Explosive Update OUT NOW!

Hello Robocrafters!

The team are still working very hard on the first game mode and online multiplayer but we wanted to release a content update tomorrow to give you just a few extra parts to play around with in the Design and Test Demo.

The Plasma Explosive Block

The plasma explosive block shares some similarities with its cousin, the plasma tank cannon. Its damage is distributed in a radius. This explosive block needs a signal to detonate which can be activated via the seat or a sensor. Here are the stats for the plasma explosive

This block has one other defining feature that is different from traditional weaponry, it has a long recharge time. In fact, upon detonating, it will take 45 seconds to recharge. It’s important therefore to try and hide your explosives while they are recharging

Here are my top three uses for Plasma explosives

Number three - The Detachable Explosive Kart

If you’ve got a huge wall in front of you and want to give some distance between yourself and the explosion. Load up a small cart with explosives and combine it with a decoupler. When it gets in position, hit the detonator and watch that wall crumble!

Number Two - The Explosive Ram

Crashing into an enemy player will deal damage, but strapping a bunch of explosive blocks to the front of your vehicle will give it an extra punch! You can add sensor blocks to detonate these blocks when in close proximity to an enemy.

Number One - The Explosive Slam Dunk

If your enemy’s robot is shaped like a bowl. Create a contraption that will dunk the explosive onto the enemy and watch them panic as they attempt to remove it from their bot. Finally, hit the detonate button and watch the bot explode into hundreds of blocks!

Friendly Fire Disabled

We’ve been thinking about how we should treat friendly fire and we made the decision to disable friendly fire in preparation for online multiplayer. We wanted to avoid a situation where players fought in the spawn room before they even entered a battle!

Explosive blocks, lasers, plasma and even collisions between parts of your own robots will not damage your own machine!

The Decoupler

We have shown off a few examples where we mention the decoupler in this post. In fact, the reason we do this is that the explosive block and the decoupler complement each other so well!

The decoupler's primary focus was to release explosive blocks. Whether you’re using a swinging mechanism to launch the explosive block or simply placing them down like mines.

But you can use the block to create fully functioning remote control bots which can be detached from the body of your main vehicle and sent out on a rampage.

We’re looking forward to seeing what the community will use the decoupler for!

Weapon Balance changes

Over the last week, the community began to make some discoveries on how damage is distributed across the blocks by building several contraptions. We spent some time analysing these machines and discovered that the weapon damage was not working as intended. We’d like to thank everyone who was involved in the discussion but we’d like to thank JC and Radyjko for providing video and spreadsheets which helped push the discussion forward and allowed us to identify an issue. We have fixed a bug where multiple sources of damage were being applied from a single weapon shot and another where Plasma cannons were doing less damage than expected outside of the centre of the explosion radius.

We have since rebalanced some of the properties of the weapons so that they deal the expected damage based on an earlier blog discussion.

Bug fixes: Fixed a bug that caused players to spawn outside of the build area when returning from simulation.

The update will launch on 10.11.2022. We are looking forward to seeing what you create with these extra blocks!