Update 1.9.0 and the start of Season 3

The update which took a year of development is finally here!

Click here to read the same announcement in our blog with a slightly better formatting.

It focuses on a much better balance and some new gameplay features. Modding support has also been improved and we are steadily moving to something big.

Note: if your progress has not been automatically migrated from the previous version of the game, you can click on a button in Settings to do that manually, but please read the warnings!

Update 1.9.0 changelist

TL;DR;

• New map editor features
• Damage numbers
• Boss HP bars, bosses became slower and harder
• New music and a proper mysic synthesizer on iOS
• Email is not requried for sign up, account screen and forms became better
• More hints and explanations in tower menus, new Gem menus
• More than a hundred of new research nodes, new free research
• Up to 16x faster resource farming in some scenarios (level farming bonuses + new ability + improved Mining speed mod)
• New Bonus system
• Towers can be manually disabled
• Steam Cloud and Linux support
• New item market in the Shop
• Much higher Bit dust drop rate, up to 12x on max difficulty and research
• More quest slots
• Removed days-in-row reward, increased daily quest rewards
• New ability, new level, many new tower mechanics and a massive rework of towers
• Better modding / scripting support
• Lots of bug fixes and performance improvements, improved text fields on mobile devices
• More colors in labels, better icons

Gameplay, new content and features

• Added 96 new passive, tower-specific, free research that are being unlocked simply by using a tower. These new research upgrade specific towers and give bonuses for farming
• "Extended statistics" research now adds a new column to the Statistics screen, which calculates damage per coin for each tower
• Per-tower in-game statistics (DPS, kills and bonus coins in the tower's menu) are now always visible - no research required. Added a total damage counter into the tower menu
• Miners now have more item slots, which allow them to farm more items per game. Adjusted item mining rate - the chance to get an item is now higher on average
• Miners now have a single mining speed which does not depend on a resource type - for example, Infiar miner will now mine Scalar and Infiar at the same speed
• Completely reworked the level I will not talk about, because there's no such level
• Gems on levels 6.1 and 6.2 now can be selected and have a proper menu, which shows detailed info about them (their effect / immunities / their HP etc)
• Added level 6.6
• Added a Bonus system, which is available on level 6.6 and in the daily maps. Currently it has more than 40 different powerful bonuses you can choose from during the game, featuring many new gameplay mechanics. Bonus system is deterministic, making leaderboard competitons fair for everyone
• Amount of prizes in the Lucky wheel has been increased, and x2/x3 segments appear more frequently. Added a new research which increases a chance for an extra x2 segment to appear in each wheel
• Completely reworked map editor - now it allows multiple selection, which can be moved or used as a "brush" for painting. Map editor now also has a history (you can undo last changes using Ctrl+Z or UI buttons) and it backs up your map in case you manage to crash the game somehow. Tile-sepcific menus and inventory has been slightly redesigned too
• Pathfinding will now never fail - enemies will always find a path to the base, even if there are no tiles along the path. This makes it easier to create custom maps and makes pathfinding less buggy. This also allows to create new crazy custom maps where enemies move right through the void (do not report it, that's intended)
• One-time gift is given for unlocking Stage 4, which includes a temporary Double Gain or Accelerators if DG is already enabled. This should make stage 4 progression much more enjoyable, as at this stage many players start to struggle due to an increased difficulty
• Towers can be manually disabled by clicking on their title in the tower menu
• Local save files are now stored in the game's folder on PC, which allows to have multiple installations of the game with a separate progress. These save files are now synchronized through the Steam Cloud, serving as a fourth backup storage (along with local files, Infinitode cloud and Infinitode auto-backup feature) for your saves and making it much easier to continue playing on any other Steam-powered platform
• It is now possible to write a note on your cloud saves. Premium access allows to have up to 7 cloud save slots
• Regular levels now can have random bonuses for a specific resource type / green papers / bit dust, which allows to farm up to 4.5x more of that specific item in a single run
• Bosses now have more HP and move slower. Difficulty of bosses has been adjusted
• Source tiles were changed on some of the regular levels, which makes levels more equal in terms of farming
• Only 20% (instead of 25%) of quests are required for the first stage of quests Prestige. Increased Prestige token rewards given for resetting the quests
• Added a small inventory to the research screen, making it much easier to see all your items at a glance. Clicking on the items will show the amount of items still needed for a full research tree and the amount of research currently requiring the item. Colored dots near the items show how much some specific item is needed at this moment
• Map editor allows to select music track files directly from the disk drive and save them back to the disk. It also allows to download music by URL - simply search for .xm/.s3m/.mod file on the Internet and paste its URL into the game
• Increased daily map rewards
• Removed item cases from the shop - they did not scale with Green Papers properly and Cyan chests were too pricey
• Added an Item Market to the shop. Most of the items you'll need can be purchased there, and it allows to exchange the resources you do not need for item cases, bit dust, blueprints and other good stuff. Item offers are updated every 1h of in-game time and are scaled according to your progression. Clicking on an offer also shows how many of this item you already have and how many of them are currently needed for research
• Pressing Enter on the research screen installs the currently selected research
• Multiple tile packs and item cases can be selected in the inventory. It is now also possible to open 4x more packs and cases at once by long-pressing the Open button
• Bit dust drop rate increases according to the difficulty of the Endless mode, now up to 6x more Bit dust per run
• Bit dust drop rate research became twice as powerful and no longer costs Bit dust
• Game website has been improved, new features were added to the account page. It is now also possible to enable two-factor authentication if you want to secure your account (will go live in a couple of days)
• Cake trophy now gives +1 Quest reset (basically +1 quest slot) and increases bit dust / prestige dust drop rates instead of giving gameplay-affecting bonuses, which should not give advantage on the leaderboards
• Email is now completely optional for signing up. Signing up with Steam has been greatly simplified
• Levels of stage 6 require resources to be unlocked. You won't have to purchase these levels if you have already played on them
• Endless leaderboards are now limited to the first 45 minutes of in-game time
• Added dozens of new research
• Level 1.3 trophy now requires more waves to be defeated
• Enemies are now considered "in range" even if they touch a tower's range (previously the center of an enemy had to be in range). Same goes for the Flamethrower's flame
• New "Slipping" debuff, which reduces enemy's speed by 30% and stacks with any other debuff or effect. Applied by Blizzard
• First level of ability research is now always free on the research tree
• Added Invulnerability buff, used by some bosses
• Added NoBonusSystemPoints and NoDamage buffs, used by the bonus system
• Abilities won't start if they will cause zero damage
• Added a new research which increases the amount of quests that can be completed in a single run
• Removed days-in-row reward from daily rewards. You should receive a compensation if you have at least 3 days of a streak. Increased daily rewards instead
• Added a new "Loop" ability
• It is now possible to receive the "Developer" trophy without installing the Developer mode research - unlocking the research is enough. This trophy still does not give any gameplay-related effects but now your trophy collection will finally be complete without enabling the Developer mode
• If enemies are allowed to walk over platforms or if their path is blocked, they will prefer to move through modifiers and, only if there's no path through modifiers - they'll start to move through towers
• Easy difficulty mode has became even more easy

Visuals, audio and UI

• GameValue icons were redesigned and now are more colorful. They are used in a Core upgrades, Boost tiles and research icons
• Added modifier and ability icons to the effect names (research menu and Boost tiles)
• Fixed: snowballs and ball lightning units appear more smoothly from the Freezing and Tesla towers
• Added damage numbers with a different visuals depending on a type of damage (more / less effective, critical, special etc). Can be configured through the settings screen
• Added boss HP bars
• Coin particles now depend on a real time and stop moving if the game is paused - same goes for damage particles. Can be useful if you want to check the efficiency of your towers at a specific moment
• Statistics screen has been updated and now features a better per-tower statistics table
• Swapped music on some levels, added new tracks. Use in-game music player or this great playlist by Cinex to listen to new tracks: YouTube
• Slightly rearranged in-game buttons in the bottom-left corner of the screen, for convenience
• Redesigned Miner menu, which explains the final mining speed better and is more invormative overall
• Game loads more smoothly on a slow devices
• Added a new "CVD-friendly colors" option, which should make it easier for colorblind players to distinguish some graphics. Research tree colors has been adjusted to be CVD-friendly by default. Added some details to the textures of some items to make it easier to distinguish them. It is now possible to click on an item icon in the research menu to enlarge it and view some info about it
• Updated Account screen UI, added more info to the sign in / sign up screens and made form fields more visually consisting
• Loading screen now has a completely black backgroud and transitions more smoothly into the main menu
• Using a case key in the inventory now opens the shop, highlights the key exchange button and scrolls the screen to it. If there are 10+ keys in the inventory, a hint bubble will be shown on the inventory button
• Fixed descriptions of many music tracks - added authors, real track names and links to the official websites. A notification will appear each time a track starts to play, and you can click on the links in it to visit the author's website
• Music track files can now store a global volume configuration. Reduced music volume on some levels
• Fixed "game over" slow motion effects
• Added missing translations
• Added a proper live music synthesizer for iOS, music spectrums now work properly on this OS
• Added a list of community translators to the settings screen
• Translations can now contain conditional blocks which improve the quality of translations
• Added a 8xMSAA anti-aliasing option for graphics settings and an experimental full-screen borderless screen mode on desktops
• Added many hints to the tower stats in a tower menu
• If auto-saves are disabled on the account screen, a warning icon will be shown in the main menu to prevent a progress loss
• Desktop version of the game starts in a full screen by default. Use F11 to switch between windowed and full-screen mode. Holding Ctrl/Alt/Shift with F11 will switch to a different resolutions of a windowed mode
• UI scale is adjusted automatically in a full screen mode of a desktop version of the game
• Improved visuals of the developer console
• Added copy / paste buttons that will appear over text fields, just like on Android or iOS. Android and iOS versions of the game no longer open a default OS UI with a single field
• Text fields will be shifted on Android and iOS to the visible area if they are being covered by a software keyboard
• Fixed: tower menu will no longer show hints for stats and tower's range for the next upgrade level of the tower if tower can not be upgraded further
• Switching game speed now works more smoothly
• Size of some projectiles and projectile trails had been adjusted slightly. Venom projectiles got more juicy particles
• Music Spectrum can be turned off in settings
• UI elements that can be scrolled automatically receive focus when you hover over them with the mouse
• Source tiles with a very low density now always render at least one colored polygon
• Adjusted mouse zoom, now it works like in a Photoshop and makes sure to zoom to some precise numbers / avoids blurring
• Gamebreaking: Script tile can no longer be selected during the game
• Fixed quest list
• New Epic rarity sound (took me a day to create, please tell me you've noticed the change)
• More sounds for Lucky wheel
• Some minor fixes related to the safe zone UI
• Large prices in Cores are now being shown as a compact number
• Trophy viewer now also has an anti-aliasing enabled on the PC version of the game
• Rearranged star research branch, should now be easier to follow
• Added music spectrums to the music player for your enjoyment
• Notifications no longer queue up if many notifications are being shown, instead new notifications show immediately and make the oldest ones disappear
• Added "how to obtain" hints to the trophies that are not unlocked yet
• Added a timer to the live leaderboards in an endless mode

Balance

• Fast enemies - HP reduced by ~10% and number of enemies by ~5%. Poison debuff slows down Fast enemies by 5% -> 7%
• Icy - shield logic has been simplified. All damage first goes into the shild - HP is not reduced if Icy has any amount of shield. Shield receives reduced damage from anything except bullets and fire
• Strong - reduced number of enemies spawned by ~10% in a later waves
• Starting XP level research removed, towers always start with L1. Research replaced with a bonus PWR per level till L10
• Rotation speed research (global) - effect reduced by ~25%
• Bonus XP research (global) - effect reduced by ~20%
• Poison debuff - now deals at least 15% of damage when stacked
• Stage 5 star requirements were adjusted
• Levels 1.1, 1.2 are now less "difficult"
• Storyline research now give new effects
• Tower XP requirements for leveling up were adjusted - now they require a bit more XP for L1-10 and less for L11-L20+
• Disoriented enemies and Air fall explosions do not affect MDPS
• Powerful ability of all towers now give 15% instead of 10% PWR. PWR calculation is now multiplicative
• Boss waves delay the wave that comes after them even more
• Minor balance changes in Research: global damage / attack speed and some other things were nerfed a bit and corresponding per-tower research has been buffed greatly. Overall tower efficiency has grown by ~25% on max research tree compared to the previous build and now per-tower research should feel more rewarding
• Slightly adjusted the difficulty of a different enemy waves, Regulars should not dominate now and Jets became a bit stronger
• Adjusted difficulty of levels 1.1-6.1 (including the bonus levels) for a more smooth progression and a better challenge
• Base piercing of explosions increased - Fireball ability, Cannon, Missile, mines and air fall explosions became stronger

Balance - Abilities

• Blizzard - now also covers 8 random roads with ice, which debuffs enemies with a Slipping debuff
• Windstorm - has increased range, doubles bonus coins for the next forced wave
• Magnet - lasts longer, projectiles fly towards the first enemy and affect MDPS. multiple instances of this ability can not be active at the same time. Colliding projectiles (Splash / Multishot etc) can now fly further if affected by this ability
• Bullet wall - if some bullets do not hit any enemy and fly outside the map, they will return back aiming at random enemies. Each bullet can return for up to 3 times
• Overload - lasts permanently, until an enemy reaches the Base. Only affects mining speed and enemy toughness, scales with endless mode difficulty
• Loop - new ability, which doubles damage of towers and doubles mined resources of miners
• LOIC - now also boosts Bounties, making them give 30% more coins next time

Balance - Modifiers

• Balance - upgrade XP requirements reduced, each of its upgrade levels now also give +1 Max XP level to the neighboring towers - up to +40 MAX XP levels if you surround a tower with this modifier. Selling a modifier will reduce max XP level of the towers but will not revert abilities
• Search - bonus range +5% -> +7%
• Power - effect is multiplied by Power platform bonus, making this modifier more useful
• Attack speed - speed bonus 22% -> 21%, same as in the Damage modifier
• Mining speed - increases miners mining speed by +35% -> +60%. The modifiers are connected to a miner, the less effective each of them becomes. Added modifier efficiency table to the Modifier's menu
• Experience - gives 30 XP -> 21 XP per resource

Balance - Towers

• Powerful ability of every tower increases PWR by x1.1 -> x1.15. Powerful platforms multiply tower PWR instead of simply adding up a percentage to it, which makes them much more... powerful! LVL 10 towers with Powerful ability now have 28.7% -> 39.7% PWR
• Towers scale much better with PWR and XP level, all towers should be useful on a higher waves. Some stats now benefit from PWR much more to compensate for the lack of damage-affecting stats in some towers
• Due to "Starting XP level" research replacements, L20 PWR of towers increased from 17% to 21.5%
• Range of all towers reduced roughly by 5%
• (i) Stat differences are compared to XP level 20, upgrade level 10 of towers in v.1.8.10

A detailed list of balance changes can be found in the blog, it does not fit into Steam news.

Technical / performance and bug fixes

• Game sessions (instances of GameSystemProvider and everything related to a single game state) are now thread safe, which allows to run multiple game sessions in parallel on a multiple threads. May be used in the future to simulate the state on a separate thread and make FPS much higher and more stable
• Added a "dirty tile" mechanic, which allows to mark specific tiles for a cache update. For example, modifiers can mark tiles around them as "dirty" and will force the neighboring buildings to recalculate their stats - previously this had to be done manually and was error prone
• Updated LibGDX game framework and many other libraries to the latest version
• Particles are now updated on multiple threads if Multithreaded rendering is enabled in settings
• Pathfinding is now handled on multiple threads, which makes it much faster and less laggy on a huge maps with lots of portals
• Removed empty parts of textures to reduce the overdraw and improve rendering performance - barely noticeable but is still an improvement
• Damage is now queued instead of being handled immediately. All damage is handled at the end of each frame, which is much less error-prone and splits the damage dealt more fairly between all towers who have damaged and killed an enemy. The main benefit of this change - enemies are not being removed from the state until the end of the frame (no issues with dereferenced enemies in loops etc) and all debuffs are guaranteed to be applied before the enemy is killed
• Added a new RenderSystem, which handles all session-specific graphics and allows to use FrameBuffers / combine Batch with a ShapeRenderer / remove default graphics or rearrange the rendered layers
• Added a MultiReasonBool structure, which is used in a fields like Enemy.invisible/disabled or Tower.outOfOrder. This allows to combine multiple tags that affect these fields and make it easier to work with them. For example, a tower could be disabled by an enemy walking over it, a Metaphor and manually by the player, all at the same time - an extra data has to be stored somehow to make sure the tower will not be re-enabled only if some single factor has been removed
• All UI listeners update the actual graphics on the next frame after the event has been triggered (using new methods of the UiManager) to prevent some bugs and avoid unnecessary work if multiple events has been triggered in a single frame
• Mouse events and map hovering / selection has been moved into a separate systems which trigger new events, which makes input handling easier and less buggy. It also adds some flexibility, making it easier to write scripts which handle the input
• Fixed: 5.b2 sometimes did not give 3 stars for beating the last wave
• Save files are now saved to the disk on a separate thread and use an optimized file format, which reduces disk usage and FPS drops
• The game now uses a new map file format, which greatly reduces their size and makes them load faster
• Removed most of the pools - they no longer improve performance, harm GC timings and can even harm the performance in some cases
• Game ships with the controllers library. Controller support can be added by mods
• Lua VM has been optimized, scripts are now able to use the full spectre of Java's multithreading and utilize the whole CPU
• Greatly reduced RAM usage, some parts of the game now load faster than before
• Fixed: Indonesian locale should no longer crash the game
• Implemented a new asynchronous logger, which writes directly into the file and does not consume RAM
• Improved collision detection and spacial partitioning of the enemies, which should greatly improve the performance
• Optimized projectile trails
• Min range is now a tower stat but should not appear in menus
• New "difficulty curve generator" - removed specific waves from the levels config, replaced them with a single number
• 3D models are loaded asynchronously where possible
• Added an experimental support for Linux OS
• Optimized Path objects - they are now immutable, less error prone and have a better performance
• Optimized Healer and Armored auras
• Fixed formatting of strings with "short numbers" (in the form of 12.3K, 23.4...)
• The lucky wheel cannot be spun for some time after downloading the saved game from the cloud
• Cleaned up the ENEMIES_WALK_ON_PLATFORMS GV handling, should now work properly in every place / map editor
• Fixed many bugs related to text fields
• Fixed some bugs in the live leaderboards
• Fixed the speed of enemies on path corners
• Fixed a bug in the Basic tower's ultimate ability, which calculated XP incorrectly (Gauss-Basic bug)
• Many performance improvements in different places
• Increased Gauss' shooting range, to make it hit enemies even on the largest maps
• Gauss now stuns all enemies in line, even if its projectile had been stopped by an enemy
• Reduced replay file size
• Game logs now "rotate" - older logs will be archived instead of being overwritten
• All towers can now be properly disabled
• Fixed #1765 - ball lightning (tower ability) hit fighter
• Fixed #1797 - Basic ult cloned xp can provide much higher levels to gauss self improvement
• Fixed #2160 - Unable to complete daily quest
• Fixed #2214 - Loot tab still shows description of keys after using all of them
• Fixed #1623 - Ease of Access (low contrast / indistinguishable colors / size of UI elements) - main thread
• Fixed #1924 - Clarity problems
• Fixed #2245 - Pause menu's music player bugs
• Fixed #2241 - Softllock - 0.4 Missing a lose condition
• Fixed #2280 - Bugged real playing time statistic
• Fixed #2276 - Indonesian localization is not functional
• Fixed #2228 - Translation Issues
• Fixed #2163 - Permanent white circles in UI, again
• Fixed #2049 - Problems with Tesla's Ultimate
• Fixed #2272 - Crash on map restart using enter key.
• Fixed #2251 - Resources ui became invisible after using the new research button in the losing screen
• Fixed #1701 - Leaderboard % label glitches in-game
• Fixed #1836 - 2nd poison tower doesn't re-target to apply multiple stacks of poison
• Fixed #2244 - Ability tickets and endless research
• Fixed #2259 - Incorrect interface at startup
• Fixed #2270 - Laser 3rd skill makes charge longer than normal
• Fixed #2252 - Glitch: how to easily win the wave that comes after a boss.
• Fixed #2312 - Music slowed when picking section of music
• Fixed #2377 - Stars on equalizer tiles goes away when load from cloud saves
• Fixed #2376 - Music player text display error
• Fixed #2389 - Power V misleading name
• Fixed #2366 - "Watch Ads" description text is overlapped by item icons
• Fixed #2414 - Irritating music player panning issue
• Fixed #2453 - multiple packs of 90% quality tiles can coexist in inventory
• Fixed #2460 - Gem enemies are counted as enemies, making it impossible to end the game
• Fixed #2475 - Disabling developer mode
• Fixed #2298 - Sound device not changing
• Various other performance and stability improvements

Please read the blog post if you want to know more about new scripting / modding features.

Future plans

There are some good things left on the TODO list, which were left there because this update already takes too long - things like rewards for reaching even higher waves, crafting and prestiging improvements, and even a (very enjoyable) feature from Infinitode 1.
We are very close to the point at which I'll consider the game fully complete, and introduction of the level 6.8 in the future updates will signify that.

Unfortunately, there's still a war going on in my country and it makes it extremely hard to continue developing the game. I can give no estimates nor guarantees this is not the last update and I apologize if this update has bugs or causes any kind of item loss.

Another announcement will appear in the game's blog soon, I still need to thank players individually and congratulate Season 2 winners.

I hope you'll enjoy this update! It took lots of effort and many people have participated in designing and testing it - thank you guys, you've helped a lot!

And thank you for playing Infinitode 2!