Preview on the next update!

Hello Patreons!
Thank you for all of your generous support over this difficult year.  
We have a lot planned over the next few patches, but as you requested, we decided to dive into the details we now plan on releasing before the end of this year!

First - Syndicate balance.
It was a long requested, debated, and refined community request and we are super excited to get some long standing issues addressed incorporating ideas and feedback direct from the community.
From the last patch, we introduces our first phase of this process, starting with changing how Firearms apply damage (no missing, but % damage applied, just like missiles) and adding the notion of "toxic" damage which we will expand on with this next update!

Here are some of the headlines on the balance changes:
Autocannons will be getting more range, to provide a real, useful, long-range option to Syndicates for PVE or PVP.
Syndicate combat robots are getting a little more speed, accum, and better srf-size tanks!
And finally Toxic damage will be added to all Firearm ammo, bonuses increased, and new Toxic ammo added to the arsenal!

Toxic ammo will be manufactured only from CT capsules sold in the Syndicate shop.
For the additional cost, you get a specially tuned ammo designed to melt through plants and tear down Walls! (Walls are plants!)

After this update we will circle back with the community on the performance changes, and then address the "economic" balance in our next (and hopefully last?) syndicate balance patch.

Another balance-bonus is that EM guns get reduced accum.

And we aren't close to done with the changes!
Next we are introducing a few big features:
First, Environmental Effects!

Now finally, the time of day and weather will have *real* effects on your bots performance while out roaming the islands.  This is a test-balloon for potential other effects and systems to dynamically manipulate them, and to see how the community takes to these passive effects as this first iteration is a light-touch.  Tying them to the environment we hope will create some interesting asymmetry in choosing when to do certain activities, taking advantage of the cover-of-night, or risk it all in a blinding dust storm, the sky is the limit! (no pun intended).

Next is probably the biggest feature of this patch in terms of development time and complexity, and we hope is a major win for creating more engaging and challenging PVE experiences.
NPC Boss Reinforcements is our latest system to create more dynamic PVE combat by having special NPCs that will spawn additional waves of other NPCs to help defend itself against you!  We hope that bosses will be less trivially defeated and more of a worthy achievement to tackle with the help of a few, or many, friends.

There are other smaller bug fixes, typos, some new, some old (like Day-0 old).  It is amazing how there is never a lack of things that need fixing.  But for most we are happy to find them before they become issues for players.


You might be wondering, have we really spent all this time only to do Syndicate balancing and some boss features?  No!  We have been cooking Strongholds and Gamma developments in parallel to speed the next phases of development on our roadmap of features.

In our next update we hope to show you something we teased earlier in these postings.  If you find the image I am talking about, that will give you an idea just how long this has been in the works.  
You can look forward to:
- New islands
- New unique bosses
- New unique loot and modules
- A PVE combat experience at a scale Perpetuum has NEVER seen before!

Hope that's enough hype for ya.
Details coming soon!

Thank you for your patience and support!
We will do all we can to make it all worth it!
See attached for the new Toxic ammo icon, done by our in-house artist!