Hey, Survivors! :cozyroe:

It's hard to believe but Soulstone Survivors is already completing 1 year of Early Access! A lot has changed and there is still much to come! We are so happy to have you with us for this incredible journey, and to celebrate the occasion we want to present to you the Anniversary Update! Have fun with the new special decorations from Nov 6th to Dec 10th and make sure to check out the Speedrun Challenge we are hosting to celebrate the update! Now lets jump into it! [hr][/hr]

New content and features:

Steam Trading Cards:

Earn Steam Trading Cards by just playing the game, complete the set, and earn unique badges, Steam Profile backgrounds, and emotes!

Major Runes rework:

You can now have up to 5 rune presets for each character, and now have two types of rune slots, Versatility and Tenacity:

• Versatility - 3 slots: These are runes that allow you to customize your build and what powers you can have access to in a match, those include all Mastery, Affinity, and Inclination runes, Gambler, and so on. These runes no longer have a Runic Power cost and are limited only by the number of Versatility slots;
• Tenacity - 4 slots: These are runes that increase your fighting power one way or another, be it by increasing your damage, movement speed, defenses, and so on. These runes still cost Runic Power and are also limited by the number of Tenacity slots;

Mastery Runes rework:

In addition to the changes above, Mastery runes now allow you to choose UP TO 5 skills from the desired skill type. Whenever you equip a Mastery rune you are guaranteed to have the selected skills in your pool of skills during a match; (Dev notes: We want players to experiment with as many builds as possible, and we know that prior to this change players would often prefer focusing their limited runic power into runes that directly make you more powerful instead of trying to experiment with varied and possibly whacky builds. We hope that with this change (and the changes listed below) you will have more freedom to create any builds you can dream of more predictably.)

Match History screen:

You can now view a list of your previous matches, including skills used, times, damage per skill, and so on, along with an overview of your account and character comparisons! The game already recorded most information about your matches so you can see retroactive stats (missing a few details that will be included only on matches in the new version). We would love to see your account overviews so please do share your screenshots with us!

New enemies:

The Dungeon of Despair is now infested with undead! All enemies have been completely revamped with 19 new enemies between regular and elite versions, along with an entirely new soundtrack! There are also a few new enemies in the Scorching Valley and the Whispering Grove!

Power Up visibility rework:

Completely revamped tooltips and descriptions of all skills and power-ups in the game, to drastically reduce the amount of text while showing more details than before. These changes make it easy to know whether you already have a version of a certain power, how it improves with multiple pickups, and so on. We also reduced considerably the number of powers in the bottom left corner of the screen, focusing the information as much as possible;

Chaos Skills rework:

Chaos skills no longer are capable of applying every negative effect in the game. You will find that they now cause random damage (more than before), and also one of these two things:

• Apply Disarray: a new negative effect that increases all damage received by a random value between -0.5% and 2.5% per stack for 8 seconds, where damage can never be reduced below 1.
• Have the Chaotic trait, which gives you a chance to cast another random skill instantly when this skill is used. (Dev notes: Chaos skills are all about randomness and unpredictable effects, however, their ability to apply all types of negative effects becomes so powerful, especially on longer matches, that they can single handedly replace almost all skills in the game and still grant all the benefits. This harms build variety and makes many skills worthless in comparison, so we hope that these changes above will make Chaos skills no longer suppress other skills in the game, but still be very interesting to mix and match with various skill types in the game, offering new strategies to create broken builds and more interesting decisions.)

Damage Breakdown during match:

We have finally added a way for you to view the damage breakdown of your skills during a match, without having to wait till the end of a match to see how skills are performing. Simply pause the game and check!

Visibility improvements:

While this will be a continuous work, with this update we have revisited the visual effects of loads of skills to make it so they are less invasive, in order to improve overall visibility. In addition to that, you can now adjust the Special Effect Visibility slider with hotkeys, making it a lot easier to adjust up and down. We will continue working with the goal that one day this visibility slider won't be necessary, but until we get there, we want your experience to be as smooth as possible.

Character changes:

• Reduced Chaoswalker Altar interaction time from 1 to 0.5 seconds;
• Divine Inspiration (Paladin's Ascension) slightly reworked: now if you miss the inspiration buff for any reason, a holy sphere will be left behind in its place. This sphere lasts for 20 seconds, and yields a diminishing amount of inspiration over time. (Dev notes: while ascensions are meant to have different levels of interaction and difficulty, we felt that the Paladin's could be quite punishing. This change still rewards you for being in the right place, at the right time, but offers a "consolation prize" if for any reason you are unable to reach the holy light in time);

Skill changes:

• Renamed Chaos Bomb into Chaotic Explosion;
• Renamed Poison Bomb into Poison Puddle;
• Removed the Bomb tag from Acid Rain, Avalanche, Chaotic Explosion and Poison Puddle; (Dev notes: the bomb tag was massively overcrowded in comparison with all other tags, not only diluting the pool of skills but adding thematically inaccurate skills to various characters)

Rune changes:

• Misfortune's Embrace now applies only damaging negative effects randomly, between Burn, Bleed, Poison and Doom, with 250% of the potency as before (no longer applies all effects randomly);

General changes:

• New language supported: Traditional Chinese, with Italian and Turkish coming very soon!
• Portals now need to be interacted with for a second before they activate, to avoid accidental activation;
• Added special visuals to the Void Presence's attack so it can be easily distinguishable from regular enemy attacks;
• Fixed an issue where when selecting a skill in the level up panel, it would not consider your existing powers that would improve that skill if that skill was selected (for example, a Nature skill will now show its damage taking into account your existing +Nature Damage powers, if any);
• Added new key bind to enable/disable auto aim with a click (default middle mouse button), in addition to a small visual indicator next to the Dash icon;
• You can now pick Powers in the level-up screen with the keys 1, 2, 3 for faster navigation;
• Added option to hide the negative effects display from health bars;
• Skill List popup will now show what achievement is required for each skill in its tooltip;
• Improved interaction on the skill tree with the mouse to make it faster to purchase nodes with double clicking;
• Made the rotation of all units smoother;
• Hidden Skill Bar while the Replace Skills popup is active to avoid confusion;
• You can now select a character in the Character screen by double-clicking its picture;
• Adjusted multiple configuration errors with enemies in all maps, such as incorrect experience numbers, incorrect rate of spawn in certain cases, and so on, which would influence the pacing of the game seemingly at random;
• Made updates to the Dungeon of Despair visuals;
• Added new menu animations to celebrate the anniversary;
• Fixed issue where you could have curses that increased the frequency of Corrupted Void Hunters without spawning any void hunters;
• Fixed issue where corpses in some cases could rotate towards you;[h1 id="Anchor"]
  
• New animation and effects for Arcane Weaver in the menu;
• Fixed interactions between Ready for Battle, Unconventional Start, and Affinity runes;

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[hr][/hr] [h2 id"Anchor"]New Speedrun Challenge
To celebrate the anniversary were hosting a speedrun challenge on our Discord server! Play on the map youre most comfortable with be as fast as you can! But don't worry too much, every participant has a chance to win! Were giving the following PRIZES to the 5 people with the best times:

• 1st place - 20$
• 2nd place - 15$
• 3rd place - 10$
• 4th place - Game Key
• 5th place - Game Key

The 4th and 5th place will be picked randomly from all participants so everyone has a chance to win!

Join our Discord and go to the speedrun-event channel for more info.

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Developer notes

We want to say a big thank you for the last year, it was an amazing journey. We are thankful to you for all the support you have given us and we hope to continue delivering the game we all love so much. There is still a lot of new content coming, and a ton of other improvements as well, but we hope you will have fun with the new update and as always, if you have any feedback or issues, let us know!
~ Soulstone Team