Peak’s new Mesa update is just too damn deadly, cue three different types of tumbleweed nerf

Stay in cover. It’s coming. THERE. You see it? A tumbleweed, the deadliest of creatures to roam the desert. Stay quiet, it might roll up on us! Well, at least we’ll stand some chance of survival, thanks to a patch Peak’s devs have just put out in response to the Mesa update being deemed to damn hard.

If you missed this update emerging atop the release summit the other day, it adds in the cannibalistic co-op climber’s first new biome, offering a different challenge to the alpine cliffs folks have been scaling since the game burst onto the scene. Key to surviving this desert is not to succumb to the heat, get blown up by dynamite, or fail in your attempt to recreate Indy’s boulder scene with some mobile shrubbery.

As it’s turned out, though, not getting deathed by those threats is providing even harder than expected. “We’re hearing you loud and clear: the Mesa is really hard,” co-publishers Aggro Crab and Landfall declare in the notes of the game’s latest patch. “Part of me say…good suffer. But it does seem like it’s a bit unfair sometimes, so this patch is to adjust balance and fix bugs that are causing that!”

This brings us to the tumbling weeds. These terrifying bundles of brush now deal thorn damage instead of causing injuries, while their ability to knock you flying has been “made more consistent”, and now scales based on the size of the particular tumbleweed. I’m outraged on the part of the plucky little tumbleweeds everywhere who’d been merrily punching above their weight, only to have their power sapped at the whim of Big Weedkiller.

At least they’re not alone. Dynamite now spawns in luggage “slightly less often”, and has been robbed of its ability to fatally blow you up through walls. Scorpions now have to be able to see you to become aggroed, have had their movement slowed a little, and “now deal less poison damage depending on how close you already are to passing out”. Three more seconds of protection from fall damage has also been added to the scout cannon, and the weight of a mysteriously unnamed thing has had its weight reduced, mysteriously.

To be fair, developers Team Peak have also helped the tumbleweeds by fixing an issue that’d stopped them from spawning. They’ve also fixed some problems with the kiln, in addition to disabling the rising lava in it, until they can work out how to make the heat growth sync up across every player in a party’s game.

Right. I think the weed’s tumbled on. We’re clear to move out. Ahh, what’s next to cl-wait, is that? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO…