On the Horizon

0.21.6b

• Farming Variety update, check dev-blog for more info/reasoning
• Massive (hopefully) performance increase for inventory and chat rendering
• Added prismatic extract chance to UI
• Improved cooking UI
• Lots of misc UI improvements
• Fix auto-sorting abilities putting autos in the wrong spots
• Fix UI for the new ammo/rune preserving affixes

What's the Plan for 1.0?

Before I begin, I'd like to take a moment to remind everyone that Idlescape is completely volunteer run, from admins to chat mods. Nobody on the Idlescape staff team takes any salary and all our money goes back into paying for the servers and other upkeep costs to keep the game running.

Here's the basic breakdown of what's going on currently: The Steam client has issues that are cropping up now that we're further along in the Steam integration, with the chief (and only real remaining big one) problem being the Steam Wallet integration. Our backend system for handling payments was designed solely for our current payment provider and there are foundational changes that are still underway to make sure our payment systems can handle both the existing payment handling as well as Steam or other potential storefronts.

We cannot launch on Steam with only our existing non-Steam payments active as it would violate their terms, and we cannot remove those payment methods because platinum purchases and IS+ subs directly pay for our upkeep fees. If you have ever donated or purchased anything in Idlescape we cannot thank you enough for contributing to keeping the game running!

We were hoping to launch 1.0 and Steam at the same time this weekend (and not announce until we had a fully reviewed, functional, and approved build playtested), on the 29th, but as of right now we do not yet have a fully approved Steam build. We're exploring options to streamline getting a build approved and integrated, but even if a breakthrough occurs overnight there's still a 2 week review period for Steam to get back to us on it that will inherently cause a delay, assuming no issues on our end (unlikely lol).

Basically, the game itself is playable and works fine on Steam purely gameplay wise, but payment shenanigans and integrations are keeping us from launching it.

As for 1.0- it's been ready for weeks now. As a developer I don't really believe in holding onto functional features for no reason. This means that in a standard game dev environment the last few weeks of updates might be held to make 1.0 more impactful, but I'd rather just let you all have access to the content now. This is in part due to the fact we have no dedicated QA or testers, but also because I as a player want all the new, shiny stuff as soon as possible. This means that 1.0 is basically "just" the introduction of new permanent gamemodes, making existing ones legacy, and starting a true long-term fresh economy again.

Right now we are still aiming for 1.0 to drop with Steam instead of having it launch early. This decision has been made because we want to stuff as much polish and fixes into the game, continue working on early/mid-game balance, and have the time to implement the remaining designed quests before 1.0 launches. Also, I want more people to be able to reach the Pre-Launch level goal for the event tokens and icon!

We're working on solutions to the current Steam roadblock and expect it to be resolved within a couple weeks as early tests have shown a lot of promise in our local builds; however, as shown in the last couple months, the local and browser builds do not translate 1:1 to the Steam client.

I apologize for any undue hype that we can't live up to, but in our defense 1.0 was ready to launch a couple weeks ago! To be clear, we're not blaming Steam here, there's just a lot of delays in the review process that neither party can skip for various reasons.

TL;DR- 1.0 is ready, Steam Wallet is not. We're delaying 1.0 until Steam approves our builds, but they ask for ~2 weeks per review so even when it's ready there will be a delay.

Today's Update:

Balance Changes

• Significantly reduce chance to transform Reinforced Crossbows and Arbalests into the Witchhunter Handgonne. It was simply too easy and inexpensive to make a near best-in-slot ranged weapon.
• Reduced crafting experience gained from Militia Quiver and Rune Bag to match its level requirement and material cost
• Removed the Mining Prodigy requirement from Hamster Hunter. This means you can get the talent at level 60 Mining if you really wanted to!
• Shrine Quest now requires you to exceed your first personal threshold to receiving buffs, ~400k gold, to complete.
• Nerfed the abilities related to Wrath and War slightly so it doesn't have such high base effectiveness. This does NOT nerf the enrage bonus, so it's still really strong.
• Added relevant accuracy scaling to range auto attacks (Serrated Ammo, etc.)
• Massively reduced rune costs of abilities to make many spells more viable in a fresh economy
• Witchhunter Handgonne has been nerfed by ~5% accuracy and affinity, mostly because it just scales really, really well

New Things

• Updated Dark Vault key asset
• Dungeon leaderboard icons for Skilling Dungeons and the Dark Vault
• Added 3 new fishing baits- Smelly Fish Guts, Crustacean, and Improved Hook Baits. These are intended to be decent early/mid-game bait options that can let you reach certain bonus breakpoints when using your expected tier of gear.
• Added the Cooking Dungeon! This is the new source for Bleached Cloth and it can be accessed by cooking the Prismatic Pudding after finding Prismatic Extract randomly while cooking/preparing.
• New assets for the Ancient Trident
• New Physical and Elemental Accuracy scrolls. They are available at the same level as Accuracy with slightly modified recipes and give 3% bonus accuracy to relevant styles, up from Accuracy's 2.5%
• Added 12 new Combat accuracy related affixes and 4 new ammo/rune preservation related affixes. These are primarily on weapons, gloves, capes, and pendant/quiver slots.

Bug Fixes

• Fix shrine activation issues. This should fix the issue of certain shrines (like Ironmen, or seasonal modes) not generating buffs after the first, or not generating buffs at all. This is a HUGE fix for shrines. I also forgot to manually grant buffs so I'll give a bunch to everyone after the update goes live!
• Fixed Enlightened Parchment not having a scrapping recipe
• Hamster Hunter properly shown in UI timer
• Fix multiple "Inventory is empty!" messages

UI Tweaks and Improvements

• Improved quest ordering in lists
• Hidden talent tutorial if you have no mastery levels
• Added support for monster shields in the UI, currently only for Aberrant Shrimp. I apparently set it up to have it literally years ago and just kind of forgot about it entirely, oops!
• Added the Equipment Tab to mobile
• Improved the cultivation description
• Improve unaccepted quest and turn in ready quest notifications

What's next?

I'll keep you all updated on what's happening with Steam. For gameplay, we'll be focusing on more polishing and bug fixes as well as new and rebalanced content. For content, I'm planning on going through all the equipment and reevaluating their augmentation bonuses for accuracy to find any that are lacking, as well as looking through abilities and seeing if any have unnecessarily bad scaling. If there are items/abilities in specific you any you have in mind that need a look over, let me know!