Winter has arrived!
Gear up for new wintery biomes, enemy strongholds, boss fights, damascus steel weapons, and much more. The next Major Act 4 update, Frozen Lands, is here.
Let's explore the avalanche of new features new to Len's Island in this major update!
First off, your existing save files will work just fine! No need to start fresh, we have worked hard to make all saves backward compatible :)
The world of Len's Island has grown -
The Len's Island map has expanded, with new biomes including cherry blossom islands, arctic fortresses, frozen mining islands, and an extension to the cave network. You'll discover an arctic town with new resources to trade, items to buy, and winter animals to hunt.
Get ready for more above-ground combat as the next round of dungeons are about to get a whole lot harder to enter. Each dungeon is situated on its own island that's heavily guarded by enemy strongholds with new armoured voidlings and cursed ballista towers patrolling the coastline. To keep these fights at an even playing field we're adding a powerful new damascus steel weapon/tool tier and a katana sword that can be purchased in the arctic town. Improvements have also been made to the enchanting table as we've added even more enchantments. You can now enchant your armour, weapons and tools, not just once but twice! The possibilities are endless as you can now create your ultimate custom build.
Farming enthusiasts can also enjoy a variety of new farmable resources and advanced machinery in the Frozen Lands update. Forage for cotton and bamboo in the new biomes and use their seeds to grow your own crops. Once harvested, these unique resources can be refined using the new loom machine and implemented in exciting crafting recipes that help you advance through the harsh environment.
There is a lot of new content in this update. Read the full changelog below to get all of the nitty-gritty details. If you don't want to have anything spoiled, then stop reading and go enjoy the update!
New Features & Changes
- Map has been expanded to include: - 4 Cherry Blossom Islands - 3 Frozen Mining Islands - 3 Frozen Stronghold Islands (Keystone dungeon islands) - 1 Large Frozen Island (Main town island) - Icebergs in the outer ring of the map
- 3 New Keystone Dungeons & New Major Boss Dungeon. The keystone dungeons are guarded by enemy strongholds, these are fortresses on the islands above the dungeons, heavily guarded by armored enemies and ballista towers.
- New town. There is now a 4th town with two vendors, upgrade levels, new resources to buy and sell, new sets of armor, and even a new weapon!
- New Katana weapon class. You can purchase the damascus katana at the new town, lowest base dmg of any weapon, highest crit dmg of any weapon. This weapon is a little different to others, hard to master, but effective!
- Damascus steel weapon/tool tier. You can now upgrade all weapons and basic tools to damascus steel. This tier raises damage and also allows for a second enchantment to be applied.
- Enchanting. We have totally reworked the enchanting system. All new enchantment table UI, new list of enchantments, you can now enchant armor and tools, and enchant damascus weapons twice! Enchanting now opens up the possibilities of customizing your character and playstyle greatly.
- New Armor sets. All have with unique abilities. Winter Fur Set, Kabuto Armor, and Oni Armor.
- New Resources. Cotton, Cloth, Bamboo, Tuna, Squid, Ink, Damascus Steel, and Tungsten, are all new in the game. Cooked fish have been reworked into different items, and the inventory UI updated into a new layout.
- New enemies. Guarding the stronghold islands are new armored variants of enemies, including armored voidings, armored voids, armored elite voids (voids on fire), armored lightning fish, armored trolls, and the new healer shaman voidlings. There are also new wolves on above islands, that can howl and alert wolves in the surrounding area. Oh, and there are now enemy ballista towers >:)
- New pet. The red panda pet can be tamed, found on cherry blossom islands.
- New machinie: The Loom has been added which turns cotton into cloth to be used for advanced crafting recipes.
- New plants to farm: Cotton and bamboo can now be farmed in all farm types. We have also allowed trees to be planted in the large pots.
- New fishing pools: You can now fish for tuna and squid, these fishing pools only appear in cold environments.
- Shield blocking rework. We have added blocking back into the game! You now hit the shield ability key to block, you can move and aim while blocking, and if you click while blocking then you will perform the shield dash ability. Blocking is a lot more essential in areas of the game now, such as dodging ballista bolts and lightning fish.
- New status effects and weather. Frozen islands will give the freezing, or frostbite effects. This will damage you over time and you will need to wear armor with cold resistance, eat warming food, or build a heat source to not get hurt. We also remade the status effect UI system, so important effects now display on the top left panel. All armor & enchantment effects display on your player window in the inventory.
- New Vendors: Baked goods vendor at the new town, and a pear vendor added to the 2nd town.
- Food items all rebalanced and fishing significantly boosted to be a more consistent food source.
- Underground caves expanded to fill new map size. The caves now have 3 new island entrances linking to the Frozen Mining islands. The cave network is now larger with more areas to mine rare resources.
- Further camera tweaks. The camera angles and controls have been tweaked and updated. You can now tilt up and down by holding right-click and dragging up/down. During build/edit mode this tilt control becomes more prominent and makes it easier to look from top-down or from the side and freely orbit around to build easier.
- Performance: We changed our lighting system which has seen a big change in performance. In general, frames should be more stable and not be affected so heavily by lots of lights and around towns. We also overhauled the chunk loading system in the game, which made the chunks loads 50-70% faster across the game, reducing the stutter when loading new areas of the map. The performance gains will be even more noticeable on lower-end machines.
Balancing & Tweaks
- Reworked scythe abilities
- Decoration Item Costs: Lowered costs for decoration items across the game to make them easier to place.
- Farming Item Costs: We rebalanced a lot of the build costs for farming machines to reduce the amount of metal and complex materials needed.
- Skill tree costs rebalanced.
- Lowered glass cost for potions from 10 to 3 (Potions are soon going to be completely reworked into a new and improved system soon)
- Changed rug placement to ignore all collisions so they can be far easier placed and also now allow overlapping for unique designs. Made all the rugs cheaper so it's more viable to place large amounts of them to completely cover the flooring with carpet designs.
- Enchantment table build cost altered, change workbench unlock level for the table from level 4 to level 3.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed cursor not working correctly for gamepad controls
- We fixed hundreds of various bugs over the past months as part of this update, too many to list.
As always, there will probably be stuff we missed and small issues here and there for the first few days. If you experience any problems, please be patient and report a bug so we can fix it! We are also a ver small team of 4 developers, we will work our hardest over the next couple of weeks to make sure everything is silky smooth.
- Julian
