Co-op survival game Enshrouded now lets you make things way tougher, or way easier, with an update that adds more than 30 difficulty sliders
Feedback for early access survival games typically comes from two sources: players who want things to be harder, and players who want things to be easier. Give people a big open world and some will always want a supremely challenging experience, while others will want to do some farming, build a base, and have a chill experience with their friends.
Enshrouded just took a crack at making both camps happy at once: the survival game's new "Back to the Shroud" update is packed with difficulty options. In fact, it's overflowing with them. There are now over 30 difficulty settings (31!) you can tweak to shape the game into the precise experience you've been looking for.
You can start with some expected sliders that let you change options like how much damage enemies and bosses do to you, how much health monsters have, and how your own health, mana, and stamina scales up or down in comparison. But you can even tweak finer settings like how far monsters' range of perception reaches, how many of them spawn at once, and even how many of them are allowed to attack you at the same time. So if you somehow like swarms of enemies but not being swarmed by enemies, you can still find a happy medium.
Survival fans who want a more traditional experience, great news: you can finally starve to death in Enshrouded, if that's been on your wishlist. You can activate "Starvation Mode" so you have to eat to live, and you can even adjust the amount of time it takes you to starve once your belly is empty. You can now also specify what you lose when you die: the default is that you just lose crafting materials, which are dropped into a container at the spot of your death, but now you can make it so you lose all your gear, a la Valheim. Ouch. Or you can slide it the other way and lose nothing at all. It's your choice.
The sliders allow for some pretty huge swings in difficulty in both directions, too. Most of the sliders I've played with in the update can be turned down to 20% and have a ceiling of 400% or even 500%, so yeah, you can really make things easy for yourself by turning everything down or brutally difficult by cranking it all up.
One setting that has me personally excited: you can now set the duration of the day and the night separately, so if you hate nighttime (I do) you can make it nice and short. The slider lets you make a day last for a (real) hour, and the night only two minutes long. Sweet.
To change the difficulty levels in your game, choose your character, select "Play," and then when your world choice comes up, choose "Edit." Then start sliding. Enshrouded's "Back to the Shroud" update is live now. Here are the full patch notes.