Beastieball News

* = Changed in update on 04/23 ** = Changed in update on 04/24 ** = Changed in update on 04/25
On PC ONLY, we've got a big update to test in the Experimental Branch! It features a number of new features and sweeping balance changes. Jump on the Experimental Branch to take a peek and help us test these balance changes before we bring them to the main Steam release.

[h2]Balance Changes[/h2]

[h3]Traits[/h3]

• (NEW!) Stagecraft: When field has RALLY or DREAD, this Beastie never takes more than 66 damage from attacks
  
  
  
  • Given to Plumask in place of Performer
    
• Precise:
  
  
  
  • New effect: SIDEWAYS attacks do 3/4x damage and ignore all shields and redirection
    The intention of Precise has always been to force opponents to cover lanes to avoid free points rather than utilizing redirection. But with lots of damage boosting, this could put opponents into no-win scenarios too easily. This refactor keeps the most threatening targeting options open, but also makes them less effective as kill options.
    
    
• Crafty:
  
  
  
  • New effect: Additional effects from this Beastie's attacks trigger twice
    
  • *Fixed to interact correctly with Cut Shot
    
• *Unflappable:
  
  
  
  • New effect: Damage from non-attack sources reduced by 20
    
  • **Fixed an issue where this didn't interact correctly with damage from traps
    
• Musclebrain:
  
  
  
  • 1.2x damage (from 1.3x)
    
• Echo:
  
  
  
  • 1x damage (from 3/4x)
    
• Vampire:
  
  
  
  • Restores STAMINA equal to 1/4 of damage dealt (from 1/6)
    
• Welcoming:
  
  
  
  • Restores 35 STAMINA to an ally that TAGS IN for them (from 40 STAMINA)
    
• Stirring:
  
  
  
  • Reflects negative
  • * FEELINGs onto BOTH opponents now (rather than just the original user)
    

[h3]Plays[/h3]

• (NEW!) Flatten - Body attack,
• 70 POW. POW x1.5 if field has any effects. Clears all field effects.
  
  
  
  • Via level up
    
    
    
    • Millimine/Demolipede
      
    • Sprecko
      
    
    
  • Via friendship
    
    
    
    • Kassaleet, Deluja, Crabaret, Trat, Yamyth
      
    
    
  • *Update 1: Changed interaction such that field effects are cleared even when the hit results in a point scored We're evaluating this move's power level to see whether it is OK to have on high-offense Beasties lke Kasaleet and Crabaret.
    
• Clear Field
  
  
  
  • Restores 10 STAMINA to entire team (from 8)
    
  Up until now, keeping the field clear has always been difficult and costly in terms of action economy. This has made it difficult to disrupt field-focused strategies including Rally, Rhythm and Trap. We're providing higher value and more convenient field-clearing tools to help mitigate the strength of these playstyles, as well as combo damage potential utilizing your own field effects.
• Dump
  
  
  
  • New effect: Mind attack, 60 POW. Used from net. Targets front row. POW x1.5 if user has 2+ ACTIONS.
    
  We're trying out something pretty different with one of the most-used and dominant attacks in the game. In true volleyball, a Dump is only effective when used as the 2nd touch instead of passing to a valid attacker. This new design simulates its iconic real-world counterpart. It means that Dump is still usable in all the ways it was before, but requires planning to unlock its full potential.
• Hyperspike
  
  
  
  • POW to 125 (from 135)
    
• Challenge
  
  
  
  • POW to 85 (from 90)
    
• Ego Blast
  
  
  
  • POW to 80 (from 85)
    
• Dive
  
  
  
  • POW to 55 (from 60)
    
• Vigor Beam
  
  • New Effect: Body attack, 20 POW. Used at net. Add user's STAMINA to POW.
    This slightly flattens the curve on this attack's power, making it a little less exploitable at its best, while better clarifying how its power is calculated
  We're lowering the power level of a few plays whose strength can invalidate what should be good matchups, or offer too much consistency without enough risk
• Heat Wave
  
  
  
  • New effect: Every non-SWEATY fielded players feels 1 SWEATY
    
  Combinations that utilize Heat Wave have been oppressively strong. Its capacity to add as many as 4 stacks of SWEATY to the field can make it game-warpingly powerful. This adjusted version makes the play far less valuable to use as the match wears on, and creates a distinct use case from plays like Heat Up which can continue stacking sweaty on opponents throughout the match. We have other ideas to mitigate this play's effectiveness, but we want to take the lightest touch to hopefully maintain its capacity to reward clever team building.
• Snipe
  
  
  
  • POW to 65 (from 60)
    
• Nerve Strike
  
  • POW to 55 (from 65)
    
  • POW x2 if target has a bad FEELING (from 1.5)
    
  These plays are cool but typically haven't been rewarding enough to be useful. We want to see players get more use out of these.

[h3]Beastie[/h3]

• Debugly
  
  
  
  • Plays Added: Dispel, Telekinesis, Assess
    
• Illugus
  
  
  
  • Plays Added: Slice
    
• Magpike
  
  
  
  • Plays Added: Tool, Snipe
    
  • Plays Removed: Tracker
    Tool was too good on Trusting-Magpike. OK, we get it. We're turning the power knob down a tiny bit and seeing if we can get away with it now.
    
• *Heliath/Lunaptra/Humflit
  
  • Plays Removed: Excited Pass
    
• Platypulse
  
  • Plays Removed: Demanding Set
    
• Noizard
  
  
  
  • 50 BDEF (from 55)
    
  • 85 MDEF (from 90)
    
• Mistic
  
  
  
  • 80 MDEF (from 70)
    
• Zefyre
  
  
  
  • 89 SPOW (from 92)
    
  • 85 MDEF (from 88)
    
• Hydrolm
  
  
  
  • 75 BPOW (from 70)
    
• Tortanchor
  
  
  
  • 70 BPOW (from 65)
    
  • 110 BDEF (from 115)
    
• Riplash
  
  
  
  • 55 BDEF (from 60)
    
  • 90 SDEF (from 95)
    
• Squimage
  
  
  
  • 46 SDEF (from 38)
    
• Pladion
  
  • Plays Removed: Demanding Set
    
  • 40 BPOW (from 30)
    
  • 81 BDEF (from 86)
    
  • 70 SDEF (from 75)
    
• Maraptor
  
  
  
  • 87 BPOW (from 89)
    
  • 29 SPOW (from 19)
    
  • 85 MPOW (from 87)
    
  • 83 BDEF (from 85)
    
  • 88 MDEF (from 91)
    
• Mascurry
  
  
  
  • 97 BDEF (from 82)
    
  • 88 SDEF (from 91)
    
  • 54 MDEF (from 50)
    
• Diabloceras
  
  
  
  • 108 BDEF (from 111)
    
  • 83 SDEF (from 86)
    
  • 68 MDEF (from 71)
    

[h2]Fixes and Other Changes[/h2]

• Beasties are now immune to all additional feelings when they are WIPED
  
• Skulkapi's Stealthy trait will now fail to activate if the space they intend to move to is obstructed by a WALL
  
• Adjusted SP cost of field-clearing plays in the Academy shop
  
• **Fixed a visual issue when scoring a poitn by hitting a WIPED Beastie through a wall
  
• **Fixed a crash to do with a Beastie trying to become TIRED from STRESSED while already WIPED
  
• **Adjusted a Heliath playbook in the Tower Challenge
  
• **Added a delay to Scary Face (Grazada's trait) triggering such that the interaction between it and other movement effects like Stealthy is clearer
  

This past weekend we hosted another BIGMOON BASH in Beastieball, where coaches could challenge one another in fierce contests of sport!

For this Bash, we BANNED the top 5 most-used Beasties from the previous Bash, which meant there was no Bandicraft, no Illugus, no Noizard, Surgus or Hopra! Here are the coaches who came out on top in the unconventional meta that remained.

1. Zonk (The Violet Enigmas) | Bash Score: 3108

2. Kim (The Happy Hearts) | Bash Score: 2980

3. Arc Tech (The Arcane Machines) | Bash Score: 2916

4. Satoros (The Diamond Ducks) | Bash Score: 2892

5. Rosery (The Roaring Knights) | Bash Score: 2860

6. Ket (The Lonesome Lovers) | Bash Score: 2848

7. Kyyg (The Wacky Worms) | Bash Score: 2828

8. AshleyETA (The Musical Girls) | Bash Score: 2816

9. Figgy (The Spicy Spies) | Bash Score: 2804

10. Knight (The Newborn Lights) | Bash Score: 2804

Congratulations to these coaches! Many of these players are active in our community Discord, often swapping strategies and team ideas. In fact, kim of the Happy Hearts (this Bash’s #2 player!) recently took it upon herself to start interviewing active community members to learn more about their angle on the game and teambuilding. Here’s a little bit of insight from some of the above coaches…

You can see more player interviews in kim’s spreadheet here!
[h2]Usage Statistics![/h2]

With the top-used Beasties all missing, we saw quite a different palette of teams emerge this time around! We’ve got all the stats here for PvP Sickos to peruse through.
[h2]>Check out ALL THE STATS![/h2]

I want to give a shout-out to some of our more active community members, who keenly noticed that their specific team compositions were missing from previous Bash stats. Thanks to them, we uncovered underlying issues with how our data was collected—it turns out, we were missing data from about half our players! As such these stats are much more representative than we’ve ever had before… a huge gift for us on the balancing team (phew!) and for our community who love to look at all the juicy numbers. We’re still working on recovering data from previous events; when we do, we’d love to share updated historic data on those with you!

In the meantime, a few insights from me looking at the usage stats in this event:

• Captains still reign supreme! With Bandicraft absent, other Captain Beasties (Tortanchor and Beetlback) took their place in top usage. Captain is just THAT handy to build around!
  
  
• Many more Beasties got to thrive this time! The top-used adult Beastie (Tortanchor) was used only ~7x more often than the least-used one (Grazada). We may never see such an even distribution between every specie in a future event again! Players really showed off their creativity this time around and discovered tons of new combos and ideas, which is exciting to see (and a bit daunting as we play whack-a-mole with balancing it all… ha ha…)
  
  
• The most underrated Beasties included Grazada, Pladion, Magpike… and Collarva?! I don’t know who brought Collarva to those high-ranking games, but kudos to you, whoever you are! You’ll probably never attain that player’s godlike skill level, but you may get closer if you try using some of those other Beasties that high-skill players gravitate to.
  

That’s all for now! We’re getting our calculators and nerf-hammers ready as we prep the next balance patch with all this data in hand.

Thank you to our players and community for your devotion to this game. It’s really an honor to get to make something that so many people put so much of themselves into. See you in the next Bash!

We just meant to update the game with some bug fixes, but we kept adding things and now it's accidentally a bit more like a proper update! These changes are only on PC at the time of uploading, but will be updated on Mac very soon (we're going to delay by about a day to make sure we didn't miss any major bugs with new features).

Parts of this update build on new features we added in our patch last week, which you can read about here.

[h2]New Features![/h2]

• Bigmoon Bash Scoring Changes! Our goal with this update is to make Bigmoon Bashes a more fun experience for players of all skill levels. We'll be assessing how players receive these changes during the next event and will make adjustments as necessary based on feedback! (Look for corresponding changes in the "Fixes and Changes" section).
  • Bash Score (our skill rating value) is now split between Bash Score, which stops updating at Rank 5, and Live Score, which continue to update throughout the event. Going forward, any event results we share will use the Bash Score, with Live Score being available to players only for their own information.
    We're enacting this change to avoid rewarding players for playing an excessive number of matches. This change means that we WILL be able to share individual player results from the upcoming Bigmoon Bash, despite previous comments to the contrary.
  • Players now gain a small amount of Ranking when they lose a match
    
  • Currently, players with a higher skill rating get bonus Ranking when they win, allowing them to advance through ranks more quickly. I adjusted the target skill values to be a bit higher, so that it takes high-skill players longer to get the maximum advantage of this. (This change would only realistically impact the top 10-20 players)
    In combination, these changes will help to normalize how many matches are required to reach Rank 5 across different skill levels, so that players have a less divergent experience. This also makes the Bash Score a little more fair as a scoring value.
  • Added a new display option to hide Bash Wins and Bash Score after reaching Rank 5.
    
• Extended Match Replay Controls! You can now scrub forward and backward through saved Match replays. You can also pause the match at any time and inspect the stats, plays, and damage calculations of any Beastie at any time. This just became a great resource for players who want to analyze matches in depth!
  
• After clearing the story, stars are added to the Coach and Beastiepedia menu to indicate accomplishments that add a star to the player's save file
  
• Adjusted playbooks on single-player encounter throughout the game, including a few boss fights and ranked opponents in the Tower Challenge
  
• Added new sounds for larger Beastie footstep sounds. Also added a special sound for Crabaret when they are moving.

[h2]Fixes and Changes[/h2]

• Draft Challenge Updates! These changes are here to help finalize the new implementation of the post-game Draft Challenge.
  • Fixed a crash when resuming a paused challenge
    
  • Increased Sports Points reward for each floor cleared
    
  • Reduced the Star requirement to 15 consecutive wins from 30
    
  • Adjusted team generation values to make certain multi-type offense Beastie builds a little less common
    
  • Changed team generation so that Beasties with Tornadoball and Cyclone can't appear during the Draft Challenge (with only 3 Beasties per team, these plays can be extremely volatile and exploitable)
    
  • Previous Draft records have been reset since the difficulty level has changed so much from the previous iteration
    
• Fixed issue preventing players from getting extra money from the Gym sponsorship
  
• Fixed an issue with occasional random triangles sticking out of overworld geometry
  
• Fixed an obscure crash when training a Beastie at the Gym
  
• Removed extra % symbol that was added to some Coached% displays
  
• Removed some floating pixels from one of the optional player idle poses
  
• Fixed issues with Sy's character art
  
• Fixed an issue with Beasties reacting to a non-existent character in an area near Rutile
  
• Simplified logic for updating the player's ranking during events, to prevent the ranking display from endlessly "Updating..."
  
• Slightly reduced the amount of Sports Points received for Bigmoon Bash ranks above 5
  (This change partially accounts for the fact that player ranks will generally be higher with the new ranking changes. By our calculations, on average, players will earn more Sports Points per event going forward)
• Fixed issue with the log not being openable at the end of a match replay
  
• Adjusted a few issues related to certain player Vibe poses
  
• Added extra collision to prevent floating Seakits from going out of bounds in the first area of Garcinia Meadow

*Added in an addional patch on April 16.

Another BIGMOON BASH is coming soon in Beastieball! During Bigmoon Bashes, coaches can challenge each other in open matchmaking for a limited time. This Bash will be the first one to go for 48 hours!
It also is the first Bash to have select Beasties banned from participation.

When: April 19, 2025 00:00 UTC to April 21, 2025 00:00 UTC (equivalent to Friday, April 18 @ 4PM PST to Sunday, April 20 @ 4PM PST) Theme: Bandicraft, Illugus, Noizard, Surgus and Hopra are BANNED!

During the event you'll have a Bash Rank, which will improve based on your performance. After it's over, you'll receive in-game rewards based on your participation, such as Social Battery and Sports Points.

Players of all skill level are invited! All you need to do to participate is to play the game on that day and join the Bash on SportNet! SportNet is typically unlocked within the first 2 hours of your adventure, after beating your first Ranked boss. And if you aren't confident in your own Beastie team, you can use a randomly generated one instead - just go to Team Setup and set "Random Team" as your current team.

NOTE: We will not be recognizing individual players' results after this Bash. You should play as much as is fun for you, but please take time for rest and breaks as well. There is no special prize for playing more games than others! Update: Player results will be shared, testing out of new Bash Scoring changes. You can read about those in patch notes here.

[h3]Official Game Rules:[/h3]
First to 2 Points wins
Standard time limit on move selection
No Undos allowed
No duplicate Beastie species allowed
Relationship Combos are disabled
All Beasties are set to Level 50

If you're wondering about why some Beasties are banned, we chose the top 5 most used Beasties from the most recent Bash! These Beasties aren't statistically overpowered, and the ban is temporary only for this event. Take the opportunity to try out some new strategies!

[h2]New Features[/h2]

• Text log added to the 'info' menu! This records all dialogue so that you can review something you've missed. This was a frequently requested feature.
  
• A few new shoes and accessories added! Every clothing store in the game should have a new item for sale.
  
• Controller rumble implemented!
  
• Some new settings menu items for adjusting rumble intensity, as well as disabling text animation
  
• Draft Challenge redesign!
  
  This post-game challenge has generally been the least popular of the bunch. But it's my personal favorite, at least in concept, so I want to rework the idea to help more players find the joy of this mode.
  
  In the new iteration, you're given full information on upcoming teams, and must trade a Beastie from your team onto the team of your next opponent. It creates some brain-bendingly hard puzzles, but ultimately it feels a lot less random. You have much more control over the matchups you have to play, while still forcing you to constantly adapt your strategies and combinations.
  
  I think it's strictly an improvement over the previous gameplay, so I'm setting it live for everyone, but I would still consider this rework to be experimental. I'll be curious to hear how players are enjoying it. After changes to this mode have solidifed, I will probably re-work how we track completion of this mode (30 rounds to count as "100%" may be too high).
  
• Still in progress: story encounter adjustments. We're still working through encounters in the game to tweak playbooks and strategies to reflect new tools we've added in recent balance patches. The build we uploaded today doesn't have any changes yet, but we may be periodically updating builds with encounters changes alongside other bug fixes in the coming days/weeks.

[h2]No Major Balance Changes![/h2]
We're experimenting with ideas in the background, but keeping balance stable for the upcoming Bigmoon Bash. We'll continue assessing PvP data and community feedback for now.

• *Adjusted some move effects to consiolidate 2-type boosts into one effect. This impacted Challenge, Jeer and Meditate. The moves are effectively identical but have cleaner interactions with other triggers, like the Defiant trait.

[h2]Other Fixes & Changes[/h2]

• *Adjusted price of Spa Salts to 60 SP (from 90)
• *Fixed issues with opponent AI using Flight
• Fix for a crash that could occur when finding a shiny starter Beastie in the tutorial (we're not sure if any player ever found this, but it came up in testing...)
  
• Fix for player character clipping through bench in the tutorial
  
• Fix for online game desyncs frequently occuring when a previous game ended with a disconnection
  
• Fix for online opponents not showing their selected vibe
  
• Fix for text sizes being too small in endgame cinematics and other menus
  
• Fixed blurry text on the numbers that pop up when the player volleys a ball in the overworld
  
• Standardized how Coached % displays so that it will always consistently show the same value in different menus (previously it was possible to see 100% in one place and 99.9% elsewhere).
  
• Fix for yearnings not working in Clown Mode
  
• Fixed an issue where rapidly clicking in the Academy Points Shop could cause your Beastie to learn the same play multiple times
  
• Adjusted layout of a couple areas with bad geometry/out of bounds
  

This update is a bit on the small side... most items we've been working on in the last couple weeks are still in progress & will be added in builds later down the line.

*Added in an edit; these things were in the initial patch release but I forgot to note them initially.