After making 1 million sales, Escape From Duckov makes eating s*** worse

Duck-themed singleplayer extraction shooter Escape From Duckov is currently one of the biggest games on Steam—particularly in China, where the majority of its over 1 million sales and Overwhelmingly Positive reviews originate. While it's drawing a comparatively smaller crowd of English-speaking players, the anglophone reception has been just as positive. Duckov's got a surprising amount of depth under that parody appearance.

Duckov developer Team Soda, a studio owned by China's Bilibili media platform, isn't resting easy on its laurels: Less than 24 hours after announcing its 1 million sales milestone, Team Soda has pushed a new update with a smattering of new features, balance adjustments, and bugfixes.

Most of the changes are fairly mundane. Orange headphones can now be dismantled for materials; there's a new UI indicator for when the player's injured; dogs are now more of an early game terror thanks to their footsteps being silenced. Oh, and then there's this:

• Reduced the Energy and Hydration values provided by Poop.

Let me explain this paradigm shift in duck coprophagia. In Escape From Duckov, you've got hunger and hydration meters to manage while you're out looting and shooting. By default, they drain pretty fast, and they can put early game players under a lot of pressure when they're still wrapping their heads around scavenging necessary foodstuffs—or getting reliable income to purchase drinks and snacks in a pinch.

Which is why some players resort to eating feces.

Duckov has a Poop item. You can gather it from porta potties littered around the map. Its primary utility is the crafting of a Poop Ball, a throwable weapon that inflicts a poison DoT effect on targets caught in the splash zone (sorry). But if you're desperate, you can eat Poop instead, recovering an amount of energy and hydration in exchange for inflicting that same poison on yourself.

Evidently, that poison wasn't enough of a deterrent for players willing to make some questionable dietary decisions. With poop now providing less nutritional value, players will be less incentivized to seek septic solutions for convenient calories.

I think we can all agree that's for the best.