Twist of Fate - v0.2.2

The Goddess, Fate, has descended upon the shifting memories of the world of Don’t Die, Collect Loot. This major title update includes a new way to control your path through the world, a new fully-featured metaprogression system, revamped items and crafting, and more content!

As always, feedback on Discordis appreciated! I’m also looking for new Alpha testers, so stop by.

Goddess of Fate

Whenever you complete an event, the game will no longer automatically create a new stretch of random tiles for you to play through. Instead, the Goddess of Fate will send an avatar in the form of a statue to interact with. You’ll have to use the statue to proceed. When you do, you’ll be presented with a number of choices describing how you’d like the next area to be generated.

An example:

This new feature gives you a lot more control of what events you’ll see, what features will show up, and what area themes will be selected. There are also rare hidden effects you might find if you get lucky!

Itemization Changes

Items are unsurprisingly at the core of Don’t Die, Collect Loot. Unfortunately, they still weren’t as enjoyable as I was hoping for. This update attempts to address one of the core issues, the fact that you receive too many poor items, especially on long runs.

Starting in 0.2.2, item drops will be somewhat rarer. Depending on how you configure your runs, they’ll be somewhere between 2 and 3 times rarer in most cases. On the upside, they’ll spawn with more modifiers more frequently, and those modifiers will generally be more powerful! In addition, items now support up to 6 total modifiers instead of 4. You’ll rarely see one drop with 5 or 6 mods, but you can fix that with the Crafter.

Crafter Revamp

The Crafter is a crucial part of Don’t Die, Collect Loot. Players who have made it through Inferno difficulty know that she’s essential to creating items necessary to survive. However, despite her power, she was painfully boring. The old crafting process involved finding a good high level item, rerolling it via the Crafter until it had one good modifier, and then having her add a modifier, hoping it would be a good one. This process would then be repeated until a perfect 4-mod item was created.

In v0.2.2, this will no longer work. The Crafter’s abilities in the Nexus have been somewhat reduced. Most notably, you won’t be able to remove modifiers anymore. Additionally, resetting the Chaos value in the Nexus is no longer possible.

Don’t despair though, the Crafter still wants to help out! She’s decided to risk her life and enter the same memories you explore. Encountering her there will result in some extremely powerful crafting possibilities. For example:

In this image, the Crafter has opted to give the player 3 crafts:

• All Modifier Tiers +1

• Remove Prefix, Add Suffix

• Reset Chaos

You’ll also notice that all of these have a 100% chance of succeeding! The downside is that you’ll only be able to pick one, so choose wisely. The Crafter has an extremely powerful pool of modifiers available when you find her like this, and the ones I’ve showed you are on the low end of the power scale. There’s also rumors that she’s been experimenting with a forbidden crafting technique, but you’ll have to ask her about that.

Lastly, you can now craft on equipped items! No more juggling your equipment to make modifications.

Quest Progression System

Don’t Die, Collect Loot has some great progression systems, but a powerful between-run meta progression system that didn’t involve items or skills was missing. To fix that, I’ve added a new Quest system. v0.2.2 adds “General” quests, which serve as a rough roadmap for how to progress through the game. Future updates will include “Class” and “Memory” quests as well.

Completing a quest gives you a permanent reward. “General” quests focus on awarding permanent experience gain rates, along with permanent bonus skill points. Keep an eye on the quest board in town if you want to check in on how you’re progressing. Additionally, these quests are configured such that, in future Steam releases, they’ll also award achievements!

Partially revealed quest board:

Shopkeeper Event Improvement

The Shopkeeper event was generally considered to be a bummer to find. She offered items at a lower price, but the other events were far stronger. To help improve this, the Shopkeeper will now always sell a random unique item. Happy hunting!

Tooltip Display Formatting

Tooltips can get pretty dense in this game, and I’ve heard some players give feedback around them being difficult to read. Starting in v0.2.2, all tooltip text is passed through an auto-formatted that colorizes and bolds specific effects. For example, all “Life” modifiers will be red, regardless of whether they’re found on items, skills, upgrades, or anything else!

Endgame Content

Endgame content is still pretty far down the list, but one new endgame boss has made its way into the game a bit ahead of schedule. I’ll leave it to the more dedicated players to find it and try to survive!

Update Information

The main title screen now includes a quick summary of the current update, and the approximate amount of time until the next major update. Minor updates will still occur now and again, but if you’re interested in major gameplay-altering content, the “Next Update:” display will let you know when to expect it.

Other Patch Notes

• Fixed a bug where Artifacts didn’t apply to players
• Reduced the rate at which Shield Toss repeatedly damages enemies
• Reduced the rate at which Blade Toss repeatedly damages enemies
• Poison-tipped Blades now adds 1 Poison Damage instead of 2 Poison Damage
• Added one new endgame boss
• Astral Incursions on higher difficulties now have significantly more life
• Bosses on higher difficulties now have significantly more life
• Monsters on higher difficulties now have slightly higher resistances and base damage
• Fixed some bugs with skill tooltips
• Fixed some bugs with interacting with Shrines will using a controller
• Fixed a level generation bug involving the Crafter ingame event
• Removed the item tier display from implicits
• Fixed a bug where certain sources of unique items were rewarding uniques of a higher tier than intended
• Fixed a bug where Treasure Beetles ran from you at an extremely slow speed
• Added 5 new unique items
• Fixed some minor bugs