Hey everyone! I am very happy to announce that we have just released a new update for Soulstone Survivors, the Scorching Sands update! This time around we are adding the remaining rare weapons to the game, offering new play styles for many characters, in addition to a complete refactor of the enemies of the Scorching Valley map, and finally a one-hand only control scheme using the mouse which has been a long time coming, among many other changes!








As with the last update, this time around our focus has been in not only adding new content in the form of a lot of new enemies, weapons and skills, but to also work on some areas that have been pending for a while. A big one is having a mouse-only control scheme to support playing the game with one hand only, which we have promised a long time ago and finally managed to get it in! This update also brings some other quality of life improvements such as the Death Recap screen, UI improvements and overall should make the game experience even smoother! We are already working hard on some bigger features that will be coming with the next few updates, and as always, we will talk a little bit about what is coming and an overall update on the game and where we are as a team, so if you are interested, check the end of this post! But first... here is the full list of changes!

New content and features:

- 7 New craftable weapons: Chaoswalker: Firewalker's Spire Beastmaster: Bonecrusher Assassin: Grenadier's Mark Elementalist: Scepter of Flame Legionnaire: Fang of Vipernus Necromancer: Noxious Reaper Death Knight: Last Sentence - 14 new active skills: Chaoswalker: Orbs of Destruction, Volcano Eruption Beastmaster: Brutal Slam, Summon Cave Bear Assassin: Debilitating Bomb, Fan of Bombs Elementalist: Ray of Fire, Heat Explosion Legionnaire: Corrosive Spear, Purging Slam Necromancer: Plague Rats, Putrefy Death Knight: Ravaging Strike, Carnage - New enemies: The Scorching Valley enemies have been completely revamped and it now has 17 new enemies between regular and elite versions! As mentioned in our last update, all other maps will also be reworked over the next updates until all enemies are unique per map. - New feature - Mouse Only input: Now it is possible to control your character only with your mouse if you so wish! Just go into the General Settings menu and turn on "Mouse Only", so you can click to move and dash. - New feature - Death Recap: If you are defeated, you can now view the Death Recap window, which shows the last few damage sources you received before being eliminated, which should make it easier for you to understand what caused your demise and prepare for it next time;

Rune changes:

- Synergetic rune now increases the chance of finding synergy type of effects considerably more than before, and has had its extra chance increased from 20% to 25%;

Skill changes:

- Summoned units now receive your power-ups instantly whenever you level up, as opposed to only when they spawned; - Skills that summon units will no longer kill the units in order to summon new units. They will now fully heal the existing units instead, which should considerably improve the interaction between Cast Frequency and Summon skills; - Summoned units now inherit the character attributes, skill tree nodes and runes selected by the player (previously they only inherited your in-game power-ups); - Fixed issue where synergy power-ups were not scaling properly with your damage modifiers, dealing considerably less damage than expected; - Bear Trap, Explosive Trap, Mine Field, Shrapnel Mine and Void Trap have had their triggering area increased by 100%; - Acid Rain rot damage increased from 100 to 150; - Arcane Orb now fires 25% less additional projectiles; - Arcane Slash cooldown reduced from 1.4 to 1.1 seconds; - Avalanche damage reduced from 90 to 80; - Bladed Chakram cooldown reduced from 6 to 4 seconds; - Camor's Arrow damage increased from 3000 to 4000; - Camor's Arrow bleed damage increased from 600 to 800; - Carnage damage reduced from 450 to 350; - Carnage bleed damage reduced from 720 to 500; - Chaos Bolt random negative effect potency increased by approximately 60%; - Chaos Bolt main projectile now also applies negative effects; - Chaos Totem random negative effect potency increased by approximately 30%; - Chaos Totem main projectile now also applies negative effects; - Chromatic Bolt cooldown increased from 6 to 7 seconds; - Combustion burn damage increased from 70 to 140; - Demolish now sends its shockwaves in predetermined angles instead of random angles; - Demolish shockwave damage increased from 100 to 150; - Demolish shockwave hemorrhage damage increased from 150 to 250; - Double Slash bleed damage increased from 100 to 200; - Fire Wall's cooldown reduced from 10 to 8 seconds; - Fire Wall's burn damage increased from 680 to 1200; - Flamethrower's cooldown reduced from 11 to 7 seconds; - Flamethrower's melting damage increased from 75 to 150; - Flame Wave's cooldown reduced from 8 to 4 seconds; - Holy Fire damage reduced from 500 to 450; - Light Beam cooldown increased from 10 to 11 seconds; - Light Beam total damage reduced from 280 to 200; - Meteor's cooldown reduced from 6 to 3 seconds; - Obliterate cooldown increased from 1.5 to 1.7 seconds; - Poison Bolt poison damage increased from 180 to 300; - Poison Bomb periodic poison application damage increased from 150 to 250; - Poison Bomb area increased by 33%; - Ravaging Strike cooldown increased from 1.3 to 1.6 seconds; - Reap cooldown increased from 6 to 7 seconds; - Reap Doom damage increased from 200% to 250%; - Scent of Blood cooldown increased from 34 to 38 seconds; - Scent of Blood duration reduced from 10 to 8 seconds; - Severe Cold now travels a total of 40 meters, down from 60; - Shadow Bolt doom damage increased from 210 to 300; - Shadow Grasp area increased by 20%; - Shadow Orb now fires 25% less additional projectiles; - Shadow Spike cooldown reduced from 6 to 5 seconds; - Shadow Spike damage increased from 230 to 250; - Shockwave damage increased from 250 to 400; - Shockwave Totem hemorrhage damage increased from 200 to 300; - Suction Bomb's area increased by 25%; - Threshing Blast cooldown reduced from 6.5 to 5.5 seconds; - Throw Axe hemorrhage damage increased from 300 to 500; - Thrust bleed damage increased from 120 to 200; - Thrust tooltip no shows the correct damage, from 90 to 120 (actual damage unchanged); - Thundering Slash extra damage per stack reduced from 25 to 20; - Venomous Strike damage increased from 120 to 150;

General changes and fixes:

- Proper controller support added to the Curses interface; - 14 new achievements, related to the new weapons and skills introduced in this update; - New soundtracks for the Scorching Valley map; - End Game interface has received multiple visual changes in addition to the Death Recap button; - Dashes no longer accumulate with your current speed, having a more stable and predictable travel distance; - Fixed an issue where in very specific scenarios, when you took an endless portal, certain power-ups would not work as expected; - Fixed an issue with certain projectile skills both from the player and enemies, where they could incorrectly be causing damage twice in the same target; - Fixed Ray of Doom not counting properly the number of enemies hit during a match; - Fixed an issue where certain skills such as Flamethrower, Flurry and Bladestorm were limited by the framerate of the game, meaning they would deal less damage than expected in extreme scenarios; - Fixed Arcane Blade tooltip displaying the wrong damage number; - Fixed a few issues with Arcane Shield damage calculations, which in some cases would deal less damage than expected; - Fixed an issue with Arcane Shield where the health of the shield itself could "critically strike", having considerably more health than intended; - Fixed Arcane Shield tooltip which had the wrong parameters being affected by the Potency modifiers; - Increased the visual indicator of Aelfraed's Shield Bash skill; - Fixed a visual issue where sometimes a new skill would not show instantly in the Power Up list; - Fixed a visual issue where some gameplay labels would not appear on Mac OS; - Multiple localization issues have been addressed; - Fixed tons of minor issues and polishing touches across the game;

Community Events:

Every couple of weeks we run suggestion events on our Discord (https://discord.gg/5RcXb8attT), where the top community picks make their way into the game, so if you want to help us shape the future of the game, be sure to check these out! In addition to that, today we are making the first ever Community Build Highlight! We pick a cool build submitted by the community, try it ourselves and showcase it on our official YouTube channel! You can check out the first highlighted build below, the Bear Enchanter! [previewyoutube=XIcokjOoM8w;full][/previewyoutube] If you'd like to see more build highlights, or submit your own build, drop us a comment on the video above and check out the description to see how to participate! And, if you have suggestions how it might be cooler to continue this series, let us know!

Developer notes

As always, in the bottom of every update we like to go a little bit into detail about what is coming to the game, what is going on with our team and what you can expect moving forward!

Map Diversity

This update takes another step into ensuring that each map plays and feels different from each other. We are continuously adding new enemies until all maps have unique challenges and will continue doing so not only with enemies but with bosses and challenges that are exclusive to each map as we continue moving forward.

But again... what about our excess resouces?

As mentioned in the previous update, we do have a system in the works which will allow you to use those precious materials to enhance and customise even more your builds and characters. We were hoping that we would have been able to get this new system implemented into this update, but unfortunately, we still have a few things left to do on our end, and we decided to postpone it until the next major update. It is still our number one priority for new content in the game, and you can rest assured that it is coming!

New Game Modes

Another major feature that we are starting to develop and add into the game are new game modes. We see the current version of Soulstone Survivors as a very solid foundation, but, with soooo many possibilities to explore that it is hard to contain our excitement! We believe that with the basis we have today, one of the coolest ways we can continue expanding the game is adding new ways to play the game, some of them can be simple rule changes, some of them can be considerably different game modes with different objectives, ways to gain power and entirely new ways to build your characters from the ground up with every match. The idea is that you will be able to play only the way you want to, and no game modes would be mandatory, as we believe Soulstone Survivors is all about having a good time and exploring crazy power and builds in just a few minutes.

New Developers

As of the middle of March, we finally finished our hiring process, and I am happy to announce that new developers will be starting with us in the beginning of April! We met a ton of amazing people along this long process that took over two months and literally hundreds of hours of work, and I am super excited to have new folks joining our team! These extra hands will allow us to not only speed up development of new content but also start working on more ambitious features that we had on hold for a while, so expect some big news in the coming months!

Next Steps

I hope that all the above gives a little glimpse about future content and directions we want to go with the game. We will continue releasing major updates not only as we move towards the full release, but honestly, we have so many ideas that we can try and create that we see all we have today as just the beginning. We are in it for the long haul, and we are taking steps to make sure we can keep supporting the game for years and years to come. And finally, to close off this wall of text haha, I just wanted to once again thank you, very very much for the support so far. We are extremely lucky to have such an amazing community with us and we don't take that for granted even for a moment and will continue working as hard as we can to make the game as good as it can be. Thank you for inspiring us, we hope you will enjoy this update, Best wishes, - The dev team