Do you feel that, Champions? There’s something in the Aether. Something...ominous.

Release 0.3.0 marks the unveiling of the final section of The Shattered Woods campaign. This includes a variety of new rooms & encounters, two as-of-yet encountered enemies, and the final encounter with the Aether Horror.

Defeat the Aether Horror and earn two new weapons - twin Katars! These punching daggers were made to synergize together, but we definitely encourage you to try pairing it with different weapons.

As you continue traversing this Aether-flooded landscape, keep your eyes peeled for the Empowered versions of both the Spellweaver and Captain. Like the Empowered Knight, these Unraveled have been enhanced by the corrupting influence of the Aether Horror, and will likely have a few tricks up their sleeves.

And of course, as with our other updates, 0.3.0 also includes a variety of bugfixes, quality of life improvements, and other niceties. Check out the patch notes below for all the details.

Lastly, a big shout out to everyone who participated in our Beta release of 0.3.0 and provided feedback (and caught some bugs, too)! Getting that type of testing and info before the official release is something everyone on the dev team really appreciates.

Good luck with the hunt, Rune Knights. Be sure to chronicle your attempts on our Discord (and don’t hesitate to give us your feedback, neither).

End the hunt!

- Dave, Project Director

Release 0.3.0 Changes & Additions

The Shattered Woods Campaign is Complete!

With 0.3.0, you can now finish the fight against the Aether Horror. Tread carefully, Champions - it will take all of your wits to defeat this monstrosity and its empowered minions.

• New Environments and Encounters, featuring entirely new Music.
• Two New Enemies: Empowered Spellweavers and Empowered Captains.
• The third and final Boss Fight of the Shattered Woods. End this!

Two New Weapons - Twin Katars

Should you prove your mettle and defeat the Aether Horror, you will be awarded access these twin Punching Daggers. Designed to synergize together, these weapons provide a new way to do battle with the Unraveled.

Gemini Stranded - Katar with Concussive Blast

• With a primary focus on dealing Guard Damage, Gemini Stranded boasts the Rending Strikes trait, increasing its Health Damage when you alternate hitting with the other weapon.

Gemini Esper - Katar with Shardstorm

• The inverse of Gemini Stranded, Esper focuses on dealing higher Health Damage. Starts with the Alternating Strikes trait, which increases Guard Damage when you alternate attacks with the other weapon.

OpenVR Fallback Fixes

Some players reported that their headset was producing weird results - namely, the controllers weren’t appearing where they should, resulting in some BIZARRE behavior in-game. 0.3.0 fixes these issues, and includes some other updates to try and better handle unsupported headsets.

• Added WMR (“holographic”) controller to generic platform controller list.
• Made the new WMR definition the default fallback for detected WMR headsets.
• If no controller model is found, we now ensure that the fallback controller model (Vive Wand) is spawned in the correct position.

Dash Updates

In order to make Dash Damage a more scalable stat, we now multiply it by the distance you travel while Dashing. This means that up-close Dashes will deal less overall damage, but Dashing from the full distance will now deal additional Guard Damage.

• Dashing from maximum range now does Bonus damage (1.25x). Dashing from point blank range does less damage (0.3x)
• Dashing backwards and then dashing forwards should deal the standard amount of Dash Impact as Guard Damage. (1x)
• A number of Dash related Traits have received updates to make them more attractive choices. (See: Traits)

Dodging Algorithm Updates

After introducing the new Empowered Captain, we found that certain attacks felt...off. After some work, we’ve identified an issue with our Dodge heuristics and improved them!

• Dodges that occured as part of long attack chains were very unreliable. We’ve changed the math under the hood so that dodges will be more accurate even when part of a long combo.

Stabbing Improvements

Based off of feedback from the community, we wanted to make stabbing with daggers (and other weapons) feel better. We put some time into tuning our Stab detection to be more consistent overall.

• Stabbing with weapons should now result in under-hits in fewer circumstances.
• Stabbing weapons like Duelist’s Edge, daggers, and the newly-added Katars have received an extra pass to make sure they feel good.

Economy Adjustments

We wanted to allow players- especially new players- more freedom to play with upgrading multiple weapons before they feel “locked in” to a single choice. To that end, we’ve reduced all tiers of weapons’ upgrade costs.

• Reduced the Costs of Upgrading all Weapons from Level 1 to level 5.
• It should now be easier, on a new profile, to try and upgrade multiple weapons at once.
• Players progressing in Tier 2 should feel that less of their income is drained on upgrading Tier 2 weapons.
• Upgrade Costs still converge at Level 6, and Weapon costs 6-10 are unchanged.

Quality of Life Changes

• The probability of Max Health crystals appearing has been increased slightly in tier 1, and moderately in tiers 2 and 3.
• Made it less difficult to reach certain enemies when in seated mode (particularly the Aether Horror).
• Increased the Guard Restore rate and reduced the delay after the dummy is hit, to make it easier to test Guard Damage while in the Runeforge.
• The dematerialization range on the Upgrade crystal has been increased, meaning it SHOULD slip out of your hand less often.
• Slightly decreased the combat distance between the Rune Knight and enemies when using daggers.
• Improved the positioning of Offscreen Attack Indicators to accommodate the FoV of the Valve Index.
• The Aether Horror’s Spike Attack...spikes...now have their final model implemented. Expect more polish on the clarity of this attack in the future.
• The end-of-run tally show has had additional visual polish applied to it. It should also feel a little faster overall.
• We are now properly hiding the loading screen and mountain skybox for the OpenVR versions of the game when transitioning between rooms. This should hopefully feel less disorienting than it used to.

Tier 1 Balance Adjustments

Ahead of our next update, which focuses on different Difficulty modes, we wanted to make some preliminary tweaks to make the early rooms of Tier 1 faster to get through and less frustrating for players still trying to learn the Knight’s patterns. Overall, we want players to be getting to (and dying on) the T1 boss sooner, rather than grinding on Knights until they’re over-skilled for the T1 boss.

• Rooms 3 and 4: Removed the ability for a second Knight to spawn in these depths.
• Rooms 5 & 6: Now will only feature two hard enemies (A mix of Knight/Captain) instead of 3.

Boss Fight Adjustments

As we take a closer look at overall difficulty (and see where players are getting stuck/frustrated), we wanted to make some quick updates to certain aspects of ALL Boss encounters. We wanted to make sure they felt appropriately cinematic during the fight, as well as rewarding AFTER the fight.

• Clearing certain phases of Boss-fights will now restore the Rune Knight from Death’s door to 1 HP crystal remaining.
• The Aether Bloom at the end of an Active Boss room now has significantly better odds of offering increased aether payouts, as well as other powerful Augments.

Enemy Balance Updates

• Dialed back the teamwork of Empowered enemies. They should no longer be quite as oppressive when exchanging attacks against the player.
• Fixed a bug where Empowered Knight frenzy attacks wouldn’t properly check for line of sight, occasionally causing them to magically leap through other enemies to attack.
• Lowered the Knockback distance on the shove attack that the captain does after being dashed.

Weapon Balance Updates

Duelist’s Edge

We strive for weapons to feel awesome and ‘breakable’ in fun ways, and we like the fantasy of the Duelist’s Edge as a high risk, high reward “bravado” weapon. We wanted to keep that, without making it a strictly “superior” alternative to the Arming sword. In light of that, we’ve tried to make the following adjustments to Duelist’s Edge:

• “Pristine” (as it can be found during a run) has been changed to +25% Damage when at full health.
• Duelist’s Edge has been granted “Untouchable”, which is a better version of Pristine (the original +50% Damage) that CAN stack with Pristine.
• The base Stats and base scaling of Duelist’s Edge have been reduced to 4G/4Hp from 6G/6H.
• The end result is that the Duelist’s Edge is a lighter, more responsive cousin to the other two swords when Untouchable is up - but the multiplicative nature of Untouchable means that it still has some of the strongest scaling potential in the game when used in conjunction with Tradeoff Augments.

Vestal’s Wrath

• Now has +1 Max Health baseline, no longer grants +5 Dash Damage.
• Now scales up to 20 Guard Damage on hit at max level.

Rokari Keenblade

• Now gains its third Combo point earlier (final stats unchanged.)

Knight-Blooded Crest

• Now has 5 less Dash Impact, and +2 Health Damage at level X to better support creative playstyles.

Level X Weapon Adjustments

Generally weapons should end up with 2x their starting Guard Damage. Helps keep Daggers & heavy weapons balanced at high levels.

• Arming Sword X: 14 Guard Damage (from 15)
• Keenblade X: 10 Guard Damage (from 13)
• HeartSeeker X: 12 Guard Damage (from 13)
• Ritual Dagger X: 10 Guard Damage (from 11)
• High Arcanist’s Blade X: 12 Guard Damage (from 14)
• Vestal’s Wrath X: 20 Guard Damage (from 18)
• Duelist’ Edge X: 8 Guard Damage / 5 Health Damage.

Trait Balance Updates

• Juggernaut: Now gives +50% Dash Damage and -25% Dash Recovery Rate (instead of +100/-50). Can now occur twice in a run.
• Fleet: Slaying an enemy restores 3 Dash Charges (up from 1).
• Nimble: Dash Charges restore 35% faster (From 25%).
• Heartseeker: Bonus Health Damage increased to 5 from 3. (Now dealing a full crystal’s worth of bonus damage.)

Supers Balance Updates

We’ve been watching closely how various supers are used in the game, and how fun they feel in practice. With 0.3.0, we wanted to make sure under-utilized Supers currently in the game received at least a little bit of love.

Void Trap

Although Void Trap is useful- trying to make use of 5 Void traps can be frustrating, and the optimal use of the super didn’t feel fun for most people. These changes try to pull Void Trap in line with the damage potential for other supers, while also making the traps a more exciting playstyle for tactically minded Rune Knights.

• Fixed a typo that stated that Void Trap had a Charge time of Moderate. (It is/was always long.)
• Now summons 3 Traps at all levels.
• Void Trap Level 2: Triggering a Void Trap deals 20 Guard Damage and 5 Health Damage (Now a fully health crystal, up from 3 hp).
• Void Trap Level 3: Traps deal 40 Guard Damage / 10 Health Damage. (Two Crystals).
• Void Trap Level 4: Traps now deal 20 Health Damage. (4 Crystals)

Bulwark

Bulwark has been a useful Super that gets overshadowed mostly because of how long it takes to charge. Although listed as “Long”, it actually took much longer than other supers to achieve full charge. Additionally, we wanted to look at ways to make higher ranks of Bulwark more appealing to take Super upgrades on.

• Charge Time on Bulwark reduced by 25% at all levels.
• Bulwark Level 3 Changed to: Bulwark grants 5 temporary armor, instead of 3, and lasts 50% longer.
• Bulwark Level 4 Changed to: While Bulwark is active, blocks with this weapon deal 50% more Guard Damage.

Shardstorm

Shardstorm is another less commonly used Super we are keeping an eye on. Like Bulwark its charge time felt too long for what it did. These changes are small steps at first, but we want to play around with a Shardstorm that is easier to cast before we make more drastic changes.

• Charge time on Shardstorm is now Moderate (reduced by 50%). Should now charge at the same pace as Soul Burn.

Empowered Strike

We’re happy with the fantasy of Empowered Strike right now, but feel that it was lacking in damage output compared to other Supers.

• Empowered Strike Level 1: Now deals 10 Health Damage through Guard (up from 7).
• Empowered Strike Level 3: Now deals 20 Health Damage (4 Crystals) through Guard (up from 10).

Concussive Blast

• Concussive Blast Level 3: Causes Concussive Blast to charge 50% Faster (down from 100% faster).

Soul Burn

• Soul Burn Level 4: Soul Burn can now be used twice on a single charge. (down from three times).

Notable Bugfixes

• Pushback effects (such as Concussive Blast or Stasis Strike’s application) now properly interrupt enemy attacks. This should prevent situations where certain attacks (especially the Watch Captains’ charging attacks) could land even if the player uses a pushback effect at the last second.
• Fixed an issue that could allow Watch Captains to complete their Channeled Slam attacks even if the Crit is successfully struck.
• Fixed a few issues where Agatha wouldn’t say the right things in the Runeforge, especially regarding milestone events (like killing the bosses for the first time).
• Fixed a variety of odd issues involving repeatedly swapping weapons in the Runeforge.
• Fixed a rare issue where getting killed and charging your super simultaneously would crash the game.
• You can no longer kill yet-to-be-revealed enemies with the improved versions of Concussive Blast.
• Soul Burn should no longer seek out yet-to-be-revealed enemies, resulting in some bizarre behavior.