Hello everyone!

We've finally got out our first QOL improvements patch and a detailed content roadmap for 2026. It took longer than expected because we got stuck for days trying to exit the game 🤷

Jokes aside, thank you again from everyone at poncle and Nosebleed for playing Vampire Crawlers and being patient for our updates and roadmap!

Version 1.5 Contents

🔵 You can now quit the game

• Settings Button and therefore Quit options always available in the bottom left corner
  
• Backspace can be used to exit Shops or return to Village from the World Map
  
• Clearer messaging around Autosave timing added to Quit Confirm pop-up

🔵 Card Sorting

• Buttons to sort cards by Mana cost or Color
  
• Pressing up/down will quickly move your selection to the next category:
  
  • In unsorted mode it moves to the start and end of the hand
    
  • In colour sort mode it moves to the next colour
    
  • In mana sort mode it moves to the next level of mana cost
    

🔵 Jeweller Clarity

• Jeweller UI now shows the chests you might find a Gem in
  
• Made several tweaks to make gems rarity behave in a more intutitive way (changes listed below)
  
• Sealing no longer requires the Player to bring a gem’s frequency below common; Gems can now be also instantly sealed.

🔵 New Deck View

• There is now a single deck view which shows you ALL your cards in one place, and whether they are in your deck pile, your hand, or the discard pile. This is accessible from multiple screens.

🔵 Tooltips

• Added Tooltip Visibility options to the settings to give players more flexibility
  
• Removed the controller button dedicated to Tooltip toggling (it is now used for card sorting)

🔵 Endless Mode

• If you have completed the game, a small new teaser area is unlocked on the map. This level contains a new Relic which unlocks Endless Mode
  
• With the Relic active, Endless Mode is available in any dungeon that you have previously cleared.
  
• In Endless Mode the difficulty is increased, and you can keep digging after completing the normal floors of a dungeon, allowing you to explore further and experience even tougher encounters.
  
• The Jeweller is disabled in Endless Mode to make it an a challenge about going as deep as possible in a stage having to rely on the base-game RNG rather than a preset gem configuration.

🔵 Other changes

• Grim Grimoire is now available during level-ups
  
• When levelling up you will be shown if any of the cards offered are part of an evolution with your existing cards (but only if you have Evo’d that combination previously)
  
• On the Pause screen we now default to the bottom row of buttons to make it easier to open the Grim Grimoire (or exit…)
  
• Previously hidden stats like Re-roll are now shown when they are not 0
  
• There is now a Luck-based chance to get 4 gems per chest intead of 3
  
• Luck increases the chance of getting better quality gems when levelling up
  

🔵 Coin Count is still OP

• Profit.

🔵 Bugfixes and improvements

• Please see the list below

2026 content roadmap

Please note this is the minimum amount of content we're planning to release with each update. We'll actively try to pack in more QOL improvements and stuff that makes sense, especially in the later ones.

New content strategy

As we all know, it's quite easy to become OP in Vampire Crawlers. It's a game supposed to be completed in some 20-30 hours. So this is how we're planning to keep expanding the game.

In every 2026 update, we're going to add a new post-game Challenge Stage. As the name suggests, in order to complete these stages you'll have to overcome a challenge in the form of a new game mechanic. After you emerge victorious, you'll be able to toggle On or Off that game mechanic in every stage (including the original Challenge one).

Most of the new content will be designed around the specific game mechanics introduced in the update, but obviously nothing will stop you from using those mechanics outside of the Challenge and find new ways to break the base game.

As you can see from the roadmap, the challenge mechanic in the next update will be a limited hand size, paired with a staple mechanic of card games: discarding.

The idea is that by the end of the 2026 update cycle you'll be able to decide to play the game in a more challenging way or stick to the base version, while still getting all the added content and mechanics.

A tease about 2027

For the next year, we are planning something different than Challenge Stages: we are building the Astral Stair.

Where will you go? Who will you be?

Steam Community Items are out today

• 1 Badge (5 levels + foil) 

• 5 Trading Cards (Featuring Gennaro, Mortaccio, Poppea, Imelda, Clerici)

• 4 Profile Backgrounds 

• 5 Emoticons 

Here’s a preview of one of the cards:
(If you are not sure what any of that means, you can read how to unlock Steam Community Items here.)

Other platforms

This update will reach all Consoles soon!

There will be a couple of major changes for Nintendo Switch 2:

• Game is now 1080p in handheld mode, and 4K when docked
  
• Mouse: the stick on the controller that acts as the mouse is now functional for dungeon navigation

Bugfixes and improvements

- Gems which move down in rarity (e.g Rare to common) will appear in both their original chest and current rarity chest. Gems which move up in rarity will be removed from their original Chests.
This helps reduce the chance of finding a gem which has been made rarer but allows high-quality gems (like the Evo Gem) to appear more often when rarity has been reduced.

- The gems which drop from different chests have been adjusted:

• Bronze: Common, Uncommon, Rare (unchanged)
  
• Silver: Rare, Epic, Legendary (Small chance of legendary)
  
• Gold: Epic, Legendary (unchanged)

- UI arrows added to the Jeweller for consistency with other Shops

- Scroll views in the Jeweller should work more consistently

- Fixed overflow bug with coin amount and enemies'health going negative

- Fix for Gorgeous Moon only targeting the front row

- Fix for Overkill UI getting stuck if rapidly re-triggered

- Fix for crash when rearranging cards in hand as the turn was ending

- Fix for ghost UI buttons showing on Credits when using mouse. This one’s for you Alex!

- Save Data time stamps are now shown in local time (rather than UTC used previously)

- End of Floor shovel now animates onto the screen instead of just appearing

- You can only revive if you’ve actually died, not when completing a dungeon

- Cards affected by Leader or Midas gems now show an indicator that this is happening

- A card with the right colour, which has the right colour gem inserted, can now unlock the Silver Chest by itself; any card with the rainbow gem can now unlock a Silver Chest

- Game now correctly respects the target framerate set in the display options (Unless Power Saving Mode is enabled, in which case framerate is locked to 30fps)

- Audio

• Extra attacks which happen at the end of a turn (e.g. Santa Water) now play their sounds correctly
• Shops should now pay their Buy/Fail sounds correctly
  
• Various small fixes to Drowner audio

- Localisation updates

• Clearer Quit behaviour (see above)
  
• Equip button label in Inn changed to “Add”
  
• Gem Description updates for Drain and Mug gems to improve clarity: Enemies that get hit by these gems will do the effect when they die and do not need to be killed at the moment the gem hits them
  
• Gem “Easy Combo” renamed to “Combo Breaker”, with improved text descriptions that better match the way it works (players were not understanding that the combo would end when this gem is used)

- General bug fixing and minor polish