Greetings, Excavouters!

This is Mark speaking, Team Leader of the Yasmar City Construction Crew.

One month down already, huh? Yup! The time really flew! We've had a lot of structural improvements and fixes applied since then, but today marks the arrival of the first real one! The first big one! Let's cut to the chase and get into what's new.

The first big point is The Sub-Weapon System.

While exploring the Ruin, Patricia can find Junk Items. Your buddy AutoBolt over on Afloat can turn them into new weaponry to bring on your next dive into the Ruin. For instance, if you've found the Recoil Pad and the Broken Barrel, AutoBolt can make the homing missile launcher called The Power Barrel. If you find the Glue Sample and the Mine Parts Kit, AutoBolt can make exploding charges called The Drop Mine. Every Sub-Weapon you build will be explained and demonstrated for you at the time of its creation.

Worried about which one to take with you into the Ruin? Don't! Every Sub-Weapon you build is available for use at the same time. Use Left and Right on your D-Pad, or the Z and X keys, to cycle through your inventory. Each one has its own independent Energy meter, and Balkin Machines now drop green spherical Ammo pickups worth five shots each in whichever Sub-Weapon is active when you pick them up.

After building a Sub-Weapon your hard-earned Zonna can be put to work on upgrades for your Sub-Weapons. Want more ammo before you need to refuel? Want each shot to travel faster? To travel farther? To hit harder? The costs, the improvements, and the stats available to upgrade vary between Sub-Weapons, but how they grow is up to you!

The important thing to remember about Sub-Weapons is that they can fill in for Patricia's areas of weakness. For example, Drop Mines can be placed regardless of which direction you're traveling, so you can place them in the path of a pursuing enemy! It's tricky, but The Power Barrel's homing missiles may be able to travel around corners or seek enemies in the next room over. These are just a few examples of what these weapons offer that the Gatler Gun doesn't.

The Sub-Weapon system is another big piece of Yasmar's foundation, now fully clicked into place and ready for the coming months.

So what else is new today? Let's go over a few big improvements and changes to the game.

• Every single map now features what we call The Trish Rescue Plan. Underneath all playable environments is a box that, when Patricia collides with it, will send her back to the door that you started the scene from. No more endless voids for you, intrepid explorer! Break through our walls to your heart's content. This doesn't mean we won't patch up environments when you find a way outside the intended play area, it just means your play session won't be cut short when you do.

• The mouse cursor now disappears during standard gameplay. While you're aiming your shots and timing your jumps the mouse cursor stays put and stays invisible. If you pause the game, or return to the title screen, your cursor is freed to move to other windows or do whatever else you need. In addition to just being less distracting, this removes the massive headaches from trying to play in Windowed mode.

• Until today there were issues with skyboxes, lighting, volume effects, and more depending on where you loaded a saved file from before moving between different scenes. These troubles have been resolved, and should bother us no more!

• Our setup for smooth scene transitions has always functioned for us in the Editor, but something was causing it to fall apart completely in builds. This has been sorted out. Camera fade ins and fade outs should look much nicer across the entire game. Although certain case-by-case issues still exist between particular scenes, nothing should be as jarring or disorienting as the way things were prior to now.

• Our Treasure Chest Manager was previously getting a bit confused about Chest IDs between scenes, leading to some false positives on which chests you had already opened or hadn't opened. This caused many treasure chests to open on their own at the start of the scene, leaving their content unobtainable. To add insult to injury, they were opening with their standard player-activated opening animation, rather than their silent 'you already opened me' animation, so their creaking hinges were being heard loud and clear throughout the Ruin at the start of every dig. No more!

• If you poke your head, so to speak, outside of the Ruin's walls you could previously see the other areas of that floor off in the distance. While we've decided not to confine the camera to the inside of the playable space, we have added vision blockers to prevent future and past rooms from being visible when the camera goes out of Patricia's bounds.

We'll go over a few smaller improvements, then move on to the focus of next month's update:

• The short cutscene outside of the western forest's Ruin entrance has been removed, and replaced with an explorable interior containing an elevator to use to descend.

• The Debug prompts for our AutoLipSync system have been removed. They were previously visible during Tamlyn's news report cutscene after the intro stage.

• Two walls in Ruin 1F were flipped inside out, allowing them to be seen through. This has been fixed.

• The untextured white Excavouter crates in Ruin 1F have been replaced with textured crates that show the age of the organization's explorative efforts.

• Withered support pillars have been added to the gorge just before the Ruin 1F drop-down back to the elevator. This makes a previously unreachable chest reachable, though it still requires acrobatics.

Now, with the October update out the door, what will the November update bring? We know it's important to expand the foundation and ensure that the gameplay fundamentals are solid, but what good are fundamentals in the first place if there's no content to play? November will bring new Balkins, improvements to the ones we already have, new obstacles, new traps, a second floor to the Ruin, a new boss battle, and more Yasmar City interior completions.

This stuff doesn't get build overnight, but if we can get it done with time to spare we'd love to add a new Sub-Weapon or two, and more important NPCs to the surface like the Inspector and the Artist. There are so many ways that we want to see the world grow, and so little time to get it all done! We're always picking our battles, but we think we're prioritizing what's important first.

As always, it's thanks entirely to you and your support that we're able to do what we do. We didn't go a single day of this first month without thinking about it! We hope you'll stick around for

Signed,

Mark - Team Leader of the Yasmar City Construction Crew.

(Sorry for the late evening upload of the update, everyone. Our internet went down in the middle of this giant storm spanning the U.S. right now, and I had to wait to upload the build until our ISP restored service. We were hoping to have the game updated before noon today, and that's what we'll continue to shoot for on the first of future months.

-NEHWindzen)