???? THE SPELL BRIGADE 1.0

1.0 is here! It’s been quite some time, but even more than usual, we have worked our butts off for the last 6 months. We hope this update was worth the wait!

First off, a BIG MIGHTY THANK YOU to each and everyone of you that have supported us during Early Access! Because of your faith in us, we have managed to keep working on this game full time for the past year and a half, and we freakin’ love it! As a special token of thanks, we have added an extra skin for each Wizard that will be exclusive to anyone that has played the full game during Early Access. Not to overhype, but they might just be our best skins yet.

We hope this update is all that you were waiting for! There’s a lot in here. For the full list, you can scroll right down to the patch notes.

We’ve already done various deep dives into 1.0’s:

• New Enemies

• Prestiges & Curses

• Social Features

• Improved Elements

• Wizard 15

• Expanded Player Progression

You can read more about them in those posts, but here’s a quick overview of what else you might encounter in the update:

???? Knelly, and her signature spell, Bell March.

???? These weird guys.

???? Bigger enemies.

???? A new boss.

???? Reworked and improved Element effects.

???? New Enchantments, and their ultimate form, Masteries.

???? Shiny new Wizard Badges.

???? Punishing Trials to test your Devotion.

???? Secret new Ascension Outfits.

???? Cool, wizard-specific Emotes.

All this and more, but the best way to find out is to simply boot up the game and find out!

We have made sure that all your progress is safely migrated to 1.0. You might encounter some weird things like content unlocking out of order, since a lot of the player progression has been reworked. We do recommend starting fresh but we understand some of you have put a lot of work in your progress and we didn’t want all that to go to waste. Some specific examples:

• Because the Enchantments have been reworked, all of them have been reverted. But no worries, all your Gold has been refunded, so you can re-purchase them.

• While the unlock conditions for Wizards, Spells and Outfits have somewhat changed, any stuff you had already unlocked will still be available.

• Because the Wizard Rank system has been expanded, any Wizards that had Max Rank will now be at the end of Rank 9. We did this so the new Prestige system would not conflict with previous progression. Simply playing 1 run will most likely give you enough XP to get back to Max.

• Of course, there are a lot of new Achievements added, so unfortunately your 100% completion is no longer. But no Achievements will be lost, you’ll just have to complete the new ones we added.

Of course, this update is quite big, so there might always be a chance that something does go wrong. If so, please reach out to us on Discord, and we will do our best to resolve the issue.

The Brigade grows! The Spell Brigade is now also out on PlayStation 5, so you can match with other wizards on PC, Steam Deck or PlayStation.

This update brings a fully revamped sound design, along with a completely new original soundtrack by Austin Wintory & Dallas Crane.

The release of this update means that our vision for 1.0 is just about complete. But don’t worry, that does not mean we are done with The Spell Brigade. In fact, we are already working on our next update! It’s still too early to get into more details, but you can expect some more info rather soon.

• ???? Spell: Bell March

• ???? Wizard: Knelly

• ???? Outfits: Fine China Knelly, Short Fuse Knelly

• ???? Enemies: Mana Hoarder & Scroll Hoarder

• ???? Elite Enemies: Elder Bloat Crab, Elder Teethy Worm, Elder Shaman

• ???? Enemy Variants: Spread Spitter, Fast Baby Worms, Fast Bloat Crab, Fast Shaman

• ☠️ Boss: Mul’gath, the Twisted One

• ???? New Enchantments and Masteries, including Ban & Pin functionality

• ????️ New Wizard Ranks & Ascensions

• ????️ Trial Covenants: new Covenants that make missions significantly harder

• ???? Outfits: Ascension Outfits for every Wizard that change your starter spell

• ???? Outfits: Big Head Outfits for every Wizard (only for Early Access players)

• ???? Pings: players can ping various points of interest

• ???? Emotes: every Wizard can now react with unique emotes

• ⭐ Titles: unlockable Titles that players can equip

• ???? New Quests - simply too many to list!

• ???? Fully revamped Sound Design

• ???? Completely new Original Soundtrack by Austin Wintory and Dallas Crane

• ???? Crossplay: players can now match with people on PlayStation 5. 

• ???? Lobby Codes: players can now find and join each other’s Lobby by code.

• ???? Player List: players can view their teammates’ profiles or report them.

• ✅ Improved most of the Infusion effects:

  • Wildfire can inflict Critical Damage ticks.

  • Thunder casts a big thunder strike on initial hit.

  • Corrosion (Acid + Acid) inflicts weakness, meaning the target deals less Damage.

  • Brimstone (Acid + Fire) inflicts splash damage.

  • Frost can potentially freeze a target completely.

  • Frostbite (Ice + Fire) inflicts knockback.

  • Miasma (Ice + Acid) inflicts knockback from the target to their surroundings.

  • Void makes corrupted enemies inflict Dark.

  • Hellfire makes corrupted enemies inflict Fire.

  • Blight (Dark + Acid) makes corrupted enemies inflict Acid.

  • Wither (Dark + Ice) makes corrupted enemies inflict Ice.

• ✅ Improved Player Progression for Wizards, Spells, Objectives, Realms, etc.

• ???? Improved Quick Chat with more relevant commands.

  • In-game notifications are now also displayed as Quick Chat entries.

• ✅ Major UX redesigns in the Lobby menus.

• ✅ Improved the timing of Scroll Chest spawning.

• ✅ Adjusted some Scroll effects so they will no longer work in a retroactive manner:

  • Go-Getter’s Grace

  • Resilient Revival

  • Fist of Support

  • Bountiful Quests

  • Savior Focus

• ✅ As a counter measure, Scroll spawn rates have been nudged so some Scrolls will now only appear earlier in a run.

• ???? Additional Scroll Chests can now appear in later Cycles of an Endless run.

• ???? Steady Hands Scroll now adds Critical Damage instead of Critical Chance.

• ???? Resilient Revival Scroll now increases Max Health per Revive performed.

• ???? Go-Getter’s Grace Scroll now increases Healing per completed Objective.

• ✅ Improved collider accuracy for the Lightning Scepter Mesh.

• ✅ Chthonic Charge’s trigger zone now also scales with Size Upgrades.

• ✅ Improved Void Hoppers so they’re no longer damageable in their initial drop.

• ???? Made sure the same Objective cannot repeatedly appear.

• ✅ Implemented basic anti-cheating measurements.

• ✅ Improved input navigation for UI so keyboard and mouse navigation no longer conflict or result in unexpected navigation resets.

• ???? Added a lock in the Lobby so hosts can no longer change their run setup in the last 3 seconds of the Ready countdown.

• ✅ Improved the tracking of progression-based achievements to complete in realtime instead of at fixed moments.

• ✅ Made many visual improvements for new (and some old) Infusion effects.

• ✅ Added a “new” visual to UI elements in the Lobby that are available for the first time.

• ✅ Improved the Credits Menu to properly show everyone involved - thank you all!

• ✅ Added some animations & polish to the Quick Chat menu.

• ✅ Improved shadow distances in all Realms.

• ✅ Added a hit effect to the Scroll Chest.

• ✅ Gave all Augmentations unique names and descriptions so they’re easier to identify.

• ✅ Made the visual difference in Upgrade Rarities more prominent.

• ✅ Enemies (and Players) now visually slow when slowed down by Ice spells.

• ✅ Fixed a visual issue in the Lobby where the camera would get stuck in an awkward angle.

• ✅ Fixed a visual issue where the player's health bar would animate wrongly after being revived. 

• ✅ Fixed a visual issue where the Cardinal Runes would not despawn properly.

• ✅ Fixed a visual issue with the background blur in some menus.

• ???? Augmentation buffs have been reworked to be additive instead of multiplicative. Additionally, most of their potency has been increased.

• ✅ Reduced Lifetime of the Yeet-Sickle by 50%.

• ✅ Increased Damage buff for the Seeking Orbs, Seeking Moonerang, Seeking Star & Seeking Beam to 35%. 

• ???? Increased Resistance reduction from Acid Spells.

• ???? Increased max % for Hard Lessons from 30 to 40.

• ✅ Slightly reduced scaling of the amount of Soul Sludge per additional player.

• ✅ Fixed an issue where Enemy death sounds weren’t played on non-host clients.

• ✅ Fixed an issue where Baby Worms would spawn inside of each other.

• ???? Fixed an issue where Wizard Rank wasn’t calculated correctly.

• ???? Fixed an issue where unreliable internet connection would prevent you from reconnecting before entering the Lobby.

• ???? Fixed an issue where Void Hoppers would spawn instantly after restarting a run.

• ???? Fixed an issue where clients would get stuck in an empty gameplay scene when quitting a run.

• ???? Fixed an issue where enemies could not enter the Spell Core extraction zone.

• ???? Fixed an issue where Mana Beasts would walk out of their pen.

• ???? Fixed an issue where some enemies would not deal damage to other enemies when corrupted.

• ???? Fixed an issue where Impish Havoc could not target the Broodmaw.

• ???? Fixed an issue where the Soul Sludge would not work in the Astral Planes.

• ???? Fixed an issue where bosses would remain alive when killed in their corrupted state.

• ???? Fixed an issue where the game could get in a locked state when the host left during loading.

• ✅ Fixed an issue where Revive Core timings were not synced with the server.

• ✅ Fixed an issue where Spitter enemies would shoot behind themselves.

• ✅ Improved performance of the Soul Sludge Objective.

• ✅ Improved performance of some projectiles and all Explode Augmentations.

• ✅ Improved performance of spawning Stampeders, Frost Root, Swarmlings and Void Hoppers.

• ✅ Improved performance of the Frozen Ancients’ Frost Branch.

• ✅ Improved performance when many Enemies are off-screen.

• ???? Added a new, giant mana orb that bundles all new XP drops when a limit is reached.

• ✅ Fully improved translations for:

  • Simplified Chinese

  • Traditional Chinese

  • German

  • French

  • Italian

  • Spanish (Spain)

  • Spanish (Latin America)

  • Portuguese (Portugal)

  • Portuguese (Brazil)

  • Japanese

  • Korean

  • Polish

  • Russian

  • Thai

  • Ukrainian

  • Dutch

???? = changes inspired by community feedback

From everyone at Bolt Blaster Games, thank you all once again! This has been a blast and we’re more excited than ever to keep working on this game. We hope you’ll enjoy this update ❤️

For the Brigade!

BOLT BLASTER OUT