Twisted Towers 0.17 Patch Notes

Welcome to the 0.17 Patch Notes! We have some big changes this release, including: Adding Guild scoring to events, harvesting and economy reworks, the AFK Pass, and some much requested quality of life features.

Event Changes

There are a ton of changes to events in this patch. We’re hoping that this makes each event more fun and engaging!

Events Becoming Guild Events

We’ve long wanted to add more social features to Twisted Towers, and we’ve now taken our first step with Guild Events. Now, every Event will actually become a Guild Event. What does this mean? Gameplay and rewards in the current events will still work how they do now. However, every event will now have an additional reward layer on top of it based on your Guild’s performance! The Event screen has also gotten an update to lay out all the information better.

As a Guild, you’ll earn progress rewards based on the total amount of Rituals members in your guild have completed. These thresholds are the same for all guilds, regardless of size.

Rank Rewards

Guilds will also compete against each other for ranked Guild rewards!

There are also now more ranked tiers to compete for.

  • Previous: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, top 5%, top 10%, top 25%, top 50%

  • New: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, top 5%, top 10%, top 20%, top 30%, top 40%, top 50%

These tiers apply to both personal and guild ranked rewards. Accordingly, personal ranked rewards have been adjusted.

You may have also noticed the “Guild Contributions” tab in the screenshot above. This lets you see how many Rituals each player in your Guild has completed that event (This is for all you Guild leaders out there!)

Events Schedule

We are also adjusting the event schedule. We will now run 1 event per week, lasting for 6 days, starting Tuesday at noon CST and run through Monday at noon CST.

We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from different types of players, but ultimately we feel like having longer events will lead to the best experience. This should allow players more time to compete for top ranks, and should make events less stressful when life happens and you don’t have as much time to devote to a particular event.

However, when 0.17 goes live, we’ll be running shorter events, possibly at different start/end times than usual. This is so that we can get live data on all the new event changes sooner than we would otherwise.

Event Shop Changes

  • Unstable Tomes removed from the event shop. There are now three Villager Tomes in the event shop, each costing a different resource: Gold, Event Elixir, and Gems.

  • All items now have scaling costs, and cost scaling for items now scales more rapidly.

    • What this means is that the relative advantage of spending a lot of resources in a particular event will be much less. This was necessary for two reasons. First, with longer events each item is more valuable, since you get to use it for longer. Second, we found that players with massive stockpiles of resources were getting too much advantage in events.

  • In Hero events, max level Hero XP can now be purchased for gems

  • In non-Hero events, level 2 houses can now be purchased for gems.

  • Event Packs have been completely removed from the event shop

Other Event Changes

  • There is no longer a claim button for rewards. Instead, you’ll tap a reward on the reward track to claim all your available track rewards.

  • All wait times and elixir costs for Rituals in events have been removed.

    • To clarify, event elixir will now only be used to get extra alchemist tomes in the event.

  • Event points have been removed. Progress rewards are now based on Ritual progress.

    • This now means that all scoring in events relies on the same metric: Rituals.

    • Event point items in rewards have been replaced with mana of an equivalent level.

  • The event deal has been updated:

  • Cost to wakeup villagers now is the same as the main base.

  • After an event, you now have 6 minutes instead of 5 to finish up any last tasks.

Economy + Harvesting Rework

We’ve felt for quite some time that the overall economy of items is too complicated. New players in particular struggle to understand how to get particular items. We have a new system which we feel is easier to understand, and also should improve the overall UX of farming items in your base.

Simplification of Endless Generators and Consumables

Every tower will now have a single endless generator and consumable associated with it. Endless generators will no longer produce items for multiple tower types.

Let’s look at Spell Canons as an example. In the new system, the Sawmill is its associated Endless Generator, and Trees are its associated consumable. Harvesting the Sawmill will yield spell canon and tree pieces. Only the max level tree will be harvestable. It will require just one energy, but it will yield many spell canon pieces, as well as a sawmill piece. In other words, as you farm your sawmill, you’ll get tree pieces, which will eventually feed back into leveling the sawmill up.



Endless generators will also be harvestable from their lowest level, so there will never be any bits leading up to a harvestable item that aren’t harvestable in themselves. To make this more concrete, here are the full chains for the Sawmill and the Ash Tree:

You may notice a few other things when reading those item descriptions, like the fact that drop rates are now listed! Also, endless generators now have a chance to drop a gold nugget. Correspondly, the gold from Ethereal Links has been significantly reduced to compensate.

Item Shifts

To follow this new system for endless generators and consumables, most all items had to change their drops, and in some cases switching from an endless item to a consumable item. Here is how all items will relate to each other now:

  • Spell Canons

    • Endless Generator Chain: Sawmill

    • Consumable Chain: Tree

  • Frost Runes

    • Endless Generator Chain: Library

    • Consumable Chain: Frost Scrolls

  • Bell Towers

    • Endless Generator Chain: Hedge Statue

    • Consumable Chain: Bell Peppers

  • Crystal Towers

    • Endless Generator Chain: Crystal Fountain

    • Consumable Chain: Cauldron

  • Elixir

    • Endless Generator Chain: Mushroom Farm

    • Consumable Chain: Lost and Found

You may have noticed several items not on this list. Most of these items will be “effectively removed” from the game. Meaning that they won’t spawn anymore, although if you still have these items, they won’t change or be removed. The following item chains will no longer spawn:

  • Wood Pile

  • Bush

  • Musical Instruments

  • Crystal Toad

  • Ash seeds also won’t spawn normally. (The sawmill will just generate Ash trees.)

The remaining items are unchanged and will still appear in the game in the places they used to:

  • Thunder Sheep

  • Storm Clouds

  • Mana Wells (however, these can no longer be obtained in Blackthorn anymore)

  • All Island 2 specific consumables

Endless Items Increasing Production

Level 2+ endless generators now have a new ability! They provide +4% bonus items to all generators of that type and level. This is the chance that a villager harvesting an endless generator will provide two items instead of one. This stacks additively, so if you have two level 3 Libraries, all level 3 Libraries will get +8% bonus items!

This change will give everyone more incremental progress, since you’ll see production increases going from 2 to 4 of a generator.

What about max level generators? Well, this bonus will still apply! Meaning that even at max level generators, production can still be increased by collecting more of that item. (If your bonus is over 100%, then you start getting a chance for a third item, and so on.) We hope this makes the end game more interesting, as working for more max level generators will always be worthwhile.

A couple notes:

  • These production bonuses do not apply to Mana Wells or Thunder Sheep

  • There is a hidden cap of +24% bonus items on non max-level endless generators.

    • This is to make it so that merging your generators is always the most efficient way to progress.

Housing Changes

The current housing system has several problems, which we would like to address. Some of the current problems:

  • Different level houses have different rest times, which makes it difficult to know exactly when you should log in next. (And this changes all the time with your housing setup.)

  • Rest times are so short that it’s impossible for most players to keep up with an optimized resting setup. However, a small portion of players will leave the game on for long periods of time in order to “AFK farm” (often using third party tools). We don’t feel like it’s particularly good gameplay for players to feel like the best way to play is to just leave the game running constantly. (And even in these scenarios, there are elements of the base that still take a lot of time to manually do.)

  • Additionally, there is too wide a progression gap between those who do decide to leave the game on constantly and those who check in occasionally throughout the day. This gap makes it very difficult for us to balance the player experience.

  • For most players, upgrading houses doesn’t actually feel that good, as they can’t take advantage of the faster resting time.

As such we are changing house resting times in the following way:

  • Old: 20 / 17 / 15 / 13 / 11 / 9 / 7 / 5 minutes (by house level)

  • New: 60 minutes at all house levels

So how will higher level houses be useful now? Well, each house will have a number of beds equal to its level. Each bed allows a villager to rest simultaneously. So, for example, a level 4 house will rest 4 villagers simultaneously! This change should help you save base space on your houses, and should make house upgrades feel more meaningful.

Also, to help you manage how many villagers and beds you have, the manage villager screen now has a counter in the upper right.

Item Management Quality of Life

We realize that managing your base is still too tedious. So we’ve implemented a couple features which should help base management considerably. The first is a highly requested feature to automate collection of resources like Elixir and Gold. Well now, you can do that! Just assign a max level collectible to an Automator, and it will automatically collect those resources for you.

Another thing we’ve done is make big bubble stacks much easier to pop. Now if you tap and hold a bubble stack, it will rapidly pop the bubbles for you. This can chain with automators, making for some quick item management!

What Does it All Mean?

Wow, that was a lot of changes! Overall we hope these changes will make base management more intuitive, fun, and quick. However, it might be hard to understand what everything means though, so we’ll try to summarize some of the key points here:

  • Harvesting

    • Towers and their associated chains will be self-contained, so it will be much more obvious how to start harvesting particular towers.

    • Player progression should feel a lot smoother, as there are more opportunities to upgrade your endless generator production.

    • Endgame should have more depth now that top level endless generators can continue to improve your top level endless generators.

    • Several items have been effectively removed from the game.

    • (Note that harvesting changes do not apply to Dustwinder Canyons, as the Outpost is used to generate items there.)

  • Consumables

    • Max level consumable items are more valuable than before, and you’ll create them less often in general. This should require less manual villager assignment to consumable items to harvest them.

    • With more valuable consumables, there should be less “trash” which accumulates in your base.

    • Only the max level consumable items will be harvestable, which will prevent people from accidentally “harvesting early” and missing out on value from merging.

  • Houses

    • Houses should take up less space.

    • Optimized housing setups will require fewer logins to maximize your villager output.

AFK Pass

Tired of having to log in all the time to get benefit from your villagers? Then AFK Pass might be for you! The AFK Pass is a purchasable perk that costs $4.99 and lasts for 30 days and also comes with a bonus of 100 gems.

While active, the AFK Pass allows your villagers to generate items for up to 12 hours while you’re offline. When you come back, you’ll be presented with a nice bubbled package of items that your Villagers would have been able to harvest during that time, as though you were logging in and having your villagers harvest.


The items generated will be based on whichever endless items you have set to harvest. This perk will work in all bases and events. And can even trigger while you’re playing another mode!

Improvements

  • Ethereal Links last 45 seconds instead of 55 seconds.

  • Items that eventually merge into towers can now be placed on the path; the only items that cannot be placed on paths now are enemies and towers proper.

    • Villagers will no longer will prioritize putting items on roads

  • Unstable Tomes and Tome stacks no longer give a random number of tomes; it’s the same every time.

  • Enemies now have up to 3x more HP at higher ritual levels.

    • Note: This change was necessary to compensate for the additional power provided by Runes. However, players that pushed Ritual progression with Runes may find their current Ritual quite challenging.

  • Gem costs to purchase towers decreased

  • Claiming a reward from the daily quest reward track will now claim all available rewards

  • Costs to wakeup villagers are now the same for each villager in a house. (Previously every villager past the 1st cost twice as much.)

  • The tower summons event now has a large area of land unlocked at the last expansion.

  • Added more info stones to the bases - this should help new players learn more of the game mechanics.

Changes

  • Daily quest rewards have been changed (1st reward is now 250 gold again, no rune chests in daily quests)

  • Changes resulting from economy changes

    • Consumable and endless generator items have had their gem costs adjusted based on their new functions.

    • Sell costs for items will be different (since sell costs are based off purchase costs, which got adjusted).

    • Raven chest drops have been adjusted to account for the new economy.

    • Items on purchasable land in Blackthorn Hollow have been adjusted.

      • Note: The images displaying the items on the land are currently incorrect; the info button of items is correct though.

  • Undo Changes

    • Undo will no longer rewind time; it will simply undo the merge you just did.

    • Undo will now work during Rituals.

    • Collecting resources will no longer break undo. (But can’t be undone.)

    • There is a minor penalty to ethereal link spawn rates after an undo to prevent exploits.

  • Spellbook discovery reward is now gold instead of event elixir

  • Milestone quests for defeating enemies are more difficult

  • Milestone quest rewards adjusted

  • Various in game text adjusted.

  • You can no longer sell the last endless generator in your base of each item chain.

  • We want to stress that there are a lot of economy and reward changes in this patch. We will be monitoring things after 0.17 releases, but expect further changes in a minor update shortly after this main release.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a bug where campaign level select arrows were still playing sound even with sound muted.

  • Fixed an issue where bonus rewards from gem deal purchases were being shown twice.

  • Fixed some issues with not being able to place towers into automators that were on the path.

  • Fixed a bug in the summon towers event where you could select the same tower multiple times to be summoned. There is now also a selected state to show you which tower(s) you’ve chosen.

  • Fixed an issue where info stones could randomly close when villagers were harvesting in the background.

  • Fixed an issue where hiding chat previews wasn’t working properly.

  • Various crash fixes.