We're currently in the process of merging the Steam branch with the latest version of the game. This is a very long, very tedious process. That said, the manual conflict resolution is nominally completed and all that's left is making sure no human error snuck its way into the merge, or any wacky automated stuff breaking. The Steam review has found even more things that need addressing; there is a problem with some installs not being able to access the register page from a fresh account and the ever annoying microtransaction integrations that have been narrowed down to only two remaining issues (one of which is literally just us selecting a checkbox).
Our main steam dev has been unable to work on the game this month due to IRL circumstances that have kept him from being able to access his PC. He should have his laptop now and will be able to continue working on it this week.
We should have another update about this that goes into more detail regarding steam soon^tm when he is able to get development going again.
Whether you've read the lost journal or burned the Demonic Orders, Idlescape without lore books is not the same. Whether you've found the fabled Animal Treats or are yet to discover them, we welcome your stories to Idlescape.
We're excited to announce the Lore Book Competition, and this time it's spooky! 🕸️🎃
Anyone is welcome to enter, and your lore book can contain (mostly!) anything you want. Whether you write a recipe with the sinister flair of the Goblin Chef, or perhaps sketch a crude map of the eerie Hidden Mine with a description of what lurks deep within, we eagerly await your spine-tingling tales!
📅 Deadline: November 1, check Discord for exact times 📌 Submissions: Post your spooky story in the #lore-contest channel/forum. Make it as easy as possible for others to read your story (discord messages or a Google Docs link is preferred). Each participant can submit up to three entries, with a (soft) maximum of 1000 words per story. Only the highest voted entry per player is counted. 📩 Voting: Other players can vote for their favorite lore books using emojis. Voting will continue for another week after submissions close
🏆 1st Place: 6,000 Platinum and a gold medal 🥈 2nd Place: 3,500 Platinum and a silver medal 🥉 3rd Place: 2,000 Platinum and a bronze medal
Winners will see their stories featured in the game, and will collaborate with our lore experts (JustinCreditRoll, Feylos, Nick) to give your stories the finishing touch and to make sure that they fit into the Idlescape universe.
Other stories might make it into the game if we think they fit. Authors of these will be rewarded with 1000 platinum.
So gather your courage, delve into the unknown, and may the best spooky lore win!
This community contest is only for mortal beings and creatures of the night. Silicone based lifeforms (AI) are excluded.
Peppercorn Seed: Experience: 120 → 125 Level: 30 → 45
Sugarcane Seed: Experience: 160 → 190 Level: 20 → 22
Wheat Seed: Mysterious Seed: 1-16 → 1-8 Experience: 50 → 35 Time: 30 → 15
Potato Seed: Potato: 1-5 → 1-6 Mysterious Seed: 1-16 → 1-12 Experience: 40 → 50 Time: 30 → 20
Rice Seed: Mysterious Seed: 1-16 → 1-8 Experience: 100 → 45 Level: 25 → 27 Time: 30 → 15
Tomato Seed: Tomato: 1-5 → 3-10 Experience: 60 → 110 Time: 30 → 40
Wildberry Bush Seed: Wildberry: 5-15 → 5-20 Mysterious Seed: 1-24 → 1-18 Experience: 200 → 225 Time: 60 → 45
Chili Pepper Seed: Chili Pepper: 1-5 → 2-7 Experience: 90 → 125 Time: 30 → 40
Pumpkin Seed Level: 25 → 40
Mushroom Spore Mushroom: 1-2 → 1-1 Mysterious Seed: 1-16 → 1-8 Experience: 70 → 45 Level: 15 → 17 Time: 30 → 15
Tree Seed Log: 20-50 → 15-40 Branch: 2-20 → 1-15 Mysterious Seed: 1-16 → 1-12 Experience: 450 → 1000 Time: 120 → 90
Oak Tree Seed Oak Log: 20-50 → 25-65 Branch: 2-20 → 3-25 Experience: 1250 → 1750 Level: 17 → 15 Time: 120 → 150
Box Trap Bone: 2-8 → 3-12 Hide: 5-15 → 5-25 Fur: 1-5 → 2-6 Raw Chicken: 5-15 → 5-25 Feather: 50-150 → 66-200 Experience: 30 → 110 Level: 1 → 5 Time: 30 → 40
Pitfall Trap Bone: 2-8 → 3-10 Fur: 5-15 → 5-20 Rough Hide: 1-5 → 1-6 Raw Beef: 5-15 → 6-18 Milk: 10-30 → 10-35 Experience: 100 → 125 Level: 10 → 13 Time: 35 → 40
Bird Trap Raw Chicken: 25-75 → 20-55 Feather: 500-1500 → 375-1125 Phoenix’s Feather: 1/100 → 3/400 Mysterious Seed: 1/2 (5-15) → 1/10 (3-12) Experience: 325 → 350 Level: 20 → 23 Time: 120 → 90
Bear Trap Bone: 5-15 → 10-35 Bone Plate: 5-15 → 10-35 Chitin: 5-15 → 10-40 Scale: 1-5 → 3-12 Raw Beef: 40-50 → 80-150 Experience: 400 → 650 Level: 35 → 50 Size: 1 → 2 Time: 50 → 60
Monster Trap Bone Plate: 10-30 → 60-180 Scale: 5-15 → 30-90 Spider Legs: 30-50 → 180-300 Goblin Brain: 30-50 → 180-300 Satchel: 1 → 1-10 Experience: 500 → 2250 Level: 50 → 60 Size: 1 → 4 Time: 60 → 90
Mysterious Seed Experience: 600 → 400 Level: 1 → 5
Worm Composting Bin Experience: 50 → 60 Level: 5 → 6
Willow Tree Seed Experience: 1800 → 1600
Banana Tree Seed Experience: 2250 → 2100 Level: 20 → 25
Apple Tree Seed Level: 20 → 30
Maple Tree Seed Level: 25 → 40
Yew Tree Seed Experience: 4950 → 5000 Level: 35 → 50
Elder Tree Seed Level: 50 → 60
Sageberry Bush Seed Experience: 450 → 600 Level: 25 → 60
Net Trap Experience: 300 → 200 Level: 25 → 33
Nature Totem Level: 40 → 50
Earth Totem Level: 40 → 50
Water Totem Level: 40 → 50
Coalescing Totem Level: 40 → 50
All drop rates have been adjusted to compensate. Trap crafting cost and xp was adjusted accordingly.
Some of the basic seeds can now be crafted into Seed Oil (Crafting -> General), which can be prepared for bitter and spicy essence.
Totem crafting level now matches the farming level of 50. Crafting cost reduced: Runes: 5k (6k for Coalescing, 0 for Water) -> 1k Stone: 1k -> 400 Additionally each totem is now thematically linked to a skill Earth - Mining Nature - Foraging Water - Fishing Coalescing -> Combat Each totem now has two crafting recipes. One requires early game, one late game resources from the respective skill.
XP from 1x1 seeds was nerfed as mentioned before from 600 to 400. But larger myst seeds now also get more xp, even though the xp per seed still get smaller and smaller the larger the seed is. A 4x4 gets 3280 xp, about half of what 16 1x1 seeds would give.
Before I begin, I'd like to take a moment to remind everyone that Idlescape is completely volunteer run, from admins to chat mods. Nobody on the Idlescape staff team takes any salary and all our money goes back into paying for the servers and other upkeep costs to keep the game running.
Here's the basic breakdown of what's going on currently: The Steam client has issues that are cropping up now that we're further along in the Steam integration, with the chief (and only real remaining big one) problem being the Steam Wallet integration. Our backend system for handling payments was designed solely for our current payment provider and there are foundational changes that are still underway to make sure our payment systems can handle both the existing payment handling as well as Steam or other potential storefronts.
We cannot launch on Steam with only our existing non-Steam payments active as it would violate their terms, and we cannot remove those payment methods because platinum purchases and IS+ subs directly pay for our upkeep fees. If you have ever donated or purchased anything in Idlescape we cannot thank you enough for contributing to keeping the game running!
We were hoping to launch 1.0 and Steam at the same time this weekend (and not announce until we had a fully reviewed, functional, and approved build playtested), on the 29th, but as of right now we do not yet have a fully approved Steam build. We're exploring options to streamline getting a build approved and integrated, but even if a breakthrough occurs overnight there's still a 2 week review period for Steam to get back to us on it that will inherently cause a delay, assuming no issues on our end (unlikely lol).
Basically, the game itself is playable and works fine on Steam purely gameplay wise, but payment shenanigans and integrations are keeping us from launching it.
As for 1.0- it's been ready for weeks now. As a developer I don't really believe in holding onto functional features for no reason. This means that in a standard game dev environment the last few weeks of updates might be held to make 1.0 more impactful, but I'd rather just let you all have access to the content now. This is in part due to the fact we have no dedicated QA or testers, but also because I as a player want all the new, shiny stuff as soon as possible. This means that 1.0 is basically "just" the introduction of new permanent gamemodes, making existing ones legacy, and starting a true long-term fresh economy again.
Right now we are still aiming for 1.0 to drop with Steam instead of having it launch early. This decision has been made because we want to stuff as much polish and fixes into the game, continue working on early/mid-game balance, and have the time to implement the remaining designed quests before 1.0 launches. Also, I want more people to be able to reach the Pre-Launch level goal for the event tokens and icon!
We're working on solutions to the current Steam roadblock and expect it to be resolved within a couple weeks as early tests have shown a lot of promise in our local builds; however, as shown in the last couple months, the local and browser builds do not translate 1:1 to the Steam client.
I apologize for any undue hype that we can't live up to, but in our defense 1.0 was ready to launch a couple weeks ago! To be clear, we're not blaming Steam here, there's just a lot of delays in the review process that neither party can skip for various reasons.
I'll keep you all updated on what's happening with Steam. For gameplay, we'll be focusing on more polishing and bug fixes as well as new and rebalanced content. For content, I'm planning on going through all the equipment and reevaluating their augmentation bonuses for accuracy to find any that are lacking, as well as looking through abilities and seeing if any have unnecessarily bad scaling. If there are items/abilities in specific you any you have in mind that need a look over, let me know!
MASSIVE overhaul of monster stats. They have higher base stats across the board, but also are much more susceptible to weaknesses. Accuracy will matter a lot more as well. This will make building equipment properly more important as well as make the higher difficulties more of a challenge. This is a massive buff for monsters.
With new clients around the corner, we're porting a few of the Quality of Life features that have generally been relegated to being implemented by scripts. In this update we're introducing a basic idle notification as well as a notification for empty farming plots.
Early game monster stat tweaks:
Gargoyle Crafting recipes are now available at level 60 crafting. They use Infernal Dust, Iron, Mithril, and Runite Bars plus their respective base obsidian counterpart to craft. Gargoyle drops have been replaced in Dark Vault with Infernal Dust.
Battleaxe Rebalance - massive buffs so it can fill the role of slow, heavy hitter better:
Ladle stat rebalances-
Other stuff-
Elite Scrolls and Dungeons now have their own hiscores! Hiscores are saved on successfully completing a dungeon and their leaderboards can be filtered by league and difficulty with shortest completion times being the best. Dungeon Mastery Icons are now awarded based on the highest difficulty completed, then the shortest time to complete. These Icons are only available for dungeons and are given to the entire party of players who were present for that run; Icons are currently not awarded for elite scroll leaderboards.
Unfortunately this uses a new system so previous dungeon runs are not retroactively applied to these new hiscores.
It's still going! We've run into a few obstacles and Boohi has been very hard at work trying to get everything solved. In fact, we actually managed to hit some rate limits whilst testing builds due to how complex the build and testing process has become. Fingers crossed it gets resolved soon!
The Pre-Launch Season is going strong for feedback! We've received a lot of good stuff from it which have directly resulted in most of the changes in this patch. Please continue to voice your thoughts! Even if we haven't directly changed something that's been talked about, it has been read and may be in the process of coming soon.
Ice has been hard at work overhauling the player inspect menu, now you can properly showcase things like your hiscore standing, achievements, icons, items, and profile backgrounds. You start with 4 showcase slots for hiscores, achievements, icons, or items, but can purchase a token to increase the number of available showcase slots for 600 plat. In the future we plan to allow purchasing different profile backgrounds as well.
Materials other than gold now contribute 15x their vendor value, up from 10x. Heavy Chitin and Heavy Scale are now longer rolled as potential materials for turn in. Affix Dusts and Scraps can now roll for turn in.
This is primarily a test season for the new experience formula curve and making sure there's no obvious problems in the progression that have gone overlooked. This season will run until 1.0 officially drops (the end date will be updated) but probably won't get any fancy mechanics. This is essentially a way to pre-plan your progression, test the new early/mid game without seasonal mechanics making things crazy, and get some more event tokens when 1.0 releases.
There will also be a unique icon for reaching a total level of 800 to show that you were one of the first to play the 1.0 balance system, and potential for Community Stars based on feedback or Bug Icons from bug reports!
We're now up to 21 Gathering Talents, 82 Combat Talents, and 58 Production Talents!
We are currently waiting for Steam to review the latest build to begin allowing public playtesting!
For those of you following the dev-blog on Discord, you may have seen the Idlescape client being downloaded by Boohi! We're in the process of ironing out the kinks related to build creation and distribution as well as continuing work on integration details. In other words, things are actually on schedule?!
Someone was cheating and causing the massive positive feedback loop so we had to manually reset it, sorry :( I'll manually reset the shrine costs once the update hits
The "First to X" announcements are not retroactive, so they're announcing whenever someone reaches those milestones. Once someone achieves them, they won't announce anymore for that league! Default = Mainscape
We're setting our Socials back up, finally! Come follow, sub, like, or whatever the social calls it!
It may be a little empty now, but we're working on getting stuff added!
Beyond the Edge is releasing today! It is a 10 person dungeon that REQUIRES the party to engage with ALL major combat mechanics to complete it. You probably can't brute force it without mind boggling madness buffs active. If you remember Rise of Info from the pre-refactor, it's similar to that, but in our new system.
This raid includes an alternate way to craft the Shrimp Whip, Stinger, and Scepter, as well as introduces the new T85 Mantis Shrimp set that is a hybrid head, torso, legs, gloves, and off-hand set. What makes it customizable is the fact that it comes with 5 new set effects that turn on depending on which pieces you have equipped. For example, you can combine the Whip and Stinger to get both the Melee and Range DPS set bonuses at once, or something crazy like the Scepter and Shield for Magic DPS and Tank bonuses! You may want to turn on compact tooltips if you plan on using them, though!
The intended difficulty of the Raid is "hardest in the game" with the intended strength of the new gear being "very strong hybrid potential, much easier to maintain than 1 endgame set per style, but potentially not as strong as a full investment single style set."
The new Mantis Shrimp set assets are placeholder recolors, besides the gloves.
If you haven't been following the dev-blog, here's a quick rundown of what we've got setup internally or are in the process of testing out:
Silent has revamped the Action Queue to make it a lot more useful!
Make sure to enable the Action Queue button in the Settings or Action Queue page to see a lot of the new functionality in the UI. It should be on by default now, but if you have changed it in the past it will use your current setting.
Now you can choose to complete an action a certain number of times instead of doing it for a specified length. One action equals 1 minute's worth of length, so if you have an hour's length as your max queue time, then you can queue up 60 actions, 60 minutes, or a mix of the two, such as 30 individual actions and then 30 minutes of something else. The UI will also reflect this more obviously to make sure you're constantly aware of the status of your queue.
We've implemented Steam authentication and logins; you will be able to link your existing accounts to Steam, or make a new one, and then use Steam to login to your account. This will be pretty useful if you're playing the game through Steam!
This stuff isn't live yet but we're currently in the process of rewriting login and authentication systems to support alternative sources, i.e. a mobile app or steam client. It hasn't been looked at since porting the original pre-refactor implementation to the refactor, so it's great pain to work on.
Oh, and Season 2 Ironman gets its own chat channel. Woo!
It's like a soft-relaunch of S2, but Ironman! Woah! This mode will share the timed buff madness changes with normal S2, though everything else will be league specific even if the mechanics are still the same. It also benefits from Global Buffs?!
The main gamemodes will now be moved over to the new augmenting system! You can read more on the previous patchnote: https://www.idlescape.com/news/beta-0-20-0
Since Season 2 launched there have been intermittent reports of transactions failing and items not being rewarded when they should have been; we've narrowed down what is happening but we don't yet know why it's happening. If this happens to you please make a bug report on Discord with as much detail as possible about what you were doing, if you had a group or were solo, if you have any of the inventory related settings (auto-vault, auto-tacklebox, etc.), or anything else you deem pertinent, thanks!
Introduced a new referral system! Everyone is assigned a code and can designate one person's code as their referrer. At 3 major gameplay checkpoints you can claim rewards that affect the whole server as well as both you and your referrer personally.
Right now there are 3 tiers:
There is no cap on the number of people you can refer, in fact, there is a special unique icon for having 5 people you refer maxing one of their characters. Your referral code is account bound, not character bound.
Added support for promo codes. There aren't any yet, but it's implemented!
Charged and Inert Heat Stones, you can craft charged heat stones with heat, some fire runes, and an inert heat stone. The inert stone can be purchased from the general shop or found while refining. The charged stone can be burned (opened, it's actually a chest for technical purposes) for heat or traded. Tradeable heat?!
You can now pause your usage of a specific buff by selecting the buff and hitting the "Pause" button in the tooltip. To unpause do the same thing but hit the "Unpause" button. No more bad buffs for your builds!
This is disabled on Season 2 because of the Madness theme. That said, I have blacklisted specific enchantments with potential for game breaking or full stall effects from rolling in the future and if I remember I'll manually remove them from the list.
We are aware that shrine is having issues; this is due to lag, we will make the system more robust by next patch!
We are aware the Ancient Cloth Fragment image is broken.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2692420/Idlescape/
After the MANY hotfixes from last week, the primary crashes have been finally found and squashed. Crashes often constitute critical, or at least high, priority issues for development time so we haven't had a huge amount of time to prepare content/fixes for this week. That said, we have some for you!
Please wishlist it, it lets Steam know that ther is interest in the game and helps drive traffic our way! There will be playtests in the future for the Steam client. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2692420/Idlescape/
Focusing on the shrine reworks, there are new instant shrines that give a random buff everytime the shrine's goal is reached separate from the rest of the shrine system.
This is a community effort! You can contribute to either the strength of the shrine, or contribute to generating new buffs in the shrine. Every 24 hours the buff madness shrines will downgrade, so you will need to be constantly maintaining (or upgrading) the shrines to benefit from the nearly limitless pool of buffs available.
Starting on Season 2 launch, wiki edits from registered accounts with at least 500 changed characters will be rewarded with a random buff on Season 2 "Buff Madness". Large edits will get longer buff durations. Wiki edits will be reviewed to prevent spam and buffs will be given out by moderators manually, so some delay is to be expected. Moderators are also allowed to give out extra buffs for edits that fall below the threshold, but still required substantial work, on their own discretion. (Begging for a buff will have the opposing effect.)
All editors will additionally participate in a leaderboard. All players with at least 1000 changed characters will receive a participation icon at the end of the season. First, second and third place will receive a medal/an icon (tbd, maybe both?). Icons will transfer to 1.0, once it releases.
Check out the leaderboard!
Instead of being a success/fail system, augmentations have been fractionalized and made into a success/crit success system.
Almost all augmentation costs in this new system have been reduced to roughly 1% of the materials required to initially craft the item.
Augmenting an item increases its Augmentation Counter, and once that counter exceeds the threshold to upgrade the item consumes up to several base variants of the item, increases its augmentation level, and resets the counter.
There is a low chance that instead of increasing the counter once a player may critically succeed, incrementing the counter twice. This system ensures that there is no ability to "fail" in the augmenting progression but there is still a chance to do better than the base.
In this new system all items are tradeable!
The Research System, also called 'Scrapping' internally, gives the player a new timed Enchanting action. It costs the same to Research as to Augment and results in the same amount of experience, but instead of upgrading items it breaks them down.
Players will research existing items with successful attempts resulting in the relevant affix dust and unsuccessful attempts resulting in the relevant item scraps. The amount of dust and scrap generated scales with the augmentation level of the item used, so high augmentation items may result in dozens, if not hundreds, of their rarity of dust before turning into several pieces of scrap.
This new system allows players to generate new materials through recycling old and unused equipment as well as accumulate a ton of experience in the process.
Oh, by the way, Ability Books/Scrolls/Tomes/Whatevers are researchable for a decent chunk of higher level dusts. Don't burn them!
Season 2 has no Soulbound status, Item Levels, or Item Experience. Every item is tradeable, go nuts on the market!
Yes, these are main game updates, not just the season changes!
All combat related stats (except offensive criticals) have been rescaled to always be at least 5% of the item's base strength. This means at +10 an item is 50% stronger, and at +20 an item is twice as strong as its base variant.
Shrines have been completely overhauled!
Shrines now have several altars of buffs that can be individually contributed to as well as introducing personal contribution goals.
Each altar focuses on a specific skill or category of skills as well as its own contribution goals. Each time a goal is reached, one of the enchantments is unlocked or upgraded in strength. Generally there are three enchantments per altar. Shrine duration now has its own contribution pool and goals; it must be donated to separately from the other altars to increase the length of ALL other altars. In order to benefit from these altars a player must meet a personal contribution goal. As of writing this post a player must contribute 1 million gold to unlock the first buff from each altar, 10 million gold to unlock the second buff, and 100 million gold to unlock all buffs. Contributing to any altar will raise a player's personal contribution.
Essentially, the shrine is now a set of 9 buffs that scale theoretically infinitely, limited only by how much gold the community wants to spend on them.
Ironmen can also contribute to shrines through donating materials rather than gold with altars asking for a specific set of items; as of now materials will count for 10x their vendor value.
Quests, Achievements, and Tutorials are making their entrance into Idlescape.
They can be advanced by accomplishing specific tasks and often reward the player with experience, items, quest points, achievements points, or access to new mechanics.
Quests are multi-step tasks to guide the player through content, such as having the player work through a specific tier of content, and often unlock subsequent quests and sets of achievements. Quests have been split into a storyline, combat quests, gathering quests, and processing quests.
Achievements are single-step tasks that focus on accomplishing one specific task a massive number of times.
Talents, also known as Mastery Talents depending on how long you have been around here, are a new progression system that generally starts after you max a skill.
There are roughly 100 talents as of writing this post; they are spread across all skills and vary greatly in their effects.
Some of the cheaper talents are minor effective level boosts, whereas the more expensive talents that require a much higher level to unlock come with new mechanics to help you specialize into your gameplay niche.
Affixes are FINALLY coming out globally and have undergone several reworks:
Smithing has gotten a rebalance; it has had more of its power moved into its tools/effective levels and its experience curve has been made flatter (nerfed) in the early/mid game. Refining has similarly been adjusted for these new rates and scaling.
Not everything has been included here since it is the culmination of several months of work, rework, and reworking the reworks. We will be around to answer questions you may have either in-game or on Discord!
This is a quick patchnote since I'm pushing this update while the server was on fire and rebooting-
The Season 2 Playtest is still public and underway, if you haven't checked it out yet feel free to give the new content a shot before it goes live! This remains the focus of our development time until it launches.
These are the remaining entries on our checklist, most of them are generally >70% completed and effectively playable; they are being worked on concurrently rather than sequentially, so when a few of them are completed then the rest will follow very shortly behind:
This last week we've been focusing on making lots of recipes a lot more sane in the new systems as well as allow much more granular control of resources used. For example, we're removing a few redundant resources and adding conversion recipes, such as the heavy variant resources in ranged crafting, or adding partial resources like breaking down gems or bars into fractional items that would be used in recipes instead. This way we can use something like 25% of a single gem instead of requiring a full gem for every attempt.
Other areas of progress are Talents! We've been working on designing some unique and powerful talents for y'all to use. Currently there are 60 planned talents so far with 37 of them implemented and in testing.
Here's a bunch of the talent names, you might be able to tell what they do from the names alone:
We're (Silent and Ice) currently working on revamping a lot of the "programmer UI" (redoing Nick's jank UI) and balancing a few potential positive feedback loops.
This week's live game update is a rather small one due to most of the focus continuing to be on the upcoming season and its reworks/overhauls. For the upcoming content it is still currently a WIP and in testing on the playtest server and may change depending on feedback we get or data we collect!
We've been working on the new augmenting/enchanting system these last couple weeks, here's a quick rundown of the main changes (still WIP, may be changed based on feedback):
Splitting augmenting into two conflicting paths has caused a lot of trouble and headaches for us and the players, and we've decided to strip out some of the chaff from both while keeping what we consider the good bits. All items will become tradeable like pre-refactor, but augmenting will be a lot less RNG-centric. Instead of a chance to destroy the item on a failed augment, each augmentation attempt adds to an augment counter that is specific to the item and once that counter passes a specific threshold the item will augment to the next level. In this system there is NO chance to fail, there is only a very small chance to critical aug, meaning that the augmentation counter increases by 2 instead of 1. The goal of these changes are to completely remove the potential "bad feeling" when augmenting and the potential loss of progression and help reduce variability due to RNG while acting as a sink for items and materials. Augmentation costs will also be overhauled. In most cases the augment attempt cost will be ~1-5% of the original crafting cost of the item; however, higher augmentation levels will require a copy of the base item to upgrade the item once the counter has reached the threshold.
Since affixes will be coming to the main gamemodes, we've had to reconsider a lot of how the economic aspect of affixes needs to look like and integrate the system into existing skills. For example, the simple "press button to salvage item" system is incredibly basic and just not good enough, so we've replaced it with a new "Item Research" system to complement the above augmenting changes. This will add a new "Research Queue" where the player will conduct experiments on items. Currently, when a player succeeds in the experiment the item is NOT consumed and produces affix dust as well as the current augmentation fail item (prismatic dust, infernal dust, etc.). When the experiment fails the item is consumed and a relevant item scrap is produced. This will become the primary source of experience in Enchanting as well as a significant item sink.
Idlescape is an idle game so the new systems had to focus more on the time than the material aspect; the primary resource consumed in these changes will be time rather than purely material, even if the new material sinks are another goal of the systems.
As it is now these changes will only be present on Season 2 when it releases; the old "Salvage" button system will be on main gamemodes as well as the Research system being disabled on them so that we can properly evaluate and balance the systems according to internal data and player feedback.
Quests have been slowly integrated into various systems and progression steps and will be able to unlock purchasable talents, unlock passive perks, unlock crafting recipes, unlock entire mechanics (do your tutorials!), and some more fun stuff! The Shrine Overhaul allows much stronger shrines at exponentially increasing costs. I hope y'all like gold sinks (and maybe material turn ins)! It should be worth it though since it is theoretically possible to unlock over 32 shrine milestones (global and personal), up from the 9 global milestones, every week!
Next major update progress is coming along nicely; however, everytime a major feature gets completed it becomes obvious that another major feature that works well with that one should probably also get fully implemented so that things don't feel half-baked. This has happened 4 times now! This latest feature creep is going forward with the enchanting rework we've been discussing for nearly a month at this point since there is a fair amount of overlap with it and affixes that smooth out the experience and relieve a lot of pain points in gameplay. Expect some dev-blog teasers when we get around to working on the UI!
We're currently in the polish and balance phase for the next major update! The next major update(s) will tentatively include: Affixes, Achievements, Season 2, Quests, Talents. Keep an eye on the dev-blog for more!
There's some interesting background stuff being worked on! It's not necessarily delaying any of the mentioned work from last week (quests/achievements/talents/affixes) but it's definitely going to need some playtesting. On the topic of playtesting, soon^tm?
Cheaper buff stacks so that the majority of buffs are viable to make
Quality slider replaced with a potion tier selection slider
Craft multiple potions instead of increasing quality to reduce inventory clutter
Reduced to one line of potions
Reduce buff ingredient drops
Increased the number of prepared ingredients used
Lower tier food (with less ingredient types) have more quality per slider thus more buff stacks
Slowed down by half, doubled experience to maintain experience rate
Faster blitzing
No more chance, replaced by level restrictions
Discontinue ladle and greater ladle
February 28, 2024! Leap day tomorrow!
A lot more Quests and Achievements work has been done, there are several completed progression questlines (augmenting tomes and crafting passive effect replacing the enchant), with some new ways to get rewards from quests also implemented (unlocking crafting recipes, unlocking talents). Quests, Achievements, Talents, and Affixes will probably come together in the next major update once we've parsed all the feedback we've received on affixes and hooked up the rest of the game to the new systems and tested them. Expect playtesting to recommence soon^tm!
Some bug fixes and oversight fixes:
Cooking has been reworked! There are now stages to cooking to spread out the skill and hopefully make it more intuitive and less jumbled.
This week is another light update focused on UI cleanup and improvements:
We (mostly Ice) have done another pass of the codebase, focused on UI, to clean it up and get the changed code up to standard. This has resulted in about 2,100 changed lines of code, so it's inevitable that something has snuck past our testing. The changes should make it easier to find and fix any new issues as well as give us a better ability to change the code in the future when we add/fix/tweak things.
There were issues with the technical stuff above, so it's actually delayed for now.
Work on the next major update has been in testing for the past week and some; the current iteration is mostly feature complete and now just needs balancing.
Silent and Ice have been very busy working on squashing bugs and implementing some fun new UI features for y'all this past week!
Bug Fixes:
User Interface Additions:
Misc:
We're currently in the design phase for the next content/balance pass that I mentioned previously (combat, primarily). So far we've landed on a decent chunk of new items to add as well as taking a look at old content to see where we can have them use the new systems so that instead of simply number getting bigger unique items may have more unique effects. Other reworks are being worked on as well, such as the elusive cooking rework that will tie into the new combat changes to make the skill more intuitive to interact with and a more valid way to interact with the overall economy.
Gathering and production affixes arrived on season 1 and season 1 Ironman! There are about 70 new affixes to play around with from simple stat boosts to adding (or re-adding) fun new mechanics.
The augmenting UI was completely rewritten. It should be a lot more intuitive to understand.
This update comes with complete rewrites of several of the skills internally to make sure they can support affixes. We have tested most scenarios for issues both locally and with playtesters but there are several hundred potential points of failure so it is inevitable that a couple may have slipped through.
~~There's so much in this update I physically cannot bring myself to listing it all. halp -Nick~~ I got you. np np -Ice
We're planning on doing another pass of general balance to the game with the next patch as well as introducing some more content where it's lacking, such as potentially new skilling sets, or fleshing out the combat styles some more so that there's more gear parity between styles since different styles have been getting upgrades/sidegrades at different rates.
December 19th, 2023
We're currently ironing out the remaining bugs on the private test server and expect things to be ready by next week! Since most of our focus is there this will be a relatively small update.
We've moved to the testing stage of the skilling affixes! Soon^tm!!
December 5th, 2023
Almost all the skilling affixes are in with all the relevant rewrites generally done. Testing + UI next woohoo
We're currently in the process of completely rewriting a lot of the skill modules to support the new hook setup to power skilling affixes as well as give us more flexibility with talent design. To give you an idea of how much spaghetti we're sifting through, we've currently straightening out the mining and foraging modules and each has gotten about 400 lines of redundant/duplicate code cleaned up. Once the modules are converted and tested, we can begin implementing the relevant affix effects; this will realistically take at least 2 or 3 weeks.
Silent has been very busy fixing our legacy and not-so-legacy UI in the Marketplace; you'll find that essentially everything has been improved upon. You can now see other people's buy offers as well as search through all food and potions in a single tab! It should be far more convenient to use now compared to before.
November 14th, 2023
Next week will have a significant rebalance of crafting experience included to make things more consistent across the board, generally; make sure to check the discord if you want more information on it.
We will be updating some of the software that we use to power the game services, this will result in 30-60 minutes of downtime when this update goes live and should hopefully resolve the random server crashes these last couple weeks.
We've begun work on the Quest, Achievement, and Mastery Talent frameworks. Stay tuned :)
November 7th, 2023
A new basic UI has been added to the sidebar to give you access to the user action queue where IS+ subscribers and those who have purchased the relevant platinum tokens can define a set of actions to do automatically with some conditions. Scroll to the bottom to see an example of the UI.
Example Action Queue UI:
Example loadout border coloring:
October 31st, 2023! Happy Halloween!
Happy second week of the season, hope you're having fun with affixes! There's not a huge list of technical fixes this week because of the several maintenance patches that went through last week and hopefully we won't need that many this week, but I'm not holding my breath.
The following buffs have been added for platinum purchase:
October 24th, 2023 hi!
Massive rework to some user defined action queue handling: if an action fails it will skip to the next one, so you can queue up an hour of mining then half an hour of smithing and it will either smith that whole half an hour or end prematurely if out of materials then return to mining, repeating as intended. This means that the queue will run on repeat until your offline timer is exceeded, or if you have the game open it will run infinitely. This should make it MUCH more useful.
Season 1 will feature two modes, the standard marketplace enabled mode and an ironman mode (not NGIM, sorry!) and will be focused around an accelerated XP progression and AFFIXES. There is a quick guide at the bottom of this post by Feylos if the quick FAQ doesn't answer everything.
Affixes are modifiers, like enchantments, that apply various stat boosts or have special chance based effects that can be put onto nearly any equipment item. As of the Season 1 launch these effects are focused purely on combat, though other affixes and types are planned! There are roughly 80 affixes varying from common, basic stat boosts to legendary effects like passive life steal or damage reflect.
You can get affixes in the Runecrafting tab by spending Runic Dust to generate a set of affixes and their strengths on an item, scaling based on the rarity of the item and the strength of the affix. Runic Dust can be generated slowly as a secondary drop from combat related activities, or specifically targeted to generate quickly through a gathering/processing gameplay loop. Combat will produce only about 10% of the dust that gathering/processing does, so get ready to engage in multiple skills!
You can reroll the strength of an affix, but if you want a completely new one you'll need an entirely new item. You can salvage the existing item to produce Gear Scraps which scale by rarity and are used in the rerolling process.
With the bulk of the work being focused on Season 1 lately, we will now be free to pursue more fixes and tweaks for the existing game content. That said, we will also be extended support for affixes and introducing new season specific mechanics or content as the season progresses, so keep an eye open for announcements!
While technically Season 1 is ready for live, our initial feedback on the systems have been that it needs some more polish and balancing before it goes out to the rest of the playerbase as a whole. We have some plans to address these issues so Season 1 will go live next Tuesday instead and will run until February 1st of next year and it will be the primary test bed for some potential polarizing features before we determine if they are something we want on the main leagues or should stay in seasons instead.
99% of this update is backend work or features that aren't accessible unless you're on a seasonal character.
Congratulations to our Pre-Season champs (awarded based on their placement when the timer in the UI ended, not on update launch)!
The winners can find their medals on their main league characters; message me (Nick) if you'd like them on another character as well!
By default you will not receive the Event Tokens from your seasonal character automatically, you have to execute the '/convertSeasonal CHARACTER_NAME' command, where CHARACTER_NAME is whatever your pre-season character is named. Whichever character you execute this command on will receive the tokens. Currently the exchange rate for event tokens is the sum of your total level * 15 and mastery level * 30.
Your seasonal character will be deleted on conversion to tokens, though we keep all the stats backed up so the hiscore may be restored at a later date.
If you delete the character through the character delete page you will lose out on your tokens.
The entire backend work for affixes is now live, though you cannot roll or find anything related to it until Season 1 launches.
Buy Orders are now available! You can create a buy order by going to an item's marketplace page and clicking the "BUY ORDER" button in the top left to pull up the UI. You can then specify how many of that item you want, the most you're willing to spend per item, as well as specify a target augmentation level, enchantment, and enchantment strength. The order will attempt to buy every listing under your specified max price, starting from cheapest and oldest first.
You can now define a specific action queue pattern if you're an IS+ subscriber or purchase the relevant tokens. By default IS+ members can specify up to 3 different actions in a 3 hours pattern. An example could be mining for an hour, foraging for an hour, and then fishing for an hour before repeating, though the actions and their lengths are entirely up to you. It will be as if you had started this action yourself, so relevant loadouts will be loaded automatically. The queue will only check the defined pattern when an action is completed, so if you put a particularly long action in there, like a several minute long smithing action, it will not be cancelled or interrupted to force another action and it will simply move to the next defined action after completing the smithing one.
To do this, use the /useractionqueue command. Try /help useractionqueue to get the options! We will add a UI for it eventually!
You cannot be in a group when using the action queue, though mercenaries will still function like normal.
There was a change to /fixinv to have it replace legacy items in stockpile with fresh copies, but that has since been determined to be a bad solve and will not be in live. Legacy collectors, rejoice!
Season 0, AKA "The Pre-Season", will be starting when this update goes live, it features heavily accelerated progression and a leaderboard. It will run for roughly 3 weeks or until Season 1 begins. Hope you're ready to min/max early and mid-game again, glhf!! Seasons will have their own unique rules, buffs, and starting equipment. Later on they may even feature unique mechanics, like Affixes! Currently, Season 0 features some global buffs, starting gear, a leaderboard, and a separate marketplace. When the season ends your seasonal character will be locked in; I will give out medals to those who manage to get into the top 3 normal and mastery total levels and all players will receive event tokens based on their participation in the season! In the future this will be extended to icons, titles, and cosmetics. Season 0 will specifically feature strength 20 Haste (80% reduction in action time), strength 20 Intuition (double xp), strength 11 Treasure Hunter (+33% drop chance), and strength 5 enlightnment (+5 essence), as well as 10k starting gold and heat, bronze daggers, a flimsy longbow, a driftwood staff, a bronze pickaxe, a bronze hatchet, and a novice tacklebox.
To create a seasonal character simply create a new character and select the Pre-Season as the gamemode. This character will NOT contribute to your max character or active character count, so it is essentially a free slot specifically for a seasonal character for as long as the season runs.
This weapon needed some love so I added two new unique abilities to it; Wrath, which deals up to double damage based on your missing health, and War, which grants your team a short-lived enrage buff. Yes, the same enrage buff that makes enemies super strong over time.
Pings got reworked and should work more as expected now
Chat links reworked
Your chat input is now stored even if the input field isn't rendered anymore. This means that you can switch away from the chat on mobile, without your input getting cleared.
Sidebar has a (hidden) entry point for script authors to inject their own buttons
Sidebar skills expose the player levels and experience
Almost this entire update was on the technical side. It included a lot of retooling of how we handle game data tables (items, loot tables, etc.) as well as rewriting a bunch of legacy UI components. If everything went well you should only notice some basic improvements to gameplay functionality with faster more comprehensive fixes and features coming soon^tm in the changed setups.
We will continue to overhaul things at a technical level, but our primary design/gameplay focus coming up next will be Season 1 and its unique mechanics. Currently the plan is to implement an Affixes system as well as look into how the food combat inventory functions and whether we want to change it.
Forgotten Platebody cosmetic added to Platinum Shop
Production and Combat Guides added
Adjustments to inventory tabbing; global rules are the only rules because non-global are buggy and just not worth it
This rewrite, by Boohi and IceFreez3r, modernizes a lot of the heavily outdated and legacy components that made of the nav drawer. This means the left-side bar interface is much better, including improvements to the loot log and UI customization like pinning the drawer or slimming it. There's some new info tooltips for some skills, with Feylos having written the guides!
Immediately on session start and then every hour afterwards the hiscores are checked and the top 20 players of each category (each skill, normal and mastery levels) are given unique icons. As long as you hold a top 20 spot you will retain that icon, but if you fall out of the top 20 it will be taken from you! We intend to expand this out to more achievements, such as dungeon clears, later on.
You can now do some basic profile customization for your /whois page. These are accessible through the /profile command; you can do /profile cosmetics to save your currently equipped items and cosmetics as your default inspection character as well as /profile icons add/wipe to add your currently selected chat icon as a highlighted icon to be displayed on your profile.
You can now purchase a new selection of profile icons for platinum that can be used like a standard chat icon- either in chat or on display on your /whois page.
Inventory Tabs are now available to help you organize your stockpile and vault. By default you will get 1 additional tab in both for a total of 4 tabs (default stockpile, tab 1 stockpile, default vault, tab 1 vault), but you can purchase Inventory Tab Tokens for 600 platinum that give an additional vault and stockpile tab. This includes an overall rewrite of the primary inventory UI, so it comes with some fun new features like quick filter buttons. I (Nick) set this up, so I will definitely need feedback on the UI/UX side of things, especially in the mobile realm. Currently this replacement UI only affect the vault/stockpile components.
I believe we've finally narrowed down the issue with offline progress seemingly being stuck; the actual data we send to client is only generated on your initial session start. Since new functionality has been added to reconnect you to a previous session this data may not be updated until the server itself restarts and forces your session to shutdown. It should now be fixed since it properly fetches the updated progress data!
We've added the ability for users to delete their own characters to free up slots/usernames
Pre-refactor players may remember when we used to release various tracked global stats, like dungeon runs or augmentation stats, and they are finally back in the game after a very long hiatus! This first iteration in post-refactor is mostly to test the waters and ensure that there's no major changes that need to happen before we can start tracking even more stats than before.
As always please give a ton of thanks to our blue names as they've helped development immensely with Chikenz, Kugan, and Dael helping with new and fancy technical mathy things on the backend and Ice rewriting our super janky legacy components in the frontend! They're the best!
In others news I am planning on adding a few new things to the Platinum shop, specifically some new player commissioned cosmetics, some purchasable icons, and once the /whois profile components are rewritten more options (both paid AND free) to setup your own custom profile! This will be the immediate next step that should have some parts ready to release next week, with the next big update being designed now being the Seasons update.
You can now fight against a DPS dummy in a special location to check your DPS using certain setups. It awards no XP or essence and it is modifiable with an ingame command. This feature will receive more features as requests are made for specific things! The max group size here is 5, so you can test your mercs or your group DPS here!
That's not a typo! We're introducing a change to the buyable plat buffs; if the buff goes longer than 24 hours it gets boosted to strength 3 and if it goes longer than a week it gets boosted to strength 4. These boosted strengths last until the buff fully expires, so once you get over a breakpoint it's boosted for the entire remaining duration!
Bringing combat to non-combat since 2021! ... but also non-combat to combat?
There are an almost innumerable number of minor fixes + QoL throughout the entire game. Seriously, there were like 200+ git commits done for this update. That's a lot.
This is a small update of what we've had ready for live and includes some technical changes to how some chat messages are handled as well as improvements to various mod tools.
The major change for this week is that playtest will go live to hopefully get the next big update ironed out for next week! See the discord for more details!
Once the server stops burning we will be focusing heavily on the next big update since it includes a fair amount of content, the systems that power that content, as well as many various technical improvements across the entire codebase.
You can login with either your account name or your verified email now.
The content and UI overhauls are still in progress and will be entering the testing stage soon! Keep an eye out for teasers posted in the #dev-blog channel.
We initially posted this in the dev-blog channel on discord, but here it is in case you missed it: Hello everyone! This is a quick pre-update blogpost to give y'all some insight into what's happening.
First off: We're aware that there are desync issues that uncommonly occur regarding items in various inventories or the action queue. Generally if the desync begins, it continues to break things until it is fixed. There are 5 main steps you should take to resolve these when it occurs-
There are a few bugs that we need reliable reproduction steps for:
The big content update that I mentioned earlier (non-combat content and balance pass) is still underway as well as the UI overhauls that Boohi showed a little of above this post.
What we're working on right now is getting our test server spinned up to specifically look into desync issues that so far have simply refused to be reproducible. We have a few ideas about what could be causing it as well as changes we can make to improve the robustness of the server in general which will reduce the more apparently random issues. If these general improvements don't prove to fix the issue entirely we've got some more technical changes that are currently being planned that ought to fix it, but these are very in-depth and complex changes that I can't readily put a timetable on yet.
This is a small update to get us back on the Tuesday schedule.
We're working on some technical cleanup to try and resolve some underlying issues that have cropped up every once and a while (desync primarily). With our fantastic new blue names this will hopefully go well!
There's a lot in this patch, I may have missed something compiling these changelogs. Feel free to shoot us a question for clarifications or explore in-game for answers!
Welcome to the Idlescape Chess Tournament, where chess enthusiasts of all skill levels are invited to participate in an exciting and friendly competition. Whether you’re a seasoned chess player or just starting out, this tournament is a great opportunity to test your skills, meet new people, and have fun. The tournament will be held on chess.com, with games played in a rapid format and scores tracked on Challonge. There are prizes for the top three places, so give it your best shot! Don’t miss out on this chance to be a part of the Idlescape Chess Tournament!
Fill out the form here and you are in!
Make sure to join the Discord channel #chess-tournament for the tournament. All announcements, schedules, planning of games will take place in there.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact Scrubbus#4589 or Boohi#4553 in Discord!
Tooltips received a new overhaul, with a more modern and compact outlook. No more overflowing tooltips!
You can enable and switch between different Tooltips (and comparison mode) in the Settings. The new Tooltips are disabled (for now) by default. Plan is to make them the default option after a while.
The Tooltips were previously part of Dael's userscripts, but now integrated to the official user interface. Thanks Dael!
Thanks a lot for all the feedback both in live server and the playtest one!
We will begin playtesting upcoming major features that will have a huge impact on the game's balance as well as playtest to iron out existing balance issues. Keep an eye out for this! This will be a closed and small scale playtest compared to the most recent TS Playtest, so restrictions may apply to those who wish to be involved.
/maxdifficulty [value]
and /startdifficulty [value]
The focus of next week's update will still be mainly on bugs and tackling the 'larger' bugs we have. With the groundwork done for fixing UI performance and styling issues, expect to more UI improvements in the next update.
We are also working on a new interface for selecting a Combat area to fight in. Nick already gave some teasers for it in the Discord #dev-blog channel. We are currently working on the UI-side of it.
Together with this update there will also be a small Easter Event. We have hidden 20 codes in various places They usually start with # in front of them, with a few exceptions. You will be rewarded with some Event Tokens for every valid code you enter. Happy hunting!
Due to some older bugs some of your inventories have been slightly janked up, hence why some of you have consistently run into particular issues that others may not have we have added an option to show currencies (gold, heat, essences) as items in your inventory. This allows you to vault them to either fix too many stacks making your inventories broken or simply to vault them since that has been a requested feature for a while. We have also enabled the /fixInventory (or /fixinv) command which should resolve these too many stacks issues by restacking all the items in your inventory. This is a last ditch resort to fixing your inventory and functions by finding any items with multiple stacks and moving all instances of them into your vault/stockpile. It does not move them back to their original inventory.
As part of our work on balancing out the new combat mechanics we decided to look into two major issues:
To resolve this we've landed on making it so that food can refill and players can select their starting difficulty. This should increase the demand and usefulness of elite scrolls further since they will boost starting difficulty as well as the demand for decent food as players who are pushing difficulties can continue to resupply as the difficulty of the zone increases. This brought up another issue- that of the healing enchantment. Currently it is an incredibly strong non-consumable heal that you simply buy/make once and stick on equipment to have forever. In many cases these passive heals completely invalidate consumable healing.
Other areas we're addressing in this update are the broken legacy values assigned to a few abilities. We've brought them more in line with all the other abilities as well as added a couple new variants that use different affinities.
A lot of combat related balance changes are coming with this update:
TL;DR = Difficulty is much less effective HP, some more accuracy and damage
Reduced monster HP scaling (new effective scaling is about half as strong as previously), new formula = base * ((1 + 0.1) ^ diff + 0.25 * diff)
Monster prot/res now scales at +1% per diff, which is basically nothing
Monster attack mastery now scales ~3x faster than other monster masteries (3.33% of monster attack additionally gets added as attack mastery)
Monster damage masteries (str/magic/range) now scale 2x faster than other monster masteries (2% of monster skills turn into masteries, i.e. at diff 5 a strength 100 enemy now has strength 100 + strength mastery 10)
Monster damage from gear (str/dex/int) now scales 2x faster than before (+20% per diff)
Monster agility now scales 1.5x faster than other monster defensives (better make acc scrolls!)
Each level of difficulty gives a 1% chance to double loot and a 0.1% chance to triple loot
Enrage timer is reduced by 7.5 seconds per difficulty, capped to 60 seconds as minimum enrage timer
Most of the fixes / additions made it into last week's update in the 0.11.9a-d versions, but here's the remaining set!
Hey everyon! I guess this is our first official patch note, if we don't count the ones posted on Discord and/or Reddit, so yay! In the future all patch notes, news, announcements etc will be posted here too.
This update also included a new Landing page for Idlescape. All feedback on it is highly appreciated! Also feel free to give suggesttions on what to add in there etc.
Now to the actual patch notes:
Some cooking changes are brewing!
The delay counts towards shards, so dangerous zones now generate as many shards as non-dangerous zones.
You will not receive combat XP from the simulated combat.