Hello! Today's 20XX patch makes a few tweaks to level 9, and continues to fix bugs found by our surge of players since launch.

GLHF!

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CHANGES:

• Level 9 tweaks:
• Our goal here is to preserve the challenge of completing each individual challenge-set in Level 9 while making it a little more accessible on Normal/Reverent. Particularly on Normal, the player will still have to complete the exact same caliber of challenges as before this patch, but they'll have a little more leeway in doing so. We'll see how folks feel after this change set. Whether or not you felt L9 needed some tweaking, let us know how you feel about this! We're being super careful not to overshoot here.
• On Reverent Mode, level length reduced by 25%. Level length unchanged in all other play modes.
• Added many more crate/machine opportunities to Level 9, so they'll come more than once in a blue moon. On Defiant and in Challenges, these crates/machines spawn much less frequently (50% less likely, which is still more crates than currently spawn by a good bit).
• Platforming difficulty unchanged in all modes.
• The level 9 boss' "Astral Orb" ability no longer deals contact damage (so players only need to avoid the beam it creates). Astral Orb move speed also reduced.
• Glory Zones now have some bad luck protection involved - at most two levels should go by without one popping up. Statistically, this results in about one extra Glory Zone every two runs.
• Alpha/Beta Arkors attack rate as Soul Foes reduced. Gamma Arkors attack rate as Soul Foes increased slightly (10%, up from 0%).
• Taste the Rainbow no longer requires that the player also have Mixmatch Mastery. (Kind of a change, kind of a bugfix.)
• Earthmetal Plating can no longer decrease your HP below 1 when picked up (so it won't kill you).
• Seed Racer now starts level generation at difficulty 2 (like Challenges do).
• When 20XX closes to desktop because of a failed tileset load (if you've had CTDs loading into lategame levels, this is probably you), it'll invoke the game's Save and Quit functionality before closing (if Save and Quit is available). This means you should be able to hit "continue" as long as you only hit a one-off crash (such as failing to load a level due to insufficient memory).

BUG FIXES:

• Fixed a bug causing co-op clients to rarely have runaway platforms at the start of a level. This was usually reported on level 9, but could happen on Skytemple as well.
• Fixed a bug causing Nut Zero to trigger with Bankrupt on if you completed a DHC that activated Bankrupt.
• Fixed being able to get stuck in Phase Blocks after locking them with Shadespur.
• Fixed a bug that'd occasionally cause The Volunteer to fail to convert a Scrap Recycler into a Very Safe Lab.
• Fixed a certain boss HP bar re-appearing if you change the screen resolution.
• Fixed an ancient bug (seriously, I think this one has been around for years) that could cause player 2 in local co-op to spawn into a run as Ace, even if the player was Nina before starting the run.
• Decreased visual explosion density during one particular explosion-heavy section (for framerate concerns, especially on Less High). Danger level unchanged.
• Fixed a bug that could prevent Arsenal from triggering on a given player's account. (Players with everything unlocked that don't have Arsenal should get it once they enter HQ.)
• Corrected a few Datalore errors.

KNOWN ISSUES:

• There are a few places text doesn't wrap correctly. We're rolling a new text renderer for our ports, and will fix these when they're done (so we can avoid doing the work twice).
• There are a few issues relating to changing display type/resolution resulting in non-perfect results - we're working on this one, but haven't been able to fix it yet.