't initially have a discord server, but due to popular demand, a fairly basic Discord Server for Cosmorists is now available!

Ambience


+ Temperate Forest ambience
+ Taiga ambience
+ Lunar Cave ambience
+ Lunar Ice Cave ambience
+ Dark Lunar Cave ambience
~ Changed Jungle Cave ambience

Enemies


+ Shadow Phantom, Spawns everywhere at night on Tierra
+ Research Stalker, Spawns everywhere at night on Tierra
~ Flaming Spirit, Replaced their 100% chance of 1 Magtise ore drop with 50% chance of 1 Magma wood drop.
~ Light Crawler, they now only spawn at layers between 200 and 240, spawning most commonly at layer 225, and changed their AI to destroy all torches except for Dim Organic Torches.
~ Magtise Wanderer, spawns 4x less frequently, Halved the quantity of Magtise ore dropped, and increased coin drops from 8-10 to 12-18.
~ Molten Slime, they no longer drop Magtise ore.

Inventory

• Gadgets can now be worn at the start of the game.

Items


Explosives

+ Crude Bomb


Food


+ Green Mushroom
+ Pyroberry
+ Tropical Soup


Gadgets


+ Basic Oxygen Tank
+ Electronic Boots
+ Shadow Phantom's Foot
+ Swiftness Boots


Placeables


+ Dim Organic Torch


Resources


+ Water Ice Shard


Weapons


+ Stone Spear
+ Copper Spear
+ Tin Spear
+ Iron Spear
+ Iron-Steel Spear
+ Magtise Spear
+ Cobalt Spear
+ Titanium Spear

Music


+ Arachnid Caves
- Plains Night

Player


~ Placing down tiles now uses a 250 millisecond cooldown instead of single mouse clicks.

QOL

• Added an option to quick stack items to and from the inventory.

Settings


~ Save creation
• + World size slider (Medium by default)


+ Save settings

• Autosave enabled toggle (On by default)
• Autosave interval dropdown (15m by default)
• Upload new saves to Steam cloud (On by default)

SFX


+ Bomb explosion (Plays when a bomb explodes after landing or hitting a solid tile)
+ Dropdown Click (Plays when a dropdown UI is clicked)
+ Enemy Death 4 (Plays when the Shadow Phantom dies)
+ Enemy Hurt 4 (Plays when the Shadow Phantom gets damaged)
+ Enemy Idle 4_1, 4_2, and 4_3 (Plays every 15 seconds for every Shadow Phantom)
+ Metal Mine 0, 1, and 2 (Plays when mining metallic tiles such as bronze anvils)
+ Mine 1 (Plays when mining icy tiles)
+ Mine 2 (Plays when mining corals)
+ Pulsating Watcher Dash (Plays when enemies with Pulsating Watcher AI dashes)
+ Removed from Cloud (Plays when clicking on the cloud icon for cloud saves)
+ Science Stalker Stealing (Plays when a Research Stalker prepares to steal science)
+ Science Stalker Idle 1, 2, and 3 (Plays every 20 seconds for every Research Stalker)
+ Science Stalker Hurt 1, 2, and 3 (Plays when Research Stalkers are damaged)
+ Science Stalker Death 1, 2, and 3 (Plays when Research Stalkers die)
+ Science Stolen (Plays when a Research Stalker steals the player's science)
+ Slider Move (Plays when a slider is being moved)
+ Toggle Click (Plays when a toggle is clicked on)
+ Tool Break (Plays when the player's sword, pickaxe, axe, or bow breaks)
+ Uploaded to Cloud (Plays when clicking on the cloud icon for non-cloud saves)
~ Enemy Hurt Generic (Changed the sound effect to be more wet)
~ Spaceship repair (Changed the sound effect to a hammer hit sound with electric sounds)

Steam

• +13 Steam Achievements.
• Cloud saves.

Technical

• Migrated all settings data from a settings.txt file to a Settings.json file.

Technologies


+ Basic Oxygen Tank (9 4)
+ Electronic Boots (12 2 6)
~ Gold smelting and Gold metallurgy now requires Iron-Steel smelting to be researched.

Textures

• Retextured the cave walls of Jungle caves and Wilting caves.
• Slightly retextured the floor tiles of Jungle caves and Wilting caves.
• Retextured the Iron electric drill.

UI

• The crafting menu can now filter items.
• Added a cloud icon to each save to indicate if they're stored in the Steam cloud. Clicking on it will add or remove it from the cloud.
• Added how many Newtons of force of all the items when the player is in the spaceship.

VFX

• When the player's health is low, a glowing red border will surround the screen.
• Trees can now sway in the wind.
• Most types of trees will now occasionally drop their leaves as particles.
• Items on the mouse will now wobble left and right slightly.
• Hovering over an inventory item will now have a slight growing animation.

World Generation

• All worlds are now 1,000,000 times smaller in area. Existing saves will still retain their large map sizes.
• Resource distributions have been shaken up for all seeds as a result of the new map sizes for both new and existing saves.

  Tierra

  • Ice caves now have frozen stalagmites, which drop Water Ice shards.
  • Magma forest caves now generate with Pyroberry bushes and decoration plants.
  • Magtise ore now less common, and no longer generates at temperatures below 40°C.
  • Added two flower variants in the plains biome whose frequency is temperature dependent.

Miscellaneous

• All torches now glow in a 50% larger radius than before.
• Increased the mining rate of all drills.

Bug fixes

• Fixed bug where fog glitches out for a single frame when moving to a new chunk.
• Fixed bug where a crash doesn't show the "Cosmorists Error" pop up.
• Fixed bug where fuel chamber information is drawn a layer below the gadgets UI.
• Fixed bug where saplings can be placed on invalid base tiles.
• Fixed rare bug where tiles can abruptly stop rendering.