Big news from Guild Headquarters has arrived: the largest content update yet is on the horizon, and is packed with loads of new content, adjustments, fixes and so much more!
The most common desire from players and frankly from us devs too is to increase run variety and replayability. For many players, runs eventually start to feel quite samey, which is natural considering the limited breadth of content and loadout options. The main goal of this upcoming update is to increase replayability and run variety way beyond what you’ve seen so far.
Major Changes:
- New gadgets and supplements
- New game mode: Guild Assignments
- New loadout menu
- Prestige mode overhaul
- New world & monsters
- Balancing and improvements on existing content
New gadgets and supplements
Armed to the teeth - with new gadgets & supplements
Gadgets are a key ingredient in changing how your run plays out. Therefore, we really wanted to offer more gadget variety, but also make them more powerful and meaningful. The goal was always for the run to feel different after getting a new gadget, and that wasn’t true for each one.
We're thrilled to introduce a whole bunch of new gadgets to the game, roughly doubling the amount you can find. Some will help you in combat, some with mining, and some with resource transportation. You’ll now have multiple gadget options for each slot, including the lift and spire slots. This variety should make for more interesting decisions!
The old gadgets also got some big improvements to freshen them up.
Can’t take everything with you? No problem with the all new resource packer gadget
In addition to the new gadgets, you can uncover during runs, we have also added a new primary gadget to accompany the selection of Orchard, Repellent and Shield: the Drone Yard. It is focused on helping you transport resources, filling a very different roll than the other primary gadgets. And of course it comes with its own battle abilities!
Choose your supplement wisely
We are also adding supplements to each gadget. You might recall dome supplements, which offered upgrades like “Scrap Repair” or “Resurrection”. To get a supplement upgrade, you had to find its chamber in the mine and bring it up to the dome, similar to the gadgets themselves.
Each gadget will now have a really powerful supplement upgrade, like removing the lift’s orbs and enabling it to transport all resources at once
As the old gadgets get a facelift, you may notice some changes to their upgrade trees. Some previous upgrade options have been removed and converted to supplements. This enables them to be even more powerful! For example, transporting resources with the Teleporter was cool, but had to be balanced so that ability didn’t completely negate the poor old Lift. But now, as a supplement, it can be made much more powerful! But that power comes with a tradeoff: there are limited supplements in the mines. Choose which gadget to supplement carefully!
New game mode: Guild Assignments
The new uild assignment mode gives you very specific conditions for a challenging run
Right now, you can build your own self-imposed challenge runs in many different ways. While this is fun for some players, we understand it is not for everyone.
Many prefer proving their skills in challenging, pre-made setups. For these players, we added a new game mode called “Guild Assignment”. You can now tackle missions with special conditions! For example, landing on a planet that only has flying monsters, or mining in a world that has a very large area with soft rock and rare-but-large resource deposits.
For us this is also exciting because it lets you utilize the gadgets to their fullest. For example, if the resource deposits are rather sparse, you really have to make the most out of the gadgets that help you locate resources to win the run!
New loadout menu
Now you can test your dome of choice before the run
You might not have noticed, but the current loadout screen was never intended to make it to release. The original goal was to have more of a central hub where you are already in control of a keeper, and can physically visit different locations to pick your loadout. This wasn’t feasible before release, as there were many more important things to work on.
Early concept for how a hub world in dome keeper could have looked
We are now taking one step toward this. The current loadout was already at its limits in terms of flexibility when picking game modes. The new loadout gives us full flexibility and is also more playful. For Guild Assignments to have the mission constraints already visible in the loadout, this new screen was necessary.
This is also the first glimpse of how multiplayer will work. The new loadout supports multiple players choosing their individual loadouts, but also allows them to share the dome.
Prestige mode overhaul
The updated mode selection at the game menu, including the revamped Prestige mode
After playing Prestige extensively, I decided to revise the current modes in close coordination with our Prestige player community on Discord. If you’d like to chat to other Prestige players, share strategies or give feedback that will directly influence how Prestige works in the future, join our Discord Server.
These were the main concerns the community and I had with the current Prestige variants:
- Endless mode runs are too long, with the top runs going for up to 10 hours
- Fixed Cobalt mode—while different in theory—ended up with the same strategies as Endless mode, where players wante to upgrade as fast as possible, and then only cared about avoiding damage as much as possible.
We will continue to tweak Prestige mode as the seasons progress, so things are still flexible if you want to give feedback. Here are the current changes:
- removed Fixed Cobalt
- added Provocation Prestige Variant:
- changed the difficulty curve so that the ceiling of what you can handle in endless is reached earlier, preventing players from getting to wave 90+ (this is also connected to tesla dome being very strong, but that’s a separate thing…)
Your score multiplier is falling with each cycle and can only be raised by increasing the wave strength. You start with 100 base per wave and can only raise it a bit. If your multiplier reaches negative values, the game is over. The idea is to challenge you to play on the edge of what you can handle monster-wise.
New world & monsters
A terrifying Tormentor attacking a poor keeper inside his dome
You can never meet enough interesting monsters, so we’ll introduce a whole bunch of new ones together with a new world to mine! Our goal is to add a bit more variety to your strategies, but also pose new challenges in the endgame. We are eager to hear your feedback on them!
Balancing existing content
Balancing Dome Keeper is not easy, because every player is different. Some play Prestige for hundreds of hours and push every piece of content to its limits (and way beyond what I can do). Some players prefer a more relaxing experience, and do runs while watching something on a second screen. There are many more types of Dome Keeper players, and that is something we really love - that this little game can be enjoyed by so many.
Tesladome has been hitting the gym!
Thanks to all of your feedback, we have made a lot of balance changes to already existing content. The Tesla dome in particular needed some changes. While being the most powerful dome by far (see the Prestige high scores if you don’t believe me!) it also somehow simultaneously feels quite weak to play. With the upcoming update, this will change.
The Laser dome will also see some changes. The double laser upgrade will instead be a supplement option, showing how much impact the supplements can have. This allows us to buff the damage of the laser, so that it will be stronger overall.
With the wealth of changes and new content, the gameplay balance may be off in some areas after the update. As usual we’ll keep our eyes and ears peeled and compile your feedback into a balancing patch afterwards. So if you notice something doesn’t feel quite right, fret not! Just let us know in the forums or on Discord.
Playtest
We are running playtests on our Discord, which is the best place to give feedback. I’m reading everything that is shared there, and carefully think about it. If you want an early look or help make the new things even better, come to the playtest section!
Engine upgrade
We also ported Dome Keeper from Godot 3 to Godot 4. This was a massive amount of work and should improve a lot of things in the game. One thing I’m most excited for is the support for right-to-left type, which means Dome can now properly support Arabic. The translation for Dome Keeper is primarily done on Crowdin, with a mix of paid and community translators. The Arabic translation community is the biggest and has put in so much effort over the past year to keep Dome 100% translated, even though the game didn’t support it yet!
Thank you everyone who helps to translate Dome, especially for languages with fewer speakers. If you want to participate,or improve some iffy translations you’ve spotted, please
join Dome Keeper on Crowdin.
Crowdin dashboard overview: community translations
The engine port—together with some very big refactors of the code base (multiplayer preparation, yay!)—also means that every mod will probably break. If you are a mod developer, please join our Discord - we’ll do our best to help you port the mod. We know all the changes to the codebase and engine, so we can really speed up the process.
That’s it!
We are really excited to finally share this huge, huge update with you. Some of you might remember that, once upon a time, we had updates like “Springloaded” that added 3 new gadgets, or the “Hard Pressed” update adding two new monsters and a world. This update is gonna be much bigger than those two combined, and will very much change how you think about strategies and loadouts for your runs.
We’ll take some more time to balance it all and make it very stable. You can expect the update to go live in early Summer.
Follow our Twitter and join our Discord to stay up to date with all things Dome Keeper. Thank you for all your support and kind words, but also the critical words as well. It really means so much for us to be able to continue making this game!
Best Wishes,
René
