A new Dome Keeper update 4.0 patch notes are released for players. Since the last major update, players have been experiencing multiple issues and bugs Hopefully, today’s Dome Keeper update 4.0 will address some of these issues and bugs.
Read what is new and fixed in today’s Dome Keeper patch. Read the official patch notes below.
Dome Keeper Patch 4.0 Notes – July 25, 2024
Game Modes
- added Assignment game mode with 16 assignments. They come with special rules and are meant as a challenge to figure out a good strategy utilizing all the content. They also come with a challenge mode, if you really want to prove your skills. Completing assignments ears you badges from the Keeper’s Guild.
- added Keeper’s Guild reward shop, where you can spend earned badges on permanent benefits. Currently there are 12 rewards to unlock. Rewards are active across all game modes, not only in the new Assignment mode.
- added Keeper’s Guild Badge rank, where you can see how mandy badges you and your friends earned
- replaced “Fixed Cobalt” prestige variant with “Provocation”. Fixed Cobalt was barely played by anyone and the same strategy as used with endless mode was ideal there. This made the mode somewhat redundant. Instead, we added a variant where you can increase how strong the monster waves are in return for more points. That should be fun!
- implemented completely new loadout. This was necessary as the old loadout was not suited to support the new content plans, but more importantly it would not work with multiplayer. For multiplayer we needed something that supports multiple players making choices together. We can’t reasonably support two different loadouts, so we opted for this one. Some things in it are better than before, but for controller or keyboard only it is probably a bit slower than the old loadout. Let us know if you encounter things that are irritating, feel unpolished or badly usable. It definitely can use some more improvements adn we closely listen to your feedback here. It will definitely stay, because we need it for multiplayer.
Supplements
- you might know supplements as these strong upgrades that you can get for your dome, that introduce new upgrades into the tree. We added a ton of them for this update. They can be found in supplement chambers after you unlock supplements with your guild badges. Generally they offer very strong upgrades. This is possible because they cannot be bought freely, but have to be weighed against each other.
- added 3 keeper supplements, one for each keeper and a shared one. The shared one is the one way teleporter from the cave. That cave was removed. It is much more interesting to have as a keeper supplement, especially since it is such a strong ability.
- added 4 weapon supplements, one for each weapon. Some are already existing upgrades retrofitted into supplements, but some are new ones.
- added 20 gadget supplements. Same as with weapons, some already existed. For each gadget we did what made the gadget as a whole more interesting. For example, the teleporter has its resource teleportation as a supplement now. This also means that it can be much stronger, teleporting resources much faster.
Gadgets
- added a total of 11 new gadgets. For reference, so far the game only had 11 gadgets! They are in no particular order: Remote Station, Drilling Rig, Furnace, Iron Worms, Mushroom Farm, Resource Packer, Suitblaster, Buzzsaw, Dome Armor, Shockwave, Rocket Launcer. They occupy different slots and help in different areas. They also finally do away with some gadget slots only having one option, like lift or spire, meaning there was no interesting decision to be had there.
- added a new primary gadget, the Drone Yard. It employs transport drones that help you bring back resources to the dome. For combat, it can use battle drones that fire projectiles at monsters, or parasitic drones that weaken monsters a lot.
- rework of all existing gadgets. For some gadgets the changes are tiny, for some gadgets the changes are very big. Blast Mining is much stronger and more useful now, with new upgrades and a rework of some existing upgrades. Same for probe, just as two examples.
Other
- added five new monsters, posing new challenges and extending the late game difficulty
- added a sixth world into the rotation for relic hunt and assignments. Worlds are a visual change, for variety only.
- added 3 new caves: Iron Tree Cave, Water Cave, Portal Cave.
- completely new map generation, more on that below
- we ported the game to a new engine version, in preparation of multiplayer and console ports. This comes with many benefits but also with some issues. The following things are related to this:
- support for right-to-left languages now, i.e. arabic
- keybinding should be sensical for non QWERTY keyboard now by default
- performance on some machines will be better, but will also be worse on others. We’ll try our best to optimize when we learn there are issues, and find solutions to improve performance together.
- font colors are now using palette colors
Balance and Changes
Game Modes and Runs
- started season 6 of prestige
- changed difficulty curve of prestige, so that the games would not go quite as long and to compensate the new battle abilities
- Prestige Countdown will now end after 20 cycles always. This removes the last bit of the run that meant gaining very few points for a lot of effort.
- added timelapse feature to the game, where you can view your run as a minimap over time
- added detailed statistics that show you how many monsters per type you killed and what dealt damage and how much. We’ll try to improve the differentiation of the damage sources a bit, right now it is a rough lense to look through.
- changed how long cycles are. They start out about 10s longer initially and will generally be longer early, but shorter in very late stages of the game.
- most gadgets keep working during combat now, so no lift stopping a cobalt delivery anymore. This is a big change, because suddenly it would be benefitial to stall waves, or to keep sitting in the station after a battle. Because of this, the countdown to the next wave will start even if you keep sitting in the station.
- if a battle takes too long at too low battle intensity, new monsters will spawn. This is to prevent stalling slightly, but it also makes sense in the world. 500 other monsters would not delay their attack only because there is a single flyer still fighting the dome.
- cobalt upgrade in prestige countdown now starts at a cost of 2 cobalt
- raised cheat detection values to absurd values. No more false positives because you are an insanely good player.
Map Generation
- maps will have much more interesting shapes now, instead of being always a similar blob
- biome sizes are balanced in size now, so that maps that are thin at the top do not have a huge disadvantage
- map sizes for prestige are balanced now. Before, the number of tiles in a map could vary a lot. Now the algorithm tries to bring it close to a given size, making it more consistent.
- totally new layout for maze maps that is crazy!
- the new map generation might take significantly longer than before. Let us know if it is a problem!
- rebalanced resource generation a bit
Domes and Weapons
- all upgrade costs have been reconsidered. Generally, late game upgrades will need a bit more iron.
- Sword Dome: 1000 hp -> 1200 hp
- Dome Supplement: Melee Damage Reduction 20% -> 25%
- Dome Supplement: Projectile Damage Reduction 20% -> 25%
- Dome Supplement: Electrified Surface 8 dps -> 10 dps, 20 dps -> 24 dps
- Dome Supplement: Thorough Combat Repair 300 hp -> 360 hp healed
- Dome Supplement: Dome Resurrection – instead of adding more hp to the maximum hp of the dome, it makes the dome invulnerable for 20s when triggered, or 30s after upgrading.
- Dome Supplement: Scrap Repair: 100 hp -> 75hp health reduction
- Laser: buffed laser damage and made it slightly slower
- Laser: added another stage to laser damage upgrades. Before maximum laser damage was 90 dps, now it is 180 dps.
- Laser: double laser is now a weapon supplement
- Sword: bomb stab is now a weapon supplement. This means you can also combine javelin with bomb stab.
- Sword: added another upgrade to long stab. In its subtree, it now also gets the ability to speed up on button press. It also can stab for much much longer, as it never retracts automatically after dealing some damage.
- Artillery: rotation speed 0.9 -> 1.0
- Artillery Monster Buster: buffed mortar damage and reduced time to reload
- Artillery Volatile Explosives: reduced time to reload
- Artillery: switched both rotation upgrades, so you can get the fast rotation earlier
- Artillery: added Deafening Blast supplement, which stuns all close monsters whenever you fire the mortar
- Tesla: removed perfect timing. This is now its weapon supplement.
- Tesla: buffed damage significantly from 30 -> 40, 45 -> 70, 60 -> 110, 80 -> 180. This is only possible due to removing perfect timing from the regular tree.
Keepers
- Engineer: Added power drill supplement, making drilling faster and enabling drilling through previously indestructible bedrock.
- Buffed Engineer drill strength: 6 -> 7, 14 -> 18, 34 -> 42, 62 -> 98, 240% -> 300%.
- Assessor: Added sphere supplement that destroys neighboring tile for every tile a sphere destroys.
- Slight increase in late stage iron cost for both keepers, slightly more increase for assessor
- Buffed Assessor repetable sphere damage: 240% -> 250%
- slightly buffed Assessor bundle duration: 25s -> 30s, 40s -> 45s
- rebalanced assessor battle abilities. Reflection is a bit better, the other two slightly longer cooldown with split spheres lasting longer.
- added one way teleporter as keeper supplement
Primary Gadgets
- Upgrade costs are all rebalanced. Battle abilities now each cost one cobalt instead of water.
- Changed overcharge mechanic: it now only affects battle abilities. The effect it had before was too convoluted and difficult to understand and predict, with too many special cases. All upgrades for overcharge have changed.
- Shield Electro Blast: the time bonus for using it after the shield depleted is a bit lower, but now you get a second use for it in one battle. Big buff!
- Orchard: you can get another use of a battle ability if you overcharge
- Orchard: Root explosion does less damage now, always 100 damage
- Orchard: the buff starts slightly weaker, but the upgrades improving it make it much stronger than before
- Added Drone Yard
Gadgets
- Reworked gadget slots a bit. The keeper suit is now a proper slot for gadgets, and only one gadget can go into it. This means you cannot have the probe and the prospection meter at the same time, for example.
- Upgrade costs are all rebalanced, with late stage upgrades costing more iron.
- Added Remote Station and supplement
- Added Drilling Rig and supplement
- Added Furnace and supplement
- Added Iron Worms and supplement
- Added Mushroom Farm and supplement
- Added Resource Packer
- Added Suitblaster and supplement
- Added Buzzsaw and supplement
- Added Dome Armor and supplement
- Added Shockwave and supplement
- Added Rocket Launcer and supplement
- Stun Laser: Reduced cooldown a lot and fire time a bit
- Stun Laser: stun strength 5.5 -> 6.0
- Stun Laser: area stun is now a supplement
- Auto Cannon: time between shots 2.5s -> 2.0s
- Auto Cannon: Machine Gun time between shots 2.0s -> 1.5s, 1.2s -> 1.0s, 0.75s -> 0.5s, 0.45s -> 0.25s
- Auto Cannon: Shotgun time between shots 3.0s -> 2.5s, 4.0s -> 3.3s
- Auto Cannon: added supplement that nearly doubles the rate of fire
- Blast Mining: slightly increased radius and decreased production time
- Blast Mining: added third stage of explosion radius upgrade
- Blast Mining: added supplement that grants you three mines instead of one in each production cycle. There was an upgrade like this before, but it would grant you three small mines. Now you can get three big mines, so a big buff 🙂
- Blast Mining: impact detonation now moves the center of the explosion into the direction of the impact. This makes blast mining way more useful.
- Blast Mining: improved behaviour when impact detonation is triggerd. There were many strange cases before, like it not exploding when it would fall on resources.
- Probe: reworked the whole tech tree and added a path that immediately completely reveals the rock, instead of placing markers
- Probe: added supplement that makes the probe recharge automatically and removes the station from the cellar, freeing that slot
- Teleporter: added two small upgrades
- Teleporter: made resource teleportation a supplement and buffed it.
- Lift: starts out with more orbs that go faster
- Lift: buffed orb speed and capacity upgrades, as well as keeper speed upgrade
- Lift: added supplement that removes the orbs and lets all resources float upwards automatically
- Condenser: Auto overcharge primary gadget is now a supplement
- Prospection Meter: added supplement that reveals chambers and has much higher range
- Drillbert: buffed drill strength
- Drillbert: added a supplement that adds two more drillberts
- Converter: rebalanced all conversions
- Converter: iron duplication is now a supplement
- Converter: added an upgrad with which you can queue conversions, so that conversion that do not take long do not suffer from you being at the dome rarely.
- Converter: added two different upgrades on how to improve water conversion
- Squidley, the resource tansporting squid from a cave, now gets faster the more resources it brought back to the dome
- gadgets like the auto cannon now lead their shots, making them much better at hitting moving (flying) targets
Monsters
- added Hornet
- added Breeder
- added Phaser
- added Bloater
- added Tormentor
- Driller changes: 800 hp -> 1400 hp, 32 dps -> 40 dps, weight 200 -> 350, minimum run weight 350 -> 850. Because the new monsters fill up some space on the difficulty curve, driller is now a proper late game monster.
- Bolter: 135 hp -> 150 hp, weight 80 -> 100, minimum run weight 200 -> 250. Effectively becomes slightly more late game.
- Scarab: 1150 hp -> 1200 hp´, damage 20 -> 25, weight 450 -> 600, minimum run weight 900 -> 1200, fires about twice as many projectiles. Becomes a very late game monster and should keep posing a threat even with all the new combat gadgets.
Download Dome Keeper update 4.0 on PC.
