With Update 0.9.2 we are further preparing Striving for Light for it's approaching 1.0 release, not only adding new content like new pinnacle boss fights, weapons, skills and trinkets but also revisiting story content, adding things we wanted to do for ages and never found time for (looking at you map decorations), adding tons of improvements, balancing changes and fixes. So wanderers, behold what the Eclipse content update holds in store for you!

🌟New Features:

New Pinnacle Boss Fights

With the introduction of the Awakened Gatekeepers we layed the foundation for the pinnacle boss fights in Striving for Light. Since our pinnacle boss fights were not quite at the pinnacle we have envisioned, we are blasting the bounds of what was possible in Striving for Light until now.

The Gatekeepers, mighty creatures utilised by the Aeodra to keep wanderers from traveling through the shattered worlds.

Once you have delved deep enough into the darkness the powerful Aeodra will Awaken the Gatekeepers granting those Gatekeepers new powers. But not only the Gatekeepers will receive new powers. The Aeodra will closely spectate your fight unleashing their darkness upon the gateway of worlds. If you manage to defeat the Awakened Gatekeeper you will be confronted with the Aeodra itself featuring a complete new Bossfight where you can encounter Noctelle, the Eclipse, or Arda, the Fallen.

New Weapons

• Grimm Rebound [Range Weapon]: Projectiles bounce off walls and create a dark explosion on wall hit. Explosion scales with AoE size and projectile damage.
• Echo Ballista [Range Weapon]: Projectiles bounce off opponents and can hit another opponent.
• Poisoned Blight [Melee Weapon]: Hit enemies are poisoned and spread poison condition to nearby enemies when defeated.

New Trinkets

• Mirror of Deflection [Trinket]: All your projectiles are deflected on enemy hit allowing the same projectile to hit another target after deflection.
• Buzzkeeper [Trinket]: Each defeated enemy has a 25% chance to summon a bumblebee companion for the duration of 8s.
• Titans Essence [Trinket]: Increased Melee Attack Range: +10% (increases weapon size and range)
• Solaris Bell [Trinket]: Each enemy hit has a 25% chance to unleash a light ray. Damage is scaling with your melee and projectile damage.

New Skills

• Sanguine Shot [Range Skill]: Your projectiles create a bloody splash covering enemies behind the hit position dealing additional damage and applying bleeding condition to enemies. Damage scales with projectile damage. Size scales with AoE size.
• Sanguine Strike [Melee Skill]: Your melee hits create a bloody splash covering enemies behind the hit position dealing additional damage and applying bleeding condition to enemies. Damage scales with melee damage. Size scales with AoE size.
• Added Sanguine Strike as legendary weapon skill

Map Decorations

All maps have received new decorations to make the maps feel more alive and vibrant.

New Story Content

• Rewritten Story Content: The whole story content got completely rewritten. A lot of dialogs were a bit dusty and written years ago when we first entered early access.
• Voice Acting: Complete new voice acting featuring professional voice actors.
• Intro Cinematic: Reworked intro cinematic.

New Bossfight Soundtrack

Seasonal Challenges

Starting with Season 13 and introduced by the 48h Challenge Race Event each season will have seasonal challenges. There are challenges in 3 difficulty tiers which grant different amount of challenge points. There is a new leaderboard in Ankerath that lets you inspect what player has finished which challenges and who currently has the most challenge points and who has completed the challenges at first.

✨Further New Features

• Trap Highlighting Option: You can now select highlight projectiles & traps from the option menu (it is enabled for new players) this option will give all traps a red outline to improve visibility and contrast
• New collision system for projectiles: With this new collision system for projectiles we have experienced a substantial increase in performance when playing projectile heavy builds.
• Performance Improvements for projectiles: The visibility check for projectiles have been removed which removes workload from the cpu.
• New Item Pick Up UI: The item pickup UI was completely reworked to make it more minimalistic and taking up less screen space
• Condition Damage Tick Info on Tooltips: Condition damage skills now show the calculated conditions damage for the first 3 ticks, also taking skill stacks into account. This should make it much more straight forward to understand the condition damage a skill will deal.

📜Historic Iconic Weapon Redesign

The historic and iconic Light Staff weapon finally got a rework. We must say that the Light Staff was the very first weapon we designed for Striving for Light, back in the Early Access Launch/ Next Fest Demo days over 2.5 years ago when we started our journey not knowing where it will head. It has been a blast working on Striving for Light and we are looking forward to all the future brings for Striving for Light.

We have been hesitant about the redesign of this weapon as this weapon had this nostalgic touch reminding us where it all started. The origin. The very first designs and the evolution of our skills up to this day. So this redesign deserved a bit more attention and we wanted to share our thoughts about this with our community.

Thank you!

This is the time where we want to thank every single one of you! Without you this journey would not have been the same! Thanks for making all this possible, for your interest in our work and vision! For tireless bug reports, for countless discussions on features & improvements. For sharing our game and spreading the word, streaming our game, creating content for it and for spending your time striving for light.

⚙️Major Changes and Improvements:

• Performance improvements for all centipede/snake/worm type enemies
• More responsive world events: World events are now updated much faster resulting in much less waiting time for new wave spawns or time until the event ends after the remaining enemies have been defeated
• Shield area of effect which deals 0 contact damage now hides the damage number completely to prevent causing confusion on which skills now did not deal any damage
• Corrected and improved tooltips descriptions
• Condition Effects are now pooled for improved performance
• Improved visuals for the Aeodra Arda, the fallen
• Added improved condition damage calculation and companion damage calculation to legendary weapon skill tooltips
• Condition hits from abilities now also trigger hit vfx to improve impact feel of the abilities
• Updated Skilltree Tutorials: All skilltree tutorials have been updated with new animations that showcase the skill gem placement and the usage of all available skillgems
• Performance improvement for light charge item
• You can now hover over the locked characters in the select character screen to display them in a red tint. This should give a better impression on what characters can be unlocked and how they look like before actually have to unlocking them.
• Improvemed pause menu layering

⚖️Balancing:

• Scattering Projectiles now scatters into two projectiles on enemy hit (was 3 before)
• Maximum Area of Effect size cap got reduced to 3.0 (was 4.0)
• Increased Area of Effect Skill now grants +25% AoE size (was +30% before)
• Darokin's Staff [Range Weapon]: Light strike damage now scales with range and with melee damage (was only scaling with melee damage before)
• Glaring light is now triggering from melee and range attacks (was only triggering from melee attacks)
• Flood is now scaling with your melee and projectile damage and skill stacks (was only scaling with projectile damage and skill stacks)
• Legendary Weapon Skill Fragmentation on Hit now has possibility to trigger 30% (was 100% before)
• Discharge now deals 20 damage (was 10 damage)
• Tower skills in the descent defense world event now do not scale with player Area of Effect size.
• Increased enemy spawn speed in descent defense event to keep wave durations shorter at higher defense encounters
• Phoenix Egg activation now costs 3 light fragments (was 1)

🔧Fixes:

• Fixed snake boss turn bug
• Fixed descent defense portal spawning multiple times when tower gets destroyed
• Fixed wrong skill tooltips for bleeding swirl and bleeding blade
• Fixed wrong calculated condition damage in tooltips
• Fixed enemy having weird glow on highlighted enemies setting activated
• Fixed crit damage spawning additional blood decals
• Fixed various of memory leaks
• Fixed missing NPC name when dialog from selection was activated
• Fixed not being able to attack after aborted dialog
• Fixed Rogue character not unlocking on defeating shadow farmer after level 40
• Fixed discrepancies between the description of the skill and the actual damage
• Fixed discrepancies between the description of the legendary embedded skills and the actual damage output
• Fixed wrong damage description of explosive potion trinket ability
• Fixed wrong image for Goladir tier 2 achievement
• Fixed wrong damage calculation for legendary weapon fragmentation skills
• Fixed a bug that caused applied conditions to be shared among multiple hit targets what caused faster damage decline and also shorter condition durations.
• Fixed projectiles not correctly scaling with melee damage
• Fixed wrong displayed sections on the descent defense event
• Fixed collider size for expanding AoE attack of tidal crabs and magma snails
• Tower AoE attacks now do not scale with player AoE size to prevent them from scaling outside the defense area
• Fixed trinket switch with active trinket ability keeps ability active even when the original trinket is not equipped anymore
• Fixed tooltips flowing outside the screen
• Fixed save file switch did not directly get saved to the settings.cfg what lead to some wrong loaded save files if the game was not exited regularly

Want to discuss the Eclipse content update with other players, feel invited to join our discord.