The Alchemical Awakening Update is our biggest update yet, introducing a completely new biome, NINE new monsters (that will open up so many new possibilities for your teams), a new Monster Deity and more!
New biome: Alchemical Woods! The new biome is an alternative tier-1 biome which can be unlocked after having beaten the base difficulty and having collected 15 monster mementos
9 new Monsters! All unique to play with, all beautiful, all viable new companions - waiting in the new biome, making it a total of 40 monsters in the game (not counting the shifts)
One new Monster Type! Echo introduces a new buff, which lets you repeat support actions
A new Monster Deity! The second Monster Deity Khepri will truly test your skills as an Aethermancer - use everything you’ve learned so far to withstand blazing heat
Changed Difficulties! We have renamed the difficulties to "Vestiges" and there is a new, higher difficulty
Food at the Merchant's! The Merchant now sells food items to help you on your journey
Once you have beaten the game on the base difficulty and have crafted at least 15 monster mementos, Sir Tiberion will offer a new meta upgrade, which unlocks access to the Alchemical Woods for you.
Alchemical Woods is an alternative tier-1 biome - letting you choose how you want to start your run. It has a mysterious feel to it and inhabits many support-focused creatures. The alchemical environment comes with new interactables and Monsterkin to gather for Pilgrim's Rest.
We are introducing a new monster type, which can mainly be found in Alchemical Woods!
Echo enables new support action builds and introduces a new buff:
On Support Action, if it costs X or less Aether: Consumes X Echo to trigger that Action again. Doesn't trigger if this monster doesn't have enough Echo stacks. Echoed Actions can't trigger Echo.
That means, as long as your monster has enough stacks of the Echo buff, it will cast the support action it just used AGAIN! This strongly enables support monsters but can also make offensive teams go wild with the right buffs!
9 new Monsters are joining the Aethermancer roster with this update, making it a total of 40 monsters not counting the shifts (which is 9,880 different teams you can make, woooah)! All unique to play with, all beautiful, all viable new companions. Among these 9 new monsters you find 2 different champions for Alchemical Woods and, of course, all of the new monsters will have a shifted version, resulting in 18 new monsters to try in your team.
Elements: Earth / Fire
Types: Sidekick / Burn / Force
Take care not to step into the ambush of this sneaky protector of the wilds! Ranger’s unique feature is its ability to apply Stealth to itself, protecting it from single-target attacks. Not only that, Stealth also helps it break extra poise! Combined with its application of Sidekick, Force, and Burn, Ranger excels at staggering enemies and dealing constant damage.
Elements: Fire / Wind
Types: Echo / Force / Aether
Kullervo embodies the edgy anti-hero trope of mythology! Living by the rules is for the normies, and so Kullervo breaks the rules of the game by making its big attacks count as “support actions”. This allows Kullervo to use Echo stacks to double its attacks as if they were support actions, as well as enabling a lot of other unique builds. The perfect damage dealer for an Echo-based team!
Elements: Earth / Wind
Types: Echo / Poison / Sidekick
Caduceus can heal, but it can also harm! It primarily plays the role of an Echo-enabling support, but also boosts your damage output with Sidekick and Poison. It also cleanses all of your debuffs, too. This monster can just do everything!
Elements: Earth / Water
Types: Echo / Tank / Weakness
This slumbering giant proves that two is better than one. Like no other monster, Ettin excels at doubling its own actions thanks to Echo. The catch? Ettin cannot attack directly - it is the first pure tank monster in the game, relying entirely on Retaliate damage. Don’t worry - that doesn’t stop Ettin from being the main damage dealer of your team!
Elements: Fire / Wind
Types: Echo / Shield / Weakness
This cunning monster helps you build up the perfect defense! Living Armor is a heavily Shield-focused support monster that excels at protecting allies from harm, as well as applying Echo stacks to them. It also helps you redirect attacks to your mightiest monsters and breaks poise on enemies. Another great monster to try out the new Echo stacks with!
Elements: Water / Wind
Types: Terror / Weakness / Critical
The Merchant’s pet joins the battle! Snallygaster is a dangerous attacker that debilitates enemies with Weakness stacks, which deal damage to enemies each turn thanks to its “Howl of the Damned”. Visit the Merchant for special Snally Snacks to boost your Snallygaster’s debuff damage even further!
Elements: Earth / Wind
Types: Dodge / Sidekick / Critical
When you face this deadly trickster, you’d wish to have it on your side instead! Stiltskin’s game plan is simple: Apply Dodge to allies, let enemies attack you, then punish your enemies with the new Tether stacks - increasing both Crit Chance and Crit Damage against those enemies! Stiltskin goes well with anything, like Critical synergies, Tank & Retaliate synergies, Dodge, etc.
Elements: Earth / Wind
Types: Heal / Force / Dodge
Life is easy when you have the magic of the fae on your side! Faerie’s Glamour duplicates random buff stacks on your monsters each turn. The best part about it? It’s free. On top of that, Faerie excels as a healer that builds up Force stacks on itself for big attacks. Faerie goes well both with teams that are heavily support- or buff-focused - which are the general themes of Alchemical Woods.
Elements: Earth / Water
Types: Echo / Power / Purge
Driven mad by the crimes of the past, Bronze Lion guards the path to the ruined Holy City! It utilizes Echo stacks in a unique way: It can bind another monster’s soul to it, enabling it to use the bound monster’s starting actions by spending Echo stacks instead of Aether - and without spending your turn! Quite strong especially in combination with other Echo monsters, but can fit into any team quite flexibly.
Delve deeper into the Void’s inner core to uncover a broken Deity. Use everything you’ve learned so far to withstand blazing heat. Khepri is the new Monster Deity in Aethermancer that will truly test your skills!
The difficulty you choose for you run determines which Monster Deity you will encounter at the end - Chernobog or Khepri. At higher difficulties the Monster Deity is random.
This will not only be a challenging encounter with a foe wielding the sun and life itself, it will also reveal more aspects of the story.
We have renamed the difficulties to "Vestiges" and added a new, higher difficulty.
By changing our difficulty naming system, we have a clearer progression in difficulty as well as in the story of the game. The name "Vestige" stems from the lore in the game, as you collect the Monster Deity's Vestiges to delve deeper into the Void.
Food items for your monsters are sold by the Merchant now to help you on your journey.
More tracks in the game have been updated! The new versions use live recordings of instruments.
To read the full list of changes, head over to our Patch Notes.
Here is a brief list of other noteworthy changes and quality of life features in this update:
Unlocked meta upgrades can be disabled now when interacting with the NPC where you buy the respective meta upgrade
You can disable "White screens and flashes" now in the Accessibility Settings (which replaces them with grey screens)
Small improvements of the combat inspector
Improved in-combat menu navigation when playing with controllers
New actions and traits for existing monster types
More actions have VFX and SFX now (more and more will come!)
New NPC dialogues
A LOT of balancing changes
EVEN MORE bug fixes
Have a look at our updated Early Access Roadmap:
As you can see above, we've made some adjustments to the roadmap compared to our last update. We will be delaying the last Early Access Update, as well as the Full 1.0 Release of the game. Part of our reason is because our last two updates ended up a bit bigger in scope than we anticipated, and we want to focus on polishing that existing content more before we continue to add new content. We feel that moving these planned releases now, and letting you know as early as possible, allows us to not rush things and to avoid disappointment closer to release. It also lets us maintain our own health and well-being while working on the game, ensuring we can deliver high quality content along the way as well as plan for major console releases for the full release of the game and additional language support.
We truly believe that the current 40 monsters (80 including their shifted versions) as well as the next update will provide you with a lot of content and replayability to bridge the time until our full release and want to thank you in advance for your patience!
We are releasing this update right in time for Steam's big Summer sale and our biggest sale yet!