PEAK

THE FINAL ASCENT

Hey Scouts! It’s finally time!!

We’ve been hard at work crafting PEAK’s final Major Update, and can’t wait to share it with you. This update comes with new variant biomes: GLOOM and THE CITADEL, which will cycle out with CALDERA and THE KILN!

Alongside that, there are new items throughout the game, a variety of bug fixes and updated mechanics, and something SUPER SECRET, only for the most determined scouts…

As always with biome updates, the next TWO WEEKS will exclusively feature maps containing the GLOOM and THE CITADEL. After that, like other biomes, it will be random whether the CALDERA/KILN or the GLOOM/CITADEL spawns in a daily map.

Patch Notes v2.0.a

NEW BIOME:

• Added GLOOM and THE CITADEL, randomly replacing CALDERA and THE KILN on some maps.

But wait, there’s more

• Mysterious statues have begun appearing all over the island… no one is quite sure, but they seem to have a connection to the Scoutmaster’s original lost troop… and that’s all I’m gonna tell you! Have fun!

Additional Features

• THE FINAL ASCENT

• Ascent 8 has been added. The description is a bit of a spoiler so we’re gonna let you guys discover it on your own 🙂

Ascent 7 has been changed.

• We felt that preventing players from reviving, while it did make it a challenge, made this Ascent less fun and was not in the spirit of the game (and its meaningless in a solo run!). Instead of “You cannot revive the dead” it's now “Start cursed and take more curse from revival” to properly punish repeated deaths without locking players out of the rest of the run entirely.

New Badges

• There are 10 new Badges to unlock and new cosmetics to go with them! For you completionists, don't worry, this is the last time we’ll be messing up your 100%.

New Luggage Type: Clown Luggage!

• Open one to get a bunch of wacky items!
• The Lollipop, Cannon, and Balloon Bunch will now spawn in Clown Luggage instead of Climber Luggage.

Loading an existing auto-save will no longer delete the save - they will now only delete when the run ends, regardless of winning or losing. Rejoice, save scummers!

• New Items:

• Jetpack: Equip this in place of a backpack and fuel it with assorted items to reach new heights!
• Warp Fungus: A strange new form of fungus growing on the mountain. Try throwing it to see what happens!
• Glider: Extremely effective at crossing horizontal distances. Just don’t run out of stamina!
• And more we won’t tell you about…

The game is now localized in Traditional Chinese!

Major Fixes

• The annoying bug that causes random fall damage when grabbing the wall with no stamina has been fixed. Read more about the changes to sliding fall damage under Balance Changes!
• Heavily reduced the frequency that arms would twist unnaturally when holding an item in your hands.
• Fixed an issue where items from a previous run in the same session could sometimes spawn randomly for players who joined the game later.
• Fixed an issue where being prompted to grab pitons would sometimes not work, especially when directly on top of the piton.

Minor Fixes

• Fixed an issue where throwing an egg at a surface would only stick it to that surface for the host.
• Fixed an issue where some badges would clip into the sash and not be visible.
• Fixed an issue where, using controller, Player 1 becomes unresponsive after selecting an item in a backpack while a Player 2 is equipping it.
• Fixed issues where players would receive poison damage after using a non-food cooked item.
• Fixed issues related to incinerated Scout Cookies giving poison damage incorrectly.
• The Anti-Rope Spool no longer makes sound while it's in the backpack.
• Fixed issues with the blindness affliction duration.
• Carried scouts will now be affected by the Remedy Fungus healing AoE.
• Dozens of other bits of polish that aren’t worth mentioning!

Balance Changes

Several changes made to ROOTS, with the goal of making it less of an outlier in terms of difficulty compared to TROPICS:

• Made several changes to beetle behavior to make them slightly less aggressive and prevent them from conspiring to trap a scout in place.
• Decreased radius of spore mushrooms in ROOTS significantly.
• Decreased spore affliction of spore mushrooms slightly, but also decreased the falloff at distance (meaning you'll get more spores on the edge of the radius than you used to)
• Wind will now disable these for an extra 2 seconds after the wind ends.
• Increased the average time between windstorms a fair amount.

Other Balance:

• Campfires now give Morale Boosts to solo players.
• The MESA has been lowered in height to match the ALPINE better.
• Ancient Luggage spawns slightly more commonly in all biomes.
• Made Fortified Milk slightly rarer, but increased the amount of hunger it cures to make it more useful as a food item. The invincibility effect remains unchanged.
• Made Scout Cannon slightly less common.
• Made Scoutmaster’s Bugle slightly more common, though still rarer than most other Mystical items.
• Drowsy decays slightly faster in all situations.
• The Portable Stove no longer spawns in the fourth Biome.
• Made Checkpoint Flag a bit rarer & removed it from Climber Luggage.

• Cursed Skull bonus stamina gain increased to 100%.
• Energy Drink

• Previously removed all your Drowsy and then gave you back all the Drowsy + a flat 25% when it wore off.
• Now removes a flat 50% Drowsy and gives a flat 25% Drowsy when it wears off. You cannot gain Drowsy when the effect is active.

We hope you enjoy this new update and the secrets within!

The future of PEAK

Since this is the last major content update, we’d thought we’d answer some questions that are sure to come up. If you have more questions or issues with the game, please reach out to us at [email protected]

Why is it the last major update?

As we’ve said since the beginning, PEAK isn’t a live-service-game. We intended to release a game that was “finished” on launch, and any major content updates would be the cherry on top. Due to the game’s overwhelming success, we’ve already spent quite a bit more time on it than we originally expected, and added so much more to it! We don’t wish for it to become a “forever game” where we constantly add new things that bloat the experience, just to try to keep people’s attention.

A small team develops PEAK, made up of developers from two studios, Aggro Crab and Landfall. As much as we all love the game, we want to return to working on our own separate projects.

But PEAK isn’t going anywhere!!! You’ll always be able to keep playing it, and we will continue to provide bug fixes and maintenance until we are satisfied with the game’s stability.

What about mod support?

We love that people are making mods and adding what they want to see in the game, and we consider this an especially important part of the experience once we’re no longer pushing major updates ourselves.

After discussing it with the modding community, we decided not to implement tools like Steam Workshop, as many modders prefer other tools and it isn’t possible to use the Steam Workshop cross-platform (see below!). That said, we remain supportive of modders who want to create cool things for the community. We try to help when we can, and have been sharing some source code with modders to make it easier to mod the game.

If you want to play PEAK with mods, we recommend you check out the unofficial modding Discord to see the amazing work of modders!

https://discord.gg/SAw86z24rB (This discord is unofficial, and is not moderated by Aggro Crab or Landfall.)

Other platforms?

We’ve been slowly working on porting PEAK to other platforms. Now that the final update is out, we can really focus our attention on bringing the game to consoles!

And the big news… PEAK is going to be cross-platform, meaning that anyone who picks up the game on console will be able to play with the existing Steam community, as well as any other console platforms!!

More news will be coming later this year! If you’re reading this on Steam, you probably don’t care as much! But if you have friends who play games on console, get them hyped!!!

As always, thank you SO much to all the players who have enjoyed PEAK and continue to do so every day. To the players who have made fan art, mods, or stream the game to share with others, an extra special thank you for putting your heart into this fantastic community. We still appreciate any feedback you’ve got for the update or the game generally, and both Aggro Crab and Landfall hope to continue bringing you new fun experiences for a long time to come.

See you next expedition! <3 /The PEAK TEAM

OH ALSO...

Yeah, okay SUPER quick - We still have PEAK anniversary plushies available with Makeship! They're around until August 15th so scoop them up before you get too stun-locked into the new update :)