Spelunky 2 is a roguelike about the unexpected interactions between characters and objects. At least, that's what I keep telling myself when horned lizards pinball me into an angry shopkeeper as he detonates my jetpack with a shotgun blast. The latest small update, 1.16.0, seems mainly aimed at cleaning up some unexpected interactions between Spelunky's people and pieces, but a couple of bigger changes lurk in the notes.
Let's start with the fun stuff:
- Prevented giant frogs from killing ghosts
- Ghost-like entities and jellyfish are now immune to curse
- Added light to Mech's eyes
- Gold parachutes will now drop a limited amount of gold
Nice to see golden parachutes finally getting nerfed. Take that, disgraced CEOs.
A couple other tweaks are meaningful, like the reining-in of spark trap hitboxes, one of the instakilliest late-game obstacles. But one other change entices me: "The jetpack flame now interacts with some entities." What could that be? Is this another secret being inserted into the game, or actually a meaningful tweak meant to nerf a valuable item? The jetpack, like previous versions of Spelunky, is a staple for high-level players because it allows easy backtracking. If the jetpack's blast ignites something new, that could throw players off of habits they've developed.
Otherwise, Olmec continues to be one of the most modified things in the game since launch, with this patch following 1.15.0's fairly dramatic changes to the boss fight with the floating golden head with yet more adjustments:
- Increased horizontal margin of Olmec's second phase bombing
- Olmec now only shoots bombs up to 3 times during its 2nd phase (resets when floaters are broken)
- Olmec's phase 2 will now trigger even when falling over a push block
Clearly Derek Yu and the rest of his team want players to engage more with the golden god. Some initial shortcuts had players idling on a ladder while stage-two Olmec spat out infinite bombs, making it easy to practically ignore the boss in the second phase while waiting to push him down to the lava layer beneath. This should make Olmec more of an obstacle, which is certainly appropriate—he was the final boss of the previous Spelunky.
Here's XanaGear, one of the top Spelunky 2 players, talking through the update, along with the full patch notes.
- The hitboxes from spark traps are now smaller
- Fixed moon challenge broken generation on large levels
- Increased horizontal margin of Olmec's second phase bombing
- Olmec now only shoots bombs up to 3 times during its 2nd phase (resets when floaters are broken)
- Olmec's phase 2 will now trigger even when falling over a push block
- Fixed issue where Olmec's floaters could potentially be pushed to the sides by other floors
- Prevented climbing gloves from grabbing to ceilings
- Corrupt savegames are now stored as savegame.cor so they can be sent as bug reports
- The jetpack flame now interacts with some entities
- Prevented giant frogs from killing ghosts
- Giant Spiders won't cause webbed monsters to incorrectly deal damage
- Average time now only takes into account finished runs without using shortcuts
- Hired Hands can now pick up dead mounts
- Fixed damage when being thrown by a vendor while underwater
- Prevented some temple monsters from spawning rewards after being revived
- Gold parachutes will now drop a limited amount of gold
- Prevented Merchant from congratulating players while stunned or killed
- Fixed cobra AI when spawning from a pot
- Ghost-like entities and jellyfish are now immune to curse
- Fixed crash when the dice game dispenser disappears
- Udjat eye socket can no longer be crushed
- Added poisoned death cause
- Prevented arena crates from spawning on lava
- Fixed crash when a door became unavailable while entering
- Moved grubs behind hard boss
- Prevented certain purple altar from triggering certain head's opening rubble multiple times
- Paste bombs can no longer be picked up in the air
- Fixed some weird Pitcher's Mitt's throws
- Prevented sleeping cavemen from waking up if the player is not moving
- Fixed pet visual deformation on picking them while waking up
- Fixed underwater detection in levels with inverted gravity
- Fixed Terra asking for a golden key in the Dwelling shortcut
- Prevented telefrag when a player is crossing a door
- Prevented laser traps from shooting through Olmites' towers
- Red lanterns will now break up when displaced from its initial position
- Tossing bear traps will now inflict tossing damage
- Removed pitcher's mitt effect from arrows when colliding with a corpse
- Necromancer spell's effect will now disappear when freezing the necromancer
- The sorceress will now cancel her attack when frozen
- Fixed sorceress' attack effect on losing her target
- Fixed webgun shot visibility on entering through a door while riding a mount
- Fixed some HUD powerup icon artifacts
- Progress is now saved as soon as a character is unlocked or the shortcut progress is advanced
- Certain ghost-like entities will now also unlock by proximity
- Added a brief time margin to a certain boss' portal before it starts absorbing players
- Equipables now correctly disappear when players enter doors (such as tunnel exit doors)
- Mech now ignores whip damage
- Falling platforms should no longer break on ethereal entities (such as the ghost)
- Added light to Mech's eyes
- Prevented bear trap from creating gold nuggets on spawning from a present
- Fixed hoverpack when it is enabled and the player's mount die
- Improved text box preview on changing the options while the preview is on the screen
- Hedjet glow will now hide when pausing the game, along with the rest of the UI
- Changed credits title
- Fixed issue where savegames with incorrect checksum were being loaded, leading to crashes
