Hello everyone!

Another two weeks have passed in All Parts Connected Headquarters and we are happy with our progress on upcoming new zooids. One of them is physical Flail:

Graphics and name are prototypes and subject to change. This little bad zooid with has a lot of weight in its not the smartest spikey end. It will require finesse to control and should be a fun zooid to play as offensively and defensively. If you would like to know more, come chat with us on Discord.

We have added two new achievements. One of them is for the hardcore players - beat the game without growing any weapon zooid. After implementing the achievement we noticed that we don't have many damaging utility zooids yet, only those which operated with poison. Thus, The Grappler has been asked to change its department to Utility instead of Weapon. It already did little damage and was expected to be operated with accompanying zooid to make a greater combo. We buffed its skill usage and nerfed damage. Later changes will include beating bosses in more creative ways.

Other balance changes and notes about upcoming zooids can be found below, in the changenotes.
Version 0.4.7

• Report if it's steam build in Options menu
  
• Fix initializing Steam
  
• Change time settings to proper values
  
• Fix offset layout previews
  
• Do not include Aquarium background in screenshots
  
• Buff greaser buff to 50%
  
• Store flail state as Sipho head buff. Tweak flail balance
  
• Tweak greaser effect
  
• Clamp edge detect shader output so it doesn't produce sparkles
  
• Add following effect remove callback and use it for Greaser effect to fix not deparenting renderer clones on time
  
• Fix dead zooids erroring out due to missing Sipho reference
  
• Make layout previews renderable in growth mode
  
• Fix screenshotter to not make flipped images
  
• Implement fast kill achievement unlock
  
• Buffs can now carry owner information and tell where the damage is coming from. This fixes the poison being counted as 'pacifist'
  
• Add a fast kill achievement for killing a full health head in 5 seconds
  
• Increase Burstopod damage by 1
  
• Scale critter minion movement speed based on spawner movement speed
  
• Critter minions scale from melee damage instead of ranged damage, as they do melee attacks
  
• Made critterminion poolable
  
• Make RendererClones always properly follow their targets
  
• Tweak zooid descriptions to include valuable information
  
• Make Flail extension toggleable
  
• Add code that can mutate the enemy inventory by swapping its native zooid with a random unowned zooid of the same type
  
• Tweak outlines of some zooids to fit better
  
• Increase the volume for swarm attack signal
  
• Add a sound effect for sprayer and slightly increase its projectile speed
  
• Critter minions can deal damage even when they do not have an attack command issued (but still require a resupply afterwards)
  
• Fix a bug where critter minion resupplying was calculated based on the sipho position and not the zooid position
  
• Make muck cloud have more angular drag
  
• Make Cra'than boss spawn minion skill more costly
  
• Fix Cra'than boss spawner zooids not being red
  
• Fix zooid graphics not taking different material and texture combo into account when assigning shared material
  
• Make poison cloud have ten times less mass, but more drag
  
• Make twister swirl initially appear larger and do not lose as much lifetime when pulling non-zooids.
  
• Convert Grabber to Utility zooid: Damage reduced from 3 to 2, cooldown reduced from 1.1 to 1 second, energy cost from 35 to 25 and added +3 energy regeneration.
  
• Enable utilitarian achievement
  
• Added a very basic attack signal effect for the swarmer
  
• Add a slight scale wobble when the swarmer is making a new minion
  
• Added a tiny minion death
  
• Reduce swarm attack energy drain a bit
  
• Added a tiny stab effect for minion attacks
  
• Critter minions are now part of the zooid effect layer as they should appear on top of other zooids
  
• Use Async GPU readback to read rendertexture without stalling render pipeline
  
• Move darken Sipho logic to Siphonophore script
  
• Add screenshotter script which makes screenshots and sipho previews
  
• Rename Math to SiphoMath
  
• Expose deep camera in Camera Follow