Enter the Chronosphere 0.146

Chronosphere 0.146

Hello! Well, it's been a big couple of weeks for us. We've had Melbourne International Games Week and a lot of new players from our sale. If that's you, welcome, and thank you for your support. We hope you're enjoying the game!

Thanks to everyone who visited our PAX booth! Really was a great PAX, quite an inspiring time for the team. Even had a few ppl win a run on their first try, which was cool.

Preparing for PAX did divert much of our attention, but we're sticking to our regular release schedule.

But first—some important news:

Imminent price increase

Now that we've been in early access for 5 months, we feel it's time to increase the price. After the current sale ends (on the 15th) we will increase the price to US$19.99 (or scaled to your locale—should be a 25% increase).

This was something we have planned to do before 1.0. Steam's rules on timing price changes meant we needed to do this now.

Anyway, if you have been holding off buying, you have a day or so to grab the game at its current sale price!

Changelog

🏓 Gameplay

• Do not auto-select interactable closest to mouse cursor, instead rely on explicitly hovering the interact button. This helps reduce the cases of accidentally interacting with e.g. an exit when you intended to pick up a stabilizer.
• Fixed hazard explosions being affected by Patent 66. (Reported by @juh9870)
• Fixed Super Splitter mod to firing projectiles at the start of the turn after an attack. (Reported by @juh9870)

🖼️ Art

• Fixed Artillery Base targets gaining obnoxious VFX from distortions. (Reported by @remostain7776, @tinklefairy6)

🗺️ Level Generation

• Greatly reduced the density of some "pole" style obstacles in some areas to make them easier to navigate.
• Replaced 8 irregular spheres with new ones to remove some of the more boring/confusing gameplay.
• Irregular spheres are no longer affected by tougher enemies from unlocked eras, hunters, exit ambushes or mission rooms.
• Irregular spheres now unlock in a loosely defined order (still semi-random) to better introduce them to new players and prevent bad experiences with unlocking very challenging irregular spheres earlier in a given playthrough.
• The Simple Trigonometry irregular sphere now starts with Patent 66 and adds projectile bounces inherently rather via a mod, mod stations can now appear in this sphere.
• The Luck of the Draw irregular sphere now adds projectile bounces inherently rather than via a mod too, enabling mod stations in this sphere as well.
• The Do Unto Others irregular sphere no longer modifies incoming damage, and instead decreases your max health based the damage you deal. Hopefully this should prevent Bellusect runs from feeling like an instant-restart on this sphere.
• The Plot Armor irregular sphere now starts with Bad Coffee and Portable Future instead of Hardened Carapace.
• The Empathy Limit irregular sphere has been reworked to use the Power effect instead of invisible damage modification, and has been renamed to Threat Reflex instead.
• The Glass Dimension irregular sphere will now spawn stabilizers, since they have received multiple changes to increase their influence on instability and can play into different buildcrafting aspects.
• All "starting loadout" irregular spheres with fixed weapons now give 2x copies of the given weapon to enable quickdraw builds.
• All irregular sphere descriptions now specify exactly which stations are banned in those spheres.
• Updated the names of all irregular spheres to correctly use title case and American English like the rest of the game.

✅ UI

• Updated the mod replacement UI.
• Fixed Character level not being displayed (first seen in 145.4).
• Previewed changes to player health are shown in the tally instead of as current health.
• Health bars show a text tally of damage/health changes.
• Fixed backing out of codex pages not working as intended.
• Fixed keyboard/gamepad costume navigation breaking on locked costumes.
• Mod station equipment buttons are now hidden when only holding one weapon.
• Added bindings to Mod Station equipment buttons.
• Fixed boss health bar not being 0 on death. (Reported by @remostain7776)
• Changed the way health changes are tallied, grouping them as one change to the health bar.
• Prevent possible exception in ability choice modal.

🤖 Tech

• Improved performance of aim indicators when completely inaccurate.
• Reduce analogue button release threshold. Speculative fix for double-triggering of attacks, assumed to be caused by trigger input jitter. (Reported by @toaster_prime)
• Add more logging to help diagnose a reported case of the UI not reappearing after completing a run.

🌏 Localization

• Run auto-localize.

📚 Changelog history

Until next time,
Chronosphere Team