Hey Keepers, We just wanted to let you know that today weve released a brand new demo on Steam for Dome Keeper, so if you or a friend are yet to try out the game - then you can now, for free! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1650980/Dome_Keeper_Demo/
Relic Hunt
In the demo you can play Relic Hunt, where you land on a world and start digging in order to find an ancient artifact, whilst also defending your dome from waves of attacking monsters! The demo version includes medium-sized maps with a choice of two primary gadgets - and theres also a choice of a few difficulty settings too. Try the default Brutal setting to get the core Dome Keeper experience, or play on Normal if you want a slightly more relaxed time.
Guild Assignments
Once youve played Relic Hunt you can also try out two Guild Assignments, which provide unique challenges that add a little extra spice to a run. Iron Contribution tasks you with delivering a large quantity of resources to the Keepers Guild, while Swiss Cheese changes the environment to add more caves whilst simultaneously making rocks tougher to dig through!
We hope you have a fun time with the demo and feel free to leave a review on the store page here! You can also follow us on Twitter and Bluesky, or join our Discord, to stay up to date with all things Dome Keeper. Thanks for the support as always, fellow Keepers!
Hey Keepers,
It's been a while since "A Keeper's Duty" released and we've been closely watching the feedback. We incorporated this into some improvements and a lot of balance changes.
Prestige
Because of the big changes to balance, we are starting season 7 for prestige now. Please keep in mind the warning about fairness that you see ingame: People who use exploits to gain the highest scores (top 100) will get banned. Don't worry about accidental use - the cases that are bannable are excessive and very structured with the exploit usage. Some parts of cheat detection are automated, sometimes i go over it manually and delete scores and possibly ban people. If you want to appeal for a ban, contact me. But i don't have time for a "ok i cheated but now i will stop" scenarios, as this is time that i don't spend making the game better for everyone.
Modding
With the port to Godot 4, the ways the game can be modded changed a lot engine side and that required a lot of work on our end. Modding is now supported properly again, with improvements to the modding popup ensuring compatibility. We have some plans to push modding a bit in the future. One part of that is making a more mod-friendly modding EULA. If you are a modder and have an example of a EULA you like, please share.
Future Plans
Don't expect exciting content in the near future. As explained with the last update, we don't have any content lined up now. Our efforts will go into two things now: multiplayer and consoles. We can't confirm any consoles yet and don't have a date for multiplayer. Just know that we are on it, it's our focus now.
Changelog
Here is what's new for v4.1.0:
Additions, Improvements and Changes
- started season 7 for prestige after vast balance changes
- massively improved performance. Also added option to render game at half resolution, which looks very similar but should run much faster.
- improved modding and made it compatible with v4 of Dome. You'll now get info in the modding popup about mods being incompatible due to not being updated to the latest version.
- added restart button to pause menu
- Anti Stall should work properly now
- drones don't bug out when resources are unreachable
- added overcharge tutorial
- improved visual clarity of tesla reticle
- brightness setting now works again
- fixed cases of extractor and converter pushing resources out of the map
- shredder now shreds faster when there are a lot of resources
- improved map generation for chambers, as sometimes they were placed too far from their ideal place, heavily affecting the runs difficulty
- chambers are a light source now too and can be seen through the vignette
- a ton of other bugfixes
Balance
- Engineer: changed Power Drill a bit. Slightly lower speedup than before, and the hardness mechanics is changed by simply buffing drill against hard rocks instead of treating the hard rock all as medium density rock.
- Assessor: Split has lower cooldown again. Spheres also get a global speed buff with the supplement.
- One way Teleporter: cooldown from 20s -> 5s. It now can also teleport items, gadgets and supplements.
- Laser: DPS increase, last stage 180 -> 210
- Tesla: changed base damage being higher early and lower late, last stage 180 -> 155. Slightly reduced quick shot strength and orb stun strength.
- Artillery: increased stun size of deafening blast a bit
- Repellent: Growth time 1.5 cycles initially, going to 0.9 with upgrades.
- Orchard: Growth time going to 0.9 cycles with upgrades. Increased buff strength and duration.
- Droneyard: Slightly slower drones initially and slightly higher upgrade cost. Slightly fewer battle drones overall.
- Furnace: increased wave delay, decreased how long resources last in burning.
- Spire: added supplement that slows down monster projectiles globally by 40%
- Chainsaw: increased damage, last stage 65 -> 80. Also fixed speed upgrade not doing anything.
- Drillbert: buffed drill strength. Drillbert won't get scared anymore during battles, if you have the supplement.
- Mushroom: Added upgrade to automatically consume mushrooms on flyby. Added upgrade to make mushrooms grow quicker in the dome.
- Resource Packer: 5s longer recharge by default. Upgrades now also make the packs shrink more. Added supplement that brings cooldown to 1.5s
- Shockwave: More expensive, slightly less damage and stun strength. Supplement cooldown addition 5s -> 8s and +1 stun strength
- Lift: now also speeds up the keeper when going downward inside it
- Missiles: Damage increased, last stage 200 -> 250
- Gadget Chambers in prestige don't go quite as deep
- Mineral Tree grows much faster
Hey Keepers,
today is a special day, because we celebrate the two year anniversary of releasing Dome Keeper. Not only that, but we also just hit 1.000.000 players, which is an insane milestone we could not have dreamt of back in April 2021 when we made a small game in 3 days for Ludum Dare 48. Back then we were hobbyists, just following our passion while working full time jobs. By all means, Dome Keeper has been a life-changing experience for us. You, the players and our awesome community are at the heart of that. From the first larger playtest in September 2021, over the many updates and patches toward the release of A Keepers Duty, youve played a crucial role in making a fun game. Thank you!
Celebrating two year anniversary
Lets celebrate together! The lovely Jarvs is back and well do a stream today at 17:30 CEST over on YouTube and Twitch. Well hang out, chat with you and play the game. Im most excited to share an awesome thing though, reveal in the stream. Its not inside Dome Keeper, no new content or plans, but still something super cool game related. Join us and lets celebrate! We'll start with one thing we are so happy about. At Gamescom 2023 we gave away Drillbert plushies to people who drew Drillbert. The result was a vast amount of amazing drawings. The breadth of what we see here is simply fantastic, we love it! Check out the full collection via the link below.
https://drillberts.bippinbits.com/
So many updates!
Im a bit sentimental looking back on all of these. With each update we not only added new content, but also worked to improve the balance and fix a lot of bugs. There were plenty of hotfixes and patches in between, but these were the most important updates:
Release
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3307354336740716276
Halloween Update
bringing the cosmetic skeleton suit and pet. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3409813763388467185
The Assessor
brings in the second keeper, complete with its own full OST. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3428955345103485749
Caves & Critters
added caves into the mines as well as small creatures living there, bringing a bit of variety to the underground experience. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3496511138517853772
Hard pressed
adding the scarab and stab monsters, the Miner mode for prestige and a own world background for prestige. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3649634951896445163
Springloaded
bringing 3 new gadgets with Spire, Autocannon, Prospection Meter. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3668782792567448910
Drillbert Mode
announced as April Fools, while doing a switcheroo and actually adding Drillbert mode to the game! https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/6384455987842263498
Re-Assessor
reworking the Assessor and changing the mechanics significantly. The old Assessor was definitely an aquired taste and the new one proved much more fun. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3716076292751694859
Mod Support
enabling Steamworkshop mods. Raffa in our team made the first mod as an example, the Hydra Launcher. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3649653272173229011
Double Dome
adding Tesla and Artillery dome to the game. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3731852209660535303
Merry Christmouse
adding mouse support to the game, a much requested feature. Also came with a christmas skin for the assessor. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3869217710016267898
Lunar New Year
adding a new cave with a special pet. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/4062878364658405866
A Keepers Duty
adding Guild Assignments, the Droneyard, 11 new gadgets, Supplements for gadgets and weapons, a new world and 5 new monsters. Its a bit crazy to list this, maybe it shows how huge that update was comparatively. https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/4396159337027279925 As you can see, we progressively made larger and larger patches that naturally needed a bit longer to develop. To be honest, the pace was sometimes a bit grueling, but it was also so exciting and fun to see you all get hyped and play the game a lot. Very motivating!
v4.1 in October
Since the release of A Keepers Duty we received a ton of balancing feedback. We also saw some new exploits for prestige, and how a countermeasure wasnt effective. Right now we are working on a patch that aims to improve balance across the whole game. Many bugs will be fixed and it will also take better care of a few exploits. With the big balance changes, well start season 7 for prestige. Ill also clean the leaderboards of season 6 of any obviously cheated runs. We are also hard at work to bring back full mod support, that broke due to the engine upgrade from Godot 3 to Godot 4. The way many mods worked simply was not supported with Godot 4 anymore, and we are working on workarounds and new ways of modding so we can see more cool mods in the future.
Whats up for 2025
The next big thing for Dome Keeper is MULTIPLAYER. It is by far the most requested feature and finally after adding content for two years, it is time for multiplayer. A Keepers Duty was our last big content update, at least for now, and well finish development of Dome Keeper with a bang, i hope. So how does the multiplayer development look like? We can differentiate two parts here: split screen local multiplayer and online multiplayer across two or more machines.
The very first test for local coop back in Dome Romantik times. Local multiplayer is relatively easy to do. It needs a huge refactoring in the code base, but its doable. I already implemented local coop last year. Its playable, but needs a lot of tuning. The challenge with online multiplayer is much greater, as the game is so far not built to support that. That means rethinking the whole game on a technical level. Usually developers decide at the beginning of a project for or against multiplayer, as such major changes get increasingly harder over time (often prohibitively hard). We still want to take a stab at it and see if we can get it done. This also means it will get quiet on the development side at least for the rest of this year. We got some implementation to do! This is also a big reason we want to fully enable and foster mods - more on that in the future. So how will multiplayer look like exactly? Well, we'll share details in the future. We got plenty of feedback over the past years and lots of our own ideas too. That should be a lot of fun!
So, who likes fun?
Ok, to wrap this up, here are some fun facts! Fun Facts
- Drillbert was originally planned to be a tunnel digging machine similar to what you see in real life. Anne had the great idea of making it into a likeable animal instead. In the code it is still called Drillbot though.
- Dome Keepers jam version was called Dome Romantik, as a pun on Dorfromantik, which was very popular back then (and still is a great game from super nice devs).
- the biggest influences on Dome Keeper are Kingdom and Into the Breach. Most people expect games like Motherload or Steamworld Dig here, but i never had played them before making Dome.
- Dome Keeper inspired some other devs to make related games, like the recently released Feed the Deep. We are really happy about that and see it as a big compliment.
- There are 320 upgrades in Dome Keeper, with 35 supplements inside 37 tech trees.
- in june 2021 we celebrated the big milestone of having 100 people on our discord, for which anne made a special graphic. Later our composer Cameron got into the habit of making celebratory tracks for the next discord member milestones.
- i wrote a post-mortem of the game jam version of Dome Keeper
- As April fools in 2022 we announced to rename to Dome Romantic and switch direction more into a The Sims meets Space Mining. It said
Build your bachelor dome and get to work in the mines of alien planets. Improve your mining skills, get elegant furniture and expand your dome. When everything's spiffy, invite your hot neighbor over for dinner, because it gets lonely fast in the domes. Don't forget to buy some curtains first, it's a glass dome after all.
So thank you for (with development time) 3 years of making us happy game devs! See you soon :)
Hey Keepers,
It seems we are reaching more stable territorry now, with the fix and change list becoming shorter. Thank you all for the plentiful reports! I was pushing this forward really quickly because i'm trying to take a few days off this week, before Gamescom madness starts. So if i'm replying less you'll know why, but i'll read everything eventually and keep my eyes open for critical bugs. Here is what's new for v4.0.4:
Balance and Changes
- added frames around icons for damage dealt statistic
- now differentiating between tesla quick shot, orbs and normal damage in damage dealt statistic
- anti stall is now disabled for defective weapon assignment
- added auto cannon to list of damage dealt entries
- auto cannon will only lead shots where appropriate and better deal with ticks
Bugfixes
- fixed mining summary popup being behind run finished popup
- fixed tech tree popup overlaying HUD with health bar
- fixed potential crash when having no pet selected in loadout
- fixed battle zooming in when anti stall was triggered, even though there were still monsters around
- fixed probe restoring charges on reloading
Hey Keepers,
thank you so much for your feedback. I hope you can see that we really value that. You might have noticed the fast patch pace. It's the weekend, no QA works at the moment. This means i can fix a lot of stuff, but also some things that i break are not caught before they reach you. So i really appreciate your plentiful bug reports. I'm around :) Two big things are in this patch: [olist]
Balance and Changes
- challenge assignments are back to "brutal" difficulty from "YAFI". The impact was too high. Feedback appreciated!
- lowered assignment difficulty on some assignments
- lowered final wave strength for most assignments
- fonts should generally not be blurry anymore
- changed anti stall mechanic. Instead of restarting the wave, the countdown to the next one will begin.
- battle grid drones will now spawn even if bought during battle
- drones can now pick up resources from converter and are a bit hardened against drops that are at invalid positions
Bugfixes
- fixed shopping bag achievement not triggering
- fixed repellents toxic fumes not dealing damage any more
- fixed converter achievement not triggering when automated conversion is used
- fixed primary weapon tech tree being available even when no primary weapon is installed in the dome
- actually fixed converter not behaving well with 0.5 iron input
- wave meter now properly initialises if there is a wave delay ongoing
Hey Keepers,
thank you for the plentiful reports. I pushed a lot today and was able to at least catch up with the bug reports and make a lot of fixes. This is basically a hotfix, so i need to rely on you a bit for feedback again, if i broke anything with the patch. Can definitely happen, but i can fix it quickly :) I investigated a bit and found many nodes that were not properly cleaned up, similar to a memory leak. This could greatly impact performance over time (but would reset on reload). Buzz saw was broken, not taking the supplement and vanishing on reload. That's fixed now. Lastly, Tesla orbs were messed up. Instead of doing 25 damage, they did base damage * 2500%. This meant a ton of damage, but also that they vanished immediately. This is fixed now. Here is what's new for v4.0.2:
Balance and Changes
- fixed many nodes not being cleaned up properly, which could lead to really bad performance over time
- chosen difficulty is now remembered per assignment
- converter now spits out resources more slowly, gives them an impulse and makes them float so they don't drop down into the mine
- dome resurrection will now trigger before auto repair
- invulnerability from dome resurrection now shows proper effect
- improved minimap colors for resources in remote station
- made resource teleportation via teleporter quicker
- added resource teleportation cooldown to upgrade stats
- made hornet pause a less long mid air, when flying towards the dome
- improved layout of upgrade icons and numbers in damage dealt statistic
- removed bolter from projectile hell, removed breeder from heavy hitter assignment
Bugfixes
- fixed chainsaw going missing on reload
- fixed tesla orbs accidentally doing way too much damage
- fixed breeder immensely lowering the difficulty of a wave by limiting how many monsters can spawn
- fixed egg not hatching if it was not visible on screen for long enough
- fixed modloader exception when disable_all_mods is called when transitioning to godot4
- iron worms now account for shortened cycles in prestige
- fixed options always showing game options instead of last shown category
- fixed bug in cave tree seed when destroying tile it was rooting
- fixed issue when picking up cave bomb as assessor
- fixed resource teleportation not working for assessor bundles
- fixed battle drone release sound playing on master bus, ignoring all sound settings
- fixed iron worms bugging out when the tile they are attaching to is destroyed
- fixed damage statistics not being scrollable with controller
- fixed water from water cave not spawning at the right position
- fixed water cave having graphical error when moving far to the sides
- fixed crash in loadout when fighting monsters
- fixed bug with saving probe markers
- fixed side driller behaviour when in combat and when paused
- fixed hornet stabbing the dome from a distance if it was stunned on the last leg of its flight
- improved hitbox of phaser to play nicer with laser dome
- iron worm cage won't attach to tiles if it is carried
- improved shield position on arty dome
- fixed relic hunt run without monsters not ending properly on relic retrieval
Have you seen this awesome assessor artwork? Thank you again for playing <3
Hey Keepers,
it has been great to see how many of you are enjoying the new update! I'm constantly reading your feedback and bug reports and try my best to keep up, which i can't quite manage yet. I do read everything over time though, even if don't immediately respond, and we take everything into our bug tracking. If you have feedback on the difficulty, please provide some details what you were playing and what you struggled with. Especially if you play assignments it is crucial to know which one you played and if it was regular or challenge. I'll continuously tweak the balance according to your feedback.
Can you spot the change with the iron and water tiles? Here is what's new for v4.0.1:
Balance and Changes
- made final wave harder again
- added additional resource sprites
- rebalanced how fast monsters can spawn after each other during one wave and made it faster for high difficulties
- battle drones now show up as damage source
- improved stall detection
- cascading impact will now only affect rock tiles, no resources
- increased iron worm cost slightly, removed prolonged production time for meticulous worms
- assessor bundles try to stay together a bit more when flying on their own
- fixed cave seed not growing into a small tree if not visible on screen
- water and iron cave now do not produce when game is paused. Water has up to 3 water now.
- multiplayerloadout will auto persist meta state on changes
- Intensive treatment upgrade of converter is now much faster
- chosen assignment is now displayed in tech tree
- tesla orbs stats are a fixed value instead of being a percentage of shot damage now
- if multiple monsters are inside a tesla orb, damage is spread across all monsters but stun applies fully
- made loadout part of the loadout mine a bit nicer
- delivery assignments do not have repeatable upgrades now, but one big upgrade
- made drone speed upgrades a bit more expensive and quick drones have fewer shots
- shockwave hammer supplement damage is now a modifier on the base damage, to avoid having a tiny hammer supplemented with great damage and low cooldown
- halved how fast squidley would gain speed
- small performance increase
- improved many sounds
- added missing icons, fixed some icon sizes, improved some icons
- increased battle drone range
- less health for bloater
- added pause as an option to keybindings
- assessor doesn't ignore the increased tile health in the dense iron assignment any more
Bugfixes
- fixed central marker not visible for assessor if bought via upgrade
- fixed crash that could happen when using resource packe
- larger mine area in mode config to compensate languages with long texts
- fixed telemetry popup not having focus on a button
- fixed exploit with manually mining tiles that are currently being mined by iron worms
- fixed scrap repair not being purchasable
- fixed accidentally offering to shred to 3 cobalt instead of 2, if three gadgets were offered
- fixed iron worms not showing up correctly in timelapse
- fixed intro music restarting when switching scenes while looping part plays
- fixed generation of split spheres not set correctly for one of the children, resulting in cascading impact working accidentally on child spheres
- removed old rotational mining code that was causing 4 fixed pixels on the assessor
- fixed conversion with 0.5 iron not working correctly (should consume one iron)
- name for fixed cobalt mode is back
- hardened loadout against non-existant keeper skins, so it won't crash if an old skin from a mod is persisted
- fixed shopping bag achievement triggering when using remote station
- fixed minimap rendering resource drops wrongly
- fixed local not switching completely when changing language in loadout stage
- fixed cheat detection limits not fitting provocation
- fixed unbreakable rock in loadout
- added missing patch notes for v4.0
- fixed bloater not actually shrinking faster if no monsters were around
- fixed resource teleportation being audible in the whole world
- fixed artillery station visual error on exitting station
- packed drop will now also properly shred and shrink
- fixed wrong message in assignments about possibly getting another badge if beating challenge mode without having played regular mode
There's never been a better time to get in on the Dome Keeper, Base Defending action!
Dome Keeper has just dropped it's largest update ever and what better way to celebrate than with a sale and a fest?
Dome Keeper and it's associated DLCs will be on sale from now until the end of the Steam Tower Defense Fest, so make sure to get in on the action before you lose your base!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/27954/Dome_Keeper_Deluxe_Edition/
[previewyoutube=OCiqPfZv0mI;full][/previewyoutube]
Hello Keepers,
after a good month of open beta we are very excited to share our newest content update with you! It is by far the largest update we ever made. As with all the updates before, we ran playtests via our Discord. Only thanks to your feedback and suggestions Dome Keeper could become the game it is now. This is not an empty phrase, but the honest truth. I can see it in every playtest: the game comes out of it way better than it went into the playtest. Thank you so much for that, we are very grateful! As developers, nothing brings us more joy than seeing you get excited about the game and having fun with it.
tl;dr - whats new?
- New game mode: Guild Assignments
- New primary gadget: Droneyard
- 11 new gadgets
- Supplement upgrades for weapons and gadgets
- Prestige mode overhaul
- New world and 5 monsters
- thorough balancing and reworks on existing content
- New loadout menu in preparation of multiplayer
Important Notes
- There are some changes in Godot4 that fundamentally break the way mods where developed in the previous versions of the game. To avoid crashes caused by these changes we have decided to temporarily disable mods for A Keepers Duty. We've been talking with the great people over at the Godot Foundation who are actively looking into this matter. We look forward to reenabling mods as soon as it is safe. For the veteran modders who whish to charter these unstable territories: You can re-activate mods by adding the "--enable-mods" launch option.
- we are keeping the old version around on a branch called legacy-godot3. If you have serious technical trouble with this update, please let us know. You can keep playing on the old branch until we can fix it.
- In order to integrate the new systems and balance the game in a good way, we needed to make some changes to existing systems and upgrades. Youll see many new upgrades for gadgets and weapons, but also some that were removed. Some existing upgrades also got transformed into supplements, usually with a big buff.
- The loadout screen needed to be changed as well, to support all the new features and also multiplayer down the line. We understand that not everyone will like everything but please understand we are trying our best to improve the game, and this sometimes also means changing something you may have liked.
Whats the goal of this update?
One of the most common wishes for Dome Keeper is more run variety and bigger replayability. We very much agree with that! So far we concentrated our effort on offering more options in your loadout by adding the assessor, artillery dome and tesla dome, among many smaller content patches. Finally it is time to really double down on what options you get during your run. The purpose of this update is that you can think about many more strategies, try different builds, face new challenges and generally get much more replayability out of the game. For that we really went beyond in new things to play with!
The new content?
Guild Assignments
Up until now, you could build your own self-imposed challenge runs in many different ways. While this is fun for some players, it is not for everyone and also limited in what is possible. To pose new and interesting challenges, we added a new game mode called Guild Assignment. In that mode you pick an assignment with some special conditions and goals. They are designed to be an interesting break from the usual gameplay, but also to pose a challenge in finding a good build for that situation. For example, landing on a planet that only has monsters shooting projectiles should make you think different about your defense. Mining in a world that has a very large area with soft rock and rare-but-large resource deposits will challenge how you actually find these resources. And a world with inverse gravity inside the mine is simply fun.
Each assignment comes in a regular difficulty and a challenge difficulty. We are curious to see you experiment with different builds to be able to beat the challenge mode. You are not finishing the assignments only for the fun of it though. With each assignment, you can earn two Keepers Guild Badges, one for the regular mode and one for the challenge mode. You can spend the earned badges on some permanent rewards, like always being offered three instead of two gadgets, being able to reroll gadget offers, starting each run with some hud elements or additional post run statistics. These rewards apply to every game mode, including prestige and relic hunt.
New Gadgets and supplements
Gadgets are a key ingredient in changing how your run plays out. Therefore, we really wanted to offer more gadget variety, but also make them more powerful and meaningful. The goal was always for the run to feel different after getting a new gadget, and that wasnt true for each one.
Armed to the teeth - with new gadgets & supplements. Chief among the new gadgets is the new primary gadget, the Droneyard. It supplies transport drones to carry resources from the mine into the dome, relieving you from that laborious task. For combat it fields two varieties of combat drones. The battle drones form a grid on around the dome and fire projectiles at monsters. The parasitic drones on the other hand infect monsters, slowing them and making them more susceptible to damage.
Tired of carrying resources? The transport drones got your back. So far you had the choice of 11 gadgets that you could find during a run. With this update, we are bringing this up to 22 gadgets! They are all quite different - from a buzz saw making quick work of melee monsters attacking your domes, over the resource packer which bundles up resources into easily carryable packages, to the underground station that lets you access your domes battle mode from deep within the mine. A few gadgets so far were no-brainers, like lift and spire, simply because they were the only gadget that could go into the given slot. This is different now, with each slot having the choice of at least 3 gadgets, making it an actual choice. The old gadgets also got quite some love. The probe has a new path where it can reveal rock permanently. Super useful to remember which parts you already scanned. Blast mining received a big buff, a new stage and a big improvement to impact detonation. The latter will now direct the explosion into the impact direction, making it possible to much more strategically remove iron clusters. Before, you usually wanted to dig into the cluster a bit so you could trigger the bomb in the center of the cluster. This was not very efficient though. Lastly, each gadget comes with a supplement upgrade. For many old gadgets, this means that an existing upgrade is not inside the tech tree anymore, but you can get it for free once you retrieve a supplement from the mine. Supplements are supposed to be very strong upgrades that meaningfully change the dynamic of a gadget, either in powerlevel or in usage. A great example for this is the teleporter. So far, you could unlock an upgrade so it would teleport resources, slowly one by one. This was useful but ultimately quite limited in how strong it could be, because otherwise the lift would be obsolete. With the supplements, things change, because if you are getting a supplement upgrade for the teleporter, it means not getting the supplement upgrade for the weapon (yet). This means the resource teleportation can go much faster, being overall more useful and having a higher impact on your run. Before and after of the resource teleportation.
Weapon supplements
Same as the gadgets, the dome weapons also each got a supplement upgrade. For most domes it is not a completely new upgrade, but a rework of something existing. The laser dome has double laser as a supplement. This means you cant buy it, but also that you can get it much earlier for no iron cost. In addition, the laser dome got a new laser strength upgrade. The sword dome got a big buff for long stab, being able to speed up the stab and keep stabbing monster for much longer. The supplement is about mounting the stab bomb, which can now also be done with Javelin.
A lot of monster stabbing going on here. Tesla overall was not in a great position. It felt too weak in most cases but at the same time was the strongest dome - just check the leaderboard for endless mode. No competition. To fix that, perfect timing became a supplement. This means the base shots can be stronger, as they would have been too strong if you can just buy perfect timing. That makes the tesla dome feel stronger from the get go, while the buffs to the other domes should make them more competitive. Finally, the artillery dome got a supplement that stuns close monsters whenever you fire a mortar shot. This helps a lot reduce the weakness of the artillery dome, where it might get a lot of damage once melee monsters reached it.
Prestige mode overhaul
The revamped Prestige mode loadout. After playing Prestige extensively, I decided to revise the current modes in close coordination with our Prestige player community on Discord. If youd like to chat to other Prestige players, share strategies or give feedback that will directly influence how Prestige works in the future, join our Discord Server. These were the main concerns the community and I had with the current Prestige variants:
- Endless mode runs are too long, with the top runs going for up to 10 hours
- Fixed Cobalt modewhile different in theoryended up with the same strategies as Endless mode, where players wante to upgrade as fast as possible, and then only cared about avoiding damage as much as possible.
- The last part of a Countdown run did not feel very engaging, because youd get only a tiny amount of points compared to what you already had.
- removed Fixed Cobalt
- added Provocation Prestige Variant:
Your score multiplier is falling with each cycle and can only be raised by increasing the wave strength. You start with 100 base per wave and can only raise it a bit. If your multiplier reaches negative values, the game is over. The idea is to challenge you to play on the edge of what you can handle monster-wise. - changed the difficulty curve so that the ceiling of what you can handle in endless is reached earlier, preventing players from getting to wave 90+
- Countdown now ends simply after 20 cycles, even if your multiplier has not reached 0 yet. This way you dont have to wait through the least impactful part of the run.
New world and 5 monsters
We added a new world to spice things up visually, but also make room for a new setup of which monsters can spawn in which world.
Striders be striding. The 5 new monsters will pose some new challenges too. A few of them are a bit special and worth talking about a bit more. Here we have the bloater. If not shot at, it will simply vanish after some time. If it received enough damage, it will eventually burst, releasing a bunch of walkers. Then we got the breeder, continuously spawning new ticks. After it receives a bunch of damage, it will harden itself and only take a fraction of the usual damage. It comes out of its hardened state after a short while. Lastly, we got the tormentor. By far the monster with the highest damage potential in the game. Its a monster that sacrifices its physical form to shoot an incredibly strong laser. Timing is key here: when the tormentor transforms, it also loses most of its health, which is quite high initially. Then you only have a few seconds to dispatch it before it fires its laser, which can take down any dome in seconds.
Engine Port
We upgraded Dome from Godot 3 to Godot 4. It might not sound too bad, but it was a massive undertaking. We did this mostly for a few reasons:
- make console ports easier
- make multiplayer easier
- future proof the project. Godot 4 is just much better to work with.
- Support for right-to-left languages, i.e. arabic. The community on crowdin already translated arabic, and we are excited that they can finally make use of their hard work.
New Map Generation
With the engine upgrade, we also had the opportunity to take another look at map generation. We overhauled the system and now can generate much more interesting maps. Before, every map was mostly blob shaped, with few interesting structures. In the new generation, we can get much more unique shapes, making the runs more interesting and less predictable.
Comparing old and new maps.
The new maze maps are wild! In addition to that, you can now find natural caves in the mine, breaking some of the monotony of mining.
Timelapse
Its only something small, but something we find really fun: timelapses of runs. You can unlock this as a guild reward. It even exports as a gif. Mhhh, satisfying!
Whats the status of multiplayer?
One big reason to make this update was to have a much better base game in anticipation of releasing multiplayer. It would be sad to finally have (much-requested) multiplayer implemented, but the replayability is just not where it could be. We are excited to speak more about the multiplayer, but we dont want to get your hopes up before we figured out some technical things. Well ramp up work on multiplayer in September and keep you updated.
Final Words
Thats it! We put a lot of effort into the update and are very thankful for all the feedback and bug reports we got so far. We will continue to listen to you, our community, to improve Dome where its needed. There are hundreds of more, smaller improvements. Too many to list. We hope youll have fun with the update. If you experience issues, let us know on Discord or on the Steam forums and well do our best to fix it or help you. Best Wishes, Ren
Changelog v4.0 A Keepers Duty
New Content
Game Modes
- added Assignment game mode with 16 assignments. They come with special rules and are meant as a challenge to figure out a good strategy utilizing all the content. They also come with a challenge mode, if you really want to prove your skills. Completing assignments ears you badges from the Keeper's Guild.
- added Keeper's Guild reward shop, where you can spend earned badges on permanent benefits. Currently there are 12 rewards to unlock. Rewards are active across all game modes, not only in the new Assignment mode.
- added Keeper's Guild Badge rank, where you can see how mandy badges you and your friends earned
- replaced "Fixed Cobalt" prestige variant with "Provocation". Fixed Cobalt was barely played by anyone and the same strategy as used with endless mode was ideal there. This made the mode somewhat redundant. Instead, we added a variant where you can increase how strong the monster waves are in return for more points. That should be fun!
- implemented completely new loadout. This was necessary as the old loadout was not suited to support the new content plans, but more importantly it would not work with multiplayer. For multiplayer we needed something that supports multiple players making choices together. We can't reasonably support two different loadouts, so we opted for this one. Some things in it are better than before, but for controller or keyboard only it is probably a bit slower than the old loadout. Let us know if you encounter things that are irritating, feel unpolished or badly usable. It definitely can use some more improvements adn we closely listen to your feedback here. It will definitely stay, because we need it for multiplayer.
Supplements
- you might know supplements as these strong upgrades that you can get for your dome, that introduce new upgrades into the tree. We added a ton of them for this update. They can be found in supplement chambers after you unlock supplements with your guild badges. Generally they offer very strong upgrades. This is possible because they cannot be bought freely, but have to be weighed against each other.
- added 3 keeper supplements, one for each keeper and a shared one. The shared one is the one way teleporter from the cave. That cave was removed. It is much more interesting to have as a keeper supplement, especially since it is such a strong ability.
- added 4 weapon supplements, one for each weapon. Some are already existing upgrades retrofitted into supplements, but some are new ones.
- added 20 gadget supplements. Same as with weapons, some already existed. For each gadget we did what made the gadget as a whole more interesting. For example, the teleporter has its resource teleportation as a supplement now. This also means that it can be much stronger, teleporting resources much faster.
Gadgets
- added a total of 11 new gadgets. For reference, so far the game only had 11 gadgets! They are in no particular order: Remote Station, Drilling Rig, Furnace, Iron Worms, Mushroom Farm, Resource Packer, Suitblaster, Buzzsaw, Dome Armor, Shockwave, Rocket Launcer. They occupy different slots and help in different areas. They also finally do away with some gadget slots only having one option, like lift or spire, meaning there was no interesting decision to be had there.
- added a new primary gadget, the Drone Yard. It employs transport drones that help you bring back resources to the dome. For combat, it can use battle drones that fire projectiles at monsters, or parasitic drones that weaken monsters a lot.
- rework of all existing gadgets. For some gadgets the changes are tiny, for some gadgets the changes are very big. Blast Mining is much stronger and more useful now, with new upgrades and a rework of some existing upgrades. Same for probe, just as two examples.
Other
- added five new monsters, posing new challenges and extending the late game difficulty
- added a sixth world into the rotation for relic hunt and assignments. Worlds are a visual change, for variety only.
- added 3 new caves: Iron Tree Cave, Water Cave, Portal Cave.
- completely new map generation, more on that below
- we ported the game to a new engine version, in preparation of multiplayer and console ports. This comes with many benefits but also with some issues. The following things are related to this:
- support for right-to-left languages now, i.e. arabic
- keybinding should be sensical for non QWERTY keyboard now by default
- performance on some machines will be better, but will also be worse on others. We'll try our best to optimize when we learn there are issues, and find solutions to improve performance together.
- font colors are now using palette colors
Balance and Changes
Game Modes and Runs
- started season 6 of prestige
- changed difficulty curve of prestige, so that the games would not go quite as long and to compensate the new battle abilities
- Prestige Countdown will now end after 20 cycles always. This removes the last bit of the run that meant gaining very few points for a lot of effort.
- added timelapse feature to the game, where you can view your run as a minimap over time
- added detailed statistics that show you how many monsters per type you killed and what dealt damage and how much. We'll try to improve the differentiation of the damage sources a bit, right now it is a rough lense to look through.
- changed how long cycles are. They start out about 10s longer initially and will generally be longer early, but shorter in very late stages of the game.
- most gadgets keep working during combat now, so no lift stopping a cobalt delivery anymore. This is a big change, because suddenly it would be benefitial to stall waves, or to keep sitting in the station after a battle. Because of this, the countdown to the next wave will start even if you keep sitting in the station.
- if a battle takes too long at too low battle intensity, new monsters will spawn. This is to prevent stalling slightly, but it also makes sense in the world. 500 other monsters would not delay their attack only because there is a single flyer still fighting the dome.
- cobalt upgrade in prestige countdown now starts at a cost of 2 cobalt
- raised cheat detection values to absurd values. No more false positives because you are an insanely good player.
Map Generation
- maps will have much more interesting shapes now, instead of being always a similar blob
- biome sizes are balanced in size now, so that maps that are thin at the top do not have a huge disadvantage
- map sizes for prestige are balanced now. Before, the number of tiles in a map could vary a lot. Now the algorithm tries to bring it close to a given size, making it more consistent.
- totally new layout for maze maps that is crazy!
- the maps now have natural caves inside them, basically holes inside the rock
- the new map generation might take significantly longer than before. Let us know if it is a problem!
- rebalanced resource generation a bit
Domes and Weapons
- all upgrade costs have been reconsidered. Generally, late game upgrades will need a bit more iron.
- Sword Dome: 1000 hp -> 1200 hp
- Dome Supplement: Melee Damage Reduction 20% -> 25%
- Dome Supplement: Projectile Damage Reduction 20% -> 25%
- Dome Supplement: Electrified Surface 8 dps -> 10 dps, 20 dps -> 24 dps
- Dome Supplement: Thorough Combat Repair 300 hp -> 360 hp healed
- Dome Supplement: Dome Resurrection - instead of adding more hp to the maximum hp of the dome, it makes the dome invulnerable for 20s when triggered, or 30s after upgrading.
- Dome Supplement: Scrap Repair: 100 hp -> 75hp health reduction
- Laser: buffed laser damage and made it slightly slower
- Laser: added another stage to laser damage upgrades. Before maximum laser damage was 90 dps, now it is 180 dps.
- Laser: double laser is now a weapon supplement
- Sword: bomb stab is now a weapon supplement. This means you can also combine javelin with bomb stab.
- Sword: added another upgrade to long stab. In its subtree, it now also gets the ability to speed up on button press. It also can stab for much much longer, as it never retracts automatically after dealing some damage.
- Artillery: rotation speed 0.9 -> 1.0
- Artillery Monster Buster: buffed mortar damage and reduced time to reload
- Artillery Volatile Explosives: reduced time to reload
- Artillery: switched both rotation upgrades, so you can get the fast rotation earlier
- Artillery: added Deafening Blast supplement, which stuns all close monsters whenever you fire the mortar
- Tesla: removed perfect timing. This is now its weapon supplement.
- Tesla: buffed damage significantly from 30 -> 40, 45 -> 70, 60 -> 110, 80 -> 180. This is only possible due to removing perfect timing from the regular tree.
Keepers
- Engineer: Added power drill supplement, making drilling faster and enabling drilling through previously indestructible bedrock.
- Buffed Engineer drill strength: 6 -> 7, 14 -> 18, 34 -> 42, 62 -> 98, 240% -> 300%.
- Assessor: Added sphere supplement that destroys neighboring tile for every tile a sphere destroys.
- Slight increase in late stage iron cost for both keepers, slightly more increase for assessor
- Buffed Assessor repetable sphere damage: 240% -> 250%
- slightly buffed Assessor bundle duration: 25s -> 30s, 40s -> 45s
- rebalanced assessor battle abilities. Reflection is a bit better, the other two slightly longer cooldown with split spheres lasting longer.
- added one way teleporter as keeper supplement
Primary Gadgets
- Upgrade costs are all rebalanced. Battle abilities now each cost one cobalt instead of water.
- Changed overcharge mechanic: it now only affects battle abilities. The effect it had before was too convoluted and difficult to understand and predict, with too many special cases. All upgrades for overcharge have changed.
- Shield Electro Blast: the time bonus for using it after the shield depleted is a bit lower, but now you get a second use for it in one battle. Big buff!
- Orchard: you can get another use of a battle ability if you overcharge
- Orchard: Root explosion does less damage now, always 100 damage
- Orchard: the buff starts slightly weaker, but the upgrades improving it make it much stronger than before
- Added Drone Yard
Gadgets
- Reworked gadget slots a bit. The keeper suit is now a proper slot for gadgets, and only one gadget can go into it. This means you cannot have the probe and the prospection meter at the same time, for example.
- Upgrade costs are all rebalanced, with late stage upgrades costing more iron.
- Added Remote Station and supplement
- Added Drilling Rig and supplement
- Added Furnace and supplement
- Added Iron Worms and supplement
- Added Mushroom Farm and supplement
- Added Resource Packer
- Added Suitblaster and supplement
- Added Buzzsaw and supplement
- Added Dome Armor and supplement
- Added Shockwave and supplement
- Added Rocket Launcer and supplement
- Stun Laser: Reduced cooldown a lot and fire time a bit
- Stun Laser: stun strength 5.5 -> 6.0
- Stun Laser: area stun is now a supplement
- Auto Cannon: time between shots 2.5s -> 2.0s
- Auto Cannon: Machine Gun time between shots 2.0s -> 1.5s, 1.2s -> 1.0s, 0.75s -> 0.5s, 0.45s -> 0.25s
- Auto Cannon: Shotgun time between shots 3.0s -> 2.5s, 4.0s -> 3.3s
- Auto Cannon: added supplement that nearly doubles the rate of fire
- Blast Mining: slightly increased radius and decreased production time
- Blast Mining: added third stage of explosion radius upgrade
- Blast Mining: added supplement that grants you three mines instead of one in each production cycle. There was an upgrade like this before, but it would grant you three small mines. Now you can get three big mines, so a big buff :)
- Blast Mining: impact detonation now moves the center of the explosion into the direction of the impact. This makes blast mining way more useful.
- Blast Mining: improved behaviour when impact detonation is triggerd. There were many strange cases before, like it not exploding when it would fall on resources.
- Probe: reworked the whole tech tree and added a path that immediately completely reveals the rock, instead of placing markers
- Probe: added supplement that makes the probe recharge automatically and removes the station from the cellar, freeing that slot
- Teleporter: added two small upgrades
- Teleporter: made resource teleportation a supplement and buffed it.
- Lift: starts out with more orbs that go faster
- Lift: buffed orb speed and capacity upgrades, as well as keeper speed upgrade
- Lift: added supplement that removes the orbs and lets all resources float upwards automatically
- Condenser: Auto overcharge primary gadget is now a supplement
- Prospection Meter: added supplement that reveals chambers and has much higher range
- Drillbert: buffed drill strength
- Drillbert: added a supplement that adds two more drillberts
- Converter: rebalanced all conversions
- Converter: iron duplication is now a supplement
- Converter: added an upgrad with which you can queue conversions, so that conversion that do not take long do not suffer from you being at the dome rarely.
- Converter: added two different upgrades on how to improve water conversion
- Squidley, the resource tansporting squid from a cave, now gets faster the more resources it brought back to the dome
- gadgets like the auto cannon now lead their shots, making them much better at hitting moving (flying) targets
Monsters
- added Hornet
- added Breeder
- added Phaser
- added Bloater
- added Tormentor
- Driller changes: 800 hp -> 1400 hp, 32 dps -> 40 dps, weight 200 -> 350, minimum run weight 350 -> 850. Because the new monsters fill up some space on the difficulty curve, driller is now a proper late game monster.
- Bolter: 135 hp -> 150 hp, weight 80 -> 100, minimum run weight 200 -> 250. Effectively becomes slightly more late game.
- Scarab: 1150 hp -> 1200 hp, damage 20 -> 25, weight 450 -> 600, minimum run weight 900 -> 1200, fires about twice as many projectiles. Becomes a very late game monster and should keep posing a threat even with all the new combat gadgets.
Bugfixes
Honestly, these are just too many to list them all here. A lot of long standing bugs have been fixed, and there surely will remain a few new ones. We'll keep fixing them as you report them :)
Hey Keepers,
tomorrow is the day the update will hit, but today we have one last patch. Please remember that we'll wipe the prestige leaderboards tomorrow, so they are not skewed because of the many balancing changes during the beta. I also expect we'll have at least one patch after the update to fix some newly found bugs, polish here and there and improve balance. I suspect that another exploit could be found. Here is what's new for v4.0.0.62:
Balance and Changes
- added 3 new caves (iron cave, water cave, portal cave)
- mac works again now
- added anti stall mechanic to prevent some exploits. The idea is that new monsters will spawn during the wave if you try to stall the wave for too long. It's not plausible that one monster would hang around for a dozen cycles with no new monsters showing up. Mechanically it is needed because stalling got more useful, as more things keep working during combat. Please tell if you unexpectedly see new monsters spawning, despite being in a normal combat situation.
- buffed laser damage
- slight overcharge buff
- improved loadout camera
- made loadout mine look nicer
- loadout now properly shows pets and primary gadget in dome
- small battle drone rebalance
- the countdown of the next monster wave will start soon after the current wave is done, even if the keeper is in the station (needed as otherwise sitting idle in the station would be an exploit, as many things now work during combat, like drones and the lift).
- teleporter now also teleports resources during combat
- squidley (squid from the cave) now gets faster the more resources it delivered
- bloater can now only make up about 10% of a wave
- phaser teleports a bit faster towards the dome
- more savegame sanitization, so fewer issues with changes and mods
- updated localisation and improved some texts
- stingers (short musical clips) when opening a chamber now respond better with a custom OST setting
- improved audio in various places
- added side driller tutorial
- added meaningful readable properties to dome armor supplement
- adjusted audible distance of tile destroy sound and transport drone
- disabled telemetry. It was cool and useful, but the current solution was too large and expensive - more than we really needed.
- re-enabled modloader, disabled all mods for profile when updating game-version
Bugfixes
- fixed rich fibre achievement to be able to trigger with the new balancing
- fixed music switching mid track in multiplayer-loadout
- fixed mining-summary positioning issue
- fixed packing drops in bundle sometimes dissolves bundle completelty
- fixed mining summary gif export logo position with long username
- fixed probemarker instantly disappearing cutting off sound
- fixed tech tree ui showing another stage of repeatable upgade even after it is maxed out
- fixed manually unpausing in furnace station
- fixed out-of-bounds elements breaking minimap
- implemented saveload of recorder, so timelapse fully works with reloaded save games
- fixed mining summary issues with controller
- fixed dome armor pulse effect
- fixed cablesegment shader having wrong colors
The Open Beta is coming to an end, and its all thanks to you!
Thank you to everyone for your invaluable feedback and help with our Open Beta. At long last were at the point where were ready to release the update to everyone - and its coming to Steam this Thursday!
A Keepers Duty will officially release on Thursday, July 25th, with a huge load of new content to enjoy!
Our amazing Dome Dweller, Ren will have a small dev stream on the day of release around 20:00 CEST / 14:00 EDT / 11:00 EDT. Make sure you tune in and say hi!
We hope youre all as excited to fulfill your duty as a Dome Keeper as we are!
Hey Keepers,
i feel like i'm repeating myself: thank you! Your feedback is super useful. Please continue to report bugs if you meet them. If the game crashes, please also share the content of your save folder with us, so we can try to reproduce it. You can find more on the save files on our discord here: https://discord.com/channels/788519597556891678/1025879299909243022 Here is what's new for v4.0.0.58:
Balance and Changes
- added a nice theme to the exported gif
- fixed wrong cycle time. Accidentally the cycles were much too long, for example about 3 minutes on cycle 14, when it should have been 2 minutes.
- side drillers now have small indicators when they are blocked
- rocketlauncher now refills on individual level, not in full clip
- engineer power drill now handles the two highest tile hardness as if they were medium hardness and is a bit stronger in general
- oneway teleporter now has 20s fixed cooldown
- added some icons
- added more space for run modifiers due to longer localizations
- updated some texts
Bugfixes
- fixed many instances of indestructible rock getting destroyed. This should only be possible with the engineer supplement, in addition to how it worked with the central shaft gadgets.
- fixed assessor overriding bundlecentralmarker guild reward setting
- added meta data sanitization for rewards, skins and pets (important for changes and mods)
- fixed title music not looping if switching keeper
- fixed drill rig sounds not fading out correctly
- fixed drill magnetic casing not working on a drop that was previously picked up
- fixed side drills not being placed correctly when reloading
- fixed windows only lzw compression causing issues on mac
- fixed assessor orbs sometimes stationary after reload
- fully removed showmine and timelapse rewards
- fixed assessor receiving engineer supplement offers and vice-versa
- fixed relic chamber closed again after load
- fixed second domearmor upgrades not actually increasing max health
- fixed drilling rig able to reset to one side drill if buying side drill upgrade after getting supplement
- fixed some particles of bundle
- fixed pickedup resources not working correctly with gravitational lift and magnetic drill
- fixed assessor sphere persisting infinitely when loading a save where they were about to fade out
Hey Keepers,
thank you again for all the feedback and bug reports. I should be etching closer and closer to a releasable state now. We do have some technical problems left to solve though, especially on non-windows PC's it seems. Please continue to report bugs if you meet them. If the game crashes, please also share the content of your save folder with us, so we can try to reproduce it. You can find more on the save files on our discord here: https://discord.com/channels/788519597556891678/1025879299909243022
Here is what's new for v4.0.0.57:
Balance and Changes
- Fixed to opengl renderer as default again. Vulkan did not improve things as we hoped. You can still launch with vulkan if you enter this as the start arguments in the game settings "--rendering-driver vulkan"
- Added keeper supplements: power drill, cascading impact and one way teleporter. One way teleporter is now a supplement instead of a cave. The cave got removed for now. This is more interesting to play with i hope.
- rebalanced all upgrade costs. Iron costs for the late game went up significantly, as it seemed the upgrade cost got less meaningful when you have 50 iron in the bank. This is also a consequence of the game getting easier thanks to strong supplements. Feedback welcome, but give it a few runs to get used to it :)
- made gravitational lift 8x faster
- adjusted time between waves, so that there will be a bit more time in the early to mid game
- assignments: changed fixed time limit in minutes to cycles when possible, so that cycle based gadgets work more meaningfully (like furnace)
- rebalanced cobalt contribution. It was much too hard.
- fixed only one supplement being in the map in general
- rebalanced droneyard battle ability
- reworked rewards a bit. Statistics are now one reward and post run timelapse is available by default. Added central certical line as a reward as the community suggested. More suggestions welcome :)
- slightly buffed furnace supplement
- changed supplement of drill rig to something more useful and made drillers a bit faster
- some caves can now spawn multiple times, in theory
- weapon defect assignment rebalance. It was too hard on challenge mode.
- significantly improved performance of scanner cave application
- improved various texts
- added move-reminder when staying idle too long in the new loadout
- removed hud run modifier. It is obsolete due to the guild reward.
- bloater will vanish faster if it is the last monster
- made autocannon rate of fire visible in stats
- added some icons
Bugfixes
- fixed desync between killed monster counter and detailed statistics screeen sum
- keeper 1 cursor is always drill
- fixed anchor in gadget option
- fixed drillbuff time for mushroom farm seemingly sinking with first upgrade
- reduced guided bundle pull distance again, hopefully guided bundles stay together a bit better
- fixed vignette transition breaking after load
- fixed drops in bundle being negatively effected by magnetic drill
- fixed unspecfic explanation of drill upgrade property
- fixed techtree fully broken in arabic
- fixed some monsters not reaching the dome and getting stuck in world 2
- fixed white space around upgrade limits leading to missing upgrades
- fixed no hud in arabic
- maze modifier now correctly works with new generation
- fixed engineer thruster particles broken after swapping skin
- fixed saveload error when using bundle guidance
- packed resources within bundles now remain inside that bundle upon completion
- fixed drillbot treat not visible after load
- fixed station extension not revealing rock anymore
- fixed minedriller upgrades not loaded correctly anymore
- fixed custom gadget order broken
- fixed sound of extractor being audible on the whole map
- fixed assessor spheres vanishing on reload (this never worked before, big oversight)
- reroll option is disabled when using custom gadget/supplement order
- paused game after assignment is won to stop any remaining monster from attacking
- added sanitization pass for metastate on load to get rid of any old or unavailable settings and crashes
Hey Keepers,
the beta keeps rolling, and we got a whole bunch of changes and fixes. We already have the next bunch coming, so i'll keep it short. Can't stress it enough, this is building on your feedback. Thank you for sharing! Here is what's new for v4.0.0.56:
Balance and Changes
- timelapse now exports as a gif
- battle drones will now vanish after a certain amount of shots fired. This was already present in the upgrade description, but wasn't implemented yet.
- fixed and buffed probe supplement, no auto recharge in normal tech tree for now
- added tutorials for new gadgets
- cobalt contribution rebalance (will actually change a lot with the next patch)
- drone dispatcher now smartly always dispatches the closest available drone to a drop
- added some icons
- automated conversion now spits out resources over a few seconds to avoid resources clipping out of the map
- improved image export of mining timelapse, so game won't freeze during export
Bugfixes
- fixed loadout ui disappearing in right-to-left languages
- disabled remote station sound effects, they were a bit annoying
- fixed gadgets being shredded when reroll was selected via keyboard
- fixed tile hit sounds having unlimited audible distance
- fixed assessor intro music not looping
- fixed mineview in run finished popup available without upgrade
- fixed probe recharging while paused or in battle
- fixed exit route pathfinding not displayed correctly
- fixed mushroomfarm wrong animation after load
- run stats now count monster kills in finale before relic explosion
- fixed only dome1 having zap-effects with dome armor reactive pulse
- fixed no bombtip on javelin with supplement
- fixed switching language resetting font palette color
- fixed extractor reinfesting same tile with worms multiple times when the tile has a different overlay
- fixed leaderboard highlighted color using wrong font
- fixed station extenion popup being left-bound instead of centered
- increased area for guild rewards to fit all rewards neatly in all languages
- fixed custom order for gadgets breaking popup
- fixed offcentered sword weapon features
- fixed no hover sound in main menu
- fixed battledrone being in front of dome
- fixed heal animation being wrong
- fixed squidley and transport drone picking up the same resource twice
- fixed mineraltree in upsidedown assignment
- added code to ensure floating drops don't get stuck for too long
- fixed converter and furnace use-action being triggered after quitting popup with keyboard
- fixed drillbot treats not saved correctly
- drill, lift and other mineshaft gadgets are now hidden during landing
- fixed teleporter leaving drops in broken state when picked up while absorbing
- added singular variation for additional gadget textww
- fixed relic-carrying music track turning on on it's own after dropping the relic
- fixed artillery not always remembering last rotation correctly when exiting during movement
- delay bar in wavemeter is now always displayed when the repellent is available
- fixed switch pro controller layout
- fixed showdown details not displaying final wave strength
- fixed flyer not correctly recognized in detailed statistics
Hey Keepers,
we've been busy at work! Most importantly, the guild rewards are in now. You can spend the badges you earned in the assignments on some cool things like a timelapse of how you mined the map (be careful with the "save images" button there, this can take several minutes in a long run). We also switched to a vulkan based render mode. This should resolve all rendering issues on Mac and might improve performance for most hardware. Older hardware might not support vulkan though. Please let us know if you cannot launch the game because of this. If it happens to many players, we'll provide a vulkan and an opengl version of Dome Keeper in the future.
Here is what's new for v4.0.0.52:
Balance and Changes
- changed to forward+ renderer
- added guild rewards
- added additional post run statistics, unlockable as guild reward
- added mining timelapse, unlockable as guild reward
- moved guild rewards to its own area in loadout. They affect all modes, so should not be part of the assignment configuration.
- made remote station minimap more useful, also showing drops and carryables
- improved colors of minimap
- creatures and clouds in world 7 are now animated
- added friend leaderboard for assignment badges
- significantly improved performance of swapping gamemode in loadout
- faster camera in loadout, added zoom stage
- improved hud to show amounts above 99
- added buttons to put gadgets to first or last entry in pro mode
- added 10 icons
- resource packer can pack carried resources
- assessor bundle reaches further and moves faster if guided
- increased how fast drilling rig will move downwards
- added domearmor adapting visually based on dome used
- removed rotated tiles that created an ugly mine look
- metastate is now saved to a new file in v4, so the manual rename of the backup metastate is not needed anymore
- improved sounds
Bugfixes
- fixed fonts across all languages
- fixed wrong loadout map on clean install
- fix crash if javelin has no bomb
- Fixed Mine texture, pixelization issues and crack texture error
- fixed tiles being rendered visible too far into the dark area
- fixed halfpixel offset and double pixels in mine rock graphics
- fixed resource shred looking different than before
- fixed keeper spark animation
- fixed black border around chambers
- fixed battle popup always showing hint for sword speedup
- fixed remote control station making resources-ui color gray
- fixed shield hud special icon positioning
- fixed seed and mineral tree in upside down
- fixed drillbot treat arrow
- fixed teleporter not displaying cooldown after using it while on item-cooldown
- fixed teleporter blue "active teleport" sprite remaining active on abort
- fixed relic switch chamber on after loading and extracting relic
- fixed seed having wrong center of mass causing weird movement
- fixed squidly positioning behind drone
- fixed teleporter charging effect sometimes remaining active when it shouldnt
- fixed relic music overlapping with level music
- fixed mine ambience music still disabled
- fixed shield active ability hud display inaccurate
- fixed remote station reveal not revealing caves
- fixed weird particles behind assessor
- fixed sorting of monsters when accessibility mode is on
- fixed keeper2 ammo achievment not working
- fixed "escape" not working on switch pro controller
- fixed being able to quit run won popup without unlocking something when possible
- fixed missile launcher floating in world 1 (by changeing ground layer)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2956040/PVKK_Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant/
Hello Keepers,
We are overly excited to share our next game with you! You read the title right, that's actually the name. It's German and means "planetary defense cannon commander", and that's actually what you do in the game. [previewyoutube=DquTRgapsiM;full][/previewyoutube] The game comes from a love of pressing satisfying buttons and a fascination of old cockpits. Mix that with a bit of escape room and "Papers, Please" and you got PVKK. The core of the game is shooting down invading space ships. You make tactical decisions and execute detection, shooting and energy procedures like a pro. In between missions you take care of your bunker and try to navigate the different factions in the game, all wanting to use you for their purposes.
Check out the steam page to get more infos! If it looks interesting to you, please wishlist the game, it really helps us out! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2956040/PVKK_Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant/
Hey Keepers,
thank you so much for your extensive feedback! We are working on many things and carefully listen and think about your feedback. I'll keep it short, here are the patchnotes for v4.0.0.48:
Balance and Changes
- reworked sword long stab. You can now speed it up by pressing shift. Additionally it will never retract once its damage potential is used up. Instead you can keep flying and stab dozens of monsters, including the same monster multiple times.
- javelin is now back in the tech tree. Stab bomb remains as supplement and now works also with Javelin.
- adjusted upgrade costs of all primary gadgets to be the same compared to each other
- battle ability upgrades now each cost one cobalt instead of water
- reworked droneyard drone count upgrade. Instead of buying individual drones, you now buy them in increasingly large packs.
- balance pass across all gadget upgrade costs
- reordered suit blaster upgrades and decreased charge speed a bit
- minimap supplement doew not reveal the full map anymore, but only a bit more than you already see. Feedback very welcome, we are not done with it!
- updated localization
- changed showdown so that cycle based gadgets work well again
- slightly increased bundle duration of assessor for the first two upgrades
- slightly increased move speed while firing for laser dome
- improved sound for blast mine explosion
- improved various sounds. Feedback super welcome here, let us know if anything sounds good/bad/like it misses a sound :)
- teleporter can now teleport packed resources
- added fallback icon whenever the icon is missing
- added world ambience to 7, and a bloater ambience
- made supplement offer limited to 1 per slot when possible
- suitblaster now detonates at the point of activation not the delayed position
- disable cheat detection for open beta. Please remember we might need to wipe the leaderboard when the beta ends.
- upgrading the rocket launcher in combat instantly gives you the extra ammo
- lowered strength of wave that is triggered by relic from 450% to 300% of a regular wave
Bugfixes
- fixed label colors and improved them across all palettes
- fixed blast mine sprites being broken and slightly increased threshold for impact detonation
- fixed resources in artillery losing collision against each other when entering the dome
- drone from cave aka Squidley now looks like it was in v3
- fixed marker sprites in cave bomb being in the wrong color
- fixed packed resources counting as too many resources if carried by transport drone
- cartography now properly displays holes again
- fixed upgrade cost not being red when not affordable
- fixed droneyard overcharge
- fixed worm animation looping on gameover
- restricted manual "view-mine" boundaries
- fixed relic hunt modifiers not being applied correctly in some cases
- keeper movement input is now restored/recalcualted when leaving a popup
- fixed drill-part glitching through a block when mining the same tile at the same time
- fixed resourcepacker fx not preloaded causing stutter
- fixed missing droneyard icon in leaderboard
- fixed droneyard external sections clipping through dome
- fixed shield overcharge and last-stand effects not centered
- fixed missing monster outlines in loadout
- fixed stun laser turning on after game over
- fixed loadout hint containers being misplaced after changing gamemode
- fixed intro music stopping when moving from loadout to title
- fixed title music not being dependent on last played keeper
- fixed option panel jumping in size when switching categories
- fixed crash/errors on reload with laser dome
- fixed orchard root explosion not dealing damage
- fixed being able to start challenge mode of assignment if regular mode was not completed
- assignments now always play on brutal difficulty
- fixed assignement "restart run" issues with keeper positions
- fixed additional drills not passing through unminable blocks
- fixed exploit when leaving the game right after finishing a wave
- fixed mushroomfarm weird green particles on station
- fixed driller die animation leaving white pixels
- fixed cobalt bomb leaving pixels on screen
- fixed relic cables turning on again afterload
- double-ensured player cannot get out of bounds in loadout
- fixed teleporter particles active after aborting
- fixed remote station upgrade ui not fully disabled correctly
- fixed repellend overcharge not correct on reload
- fixed orchard overcharge not correct on reload
- fixed doublelaser positioning after load
- fixed teleporter missing charge vfx
- disabled achievements in new loadout
- fixed die animations of tormentor
- fixed run stats showing stats they should not show
- fixed artillery tutorial fonts
- fixed relic hunt end popup font
- fixed label style for changed properties in tech tree
The Dome Keeper - A Keepers Duty Public Beta is LIVE! As of right now all Keepers can opt in to the beta and access the full scope of the update. We invite you to play around with everything new with an understanding that this is not final. To answer some initial questions about the Beta and how to join it, please check our recently posted FAQ on Discord and Steam.
If you missed the news about this update, please check our last fancy news post about it.
The new "Tormentor" putting his name into practice.
There will be bugs, balance will need tweaking and you may encounter stability issues. If you do, please use the proper bug report and feedbacking channels on Discord or post to the Steam forums. At the end of the day, gathering such feedback and we appreciate all of you who choose to do so!
Lets repeat what youll find in the update:
Were grateful to all of you who choose to join us in the public beta and help us make Dome Keeper the best it have ever been!
Dome Keeper: A Keepers Duty is coming and is shaping up very nicely. This is our most ambitious update by any measure you throw at it and were thrilled to bring Keepers of every ilk a much improved replayability through new gadgets with over 100 new upgrades, supplements for all gadgets and weapons, a new prestige variant, a bunch of new monsters with a new world, big balancing changes and improvements on existing content and the brand new Guild Assignment game mode.
Assignments are interesting challenges, feeling quite different from regular runs and often need a smart build.
Add to this an engine update from Godot 3 to Godot 4, a daunting task but one weve deemed necessary to ensure Dome Keeper is set for the future as this, among other things, enables us to add Multiplayer and youve got A Keepers Duty.
What is hopefully made clear by reading this is that were bringing a lot of (positive!) change to Dome Keeper all in one go and while that is incredibly exciting, it inadvertently WILL also bring problems big and small. With more than doubling your options in each run, game balance will be all over the place. The engine upgrade can also bring a lot of technical issues that only happen on specific hardware.
We have thus reached the conclusion to iron out the bulk of these issues together with you, our Keepers! Starting June 20th all players will be able to access the A Keepers Duty content through a Beta Branch on Steam. The main game app will remain as it is for some time but players who opt in to the Public Beta will have the full update available to them from that day. The update is content complete so all the things weve spoken of before are in place; what might not be is our usual level of balance and stability. We will add some smaller things in the next weeks too, like icons and new achievements.
Tired of carrying resources? The new primary gadget "droneyard" got you covered.
Lets recap what is included in the update! This list is a little short now, but well provide a full changelog when the update is fully released later this summer.
Whats new:
- Twice as many gadgets as before (from 11 to 22)
- Extremely strong supplement upgrades for all gadgets and weapons
- New game modeGuild Assignments with 16 different assignments
- New loadout menu (Multiplayer preparation!)
- Prestige overhaul with Provocation replacing Fixed Cobalt
- New world & monsters
- Balancing and improvements on existing content
- New and improved map generation
New monsters will pose new challenges to your defense.
What to expect from the Public Beta:
- Mods WILL break.
- Currently the very fundamentals of Godot 4 are incompatible with how mods have been made in the past. This means that currently there is no known process for how modders can bring over their mods to the latest version of the game. We are however working actively with our modders and contributors of the engine to figure out how we can make this work as we really love mods. At this very moment we dont know for certain how this will develop even for the full release of the update.
- Updated language support
- The move to Godot 4, among other things, will enable us to implement localization from languages that in the past were not possible, for instance Arabic which has a 100% complete (fact check) translation ready and made by fans. Read more about the fan localization project here: [Link Coming Soon]
- Current run save games will not transfer between versions
- If you have a run going on you want to finish, best do so before switching to the beta branch, as run save games will not work. We disabled that intentionally, as we had some issues in the past with migrating ongoing runs (remember the unusable relic chambers with black rectangles around it?).All of your meta progression should be safe and your saves in each branch is retained in the files, in case you wish to hop between versions you CAN, all you have to do is rename your save file to be recognized by the game when you switch between versions [FAQ Coming Soon]
- Mac Support
- We are on it, but right now we havent been able to export a running build for Dome after the Engine Port. It is supported in principle, so we are confident well get it to work eventually, but we need a bit more time.
- General bugs, balance issues and instability
- Were very proud of the new update but bringing it to public beta is not for naught. The game is entirely playable but we urge you to expect balancing to be a bit off, bugs to occur and the possibility of things not being entirely stable. Please help us by giving us feedback and reporting any bugs you encounter. We listen closely to your feedback and now is really the best time to advocate for changes.
With Godot 4 we got some new options for map generation and made use of it for more interesting shapes. On the left is a maze map, on the right a large map for relic hunt. You may notice that this announcement has a Start Time & Date and an End Time & Date. While we're planning on releasing the public beta sometime on the 20th the release timing is placeholder and the End Time & Date are also currently placeholder. It will be entirely possible to jump between the main app and the Beta at your leisure. When you switch to the beta branch, your save files are backed up in the save folder like "savegame_full_backup_2024_6_18_12_53.json". If you remove the date part and switch back to the public branch, you can recover the old state. We hope youre as excited as we are to play with the new content as we are in this Public Beta.
Big News, Keepers! Big news from Guild Headquarters has arrived: the largest content update yet is on the horizon, and is packed with loads of new content, adjustments, fixes and so much more! The most common desire from players and frankly from us devs too is to increase run variety and replayability. For many players, runs eventually start to feel quite samey, which is natural considering the limited breadth of content and loadout options. The main goal of this upcoming update is to increase replayability and run variety way beyond what youve seen so far. Major Changes:
- New gadgets and supplements
- New game mode: Guild Assignments
- New loadout menu
- Prestige mode overhaul
- New world & monsters
- Balancing and improvements on existing content
New gadgets and supplements
Armed to the teeth - with new gadgets & supplements Gadgets are a key ingredient in changing how your run plays out. Therefore, we really wanted to offer more gadget variety, but also make them more powerful and meaningful. The goal was always for the run to feel different after getting a new gadget, and that wasnt true for each one. We're thrilled to introduce a whole bunch of new gadgets to the game, roughly doubling the amount you can find. Some will help you in combat, some with mining, and some with resource transportation. Youll now have multiple gadget options for each slot, including the lift and spire slots. This variety should make for more interesting decisions! The old gadgets also got some big improvements to freshen them up.
Cant take everything with you? No problem with the all new resource packer gadget In addition to the new gadgets, you can uncover during runs, we have also added a new primary gadget to accompany the selection of Orchard, Repellent and Shield: the Drone Yard. It is focused on helping you transport resources, filling a very different roll than the other primary gadgets. And of course it comes with its own battle abilities!
Choose your supplement wisely We are also adding supplements to each gadget. You might recall dome supplements, which offered upgrades like Scrap Repair or Resurrection. To get a supplement upgrade, you had to find its chamber in the mine and bring it up to the dome, similar to the gadgets themselves. Each gadget will now have a really powerful supplement upgrade, like removing the lifts orbs and enabling it to transport all resources at once As the old gadgets get a facelift, you may notice some changes to their upgrade trees. Some previous upgrade options have been removed and converted to supplements. This enables them to be even more powerful! For example, transporting resources with the Teleporter was cool, but had to be balanced so that ability didnt completely negate the poor old Lift. But now, as a supplement, it can be made much more powerful! But that power comes with a tradeoff: there are limited supplements in the mines. Choose which gadget to supplement carefully!
New game mode: Guild Assignments
The new uild assignment mode gives you very specific conditions for a challenging run Right now, you can build your own self-imposed challenge runs in many different ways. While this is fun for some players, we understand it is not for everyone. Many prefer proving their skills in challenging, pre-made setups. For these players, we added a new game mode called Guild Assignment. You can now tackle missions with special conditions! For example, landing on a planet that only has flying monsters, or mining in a world that has a very large area with soft rock and rare-but-large resource deposits. For us this is also exciting because it lets you utilize the gadgets to their fullest. For example, if the resource deposits are rather sparse, you really have to make the most out of the gadgets that help you locate resources to win the run!
New loadout menu
Now you can test your dome of choice before the run You might not have noticed, but the current loadout screen was never intended to make it to release. The original goal was to have more of a central hub where you are already in control of a keeper, and can physically visit different locations to pick your loadout. This wasnt feasible before release, as there were many more important things to work on.
Early concept for how a hub world in dome keeper could have looked We are now taking one step toward this. The current loadout was already at its limits in terms of flexibility when picking game modes. The new loadout gives us full flexibility and is also more playful. For Guild Assignments to have the mission constraints already visible in the loadout, this new screen was necessary. This is also the first glimpse of how multiplayer will work. The new loadout supports multiple players choosing their individual loadouts, but also allows them to share the dome.
Prestige mode overhaul
The updated mode selection at the game menu, including the revamped Prestige mode After playing Prestige extensively, I decided to revise the current modes in close coordination with our Prestige player community on Discord. If youd like to chat to other Prestige players, share strategies or give feedback that will directly influence how Prestige works in the future, join our Discord Server. These were the main concerns the community and I had with the current Prestige variants:
- Endless mode runs are too long, with the top runs going for up to 10 hours
- Fixed Cobalt modewhile different in theoryended up with the same strategies as Endless mode, where players wante to upgrade as fast as possible, and then only cared about avoiding damage as much as possible.
- removed Fixed Cobalt
- added Provocation Prestige Variant:
Your score multiplier is falling with each cycle and can only be raised by increasing the wave strength. You start with 100 base per wave and can only raise it a bit. If your multiplier reaches negative values, the game is over. The idea is to challenge you to play on the edge of what you can handle monster-wise. - changed the difficulty curve so that the ceiling of what you can handle in endless is reached earlier, preventing players from getting to wave 90+ (this is also connected to tesla dome being very strong, but thats a separate thing)
New world & monsters
A terrifying Tormentor attacking a poor keeper inside his dome You can never meet enough interesting monsters, so well introduce a whole bunch of new ones together with a new world to mine! Our goal is to add a bit more variety to your strategies, but also pose new challenges in the endgame. We are eager to hear your feedback on them!
Balancing existing content
Balancing Dome Keeper is not easy, because every player is different. Some play Prestige for hundreds of hours and push every piece of content to its limits (and way beyond what I can do). Some players prefer a more relaxing experience, and do runs while watching something on a second screen. There are many more types of Dome Keeper players, and that is something we really love - that this little game can be enjoyed by so many.
Tesladome has been hitting the gym! Thanks to all of your feedback, we have made a lot of balance changes to already existing content. The Tesla dome in particular needed some changes. While being the most powerful dome by far (see the Prestige high scores if you dont believe me!) it also somehow simultaneously feels quite weak to play. With the upcoming update, this will change. The Laser dome will also see some changes. The double laser upgrade will instead be a supplement option, showing how much impact the supplements can have. This allows us to buff the damage of the laser, so that it will be stronger overall. With the wealth of changes and new content, the gameplay balance may be off in some areas after the update. As usual well keep our eyes and ears peeled and compile your feedback into a balancing patch afterwards. So if you notice something doesnt feel quite right, fret not! Just let us know in the forums or on Discord.
Playtest
We are running playtests on our Discord, which is the best place to give feedback. Im reading everything that is shared there, and carefully think about it. If you want an early look or help make the new things even better, come to the playtest section!
Engine upgrade
We also ported Dome Keeper from Godot 3 to Godot 4. This was a massive amount of work and should improve a lot of things in the game. One thing Im most excited for is the support for right-to-left type, which means Dome can now properly support Arabic. The translation for Dome Keeper is primarily done on Crowdin, with a mix of paid and community translators. The Arabic translation community is the biggest and has put in so much effort over the past year to keep Dome 100% translated, even though the game didnt support it yet! Thank you everyone who helps to translate Dome, especially for languages with fewer speakers. If you want to participate,or improve some iffy translations youve spotted, please join Dome Keeper on Crowdin.
Crowdin dashboard overview: community translations The engine porttogether with some very big refactors of the code base (multiplayer preparation, yay!)also means that every mod will probably break. If you are a mod developer, please join our Discord - well do our best to help you port the mod. We know all the changes to the codebase and engine, so we can really speed up the process.
Thats it!
We are really excited to finally share this huge, huge update with you. Some of you might remember that, once upon a time, we had updates like Springloaded that added 3 new gadgets, or the Hard Pressed update adding two new monsters and a world. This update is gonna be much bigger than those two combined, and will very much change how you think about strategies and loadouts for your runs. Well take some more time to balance it all and make it very stable. You can expect the update to go live in early Summer. Follow our Twitter and join our Discord to stay up to date with all things Dome Keeper. Thank you for all your support and kind words, but also the critical words as well. It really means so much for us to be able to continue making this game! Best Wishes, Ren
Dome Keeper is on sale now!
New recruits to the Keeper's Guild are always appreciated - and now's the best time to join up!
From now until April 18th @ 10:00 PDT / 13:00 EDT / 18:00 Brit Time / 19:00 CEST, you can get Dome Keeper and all of it's DLC on sale! Keep in mind that all of these discounts also compound with the Deluxe Edition bundle discount!
- Dome Keeper
- 50%
- Dome Keeper Soundtrack
- 40%
- Dome Keeper: Engineer Gear Pack
- 20%
- Dome Keeper: Assessor Gear Pack
- 20%
Time to clean up that Steam Wishlist and take advantage of those discounts - it's the Steam Spring Sale!
Right now you can save on Dome Keeper, all of the Gear Packs, and the Dome Keeper Soundtrack - so if you've been trying to get one of your friends to try our Dome Keeper, this is the best time to do it!
The following discounts will be active from March 14 @ 10:00 PDT / 13:00 EDT / 17:00 GMT / 18:00 CET until March 21st @ 10:00 PDT / 13:00 EDT / 17:00 GMT / 18:00 CET:
- Dome Keeper
- 50%
- Dome Keeper: Engineer Gear Pack
- 20%
- Dome Keeper: Assessor Gear Pack
- 20%
- Dome Keeper Soundtrack
- 40%
Happy lunar new year, keepers! As we enter the year of the dragon, we wanted to do something special to celebrate. Starting February 6, you can find a special cave in the game that will reward you with a dragon egg.
Dome Keeper will also be part of a Lunar New Year Sale, which ends on February 15th. The new pet will be unlockable until February 21 and will be a yearly event going forward, so make sure to get in there and find that Dragon, Keepers!
Changelog
- Added new seasonal content for Lunar New Year. As always, you can disable seasonal content in the options if you don't like it
- added dragon cave and new pet
- added lanterns to the Dome during Lunar New Year
- resurrect will now trigger before auto heal
- assessor reflector can sometimes let spheres through if too close to a wall. This works better now, but can still happen (try to not spawn the sphere within the reflector).
Greetings, Keepers, and Happy Holidays!
Since were such great pals with the folks over at Kingdom, weve recorded a stream together! Join MissDeliana and Vicky as we explore what the two games have in common, and learn a thing or two about them as we play.
The premiere starts today (December 20th) at 17:00 CET, and you can watch it right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1EHfj0l4_M
Cant make it? No problem! You can watch the stream VOD afterwards on YouTube, and we will be playing the stream on the Store pages for both games over the Steam Winter Sale.
And speaking of sales, we currently have a Kingdom x Dome Keeper bundle for sale, so consider this a gift idea for the upcoming Holidays: https://bit.ly/3TDtc26
Hey Keepers,
we got the hopefully last patch for this year ready, with some important fixes. We are especially happy about a finding the cause and fixing one bug that has been bothering people with gamepads and which was around since release, see below. Also a pretty funny one - the caves and chambers that took your resources to activate or open did actually also add this resource to your inventory, as if you had brought it back to the dome. No one seemed to notice.
Changelog V3.1.3
- added mine view to prestige mode
- fixed long standing bug with external gamepads on steamdeck and with gamepads being detected twice. You need to activate "automatic detection of preferred gamepad" then. Up until now, on some controllers the sticks of the other gamepad would still create input events, messing with the directional control. This is now fixed and should work properly.
- fixed chinese languages having a wrong name in the language selection (referring to the letters instead of the language)
- fixed slots in caves and supplement chamber that take one resource actually also adding this resource to the inventory
- fixed prestige mode accidentally spawning way harder waves in the late waves (most notable at 50+)
- fixed artillery moving to the side when exiting while using mouse
- fixed custom cursor sometimes showing even if turned off
- fixed auto cannon shooting too low when aiming at worm
Zimny from our Discord community and prestige fame made this absolutely lovely winter christmas dome animation. We love it!
See you next year!
Dear Keepers, We know how much you love defense strategy, so this Rawcember weve carefully prepared a special present just for you - you can now get both Dome Keeper and Kingdom Two Crowns as a bundle, or separately at a discount! We hope that you will enjoy the other game, if you have already played one of them, or give a chance to both. This is a wonderful opportunity to test your strategy & defense skills and immerse yourself into unfamiliar but fascinating realms under the spice of the similar goal - in each game you must protect your base from the waves of enemies but to do that you have to explore and conquer unknown territories, find resources and manage your time. Were game developers which means that were big believers - and wed like to believe that if you loved one of the titles, youll also enjoy the other one! Check out the bundle here - https://bit.ly/3sY1EtK Kingdom Two Crowns info & discount: https://store.steampowered.com/app/701160/Kingdom_Two_Crowns/ Dome Keeper info & discount: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/ Follow us on social media to never miss any updates! Kingdom: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Discord Dome Keeper: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Discord
Hey Keepers,
we understand there were a lot of troubles with the gamepad with the recent patch. I think it was mainly due to twin stick controls being activated by default, changing up how the Assessor plays without telling you explicitly about it, or having tutorials that are specific to the current way of input. That was one reason i was delaying mouse support for so long, as suddenly the situation is much more complicated, having basically 4 ways of input:
- keyboard only
- keyboard and mouse
- one stick gamepad
- twin stick gamepad
Changelog V3.1.1
- fixed some gamepads not working in menus anymore
- twin stick is now disabled by default and also set to disabled for every player, as a lot of people had difficulties with it. If you want to play with twin stick, you have to activate it again. Sorry for the invonvenience!
- fixed the battle popup also showing mouse key hint if mouse was not enabled in battle, but enabled in menus
I always like to share small bits with these news. Here you can see a concept for a world that we have and might bring it to the game one day (not a promise though, we also have a lot of other exciting stuff). You can see these tall things in the background? These are actually creatures and they should be animated, walking around in the background.
Merry Christmas!
December is here, Keepers, and its time to get festive! The star at the top of the tree that is this merry update is mouse support. We know that there are many of you out there who prefer a combination of mouse and keyboard as you play, so this gift is for you! You can configure the controls in the options for a perfect fit. Way better than knit socks, right? How are they always the wrong size, and so itchy? Anyway, moving on.
Our next set of gifts are for all of you who enjoy seasonal events as much as we do: we brought Christmas cheer to the dome! Not only have we given the main title music a festive makeover, weve also added a brand new skin for the Assessor as well as a special pet, and these can only be unwrapped for the duration of December. Remember to make sure that you have seasonal content enabled in the options!
Weve also made some small tweaks and added sounds for the pets, to make sure you are welcomed back to the dome properly. Read the changelog below for a full list!
What you need to know
Due to the vast changes to the input system, we strongly suggest resetting the key bindings to the default. You'll find many new input options in the menu with which you can adjust the game to your liking, for example playing only the Assessor with mouse but domes with keyboard. We also added twin stick controls to gamepads, which are active by default. With that you can, for example as an Assessor, shoot spheres and bundles in any direction you want, irrespective of where you are moving. Just use the right stick to aim and shoot with the shoulder buttons. You can also adjust directional snapping, so it gets much easier to shoot in straight lines (especially upwards!). The move indicator helps you understand the snapping better, and see where you are aiming towards. However, you can also configure everything to be the same way it was before the update - it is up to your preference.
Changelog
- Added support for mouse controls, configurable and re-bindable via Options
- Added twin stick support for gamepad
- Added various Christmas themed bits:
- New unlockable pet and skin for the Assessor (find a gift chamber and win the run to unlock them)
- New themed title music
- Snow weather happening across all maps
- Drillbert skin
- As always you can turn all this off via options
- Added sounds for pets when you return to dome
- Improved snow weather effect
- Assessor spheres now also play resource-dependent sounds
- Assessor bundle moves twice as fast when using bundle guidance
- Made some parts of the game easier to mod by making dictionaries variables instead of constants
Greetings, Keepers!
It's that time of the year again, friends: Steam Awards season is here! If youve enjoyed Dome Keeper you probably know we've been hard at work this past year and released
7 major updates for free as well as 23 patches.
We are not done yet and love to work on the game and see y'all get excited for the hot new stuff! Wed be absolutely thrilled if you would nominate the game in the Labour of Love category. You can nominate us either by using the box at the top of this news post, or by visiting our Steam Store page! Second, wed like to take this opportunity to also let you all know that Dome Keeper is part of the Steam Autumn Sale! During this sale you can get Dome Keeper at 50% off, so this is a great time to mining suit up and get into the dome if you havent already or to get the game for a friend. Christmas is coming up, after all! And if you already do have the game, why not get yourself a little pre-christmas treat? The Soundtrack is currently at 30% off, and the Gear Packs are both on sale at 10%, so make sure to grab them now! Thats all from us this time. As always, we thank you all for your continued feedback and support and we invite you all to join us on the Official Bippinbits - Dome Keeper Discord Server to chat about all things Dome keeper.
Hey Keepers,
time for another mini-patch! I recently saw that some players would get very frustrated because their scores got removed. They could not see why and did not reach anyone as our channels are all in english, so naturally it was a unpleasant situation for them. Imagine playing hundreds of hours to get in a really good prestige run, only to have it deleted out of the blue - sucks! The reason for the deletion was, that the runs used what we consider exploits. The problem was, that I never communicated properly what was acceptable for a prestige run and what was not. Because of this, I cleared the list of people banned from competing for prestige, and added a big section that explains this a bit. The section goes like this [quote]
Fair Competition (prestige only)
We love to see you prestige players compete for the highest scores and find better and better strategies. We want to keep this a fair and fun competition, so it is important that everyone plays on equal terms. Please understand that your runs might be flagged as inadmissible or might get deleted, if it seems like you are using cheat tools or exploits. We define exploits as anything that provides you a tangible benefit in your prestige run that is not intended through normal gameplay means. This includes things like savegame editing or viewing, excessive reloading, using mods that are not whitelisted or intentional and repeated use of bugs. You might get permanently barred from competing on the usual leaderboards, if your run appears to have made significant use of cheats or exploits. If you are unsure about whether something is considered illegal, please ask on our Discord or via e-mail at dome@bippinbits.com. You can always appeal to us, if you got flagged wrongly. Have fun! [/quote] So, everyone is cleared again, but blatant cheating or excessive use of exploits will get you banned from normal competition quickly and decisively. Please not that this only affects prestige runs, and only the highest scores. If you want to speedrun the game, you are absolutely free to do so.
Being Political
There is another topic that can be a bit touchy, but i want to discuss. Dome Keeper is a simple and fun game. It does not try to sell you any world views, opinions or politics. It is open to interpretation of course, which is part of the fun! I very much like this part about Dome Keeper, that we can come together despite possibly conflicting world views, and enjoy a game and each others company. Because of this, I take care to keep very divisive topics and politics to a minimum, also on the Discord server. Recently I learned that using flags in a game, even if it is only for language selection, does make a political statement too. I do not want that for Dome, even if I as a private person have a opinion (on some things at least). Because of this, I removed the flags from the game and instead each language is now written in its own words, instead of all of them being in english. I fear that not making a statement is also making a statement, but in this way I think we can have the least friction in and around Dome Keeper. So many things in todays world are dividing people and political or ideological views penetrate so many areas in our lives. My hope is that we can still have some places that are free of it, where we just can come together to have some fun, as that's an universally human thing.
Changelog V3.0.2
- removed flags from language select
- language names are now in their respective language, instead of all being in english
- cleared known cheaters list
- added a long panel about fairness, rules and exploits when you start a run in prestige mode while you also got pro mode unlocked
- fixed auto repair not working during the final relic hunt battle
- fixed shield's last stand not preventing the start of the relic bomb
- whitelisteda mod for prestige (Among Tick - AshAxolotl
This is an actual dome, situated in Stockholm - the Avicii Arena. Looks unreal, doesn't it? Definitely larger than our 1-person domes! Photo from the lovely Jakob K.
Thank you and a happy Halloween!
PS: i pushed another sneaky build fixing a broken font and making the fairness popup closeable, as some people found it distracting (including myself).
Hey Keepers, time for another hotfix! Despite resolveing some issues, we are also listening to your feedback on the new domes. Tesla is at a slightly strange spot right now, where it can be very very strong later on, but initially does not feel great, especially if you don't combine all abilities. It just got a slight rebalance with this patch. Artillery on the other hand is great fun to use already for many people, but a bit too strong. We are seeing winrates that are a good bit above the other domes. While that is not forbidden in general, the domes should be a bit closer together in balancing, so this is an attempt to improve it. We'll continue to listen for feedback on balance, and improve as much as we can. Likely the next patch won't be in october, as right now it seems we better wait for some more feedback, prestige runs and telemtry data.
Changelog V3.0.2
- fixed a very deep layer being indestructible despite looking like normal dirt
- tesla reticle slowdown only sets in right before finishing the charge
- tesla now has a second quickshot upgrade and two instead of three perfect timing upgrades. This makes perfect timing less important and quickshot more useful. Second quick shot upgrade deals 120% of base damage, from initial 60%.
- slightly increased tesla base damage to compensate for lower buffs from perfect timing
- limiting maximum size of tesla dome's electro orbs. They can still be charged higher to remain for longer, but their size is hard capped now (still very large).
- reduced spire's targetting time from 0.5s to 0.2s (reload time is unaffected)
- reduced artillery mortar damage by 10% on later upgrades
- reduced direct hit damage bonus on artillery splash upgrade line
- slightly reduced rate of fire on artillery machine gun
- better visibility for artillery mortar aim line
- fixed prospection meter not detecting power core chamber or relic switch chambers
- made orchard roots explode in short succession after each other instead of all together
- fixed electro orbs not doing damage while keeper is outside of dome
- updated localisation
- better font for vietnamese
- fix small visual error of tesla dome in loadout stage
- no points will be deducted in prestige, even if the multiplier reaches a negative value
- fixed relic switch chambers looking inactive on reload, after activating them before
- fixed kept gadget getting lost if not immediately starting a new run
- removed small arc effects from the reticle after auto aim is bought
- added custom supplement order for prestige pro mode
- vignette will show up later the deeper the map is
- whitelisted three mods for prestige (Ste - Prestige Quick Restart, Nanimonull - Tech Tree Loop Select, Kana - Hello There)
Thank you and have a great autumn!
Hey Keepers,
Ren here, i made a big mistake! I accidentally omitted the fixes we made vor v2.6.2 and v2.6.3 from yesterdays v3.0. That means that some of the things that were fixed before broke again. I now pulled the fixes over to the current build and got v3.0.1 ready.
Please let me know if you experience any issues. Best reported on our Discord Server, as it's easiest to share files there.
Generally this is important:
[olist]
Changelog V2.6.2
- Fixed achievement "Thorough" for mining map completely not triggering
- Fixed assessor not being able to pick up dropped gadgets inside dome
- Fixed music cycles being one-off
- Fixed prestige score hud showing 0 as total when multiplier was zero (for countdown)
- Fixed prestige score hud adding a plus sing in front of negative changes (like +-2 instead of -2)
- Fixed exploit around friendly mode
- Fixed some false positives of cheat detection in countdown mode
- Modding: updated mod loader to v6.1
- Modding: fixed existing upgrades appearing twice if they were changed through a mod
- Modding: better support for adding your own game modes
- Modding: whitelisted HelloWorld-RunLogger and Ste-Petmagotchi for prestige runs
Changelog V2.6.3
- fixed worlds already showing up in relic hunt that you hadn't unlocked yet
- fixed getting stuck playing the same world and palette over and over again after some specific game loading situations
- if some mod content was used in the loadout screen and the mod was later unsubscribed to, it should revert to default options instead of showing an empty space now
[previewyoutube=_z4HEQMgzQM;full] [/previewyoutube] Greetings, Keepers! The Keepers Guild is thrilled to announce that the Double Dome Update is live and available now! This means that you now have access to not one but TWO new domes: the Tesla Dome and the Artillery dome, as well as the new Dome Supplements system. Quick warning: if you played with mods before, your game might crash with this update due to the mods not being updated for 3.0 yet. The safest route is to unsubscribe from the mods via steam and then test what mods are already working. The Artillery Dome wields the greatest fire power of any dome to date, and is sure to make short work of any monster when used right. It comes equipped with a mortar firing high explosive shells as well as a fast firing anti air machine gun. The Tesla Dome is nothing short of electrifying, literally, and it is the only dome that allows you to aim freely in both dimensions. With this dome you can place Electro Orbs around your dome for defense and zap those monsters before they even reach your dome. Did you ever wish that you could use Dome Hardening on the Sword Dome instead of the Laser dome? With Dome Supplements, you can! Weve removed some of the dome upgrades from the Tech Tree, and replaced them with Supplements which are additional upgrades that can go into already existing upgrade tracks for your dome. You find these supplements by uncovering a new chamber containing a power core, similar to how you would find gadgets. This update is, of course, packed with a lot more than the headliners! (You can read more about the domes and the dome supplements in our previous dev diary by the way!) We have several fixes in the mix and our Prestige players will be happy to know that with this update we also move into Season 5 of Prestige Mode. There is a full changelog further down in this post with all of the details, of course. Oh and another thing: if youve changed your dome ability control key bindings you might find that they have reverted back to the default after updating. Since we added the Artillery Dome we needed to make room for the secondary fire ability in the keybindings, and if the keybindings have been changed from the default that could cause a conflict.
Changelog
New Content Domes
- Added Artillery Dome
- Added Tesla Dome
- Added custom sprites for all primary gadgets per dome
- Replaced cobalt branches in dome tech trees with a new system, the dome supplements
- Added a new chamber type, the power core chambers. Retrieve the core inside to receive a supplement.
- Added 6 dome supplements
- Added run modifier that lets you get 3 dome supplements instead of only one
- Added "mine view", where you can watch the mine you dug out after finishing a run and even show the resources you missed
- Added run modifier that lets you play completely without monsters
- Added classic "Dome Romantik" palette (orange, blue, purple)
- Improved how orchard shields are spaced across domes, adapting better to different dome shapes and sizes
- Orchard root explosion won't remove other roots anymore
- Improved orchard shield destruction effect
- Gamepad auto switch option now also works for steam deck, resolving some issues of inputs being unresponsive
- Improved positions where domes are shot at
- Relic switches can now be activated immediately after uncovering, no need to wait for the animation
- Stingray is back to the old animation, does not look squished anymore
- Assessor can now collect again when in cellar
- Changed gadget chamber placement to be less predictable
- Prospection meter does not target rooted resources anymore
- Auto cannon and stun laser won't target burrowed monsters anymore
- Teleport won't trigger if you or the moveable portal are still inside the dome
- Improved visuals of the shield battle ability "electro blast"
- Updated localisation
- Improved some sound effects
- Changed run modifier "double iron" to simply increase the iron in the underground by 50% and no increase in upgrade cost
- Cycle time: increases slightly slower the larger the dugout mine is
- Orchard: halved how quickly moving uses up the orchard buff
- Orchard: increased initial buff strength and decreased growth time
- Orchard: slightly buffed orchard shield hp (120->130)
- Shield: very slightly decreased max strength (6.6%)
- Scarab: slightly increased health
- Repair: depends slightly less on dome health
- Auto repair: is not a standalone upgrade anymore but instead comes for free with the inventory upgrade
- Engineer: buffed drill strength of the last drill upgrade
- Engineer: slightly buffed the speed upgrades
- Engineer: slightly buffed the second carry strength upgrade
- Assessor: buffed the sphere base damage to be a more viable mining option, especially in the deeper layers
- Assessor: slightly buffed the upgrades for minimum speed when carrying or collecting
- Assessor: slightly decreased effectiveness of contact mining, with the last stage being weaker and rock hardness still having a small impact. It was faster than the engineer in deeper layers, but really spheres should be the main mining tool for the Assessor
- Assessor: slightly changed costs of some upgrades, 2 iron more or less
- Fixed stag shooting too much if hit by sword and stunned while walking
- Fixed some resources not getting revealed initially when picking up scanner from cave
- Fixed vignette not showing up for cobalt bomb, if you disable the vignette in the mine
- Fixed all worlds showing up in some cases, irrespective of unlocked ones
With Dome Keeper celebrating its one year anniversary, we really wanted to make something special. So instead of just adding a new dome, we decided to double up and add two! In this dev diary, we are going to take a deeper look at both the Artillery Dome and the Tesla Dome as well as the new Dome Supplement mechanic, all coming in the Double Dome update on October 5th!
Like with the keepers, we want every dome to feel really different, to set them apart from each other and offer more variety in gameplay. The goal is to have them offer new challenges and make you as a player approach battle differently with each dome.
The Artillery Dome
The Artillery Dome is the only dome that actually comes with two weapons: the mortar and the anti air gun. The slow-firing mortar stands out amongst the existing dome weapons, because you have to plan with the travel time of each shot. When you fire the mortar, a few seconds will pass before the shell arrives at its destination and explodes. In combination with the slow rotation, you have to plan ahead and predict where the monsters will be at the time of impact. While this poses a challenge, you can also really use this to your advantage and make good use of indirect fire as well. If you manage to directly hit a monster, youll always get some bonus damage.
While the mortar is excellent for obliterating ground based monsters, the anti air gun is more useful for flying enemies. Riddle the sky with bullets and hope for the best! However, there is an upgrade in the tech tree for the Anti Air Gun that allows you to aim at ground based enemies as well. Double the trouble, all around. Especially since you can also, technically, use the mortar for flying enemies too. Ultimately the success youll have with the dome is all about how nifty you can be in combining the power of these two weapons. Speaking of upgrades, lets talk a bit about the tech tree for the Artillery Dome! The mortar has two different lines of upgrades: one is focused on making direct hits with the mortar shells. With this upgrade any direct hits deal massive amounts of damage and if you follow this track youll end up with a dome that can easily deal with even the most high level monsters in no time. Did you ever wish to one-shot a Driller? If so, then this might be your path. However, weaker monsters that attack from both sides will be more of an issue, because of your limited rate of fire and area of effect. The other upgrade track is all about area damage. It lets you expand on the mortar's explosion radius and adds additional shells per shot. Following this track you can pretty much cover the entire ground in exploding mortar shells with just one shot and easily deal with whole packs of attacking monsters.
Theres also some choices you can make when it comes to upgrading the Anti Air Gun. One track is centered around drastically improving the rate of fire, and the other on homing rockets that will detect monsters and change their course to find their target.
The Tesla Dome
While the Artillery Dome is in its essence based on ballistic explosions, the Tesla Dome is built around the power of electricity. It also just happens to be the first dome that allows for two dimensional aiming.
You aim by moving your reticle in any direction across the screen. When youve found a suitable target you hold down the shoot button to charge your weapon. Once you are fully charged you then release the button to shoot. This means that when you release, you really need to be in the right spot, as otherwise you have to charge again from zero. This is very different from, for example, playing with the laser, where you can easily adjust your aim while firing. You can of course charge as you move, but as movement speed is decreased while charging, you need to plan your moves carefully to be in the right spot at the right time. Another useful upgrade worth mentioning is Perfect Timing. A perfectly timed shot will happen if you charge your weapon and release it right when its fully charged. This is indicated by visual cues on the reticle, and as a result your shot will be a lot stronger.
Where it really gets interesting however, is with the Electro Orb upgrades. With this, every shot creates an Electro Orb that remains in place for some time, stunning and damaging any enemy that passes it. So lets say you see a horde of ticks coming towards your dome. Instead of shooting right at them, you can place an Electro Orb in their path and move your attention elsewhere, while the orb deals with them. You can, of course, also upgrade these orbs! The obvious one is to increase their longevity with the Persistent Orbs upgrades. Another very useful thing is the Nurture Electro Orbs upgrade. With nurturing, you can boost an already placed Electro Orb by shooting it again to both increase its size and how long it stays. The Electro Orbs challenge you with a brand new way of thinking about how to work with the space around your dome for defense. You could, for example, place two orbs on one side of the Dome to block off that space from enemies, while you focus on bigger targets Or, knowing that a diver is incoming, you can simply place a sphere where its most likely to attack and not worry about keeping an eye on them. You can even start placing a few orbs before the battle starts, to better prepare for the first enemies.
The Electro Orbs also work together with Perfect Timing to create stronger orbs. if you also have upgraded your Shot Power, then your orbs can end up dealing quite a lot of damage. You can also upgrade the stun power of the orbs, to make sure the monsters slow down and take as much damage as possible. All in all, the Tesla dome is an interesting dome to play in, as it requires a lot of planning and gives you new ways to think strategically about the space around you.
Dome Supplements
Besides the two brand new domes, this update will also come with an exciting new feature: Dome Supplements. Previously, each dome came with its own basic branch in the tech tree where you had the various health upgrades, repairs and so on. Each dome also had their own specializations like how the Laser Dome had the hardening ability, and the Sword dome had combat repair. With the Double Dome update, we are changing that. The domes will not come with this predefined upgrade branch, but instead you will be able to unlock Dome Supplements as you play. Once you bring a Dome Supplement back to the dome you can choose between 6 different kinds of supplements to add to your already existing upgrade track:
- Reduce melee damage (also buffed with this update)
- Reduce projectile damage
- Combat repair (also buffed with this update)
- Electrified hull that hurts melee monsters(basically thorn damage if you know you hack and slash games)
- Dome resurrection, where instead of being destroyed, the dome fully restores and even gains additional max health
- Scrap repair, with which you can repair your dome for iron, but lose max hp when doing this (max hp can be restored once)
The one year anniversary of Dome Keeper
Time sure swooshes by when youre having fun. The one year anniversary for Dome Keeper is coming up next week! To celebrate, we are going to have a livestream with Ren and your friendly neighborhood Community Manager Sanna. Well be playing Dome Keeper using one of the new domes of course, and talk about whats happened with Dome Keeper over this past year, what the future holds AND well be answering your questions about Dome Keeper. The stream will take place on Tuesday, September 26th, at 21:00 CEST on the Bippinbits twitch channel, so make sure to join us then! [hr][/hr] We hope youre as excited about the Double Dome update as we are, keepers! Thats all from us this time. As always, we really appreciate hearing from you so please let us know what you think in the comments below, and join us to discuss all things Dome Keeper on our official Discord server: Bippinbits Dome Keeper Discord Server.
[previewyoutube=nFH6JOWiXBU;full][/previewyoutube] Greetings, Keepers! We have received word from the Guild Council that another update is dropping soon. We are thrilled to announce that we have not one but TWO brand new domes coming your way on October 5th! No shade thrown on the Laser Dome or the Sword Dome, but isnt it about time we had more options? Well we agree, and thats why were excited to bring you two new domes: the Tesla Dome and the Artillery Dome. The Tesla Dome is equipped with powerful electrical abilities, and the Artillery Dome features a powerful mortar and an anti-airgun as well! Both offer new, exciting ways to deal with the attacking waves of monsters that threaten your dome. Were also introducing a major change in upgrades for your domes in the form of Dome Supplements! With this new mechanic, you can add new upgrades to your dome tech tree during your run. So instead of upgrade paths like Hardening being a fixed part of the laser dome, now you can make your choice freely among a bunch of similar supplemental upgrades Keep your eyes peeled for an upcoming dev diary soon, where we will go more in-depth on the new domes as well as the Dome Supplements system to come. In the meantime, come on in to the Bippinbits Dome Keeper Discord Server, its the number one place to discuss Dome Keeper and also a pretty nice place to hang out while we wait for the update to drop.
Hey there, Keepers!
It is Gamescom week, and well be right there on site in Cologne, Germany, more specifically at the Indie Booth Arena. If you are there, make sure to come visit our booth to get a hands on look at split screen multiplayer!
Yes, you read that right: multiplayer is coming for Dome Keeper. We cant yet say exactly when it will be ready to be released into the wild, but as you will be able to see in our booth at Gamescom, it is coming along really nicely. You will find us in Hall 10.2.
Besides multiplayer, we also have something very special at our booth only: Drillbert plushies! We only have a very limited amount however, so we will require you to overcome a challenge to get one.
For those of you at home that arent able to swing by, you can still get some Gamescom related Dome Keeper content. Well be part of a couple of livestreams over this week, the first one happening already tonight at 20:00 CEST! Make sure to tune in to the Awesome Indies Showcase to see Ren talk Dome Keeper at https://www.twitch.tv/gamescom.
Make sure to also check us out on Friday, when well be part of the Indie Arena Booth stream, at 12:45 CEST! You can watch the stream on the Gamescom twitch channel but also on the official Indie Arena Booth twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/indiearenabooth.
Thats all for now! If youd like to follow our Gamescom experience AND chat with other great community members, wed love it if youd join the official Dome Keeper Discord server!
Hello, Keepers! Thank you for your reports around some issues with worlds in palettes. We have two bugs fixed with this patch that could cause you to play the same world over and over again, and also let you play worlds you didn't unlock yet. Please let us know if you see any other issues like that.
Changelog V2.6.2
- fixed worlds already showing up in relic hunt that you hadn't unlocked yet
- fixed getting stuck playing the same world and palette over and over again after some specific game loading situations
- if some mod content was used in the loadout screen and the mod was later unsubscribed to, it should revert to default options instead of showing an empty space now
Just a throwback to old times when this game was still called Dome Romantik. These were the original ideas for domes. If you read the post about the future of dome, you might recognize the artillery domes shape existing back then already. The asymmetric dome wasn't possible with how the monsters work, but maybe we'll see something like it in a monsterless mode ;) That's all for today! As always, please let us know if you encounter any issues through the official Discord server: bippinbits - Dome Keeper.
Hello, Keepers! We have a small patch for you today with some tweaks and fixes for our latest update. Thank you everyone for your feedback and for reporting any bugs you find as you play!
Changelog V2.6.2
- Fixed achievement "Thorough" for mining map completely not triggering
- Fixed assessor not being able to pick up dropped gadgets inside dome
- Fixed music cycles being one-off
- Fixed prestige score hud showing 0 as total when multiplier was zero (for countdown)
- Fixed prestige score hud adding a plus sing in front of negative changes (like +-2 instead of -2)
- Fixed exploit around friendly mode
- Fixed some false positives of cheat detection in countdown mode
- Modding: updated mod loader to v6.1
- Modding: fixed existing upgrades appearing twice if they were changed through a mod
- Modding: better support for adding your own game modes
- Modding: whitelisted HelloWorld-RunLogger and Ste-Petmagotchi for prestige runs
That's all for today! As always, please let us know if you encounter any issues through the official Discord server: bippinbits - Dome Keeper.
Greetings, keepers! Its been just a bit over a week since we released the V2.6 Mod Support Update, and were thrilled to see how much you all have enjoyed it so far! Were grateful for all of the feedback weve received so far, its thanks to you all that we are able to continue making Dome Keeper as good as can be! And, we cant wait to see what sort of mods our amazing community will come up with going forward.
We suspect that you might be interested in knowing a bit about what sort of content we have planned for the future of Dome Keeper, so lets dig into it!
Multiplayer
We know this is *the thing* that everyone wants, and its the same for us! We did quite some planning earlier this year and started proper development on Multiplayer last month. Ill share our current plans - please keep in mind that plans can always change, and there is a lot of uncertainty in how well development goes (as multiplayer is tough, especially when adding it retroactively.) As a first step, well implement local multiplayer with a coop mode for 2-4 people. Right now our goal is to have that playable for Gamescom this year, which is at the end of August. There we can get some first hand impressions of how people enjoy and play with coop mode. I expect well learn a bunch there, and give us the feedback we need to continue iterating on the mode. If everything goes super smooth we might have a second game mode by then, but I wouldnt bet on it. Please note that multiplayer won't yet be released publically, as we'll continue refining it after Gamescom. Anyway, more on that mode in the future!
What was last years april fools will become reality with the second multiplayer mode. Well, not exactly this, a lot less romantic, but it similar. In the meantime, we are getting some outside help with porting Dome Keeper from Godot 3 to Godot 4, Godot being the game engine we use. With Godot 4 we expect that adding an online multiplayer on top of the local one will be a bit easier. Here is where a lot of uncertainty lies - we are sure we can make a local multiplayer, but online can be sooo tricky. Apart from multiplayer, the upgrade to Godot 4 will also make porting to consoles easier. We cant yet say when we can release multiplayer as well only release it when we think its fun and done, and we cant plan for fun.
Double Dome
Apart from multiplayer we are also working on some really cool content, hooray! Well actually add two new domes this year: The Artillery Dome and the Tesla Dome. In typical Dome Keeper fashion they play very differently compared to the already existing domes.
Artillery dome closeup. The Artillery Dome is centered around having a big mortar that is extremely powerful, but a bit slow. It requires good timing too, as its fire is indirect. In addition, the Artillery Dome sports an anti-air machine gun, making it the first dome with two weapons. Twice the weapons, twice the firepower! The Tesla Dome on the other hand has perfect control on where and when its shots hit, as you aim with something akin to a reticle. If you can time your shots well theyll hit even harder, and there can be an electric field that retains after you shot, which damages and stuns approaching monsters. With some upgrades you can even nurture these fields to a very large size.
A lot of work happens behind the scenes. On the left you can see the first design for the tesla dome that we eventually scrapped. On the right is the new design with a very sophisticated weapon animation. Fun fact: the Artillery Dome is actually based on two of the domes I had planned for the original Dome Romantik release. Those domes were planned but never made, as we had a big change of plans with making Dome Keeper instead of Dome Romantik, but their time has finally come.
Artillery dome in its natural habitat. The double dome update will hit in Q3 this year, and we are really excited for it!
Far Future
But wait, theres more! Were doing some early work on more cool stuff - it seems we have too many ideas and too little time to make them all reality. Well share some of the things now, but please be very mindful of the fact that all this is in its very early stages and could be canceled if we think its not fun, too big for us, or if outside circumstances dictate it. We got ideas for two new game modes. One is Colonization, a proper peaceful mode without monsters, centered around terraforming and colonizing a barren planet. It is a much longer experience than the miner mode in prestige runs, and comes with a lot of neat visuals.
This could be your very own utopia! The other mode is Migration, which we wanted to have in the initial release of Dome Keeper. Back then we realized it could be a much larger mode than we anticipated, and that we couldnt do it justice if we only had spent some weeks on it. The idea here is that you jump from planet to planet in a run, instead of spending a long time on one planet. Youll get very strong upgrades by recovering relics, and the planets will each come with their own modifiers posing new challenges to your build. This mode is also really well suited to support a roguelite mechanic that really has no place in the other modes. We know a lot of you really want one, and its the same for us - a proper campaign mode. Both modes feel very rich in areas we could expand on - having a bit of farming in colonization mode, where you grow things inside of the mine and in additional domes on the surface. Migration on the other hand could also get some added story touches, or even a light mission mechanic. Its also exciting to think of the possibilities mods have to expand both modes. Just to enrich the base game, we also got a bunch of new monsters on the bench, ready to be released into the wild together with a new world. Its not sure when we can release this, as our hands are really full with the new domes and multiplayer right now, but the monsters are designed and drawn already.
One of the new monsters weve been working on: the Tormentor! On the other hand we are not forgetting the things that spice up your runs: caves and gadgets. We want to add more here and are currently gathering ideas around those. Additionally wed like to expand bits we already have, like underground plants becoming gameplay relevant.
Making more Dome Keeper
As I said, we have many more ideas than we can make. In order to realize them, we have expanded the team by hiring Raffa and Fio. Raffa is an expert in making things look awesome and really juicing it up, as you can see in the Artillery Dome footage or his Hydra Launcher mod. Besides that, he is also a very good engineer, taking care of performance issues and digging deep into the engine. Fio on the other hand is key for us to make use of the telemetry data. We have a wealth of run data already, but havent been able to spend a lot of time yet on analyzing it and drawing smart conclusions. Fio is about to change this and will tell you a bit about that in another blog post. If you love charts, this is gonna be a treat!
This is the kind of insights we get from telemetry. You can see that there is a clear difference in winrates per world on relic hunt. This is due to the different monster compositions, suggesting where we can rebalance some of the monsters.
Soundtrack update
You might remember that we made an update to the Pioneer Pack a while ago. We renamed it the Engineer Gear Pack and added two new songs to it, to match with the Assessor Gear Pack. We wanted to make sure that the songs would be playable outside of the game as well, but it seems we might have promised a bit too much. As it turned out, there were some technical limitations in the Steam backend we werent expecting that wouldnt allow us to release the tracks as a separate soundtrack along with the in-game items. But, we have come up with another solution that we hope youll like. We have decided to add the tracks from these two packs to the Dome Keeper Original Soundtrack in the Steam store. That means that everyone who has the OST will be able to listen to these four tracks for free, but only outside of the game. In-game you'll only hear them if you got the pack they are included in. (The OST is included in the Steam Summer sale, by the way!) We know that this isnt a perfect solution, we tried our best to make it work as we initially intended and we apologize deeply to all of you who bought the packs specifically for the sound files.
Thats all, for now
Well thats all we have to share right now. To summarize: we have quite a lot planned for the future of Dome Keeper. Enough to certainly keep us busy for quite a while making Dome Keeper into the best game it can be, and we cant wait to release it all and see what you think! As always, wed love it if youd join us over at the Official Dome Keeper Discord server: Bippinbits - Dome Keeper. Thank you for all of your support - its the only reason we can continue to work on and expand Dome Keeper. Stay safe, Keepers! Love, The Dome Keeper team.
Goofball
Greetings, Keepers!
we are so happy to read all the comments on the mod support update! It really is something that gives is strength and helps us push forward :) We had a really tight timeline with the mod release, so a few bugs slipped. Thanks to your reports, we got them fixed. If any more turn up, we are ready.
Changelog V2.5.1
- fixed crash if drillbert mode was selected
- fixed issue where difficulty for prestige was taken from last relic hunt run, unless friendly mode was used
- fixed "shorten cycles" of Prestige mode also applying to how fast monsters spawn after each other
Greetings, Keepers! We have a brand new update for you today, officially adding mod support to Dome Keeper. Thats right: Steam Workshop support is IN!
Weve also made some tweaks and improvements here and there, including adding a Friendly Mode variant of Prestige Mode. It was requested by the community from people who enjoy improving their score, but found the very high difficulty of Prestige mode too punishing. Friendly Mode comes with a lower difficulty for a less intense run, where you just compete against your own score and those of your friends who also play that mode. We hope youll enjoy it! A full changelog can be found further down in this post.
Look at that mole man go!
Back to the topic of modding! We highly recommend that you head on over to Steam Workshop and check the Mole Man Keeper mod out, created by community members Ategon (music, art, code) and Leif (code). Its really well made coming with its own tech tree and OST, and just a lot of fun. You can easily see what a different concept it is - exactly the exciting things we hope to see more of with modding!
A really neat way to transport resources in the Mole Man Keepermod!
If you like what they made, go on and join Ategons Discord server to keep up to speed with what hes working on (like his own game Vuladune)!
Thats not all though! Bippinbits has two new team members: Raffa and Fio. Raffa already made a mod called the Hydra Launcher, which is a strong combat gadget that also looks fantastic, as you can expect from him. Hes already working on adding a mod for a new combat focussed mode, so stay tuned!
HAIL HYDRA!
If you want to learn more about making mods yourself, head over to the Dome Keeper Wiki:
https://dome-keeper.fandom.com/wiki/Mod_Developer_Guide
We are working on the documentation and will be expanding it in the coming days. Raffa offered to provide full time mod maker support the coming week, so if you want to get into modding definitely come to our Discord and let him support you.
Changelog
- Added mod support via Steam Workshop
- Added "Friendly Mode" to Prestige. It is Prestige on a lower difficulty, where you can beat your own scores and those of your steam friends instead of competing globally
- Improved visuals for the Relic Hunt cables and hopefully solved all missing cable bugs
- Added themed cursor, which can be turned off in the options
- Improved Teleporter animation
- Improved Assessor icons
- Fixed some issues around monster movement, especially around drillers not slowing down or stopping on Repellent skills. Behaviour can be slightly different than before.
- Restructured title stage menu to make space for modding (and multiplayer eventually)
- Fixed Assessor spheres very rarely not pausing correctly
- Reverted bad Sword Dome shield battery graphics (will get new sprites eventually)
- Fixed assessor sphere explosion also running when paused
- Raised upper limit of maximum monsters per wave to 400 from 100
- Refactored the "shorten cycles" upgrade inPrestige, as it had various bugs and exploits
- Fixed Wither ability of Repellent making monsters permanently weaker if reloading while it is active
- Game will now save automatically only after a wave is beaten, not both before and after a wave
- Improved cheat detection, especially with false positives
- Fixed Assessor explosions having no sound upon reload
- Fixed Assessor explosions not pausing properly when game is paused
Greetings, Keepers!
as announced earlier, today we change the pioneer pack into the Engineer Gear Pack. This is now more consistent with the Assessor and something we'd love to do with every keeper. Cameron made two new hot songs that go into it, so feast your ears! Best thing: whoever got the pioneer pack gets the new songs for free.
Changelog V2.5.2
- added brightness slider and accessibility option to remove vignette effect when deep in the mine
- fixed cheat detection marking some legit runs as cheated
- fixed Assessor bug on Intel 620 graphic cards, where a lot of elements went invisible
- improved bundle decay effect, so it gets clearer when it runs out
- changed Pioneer Pack to Engineer Booster Pack with two new songs
- updated localisation. Thank you very much everyone who helped on crowdin, it's great work!
Hey, Keepers!
If you haven't bought the Pioneer Pack yet, this is your sign to do so!
We're adding 2 new songs to the pack on June 1st and we're also increasing the price to match the recently released Assessor Gear pack. (And yes, you get the songs even if you buy it before we adjust the price!)
The Pioneer pack currently contains the Hardened Suit for the Engineer and the Vigilant Owl pet and, as mentioned, starting June 1st it'll also contain 2 new songs for the Engineer soundtrack.
These packs are meant to be a way for our players to support continued development of Dome Keeper, while also getting some cool cosmetics (and music!) in return.
Get the Pioneer Pack here: https://bit.ly/3MF3QgN
Greetings, Keepers!
Thank you for all the feedback on the new Assessor, we are so glad you like it! You also reported a few bugs that we dilligently took care of. :)
Changelog V2.5.1
- Massively improved performance for the Assessor, especially for Mac and older hardware. There was a shader that was causing issues, and we replaced it with something more efficient.
- Resource distribution for iron and water is now close to what it was in v2.4. We reduced it a bit too much for v2.5, making the game harder unintentionally. Sorry about that!
- Mineral Tree won't have resources that you cannot pick up anymore
- Fixed so that cobalt cave does not generate for fixed cobalt mode
- Fixed some tutorial icons being offset
- Fixed missing translation of a shield upgrade
[previewyoutube=uK6H0eNJSu4;full][/previewyoutube] Greetings, Keepers! Today we bring you the Re-Assessor Update. In this update, we are giving the Assessor a complete rework that should make it a lot more fun to play, starting Season 4 of Prestige Mode as well as adding a new modifier to it and more! "Pro Mode" is a prestige mode modifier aimed towards those of you who are aiming to get the highest scores. It gives you the option to choose an order of caves and gadgets when starting a Prestige Run. This modifier unlocks when you get the achievement for winning a Prestige Mode run with a score of 1000 points or more. Alongside this patch we have also released a Booster Pack (containing a new suit for the Assessor, a brand new pet and two new Assessor songs for the soundtrack!) that you can purchase to support the continued development of Dome Keeper, so make sure to check that out! We are also making sure that Drillbert mode stays. We saw that you as a community really enjoyed it, so we decided to make it permanent! That means that you can now unlock Drillbert mode as you would any other type of modifier in Relic Hunt. Hooray! Read the full change list below!
Change list
ASSESSOR
- Got a complete rework to make it more fun and remove a lot of friction from the controls.
- Spheres are now shot by hitting the shoot key while moving into a direction, instead of holding it and aiming in a direction. This makes shooting feel much more fluent.
- Picking items up is now consistent in controls, being bound on the use key by default (as "using" often means "picking up" with gadgets and caves). The controls are automatically reset to this default, so please change as you like (but note that you should keep use and collect on the same key, ideally).
- Bundle is now the default mode of shooting resources. Ability to shoot single resources is gone. While it was fun, it was too unreliable and slightly redundant. To shoot a bundle, just move in a direction and press the shoot key.
- Rotational mining is gone. Instead you now push against the rock to remove it. This has the same gameplay, but you don't need a sphere to mine and it's less tedious.
- Assessor now has the option of 3 sphere abilities: reflect, split and explode
- Reflection is now a stationary field that can be placed, instead of being an ability you have to time perfectly. While the old way was fun too, it didn't stay fun if you kept reflecting spheres for 2 hours.
- Added sphere explosion ability, which lets spheres in your vicinity explode, removing a lot of rocks around them.
- Reflect, split and explode each got one improvement upgrade in the tech tree.
- Rebalanced reload times, with a repeatable upgrade to get more spheres and a repeatable upgrade to extend the sphere lifetimes.
- Added a free pet and skin, in addition to the Assessor Gear Pack (which also has a pet and a skin.)
- Added 3 achievements for the new skills and updated the older ones.
- Started season 4.
- Added "Pro Mode". It's a prestige modifier aimed for the keepers competing for the highest scores. Until now they had to restart their runs often until they had their desired gadget and cave combination. To avoid this unproductive repetition, you can now choose an order of caves and gadgets when starting a run in pro mode. Pro Mode unlocks when getting the achievement of winning prestige with 1000 score points.
- All highscores can now be seen on the title screen. This panel can be hidden if it bothers you.
- Added upgrade to lower time until the next wave, to get rid of joyless waiting after you mined the whole map. Everything is sped up, including the converter, mineral tree and shield.
- Drillbert mode can now be unlocked as a regular run modifier!
- Reduced blast mining upgrade cost, increased last stage blast radius and lowered initial production time.
- Teleporter will now just stabilize instead of trying to float back to the position it was dropped at.
- Mineral Tree from the seed cave has changed root mechanics, which especially impacts prestige. Previously it was best to build a very sophisticated setup of connected cobalt for the tree to grow in. This was a ton of work and quite RNG dependent, which was no fun. Now the tree only grows roots within a radius of 3.5 tiles (fraction is important for diagonals) and can only grow one cobalt in total.
- Mineral tree now drops resources that are not picked up after a cycle. This way it can also work with lift or resource teleporter, and generally requires less attention.
- Added Catalan, Estonian, Slovakian, Hebrew and Filipino as community translated languages (incomplete right now - if you want to help translate Dome Keeper into your language: check out the link in the language selection panel in the options!). Please reach out if the fonts are not great, we need some help with it (ideally with a suggestion for two fonts, one being monospaced and the other not). Thank you to everyone who helped translate it! We will have support for Arabic once we can upgrade the engine from Godot 3 to Godot 4 this year.
- Added button to show all relevant previous tutorials in the pause menu
- Rebalanced cobalt distribution across all maps. Previously it was pretty much equally spaced out, but now it gets more sparse the deeper you go, to compensate for how your mining ability gets more powerful.
- Added different sky backgrounds per world when landing.
- Achievements are now checked upon startup, so if you have something unlocked/completed but are missing the achievement, it should automatically pop up on startup.
- Reworked relic bomb animation (the old skull is back!)
- Improved handling of the laser when using a gamepad. It should now respond more directly to the stick movements.
- Fixed teleporter looking deactivated after keeper teleports.
- Sword does not try to reflect rocks anymore.
- Driller is reachable by longest swords again.
- Improved shield hud visuals, with ability duration not hiding shield state.
- Very slightly changed timing on when scarab switches phases.
- Improved some UI sounds.
The Assessor is quite a powerful keeper - however, it seems that it just isnt that much fun to play. So we decided to rework the Assessor into something more enjoyable, so that they dont remain benched in your next Prestige run.
Something that is very important to us for Dome Keeper is that every element in the game should be different in a meaningful way in comparison to already existing elements of the same type. For example: the laser dome. It shoots a laser beam! While we could just add another dome that moves a gun across its hull and shoots bullets, it would in essence really be the same thing. It might look different, but it would play the same and pose the same challenges when thinking about how to deal with the different monsters.
The same is true when it comes to keepers. Keepers should differentiate themselves on three levels: how they move, how they mine, and how they carry things.
When it comes to movement, the Assessor isnt really that different to the Engineer. Mining though is quite different. Instead of the drill, the Assessor uses Kinetic Spheres and these have two functions: the rotation mining where you destroy rocks by rotating the spheres in front of you, as well as the ability to bounce the spheres between tiles like pinballs.
The difference in mining technique forces you to think more strategically about how to mine. With the Engineer you could go in any direction without planning ahead, while with the Assessor you must first create the right environment for your spheres to be as effective as possible. Thats the fundamental idea of the Assessor: setting interesting constraints on the mining so you have to be smart on your approach.
Carrying things is also quite different. When you pick things up as the Assessor they float around you in a sort of energy field, and then you can shoot these items out in the general direction of your dome. You can upgrade this ability to make the resources float together in bundles to shoot more items at a time but you cant upgrade your carrying capacity - which means that you really have to think about how to transport your resources back to the dome.
While it worked on a mechanical level, this was in all honestly quite tedious and clumsy to play. It also ended up having a lot of unfun downtime. If you had shot your Kinetic Spheres, you were basically just waiting around for them to finish bouncing around as you didnt have any other way to mine in the meantime. In addition to that, the way you shot your resources back towards the dome wasnt quite accurate enough.
Another important ability for the Assessor is the Sphere Reflection. It enables you to let the kinetic spheres bounce against your keeper, meaning you could in essence use that to mine in one specific direction. While very useful, the way it functioned was entirely timing based.You, as the player, had to hit a button at the exact right time for the sphere to bounce off of you, which made it a very tedious technique in the long run.
All of this led to the Assessor not getting used much by you. We knew that the basic idea could work well, so it was clear that we had to make it much more fun to play!
Enter the Re-Assessor
We have made three major changes to how the Assessor operates, and we do believe it makes it a lot more fun and easier to control. First, we completely replaced rotational mining. While the concept was right as a secondary, weaker mining ability to help you prepare the rock for spheres, it also meant that if your kinetic spheres were already in use, you could not mine at all. We replaced it with an ability called Contact Mining. With Contact Mining, the Assessor presses firmly against the tile, slowly breaking it down with kinetic energy. In function it is the same as rotational mining, but it does not rely on the kinetic spheres. Its also a little bit faster than rotational mining but not very efficient.
Then we changed how the kinetic spheres are shot. Previously, you had to hold a button (which would also stop your movement) and then choose a direction. Now the spheres fire instantly, as soon as you press the shoot button. It might take a bit of time to get used to as a seasoned Assessor player, but we find it feels a lot more intuitive and fluent. Lastly, we also tweaked the carrying mechanic. The shooting of single resources was fun to play around with, but overall an unneeded complication and simply not accurate enough. Instead you start out with the bundles, always shooting stable and precise groups of resources.
Weve also made some changes to the tech tree of course! You can upgrade to get as many as 6 spheres. The lifetime can be upgraded as much as you want but as usual, the cost for it increases. Increasing the sphere strength does increase the reload slightly, so you might want to keep a nice balance there to make sure you have enough spheres to be efficient.
The main changes however are in a very specific area of the tech tree for the Kinetic Spheres. Here you can choose between 3 abilities, and each has one upgrade to make it more powerful: Sphere Reflection is still there, but has a fundamental change. Instead of you micro-managing the reflection, you now place a static reflection field in the mine. It stays there, reflecting and powering up any spheres that get in contact with it. This ability has a cooldown, but with the upgrade you can even have multiple fields simultaneously.
The second ability is to explode spheres. Shoot your sphere as usual and then press space to make any spheres near you explode. Previously the Assessor didnt deal so well when you wanted to unearth a chamber or a large cluster of iron, but with the explode ability, youll uncover those gadgets and relics in no time.
The third ability is to split spheres. You shoot a sphere as usual and then you can split it to replace it with two smaller spheres, which you could then also split to get even more even smaller spheres.
We tweaked both the shooting of spheres and bundles in subtle ways, which should generally lead to them always doing what you intend. Previously, spheres would sometimes hit a corner and fly off into the distance. Finally, we changed the keybindings. With the default bindings, it wont happen that you can pick a gadget from a chamber that you cannot seem to pick up again after dropping it. It is consistent now and should work intuitively. All of these changes do mean that you might have to unlearn the old ways a bit, if you were a fan of the Assessor. That being said, we really hope that you will enjoy this coming update, and that youll have more fun playing the Assessor. And while you wait for this update to appear, join us on the Bippinbits Dome Keeper Discord Server to talk about Dome Keeper and just to hang out with some nice people!
We have news from the Guild Council for you, Keepers! It is our pleasure to announce that the 2.5 Re-Assessor Update is coming to Dome Keeper in the first week of May! So get ready to re-assess the Assessor.
This update focuses first and foremost on improving gameplay for the Assessor. While the Assessor is a powerful keeper on paper, gameplay wise there has been a lot of room for improvement. Weve overhauled it completely, making it stronger and much more fluent and fun to play, while staying true to the original idea and what was interesting about it. More on that in an upcoming dev blog purely focused on this topic!
This update will also feature a new Prestige Mode variant for those of you who enjoy the challenge: Prestige Pro Mode. Once youve gotten the High Score Achievement, Prestige Pro Mode gets unlocked.
Prestige Pro Mode is not its own mode, but provides more options to your prestige runs. You can choose a preset order of gadgets that you'll encounter and caves, so you never have to restart your runs because you didnt meet the caves or gadgets you wanted.
No more hoping for the seed cave, decide your own future!
The best of you also had the luxury problem of having the mine completely dug out and then waiting for monsters for 20 cycles. To eliminate this idle time, you also get access to an additional upgrade that lowers the cycle length in steps, down to a few seconds. This should make the waiting time in between waves disappear, if you like. Oh, and speaking of Prestige Mode, with this patch were also starting season 4!
Making the monsters angry.
In addition to the Assessor rework and Prestige Mode Pro, we are of course also including various other fixes and tweaks like for example having the Leaderboards accessible right from the title screen and the skies being different in the landing intro depending on which world you are in. We are also adding a way to revisit all past tutorial popups, something that was requested a lot. A full list of patch notes will as usual be available once the update is rolled out.
We are also releasing a purchasable Booster Pack alongside this update. The Assessor Gear Pack contains a new suit for the Assessor as well as a brand new pet(!) and 2 new Assessor songs. Purchasing this pack helps support Dome Keeper development, and adds no new gameplay features. The pack will cost 2.99, and you can wishlist it here. In addition to the pack, there will also be a new Assessor suit and pet for everyone, for free!
Until then, come on in to the Bippinbits Dome Keeper Discord Server, its the best place to discuss Dome Keeper and a pretty nice place to hang out while we wait for the update to drop.
[previewyoutube=BnEDbFnOAOM;full][/previewyoutube] Greetings from the Dome, Keepers! Today we have a very special treat for you: Drillbert mode! In this brand new game mode, you will start equipped with one Drillbert and blast mining, with the possibility of getting more Drillberts as you go. You unlock this game mode by. Um, sorry but I cant seem to find in my notes how to unlock it. Oh well, youre a clever bunch. Im sure youll figure it out. Maybe ask Drillberts mom? Her name's Madrillda, by the way... Youd better hurry up though, word has it that Drillbert Mode is only around for a limited time. More about Drillbert mode:
- You start with one Drillbert and the possibility to get plenty more
- You will not be able to upgrade any mining abilities
- You start with Blast Mining to help set up the right structures for your Drillbert friends to do their work
Edited on April 2nd to add:
Good news! Now that the dreaded day of April 1st has passed it is safe for us to let you all know that Drillbert mode is indeed real, and can be unlocked at any point during the month of April AND: when it's unlocked it's yours to keep forever!
Greetings, Keepers!
We have a very small patch for you today, containing some adjustments made on how the run modifiers are unlocked as well as a few other small fixes that should make the game more enjoyable. Full list below!
Changelog V2.4.3
- Run modifiers for Relic Hunt will now unlock one by one. Each time you win Relic Hunt and have two or less other new things unlocked, a run modifier will unlock too
- Double Iron Mode now gives a bit more iron and also more water
- Fixed countdown variant in prestige not always being unlocked by default
- Flames in the Blast Mining station now show up in an exponential time, which gives better feedback as to when the next bomb is ready
- Relic bomb will now again kill monsters that are not actually hittable
- Fixed prestige showing nan when the score is negative
- Mouse is now fully functional for choosing a gadget
Not actually coop, despite two keepers being there. Screenshots were stitched together. Thats all for now. As always, have fun and please let us know if you experience any issues though the official Discord: bippinbits - Dome Keeper.
Hello Keepers
again thank you for all the reports in the forums and on Discord! Thanks to that we can deliver a patch today, fixing a few issues. We'll wait a bit longer for your feedback regarding the balancing. One thing that made us very happy to see was how well mixed the prestige scores were. In endless, we are seeing both domes and all primary gadgets in the top score, yay! :)
Changelog v2.4.2
- fixed repellent delay achievement not triggering
- fixed crash when assessor shoots bundle into resource teleporting teleporter
- fixed drillbert sometimes staying scared after wave was over
- implemented limit on number of times a repeatable upgrade can be bought. This is set now for the Spire upgrade that would eventually become a negative.
- not showing lock icon for upgrades that have multiple predecessors, but only need one to unlock. A bit cleaner this way.
- fixed autoheal crashing the game when playing fixed cobalt
- added sound to auto heal and impact recuperation
- not spawning punisher monsters in automation mode anymore
Drillbert i actually thought of as "Drillbot", a robot that can drill. But Anne loves animals and had the great idea to make it into something much more likeable. So she sketched some animals - one like a dinosaur, one mole and an octopus. We both liked the Drillosaur best, who'd later be named Drillbert of course. In the code it is still called Drillbot by the way. This also worked so well with the "station" that Drillbot needed. Instead of fuel you'd bring treats to it, which again feels much nicer in a way. On the top left you can see some experiments as to how it would look like when carried. Can you spot the sketch that was picked and worked into what is ingame now? --- As always Should you encounter any bugs/issues while playing, please visit our support desk where someone can assist you https://rawfury.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1 We are of course also active on the forums and our Discord.
Have fun :)
Hello Keepers
thank you so much for your feedback and first bug reports! We've been busy listening yesterday, and already fixed what we could. One big fix is for the time between waves. This one has been around for long but went unnoticed by us. The original goal was for the easier difficulties to have more time between waves, and YAFI be the same as brutal, which is our baseline for everything. But actually the easier difficulties had the same time as brutal, and YAFI 36s instead of 60s initially. So it was the other way round. The 24s less for YAFI also were constant, and didn't depend on the cycle length. With this version, the timing is affected by the difficulty like this:
- normal 20% more time between waves
- hard 10% more time between waves
- brutal remains the same, 60s initially
- yafi 20% less time between waves
Changelog Hotfix v2.4.1
- fixed cheat detection marking runs on fixed cobalt cheated if they lasted above 20 cycles
- fixed time between waves not being correctly influenced by difficulty
- fixed diver not dying when hit with repellent's toxic fumes
- fixed maze and long cycles not working together
- added back strong repair for fixed cobalt mode, was missing by accident (50% heal instead of 15%)
- implemented workaround to fix invisible relic switch chambers (long standing rare bug) that prevented finished a relic hunt run
- spire burst now has 6s recharge time instead of 8s
Have fun :)
Greetings Keepers! Update 2.4 is HERE, and it is packed with goodies for all of your domekeeping needs! The free 2.4 Springloaded update brings three completely new gadgets to add to your arsenal: the Spire, the Autocannon and the Prospection Meter as well as multiple reworks and updates to existing ones. On top of that, the update introduces tons of new quality of life and game balance improvements to the game. Dome keeping has never felt so good before, thats a promise! [previewyoutube=azE1zlQhevI;full][/previewyoutube] Weve been teasing that update for a long enough time in our previous posts, so well cut to the chase: you will find below the full patch notes to get all the details on everything new featured in the 2.4 Springloaded update:
Changelog v2.4
GADGETS
- Added a defensive gadget called Spire, which can deal well with monster projectiles
- Added an offensive gadget called Autocannon, which behaves like the stun laser but is all about dealing damage
- Added a mining gadget called Prospection Meter, which displays the distance to the nearest resources
- Probe can now detect caves and chambers
- All primary gadgets got rebalanced, especially their battle abilities
- Orchard shield and roots now persist between waves
- Shield got more hp and reflection and electro blast got big buffs
- Repellent wither now does not flat out reduce HP from all monsters, but makes monsters take much more damage while it lasts
- Drillbert and Drilliam are now much better at drilling and the upgrade branch is now changed slightly
- Added an upgrade for Drillbert which shows you the direction to Drillbert, when carrying a treat
- Drillbert is now scared when monsters come instead of going to sleep, to better show the difference between the two states
- Added slot visualisation for gadgets, so that you can see where each gadget goes upfront. You usually can only use one gadget per slot (so no stun laser and auto cannon together)
- Added an upgrade to the Teleporter, to be able to teleport with a lot of carryables (like blast mines or Drillbert treats)
- Rebalanced converter upgrades and conversions to offer more useful options
- Reworked and improved the stun laser with a lot of new upgrades. Removed the damage option as this is now Autocannons job
- lift orbs now always cost 1 water and 1 iron, and never increase in cost
- Added two new run modifiers: HUD and Automation
- Countdown is now the default mode for prestige. The old standard mode is now called endless.
- Changed prestige difficulty to not take collected resources or gadgets into account at all
- Rebalanced relic hunt difficulty slightly, so amount of collected resources factors in less
- Cobalt upgrades now increase in cost in prestige countdown, so that it wont stretch the run for too long
- Added additional stab damage to most of the sword blade upgrades, so upgrading the blade has a stronger positive impact on the stab
- Improved Javelin visuals and feel
- Increased Javelin damage
- Buffed impact recuperation
- Increased slice damage for all blade upgrades
- Increased base health and additional health points from upgrades
- Domes now have an auto heal upgrade, that will heal the dome if it is about to be destroyed but you still have cobalt
- Domes now have a wave warner upgrade, that will let you know when its about time to head back to the dome because a wave approaches
- Domes now have an upgrade that shows you the shortest way back to the dome. The shortest might not always be the fastest, but you cant get lost this way
- Added telemetry, which helps us balance the game and focus on the things that will improve it the most. Telemetry means capturing some in-game events and sending them to us, so we can better understand how you play. For example, we can see how often each upgrade is bought, and thus can buff upgrades that are rarely used
- Added the option to manually choose gamepad icons in-menu (Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo). Controllers are often detected as generic devices, so your operating system cannot detect that it is a PS4 controller, for example - and thus not automatically pick the right icons
- To avoid unwanted relic bomb triggers in relic hunt, it will will only launch when hp reaches zero, and wont trigger if auto repair can still happen
- Fixed enemies staying stunned for the whole duration of repellents slowdown abilities, after going into full stun once
- Fixed scarab sometimes surviving the relic bomb like a badass
- Fixed worm rock not properly being removed after being blocked with sword
- Fixed key hints for use key binding always showing E, irrespective of actual binding
- Fixed some glyphs not updating to changed keybindings without reloading the game
- Fixed numbers in tech tree being unpleasantly offset for languages with non-western fonts
- Added more stats to the leaderboard submission to help with cheat detection
- Fixed scanner cave not revealing first biome
- Gadget drop will not get resources stuck anymore, if you deliver it to the dome with a lot of resources
- Fixed gadget chamber not opening after reload, if game was saved while it was opening
- Fixed big tick not properly playing its explosion sound when hitting the dome
- Fixed Drillbert treat turning invisible when Drilliam is unlocked
- Orchard shield now dissolves when dome is destroyed
- Invulnerable monsters will not be affected by any stun or damage ability (caused various issues like big ticks being invulnerable because they were stunned underground by repellents paralysis)
- For shield, fixed additional battle ability duration not being added after overcharging but depleting the overcharge part of the shield
- Fixed shield gadget reflection ability not catching some projectiles reliably
- Fixed beast animation getting messed up when stunned while jumping onto the dome
- Critter worms will now vanish if their tile is destroyed
- Tree seeds will also grow if they were about to root on a tile that then gets destroyed
- Probe impulse and marker now properly react to game pause and persists in the game save
- Fixed the big input icon in the pause menu not immediately switching, if input method was changed
- Drillbert treat will now better catch up with Drillbert, if hes speeding past it
- Fixed language select panel in some locales never setting focus to language buttons, being unable to switch the language without the mouse
- Fixed repeatable upgrades not marking resource cost as red, when it would be too expensive
- Fixed save getting broken if saving after sword dome impact recuperation triggered
- Fixed gadget choice popup sometimes staying outside of screen, if multiple gadgets are brought to the dome simultaneously
- Fixed pet duplicating on reload when one hatched from an egg and one was brought with you
- Triggers can now be properly bound to actions
- Fixed faulty animation of diver when it hits the dome while the dome is invulnerable
- Fixed sword pad still reflecting projectiles after dome got destroyed
- Fixed shield hud not updating battle ability display when wave ends
- Slightly better carry capability of engineers first carry upgrade
- Orchard now shows additional battle ability use from overcharge in HUD too
- Reduced driller damage by 20%
- Slightly reduced lasers stun capability
- Last health upgrade of laser dome increases health less, but is also cheaper
The Guild Council is excited to announce that the 2.4 Springloaded Update is in final testing and will roll out for all Keepers on Tuesday, March 7th. Along with the new gadgets and improvements revealed in our earlier posts, weve got one more thing to share. With a couple big changes, this update brings us to Prestige Mode season 3!
To start with, Countdown becomes the default mode, and the old standard mode has been renamed Endless. This makes prestige points a relevant resource sink from the start. We aim for Prestige to be a fundamentally different experience from Relic Hunt. In the current model, players mined to max upgrades first as they would in Relic Hunt and then go for prestige points. This also led to high scores being a function of endurance for runs lasting several hours. Countdown generates tough decisions on resource spending and risk taking to get a better score.
We also removed collected resources and gadgets contributing to the difficulty in prestige. For a competitive mode, this was not having the intended effect. Starting with Season 3, difficulty scales up solely on the passed number of waves. We are excited to see the impact on the meta from this change combined with the new gadgets and other rebalancing steps. We will know it is working if we see more than repellent with wither on every top score.
Good player telemetry information will be super valuable to improve the balancing across the board, be it upgrade costs, monster strengths or battle abilities.
Weve had a great time working on this update, and by that, I mean playing it on the daily. There are also a lot of little touches in there we think you will appreciate. We hope you enjoy it too. Now back to work, where we are already into development on the next update.
Greetings Keepers, Fresh reports have arrived from the final stages of preparation for the Springloaded update! Details include revised info on several existing gadgets and notes that the R&D team also put their time into engineering a number of exciting Dome and device updates. The Guild put together the following brief to help in preparation for the coming new deployments:
Gadgets
Keepers will want to be ready to take another look at some of the existing gadgets. Improvements to the probe, teleporter, and particularly our buddies Drillbert and Drilliam figures to make them more useful. One scout reported forgetting that they had a snack with them when jumping into the teleporter only to find it still with them when they materialized back in the mines. And that even before feeding the little guy, Drillbert seemed to have made a lot more progress than expected. The Scouts entry ends there as an attack wave hit, though it does mention that Drillbert started to cower in fear rather than falling asleep.
Loadout choices may also need a second look. Combat abilities on all three of the primary gadgets appear to be operating differently. Shields crackled with energy and the roots and canopy shield of the orchard do not seem to crumble away after each attack. Be careful with Wither, though, as it no longer seems to take out waves of enemies, though reports are that monsters were taking heavy damage from weapons fire while active.
All Domes
Guild quartermasters are also ready to deploy new dome tech upgrades. Working in cooperation with Keeper debriefings, R&D have developed the following to support Keepers on their expeditions!
- Adaptive Wave Warner
- Auto Repair
- Exit Route
Sword Dome
Also based on Keeper reports, the Sword dome gets improvements we think you are going to like. Higher power motivators have been developed that increase damage for both slice and stab. This upgrade also benefits the Javelin, which required a little additional tuning to feel just right. To handle the increased power, the dome has been strengthened and the Impact Recuperation upgrade boosted as well
We Need You
Keepers, your feedback played a big part in our work on this update. We use it side by side with our designs to develop and improve the game. With so many Keepers going on so many runs we need a better way to understand all the experiences you are having. So we will add anonymized in-game action telemetry through PlayFab with this update. This will give us super-valuable answers like, how many players chose shield vs. orchard vs. repellant? or which gadgets do players most often shred for cobalt instead of using? We only collect player actions with a randomly generated ID number without any personal info attached. There is so much vital information about how you interact with the game and changes to make the game more fun. We implemented this as a setting in the options, so you can turn it on or off. An in-game popup will ask you first, and it is not turned on by default. We are very thankful if you can help make the game better by allowing telemetry. Well make sure to share some insight in the future. That should be interesting for everyone. Now, would you believe there is even more to talk about for this update? Next time well dig into the coming adjustments to both Relic Hunt and Prestige modes, and if all goes to plan let you know when the Springloaded update will be sprung.
With gadgets set to star in the free Springloaded Update - oh, had we mentioned that it will be free? Yeah, it is :) Anyway, this makes the perfect time for a deeper look at gadgets in the design of Dome Keeper. Gadgets add variety to Keeper strategies. The primary gadget selected at loadout sets up a major element of the run ahead. Secondary gadgets found in the mines open up new tactics in the middle of the game. These offer interesting options affecting offense, defense, transportation, and information. When designing gadgets, we look for creative ideas that boost one of these areas, or create a whole new way of thinking about it. New gadgets also need to be unique. They need to give players a whole new dynamic to play right in the middle of a run. Starting with the Springloaded update, Keepers will be able to find three new gadgets buried beneath their domes.
The Autocannon
The Autocannon is an automated defense gadget for the players that want a more direct helping hand with monster defense. focusing on the source of danger itself - the monsters. The autocannon comes with a series of tech tree options allowing you to choose what fits your needs for the current situation. The key attributes of the Autocannon are bullet damage, movement speed of the cannon, bullet spray, and the time between shots.
The Autocannon will have several upgrade options, one example is the Machine Gun. This upgrade will decrease your time between shots as well as slightly increase your bullet spray.
The Heavy Bullets upgrade however, is all about the impact. Increasing the size of the bullet as well as the base bullet damage. The Autocannon really is the very first gadget that has strong offensive abilities. It will be interesting to see how you use it to complement your main weapons.
The Prospecting meter
A new gadget to support and aid underground discovery and improve your chances to find valuable minerals to bolster your dome defenses. The prospecting meter points out how close different resources are, a bit like you are playing "hot or cold" with resources. Its main attributes are detection range, what resources it detecs and how often it refreshes this information.
The Prospecting meter starts out detecting iron, but can be upgraded to display the distance to water and cobalt too.
Its detection range can be upgraded to find resources even deeper underground. Overall it will be an interesting alternative to the probe, especially as it does not even need a cellar slot. The probe in return also got some improvements, but more on that in another post.
The Spire
A new state-of-the-art projectile defense system, the Spire is designed to detect, intercept, and destroy incoming monster projectiles through accurate auto-targeting. The main attributes for the Spire are how often it can shoot before it needs to recharge and the recharge time.
The spire has a few critical upgrade paths, focusing on one of two fire modes. You can either go for a burst fire mode, where the spire can take out many projectile sin a short time but needs serious time to recharge.
Or you can go for a sustained fire mode, where the spire recharges between each shot, but does this quite quickly. For defense the spire also comes with two modes. In one mode, it can either split the monster projectiles into many small ones that do damage the monsters. Alternatively it can transform an incoming projectile into an energy trap, which blocks other projectiles and can even stun monsters. We hope youre excited to give these new gadgets a go in the upcoming free Springloaded Update. And this really isnt all. Many gadgets, both primary and secondary, have been reworked. Take the stun laser. We couldnt let the autocannon have all the fun. But more on that to come.
Incoming reports from scouts point to changes for gadgets on upcoming deployments! The Guild R&D department has given the codename Spring Loaded Gadgets to this information.
Readings from Dome sites beyond the next update show advancements to the known existing gadgets and three devices never seen before now. Two gadgets are unlike anything we have in the current catalog, and the third at first got misidentified as the stun laser. A closer examination of the readings showed they are not consistent with that gadget - it must also be something new. Additional data and analysis is needed.
Along with these exciting discoveries, evidence of improved versions of existing gadgets is being evaluated now. It seems the R&D team has also been working on a number of improvements to the standard gadgets as well as other core Dome components.
This preliminary report is only the beginning - please await further updates as we continue to collect more information and research.
Happy Base Building Fest, Keepers! We celebrate the joy and happiness of setting up a solid base and protective dome with 25% off! We are counting on you veteran Keepers who have survived and thrived on the frontier to support the aspiring new Keepers joining every day now might be a good time to share some of the accumulated knowledge! Play the game however you want, if you happen to face difficulties; here are some tips from the Guild to get you started:
- Use your first few runs to get the hang of it and earn some unlocks. Get to know the tools at your disposal and then move on to bigger maps and higher difficulties. With that suggestion in mind, let's look at some of the considerations Keepers face on their runs.
- Use the pre-drop choices of dome and primary gadget to suit the way you like to play. Sure, experienced Keepers love to argue about the best loadouts. That doesn't necessarily make them your favorite. The Guild works day in and day out to make sure that every combination offers a good way for a Keeper to work their run the way they want to.
- Once on the surface, things start to happen pretty quickly. After the first level of resource gathering and basic defense upgrades, plans tend to change on the fly. Don't overlook the active combat ability of your primary gadget. It can come in handy during almost any attack wave.
- Secondary gadgets, found through digging, add another layer to the strategic choices a Keeper must make. They provide support for specific aspects of dome management. This gives you flexibility based on what you find. For example, get the Elevator and consider whether its resource transport function will allow you to upgrade other areas before taking the increased carrying capacity.
- You never know what combination of resources, gadgets and caves you'll find on each run. Finding the path to success is what Keepers do. Before you know it, you'll be facing challenging scenarios and coming back to discuss the finer points of dome building.
Greetings Keepers
thank you again for your plentiful bug reports! We looked into the trouble with lasers letting some projectiles through, despite claiming to shoot them down. During that, we figured out another issue with laser, where shots could block the laser from reaching a monster. In the meantime, we are working on bundling up some cool additions and improvements into a new update. We'll share something in the next weeks, stay tuned :)
WIP cool stuff :D
Changelog v2.3
- fixed monsters not getting hit by laser, if there is a projectile between monster and laser
- fixed destroyed projectiles still catching the laser, allowing projectiles behind it to pass through
- scarab won't flash white when invulnerable and hit
- fixed squidley getting stuck when trying to carry off a resource that is in the lift, but pushed onto an impassable ceiling
Have fun :)
Greetings Keepers
The Guild Council appreciates your patience while we took a little time off over the end of the year. You gave a lot of great feedback which helped us with these adjustments. Please keep it coming and happy keeping!
Changelog v2.3
- toned down the stag - 1000hp -> 800hp - 10 dmg air projectile -> 8 dmg air projectile - 100 dmg ground projectile -> 80 dmg ground projectile
- toned down the scarab - 1200hp -> 1000hp - 40 dmg -> 25 dmg - only goes invincible once
- increased sword dome health by 25%
- reworked the Javelin. The sword now reappears immediately after shooting, and you are never blocked from moving the pad after shooting. The tradeoff is you can no longer control the Javelin in flight. To keep the timing, the charging does take slightly longer. To improve feedback on charging being finished, it no longer charges linearly and ends with a sound and animation.
- buffed sword fast stab damage across all upgrades
- fixed orchard shield not actually protecting from stag and scarab projectiles
- orchard shield now also blocks worm rocks
- tree seed won't grow on indestructible tiles anymore
- halfed the cost increase of buying lift orbs repeatably
- fixed gadget duplication exploit via saving and reloading in the right moment
- fixed crash when switching between some audio devices
- fixed rare crash when reloading save and the squidley cave has been found
- fixed stag and scarab projectiles not getting reflected by sword dome
- increased damage and size of explosion of projectiles that got reflected by sword dome
- fixed scarab getting stuck outside of screen
- improved the timing of the scarab losing its arms
- fixed stun laser sometimes not targetting stag
- fixed stun laser sometimes wobbling in place instead of targetting an enemy
Hey, Keepers! It's been an amazing 3 months since the first Dome dropped. We've seen over 300,000 Keepers make planetfall, retrieve countless relics and set some really impressive high scores. Plus, your masterful skills have been seen by more than 4.3 Million Twitch viewers, watching 3 Million hours of Dome Keeper. Incredible!
Your enthusiasm has been inspiring, and given us more energy than ever. We've released the Assessor Keeper, Caves & Critters, and Hard Pressed updates, and more. Thanks to you, this is just the beginning! We've got big plans for 2023 to turn our hopes and dreams into reality.
Were planning various and multiple types of content, gameplay additions, and tweak/balancing updates in various sizes, from smaller to epic ones. Well go into more detail about upcoming updates next year, however, wed like to celebrate 2023 by teasing our first epic project for 2023: Multiplayer!
Yes, we know you've been asking for it and we're committed to making it happen. It's a huge project - the goal is to include both co-op and versus modes. To make sure we deliver a great experience well need your input along the way.
Itll take awhile, and well have lots more to share along the way. For now, we're taking a few days off to enjoy this special moment and get ready for the amazing year ahead.
This is it, Keepers. Voting in the Steam Awards is now open and we hope you will cast a vote for Dome Keeper for Most Innovative Gameplay. We are still completely over the moon to be one of the five nominees. Your support means so much to us. Dare we hope to take home the Award? A Keeper can dream. In our excitement we thought, how else can we celebrate? Someone mentioned the Winter Sale so we decided to go for a 30% off offer. You, the community made this all happen and we have really awesome plans for the year ahead more on that soon. [previewyoutube=EIMuS6_ZW-8;full][/previewyoutube] It's always more fun to share good times. So invite a friend to join the Keeper ranks on this epic journey. Were gonna need everyone of them. These Domes wont keep themselves.
Check your inventory, Keepers! Weve created presents to add to your holiday cheer. Trading Cards, Badges, Emoticons, and Backgrounds. If youve played, you will likely find you already have a card or two (or more, up to 5). Play the game and trade to build out a full collection to proudly represent for the Keepers Guild wherever you go around Steam.
Again, thank you for your nominations to the steam awards. Here are some community items to celebrate the occasion!
When we got the news from Steam it took a minute to sink in. Your game has been nominated for a Steam Award! - Most Innovative Gameplay. Its a moment we wont forget. And lets be honest, its really ours together because this all comes from your support and recognition of the game. We are truly humbled and honored. [previewyoutube=8NHergfsj7w;full][/previewyoutube] From the early times on Discord, through play tests, to meeting you at game events, and to the many enthusiastic pieces of feedback today, your involvement makes Dome Keeper the game it is. Your enthusiasm and inspiration fuel our search for and experimentation with innovations to create the game experiences that make Dome Keeper really fun, and the results start the circle over again. We are grateful for this Keeper community, look forward to adding to its ranks, and seeing where we go together. We look forward to sharing our plans as we have so much more in the works.
Changelog 2.2.14
- Stag and Scarab projectiles no longer explode mid-air when pausing game
- Stag fires single projectile with combined damage amount instead of two separate ones, visuals slightly improved
- Adjusted final wave balance to be more viable on smaller runs, and slightly increased time between monsters
- Fixed Miner mode not displaying if Miner mode was the only unlocked Prestige mode variation
Keepers!
Your growing skills look ready to take on greater challenges. So they shall be put to the test. Extended runs have taken Keepers to ever greater depths. This has not gone unnoticed by the denizens of the planets. Even their strongest attacks have needed somethingmore menacing.
[previewyoutube=P0h1ckmPsOs;full][/previewyoutube]
Consider this an alert from the Guild. We have identified two new monsters coming and they are unlike any seen before. Look for new forms of attack from these menaces and be well prepared to bring down these formidable opponents.
With the tuning since launch and addition of the menaces, the time has come to archive the scoreboards and conclude Season 1. Today, Season 2 begins with a fresh set of leaderboards, including the new Mining variant. We also moved Prestige mode to its own unique world. There are no relics to hunt here, only the challenges of becoming the best Keeper you can.
In addition, we created a new unlockable Miner variant for Prestige to help Keepers hone their mining skills. This option offers a simulation without enemy attacks to allow time for experimentation with techniques. To keep the sense of time, the wave timer will run with the prestige score banking at the end of each cycle. After 20 rounds, the simulation ends. How high will the best Keepers score?
Wait, there's more...next week! Fun things, big news, and after the Guild Council planning meeting last week, exciting updates on things to come in the year ahead.
Happy Keeping!
- the Council
Changelog v2.2
- added two very strong, late game monsters: the stag and the scarab
- added a new prestige mode variation named "Miner", where you dig for 20 cycles without monsters
- added a new world that is exclusive to prestige
- added seasons to leaderboard. We had so many changes to balance already, and with the new monsters we start season 2. Season 1 scores are still visible in the leaderboard an via steam
- improved map generation, so that resource distribution is closer to what it was before the last change especially for prestige mode
- fixed rat animation when he's stuck in a corner
- stingray will now fly at lower heights, to differentiate more from flyer
- improved stingray death sound
- showing friends highscores in prestige by default, but remembering your last choice
Dome life gives Keepers their own unique perspective on the worlds theyve seen. Their PDAs and notepads filled with sketches can be found around most every Dome. The Guild has seen some pretty fine work pinned up around the walls and figures this holiday, as part of Rawcember, let's celebrate the art these Keepers create. Starting now and running through 12 December were inviting Keepers to share their Dome Keeper art with us as a reply in this Twitter thread this Twitter thread. Then on 13 December we will select 10 entries to receive a copy of Dome Keeper ready to gift to a friend and a special Discord role as Fan Art Fest 2022 Winner. Winning entries will capture the best look and/or references of Dome Keeper, decided by a jury of people from the game team. Beyond that, the format is anything that your creative vision desires. Please see Raw Fury General Competition Terms and Conditions for details on this information.
Greetings Keepers
we fixed a few more things, following your reports. The most important one, which is also the reason we didn't want to wait until the next bigger update, is a crash that can happen with the scanner cave. The game would crash if you'd activate the scanner cave quickly after adding the last resource. This was due to the resource still existing and trying to move into the right slot, but the slot being deleted as soon as the cave is activated. The deletion happened to free some resources, as the slot is not needed after the cave was used. We also added a small fun thing we wanted to do for a long time: more variation in the initial animation, with the monster that gets landed on. I hope we can add more in the future. I consider it our version of a simpsons couch gag ;) (and yes, maybe also an option to turn that off).
Changelog v2.1.17
- fixed crash when scanner cave was used while drop was still being placed into socket
- added new intro monsters getting landed on
- fixed worm spawning outside of map
- fixed shield overcharge being white. It's now back to the way it was before.
- fix lag spike when fog in the overworld would spawn
Greetings Keepers
yesterday we launched the Caves & Critters update, spicing up the underground a bit. Thanks to your reports and feedback, we have a nice hot fix ready now, which also solves some other issues. Thank you for all the support! :)
Changelog v2.1
- fixed crash when squid picked up bundled resource
- fixed wave timer not running on reloading game
- never switching to mouse and keyboard controls, when playing on Steam Deck
- fixed drone cave turning into a rock tile after reloading the savegame twice
- fixed squids moving into rock and sometimes getting stuck, when the scanner cave was activated before
As always should you encounter any bugs or issues while playing, please visit our support desk where someone can assist you https://rawfury.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1
One of our favorite parts of being a Keeper comes from that moment while digging when the next piece of buried treasure becomes visible. It could be that sigh of relief from a cobalt deposit to make dome-saving repairs. Then there are the unknown gadgets and the anticipation bringing them back to see what we have found. And then there are caves. Their unexpected rewards add another incentive to mine one more block because who knows what might be there. Caves hold so many fun opportunities (well, at least only fun ones for nowmuhahaha) that we figured, hey, lets mix it up and add some more fun things to the game. Now, you might ask, wait, why not make these new gadgets? Gadgets have multiple elements to them that can be developed in unique ways in the tech tree. This also makes them figure into your resource use decisions. Caves, on the other hand, are a power up (note to us, quad damage cavemmm!). When you discover a cave, you get its reward and that instantly becomes part of your moment-to-moment play, while not changing the upgrade path youre on. [previewyoutube=B7jI8zTL280;full][/previewyoutube] So, yeah, four new caves are waiting to be discovered. With the new caves you can
- make tunnels in all directions
- expand your vision
- improve your bedrock scanner to see beyond
- unleash a caged squid
Changelog v2.1
- added 4 new caves
- added critters, small creatures roaming the mines. They can be disabled via options.
- shield can now be overcharged during battle
- changed how double laser affects movement speed and damage
- improved Assessor movement
- smaller Assessor rebalances: spheres reload a bit faster, some upgrades are a bit cheaper, re-arranged some upgrades to access sphere split earlier. Deeper changes will come in a later update, thank you for all the feedback!
- improved all icons for Assessor
- Assessor now always shoots at full force
- Assessor can now pick up things from caves with the pickup button. Not ideal yet, but slightly more consistent.
- translated thousands of words across many languages
- fixed dome sometimes being destroyed before invulnerability on shield depletion was able to take effect
- shield hud now also shows overcharge status and ability duration
- fixed last bomb upgrade for sword long stab not having an effect
- divers will now spawn again
- fixed butterflies only coming from the left side
- improved all monster energy projectile sprites
- improved resource distribution in maps slightly, in preparation of bigger maps
Keepers! Thank you for all your support, ideas, feedback, and camaraderie as part of the Keepers Guild. While we are hard at work developing new content for the game, there is something only you can help with - The Steam Awards. We are hoping you will nominate us for
Most Innovative Gameplay
Creating Dome Keeper has been a fantastic journey as we discover, develop, and improve various aspects of the game. If like us, you too enjoy the trek as we experiment, prototype, and create new types of gameplay, then please share the love with a nomination. Thank you again for all for your continued support and we will keep being busy with all the new things we're excited to bring you. Until the next one, Keepers
Hey Keepers!
thank you for the feedback regarding problems with the waves. In the Assessor update, we changed a bit how waves were generated, and that magnified a bug that always existed. A bit of insight :)
Wave Designer
The Wave Designer, one of many tools we made to make dome. That's a small tool i built to help create snippets.
Snippets
Snippets are small sequences of monsters. The intention of having them was to combine pre-designed challenges with procedurally generated waves. Tasked with generating a wave, the wave generator would then look at all valid snippets, and combine them freely until the desired wave strength was reached. You can see that a monster either spawns left or right. Randomly, the whole snippet could also be flipped, to spawn on the other sides.
Do we even need snippets?
In the last update, i removed all snippets except for single monster ones. With the stingray, it suddenly did not make sense to have all these premade flyer snippets - instead we'd need a stronger system to support "one of those" as a placeholder, like "use a tier 1 flying monster". Before doing that, i wondered if the snippet system was actually beneficial, or if not having it would feel any different. You see, this is complexity, and avoiding complexity is usually great. There are many risks in there too, like some monster appearing overproportionally often, because they are in many snippets. This gets harder and harder to balance the more monsters we have. Because of this, i decided to remove all snippets and only keep single monster ones. So the most basic setup. Divers didn't appear as a single snippet, so i accidentally culled them too.
The Bug
Remember i wrote that snippets could be flipped? What happened here is that flipping a snippet would cause every occurance of that snippet to be flipped. This is a bug - each snippet should be flipped or not flipped individually. Before, this was not very obvious, as every monster appeared in various snippets. But now with only one snippet per monster, it meant that all monsters of the same type would come from the same side. Very bad. Especially if you suddenly have 7 drillers coming from the same side.
That's not right.
Fixed
It's an easy fix, just making all used snippets independent of each other (separate instances). But it shows well how bad complexity can be - in this case, it hid this bug that was always causing some obscure shenanigans. If you saw very strange waves that were lopsided, like 5 ticks coming from the same side, it might have been this bug. It can still happen now, which is also ok, but less often and we also know why it happens.
v2.0.15
- fixed monsters of the same type only coming from the same direction within a wave.
- less lopsided waves - some of it is ok and interesting, but it's a bit less random now
- divers will spawn again
- fixed rare crash when starting a new game or loading an old save
That's right, Keepers, Dome Keeper is now 20% off for the Midweek Madness sale!
Have you been waiting to get digging? Then here's your time to get going! With our new Assessor Update, there's even more new content for you to enjoy.
Now's the time to dig, survive and be kind to Drillbert; he needs his rest.
[previewyoutube=5ceaxt_jgX8;full][/previewyoutube]
Dome Improvement: Meet the Assessor!
Greetings, Keepers!
We hope you've been having a smashing time (quite literally) in Dome Keeper and are diligently keeping your Drillberts happy, healthy, and full of delicious treats. Today we'd like to introduce you to The Assessor, Dome Keeper's all-new Keeper! With an exciting new set of skills and abilities, we reckon The Assessor will turn the underground Dome Keeper experience completely upside down as up until now, you've only been able to experience the wonder of Dome Keeper playing as The Engineer, the gritty, non-nonsense miner who powers through the bedrock with force. A band of technologists living right on the precipice of experimental science, one might think of the Assessor as the high-tech yin to The Engineer's brute force yang. Here's everything you need to know about the all-new Keeper and their unique skill set [previewyoutube=i3a7RTOxD7M;full][/previewyoutube]
Self assessor-ment
Furnished with the latest state-of-the-art equipment from the Guild, Assessors are equipped with their trusty electromagnetic power pack. Unlike The Engineer's separate drill and jetpack, Assessors use their equipment to levitate both themselves and their finds, zipping through tunnels and mining out iron, cobalt, and water not by drilling but by smashing up the rock with their astonishing kinetic spheres!
Initially, you'll have two spinning spheres you'll launch toward the rocks. They'll hit the wall, damaging it, and after a few hits reducing that rock to rubble. Things get even more exciting when you start unlocking upgrades. One pathway, for instance - Sphere Reflection - lets the Assessor reflect the spheres to rebound, essentially creating a mini-game of breakout. That lets you quickly chip away with good timing. Another option offers to add more spheres or buff how powerful they are, helping you mine much more rapidly. Carrying your resources back to the dome works differently, too; thanks to the Assessor's mysterious force field, you'll not carry your resources back up to the dome as much as they'll levitate alongside you. You can even fire the resources off, flinging them closer to the dome or straight into there if you're a good enough shot!
But all of the Assessor's fancy tech also requires you to do one thing well: plan your shots! Once unleashed, you have little control over the spheres. A bad shot will vanish quickly, a great shot will destroy swathes of rock, so you always want to make sure you place your spheres where it matters. Sometimes you won't find a great spot. Then you can rely on your rotational mining for help - often you'll be able to prepare the rock layout to maximize the power of your spheres.
Jeepers Keepers
No longer will you be playing in the straight forward fashion you get with the Engineer. It'll be up to you to ensure you properly plan your sphere shots and time your reflections well, to maximize your mining capabilities! So go on then, get in there and let those spheres fly! Let us know what you think, and what ideas you have for any future Keepers that may join the team! Make sure you're following Dome Keeper on Twitter or join our Discord to meet and swap tips with other Keepers, as well as tell us all about your favorite map modifiers, gadgets, and anything you'd like to see us bring to Dome Keeper in the future!
Changelog
- - added the Assessor, a new keeper based around control of gravity. Also comes with a completely new OST and 4 Achievements.
- added a new monster, the Stingray. It's a lowest tier flying monster, bringing a bit of variety early on, replacing the flyer in some worlds.
- improved sprites for Rockman
- buffed orchard: - Root explosion deals a fixed, high amount of damage. - Fruit buff upgrades are much cheaper. - Shield last for much longer and is a bit cheaper.
- more community translated languages now available
- reworked sword impact recurperation and added visual effect for when it's active. It will now activate during the battle, as soon as the damage threshold is reached.
- added alternative tooltips for other controller types than xbox. Automatic detection should work for Playstation and Switch Pro controller.
- improved sprites for keepers in loadout screen
- added option to set how often music plays
- improved colors of orchard fruit in HUD, for better readability towards the end
- improved animations for unlockable screen
- improved some worm and sword sounds
- wave counter and inventory now cost 1 water
Dome Improvement: Gadgets Galore
Although we've already spent time talking about the primary gadgets you'll encounter in Dome Keeper, how about a little more information about the other gizmos and gadgets you'll come across, too?
Sure, you get to choose your primary gadget before you kick off each new Dome Keeper run, but there's also an incredible smorgasbord of tools and gadgets hidden in the rocks below your dome. Here's a rundown of some of the types of gadgets you may find, and what benefits they bring
Inspect-our Gadgets
As well as the minerals and resources your Keeper needs to make upgrades and keep your dome in tip-top condition, beneath the surface you'll uncover secret chambers that contain helpful little gadgets, too.
Bring one back to your dome, and you'll get a choice: select one of two randomized gadgets, or sacrifice it for two extra cobalt pieces and what you choose can make a big difference to your run!
Take Blast Mining, for instance. Drag it - or fling it! - to your preferred spot and it'll detonate, instantly excavating an area and saving you a lot of time. Alternatively, you can upgrade it so it digs out a long tunnel instead of a small square.
How about a Lift that sounds handy, right? Set one up, gather your resources, and you'll be able to send them back to the dome, giving you extra precious time to keep digging whilst the elevator does the heavy lifting literally!
A Teleporter, on the other hand, enables you to move quickly back and forth between the mine and the dome, cutting down your traveling time which - let's face it - can be the difference between life and death in Dome Keeper! What's that? You'd rather send back resources and fly home the scenic route? Well, you can do that, too, via an upgrade available in the Teleporter's tech tree for that matter, every found gadget has its own upgrade pathways, too.
That's not all, though! We have a Condenser - a nifty machine that auto-magically generates water, which can be used to overcharge your primary gadget - and a Converter, which does exactly what it says on the tin and lets you convert excess materials, which is particularly useful if you're running low on one resource but have more than you need of another.
There's even a Probe that sends out an electronic impulse to show you exactly where nearby resources are hiding, saving your Keeper time and effort and ensuring your digging pattern is much more targeted.
Last but definitely not least: have you met Drillbert? He's your super cute dino pal who loves to dig and will scratch away wherever you place him, leaving you free to drill someplace else, essentially doubling your chances of unearthing something valuable. When he hits a dead-end he'll take a brief nap until you reposition him. You may even discover that he'll dig a little faster if a tasty treat or two is up for grabs!
Because each tech tree offers plentiful pathways and branches to upgrade your gadget, there are many, many ways to customize your gadgets, with every branch specially designed to address a particular aspect of the game: traveling time, resource management, getting materials back to the dome, and so on. Use them together, though in synergy and you'll open all kinds of neat shortcuts and ideas, making every run feel fresh and rewarding.
Make sure you're following Dome Keeper on Twitter or join our Discord and tell us all about your favorite gadgets, including your wishlist for the future! And don't forget: Dome Keeper is out now!
Until the next one, Keepers - Dome Sweet Dome!
Greetings Keepers
Well, funny as the "top men" meme may be, we are fortunate to have an awesome team that got to it on this one. We have cleaned all the monster goo from the Dome and restored full movement functionality. Or in plain terms, we think we found everything causing the issues with sluggish movement, quirky stick and D-pad response, and keyboard input issues. A quick note for controller users - in options on the input tab there is an on/off box for "automatically select preferred controller." This is for players using two different sort of controllers for different sessions, like if you use an Xbox 1 controller and switch to a PS4. If that is you, try selecting "on" for this. If you use the same controller all the time, leave it "off" which basically locks the game to the controller you are using right then. As always Should you encounter any bugs/issues while playing, please visit our support desk where someone can assist you https://rawfury.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1 Now here's a cute picture of Drillbert. Thanks for your support!
Keepers! To celebrate the MIX showcase, we thought we'd share with you our beautiful accolades trailer! We super appreciate all the kind words [previewyoutube=5ceaxt_jgX8;full][/previewyoutube] If you haven't picked up Dome Keeper yet, now's the time! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/
Hey Keepers!
a quick one this time, a hotfix if you will. Some of you noted that with the last update, movement with gamepad sticks was unpleasant, as it would slow down in strange ways. We immediately investigated it, and were able to reproduce and fix it. We also snuck in some very small other things.
v1.5.17
- fixed movement with gamepad stick slowing down unpredicatably. There were some other quirks around movement speed, but now it should all be fine.
- skeleton cave won't spawn in Prestige anymore. Unlocks like worlds, difficulties, pets or modifiers are not available for prestige, so generating the cave in Prestige was misleading.
- fixed skin selection not properly remembering last used skin
- small balancing change of laser strength 3 with double laser. Combination was OP and probably still is, so the total damage and stun is reduced a bit.
work in progress of some monsters that you might meet eventually Have fun! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/
Keepers, it's spooky season!
To celebrate Steam Scream Fest, we have guild-approved cosmetic spookiness available to find by all Keepers! A newly developed Suit and Flaming Skull Pet will be sure to scare the waves of monsters coming to destroy your Dome! The Skeleton Suit and Flaming Skull Pet cosmetic items are available to discover during the Halloween season, 25th of October - 13th of November, for anyone playing Dome Keeper during this time.
You will gain permanent access to these items, as long as you can find their hiding places, and complete a successful run. Summary of Seasonal Content:
- Skeleton Suit
- Spooky Underground
- Flaming Skull Pet
- Added a pet, a new cave, and decorations for Halloween. Only available until the 13th of November, but unlock permanently if you get it now. You can disable seasonal content via options if you prefer "vanilla".
- Fixed pet and egg not saving properly
- Improved many sounds
- Gamepad bindings now also got alternative key bindings and the axis can also be bound (stick or trigger)
- Laser strength 3 and double laser are not mutually exclusive anymore
- Pets don't duplicate on reload anymore
- Skin unlocks are now also listed when showing what was unlocked this run
- Fixed keeper slowing down when moving the stick and then pressing and releasing d-pad in the same direction
- Fixed prestige maps just stop at a fixed depth, instead of fading out naturally
- Fixed double iron modifier not being remembered to be selected previously
- Fixed lift not going through the middle of indestructible parts where there was no border tile
- Added animation for sword dome in the loadout screen. Also added a dummy monster to show the sword's impact better.
- Shield reflection stage 2 from 2s to 3s
- Sword fast stab 2 adds 20 instead of 10 damage to the stab
- Sword stab cooldown change for bomb upgrade goes from +3s to +1s
- Sword stab last bomb upgrade now has 3 charges instead of 2
- Sword javelin upgrade adds 40 damage instead of 50
- Orchard roots now spawn 6 and 12 roots, instead of 4 and 8. Additionally, it lasts for 12s and 24s, instead of 10s and 20s. This is only a small step, orchard needs some more serious buffs or additions.
- Removed empty Drillbert upgrade
PS. The guild hasn't forgotten the Assessor, it's very much still coming soon, we just wanted to get involved in the festive, spooky fun!
Hey Keepers!
Another week, another Patch! Thanks to your super helpful reports, we were able to fix some annoying bugs. The bulk of our time is spent on the Assessor now, which enters Playtest this week, over on our Discord. We are also preparing something small but fun for Halloween :)
transcending physical limits
v41.5
- fixed some tiles being indestructible, that should not be. This affected resources sometimes beind inside in border tiles, but also unreachable chambers.
- lift can now pass through indestructible terrain, so should be viable on all maps
- fixed laser sound playing permanently in some cases
- added option to detect used gamepad automatically. If you got problems with a gamepad, try changing this setting.
- repeatable drill upgrade of the engineer is now much stronger, going from a 50% to a 120% increase
- fixed long probe marker retention being overwritten if purchasing an upgrade with shorter retention
- reduced probe auto recharge time from 0.8 to 0.5 cycles
- disabled HDR, so there should not be any effect on monitor brightness anymore
- orchard root now pauses properly
- exploit of reloading the game to "roll" higher yields from tiles should not work anymore
- fixed a "fixed cobalt" run causing that no cobalt would spawn in next run
- reduced amount of very hard and very soft rock a bit (effectively lowered the increase from last patch to 50%)
- fixed all "fixed cobalt" runs markes as cheated, if the cobalt multiplier was bought
- removed some false positives from the cheat detection
Hello Keepers!
It is patch time again. Thank you for all the feedback and bug reports you've shared! With your help, Dome Keeper can get better and better. If you were struck by a savegame issue on Steam Deck, head over to this thread in Discussions where ZeP found a solution how to recover your savegame. The savegame is not lost, but Steam Deck has switched between the Linux build and the Windows+Proton build, switching save directories in the process. This is out of our control right now, but we are talking with Steam Support about how to improve this. Behind the scenes we are also working on major content updates - more on that in the coming weeks.
double the iron, double the fun
v41.4.11
- fixed cheat detection having a lot of false positives. Old highscores might be gone now, as they falsely got flagged as cheated. This will be a thing we continuously improve, so more and more cheat/exploit runs are caught. We also clean the leaderboards from time to time.
- added "double iron" run modifier for relic hunt as a challenge to your logistic setup. It doubles both the iron cost of upgrades as well as the iron amount found underground.
- automatically switching to larger font sizes, when playing on steam deck
- fixed big ticks going into a state of being stunned and invincible, when caught in an orchard root while burrowing
- fixed stun laser trying to rotate underneath the dome
- fixed maze and long cycle modifier being incomptible
- memory upgrade of probe is now not exclusive to the other higher tier upgrades
- changed condenser code slightly, possible fixing an issue with it stopping production
- possibly fixed teleporter teleporting to the same place where it started
- pet will now not wildly jump positions if out of sight
- controller vibration will now only happen if controller is actually used
- fixed orchard and repellent charging up in the initial grace period, where no monsters spawn
- reduced number of monsters that can be on screen at the same time, more so for hardest difficulty
- punishers are much more effective now, and won't trigger when not intended
- fixed controller not vibrating, if any given vibration would go over 100%
- focus continue button in main menu, if it is available
- increased the density spread, so more tiles belong to the extreme hardness stages
- increased difference between hardness 2 and 3, raised hardness 5 a bit and lowered progression between biomes slightly
- fixed map being cut off when zoomed out in 16:10
- changed font for hungarian
- prestige scores of 0 won't be uploaded anymore
- fixed mode button not switching correctly to the button left of it, for some languages
- reduced drillbert drill upgrade costs a bit
Keeper Friends,
Introducing an upcoming new addition to your Keeper options, The Assessor. Their distinctive helmet and protective cloak provide more than good fashion. Each is part of the cutting-edge technology the Assessor employs for elegant operations. They dont need to get their hands dirty, there are far more advanced ways to perform the work.
An experimental energy field generator developed by the science branch of the Keepers Guild provides their power. Able to bend the very gravity around them, the Assessor effortlessly glides through the world around them without the need for a cumbersome jetpack.
That energy holds mining applications as well. Focused into a powerful orb, it packs the ability to tear apart rocks. By launching the orb, its force becomes unstable and grows more powerful, ripping apart the surfaces it hits. Each rapid impact amplifies the effect, enabling rapid excavation in tight spaces.
To collect resources the Assessor reverses the polarity, using the field to draw free ores up for carrying. Not that they must be taken all the way to the Dome manually. A skilled Assessor uses the projection capabilities to fire resources back into the Dome without needing to go all the way there.
All in a days work for the Assessor, who is ready to get back to some welcome rest with their loyal companion the Seahorse.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/
Hello Keepers!
We are back with another patch that squashes some more bugs, adds a new accessibility option, a new map size, and more! Please do keep the feedback coming, we really appreciate it and it helps us make Dome Keeper the best it can be!
Build 41.3.7
- Full patch notes below:
- Added accessibility option to always highlight monsters with an outline
- Orchard fruit buff cannot be stacked anymore, but repeated use will refresh the buff
- Added missing sword dome tutorial popup
- Allowing bind of pick up and drop to the same key again, as in the Dome Romantik prototype
- Added huge map for relic hunt
- Showing up to 3 unlocks now, instead of 2 at most
- Improved controller detection, which might solve issues with some models being unresponsive
- Added information on which rule in the cheat detection was triggered, allowing us to improve it in the next patch, after seeing what causes the false positives
- Lift now starts with an additional orb, and more orbs cost 1 water instead of 2
- Teleporter won't teleport resources during battle anymore
- Fixed repair indicator on health bar sometimes staying visible after closing the tech tree
- Fixed vibration setting from options not being applied
- Fixed keeper not moving if exiting the station with an already rotated joystick
- Fixed keeper being stuck in pickup mode if the station was entered holding the pickup key and use and pickup being bound to the same button
- Fixed one instance of the cheat detection triggering erroneously
- Fixed some small errors in the savegames
- Fixed issue where final battle music was playing after the wave was over, overlapping the win music
- Fixed condenser, converter, and drillbert achievements not counting properly, if the game was saved and reloaded
- Improved blue underground biome color to be more distinct from grey
- Rendering all percentage values without digits after the decimal point in the upgrade tree
- Improved rock texture for medium rock hardness
- Fixed unlock potentially getting lost if immediately exiting the game upon unlock
- Selected gadget in keep gadget popup is now animated, for better visibility
- Fixed button focus in loadout stage not jumping from gadget to mode as expected
- Reduced condenser production delay on overcharge from 0.75 to 0.5 cycles
Don't forget we have a list of known issues in the discussions thread here on Steam, so keep an eye on that and if you run into any issues please let us know [url=https://rawfury.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1]here! Feel free to join our Discord and share your feedback with us there too! Enjoy! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/
Keepers,
Tomorrow marks one week since Dome Keeper launched, and with that, it's the last day of the launch discount price! Take advantage of the sale, join the growing ranks of the Keepers Guild, and start perfecting your Dome Keeping skills. Later this week we will begin letting you assess some of the upcoming plans for Dome Keeper including a few details about the first addition that's in the works. We listen to your feedback closely as part of the development process, it helps prioritize updates and adds to our own wishlist for the game. So please share everything with us here and join our Discord server to get into playtests for future development.
This brand new tutorial will help explain the sword dome mechanics on your first round with it. Thank you for an amazing launch week. From the beginnings at Ludum Dare 48, as the tenth time entering for Bippinbits, to here has been an amazing, intense journey. The time ahead promises even more and we are excited to share them with you in the months ahead. You wont have to wait long for the next update, though. Tomorrow we expect to release our next update which includes a new huge map size in Relic Hunt to put your endurance to the test, an accessibility option to always highlight monsters for visibility, improved controller detection, a nicer looking medium-density rock, and a handful of other fixes and enhancements.
Again, thank you so much for your support! - Bippinbits and Raw Fury
Hello Keepers! A patch is out now that squashes some pesky bugs and adds in controller vibration and an anti-cheat system, to name a few! Full patch notes below:
Version v41.2
- Fixed crashes when loading a savegame, related to Mineral Tree and Shield
- Added anti-cheat system for Prestige Mode
- Some players with non-Latin characters in their names did not see their names on the leaderboards. Fixed implementing a new font
- Match modifiers have been changed to checkboxes instead of buttons
- Fixed keeping a gadget not working, when the previously saved gadget was chosen again
- Fixed Pet and Map Size unlocks vanishing, if game was immediately quit after the run
- Added controller vibration. Options now has a setting for vibration strength.
- Small SFX tweaks in the Beast and Big Tick monsters
- Raw fury logo now fullscreen in 21:9
- Fixed UI not being responsive to joystick anymore, if an alternative key mapping was applied
- Fixed snow overlay being offset in world 3
Keepers! Wow. Thank you so much for all the support you've given us! This game has been a long time in the works and we are so thrilled to be able to finally share it with you! Right now, we're focusing on making Dome Keeper the best it can be, before moving on to all the exciting things we have planned! We're hearing your feedback and will be working super hard on squashing any bugs, with a hotfix coming tomorrow to kick it all off! For known issues please see the discussions thread and to report issues please visit: https://rawfury.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1 If you haven't had a chance yet, you can grab yourself a copy at 10% off here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/ [previewyoutube=UgbaE75yYPU;full][/previewyoutube]
Keepers! We are so thankful for all of your support and you've been patient, but the wait is over... the time has come to step up and save your dome! [previewyoutube=UgbaE75yYPU;full][/previewyoutube] All your excitement for the game, first with the demo and then the amazing streams and videos, gave us such a boost in the push to launch! With the release today, Dome Keeper finally lands for you to begin perfecting your Keeper skills. Defend your dome from wave after wave of monsters in this innovative roguelike survival miner, Dome Keeper. Use the time between each attack to dig beneath the surface in search of valuable resources and artifacts use them carefully to choose powerful upgrades and bonuses. Set on beautifully crafted pixel art alien planets, Dome Keeper offers a captivating atmosphere, music tracks fusing melodic and synthetic creations together with a sense of wonder that meets the jet age making you want to come back for more.
Features:
Dig Drill tunnels beneath your dome in search of precious materials or to uncover powerful hidden artifacts. Watch the time, you need to get back to the dome and be ready when the next wave of attack comes. How deep will you get this time? How much can you carry back? Defend Take control of your defenses to fend off the alien attacks. Air and ground, slow and fast; the attackers must be prioritized and dealt with before they tear your dome apart. Develop Utilize your mineral harvest to unlock powerful upgrades: augment your weapons, enhance the impact of your drill, boost your jetpacks max speed, and many other upgrade paths - each of which gives you and your dome the best odds for survival! You have a lot to work for, but so do we! We have massive plans for the coming months. More of everything - keepers, modes, domes, gadgets, and a whole bunch of other fun things! More about those plans starting next week. Right now its all about getting in your first runs. Player feedback has been a huge part of the development process and we will be thoroughly going over all your feedback. Please let us know what you love, what you want more of, what strategies feel like they work, and those that dont. We plan to address your concerns as quickly as possible. For known issues please see the discussions thread, you can also check out our handy FAQ for any questions you may have there too! To report issues please visit: https://rawfury.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1 If your questions haven't been answered in our FAQ, please feel free to reach out! Follow our Twitter and join our Discord to stay up to date with all things Dome Keeper This is the beginning, Keeper. Welcome to the guild. Were going to become good friends. Dig in! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/
We've already told you a little bit about your primary gadgets, what inspired us to make Dome Keeper, and even given you a tech-tastic breakdown of how our color palette works. Today as we creep ever closer to launch day we're going to tell you more about the modes coming to Dome Keeper!
You've already played Relic Hunt mode: that's the classic mode we've all been enjoying with the Dome Keeper demo. And when Dome Keeper finally releases on September 27, 2022, you will also get to play Prestige mode and that's what we're going to talk about now!
Seeing is Prestiging
In Prestige, you score points by sending home as many resources as possible before your dome falls or you safely leave the planet.
In addition to the upgrades you've already encountered in the demo, in Prestige there'll be a few additional options to consider, too.
See the bottom left of the screen? That's a little scorecard. It's here you'll be able to keep track of the Prestige points you amass each time you successfully tackle a monster wave.
There are three things it keeps track of your Base Prestige per wave, and the Prestige per Wave Multiplier - both of which can be increased - and your Points total. This means that if you have a Base Prestige of 4, a Prestige per Wave Multiplier of 10, and successfully fight off a wave of enemies, you'll get 40 points added to your score. Simple!
Only you can decide when to buy upgrades or when to send resources back home, and both choices with their own dilemmas.
Keep the points, and you'll be able to keep making those all-important upgrades, but your home planet won't be getting the resources it needs. Send them home, however, and you won't be able to make as many upgrades but you may become a bonafide hero to the folks back home. And how can you become famous amongst the other Keepers in the Keepers Guild (that's right: theres a guild!) if you're not a hero first... am I right?!
What does Prestige mode mean for gameplay?
Crucially, Prestige is not for faint-hearted Keepers. Whereas survival is usually all we're hoping for when a Dome Keeper monster wave strikes, in Prestige you need to think about combat strategy, investing in your gadgets, and sending resources home, too.
With every wave becoming ever more challenging, you'll find yourself forced into making increasingly more difficult decisions about whether to power up or score points. Therefore, we reckon Prestige mode is best suited to more experienced Keepers.
When you take on the challenge, though, you'll be able to see how you rank against the other Keepers in a global leaderboard. That's right; Dome Keeper lets you compete against your friends and other Keepers all across the world, as well as check out their stats and preferred builds. We can't wait to see what builds and battle abilities you'll be using when you top the rankings!
These won't be the only two modes coming to Dome Keeper, by the way. An additional mode - Migration - is also on the way. During development we realized we wanted to do something even bigger with Migration, so instead of squeezing that in for release day, we've pushed it post-launch so that we can take our time with it and ensure it's ready for you (it'll be worth the wait, we promise!).
Make sure you're following Dome Keeper on Twitter or join our Discord and tell us all about your favorite gadgets and modes, including your wishlist for the future! And don't forget: Dome Keeper is out on September 27, 2022.
Until the next one, Keepers - Dome Sweet Dome!
PS. Dome Keeper is now available to pre-purchase here on Steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/
Keepers!
Dome Keeper is now available to pre-order!
As a thank you, as well as a 10% discount, pre-ordering will get you the Pioneer Pack which includes TWO cosmetic items: a hardened suit, and a vigilant owl pet!
What is Dome Keeper I hear you ask?
Defend your dome from wave after wave of hostile attacks in this roguelike survival miner. Use the time between each attack to dig beneath the surface in search of valuable resources. Use them carefully on powerful upgrades to help you stay alive and make it to the next world.
Dig
Drill tunnels beneath your dome in search of precious materials. Watch the time, you need to get back to the dome and be ready when the next wave of attack comes. How deep will you get this time? How much can you carry back?
Defend
Take control of the defenses and fend off the alien attacks. Air and ground, slow and fast, the attackers must be prioritized and dealt with before they tear your dome apart.
Develop
Use your mineral harvest to gain powerful upgrades; improve the strength of your weapon, make your drill more powerful, increase the speed of your jetpack, and research other improvements. Find artifacts to give an extra boost to your survival odds.
[previewyoutube=WZplRH4PB6E;full][/previewyoutube]
Secure your pre-order here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/
Dome Keeper's combat looks simple, and that's by design. Move your weapon, attack, and knock out the baddies. Easy, right?
How you fight isn't quite as straight-forward, of course, because as we talked about last time you'll quickly have to master the art of prioritization, learning which enemies you need to tackle first to minimize damage.
We didn't stop there. Battle abilities for primary gadgets add another option to your combat tactics. Here's a little more about how they work and why they'll be different from the gadgets you've been playing in the demo (which is back, by the way: give it a try if you haven't played it yet!)
Tech-tree-tastic!
What's that? You played with the three gadgets in the demo and loved them? Us, too! And though it may look like you get the same gadgets in the full version of the game Well, we have a little surprise for you. ;)
During Dome Keeper's development, the tech trees have been completely reworked. That means we've enhanced the design of every gadget especially the primary ones with expanded upgrade options, too, in order to bring added depth and complexity to the game. Take the Orchard, for example, which lets you plant a tree that bears fruit that will buff the speed of both you and your drill. Originally, the Orchard offered eight possible upgrades but now, in our reworked system, you can choose from six different unlock-able abilities that altogether offer 17(!) options. Or take a look at Snare Roots, a nifty little defence mechanism that briefly catches wandering monsters and locks them in place. This gives you time to deal with them or, alternatively, keeps them out of the way whilst you deal with more troublesome monsters first. What's that: you'd like roots that not only catch monsters but destroy them, too? Sounds good to us! Unlock further Snare Roots upgrades and you'll discover that monsters trapped in the roots will explode and damage nearby enemies, too. Yet a further upgrade lets you grow even more roots around your dome.
Another Orchard upgrade lets you cover your dome with an additional carpet of protective roots that shields your dome from projectile damage. Upgrading this one even further lets you double that protective layer. As for the Repellent? That can slow down all the monsters - or even stun them completely if you upgrade it enough - and you also have an ability that reduces the amount of health each monster has. The Shield, on the other hand, has three abilities: Electro Blast, Invulnerability (later upgrades for this trigger automatically, as soon as your shield depletes, or kick in when your dome is about to be destroyed; cool, eh?) and Reflection. Each of these abilities have their specific uses and advantages, enabling you to mix and match your skills to match your Dome defense strategy or tackle your world's trickiest monsters, as the case may be!
Charged Up
Before we go, there's one more change we wanted to talk to you about, and that's water! Whereas previously the Repellent and Orchard required water to operate and the Shield didn't we realised this left the game a little unbalanced. Because the amount of water you have in the world is fixed, you could find yourself running low or, alternatively, drowning in the stuff! So, to improve this, we've removed the requirement to use water and given every primary gadget an overcharge ability instead. What's an overcharge, you ask? Good question! It does exactly what it says on the tin, enabling you to go to the gadget in your dome and quite literally overcharge it. Every primary gadget's overcharge is a little different, so - for example - the Shield overcharge means you get to absorb more damage during the next monster wave. And yes, just like your other abilities, overcharging can be upgraded further, too We didn't just rework the primary gadgets, of course we've been working to revise and expand all our tech trees! but we hope this has given you a wonderful sneaky peek into the changes we're making and how they will improve Dome Keeper. Make sure you're following Dome Keeper on Twitter or join our Discord and tell us all about your favorite gadgets and what gadgets you may like to see in the future! And don't forget: Dome Keeper is out on September 27, 2022. Until the next one, Keepers - Dome Sweet Dome!
Attention Keepers! We hear you! Youre excited for Dome Keeper and want more. Hey, we have the same hard time putting it down so who are we to say, no? The demo is back! We do have a couple of quick notes! A lot of work has been going into the full game, including some changes. We think Keepers will enjoy a long career so we moved some ideas into post-launch content, which we have big plans to bring you more of, and we have new things in store for you on launch day! Were excited for you to start your Keeper career on September 27th!
As a thank you for all your support, over the next few weeks we'll be sharing behind-the-scenes peeks at how Dome Keeper is made. This week, we explore the influences and inspirations behind Dome Keeper's key design choices.
The idea for Dome Keeper or Dome Romantik, as it was called once upon a time came via the three-day Game Jam Ludum Dare 48 and the theme "Deeper and Deeper". Just three days later, Dome Keeper was born!
While it made sense to pick a mining game for the theme, it was important to us that the mining had a purpose, too. We also didn't want mining to be the only thing you did, either
Product of our own design
Every game we've ever played shapes the way we think about game design, but we were particularly inspired by Kingdom (yes, the same Kingdom published by our publisher, Raw Fury!). It was its minimal control you could only move left and right and collect and drop coins and lack of handholding that impressed us most. Every gamer is different, sure, but we've never been a big fan of tutorials, and would much rather figure out how to do things on our own. Older games were like that, weren't they? They trusted you. And so do we. That's why Dome Keeper gives you the chance to figure some things out on your own. Letting players make their own discoveries and not hand-feeding them every answer is something Edmund McMillen (Super Meat Boy) has been vocal about, and we agree!
The original Legend of Zelda is a good example of that kind of game design. Its world was open and mysterious, and you learned through exploration and experimentation. There was beauty in that discovery that's harder to find these days, as newer games try to give more instructions in order to improve accessibility. Justin Ma (Into the Breach) and Lucas Pope (Papers, Please) were also influential. Both designers only add something to the game if it's significantly different to what's already there. That's why when we add things to Dome Keeper, we make sure it's never just making boring variations of the same old gameplay.
Monstrous design
Take a look at this Walker. It comes in (very) fast and starts beating on your Dome. But it's pretty straightforward, right?
So when it comes to creating other monsters well, we could've just made a bigger Walker. Maybe one that's a little bit slower, but a little bit stronger. But honestly? That just doesn't appeal to us. What's the point of taking on the same kind of enemy with the same kind of strategy? It's not about giving you different monsters as much as it's about giving you varying challenges. That's why Dome Keeper has a whole menagerie of creatures to keep you on your toes! Look at this flying monster: you can't tackle it by using the same strategy as the Walker because it shoots projectiles and even has an invincible phase. The Walker can be tackled at any time. You can choose not to engage the flyer, especially if it's on the other side. But if you're tackling a Walker at the same time one of these bad boys swoops in, you have a decision to make; can you make it over there in time, or will you mess it up? Do you keep fighting the Walker or tackle the flying enemies? What you decide next may be a matter of life or death!
What happens when this pesky divebombing enemy comes in, does a tonne of damage to your dome, and flies off? If you don't deal with it immediately, it can do a lot of damage, but as it retreats, it can be safely ignored until it loops back again. What happens when the burrowing worm beast arrives? Or the Shifter, which teleports around and shoots a very strong projectile. Which monster do you need to fight first to minimize the damage they cause?
All of Dome Keeper's combat is about assessing the threat and working out how much time you have to fight with the weapons you have at your disposal. And as the game progresses, the monsters you meet in the early game may not be as threatening later on, so eventually a variant of that enemy may arrive and change things up even more Make sure you're following Dome Keeper on Twitter or join our Discord and tell us all about your favorite monster designs. And don't forget: Dome Keeper is out on September 27, 2022. Until the next one, Keepers - Dome Sweet Dome!
As a thank you for all your support, over the next few weeks we'll be sharing behind-the-scenes peeks at how Dome Keeper is made. This week, Bippinbit's Ren offers a tantalizing technical breakdown of our game's striking color palettes and how we make every world feel distinctive. Like a lot of things in life, sometimes it's the tiniest details that make the biggest impact. Take the colors used in Dome Keeper; we already know that its striking art style makes it stand out for all the right reasons, but did you know that every world has its own particular mood and atmosphere (pun intended, of course), too?
Color me excited!
First, check out this hot pink screenshot below. It's memorable, right? I mean, I don't think any of us are going to forget a world with a hot pink sky and royal blue plant life, but this image is unforgettable not just because of its strange color combination! You see, without this particular color palette, Dome Keeper would be a very different game indeed Here comes the science bit!
Thanks to the color combination of this world, we can create whole new hues and colors on other ones, too. To help you visualize it, here's a handy breakdown of the hues and shades we can find in the color palette for the groovy image above:
It's kinda cool, right? Varying shades of green, blue, and pink dominate the color scheme, but the palette also generates a number of purples, violets, and browns, too. What's that? You don't want to live in a hot pink world? We're not sure what you have against the pink skies (we dig it, quite honestly), but the good news is, you don't have to! "The reason this pink palette looks so strange is because the color values here actually have something encoded, so it's not about the colors at all," Ren explains. "It's about the placement in this grid. "We can tell the game to use a different palette, but one in the same shape. For example, it will take the color that's in one square and replace it with the color in the same spot from a different palette. Like this!"
Some of these colors and shades are just for the monsters. Some are for the Dome. Some can only be used for your Keeper. But that's why - thanks to this nifty system - Dome Keeper enables you to easily swap color schemes and create a world that feels special and personal to you!
Worlds apart - making Dome Keeper's worlds feel distinct
But it's not just the colors that make every world in Dome Keeper feel unique. In the future, Dome Keeper's worlds will offer different challenges, including what monsters may spawn there, and how often. For instance: although you may encounter the same monster type on more than one world, each world will have a unique setup. This means every battle phase will play out a little differently, and every battle will offer its own unique benefits and threats. Combat will always feel distinct as you move from world to world, adapting your battle strategies as you go.
There will also be modifiers that offer pre-made setups that will spice up your worlds, too, allowing you to select preferred modes when choosing your loadout. One mode includes speeding up the monsters - oh no! - but giving them fewer HP points - yay! Another includes creating a maze-like map with loads of appendages, tunnels, and chambers to explore. And another again halves the number of attack waves you encounter giving you much more time to do that all-important mining, of course but the waves you do endure will be much more challenging. As for why we're mining for minerals, relics, and gadgets? Hmm. Guess we'll have to tell you more about that in another update, eh? Watch this space Make sure you're following us on Twitter or join our Discord and let us know what color schemes and modifiers you'd like to see pop up in Dome Keeper!
Until the next one, Keepers - Dome Sweet Dome!
You heard it right, this is not a drill! Dome Keeper is coming to Steam on September 27th! Prepare yourselves to dig deep and discover the secrets of the underground, fight off aliens and uncover precious relics to save your dome! We can't wait for you to get your hands on the full game, thanks for all your support so far! Wishlist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/
Hey Keepers! It's been fun to watch you all play and love Dome Keeper, share your stats, your play styles and the progress you've made on your games! We are so excited for you to get your hands on the full game! In preparation for this, the demo will be taken down on the 5th of September at 00:00 PDT as we'll be adding the finishing touches to Dome Keeper to make it the best it can be. This is not a drill, Dome Keeper is coming. More info soon! Join our Discord or follow us on Twitter and share your longest runs with us! MORE NEWS: We had a great time at BitSummit - thanks again to those who came to see us! The fun doesn't end there though, we'll be at Gamescom at the end of the month at the Indie Arena Booth and we can't WAIT! Speak soon :)
Dome is where the heart is, but these ones aren't just pretty to look at! To help you get ready for Dome Keeper's release later this year, here's (almost) everything you need to know about your dome's defenses and how you can best utilize your harvested resources to improve your base and fight to survive! While we're sure you'd like nothing more than to rest up and chill out after a hard day's mining, in Dome Keeper your downtime is dometime. Rather than putting your feet up, you'll be fending off waves of alien attackers instead. The good news is, your valuable mined resources can be used to make all kinds of nifty upgrades to your dome to tackle even the biggest and baddest beasts. Here's a breakdown of the domes you'll get to play at launch and a sneaky peek at some of the defensive choices you'll have.
Laser Dome
Doing exactly what it says on the tin, the Laser Dome comes equipped with - you've guessed it! - a snazzy laser. Whilst the default laser is pretty impressive all on its own - to start with, at least! - collect enough resources and you'll be able to make upgrades to improve its speed and strength, making it easier to tackle those enemies so desperate to smash up your humble abode. The best thing about the laser dome is that it's pretty easy to use; just point it in the direction of the enemies - even the flying ones - and if you hold down the fire button, your laser can do all the hard work for you. Of course, things may get a little dicey should enemies come at you from all sides. An upgrade may double your laser and enable you to take on enemies coming at you from all angles, but initially, you'll need to get into the habit of prioritizing your targets. Just remember that it takes time to move the laser from side to side, though, and your dome should make it through the night in one piece!
Sword Dome
What's cooler than a dome? A dome with a sword on it, of course. How about a sword that does more damage the quicker you move it - wouldn't that be even better? And what about a sword that can be fired like a projectile at enemies far away?! Sounds good? Yeah, we thought so, too. Unlike the Laser Dome's primary weapon, the faster you swing your sword, the harder you'll hit those pesky aliens. This means that even if you have walkers coming for you from the left and right, get your timing right and you'll be able to finish 'em in just a couple of sweeping strokes. Is it more of a challenge to get your aim right and take down flying monsters or distant enemies? Hmm, maybe. Trying to hit smaller enemies further away may be a touch harder, too. Oh, and don't forget that there's a cooldown Just as well that the Sword Dome can be upgraded with a reflection pad that bounces back enemy projectiles then, eh? You're welcome.
??? Dome
You think that's all we'll give you - a laser and a sword!? Pft. As if! No, we can't give you all the details just yet - sorry! - but we can confirm that there will be other dome types available after Dome Keeper launches later this year. Because every dome has been designed from the ground up with its own unique traits, swapping them will always keep your game feeling fresh. For instance, the Laser Dome may be more dynamic - you aim, you shoot; that's it! - and feel very different to, say, the Sword Dome, but the latter - though requiring a little more combat strategy - can do more damage. Decisions, decisions! So, while we can't tell you all about other domes just yet, make sure you're following us on Twitter or join our Discord to be the very first to know when we're finally able to share them with you Until the next one, Keepers - Dome Sweet Dome!
Hey Keepers!
BitSummit was last weekend and we had a blast! We were so happy seeing how many of you enjoyed Dome Keeper, so if you were there, thank you!
Here are some snaps
Speak soon!
Hey Keepers!
Were thrilled to announce that Dome Keeper will be at BitSummit this weekend!
Were so excited to show off the latest demo - come and check it out if youre attending!
Also, ICYMI, one of the tracks in Dome Keeper features on the Black Screen Records Sounds Of Summer vinyl compilation! Find out more here: https://twitter.com/blackscreenrec/status/1554135783635910656
Thanks for reading and we'll hopefully see you at BitSummit!
Hey Dome Keepers,
we just wanted to say: thank you so much for playing the Dome Keeper Demo, for all the feedback and suggestions, bug reports, as well as all the great videos and streams we got to watch! As a gamedev, this is the best of times - when you get the game (or a part of it) out and see that people have a good time with it. I wanted to give you a few stats as well, but this has been made very hard by the huuuge amount of bots that were part of this Steam Next Fest (i estimate half a million bots for dome). Anyway, we are still going through the feedback and thinking about improvements, rebalances and additions to Dome Keeper. Apart from that, we are hard at work on new content like the sword dome i played a few times on stream. Check out these cool upgrades :D
Any Berserk fans around? We got so many great responses, i can't even count them all.
like this great article in Rock Paper Shotgun (linked on the image) I also gave had an interview with Shacknews, for their E6 Event. We talked about Dome of course, the transition from itch.io game jam game to Steam release, scoping, how work is with Raw Fury and how we started. [previewyoutube=HxDGK-Y-a24;full][/previewyoutube] Thats it for this time.
Thank you for being amazing!
Hey Keepers, i'll stream a few rounds with the new
Sword Dome
for Steam Next Fest. While it's not in the Demo, i think it's fun to take a look of what we are working on for the full release.
Hope to see you then! Best Wishes, Ren
Hey Keepers, i'll stream a few rounds with the new
Sword Dome
for Steam Next Fest. While it's not in the Demo, i think it's fun to take a look of what we are working on for the full release.
Hope to see you then! Best Wishes, Ren
Hello Keepers,
now that a few days have passed, I wanted to take a moment to look back. The new demo was really well liked, and I'm happy to see so many of you playing it and enjoying the way the game is coming together. You shared a lot of great feedback and comments with us and we're already working on adding more exciting things to Dome Keeper! Dome Keeper is also taking part in Steam's Next Fest! Starting today, our game will join hundreds of others in a celebration of upcoming titles here on Steam. We're planning two livestreams with Q&A, where we'll also take a look at what's planned for Dome. We'll announce the exact times soon, so keep an eye out for those!
Have fun with all the amazing Demos :)
Hey hey,
i hope you had a chance to play the Demo already, because i'd like to play a round and talk with you about it! We can also go into what the future holds for Dome, or how we got here in the first place. We'll just hang out, have a good time and try to not get our dome smashed.
See you then :)
-Ren
Hello Keepers,
we are so hyped to finally share the new Demo with you today! Youll quickly see just how much has moved and improved since Dome Romantik, while staying true to the original version. I cant overstate how much we were looking forward to finally putting the new Demo into your hands, and how thankful we are for playing Dome!
Obviously the graphics got a major overhaul. The music was updated too, and we have lovely new sounds for everything in the game. Youll find that the underground is more complex now, with different biomes and rock densities, as well chambers you can excavate. Two new monsters and a new gadget will also spice things up for you, if you played Dome Romantik before. There are many more things, but its best you find that out on your own!
Ill stream tonight at 19:00 UTC, just playing a bit and having some fun with you in the chat. Well also be in Steam Next Fest next week, in which well do some fun streams too. As always, I'll roam through the Steam Forums and carefully read all the feedback you got, and fix any bugs as quickly as possible. Im also active on our Discord, which is also a great place to talk to other dome players. I hope the wait was worth it! And talk to us - you can really make a difference here :)
Have fun :)
-Ren PS: Also keep an eye out on youtube, as there will be some great people making videos on Dome! If you want to see more of that, a very impactful way to support Dome is to recommend it to your favorite content creators.
Hello there!
Keeping it short this time. Tonight i'll do a Stream here on Steam, playing the current Demo, showing and explaining what changed and why. I'm happy to go into any questions you might have, and take your suggestions and feedback. The Demo will be ready for you to play in June, and also be part of the Steam Next Fest.
Start is 19:00 UTC, here on Steam, for about an hour.
Dome gets a Publisher
We've got a publisher! And not just any publisher, but one of the best you can get when you want to make great indie games: RAW FURY. Raw Fury has a ton of fantastic games, which we are very thankful to stand next to in the future. I'm a huge Kingdom fan, starting with the original. Many of you pointed out how Dome reminds them of Kingdom, which is a great sign of how influential it was on me as a Game Designer. [previewyoutube=Idj-IWIHL6I;full][/previewyoutube] showreel of Raw Fury games
How it happened
Back in September 2021 we were really polishing basically an expanded game jam version of Dome Romantik. We also had our first playtest over Discord, to prepare entering the Steam Next Fest in October. Two weeks before that, Johan from Raw Fury sent me a little Tweet about maybe having a talk about Dome. I quickly made a pitch deck and sent over the Demo. It seemed to us the whole company took quite the liking to Dome, and so it only took a few days until we agreed we'd want to continue this together. I delayed the Steam Next Fest to be able to do more with it in the future.
one fateful tweet During the talks about publishing, Raw Fury made a huge impression on us, with how they operate. So much so, that i often stopped to wonder "ok, what's the catch? Is this for real?". It turned out, no catch and very real. I've seen a lot of companies in my IT career, and also talked to a lot of people (lawyers, tax agents, grant people) about Raw Fury, and it's clear they are an absolute outlier in the best sense. A ton of trust and support is put into us, with no corporate loopholes or exploitation. They take big risks to build a environment where we can really concentrate on making the best game we can. I and the many people i spoke to have never seen something like that. So, we couldn't be happier with this and feel like we went from zero to indie heaven. So, are we still indie developers? The answer for me is a clear "yes we are". The reason for that is that we still have full creative control over Dome Keeper and it remained our IP. It couldn't happen that Raw Fury dictates to make 2 or 10 domes, or to switch to a 3D style, or to add micro transactions. They took care to contractually fix it that way (with all their games, actually). Of course we would be stupid not to also rely on their advice, seeing their wealth of experience and success, so we always seek that.
What this means for Dome
Originall we had plans to be already released by now, with a game still called "Dome Keeper" (we already planned the name change ~8 months ago https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/pcjagu/which_name_is_the_best_for_this_game/).
we even had the assets ready It would have featured basically what was hinted at in the old Demo. Now with Raw Furies support, we were able to aim higher than that, first pushing the graphics to a new level. The Dome Romantik Demo you might have played was only a hobby project, made in our free time, with the graphics mostly unchanged from the game jam version we made in 3 days. Apart from the graphics, this is a big win on all levels for Dome. Raw Fury can help with everything - you might have seen the amazing new Trailer Marcus from Raw Fury made, with the awesome intro and outro scene from the amazing Zak Amana. It will also be a big plus on quality with professional help on QA, on localizations and on the game content itself. We speak every week with our Friends Loke and Garnett from Raw Fury, getting their feedback on the build and planning next steps together. We never made a really professional game before, so that's a great support to have.
the graphics upgrade is most notable in (and needed for) the underground
What this means for us
The game is well off now, and luckily, we are too. We don't have to basically crunch next to a 40hr daytime job as we did many years before, but can focus all our energy, passion and creativity on Dome. I still can't quite fathom how incredibly fortunate we are to get into this position, from being small time hobby devs to getting into what feels like the indie dev heaven. After working like this for a month, Anne said to me "it's so nice to see you finally be happy again", and i really felt that. We are filled to the brim with gratitude, both at Raw Fury for placing their trust in us and at you the players, who are sooo engaged with Dome. Thank you!
my current emotional state Best Wishes, Ren
Hello keepers of the dome
PAX
We are entering a hot phase now in April! We'll fly over to Boston to be part of the great indie game conference PAX East https://east.paxsite.com/en-us.html We'll show and reveal a lot of cool things then. For one, we have a shiny new trailer, that should give a good impression on how the game feels now. We will also reveal the name change, which we planned for so long. Dome Romantik was really only a pun that lived much longer than anticipated, although i appreciate that many of you actually like the name! On our booth there will be a few stations where the current version of Dome can be played, and where we'll hang around and chat. There is another big reveal about to happen there, which i won't spoil yet
Demos
I can also tell we'll be part of the Steam Next Fest in Summer, in which you'll get your hands on the new demo. That demo will look and feel more like the Steam Release we are working on, and not so much like the (expanded) game jam version you've been playing as a demo so far. With the start of PAX, we'll also finally take the current Demo offline on the 17th ofApril. Initially we announced to only keep it up 3 days, not 60. So there will be no Demo for some weeks, until the Next Fest rolls around. This is because we think some people might see the game on PAX and the new Trailer, and then might look for the Demo, which doesn't fit anymore. We'll do some playtests here and there, organized over on our Discord - come over and hang out, it's a lovely community!
the wtf part
Exactly 2 months back on the 14th of February, when we were still young and innocent, we put the Demo of Dome Romantik live on Steam. We decided that on a whim, spontaneously a few days before the Midweek Madness Event Games from Germany started. This Demo had been sitting in our hands a few months already, and we were happily working on it in our spare time - we were hobbyists back then. We had a good time and were testing the build with our small but amazing community. We expected a small bump from that event. But oh boy, we had no idea. Fast forward to today and 75.000 people spent a combined 224.000 hours in the demo. On some days, over 5000 people played it. Our Discord exploded from 270 people to nearly 4000. So many fantastic youtube channels and twitch streamers covered Dome, that we couldn't even keep up watching it. Sometimes we still stop, look at each other and ask ourselves: How insanely awesome is that? That our little game jam entry finds so much love with you? You wouldn't believe how much that powers us to push and push, to make a worthy game, to make this the best we can. In January we switched to working full time one Dome, and i like to think: if we could make something you liked that much in our spare time, what can we do when we can focus on it 100%, when it's not in the late hours after an exhausting day at the offices? Anyway, i'm just feeling so thankful and happy to be able to work on this with all I got, and i know the team feels a similar sense of fullfilment. See you at PAX, or maybe some time on a Dome Stream :)
Have a good time
:)
Hi there!
To celebrate the Games Germany event, I'll play a few rounds with the very demanding sword dome. It's not available in the demo, so you can get a glimpse what might wait in the future.
But mostly, i just want to hang out with you and chat about dome, and hear your ideas, concerns and wishes :) It will also be my first time streaming at all. Be sure to check out the other games in the event too, like the lovely Curious Expedition 2. Hope to see you then! - Ren
Steam celebrates the finest games made in germany for 3 days, starting right now. Of course we joined the party with Dome Romantik! For the first time, you can publicly play the Demo, to get a feel for how the game plays. So, let's not waste time and get to it :)
In the mean time, we are working on a major graphics overhaul for Dome, coming later this year.
Follow us on Steam or join our Discord, to see where we are headed with this.
Have fun in the event :)
We were very busy improving and expanding Dome Romantik, and will launch a first alpha test with our community on our discord. The demo will feature a ton of new, unlockable gadgets for the dome, having a big impact on how the game plays. Many visuals are improved and over 60 upgrades will give you something to think about in the tech tree. If you'd like to play this early demo version and contribute with your feedback, please come over to our discord (news section of Dome Romantik)!
Check out the first trailer, if you haven't :)
[previewyoutube=9jK4qb6p6Kc;full][/previewyoutube]
This is how a built out dome can look right now.
If you'd like to play but don't use discord - tell me! Maybe we can also do it here, if enough people are interested. After all, we only wanna have some fun like these guys :D
Cheers!
PS: What do you think about the name "Dome Keeper"? The game isn't romantic at all so far, i fear!
Dome Romantik
Bippinbits
Bippinbits
tbd
Indie Singleplayer
GameBillet
5.89 /
€
Game News Posts 109
🎹🖱️Keyboard + Mouse
🎮 Full Controller Support
Very Positive
(12184 reviews)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320 
[654.93 M]
Dome Romantik is a roguelike mining game, where you go on a run to strip multiple planets of their minerals, while the native creatures furiously try to stop you. They come in waves, so you have to carefully consider your mining activities to return just in time to defend you dome. Greed can be deadly, information a viable tool for survival. Powerful upgrades will help you stay alive and be productive until you can move on to the next world.
Your Dome
Choose a unique dome that will shape your run. Each dome has different weapons, abilities and upgrade paths, each bringing their own challenges along.
Your Task
Extract minerals and use them to improve your dome and yourself. Install shields, new weapons, or facilities to generate powerful fuel for your jetpack or even ammunition. Improve your mining abilities with stronger drills or innovative ways to retrieve minerals.The Worlds
You'll meet many strange lifeforms as you progress through the worlds. They are as different as the worlds they live in, so you need to learn their tricks and focus to stay alive.- OS: Linux/X11
- Processor: 2.5Ghz or betterMemory: 512 MB RAMStorage: 500 MB available space
- Memory: 512 MB RAMStorage: 500 MB available space
- Storage: 500 MB available space
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