Hello Gamers,

Today marks the release of version 1.3 of Rodland of Pipes and there are many new features I’m excited to share with you!

Achievements

There are now achievements! These range from standard (Collect all the flyers) to puzzling (Complete a Pipe without turning right) to really really hard (Complete the final Pipe in custom mode with maxed settings).

If you have an existing save file, some achievements will be unlocked automatically. However, some achievements were not previously being tracked and will have to be completed again.

Achievements can be found under Options -> Achievements.

Stats

You can now see stats for each Pipe in each mode, best times, shortest distances, left and right turns, encounters by type and more! These stats are not cleared when you use the “Clear Story Progress” button, allowing you to track stats over multiple playthroughs.

Stats can be found under Options -> Stats.

Extras

Extras are a new set of options catered towards more experienced Operatives. You’ll need to complete story mode at least once in order to unlock these, but they should make future playthroughs more enjoyable.

Mute all dialogue - If you’re replaying Story Mode, you probably don’t need to have your job explained to you.

In Pipe Timer - Best paired with the stats screen otherwise it’ll be hard to see your final time.

Stats Screen - See your end Pipe stats, including the total time you took. Then you can retry the Pipe if you want or just continue to the next. At the end of the very last Pipe, you’ll be given the time it took for you to complete Story Mode from the very first Pipe. Only the time actually spent in The Pipes is counted.

Hard Mode - This increases the difficulty of all monsters, lowers overall heat, increases blockages and raises the upper ping limit. If you’re finding the normal story a little bit too relaxed, this should help you stay on your toes.

This mode also comes with its own set of achievements and statistics.

Extras can be found under Options -> Extras.

Save File Changes

Save files have been split into 2 separate files, your “Story” save data and your “Persistent” save data.

Your Story save file contains story data (Map unlocks, Flyers, etc.)

Your Persistent save file contains your options, stats and achievements.

When you “Clear Story Data” in options now, you clear just your Story save file. This means that a new Story file can be started up while keeping all of your volume/video/extras settings intact without having to set them every time. It also means your stats will be aggregated over all Story playthroughs you’ve ever done. So if you want to know what your best ever performances are, you can easily check.

A more robust save system has been added, now saves are automatically backed up and will load themselves if the main save becomes corrupted or otherwise unreadable for some reason.

Pricing Changes

The price of the game has moved to 8.99 USD.

When this game first launched here back in June, it had bugs, missing features and some serious frustrations. As the patches have progressed there have been fixes, subtitles, custom difficulty options, balancing passes and now even some new features like achievements, stats and extra modes. Now that this has become a full featured release, I believe it is now fair to price it similarly to other games in this genre.

Misc Changes

Difficulty Assists no longer apply to Custom mode

An option to turn off Film Grain has been added

Bug Fixes

Fixed an issue where unstable pipe sections could cause lighting issues.

Finally, a challenge.

This was my best speedrun time as I played through this patch in preparation for release. Think you can beat me?
 (You'll need to turn on the "Show Stats on Pipe Completion" option to see this screen.)

Happy Crawling!