Some freeplay balance, some monthly level fixes and improvements, some optimisations, some other fixes a bit of everything! If you're not participating in the optional beta and would like to, follow the instructions in the original beta post for details of how to participate. You'll need to be running the game on Windows and through Steam. https://steamcommunity.com/games/463530/announcements/detail/1705107447279697254

General and Extra Level Fixes and Balance Changes

• Fixed an issue where a picked up creature would kill the creature picking it up and would cause it yo be locked in an attack animation permanently
• Fixed issues where ants in another colonies nest could could freeze when the marker was removed and other situations
• Fixed an issue that could cause flickering with moving static meshes
• Fixed some aesthetic issues on the crucible
• Substantially reduced the cost of rendering the Isolepis Cernua (spiky plant)
• Movement changes preventing creatures rubber banding off one another (the vibrating woodlouse for example)
• Added in a minimap ping and alert message on babysitting when the enemy colony is attacked, when they head out to attack some enemies and when they head out to defend the player
• Increased the amount of time the allied colony has to gather the starting resources
• Fixed a crash that could occur when viewing climbable plants resource quantities and it is deleted
• Fixed an issue where vines could show as harvestable above tiles that were not accessible
• Victory condition now works in Extremis (wave 30) and will provide a reward
• Small optimisations with auras
• Wood ants will no longer target allied colonies
• Fixed a crash that could happen with loaded freeplay games (and harvestman legs)
• Fixed an issue that could cause abilities not to trigger
• Fixed an issue that reduced wood ant range dramatically and cased them to freeze

Optimisations

• Nativised some costly classes
• Some additional optimisations in creature scanning
• Creatures scanning for other creatures has seen several optimisations (this should lead to better performance when lots of creatures are in close proximity). Please note there may be bugs with this change, if you notice any strange behaviour please let us know

Freeplay Changes and Balance

• Small creatures now cannot invade for half the amount of time large creatures cannot invade for
• Fixed a bug that caused the large creature invasion block to not change with difficulty setting
• Massively reduced the chance a passive swarm will invade the player nest
• Slightly reduced the chance an aggressive swarm will invade the players nest
• Reduced chance aggressive swarms will spawn early on
• Moderately reduced the chance defensive and neutral swarms will invade the players nest
• Creature swarms are now removed when all creatures belonging to the swarm are killed
• More than doubled the range at which enemies cannot loiter around the players nest entrance