Sorry for the silence since the last update! A few major real-life changes were stacked with the game’s release. For some time, we combined it with working on updates, but at one point, it got overwhelming. We had to step back to handle the urgent matters, and it took longer than expected. The communication since then has been lackluster on our part. We apologize.

Now, we’re back to consistently working on new updates, but not at the same intensity as before. To add a time framework to all this, we are sharing a roadmap. You will know when to expect the next updates, and what’s planned for them. The updates might contain more/less/other changes, and of course bugfixes. If the dates were to change, we will let you know.

We're glad Update 1.1 got a good reception. Hopefully, we’ll keep it up with the next ones.

Thank you for all the comments.

Mike & Ada

• Fixed an issue where the player could lose a part of the inventory, pets, and item collection progress after a hard prestige.

If it did happen to you, please try to load a save via the 'recovery' menu. You can also send us the save file (via Discord or via email) and we'll add your lost items. I apologize for the trouble.

The main goal of this update is to improve mid-game, by adding more mid-goals between Boss X and Boss Y. Added a way to change your advisors (but it's not easy to get). Reworked weather damage calculations. A few additional nodes in the Skill Tree, a general balance shake-up, and more!

- Have more HP

- Possess higher resistances and often better abilities

- Drop more gold

- Have a higher chance of dropping items

- Level 4 Bosses drop 2 chests

- Count as more kills each (eg, Lv 3 => 3 kills)

- Can drop unique items (eg, the new item used to change advisors)

- Adds an additional way to get more Divine Gems (Baldog+)

- Look slightly different

- Each Boss now has 4 levels

- New material used to replace Advisors

- Reworked math behind weather damage - now weather modifies the damage, and boss resistances are applied afterward

- Show a checkmark in the loot panel for items that can drop only once

- Allow to dynamically fill the Boss ability info (used for the counter in the final boss fight)

- Chest helpers open chests much faster

- Add a new upgrade for Observatory to unlock Boss Levels

- Show damage per second in the Burn tooltip instead of total damage for the entire cycle

- Add a tooltip for shift+click and hold lmb options

- Show elemental damage in tooltips multiplied by the general elemental bonus

- Add every elemental icon to the Crystal Ring's Great effect description

Reworked weather system damage calculations

Once reaching a certain point in the game, the Boss's resistances didn't matter at all because of the weather, while also allowing it to reach 100% and suddenly, no damage was dealt to them. It should now keep them more useful. On top of that, the general elemental bonus \[Crystal Ring] is now multiplying the damage instead of being part of the sum (which made it do barely anything in some cases).

If you are interested in the math behind it now and how it was before, let's take Poison Detonate Damage, for example:

New hit calculations:

S (source) = (Base poison damage + flat damage bonuses \[eg, Great Tooth Amulet]) * (sum of all poison % and mult bonuses) * elemental bonus \[new, previously it was part of the sum of % + mults]

W (weather) = S * Weather bonus

Final (internal boss) = W * 'Damage taken from all sources' \[Flail] * Boss resistances/weaknesses \[including Baldog's crit reduction]

Previous hit calculations:

S = (Base poison damage + flat damage bonuses) * (sum of all poison % and mult bonuses and elemental bonus)

Final = S * 'Damage taken from all sources' * (Boss resistances/weaknesess +- Weather bonus)

**Loot and structures**

- Add general elemental damage mult stat and use it for Crystal Ring - adjusted values are smaller, but the final damage is higher

- Phoenix: rebirth duration doesn't increase with each rebirth

- Phoenix: Base burn stacks per tick 10->6, burn stacks per level 2->3, additional exp required per level 2->1

- Zephyr Fan legendary effect: 30s->90s

- Meteor Hammer damage bonus base 2K->1.5K, damage bonus per level 500->1K, Momentum effect damage base 50K->100K, damage per level 50K->100K

- Change both Recruiter skill tree nodes to 50% instead of 40% and 100%

- Clawed Knuckles min cooldown 1s->0.5s, cooldown reduction per level: 0->0.25s

- Ballista's damage upgrade value grows slightly faster

- Altering Clock now has a 1 second cooldown, its effect base cooldown reduction 0.5s->0.6s, but reduction per level 0.1s->0.05s

- Sacred Bolt damage now scales based on Ballista's damage, and its gold spawn effect is based on the damage dealt

- Crystal Boulder scaling with Freeze 90x->50x, with Poison 1x->0.5x

- Wormhole Worm Pet can now actually drop a chest

**Skill Tree**

- 3 New skill tree nodes: Phoenix rebirth duration reduction; Another crit from all sources; New effect for Birds to disable Boss' ability

- Cap Poison Overflow at 100x damage

- Path to 'Freeze x Troll' is slightly longer

- CritCritCrit mult 0.2x->0.25x

- 'Special Toads' node gives 15 levels instead of 10

- 'Iridium Peaks' bonus 100x->50x

**Other**

- Fix Special Toad chance being multiplied twice by items

- Fix Ungodly Flail duration not increasing on Great quality

- Fix 'NaN' appearing on the Special Toad chance upgrade for the first level

- Prevent Bosses' healing if resistance is higher than 100%

- Adjust Crystal Boulder, Crystal Ring and Ice Whip descriptions

- Fix item enhancement not saving properly if the game was quit or hard prestiged shortly after enhancing

Plans for the future: the Stone Tablet Boss, a new burn item(s).

Enjoy!

Mike & Ada

This update brings often-requested improvements: an option to buy max affordable upgrades with a single click, removes the hard cap on residents, improves the save system, chest flood prevention, and more. Not a lot of balance changes in this one, because of a significant change coming in the next update, which we wanted to get your opinion on (see below the changes list).

An important new feature is the new Save Recovery pop-up to load any backup, as unfortunately, save corruption still happened to a few people. I'm sorry for it happening, and I'm pleasantly surprised that so many people are understanding about it. There's also contact info added on where to get help restoring it.

Before launching the game, we recommend doing a manual backup of your saves if possible (copy them anywhere), located at %USERPROFILE%/AppData/LocalLow/Irid Games/IDLE BOSS RUSH

Please check if your game's version is actually 1.0.6, as Steam sometimes doesn't auto-update the game. Version is displayed in the bottom right corner. If it's anything other than that, right-click on the game on Steam and validate game files.

- Add an option to buy the maximum affordable levels in a single click when holding left shift

- Remove the hard cap (limit) on residents

- Add a save data recovery pop-up, listing all saves and backups (including file size, data, town name) and allowing to load any from there

- Hourly backups are modified to a rotating 3-file system

- Fix 'Clear all data' not working because of the backups

- Show Poison Overflow* stacks on UI (*it's a node in the skill tree)

- Reaching the limit of 40 active chests will now auto-collect 10 of those

- Arena: add a button in the Arena pop-up as an additional way to unlock the next tier challenges

- Arena: use an undiscovered Boss image for Bosses that weren't beaten yet

- Arena: to fight in a Boss Rush challenge, you need to have previously beaten every boss that's part of it

- Increase the size of the texts said by units ('finish/click him') in the final Boss fight

- Bright Scythe: change the third upgrade material from Stone Shard to Feather

- Fix 'Troll Legion' skill tree node

- Reduce 'Freeze x Troll' damage from 1M to 800K (to balance the now fixed 'Troll Legion')

- Add the word 'base' to poison damage skill nodes

- Fix Phoenix not completing the rebirth until hovering over the UI

- Prevent the initial cost of Temple's change weather spell from going below 0

- Fix status effects applying and detonating when the Boss is invulnerable (most important for poison and Arena)

- Items applying status effects go on cooldown only if the stack is applied successfully (Ice Whip, Toxic Tongue)

- Set max price of upgrades to 100Q

- Fix Ungodly Flail interaction with the high-level Altering Clock, resulting in not activating at all

We've got a lot of feedback saying that the pacing needs improvement. The game makes a sudden jump from a fast-paced early phase to a slow-paced late phase, with not much in between.

- When you prestige for the first time, you have around 15 Divine Gems from achievements, so you can buy a pretty decent amount of skills. After that, you probably don't have maxed Alchemist and Marketplace, so getting achievements is your only option to get Divine Gems, which is slow

- Bosses are getting stronger faster than you

- There is a big HP gap between bosses

- Getting Equipment in the mid-game is slow because you don't have enough good items for farming yet

- Each boss has 4 levels

- Each level means: more HP, stronger resistances and abilities, but also a higher chance for loot

- You get 1 Divine Gem when you for the first time beat levels 2, 3, 4 of Baldog and bosses after it (overall 21 Divine Gems)

- For level 4 of Hypnothreek and the preceding bosses, you get a one-time use item that allows you to change advisors without doing a hard prestige

- You can freely change which level of the boss you want to fight

- It should improve the balance between damage-oriented builds and farming builds, not depending on respawn timers

- Higher levels count as more than 1 kill for the achievements (based on level)

Do you like that idea?

This next update is planned for the end of this week. After that update, we want to bring back the Strange Tablet from the Demo for an additional late-game challenge and a way to get the demo pet.

Thanks for reading

Another update, this time tackling issues with saves getting corrupted (usually in case of power loss), zooming out after a hard prestige, gems limit, Warriors' crit damage, Hexgaze ability duration, and a lot of bugfixes.

- Secure data saving and loading to prevent corrupted saves

- Keep a backup of the last save, plus create an additional backup every hour

- Game now checks for a backup before creating a new save file

- Always zoom out to the highest seen boss, even after a hard prestige

- Increase max gems that can be collected in Alchemist and Marketplace to 500 each (from 100)

- Change Alchemist gem offers to always be random (instead of the first few offers being determined beforehand)

- Add a tooltip after a hard prestige informing that items are still there

- Make the first Warrior move closer to the boss

- Reduce the volume and max pitch of the coins sound effect

- Update achievements progress only if the new value is higher than the previous one

- Hexgaze ability duration: 20s -> 10s

- Fixed the Warriors' base crit damage being 0. Now it is 150% as it should be (which means they are stronger now)

- Fixed detailed DPS displaying negative values after reaching massive numbers

- Fixed a few typos

- Fixed Ice Whip description: 2 -> 3 stacks (it was always applying 3)

- Fixed an issue with freeze stacks getting applied over their limit

- Rigged Dice description: Shiny -> Special Toad

We are taking notes on your opinion on the game balance and pacing. We will improve this part in the next update(s).

Thanks for your patience!

The first update is now available, resolving the most critical issues.

• Fixed Marketplace deleting item upgrades if all copies were traded

• Fixed memory leak present in exp/level/other text popups and in damage numbers

• Fixed the Giant Cleaver effect, giving 3% instead of a 300% bonus on epic quality

• Always zoom out the camera for the highest beaten boss, not the current one, after restarting the game

• Clarified the description and added a tooltip to Divine Gems in the achievements tab

• Show the time left until the required material changes in the skill tree

Thanks for your patience!

IMPORTANT

1. There's a bug with Marketplace that when you trade every copy of an item, you lose it, including upgrades, after restarting the game.,

2. In later stages, you might experience a memory leak, probably related to damage numbers. A temporary solution is to disable them or restart the game.,

Sorry for that!

We're working on fixing those issues as soon as possible.

We will address other topics as well, but let us focus on those first.

As a side note:

• If your demo save didn't import, see this thread: ⁠Demo save⁠

• Not everyone realized you can hold left click to auto-hit bosses and to auto-buy structure upgrades. We need to add this info somewhere in the game.

• Another thing easy to overlook - to unlock other boss rush challenges in Arena, you've got to upgrade the building.

Last note: a massive THANK YOU! We're trying to keep up with all the comments. Love reading your theorycrafting, it's insane what's happening.

Thanks for all the hype, wishlists and feedback! We're forever grateful!

Enjoy the game!

Ada & Mike

Hey, thank you for 30K wishlists!

We've updated all screenshots, so check them out if you are interested in Skill Tree, new Bosses, etc.

Now, let's answer the often asked questions: price, content, and demo progress.

at -10% for the first 14 days:

$8.99 | 8.77€ | 35.99zł | £7.65

and standard Steam price conversion for other currencies

How much content is there? It is difficult to estimate playtime in a game that can be played actively or may be left in the background for hours. Build types, hard/soft prestiges done, completed challenges - each can heavily affect the time.

Our estimates are:

~3 days to beat the main Bosses

~1-2 weeks to get all achievements

??? to max everything, get all pets and complete optional content

After beating all the Bosses, it's not over. You can continue playing, and it's worth doing so, as each Boss drops unique items, and duplicates are used to reveal additional effects. It'll be possible to do 100% in the game, such as beating all bosses, collecting all items, getting max levels. There'll be some end-game activities, like Steam leaderboards in the Arena.

If you want to know details, SPOILERS: Content of the full game is ||13+|| Bosses, ||15+|| structures, ||27+|| equipment items (each with multiple upgrades), ||14|| Pets, ||Weather|| system, numerous variants of Meteors, Skill Tree.

If you've managed to beat Crystal Golem in the demo and kept the save, you'll receive a special pet to make sure your comeback is rock solid! The pet will be tough to get in-game otherwise.

You will keep your items from the demo (equipment, materials, keys), but gold and town upgrades do not carry over. You'll be able to start completely fresh if you prefer, and still keep the pet.

Release is in just 10 days!