Possibly one of the largest content patches in Rise to Ruins history has been released. Over 2 months in the making, I'm proud to finally release The Defense Update! This update brings in a ton of new content ranging from new towers, rebalancing, improved AI, new game modes, and a bunch more. This patch also includes sweeping changes to game performance, increasing baseline frame rates by as much at 10 times what they were for some lower end machines. Check out the change log for all the expansive changes, and let me know down in the comments what you think, as well as if you noticed any significant performance boosts! You can report bugs over at the official website's Support and Bugs Forum, or on the Steam Discussion Board. :)

InDev 26 Change Log

• New Game Mode: Custom. This mode lets you set a whole manner of difficulty settings, allowing you to create a game mode to fit your play style.
• New Game Mode: Nightmare. This mode is insanely, over the top difficult. Designed specifically for masochistic veteran players. There's no spawn delay, the spawn rates are higher, monsters are pre-spawned and full moons are less frequent.
• New Game Mode: Peaceful. While this mode carries the same name as the old removed Peaceful Mode (that was retooled into Traditional Mode), this mode is truly peaceful, with no monster spawns what so ever.
• Traditional mode is now a bit harder, but is still fairly easy.
• Survival mode has been very slightly nerfed, to make up for the changes making monster spawners more difficult to destroy.

• Every damage in the game now has an assigned "type". Some types, like blight or poison, have residual status effects.
• Towers can now target a new monster before the old target is dead, if the new target is closer or more vulnerable to the tower's damage type.
• Mobs can be resistant or vulnerable to damage certain damage types. For example, the skeleton is now highly resistant to piercing damage from the bow tower.
• Zombies now do "Blight" damage, and can turn a villager into a zombie if they die while blighted.
• Slimes can now poison villagers.
• Being poisoned, on fire, frozen or blighted is now factored into fight or flight.
• Medics can now heal blight and poison.
• Healing aura now heals blight and poison.

• All 4 original towers from InDev 25 can now be upgraded, increasing their damage, firing rates and sometimes range. Their final upgrades all offer additional elemental damage of some kind. For example, the final stage bow tower can be upgraded into a fire, ice or poison bow tower.
• The fire bolt tower has been replaced with a very similar elemental bolt tower, that can later be upgraded into a fire, ice or electric bolt tower.
• New Tower: The Spray Tower, a slightly more powerful variant to the Bullet Tower, very inaccurate, but has high rate of fire.
• New Tower: The Recombobulator. Will heal nearby golems. Does not work on the Holy Golem.
• New Tower: The Attract Tower. Will pull nearby equipable items to it. Useful for fetching item drops out of a monster heavy area.
• New Tower: The Banish Tower. A very expensive, short range tower that will banish an enemy that gets near it.
• New Tower: The Static Tower. Does low damage to all monsters in range, consuming more energy the more monsters that are nearby.
• New Tower: Phantom Dart Tower. A small 1x1 sized early game tower that does very low level magic damage, and can easily be built by day one or two.
• New tower: The Ballista. The ballista is a mid-late game large bow tower, with extremely long range, high damage, and a slow firing rate. It can also shoot over anything in the game (Including terrain).
• The kitchen is now upgradable.
• The clinic is now upgradable.
• New building: The Lightning Rod. This building will attract nearby lightning to it, protecting your walls and other buildings from damage. But it also has the added bonus of converting those lightning strikes into energy that can be used to power your towers and recharge your essence collectors.
• All towers can now be paused, allowing you to stop certain towers from firing all together.
• Completely rewrote the entire missile system's firing mechanics from scratch, creating a more dynamic tower system for future content.
• Crystal motivator completely rewritten into the tower code.
• Crystal motivator now costs energy to fire, and only fires at harvested crystal tiles.
• Essence Collector's first build phase no longer requires cut stone, allowing you to build it much earlier in the game, and can now be upgraded.
• Golem combobulators now require an Essence Collector to function.
• Rain Catcher range extended to 6.

• Skeletons no longer spawn until day 4.
• Regular sized slimes can no longer spawn until day 3. But small slimes can still spawn by day 2.
• Fire elementals will not spawn until day 6. (Formally day 5)
• Greatly reduced spawn rate of spawners, but increased the rates spawners themselves spawn. (Meaning more spawners, but the same amount of monsters)
• Increased spawner build time, resource requirements and hit points.

• Tons of new sound effects have been added for spells, towers, combat, harvesting, construction and much more!
• Game world sound is now quieter the more zoomed out you are.
• Sound loading is now multithreaded.

• You can now input your Twitch channel name when you create a new profile, or in the settings menu. When your channel name is input, the game will pull your viewer's list off Twitch and use it to generate random names for your villagers based on your current viewers.

• Dissolve spell slightly nerfed when used on corpses.
• Tweaked a few spell effects to match the new sounds.
• Storm spell has been buffed a bit.
• Increased flame spell damage.

• Monsters can now slowly repair their home spawners if they are damaged.
• Golems can repair their own combobulators.
• Equipment storage can now store water bottles.
• Water Bottler building now provides refining speed bonuses.
• Removed resources on the ground from movement cost calculations.
• Tool tips and other overlays no longer pop up under the interface when you scroll over them.
• Can now move the map father out along the outer edges.
• The hidden "interfaceScale" setting in settings.properties can now be set to fractional values, like 1.2, 1.3, etc.
• Added a new Earthquake spell to the game, that will damage any mobs or buildings nearby, but can generate new rock in the epicenter of the quake.
• Particles can now vary in sizes.
• Many particle, projectile and spell effects have been adjusted.
• Changed restore hunger to restore needs button in sandbox mode, healing thirst, hunger, energy and balancing body temperatures.
• Can now fire missiles in sandbox mode under the miscellaneous tab.
• Holy Golem now does magic damage.
• Added some particles to the console banners.
• Villagers can now trade food, water and bandages if they need them.
• The console banner messages now have some particle effects.
• You can now hit escape in the world map to bring you back to the main menu.
• You can no longer escape out of the game mode selection screen when you visit the world map for the first time after creating a new profile.
• Added status effects to villager pop out panel (Bottom panel, when you click on a villager).
• Removed lightning "branching" that could cause very excessive damage in some cases.
• Lightning can now charge whatever it hits, if the building can store energy.
• You can now move the map with the arrow keys, as well as WASD.
• Increased the chance mobs will wake up from being knocked out/incapacitated.
• Reduced how often villagers stop to chat.
• Decreased the speed that body temperature adjusts, allowing villagers to stay out in the hot or cold longer.
• Rebalanced start stats and level up amounts for all mobs.
• Mobs run away more often when low on health.
• Removed 2 erroneous names from the villager name list.
• Slowed down thirst decay rate for children.
• Added some new death messages and new death message subtitles.
• Generic wood GUI buttons are no longer in all caps.
• Completely removed "Stun" effects from the game's AI.
• Live stream message now pops up on the main menu when live streaming.
• Twitch link added to main menu.
• Reversed changes made that prevent building roads before the way maker shack is completed.
• When resurrected, villagers no longer start with 0 energy, hunger, and thirst.
• Added more surface to Survival Island in an attempt to make the map harder.
• Gave system panel in the main menu a box.

• Sweeping optimizations have been done across the entire game, giving Rise to Ruins a 4x to 10x boost in base performance mid-late game for most machines.
• Fixed a water fill level bug when using the grab tool on water sources that would cause the water to drain sooner than it should.
• Fixed an issue with fill phases not working correctly on buildings that only store energy.
• Water now connects correctly while raining if you're digging holes at the same time while the rain is filling them.
• Typing "Reset" into the Doom World input box no longer moves around the map or activates other hotkeys.
• Fixed a minor bug where the last used game mode from one profile would be set in the next, if you changed profiles after playing and have not restarted the game.
• Fixed some lightning generation positioning issues when new lightning is created.
• Completely rewrote the map tileset loader, reducing memory usage and optimizing code flow.
• Fixed overlapping data on the building priority list GUI.
• Fixed harvest food and water shortcut assignment in the settings menu.
• Fixed a few minor shadow and collision map issues on various buildings.
• Energy no longer resets when upgrading a building.
• The "No water production" tip no longer pops up when all water buildings are being upgraded or under construction.
• Optimized golem combobulators resource search system.
• Fixed a bug where the charge level of golem combobulators would reset on reload.
• Fixed some minor sprite coloring issues.
• Improved some of the mob search algorithm. Improving update logic speed game wide.
• Reduced overall mob aggressiveness, making them search for combat less, reducing CPU usage.
• Reduced how often the tick to look for food or water when hungry or thirsty runs, reducing CPU usage.
• Reduced how often mobs wander aimless, to reduce CPU usage.
• Added a slight targeting buffer/delay to tower target searching to reduce CPU usage.
• Fixed the abandoned crystal harvestry in map Enchanted Shoreline.
• Fixed monsters "Turning invisible" when using brute force pathfinding.