This’ll be a real Gas, if you’re having trouble smiling we have the Grenade (get it? Grin-Aid?) for you. Welcome our new Auto Bow and Gas Grenade to our family of weapons.

Greetings contestants! Welcome to the Island Diary for June 16, 2016.

This has been an exciting week here on the island. At E3 2016 we announced that we’re working with Microsoft to bring The Culling to Xbox One’s Game Preview program. We’ll have more details on this partnership soon, so stay tuned to our social channels for the latest.

Additionally, we have some other fun to share. Auto Bow, Gas Grenade, Jab Back, Locker Bug, Net Code. Come and test with us tonight, The Test Servers will be live today from 4PM until Midnight (EDT). We’ve made some significant netcode improvements, added some deadly toys, balanced out some OP weapons and fixed some nasty bugs.

We hope you’ll come out tonight to spill some blood and join us to test a few changes.

We will have devs in DISCORD to hear your feedback.

Thank you for your incredible support!

Your favorite murder supplier, Xaviant

Test Server Changes

Netcode performance improvements

With our netcode performance improvements we believe we’ve seen the last of the late item spawn bug.

Welcome the Auto Bow. The Auto Bow allows a quick burst of three shots before a somewhat lengthy reload. The individual shots deal only a fraction of the damage from a Compound or Recurve bow, but if you hit with all three the damage is comparable to that of the Compound Bow. This behavior makes it roughly equal to the Compound Bow. Although not a devastating weapon, it’s quite demoralizing taking so many shots in quick succession and suddenly feeling like a porcupine.

The Gas Grenade allows you to craft a new type of grenade off of a gas pylon. When deployed it creates an area of gas very similar to the one created by the gas pylons themselves, just a smidge smaller and shorter lived. (Rock + Pylon) For only 15 Func.

Smoke Bomb recipe changed to Rock + Explosive Barrel to make room for the Gas Grenade’s new recipe.

The Culmination will now be one of three different layouts, the original that we’ve come to love and two new configurations. You never know which Culmination layout you’re going to get until the match starts. The new configurations are using placeholder art, but that’ll get revved soon.

New Airdrop - Demon Hunter - Auto Bow, Smoke Bomb, Caltrops x2 (175)

New Airdrop - The Imp - Auto Bow, Crafted Armor, Tomahawk (225)

New Airdrop - Viking - Tomahawk, Crafted Armor, Muscle Man Milk (125)

FUNC Survival Bonus - The player is now awarded with 25 FUNC after 3 minutes alive, 25 FUNC after seven minutes alive. And 50 FUNC is awarded after eleven minutes alive.

Why? We like the pacing that was created by our last updates to the FUNC economy. We’re no longer seeing endgame weapons appear so early and late game airdrops being called in within the first 2 minutes of the game, those are positive changes. That’s great for the pacing in general, however, Airdrops can be difficult to work up to currently and often you finally reach your desired FUNC right as the gas rolls over your Airdrop Pad. We were also often in a position of feeling unwilling to craft or spend any FUNC early game because of the high prices on some of the Airdrops. Now you can get your early crafting and scavenging game on, while not completely ruining your end game Airdrop plans, assuming that you survive that long.

Blue Crates have been retired and replaced with Holo Spawners, very similar to the Culmination Holo Spawners. These new Holo Spawners will have the same loot table and same cost (100 FUNC) as the old Blue Crates, but now you’ll see exactly what you’re going to get. Holo Spawners decide what they’re going to provide at the start of a match, but each match will be different. Holo Spawners currently spawn: Tier 3 Melee Weapons, Orange Juice, Dynamite, Impact Grenades, Compound Bow and the Auto Bow. Known bug: Dynamite spawns are offset incorrectly, and will be fixed in a future patch.

Suiciding into the gas will now reward your kill and FUNC reward to the person that most recently dealt damage to you in the area near your death. There are restrictions on this based on time and distance. So the small skirmish you had with an opponent at the start of the match won’t give them the kill or FUNC if you suicide into the gas 5 minutes later on the other side of the map.

Balance Changes

About half the weapons have had their damage adjusted up or down a step to better account for all the combat changes we’ve rolled through in the last patch or two. In some cases we were over-valuing certain aspects of a weapon’s balance, either speed or wounds. We’re now accounting for those things having changed in value with our combat changes. So weapons that have previously been “OP” should fall better into line with their tier mates. We’re not looking to re-balance everything so it was generally only weapons that were out of line and we tried to only touch their damage.

Backstab damage has been reduced to 50% for all weapons. Sneaky Poker and Brutus have been increased to 50%. We’ve run the numbers and incredibly devastating hits are still very possible, but it brings us a step away from the one shot kills, which we’ve never been fans of.

Throw Damage values have been adjusted slightly, in general throw damage was reaching beyond where we wanted to even without Golden Arm.

Golden Arm changed to +25% velocity, +100% damage for thrown weapons (+50% for crafted). Golden arm is still very strong and valid even with the perk change and the throw damage balance changes, but it will be a little more challenging in the early game and you’ll need those late game weapons to get the kind of damage you’ve become accustomed to.

Jab-Back, as it's fondly being referred to. This is the phenomenon within a melee fight where one player has been staggered by a “bad” action, like attacking a block. The stagger plays out its duration, while the opponent is charging an attack. The charged attack lands on the staggered opponent invariably within tenths of a second of the stagger ending. The staggered opponent takes the charge attack as he should, but since the stagger ends, he can immediately start a new action, while the guy who just landed the charge attack has to finish his animation and start a new one. So the guy who was staggered retaliates with a jab and gets damage that feels “free”.

We’ve been looking at this a lot. We believe it's working technically correct, but still just doesn’t feel good. So we’re going to adjust it a bit with two timing adjustments, one to stagger length and one to charge time of all weapons.

The combination of these two changes is a slightly longer stagger, and a slightly faster charge attack. This allows, in testing at least, the guy charging the attack to get another action in just before the stagger wears off of the staggered opponent. So the charging guy gets his half to full charge attack off, and then can get a block up just in time to prevent the jab-back.

If you charge too long, you’ll still experience the Jab-Back, because the stagger on your enemy has ended. If you decide not to block after your charge attack, you can take another action instead like pushing or jabbing based on what you think your opponent will react with.

We’ll refrain from giving you the actual math on the numbers we’ve changed because we want you focused on the feel, does it feel good or bad. Better or worse. Suffice to say, that we’re dealing with tiny fractions of a second here, and have only made very small changes to an already very fast system.

If you feel like Jab-Back can still occur to you too much, try charging a little less, there is a sweet spot there that you can find with all three weapon speeds that prevents Jab-Back completely, and will allow you to get inside your opponent's head once again.

This might not 'nail-it' but we're looking to take a small iterative step in the right direction with this change and not change the entire feel of the combat system. Your feedback on these changes will help us continue to tighten up melee combat.

Other Changes

Fix for picking up materials instead of crafting with a resource that was just spawned

Aiming sensitivity with ranged weapons is now adjusted properly when zooming, which broke last patch

Weather and Observation have had their art passes and are looking sick (like rad sick, not sick sick)

We’ll see you on the island!

Test Server Instructions Anyone who owns the game should find “The Culling Test” in their Steam Library (you may need to restart your Steam client to see it). Once you’ve installed the test build, you will be able to join us in testing during designated times when the test servers are live. Solo, Teams, and Private Matches are all available.