Greetings!

Another Sipho update is upon you! We are inches away from having new zooids ready for 0.5.0 update. One of the new zooids is Swarmer, with never-seen-before mechanics:

It spawns small critters which circle the Swarmer and spread out to attack common enemies on-command. These critters can be defended against with other weapons and take little time to respawn. We can't wait to see what combinations you are going to put them in!

As per request of one of our Discord server members we have implemented "multi-growth" mode in growth menu. By holding multi-spawn key, which default is left shift, growth will not end after placing single zooid, which helps quickly place multiple zooids with a single mouse click.

Some of changes below mention "growth points". We are preparing to have better UX in Growth mode which is displaying potential points at which zooids can be grown. Currently, we find those potential points by constantly "asking world" if there are any positions nearby mouse cursor for growing a new zooid. Changes we made allow us to find all positions ahead of time which we will be able to display when selecting to grow a certain zooid. That should be especially convenient when playing with controller - all you will have to do is jump through positions you wish to grow at instead of potentially having a "fake mouse pointer".

The rest of changes, balancing of new zooids are below:

Version 0.4.9

• Use multi spawn key for growing zooids as well
• Fix one of built-in Layouts which had first zooid as non-head and add validation check for future layouts
• Add a null check and early exit if we encounter a weird zooid id when generating growth points
• Growth points are now stored in a dictionary according to their sizes
• Use the sizes of all growable zooids when determining growth points
• Make growth point generation completely lazy
• Fix outline scaling error when ungrowing greaser
• Fix deformable using incorrect rotation when spawning from rotated Sipho. This fixes Cra'than boss and possibly other things spawning at incorrect angle
• Fix a bug where growth points were discarded due to the radius and the distance being equal
• Fix errors when trying to check if a blueprint is valid when it has invalid zooids (caused by growth point regeneration)
• Add basic melee damage to Sprayer
• Fix incorrect growth spot blocking calculation
• Regenerate growth points when growing, ungrowing or updating the blueprint. Allow external access of the growth points
• Increase swarmer range from 7 to 12 (originally was 15)
• Resave animation and controller
• Add a swarmer minion animation
• Swarmer uses range stat
• Slow down swarmMinions when they are resupplied, not attacking and near the swarmer zooid
• Use new sprites for Swarmer and use better names for scripts
• Make growth background arrow not overlap outlines
• Use thinner sprite for Flail connection to have better looking bends
• Use new graphics for Sprayer
• Add code for generating a list of possible growth points
• BlueprintEntry can now cache and return the Zooid value based on the id
• Use new Flail graphics
• Zooid Outline setup dirties prefabs properly
• Make Flail head not collide with connections
• Use new Greaser graphics
• Forgot to check-in IgnoreListenerPause script
• New sprite import settings
• Parasite sprites
• Add a UIModule for handling skill rebinding
• Pause in-world audio sources and allow playing UI audio when game is paused
• Fix Vagorian Mover and Structure zooid connector offsets