After extensive internal playtesting and observing countless players discover and interact with Utility cards (those unlocked with the Prodigy background), we noticed that some felt OP, while others were nearly unplayable and were often removed from decks after just a few fights. We therefore decided to spend some time reworking them and creating a new, updated version of these cards that would excite players and inspire new strategies.

For this utility, we completely redesigned the Malus it generated. Before this update, the "Burning" Malus caused a percentage loss of HP, but we realized that this choice severely penalized the player, who often found themselves with more Max HP than their enemies. The damage was therefore almost useless against enemies, but we couldn't change it for fear of making it even more unmanageable for the player.

Since we plan to remove bosses' immunities to Maluses (as you’ll read about in the final paragraph of these patch notes), we decided to return to a fixed amount of fire damage received by an entity with the "Burning" Malus. This way, it is more effective against enemies and less effective against the player, allowing everyone to experiment with this mechanic.

For Ice Utility cards, we had to remove the ability to continuously freeze enemies. This effect, tied to a Standard card (and therefore infinitely reusable), was too strong in some contexts, especially now that Bosses will no longer be immune to Maluses. Now, Ice Utility cards allow you to reduce your opponent's damage output, reusing an effect already present on enemies in this region, but still dealing damage, allowing you to build a strategy around these cards.

As for the Nature Utility cards, we already really liked them as they were before, so we decided to keep their unique effect of scaling up as the battle progresses, and simply increased the targets to 2 per card to be in line with the rest of the other Utility cards.

Like Ice cards, Rock Utility cards were too strong as Standard cards, meaning they could be reused indefinitely. We decided to keep the spirit of the card protecting the player (i.e., the ability that best reflects the Rock Region), but opted for a temporary Absolute Defense bonus, relegating total invulnerability to Special cards.

As with Fire cards, we had to completely rework the associated Malus for Poison Utility cards. We followed the same reasoning, so now the damage of an entity with the “Poisoned” Malus will start at 1 flat damage and double each turn.

We liked the Wind Utility cards, so we kept their original effect of pushing enemies away from the player for a turn, but increased the number of targets on each card to be in line with other Utility cards.

Like Freeze, Stun was too strong when used repeatedly and without limit. Therefore, we decided to utilize the other effect tied to the Lightning Region, Electrolocution. This allows the player to continuously deal damage to enemies while maintaining a good amount of damage on their Standard cards.

Finally, the Water Utility cards. Here, too, we believe we've captured the essence of the Water Region with its original effect, so we've kept it and increased its targeting to ensure that all eight types of Utility cards share this element.

We felt the Leather Armor that the Hunter sells you in his own event was not special enough, so we decided to give it the “Spiky” property. Now, if you wear that armor, any enemy that damages you will receive 2 Physical damage as retaliation. This item, together with some special Traits, opens the possibility of creating more Constitution-based builds.

Before this update, self-inflicted damage (such as poison or demon attacks) wasn't reduced by any defense and was a sort of "pure damage." We've decided to allow players to reduce this damage to build builds that accommodate it, so you'll notice this difference in this patch.

We've combed through the enemy drop database and updated some of them to better reflect the game's design direction. We've also fixed a small bug where rewards sometimes wouldn't appear during combat.

We've rebalanced the prices of some items sold at improved vendors to allow players to purchase items as they unlock.

The Pureblood backgrounds are unlocked as a reward for defeating the Heralds, but we've received feedback from several users that they weren't appealing enough. We've decided to slightly tweak their decklists to make them a viable alternative to the other two starting backgrounds.

We've increased the percentage of the “Circle of Runes” event appearing on the third map, and removed the stat requirements for the special fight to allow more people to take on its challenge.

After careful observation of the gameplay experience, we've decided to increase the number of Essence points earned through battles on all difficulties, from the easiest to the most hardcore. This should allow all players to unlock new cards and traits faster and have more tools to experiment and create new personal builds.

We weren't entirely sold on the "Hinder" cards, which are unlocked through Prodigy backgrounds. So, we decided to make them more effective and versatile. All cards now have the "Cleanse" effect, giving any player who decides to start a run with that background a way to remove any penalties they've received.

We've decided to adjust the number of traits generated for each character at the start of each run. Positive traits are divided into two categories: strong and weak. Strong traits are generally more useful than weak ones. We've decided to ensure that each character generated at Fatigue 0 now has one strong positive trait, one weak positive trait, and one negative trait. This allows each run to be even more unique due to the combination of different traits, and also allows for the discovery of traits (weak ones) that were previously not extracted in Fatigue 0 runs.

This is a pretty substantial change to the deckbuilding system.

When we created the different standard attack types, it was clear that there needed to be two different types of cards: one more powerful but with fewer targets, and one less powerful but with more targets. With the current stat system, Slash cards ended up almost as powerful as Strike cards (with only a 3-point difference in damage). That's why we've decided to give Slash cards the "Scale with Milestones" effect, so players can decide which ones to keep in their decks based on their needs.

We'll continue to monitor the game closely and remain open to player feedback on these changes.

We decided to help players complete all the game's stories and earn all the achievements. In this version of the game, we introduced two small icons next to each region name on the Region and Background Selection screen.

The first icon, of a flower, will light up once the Shrine of that region is fully built. The second, of a bag, will light up when players complete that region’s Merchant’s request.

We've also changed the titles of Shrine-building events to make their category more explicit and to show the progress being made at each event.

We wanted the Cross-Region icon to remain somewhat mysterious to players, so we initially decided to remove it from the Legend on the map. After watching several matches, we noticed that players were confused by an icon not present in the Legend, so we decided to add it. To maintain the mystery, we decided not to explain its purpose (even though it's clearly deducible from the dotted path), leaving players free to interpret until they take that path.

Here is a list of bugs that we fixed in this version of Journey to the Void.

• Fixed Heir of Flame Trait.

• Fixed a layering issue with Rock Boss.

• Fixed First Shrine achievement.

• Fixed the Burning visual effect.

• Fixed Mausoleum Rewards.

• Fixed some localization inconsistencies.

• Fixed Italian Event descriptions.

• Added some missing codex animations.

• Removed Ice Boss’s shadow after death animation.

• Missing item drops in specific Demon-based fights.

• Fixed some advanced enemies' previews in battle.

• Fixed prices for advanced items in merchant nodes early.

• Fixed Poison Boss ability description.

One of the next immediate steps concerns bosses and their abilities. Since the game's inception, bosses have always been immune to any Malus, making them terrifying entities that players would have to be resourceful to defeat. In practice, however, this has led to some specific builds being nearly unusable, as the boss fights at the end of map 2 and the final boss are unavoidable in every playthrough.

We have therefore decided that, to allow players to enjoy their favorite builds, we will remove boss immunities and transform them into unique abilities for each.

This decision, however, requires a little more of our time, and to release this update within a reasonable timeframe, we are forced to exclude this part.

We therefore use this final paragraph to reassure you that we are working in this direction and that we will soon be able to publish an update dedicated to bosses and their abilities, so that players will be free to use their preferred strategies and builds to defeat them.

Thanks for reading these patch notes. We hope you're enjoying the game. If you have any questions or feedback, please don't hesitate to reach out to us on our Discord server.

See you next time!

Alessandro

First of all, thank you for your incredible support on the launch of Journey to the Void!

Your constant engagement and feedback help us improve the game and fix aspects that slipped through our tests before release. I wanted to take a few words to cover what you’ll find in this update, and at the end, I’ll speak about what we are working on and what to expect from future patches.

We wanted to focus on playability first, so we concentrated all our efforts on removing bugs and improving the player experience.

We decided, for the moment, to remove the “Foulshape” waves when you start your run with a Villager deck, in order to avoid a hard obstacle that only the most skilled players could overcome.

We heard your feedback and added the description of the Reload effect whenever it is mentioned in the game, so that you could decide which card to pick even if you’ve never seen that card before.

This is just a first step in the direction we want to go, but we felt it necessary to remove this Ability from Map 1 bosses, since their encounter is the first real challenge the player faces, and we didn’t want to remove agency from players. We want to do much more to balance these and the Map 2 boss fights, but you’ll have to wait for the next patch for that!

While we liked the Ability from a lore standpoint, the fact that both Fiery Wisps and Flamefoxes were immune to the Burning malus left the Fire Prodigy deck in a tough position. Our next patch will focus on balancing, and all Status cards will be discussed. For now, we wanted to give players another tool to face the Fire Region.

We noticed that the Shrine events were appearing less than we hoped, so we increased the probability they spawn in your runs. Since there is an achievement tied to them, we didn’t want players to be forced to play several runs just to encounter one of them.

From this version onward, your saves will be compatible across Mac and Windows, letting you enjoy your game and switch easily between them.

We chose to reduce some special effects, especially in the endgame, to ensure that photosensitive people would not have any problems playing the game.

While the icons for Exhaust and Weakened were, in fact, different, we felt that it didn’t really show in-game, so we decided to change the Exhaust icon to something very different to better distinguish the two.

We removed a bug that made the Giant Tentacle from the final boss fight disappear. The tentacle was still there, but the graphics disappeared.

We removed a bug that made it so that once the Giant Tentacle made a strange attack where it slammed and immediately disappeared, the final boss stopped attacking (essentially soft-locking the players).

We removed a bug where the final boss didn’t die when going at exactly 0HP. It was already difficult enough to bring it to 0HP, we didn’t want the fight to be unbeatable!

We fixed a bug where, when you obtained the max of Affinity for a region, the level didn’t change from 9 to 10 until you went back to the main menu and back again in-game.

We fixed a visual bug that prevented cards from displaying numbers higher than 99 in deckbuilding or card reward selection. The cards worked fine, but were shown incorrectly, so we fixed them.

We fixed the first event in the Water Shrine sequence. It now works as intended.

We fixed a bug where cards discarded with the right-click shortcut (and not by being dragged to the corner) didn’t count towards the “Discarded Cards” stat.

We fixed the “Friend of Merchants” achievement, and it should now work correctly. If you obtained the requisites to unlock it, it will be unlocked the next time you log in to your game.

We fixed a mistranslated term in Spanish and a typo in the English description of the Burning Malus.

I wanted to say a few words about where Journey to the Void is headed by explaining our next steps and what we will focus on next:

We want to focus on improving the player experience by balancing the game more effectively now that we have data from many players. Our main goal will be:

• Improving the effectiveness of Status cards (the ones you unlock in Prodigy decks)

• Balancing all the boss fights (Map1, Map2 and final boss)

The fight is never over, and while we solved the most important bugs, as long as the game is alive, we’ll keep finding and (hopefully) fixing them!

We are currently working on an “Endless Roguelike” mode for when you complete the main story of the game. We want it to be as good as possible, so we’re taking our time to prepare it. We’ll share more about it when we’re ready. We are also evaluating the best way to introduce new content (cards, items, traits, enemies, etc.).

While expert players have no trouble playing our game, we want to make it accessible to all players. This means increasing readability of the board and cards, explaining obscure concepts, and more.