u/FossilSouthie_

A new mission alert codenamed after the Greek personification of gold "Chrysus" and has the following strings:

"Power Hour - Golden Mist Monsters" - "Collect gold coins by defeating golden enemies! They are melted down into a Gold reward at the end of the mission."

The quests are:

-"In successful missions eliminate 5 Golden Mist Monsters"

- "In successful missions eliminate 15 Golden Mist Monsters"

- "In successful missions eliminate 30 Golden Mist Monsters"

Alongside this the Frozen Fjords superheroes modifier, for individual heroes listed in the alert not all of them, will be enabled during Power Hours! Also golden Mist Monsters have a high chance to drop evolution caches.

Since STW is now f2p, I wanna remind people that there is in STW's current files, 2 unused enemy types:

- Armoured Husk
- Digger Husk

Which one you think would be cool to be added to the game :D

Here are the descriptions:

- Armoured Husk: "A silver husk that has 3 shields above it's head where one shield is 30% ranged weapon damage resistance. Armor can be broken through if attacked with a melee weapon where one melee hit equals one shield removed. Silver effect goes away once the last shield is broken. Doesn't have elemental support".
(If this effect looks familiar that's because it's re-used in Hit The Road's "Husk Heartiness" modifier)

- Digger Husk: "A husk that digs underneath builds to get to the objective faster. Pops up right before the player / objective. Normally digs for 5 seconds, then tunnel instantly breaks when digger comes back to surface. Can be stopped by placing a floor in it's path. Has elemental support."

Also an extra one after some digging of OLD stuff:

- Tunneler (image is concept): "Mist monster version (likely) of Digger Husk. Can pickup husks and bring them inside the tunnel it starts digging. Any husk left behind can then walk into the tunnel and travel through it for the short life duration of the tunnel. When tunnel breaks, the husks get kicked out the ground. Mist monsters could NOT use the tunnel. Could be stopped by placing a floor."
(Not known whether Tunneler has elemental support or not)

There's few missing stuff from them though. Miner husk lacks AI, some animations and abilities, which requires a game patch. Armoured husk has everything still in although, it could be buggy so again would require a game patch. Tunneler just doesn't have anything on current STW so again, needs a game patch. With STW going f2p, more enemy types would be amazing.

Epic has worked on another major project codenamed "Demeter", and was actually connected to Hestia.
Demeter is a greek goddess, sister of Hestia, and knowing Epic they only often codename projects after Greek gods if they're major. I think this PROBABLY was Twine Peaks. Coming back to that as you further read.

Project Demeter was supposed to be an entirely new "Procedural Map System", as it uses Suburban, Urban and Industrial tiles to create a randomly generated map, so unlikely it was supposed to be used for just a limited time event, unless it was used within a permanent or returning theater, example being Ventures with Frozen Fjords and Hexylvania.
A lot of the tiles have been re-used from already existing zones though, example "Demeter_5x5_WIP_Ind_Refinery_a" coming from "IND_5x5_Refinery_a", as it is an efficient move when developing new WIP zones. Demeter also used it's own "ZoneTheme" in the frontend, "BP_ZT_Demeter", along an unique ingame skybox, "Skybox_Demeter", "WorldLighting_Demeter", similar to how zones in the game currently have their own unique skybox. Also had it's own enemy type too.

An interesting thing about Demeter is that it DID use few unreleased structures / tiles not seen in STW before, both now and for that time. Two lighthouses, two hamlets, hermit homes and "little village settlements". The only hermit home we know of from STW files, is used in BR (but oddly enough never used in STW, maybe except Early Access) is the "Pleasant Manor" between Pleasant and going towards Snobby Shores / Haunted Hills. While the unreleased tile on latest exists and it's a 5x5, Demeter used a 10x10 version. Now this is where it gets interesting and why I personally think that Demeter was an iteration of / early Twine Peaks zone. Hamlets, lighthouses, hermit houses and village settlements are commonly found in tropical areas. Hermit Houses (Hermitages) are for the individual, and traditionally found in the tropics. In the tropics, these are often simple, remote structures, or found in a secluded beach hut in the Caribbean, built for total privacy and silence. Hamlets are then small clusters of homes you'll find tucked away in tropical mountains or deep in the rainforest where a few families live together, sharing resources while still remaining isolated from the rest of the world. Last, a village settlement would be a permanent cluster of dwellings designed for tropical heat, serving as a location for shared resources, agriculture, and protection.

Along this, Demeter is the Greek goddess of the harvest, agriculture, fertility, and sacred law. The Earth's ability to provide is tied directly to her emotional state. In Greek myth, when her daughter Persephone was abducted to the Underworld, she struck the land with a "barren" curse, which is the mythic equivalent of a volcanic landscape like "Barren Island", where her grief creates a scorched and infertile surface. This "barren" state in a volcanic-tropical setting, plays out through rapid nutrient cycling where heat and mineral-rich ash eventually fuel a dense and high-energy tropical rainforest, much like Demeter is identified with Gaia where the decay of the "old world" immediately fuels an explosion of vegetation.
By codenaming the potential STW campaign map "Demeter", Epic were signalling a focus on rebuilding the Earth itself, which is what the main campaign story was moving towards back then.

Now the connection behind Hestia and Demeter.
In the Greek pantheon, Demeter and Hestia are the two eldest daughters of Cronus and Rhea. Demeter and Hestia provide the two things you need to survive an apocalypse, aka food and shelter. Without Demeter, there is no resources, and without Hestia there is no "homebase" to return to, so establishing and working on Hestia as a diegetic Homebase, shows that Demeter was likely the blueprint for Twine Peaks, as the two projects were firstly worked on in 2018 to function as the "Inside" and "Outside" of the same endgame world.

Edit: Okay so now this is awkward. It turns out Demeter and Hestia were worked on when not all of Chapter 2 art was done yet.

• Lockie's Lighthouse light,
• The waterfall mesh from the chapter 2 dam,
• Lazy Lake waterfall mesh,
• Chapter 2 style bridge / road spline,

These all were originally made for STW's "Demeter" project, and coincides with how current Hestia is mostly ch2 and ch3 artstyle (Fortilla) too. So likely STW was planned to have a Chapter 2 overhaul along Twine Peaks, if Epic kept the full development plans (probably more even?). And that Chapter 2's artstyle is a fraction of a scrapped major STW project.