Vital Shell news & patch notes

• Improved save file handling to prevent memory_card.res corruption
• Prevent a crash when memory_card.res is corrupted (falls back to backup or creates a fresh save)
• Fixed a bug where pressing escape or B on P2's shop would cause a state desync
• Adjusted the multiplayer camera to account for camera angle and improve visibility at the bottom of the screen

Howdy All, Big patch here! This adds 2 player local co-op as well as Steam Workshop support for modding. I'm working on some public documentation for modding, but please reach out on the Discord modding channel in the interim. In additional to local co-op I've brought in some new protocols. Each shell now gets a class specific protocol that offers opportunities to lean into certain builds or switch things up. Additionally, there are 5 new co-op specific protocols to help you find some unique synergies when playing with a friend. All game modes except for the weekly challenge and arena are available for co-op. All unlocks and achievements should be working as well. I'll keep a close eye on the bug reports! Hope you all enjoy. Thanks, Your Friend, Marvin Wizard

• Fixed a bug where the Nova achievement wasn't correctly being tracked
• Fixed a bug where pausing and unpausing during the "WAVE COMPLETE" message would start the timer prematurely in Arcade mode.

Howdy All,

Big patch under the hood here. This has all of the infrastructure changes required for local co-op and modding. I just have a bit more QA to do before it goes live.

Aside from that, there is a major update to how reroll gems work. They are now permanent, but their drop rate goes down every time you find one. Everyone who has already progressed through the game will be granted permanent gems based on their game completion. A full 100% grants you 8 gems (8 rerolls per run).

Classic Arcade & Weekly Challenge mode remain unchanged and each run grants a total of 10 available rerolls.

I know this has been a rough point for some folks. I hope this new model preserves some of that need to roll with the punches early game, while over time allowing you to be more and more deliberate with your builds as you finish up achievements.

If you are interested in testing local co-op or working on mods, please reach out on discord. Keep me posted on any bugs, a lot had to be shifted around to make room for local co-op.

Thanks for your patience as I finish things up.

Your friend,

Marvin Wizard

P.S. there's a new bundle with Granvir, if you're looking for your next mecha fix, definitely check it out.

Howdy Everyone, Long time no patch. This is a small but important one, it fixes OpenGL for players on integrated graphics and hopefully makes the game a bit more accessible for low end systems. I also fixed an issue with the font used for simplified Chinese where the character 回 was not rendering correctly. I'll also be turning on launch options for Windows players to be able to easily launch via Default (Vulkan), DirectX, or OpenGL more easily. I probably should have done this from the start with all the AMD driver problems with Vulkan. I've been deep in the trenches of the local co-op refactor and am just about done and testing things now. In addition to the co-op support I'll be adding 10~ more protocols. More importantly though, with that patch I intend to turn on the Steam Workshop and have things situated for modders to get cooking. If anyone is interested in modding or testing local co-op, please reach out on discord! https://discord.gg/aRpTSz5dDM Your friend, Marvin Wizard

• Russian localization improvements for clarity around unlock criteria
• Fixed a bug where firing many projectiles could cause some periodic flashing on the screen
• Fixed a bug where the sword audio on Koenig would not fully mute when SFX were set to 0
• Continued performance improvements

Howdy All, Couple things to cover here. You may have noticed a few bundles on the Steam page now. Vampire Survivors was of course a large influence on the game, so it is really awesome to have them bundled with Vital Shell. And then BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER 3: I OPENED A PORTAL TO HELL IN THE FAVELA TRYING TO REVIVE MIT AIA I NEED TO CLOSE IT, another game harking back to times passed in a way that feels sincere, is definitely worth checking out.

Another exciting addition is Community Items are now live. Finally got everything approved, hope you all enjoy the trading card art and backgrounds.

I pushed an update to the Demo (disc), there were enough fixes and accessibility improvements that I thought it would be nice to bring that all to demo players.

In game fixes/improvements:

• Português (Portugal) localization

• Fixed an issue where new shader materials were being initialized for every bird, should prevent Descriptors Heap Allocation errors when running the game on direct X, particularly with many birds on screen

• Made some mesh & material optimizations to player projectiles to reduce draw calls, should bring performance improvements to low end systems and improve the intermittent flickering issues some players were having

Keep me posted on any projectile funny business! Outside of any major crashes or issues, I'll probably take a little bit of a breather and play some games myself. Need to build up energy and inspiration to start the next game! Local co-op is still the next major feature priority for Vital Shell though, definitely not going to stop supporting the game. Thanks Everyone, Your Friend, Marvin Wizard

• Fixed a bug where repeatedly hitting B or escape would close the boss cutscene player and break pause functionality
• Fixed various places where text was not localized
• Normalized dithering, should no longer look chunky on small screens or washed out on large displays
• Add German & Turkish Localization
• Fix a variety of crashes and input map problems with various controllers (Victrix controllers now supported)

• Fixed a bug where Blood Pact was inflicting damage while the game was paused
• Fixed a bug where certain USB audio devices were losing all sound after entering the main menu

• Added Italiano localization
• Removed a debug setting that was left in options
• The border is actually black now in full screen

Howdy Everyone, I've been grinding this past week and some change on some new game modes. I have updated challenge mode, which is now more broadly Arcade Mode. It features 3 game types: Classic - Challenge mode as you know it today Weekly Challenge - Classic mode locked to a specific shell with 3 random modifiers applied, new shell and modifiers with every weekly reset Arena - A game mode for experimentation and build-craft, allows you to create a loadout and battle against an endless infinitely scaling wave Achievements are still turned on for Classic and Weekly Challenge, however they are disabled for Arena mode, as you can bring in whatever weapons and stats you want. You still earn experience for your devotion in all modes. A few important bug fixes and updates as well

• Fixed some tearing problems on the floor of Molten Core

• Fixed a bug where equipping special weapons did not contribute to Treasure Hunter totals

• Changed the border of the game window to black (Prevent OLED ghosting)

• Critical Strike floating text now appears in yellow and will always be rendered on top of other damage types

Hope you enjoy the new modes, I'm sure there will be lots of tuning and tweaking to the weekly modifiers as the different combinations get played. The Arena mode isn't built to be a pure endless mode as it is more of a place to test out synergies and experiment. Ultimately the game has discreet equipment slots, rather than infinitely stacking upgrades, so it's not as conducive to a true endless mode. See you all on the leaderboards, thanks as always for keeping the great feedback coming. Your Friend, Marvin Wizard

Howdy everyone, Wanted to get a few QOL changes plus a Burn buff in before I lose power from this snowstorm.

• Burn damage is now distributed across 3 ticks instead of 4

• Burn damage tick speed has been increased

• The detail page for Volatile Shell now lists all bonuses granted, accessed by clicking the protocol on the equipment panel

• Treasure Hunter now additionally awards a free reroll in Battle mode, having Treasure Hunter III adds 3 free rerolls to every run (Challenge mode is still locked at 10 rerolls)

• Added a restart button to the pause menu

Hope the Burn changes (as well as the free rerolls) makes the Conflagration unlock feel a bit more consistent. Thanks all, Marvin Wizard

• Update Localization for Blood Temple, Missile Circus, and Spirit Bomb unlocks to use the language "as Meteor/Bloodfang/Sidewinder" to better clarify the unlocks must be performed playing as the respective shell
• Alt + Enter now toggles between windowed and full screen mode
• The game now launches full screen to help improve launch window behavior; there should no longer be a draggable boot splash window
• Fixed a bug where missiles would get stuck outside of collision range and follow enemies without exploding
• Sidewinder's pets now take on Shell customization colors

• Reduced the file size of the game icon which may prevent launch window issues on Windows
• Added additional leaderboards for each Shell, these aren't backfilled so will require new runs to populate

• Fixed a bug where the Koenig achievement wasn't triggering if you've played the demo, should now trigger upon entering a level as Koenig
• Increased the visibility of Static Field
• Added Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean as available languages

Howdy everyone, Big patch here with some important fixes and balance updates.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a gnarly bug where explosion crits were doing 0 damage (including Shifting Staff attacks)

• The number of enemies spawned during Challenge Mode is now consistent

• Fixed a bug where the Koenig achievement triggered upon launching the game

• Fixed a bug where enemies could spawn burning

• Fixed a bug where Conflagration could apply to deactivated enemies (Exploiting the spawning with burning bug fixed above)

• Fixed a bug where the Blood Temple buff indicator wasn't updating when stacks fell off

• Fixed the localization for Burn damage on the weapon detail panel

• Fixed a bug on Russian where the potency effects listed on the stat panel were extending beyond the edge of the panel

• Fixed a bug where dying on Mir'Van in the middle of the breath attack could cause a crash

Class Changes

• Mirage now gains a damage buff for burning enemies

• The duration of ground fire from Mirage's boost has been increased

• Meteor's scythe (World Eater) attack remains Force damage and now pierces enemies without splitting damage

• World Eater's Potency effect is now "Dark Harvest", which periodically drains life from a nearby enemy, dealing damage and restoring life proportional to damage dealt. Potency increases the chance of this occurring

Ability Updates

• Removed the internal rate limit from esurience

• Riposte no longer persists between waves and there is no longer a cap on the bonus

• Shadow Dancer no longer persists between waves, the bonus now accumulates faster

• Stability core no longer has a cap

• Reduced the visual intensity of ground fire

• Removed the attack speed and critical strike buff from Blood Temple and increased the raw Damage buff

• Increased the healing from the Purification resonance

Weapon Balance

• Slightly reduced the base damage on Crimson Duet

• Slightly reduced the base damage of Geist Rifle (its effective DPS was higher than Gaze of Ruin)

• The base damage of World Eater has been reduced to 66.6 to account for no longer spreading damage across enemies hit

• Increased the base damage of Force Weapons

• Slightly increased the base damage of Heavy Weapons

• Due to the nature of various mechanics and tracking Flame Buffet will continue to deal direct damage, however the base damage has been reduced and instead its native burn and potency burn are applied at 2X.

Blood Temple contained too much power for the lifesteal engine on top of being a massive DPS boost. By removing the Attack Speed bonus it now demands more careful build craft to ensure you can keep up with the life drain. Similarly, an early Shadow Dancer could easily result in approaching 1000% attack speed and invalidating most of the later waves. Hopefully having the wave reset makes it less punishing to get hit at high stacks, while also preventing the protocol from winning the run by itself. Most of the weapon stat changes were just moving a few points around to make sure there weren't any egregious outliers, as well as giving a small boost to heavy weapons to make sure they are more powerful than light weapons. The updates to Mirage and Meteor should bring their power levels up a bit. The fantasy of wielding a scythe feels much better with a large sweeping attack, and getting a nice damage buff from a well-placed boost on Mirage is satisfying.

I will let this patch simmer for a bit before resetting the challenge run leaderboard. Class specific leaderboards are also a priority.

The todo list is quite a mountain and it is a big balancing act to work on improving the game mechanically as well as making it more performant and accessible. I really appreciate the continued feedback, bug reports, and general patience as I work on the game. Hope you enjoy the changes, Your friend, Marvin Wizard

• Added the ability to resize the cursor
• Added two additional cursor shapes
• Added 5 additional high contrast cursor colors
• Added a toggle to always display the cursor
• Fixed a typo on the credits page
• Removed the game guide animation when opening from the pause menu
• Fixed a bug where the Earth Shatter unlock/achievement was not triggering and updated the requirement to 25 (10 was trivial to proc once it was fixed)
• Bosses in now have a chance to drop multiple reroll gems, this is influenced by the Treasure Hunter passive (Does not apply to challenge mode)
• Fixed a bug where Meteor wasn't correctly displaying weapons on the Menu Carousel
• Fixed a bug where Blood Temple activations caused Reactive Armor to trigger at the wrong location

Large scary patch here, with the goal of bringing more stability to various controller configurations. I wanted to save this for the weekend where I'll be able to triage issues more rapidly.

• Improvements to Russian Localization

• Base game font now supports cyrillic characters (should improve interface behaviors in Russian)

• The game now attempts to listen to a single controller (fixes double input bugs with services like Steam Input or DS4Windows)

• Added an initial pass of key remapping to options (No analog sticks or mouse remapping yet)

• Updated the controls display in the game guide to correctly reflect re-bound controls

• Added the ability to select the desired gamepad in options if multiple input sources are detected

• Interface navigation behavior has been reworked to allow for full keyboard navigation in all menus

• Improved handoff between keyboard and mouse to improve keyboard navigation

• In support of the above changes, arrow keys no longer function by default for player movement and need to be set in key bindings if they are the desired movement keys

• Fixed a bug where Mirror Image was losing 2 stacks in one hit

• Added brief iframes to Mirror Image procs to prevent multiple stacks from getting popped in a single frame

• Fixed a bug with Final Answer where certain resonance effects were being fired upward instead of forward

• Updated the game guide with full game art

Keep me posted on any new problems you're running into with controllers or keyboard navigation. The big thing is now the game tries to only listen to a single controller, which should fix all of the double input bugs folks were running into, but does add some complexity and points of failure. If multiple input devices are detected there is a selector available to target a specific controller inside the Control options.

I will likely have a patch coming soon with support for an always visible aim-line toggle for mouse aimers, I have not forgot about yall.

Beyond that there will be a balance patch and class specific leaderboards coming soon. Hoping to go turbo-mode this weekend.

Thanks as usual for all the great reports and feedback, please let me know of any controller/key-binding issues that arise.

Your friend,

Marvin Wizard

• Increased the grace period iframes after taking damage (could almost call this a bug as short as the window was)
• Fixed a bug where rapidly activating Static Field or Aegis could consume a charge and trigger the cooldown without granting the effect.
• Specials can now be continuously activated by holding the keybind, with the exception of Blood Temple which still requires discreet activation

• Continued work on improving launch window behavior
• Added vsync to display options (on by default)
• Added FPS limit to display options (unlimited by default)
• Adjusted audio output latency to (hopefully) improve some of the audio issues folks with USB audio devices were experiencing
• Reduced the default launch window size to improve launch behavior on smaller devices. (Windowed mode still fully resizable and native game resolution is unchanged)
• Fixed a bug where players could take damage multiple times in a single frame before iframes triggered
• Fixed the selection card for Missile Circus, Static Field, and Aegis to correctly display their damage types

• Fixed a crash that was occasionally happening in the Game Guide
• Fixed a bug where it was possible to double tap done on the resonance panel and double increment a wave

• Fixed a bug where potency devotions weren't correctly being applied
• Fixed a bug where Memory Card profiles were showing 99% progress with all unlocks complete
• Buff indicators now correctly wrap instead of extending off screen when more than 4 are active

• The game now correctly pauses when the steam overlay is triggered
• Added a provisional guard rail to ensure victory triggers if the game gets into a state where the wave is over 20. Some players have reported getting stuck on "Wave 21" where the final boss is defeated and the clock just ticks forever.

Thanks for all of the great bug reports and feedback everyone. I wanted to quickly get out a couple more small fixes and improvements today.