Bloons TD 6 — Bloons TD 6 - Update Notes! Version 42.0 release notes

Update: Bloons TD 6 v42.0 - Update Notes!

Update Video: https://youtu.be/Kg5tHguhsGg

Key New Features

Accolades and Player Revenue Share
We are so excited to bring the success of BTD6 back to players and share revenue with players who are helping in making the game more awesomer!
The system allows players to gift player creators with animating Accolades that will follow their map or challenge wherever they are seen in game.
The initial 12 Accolades express a variety of positive reactions to inspiring content, such as Smart, Tricky, Beautiful, Fun, Masterpiece, and more!
At launch and for the foreseeable future we’ll be sharing 35% of the Accolade purchase price with the player creator, which means 50% if they are also a content creator and you are using their Creator Code. This is an industry leading share amount, which we aim to maintain; after the platform fees, Ninja Kiwi and Nexus.gg have the smallest shares of these purchases, as they truly are meant for the player creators.
Revenue share is available on platforms with IAP systems. We’ve tried to make Accolades receivable wherever possible, but we must restrict this to players who register with Nexus according to their terms and to players on non-subscription platforms. We are looking for solutions for subscription players but this will take significant time.

New Awesome

New Hero Skin, the Gentlemonkey Gadgeteer Geraldo! Geraldo was a challenge to find the time for a skin with so much more custom art required compared to our normal hero roster but he’s finally, fancily here
New Map, Castle Revenge! Longstanding fans of BTD will notice something familiar here. We love bringing our classic content forward and not just because we are nostalgic saps but because they have great play value. This one hails from both BTD5 and BTD Battles, but with a dynamic flourish that we hope gears you up to earn all of the badges!
New Quests
Multi-stage story based Bloonarius quest - prepare to be slimed!
Royal Tank Academy trial: discover Captain Churchill’s strengths and abilities
One Stop Pop Shop trial: discover Geraldo’s strengths and abilities
Phayze One Experiment Quest: if you enjoyed the Party Bloon Quest we have another infinite scaling Quest Boss to challenge you. This version includes unique round mechanics tied to the Boss.
New Trophy Store Items
Heroes: Corvus Owl pet - darkly adorbs!
Monkeys: Engineer Palbot pet - mechanically adorbs!
Bloons: Nightcap Bloons decal
Game & UI: CatEzili avatar, Boss Phayze avatar, Super Chill Banner
New CT Team Store items
Base Props: Junk Tower
Big Map Editor Additions!
Implemented a Removable/Interactable state for props through the props UI; this can be done by linking together the new Interactable Area to different special props, available from the Areas Menu (at the bottom) and the new Interactable prop menu with the Hammer icon
Added new category for Interactable props (look for the Hammer icon tab); these add animating flavor when Interactable layers are removed, but they can also be used as props (but with only limited animation)
New items: Responding to the many requests for cityscape elements, we took existing assets from maps like high finance alongside some new stuff to make building the city of your dreams a possibility! The construction supervisor just radioed in saying there are over 60 new construction props with which to build, plus new Paths, Stamps, and Terrain to match!

Game Changes / Additions

Map search is now also available for co-op lobby map selection
Map ‘Gizmos’ are now influenced by Challenge Editor 'removable cost rate'
This includes items such as: Workshop Conveyor Belt / Track Extensions, Dark Dungeons Statue & the Polyphemus Eye mechanic.
While we like giving players lots to choose from as early as possible, we’ve seen feedback that the current hero unlock flow can feel overwhelming with all Monkey Money unlockable heroes becoming available immediately at account level 10. To address this, we are spacing this period out with a few different groupings of Hero unlocks and holding back some of the more complex Heroes until account level 35.
Level 15 heroes: Churchill, Benjamin, Pat Fusty
Level 25 heroes: Sauda, Ezili, Etienne, Adora
Level 35 heroes: Psi, Brickell, Geraldo, Corvus
Added 'cash spent' to the Victory Screen summary
PC players request to have many niche things hotkeyed, but unfortunately these are often too niche for us to take up valuable real estate with limited keyboard space. To enable players to take this into their own hands we have added a new advanced section of default unbound hotkeys to cover more heavily situational use cases. None of these hotkeys will work by default, but if you find any to sound useful they can be manually bound in order to enable them. We are interested in hearing your feedback on more things that make sense to fit in this list.
Cycling upgrades menu in challenges now skips past towers that are banned (yay!)
Individual stages of Quests can now be replayed without resetting the entire Quest

Bug Fixes & General Changes

[Map Editor] Duplicate prop button no longer allows users to exceed the prop limit
[Map Editor] In progress maps at prop limit no longer allow +1 prop after loading saves
[Map Editor] Erasing stamps now correctly restores the ‘prop limit’ spent on them
[Map Editor] Resolved small graphical errors with asphalt path
Ranked boss and Battlemode boss challenge should now have the same starting cash
Resolved audio being triggered the background screens in some other places in the UI
Resolved an issue in co-op sometimes visually displaying other player towers as upgradable to you
Resolved some overlay display issues that occurs in some resolutions
Paragon cost slider no longer exceeds limits in least cash challenges
‘Retry Last Round’ should no longer be available on the first round of quests
When users ‘Confirm’ entry of a Creator Code, the game should now keep the dialog open until server communications have either confirmed or rejected the creator code
Resolved a number of softlocks that could occur
Resolved a number of UI issues
Swapped some frame based timings to real world timings so the game can run smoother on specific refresh rates that were not easily divisible by 20. Our lead coder assured me this sentence made sense.

Event bug fixes

Players should not be able to modify Odyssey crew after sharing to the Content Browser
Fixed inconsistency in the ‘Upgrade Restricted’ red stripe through tower upgrades

Map Specific Fixes

Resolved an issue where Blons could be played through co-op
Resolved a crash that could occur loading some saves on Glacial Trail
Lych should no longer drain the Frozen status on Glacial Trail - sheesh!

Tower Specific Fixes

Dart Monkey

4xx Juggernaut’s bonus damage to fortified targets now works across crosspaths

Ice Monkey

Resolved another arctic wind crash (polyphemus style)

Sniper Monkey

Resolved a case in which the Supply Drop ability could fail to trigger other Supply Drops

Monkey Sub

Resolved an issue where Retry Last Round removed the submerge option from Sub
Flanking Maneuvers MK now applies to the Sub Paragon
Submerge toggle now has cooldown art

Heli Pilot

MOAB Shove no longer ignores the children of the target it is shoving

Ninja Monkey

xx3 Flash Bomb should no longer fail to stun targets if damage is externally buffed

Druid

x5x Spirit of the Forest Track Vines now do not display over invincible/covered track sections (like Dark Castle trees, or on the new Castles Revenge map)

Hero Specific Fixes

Quincy

Resolved an issue with the Quincy Spec Ops Drop In placement animation

Geraldo

Resolved an issue where Geraldo’s subtowers would be immune to freeze on Glacial Trail after Geraldo is sold
Geraldo’s Lv16 Nail Mine should now save correctly
Geraldo should now restock inventory correctly when leveled immediately from 18 to 20

Corvus

Corvus - Optimisation Pass improving general performance

Platform Specific fixes

- Resolved a game freeze occurring on devices with a Exynos Chipset - this was affecting a number of players, so hope you are now back up and popping!
Alternate send round hotkey (Race Hotkey) now sends round in Sandbox
Mentioned in more detail above; new advanced hotkeys section
[Vision Pro] Resolved a number of various crash fixes around different parts of the game

Balance Changes

Tower Balance

Many towers in the game still have low tier Damage Over Time mechanics that have not been scaled at all or particularly well, so this update we went over some of these cases to bring forward more Damage Over Time use.

Dart Monkey

Players have found Spike-o-pult’s lower range to sometimes cause issues leading into Juggernaut due to very specific placement being required to aim the attack on this path and how that aiming changes along with increased range, while quite a niche problem we feel it’s fair enough to match the range across these upgrades to address this concern.

3xx Spike-o-pult range increased from 32 > 36.8
4xx Juggernaut range remains unchanged at 36.8

Bomb Shooter

In efforts to bring more player control the MOAB Assassin ability will now follow tower target priority to determine its targets, although note it will still never target non-moabs. As a mainly AoE path Fortification will always be a powerful weakness unless the bonus was to be far more than double effectiveness, we feel in hindsight it was never a good idea to try and counter that weakness on this path, instead we’re going to lean more into the raw cheap AoE damage output that this path specializes in and players can deal with fortification on their own with the leftover cash from this price reduction.

x4x MOAB Assassin ability follows target priority instead of Strong
xx5 Bomb Blitz price reduced from $35,000 > $28,000
xx5 Bomb Blitz attack cooldown reduced from 1.5s > 1
xx5 Bomb Blitz damage reduced from 6 > 3
xx5 Bomb Blitz no longer deals bonus damage to Fortified

Ice Monkey

Embrittlement is cheap and balanced by its limited range and rate making it difficult to apply to very many targets with reliable frequency, however Super Brittle is far more expensive but still faces these same struggles. Feels fair for the cost to increase its attack rate further.

5xx Super Brittle attack cooldown reduced from 2.16s > 1.8s

Sniper Monkey

Bouncing Bullets still feels decent enough at some points, however we feel it’s too difficult to save up into to justify the current power level. We’re shuffling prices to allow this upgrade to come online sooner while keeping the path at the same value for higher tiers as these still offer additional income support that they are balanced around. Additionally we think the T5 sniper changes for improving sniper farming QoL was a step in the right direction, however we want to take it further and work this way directly from the T4 Supply Drop.

x3x Bouncing Bullet price reduced from $2,800 > $2,400
x4x Supply Drop price increased from $7,200 > $7,600
x4x Supply Drop now triggers other supply drops when one is used

Monkey Sub

As currently nothing else ever happens with the main attack beyond T2 on the top path we want to give Energizer a little more power here to promote reason to un-submerge, although knowing how well this attack scales in terms of buffability we’re starting off with a careful amount to not take this too far.

5xx Energizer main dart attack damage increased from 1 > 5
502 Energizer airburst attack damage increased from 1 > 5

Monkey Buccaneer

General improvements made to higher tier DoT applications for Buccaneer. The pierce from bottom crosspath seems to be better after destroyer currently, so this also acts as some crosspath balancing for Flagship. Middle path buccaneer continues to attack with its initial 1 damage projectile that never gets upgraded but the Cannons are very much intended to be a ‘replacement’ upgrade to this main attack, so we are finally disabling that dart along with improving the damage of grapes for the T3 & T4 on this path so the lower tiers can save into Pirate Lord better.

420 Aircraft Carrier damage over time increased from 2 > 4
520 Carrier Flagship damage over time increased from 2 > 9
x3x Cannon Ship main dart attack disabled
x3x Cannon Ship Grape damage increased from 1 > 2
x4x Monkey Pirates Grape damage increased from 2 > 3
x4x Monkey Pirates damage over time increased from 2 > 4
024 Flavoured Trades damage over time increased from 2 > 4
025 Trade Empire damage over time increased from 2 > 9

Heli Pilot

The blowback rate of Special Poperations is being increased to reflect the previous changes upgrading downdraft to support chinook and bring up more lategame value in the support capabilities of this path. Comanche Commander’s value soared recently with buffs along with the recent Geraldo subtowers bugfix which solidified it as a strong lategame dps, and given the powerful synergies right now the current price feels far too low for what is now a solid pick for any map; we feel this may not be enough of a nerf but wish to hold off until v43 for further changes to be considered with this synergy.

x5x Special Poperations downdraft attack cooldown reduced from 0.15 > 0.075
xx5 Comanche Commander price increased from $32,000 > $35,000

Mortar Monkey

We’re feeling quite happy about the overall state of mortar compared to how it has fared in the past, however the Burny Stuff crosspath is still very hard to justify on middle mortar so along with other DoT attacks in this update we’re trying out a slight increase to damage over time across this path.

032 Heavy Shells burn damage over time increased from 1 > 2
042 Artillery Battery burn damage over time increased from 1 > 3
052 Pop & Awe burn damage over time increased from 1 > 5

Wizard Monkey

Wizard is feeling effective across the board with nice use cases across each path so there was hesitation about making changes. Nevertheless we felt there were important changes here with DoT in mind, so there’s now new scaling on the Dragon’s Breath attack improving damage over time on higher upgrades and a for-fun change to the projectile count assisting in spreading flames to many targets. We understand we are affecting current balance but it’s done in the name of fun and for Wizard fans.

x4x Dragon’s breath damage over time increased from 1 > 2
x4x Dragon’s breath attack now ‘fires’ (hehe) 2 projectiles
x4x Dragon’s breath attack pierce reduced from 4 > 3
x4x Summon Phoenix ability projectile speed increased from 350 > 450
x5x WLP’s Dragon’s Breath attack damage over time increased 1 > 10
x5x WLP’s Dragon’s Breath attack now fires 3 projectiles
x5x WLP’s Dragon’s Breath attack damage reduced from 6 > 2
x5x WLP’s Dragon’s Breath attack pierce reduced from 50 > 15

Super Monkey

We lowered the price of Tech Terrors to keep them ‘unchanged’ with Robo’s recent balancing, however in hindsight Robo is still too powerful and Tech Terrors themselves were already good enough that they really should’ve taken the hit along with Robo. Instead as they have risen in power even more, both of these upgrades are being properly nerfed now with a compensatory price buff to Anti-Bloon instead (hopefully not groundhogging to where Anti-Bloon becomes far too powerful and more changes are needed in v43)

x3x Robo Monkey price increased from $7,000 > $7,500
x4x Tech Terror no longer slightly increases attack speed
x4x Tech Terror price increased from $18,000 > $25,000
x5x Anti Bloon price reduced $90,000 > $80,000

Ninja Monkey

Bottom path Ninja never does anything with the main shuriken projectile past the xx1 upgrade leaving it inconsequential on higher tiers. Given that Flash Bombs can feel lacking without heavy support, we’re trying out a change that makes Flash Bomb Ninja scale better with attack speed and pierce as something of a combo-attacker. Overall, this feels pretty ‘right’ for ninjas and more importantly it’s cool and sometimes that’s what matters most.

xx3 Flash Bomb main Shuriken attack deals more to stunned Bloons +3
xx4 Sticky Bomb main Shuriken attack deals more to stickied targets +3
xx4 Sticky Bomb damage reduced from 500 > 450
xx5 Master Bomber main Shuriken attack deals more to stunned Bloons +9
xx5 Master Bomber main Shuriken attack deals more to stickied targets +9
Paragon main Shuriken attack deals more to stunned Bloons +15
Paragon main Shuriken attack deals more to stickied targets +15

Alchemist

As groups of Berserker Brew seem proportionally too good compared to upgrading to Stronger Stimulant in some cases, we are slightly shifting price down into T3, keeping the total price of Stronger Stimulant the same but adding up more if choosing to spam T3 Brews. Back to improving damage over time, Lead to Gold currently deals a large damage increase to Leads but only on the main impact of the attack. I’m sure you can see where we’re going with this.

3xx Berserker Brew price increased from $1,250 > $1,300
4xx Stronger Stimulant price reduced from $3,000 > $2,950
xx3 main attack damage over time now also deals bonus to Leads +9

Druid

Same as the sniper, group triggering these spam abilities that require no timing other than ‘as soon as possible once off cooldown’ feels like a good quality of life change for those wishing to play alternate farming methods.

x4x Jungle’s Bounty now triggers all available Jungle’s Bounty abilities when one is used

Banana Farm

Banana Central’s current level of buffability for a single tower makes it quite exceptional of a cash producer right now so it is increasing in cost. Players have made it clear that for Boss Events the current cooldown on IMF Loan regularly puts it into a position where timing is frustratingly tight in order to maximize profits when farming with banks, so we’ve agreed to loosen up on this cooldown to help with this issue. Finally, the Banana Salvage crosspath is also being increased in cost to reflect the current huge value granted to it with sellback metas where it is used.

5xx Banana Central price increased from $100,000 > $115,000
x4x IMF Loan cooldown reduced from 90 > 85s
xx2 Banana Salvage cost increased $200 > $400
xx3 Marketplace cost reduced from $2,900 > $2,700

Beast Handler

When first creating Beast Handler we balanced the T1-3 upgrade costs with a goal of creating a decision point between spending free playa