Patch 1.3 is here!

One benefit to the unbearable heat of summer is that it gives you a lot of reasons to stay inside. And as it turns out, when you stay inside and you are not constantly harassed by between two and four horsemen of the apocalypse, you get a lot of thinking done. And it turns out, thinking gives you lots of ideas.

Circle up, Custodians. A number of truly unhinged ideas are coming in hot, and you are all now witness to them.

Steam Workshop Support

When we originally launched mod support, we fell back on NexusMods because it was far simpler to accomplish with the time we had available and had a proven track record older than many current-day college graduates.

Naturally, mere months after we got things started off, Nexus Mods was acquired by a shadowy corporate entity that said the bare minimum to not make their audience immediately abandon ship, but otherwise failed to inspire a lot of confidence, or make real commitments to the future of the site.

Regardless of what does or doesn't happen with Nexus, we as developers couldn't ignore the similarities between what happened there and the dozens upon dozens of other shadowy corporate acquisitions in the gaming world. We've also been players for decades. We've watched helplessly as dozens of IPs and hundreds of fun game modes get hoarded up by magpie-like companies intent on making de-facto fiefdoms out of culture. Especially when the tag line"We partner. We amplify. We conquer."is being thrown around.

We are not important developers, nor are we part of some great movement. But we are old enough to see where this ends, and our first unhinged idea was: How about NO?

The Steam Workshop is now enabled for Endless Dark. The existing mods menu will let you do everything you expect, including upload a mod you've created and placed in your installation of the game manually.

The local-only distribution flow that we originally created for Nexus Mods is still 100% functional, and we fully encourage any mod makers to upload their mods to both. This is the tooling we can give everyone to make modding the game as easy as possible, and also to make sure no one is able to uniquely claim whatever the game turns into, should more creative minds work with it.

Rebuilt Keyboard and Gamepad support

Endless Dark is our first game, with a framework we weren't familiar with, and one of the places that is most obvious is how we implemented keyboards and gamepads. They both use a similar framework that was quite brittle and had lots of unfortunate edge cases. As the game got more complicated, we progressively fell shorter and shorter of having keyboard-only and gamepad-only be true first class citizens. And, in the interest of full honesty, the actual situation is even worse than that paragraph - there were a few long-standing bugs where these brittle edge cases could, in rare instances, enter a sort of input deadlock that would slaughter frame rate and quietly block all further action inputs until the player paused in order to dump the deadlocks.

So we airlocked it.

Controllers now work like controllers in pretty much every other game on the planet. The left stick moves you, the right stick moves a virtual cursor that behaves exactly like a mouse. Buttons do select, cancel, examine, whatever.

Keyboard controls have been rebuilt using the same system, while also enabling a "HUD Focus Mode" that lets you get to the HUD alone during play.

Zombie Mode

One thing that has frequently remained just out of reach for us is allowing the robot to go fully autonomous during things like stress breaks, reliability crises, and extreme events. The reasons it's been intractable are incredibly nerdy programming reasons, and largely boring. What's important is that we've solved it, and it's now in the game.

In certain situations, Annie, FRANK, and Robbie can now completely buck your control and go on different berserk frenzies that suit their personalities. Robbie will zoom off to the dankest part of the ship to methodically fix all the little things that you've considered unworthy of your attention for the last 5 cycles. Annie will hide in the engine room and huff fumes until it gets high enough to see the 9th dimension.

...You should already know what FRANK will do.Steam post image

Pressure, Ship Decay, and Shadows

Since we've continually tried to combat event spam and increase player agency, the Pressure system has been reworked a bit.

The Pressure system is the one where, as bad things happen to you, a little meter fills up. When it's full, you get a little boon to help you cope with all the trouble thrown your way.

But what if you don't want to use it now? What if you want to hold onto it, and use it in a turn or two, when it'll really have impact?

Under the old system, the answer was mostly "uh, sorry." You could refuse to use Pressure, but when you were ready to use it, you would need to tactically do damage to yourself or increase the Pressure again to get another prompt.

That is now gone. When Pressure is full, you can now click on the filled bar yourself. Not only do you only see the event popup when you want it, it remains available for you after bad things have happened.

Naturally, because this is a good thing that helps out, we have to include two bad things that make things more miserable. Truly, I'm sorry, but it's kind of the brand of the game.

Above and beyond the established Decaying Ship systems, it is also now possible for ship support components (thrusters, batteries, capacitors, and scanners) to break PERMANENTLY and reduce your capacity for the rest of the run. Much like Zombie Mode, these permanent breaks do not happen casually or randomly. They are unhealing scars meant to be a dire consequence that no amount of compensation will ever truly fix, and they only show up when things are genuinely messy.

In addition, the shadows around the ship have gained a few extra tricks using the same pathfinding pipework that made Zombie Mode possible. If you're not afraid of your own shadow, well....

...you haven't been paying attention.

Odds, ends, ands, plus a couple futures

A few other bullet points:

• The in-game console has been reworked to be a lot more user friendly and pretty looking.

• METASTABLE now registers arc completion on victory.

• A couple achievement perks were fixed to gate on the actual perk, rather than the achievement flag, which lets you earn them while offline.

• There were a large pile of other assorted bugfixes we ran into and corrected, all relatively minor but all annoying in various ways.

There's also one piece of quality of life that we've been meaning to add for a while, but only just now got around to: A freaking map you can check.

Steam post imageIf you've ever forgotten where a place is supposed to be, you can now check a strategic map that one of your robot forebears has sketched out in Command.

In addition, we want to call out two future plans that have been specifically requested by folks in our patch threads:

Text Packs for Translation

This is something that a few enduring badasses have been asking after for literally a year or more, and has remained a deferred thing because, again, when we were originally creating the game, we did a few things wrong that makes presenting the text packs an enormous pain in the neck.

We have started the process of unwinding that knot. It's not included in this release because it actually touches MORE files and creates MORE opportunities for failure than all of the features in this patch combined. If you're a programmer, you likely just winced, because you have an idea of deeply wrong we did it originally. Yeah. You're right. We did do it wrong.

An option to use the older sprite set

This is also coming in a future patch. The reason it's not in this one is the same as the one above - while actually injecting and using the old sprite set is relatively simple, it is so high impact and touches so many things that it's terrifying to do. So we've made the decision to handle that in its own, more minor patch where there is less dust flying around.

That's all for now, Custodians - careful of the zombie inside you!