Dice Pickup QoL

• Picking up any dice on the ground now automatically stashes all uncollected dice at once.
• This feature becomes available once you've unlocked the stash.
• A summary message will now appear, showing what was stashed. This should help clarify what just happened - especially for new players.

Soul Stone Improvements

• Soul Stone now works when placed into item chip sockets
• Item allocated skills are now highlighted on the skill tree
• Infinity dice can re-roll items that are already eternal. This change prevents Soul Stones being bricked due to too many re-rolls.

Tutorial Improvements

• Stats are not shown until Starter Mod Reward is claimed
• Items / Skills / Mission tabs are hidden until Starter Mod Reward is claimed
• When claiming the Starter Mod Reward, the chosen Mod is automatically equipped
• Rename first mission from "Asteroid Field" to "First Contact"

Bugfixes & Improvements

• Fix persistence of dash button on controller settings
• Double all pickup drop ranges on skill tree
• Make Lin's Yin description consistent with other crit reductions
• Do not show armor percentage in skill diff when hovering over allocated Nuclear Deflection node (percentage would be close to infinity)
• Remove voice slider from audio settings for now

Hotfix for random Audio crashes introduced with 0.3

Happy Easter everyone!

New Chip Possibilities

• Range T2: 3-4%
• Range T1: 5-7%
• Area of Effect P2: 3-5%
• Area of Effect P1: 6-10%
• Area Damage P3: 4-8%
• Area Damage P2: 9-18%
• Area Damage P1: 19-32%
• Crit Chance S3: 4-10%
• Crit Chance S2: 11-20%
• Crit Chance S1: 21-30%
• Crit Damage S3: 4-8%
• Crit Damage S2: 9-16%
• Crit Damage S1: 17-25%
• Damage over Time S3: 8-14%
• Damage over Time S2: 15-21%
• Damage over Time S1: 22-34%

Audio Enhancements

• All OpenAL library calls now happen on a dedicated thread
• Unused Sound files are removed from the sound pool and disposed after each mission
• Offer an alternative Audio library in beta mode (choose 'miniaudio' in settings, if the issues with OpenAL remain)

Crafting Enhancements

• The Wheel of Fortune search has been put onto a background thread
• While searching, dice keep rolling and the dice count increases steadily
• You can always abort search by clicking 'prev' or changing craft mode
• Search now always stops if max modifier slots are reached (Slot Dice)

Time Enhancements

• Time can accelerate movement of entities only for a maximum of times two, not more
• Intrinsic base velocity of engines does not increase after Relic item quality
• Reduce intrinsic velocity affix on Siebenmeilen unique item from 80-100% to 10-30%

Bugfixes & Improvements

• Only Fields work with and can be put into DIY Workshop
• Enemy objective hints fade in and out and don't appear / disappear abruptly
• Fix double damage chance to scale with Luck
• Add range tag to Plasma Nova
• Nova attack range scales with AoE damage radius
• Radiant Annihilation does not affect DoT in preview damage
• Fix weapon base damage on item info. Damage Conversion is applied later - it was confusing and sometimes wrong, when it happened here before.
• Display actual range on Viral Nexus item info

• Fix performance regression for projectile heavy builds introduced in version 0.2.11
• Improve performance of split / chain entity lookups
• Rewrote animated lightning system for better performance (decouple game state from presentation to reduce entity creations)

This is a small improvement on yesterday's projectiles update.

• Lifetime of Rockets increased by accident from 5s to 17s. This release adjusts Rocket lifetime to 3s. It also slightly increases Rocket velocity (still a lot slower than before last patch).
• Reduce projectile amount of small Thorns from 12 to 4
• Remove small Thorns from Abyss, only big Thorns remain in Abyss
• Slightly increase projectile speed of cannon / blast gun / plasma blaster (still a lot slower than before last patch)
• Restore previous lifetime of Azathoth projectiles

Slower Enemy Projectiles

Bramble and Ash Path polishing

• Add limit to enemies that spawn other enemies, at some point they run out of enemies to spawn
• Reduce spawn rate of enemies that spawn other enemies
• Enemies that spawn other enemies do not spawn enemies that shoot projectiles
• Reduce armor of Ash Queen and Bramble Queen
• Ash Queen has no Flame Slinger weapon
• Bramble Queen has no Blastgun weapon
• Reduce armor of Motherships

Performance Improvements

• Swapped collision detection broad phase to a faster algorithm (this should benefit performance for all builds)
• Extra mine triggers add to the triggered mine's damage multiplier and do not spawn extra mine effects
• Storm Mine and Shrapnel Mine spawn 3 projectiles at all item qualities (was up to 6 at Eternal quality)
• To compensate, Storm Mine and Shrapnel mine's damage was increased (up to doubled at Eternal quality)
• Limit amount of animated lightning projectiles rendered in parallel on screen (they are still simulated, but do not shred the GPU and Renderer)

Bugfixes

• Reworked Shock preview calculation. It now estimates enemy resistances before calculating each weapon's hit damage. This means, when you apply shock with a support weapon, the DPS preview for your other weapon will properly take into account the applied Shock of the support weapon.
• Increase max packet size when playing via Steam network, to fix mission starts with builds that use more memory than expected (this still needs to be fixed for local network games)
• Ensure only one instance of Astroloot runs in parallel

Hotfix for glitch discovered by TomatoYogurt.

Mission Objective Hints

• Destroy all enemies, Enemy Waves, Enemy Spiral, Abyss (once 25 enemies or fewer remain)
• Egg Hunt (every egg marked)
• Destroy Boss (boss is marked)
• Talk to NPC (all NPCs marked)

Skill Tree

• Deallocate entire sections of the tree in one go
• Allocate multiple skills at once - the system finds the shortest path and spends your points efficiently
• Mix and match allocation/deallocation in one go. Once you hit confirm, you'll be prompted to spend Blank Dice if needed to refund points.

Loot Balancing

• Introduced an Item Rarity system, which is being tested in Abyss missions. Each Abyss depth adds +1% Item Rarity. Item Rarity has diminishing returns, so the highest depth won't automatically bring the best loot outcome in terms of time spent vs drops.
• Abyss missions now drop extra dice, making their longer time investment compared to regular missions more rewarding
• Mod drops now scale better: their drop rate is reduced at higher-level missions where they're less useful

Balancing

• Unique items with no visible item tier have no item tier level requirement
• Add more field effect affix to Papyrus
• Animated lightning duration is affected by projectile speed
• Reduce enemy amount of level 25 missions final wave
• Remove Motherships that spawn Thorn enemies from the game entirely (they were just annoying)

Bugfixes

• Fix stacking of dice with controller
• Fix update of item diff when hovering over multiple empty slots with a Mod item
• Fix Chronos Virus combined with virus effectiveness, before it resulted in faster enemies instead of slower enemies
• Fix damage preview for Pendulum, to only works for hits
• Fix damage preview for Shock, to require lightning damage to trigger

Improvements

• Glossary hints on item description now work with controller input.
• Glossary hints on item description now properly work with loot items on the ground.
• Improve switching between screens and loot item description with controller input.
• Show Aftershock chance if Nuclear damage can cause Aftershock and a weapon deals Nuclear damage.

Balancing

• Remove XP penalty for playing higher level content. An XP penalty now only applies if you play content that is below your level.
• Additional Attacks Mod now works with Laser.
• The Critical Corrosion skill now works with Radiation Damage.

Balancing

• Hullbreaker now grants 30% less damage taken (before: 20% less damage taken)
• Enemies spawned from Motherships grant experience, the experience amount decreases for each enemy the Mothership has spawned so far

Bugfixes

• Fixed a crash with Black Hole Warp
• Skill and item diffs group Thermal Damage taken correctly
• Display critical strike stats for DoT weapons if Critical Corrosion is allocated

Glossary Hints on Items

Minion Resistances Mod

Improvements

• Take all dice at once while crafting is not yet unlocked. This way new players can better organize their inventory.
• Improve visibility of enemy projectile tells
• Change blend mode of Flame Slinger projectiles for better visibility
• Improve explosion particles so that they don't overlap too much and don't turn into bright flashbangs.
• Improve Debris description
• Improve Multicrit description

Balancing

• Buff Minion Damage Mod from previously 40% more damage at level 1 and 60% more damage at level 20, to 60% more damage at level 1 and 80% more damage at level 20
• Reduce velocity of DrakVeth Eggbane
• Motherships don't spawn new enemies if there are too many enemies alive
• Motherships, Ash Queen and Bramble Queen grant more experience, to account for their spawns giving no experience

Bugfixes

• Unlock gained Achievements when loading a Demo game into the EA version. Unfortunately this does not help existing imports, but will prevent this for new players.
• Treasures can be damaged by Black Holes
• Fusion Drive triggers when dashing during a dash
• EMP triggers when dashing during a dash
• Remove range tag from Black Hole Warp, since it only scales with AoE

QoL

• Always show diff when hovering over items, ALT now only toggles between verbose details
• Simplify less damage taken in diff (group different damage types if all values are the same)
• Ships can be renamed (Resume Game -> Edit -> Rename)
• Add stacked Buff display to Aetherbane, replacing its damage increase notifications
• Reduce clutter on death screen if no damage was mitigated
• Change wording of "Replay" to "Watch Replay" on death screen
• Rename "Kamikaze Drone" to "Hunter Drone"

Balancing

• Buff Minion Armor, add hidden modifier to all minions "50% less damage taken from enemies"
• Improve Parasite damage scaling, especially with fields
• Enemy pack size does not grow after monster level 100
• Reduce amount of enemies on first Bramble Path mission

• Fix bug when taking a not yet earned boon reward out of the stash via mouse input
• Turbine Blades fade out after not attacking to prevent flickering on high damage builds
• Clarify Rigor Mod description, it now says "increased base critical strike chance"

QoL

• Make Abyss depth clickable to jump to the bottom of the Abyss
• Add button to the Abyss bottom to jump back to the top

Balancing

• Attack speed of your ship now applies to Parasites
• Luck of your ship now applies to Parasites
• Automatically destroyed enemies after victory do not trigger on-death effects
• Reduce projectile speed of Thorns
• Reduce damage and projectile speed of Blast Gunners

Bugfixes

• Fix abyss jump to top with controller input
• Properly spawn new parasites instead of redirecting the host, this fixes the observed Parasite attack animation glitches
• Parasites are properly disposed (fixes jerky movement if they left a time field behind)
• Add base crit chance to Fusion Drive
• Fix Deflector Shield glitch with Aurora Bulwark + Aegis
• Improve readability of abyss depths and abyss edge color

Performance Improvements

• Improve performance of impact and explosion particles (already part of yesterday hotfix 0.2.1)
• Optimize Death System performance
• Rewritten Debris system for better performance
• Limit amount of Asteroids that can be spawned from an Abyss wave
• Limit amount of overlapping animated lightning projectiles
• Limit amount of overlapping novas

Fixes and Improvements

• Actually check if Opal is unlocked for Affix crafting
• Adjust Abyss color scheme to a deep blue / purple, as the bright red caused visual problems for some players. The deepl blue / purple also better fits the laid back vibe of Astroloot and a dark Abyss in general.
• Jump back to campaign by clicking the Abyss button
• Improve checkbox UI

21 New Missions

Face King Gruvak

Kiki's Lost Opal

Carlo's Stolen Legacy

Enter the Abyss Endless Wave Mode

Balancing

• Regular Rocketeer enemies now deal less damage
• Death Explosions deal less damage
• Adjust level requirements and drop level of Ancient and Eternal items. Ancient items now require player level 68 (previously 64) and can drop from monster level 65 (previously 60). Eternal items now require player level 80 (previously 70) and can drop from monster level 80 (previously 68).
• Chase uniques always sell for an Inifinity Dice, even if they have max slots

Bugfixes

• Black Hole now deals damage
• Fix a bug in the time system, which caused time running backwards in rare scenarios
• Fix glitch with returning projectiles
• Fix for Mine tells sometimes being hidden by enemies
• Fix dsync with Retaliation Instinct
• Fix dsync with increased armor per mass

Fix crash when selling chase unique item from the ground

Death Screen Improvements

• Show total received damage next to damage taken, so that it is apparent how much damage was absorbed by your defence layers.
• The same has been done for the final blow.
• Fix: Damage applied to your ship corpse was aggregated into damage taken. Corpses have no defence, so it looked like your ship's defence was not applied correctly. Now, only damage taken while your ship is alive is aggregated.
• Allow to take screenshots on death screen with F12.
• Add new hint to random hint pool, if playing co-op: "You can give items to your co-op partner by dropping them on the ground".

Other improvements

• Reduce armor of Bosses in Kiki Wheel of Fortune Quest (first missions -50%, final mission -66%).
• Dash distance is constant and does not scale with max velocity, to allow for predictable dashes.
• Mouse cursor is not always hidden on Steamdeck or in Steam Big Picture Mode, so that an external mouse can be used.
• Change from controller input mode to mouse input mode only when mouse moved significantly.
• Minions now always follow their summoners' ship. Only if the summoner is destroyed, they follow the closest nearby player.
• Fix highlighting of damage types on some weapons / skills.
• Chase unique items can be sold for an Infinity Dice.
• Aetherbane and Twin Blaster gain "base weapon attack speed" affix instead of "ship attack speed" affix. Unfortunately this applies only to new drops. Existing items can be upgraded to the new variant with an Infinity Dice.

QoL

• Faster death screen appearance.
• Boons can be put into the stash. They can be only taken out by ships that reached the required quest state.
• Add Misc stats including stats for Luck, Multiluck and Thermal Detonation (if present).
• Add setting for controller vibration.
• Enable wheel of fortune crafting for Jinx Dice.

Balancing

• Improve cooldown of Parasites, they now really behave like weapons. Their cooldown now only resets when they actually spawned.
• Increased attack speed applies to Parasites.
• Adjust T1 max explosive resistance affix to be in line with other max resistance affixes.

Bugfixes

• Fix a dsync that could happen with boss attack sequences. This resulted in a weird death screen replay.
• Fix wording from Armor Reparation to Armor Repair.
• Improve wording of damage taken from Dash.
• Improve flame slinger projectile texture

Hotfix for game crash when clicking on the skill tree on desktop

Hey everyone! I'm a solo indie dev working on Astroloot in my spare time after work. To keep development manageable, I focus on one major feature at a time. Once that feature is finished and released, I move on to the next big thing. For progress updates and a sneak peek at what I'm working on, join the community on Discord! I'm excited to announce that the first focus feature is complete: The Death Screen!
[h4]What's New?[/h4] Previously, when you died in Astroloot, you were instantly sent back to the mission selection screen, with little feedback on what actually killed you. That's no longer the case! The new Death Screen adds clarity and impact to your final moments:

• Freeze-frame your death See the exact moment your ship was destroyed, frozen in time.
• Damage Breakdown View all the damage types you took during the mission, which enemy delivered the final blow, and what kind of damage ended your run.
• Bullet-Time Replay Watch a slow-motion replay of the last two seconds before your destruction, helping you analyze what went wrong.
• Instant Retry & Ship Screen Options Quickly restart the mission or head back to customize your ship.
• Contextual Hints A randomly selected hint appears, with the pool of hints adapting based on your run. If you took heavy Electric damage, for example, a tip about boosting Electric Resistance may show up.
• Full Multiplayer Integration The Death Screen works seamlessly in multiplayer, so you and your co-op partners can see what happened.

QoL

• Astral Affixes can be sold for an Astral Dice
• Increase default mouse scroll speed and add setting to adjust it manually
• Improve skill search interaction with controller

Bugfixes

• Fix rare multiplayer dsync caused by a combination of lightning projectiles and rollback netcode
• Fix rare multiplayer connection race condition where one player did not receive messages from the other player anymore
• Fix rare multiplayer connection timeout issue at start of game
• Fix verbose ranges on minion attack speed and armor affixes
• Fix radiation damage preview to consider more damage over time taken

Balancing

• Reduce intrinsic max dodge from 90 -> 75 and theoretical max dodge from 99 -> 90. (I know, I know it says balanced for fun, but it really was a little bit over the top.)
• Buff Parasite, before it had 25% less damage at all levels, now it scales from 25% less at level 1, to 25% more at level 20

QoL

• Dice can be rolled by left / right keybinding
• Radiation damage is now displayed as a separate stat, especially when using Radiant Annihilation it was very confusing before being mixed with hit damage
• Extended path to take screenshots to /Astroloot subfolder

Bugfixes

• Fix for skill info in skilltree to always fit the screen
• Fix initialization order of spawned mods, which has caused rare minion level / minion count mismatches
• Fix Pelt of the Moon King max dodge
• Show power up notifications only on player entities
• Prevent skill tree movement while searching and typing W, A, S, D

QoL

• Improve Wheel of Fortune visibility
• Reduce spatial audio falloff, you should now hear distant enemies better
• Reduce rendering statistics to FPS and Ping

Balancing

• Reduce projectile speed of certain enemies about 40% to 20%, so that players have a chance to evade manually
• Improve Parasite spawn cooldown

Bugfixes

• Fix highlight that stayed visible if items are moved via CTRL, until you hovered any other item
• Fix mod / minion level affixes now always count towards the players ship, instead of sometimes just the minion that carries the item
• Fix slot highlight bug with minion mods, now only possible slots are highlighted
• Fix rare keyboard movement glitch, where the game missed a released key and the ship kept moving in a direction
• Add a setting to use the native mouse cursor
• Show the actual key that is configured for Details Hint, instead of always "Alt"
• Fix rare crash in bitsets, improve sparse bitset performance

Final preparation for Early Access

• Improve victory sound
• Improve spikes sound
• Some QoL improvements for mechanics that get unlocked later in the game

Hey everyone! Just a quick (and slightly sleep-deprived) update Astroloot is getting a full sound and music overhaul! Two days ago, a streamer reported that the game's music got flagged for copyright. This took me completely by surprise. I immediately contacted my sound asset provider (whom Ive had a pro subscription with for two years), and turns out even though they offer lots of game assets, their license doesn't actually allow asset usage in games - only for videos. There would have been a business license option, at around $10k, which was just out of my league as a solo indie dev. So I really messed that up, big time! So what happened next? Well, I basically hit panic mode, took two days off work, and went on a full sound rescue mission:

Removing Cutscenes

QoL Improvements

• Color-code all damage types and their corresponding ailments on items and skill tree (if you prefer no color, you can disable this in the display settings).
• Add min height for Deflector Shield Bar if it is present, to improve its visibility
• Distinguish dash bar color from deflector shield bar color

Bugfixes

• Fix Early Access countdown. EA starts Friday 7:00 PM GMT+1 (not AM). Sorry for the confusion this has caused!

QoL

• Directly jump to Stash when unlocking it
• Add more contrast to highlighted possible item slots
• Game remembers last window size and position in Windowed Mode

Bugfixes

• Fix Minion level and all mod level affixes on weapon that Minions are attached to
• Fix damage preview for Minions, points in Time affect nearby Minions
• Fix +Dash Slot Affix on Engine
• Ensure item info overlay fits the screen for loot items
• Fix dash movement when ship velocity is zero (at start of mission dash did not move the ship forward)
• Fix sound glitches by having only one instance per sound loop running in parallel
• Enemies with death explosion attribute count towards mission objectives

Balancing

• Remove shortcut to Halo on skill tree
• Reduce scaling of Zapper projectiles at higher item levels

Enemy Balancing

• Better constrain enemies attacks to visible area
• Randomly delay initial enemy attacks to prevent unfair one-shots

Parasite Improvements

• Add indicator to enemies that have a Parasite attached
• Indicate that Parasite Mod isn't compatible with Minions
• One Parasite per weapon can attach to an enemy, making boss fights more rewarding
• Better Parasite distribution accross enemies, when there are many around

Balancing

• Tune down Railgun a little bit, so that it is in line with other weapons
• Solar Dice cannot be rolled onto Astral Affixes
• Rework of EMP to reduce CPU spikes

Quality of Life

• Restore Search / Power Report selection when opening skill tree again
• Improve astral affix validation message for common items
• Better aggregation of Minion Range in diffs
• Warp sound for all Engine dashes

Bugfixes

• Fix initialization order of affixes with Minion buffs on items
• Mod level affixes work on Chips
• Enter Search Text, then hover over skill, alt is now working
• Fix resume game screen glitch after deleting a game

This is somewhat of a screen scaling improvement release!

Screen Scaling

• Scale down item info widget if item info does not fit the screen entirely
• Improve screen scaling, so that players always see the same amount of space during combat
• Fix glitch with unsupported aspect ratios, black bars are shown when aspect ratio is not within 4:3 to 21:9
• Fix glitch of stats / trade when resizing window
• Fix glitch of skill tree lines on scaled resolutions

Balancing / QoL

• Improve astral affix validation order so that players understand better on which items the affix is going to work
• Adjust Armor Leech and Minion Armor Leech, so that it needs a bit of investment to get going
• Fix layout of armor leech indicator
• Cap enemy weapon range to visible screen range
• Adds one more digit to xp progress display

• Improve UX by highlighting action buttons, this should especially prevent accidential crafting
• Add more glossary entries
• Minor wording improvements

• Improve UI scaling of Full HD display resolution
• Trigger chance of Ailments does not cap at 80% but 100%
• Fix effective Radiation Chance of Sport Blaster
• Fix Radiation DPS preview calculation

• You can now press ALT and hover over underlined parts of the skill node description! So far, there are about 80 entries in the glossary explaining various mechanics of the game. Hopefully that lets you enjoy planning your build on the tree even more!
• Allow to compare mods when pressing ALT and there are empty slots where the mod would fit into
• Add more stats descriptions
• Add Windows taskbar icon
• Fix some UI glitches

• Add hoverable descriptions to ship stats screen (see screenshots below)
• Add setting to configure the input controller deadzone
• Fix movement glitch when switching between keyboard and controller movement

After almost two years of development, Astroloot is ready for Early Access, and I want YOU to be part of this journey.

What is Astroloot?

Whats Included in Early Access?

• Core gameplay loop: Loot, craft, and optimize your ship
• A massive skill tree for endless build possibilities
• Deterministic crafting craft gear your way, with the right amount of RNG
• The first major sectors to explore and conquer, the final EA boss is monster level 50
• A vast amount of items and mods to find, that shape your playstyle

Why Early Access?

Join the Looters!

• Add setting to adjust the display mode of the game. Available modes are Windowed Fullscreen, Windowed and Fullscreen
• Add keybinding to take an in-game screenshot. Default key is F12
• Shorten end of tutorial voice

• Fix numbers for Dash on Hit Mod
• Fix L2/R2 buttons on Xbox controller