New map, broken tanks for all and a Russia fix

A big one today! There is a brand-new map called Duel, every tank now breaks into pieces when destroyed, and players in Russia can play again without any tricks. And while Halloween lasts, every X-crystal pack gives you double X-crystals.

New map: Duel

Meet Duel, a compact arena for up to four players. A sunken concrete fortress with watchtowers sits in the middle of green countryside, with a lake and mountains on the horizon. Short sightlines, tight corners and nowhere to hide for long.

• Modes: Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch (2 vs 2)
• Battle list: for the release, there is always at least one Duel room open.

Duel is too small for regular matchmaking, which is why you will find it in the battle list.

We made Duel for short, intense fights, and we hope it is just right for that. Give it a try and tell us what you think on our Discord: what works, what doesn't and what you would change. Your feedback helps us shape this map and the ones still to come.

The first map from our map SDK

Duel is special for another reason: it is the first map built with our new map SDK. The SDK is a separate toolkit with every building block of the game's maps: all the props and buildings, their materials, the lighting, and the map objects such as spawn points, flags and bonus regions. It comes with tools of its own for painting the ground and the grass, shaping terrain, laying streets, scattering fallen leaves and even stringing up power lines. When a map is done, the SDK checks it and packs it, and we bring it into the game from there.

Duel was our testing ground: while building it, we kept improving the SDK. Expect more maps to come from it.

Credits: Duel was made by the Revive Tanki team, with the help of feen from our map making team. Thank you, feen!

Two contests: win X-crystals

Find the makers' mark: 500 X-crystals. The makers of Duel left their mark somewhere on the map. The first player to find it and e-mail us a screenshot of it wins 500 X-crystals.

Write Duel's story: 1,000 X-crystals. Every map tells a little story on its loading screen, about the world of the game and what happened at that place. Duel still needs one. Write a short description of a few lines that fits the map and the world of the game. The best one wins 1,000 X-crystals and will be shown on Duel's loading screen.

How to take part

• Send your entry to [email protected] with your account name.
• Subject: "Duel: makers' mark" for the mark, "Duel: story" for the story.
• You can write in any language.
• One entry per player and contest.
• Stories can be sent until November 6.

Wrecks for every tank

In the original game only a few hulls and turrets broke into pieces when destroyed; all the others simply burned out. Now every hull and every turret, in every skin, comes apart in the style of the original ones: armour plates fly off, wheels and track links scatter across the ground and the barrel hangs loose.

And when a whole team goes down at once, the battlefield fills up with debris.

Russia: back in the game, no VPN needed

Since last year many of you in Russia could hardly play: several Russian internet providers cut off connections to our servers after just a few kilobytes. Logging in failed, downloads broke off and even our website would not load.

That is fixed now. If you play from Russia, the game finds its way to our servers by itself. There is nothing to set up and no VPN to switch on, and it works for everything:

• the game connection itself
• the game's downloads
• the pictures of the in-game news
• our website and its download buttons

Two more things help with slow or unstable connections, everywhere in the world:

• Downloads continue where they stopped. Until now, a download that was interrupted started over from zero. Now the game keeps what it already has and only fetches the rest. And when you skip the download at the start, the game no longer keeps downloading in the background while you wait for a map to load.
• A snappier connection. The game now sends its small messages to the server right away instead of collecting them first, so your actions reach the server a little faster.

China: a better connection in testing

We are also testing a better connection for players in China, on a route that is optimised for China: a lower ping, and lost packets down to almost none. If you play from China, the game uses it automatically. Tell us how it feels! And Chinese characters now finally reach the chat.

Double X-crystals for Halloween 🎃

Halloween is still on: until November 1, every X-crystal pack in the shop gives you twice as many X-crystals for the same price.

Fixed and improved since the last update

Since our last update article a lot has happened. Thank you for all your reports!

New

• Connections for Russia and China (see above), and downloads that continue where they stopped
• X-crystal bonus as a battle reward: be the best player of a battle, win three in a row or score 1000 points, and your next X-crystal purchase within 24 hours gives you 50% more X-crystals (at most once a week, and not while another discount runs)
• When you reach a new league, its special offer is shown right on the result screen
• Purchases are confirmed with a message again, and premium shows its "activated" window again
• A discount can now show its own message above the X-crystal packs
• Idle players are warned and then removed from the battle after two minutes without input, as in the original game
• Discord Rich Presence works again, now also on Linux and macOS. It counts down the warm-up and the battle, shows your party size, and has tooltips for your rank and the battle

Battle list

• The rooms are now right next to the ranked battle on the play screen
• A room's lobby shows the names of the players in it
• A room starts as soon as everyone in its lobby is ready, instead of waiting out the countdown
• After a battle from the list you get back to the main screen

Battle

• Tanks being destroyed after a lag spike or a stuttering connection
• Mines often not going off when a tank drove over their edge: the distance to a mine now counts from the nearest part of the tank, not from its centre
• An Explosive Mass dealing no damage when its owner was destroyed at the same moment
• Freeze now cools down burning team mates, and Firebird thaws frozen ones
• The damage direction indicator showing nothing
• Mines, spider mines, drones and Force Field missing their activation flash and sound
• The EMP missing its icon in the effect bar of its owner
• Armour and double damage being invisible on tanks that were destroyed when you joined the battle
• Supply boxes lying on their side half in the ground, or falling through the floor
• Supply boxes of a finished round staying on the map
• Returning to a battle you left not putting you back into it right away
• Missing rewards when you left just as the battle ended
• Missing weapon sounds and battle music
• No sound when a tank lands on the ground
• The energy bar keeping a wrong colour after an Extra Mag flash
• The deathmatch score staying on screen in a team battle that followed a deathmatch
• The game crashing when joining a room of the battle list during its warm-up
• Graffiti going on cooldown even when nothing was painted
• Windows of the background houses on Rio mirroring the world upside down
• Water mirroring your tank upside down on Linux
• Shadows on Arena's plants

Bots

• Bots no longer join and leave over and over when several players join a battle together

Squads, friends and chat

• A squad no longer breaks up when its leader leaves a battle
• Squad invitations staying valid for as long as you see them, and joining you to the squad they came from
• Accepting a request to join your squad now also brings the new member into your custom battle
• A private chat shows when the other player is offline, and the "player is offline" message appears in that chat
• Friends showing as offline or "in battle" after their battle had ended
• Friends lists with more than 126 friends missing some of them
• Names under the squad's avatars being cut off
• /block, /mute and /unblock now work and reply in every chat
• Reports of players are now received from everywhere, also from the result screen

Interface

• Your turret and hull keep the skin you chose when you switch to another one and back
• Two items glowing as selected in the garage lists
• Module cards glowing red in the Halloween garage
• Tabs of the result screen and module names in the modules window not fitting their text
• Load screens showing the progress of every download
• The load screen now shows what kind of battle you are joining
• The new password screen showing no account name
• The newsletter setting not saving
• Items given to you only showing after logging in again
• Premium giving its daily crystals at every login instead of once a day

Balance

• Freeze: damage raised from 506 to 550 per second
• Firebird: longer burst (4.6 instead of 4 seconds), with slightly weaker afterburn
• Thunder: damage lowered from 633–647 to 593–607

Found a bug that is not on this list? Please report it to us together with your crash log. The guide on finding your crash logs shows where the game keeps them.

We are still cooking

Duel is only the first map from our SDK, and it won't be the last. More is on its way, and we can't wait to show it to you.

See you on the battlefield!