Season 2 and More

Hotfix notes are at the very bottom!

Steam Store Page

Our store page on Steam is live!

Please wishlist it, it lets Steam know that ther is interest in the game and helps drive traffic our way! There will be playtests in the future for the Steam client. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2692420/Idlescape/

Season 2 - Buff Madness - May 22nd to September

Buff Madness

Focusing on the shrine reworks, there are new instant shrines that give a random buff everytime the shrine's goal is reached separate from the rest of the shrine system.

This is a community effort! You can contribute to either the strength of the shrine, or contribute to generating new buffs in the shrine. Every 24 hours the buff madness shrines will downgrade, so you will need to be constantly maintaining (or upgrading) the shrines to benefit from the nearly limitless pool of buffs available.

Wiki Madness

Starting on Season 2 launch, wiki edits from registered accounts with at least 500 changed characters will be rewarded with a random buff on Season 2 "Buff Madness". Large edits will get longer buff durations. Wiki edits will be reviewed to prevent spam and buffs will be given out by moderators manually, so some delay is to be expected. Moderators are also allowed to give out extra buffs for edits that fall below the threshold, but still required substantial work, on their own discretion. (Begging for a buff will have the opposing effect.)

Leaderboard

All editors will additionally participate in a leaderboard. All players with at least 1000 changed characters will receive a participation icon at the end of the season. First, second and third place will receive a medal/an icon (tbd, maybe both?). Icons will transfer to 1.0, once it releases.

Check out the leaderboard!

Augmenting Overhaul (includes changes below)

Augmentation Counter System (Season 2 Only, Currently)

Instead of being a success/fail system, augmentations have been fractionalized and made into a success/crit success system.

Almost all augmentation costs in this new system have been reduced to roughly 1% of the materials required to initially craft the item.

Augmenting an item increases its Augmentation Counter, and once that counter exceeds the threshold to upgrade the item consumes up to several base variants of the item, increases its augmentation level, and resets the counter.

There is a low chance that instead of increasing the counter once a player may critically succeed, incrementing the counter twice. This system ensures that there is no ability to "fail" in the augmenting progression but there is still a chance to do better than the base.

In this new system all items are tradeable!

Research System

The Research System, also called 'Scrapping' internally, gives the player a new timed Enchanting action. It costs the same to Research as to Augment and results in the same amount of experience, but instead of upgrading items it breaks them down.

Players will research existing items with successful attempts resulting in the relevant affix dust and unsuccessful attempts resulting in the relevant item scraps. The amount of dust and scrap generated scales with the augmentation level of the item used, so high augmentation items may result in dozens, if not hundreds, of their rarity of dust before turning into several pieces of scrap.

This new system allows players to generate new materials through recycling old and unused equipment as well as accumulate a ton of experience in the process.

Oh, by the way, Ability Books/Scrolls/Tomes/Whatevers are researchable for a decent chunk of higher level dusts. Don't burn them!

No More Soulbound

Season 2 has no Soulbound status, Item Levels, or Item Experience. Every item is tradeable, go nuts on the market!

These gameplay changes (besides the buff madness seasonal mechanics) will inevitably come to main game, either mid-season or post-season 2

Global Game Changes

Yes, these are main game updates, not just the season changes!

Partial Augmenting Overhaul

Augmentation Bonus Rescaling

All combat related stats (except offensive criticals) have been rescaled to always be at least 5% of the item's base strength. This means at +10 an item is 50% stronger, and at +20 an item is twice as strong as its base variant.

Shrine Rework

Shrines have been completely overhauled!

Shrines now have several altars of buffs that can be individually contributed to as well as introducing personal contribution goals.

Each altar focuses on a specific skill or category of skills as well as its own contribution goals. Each time a goal is reached, one of the enchantments is unlocked or upgraded in strength. Generally there are three enchantments per altar. Shrine duration now has its own contribution pool and goals; it must be donated to separately from the other altars to increase the length of ALL other altars. In order to benefit from these altars a player must meet a personal contribution goal. As of writing this post a player must contribute 1 million gold to unlock the first buff from each altar, 10 million gold to unlock the second buff, and 100 million gold to unlock all buffs. Contributing to any altar will raise a player's personal contribution.

Essentially, the shrine is now a set of 9 buffs that scale theoretically infinitely, limited only by how much gold the community wants to spend on them.

Ironmen can also contribute to shrines through donating materials rather than gold with altars asking for a specific set of items; as of now materials will count for 10x their vendor value.

Quests and Achievements

Quests, Achievements, and Tutorials are making their entrance into Idlescape.

They can be advanced by accomplishing specific tasks and often reward the player with experience, items, quest points, achievements points, or access to new mechanics.

Quests are multi-step tasks to guide the player through content, such as having the player work through a specific tier of content, and often unlock subsequent quests and sets of achievements. Quests have been split into a storyline, combat quests, gathering quests, and processing quests.

• Storyline quests follow the progression flow of the game and allow many different avenues to complete it; most steps can be completed through combat, gathering, or processing, and are designed to allow any playstyle to easily approach the story.
• Combat quests focus on the combat within a specific tier and see the player engaging several difficulties in that tier's combat zone, culminating in the relevant elite scroll or dungeons.
• Gathering quests focus on all the gathering zones within a tier to familiarize the player with the materials that are found there.
• Processing quests are a specialized set of quests that allow the player to obtain specialized rewards; for example, there is now a questline to unlock each tier of the enchanting tomes as well as a questline to passively unlock the effect of the previous crafting enchantment (crafting resource reduction).

Achievements are single-step tasks that focus on accomplishing one specific task a massive number of times.

Talents

Talents, also known as Mastery Talents depending on how long you have been around here, are a new progression system that generally starts after you max a skill.

There are roughly 100 talents as of writing this post; they are spread across all skills and vary greatly in their effects.

Some of the cheaper talents are minor effective level boosts, whereas the more expensive talents that require a much higher level to unlock come with new mechanics to help you specialize into your gameplay niche.

Affixes

Affixes are FINALLY coming out globally and have undergone several reworks:

• Affix rerolling has been redone so that you have the option to choose either the new or old rolls.
• Dust and Scrap generation has been integrated into the previously mentioned research system; on a successful research attempt dust will be generated. On an unsuccessful attempt the item will be consumed and scrap will be generated. The number of dust or scrap produced scales with the augmentation level of the item researched.
• Affixes are now internally stored as a range of 0 to 1 so that we are able to rebalance and change affix strengths after they are already applied to items. This means that if you get a perfect roll on an item that affix value will be stored as 1; if we buff the affix later it will be automatically updated to the new higher strength, or lowered if the affix is nerfed.
• Affix UI now displays the odds for rolling specific affixes as well as rarity categories so you should now know exactly what you should expect from RNG rolling

Other Balance Notes

Smithing has gotten a rebalance; it has had more of its power moved into its tools/effective levels and its experience curve has been made flatter (nerfed) in the early/mid game. Refining has similarly been adjusted for these new rates and scaling.

Lots of other stuff

Not everything has been included here since it is the culmination of several months of work, rework, and reworking the reworks. We will be around to answer questions you may have either in-game or on Discord!

0.20.0a

• Add a big warning text for quest steps that aren't active with reason why they aren't active
• Fix some enchant calc errors
• Fix chaos hand-in twice for fallen academy quest
• Announced quest/achievement completions in season 2 give 4 hours of magic catastrophe buffs
• New announcement handler
• bronze hatchet craftable, augmentable, and scrappable
• Master Miner now accepts Deep Pit for progress
• Elf Slayer properly accessible
• New Shrine System quest / tutorial
• Fix some notifications showing as errors instead of successes
• Added runeslate to gathering tutorial, not retroactive sorry :(
• Fix wiki madness icon paths
• Season 2 ends in September, not in a week!
• Updated descriptions of Silent Fury and Unbound Rage to note they are incompatible
• Quest progress bars can now fill fully properly
• Added talent respec token to platinum shop; costs 500 platinum. There WILL be more free opportunities from the main storyline to get them without paying any plat!

0.20.0b

• Show correct quest step tooltip
• Fix scroll position flicker
• Fix rainbow road achievement
• Fix smithing button width
• Changed default scroll filter from hatchet to gloves
• Don't reset aug counter on affix
• Increased quest point requirements for enchanting tome and crafting questlines, +1 per level so first one is 1 req, 5th one is 5 req; Gave a quest point as a reward for completing the final 2 of each line
• Fix some crash cases
• Increased material donation cost (for ironmen) by 10x
• Show more decimals for affixes
• UI for jumping to required quest
• UI toggle for showing quest progress
• Max turn in button for quests

0.20.0c

• Maybe crash fix please PLEASE
• Unpinning quests
• Death essence added to fallen academy quest
• Filter augment message setting working
• Restore the Combat Instance Stats formatting that got accidentally deleted

0.20.0d

• PLEASE FIX THE CRASHES AAAAAAAAA
• Hide gathering drawer on NGIM characters
• Some improved logging to misc things in backend
• Fix scrapping item amounts
• combat instance stats support cast count for more accurate ability dps
• Improved initialization of offline time checking
• New session reconnection handling
• Lower burn chance at low level cooking
• Fix some crafting experience being 1
• 'Consistent Chef' talent to always cook higher quality and ignore chance to increase quality
• Augmentation announcements for successful high level augs only happen in the new augmenting system
• Augmentation failed announcements added, red text!!

0.20.0e

• Fixed nine-lives taking your health away accidentally
• Optimized market manifest snapshot
• Allow items to transform when augmenting
• More tweaks to session handling to optimize and fix things

0.20.0f

• Improved catchup frozen check; should more aggressively handle potential frozen actions
• Added 5 more achievements: "It's Definitely Spelled 'Mellon'", "Destroying History", "Feeling Lucky?", "Burning with Enthusiasm", "BURN IT ALL"
• Fix all the mismatched quest/achievements
• A lot more logging for ongoing issues we've been investigating that are making me GO CRAZY

0.20.0g

• Fix golden spoon requiring 3000 shards per aug instead of 300
• Improved offline session error handling
• Start next action on action fail, if it exists
• Add golden spoon to crafting v quest
• Decreased affixing tutorial RC exp from 50k to 500 :x
• Essence concentration strength UI made more clear
• Post soulbound resource check working as intended
• Clearer description for "Idling like a champ"
• More logging for errors that PLAGUE ME

0.20.0h

• Prepped ingredients can now be eaten directly; they're way worse than proper meals but are better than nothing!
• Refactored our session start and initialization system; this should make it significantly more robust and informative when errors occur
• Please report any session related errors, like getting stuck when connecting or not being able to load a character!

0.20.0i

• THOU SHALT ACKNOWLEDGE MOD POPUPS (by clicking a close button)
• Phoenix's Flame debuff now Overheating 3, down from Overheating 4
• Improved location de/buff handling (still kinda iffy when there's lag)
• Crashed shards should now at least attempt to recover crashed player sessions instead of ignoring them
• Cave Cleanup correctly rewards the lesser ladle instead of the legacy ladle
• More adjustments to session starting tolerances

0.20.0j

• Reduce heat and cooking time for simpler recipes
• ~20% less refining gems on forge 2
• Only auto-pin accepted quests
• Show next quests
• Fix invalid date string for end of season
• More backend cleanup tasks and refactoring

0.20.0k

• Fix a market snapshot error that made it never run, probably
• Slightly improved logging on our end for the farmingerrors that are probably just lag related
• Handle some marketplace item related errors
• Runecrafting enchantments can go on the runecrafting set
• Added item tags to the legendary skilling gear mats
• Turning on some process logging and updating software

0.20.0l

• Entirely a backend update
• Fixed the persistent crash from the last few days. WOOHOO