Tech in Modules

Tech has finally gotten the attention it deserves. Now with tech, you can insert them into modules. Most of the tech only affects the blocks they are placed inside of, which adds a whole new level of customisation to your weapons. Tech is also now a regular drop from all enemies, and will appear in the same section as loot. If that wasn't enough, you can also forge tech with other items as well as buy tech from the shop.

Since tech will need to be placed inside modules, you are going to probably want to know how the new tech placement system works. If you go over to the tech tab, island blocks without any tech slots will be more transparent. Once you go over and select a tech, only the places where the tech can go will be highlighted. Certain tech can only go on certain modules. If you have a tech selected, you can go over to the editor and click the desired module to place it in. This will bring up a new tech bar at the bottom where you can manually insert each tech into different slots. 

That whole process seems to take a while, so there are some helpful shortcuts to speed thing up. Using space+click even when not in the tech tab will automatically select that module to place tech inside. In the inventory, instead of having to click on a tech and place it inside the slot, you can shift + left click the tech to instantly send it into the first available slot in the module. You can also use shift + right click on any tech to remove all the tech from the selected module. Finally, if you have a module selected, only the tech that can be placed will appear in your inventory to avoid confusion.

As mentioned earlier, most of the tech will only affect the module it is placed in, with the exception of the quantum cat, and weapon targeting system. These tech increase your overall dodge and crit chances respectively.

If you want to hold more global tech, we have a new module called the augmentator. These can hold the island wide tech as well as some other tech that can go in any module, like the reinforcements which increase the health of the block by a certain percentage.

Overall, I think the tech will be a great way to customise your weapons further. Try putting different techs in different places to come up with some interesting combinations.

Dodge and Crit

That's right. Dodge and crit have both been given a small rework. Dodging felt pretty awful and random most of the time, and sometimes you would get large enemies who would seem to dodge a lot for no apparent reason. Crits felt underwhelming, and mostly used because why not.

For dodging, I have split the dodge chance into two variables, the maximum dodge chance and the actual dodge chance. The maximum dodge chance is increased by all your tech and your floatrons. The actual dodge chance is only a percentage of your maximum dodge chance and is determined by how much extra thrust you have. If you have 2x the thrust than mass, you will get your full maximum dodge chance. Anything less and you will start to see your actual dodge chance drop to zero, where zero dodge chance means you are very close to being an overweight island.

Crits have also gotten a rework. Your warp core will give you a standard base crit rate of 40%. Each weapon you place will decrease the crit chance instead of increasing the crit chance. Some weapons will decrease it more than others. This makes small and compact island more powerful, since they will usually crit more. The total crit chance can also be increased by placing the respective tech into your core or augmentators. Certain tech will also increase the crit chance for that weapon only. This will not affect your overall crit chance but will directly be applied to the weapon itself and added to the firepower calculations.

Enemies

Due to the nature of the new tech, I had to completely redo the enemy generation. Enemies are now generated smarter. Enemies will also fight smarter and will be generally more accurate and try to destroy themselves less. The also tend to chase the player more and be more aggressive, making them a little bit harder to combat.

Here is a full rundown on how enemies are now generated:

• Enemies are given a certain amount of money to build their island.
• Enemies select blocks, floatrons, and other modules till they run out of their money.
• Enemies will choose the items based on one of three categories: tanking, speed, and damage. They will try to progress towards of these builds or have a mix and be more well rounded.
• Enemies then generate a shape that they want to build for their island, then place their blocks inside that shape. The placement of their blocks will try to make them have a strong core, strong exterior, or anything in between.
• Enemies then place their warp core and try to minimise its exposure
• Enemies take their strongest block on their island, and swap it with the block under the core
• Enemies spread their floatrons out to prevent mass casualties
• Enemies place weapons of the same type in the same area to maximise burst damage
• Enemies place the rest of their modules on the island in a semi random order
• Enemies place shields nearer to the middles and trees on the edges of their island

Shield Overloading

Shields have always been in a tight spot. While being good, they have have either been too good, or just plain annoying sometimes. Thats why I also took time to take a look at shields and make some mechanics to put them in a better place.

Firstly, shields now can overload. Overloading happens when you have no shields to protect your island. The amount of time spent overloading is based on the number of shields you have. After the shields are finished overloading, they will come back up online. Shields still charge while overloading, they are just not projected out onto the island and thus do not block any damage. If a shield comes back online with no shields charged up, it will automatically receive one shield. This can actually reduce the base cooldown time for a single shield.

The shield overloading gives players a chance to get some uninterrupted shots onto the enemy island after taking down all their shields. 

In addition, energy weapons no longer damage shields and will actually get absorbed by the shield. Laser, plasma and beam weapons all fall into this category.

Other Changes

There really is a lot here. Brace yourself.

• Increased the size of the shield by 10% to cover corners of large islands
• Changed the UI sprite corners to be sharper
• Changed the inventory to have graphical tabs
• Added the swarm and blitz missiles
• Changed the names of the missile and dual missile to rocket and dual rockets
• Changed the turbo laser sprite to match the other laser weapons (sorry ScrapMan, that was my bad)
• MOAR LOOT, get one more item of loot from treasure and all enemy drops
• Loot screen now shows the item type and the description
• Forge now tells you if you have an invalid island
• Penetrating damage now gets destroyed once it no longer deals damage
• Changed the background music to be less intrusive and more epic
• Health and damage roughly multiplied by 10
• Block health balanced
• Weapons are heavier
• Weapons balanced
• Shop is guaranteed to have at least one tech(as well as the block, module, floatron, and weapon guarantee it already has)
• Use tab to flip weapons before placing them
• Added the electromagnet which attracts projectiles
• Added a health/damage/mass heat map to show which areas of your island need some upgrades
• Added a secret glitched tier

Bug Fixes

There were a ton of them. I just didn't write them all down as I was fixing them. But heres the notable ones that I did fix.

• Fixed some consistency issues between J and kJ. Everything is now kJ
• Fixed a bug where deflected bullets pass through shields
• Fixed a bug where assigning weapons to "P" would crash the game
• Fixed a bug where the forge output doesn't update after fixing your invalid island
• Fixed a bug where crystal shards would go the wrong way when deflected
• Fixed a bug where enemy wheels would display as 0 when it had shields active
• Fixed a few deflection interactions
• Fixed a bug where energy would be shown as going over the maximum

Summary

There are a lot of changes in this update. Hopefully it was worth the two and a half week wait for this. I certainly hope you enjoy all of the new content and stuff in this new update.