*Fixed the timer for Scratch and Squawk's spawning being twice as long as it was supposed to be

*Scratch and Squawk now have their own theme song!

*Reduced lifespan of plague clouds to 24 seconds from 30

*Plague clouds no longer give Wortox souls

*Spawn locations of plague clouds are more random

*Scratch and Squawk now get knocked back when they bump into large creatures

*Brought Scratch and Squawk's trails slightly back to better match the hems of their robes

*Beefalo now lose their fur after a short delay when they first get infected. Like before it won't grow back until they're no longer plagued

*Increased randomness of blighted ground for less visual repetition

*Fixed bad algorithm that resulted in blighted ground always spawning south of the infected zone

*Fixed plague clouds never despawning if they go offscreen for more than 20 seconds, causing infinite clouds to spawn

*Increased lifespan of plague clouds

*Increased range of the blight catcher's cloud-culling to match its immunity range

*Finally replaced placeholder animations for plague globules despawning. No more black rectangle!

*Fixed plague clouds playing the dissipate animation twice when entering a blight catcher's range while near the end of their lifespan

*Made blight catchers better at repelling plague clouds

UPDATE 7.1

Groups of infected will periodically spawn clouds that hunt down and infect healthy creatures

Reduced the radius the plague normally spreads at to compensate.

As creatures get infected the ground will progressively become darker and more gunked (can be disabled for performance)

Creatures that die while burning will not turn into plague globules

Scratch and Squawk's spawn rate can now be configured

Scratch now spawns infectious clouds

Globules spawned by Squawk now decay 99% faster and are no longer affected by Scratch's rotting aura


BUG FIXES/OPTIMIZATION

Components are no longer applied twice to everything, essentially halving memory usage

Made another attempt to fix the map bug. I still have no way to test it so feedback/testers would be appreciated

Fixed a bad algorithm for Scratch and Squawk's timer meaning they spawned half as often as they were supposed to

Fixed clients sometimes being cured in half the time they were supposed to

Possibly fixed a crash where some clients crash when opening the map

*Myself and no one else I know could recreate the issue so we're kind of shooting in the dark. Please tell me if it works.

I didn't actually upload an update. Steam is just lying.

*Reverted the globule change to investigate a strange bug

UPDATE 7: BEARERS OF BLIGHT

*Two new bosses that spawn if a player has not caught the plague in too long
Scratch is non-hostile, but will still deal damage to enemies it runs into and will leave behind an acidic trail while stealing items
Squawk is hostile and will charge anything that tries to attack Scratch. He is also capable of spitting plague globules.

Killing them may give you a cure to the disease!


*Plague Globules can no longer be harvested by auto-picking

*Sickly creatures now have greyed names. When they have progressed to maximum contagiousness their names will darken further and be described as "Blighted"


Bug Fixes:

Harvesting a Plague Globules no longer grants the apron durability instead of taking it

*Bad check for plague spreading has been replaced to GREATLY reduce lag when in highly plagued areas