New Team Play & Co-op Custom Game Options

Update 1.8.0 brings new ways to play together with Team Play and Co-op, letting you compete against other teams or work together as a single team. We’ve also included options for always-on player collisions and added XP Level 6 customisation unlocks.

In-game match showing multiple players competing in team play on a mini golf course.

Team Play and Co-op

Golfing in Aether now lets you play together in teams or as a single team in co-op, with everyone working towards a shared score rather than competing individually. Choose between multiple teams and compete against each other, or join forces and take on the course together in co-op.

Custom Game menu with the Teams/Co-op option selected.

When creating a custom game, you can now choose from a range of team scoring options. Team scores are combined and averaged across all members, with rounding applied to the final score.

The Auto option can create either two or four teams, while Co-op lets everyone play together as a single team. If you want full control over team assignments, Custom allows you to manually assign players to teams.

Select Players menu showing options to choose a team during local multiplayer setup.

Pre-game lobby menu showing the team selection options for players.

When using Custom team settings, you can assign teams directly from the Select Players menu in local multiplayer. For online multiplayer, teams can be assigned in the pre-game lobby, use the View button to switch to the team assignment page.

In both online and local play, players can also be left unassigned, allowing them to play as individuals. This means you can create mixed teams, with some players grouped together while others compete individually.

Black and white Whisker golf balls wearing matching cat and bunny hats.

New XP Level

In this update, we’re introducing XP Level 6, giving long-time players something new to work towards. The XP required to reach Level 6 is the same as the amount required for Levels 4 and 5, and reaching it unlocks three new ball designs.

Whiskers can take on several different appearances depending on your selected hat and colour, including cat and rabbit-inspired looks. Streak adds a new striped design, while Donut gives your ball an icing-and-sprinkles makeover. All three designs can be customised with different colours.

Bunny Ears Hat

We’ve also added a Bunny Ears hat to the customisation options available from the start of the game. It pairs particularly well with the new Whisker ball customisation from XP Level 6.

Three patterned golf balls featuring Shelly the chick, Coil, and Waves.

Spring Customisation Unlocks

For playing between March and the end of May, you’ll unlock the seasonal customisations above. Each features a colour-customisable design. Shelly is a chick-inspired bird design, while Coil and Waves take inspiration from colourful Easter egg patterns.

The seasonal unlock check is handled locally by the game, so if you miss these customisations during the event period, you’ll still be able to unlock them in future years when the seasonal period returns.

Improved Player collisions and options

A requested feature was to allow always on collisions, we also found online play needed improvements to be able to accomplish this. A key change was making the collisions server sided (on the p2p host) so that there is a single point of authority rather than a miss-match of ball movements. We have enabled collisions to be on always as part of the “Race” preset, but you can customise whether to be on or off, as well as only while moving, as part of custom session settings.

Additional Fixes

This update also includes a range of smaller improvements and bug fixes. See the full patch notes below for the complete list of changes.

If you encounter an issue, please report it through our support email. Even if you believe it may be a known issue, reporting it helps us track and address problems more effectively.

Patch Notes

General

Fixed an issue where leaderboard scores could be reported higher than they should be.
Fixed various instances where master sound settings were not being respected. This included lava, an impact sound, and XP ticker.
Added additional smoothing behaviour when camera is in ‘no bounce’ mode so it will not track ball as it goes into a sloped hole (and instead will remain at static height).
Added a change to enable collisions between players during practice mode.
Fixed an issue where resetting a replay wouldn’t correctly orientate the ghost.
Fixed an instance where you could loose input when skipping a level while in shared input mode.
Fixed a logic problem where if you nudged a player into a hole and used skip level in the process.
Added a sync mechanic for the level sequence playing where a client running faster hardware must wait for the host to complete loading.
Added a tweak to reduce stuttering in level sequences on particually low end hardware by delaying ending the loading screen by a few seconds.

Customization

Added rabbit ears hat.
Added Shelly, Coil, and Waves as part of Spring unlocks.
Added Whisker, Donut, and Streak to XP Level 6 unlocks.
Fixed sun hat clipping at low quality / LOD levels.

Environment

Fixed cup material friction to enable balls to stop quicker.
Fixed a small wall gap on Center Path.
Fixed a small wall gap on Putt Pendulum.
Fixed alignment of some walls on Behind the Tee.
Fixed a raised log on Up the Stairs.
Fixed a wall gap on Speed Bump.
Fixed alignment of a wall on Right Angle.
Fixed placement of a log on Right Angle.
Fixed Don’t Fall In has a log raised too high.
Fixed a small wall gap on Don’t Fall In.
Fixed some minor material detail on Rock Bottom.
Fixed placement of a stump on Hole in Fun.
Fixed a collision with ramp on Curve It.
Fixed some minor material detail on Rail crossing.
Fixed some minor material details on Cliffhanger.
Fixed LOD quality on wall some wall pieces to ensure no stand-out brick gaps far from camera.
Fixed rock placement on Bridge hole.
Fixed a minor wall gap on Up, Down, and Around.
Fixed flag raise radius on sinkhole being too small.
Added new blocking volumes for camera so when in ‘no bounce’ smoothing mode the camera will not follow the players ball into out of bound pits e.g. water.
Fixed a small collision issue on the first corner of Cauldron.
Added a tweak to fences to make them fade out a bit further from the camera so your view is obstructed less by then. You can disable this feature in graphics settings by turning off proximity dithering.
Added improvements to rock placement on leapfrog and crazy golf.
Fixed an issue where an out of bounds part of a water wheel wouldn’t reset the player.
Fixed rock placement on What goes around.
Fixed an issue where free camera wouldn’t work when the game timer was set to none but free camera was still a percentage of the game timer. It will now be 50 seconds in this situation.
Fixed rock placements on Deja vu.
Fixed a small wall gap on Millpond.
Fixed placement of rocks and log on Serpentine.
Fixed some leaves floating, notably on Spin City.
Fixed inconsistent Lilly appearance on Angler.
Fixed appearance of rotators in distance levels.
Added improvements to the replication of movers, these will now be exactly in sync. This is to accommodate for minor network time drift.

Interface

Fixed an instance where returning to the main menu during split screen wouldn’t promptly disable split screen while fading to white.
Fixed new game menu having inconsistent icon.
Fixed an issue where when player 2 pauses during split screen, background blur will overlap hole info.
Added a change to hide some developer scores from leaderboard menus where testing was done on multiple different platforms (now only 1 will be shown).
Fixed some rare quality issues with various text on XP screen.
Fixed a potential issue where view button wouldn’t work on some menus.
Fixes scroll-bars out of alignment for session replay.
Fixed appearance of some keys for replays.
Added an adjustment to the contrast of some text such as ‘its your turn’.
Added various improvements to better support ultra-wide resolutions, e.g. 21:9. This includes tweaking how menus scale at extreme horizontal sizes and correctly highlighting these ratios in resolution settings.
Added team option to custom session settings.
Added a reorganisation of custom settings menus so they follow a consistent layout between online and offline.
Added team selection function to player selection screen when using custom team options. Also added team selection to lobby when using custom and playing an online session.
Fixed a navigation menu in progress saves menu.
Fixed an instance where local settings wouldn’t open.
Fixed an issue where local players wouldn’t be able to trigger the level name as part of focusing not the flag.
Fixed an instance where the next hole number wouldn’t display correctly while a spectator.
Added a few changes to copywrite and credit screens.
Fixed contrast of some faceplates.
Fixed unnecessary countdown when using skip level in Hotseat.
Fixed an issue where ending a turn could occur while in a menu didn’t correctly transfer input.
Fixed some instances where player names wouldn’t appear in lobby right away.
Fixed button to save progress save being incorrectly visible when watching a replay.
Fixed opening social menu while on the scoreboard for the last hole could display a negative timer remaining for the level.
Fixed instance where if in free camera and the player you were spectating completed the hole you would have ‘free camera’ displayed on the screen still while focusing on the flag.