AVWW Beta 0.523, "Miniatures and Health/MP Drops," Released!

This one is really all over the place in terms of what it adds -- a lot of things people have wanted for a while, plus yet more internal progress on the multiplayer front.

The first really huge change is to how the balance is handled for your equipment as your civ level increases.  The short explanation is that there's now a grace period so your equipment doesn't start to get worse until you actually are able to start crafting new equipment of the next tier.

Kind of going along with that, there's also now a bit of randomization of when you will find gems of the next tier.  The 100% changeover point from one tier to the next is still the same, but there is now a chance of finding higher-tier stuff a little early.

The namesake new feature of this release is actually the new Miniature spell, which is another Movement type spell (like storm dash, teleport, and ride the lightning).  Miniature lets you shrink your character down to 25% of their normal size for about ten seconds, but you take twice as much damage while small.

This is great for a lot of purposes in exploring through small holes that previously only were traversible if you transmogrified yourself into a bat.  However, it's also good in general for making it so that neutral skelebot characters can fit through underground areas that otherwise might have posed permanent blockages to them.

The Miniature spell can be activated by a double-tap of the down key, so that makes it convenient enough to actually use for purposes of dodging enemy attacks, too.  This should fulfill some of the goals of the "crouch ability" discussion that's been going on for the last week or so.

There are another dozen or so smaller tweaks and features that I won't enumerate here -- see the release notes for details -- but the last new feature I want to highlight is healing and MP drops from non-boss enemies.  Previously non-boss enemies only dropped shards or nothing.  Now they also have a 10% chance each of dropping either a minor healing or minor MP-restoration item that flies to you automatically like the shards do.

This is another one of those things people have been asking for since the start of beta, so it's great to finally have that one in place.  More to come tomorrow.  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.