The biggest update since launch. There is a whole second half of the game now, and the first half plays very differently.
v1.1 shipped days ago. Since then I have been building and, more usefully, measuring — the game had a lot of numbers nobody had ever checked, including me.
THE VOID
From NORMAL up, a kill can tear the sky open. The void washes across the map, then purple elites arrive through separate rifts — WARRIOR (snares you), ASSASSIN (fast, triple damage), TANK (4x health, aura). Each gets one 50% revive. They pay VOID credits, a currency you cannot grind normally.
THE VOID BAZAAR [V]
Three armaments, an exclusive pick — taking one empties your gun slots. VOID SPEAR (cone slash; kills stack permanent armour), LIGHT WANDERER (light waves + chain lightning), ASTRONOMIC WANDERER (meteor strikes; revives you once). They are abilities, not guns: self-firing, scaling with ability haste, each with a max-HP bonus. Switching is free after paying the price gap once. Each evolves, and each has a red PREMIUM CAPSTONE card that rewrites it: time stop, heal-per-sweep, orbital judgement.
THE PILOT AND THE ARMOURY [G]
The ship is gone — you are a pilot who visibly wears what you equip. Four armour slots, seven rarities, eight reforges, its own skill ladder; UNIQUE pieces can be void-forged to double defense.
DOCTRINES
At floor 5 you pick one of three, once per run: GUNSLINGER, VOID-TOUCHED or ENGINEER. Each opens its half of the skill tree and closes the other two — runs finally diverge.
MATERIALS AND THE FABRICATOR [X]
Five materials from five activities, seven recipes, from repair kits to a permanent hull plate. The best reforges are now bought with VOID credits at a fixed counter, not gambled for.
SKILL TREE: 46 nodes, 16 tiers, 109 ranks. The far end costs millions on purpose.
PERSISTENCE: runs live in localStorage now. Plus TODAY’S EXPEDITION — one seeded daily run, same for everyone, one life — and the CORE FORGE, an endless meta tier.
BALANCE — WHERE I STOPPED GUESSING
I spent a day measuring. Highlights:
- The anti-idle system had never once fired (menus reset its timer). Fixed — a parked ship dies in 30 seconds now.
- Enemy health was clamped to your own DPS, and the clamp always bound: time-to-kill was exactly 2.00s at every floor of every difficulty, so every damage upgrade was cosmetic. The anchor is now a floor expectation; real damage only supplies guard rails (6.0s neglected / 2.0s kept pace / 0.5s min-maxed).
- A void loadout emptied your gun slots, so the game read you as zero damage and INFERNAL died in one hit. Fixed.
- Boss sizing only saw your active gun — a fifth of a real build — so bosses died in under a second. NIGHTMARE bosses now run ~8s.
- Void damage compounded to x50 by floor 29. Capped at 2-3x — still the best chase.
- The meteor is aimed by hand now: click to call it.
- TRIPLE TRIGGER 25%→60% cost, SMG −35%, HOMING −75%→−30%, flat 50% death penalty, enemy count scales past floor 10, armour benefits from LUCK now.
Plus a long fix list: cone weapons missing targets standing inside them, time stop ignoring mid-stop spawns, pets flying into enemies’ faces — and two whole systems (ARMOURY, FABRICATOR) that shipped without appearing in any menu. The hotkey bar is colour-coded chips now, and there is a REFORGE CODEX.
KNOWN: a life’s first boss is still short — no data to size it yet.
WHAT’S NEXT: GMTK Game Jam starts July 22nd, so I am away a few days building something small. Feedback very welcome — especially if something feels too slow or a doctrine is the wrong pick. I have done enough guessing.
Thanks for playing ⭐
