AVWW Beta 0.521, "Storm Dash," Released!

This one is surprisingly large for being our second release of the day. 

First up is a new spellgem, called "Storm Dash."  You can use this to increase your movement speed by 500% briefly, but you'll also take twice as much damage while you do so.  This is particularly great for the overland segments if you have a lot of overland travel to do in one go -- especially if the monsters are lower-level than you.  It's really a big convenience, I find, and the visual effect is also pretty cool; traveling along the sloped ground reminds me somewhat of the old Sonic games, which is kind of neat (though unintentional).

The next big thing in this one is "stashes."  Especially with the removal of the profession books, most of the buildings in the game -- keeps, outposts, and towers aside -- have been rather low-value exploration targets. Sure, you could get some dust, and some healing and MP-restoration potions, but you can get those things other ways.  And those are only so exciting.

The stashes are basically rooms that are left over from during the cataclysm, when people who are... ahem... no longer with us, were trying to stock up and save themselves.  The people are gone (providing some clue as to where all the consciousness shards came from), but the supply caches remain for you to plunder.  You can find potions in large quantities (x10, usually), making it so that a visit one or two stashes replaces a much longer trek through many rooms.  You can find wooden platforms and other objects, and even spell scrolls.  Eventually there will even be some treasures you can only find through rooms like this.

Next up is a new pair of keybindings: Use Best Available Healing (default bound to Y) and Use Best Available Magic Restoration (default bound to U).  They do what you'd expect, and that's a function some players have been asking for since last week.

There are a goodly array of other smaller changes and tweaks in there, too, now.  You can now use Ride The Lighting via double-jump even if it's not directly on your ability bar.  Heatsuits and snowsuits provide some new protections.  Balls of light are cheaper in MP costs now.  There are vastly fewer of the really large maze rooms in overlord/lieutenant strongholds.  Real (and animated) vortex icons on the world map.  Among other fixes.

This is likely our last release until Monday, unless something comes up and we have a bit of extra time.  It's been a productive week, and I think next week will be even better -- I've been somewhat ill all this week and a bit of last week, but finally that seemed to come to an end today.  Anyway -- enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.