Good evening, miners. v1.0 is going to be a doozy of an update and will lead to a very different player experience. This post goes into detail about what's going to change.

All weapons will suffer from overheat--an automatic cooldown triggered if you use the weapon too often. In compensation they will be buffed in direct damage to yield roughly the same damage as they do in the current stable release, v0.9.5. There is a thin line between overbearing and unnoticeable cooldowns, so this feature will have lots of care put into it to make sure it fits in the mod.

The current plan is that overheat will tick down at the same rate whether the weapon is held or not, and cooldown will not start ticking down immediately. If a weapon is close to overheating, the actual cooldown can be started slightly faster by continuing to fire, which is niche but works as tech to help make the player feel more in control.

The previous item-based system for upgrades is being scrapped. In its place, a special Upgrade Station will allow you to equip up to 5 upgrades + 1 overclock, along with a potential ability to upgrade any item, not necessarily just weapons. The old system suffered from 1-2 upgrades being meta, and irreplaceable until the next upgrade was obtained. The new system should encourage diversity and tougher choices.

Upgrades will still require ingredients to obtain (crafted in the station itself), however the Upgrade Tokens will no longer be required. A new post will release 2 weeks before the update to warn players, so they can de-equip their upgrades and sell them.

Quests will remain in the game, but they are going to be on the back burner. Upgrade Tokens will be removed from the pool, and you will no longer be able to obtain weapons as a "Unique" reward. In exchange, more items and a wider selection of materials can be rewarded.

Enemies will now suffer from temperature related effects from specific weapons or upgrades. When an enemy is superheated, they will take 3x damage from ranged and summon damage. When an enemy is supercooled, they will take 3x damage from melee and magic damage. Additionally, enemies will be inflicted with fear and frozen status effects respectively. Fear causes enemies to flee from the position they were inflicted with fear, and freeze will make enemies immobile and take fall damage. Not every enemy can be fearing or frozen, and bosses are immune to both.

Enemies will change color when at either extreme, and enemies suffering from any sort of temperature shifts will display their temperature above them. There's two settings for the UI: one is just a colored health bar, and the other is styled similar to Deep Rock.

The Cryo Cannon is a new Hardmode magic weapon with low damage and high fire rate. The damage isn't the selling part of this weapon, as the Cryo Cannon will rapidly chill an enemy until they freeze. This weapon is intended to be used as support, switched to while your main weapon is on cooldown.

Many of these changes are going to completely change how the mod plays out. Instead of weapons trying to be the best of the best, the plan is for weapon builds to emerge to add choice into how upgrades are used. There isn't a firm release date, or even a time of year, but the goal is before Thanksgiving. As the update circles in, more details will be available. A new post will release with the changelog and a warning that the new update will break things.

Remember that you can post bugs, suggest features, or even make your own content for the mod on the official GitHub at https://github.com/scottysimply/deeprockitems.

Rock and stone.