Content Drop: Assault Rifle and More!

Hello again! We've got a big content drop for you all!

First off, we've got a new chassis: The assault rifle!

The assault rifle deals considerably less damage than the pistol, but it has a high rate of fire, a short reload time, and a very large clip! This is an easy-to-use combo weapon that goes well with a wide variety of augments. In the full game, this will be the first weapon you unlock, and it's meant to be the "old reliable" of the chassis options. Its high fire speed lets you take augments that reduce your rate of fire without it getting too low, and its ammo clip goes very well with certain early-game augment options...

Speaking of augment options, we put in another two this time, bringing up up to a full four augment options per slot! The first is the Tech Module:

The tech module's big gimmick is the containment field it sets up around you. Bullets bounce back and forth inside the containment field, potentially hitting the same enemy multiple times! If taken with the right gun setup, the inside of the containment field becomes a ball of death that destroys anything that enters it. Taken with the wrong gun setup, and it won't do anything more than reduce your range...

The other augment we're releasing today is the Energetically Dissuasive barrel!

This is a strange barrel in that it doesn't affect your damage very much. Instead, it punishes enemies that dare to touch you with an energy blast and dozens of lightning bolts. This barrel can deal a ton of damage... but only when you get hit! A build built around this barrel can be very effective if you've got the HP regeneration to sustain it, but giving up the opportunity to get a hellfire or helix barrel is a big opportunity cost...

We'll be slowing down our release schedule for a while as we refill our buffer. We'll still be dropping something new every week, but don't expect for it to be as big as these recent drops!

We've also been working on less obvious stuff for a while that'll make the game a lot better in smaller ways. For instance, we're changing the physics system around the way that players and enemies move to make it more smooth, more consistent, and more intuitive. (No more tiny winged snakes pushing giant eyeball rock monsters!) Next week, our star programmer, Kmess, will explain a little more about that. On *my* side, I've been making a tool that'll simulate thousands upon thousands of random gun builds and calculate their expected damage per second so I can get a better idea of what augments work well with other augments to check for broken combinations... or augments that are under-performing. This tool is directly responsible for the buffs you're seeing in the patch notes today, and I'm excited to see what else it reveals!

And with that segue, I present to you the patch notes!

New Content:

• Tech Module Added!
  • Tier 1: Bullet Optimization:
    • Bullet Penetrations increased by x2
    • Rate of Fire reduced by x0.55
  • Tier 2: Containment Field:
    • Increases Bullet Penetrations by x1.5
    • Increases Bullet Lifetime by x1.67
    • Decreases Bullet Damage by x0.92
    • Creates a containment field around you that scales with vision range. This containment field bounces bullets back towards you, possibly damaging enemies that were already affected by that bullet previously.
  • Tier 3 Option 1: Bidirectional Attracter:
    • Increases Bullet Penetrations by x1.33
    • Increases Rate of Fire by x1.11
    • Increases Bullet Lifetime by x1.4
    • Enemies inside of your containment field are slowed by 25%.
    • Enemies outside of your containment field are sped up by the same amount.
  • Tier 3 Option 2: Enhanced Vulnerability:
    • Increases Critical Hit Chance by +30%.
    • Increases Critical Hit Damage by +30%.
• Electrically Dissuasive Barrel Added!
  • Tier 1: Energetically Dissuasive Barrel:
    • When enemies touch you, they trigger a massive damaging shockwave dealing 8% Ability Damage in a large radius around you.
  • Tier 2: Electrically Dissuasive Barrel:
    • All enemies hit by this shockwave spawn a lightning bolt. This lightning bolt bounces to 2 other targets, dealing 50% of the previous target's damage each bounce. Each lightning bolt can bounce to a given enemy once, but an enemy can be hit by multiple lightning bolts.
  • Tier 3 Option 1: Mixed Message Barrel:
    • Increases Tesla Bounces by 1.
    • Increases Rate of Fire by x1.16.
    • Increases Bullet Damage by x1.16.
    • Bullet knockback is reversed, bringing enemies towards you instead of away from you.
  • Tier 3 Option 2: Orbital Dissuasion Barrel:
    • Decreases damage by x0.83.
    • Decreases Rate of Fire by x0.83.
    • Firing a bullet also fires a *second* bullet that orbits around you for a while, striking any enemy it hits.
• Assault Rifle added!
  • 9 base damage, decreasing to 5 at max range.
  • 6 rounds per second
  • 20 rounds in Magazine
  • 0.85 second base reload time
  • 67.5 foot range
  • Difficulty: Less Challenging than Pistol.
  • Cost: 30 red research, 25 credits.

Bug Fixes:

• When you lose access to the scanning foregrip (because you put the gun down or your drone with the foregrip flies away) the health bars now correctly disappear.
• The Tier 3 scanning foregrip will not cause your inner vision radius view marker to pulse.
• Livingwood Stock now called Livingwood Stock instead of "Fixme".

Balance Changes:

• Overkill Harness damage bonus boosted to .35% per hit point instead of 3% per hit point.
• Terra Cannon Mount's damage bonus boosted from x1.4 to a higher x1.4 that rounds down instead of up.
• Berserker's Harness damage from missing HP doubled from .5% per missing HP to 1% per missing HP.
• Fire speed reduction removed from both Terra Cannon Mount and Berserker's Harness. (This was unintentional.)

Cosmetic Changes:

• Many Augments look different now in an attempt to make the guns look more like guns and less like spaceships or boats.
• The weapon rack is a lot bigger. One day, hopefully soon, you'll be able to store multiple guns on it!