Hello all,
Today we are releasing the Three Quarters update, so named because, of course, exactly three-quarters of the year has passed already! This update contains a new Mob-Arena map set in a mountain island that explores the conquests of what was once the most populous empire in the world which claimed an entire sea to itself. We have also added much-needed stability fixes to the server.
NEW MOB-ARENA MAP: MARE NOSTRUM
We have added a new Mob-Arena map, Mare Nostrum, based on the old Volcanic PVP map. Explore a mountainous island with a Roman landscape full of ancient ruins, and be greeted with ancient-themed foes as soon as you arrive on the island. This map features 10 waves with an extra wave on the Expert difficulty, and uniquely features a tough mini-boss on every wave, so you might want to bring powerful items such as a Mortar Strike.
But watch out, as the foes here may not be what they initially seem! Remind yourself, what day is it?…
OCTOBER FOOLS EVENT
… It’s October Fools, of course! After our previous two October Fools events in 2022 and 2023, we are now bringing back some limited-game scenarios for our third-ever October Fools (which is another reason for the name of this update, I swear comrade I did not have any other reason in mind). Specifically we are bringing back the MineSpades gamemode with Overpowered scenario and 5X reduced player damage in order to give players the unique experience of flattening the map while fighting tanky guys on the enemy team.
Oh… and we also threw in the Villager mutator because we think this mode might have been too fun otherwise.
OCTOBER FOOLS QUESTS
In addition to our new superb gameplay additions, we have added new quests for October Fools, which will reward you with entire stacks of goodies as a reward!
Quests can be completed for:
- Destroying blocks in Mine-Spades (best completed by playing the October Fools PVP event)
- Beating Mare Nostrum on any difficulty
- Beating Mare Nostrum on Expert difficulty
To keep the playerbase sane, these additional gamemodes and quests are scheduled to be removed at around October 10th. Which is a random time I picked for no particular reason.
OTHER CHANGES
- The Trump Wall boss skill is now randomized with three possible messages & mob name combinations.
- Two of the options that can be chosen by the skill are the old messages as well as the current messages.
- The third possible option shows “Donald Trump warns you of the real threat!” with the mob name being “Made in [REDACTED] creeper”, whoops there was a word that wasn’t supposed to appear in the blog post
- Changes in recent hotfixes:
- Adjusted layout of Garrison to improve the team balance
- Changed SandyWars MineSpades from KOTH to TDM
- Fixed the spawnpoint of the Mineshaft Mob-Arena map. Players should no longer fall to their death upon spawning even if they joined at an unlucky time.
- Removed Bombard skill from Hangar’s final boss to make it a bit harder by increasing the amount of dangerous skills it uses
BUG FIXES
October Fools silliness aside, we have fixed several more important stability issues in GunColony with this update and previous hotfixes. Double XP will be extended as compensation until we have rooted out all current stability issues affecting the server.
- Fixed a major issue where joining a Mob-Arena map and leaving it before the game starts did not cause the map to be unloaded from the server, causing a memory leak that resulted in server freezing and crashes
- This issue is long-standing but became more visible recently as more maps are converted to the new map system
- Fully removed an older unused feature which rapidly added entries to the SQL database causing lag
- Added SQL slow query logging to help find future stability issues
