For players who don’t yet know, and who continue to fight for minerals, loot, and crowns: the developers behind Spiral Knights implemented a few features that are meant to remove the need for loot in-fighting. Mainly:

• All minerals are automatically shared. In other words, if every player in a party of four picks up five minerals, each player will get twenty (4 x 5) minerals.

• All crowns are automatically shared in the same way.

• All tokens are automatically shared in the same way.

• All heat is automatically shared in the same way.

• Every heart is available for each person, but they have to pick it up themselves. My friends and I will point out to each other where hearts are.

• Loot is distributed randomly; the person picking up the loot will not necessarily be the one who gets it. You used to be able to pick a round-robin distribution instead, but apparently some people were gaming that to get lucrative loot to themselves, so it’s been removed.

And so now everyone in a party can focus on one thing: kill all the cute things!

By the by, Swiftstrike Buckler is pretty damn sweet. It gets Kamarin to move at a normal speed rather than its usual, slower 2-strike mode. The acceleration was even noticeable to me and my friends—unlike the attack speed trinkets from the preview. And it looks cooler, with its spinning vortex effect.

Well, perhaps this will introduce a lot of bad habits—slow swords need to be handled carefully—but for the time being, being able to hit 80 to 90 damage at normal speeds is quite nice. It’s still only a 2-hit combo rather than a 3-hit like normal speed swords, but you can’t have everything.