Major Improvements

• Loading times have been reduced tremendously to make switching to skilltree less time consuming and get you back to the action as fast as possible. This also makes navigating menus more snappy and responsive.
• Improved Audio: The mix and master chain for all sound effects have been reworked to improve sound effect dynamics and preventing sound effects sounding squashed when multiple effects have been played simultaneously.

Bugfixes

• Fixes for portuguese localisation (v.1.3.1.2a)

New Features:

• New Camera Zoom System: A new fluid camera zoom system has been implemented that allows a much finer zoom adjustment.
• Dodge Cancellation: A new dodge cancellation system has been implemented that lets you cancel the dodge animation on dodge button release. The dodge distance will now be equivalent to the duration the dodge button is pressed. Holding the dodge button for the full dodge duration will result in the maximum dodge time and the maximum dodge distance. This will also allow completely new uses of on-dodge skills.
• Dodge without Movement: Pressing dodge will now trigger dodging in the last performed movement direction. This will lead to a much more consistent dodge experience, as it fixes the issue where a dodge might not register if a movement direction was not pressed at the exact same moment.

Major Improvements and Changes:

• Increased maximum camera zoom level to allow zooming out further.

With Update 1.3.1 we ware bringing major improvements and reworks to Striving for Light: Survival. Featuring the start of Season 5, Coop Rework, a new falcon companion, improved companion AI, projectile multiplier redesign, performance improvements, memory leak fixes and more!

Season 5 has started!

New Features

Falcon Companion

Coop Rework

Projectile Multiplier Redesign

• Increased Shot Angle: Angle between spawned projectiles increase has been lowered to 20 (was 30), this skill now also increases projectile range by +10% (was not present on this skill node before)

Melee Scattering Skills Redesign

Companion Skill Node Redesign

Performance Improvements

Balancing

• Increased the map size of the descent map.
• Increased Shot Angle: Angle between spawned projectiles increase has been lowered to 20 (was 30), this skill now also increases projectile range by +10% (was not present on this skill node before)

Bugfixes

• Fixed a memory leak for condition damage.
• Fixed a memory leak related to damage numbers.
• Fixed a potential crash when using darokin's staff ranged weapon.

New Features:

• Skill tooltips now display how much amount of effects they will have. For skills that spawn projectiles, this will display the amount of projectiles. On stacking this skill this number will also represent the total number of projectiles from that skill. This should make it much easier to understand how skill stacking actually works and how it interacts with the skill.

Bugfixes:

• Fixed wrong damage display in the tooltips for all skills that spawn projectiles. Skill stacks now properly reflect what they will change for that skill.
• Fixed skilltree tutorial not being able to hide when certain tutorials have already been completed.
• Fixed wrong state initialisation for skilltree tutorial hide button.

Bugfixes

• Fixed range weapon on attack effects not triggering (like emerald staff spawning spiders)
• Fixed a crash when closing the stats window with the x-close button multiple times (v.1.3.0.1c)

Bugfixes

• Fixed a crash that could occur when loading the skilltree after a wave if a node was not saved correctly.

New Features

• User Interface redesign for exp bar and health bar

Improvements

• Software cursor is now only active by default on linux os for steam deck

Bugfixes

• Fixed multiple skill effects not being triggered due to recent update regression

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a few crashes due to recursions from the 1.3 update.

Update 1.3 marks the start of Season 4 bringing a big array of crucial improvements, visual enhancements, quality of life features as well as performance improvments to Striving for Light: Survival.

Season 4

New Features:

Character Redesign

Performance Improvements

Improved skill connection design

New Software Cursor:

Improved Controller & Steam Deck Support:

Hide Skilltree Tutorials:

Reimagined UI

View Achievements during Run

Improved Enemy AI

Redesigned Range Companions

Major Changes and Improvements:

• Tooltips improvements: Tooltips are now hidden when changing input type from mouse to keys or controller to prevent multiple active tooltips after input type switch. Tooltips are also more responsive.
• Smaller damage numbers
• Redesigned player level up effect
• Complete Options Menu Redesign to group options for better structure and readability

Balancing:

• Range companions now have faster attackspeed
• Reduced condition damage scaling
• Increased collect range skill node now increases collect range by 30% (was 20% before)

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a memory leak in replicating projectile skills and weapons
• Fixed replicating projectiles not aiming at enemies
• Fixed a bug that caused projectiles that scaled with multiple sources to only scale with one source (i.e. scaling with melee and range damage)
• Fixed player damage numbers not beeing displayed on certain conditions

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a bug that caused enemy AoE attacks to remain active after freezing the enemy.

New Features:

• COOP: You can now select what second coop player character you want to play. Previously the coop character was always chosen randomly. The currently selected coop character is now as well displayed.
  

Bugfixes

• Fixed back button on run successful menus not being blocked by other UI elements.

With update 1.2.0.2 we are addressing some of the very frequent feedback we have received regarding too short early waves. We are also improving the charge mechanic of the new evolution weapons to make losing charges in the early game more forgiving and more relevant in the late game.

Major Changes and Improvements:

• Prolonged Early Waves: First wave starts with 30s duration (was 24s before). Yes, we have heard your feedback on the early wave duration. Give us feedback how you enjoy it.
• Improved Evolution Weapons: Wildfire's Wrath and Abyssal Hunger weapon charges now are much more forgiving when getting hit in the early game. Getting hit will now reduce your weapon changes by 25% instead of the flat 40 charges. This will prevent to constantly getting offset to 0 weapon charges when getting hit in early waves. Due to the percentage charge losses getting hit in the end-game will have higher impact with better possibilities to gain back those charges quickly as you naturally defeat more enemies on higher waves.
• Wildfire's Wrath: Has slight different evolution steps. Additional projectiles will be granted at 30,80,150,300 charges.

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a bug that caused skill-tree tooltips to remain active.

Improvements:

• Dodge Mastery Skill node is now always part of the core skill spawn pool (previously was only added when you had dodge skills selected or in you skill spawn pool)
• Dodge Mastery increases max dodge +1 and your dodge regeneration by + 5%

Balancing:

• Unknown Wanderer Melee Character has now +10% increased dodge regeneration (was +5 before)
• Unknown Wanderer Ranged Character now as +10% movement speed (was +5 % before)
• General dodge regeneration has been reduced to 0.3 /s (was 0.35 /s)

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a bug that caused player with older save files to never get the dodge mastery skill node spawned in their skill tree (sorry for that, now your dodge build dreams can come to life)
• Fixed a bug that caused the unlock all skills achievement to not unlock (just start a new run and you will receive it, if you have all skills already unlocked)

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a bug that caused deactivating skills in the skilltree to not directly update the visual skilltree connections.
• Fixed wrong displayed attack speed for Abyssal Hunger. Attack speed is 1.25 (was displayed lower at 0.83)

Update 1.2 is the first of two big updates for Striving for Light: Survival, featuring a complete overhaul of the oldest and most iconic player characters "The Unknown Wanderers", 2 new evolution weapons, a quick restart run option, performance improvements, redesigned effects and visual improvements and much more. Staying true to our tradition of always delivering MOAR, we're excited to announce that this update is only the first part of a huge update coming a bit later this year with 4 new maps and new uber pinnacle boss fights. But we know most of you are waiting for Season 3 start, so we are happy to announce the start of Season 3:

Season 3 start: Saturday 21.9. at around 11am CEST

New Features:

• New Unknown Wanderer: The two Unknown Wanderers got completely overhauled. Both wanderers have received a few further stats to make the character choice a bit more exciting.
  
  Melee Unknown Wanderer starting stats are now: +20 % Melee Damage, -20% Projectile Damage, +5% Dodge Regeneration, +5% Critical Hit Damage Range Unknown Wanderer starting stats are now: +20 % Projectile Damage, -20% Melee Damage, +5% Movement Speed, +3 Companion Damage
• New Range Weapon: Wildfire's Wrath is a new evolution range weapon that evolves while defeating enemies. This weapon is gaining up to +3 additional projectiles upon charges. If you get hit some weapon charges will vanish.
  
• New Melee Weapon: Abyssal Hunger is a new evolution weapon that evolves while defeating enemies. This weapon is gaining increased attack range and damage upon charges. If you get hit some weapon charges will vanish.
  
• Quick Restart Run: You can now do a quick run restart on the game over screen without having to confirm your unchanged build and reselect the map
• New Attack Direction Indicator: When using manual aim the direction indicator ring has been redesigned to better visualise the attacking direction without the distracting ring.
• Effect Redesign: Plenty of enemy effects have been updated and redesigned to better match the game perspective.
  
  
• New Player Character UI Images: New player character images in the prepare your run screen.

Improvements:

• Performance Improvements: Plenty of performance improvements should allow pushing your builds to new extreme.
• Blood Decals: Blood Decals have received normal maps and are now a lot darker to increase screen readability. You can still always turn them off to maximise visual clarity.

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Improvements:

• Reworked Endless Mode: The endless mode got a major rework with a reduction in boss spawns and therefore a slight enemy hp scaling buff.

Improvements:

• Performance improvements for endless mode

Bugfixes:

• Fixed companions not directly attacking after being spawned

We are thrilled to announce that the soundtrack for Striving for Light: Survival is now available on all major music streaming platforms!

Listen on:

• Spotify
• Apple Music
• Amazon Music
• Youtube Music
• Deezer
• Tidal and many more!

Cutting Dark

• Eternal Horizons

  
  Release on 21.6.2024 The album captures the beauty, power, and recovery of nature, telling a story of destruction and renewal through powerful and emotional melodies. [previewyoutube=GXV1C7dfmQA;full][/previewyoutube]

• Into the North

  
  Release on 5.7.2024 An evocative album that musically captures the harsh, icy landscapes and the rugged, untamed spirit of the northern wilderness. [previewyoutube=f6sNKdEVwlY;full][/previewyoutube]

Hotfix 1.1.0.1e

Bugfixes

• Fixing endbosses not spawning on final wave. This fix should once and for all fix the not spawning bosses on wave 20. If you haven't unlocked tier 2 or the boss defeat unlocks this was related to this bug and should be fixed now as well. If you somehow should end up with a wave 20 without boss here is a temp fix to allow you to further progress. Simply directly exit the game when you notice that there is no boss spawned and re-join the run until the boss spawns. However, I think this should not be neccessary as this should be fixed by now. Just in case, to give you some control over this in case I have overseen something.
• Fixed a crash when entering or exiting the skilltree. This was mostly related to using a gamepad when a node was still selected when exiting the skilltree and the tooltip wrongly initialised on re-entering the skilltree.

Bugfixes

• Fixed dark staff projectiles not being destroyed when colliding with map border causing potential performance issues
• Another fix for endbosses on wave 20 not spawning
• Fixed LB/RB behaviour in skilltree when switching through stats window and search function, windows did not close as expected
• When closing skilltree screen keyboard for node search is getting deactivated again

Improvements:

• Slightly increased map size of descent map
• Forest Map now unlocks when completing descent map wave 10 (was 15 before)

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug that seldomly caused endbosses on wave 20 to not spawn

Bugfixes:

• Fixed toggle skill tutorial spawning two times when entering skilltree and taking away the focus on gamepad controlls

New Features

• Stats window now shows your current helth value next to your max health value
• Improved skill description for bursting skills
• Added tooltips for health in stats window
• Improvements to recently added new soundtracks

Bugfixes

• Fixed to early reset stats before submitting highscores when being defeated.
• Fixed infinite soundtrack loop on Striving for Light OST

Improvements:

• Some improvements and adjustments for the new soundtracks

Bugfixes

• Fixed skill tree shard UI in skilltree floating offscreen when playing with gamepad

Bugfixes

• Fixed a crash when playing with grim rebound or echo ballista
• Fixed new soundtracks repeating instead of playing in shuffle mode
• Fixed crash when starting new run after abondoning run on other save file
• Fixed crash when exiting skilltree when stats window was open
• Fixed crash due to not resetting skill tree after switching save games

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Bugfixes:

• Fixed bursting companions and other companions on enemy death spawning on wrong positions
• Fixed collected skill tree shards UI not being updated correctly
• Fixed next wave UI in skill tree not being updated correctly
• Fixed companions being idle instead of targeting next enemy

With Content Update 1.1.0.0 we are kicking off a new chapter of Striving for Light: Survival featuring a new map with a new pinnacle bossfight, 4 new weapons enabling new playstyles, 4 new soundtracks bringing the Survival OST to over 34 minutes of playtime and a new scene management system fixing memory leaks and performance issues on long runs. Update 1.1.0.0 marks the start of Season 2 which gives you access to fresh leaderboards to climb. No worries you when you join season 2 all your progress will be copied to your new save file. You can still access the season 1 from the league manager on the top right in the main menu.

New Features:

New Map with Pinnacle Boss Fight

New Weapons

• Moonblade - Melee Weapon:
  Each attack casts an additional AoE in attack direction, damage scales with projectile damage.
• Sun Orb - Range Weapon:
  The projectile deal splash damage which scales with melee damage.
• Gloomtide - Melee Weapon:
  Spawns two orbiting melee blades each 2 seconds without attacking, triggering all melee effects.
• Sunfire Sceptre - Range Weapon:
  Spawns an orbiting projectile each second without attacking, triggering all projectile effects.

New Soundtracks

New Scene Management System

Improvements:

• Plenty of smaller fixes and improvements.

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There is now a new beta for update 1.0.6.5 in the public playtest branch. This update fixes memory leaks which have lead to degraded performance on very long runs. As this update has some bigger changes under the hood we want to have this battle tested first before rolling this out for all players. We are happy about anyone jumping into the playtest and giving it a spin.

Join the public beta branch:

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With update 1.0.6.4 we are improving the character unlock progression by making a lot of characters naturally unlocking when defeating the bosses on early maps at the base tier 1 difficulty. This should grant more character choices early on and increase gameplay variety.

Major Changes and Improvements:

• Easier unlock conditions for Dark Wanderer Character: Defeat the endboss on wave 20 on the descent map in tier 1.
• Easier unlock conditions for Farmer Character: Defeat the endboss on wave 20 on the stonehold map in tier 1.
• Easier unlock conditions for Rogue Character: Defeat the endboss on wave 20 on the hideout map in tier 1.

Fixes:

• Fixed some errors in german localisation

Balancing:

• Increased Grim Reaper skill scythe radius to improve usability of this skill without increased AoE size

Fixes:

• Fixed a bug that caused on attack triggered skills always spawn to a static (right directed) angle
• Fixed scythe weapon not having knockback

Major Changes and Improvements:

• Improved caption design in prepare your run screen
• Improved look of recently unlocked weapons, characters and skills icon
• Performance improvements for all on death skill effects
• Improved description of bursting shot and bursting hit skills

Fixes:

• Fixed fragmentation spawning more projectiles on enemy death as intended
• Fixed ranged weapon not displaying their projectile damage (v.1.0.6.2b)

New Features:

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a bug that caused to much fragmentation stacks be applied as on enemy death effect

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WIth update 1.0.6.0 we are introducing a new lighting system, icons for all weapon, skills, character tooltips to display cross interactions and scaling possibilities, we are extending our localisation support for Polish, Russian and Turkish language, improved design of the "prepare run screen", adding support for 240 Hz setting in the options menu and much more!

New Features:

• New Range Weapon: Buzzkeeper Projectile damage scales with companion damage. Projectiles hits have a 40% chance to spawn a bumblebee companion on enemy death.
  
• New supported languages: Russian, Turkish, Polish
• New Lighting System: We have created normal maps for all ground and player model textures which now allows us to use this height information on the textures to render more realistic 3D lighting on our textures. This results in much more plastic looking textures. (Note the new character lighting was rolled in with version 1.0.6.0b and was not yet present on the comparison screens, this showcase is only for the ground textures, so expect even better looking character models with this patch).
  
  
  
• Interaction icons for skills, weapons and character tooltips: Given the complexity and deepness of interaction the SfL skill system offers there has been urgent wishes by the community to streamline and improve the tooltips for a simplified and better way of understanding those skill/weapon/character/trinket interactions. As many tooltips are already rivaling the length of a one-page essay we decided to add a tag based cross reference system to all tooltips. Since the tooltips are already mainly text based we decided to add icons for all the differend damage scaling sources as well as for the AoE size modifier. This will allow you to directly grasp on how to scaling and interactions work. The icons have been designed to match with the corresponding skill node design that grants this damage source, i.e. the scaling with melee damage icon is looking equal to the one you find on the Increased Melee Damage skill node.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Improved design of the "Prepare your Run" screen
• Added level up indicator that displays how much additional skill point by leveling up you have accumulated during a wave. This should make it much easier to understand how gaining skill points works.
• New Voice Acting for Arda, the Fallen: Arda the Fallen has received new professional voice acting

Major Changes and Improvements:

• Added support for 240Hz setting in the options menu
• Improved tooltip description for elite enemy spawn pool
• Improved responsiveness of skill and weapon tooltips

Balancing:

• Ravaging Companions now have a maximum life duration of 10 seconds (was unlimited before)

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With Update 1.0.5.0 we are reworking our story cinematic as well as adding map decorations, a trap highlighting option, balancing changes for the endless mode and further improvements to the game.

New Features:

• Reworked story cinematic
• Map decorations: All maps now have unique map decorations
  
• Trap highlighting: There is now an option to highlight traps in the options menu at the gameplay section. This option is active by default.
  
  
• Skilltree shard items are now as well affected by your collect range. The shards now also have a faster attraction speed to make it easier to pick up those shards.
• Historic Iconic Weapon Redesign: The historic and iconic Light Staff weapon finally got a rework. We must say that the Light Staff was the very first weapon we designed for the Striving for Light Base Game, back in the Early Access Launch/ Next Fest Demo days over 2.5 years ago when we started our journey not knowing where it will head. It has been a blast working on the Striving for Light Games and we are looking forward to all what the future brings!
  

Improvements:

• Improved stats tooltips with information on stat caps
• Improved translations
• More dynamic emerald staff attack SFX

Balancing:

• AoE size is now capped at 3.0 (was uncapped before- we somehow forgot to implement the cap from SfL - which could not only lead to performance issues but also trivialise gameplay in the endless mode)
• Lifeleech is now capped at 1/60 kills (was uncapped before). Lifeleech scaling got reduced but therefore starts at 1/150 kills (was 1/160 kills before)
• Increased AoE size now grants +25% size increase (was +30% before)
• Slightly increased enemy/boss hp scaling in endless mode
• Reduced hitbox size for the magma snail explosion attack
• Reduced hitbox size for tidal crab enemy explosion attack

Fixes:

• Fixed a bug that caused plenty of skills to have the wrong rotation on spawn. Now only sanguine strike/shot gets modified rotation depending on the attack angle.
• Fixed missing and wrong translations

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New Features:

• Added Framerate limit setting slider in the display tab of the options menu. You can now unlock the framerate (which was locked by globally enabled vsync previously) and set it to a target framerate. If you wish to set your framerate over 144hz you can edit the settings.cfg file and enter your desired framerate there. settings.cfg located at: %appdata%\Godot\app_userdata\StrivingForLight-Survival\

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Update 1.0.4.2 focuses further on performance improvements, fixing memory leaks to fix degraded performance on very long gaming sessions, plenty of improvements, balancing changes and curcial bugfixes.

Improvements:

• Performance improvements for all condition skills, condition effects are now also pooled and re-used for improved performance
• General performance improvements for long gaming sessions due to fixed memory leaks
• Sanguine Strike/Shot now has improved directioning when triggering the skill with melee constructs or trembling ground
• Moved highlighted cursor up in the display options menu to make the option more visible
• Improved main menu visuals
• Improvements to scene transition
• Improved tooltips for scattering projectiles and scattering dodge. Tooltips now show the amount of projectiles

Balancing:

• Scattering projectiles range skill: Projectiles now scatter into 2 new projectiles on enemy hit (was 3 before)
• Scattering cast range skill: Projectiles now scatter into 2 new projectiles on range attack (was 3 before)
• Scattering dodge skill: Your dodge creates 5 projectiles (was 3 before)

Fixes:

• On leaderboards now beach difficulty tier 1 is now loaded by default (was basement tier 1 before which did not make any sense)
• Fixed plenty of memory leaks
• Fixed weird glow on rat enemies if highlighted enemies option was enabled
• Fixed enemy spawns some times stopped at the end of high waves
• Fixed too fast button press on map selection screen preventing map buttons being interactible
• Fixed lost focus on gamepad (and steamdeck) input at wave 20 completed screen if the endboss was not defeated

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Improvements:

• Enemies that always deal contact damage now have a more intense red glow to tell them appart from other enemies that don't deal contact damage (like flying enemies on basement and one of the enemies on the descent map)
• Locust enemy has gotten an improved attack animation before enemy enters attack charge
• Sanguine Strike is now pointing in the attack direction when triggered by trembling ground (v.1.0.4.1c)
• Some further improvements to enemy attack indicators (v.1.0.4.1c)
• Improved condition damage calculation on skill tooltips. Tooltips now show the condition damage on each of the 3 standart condition ticks of the skill also taking into account your skill stacks (v.1.0.4.1c)

Balancing:

• Flood Skill: Default Size of Flood has been increased by 50%

Fixes:

• Fixed round shaped maps not destroying projectiles on border collision. If you noticed a downgrade of performance in the smaller round shaped maps, this was the reason for this.
• Fixed wrong damage on tooltip for stone surge and stone toss skill nodes
• A fix for invalid moitor resolutions being loaded which was an issue for some dual monitor setups (v.1.0.4.1b2)
• Fixed wrong unlock description translation for character heleja (v.1.0.4.1c)
• Fixed play button text not being updated on save file switch (v.1.0.4.1c)

Update 1.0.4.1 focuses on performance improvements so that you can push the boundaries even further! More projectiles, more companions, more whatever should now be possible with overall better performance. If you nevertheless run into performance issues on very very very high waves just remember that there is a player effect transparency option that you can put to 100% to hide all effects.

Improvements:

• Performance improvements for all projectiles.
• Performance improvements for all companions
• Improved object pooling system for improved performance
• Revert Shot rework for improved performance. It does the same but is more performant.

Balancing:

• Grim Reaper Skill now has a reduced attack speed malus of -15% (was -20%)
• Baby Phoenix Skill now has a reduced attack speed malus of -15% (was -30%)

Fixes:

• Fixed wrong map names for some translations in the unlock conditions

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Improvements:

• The uncollected and stashed light fragments counter now starts with the fragment count from previous wave and counts up to the new stashed light fragment count to prevent confusion. Previously if you had 6 stashed light fragments on last wave and collected all light fragments beside 1 in the current wave the counter would still count from 0->7. With the new improvements the counter will count from 6->7 so you only see the difference animated. This hopefully should solve the confusion about the stashed light fragments and make it easier for new players to understand this system.
• Improvements for faster scene transitions (v.1.0.4.0g)

Fixes:

• Fixes to the scene transition to fix occasional game freezes (v.1.0.4.0g)

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New Features:

• Poisoned Blight [Melee Weapon]: Hit enemies are poisoned and spread poison condition to nearby enemies when defeated.
  
• Grimm Rebound [Range Weapon]: Projectiles bounce off walls and create a dark explosion on wall hit. Explosion scales with AoE size and projectile damage.
  
  
• Echo Ballista [Range Weapon]: Projectiles bounce off opponents and can hit another opponent.
  
  
• Sanguine Shot [Range Skill]: Your projectiles create a bloody splash covering enemies behind the hit position dealing additional damage and applying bleeding condition to enemies. Damage scales with projectile damage. Size scales with AoE size.
  
• Sanguine Strike [Melee Skill]: Your melee hits create a bloody splash covering enemies behind the hit position dealing additional damage and applying bleeding condition to enemies. Damage scales with melee damage. Size scales with AoE size.
  
  

Improvements:

• First map is now the beach map
• Unlock condition for descent map has been reduced to complete wave 10 on the basement
• Improved plenty of skill tooltips
• Improved damage number animations for improved hit feedback
• Improved effects in the main menu (v.1.0.4.0c)
• Improved enemy hit culling system

Fixes:

• Finally completely fixed the scene transition freeze bug
• Finally fixed the underlaying issue that caused no hit achievements to not being triggered
• Fixed clipped farmer idle animation
• Fixed exploding dodge skill not showing damage numbers in the tooltip
• Fixed not translated watching at tag in live streamer tooltip (v.1.0.4.0b)
• Fixed wrong calculated condition damage in skill tooltips (v.1.0.4.0b)
• Fixed wrong skill description for bleeding blade and bleeding swirl skill nodes (v.1.0.4.0b)
• Fixed clipping toggle skills tutorial for some translations (v.1.0.4.0d)
• Fixed wrong german translation for construct steam achievement (v.1.0.4.0d)
• Fixed enemy hit effects sometimes not being spawned, the effect culling system has got some improvements (v.1.0.4.0d)

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Improvements:

• Performance improvements for all centipede/snake/worm type enemies

Improvements:

• Improved companion AI: Companions now attack enemies faster after spawn which makes companions more responsive also if they repawn in case they move to far away from the player position
• Cyclic Might [Melee Attack Replacer Skill] now has much smoother swirl animation and melee weapons now do not jump to new aimed enemy position anymore

Balancing:

• Taurus enemy at caves map has been slowed down and added variance to attack pattern to prevent those enemies charge attacking to frequently

Fixes:

• Fixed wrong achievement images for courtyard of ankerath

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Improvements:

• Additional projectiles, projectile multiplicator and projectile spawn angle skill node is now only part of the base skill pool when the range weapon has projectiles (i.e. is excluded if you have chosen the emerald staff that summons spiders) to prevent unneccessary cluttering up of the skill tree
• Improvements to the spawn rules for base skills depending on what skills are selected for the skill spawn pool

Balancing:

• Woodweaver Range weapon: Added +6 additional companion damage

New Features:

• New Blazing Trail Skill: The burning dodge skill got reworked and renamed. Blazing Trail now lays a trail of fire behind you when dodging. The size of the fire trail can be scaled by AoE size and the damage by your condition damage.
  
• New Base Skill: Dodge Mastery - Increase your max dodge charges and your dodge regeneration. This skill might not be needed for all builds so it will only show up if you selected a dodge skill (or one got randomly added to the skill spawn pool). This will make it possible to build more around the dodge mechanic as you can now have more dodges and trigger your dodge attacks more frequently.
  

Improvements:

• Improved and faster scene transition to make scene transitions more robust to prevent game freezes.

Fixes:

• Fixes to scene transition to prevent game freezes

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New Features:

• New skill tree shard tutorial: A new tutorial has been added to the skilltree showcasing the possibilities of shaping the skilltree by utilising those shards. It will show up the first time you aquire a skill tree shard.

Improvements:

• Minor adjustments to the dodge acceleration to make the dodge a bit more smooth. Please give us feedback how you like our recent adjustments to the player dodge.

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If your operating system decided to hide the software cursor go to the options and deactivate highlighted mouse cursor option. We have deactivated this option by default now. If you have trouble navigating to the options delete the settings.cfg in %appdata%\Godot\app_userdata\StrivingForLight-Survival.

New Features:

• Added steam rich presence support: Steamfriends can now see the what wave, level and map you are currently playing on.

Improvements:

• Performance improvements for all enemy spawn
• Software cursor setting has been renamed to "Highlighted Mouse Cursor" to make it this option more clear. This option is now deactivated by default since the OS of some users makes the software cursor disappear. For all players that have a hidden cursor go to the options menu and deactivate the highlighted mouse cursor setting.
• Improved window positioning for borderless mode. You should now be able to toggle borderless window mode on your secondary monitor without the game window moving back to the primary monitor.
• Improved Dodge: Dodge now has a shorter duration and faster travel speed which makes the dodge more responsive. The shorter duration also gives you back the control over your character faster. Invincibility duration has not been changed.

Balancing:

• Lowered attack speed for first enemy in cave map
• Lowered attack speed for scorpion enemies and increased the shooting cooldown
• Lowered scorpion projectile range (v.1.0.2.2b)
• Changed enemy spawn order in the caves map (v.1.0.2.2b)
• Lowered frozen ground snail effect duration in frozen lands map
• Performance improvements for on death skills
• Removed the steam achievements for no move challenge level 15/20 they are now only available in game
• Slightly increased base enemy hp scaling in endless mode (v.1.0.2.2b)

Fixes:

• Fixed the initial language setting fetched from your operating system containing additional locale extensions like "en_US" and also displaying your operation system language setting instead of the fall back language in the options menu.
• Fixed on death effects not being stacked properly. Fragment was only triggered once even though there where multiple instances skilled.
• Fixed a bug that caused not all grim reaper scythes being spawned and causing a memory leak
• Fixed memory leaks on scene switch in the menues and prepare run screen
• Fixed wrong damage calculation for bursting skills on enemy death
• Fixed saved health when entering a saved run collecting health exiting and re-entering to heal up

Join the community!

Improvements:

• Skillshard Collect UI: The item collect notification UI is back with a simplified style on the left window boarder indicating that you have picked up an item.
• Added glow effect to skilltree shards to make them better visible on the map backgrounds

Fixes:

• Fixed a bug for recent pet performance optimisation that could lead to crashes

Improvements

• Improved boss spawn order on maps

Fixes:

• Fixes a bug that caused a crash when enemies spawned other spawner objects

With update 1.0.2.0 we are introducing a new backup system that will create an additional backup copy of your current selected save one time each day and a skill stack counter so that multiple of the same skills not clutter up the skills section on the stats window (or build viewer) and directly shows how much stacks of a skill you have aquired. As a short recap, a hotfix yesturday which was live for a few hours messed with the save files resulting in lost progress. If you have lost any progress due to this bug please contact us and we will restore your progress, more information on this at our yesturdays post: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2286450/view/3901870244741122367?l=english

New Features:

• New Backup System: Errors that can happen will happen sooner or later, so we took this as a lessons learned and implemented a backup system that backs up your current selected save file one time each day on game start. This will also make it possible for players that messed with the save file on mistake to restore their progress. As this error caused quite some inconvenience it also contributed to improving the game.
• Skill Stack Count on Stats: In the stats window and on the build viewer in the skills section you will now only see one instance of each skill with the amount of skill stacks for each skill. This will make it possible to see how much of each skill you have active whithout having to count. You can also hover over the skill in the skill section and highlight all instances in the skill tree to faster locate them.
  
  

Improvements:

• Changed vsync mode to fix micro stutters that have been reported. Please keep us updated on this if the change improved it or made it worse as this will depend on the operating system / PC setup/ graphic driver settings etc.
• Improved basement map lightning (v.1.0.2.0b)
• Increased skill stack number size in stats window and build viewer (v.1.0.2.0b)
• Enemy spawns created by other enemies are now as well indicated by red spawn circles (v.1.0.2.0c)

Fixes:

• Language is now properly saved and not reset after a few game restarts
• Fixed farmer and rogue unlocks missing in the achievement lists
• The random skills on a new run when not re-selecting new skills are now shuffled again (v.1.0.2.0b)
• Fixed crash on beach endless mode whan awakened tidal titan should spawn additional enemies (v.1.0.2.0c)
• Fixed achievement unlock conditions for burning projectiles and burning cast (v.1.0.2.0d)

Join the community!

Thanks for your reports about the last hotfix messed with the save files. We just released a fix for this. We are sorry for all inconvenience this has caused. If you lost your progress (weapons, skills, characters and maps) please contact us via the bugreport button in the main menu and attach a screenshot (of the prepare run screen with markers on what you had unlocked) or a list of things you had unlocked and want to gain back. We will then try to restore this progress on your save file and send it back to you. You can also contact us via discord if you want. You can directly access the bugreport form to submit your save file with this link: https://www.strivingforlight.com/bugreport/ Save files are located at: %appdata%\Roaming\Godot\app_userdata\StrivingForLight-Survival Edit: We are already working on a backup system that will create a backup of your save file one time each day so that you can restore your progress for all kind of unhappy events. We always try to adress bugs and issues as soon as possible and ask for your understanding for any inconvenience caused by our errors.

Thanks for your valuable feedback and reports!

Improvements:

• Increased hearth move speed to make it easier to pick up hearths with higher movement speed (v.1.0.1.3c)

Fixes:

• Fixed a bug that caused selected skills to be reset when not at least re-selecting one skill in the prepare your run screen. This is now fixed and your selected skills are not reset when you start a new run with unchanged skill selection.
• Fixed a bug that caused no hit and no move stats not being properly reset when restarting / abandoning a run (v.1.0.1.3c)

Update 1.0.1.3 improves the scene loading and drastically reduces loading times on scene transition, also the occasional game freeze on scene transition has been fixed.

Improvements:

• Improved scene loading which now results in way shorter loading times between scenes switches. Previously loading times even in simple menue scenes were pretty long this is fixed now. This improved scene loading should also fix occasional game freezes on scene switch.
• Skilltree shards tooltips now have way shorter delay when hovering over them.
• Software cursor is now active by default for new players. If windows somehow decides to hide your cursor got to options and deactivate the software cursor.

Balancing:

• Further reduced enemy and boss hp scaling in endless mode

Fixes:

• Fixed vsync not being applied from the gamestart
• Fixed occasional game freeze on scene loading

Fixes:

• Fixed not unlocking maps on older pre-release save files
• Fixed a bug that caused skill nodes not being able to be skilled after using shard of conjunction

Fixes:

• Fixed a crash on the last build on game startup. Sorry for the inconvenience this has caused. And thanks to everyone reporting this right away so that we were able to fix this immediately!
• Fixed icons in playernames causing leaderboards not being displayed correctly. You can now no longer use those symbols in your player name.

Improvements

• Removed a too relaxed soundtrack out of the SfL OST soundtrack queue
• Added 2 new SfL soundtracks to the SfL OST soundtrack queue
• Poison nova unlock condition has been changed to reach 20 conditoin damage until wave 2 -> 3

Fixes:

• Fixed no hit on wave 5 achievement not being triggered
• Fixed wrong tooltips in the options menu
• Fixed wrong tooltips on condition damage skill node

Thanks for all your valuable feedback! This update features a rebalancing of the endless game mode as well as adding plenty of new additional stats to a lot of weapons which did not have stats until now. This should open up new weapon/skill synergies.

Improvements:

• Plenty of weapons have received additional stats that should open up new weapon/skill synergies.
• Improved description for projectile shield and how it is scaling.

Balancing:

• Endless Mode Rebalancing: Boss enemy hp scaling has been massively reduced. Enemy hp scaling in endless mode has also been further reduced
• Improved enemy and boss spawn patterns to better match the map environments.
• Descent map now has Izamuth as endboss
• Stonehold now has Gride as endboss
• [Melee Weapon] Shortsword companion damage: 10 -> 5
• [Melee Weapon] Greatsword crit chance: 5% -> 10%
• [Melee Weapon] Scythe crit chance: 0% -> 5% , Movementspeed: 0% -> +5%
• [Melee Weapon] Spear crit damage: 0% -> +10%, Condition damage: +5 -> 0
• [Melee Weapon] Bleeding star condition damage: +0 -> 1
• [Melee Weapon] Amber condition damage: 0 -> 5
• [Melee Weapon] Ripping Axe condition damage: 0 -> 2
• [Melee Weapon] Candy Cane collect range: 0 -> 10%
• [Range Weapon] Dark Staff crit damage: 0 -> 10%
• [Range Weapon] Ice Staff companion damage: 0 -> 1, condition damage: 0 -> 1
• [Range Weapon] Bow crit chance: 0 -> 5%
• [Range Weapon] Focus area of effect: 0 -> 10%
• [Range Weapon] Emerald Staff companion damage: 0 -> 2
• [Range Weapon] Lightning Staff crit damage 10 % -> 20%
• [Range Weapon] Ice Focus condition damage 0 -> 5
• [Range Weapon] Slingshot crit damage 0 -> 10%, movementspeed 0 -> 10%
• [Range Weapon] Unstable potion condition damage 0 -> 2
• [Range Weapon] Cinnamon Star collect range: 0 -> 10%
• [Range Weapon] Bear Caller companion damage: 0 -> 2, area of effect 0 -> 5%
• [Range Weapon] Darokin's Staff area of effect 0 -> 10%
• [Melee Weapon] Frozen Vessel area of effect 0 -> 10%, movement speed 0 -> 5%
• [Melee Weapon] Ballistic Barkwood collect range: 0 -> 20%
• [Range Weapon] Blazebolt movementspeed: 0 -> 5%
• [Range Weapon] Woodweaver crit chance 0 -> 10%, movementspeed 0 -> 15%
• [Melee Weapon] Earthshaper collect range 0 -> 15%, crit damage 0 -> 25%
• [Range Weapon] Throwing Spear area of effect: 0 -> 15%

Fixes:

• Fixed typo in hammer weapon description.
• Fixed clipping streamer tooltip
• Fixed cave map not unlocking if the achievement was already unlocked pre-release

Join the community!

Improvements:

• Highlighted enemy projectiles now feature improved projectile outlines for improved enemy projectile visibility. (This option is active by default but can be toggled in the options menu -> gameplay). You can also toggle blood effects on the ground off to improve readability screen readability in options -> display.
• The stone swirl attack of beach crab enemies now also have outlines to make stones better visible.
• Improved visibility of basement enemy projectiles

Fixes:

• Fixed beach crab enemies rapidly interrupting their attacks.
• Fixed steam achievements not being unlocked on native linux build.
• Fixed typo in goladir character description

Join the community!

Balancing:

• Lowered endless mode enemy hp scaling for more settle transition
• Further lowered elite enemy hp scaling in endless mode (v.1.0.1.0d2)

Fixes:

• Improved aeodra design

Improvements

• Improved attacks of beach crab enemies with improved colliders an better visual clarity.
• Improved hitboxes and attacks of descent enemies.

Improvements

• Tooltips in the prepare your run screen are now much more responsive and don't have a delay anymore.

Fixes

• Fixed flickering issue on tooltips in the prepare your run screen. Hovering over the skills/weapons/character the tooltip was sometimes disappearing if you moved the mouse slowly on the panel.
• Fixed baby pheonix skill unlock not working

Since the 1.0 release of Striving for Light: Survival we have been focusing on critical bugfixes and improvements in numerous patches and hotfixes according to all your valuable player feedback. But this was not all we had been working on since the release and now is the time to unleash content update 1.0.1.0 featuring new ways to shape your skilltree, a brand new chaos game mode, improvements and balancing changes for endless mode. We have heard your feedback and opinions on our poll regarding new skilltree shards and also concerns have not been overheard. With the introduction of the new shards we did major adjustments to drop rates and the acquiring mechanisms to prevent to be able to just respec every skill node. Also refunding is bound to the condition that all your skills still hold connection to the skill tree origin.

New Features:

• New Chaos Game Mode added: From the prepare your run screen you can now hit the chaos button and throw yourself directly into the action with a random character, weapons and skills. For the chaos mode no unlocks are needed and everything is available from the start. Shape the chaos and compete agains other players that all face the same odds. New leaderboards are added for this mode. Chaos mode is also available in the demo. So new players can try out everything the game has to offer without needing to unlocking them first. Also the chaos mode can be used to unlock other weapons/characters and skills if you wish.
  
• Endless Chaos Mode: The new chaos mode can also played in the endless variant.
  
• Improved random skillpool: The random skillpool now utilises all available skills and not just the unlocked ones. So if you now only select a few skills the remaining skills to fill up the 12 slots will be picked randomly among all available skills not only the same unlocked ones. This should lead to more diverse runs for new players that do not yet have unlocked a lot of skills.
• Shard of Conjunction added: New skilltree shard that holds the power to reforge the connections between skill nodes. Can be dropped by elites.
  
• Shard of Refund added: New skilltree shard that holds the power to refund skill nodes if the rest of the skill nodes hold connection to the skill tree origin. Can be dropped by elites.
  
• Blood Effect Setting: Added a new option in the displays menu to turn off ground blood effects for cleaner visuals and less gore effects. This might also improve performance a bit.

Improvements:

• Improved skill tooltips to make them more clear
• Improved elite enemy spawn tooltips to make them more clear
• Removed the collected items notification to not clutter up the screen space
• Darokin character unlock condition has been lowered to defeat endboss on tier 1 on any map

Balancing:

• To compensate for the new arsenal of shards to shape your skilltree the enemy hp scaling in the endless mode was slightly increased and also the enemy spawn speed now scales with increased waves in the endless mode
• Locust enemies have slower charge speed
• Elites now have a chance dropping one of the 3 skilltree shards. The new shards have different drop chances.
• You now gain one shard of change each 3 waves
• You now gain one shard of conjunction each 5 waves
• You now gain one shard of refund each 8 waves

Fixes:

• Fixed hidden shard icons behind mouse cursor on specific screen resolutions and zoom factors
• Fixed leaderboard glitch that displayed full leaderboard in the your rank field
• Fixed weapon spear unlocked at wave 10 instead of 20
• Fixed map switch bug

Since the release three days ago we have been busy fixing critical bugs and implementing improvements and changes that came up after the release in a numerous of hotfixes and patches. We are taking every feedback seriously, so if there are things you don't enjoy, bugs or other issues, please post them on the steam forums or on the discord! We are looking forward to read through them and make this game the best it can be. We are already preparing the next content update for Striving for Light: Survival and would like to hear your opinion on the following: Introduction of new skill tree shards to further shape the skilltree. They would also drop from elites and bosses. [olist]

Would you like seeing the introduction of the Shard of Conjunction that lets you reforge connections between skill nodes?

Would you like seeing the introduction of the Shard of Refund that lets you refund skill points you no longer need?

Improvements:

• You can now zoom out further.

Improvements:

• Leaderboard entries now check in which language player name is written and switch to the correct font depending on the language (korean, chinese & japanese)
• Changed map unlock order to have basement as first map
• Adjusted and improved all map background brightness levels and colors
• Added glow effect to enemies

Balancing:

• Slightly increased enemy spawn rate in endless mode
• Slightly increased enemy hp scaling in endless mode

Fixes:

• Fixed freeze on scene load

Major changes and improvements:

• The save file notification messages in main menu on top right are now localised as well.
• The save file notification in main menu now notifies you if you are playing an older season online save file or if you currently play offline.
• Updated the Shard of Change description to make it clear that those shards can only be used on unskilled skill nodes.

Balancing:

• Decreased rat enemy charge speed

Fixes:

• Fixed a crash that occured on courtyard of ankerath map on wave 15 (v.1.0.0.1g)
• Fixed a bug that caused some projectiles not scaling with additional projectile damage skill nodes

Major Changes and Improvements:

• Improved Leaderboard Menu: Leaderboard has received improved highlighting if normal or endless mode is selected. Switching from normal to endless mode in the leaderboard menu will directly show the endless mode highscores of the previously selected map and difficulty tier.
• Improved enemy colliders
• Flying enemies which always deal contact damage now have a grace period after spawning where they do not deal damage in case they spawn very close to your current player position.
• Flying enemies are now a bit bigger and have a glow effect to make them visible better on multiple different backgrounds (v.1.0.0.1b)
• Rat enemies now have a glow effect to make them visible better on multiple different backgrounds (v.1.0.0.1b)
• Your selected league save file is now set up for loading on new game start directly when you have selected it and not only on correct game shutdowns. In case of a crash this could lead to a wrong save file selected on game re-start which could have caused some confusion. (v.1.0.0.1c)
• When you enter the new season the "new season notification" is now updated and hidden once you are in the new season (v.1.0.0.1d)

Balancing:

• Stonehold map now has slightly easier enemy spawns and an easier endboss to challenge.
• Aureate Dome now has Shadow Rogue as endboss
• Reduced movement speed of flying dragonfly enemy
• Reduced movement speed of tidal crab enemies
• Increased warning time before tidal crab expand AoE deals damage
• Increased warning time before magma expand AoE deals damage

Fixes:

• Fixed wrong map loaded after resuming a run and then starting a fresh run on new map (v.1.0.0.1b)
• Fixed no hit, no movement achievements being unlocked on game restart when resuming an active run (v.1.0.0.1b)
• Fixed layering of magma snail boss (v.1.0.0.1d)
• Fixed tooltips overflowing from top screen for some translations (v.1.0.0.1e)

Fixes:

• Fixed occasional lagg spikes on elite enemy spawns (v.1.0.0b)
• Fixed wrong tooltip in stats window for collection range (v.1.0.0b)
• Added tooltips for dodge and dodge regeneration in the stats window (v.1.0.0b)
• Fixed wrong German translation for cellar map (v.1.0.0b)
• Added manual aim option back in. Manual aim is also compatible with the new coop mode. (v.1.0.0a)

After 10 months of Early Access Striving for Light: Survival version 1.0 is now out! [previewyoutube=jPPeWv7eUWc;full][/previewyoutube]

Update 1.0.0.0

• New Skills: 4 new weapons have been added. Baby Phoenix, Grim Reaper, Stone Toss & Stone Surge
  
  
  
  
• New Weapons: 5 new weapons have been added. Blazebolt, Frozen Vessel, Ballistic Barkwood, Woodweaver & Earthshaper
  
  
  
  
  
• New Maps: 6 new maps with 7 new enemies, 7 new bosses and 6 new endbosses
  
• Local-Coop Mode: New couch coop mode to play with a friend
  
• Redesign & Polish: Redesigned enemies, maps, projectiles
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Endless game mode: If you managed to defeat the endboss on wave 20 you can now progress into endless mode. Endless mode has it's own leaderboards and offers new uber boss encounters. How far will you reach?
• New Soundtracks: SfL original OST can now be played in shuffle mode. Together with the Survival OST there is now +97 min soundtrack in the game.
• Highlighted enemy projectiles: This option is now on by default and adds a red outline to all enemy projectiles for better visibility.
• Minimap transparency option: You can now make the minimap overlay transparent
• Improved sound effects: Fixed sound effect cut off and added new alternating melee weapon sound effects.
• New menues: The options menu and the achievements menu have been redesigned. Achievemtns how have categories.
• Improved visual effects: New blood effects, improved lighting, improved shadows
• Performance improvements: A lot of skills and effects have been redesigned to improve performance
• Exit Run & Continue Run functionality added. When you now exit a run you can now load and resume your current run.
• Quick restart run added. A new restart run button has been added to the pause menu which lets you quickly restart the current run. No need to go through menues as previously.
• Abandon run option added. A new abandon run button has been added to the pause menu where you can now completly end a run, a confirmation is requested for abandoning a run.
• Further improvements: Balancing changes, improved unlock conditions, new achievements

Balancing Changes:

• Updated enemy attack patterns and movement speeds
• First condition damage tick now deals full condition damage. Conditon damage decay then sets in with 70% of condition damage each tick (was 55%). To compensate this buff, base condition damage was reduced to 5 and increased condition damage nodes increase condition damage by 5 (was 10 before).
• Cuttting shot now does not trigger melee attack skills anymore
• Heleja now has +1 projectile multiplicator (had +2 projectile multiplicator)

A new beta build for the upcoming 1.0 release is now live, featuring:

New Features:

Striving for Light: Survival is celebrating the full 1.0 release on December 2nd! [previewyoutube=jPPeWv7eUWc;full][/previewyoutube] The release will be accompanied by a big content update featuring:

• 6 new maps with 7 new enemies, 7 new bosses and 6 new endbosses
• 2 new skills: Baby Phoenix & Grim Reaper
• 3 new weapons: Blazebolt, Frozen Vessel & Ballistic Barkwood
• Local-Coop Mode
• Endless game mode
• Redesigned enemies, maps, projectiles
• New Soundtracks: SfL original OST can now be played in shuffle mode. Together with the Survival OST there is now +97 min soundtrack in the game.
• Highlighted enemy projectiles option
• Minimap transparency option
• Improved sound effects and new alternating melee weapon sound effects
• New options menu, improved achievements menu
• Improved visual effects, new blood effects, improved lighting, improved shadows
• Plenty of performance improvements
• Balancing changes, improved unlock conditions, new achievements

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a crash that could randomly occur when leaving the skill tree

New Features:

• New player hit visual and sound effects. This new effects will make player hit feedback much more responsive and visual.

Improvements

• Performance improvements for all constructs.

Bugfixes:

• Fixed potential crashes due to new improved scene loading.
• Fixed a crash on player death (v.0.9.9.2c)
• Fixed a crash due to new improved scene loading (v.0.9.9.2.c)

Improved Controller Support

Improvements:

• Highlighted nodes in the skill tree and the pathfinder now have an animated highlight for improved visibility when using a controller.
• Fissure skill is now fully affected by the player effect transparency setting
• Improved distort shader effect for the fissure skill effect.
• Reduced loading times when switching scenes.
• Player character is now remaining facing in the latest walking direction instead of always facing in the downwards direction.

Bugfixes:

• Fixed flail melee weapon not having knockback

Update 0.9.9.1 is all centered around to make Striving for Light: Survival as enjoyable as possible, featuring massive performance improvements, private league improvements, memory leak fixes and balancing changes.

New Features:

Improved Weapon Effect Triggers

Improvements

• Massive performance improvements for all enemy hit flash effects that have multiple body parts like worms/centipedes. Previously long worm enemies like worm map boss or the bleak worm gatekeeper endboss could lead to massive frame drops when attacking with a huge amount of frequent hits. The enemy flash effect was rewritten for maximum performance at exact same functionality.
• Massive performance improvements for all companion enemy hit effects. Previously all companions triggered additional enem hit visual effects that where not intended. This could lead to massive frame drops when a big bunch of companions attacked an enemy with much HP like bosses.
• Enemy hit visual effects are now no longer played when they are spawned off screen and you move to the area later
• Improved player camera smoothness
• Companions spawn now with slight offset to not make them perfectly overlap on spawn
• Improved Private Leagues, added youtube and twitch integration for private leagues

Balancing

• Reduced Darkness Staff projectile damage to 5 (was 10)
• Increased Throwing Spear projectile damage to 8 (was 6)
• Increased Hammer melee weapon attack speed and reduced melee damage to 12 (was 16)

Bugfixes

• Fixed potential crash on flail weapon with boomerang attack replacer due to wrong animation paths.
• Fixed steam achievements not being unlocked on steam
• Fixed plenty of memory leaks
• Fixed floating number display in player stats
• Fixed crash when spawning eternal sands map endboss (v.0.9.9.1a)

New Features

• Re-designed tooltips for skills, characters and consumable items. Here is how the new tooltip design looks like.
  
• Re-designed damage numbers. We completely redesigned the damage number animation to make damage numbers feel as responsive as possible and more satisfying to look at. So the new animation is designed to reflect the damage inpact. Also the damage numbers have got a complete new color code with gradual tint shift from pure white - yellow - golden depending on the damage amount. The previous color code was just to diverse with a more rainbow disco feel.
• New multi threaded physics model for improved performance.

Improvements

• Loading screen now has translations
• Software cursor is now active by default but can be turned off in the options menu if windows refuses to display the cursor in fullscreen mode

Balancing

• Shard of Change is now only gained after each second completed wave (was after each wave previously)

Bugfixes

• Fixed memory leaks on scene switch which lead to degraded performance over time. In case you had noticed degrading performance the longer you play, this should be fixed now.
• Fixed the cursor hotspot offset for the software cursor

New features:

• Software cursor is now a opt-in option in the options menu. As plenty of players reported back that windows hides the software cursor for some specific resolutions and screen scaling settings in fullscreen mode the software cursor is now disabled by default. This should always yield a visible cursor with the option to activate the nicer looking software cursor if your windows settings support this.

Improvements

• Performance Improvements
• Increased Shard of Change mouse icon when it was activated to make it better visible that the Shard of Change mode is currently active.

Bugfixes

• Improvements to the game start-up routine. If you still get a hidden cursor on start try disconnecting all gamepads, and check if third party software is installed that could prevent the game cursor from showing up.
• Switching from fullscreen to window mode and back now as well sets cursor as visible to hopefully fix the hidden cursor for some players.

New Features

Re-Rolling Skill Nodes

Balancing

• Elite enemies have reduced HP

The first iteration on the new Endless Mode and the Local COOP Mode is now live on our new public beta on steam.

How to get access to the public beta?

New Features:

Endless Mode

Local Coop

Since our Early Access release of Striving for Light: Survival on February 20th a bit more than 3 months from today we have worked hard on improving the game, adding new content listening to your player feedback and fixing bugs. We are quickly approaching the full 1.0 release of Striving for Light: Survival and want to inform you about what new features we have planed for the 1.0 release build. We are also giving an update on the pricing for the full release transition. So lets get started!

Early Access until now:

• New Weapons added: Bear Caller, Darokin's Staff
• New Skills: Projectile Shield, Fissure, Lightning Strike, Discharge
• New Elite Enemies and Catch Up System to received uncollected light fragments
• Plenty of performance and plenty of visual improvements like complete redesigned enemy projectiles
• New Damage Number System
• Critical Hit Chance System Added
• Manual Aim added
• Player effect transparency slider added
• Plenty of controller support improvements and Steam Deck verification
• New Original Survival OST + Soundtrack selection system
• New alternate sound effect trigger system
• Updated all weapon trail VFX + Weapon Swing Effects
• Reworked condition damage + new condition visual effects
• New enemy health bars

Content of the major 1.0 update:

• A new endless mode with separated highscores
• Local coop mode
• 2 new weapons
• 2 new skills
• Improvements and bugfixes

Public Beta-Testing Branch

Updated Pricing

Feedback & Suggestions

Improvements:

• All unlocked in-game achievements are now updated to steam and unlock the corresponding steam achievements as soon as you launch the game. This should grant you all missed out steam achievements due to the bugged steam API on the last weeks.

Improvements:

• Companions now spawn scattered around spawn position to prevent them being perfectly stacked on top of each other which made it hard to see how many companions have been created

• Freshly included the steam api files into the game build as some players reported that the steam achievements fail to update. Important note on this: Always launch the game from your steam library and not the .exe. Otherwise steam can not hook onto the game.

Update 0.9.5.7 adds a loading screen to the game and fixes crashes on game start when there is no internet connection or fetching data from servers or API fails.

New Features

New Loading Screen

Bugfixes

• Fixed crashes on startup due to failed requests in receiving data from our APIs

Improvements:

• If emerald staff is equiped no projectiles are displayed in the stats window to indicate that you don't have any projectiles when emerald staff is equipped
• SFX adjustments

• Dark Wanderer now has +5 companion damage as base stat
• Reduced elite enemy hp to make it easier for weaker builds to catch up and stay above the difficulty curve of the run

• Tooltips for each stat in the stats window has been fixed so that you can now get more information on the different stats.
• Fixed a crash when entering a map and keybindings have been changed in a way that one action is not set to a key
• Fixed a potential crash on player death when timed skill effects end

With this update we are focusing the sound effects of Striving for Light: Survival. We also fixed a bug that caused the game to crash for some users directly after startup when running multi monitor setups.

New Features:

Random Alternate Sound Effect Trigger System

Brand New Sound Effects

Bugfixes

• Fixed a crash that could occur on game startup with multi monitor setups and older save files. Now the saved screen resolutions are checked if they are compatible with the current monitor before loaded to prevent crashing the game on startup

Improvements:

• Performance improvements for all projectiles. This especially becomes noticeable on high refreshrate monitors with fps >60. This should also improve micro stutter issues when playing builds with massive amounts of projectiles.

Bugfixes:

• If fullscreen is active borderless mode is now always deactivated on game start as this might lead to crashes on the steam deck.
• Steam Input is now deactivated by default to prevent duplicated inputs on external controllers on the steam deck. If it is not deactivated by default make sure to deactivate this feature on the steam deck when encountering this issue.

Improvements:

• Completly reworked controller cursor navigation in the skilltree, you will find the cursor navigation with the controller much smoother now
• Added new controller sensitivity setting in the options which lets you adjust the sensitivity of your thumbsticks, this will give you complete control
• Eplode on Death effects have received some performance optimisations that should prevent lag when plently of enemies explode at once.

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a bug which made it possible to call the pause menu during scene switches which could lead to a screen freeze in the options menu.

New Features

Range Weapon Attack Effect

New enemy health bars

New enemy projectile design for poison projectiles

Improvements

• Additional information was added to the end of wave screen to indicate that uncollected light fragments are converted to elite enemies
• Increased the space for the ranking on leaderboard entries as they now range up into the 4 digits
• Improved forest map design which now has more of a blue tint to diversify colour palettes.
• You can now dynamically enable and disable highlighted enemies without restarting the run or the game
• Improved controller/ mouse transition where controller thumbstick deadzone is increased to prevent ghost inputs of connected controller hiding the cursor
• Mouse cursor is now always initialised visible on game start

Bugfixes

• Fixed suddenly hidden particle effect in forest map

New Features

Screen Readability

Improved skill tree algorithm

Improved Auto Aim and Manual Aim

Improvements

Performance improvements

• All enemy projectiles and enemy AoE effects have been reworked from scratch which also made it possible to sneak in some performance improvements for all enemy projectiles and enemy AoE effects.
• Performance improvements for centipede and worm enemies.

• Void map background brightness has been increased to make enemies better visible
• Improved enemy highlighting and removed clipped out red floating lines.

Balancing

• Increased AoE size of Darokin's Staff light ray.
• Darokin's Staff now has a 25% chance on projectile hit to cast a light ray (was 20%).

Bugfixes

• Fixed wrong scroll list position for choose map menu
• Fixed wrong unlock description for lightning strike, it unlocks defeating the endboss on Tier 3 on the Caves using the Rogue.

New Features

New Ranged Weapon: Darokin's Staff

Improvements

• Unlock conditions for lightning strike and discharge have been lowered to tier 3 difficulty.

Balancing

• Heleja now has +25% additional projectile damage (was +100%)

Bugfixes

• Fixed overflowing controller hints in skill tree (v.0.9.5.2a)
• Fixed wrong LT/RT hint for controller navigation in skill tree (v.0.9.5.2a)
• Fixed a bug where zoom in/out on controller is blocked after opening/closing stats and skill tree search (v.0.9.5.2a)

Bugfixes

• Fixed lightning strike also scaling with melee damage
• Fixed fragmentation projectiles scaling with melee damage
• Fixed wrong skill damage descriptions in scattering hit and scattering sweep

New Features

Critical Hit Feedback

Improvements

• Performance improvements to all enemy hit and enemy death visual effects.

The Stormcaller Update 0.9.5 is bringing 2 new lightning skills to Strivin for Light: Survival. You can now unleash a mighty lightning storm over enemies or set up constructs or summon companions that will unleash the storms for you. There are so many ways you can use and combine these skills with exisiting skills and weapons. We have also improved our backend leaderboard systems and fixed builds not being saved consitently and reworked cursor movement on controller for better experience on controller and Steam Deck.

New Features

Discharge: New Melee On Attack Skill

Lightning Strike: New Range On Attack Skill

Backend improvements and fixes

Controller/ Steamdeck improvements

Improvements

• Tutorial for toggle skills to save attack speed improved
• Improved visuals of the light staff projectiles
• All player projectile trails are now affected by the player effect transparency setting

Bugfixes

• Fixed streamer online tooltip layer on game over screen

New Features

Condition Damage Rework

• 1st DoT: 10 (only one basic burning stack)
• 2nd DoT: 10 + 2/3(3x10) = 30
• 3th DoT: 10+ 2/3(20) = 23
• 4th DoT: 10+ 2/3(13) = 18
• 5th DoT: 10+ 2/3(8) = 15
• 6th DoT: 10+ 2/3(5) = 13

Improvements

• Fissure distortion shader improvements

Bugfixes

• Choose map list now correctly scrolls to the position of the highlighted map from last run

New Features

• New in game tutorial added to the skill tree showing up when you have very low attack speed, It displays a hint that you should increase your attack speed or that you can disable skills to maintain your attackspeed. This should hint new players towards the attack speed tradeoff for most of the ability skills.

Improvements

• Lowest possible attack speed has been increased and is now now caped at 0.1 attacks per second (was 0.05 attacks per second)
• Stone Turtle highlight has been improved.

New Features

Striving for Light: Survival is now Steam Deck Verified!

New Weapon Stats

• Life Leech
• Max HP
• Critical Hit Chance
• Critical Hit Damage
• Movement Speed
• Collect Range
• Additional Projectiles
• Additional Projectile Multiplicator
• Condition Damage
• Companion Damage
• AoE Size Increase

Extended Twitch Livestream Integration

Improvements

• Enemy designs got reworked to prevent the outline shader from displaying misplaced lines.

Balancing:

• Shortsword now grants +10 companion damage and +5% collect range
• Greatsword now grants + 5 % crit chance
• Dagger now grants +15% critical hit chance and +20 % critical hit damage
• Greatsword has reduced attack speed 0.58/s (was 0.66/s) to compensate new added
• Flail now grants +10% increased collect range
• Magic Shield now grants +1 max HP
• Elder Club now grants +1 projectile multiplicator
• Spear now grants +5 condition damage
• Amber now grants +10% movement speed
• Sting now grants +10% critical hit chance, +10% critical hit damage, +10% AoE size increase, +10% movement speed and +10% collect range
• Gnarly Mace now grants Life Leech
• Light Staff now grants +10% critical hit chance and +10% critical hit damage
• Bow now grants +1 additonal projectile
• Throwing Axe now grants +20 % critical hit damage
• Lightning Staff now grants +10% critical hit damage and +5% movement speed
• Ice Focus now grants +10% incrased collect range
• Unstable Potion now grants +10 companion damage

Bugfixes

• Fixed completed map difficulty tier not being saved

New Features:

• Condition damage over time effects can now deal critical hits
• Crit stats have now been added to the build viewer for the leaderboards

Improvements:

• Updated SFX on double hit and clash of steel
• Improved damage number font clarity and removed glow effect
• Improved description of stashed light fragments to uncollected light fragments to make it clear that they will be converted to elite enemy spawn

Balancing:

• Trembling Ground now has -40% attack speed
• Slightly increased enemy hp pool scaling for late endgame

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a crash that occurred when companions dealt critical damage
• Fixed -1 elite spawn pool display bug
• Fixed not unlocking chicken achievement (it now also counts the basic farmer chickens)

New Features

Manual Aim as Optional Setting

• aim with you mouse by simply pointing into the desired attack direction
• aim with the keyboard arrow keys to aim left, right, top or down
• aim with the right stick when you are playing with controller
• aim with the XYBA buttons for left, up, right, down attack directions

New Mechanic: Critical Hit Damage

• Critical Hit Chance: the chance your attacks and skills perform a critical hit
• Critical Hit Damage: the damage bonus if you have performed a critical hit

New Base Skill Node: Critical Hit Chance

New Damage Number System

Improvements

• Increased serpent projectile brightness
• Increased void trap projectile brightness

Balancing:

• Heleja has +5 % critical hit chance
• Rogue has +10% critical hit chance and +20 % critical hit damage
• Goladir has +10% critical hit damage

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug which caused skill damage numbers to not be displayed.
• Fixed a bug which caused trembling ground to trigger plenty of glaring light effects which destroyed the game performance.
• Fixed a bug with could lead to a crash or bad performance when playing the flail weapon with trembling ground attack modifier.
• Fixes for not unlocking ranger achievement
• Fixed wrong initial scroll value for choose map scroll list

New Features:

New Improved Skill Damage Scaling System

• 1 skill stack = base damage & 50% proc chance
• 2 skill stacks= base damage & 100% proc chance
• 3 skill stacks= base damage & 150% proc chance which still defaults to 100% proc chance
• 4 skill stacks= + 100% & 200% proc chance

• 1 skill stack = base damage & 50% proc chance
• 2 skill stacks= base damage & 100% proc chance
• 3 skill stacks= + 50% & 150% proc chance which still defaults to 100% proc chance
• 4 skill stacks= + 100% & 200% proc chance which still defaults to 100% proc chance

Improved Skill Tooltips

• Skill Tooltips now display the trigger possibility below the damage of the skill.
• Skill Tooltips now differentiate between a skill you have already skilled and a skill that has not been skilled. This means that when you hover over a skill that you have not skilled yet but you already have some skill stacks of this skill, it will show what possibility and damage this skill will have when a new skill stack is added. If you already have activated the skill node it will then display what damage the skill does.

Improvements

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug that caused trembling ground on hit skill triggers to not apply the correct skill stacks (v.0.9.3.2c)

New Features

Fissure - New Melee On Attack Skill Node

Improvements

• Revert B button on controller for options, achievements and leaderboards
• Prevent skip of last screen on space button pressed
• Fragmentation projectiles are now affected by player effect transparency setting as well
• Final adjustments and fixes for steam deck verification

Balancing:

• Elites HP scaling now increases with higher waves
• Elite enemies are now immune to all knockback sources like projectiles and skill AoE effects (previously was only melee weapons)

Bugfixes

• Fixed duplicated character achievements in the in game achievements menu
• Fixed wrong possibility scaling on stacked melee On Attack skills
• Fixed wrong tier description on character achievements
• Fixed select button icon in skill tree placement on ultra-wide monitors
• Crab elite shader is now applied correctly
• Fixed duplicated achievements (v.0.9.3.2a)
• Mouse is now switched visible again after wave completed on keyboard and mouse input (v.0.9.3.2a)

New Features

Improved Controller Support

• You can now use the START button on your controller to jump to the choose your map screen once you have set up your run in the prepare your run screen.
• You can now always use the B button on controller to navigate back to the previous screens.

Saved Last Map for Quick Start

Tooltip for Stashed Light Fragments

Improvements

• It is now checked what you OS language setting is instead of defaulting to the english language. This should also fix the revert back to english after game updates.
• Bleeding blade is now affected by the player effect transparency setting
• Moving the mouse in main menu now triggers switching back to mouse input instead of having to click once

Balancing:

• Switched rolling stone boss on mountains map with the worm boss since the rolling stone is harder to defeat.
• Changed unlock condition for character Darokin: Defeat the endboss on wave 20 in the basement (was any map before).

Bugfixes

• Fixed boss sound effects being played when sound effects are turned off

Improvements:

• Melee Constructs now attack always, also when no enemies are near the construct
• Elite enemy spawns are now indicated by a new sound effect
• Performance improvements for range construct attacks
• Player effect transparency slider now works without restarting the game (v.0.9.3.0b)
• Player effect transparency slider now also changes transparency of player projectiles (v.0.9.3.0b)
• Player effect transparency slider now also changes transparency of your companions (v.0.9.3.0c)
• Higher contrast for enemy projectiles for better clarity (v.0.9.3.0c)

Balancing:

• Elite enemies now have 30% increased health
• Elite enemies are now immune to knockback
• Range companion projectiles now pierce trough all enemies
• Melee attacks from skills (like Double Hit) can now not trigger Glaring Light anymore

Bugfixes:

• Fixed duplicate achievements (v.0.9.3.0d)
• Fixed to early triggered achievement for melee weapon collection (v.0.9.3.0d)
• Fixed not unlocking achievements for builds like ranger, fire & ice... (v.0.9.3.0e)
• Fixed not unlocking achievements for tier 5 map difficulity (v.0.9.3.0e)

With Update 0.9.3.0 we are adding some highly requested features. We proudly present: Stashed uncollected light fragments, a new skill, new elite enemies, Player effect transparency setting and more!

New Features:

Stashed Light Fragments

New Elite Enemies

New Range Attack Replacer Skill Node

Player effect transparency setting

New Weapon Attack Swing Effects

Reworked shaders for player effects

• Clash of Steel
• Double Hit

Improved skill tree node connection colouring

Improvements

• General performance improvements for enemy spawn and initialisations

Balancing

• Rogue Character has now 50% Attack Speed Bonus (was 30%)

Update 0.9.2.0 introduces a new melee weapon to Striving for Light: Survival. The Bear Caller is the very first melee weapon that can summon companions. Futhermore this update enables melee constructs to trigger double hit which should make them a more valid build choice.

New Melee Weapon: Bear Caller

Improvements

• Melee constructs can now trigger double hit. This should make melee constructs a viable build choice.

Update 0.9.1.4 brings performance improvements for projectiles, scaling collect speed of light fragments, improved melee construct attacks a new leaderboard rank frame and further improvements to the game.

New Range Projectiles

Improvements

• Added new visual frame to your leaderboard rank.
• Improved basement trap animation
• Melee constructs now have increased attack range and longer attack period that should make it easier for them to hit enemies.
• Characters can now also be unlocked when you defeat the endboss on a map tier higher than the required tier.
• Collect speed of light fragments now scales with your movement speed so that you cant outrun the attracted light fragments.

Bugfixes

• Fixed wrong skill description for bursting skills.

WIth Update 0.9.1.3 we are improving controller support by improved hovering visuals and button hover/click sfx, adding a new leaderboard display that shows your current rank on top of the leaderboard entries so that you don't have so search for it, plenty of balancing changes and bugfixes.

New Striving for Light: Survival OST now available!

New Features

Current Leaderboard Rank Display

More New Features

• There is now an indicator in the skill tree that shows which is the next wave
• Added button click and hover sounds to all buttons in the game
• Improved button highlighting for controller input
• Improved button highlighting on controller input when skills, weapons and characters are locked
• Added hover animation to the skill pool label to indicate there are tooltips
• Added new locked colour panel to locked skills, weapons and characters
• If you leave the stats window open it will be open by default after the next wave when you enter the skill tree again

Improvements

• Glaring light now shows two effect stacks, that should prevent getting the feel that there is an interruption between multiple active glaring light effect
• Improved range construct attack pattern and performance improvements for range constructs

Balancing

• Elder Club got reduced melee damage to 20 (was 25) and reduced attack speed to 0.25/s (was 0.6).
• Range Constructs reduce your attack speed by 50% (was 25%), range constructs now also decrease projectile damage by -30%.
• Melee Constructs now don't have an attack speed malus anymore (was -25% attack speed)
• Boomerang now reduces your attack speed by -30% (was -50%). Boomerang now additionally decreases your melee damage by -30 %.
• Increased melee damage skill nodes now increase your melee damage by 70% (was 80%).
• Character Stats for melee and projectile damage have been reworked and are now scaling from your base weapon damage.
• Character Heleja has increased projectile damage by +100% (was +10 flat damage). Melee damage is decreased by 50% (was -5 flat damage)
• Character Goladir has increased melee damage by 50% (was 10 flat damage) and has decreased projectile damage by 50% (was -5 flat damage)
• Character Dark Wanderer decreases your melee damage by -30 % (was -3 flat damage) and your projectile damage by -30% (was -3 flat damage)
• Unknown Wanderers now increase melee or projectile damage by 20% (was 2 flat damage) and decrease in the other stat accordingly
• Reduced stone turtle AoE size on forlorn lands. Also decreased duration of AoE fields to 1 seconds (was 2 seconds)

Bugfixes

• Fixed wrong skill description for glaring light. Glaring light lasts of 2 seconds
• Fixed wrong damage description on companion skills. All companion skills now display the companion damage.

Improvements

• Improved enemy projectile highlighting for all enemy projectiles. Let me know if there are specific projectiles which get lost in the background and lack further highlighting.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a recursion on the latest hotfix 0.9.1.2a-b that lead to a freeze when ever a skill tree is initialised with only range or melee skills selected (v.0.9.1.2c)
• Fixed non selected skills (if at least 12 have been selected) appearing in the initial skill tree
• Fixed defeated endboss progress not being saved to count towards unlocks for all tier 2/3/4/5 achievements
• Fixed Victorious message at the end of a run being displayed even if you have not defeated the endboss on the final wave.

WIth Update 0.9.1.2 we are focusing completely on improving the overall player experience by adding a new player level up visual effect, adding a new light fragment drop from bosses to make defeating bosses feel more rewarding. We are also adding a new indicator which displays on which map tiers you have already defeated the endboss.

New Features

Defeated Endboss Indicator

New Boss Light Fragment Drops

New level up effect

Further improved melee weapon trails

Balancing

• Throwing Spear damage reduced to 8 (was 16), attack speed lowered to 0.7 /s (was 0.9 /s)

Improvements

• Improved weapon trail effects
• Improved projectile visual effects for light and phoenix projectiles

Bugfixes

• Fixed chicken companion achievement unlocking on the wrong skill combination, this achievement should now unlock as it should when 10 companion skills are active.

WIth Update 0.9.1.1 we are reworking condition damage status effects on enemies to make conditions on enemies better visual but also improving performance when a lot of condition effects are displayed at once. The save file management system was improved to fix wrongly switched save files that looked like you lost your unlocks. We also tweaked some of the newly added soundtracks.

New Features

New enemy condition status effect visuals

Improved Save File Management

Improvements

• New added soundtracks got some minor tweaks and adjustments
• Some backend improvements on the save file system
• Performance improvements for enemy condition status effects
• Fixed endboss name offset on the healthbar for korean, japanese and chinese languages

Bugfixes:

• Fixed save file switch when pressing the join public league button even though no player name was entered

Honestly we are blown away by all the positive feedback for Striving for Light: Survival and thereupon decided to compose a new original soundtrack for SFL: Survival. Update 0.9.1.0 additionally adds a soundtrack selection system so that you can switch between the new and the old soundtrack.

New Features

Survival gets its own Original Soundtrack

Soundtrack Selection System

Survival Soundtrack DLC

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a bug that caused map tier achievements on the last map (aeodra arena) not being unlocked. If you already have defeated some map tiers of the Aeodra Arena you might have to complete them again for receiving the Tier X Master Achievements.
• Fixed a bug which caused the Tier X Master achievements not being unlocked.

With hotfix 0.9.0.6a we are fixing the carry over bug that prevented that your previous run was reset. We therefore also rolled back the leaderboard to the state of 23.02.2023. We appologise for the inconvenience caused by the roll back or for the hours you where not able to play the game properly. Note that we also crated a new leaderboard connection so that old game builds are not able to publish scores into the new rolled back version of the leaderboard. This should ensure that the new leaderboard will not receive any entries of older game versions which are updated at a later time abusing the bug to post higher scores. Edit: There have been some remaining bugs regarding the reset of saved run data, those should now all be fixed in 0.9.0.6c so if you are running an older game version please update. We will remove some of the recent posted scores that are postet to the leaderboard that utilised these bugs. Bugfixes:

• Fixed carry over run progress bug
• Another hotfix was supplied to fix carried over run stats (v.0.9.0.6b)
• Fixed wrong skill highlight on companion skills when hovering over the skill node in the stats menu.
• Fixed missing traps in mountain peaks map on difficulty tier 2, 4 and 5 (v.0.9.0.6b)

WIth Update 0.9.0.6 we are starting some major improvements to our leaderboard backend as the amount of players exceeded our expectations. Also the initial player attack delay got removed. We also added Korean, Japanese and Portuguese language support to the game. As this are some major changes let us know whenever you encounter a bug.

New Features

Korean, Japanese and Portuguese Language Support

Improvements

Instant Player Attacks

Improved leaderboard backend

Bugfixes:

• Fixed wrong damage displayed at scattering projectiles and scattering cast
• Corrected description of scattering dodge casting 2 projectiles on dodge.
• Fixed not unlocking achievements for completing difficulty tiers with specific characters.

Thanks for all your reports, this is of immensive help hunting down those bugs! Update 0.9.0.5 increases the display amount of the leaderboards, improved trap and enemy projectile visibility, enemies now don't spawn on top of your current player position and plenty of further fixes and improvements.

New Features

Increased Leaderboard Ranking Display Amount

Menu navigation with left thumb stick on gamepad

Improvements

• Updated forest visual light effects
• Traps and projectiles from ice traps in the frozen lands are now coloured red to make them better visible
• Fire creature projectiles in the caves now have a more intense glow to make them stand out more
• Improved German translation

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a huge bug which caused enemies to spawn on your current player position.
• Fixed enemies spawning outside of Aeodra map
• Enemies should now never spawn within a certain margin around you
• Fixed miss placed ice trap in the frozen lands for difficulty tier 3
• Fixed trembling ground not able to trigger some melee on hit effects (like Double Hit)
• Removed duplicate achievement survive level 20 with max level 5
• Fixed missing enemy outline for antlered beast in the caves
• Fixed wrong unlock description for Hammer Weapon, needs increased AoE size of 2.0 (wrong description stated AoE size of 1.75)
• Fixed some weapon unlock achievements unlocking to early (v.0.9.0.5a)

Thanks for all your bugreports. With the Update 0.9.0.4 we are adding a new online leaderboard guide which explains the online functionality and how savefiles work to new players. It also communicates that there is Twitch & YouTube integration. Furthermore we are improving tooltips to prevent top overflow and change some weapon unlock conditions along some bugfixes and further improvements.

New Features

Play Online Guide for new Players

Permanently Close Play Online Notification

Victorious Message on Endboss defeat

Improvements

• Improvements to the tooltip system to check for top window overflows. This should fix all tooltips which had a top overflow like the character tooltip for Darokin.
• Improved visuals of snail frost ground AoE effect. They now have a very clear outline which should make it much easier to avoid stepping into them.
• Increased red glow of traps in the forrest map (v.0.9.0.4b)

Balancing

• Unlock requirements for Bow have been lowered to 8 projectiles (was 10)
• Unlock requirements for Burning Skills with Sword and Staff of the Phoenix changed to complete wave 20 (was wave 10)
• Unlock requirement for the skill Wind Shock was changed to complete wave 20 with Lightning Staff equipped (was defeat 100 enemies in one run)
• Unlock requirement for the skill Piercing Blow was changed to complete wave 20 with Slingshot equipped (was defeat 400 enemies in one run)
• Unlock requirement for the skill Cutting Shot was changed to complete wave 20 with Ice Focus equipped (was defeat 500 enemies in one run)
• Unlock requirement for the skill Piercing Blow was changed to complete wave 20 with Throwing Spear equipped (was defeat 750 enemies in one run)
• Unlock requirement for the skill Wind Shock was changed to complete wave 20 with Scythe equipped (was defeat 900 enemies in one run)

Bugfixes:

• Fixed achievements triggering on start instead of end of wave.
• Fixed wrong description for tier 2 map difficulty. Tier 2 actually has a few traps.
• Fixed a bug which caused the skill search not being ended properly when closing with gamepad controls
• Fixed poison nova not being able to be unlocked (v.0.9.0.4a)
• Fixed mouse panning bug when the skill tree search function was used (v.0.9.0.4a)

Thanks for all your bugreports. With the hotfix 0.9.0.3e we are improving visual clarity by coloring more enemy projectiles and AoE fields into red color.

General

Improvements

• Fixes and tweaks for new weapon trails
• Reduced brightness of eternal sands map to reduce color blow out
• Snail Boss now has better visible AoE fields
• Ice trap projectiles are now also tinted red to make them better visible
• Bleak Worm Endboss projectiles are now also tinted red to make them better visible
• Snail ground fields are now also tinted red to make them better visible
• Ice bird projectiles are now also coloured red (v. 0.9.0.3f)
• Stats window now shows projectile range + speed (v. 0.9.0.3f)
• Improved visuals of player ice projectiles (v. 0.9.0.3f)

• Fixed carrying over companion damage to new runs
• Fixed bug that caused achievement for unlocked all melee/range weapons/ all characters to early. This might still happen for everyone who already played the demo/ full game previous to this patch. For new players this should be fixed now.
• Fixed greatsword not having knockback (recursion from latest update)
• Fixed french translations
• Improved tutorial descriptions for toggle skills
• Fixed wrong flavour text for the characters farmer and rogue
• Fixed missing companion damage tooltip for the Character Farmer (v. 0.9.0.3f)
• Fixed Burning Cast Skill Achievement not being able to be unlocked (v. 0.9.0.3f)
• Fixed achievement unlocks being unlocked at the start of wave instead of the end of wave (v. 0.9.0.3g)
• Fixed cinnamon star not being able to be unlocked (v. 0.9.0.3f)
• Fixed a recursion in a previous hotfix that light staff will not be unlocked by default (v.0.9.0.3g)

Striving for Light: Survival has just been released and is now available on Steam!

Improvements:

Updated all weapon trail VFX

Further Improvements

• Updated tutorials for activating/ deactivating skills
• Updated tutorial visuals
• Added tooltip to skill spawn pool message to explain how the skill spawn pool works.

Balancing:

• Changed some of the weapon unlock conditions to higher wave requirements
• Reverted recent change: Uncollected hearts now only remain on the floor for one additional wave (they were stacked infinite before). (v.0.9.0.3a)

Bugfixes:

• If 12 skills have been selected no more additional random skill will be added to the skill pool anymore
• Fixed several achievements not being able to be unlocked
• Removed a debug message that could slow down the game on many melee attack effects

Improvements:

• Improves brightness of enemy AoE fields in the forest.

Balancing:

• Life Leech changed to 1/160 enemies with decrease of 20 for each additional Life Leech stack (was 1/100 with 10 decrease per stack).

Bugfixes:

• Endboss names are now also displayed in chinese
• Fixed wrong life leech description
• Increased size of node search field so that no scroll bar appears on Chinese language setting
• Fixed not being able to continue on game over screen when you are playing in offline mode
• Fixed a bug which caused the selected skills from the selection menu being reset even though they where highlighted. If you wondered why your previously selected skills did not show up in the run, yep that's why. This should now be fixed.
• Fixed wrong sill damage calculations on skills with possibilities <100%. This are in general very powerful skills and in order to increase the damage of these skills you need to reach 200% trigger rate to make them deal double of damage.
• Fixed alt tab to trigger pause menu on game over or run success screen

Improvements:

• Reworked all arena environments to support widescreen monitor resolutions up to 32:9
• Reworked all arena environment particle effects
• Snail boss in the forest now has red AoE effect to make them better visible

Balancing:

• Life leech is now activated by 1 per 100 enemies ( was 1/60) for each additional life leech node life the life leech count gets reduced by 10 (was 5)
• Small adjustment to enemy hp scaling
• Small adjustment to enemy spawn algorithm
• Fragmentation unlock achievement has been changed to defeat 35 enemies on wave 3 (was 40 enemies on wave 2) (v.0.9.0.1a)

Bugfixes:

• Wrong life leech stats display has been fixed
• Ultra wide-screen overlay fix
• Fixed wrong description for burst skills
• Fixed bug that caused builds to not fully upload to the leaderboards (v.0.9.0.1a)

The Early Access Release on next Monday 20th Feb. 2023 of Striving for Light: Survival is fastly approaching! So we want to share the early access release update preview with you all so that you have an idea of what to expect on launch day. Furthermore we have updated the demo so that you can check out some of these new features for your self. So this is what the Early Access Release (Version 0.9.0.0) will hold in store for Striving for Light: Survival.

New Features

New Map Difficulty Tiers

New Unlockable Characters

• Farmer
  Once his mission was to herd the chicken, until the darkness engulfed his farm. Now he is taking his chicken to fight back.
• Rogue
  A unknown rogue. Quick but weaker attacks.
• Dark Wanderer
  Nobody knows where he came from and where he will go. They tell that he channels the energy of each defeated monster to create his own monstrosities.
• Darokin
  Darokin, the wise man of Ankerath. Slow but with unique magical strength. Start Skill: Glaring Light on attack.
• Heleja
  Heleja, the scholar of Ankerath. Outstanding range skills, but week melee skills.
• Goladir
  Goladir, blacksmith of Ankerath. Made for melee combat, but week ranged skills.

Build Viewer

Steam Achievements

Steam Rich Presence

Start of a new Public Season

Map Difficulty Tier Display

Demo and Full Version Progression Share

Improvements

• Hearts can now accumulate infinitely. Previously only 2 hearts in the arena could be carried over to the next wave. From now on you can accumulate all not used hearts infinitely and keep them until the last wave. This should even more reward players that manage to not receive damage for many waves.
• Reduced attack speed is now indicated as a red label on the skill tooltips
• Heleja now has a default projectile multiplicator of +2 (was 1)
• Increased attack and movement speed of melee companions
• AoE fields in the forest are now red instead of green to increase visual clarity
• Increased distance for all enemy and boss spawns to player position
• New map difficulty system
• Increased heart attraction movement speed
• Performance improvements for projectile heavy builds

Balancing

• Increased boss enemy HP pool
• Rebalanced traps for all difficulty tiers.
• Increased companion damage skill nodes now don't have any downsides (was -10 % attack speed)
• Decreased spawn possibility of max HP skill nodes slightly
• Increased enemy spawn rates on waves 12-16
• Bursting Shot / Wield now has flat damage 20 (was scaling with melee and range damage before)
• Decreased cellar spider charge speed
• Increased brightness of cellar spider to make them stand out more against the arena backgrounds
• Increased brightness of ghost enemy to make them stand out more against the arena backgrounds
• Improved enemy spawn algorithm to prevent enemies to spawn very near to player position

Bugfixes

• Fixed weapon names not being displayed for Chinese language
• Fixed skill node search bug which caused cursor to jump to a skill node when pressing enter key for adding "space"
• Fixed a bug which caused selected melee and range weapons not being saved and applied for next run
• Fixed a bug which made it able to continue the game on the end of waves

Thanks for all the feedback already, here is what update 0.8.1.1 will bring to the Demo of Striving for Light: Survival.

New Features:

• Player damage received feedback By default a new player damage received effect is displayed at the screen borders to indicate you have received damage. This should help not loosing track of your current health while focusing on the action. This effect can always be turned off in the options menu.
  
• Default skill setup is now saved Your selected skills when preparing your runs are now saved, so you can quickly start a new run with the same setup without having to remember which skills you put into the skill pool previously.

Improvements:

• Forrest map visual effects have been reworked to be overall brighter and make enemys stand out better from the background. Also new light effects have been added to make the ambience more appealing.
• Enemies now no longer spawn on top or very close to player
• Collecting light shards is more responsive and now feels even more rewarding. This should prevent missing shards by walking passed to quickly
• Improved button positions in options menu

Balancing:

• Increased player invincibility after receiving damage to 2 s (was 1 s)
• The minimum attack speed is now caped by 0.05 attacks / s and can't go lower than this. Some players reported stuck weapons so this should fix frozen weapon attacks but still communicate that attack speed is required to speed again

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a bug which caused enemy spawn fog effect being displayed on areas where no enemy spawned
• Fixed enemies spawning outside the arena in seldom cases
• Fixed a bug which reset your previous selected weapons from last run when you died
• Fixed map loading bug that switched map during runs to something else
• Fixed game over screen freeze when opening the pause menu on death (v.0.8.2.0a)
• Fixed projectiles not getting current projectile damage from player stats and ending up dealing less damage (v.8.2.0b)
• Fixed additional random skill amount display not being updated correctly when entering the prepare your run screen (v.8.2.0b)
• Fixed condition damage skill being behind demo lock (v.8.2.0b)

Thanks for all the feedback already, here is what update 0.8.1.1 will bring to the Demo of Striving for Light: Survival.

New Features:

• YouTube integration When joining the public league (online mode) you can now check the "YouTube Creator" checkbox which lets you input your YouTube handle name instead of your player name. Your leaderboard entry will now contain a YouTube button which takes players directly to your YouTube channel, making it easy to check out your content.
  
• Twitch integration Twitch integration now displays when you are live on twitch. If you checked the twitch streamer checkbox when entering your twitch name you will receive a twitch icon next to your name on the leaderboards. This will allow other players to join your twitch channel with one button click. There is now an additional red dot as an online notification when you are currently live streaming in the game category "Striving for Light: Survival" or have something equal in your stream title.
  

Improvements:

• Performance improvements for the new introduced Highlighted Enemies feature, when this feature is turned off it now does not have any performance impact
• The unlock achievement for the skill Exploding Projectiles has been changed to "reach 4 projectiles at the end of wave 4 (was end of wave 2 before)

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a bug which might have lead to a crash when pressing the leaderboard refresh buttons very fast multiple times
• Fragmentation projectiles can now also trigger enemy on death effects (v.0.8.1.2a)
• Fixed glaring light ability of Darokin not scaling with projectile damage (v.0.8.1.2a)
• Fixed some wrong skill descriptions (v.0.8.1.2a)

Thanks for all the feedback already, here is what update 0.8.1.1 will bring to the Demo of Striving for Light: Survival.

New Features:

• You can now enable "Highlighted Enemies" to gain additional outlines for all enemies to make them stand out more from the background. It can be enabled/ disabled anytime from the options even during your current run. It's available in the demo as well and this is how it looks like:
  

Improvements:

• Increased attraction speed and acceleration of light fragments to make it easier collecting them.
• Improved enemy spawn visibility of the indicator animatons.

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a bug with fragment skill not being applied multiple times to enemies.

Join the developer livestream where we play our upcoming arena survival roguelite Striving for Light: Survival and answer your questions! Livesteam is scheduled for: 8th February 2023 9:00 PM CET. We are looking forward to see you there!

With the major update 0.8.1.0 we are introducing new characters with different stats and talents for the first time ever into world of Striving for Light. Two of these new characters are already available in the Demo we have updated to celebrate the Steam-Next-Fest!

New Features

Playable Characters

• Dark Wanderer - (Available in Demo)
  Nobody knows where he came from and where he will go. They tell that he channels the energy of each defeated monster to create his own monstrosities.
• Darokin - (Available in Demo)
  Darokin, the wise man of Ankerath. Slow but with unique magical strength. Start Skill: Glaring Light on attack.
• Heleja
  Heleja, the scholar of Ankerath. Outstanding range skills, but week melee skills.
• Goladir
  Goladir, blacksmith of Ankerath. Made for melee combat, but week ranged skills.
• Farmer - Work in Progress
  Once his mission was to herd the chicken, until the darkness engulfed his farm. Now he is taking his chicken to fight back.
• Rogue - Work in Progress
  A unknown rogue. Quick but weaker attacks.

New Skill Node Icons

Improvements

• Achievement unlock notification now displays more information about which skill or weapon has been unlocked.
• Boss soundtracks have been implemented for waves which include a boss fight.
• Incrased wave lenght to 24 s (was 22s)
• Increased light shard movement and acceleration speed
• Improved visibility of enemy spawn indicators, they should now not be covered by projectiles and other enemies
• Added additional ability information on character tooltips
• Added damage number for glaring light skill effect

Balancing

• Enemy spawn algorithm has been reworked which should smoothen out the difficulty jump between Map Tier 2 and Tier 3. Map Tier 2 should be a bit more challenging now.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug that caused glaring light to not trigger each time
• Fixed pet damage numbers from melee attacks not being visible
• Fixed stats from successful runs being kept on fresh run
• Fixed bursting shot being persistent from previous run
• Added missing information on glaring light skill tooltip description

Join the developer livestream where we play our upcoming arena survival roguelite Striving for Light: Survival and answer your questions! Livesteam is scheduled for: 6th February 2023 10:00 PM CET. We are looking forward to see you there!

Thanks for all the feedback already, here is what update 0.8.0.3 will bring to the Demo of Striving for Light: Survival.

Improvements:

• Increased light shard attraction speed to make it easier collecting them
• Leaderborad window is now responsive on ultra wide monitors
• Added tooltips to different difficulty tiers on select map screen, displaying what the difficulty tiers actually change
• End of wave sfx is now triggered for the remaining 6 s ( was 5 s)

Balancing:

• Increased base wave time to 22 s (was 20 s) this should give you more time to collect those light shards especially in the first waves
• Life leech does now has a base leech of 1/60 (was 1/50)
• Corrupted light enemies on basement have larger AoE fields

Bugfixes:

• Fixed activating skill nodes in skill tree with enter triggering exit dialog
• Fixed typo for Increased Collect Range skill node
• Fixed some not unlocked skills being included in the skill spawn pool (i.e. life leech and

Thanks for all the feedback already, here is what update 0.8.0.2 will bring to the Demo of Striving for Light: Survival.

New features:

New Skills

New Achievements

Balancing:

• Granted boss exp has been increased by 25%.

Bugfixes:

• Fixed not triggering range attacks on high attack speed values
• Fixed tooltips clipping out of window
• Fixed a lagg spike on player level up
• Fixed super boss exp not being as high as intended
• Fixed not being able to assign space key in the key binds (v.0.8.0.2a)
• Play online tutorial is now only showing up in offline mode (v.0.8.0.2c)
• Increased collect range is now not going to infinite when activated (v.0.8.0.2c)
• Hotkey "T" can now again be used to exit the skill tree along the ESC button or Space after all skill points have been spent (v.0.8.0.2c)
• Bosses now spawn more in the centre which should yield better endboss placement (v.0.8.0.2c)

New features:

• You can now rebind the keys for panning the camera in the skill tree

Improvements:

• Changed the standard keys for jumping between nodes to WASD and for panning the camera to arrow keys
• You can now press buttons with space and enter key on keyboard
• When you spent your final skill point the focus will directly jump to the continue to next wave button, so you can hit space/enter or A/select button on controller to progress to the next wave immediately
• End of wave screen now has a fade in effect
• Added spinning animation to metal blade projectiles
• Improved visibility of enemy projectiles
• Player is now always spawned in the centre or the arena on the next wave (0.8.0.1a)

Balancing:

• Slightly increased endboss HP

Bugfixes:

• Fixed game unintended unpause of game when leaving the survived window at the end of a run
• Fixed a bug which caused virtual keyboard in skill tree not to close when pressing RB on controller again
• Improved description for exploding projectile achievement
• Fixed key rebind menu not being able to exit when accessed during an active run
• Fixed not triggering range attacks on high attack speed values (0.8.0.1a)
• Fixed tooltips clipping out of window (0.8.0.1a)

Balancing:

• Decreased enemy spawn interval to make early game more interesting and challenging
• Decreased the wave duration slightly for endgame waves
• Increased low tier enemy spawns on waves 9-15 to keep enemy densety consistent

Improvements:

• Increased clock sfx volume
• Increased collect sfx volume

The Striving for Light: Survival Demo is out now!

• Experiment with more than 50 skills in an procedurally expanding skilltree
  
• 10 maps with different enemies, traps and multiple difficulties to unlock
  
• 8 different player characters
  
• Over 30 weapons to unlock
  
• Over 20 unique enemies, over 20 unique bosses and 10 unique endbosses
  
• Use dodge skillfully to avoid and escape attacks
  
• Everything is hand drawn, self-composed soundtrack with about 1 hour playtime
  
• Compete in multiple online leaderboards with seasons and private league system

Check out Striving for Light

• Processor: 3 Ghz or higherMemory: 4 GB RAM
• Memory: 4 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX960 or equivalent
• Storage: 1000 MB available space

• Storage: 2000 MB available space