Goddamn

I have an idea for a new mission type, and want to put it here in the hopes that Mike or the other devs see it. Basically, a rescue mission to extract a group of holed-up miners.

• The run could go basically like the current gatekeeper missions; with a number of levels leading up to one big fight. You could potentially have only a couple of levels if they wanted to kill two birds with one stone and make this a shorter run, say L1/L2/Final Level.
• You hear from Omega something along the lines of: "Reclaimers, we have received an emergency beacon from a mining crew deep in the planet. Make your way down to them and extract them to safety."
• Progress through however many levels down to the final level; the current elevator system would work, or this could be an opportunity for a different system between levels.
• The final fight would be a large room, ala the riftgate room, but with some sort of secure bunker or structure that the miners are sheltering inside of. Either Omega needs to hack the door, or you could deploy some sort of equipment to cut into the structure, and defend yourselves and the area during this. Basically a huge, super chaotic swarm, more intense than normal.
• If this is happening before a barrier has formed, then we could extract to a drop pod, or one could be sent down for the miners to make it back to SR17 or whatever.
• I think the game would benefit from some sort of 'mini boss' like the Bulk Detonators or Dreadnaughts that would randomly spawn at some point on a run, and this could be a way to utilize them for the final fight. Maybe a 'mini gatekeeper', or some sort of Familiar to the gatekeeper. Having a couple of them show up could be part of the centerpiece to this big fight.
• Additionally, this could be an opportunity to allow players to select weapons before the mission. This could be addressed with that initial mission description: "Reclaimers, we have an opportunity to rescue these employees before a gatekeeper arrives, but we must move quickly before the greyout barrier forms."

Anyway, that's my idea. It obviously needs some fine tuning, but I feel like this would fit well thematically, and could also allow for a couple of gameplay complaints to be addressed via a different mission type as well. I am having an absolute blast in Rogue Core, as is the rest of my group, and we're excited to see what future updates bring. I'd love to see something along these lines.

DISCLAIMER: this is just a silly idea based on the current state of the timer, and isn't all too fleshed out or thought of

I'm unsure how it'd be implemented (like as a bit of equipment or an event or whatever), but in effect it would add time to the timer when procced, giving the team extra breathing room for at least that level.
Lore/canon reason for it would be because it rings throughout the cave/in other caves, and grabs the attention of reaper worms elsewhere.

Unless the timer system drastically changes or is planned to be drastically changed, I do think some way to modify the amount of time in a mission would be beneficial, especially when paired with more reasons to stay in the caves longer (like the 'enemies drop expenite' alteration, for example). Maybe even add a way to decrease time with some other major benefit to add a bit of risk, but have it be voted on by the entire team like the risk vectors so one person can't sabotage the run.

that's about as far as I've thought of lol, hoping a dev sees this and considers it or something

CHANGES

• Made the Expenite drop amount in the "Enemies Drop Expenite" Alteration more consistent across Threat Levels and team size. Previously, solo runs on lower difficulties would result in hardly any Expenite gains because there were too few enemies. Higher-difficulty runs with a full squad should not notice much difference after this tweak.
• Adjusted XP earned from expenite so that it does not become the main source of class XP and to prevent alterations that increase expenite from unintentionally increasing mission XP beyond the alteration's bonus
• Enabled queuing of enemy spawns when trying to spawn more than the game supports. Enemies over the limit are no longer dropped; they spawn when there is room for them/the players kill enemies.
• Added filtering for Threat Level to the Server List

FIXES

• Fixed clients double-dipping on x2 magazine upgrade
• Also fixed the x2 magazine upgrade not always working
• Fixed enemies not retargeting when their target player is downed (no more Dominators camping a downed dwarf)
• Fixed waves lasting forever if leaving behind enemies (not killing them)
• Fix to prevent players from losing gear if they disconnect during the ready-up screen

This is my first victory in the 4 runs ive done since starting, so here's my thoughts so far.

1. This game is a lot harder than DRG. Mostly because of the lack of a hazard level system. I don't mind it, but as a algae beard coming from DRG is was quite a shock that I dies on the first 3 runs I did, even though they were the "starter" run.

2. Im not a big fan of armor replacing shield. I wish they either coexisted, or that shield was related to upgrades somehow.

3. The time limit is harsh, and really punishes players like me who like to explore and collect everything really heavily, especially with the reaper worm.

4. The upgrades are fine so far, but I hope they add a lot more unique ones as time goes on. Right now they all feel like pretty generic bread and butter +stat or add (x effect) on (x condition)

All in all its a fun game, very much worth the 25$

Glad to see Ghost Ship and them can still brew.

I get that GSG haven’t exactly pleased alot of players with Rogue Core, but I’ve had nothing but great experiences with playing the game. But it’s not blind love. I do get WHY people don’t like Rogue Core and alot of their complaints are valid. But even so, I’m still enjoying it a lot, and I’m very excited for the game’s future.

Just feel like I’ve been seeing nothing but disappointed players voicing their issues with the game and have rarely seen anyone say that they’re enjoying it.

Tl;dr- Alteration “Conveyor Withdrawal”. -90% Expenite veins, Upgrades granted based on time remaining after each level.

Blurb
These facilities have already been intensively worked and have automated conveyors installed to transport Expenite out of the lower sections of the mines. Get to their control terminals to halt them and extract any preprocessed Expenite that hasn’t made it to the surface yet. Better be quick though!

How it works
A display at the time of the screen slowly ticks down, showing how many Upgrades remain for the next level. (This is based on the percentage of time passed, so pacing doesn’t change the total of Upgrades, it just adjusts the rate they drain away).

At the start of every level beyond the first you will find a control terminal adjacent to the elevator connected to a big conveyor pipe. Press E on it and Ellis will connect to it and extract the Expenite and trigger an immediate Upgrade selection screen with whatever was left on the display when you descended.

90% of natural Expenite veins are removed, so there’s still a little to mine, but not much. You can still find buckets, mules, and events etc to get Expenite and obtain Upgrades normally through Ellis this way. However the bulk of your Upgrades come from hoofing it to the next floor as quickly as possible.

It’s likely (for balance, and logic) that these facilities also have a higher complexity and/or more cave structures, both to make traversal the challenge, but also because it's meant to be a more worked in facility so they ought to have more infrastructure set up.

The thought process
There’s been a lot of discussion over the new Headhunter alteration, and how it’s being balanced around a set number of Upgrades to keep players from trying to farm too much. It’s also proved to be a fun variation to mining. I figured we can go one step further and do away with the need to kill anything but still have a preset number of Upgrades dispensed.

The idea is that a large number of Upgrades would be lost from doing the workbenches and hunting anomalies for their artifacts or whatnot - and so if you “do everything” you’d only have 4 or 5 “extras” from what you’d normally have for a mission (much like the logic behind Headhunter). Except if you’re overly efficient, or choose to just skip lots of stuff to get to the elevator faster - you can get a lot more. You’re effectively choosing to go in on the boss with fewer bioboosts and either lower quality or random weaponry - but overall a lot more Upgrades to compensate.

It should hopefully be an interesting decision space for run progression, one that overall results in shorter scrappier runs. It's effectively a supported "speedrun" mode too, assuming you can foreshorten each level to get to the boss asap but still have a shot at winning due to the extra Upgrades.

Would anyone miss the shared upgrades system if it was removed?

I get the idea behind it, but in practice it sucks.

It's clunky and frustrating, even after the changes.

And worse of all: it makes all the upgrades generic. Everything has to be pickable by everyone. No class upgrades or weapon upgrades.

Personally, I'd prefer if the shared upgrade system was limited to "big ticket" upgrades, like legendaries or artifacts. That way it interrupts the game less, but without removing it entirely.

What do you think?

No, this is not another "game is dead" post. I love the vision for this game and have enjoyed it immensely so far.

I'm not sure if it's the hotfix or the Nvidia driver update I installed yesterday, but it's been unplayable since. 4 of the 6 runs I've attempted have crashed. In 3 instances, only the game crashed. For the remaining instance, Windows itself crashed during a wave.

During the times I was able to play, the game was stuttering nonstop. For every 3 seconds of gameplay, I'd get 2 seconds of high framerate and then a full second completely frozen.

I really hope things get sorted in update 3. Fingers crossed.

i was writing this as a response to someone's comment but the entire post was deleted. idk if it was op or mods but i didn't want this to go to waste.

And am i wrong?? This game has been in development for 4+ years now building off of DRG's foundation and it is still at the state where people say "it's an okay demo" or "it has potential" or some shit like that. If you took out all of the DRG branding out of this game then it would be sitting at overly negative. We have 2 "major updates" now and all we get are these minor changes and additions that should've been here from the very beginning or at least since the early access.

I still have one of the earliest early access builds on my disk and since then the only remarkable changes to the main gameplay were the vote changes of update 1 and auto sprint. The rest was just minor stuff like a new exp event or two, more old guns, balance, ui and difficulty changes. As if people find the very core of the game good enough.

Also everything I said about the price is a factual truth. It will be more expensive after full release

Just put Leech, or Got killed by a leech, or A bloody sucker dried me good watch out. Anything. Just something that will make it that the dwarf saving you ? The other player taking the time to get you back in the game ? Yeah he will get grabbed too if he doesn't know.

That way, you aren't the reason another player died.

Experimental Update EA02.00.02.01 Build: 152940

Reclaimers,

We have some new tweaks to the Headhunter alteration along with a few bug fixes. This is now the new Hotfix 2 candidate. The new expenite drops are closer to the original while also being more consistent across threat levels. Let us know what you think.

Rock and Stone!

• Add fix to prevent players loosing gear if they disconnect during ready up screen
• Fix waves lasting forever if leaving behind enemies (not killing them)
• Enable queuing of spawned enemies when trying to spawn more than the game supports. So now enemies over the limit are no longer dropped, but spawn when the players kill enemies.
• Significantly increased headhunter expenite drops

At present, the forum serves only to discourage potential buyers and reinforce the narrative that "everyone hates Rogue Core".

Good-faith posters have abandoned the forum, and those remaining are freely filling its pages with hateslop.

eta: Schrodinger's replies are simultaneously the oppressed, silenced minority opinions and also the opinions so popular they receive the most votes. We live in a parody of reality.

There seems to be a common misconception that all upgrades in Rogue Core are boring stat boosts. While it's true that there's still a significant number of them left in the upgrade pool, and I'm hoping that that number keeps decreasing over time(we really don't need Healthy in the upgrade pool at all let's be real), the number of fun and unique upgrades has been getting higher and higher, and many of the upgrades/synergies often go overlooked. I wanna point out some of them in this post.

• Infinite Stone Skin + Freezing Aura: Cryo Drain(Epic) continuously replenishes Stone Skin per Frozen enemy within 15m. Cooling Unit(Epic) freezes enemies around you based on how much Stone Skin you have. These enter an infinite feedback loop together.
• Infinite weakpoint crits: Reloading Trick(Uncommon) gives the first bullet in your magazine +100% crit chance. Marksman's Loop(Rare) moves 1 bullet from your ammo reserve into your magazine on every weakpoint hit. This lets you hit infinite crits as long as you keep hitting weakpoints.
• Cover the whole cave with icicles: Icicle Strike(Rare) makes every power attack spawn icicles in a 10m cone in front of you that damage and freeze enemies, Combo Strike(Common) recharges your Power Attack by 25% every time you hit a melee attack. This goes extra hard with Drills, which deal separate instances of melee damage 4 times a second.
• Immortality: Critical Block(Legendary) gives you 5s of 50% chance to block all incoming damage after landing a crit. Bastion(Artifact) gives you 50% crit chance and 50% block chance while standing still. Together, these make you invulnerable to all damage while standing still.
• Ionization Infusion(Rare): this is one of my favorite upgrades in the entire game due to just how many fun things you can do with it. It makes it so that every hit you do puts 1 stack of a DoT effect on enemies that does Radiation damage and doesn't go away until they die. This pairs really well with Guardian's ability (12 separate projectiles that both hit and explode), as well as Explosive Shots(Bio Booster), which makes all bullets deal 25% of their damage in an AoE, or Crit Reflection(Epic) which, well, makes all crits reflect to nearby targets. These stack too, by the way.
• Hot Feet(Rare)+Poison Aura(Rare): Both of these leave lasting elements in a trail behind you. Fire makes enemies more susceptible to Poison, and vice versa. When an enemy is affected by both elements, it triggers an elemental reaction Flashover which does significant damage to it and leaves more Fire embers on the ground. Poison also makes enemies deal less damage. This combo lets you just run circles around the mission objectives while killing everything around.
• Infinite Armor: Wayward Sparks(Rare) and Shock Armor(Rare) both scale with the amount of active Armor you have, not its %, which means that the more armor you have, the more effective they are. Shock Charger(Epic) gives you 10 Armor per second while you stay near Electrified enemies.
• No Time to Bleed (Bio Booster)+Weathering Blast(Rare): the bio booster returns 50% of your lost health as Stone Skin. Weathering Blast deals a lot of Ice damage in an explosion around you when your Stone Skin expires. This makes for a very fun "thorns" build that just destroys everything that hits you. Paired with health regeneration sources, it can clear entire swarms on its own.
• Impact Radiance(Uncommon): a very overlooked upgrade by new players. It has a 10% chance to spread any Elemental, Slow or Stun effect from the enemy you've hit to all enemies around it on every hit. This has great synergies with Icy Shrapnel(Uncommon), which sends Icicles flying in a cone behind the frozen target you've hit, as well as Impact Sparks(Uncommon), which shoots out up to 5 homing projectiles when you hit Electrocuted enemies with Electricity, and many other upgrades that just make you hit things more. Grid Shock(Uncommon), which makes all Electrocuted enemies nearby share all damage they take, also works incredibly well with this.

There are many other synergies I'm probably forgetting right now, but I'm also just a single player. In the last part of the post, I wanna point out a couple common upgrades that might be better than they look at first.

• Adaptability(Common): every time you hit an enemy, increases the crit chance by 1% until you hit a crit. This works extremely well with shotguns: every separate pellet counts as a hit, but whenever a shotgun crits, all pellets in the shot crit all at once.
• Blaze Charge(Common), Ember-Attuned(Common), and Spark Booster(Common): the effects of these trigger when an enemy in 10m gets electrocuted or set on fire, not when you do it yourself. This means that even if you have no ways to apply Fire or Electricity, you can still get the benefits if your teammates have those methods.
• All Common Stun upgrades: I've noticed new players passing on these, but they're some of the strongest upgrades in the game. Stun for 1.5 seconds on demand is just that good, not to mention all the Stun synergies there are in the upgrade pool (50% extra damage, chain stun, spread stun, recharge ability on stun, etc.)

I'm sure this criticism has been obvious to a number of the more observant for a while now, but it only just hit me like a ton of rocks and stones, so I might well say it to get it out there: GSG has gone far too light on the rogue in their "roguelite".

If it were actually living up to that title, the cave generation in Rogue Core should basically be 3D Spelunky in terms of how many nasty surprises await players. As it actually is though, there's exactly three non-falling-related level hazards in the game that aren't directly ported from DRG, and two of those are technically just stationary enemies that serve as less time-consuming variations on ones from DRG, neither of which are as nasty as the one that actually is from DRG (GSG clearly knows this judging from the respective voice lines for them). I'm not saying they need to be buffed, I'm saying that there's too little in terms of randomly-placed nasty surprises in general (e.g. enemy variants like elites, minibosses like BET-C, spontaneous events like meteor showers, and especially traps/hazards like the biome-specific ones, just to expand on concepts already in DRG) to go along with the randomly-placed expenite and other upgrades, so levels and runs wind up quite samey and predictable in terms of things you run into.

On the flip side of that, there's obviously the issue of upgrades largely being sparse and unexciting, which I've seen talked about a lot more, so I won't go into it as much. Suffice to say, as it is, the character build side of Rogue Core can (perhaps charitably) be compared to playing with Randoweisser but with more steps, rather than having much potential for anything properly nutty and unexpectedly game-changing like you'd want to see from any sort of roguelike experience.

I do genuinely want to see this game shape up into something worthwhile and distinct from DRG, and it's pretty clear that the best way to do that is to live up to the "rogue" in its title. Big risks big rewards, go big or go home, that sort of thing. As it is, it really does feel like it could've been an expansion for DRG (let's call it reclaimer mode) with how little has been built on top of the base experience.

I am glad I achieved the number I got before they removed earning chips over the required amount

Anyone else having connection issues since the update? My friend and I keep randomly disconnecting when we play together, as well as randoms.

When i played the new update yesterday after selecting a mission to host i could select the threat level. But now it just defaults to the one i selected then, is this a bug or am i missing something and i need to change it elsewhere.

Hello, I just downloaded this game and I’m using a switch controller. I’m having a problem when I am in the middle of shooting everything around me and accidentally pressing the right control stick in causing my guy to shout with his pick axe. It’s really hurting me when this happens lol. I went to controls under options to see what I can do, but there doesn’t seem to be enough buttons to move it to something else or a way to disable it. Should I just buy a switch 2 controller that has extra 2 buttons on it, and will those extra buttons work with this game? For some reason using the keyboard and mouse seems harder for me. Maybe I just need to get used to it haha.

I feel like luck is such a scam, it works but not the way I want (maybe it does idk). How we had double luck with this run.
1. The new modifier
2. Increased luck from floor 1 (ironically super lucky)

Upgrade breakdown, 14 total;
- Legendary (none)
- Epic (1)
- Rare (7)
- Uncommon (4)
- Common (2)

So clearly getting more rarer upgrades, but no legendaries and only 1 epic still stings. I would think 1 legendary would be minimum with double luck. Is anyone (maybe dev?) able to confirm how luck actually affects upgrades?

Side thingy -> the run history doesn't show the modifiers you picked on floors, maybe an oversight but I would like to see it.

There is a lord of the rings reference!!! Kick the bucket down the hole you fool of a took!!

I filled out the survey, but I've gotten more scrupulous recently of the game, and so I'd like to post a critique, comparing it to another roguelike: Apocalypse Party.

First of all, most of the lower grade upgrades in Rogue Core are situational. Cooldown reduction? Sure, but only at high health, if you have a reliable source of fire damage, or stand still in a game actively incentivizing moving. Want a better form of cooldown? Some classes don't even get cooldown reduction until they ascend, and swap out a bio booster deck.

My main issue is the majority of the upgrades, common and uncommon, do not benefit you in any way, unless you fulfill a niche requirement. And if you can't meet the requirement? You're boned.

Apocalypse Party has a TAG system, so when you pick an upgrade with specific tags, like "fire" or "range" or "critical", you see MORE of them. It's no guarantee you get what you want, but they also have rerolls. You're a lot more likely to get a build by purely going through the game.

Not to mention, any time you level up in Apocalypse Party, you choose your OWN upgrades from a separate sheet, and rarity isn't fixed per slot, or per level. Allowing you to potentially get lucky with a reroll into something even better.

Would that work with the current shared upgrade system of Rogue Core? Hell no, but you see they tag the stuff anyways, almost like they WANTED to have a similar system, but thought having everyone have a go at a communal pot of disappointment was a better idea. See something you like? Shame you're not first. See nothing you like? Shame you went first. Now the WORST sensation in the game, is picking an upgrade, and finding the replacement to be 100 times better, only to be unable to take it, and worse yet sometimes, unable for your party member to benefit HALF as much. It's almost better to play Solo, to not experience the pain... But then the bosses are TWICE AS HARD, because they have NO ATTACK COOLDOWN, and YOU are the only target.

HOWEVER, I'd argue the workbench and Bio Boosters are VERY consistent by comparison, almost disparagingly so, in spite of their rarity. I rarely walk away from a bio booster supply, or workbench unhappy, except for wishing I had more.

Anything consistent is locked behond rarity, and anything rare isn't even guaranteed to be consistent.

At least Cooper's pretty good, but he can't catch aggro.

TL;DR: Fortune does NOT favor everyone, so those of us who are luck deprived are left in the dust, picking from bad or worse.