Roguelike deckbuilder Slay The Spire 2 continues its journey through early access with an update that fixes various crash bugs, adds new card art, changes how the game files mods, and implements some balancing changes. Item #1 on the balance change list: “Players, enemies, and pets can no longer have their HP increased above 999,999,999.” Yep, that sure sounds like a balancing problem. Thanks, Mega Crit.

Out now via the game’s opt-in public-beta Steam branch (right-click the game in your library, select Properties, then Game Versions & Betas), with a full public release to follow, the update introduces new portrait art for three cards – Feeding Frenzy, Sloth and Waste Away.

If you missed it, one of the charming things about Slay The Spire 2 right now is its usage of early access placeholder art with extreme Did My Homework On The Bus energy. Julian wrote a piece about how these scruffy doodlings give the lie to the idea that it’s fair to use generative AI for placeholder art. Please, let them not turn out to be AI-generated, all along. I don’t know what to believe, anymore.

As for the bug fixes, here are a few more significant ones I’ve picked out from the full changelog. Firstly, Slay The Spire 2 will hopefully no longer crash when you interact with potions during combat transitions, or when synching cloud saves on Windows, or when navigating too hastily away from menus.

In happy news for those of us who’d secretly rather be playing an idle clicker, there’s less risk of a softlock when auto-played cards trigger grid or card selection. The game will also no longer softlock if you die in the Room Full of Cheese. And the game will no longer crash when you select Ironclad while living in Turkey.

God how I love the delirium I get, reading changelogs. We should pay apple-cheeked men in tights and doublets to declaim them from a large scroll in the village square.

Looking beyond crashes and softlocks, Ironclad’s Hellraiser power will no longer play Strikes without a valid target. Fairy in a Bottle and Lizard Tail relics will now heal you even if your Max HP is 1. Tezcatara’s Brightest Flame card will no longer be able to decrease your Max HP to less than 1.

There’s another round of fixes for multiplayer specifically, targeting softlocks, divergences between game states, and other weirdness. You’ll no longer find yourself unable to end your turn if you pop your clogs while the Whispering Earring is autoplaying your cards. The Doormaker’s Door HP will now scale correctly after the Doormaker escapes. You’ll no longer have a problem where host and client players generated different maps from the same seed. You’ll no longer get stuck forever beholding an empty chest.

The full list of tweaks and twiddles can be read here. The game’s new file structure for mods is worth quoting in full. Here you go:

mod_manifest.json has been moved outside of the PCK. All mods should now ship with an additional file named .json – see ModManifest for the new JSON structure.

PCK is no longer required for all mods. Json is the only file that is required to declare a mod. The json must declare whether the mod includes a pck/dll file.

settings.save now includes a list of all mods that were loaded in the last game run. Reordering this list affects load order.

Mods may declare dependencies in the manifest. If settings.save declares a load order incompatible with the listed dependencies, then a re-sort is forced.

Added affects_gameplay field to mod manifest. If false, then the mod will not be checked against the host’s mods in a multiplayer game.

Updated 0Harmony/MonoMod to support mac arm64. Manually overwriting it should no longer be required.