It's finally here - Sipho 0.6 available for everybody to play! First and foremost, we want to again congratulate our Halloween zooid design contest winner Scepti! The winning entry was a design of Soul Eater which charges its pressure up with eaten remains of enemies and blasts remaining enemies with harmful fluids. We have implemented this idea and it is now available to adapt in game!
We are very happy how it turned out and we will definitely are going to hold more community contests in the future! As the Soul Eater was a recent leap in new game mechanics we had an another idea sprout some time ago. Back in version 0.5 we have added a Greaser - a unique part that buffed-up Range and Movement Power stats of connected zooids. And it was great - it deepened mechanical importance of part placement which spawned many new interesting Sipho designs. Inspired by your creations we wanted to dive deeper with such buffing mechanic. So deep that we did a bold move and have re-balanced all structure zooids to have more importance where they are placed. And the results are glorious:
The screenshot above shows some of new buffs that are applied by Structures. The changes in detail are as follows:

• Advena structure now costs 3 (instead of 2) nutrition and increases attached zooid damage by 1 and healing efficiency by 1 - zooids with higher healing efficiency will get more health points from healing effects.
• Saenus Beefuorus structure will now automatically cover neighboring zooids with protective shell.
• Buginis structure now adds 1 point of energy regeneration to neighboring zooids.
• Each Cra'than structure now heals 2 health points (instead of 1) and skill cost is lower, but increases with each zooid.
• Vagorian structure gives 10% movement speed bonus to attached zooids.

• Grinder will grind down your zooid weapons making them sharper and increasing their piercing abilities. This works for poison too - it affects more zooids!
• Agonizer imbues nearby zooids with acidic substance which increases their damage. Perfect to amp the damage up together with Advena structure!

Version 0.6.2

• Track and report semantic game version numbers separately
• Log when damageable does not have a collider
• Don't show irrelevant stats. Gray out irrelevant stat buffs in tooltips
• Use nutrition icon to convey nutrition ungrow value in zooid tooltip
• Track zooid original prefabs and their base stats in Zooid Info
• Remove unused Zooid connector color as all zooids now have their own connectors
• Damage stat determines max stack count on target
• Each poison cloud now has Damage * Penetration charges which determine maximum amount of stacks each poison can apply
• Poison cloud now scales from Damage and Penetration stats:
• Poison debuff now stacks and has duration of 0.9 seconds (down from 3s)
• Change how DOTs work: instead of dealing damage throughout duration, damaging buffs will now deal damage on stack timeout
• Update crop for stat icons to reduce mip bleeding
• Revert Aquarium UI icon change to old Sipho head icons
• Don't display buffs in tooltips with 0 stacks
• Update Soul Eater skill description
• Swap graphics of Agonizer and Grinder
• Use icons for skill descriptions
• Update icon bounds in sprite sheet
• Use new icons for stat tooltips
• Use named controller icon references without referencing specific TMP sprite icon sheets
• Reduce pixel bleeding for new icons
• Tidy TMP icon assets
• Use names for controller icons rather than indices
• Icons with padding
• Make Soul Eater projectiles non-solid, tweak and polish them
• Add concept of non-solid projectile. Add lose velocity on hit ratio to projectiles
• Make Poison Mine explosion more powerful
• Create TMP stats Sprite Asset
• Icon sheet import settings
• Icon sheet
• Add per-projectile extra damage scaling parameter
• Soul Eater effect improvements
• Create rotated chip effects when projectile dies
• Allow projectiles have no renderers attached
• Make Soul Eater projectile trail follow scale
• Add scale following to Following Effect
• Update Steamworks tools

Version 0.6.1

• Update Soul Eater description
• Set Soul Eater projectile layer to Projectile
• Rename Advena structure buff to Acidic Metabolism
• Make Soul Eater available in Campaign
• Change unused Greaser range stat to 0
• Rename Phaser to Agonizer. Make Agonizer apply damage increase and make it available in Campaign
• Change Grinder effect to apply penetration stat buff and make Grinder available in Campaign
• Add Save Custom Data get method with default value override
• Only play one shot at a time of Soul Eater shot sound
• Soul eater shoot effect and tweaks
• Calculate steering direction from projectile rotation if velocity is close to zero
• Fix Flail outline and remove angular drag from Flail connector. Now Flail should have no drag at all
• Make flail do 50% of damage when retracted.
• Do not auto-save layout if layout exists with same content
• Add Built-in layouts to Layout Database. Initialize Layout Database on game launch and keep it warm when managing layouts
• Better Layout hashing
• Keep track of original materials when making copies in Zooid Graphics
• Soul Eater animations
• Reserialize Buffer zooids
• Fix max health debuff reducing more health than it should on apply
• Sparks for Grinder buff effect
• Fix flail power scaling
• Update Steamworks to 1.66 (Steamworks.NET 13.0.0)
• Fix player being frozen after death in Aquarium
• Stat buffers no longer buff themselves
• Added a more robust way to save/load custom data with base type support

Version 0.6.0

• Move several test structure prefabs to disabled folder
• Make Flail weapon damage based more on impact velocity rather than time
• Increase Muck effectiveness against projectiles
• Fix Muck animation becoming off-sync when continuously using launch skill
• Increase Nervefiber healing amount from 1 to 2
• Chitin Shell buff sprites should not be affected by Greaser effects
• Despawn environment objects when they sink
• New buffers use new sprites
• Buffer zooid sprite metas
• Tweak Chitin Shell visuals and don't despawn them on level change
• Buffer zooid sprites
• Where does the sniper piercing keep disappearing?
• Try to make flail more fun by reducing its drag and boosting its launch force 20 times. Now you can sort of chase people around with it
• Set Greaser sac layer to Outline to make it ignored by Renderer cloner effect
• Hide the weird "zarnokas" sprite in the soul eater projectile
• Buff soul eater force per range from 150 to 220
• I suck at making particle effects, but I'm trying to improve the Grinder particle effect
• Projectile size scales from bonus damage
• An attempt to make a Grinder effect of some sort
• Serialize phaser
• Rename spike skill to "Impale" so it's not confused with pierce stat
• Slightly robustify shell code from weird states
• Shells don't expire and sea structures regrow shells every 7 seconds instead of 6
• Fix a bug (feature?) where dead zooids grew shells.
• Increased shell lifetime from 16 to 18 seconds and decreased spawn frequency from 4 to 6 seconds to make fighting sea boys less annoying
• Alien structure costs 3 instead of 2, but retains the 12 health so it's more robust for the price
• Add a regeneration efficiency stat description
• Update descriptions for a few structure zooids
• Vagorian structure buffs nearby movers with 10% extra movement force
• Reserialize the rest of the zooids
• Reserialize the two zooids that feel like it
• Heal skill uses less energy up-front but uses 5 more energy per-zooid
• Fix nothing healing anymore since the regenerationEfficiency got reset to 0 everywhere
• Skills can have an extra energy cost per-zooid
• Advena structures add a health regen efficiency bonus - heal more with less!
• Advena structure buff naming came back to its senses
• Shell lifetime extended from 15 to 16 seconds
• Saenus Beefuorus structure passively grows a shell over a single zooid every 4 seconds
• Fix exceptions when loading a save with a player skill that no longer exists
• Advena structure buffs nearby zooid damage by 1
• Update Buginis structure description
• Make Buginis structure give +1 energy regeneration to neighboring zooids. Decrease their max energy bonus from 10 to 5