Hi everyone! As a reminder, the Discord community for this game can be found here: https://discord.gg/m6hp2ZVV6R

As Don't Die, Collect Loot has evolved, so has player power, agency, loot, and the ability to scale to the moon once you get the hang of it. Creative players have found ways to push the game to limits I never thought possible. Honestly, it's humbling to hear that people are enjoying the game to this degree, I honestly never expected it! 

The following patch notes are aimed at making the game more interesting at all levels of play, and providing more challenges for people who are really trying to push ridiculous builds and characters.

As always, this is an alpha, so there will be bugs and scaling issues. More importantly though, if this is or isn't fun, I'd really love to hear from you, so let me know!

Without further ado:

Difficulty and Scaling

Prior to this patch, a run in Don't Die, Collect Loot scaled infinitely, or at least until one particularly enterprising player managed to hit the max integer value on experience scaling (oops).  This starts to cause problems down the line, and results in endless runs that eventually become boring. To that end, the following changes have been made:

• Three difficulty levels, Normal, Spicy, and Inferno have been added to the game
• To unlock the next difficulty, defeat a boss in the Forest on the previous one. For example, to unlock Spicy, beat the Treant on Normal. Once the run ends, you'll get a notification about the difficulty you've unlocked
• Note that as more areas and bosses get added, these unlock criteria will change
• It's very unlikely you'll be ready to tackle the next difficulty, especially the hop from Spicy to Inferno, right away
• It is now possible to end the run every time you beat a boss. Instead of taking the penalty upgrade, pick up the treasure chest marked "exit". Beware, picking the penalty upgrade immediately despawns the chest, and you won't get a chance until you kill the next boss in the cycle!
  • The "exit" chest drops a lot of high quality loot, and may even drop uniques depending on how your run went!
• Monsters and the player now have a level cap per difficulty. This does mean that loot will quality will stop growing once you hit the level cap
  • Normal: 25
  • Spicy: 50
  • Inferno: 99
  • Note that in this build, it's possible to push beyond the level cap, but it's a bit of a grind. Curious on feedback about this one!
• The starting monster level is higher on higher difficulties
• The starting monster tier (for example, seeing an Ice Slime instead of a Green Slime) is higher on higher difficulties
  • Inferno only spawns the maximum monster tier, good luck!
• Player resistances are penalized on some difficulties
• Spicy: -20%
• Inferno: -50%
• Monsters may spawn additional modifiers on higher difficulties
• Player experience growth is reduced on higher difficulties
• The base item quality is substantially improved on higher difficulties
• For example, a level 5 Green Slime will drop an item of level 5 on Normal, but an item of level 10 on Spicy
• The odds of rolling additional modifiers on loot increases on higher difficulties too!
• Better uniques unlock on higher difficulties. Can you collect them all?
• Note that the ingame level select menu also describes what these difficulties do, in case you forget

Other Content

• Added more secrets to discover

Bug Fixes

• The Shield Toss ability will no longer bounce erroneously on the Treant while it's invincible
• The Shield Toss ability should behave more reliably in general
• Cleaned up some performance issues with combat text (hopefully)
• Fixed a bug where the character would continue to slide while dying
• Fixed an issue where some torches would not emit light
• Fixed the layering of some NPC text
• Fixed the Crafter unlock sprite
• The special cursed event should no longer spawn a weather effect