One-shot and Lost Caches | Coming in Runes of Power

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Welcome to the final Pre-Patch Blog Post before the release of the full Patch Notes for Runes of Power!

Today we’re going to be looking at another new encounter mechanic we’re adding to Last Epoch in just three days! As mentioned in the Rune Prisons blog post, we wanted to improve the moment- to-moment feeling within the Campaign, as well as within Echoes. To bolster this, we’re adding two types of caches to the game: One-shot Caches, which can be found during the Campaign, and Lost Caches, which can be found within the Monolith of Fate.

One-shot Caches

Have you ever thought to yourself “I love exploring, but sometimes I wish there was something just a little bit more to find while exploring”? Well, we have, and so we’re introducing One-shot Caches!

These Caches are hidden throughout various Campaign zones. You won’t find them on the beaten path either, so if you want them, make sure to put your exploring boots on. When you begin to approach a One-shot Cache, you will be able to see the cache appear as an icon on your mini-map to let you know that treasure is near.

One-shot Caches, as the name implies, can only be opened for their specific rewards once per character, but when opened provide greater rewards than a normal chest and always have a guaranteed drop of either a Personal Item or other helpful leveling items. Personal Items are hand-crafted items which once belonged to another entity that left them behind. They have fixed stats on them, and boast special Personal Affixes. These Personal Affixes cannot drop naturally, define the name of the item, and can be identified by their pale yellow color. Personal Items also cannot be crafted, so you’ll need to find the cache that has the personal item for you.

To prevent missing out on One-shot Caches when playing in a party, the Cache will only be opened for you by another player if you are also nearby. If you’re further away, it will remain safely closed for you to explore it yourself when you’re ready.

You can always find the same One-shot Caches in every playthrough: so once you know where to find one, containing a particular item to help you through the campaign, you’ll know where to go. This also provides an opportunity for more experienced players to find different routes through the campaign for different characters, depending on which One-shot Caches they may want to nab.

Lost Caches

Lost Caches are similar to One-shot Caches, however these will randomly appear in Monolith Echoes and don’t have any limits on finding and opening them. Our goal here is to improve the feeling of each potential echo by adding random events where you can find fun little rewards - perhaps stumbling upon them, or for the avid explorers out there, a reward for your efforts. Do keep in mind, not all Echoes will contain a Lost Cache.

When found tucked away within Echoes, Lost Caches will grant a bunch of powerful items themed around the specific Lost Cache. There are many types of Lost Caches to find, as well as several Tiers of each type of Lost Cache. For example you may find an Explorer’s Cache which hoards keys, a Lost Thief’s Cache which contains jewelry, ranged weapons, and daggers, or perhaps a Thief Lord’s Cache which contains a greater version of the rewards from the Lost Thief’s Cache.

Monolith of Fate Improvements

Alongside adding new mechanics and things to find in Monoliths, we’re making some changes to Echoes themselves to improve the experience. Our goal here is to make Echoes feel more consistent in navigation, feel better when clearing, add a bit more variety, and reduce the feeling of “getting a bad map.”

With the performance improvements we’ve been making, we’re feeling confident about this first change being made: increasing mob density. On average, this works out to about a ten percent increase in mob density. However, in combination with adjusting mob spawner locations, we believe this can help with the feeling of density, without too much of a performance impact. This is just a first step towards better balanced endgame monster density and this will be an ongoing effort.

The second change we’re making is adding more possible player spawn locations. This was a quick change which can help to make maps feel more variable by creating different routes around the maps.

The third change we’re making is to maps with a lot of dead ends — either removing many of the dead ends, or adding additional connections to make these maps less punishing on path choice and reduce backtracking.

The final change is we’re reducing the sizes of some of the larger maps. This means Alpine Halls is now about one third the size it previously was.

Patch Notes Soon

Thank you everyone for joining us for the final Pre-Patch Blog Post for Beta Patch 0.9.2 Runes of Power! With One-shot Caches and Lost Caches providing more reward to exploration, and general Monolith of Fate Improvements keeping the feel-goods coming, we hope everyone enjoys Runes of Power and Runemaster as much as we’ve enjoyed creating it. So get your theory-crafting juices flowing, and your plans set, because Runes of Power releases in just three days on September 7th!

Keep your eyes open tomorrow for our final post before the patch, containing all of the juicy patch notes, coming soon!

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:heart_eyes: :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes:

Dusk shroud chance on non rogue specific item? Will there be many class specific skills/subskills/affixes that will now have a way of finding there way onto items for other classes?

Or is the 2 hand staff in the picture actually rogue class specific now

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Good to see more random encounters added to the game!

I would love to play female mage, could you make it possible? :pleading_face:

Fun changes :slight_smile:
Will the one-shot caches be zone level or character level?

Personal items will not have affixes which grant one classes skills to another, though there may be more examples of affixes normally available to one class, available to all on a Personal Item. One-shot Caches are only found during the campaign, as such Personal items are generally intended for leveling. So do keep in mind you won’t be seeing high level or endgame variants of Personal Items at the current time.

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This patch is shaping up to look very, very sexy. :smiley:

What’re the possibilities of getting a map marker function so we can tag our maps to mark those caches for future run throughs? I can imagine once its datamined they’ll be an online map that shows this but it’d be really cool to mark them in game instead.

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Best part of the update :heart_eyes::heart_eyes::heart_eyes::heart_eyes:

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Will items from these caches have a limited pool of affixes that they pull from?

2 major mechanics and a lot of small stuff coming together to enhance the MoF Echo experience, this will be a killer patch!

One portion of feedback though: The minimap icons for the One-Shot and Lost Cache looks a) very dated and b) not so exciting and most c) importantly like a placeholder.

I hope you can give these a bit of a cooler icon on the minimap. Maybe evne giving them 2 distinct icons.

Other than that, I am very much looking forward to play this patch, way more than the last 2 majpr patches.

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"“Have you ever thought to yourself “I love exploring, but sometimes I wish there was something to find” I would say that would be a right one I like your previous update with exile mage, experimental items and crafting but 2 chests I think that is the most simplest of the simplest content you could possibly implement I have expected a lot more for one shot and lost caches, increasing mob density that is really nice, why not put that modifier in to the echoes, I dont know how is it in regards to performance but to have 10 monsters and now with increase in density to have 11 I mean its not of a difference really

Adding more player spawn points (again) is definitely helpful for making monoliths a little bit less mindless. However by reducing dead ends, you just make them more mindless by a suignificantly larger factor.

This feels like you don’t really know what you want from monoliths, we should either have to learn the layouts to avoid dead ends etc… and need to think a little bit going through them at worst, at best them not be mindless in the slightest.

Or we should be able to not think and just zoom through without paying any attention.

I honestly don’t know what you want monoliths to be with this post, it could go either way.

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They not only increased mob density, but also adjusted mob spawns, so that mob packs will be better placed.

yep we will see I hope it is noticable couse that really is something to look forward to

This all looks cool and great but my question is why are you all showcasing a tempest strike shaman build in the middle video…? Anything you want to share?!

Quick note: We changed out the image of the Personal Item as the previous one had a bug where part of its name was not displaying correctly.

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Like grim dawn nice.

Petition to change the name of One Shot Chest to YOLO chest. Please sign.

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So putting the caches out of the way will incentivize third party map hacks. The only ways around this, that come to mind, are to either not put them out of the way or don’t let the client know they exist until the player can see them on the minimap.