Hello Keepers,
after a good month of open beta we are very excited to share our newest content update with you! It is by far the largest update we ever made.
As with all the updates before, we ran playtests via our Discord. Only thanks to your feedback and suggestions Dome Keeper could become the game it is now. This is not an empty phrase, but the honest truth. I can see it in every playtest: the game comes out of it way better than it went into the playtest. Thank you so much for that, we are very grateful! As developers, nothing brings us more joy than seeing you get excited about the game and having fun with it.
tl;dr - what’s new?
- New game mode: Guild Assignments
- New primary gadget: Droneyard
- 11 new gadgets
- Supplement upgrades for weapons and gadgets
- Prestige mode overhaul
- New world and 5 monsters
- thorough balancing and reworks on existing content
- New loadout menu in preparation of multiplayer
Important Notes
- There are some changes in Godot4 that fundamentally break the way mods where developed in the previous versions of the game. To avoid crashes caused by these changes we have decided to temporarily disable mods for A Keepers Duty. We've been talking with the great people over at the Godot Foundation who are actively looking into this matter. We look forward to reenabling mods as soon as it is safe. For the veteran modders who whish to charter these unstable territories: You can re-activate mods by adding the "--enable-mods" launch option.
- we are keeping the old version around on a branch called “legacy-godot3”. If you have serious technical trouble with this update, please let us know. You can keep playing on the old branch until we can fix it.
- In order to integrate the new systems and balance the game in a good way, we needed to make some changes to existing systems and upgrades. You’ll see many new upgrades for gadgets and weapons, but also some that were removed. Some existing upgrades also got transformed into supplements, usually with a big buff.
- The loadout screen needed to be changed as well, to support all the new features and also multiplayer down the line. We understand that not everyone will like everything but please understand we are trying our best to improve the game, and this sometimes also means changing something you may have liked.
You can find a detailed Changelog below. It was too large to translate it into all languages, I am very sorry for that!
What’s the goal of this update?
One of the most common wishes for Dome Keeper is more run variety and bigger replayability. We very much agree with that! So far we concentrated our effort on offering more options in your loadout by adding the assessor, artillery dome and tesla dome, among many smaller content patches.
Finally it is time to really double down on what options you get during your run. The purpose of this update is that you can think about many more strategies, try different builds, face new challenges and generally get much more replayability out of the game.
For that we really went beyond in new things to play with!
The new content?
Guild Assignments
Up until now, you could build your own self-imposed challenge runs in many different ways. While this is fun for some players, it is not for everyone and also limited in what is possible.
To pose new and interesting challenges, we added a new game mode called “Guild Assignment”. In that mode you pick an assignment with some special conditions and goals. They are designed to be an interesting break from the usual gameplay, but also to pose a challenge in finding a good build for that situation.
For example, landing on a planet that only has monsters shooting projectiles should make you think different about your defense. Mining in a world that has a very large area with soft rock and rare-but-large resource deposits will challenge how you actually find these resources. And a world with inverse gravity inside the mine is simply fun.
Each assignment comes in a regular difficulty and a challenge difficulty. We are curious to see you experiment with different builds to be able to beat the challenge mode.
You are not finishing the assignments only for the fun of it though. With each assignment, you can earn two Keeper’s Guild Badges, one for the regular mode and one for the challenge mode. You can spend the earned badges on some permanent rewards, like always being offered three instead of two gadgets, being able to reroll gadget offers, starting each run with some hud elements or additional post run statistics.
These rewards apply to every game mode, including prestige and relic hunt.
New Gadgets and 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.
Armed to the teeth - with new gadgets & supplements.
Chief among the new gadgets is the new primary gadget, the “Droneyard”. It supplies transport drones to carry resources from the mine into the dome, relieving you from that laborious task. For combat it fields two varieties of combat drones. The battle drones form a grid on around the dome and fire projectiles at monsters. The parasitic drones on the other hand infect monsters, slowing them and making them more susceptible to damage.
Tired of carrying resources? The transport drones got your back.So far you had the choice of 11 gadgets that you could find during a run. With this update, we are bringing this up to 22 gadgets!
They are all quite different - from a buzz saw making quick work of melee monsters attacking your domes, over the resource packer which bundles up resources into easily carryable packages, to the underground station that lets you access your domes battle mode from deep within the mine.
A few gadgets so far were no-brainers, like lift and spire, simply because they were the only gadget that could go into the given slot. This is different now, with each slot having the choice of at least 3 gadgets, making it an actual choice.
The old gadgets also got quite some love. The probe has a new path where it can reveal rock permanently. Super useful to remember which parts you already scanned.
Blast mining received a big buff, a new stage and a big improvement to impact detonation. The latter will now direct the explosion into the impact direction, making it possible to much more strategically remove iron clusters. Before, you usually wanted to dig into the cluster a bit so you could trigger the bomb in the center of the cluster. This was not very efficient though.
Lastly, each gadget comes with a supplement upgrade. For many old gadgets, this means that an existing upgrade is not inside the tech tree anymore, but you can get it for free once you retrieve a supplement from the mine. Supplements are supposed to be very strong upgrades that meaningfully change the dynamic of a gadget, either in powerlevel or in usage.
A great example for this is the teleporter. So far, you could unlock an upgrade so it would teleport resources, slowly one by one. This was useful but ultimately quite limited in how strong it could be, because otherwise the lift would be obsolete. With the supplements, things change, because if you are getting a supplement upgrade for the teleporter, it means not getting the supplement upgrade for the weapon (yet). This means the resource teleportation can go much faster, being overall more useful and having a higher impact on your run.
Before and after of the resource teleportation.
Weapon supplements
Same as the gadgets, the dome weapons also each got a supplement upgrade. For most domes it is not a completely new upgrade, but a rework of something existing.
The laser dome has double laser as a supplement. This means you can’t buy it, but also that you can get it much earlier for no iron cost. In addition, the laser dome got a new laser strength upgrade.
The sword dome got a big buff for long stab, being able to speed up the stab and keep stabbing monster for much longer. The supplement is about mounting the stab bomb, which can now also be done with Javelin.
A lot of monster stabbing going on here.Tesla overall was not in a great position. It felt too weak in most cases but at the same time was the strongest dome - just check the leaderboard for endless mode. No competition.
To fix that, perfect timing became a supplement. This means the base shots can be stronger, as they would have been too strong if you can just buy perfect timing. That makes the tesla dome feel stronger from the get go, while the buffs to the other domes should make them more competitive.
Finally, the artillery dome got a supplement that stuns close monsters whenever you fire a mortar shot. This helps a lot reduce the weakness of the artillery dome, where it might get a lot of damage once melee monsters reached it.
Prestige mode overhaul
The revamped Prestige mode loadout.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.
- The last part of a Countdown run did not feel very engaging, because you’d get only a tiny amount of points compared to what you already had.
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+
- Countdown now ends simply after 20 cycles, even if your multiplier has not reached 0 yet. This way you don’t have to wait through the least impactful part of the run.
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 and 5 monsters
We added a new world to spice things up visually, but also make room for a new setup of which monsters can spawn in which world.
Striders be striding.The 5 new monsters will pose some new challenges too. A few of them are a bit special and worth talking about a bit more.
Here we have the bloater. If not shot at, it will simply vanish after some time. If it received enough damage, it will eventually burst, releasing a bunch of walkers.
Then we got the breeder, continuously spawning new ticks. After it receives a bunch of damage, it will harden itself and only take a fraction of the usual damage. It comes out of its hardened state after a short while.
Lastly, we got the tormentor. By far the monster with the highest damage potential in the game. It’s a monster that sacrifices its physical form to shoot an incredibly strong laser. Timing is key here: when the tormentor transforms, it also loses most of its health, which is quite high initially. Then you only have a few seconds to dispatch it before it fires its laser, which can take down any dome in seconds.
Engine Port
We upgraded Dome from Godot 3 to Godot 4. It might not sound too bad, but it was a massive undertaking. We did this mostly for a few reasons:
- make console ports easier
- make multiplayer easier
- future proof the project. Godot 4 is just much better to work with.
- Support for right-to-left languages, i.e. arabic. The community on crowdin already translated arabic, and we are excited that they can finally make use of their hard work.
There will still be a few issues related to the port. For one, we expect that all mods broke and need to be updated. This is in part because of the engine upgrade and in part because we did massive refactorings in the codebase in preparation of multiplayer.
You might see performance issues, rendering bugs or new crashes. Please let us know, we want to fix that stuff :)
New Map Generation
With the engine upgrade, we also had the opportunity to take another look at map generation. We overhauled the system and now can generate much more interesting maps. Before, every map was mostly blob shaped, with few interesting structures. In the new generation, we can get much more unique shapes, making the runs more interesting and less predictable.
Comparing old and new maps.
The new maze maps are wild!In addition to that, you can now find natural caves in the mine, breaking some of the monotony of mining.
Timelapse
It’s only something small, but something we find really fun: timelapses of runs. You can unlock this as a guild reward. It even exports as a gif.
Mhhh, satisfying!
What’s the status of multiplayer?
One big reason to make this update was to have a much better base game in anticipation of releasing multiplayer. It would be sad to finally have (much-requested) multiplayer implemented, but the replayability is just not where it could be.
We are excited to speak more about the multiplayer, but we don’t want to get your hopes up before we figured out some technical things. We’ll ramp up work on multiplayer in September and keep you updated.
We do know that we will need to take some time with multiplayer. It needs to be stable, fun and balanced. We’ll have a big playtest before it releases, probably for many weeks. Because of this, multiplayer will not be released this year. Our target right now is in the first half of next year. Please keep in mind that plans can change. If we think the multiplayer needs more time to be good, we’ll keep working on it longer. No one wants an unstable multiplayer, right?
Final Words
That’s it! We put a lot of effort into the update and are very thankful for all the feedback and bug reports we got so far. We will continue to listen to you, our community, to improve Dome where it’s needed.
There are hundreds of more, smaller improvements. Too many to list.
We hope you’ll have fun with the update. If you experience issues, let us know on Discord or on the Steam forums and we’ll do our best to fix it or help you.
Best Wishes,
René
Changelog v4.0 “A Keeper’s Duty”
New Content
Game Modes
- added Assignment game mode with 16 assignments. They come with special rules and are meant as a challenge to figure out a good strategy utilizing all the content. They also come with a challenge mode, if you really want to prove your skills. Completing assignments ears you badges from the Keeper's Guild.
- added Keeper's Guild reward shop, where you can spend earned badges on permanent benefits. Currently there are 12 rewards to unlock. Rewards are active across all game modes, not only in the new Assignment mode.
- added Keeper's Guild Badge rank, where you can see how mandy badges you and your friends earned
- replaced "Fixed Cobalt" prestige variant with "Provocation". Fixed Cobalt was barely played by anyone and the same strategy as used with endless mode was ideal there. This made the mode somewhat redundant. Instead, we added a variant where you can increase how strong the monster waves are in return for more points. That should be fun!
- implemented completely new loadout. This was necessary as the old loadout was not suited to support the new content plans, but more importantly it would not work with multiplayer. For multiplayer we needed something that supports multiple players making choices together. We can't reasonably support two different loadouts, so we opted for this one. Some things in it are better than before, but for controller or keyboard only it is probably a bit slower than the old loadout. Let us know if you encounter things that are irritating, feel unpolished or badly usable. It definitely can use some more improvements adn we closely listen to your feedback here. It will definitely stay, because we need it for multiplayer.
Supplements
- you might know supplements as these strong upgrades that you can get for your dome, that introduce new upgrades into the tree. We added a ton of them for this update. They can be found in supplement chambers after you unlock supplements with your guild badges. Generally they offer very strong upgrades. This is possible because they cannot be bought freely, but have to be weighed against each other.
- added 3 keeper supplements, one for each keeper and a shared one. The shared one is the one way teleporter from the cave. That cave was removed. It is much more interesting to have as a keeper supplement, especially since it is such a strong ability.
- added 4 weapon supplements, one for each weapon. Some are already existing upgrades retrofitted into supplements, but some are new ones.
- added 20 gadget supplements. Same as with weapons, some already existed. For each gadget we did what made the gadget as a whole more interesting. For example, the teleporter has its resource teleportation as a supplement now. This also means that it can be much stronger, teleporting resources much faster.
Gadgets
- added a total of 11 new gadgets. For reference, so far the game only had 11 gadgets! They are in no particular order: Remote Station, Drilling Rig, Furnace, Iron Worms, Mushroom Farm, Resource Packer, Suitblaster, Buzzsaw, Dome Armor, Shockwave, Rocket Launcer. They occupy different slots and help in different areas. They also finally do away with some gadget slots only having one option, like lift or spire, meaning there was no interesting decision to be had there.
- added a new primary gadget, the Drone Yard. It employs transport drones that help you bring back resources to the dome. For combat, it can use battle drones that fire projectiles at monsters, or parasitic drones that weaken monsters a lot.
- rework of all existing gadgets. For some gadgets the changes are tiny, for some gadgets the changes are very big. Blast Mining is much stronger and more useful now, with new upgrades and a rework of some existing upgrades. Same for probe, just as two examples.
Other
- added five new monsters, posing new challenges and extending the late game difficulty
- added a sixth world into the rotation for relic hunt and assignments. Worlds are a visual change, for variety only.
- added 3 new caves: Iron Tree Cave, Water Cave, Portal Cave.
- completely new map generation, more on that below
- we ported the game to a new engine version, in preparation of multiplayer and console ports. This comes with many benefits but also with some issues. The following things are related to this:
- support for right-to-left languages now, i.e. arabic
- keybinding should be sensical for non QWERTY keyboard now by default
- performance on some machines will be better, but will also be worse on others. We'll try our best to optimize when we learn there are issues, and find solutions to improve performance together.
- font colors are now using palette colors
Balance and Changes
Game Modes and Runs
- started season 6 of prestige
- changed difficulty curve of prestige, so that the games would not go quite as long and to compensate the new battle abilities
- Prestige Countdown will now end after 20 cycles always. This removes the last bit of the run that meant gaining very few points for a lot of effort.
- added timelapse feature to the game, where you can view your run as a minimap over time
- added detailed statistics that show you how many monsters per type you killed and what dealt damage and how much. We'll try to improve the differentiation of the damage sources a bit, right now it is a rough lense to look through.
- changed how long cycles are. They start out about 10s longer initially and will generally be longer early, but shorter in very late stages of the game.
- most gadgets keep working during combat now, so no lift stopping a cobalt delivery anymore. This is a big change, because suddenly it would be benefitial to stall waves, or to keep sitting in the station after a battle. Because of this, the countdown to the next wave will start even if you keep sitting in the station.
- if a battle takes too long at too low battle intensity, new monsters will spawn. This is to prevent stalling slightly, but it also makes sense in the world. 500 other monsters would not delay their attack only because there is a single flyer still fighting the dome.
- cobalt upgrade in prestige countdown now starts at a cost of 2 cobalt
- raised cheat detection values to absurd values. No more false positives because you are an insanely good player.
Map Generation
- maps will have much more interesting shapes now, instead of being always a similar blob
- biome sizes are balanced in size now, so that maps that are thin at the top do not have a huge disadvantage
- map sizes for prestige are balanced now. Before, the number of tiles in a map could vary a lot. Now the algorithm tries to bring it close to a given size, making it more consistent.
- totally new layout for maze maps that is crazy!
- the maps now have natural caves inside them, basically holes inside the rock
- the new map generation might take significantly longer than before. Let us know if it is a problem!
- rebalanced resource generation a bit
Domes and Weapons
- all upgrade costs have been reconsidered. Generally, late game upgrades will need a bit more iron.
- Sword Dome: 1000 hp -> 1200 hp
- Dome Supplement: Melee Damage Reduction 20% -> 25%
- Dome Supplement: Projectile Damage Reduction 20% -> 25%
- Dome Supplement: Electrified Surface 8 dps -> 10 dps, 20 dps -> 24 dps
- Dome Supplement: Thorough Combat Repair 300 hp -> 360 hp healed
- Dome Supplement: Dome Resurrection - instead of adding more hp to the maximum hp of the dome, it makes the dome invulnerable for 20s when triggered, or 30s after upgrading.
- Dome Supplement: Scrap Repair: 100 hp -> 75hp health reduction
- Laser: buffed laser damage and made it slightly slower
- Laser: added another stage to laser damage upgrades. Before maximum laser damage was 90 dps, now it is 180 dps.
- Laser: double laser is now a weapon supplement
- Sword: bomb stab is now a weapon supplement. This means you can also combine javelin with bomb stab.
- Sword: added another upgrade to long stab. In its subtree, it now also gets the ability to speed up on button press. It also can stab for much much longer, as it never retracts automatically after dealing some damage.
- Artillery: rotation speed 0.9 -> 1.0
- Artillery Monster Buster: buffed mortar damage and reduced time to reload
- Artillery Volatile Explosives: reduced time to reload
- Artillery: switched both rotation upgrades, so you can get the fast rotation earlier
- Artillery: added Deafening Blast supplement, which stuns all close monsters whenever you fire the mortar
- Tesla: removed perfect timing. This is now its weapon supplement.
- Tesla: buffed damage significantly from 30 -> 40, 45 -> 70, 60 -> 110, 80 -> 180. This is only possible due to removing perfect timing from the regular tree.
Keepers
- Engineer: Added power drill supplement, making drilling faster and enabling drilling through previously indestructible bedrock.
- Buffed Engineer drill strength: 6 -> 7, 14 -> 18, 34 -> 42, 62 -> 98, 240% -> 300%.
- Assessor: Added sphere supplement that destroys neighboring tile for every tile a sphere destroys.
- Slight increase in late stage iron cost for both keepers, slightly more increase for assessor
- Buffed Assessor repetable sphere damage: 240% -> 250%
- slightly buffed Assessor bundle duration: 25s -> 30s, 40s -> 45s
- rebalanced assessor battle abilities. Reflection is a bit better, the other two slightly longer cooldown with split spheres lasting longer.
- added one way teleporter as keeper supplement
Primary Gadgets
- Upgrade costs are all rebalanced. Battle abilities now each cost one cobalt instead of water.
- Changed overcharge mechanic: it now only affects battle abilities. The effect it had before was too convoluted and difficult to understand and predict, with too many special cases. All upgrades for overcharge have changed.
- Shield Electro Blast: the time bonus for using it after the shield depleted is a bit lower, but now you get a second use for it in one battle. Big buff!
- Orchard: you can get another use of a battle ability if you overcharge
- Orchard: Root explosion does less damage now, always 100 damage
- Orchard: the buff starts slightly weaker, but the upgrades improving it make it much stronger than before
- Added Drone Yard
Gadgets
- Reworked gadget slots a bit. The keeper suit is now a proper slot for gadgets, and only one gadget can go into it. This means you cannot have the probe and the prospection meter at the same time, for example.
- Upgrade costs are all rebalanced, with late stage upgrades costing more iron.
- Added Remote Station and supplement
- Added Drilling Rig and supplement
- Added Furnace and supplement
- Added Iron Worms and supplement
- Added Mushroom Farm and supplement
- Added Resource Packer
- Added Suitblaster and supplement
- Added Buzzsaw and supplement
- Added Dome Armor and supplement
- Added Shockwave and supplement
- Added Rocket Launcer and supplement
- Stun Laser: Reduced cooldown a lot and fire time a bit
- Stun Laser: stun strength 5.5 -> 6.0
- Stun Laser: area stun is now a supplement
- Auto Cannon: time between shots 2.5s -> 2.0s
- Auto Cannon: Machine Gun time between shots 2.0s -> 1.5s, 1.2s -> 1.0s, 0.75s -> 0.5s, 0.45s -> 0.25s
- Auto Cannon: Shotgun time between shots 3.0s -> 2.5s, 4.0s -> 3.3s
- Auto Cannon: added supplement that nearly doubles the rate of fire
- Blast Mining: slightly increased radius and decreased production time
- Blast Mining: added third stage of explosion radius upgrade
- Blast Mining: added supplement that grants you three mines instead of one in each production cycle. There was an upgrade like this before, but it would grant you three small mines. Now you can get three big mines, so a big buff :)
- Blast Mining: impact detonation now moves the center of the explosion into the direction of the impact. This makes blast mining way more useful.
- Blast Mining: improved behaviour when impact detonation is triggerd. There were many strange cases before, like it not exploding when it would fall on resources.
- Probe: reworked the whole tech tree and added a path that immediately completely reveals the rock, instead of placing markers
- Probe: added supplement that makes the probe recharge automatically and removes the station from the cellar, freeing that slot
- Teleporter: added two small upgrades
- Teleporter: made resource teleportation a supplement and buffed it.
- Lift: starts out with more orbs that go faster
- Lift: buffed orb speed and capacity upgrades, as well as keeper speed upgrade
- Lift: added supplement that removes the orbs and lets all resources float upwards automatically
- Condenser: Auto overcharge primary gadget is now a supplement
- Prospection Meter: added supplement that reveals chambers and has much higher range
- Drillbert: buffed drill strength
- Drillbert: added a supplement that adds two more drillberts
- Converter: rebalanced all conversions
- Converter: iron duplication is now a supplement
- Converter: added an upgrad with which you can queue conversions, so that conversion that do not take long do not suffer from you being at the dome rarely.
- Converter: added two different upgrades on how to improve water conversion
- Squidley, the resource tansporting squid from a cave, now gets faster the more resources it brought back to the dome
- gadgets like the auto cannon now lead their shots, making them much better at hitting moving (flying) targets
Monsters
- added Hornet
- added Breeder
- added Phaser
- added Bloater
- added Tormentor
- Driller changes: 800 hp -> 1400 hp, 32 dps -> 40 dps, weight 200 -> 350, minimum run weight 350 -> 850. Because the new monsters fill up some space on the difficulty curve, driller is now a proper late game monster.
- Bolter: 135 hp -> 150 hp, weight 80 -> 100, minimum run weight 200 -> 250. Effectively becomes slightly more late game.
- Scarab: 1150 hp -> 1200 hp´, damage 20 -> 25, weight 450 -> 600, minimum run weight 900 -> 1200, fires about twice as many projectiles. Becomes a very late game monster and should keep posing a threat even with all the new combat gadgets.
Bugfixes
Honestly, these are just too many to list them all here. A lot of long standing bugs have been fixed, and there surely will remain a few new ones. We'll keep fixing them as you report them :)
