Greetings East Side High!

We know it has been a while since our last patch. The team at Undaunted Games has been hard at work porting Last Year over to Unreal Engine 5 and refactoring the source code to allow for more consistent updates, hence our silence during this period. If you join our Discord, you can keep up with the progress we have shared with our community so far! We want Last Year to be better than it's ever been but, it takes a lot of time and work. We're hoping that we can get the update finished and pushed by the end of the year. In the mean time, our community has brought some issues to our attention that required an imminent patch. This patch hopes to address those issues.

Before we proceed we have removed The Sawmill from the random map pool, therefore making it impossible to select the map now until further notice. We desperately tried fixing the map to no avail, thus the map will have to return sometime after our engine update.

With Patch 1.0.23, we're introducing:

1) MATCHMAKING CHECK: There is now a matchmaking check from this patch moving forwards. You can no longer matchmake with other players that are playing on an older version of the game.
This was implemented to avoid cheaters using older builds of the game to ruin matches for other players.

2) FIEND COLLISION: After a classmate is freed from a grab ability, they will lose collision with the Fiend for 3 seconds. This was done to crackdown on methods that abused trapping the classmates in corners.

3) DOOR COLLISION: Tired of those pesky doors slapping you in the face when running away from the fiend? Fear the doors no more as when doors open, they will have no collision now! We hope this will reduce frustration of deaths not caused by individual fault.

4) OBJECTIVE RESET DISTANCE: The objective will now begin de-spawning if all classmates are 10 meters away.

We have also taken this opportunity to do some balance adjustments following our last patch. We were overall happy with the reception from the community however, with this new patch we wanted to experiment further. Unfortunately, we still couldn't address some larger issues with the balance such as a Strangler rework or a Deep Wounds nerf. Those will have to wait until after our engine update with proper reworks. Nonetheless we hope you will enjoy the changes and please remember to leave us feedback on our Discord!

Map Changes:
- The Mine's crank completion time has been reduced from 50 seconds to 40 seconds
- Cryptids will spawn in batches of 3 instead of 5 on The Mine

Classmate Changes:
- Gas Traps no longer reverses the affected classmate's controls
- Classmates speed when afflicted by Gas Traps has been changed from 0.5 to 0.65
- Assault Pipe damage has been decreased from 20 to 15
- Assault's Helmet scrap cost reduced from 12 to 10
- Assault's Molotov damage against Fiend reduced from 1.7 damage per 0.1 seconds to 1.2 damage per 0.1 seconds
- Assault's Molotov damage against classmates reduced from 0.8 damage per 0.1 seconds to 0.5 damage per 0.1 seconds
- Medic's Gas Mask scrap cost reduced from 12 to 10
- Medic’s Pipebomb scrap cost reduced from 22 to 18
- Scout's Tracker recharge increased from 20 to 25

Fiend Changes:
- Strangler chokehold reduced from 5 seconds to 3 seconds
- Giant's sprint speed has been increased to Slasher's base walking speed

When working on the balance, we took the opportunity to fix some small bugs with Fiend and Classmate:
- Fixed an issue where Classmates were forced off of the crank after 25 seconds on The Mine
- Fixed an issue where Strangler pulled you indefinitely when on a different elevation from the Classmate

Thank you all for your continued support and patience for the engine update. We’re all working very hard to bring you the best Last Year experience possible. We hope to share more exciting information with you soon!

See you in the Nightmare!