Hey there! I've been working hard the past days together with @Jouki (Who brought in most of the ideas for the skill tree and balancing) to release this update! It includes a ton of new features, so lets go through them:

Skill tree & Essence rework

The old essence was used for local research of buildings. While this was a cool addition compared to the old YORG.io, it had its flaws - you were limited in how much essence you get. zombies dropped essence and thats it. And since amount of zombies is fixed, it was pretty much hardcoded how much essence you have at a given time.
Meet the new skill tree, research labs and local research for crystals! First of all, you can now unlock skills using essence:
Besides of that, local research no longer requires essence - instead you can unlock it using crystals now (This change is still on our watch as we add options how to get the Essence).
And to fix the problem of being limited by essence, you can now build research labs which produce essence! However, be careful - Each research lab attracts more and stronger zombies!
Please note that those are brand new features and thus might not be perfectly balanced - Working on this!

Further Changes

Reworked Shields: Shields have been reworked - Instead of absorbing an attack regardless of the damage, they now absorb the damage, basically like additional health. Also, the maximum amount of shields a building can have is now determined by the level of the shield generator. Reworked Waves: The waves have been changed, now a boss spawns every 10/25 days. Also you can now see the amount of zombies in the next wave in the upper left corner! Reworked Invisible Zombies: Instead of revealing invisible zombies, the signal repeater now gives all defensive towers within its range the ability to target them. This should make them much less annoying! Besides of that, spotlights now also reveal them. Reduced sound volume: A lot of people claimed about the game simply being too loud compared to other applications - this should now be fixed! Copy Key: You can now press 'B' to select the building below the cursor and place it again! UI Improvements: You can now see buildings of the same type when placing, as well as to which buildings it will be connected!
Besides of that, there are also a lot of minor changes: - Miners and factories now show the actual value instead of their base value - The cost of signal repeaters now scales exponentially again - The 'click to rebuild' now stays for 2 minutes - Now showing their radius when placing new towers - There are now dialogs shown when the invisible and armored zombies spawn for the first time, explaining how to counter them - Added setting to hide action bar - The arrowfactory and cannonballfactory now store much less uranium - The pulse zombie pulse now occurs less frequent, also the radius has been reduced to 2.7 tiles from 3.5 - Vastly increased resource storage capacity and made the building cheaper - Balancing: Increased exploding zombie damage in singleplayer - Balancing: Blueprints are no longer targetable on medium/hard difficulty - Balancing: Increased burn damage from the sun in singleplayer - Balancing: Increased building health regeneration on day in singleplayer - Fix settings going not back to the actual game but the main menu - Fix music overlaping sometimes - Fix resource statistics not closing when using its hotkey - Fix spotlight just targeting the first entity instead of all within range - Fix zombie factory being available via hotkey - Updated Translations - Added Japanese and Polish translations

Whats next?

For the next update improving the multiplayer experience is planned! Things in my mind: - Leaving games should count as a loss - Improve servers & connections - Make sure people with a bad internet connection don't ruin the experience for others - Rebalance - And much more! Thank you for your continued support!