Nova Drift Patch Notes

Version 1.1.00 (Unreleased, internally testing)

Updated November 19, 2024

User Interface Improvements:

• Polished and reworked the Settings menus: Each category section is now a tabbed page
  • This lets us fit more options and makes the game easier to port
• Fonts now appear crisper and more readable, especially at non-native or small resolutions
• Replaced the old lock graphics with overlays so that locked content can be seen and moused over
• Made various other changes that improve the Steam Deck experience and make the game easier to port to smaller devices:
  • Ensured accurate glyphs are displayed when using Steam Deck
  • Controller glyphs are larger and easier to see at low resolutions
  • Tutorial visuals appear larger
• Tutorial buttons now scale with the width of the message
• Dimmed the background behind non-gameplay UI screens to improve contrast

Major Changes:

• Reworked unlock progression
  • Previously, unlocks were acquired based on your score after each run. However, the scores that players are able to achieve tend to vary wildly in Nova Drift. This led to rather inconsistent experiences where, for example, some players would get showered with unlocks after powerful runs while other players could see their progress slow to a crawl if they couldn't get high enough scores. Additionally, now that Endless mode is optional, it's important to consider unlock rate for players who may prefer not to enable it. So, the new unlock system is based on waves cleared in a run instead of score earned. This ties unlock progression more closely to playtime and allows players of all skill levels to get to max account level in a reasonable amount of playtime (while still rewarding those who perform well). Overall this should provide a more consistent meta-progression experience for players, and we have tried to tune it so that in most cases it will take about the same or less time to get to max level. Additionally, extra consideration was made for the early unlocks in the game. Previously it was not too hard to get 8+ unlocks on your very first run, but this rate would drop off very quickly. Again this was not a very consistent experience, but also it's important not to deny some of the early unlocks too long, so we've tried to tune this carefully.
  • Extra details about the new unlock system:
• Every wave cleared gives 1 point
• Boss waves (multiples of 20 up to 120) give additional points, especially Star Eater
• Waves cleared after 120 (or 180 for Draft) give additional points
• Each difficulty mod enabled (except Annihilation) grants a bonus to your unlock points earned (note this was already the case previously since difficulty mods give score bonuses)

Minor Changes:

• Achievements can now be earned in Assist Mode
• Rapid Regeneration banishes Infuse
• Increased Spitfire's base hull by 13.6%. Decreased the multiplier to late-game Spitfire 2.0 -> 1.8, which makes it tougher in its boss fight and only barely tougher later on

Bug Fixes:

• Attempted to fix issues caused by Interceptor Swords after upgrading, resulting in Swords corrupting enemies (making them appear to vanish)
  • Interceptor now initializes Swords after completing all other initialization
  • Problems seem to have been caused by NaN object positions
• Attempted to fix a rare crash involving Hammerhead's burst warning objecet
• Attempted to fix a rare crash when transferring Star Eater damage to its controller
• Added a few measures to help prevent cases of corrupt values propgating and causing more trouble
• Fixed Shield continually cooling down with Hypermetabolism
• Priority Zero now scales based on the maximum hull of the enemy destroyed, not the maximum hull of the player
• Removed Shockwave pulses and Orbital orbs from destroyed drones that have * * Shielded Drones and Terminal Directive
• We now display an informative message when a custom skin sprite could not be loaded
• Refreshing player constructs also syncs Shield visuals (examples: Amp glow, * * Bastion glow, Helix controller, Shockwave controller)
• Cleaned up Salvo weapon state and display after the player switches to a different weapon
• Engineer Body construct assembly speed bonus now properly counts unassembled constructs
• Spectre decloaks when auto-deploying a Drone, Ally, or Turret
• Fixed a crash related to switching starfield backgrounds during gameplay under certain conditions
• Fixed the Leaf on the Wind multiplier potentially getting used before being set
• Fixed incorrect layout of banished mod hexes
• Prevented hull and shield bars from getting wider than the screen
• Fixed asymmetrical Homing Strike spreads

Version 1.0.131

Updated August 29, 2024

Balance Changes

• The Final boss' hull reduced by ~15%
• The Final boss' increased damage taken now starts 35 seconds into the fight instead of at the first crossing phase, ramps up twice as fast, and only loses up to 0.5 of it's multiplier at phase 2 instead of all it
  • This is a hidden mechanic that makes the boss take more damage the longer the fight drags on. It's designed to aid low DPS builds, but it wasn't doing enough work, previously

Bug Fixes

• With Endless Mode turned off, your final time will be your final boss kill time, not the time at which you accessed the end score menu
• With Endless Mode turned off and Speedrune Mode turned on, Speedrun stats won't be hidden during the final boss kill transition
• Fixed window positions not being saved
• Fixed window and cursor issues when switching from full-screen to windowed mode
  • Window position now gets restored to its original location in windowed mode
  • Fixed the mouse cursor snapping to the center of the window when it shouldn't
  • The software cursor no longer drifts when the window size was as tall as the screen
  • We now use GameMaker's built-in mouse pointer locking and mouse movement delta functions, which is less error prone

Version 1.0.09

Updated August 27, 2024

New Features

• Added $15+ tier Kickstarter backers to the credits
• Made custom skin handling more robust
  • Skip blank lines, comment lines (starting with # or //), and lines without a body artwork column
  • Avoid runtime errors when body artwork is not found

Bug Fixes

• Added safeguards against square root or power functions returning bad values. If debug mode is on, and the safeguard is used, the game should create a pop up message detailing what happened. If you see this, please show us the message!
• Fixed excess Voids getting added to the mod pool when Wild Mods filled some of the upgrade slots
  • These excess Voids could show up in subsequent rolls even when enough mods were available
• Fixed very fast weapons triggering Assault's empowered shot screen flash
• Fixed Host drones being a valid target for Cherub shields
• Fixed the game ending sequence not cleaning up several data structures when destroyed
• Attempted to prevent a rare crash that could occur by skipping the ending at a certain moment
• Attempted to fix a rare crash within a singularity where enemy positions became corrupt
• Attempted to fix a few rare crashes with Swords

Version 1.0

Updated August 6, 2024

Major New Features

• Added a final boss(!). It will be encountered at wave 120, unless you start the game at this wave using Draft Mode. A stronger version of the boss will also be encountered at waves 240, and intervals of 240 after that
• Added the game ending sequence, which you will encounter if the Endless challenge mode is disabled
• Endless Mode can now be turned off, and unlocks when you first beat the game's final boss for the first time
• Added new boss and ending BGM: Alioth, Astrophagi, Alioth Redux, and Remnant
• Added the ability to override body and drone artwork with custom skins. Added 3 sets of custom skins. Players may also create and play with their own custom skins!
• Added German localization
• Implemented texture compression, significantly improving performance!

New Features

• Added a new setting: Assist Mode
• Added a new setting: High-Visibility Mode
• Added a new setting: Ataraxia Reminders
• Added a new menu option to join the Discord
• Added intro sound effects to many medium-to-large enemies

Player Balance Changes

• Assault body base thrust increased from 100 -> 110
• Research body gained a new power: Destroyed enemies have a small chance to drop power-ups
• Pulse's blasts now gain 50% of blast radius modifiers as damage
• Pulse now passively scales somewhat in radius as battlefield size increases (the same way shield effects do)
• Pulse Shards now passively gain some velocity as Pulse's radius increases so they can "keep up" with the Pulse better. This is mostly for aesthetic reasons but should make Pulse shards feel a bit better
• Swords now have hidden diminishing returns on their crash damage scaling after it exceeds +100% damage (realistically, this only affects Hullbreaker)
• Blades fired by the player now have a large damage reduction when they are fired that quickly decays (This is intended to help them punch through and survive fields of enemy projectiles)
• The shield radius and effect gained from Siphon is now multiplicative instead of additive, like other gear effects
• Rapid Reconstruction Base Hull bonus increased from 40 -> 50
• Rapid Reconstruction Plating bonus increased from 1 -> 2
• Deadly Wake burn damage increased from 120/s -> 300/s
• Deadly Wake duration increased from ~3s -> 5s
• Deadly Wake trails are slightly larger
• Snipe max damage bonus reduced from +120% -> +80% (the damage bonus per unit of distance travelled is also proportionally reduced)
• Reduced the effect of mobility reducing effects in the game:
  • Charged Shot, Vortex, Torrent, and Thermal Lance thrust penalty reduced from 30% -> 20%
  • Thermal Lance rotation penalty reduced from 50% -> 35%
  • Siege Weaponry thrust penalty reduced from 80% -> 60%
  • Rancor and Charged Shields now increase the mobility penalty of Charged Shot to 35% (50% if you have both)
  • Power Reserves mobility-reduction resistance reduced from 50% -> 40%
  • Assault body no longer grants-mobility reduction resistance
  • Overall, mobility reduction effects will be much easier to play with early on when you do not have resistance to them, and upgrading Power Reserves will leave you at roughly the same level that Power Reserves + Assault did previously
• Homing Strike now creates projectiles based on the main attack's projectile count
  • Accounts for the Engineer's increased Blade limit
  • Accounts extra projectiles from Charged Shot
  • Accounts for Sword spray from large enemy projectiles
• Mines can now fire Homing Strikes
• Mines now get the velocity benefit from Calibrate
• Allies now get the velocity benefit from Calibrate in addition to the spread reduction
• Ally Interceptors and Mines (with Loaded Mines) can now create Homing Strike Blades
• Architect with Blade, but also with either Loaded Mines or Interceptors, can now be offered Homing Strike and Firing Array
• Firing Array now applies size, blast, and damage modifiers halfway between center and edge to singular projectiles
  • It previously applied the edge modifiers, reducing the projectile size by 30%
• Homing Strike now applies the effects of Firing Array
• The amount of damage reduction that Armor Fragments from Reconstituion gain from the Defense Drone's damage taken now has diminishing returns, but always grants at least 15%
• Improved the balance of Armor Stacks
  • Armor Stacks are now spawned based on damage dealt after damage reductions instead of before
  • Adaptive Armor stack base duration increased from 2.0s -> 2.5s
  • Rebuke duration bonus reduced from 110% -> 80%
  • Adaptive Armor generates ~27% more stacks per point of damage
  • It was possible to gain very high damage reduction from Armor Stacks for too little cost by building into a lot of self-damage and self-damage resistance. This change should bring those outlying strategies more in line, and in exchange Armor Stacks have been buffed to make them better in general
• Slightly increased Charge Shot's charge rate, particularly it's initial ramp-up (does not affect Vortex or Thermal Lance)
• Skirmish works better with Overseer, Strafing Strikes, and Hidden Power:
  • Hides visual indicator when in weapon bonus mode and the weapon cannot fire
  • Triggering on-fire effects switches to crash bonus mode like firing a weapon
  • Swords use the shared skirmish state instead of their own private copy
• Mines now have a minimum rotation speed (it cannot be zero or near-zero). This is to make Thermal Lance + Loaded Mines feel better to use
• Flash Shielding shield malus reduced from 40% -> 25%
• Tempest Break shield malus increased from 10% -> 25%
• Warp Strike now reduces all targeting by 50%, instead of only after a projectile wraps
• Celestial Surge damage now scales much harder with its size (small surges will do less damage and large surges will do more)
• Celestial Surge now ignites enemies for 20% of the burn damage it deals (note that multiple ignites from the same source do not stack; a stronger Surge ignite will overwrite a weaker one)
• Celestial Surge's self damage increase was inaccurately reported as +25%, it was really +42%. It has been changed to +35%
• Charged Shields maximum Radius and Effect bonus reduced from 100% -> 80%
• Singular Strike no longer has a cap on the number of projectiles it can fuse
• Sanctuary has slightly higher acceleration and top speed
• Sanctuary now reads your velocity to try to predict where you will be in a short time, and move there. This makes Sanctuary track you better and be more responsive to your movements
• Saturation Fire now increases the thrust penalty of Siege Weaponry by +10% (But we decreased that penalty substantially, see above)
• Saturation Fire now increases the self-damage of Siege Weaponry by 25% instead of 15%
• Void Slice I-frames after blinking reduced from 0.5s to 0.33s (Note that this does not affect Void Slice during it's teleportation, it affects the grace period afterward)
• Dying Star self damage increased 11 -> 12/s
• Ataraxia is guaranteed to be offered as the next non-wild mod you roll if you meet its unlock condition (only works once; if you reroll it away, you have to find it again)
• Triggering strafe while you have a weapon cooldown of .5s or less will now remove the cooldown and Strafing Strikes will work normally
• Homing Strike Blades with Antimatter Rounds can now hit and degrade enemy projectiles
• Transmogrification now removes 1 reroll instead of all your rerolls
• Transmogrification now prevents you from spending rerolls (including banish w/ Research) during the 3 all-recursive rolls
• A Construct Specialist mod will only be offered if you have upgraded its corresponding construct, unless you have no such constructs in which case all 4 may be offered
• Galvanic Outburst Shield Effect Power bonus increased from 2% -> 5%
• Energized Shields provides 20% less Shield Effect Power per point of speed
• Improved Phantom Strike behavior with enemies in formations and with Glaucus
• Hyperboost rate of fire modifier appies to Interceptor integrated weaponry

Enemy Changes

• Asteroids and Comets have greatly reduced damage when they first spawn and are near the edge of the screen. This is to prevent deaths from unlucky Comet/Asteroid spawns where the player has little to no time to react
• Added three new enemy entry sound effects for larger / faster enemies that entered silently:
  • Enemy entry medium: Tracer, Celestial, Vanguard
  • Enemy entry large: Spitfire, Hive, Crab Nest,
  • Enemy entry huge: Scion, Warbringer, Seraph, Bulwark, Juggernaut
• Scion's Lance deals ~25% less damage
• Glaucus' hull increased ~9%
• Warbringer's hull, Warbringer segments, and the damage dealt by destroying Warbringer segments, has been increased by ~3-4%
• Warbringer's centering impulse now depends on the camera zoom
  • Makes it stay near the center of the screen under most conditions, but this relaxes as zoom increases
• Warbringer's segments area damage resistance 40% -> 50%
• Elite Bolt-Throwers now fire 3 pairs of bolts instead of 4, and fire them more slowly
• Champion Bolt-Throwers fire their bolts slightly earlier
• Elite Juggernauts rotate slower, charge less frequently, and have a lower top speed while charging
• Champion Hives now take progressively longer to spawn Wardens as they stay alive, up to a point
• Reverted the wave speed scaling change that was made in the Glistering update
  • This change was originally introduced as a form of 'compensation' for adjusting Strafe and Blink. However, in hindsight it has become clear that this was not necessary. The Strafe/Blink changes were not as impactful as was originally feared, and scores from our top players have only gotten higher. So, in the interest of curbing game length, at least by a little, we're rolling back this wave scaling change

Minor Improvements

• Comets now use a bigger, unique HUD warning
• The default control for WASD Blink is now "F"
• The in-game cursor now rotates to point away from the player ship
• Improved gamepad mouse emulation by using a radial deadzone
• Player Blink and Warp Shield now wrap around screen boundaries
• The game now validates the window position the save file and resets it to a safe position if off-screen
• Improved the readability and accuracy of the Pause display:
  • Better projectile counts
  • Shows burst fire and barrage count separate from projectile count
  • Accounts for Barrage velocity variance with Railgun damage
  • Weapon Blast Radius Modifier is now shown separately
  • Shows non-firing and firing values for Shield Regeneration and Shield Cooldown
  • Shows non-firing and firing values for Hull Regeneration
  • Rounded values to integers where displaying decimal values wasn't helpful
  • Shield damage reduction includes damage reduction from Tactical Link for Bastion shield
• Railgun now uses trail rendering to draw its sprite so it can bend along the flight path
• The "Serenity Now" achievement is easier to get in light of Ataraxia's previous changes
• Added "Toward the offender" to the Glossary, and more texts now use this term
• Improved menu navigation with keyboard and gamepad controls
• Enemy damage scaling from high waves no longer affects asteroids and comet damage
• The pause screen now shows base construct assembly speed and (in parentheses) the construct assembly speed with the Engineer assembly speed multiplier
• The pause screen now includes Construct Rate of Fire Modifier from Overclock and Burnout Reactors
• Made construct shield radii always remain larger than the constructs themselves and made them fit better at small sizes
• Lowered the volume of the player charge up sfxs so they don't drown out the other action so much
• Increased the volume of the background music
• Accessing debug mode now requires holding "SHIFT" in addition to pressing delete or F7, so that its harder to accidentally activate it and have your run marked as "cheating"
• The game tries to be smarter about gamepads:
  • Until you press a gamepad input anywhere, the game will not assume you're playing on gamepad. In this state, gamepad steering and also the gamepad cursor control will not work and gamepad tutorials will not appear. This hopefully fixes issues associated with gamemaker identifying things as gamepads that aren't, like steering wheels and pedals
  • Allowed gamepads other than the one in the "0" slot to be used. Anywhere that you can use the gamepad cursor, switching from one gamepad to another should work (just not in-game)
• Improved or clarified the text of many upgrades
• The Banished Mods list draws smaller when more than 50 mods been banished
• If the player has at least 60 mods, the background of the pause menu is dimmed for readability in case text overlaps the mod list
• Improved or clarified the text of many upgrades

Bug Fixes

• Switching audio sources now functions and no longer results in muted sound
• Fixed the Blade limit with Barrage
• Extra Blade projectiles from the Engineer body now get applied to the projectile count so they contribute to Barrage burst length
• Blade homing behavior now works more like other player projectiles
  • Smarter targeting logic
  • Only changes target when the previous target becomes invalid
• Fixed Homing Strike seeking bonus not applying to Blade projectiles
• Fixed Railgun with Antimatter Rounds sometimes skipping over targets
• Unlocks screen now shows padlock icons for locked mod trees
• Prevented comets from inflicting damage on objects obstructed by a hard shield or mine shield
  • Fixes hard-shielded Bulwark barriers getting charged up by hits from comets
• Fixed comet shards so they emit from the point of impact instead of the current position of the comet
• Blade projectile no longer ricochets if broken by Architect while in contact with an object
• Fixed Phantom Strike targeting the Seraph after colliding with a Seraph Zone Drone
• Comet shards now do less damage to Bulwark barriers, just like comets do
• We now skip joystick-based mouse cursor movement when a controller is not connected to avoid odd device behavior
• Fixed a few potential crashes with Swords
• Fixed a rare crash with enemies using celestial lances
• Fixed the fullscreen controller object being created on Steam Deck
• Antimatter Rounds color takes precedence over Hypercharge color for Charged Shot and Vortex
• Fixed some light fringes on the mouse cursor sprites
• Fixed Constructor healing pulse showing the sprite for the wrong unit rarity
• Attached effects now update their positions last so they don't lag behind by a frame
• Fixed attachment offsets for some jet trails
• Fixed Vortex discharge positions
• Fixed the shield cooldown bar "going negative" due to purchasing mods
• Fixed sound effects getting stopped when they shouldn't if you die with Last Stand
• Fixed Shielded Constructs with Gemini Protocol and Burnout Reactors turning the health bar white as if redirecting damage to your hull
• Self-damage from Antimatter Rounds now uses actual projectiles fired so it takes Blade reserve into account
• Fixed one of the shield break flash effects drawing in the wrong place at certain zooms
• Fixed the position offset of the Hammerhead explosion shockwave
• Fixed the position offset of the Eclipse wave firing effect when missing a chassis piece
• The player now properly enters (or re-enters) from outside the lower left corner of the screen at higher zoom factors
• Bolt Thrower charge effect scales times and rates based on enemy speed
• Fixed a number of random directions being very-slightly-not-entirely-random
• Some effects fade out faster when their emitter has been destroyed
• Fixed some effects from Eclipses persisting when they shouldn't
• Fixed a crash with Mine Drones
• Fixed the Mine Drone gun lagging behind the Drone by a frame
• Infuse can no longer create zero damage bolts
• Fixed an issue where Bulwarks would drift toward the bottom corner of the screen
• Fixed changes to the Constrained Mouse Aim setting not applying during a game session
• Fixed Bastion stored energy not getting cleared if switching to a different shield type or taking Shielded Drones
• Fixed Leviathan push resistance not getting applied
• Fixed pause display not factoring Antimatter Rounds velocity bonus into Railgun damage
• Fixed Barrage + Singular Strike showing an incorrect total damage per second in the pause screen
• Pause screen weapon display now accounts for Barrage power modifier range
• Pause screen weapon display now rounds the seeking value to the nearest integer
• Voids added by Evolutionary Niche count towards "Savor The Void" achievement
• Fixed some visual issues with Shockwave shield
• Enemy projectiles reflected by Reflect Shield target enemies within the shield effect radius even if the shooter is outside the radius
• Rupture does not count as weapon damage so it no longer triggers Blitz boost, Saturation Fire hit, Terminate cull, Incendiary ignite, or Infuse discharge
• Removed inconsistencies and artifacts in mod and gear hex artwork
• Practice Mode's damage reduction now works properly
• Removed "Weapon" tag from Corrosion
• Drones with Terminal Directive now become unshielded when destroyed
• Fixed some cases of Antimatter Rounds triggering on projectiles that should be ineligible
• Fixed Sword gear using the Blade unlock (rank 21) instead of Sword unlock (rank 25)
• "Reset Gamepad Controls" option now clears custom gamepad controls
• Fixed inconsistency between defining custom controls and resetting controls to defaults
  • Resetting controls to defaults does not save them immediately
  • Backing out of the menu without saving restores controls to last saved values
• Continuous damage from an attached Dart projectile now applies enemy weakness modifiers
• Vertically centered the text in the Upgrade Menu "Banish Mod" button so it is positioned correctly with large text
• Fixed inconsistent results, using Strafe, when holding multiple direction keys at once
• Fixed Crucible Burning Hoop projectile pushing constructs that aren't touching the area
• Fixed damaging bursts from Counterpulse, Terminal Directive, Mine Explosion, Mine Bomblet, and Self Destruction counting towards Essence Sap, when they shouldn't (because they're construct damage)
• Fixed Sword damage state sprites for shield hits to cover the case of hull damage from Gemini Protocol or Discharge with Shielded Constructs
• Added missing borders to the Gear icons on the Pause and Game Over screens
• Pause screen now includes damage bonus from Propulsive Munitions in weapon damage
• Fixed the +15% base projectile blast radius modifier that wasn't being calculated for Singular Strike
• Carrier Swarm Constructs with Shielded Constructs mod will now properly "enrage" while the shield is down
• Fixed the pause screen showing the wrong value for projectile size modifier
• Fixed player construct projectiles not damaging Station Omega when the hit wall segment has zero or less health
• Emergency Systems now properly prevents self-damage from Antimatter Rounds, Siege Weaponry, and Vortex
• Architect better enforces the single construct limit, retaining the first construct found in this order of priority: Swords > Bastion > Ally > Turret > Blade > Mine > Drone
• Ricochet now cannot reduce projectile count below the number of guns
• Fixed the pause screen not accounting for projectile scatter when reporting the spread arc (affects Grenade, Flak, and Torrent)
• Fixed the "I Regret Everything" achievement so that it checks when you actually die while using Vortex
• The "Joust" achievement should more reliably unlock, now
• Fixed the upgrade menu closing after spending the last upgrade point on a mod that grants more points
  • It now checks whether to return to the upgrade menu after mods apply their effects
• Singular Strike sets effective projectiles to the number of guns instead of one
  • Fixes Loaded Mines, Salvo, Blade, and Outrage Module getting penalized
• Fixed earleir adjustments to Salvo repeat fire time not also applying to Allies with Integrated Weaponry
• Unshielded drones (e.g. Terminal Directive) now don't contribute to shielded constructs count
• Fixed missing tutorial popup for Firefly body
• Tutorial pop-ups push existing instances up instead of overlapping them
• Fixed some issues with the Salvo counter disappearing when it shouldn't
• Fixed some cases of Purge instances initializing at the wrong size
• Fixed incorrect unlock condition for level-locked mods (Kinetic Boost, Stabilization, Candescence, Skirmish, Efficiency, and Adaptive Armor)
• Fixed being able to have more than the maximum number of Warpath Stacks if multiple enemies were killed on the same frame
• Fixed Warpath's bonuses becoming locked at their current value after picking Hidden Power instead of being removed
• Fixed Dart trails persisting if the projectile stuck too soon
• On Loaded Mines, Railgun muzzle effects are now centered, detached, and don't move
• Fixed Shredder Mines being unable to detonate, no matter how hard they tried, when being healed by a Cherub or Myrmidon
• Fixed player construct self-destruction with Burnout Reactors showing a hit damage indicator in addition to the burn damage indicator
• Highlighting a mod properly updates the flashing state of available mods
  • Fixes all mods flashing when Regression is highlighted after highlighting Winnow
• Fixed Vortex self-damage not showing damage indicators
• Fixed incorrect scaling of Self Destruction bursts
  • The multiplicative scaler value was being applied twice
• Prevented body spread multiplier from going negative at high body power multipliers
• Fixed the first wave of Draft getting skipped
• Fixed Sanctuary incorrectly reducing Shield Effect Power by 20%
• Fixed some vfx lagging a frame behind their targets
• Homing Strike projectiles now support fractional step offset like regular projectiles do
  • Mostly relevant with Salvo release (which fires continuously and quickly)
• Fixed tutorial notifications sometimes going missing when applying upgrades in a large batch
• Fixed tutorial notifications stacking on top of each other in some cases
• Fixed unset Vortex projectile tempest color and flash color with Hyperboost
• Fixed shield getting stuck below full if it takes enough damage during recovery
• Fixed Dart impact splash not being affected by blast damage multipliers
• Fixed Dying Drones with Terminal Directive incorrectly applying Corrosion on impact
• Fixed Challengers sometimes dropping no power-up if you have Quantum Decoherence
• Fixed Pulse getting Amp's bonus applied twice
• Fixed Hard Shields affecting enemy speed in some cases
• Fixed out-of-sync hex flashing when selecting both both Regression and Winnow
• Fixed Antimatter Rounds recoloring Firefly thrusters
• Fixed vanguards not properly adjusting their rotation speed during charge maneuvers
• Polish localization now uses the Roboto font for titles so it can have access to the characters it needs
• Fixed sprites that were drawn in the main menu causing several player shield texture sheets being loaded that didn't need to be
• Moved the purple and red celestial background object spawns further off-screen to prevent their "pop in"
• Fixed Carrier body jet trail positions
• Updated cooldown icons for Mines and Turret to match the current artworks
• Updated hexes that contain outdated turret or mine artwork
• Cargo trains now use the logic to follow eachother that other segmented objects use. Fixes them getting spread apart, too
• Fixed screenshotting with F12 not working on many menus
• Fixed several gamepad tutorials not showing up if you have a controller plugged in but have custom keyboard schemes: Blink, Strafe, and movement
• Fixed Vortex flash color being set when charged with Hyperboost, which created a crash
• Fixed a crash with projectile trails
• Fixed terminate not working on enemy segments
• Fixed the burst vfx for Antimatter-projectile collisions sometimes being larger than intended
• Fixed problems with overlapping text for large text mode in various languages
• Fixed wave delay timing not considering enemy doubling with pincer waves
• Last Stand now makes you release fire when you die, which fixes bugs with some charged weapons and maybe other things
• Prevented the creation of an "upgrade ready" pop-up if the upgrade menu already exists
• Prevented the follower code from overwriting enemy rotation, which was messing with Beamcasters in formation
• Fixed the "self-destruct construct" being unselectable for Architect on gamepad
• Fixed turn momentum inconsistently persisting when switching turn directions with key inputs
• Fixes sfx bugs with Halo and Siphon shields
• Fixed Beamcaster's beams not scaling with enemy speed, even though their firing time and beam charge time did
• The game will now clear inputs when confirming an upgrade or returning to the game from pause, so any bindings shared (like thrust or fire) don't also trigger when using those menu options
• Ceratotitan now won't summon adds if the player is dead
• Warden move speed easing is now much faster until it starts escaping
  • Fixes a bug with Wardens being "launched" if their leader is destroyed instantly
• Fixed Ceratotitan's projectile origin not being affected by enemy scale
• Fixed Pulsars failing to dodge at high waves. Enemy dodge speed no longer scales with enemy speed
• Prevented Strafe from being triggered more than once in a frame, using different inputs
  • Prevents two charges of Void Slice being used up at once
• Fixed Void Slice not displaying the correct reticle if you upgrade while you have 2 charges
• Fixed: Time spent in the settings menu delayed the next bgm track starting
• Fixed Bulwark counter projectiles and jet projectiles double-dipping enemy size modifiers
• Fixed Bulwark blast size not using enemy size modifiers
• Flak's projectile doubling now works with the +1 projectile from Barrage, as intended
• Fixed the end score screen displaying a "damage taken" score that can continue to change after you're a dead leviathan
• Fixed several crashes with the Swords weapon
• Fixed a crash after taking Shielded Constructs during a Death Blossom
• Fixed incorrect line wrapping of the description at the bottom of the Settings screen
• Fixed: Bastion now won't result in you getting Elegant Construction or Priority Zero in your mod pool if you also have Rapid Reconstruction
• Fixed Hullbreaker being able to treat Station Omega's walls like they've been penetrated if they've taken enough damage
• Made the high score system more robust, and less likely to lose data
• Fixed Settings descriptions not line breaking in large text mode in Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese
• Fixed Outrage Module and Phantom Strike not ignoring burst count with Hidden Power
• Fixed Salvo launched from Outrage Module with multiple guns firing too few projectiles
• Fixed the draw order and visibility on several menus, especially in situations with very high amounts of upgrades
• Optimized the game by turning off the depth buffer and stencil buffer, which we don't need
• Made texture optimizations
• Made several improvements on different localizations with large text mode enabled
• Fixed several cases where the player could take damage while invulnerable
• Fixed enemy segments not contributing to Amp count
• Fixed it so that Calibrate only resets when the weapon actually fires
  • It now uses the same "firing" check as the regeneration firing modifier and shield cooldown multiplier
• Fixed Tracer split shots being off-center
• Fixed a crash with Architect + Shielded Constructs in Draft mode
• Prevented a rare crash caused by the singularity pull potentially dividing by zero

Version 0.36.14: GLISTERING Update

Updated December 20, 2023

This update aims to balance and refine Nova Drift's rough edges before we shift focus to the game's release, which features a final confrontation, ending, and full release.

Important note: Menu control bindings have been separated from ship controls. If you have been using custom bindings, you may want to rebind the menu controls after updating.

New Feature Overview

• Added new background music to all modes: "Spectra"
• Added new background music to all modes: "Fukura"
• Overhauled how burn and ignites work and made them simpler. Many burn and ignite upgrades have been made more powerful and easier to understand
• Viper has been reworked to be simpler, stronger, and more cohesive. See below for details
• Sanctuary has been completely reworked. See below for details
• Most text-heavy menus have received an aesthetic pass
• Added a lot more options for input binding
• Auto Firing can now be selected from the settings menu, allowing the "fire" input to turn it on and off during gameplay
• The maximum account rank is now 64, up from 60

Progression Changes

Please read me! Your unlocks may have changed, and returning players will need to reach the new maximum rank of 64 to have access to a few unlocks they may have previously had.

If you don't want to deal with this, you can edit the "accountLevel" setting in your save .ini file to a value of "64".

• Updated the account unlock order:
  • Max account rank is now 64, up from 60
  • Swords now unlocks at rank 25, up from 21 (It was unlocked at the same rank as Blade). This pushes all unlocks after it back one rank (Except Annihilation, which remains at 50)
  • Charged Shields, Strafing Strikes, and Infuse now unlock at separate ranks instead of all at once on 60
  • Reordered the final unlocks:
    • ChargedShields = 59
    • Infuse = 60
    • StrafingStrikes = 61
    • Leviathan = 62
    • Apotheosis = 63
    • Ataraxia = 64

Settings and Bindings Improvements

• Added a new setting: Toggle Auto Firing. Enabling this will cause pressing the fire input to alternate between two states: Firing (input held) and not firing (input not held)
• The mouse can now be moved by using the gamepad right joystick in all menus. This allows players using gamepads to mouse over mods in various menus in order to see their names and descriptions
• Added new bindings: Menu Up, Menu Down, Menu Left, Menu Right, Confirm Menu, Exit Menu, Toggle Pause Game, Toggle Show Combat Log, Strafe Forward, Strafe Backward
• Added the ability to unbind an input
• Gamepad's "back / select" button now declines on the upgrade menu now, not "start", and the button graphic has been updated to match
• The high score entry now accepts spaces and up to 32 characters
• The upgrade, fire, and thrust bindings no longer confirm on menus, though there are now two slots to bind "confirm menu" to
• The directional bindings that affect the player now only affect the player, and not menus
• To prevent users from locking themselves out of the game, critical menu bindings now cannot be unbound and cannot share bindings
• Steam Deck no longer automatically hides the cursor, turns off constrained mouse aim, and disables mouse aim. It loads your saves and defaults as usual. Instead, it hides the cursor in menus (except the upgrade menu) when the cursor hasn't moved for 3 seconds. In such menus, it shows the cursor if the cursor has moved for 7 frames. By default, on the main menu, the cursor starts hidden. (The "hide mouse" setting can still overwrite this as usual)

Burn & Ignite Rework

A rework designed to clarify and simplify text and mechanics related to burn damage and ignites.

• All burn damage now implicitly ignites, and ignites now deal 120 damage /s for 3 seconds unless otherwise stated
• Adjusted the text for every upgrade that uses burn mechanics: All upgrade text referring to ignites have been removed unless they're special cases, cutting down on a lot of reading!
• The terminology for "burning", referring to an ignited target, is now "ignited"
• Ignite duration modifiers are no more. They have been replaced by ignite damage modifiers
• Viper has been reworked to be simpler and more cohesive:
  • When you take a hull hit, you disgorge Venom Strike projectiles toward the offender
  • Venom Strike projectiles deal 90 burn damage /s
  • When you crash head-on, you release up to 24 additional Venom Strike projectiles, increased by 2% per your level. This effect strengthens the longer you have not crashed head-on, up to 10 seconds, and has a 2-second cooldown
  • +50% head-on crash damage resistance
  • +50% total ignite damage
  • Hull: 110
  • Thrust: 110
• Deadly wake objects persist ~14% longer
• Corrosion no longer reduces weapon damage
• Corrosion stack damage 2.5 -> 2.0
• Corrosion spreads fewer stacks from enemy hull (Corrosion's malus made it often awkward to evaluate and pick on weapon builds, so this has been removed in exchange for some of Corrosion's overall power. The goal is to make the mod feel appealing in more cases, especially on weapons)
• Incendiary Strike ignites for 150% of the damage of the hit, up from 125%. The text now simply displays the ignite as doing "50% damage per second" (this is a buff)
• Purification weapon damage -30% -> -20%
• Purification's +30% Ignite Duration has been replaced with +20% Ignite Damage
• Purification's recovery increased from 0.2/s -> 0.4/s, but it now has a maximum target cap of 5
• Purification's hull recovery is now doubled if you have no shield (meaning you have Rapid Reconstruction. This allows Rapid Reconstruction builds to have the same total healing from Purification, making it and subsequently Dying Star more viable on Rapid Reconstruction builds)
• Dying Star's +30% Ignite Duration has been replaced with +30% Ignite Damage
• Dying Star's range 1200 -> 1500
• Dying Star's ignite damage has been doubled(!)
• Fixed inconsistencies when referring to "burn" damage vs "burning" damage. They just say "burn damage", now
• Added text about Vortex' bolts of energy to the description
• The text now explains Darts more explicitly: "Darts do not ignite targets, but deal their damage, scaling with their weapon projectile size, as burn damage over their duration"
• Since Halo's ignite has been reduced, it has made up for it in base damage: 240 -> 300 /s
• The value for Purge is now calculated right as an enemy is destroyed, so that Incendiary Strike doesn't get skipped for Purge/Deflagration when enemies are instantly killed before a burn tick has happened
• Fixed Viper Strike ignites not stacking with Scorching Wake ignites
• Fixed Discharge bolt, Galvanic Outburst bolt, Vortex bolt, and Tempest Break bolt ignites not stacking with each other
• Rebalanced Scorching Wake in light of increased ingite damage: 240 -> 180 base damage
• Fixed most of the damage from Discharge, Galvanic Outburst, and Tempest Break not scaling with shield effects
• Reduced lightning bolt shield effect damage by ~30% to compensate for them previously not scaling with shield effect

Upgrade Reworks & Balance Changes

• Sanctuary has been completely reworked:

  • While your shield protects you, create a large Sanctuary on the battlefield that slowly follows you. Your shield still protects you from damage, but shield effects originate from the Sanctuary instead of from you

  • While you are inside the Sanctuary, you gain 10% shield damage resistance, +15% global damage, and recover 6 shields /s

  • +40% crash knockback resistance

  • -20% thrust

  • Your shield effect radius becomes equal to the Sanctuary's radius, but it cannot be increased or decreased by other modifiers. Instead, your modifiers to shield effect radius apply at 40% effectiveness to your shield effect power

  • While you are outside the Sanctuary, your shield effects are disabled, and your shield cooldown is doubled

• Blaster base damage 20 -> 25
• Flak base damage 45 -> 50
• The way Salvo calculates the rate at which it unloads its stockpile has changed: Releasing Salvo is baseline slower and gets faster for higher effective projectile counts, instead of higher stockpile amounts. This addresses the problematic combo of Singular Strike + Salvo while leaving other uses alone (Slowing down Salvo's release allows Amp, Charged Shot, and Cloaked to fall off before too many missiles are released)
• Further lowered the knockback of Salvo
• Bastion now inherits the player's crash damage, and then applies mods for construct damage and shield effect
• Phantom Strike and Outrage Module now put Swords on cooldown, unless you're charging. (Though its still an unusual interaction, this is to make it more consistent with other weapon gear and removes an exploit)
• Homing Strike now adds an additional pair of projectiles for every 5 of your projectiles
• Polished Rebuke orbs a bit: They reach a higher targeting value more quickly and then lose it linearlly rather than proportionally. (Should look a bit more natural and be more reliable)
• Maelstrom now excludes projectiles reflected by you
• Updated the artwork for Power Reserves. (We needed fewer icons that contain the player for better visual parsing)

Enemy Adjustments

• Nova Drift has been steadily experiencing the power creep expected of any very long duration game project. Upgrades are generally stronger, but more specifically, construct performance has increased dramatically, ignites are better, and crashing does more damage. This has the greatest impact on the early game, especially the new player experience, resulting in weak, older enemies feeling a bit fragile. To compensate, the base hull of most older enemies and asteroids has been increased by a small value between 10 - 240, depending on their previous hull pool
• Adjusted Crucible to provide more time for newbies to calm down and learn its moves. It's also slightly less lethal
  • Crucible idles for an additional 1.5 seconds before acting, so players can register the disabled screen wrapping
  • Crucible orbs ramp up their rotation a little slower
  • The single Crucible Hoop charge up time has been increased by 1.5 seconds
  • Crucible Hoop damage -5%
  • Crucible Drone bullet damage 15 -> 14
• Crucible now reduces its "Bullet Party" phase duration if all of its drones have been destroyed (750 -> 150 frames)

Text and Localization

• Made over 100 text changes based on community suggestions
• Fixed a few inconsistencies with gear description spacing
• Added scroll bars to a bunch of menus
• Updated the Japanese localization

Bug Fixes

• Void Slice now appends its extra invulnerability time to the start of its "blink", not the end, preventing a single frame window of vulnerability
• You no longer lose invulnerability from being in a Singularity if you upgrade
• You can no longer collide with targets while being damaged by a singularity
• Singularities now won't do anything to you while you're not in control of the player (Such as teleporting in any way)
• While charging weapons but not in control of the player (such as teleporting in any way), the player will still be considered to be charging, but will no longer gain weapon charge or take self-damage from charging
• Exiting a singularity now sets strafing strikes to end
• Time scaling from Temporal Shield or waves advancing now affects Scion and Snapper charge effects and lance beams. Because this would have resulted in them being overall larger, their size has been reduced to 75% of what it was
• Fixed Temporal Shield behaving oddly for asteroids. It was less useful each wave until it was finally accelerating them!
• Fixed the build prefab debug tool from spawning some unintended objects that could crash the game
• Viper strike trails no longer have their colors affected by Antimatter Rounds
• Fixed Rupture and Deflagration not triggering for some enemy segments
• Fixed Emergency Systems text so it says what it actually does. This mod does boost regeneration, but does not boost thrust
• Fixed Emergency Systems affecting regeneration based on Hyperboost stats (Which is +33%) instead of its own reported stat (Which is +25%)
• By extension, fixed Emergency Systems regeneration not stacking with Hyperboost
• Fixed Turrets with Point Defense and Temporal Shield using the wrong variable (and probably never working properly?)
• Fixed the angles of the secondary spikes produced by the Shredder Mine triple-spike projectile
• Fixed a rare crash from the player's gun angle potentially being unset

Version 0.35.30.1: VORPAL Update

Updated September 25, 2023.

Introducing the weapon gear: Swords and the Super Mod: Void Slice. This update, and the one that follows it, aims to balance and refine character progression before we shift focus to the game's final confrontation, ending, and full release.

New Upgrades and Mod Reworks

• Added Weapon Gear: Swords to the game, allowing you to wield a pair of monomolecular double-edged swords that can slice through targets, scale with construct, weapon, and crash modifiers, and can cleave through enemy projectiles
• Super Mod: Displacement has been reworked. It is now: Super Mod: Void Slice. Void Slice makes you Blink to your Strafe destination, cutting through targets in your path. Void slice deals damage based on a flat amount added to a percentage of the enemy's remaining hull
• Super Mod: Antimatter Rounds has been reworked. It now causes projectiles to degenerate or destroy each other on impact. Antimatter Rounds now gives weapons uniquely colored VFX. Additionally, the stat bonuses now benefit constructs at a lesser percentage
• Ally and its mod tree have been updated. Ally now fires "explosive rounds" as its base weapon, which have a cone-shaped blast radius
• Evasion has been removed. Half of the passive attack avoidance from Evasion was moved to Ally base stats and half was moved to Outmaneuver
• Echo Strike has returned to the game and replaces Evasion, adding an additional, larger circular blast radius to Ally explosive rounds
• Outmaneuver has gained a new buff: After dodging, your interceptor's explosive rounds gain +700% rate of fire for .25 seconds
• The Blast Radius tree has been reworked. Blast Radius, High Explosive, and Concentrated Blast now affect all blasts
• Preexisting blast radius modifiers have been divided into new categories: Weapon blast radius, weapon projectile blast radius, and (global) blast radius
• Many mods now scale with the tree's global blast modifiers: Discord, Force Armor, Last Stand, Mines (base explosion and clusters), Rebuke, Force Armor, Blink, Void Slice, Purge, War Machine (missiles), Bastion (blast wave), Counterpulse, Shockwave (shield reset shockwave), Reflexive Shields, Warp (warp blasts), Volatile Shields, Self Destruction, Ally (explosive rounds and Echo Strike)

New Features

• Allowed separate key bindings for Strafe and Blink. The default binding for Blink is now "F". Strafe is still "Shift"
• Added SFX for the player taking burn damage, which layers 3 sfx at volumes determined by how long the player has been affected by burn damage, and how many sources they've been affected by
• Increased the volume of the self damage warning SFX from Siege Weaponry (Which is also louder proportional to how much hull you're missing)
• If the player can't fire (via Overseer), constructs will trigger enemies being the target of the enemy hull bar display with their attacks. Previously, only non-construct attacks would set enemies as the target of the enemy hull bar display for clarity
• Added some new "kaleidoscope" vfx for certain enemy portals, Station Omega's death, Seraph's death, Ataraxia stacking, and Last Stand's rebirth
• Added a new setting: Disable Kaleidoscope Effects. Reorganized the Settings menu to make room for this
• Added a new setting: Hide Cursor, which is enabled by default on Steam Deck. Steam Deck now automatically turns off and greys out most other mouse related settings

Player Balance Adjustments

• Made some general buffs to under powered blast mechanics:
  • Orbs of Discord deal ~+25% average damage and have twice the damage ceiling
  • Bastion wave base blast damage +25%
  • Reflexive Shields damage +25%, but scales its size far less severely (especially its width)
• Made some compensatory balance changes due to the new global blast changes:
  • Counterpulse base radius -25%
  • Warp base damage 600 -> 750, hitting once on both entry and exit, not up to twice on each, and its base radius -21.4% (Warp was overpowered in general)
  • Minefield mine stats -30% -> -20%, and chain reaction modifier +5% -> 4% per chain reaction
  • Volatile Shields base damage and base radius -16.66%
  • Turret base damage 40 -> 35
• Hidden Power no longer removes the blast radius tree from the mod pool
• Strafe has been adjusted to feel more fluid: It now spreads its acceleration over a short interval while strongly redirecting your motion in the direction you strafed
• Strafe cooldown 1 -> 1.5 seconds (We realized that strafe was becoming near-mandatory for any hyperscoring build, and that Blink had trouble competing with its power level. To compensate for this, enemy speed scaling has been significantly reduced, which benefits all builds)
• Using Stabilization during Strafe's acceleration period will weaken Strafe. This is to help control Strafe with Stabilization
• Blink cooldown 2 -> 1.5 seconds
• The base crash damage for all bodies is now 200, up from 100 (And this is now explained in the Glossary)
• Bodies that have increased crash damage now do so with a percentage modifier, instead of a hidden number, so that damage can scale with Sword's mechanic. This effects the following bodies in different ways:
  • Carrier now has +250% crash damage instead of 350 base crash damage. This will help it be a decent choice for Sword wielding. Additionally, it also got knockback resistance, like Battery has
  • Battery now has +50% crash damage instead of 400 base crash damage. To help sell the difference in crash output between Carrier and Battery, Carrier has been made slightly larger and Battery has been made smaller
  • To compensate for the doubling in base crash damage, Leviathan's maximum increase to segment crash damage has been halved. This should be a general buff to crashing with Leviathan at slower rotation, the same value at the maximum rotation
• Hullbreaker's scaling from speed has been adjusted for the new base crash damage. It has also been made less explosive at high values, but higher at low to middling values
• Hullbreaker rate of fire -30% -> -25%
• Hullbreaker shields -30% -> -25%
• Carrier has been buffed:
  • Carrier Swarm will heal and try to attack while farther away from its target
  • Carrier Swarm base speed 5 -> 6
  • Carrier base hull 110 -> 115
  • Carrier shield bonus 10% -> 15%
  • Improved acceleration of Carrier Swarm and Assault Drones
• Constructs that passively avoid attacks now do so with unexploded enemy explosives
• Vital Bond buff 60% -> 70% of player regeneration (As a result of the above changes, Carrier can stabilize "Burnout Reactors" for its Swarm without Wild Mods or Super Mods)
• Armor stack buffs:
  • Armor Stacks deal 40% more base damage with Rebuke
  • Rebuke now applies 2.5% vulnerability per stack
  • Channeling regeneration multiplier .04% per stack -> 1% per stack
  • Experiment: Armor Stack base quantity .125 -> .1375. (Was .2 before the nerf Feb 2021 )
• Spectre now scales less crazily with levels:
  • Spectre's buff to cloaked rate and cloak damage per level 2.5% per level -> 1% per level
  • Spectre's base cloak damage 250% -> 300%
• Interceptor Ally no longer waits to fire Salvo until it accumulates a salvo count of 10 or more. (This was needed for the original Salvo accumulation and firing behavior but is no longer relevant. Charged Shot (especially with Siege Weaponry) can fill that "accumulate salvo count" niche)
• Ally's base projectile (now called explosive rounds) no longer creates two explosions, one of which was too small to matter much
• Interceptor Allies can now use Calibrate
• Firing Array now works with Barrage, applying bonus towards the middle of the stream of projectiles
• Removed some Siege Weaponry bias and inaccuracy
• Weapon constructs (Blade and Swords) now have 2 plating
• Weapon constructs (Blade and Swords) weren't getting the innate blast damage resistance that other constructs were. Now they get it, in addition to their 75% resistance to all damage (This, along with Construct native blast resistance, is now explained in the Constructs glossary entry and in a new entry for "Weapon Constructs")
• Ataraxia's second threshold effect has been changed:
  • Was: While you have 10 or more unspent upgrade points, all Ataraxia bonuses are increased by 50%.
  • Is: While you have 10 or more unspent upgrade points, +15% recovery and shield cooldown. (While the extreme scaling of body powers is interesting, in practice it ends up being a degenerate amount of damage scaling in specific cases such as Spectre and Architect)
• Strafing Strikes dual cannon aspect now affects non-construct weaponry
• Changed the way Antimatter Rounds calculates self-damage, especially for Salvo
• Lowered Antimatter Rounds base self-damage, making it more usable with fast-firing weapons. Homing Strike no longer counts as an added projectile for the purpose of Antimatter's self-damage
• Juggernaut maximum hull +20% -> +25%
• Death Blossom ruling has been changed to trigger the weapon to fire for weapons that innately create no projectiles
• Adjusted and clarified a few things regarding Mines and mine effect:
  • Mine effect has always impacted mine radius, but this wasn't made clear by the text descriptions. The Architect description has changed, now representing only an increase to mine effect for Architect (which already increases radius)
  • Architect no longer doubled dips mine radius. (However, note that combining High Explosive and Architect results in the same mine blast radius that Architect previously had)
  • Updated the Glossary to clarify "Mine Effect"
  • Mine cluster range and radii are now properly affected by mine effect and global blast radius modifiers, not just Architect's modifiers
  • Minefield's total modifier to mine effect now affects mine stock blast and clusters as it should, not just Loaded Mines
• Void Slice and Strafing Strikes now mutually exclusive, since you can't "Strafe" with Void Slice
• Twinned weapons (Blaster, Torrent) now use consistent Barrage modifiers for each group of sub-projectiles
• Blade (and Swords) no longer take extra damage from enemy damage scaling
• Phantom Strike and Outrage Module with Spectre now always decloak the player
• Rupture now counts toward progress for enabling Hidden Power as a mod choice

Enemy Adjustments

• Enemy speed scaling from advancing in later waves has been significantly reduced (See Strafe changes above)
• Adjusted Glaucus variable area resistances along its body parts to be generally higher
• Enemies are now less stupid in the face of a cloaked Spectre with no targets:
  • Scatter Drones, Swarmlings, and Beamcasters with no targets are now able to "blind fire" a few seconds after spawning
  • Juggernauts with no targets are now able to "radial fire" a few seconds after spawning
• Made adjustments to Tracers:
  • Tracer shields have a quarter-second shorter duration
  • Tracer shots now degenerate completely after a while
  • Tracer shot burning wake now scales with the current projectile size of the projectile that spawned it
  • Instead of firing at any range when they can't find a target, Tracers instead use the new "blind firing" logic
  • Blind-fired Tracer shots degenerate quickly and linearly
  • Aesthetic: Tracer shots wrap at a larger distance, helping to "hide" the trail cut-off
• Added two new curated waves: "Crab Nest" and "Crab Vic"

General Improvements

• Dreadnought vulnerability flash is now less strobey
• Clarified or simplified many upgrade descriptions
• In light of the global blast changes, clarified which modifiers specifically affect the player weapon. Such mods always have "weapon" in their description
• Language for "projectile spread" is now "weapon spread", displayed as "spread" in short descriptions
• Language for "projectile targeting" is now "weapon targeting", displayed as "targeting" in short descriptions
• Upgrades that scale with blast modifiers now use the word "blast" somewhere in their descriptions
• The game now uses a less bright screen flash for teal / green effects
• The pause menu now shows new stats including your construct size modifier and damage modifier
• The game can now detect the difference between Steam Deck and Steam Deck in desktop mode, allowing more Settings in desktop mode
• Updated localization, and improved or clarified the text of dozens of upgrades

Bug Fixes and Optimizations

• Phantom Strike and Outrage Module with Overseer now properly count as firing
• Made sure Outrage Module and Retribution always trigger from the player ship. This fixes an error when Outrage Module triggers with Blade, Bastion shield, and Gemini Protocol on a body with multiple guns (Battery or Courser)
• Fixed self-damage from Discharge not being applied evenly to Shielded Construct hull with Gemini Protocol
• Fixed Salvo pausing briefly after gaining a level
• Fixed some Drone issues with Fleet Commander: Amp Shield damage bonus doesn't get "baked into" shot damage on promotion. Fleet Commander power multipliers don't get reset on gaining a level
• Improved performance and visuals of the glossary
• Fixed visible streaks when a player construct with Orbital Shield wraps around
• Railgun trails better match the actual size of their projectile
• Fixed an error when checking if the firing construct is shielded
• Fixed a bug where the radius of Volatile Shields was smaller when triggered from a Bastion
• Fixed Propulsive Munitions giving the wrong modifier value for projectile size
• Fixed siege multiplier not getting reset properly in some cases
• Basic construct Blades (e.g. from Homing Strike) now don't get shields
• Volatile shields vfx now scales with the same modifiers its blast does
• Fixed an issue with Amp affecting Integrated Weaponry Vortex improperly
• Fixed Dreadnought being able to make cannon sfx with no cannons
• Fixed a popping sound the first time singularities appeared
• Fixed a popping sound in the short enemy charge sfx
• Fixed Last Stand not counting toward unlocking Hidden Power
• Fixed Barrage triggered by Phantom Strike or Outrage Module continuing to fire with Overseer in some circumstances when the trigger was held
• Battalion Drone beams now don't damage enemy segments covered by a hard shield
• Fixed Achievement issues: "The Hard Way", "Tis But A Scratch", "Ya Basic", "Don't Play Dice With The Universe", or "Still Alive" achievements now can't be awarded after player death. "It Was At That Moment He Knew" is no longer achievable with Rapid Reconstruction
• Fixed Dweller Guards being unable to slow down after being sling-shot by an insta-gibbed Dweller (Weeeee!)
• Collision with Scion orbs no longer produces hit or sfx feedback if you're invulnerable
• Infuse now handles barrage properly, dividing the bonus among your projectiles
• Fixed inconsistent Ally burst counts
• Fixed Dweller not counting as a boss if the wave advances past 60 while still inside its asteroid
• Fixed enemy charge up getting loud and crackly by allowing the sfx to "interrupt" each other
• Fixed Blades generated by Ricochet not getting shields with Shielded Constructs
• Fixed Swarm constructs being exempt from enemy damage scaling
• Made many mod tags more accurate
• Lots of internal bug fixes, optimizations, and minor visual polish

Version 0.34.31: Enemies 2.0, Part 3

Updated April 17, 2023

New alternate bosses, updated old bosses, achievements, glossary, and mod overhauls.

New Features and Reworks

• Added the two remaining alternate bosses that may be encountered instead of standard bosses if the NEMESIS Challenge Mode is enabled:
• A new alternate boss: Dreadnought (wave 40)
• A new alternate boss: Dweller (wave 60)
• Spitfire (Wave 20) has been visually updated and given a few new attacks
• Scion (Wave 60) has been visually updated and given more hull
• Warbringer (Wave 80) has been visually updated and had a few mechanical alterations, making it easier in some ways and harder in other ways. The intention is to make it less of a cakewalk for AOE builds and less of a "ping-pong disaster" for newbies. The battle is now zoomed out by 1.4x, the boss is much larger, slower, has area-damage resistance, and destroying parts deals more damage to it
• Two new boss BGM tracks have been added
• Added 21 new achievements
• Added a Glossary option to the Main Menu, explaining many mechanics

Ally & Guardian Improvements

• 30 -> 50 Ally base damage
• 1 -> 3 Ally base projectiles and increased projectile divergence
• Greatly increased Ally projectile range
• Improved Ally firing and projectile vfx
• Guardian's Medi-Charge power-ups can be collected from farther away
• Guardian's Medi-Charge mod gained a new power that helps it absorb self-damage for you and your standard and advanced constructs
• Guardian's Medi-Charge no longer benefits Guardian's construct healing, but the Guardians base construct healing is now 25% stronger
• Guardian's Echo Strike mod has been removed from the game and replaced with a new mod: Nanotech Dissemination, that helps it absorb enemy damage for your standard and advanced constructs. On death, this mod will also allow it to spawn a number of power-ups, based on how much hull and damage it absorbed, that boost your constructs
• Mobile player constructs avoid the front of a dangerous composite enemy when targeting one of its parts. This fixes Ally, Pursuit Drone, and Swarm constructs sitting in front of a Bulwark instead of moving behind it
• Made Interceptors manage their Siege Weaponry damage better; they should maintain relatively high hull in general and get more conservative if their hp drops

Mod Balance

• 22 -> 24 Split Shot base damage
• Split Shot splash damage 40% -> 50% of shot damage
• Adjustments to Vortex have been made to make it easier to use self-charged and less over-the-top when abused with Rancor:
• Vortex base damage +11%
• Vortex base self-damage -10%
• Adjusted Vortex decay formulae: Reduced the linear decay component and introduced a percentile decay component (with a maximum) for large Vortexes
• Homing Strike no longer affects the decay of Vortex like other added projectiles do
• Adjusted Rancor-Vortex interaction, which massively favored Vortex over other charged weapons
• Lightning origin from Vortex now aligns better with the white part of the core
• Reduced the brightness of the screen flash from charging up Vortex
• Removed the brighter screen flash from releasing a Vortex
• Blade's hidden enemy damage resistance 60% -> 75%
• Reworked Orbital's size scaling: Introduced diminishing returns on Orbital size scaling to prevent very large orbs. Significantly increased size scaling at lower sizes. Reduced Orbital decay, especially at small sizes. For orbs after shield break, added a slight decay proportional to orb size. Overall, Orbital should be much stronger "out of the box" and with low-moderate investment, but shouldn't get so out of control when fully invested into
• Slightly reduced Orbital's base orbit radius
• Added cleaner, higher res artwork for Orbital orbs
• Orbital draws trails for constructs now, too
• Saturation Fire has been upgraded to be a better fit for weapons that hit often. It now has a new rule: "While you fire your weapon consecutively, your * projectiles that hit deal +.04% total damage per hit, up to +50% against the current target. This bonus resets when you stop firing"
• Wild Mod: Grandeur rules have been changed to prevent exploits: "Grandeur will not appear again in the random mod pool for your next 2 upgrades" is now "Wild mods that grant levels will not appear in the random mod pool for your next 2 upgrades"
• Bastion crash damage now scales with Architect's construct damage bonus
• Bastion wave discharge base damage 2000 -> 2400
• Removed flat rate of fire delay from Battery and replaced it with -15% rate of fire
• Battery's +20% projectile size -> +15% projectile size
• Turret base damage 35 -> 40
• Removed flat rate of fire delay from Singular Strike and replaced it with -15% rate of fire
• Thermal Lance base damage has been increased ~8.7%
• Pulse "shards" can now ricochet
• Saturation Fire now works with Charged Shot for Interceptor
• Phantom Strike and Outrage Module now count as firing for Specter cloaking
• Rebuke targeting has been improved

Refinements

• Bosses now display their names at the start of combat
• "Cursed waves" (Encounters at wave multiples of 100 of 2x powerful enemies / bosses) can now contain some alternate bosses as one of the two spawned enemies, including Dreadnought, Dweller, and Glaucus
• The game will now preserve the window position instead of always centering it
• Made some improvements to the Steam Deck GUI experience
• Rank and max rank is displayed on the Unlocks menu
• Arc Barrier now has VFX
• Replaced the "deploy bastion" GUI element with Architect's self-destruct button, which can be accessed with any construct
• On gaining a level, more level-scaling effects are refreshed in real-time, without upgrading: Leviathan, Specter, Carrier, Allies, Turrets, and Drones
• Standardized the hull scaling on wave 20 and 40 bosses when encountered in the wild: +100% hull
• Tracers, Juggernauts, and Celestials are now slightly more rare
• Made many changes and clarifications to the game text
• Increased the time alloted to defeat several enemies
• Boss encounters that warn the player about their vulnerabilities now only do so once per game
• Hammerhead followers break off slightly less quickly

Bug Fixes

• Concentrated blast now affects Grenade sub-munitions(!)
• Fixed a few cases where stockpiling Salvo could stall-out for players or allies
• Fixed bugs related to Orbital: Fixed player damage taken contributing to Maelstrom and Orbital magnitude if you have Shielded Constructs. Fixed cases where all construct damage taken was benefitting Orbital Shield, even if it was construct hull damage (like from Gemini)
• Fixed Interceptor not using Charged Shot properly with Barrage Salvo
• Prevented enemy "entry speed" from applying if the enemy was ever a follower. This fixes issues where enemies at high waves who break off very quickly from their leaders get launched forward
• Switching from borderless full screen to windowed mode now sets the window size properly
• Removed knockback from Salvo missiles, since the explosion already has it
• Corrected Salvo ROF display so it shows how it actually works: Salvo can fire as long as you have stock. 0.5 interval = 2/s
• Reduced the exponent on player knockback so that its less crazy at very high values. Fixed excessive knockback from Splinter and Ricochet projectiles
• Fixed leveling up (not to be confused with upgrading) resetting the Vortex charge rate, resulting in an unintended boost to Vortex size
• Fixed modifiers to body powers not affecting Leviathan segment count
• Fixed Leviathan hull not getting the base stat bonus from Wild Mod: Bravado
• Fixed a major issue with collision knockback resulting from "mirrored" sprites (Affected Bulwark and Eclipses most notably)
• Fixed self-damage resistance not applying with some instances of Gemini's split damage portions
• Fixed Barrage projectile count sometimes being inconsistent between gameplay and pause screen
• Fixed some cases where hard shields interfered with Amp's threat assessment
• Fixed cases where hard-shielded enemies were still vulnerable to certain burn effects
• Fixed lateral strafe affecting Firing Array projectile sizes
• Fixed Subsumption not working on a controller
• Fixed a case where Pulsar could dodge before intended
• Fixed cases where rate of fire could be wrong with Singular Strike or Energized Shields
• War Machine's increase to missile damage has been removed, but never worked in the first place. Instead, Turrets deal more base damage
• Fixed Singular Strike with Barrage having a projectile count too low by 1
• Fixed Salvo Stockpile having a projectile count too low by 1
• Fixed Regression not banishing Guardian, Assault Drones, and Defense Drones
• Seraph Tesla Mine now collides with Leviathan player body segments
• Firing with Outrage Module now applies recoil with Overseer
• Prevented Overclock overwriting Turret rotation rate modifiers from Burnout Reactors, Counter Artillery, and War Machine
• Fixed a case of Charged Mines bonuses applying to non-mine Vortex and Thermal Lance
• Fixed the Challenger mod allowing bosses earlier than intended (was as low as 70 for annihilation, now 100 for annihilation)
• Fixed a case where Architect's self-destruct didn't work with Rapid Reconstruction
• Levels gained from Challenger now update Ataraxia breakpoints
• Prevented Terminal Directive drones re-centering when the player teleported
• Winnow now sets the banished specialist sprite properly
• Fixed the comet collision with Bastion not applying enemy damage scaling
• Enemy damage scaling now applies to player constructs and blades
• Fixed cases where the player's transparency was not reset when switching off of Spectre Body Gear
• Minelayer shields now generate collision effects when hit by a player Bastion shield
• Bastion self-damage from Burnout Reactors now applies self-damage and shield-damage resistances, and boosts Rancor, Maelstrom, and stored energy
• Adjusted Myrmidon's size buffer to make distances and hard shields work better with its strange sprite dimensions
• Fixed the wrap buffer on several asteroid types
• Fixed fiddly conditions for several old achievements
• Railgun Splinter and Ricochet projectiles color cycle properly during Hyperboost
• Fixed Splinter and Ricochet projectiles resetting the Snipe distance damage bonus
• Antimatter self-damage now applies after shooting like Discharge self-damage, which fixes an edge case with Blade and Mine with Retribution
• Fixed Bastion shield lagging behind its owner if external movement was applied
• Bastion offset distance now gets scaled by construct effect multiplier
• Fixed Discharge + Gemini + Shielded Constructs applying hull damage not-at-all. It now applies to the constructs
• Fixed constructs taking damage from Gemini resulting in flashing the player's hull bar
• Cherubs, Hosts, Myrmidons, Shredder Mines, Tracers, and Wardens previously had no way of reducing their move speed back to their default if they were somehow accelerated. Now they do
• Hammerheads no longer try to charge when they are followers, nor does their grace period decrement before they break off from formation
• Cherub's "cast hard shield" projectile is now affected by the Temporal Shield and Shockwave effect
• Fixed targets near the center of a Singularity overshooting and vibrating around
• Fixed the burning trail of a reflected Tracer projectile not damaging enemies
• Reflected areas of effect now don't damage the player (like Tracer trails)
• Added a 5-frame cooldown to Subsumption, and Arc Barrier now takes 10 frames to activate. This was done to prevent certain exploits
• Fixed Snapper segments having strange hull values. Jaws and tentacles should be as tough as they used to be, now
• On gamepad, fixed the inability to toggle construct selection to drones even if you have Subsumption
• Refactored a lot of code and optimized some systems

Version 0.33.20: Enemies 2.0, Part 2

Updated September 8, 2022

Draft Mode, new alternate bosses, new powers, and a ton of balance changes.

New Features and Upgrades

• Challenge Mode: Draft has been added to the game! Jump into end-game (wave 120) with 35 upgrade points to spend. If Draft mode is enabled, it will use separate leaderboards for "Draft" and "Wild Metamorphosis Draft"
• Added three of the five alternate bosses that may be encountered instead of standard bosses if the NEMESIS Challenge Mode is enabled:
• A new alternate boss: Ceratotitan (wave 20)
• A new alternate boss: Crucible (wave 80)
• A new alternate boss: Glaucus (wave 100)
• Added new BGM & SFX for all new boss fights
• Ultra-Rare Wild Mod: Ricochet has been added to the game
• Ultra-Rare Wild Mod: Challenger has been added to the game
• New Super Mod: Charged Shields has been added to the game
• New Super Mod: Infuse has been added to the game
• New Super Mod: Strafing Strikes has been added to the game
• Added a new power-up to the game: Armor Fragment
• Steam Deck is now fully supported!
• You can now enable "Large Text" from the settings menu. This also compacts the upgrade layout, which is also useful for very low resolutions or window sizes. With Steam Deck, this will be enabled by default
• Spanish localization has been added

Drone Reworks

• The three Drone mod trees have been reworked with all new mods: Subsumption and Grace Protocol, replacing Rocket Drones and Reinforced Drones
• Drones can now access Assault Drones and Defense Drones mod trees immediately after choosing Drones
• Reworked the Assault Drones mod tree with new mods: Terminal Directive and Fleet Commander
• Drones now have natively larger blasts (to compensate for the loss of Rocket Drones)
• Assault Drones Formation: Pursuit now comes packaged with Assault Drones
• Assault Drones mod Formation: Battalion has been reworked, allowing your drones to fire high damage piercing beams
• Reworked the Defense Drones mod tree with all new mods: Arc Barrier and Reconstitution
• Defense Drones Formation: Rampart now comes packaged with Defense Drones
• Improved Drone cosmetic firing effects

Mine Rework & Balance

• Mines have been reworked to provide a low-investment, alternate option to Loaded Mines
• Mines now assemble twice as fast, 4s -> 2s (Loaded Mines now return this assembly time to the original value, and so is unchanged)
• Mines now spawn 6-9 bomblet explosions moments after detonation. Each bomblet deals 50% of the mine base damage
• Mine base damage 350 -> 250
• Minefield has a new rule: Your mines cause a chain reaction when they detonate, increasing total mine damage and total mine effect by 5% for each mine detonated
• Loaded Mines now removes the bomblet mine effect
• Mines deployed by Retribution now have +30% mine damage and mine effect

Construct Quality of Life

• Like Drones, Allies can now access their specialization trees, Guardian and Interceptor, from the first Ally mod instead of from the Evolution mod
• All player constructs avoid firing at a Bulwark Shield
• Bulwark won't fire a shield retaliation at a player construct, only the player
• Juggernauts will not charge at player constructs (These changes also prevent Decoy Guardians from being actively harmful in such cases)
• All roaming player constructs now regard the business-end of a Bulwark as a bad place to be
• Mortar now requires only the Mines mod, not the Loaded Mines mod

Super Mod: Ataraxia Rework

• Ataraxia now has threshold powers in addition to its original effect:
• +5% global damage and 1% total maximum hull, maximum shields, and thrust per unspent upgrade point
• While you have 5 or more unspent upgrade points, +30% body gear powers
• While you have 10 or more unspent upgrade points, all Ataraxia bonuses are increased by 50%
• While you have 20 or more unspent upgrade points, you continually have Hyperboost
• Ataraxia no longer increases the distance of orb and power-up attraction (Instead, now Last Stand does this)

Gameplay Changes

• Railgun now uses raycasting to make its hit position pixel-perfect. This allows for accurate strikes on enemy weak points and also removes the possibility of a very fast projectile "skipping" its target
• Singular Strike +15% damage, size, and blast modifiers are now multiplicative with the fusion modifiers
• Cargo Boxes can now additionally drop Armor Fragments and Medi-Charges
• Hyperboost power-up total regeneration multiplier +100% -> +33.33% (which is consistent with its increases to fire rate and thrust)
• Added support for scaling every enemy in the game by size, speed, and damage. This tech is used by Wild Mod: Challenger and will be used in curated waves and other encounters, such as uber bosses, in future updates
• Mods you have banished are now displayed, tiny-like, on the right side of the upgrade screen
• Experience orbs and power-ups are now very resistant to singularities. Rejoice!
• The EXP curve has been very slightly adjusted at very high levels, lowering the soft cap a bit closer to 50. This has no tangible effect on the vast majority of runs
• Mitigated several cases where player knockback could become unintentionally severe
• The pause menu now displays more data:
• Friction %
• Recovery %
• Body Gear Powers %
• Upgrades #
• Rerolls #
• Wild Mods Owned #
• Constant Self-Damage Taken
• The above percentile displays are only displayed if the value is not 100%
• Added score verification. This should combat users manipulating or spoofing score submission to the Steam leaderboards
• BGM originals and remixes now play in both standard and Wild Metamorphosis modes (what differs is which are played first)

Player Balance Changes

• Grenade base damage 85 -> 90
• Grenade base velocity 12 -> 13
• Grenade sprite size increased
• Genade minimum cluster blast size increased
• Grenade cluster travel range increased
• Slightly reduced Railgun's targeting
• Carrier no longer has a -10% rate of fire malus
• Carrier now has +10% shields
• Carrier's chance to spawn Elite or Champion Swarm Constructs now scales with modifiers to body powers
• Sentinel shield effect power +15% -> +10%
• Sentinel shield effect radius +15% -> +25%
• Architect mine effect +50% -> +30%
• Specter's rules have been rewritten to be more clear and to encourage active play rather than non-engagement
• Specter now instantly decloaks when you deploy a construct or use an active mobility power
• Increased the speed Specter can travel without beginning to decloak 6 -> 10 pixels per second
• Slowed the rate at which Specter loses cloak while firing or moving too fast 20 frames -> 40 frames (this is a buff)
• Increased Specters cloak rate bonus 1% -> 2.5% per level
• The above bonus now also applies to Specter's cloaked total weapon damage bonus
• Specter now does what it says: Decloaking is based actually on true speed and not contingent on thrusting
• Halo burn damage 180 -> 240
• Halo ignite damage 120 -> 180
• Temporal base shields 70 -> 75
• Temporal base radius 280 -> 310
• Reflect base shields 115 -> 120
• Reflect base radius 450 -> 500
• Reflect enemy weapon damage boost + 900% -> +1100%
• Reflected Tracer shots can now propagate their reflected properties to the Tracer shots spawned from a Tracer Orb, as well as the ensuing explosion
• Siege Weaponry, when used with Charged Shot, no longer shortens the weapon cooldown after releasing your weapon (as it's already doing very hard work to charge rate)
• Reworked Charged Shot mechanics. Charged Shot's power curve now looks more like an "S curve" (based on a logistic curve) compared to its previous steep, exponentially-decaying curve. As a result, you need to charge a bit longer to have large gains, but it can also reach a higher charge much faster as compensation. In short, its less front-loaded.
• This change was made because playing with Charged Shot optimally involved only charging briefly before each shot, and often still ending up with more damage than non-charged firing modes because of how front-loaded its power curve was. We want Charged Shot to feel really powerful, but to be such that you have to actually commit to an attack, which was the original intention of the mod.
• Sanctuary's (insignificant) base shield recovery rate is slightly lower 3.6 hull / s -> 3 hull /s
• Sanctuary's maximum-shield-scaling shield recovery rate has been increased by ~20%
• Discharge base size is now a little larger, and it's scaling from ROF a little lower
• Discharge, and all other lightning attacks now apply damage per bolt chain instead of per bolt segment, making their damage much more consistent and removing the problem of increased shield radius sometimes resulting in lower damage
• Discharge scaling changed to be more weapon agnostic after the lightning damage changes (slow weapons deal similar dps compared to fast weapons)
• Mortar no longer has a malus to mine damage
• Mortar malus to mine effect -25% -> -15%
• Self Destruction base damage 50 -> 100
• Increased Self Destruction base and scaling blast radius
• Greatly increased Self Destruction hull-scaling damage
• Mine base damage 200 -> 250
• War Machine missiles have increased area of effect
• War Machine rate of fire and rotation scaling 3% -> 4% per your level
• Point Defense hull scaling 3% -> 4% per your level
• Counter Artillery can now degenerate Myrmidon bombs, resulting in less or no cluster explosions when they burst
• Shield Radius shield radius +20% -> +25%
• Radiant Shields shield radius +40% -> +50%
• Firing Array cascading damage modifier +15% -> +20%
• Homing Strike now handles twinned projectiles (Torrent and Blaster)
• Salvo now releases Homing Strikes every number of shots equal to its effective projectiles
• Celestial Surge base damage has been increased by 50%
• Celestial Surge attacks degenerate less quickly
• Blitz now works as long as the enemy hull is >= 95% and it hasn't been triggered yet
• Conversion now grants +5 to base hull and base shields before conversion
• Reduced the targeting constant on Railgun
• Common Wild Mod: Hypermetabolism regeneration +45% -> +60%
• Wild Mod: Defiance is now common instead of rare
• Ultra-Rare Wild Mod: Maelstrom now uses a simpler formula, and additionally gains less magnitude from taking damage and falls off more quickly (Maelstrom, when abused, was extremely dominant almost removing projectiles as an obstacle entirely)
• Super Mod: Last Stand death results in -75% -> -60% maximum hull and shields
• Super Mod: Last Stand now increases the distance of orb and power-up attraction
• Super Mod: Barrage damage modifier -50% - 0% -> -40% - +10%
• Super Mod: Warp Strike no longer has a malus to projectile velocity or size
• Super Mod: Warp Strike instead reduces targeting on projectiles by 50% after they have screen wrapped
• Charged Mines now add projectiles based on charge level with Split Shot, Torrent, or Flak, just like the player does
• Improved the way Phantom Strike interacts with Station Omega

Enemy Balance Changes

• Cherub base hull 500 -> 450
• Bulwark base hull 5500 -> 5000
• Scion base hull 20000 -> 22500
• Slightly reduced Celestial high-end spawn quantity
• Slightly reduced Spitfire high-end spawn quantity
• Slightly reduced Tracer high-end spawn quantity
• Changed the logic of repeating waves to make them less punishing (especially for Shredder Mines)
• Repeating waves no longer scale up as hard as enemy quantity does
• Shredder Mine waves repeat in smaller values
• Repeating waves no longer unintentionally use the same delay formula as "cascading" waves. More enemies spawned makes the repeated wave delay longer, not faster
• Very early bosses, Spitfire and Ceratotitan, now have +50% base hull when encountered later in the game
• Bosses now don't dynamically spawn until 30 waves after they've been defeated, up from 20
• Adds spawned by enemies grant slightly less experience orbs each time they spawn (many players did not like "farming" enemies to be incentivized)
• Hard Shields now protect more things that they visually appear to protect
• Hammerhead and Myrmidon bomb explosions scatter bursts more evenly within their area
• Hammerhead spawn types that result in very high quantities or being surrounded now cannot appear until after wave 30
• Reduced Tracer high end-quantity
• The curated wave, "Don't Talk To Me Or My Son Ever Again", now actually scales the power and size of the involved parties
• Bulwarks now do a better job of staying on-screen while not charging

Bug Fixes

• Reduced excessive knockback from some collisions
• Fixed several explosion hitboxes that should have been circles but were squares (including Hammerhead explosions)
• Revised many inaccurate tags
• Revised a lot of inaccurate or misleading upgrade descriptions
• Architect construct size multiplier applies to Ally construct
• Firing Array now works properly with Salvo release
• The Scale of the Thermal Lance now adjusts dynamically with rate of fire
• Doubled the maximum length of enemy beams so that the ends aren't visible
• High scores now include base64-encoded names to allow double-quotes and other characters
• Blade projectile now shows damage floaters for accumulated self-damage
• Bastion shield now shows damage and healing floaters
• Shield damage and healing floaters now shown for shield recovery
• Swarm self-damage from Spontaneous Generation now applies Gemini Protocol shield split if shielded
• Tried to add a fail-safe for a rare bug where Turret stops firing
• Player Swarm Construct attacks no longer unintentionally contribute to Essence Sap
• Singularities should now no longer interrupt boss waves
• Fixed a case where Salvo release wouldn't result in a muzzle flash with Antimatter Rounds
• Fixed anomalous (but hilarious) acceleration of a dying Leviathan player
• Fixed Blade not always discharging on launch as it should
• Fixed a way Salvo accumulation could break or become unable to fire
• Fixed several rare crashes resulting from unset variables
• Fixed a visual hairline seam with Station Omega between body segments
• Fixed a glow artifact with the Warbringer boss
• Fixed comets silently "deleting" hard shields
• Fixed Bastion shield and Carrier body adding Priority Zero to the mod pool at the wrong account level
• Fixed the possibility of an infinite loop while toggling constructs with a gamepad
• Fixed Vortex gravity resulting in enemy "jittering"
• Fixed projectile velocity from Antimatter Rounds not contributing to Railgun damage
• Fixed cases where enemy blasts always pushed objects to the right (0 degrees)
• Fixed inaccurate pause screen readout for Barrage projectiles in edge cases
• Fixed Tracer projectile deadly wake emission rate being immune to Temporal slowdown
• Fixed cases where Ally would stop firing Thermal Lance when it shouldn't
• Fixed incorrect handling of Siege Weaponry self-damage by Interceptor Ally
• Fixed issues where destroying the head of a Cargo Train or Serpent would prevent the rest from being created
• Fixed a rare(?) error where the player target was somehow invalid
• Fixed the position offset of the Celestial's projectile explosion shockwave
• Fixed some things, like the high score screen and logos, so they fade out properly
• Fixed non-Pulse Loaded Mines with Minefield from increasing the gun count above one
• Fixed some minor cosmetic issues with various shielded constructs
• Fixed Overclock not doing what it said it was doing. Was: +66.67%. Said it was: +40%. It is now +50% as a compromise
• Fixed Myrmidon Bombs not exploding on contact with a Bastion
• Fixed some cases of sound loops not properly ending
• Fixed a crash relating to blast collisions occasionally getting called from a no-longer-valid object
• Fixed enemy weak-point bonus applying to EVERY damage type, not just projectiles and crash damage, as intended
• Fixed Minelayer shield not applying to a collision with Bastion and not caring about knockback resistance
• Fixed the weird hitbox on Railgun
• Fixed the POP that can be heard sometimes at the start of a boss track when music is muted
• Fixed weird behavior when using two separate fire buttons
• We now handle "pressed" and "released" using the previous fire state
• Fixed some cases where Siege Weaponry self-damage was being applied incorrectly:
• Innately charging weapons (Vortex and Thermal Lance) no longer apply it on firing a projectile
• Ally with Thermal Lance applies it continuously while firing
• Fixed some edge cases with Ally Integrated Weapon:
• Handled Vortex size properly with Burst Fire
• No longer try to fire until the weapon is ready to fire
• Twinned weapons (Blaster, Torrent) now create two projectiles instead of having the projectiles split themselves after a step:
• Fixes cases where projectiles could hit before splitting (such as when the player overlaps the target with Apotheosis)
• Splinter scatters projectiles more evenly (since the splintered projectiles aren't splitting themselves)
• Fixed some issues with dual-projectile Celestial Strike:
• Made the projectiles fully independent so that they can be reflected separately
• Orbit speed is now affected by Temporal Shield slowdown
• Fixed Charge Shot extra projectiles and Saturation Fire spread not updating during burst fire

OPTIMIZATIONS & COSMETIC

• Rupture now uses a less visually occlusive sprite
• Refactored a ton of code!

Version 0.32.32: Enemies 2.0, Part 1

Updated January 25, 2022

A comprehensive overhaul to enemies and waves, along with new foes.

New Major Features

• Dynamic Waves: ALL original random encounters have been removed from the game and replaced. Most waves are now procedurally generated from a complex set of rules and have their difficulty scaled based on the current wave. Please note that you will need the Challenge Mode, Elite Enemy, enabled to see the full capabilities of Dynamic Waves
• Curated Waves: Waves that are multiples of 10 (that are not boss waves) are now "curated waves" which are hand-crafted semi-random waves. There are many variants, and some require you to have reached a certain wave (usually wave 120+) to encounter them. Please note that you will need the Challenge Mode, Elite Enemy, enabled to see the full capabilities of Curated Waves
• Enemy Formations: Certain enemies can now spawn in "formations" with followers. The following formations are possible: Orbit, Flank, Rank and File, Trail, Protect, and Support
• Battlefield Zoom & Background parallax: As you progress in the game, the camera will gradually zoom out further and further, allowing you more room to maneuver as enemies become more numerous. Some boss fights will have a discrete zoom level. The background star fields and celestial objects now parallax as the zoom changes
• Station Omega has been reworked. It is now gigantic and has had its artwork and visual effects overhauled. It should otherwise be more or less the same fight, but with more room to maneuver
• Added a new enemy: Bulwark
• Added a new enemy: Myrmidon
• Added a new enemy: Hammerhead
• Added a new enemy: Tracer
• Added a new enemy: Cherub
• Added a new enemy: Swarmling
• Added a "weak point" mechanic, allowing certain enemy segments to take extra damage from projectile hits:
• Weak points take 2.5x damage
• Station Omega, Eclipses, and Warbringer have weak points
• Weak point hulls have been generally increased to balance this mechanic
• Wild Mods now display how many copies of a recursive mod you'll get when you're getting more than one
• Added a new rarity for Wild Mods: Ultra-Rare
• Added a new Ultra-Rare Wild Mod: Far Sight
• Added a new Ultra-Rare Wild Mod: Explosive Growth
• Grandeur, Maelstrom, Twin Strike, and Quantum Decoherence are now Ultra-Rare Wild Mods
• Added a new Super Mod: Deflagration
• New Background music: "Centerless"
• Added dozens of new sound effects
• Added Korean localization
• Added Borderless Fullscreen Mode to the Settings menu (I recommend switching it on!)
• Added Legacy Support:
• Starting with the Syzygy update, old version of Nova Drift will be accessible on Steam branches. Created separate leaderboards for Syzygy for when Enemies 2.0 goes live

New Features

• Added input support for mouse wheel up and down, mb side 1, and mb side 2 buttons
• Made player, player segment, and Bastion collisions with solids more "physicsy"
• You can now create your own prefab builds by editing a .CSV file found in the game files called "prefabPlayerBuilds", or adding your own called "userPrefabBuilds.csv", and using the debug cheats to spawn the build (See the Discord for information on debug mode)
• Settings now allows you to select "Background Detail". Higher settings look better, including more star layers and nebulae. Lower settings improve performance - The default is "high" - 'None' is an empty void except for fixed celestial object spawns
• A toggle for VSync has been added to settings. Please experiment with this to see if your performance is improved
• While toggling Windowed resolutions, you'll find a new custom window size option available: Your display size, minus a buffer of 150 pixels
• Windowed Modes now use a custom window, and hides the window during gameplay

Global Changes

• Revised the order and contents of unlocks. Check your Unlocks menu. Please be warned: YOU MAY LOSE OR GAIN ACCESS TO UPGRADES YOU PREVIOUSLY HAD DEPENDING ON YOUR ACCOUNT RANK. You may also see the new unlock order here: https://trello.com/b/4NhLxMb9/unlocks
• Changed the way score converts to Rank Exp at the end of a run. Old formula: Score = Rank Exp. New Formula: Rank Exp = (Score * 20)^.8 (This helps new players earn unlocks and slows massive progression from huge scores)
• The exp curve has been replaced by a new formula that is less exponential. Now, you will reach the 40's more slowly, but afterward leveling will remain consistent instead of becoming incredibly expensive. This serves to improve the difficulty curve, as many complained that mid-game was comparatively much duller than early and late waves
• To alleviate game difficulty resulting from the Enemies 2.0 changes and the changes to the exp curve, especially for less experienced players, the following changes to exp have been made:
• The base exp gained from orbs has been increased 15%
• Mayhem no longer provides more bonuses than other modes do, instead, Endless does
• The bonuses from having challenge modes enabled has been decreased from a total of +40% for all modes enabled to a total of +30%
• Please note that these changes result in more experience being earned for any configuration, and it means that having challenge modes on has less of an impact on the overall power of the player (and thus making them feel less mandatory)
• Enemy stat scaling starts at wave 120 by default, up from 100
• Exp values for many enemies have been adjusted. The goal was to provide more appropriate rewards considering enemy difficulty and quantity. Secondarily, the goal was to compensate for the above exp changes and ensure the player still has some decent upgrades before reaching the wave 20 boss
• Added a new challenge mode: Annihilation. This mode is designed to be ultimate difficulty for veteran players. It gives no increases to the score or experience multiplier and is intended for personal challenge and bragging rights (and because its how intense I personally want the game to feel). It unlocks at rank 60. Scores earned in this mode will display in a special font color, "Pink Violence!"

Player Balance Changes

• Split shot now has more base damage (20 -> 22), considerably more range, and waits longer to degenerate
• Split Shot base damage converted to blast is now 30% -> 40%
• Torrent rate of fire 10 /s -> 12 /s
• Torrent velocity 5.2 -> 6.2 (Note: this is the buff that really matters, as most projectiles are "wasted" due to velocity)
• Torrent damage 22 -> 20
• Torrent spread slightly increased
• Torrent now benefits much more from targeting
• Vortex's damage formula has been adjusted to be easier to use early on. It deals far more damage at very small sizes, about the same damage at middling sizes, and inconsequentially less damage at huge sizes. Increased the damage of Vortex bolts. Further dampened self damage from Vortex at very small sizes
• Salvo base damage 90 -> 60 (Explanation: Before Salvo was reworked with the previous update, it was buffed from 60 -> 90 due to under performing. Then, in the next update, Salvo was drastically overhauled. Both fixes made the weapon far stronger, and together they were overly dominant.)
• Salvo stockpile release is now considered "firing" (preventing cloak, charged shot, efficiency, etc.)
• Salvo firing triggers projectile release directly, instead of firing a single shot and then "repeating" for the stockpile
• Salvo accumulation time acts as the de facto fire delay
• Salvo spread is now affected by Barrage
• Salvo stockpile can now be affected by Empowered
• Blaster damage 17 -> 20
• Blaster velocity 17 -> 18
• Blaster now blends with the background
• Bastion shield now only protects the player ship from beam damage if it's in the way
• Bastion's wave discharge damage and area of effect increased ~14%
• Siphon shield can now drain duration from enemy hard shields (a new mechanic)
• Fixed reflected Tracer shot flames dealing damage to BOTH parties
• Enemy projectiles that can be reflected that produce enemy "blasts" also become reflected (Notably Myrmidon grenades and Eclipse vortex orbs
• Reflected blasts and burns don't harm your constructs
• Bastion's wave discharge damage and area of effect increased ~14%
• Research now tracks rerolls spent by banishing mods and computes hull/shield bonuses from that
• Leviathan base hull 50 -> 60
• Leviathan body segments are now immune to projectile piercing
• Improved a hidden Leviathan power: Burn damage by your segments reduce their damage to 50% over 100 frames -> 80 frames
• Snipe now cares about how far a projectile has traveled, not how far away you are when it hits
• Constructs (excluding Bastion) are now innately 60% resistant to enemy blast damage
• Blade's hidden resistance to all enemy damage increased 50% -> 60%
• Burnout Reactors now has +30% construct rate of fire in addition to the scaling value from lost hull. This is to compensate for the fact that it wasn't behaving as advertised (see the bugs section)
• Mortar -20% -> -25% mine damage and mine effect
• Mortar -15% -> -20% self damage to hull and shields when fired with no assembled mines
• Last Stand now restores the player to full (reduced) hull and shield after death
• Regression now also grants a level up
• Drone assembly time 6s -> 5s
• Drone fire rate 1.5/s -> 2/s
• Assault Drone Formation: Battalion rate of fire increase +50% -> +100%
• Assault Drone Formation: Pursuit rate of fire increase +25% -> 50%
• Assault Drones in Formation: Pursuit passively avoid danger more effectively
• Significantly improved Defense / Assault Drone aiming accuracy
• Reduced chances of Ally immolating itself with Siege Weaponry self-damage, by taking Barrage health recovery multiplier into account
• Limited the Ally standoff distance to a maximum of 600 units
• Force armor burst has more range & no longer causes screen flash
• Shield radius now scales up slightly as battlefield base zoom increases. At maximum zoom, which is +40% battlefield size, you will have +20% increased shield radius
• Reflexive Shields base flat damage 20 -> 30
• Reflexive Shields scaling damage 400% damage taken -> 500% damage taken
• Reflexive Shields now increases its size a bit by the damage taken
• Discharge base damage and scaling damage output increased 10%
• Discharge segment length is now affected by shield radius and not shield effect. Discharge segment width is now affected by shield effect and not shield radius
• Discharge with Shielded Constructs can now trigger Counterpulse on Defense Drones
• Charged Shot, Thermal Lance, and Vortex are now affected by Hyperboost
• Purge now has new artwork
• Spontaneous Generation now has better scaling. Previously, multiple copies of the mod weren't meaningful except on high-hull enemies
• Gemini Protocol applies to Blade (including self-damage from hit), Advanced Constructs, and Turret degeneration damage
• Loaded Mines are now affected by construct rate of fire multipliers
• Slipstream has been reworked: Now provides +7% thrust, +7% rotation rate, and -7% friction
• Drone avoidance now looks further away for moving hazards which should improve their avoidance capability a bit
• For the player, in addition to having iFrames for colliding with ANY solids, the following change has been made:
• For a period of time equal to 125% of the player's collision iFrames during and after the player has occupies and exits the sprite of a particular "solid", the player cannot collide with that same solid again
• This should mitigate the player getting "stuck inside" an enemy and being collided multiple times. Note that this does not prevent "composite" or "segmented" enemies from wombo-comboing you

Enemy Balance Changes

• The Elite Enemy Challenge Mod has less of an initial effect, but now increases the amount of enemy "rarity" that increases each time the wave advances
• Adjusted the exp values of most enemies
• Adjusted the hull of most enemies
• Adjusted the time allocation to defeat most enemies and fixed many problems with the previous calculations
• Adjusted restrictions for enemy appearances and minimum waves for enemy rarities (Elites and Champions)
• The player will no longer collide with very small asteroids
• Interceptors no longer try to crash into you, and will instead try steering around you
• Many enemies now avoid overlap with each other
• Spitfire summons Pulsar less frequently
• Tried to make Pulsar less annoying at early waves. Elite Pulsars and especially Normal Pulsars dodge less frequently and less powerfully
• Pulsar (and Seraph) backpedal less quickly
• Pulsars push harder away from the edges of the screen when near them
• Pulsar barrage attacks degenerate more swiftly once they start degenerating. They also start degenerating slightly sooner, at 260 -> 240
• Interceptors now drop mines less rapidly
• Hives now spawn adds more slowly depending on how many already exist
• Singularities now deal percentile damage to enemies on top of their usual dps (was just over 9000 per second), get larger and more forceful with higher waves, and are resisted by enemy resistance less
• Added a delay and moment of musical silence before boss encounters
• No Enemy projectiles have infinite duration anymore
• Enemies changing directions do so more naturally
• "Swarmy enemies" now have more scattered spawn positions
• Updated a very old formula for enemy crash damage output. Enemies reach the hard cap at much higher hull values, and have more range at middling hull values
• Seraph now has "wings"
• Seraph orbs move faster to compensate for larger zoom. Buffed Seraph railgun damage, since only one rail can hit the player at once due to iFrames
• Serpents attempt to spend less time off-screen

Under the Hood

• Updated to the newest GameMaker Studio 2 edition: Replaced old boring problems with new ones!
• Vast code refactoring and optimization has occurred! There are too many to list
• Converted many old enemies to a new, far more maintainable, compact, and convenient architecture. All new enemies use this system, and old enemies will slowly be converted as needed
• The background stars are no longer many discrete objects, but several layers of parallaxing sheets
• All GUI now draws on top of the battlefield instead of on the same layer in order to allow zooming the battlefield
• Improved avoidance and targeting use more accurate bounding shapes for objects

Text / Consistency

• Made more things do what they say / say what they do. Also fixed grammar and or consistency mistakes. This affects: Convergence, Winnow, Carrier Swarm, Overclock, Temporal Shield, Firing Array, Snipe, Efficiency, Assault Drones, Defense Drones, Channeling, Shield Effect Radius, Support Specialist, Warp Shield, Galvanic Outburst, Phantom Strike, Obsession, Specialist, Quantum Decoherence, Explosive Growth, Hyperboost, 5 Gear Choices Unlock, the pause menu (spread and shield stats)

Bug Fixes

• Burnout Reactors was applying +50% construct rate of fire by default and up to 100% from missing hull. This has been fixed, and now applies the advertised 0 - 50% increase
• Efficiency applies properly to Bastion assembly
• Higher-rank Swarm constructs now get their Bastion shield back after they break and reassemble
• Bastion shield cooldown is now more accurate: Accounts for firing, barrage, and efficiency. It is now fully consistent with other shield types
• Fixed Bastion failing to get post-Singularity invulnerability or intangibility
• Allies, when firing your charged weapon, properly apply rate of fire penalties and buffs. (Was missing: Integrated Weaponry, Construct rate of fire, Overclock, Evolution, and Siege Weaponry)
• Shield effects on Blades will now be restored after an upgrade
• Fixed Blade's blast damage not being affected by concentrated blast
• Fixed Warp-shielded constructs teleporting all in the same direction, rather than their facing
• Fixed Volatile Shields having the wrong base damage when used by constructs
• Fixed Temporal Shield affecting ineligible constructs
• Fixed construct counts working against you with Rapid Reconstruction + Support Specialist / Overseer
• Fixed Barrage firing too few projectiles from multi-cannon bodies by half (Battery/Courser)
• Guardians no longer give up Medi-Charge production forever if one is lost to a singularity
• You will now see the Constructs section of the pause screen even if you only have Blade or Carrier
• Fixed lopsided drones in Rampart formations
• Fixed Saturation Fire's spread not applying in edge cases
• Fixed many cases where "NaN" could generate in place of a number and wreck havoc
• Fixed Drone Constructs being immune to burn orbs
• Fixed Interceptors no longer firing a spread after changes to their facing
• Fixed Gemini splitting damage with constructs that are ineligible for shields
• Fixed Loaded Mines/Interceptor's Thermal Lance or Vortex going invisible during the player's Warp Shield intangibility
• Fixed pause menu only showing integer values for Plating, not 0.5 increments
• Fixed mods banished by Winnow or Regression counting toward Research's buff after its most recent rework
• Guardian now considers advanced Swarm Constructs to be potential healing targets
• Pulse-Loaded-Mines emit the correct number of projectiles
• Amp, Reflect, and Temporal radius indicators now update when the construct effect multiplier changes
• Fixed some a case of Amp shield not applying to allies using Salvo
• Vortex now looks at the right object to calculate its snipe bonus
• Fixed positions of Pulse with Loaded Mines being incorrect
• Damaging muzzle blasts (Railgun, Antimatter Rounds) no longer apply their blast damage multiplier twice
• Pulse can now follow allies the way it follows the player
• Fixed Splinter projectiles sometimes hitting the original target immediately
• Fixed Dart not sticking when it should
• Fixed Railgun shattering when it shouldn't
• Fixed Death Blossom's timer decrementing while paused
• Fixed escaping enemies sometimes leaving glow artifacts behind
• Mortar now adds up its cost properly when multiple guns are involved
• Original Thermal Lance beam color is now restored when Hyperboost ends
• Fix the side scopes on Battery and Courser getting stuck bright after firing Thermal Lance
• Increased the opacity of Force Armor sprites for Carrier and Courser to match other bodies
• Viper now has a Force Armor graphic
• Constructs that evade can now evade Celestial fireballs
• Fixed a few cases of the "edge" of the screen being visible during screen shakes
• Fixed Blitz procing on 0 damage hits
• When the player or a player construct gets hit by an enemy blast, add it to the blast's hit exclusion list instead of zeroing out the damage
• Fixed improper texture clearing with fonts
• Bastion allows only one wave at a time and low-intensity waves are fainter and quieter, improving behavior when the player is taking continuous damage
• Fixed Guardian not properly excluding its own Bastion shield and fixed up various places using an object type id or "other" as the target to follow
• Mitigated Hive problems:
• Fixed off-screen Hives never becoming able to wrap
• Hives move more quickly and "push to wrap" with a larger border
• Instead of targeting the general area of the player, hives just target a cone around the center of the view, reducing cases where they're off-screen
• Tesla Mines now have player collision
• Fixed the imprecise hitbox on Station Omega drones
• Fixed interceptor allies not scaling with architect size bonus
• Prevented Swarm Constructs from spawning from Spontaneous Generation if the player is dead
• Fixed the Void added by Evolutionary Niche sometimes getting picked more than once, as they weren't being removed from the draw pool when chosen
• Fixed attached Dart projectiles creating trail wraparound artifacts with Warp Strike
• Fixed a bug where Pulse is better with some shields because the hitbox was rectangular and not an ellipse
• Vortex doesn't block Siege Weaponry from appearing anymore
• Fixed Railgun blast sprites having a square hitbox when it should be round. This affects Railgun and also anything else that used this sprite
• Force Armor now uses the aforementioned sprite instead of an explosion because its less occlusive for rapid collisions (Leviathan / Hullbreaker)
• Fixed Incendiary Strike applying the global damage multiplier twice
• Fixed enemy drones (Celestial, Constructor, Host, Seraph) performing on-death actions twice (this was causing Corrosion and Deflagration to spiral out of control)
• Guardian now keeps track of the Medicharge instance and will replace it if it goes missing unexpectedly
• OSX: Fixed mouse aim for enemies 2.0

Version 0.31.19: SYZYGY Update

April 12, 2021

A balance update to keep you busy while you wait for the first round of enemy improvements and additions. With this update, we have switched to the new enemy "engine", so there may be some growing pains to iron out.

Minor Features and Improvements

• Speedrun Mode has been added to the Settings menu! While this is toggled, you'll always see your game time and wave. Additionally, the game will display your splits for each boss you defeat
• Added additional Steam and GOG scoreboards for Speedrun Mode and a separate one for Wild Metamorphosis Speedrun Mode. Your time for defeating the fifth boss will be recorded. When the final boss has been released, the game will instead use your time for the final boss boss kill. Your scores are still submitted as normal
• Since we're supporting speedrunning, the game now uses "real time" instead of game time. As a result, your time at game end is accurate regardless of your hardware
• Comets now shatter on enemies they can't one shot, creating a spray of rock and ice. This helps make comets less swingy on boss fights and more interesting during encounters
• Added a unique FX and SFX for the player death! The higher your level when you die, the more spectacular it is (up to level 50). The SFX you hear will be a little different, each time, too
• Added a new setting: Auto deploy Turrets
• Added a new setting: Auto deploy Mines
• Added a new BGM Track: "Parallelism"
• Added a new BGM Track: "Parallelism Freed", the remix to Parallellism, that plays in Wild Metamorphosis
• BGM Tracks: Zeroed, Recursor, and NoGrav now play in both Wild Metamorphosis and standard as they have no remix
• Auto deploy will no longer behave differently for Architect. If you do not want architect to auto deploy, you can leave these settings off
• Constructs will now attempt to avoid impending blasts, such as Celestial bombs
• "Centering" enemies on screen now works better with various monitor aspect ratios
• Grenades, Grenade submunitions, and Salvo missiles are no longer removed from the game if you level up while they are present
• The player won't take damage from enemies or celestial hazards while touching a singularity until 3 seconds after they come out
• Reroll drops in the Wild Metamorphosis challenge mode are consistent with the reroll penalty at game start, which is 50% fewer rerolls. Previously this rate was reduced, but not consistently
• Improved the accuracy of measuring various shield radii

Balance and Mechanical Changes

• Super Mod: Singular Strike has been reworked. New rules: Your weapon behaves as though your projectile count is 1. Your projectile count beyond 1 is fused into your single projectile, strengthening it. Up to 25 projectiles can be fused. +15% damage, size, and blast radius. Each projectile fused adds an additional 50% of its damage to your projectile. Each projectile fused further increases the size and blast radius of your projectile, with diminishing returns. +.1-second rate of fire delay
• Warp Shield has been reworked, and given updated visuals. The warp destination no longer automatically rotates around you, and is instead forward facing. It has gained a new power: If your shield protects you when it breaks, you will be intangible for .75s while teleporting. In this state, you may steer the position of the destination point around your shield radius
• Salvo has been reworked. Salvo now stockpiles 4 missiles per .5 second interval. Modifiers to projectile count affect the number of missiles stockpiled per interval while modifiers to rate of fire affect the interval duration. It still has diminishing returns as the stockpile becomes larger. Salvo is considered a 4-base-projectile weapon
• As a result of the above changes, Salvo begins weaker, but scales much more powerfully from many weapon mods. Also, Salvo always fires 1 missile and ignores burst fire. However, for the purposes of barrage, it still behaves as it previously did
• Salvo seeking begins to decay after being in existence for too long (this is only noticeable with really, really slow projectiles)
• Salvo-Loaded Mines now calculate their projectile count based on a stockpile of one second
• Vortex has been reworked, with the goal of making it easier to use at low levels, and less out of control when pushed to the maximum. Vortex charges faster at small sizes, and has a lower base cost of self-damage. However, to compensate, the self-damage costs scale more exponentially with the size of the vortex. You may need to release your Vortex sooner at very high sizes!
• Vortex scaling has been made generally more sensible and consistent under the hood. Singular Strike now applies its size bonus during the charge rather than on release
• Vortex has been given new visuals that are less blinding and occlusive. Also, the Vortex is held slightly farther away from the player so you are less likely to collide with your target
• 18 -> 12 base projectile count for Flak. Flak has gained a new power: Doubles added projectiles gained from upgrades. Slightly reduced Flak spread and projectile size
• Made Grenade's cluster count less prolific at high size modifiers. Shouldn't affect much at low values
• Blade used to deal "area" damage if it was in contact with a target. Blade now does this all the time, making it more reliable and generally more destructive, especially at larger sizes. Its area hitbox has been made more accurate
• Blades have a new hidden ability: They now take -50% less total damage from all sources (except self-damage)
• 1.75s -> 1.5s Blade assembly time
• Blades no longer trigger so much player self-damage from mods that scale with your rate of fire
• Overseer will now only add additional blades from base construct count and added constructs, not from projectile mods
• 180 -> 220 base damage for Pulse
• Pulse projectiles now work with all projectile mods!
• 50% -> 35% Pulse base damage for Pulse shards
• Thermal Lance base beam damage has been increased by 15%
• Cloak rate for Spectre is now 1% faster per your level
• +200% -> +250% cloak max stealth bonus
• Shockwave shield small pulses have a 22% longer delay between pulses. Shockwave shield now only releases its large shockwave on shield reset if the shield has broken
• Orbital Shield now gains less magnitude based on how much magnitude it already has, resulting in a soft cap on size and damage. To compensate, the base magnitude gain from damage has been increased ~21%. (Orbital was reaching potentially screen-sized sizes, shutting down enemies completely)
• Firefly thruster size now also scales with sources of "total" thrust, such as Amp and Ataraxia
• 25% -> 15% Firefly self-damage resistance
• 25% -> 15% Firefly crash damage resistance (Firefly was already the whole package with no drawbacks on top of being capable of massive area burn damage)
• Body power multipliers now affect Battery projectile size modifier
• 600% -> 400% for Leviathan max crash damage bonus
• Banishing any Wild Mod using the Research body gear now costs 2 rerolls, however Research now gains its defensive buff for spending rerolls by banishing, not for the amount of mods banished. (Research has become a staple of truly busted Wild Metamorphosis builds to the point of becoming practically mandatory in the highest scoring builds. Something had to be done)
• Overseer has been reworked. It now provides +1 to advanced constructs instead of doubling them. It still doubles basic and standard construct assembly limits. Overseer's assembly speed buff has been increased 1% to 2% to match its thrust malus. (Overseer's explosive power when combined with Engineer was negatively impacting game balance. Without making this change, advanced constructs would need to be made weaker, which negatively impacts all other ship bodies). As a result of this change, some constructs have been adjusted to help compensate for the loss of power to Engineer via Overseer:
• 30 -> 25 second assembly time for Allies
• 35 -> 30 second assembly time for Turrets
• 125 -> 150 hull for Turrets
• 25 -> 30 damage for Drones
• .04% -> .05% assembly speed per your level for Elegant Construction
• -30% -> -40% drone rate of fire for Rocket Drones
• +25% -> +60% damage for Rocket Drones
• +30% -> +40% drone hull for Reinforced Drones
• Weapon movement and turn rate modifiers now apply to Interceptor Ally
• Interceptor Allies will not fire a number of Blade Drones exceeding your Blade assembly limit
• Barrage will now only scale additional projectiles for Blades from projectile modifiers, not construct assembly limit modifiers
• Splinter Shot projectile count has been made less prolific at very high size values
• Super Mod: Tempest Break now requires Deadly Wake and Flash Shielding instead of Streamline and Flash Shielding. (Shieldbreaker builds couldn't afford to be this fragile)
• +8 -> +10 base damage for Super Mod: Barrage, which now grants base damage instead of flat damage
• 25% -> 30% maximum hull or shields converted for Conversion
• Siege Weaponry now works with Charged Shot, Thermal Lance, and Vortex. This applies self-damage continuously while charging, and the rate of fire multiplier from Siege-Weaponry applies to the charge rate
• Siege Weaponry + Charged Shot now boosts Salvo stockpile rate while charging
• Siege Weaponry + Interceptor Ally now applies construct fire rate multiplier
• Weapon total thrust while firing malus are now multiplicative with each other. Base maluses of this type have been adjusted: Thermal Lance, Torrent, and Vortex -35% -> -30%
• -90% -> -80% total thrust while firing for Siege Weaponry. Siege Weaponry's ramping self damage has been made less severe
• Charged Shot minimum bonus value is now +0%, instead of +15%
• -80% -> -90% for Calibrate max spread reduction
• Splinter shot velocity now has a floor. This helps things like Blade bursts stay relevant when the projectile is at the apex of boomeranging
• Rare Wild Mod: Twin Strike spread reduction is now a "total" modifier to your spread
• -15% -> -10% for rare Wild Mod: Twin Strike total spread modifier
• -5% -> -7% for rare Wild Mod: Twin Strike cooldown and recovery
• +10% -> +7% weapon damage and projectile size for Heavy Caliber
• -10% -> -7% weapon velocity for Heavy Caliber
• Wild Mod: Maelstrom scaling has been adjusted similarly to how Orbital Shield was
• Wild Mod: Scorching Wake fireballs now offset more the more you have, causing them to be less clumped-up
• Wild Mod: Solar Heart has been made more impactful. It's bonuses have been doubled and it's malus has been more than doubled
• +50% -> +40% global damage for Hidden Power (This massive bonus was from an older time, where there were fewer ways to deal "secondary damage")
• Firing Array has been reworked. New Rules: +15% total projectile damage and blast radius for your central projectile. Other projectiles also receive adjustments to projectile damage and blast radius, incrementally decreasing to 0% for your outermost projectiles. +30% total projectile size for your central projectile. Your other projectiles also receive adjustments to projectile size, incrementally decreasing to -30% for your outermost projectiles
• Gemini Protocol now works for shielded constructs
• Rare Wild Mod: Obsession has been reworked. It now only applies the malus for recursive mods added by Obsession, not for your total Wild Mods owned. As a result, the malus has been increased from 1 % to 3% of your total hull and shields
• Wild Mod: Spontaneous Generation no longer self-destructs Architect's constructs.
• +3% -> +2% maximum hull and shields for Wild Mod: Rampage
• Hull threshold triggers have been reworked. This affects Retribution and Outrage Module. They now trigger based on the original damage dealt, and not the damage taken. Since this is more damage, the trigger threshold has been increased from 10% to 15% of your maximum hull (This change was primarily made so that "Minebreaker" builds could work again, now that Retribution has limitations)
• Armor stack quantity gained by taking damage has been reduced by 37.5%. To compensate, Rebuke damage has been increased 60%. (Adaptive Armor was insane value for one point, and pretty much a mandate for any very high scoring build. It still provides a lot of defense when needed, but it's now more in line with other defensive mods)
• Self damage "hits" no longer always give at least one armor stack, but Self-damage now generates armor stacks at a more favorable rate. 50% -> 75% efficiency
• 35 -> 40 base hull from Rapid Reconstruction
• +80% -> +100% regeneration from Rapid Reconstruction
• 25 -> 100 damage for Blink (This change was primarily made so that the Super Mod: Displacement deals more relevant damage
• Super Mod: Burnout Reactors + Gemini Protocol now behaves as you'd expect
• Each type of damage resistance is now additive with other sources of the same type instead of either additive or multiplicative. Fixed several inconsistencies with how damage resistance is calculated
• Stacking burn damage from enemy orbs, especially from Seraph, takes longer to ramp up to its full damage, starting from 0. This effect has been applied to enemy deadly wakes, as well. My hope is that these are less of a hard counter to Leviathan as a result, as well as making Seraph and Spitfire less of an "insta-kill" at very high waves
• Regeneration and shield cooldown no longer occurs if the player is invulnerable (except during Emergency Systems)
• Made knockback from the player less extreme at high values

Localization Changes

• For strings that were changed this update, and new strings moving forward, tool-tip numbers now reflect in-game variables. This means that changes which only affect numbers will not require re-translation
• Improved dozens of upgrade descriptions

Fixes & Under the Hood

• Removed the requirement that you first orb come from an enemy if you're skipping waves using the Danger Zone challenge mod
• Previously, "flat" damage and "base" damage behaved inconsistently, scaling from some things they should not, in order of operations different than what you'd expect. This has been corrected. All instances of flat damage are now base damage, and base damage is simply added to the weapon base damage before modifiers. This affects: Wild Mod: Solar Heart, Super Mod: Antimatter Rounds, and Super Mod: Barrage
• Fixed some hitboxes that were slowly and invisibly rotating, causing some unintended behavior
• Fixed Corrosion's wildly inaccurate tool tip damage
• Rewrote Bastion code to try to be less of an error-prone special snowflake
• Windowed Mode: For window sizes that fit vertically but not horizontally, we now clamp the width to the maximum and allow it to be used
• Leviathan tries harder to keep its segments together
• Leviathan, at extreme sizes, now doesn't show its seams while wrapping
• Crates outside the edge of the screen are allowed to generate loot normally when destroyed
• Charged Mines now correctly reduces your mine assembly limit, as it claims it does
• Fixed Constructs using Siege Weaponry automatically having Saturation Fire
• Fixed reflected projectiles not getting handled properly in a few places
• Fixed recoil resistance not affecting player recoil from Heavy Caliber
• Fixed Calibrate applying in a few cases it shouldn't have
• Fixed some inconsistencies with Blade assembly limit being misreported
• Fixed Turret Specialist not reducing Turret self-damage
• Fixed the Construct Swarm rate of fire boost only applying to a single advanced Swarm Construct
• Fixed Venom Strike not scaling with body power multipliers
• Warp Strike now wraps wider, allowing the weapon to hit off-screen enemies more reliably
• Railgun and crash damage now can't reach quite such extreme values of screen shake and has a cap
• Fixed a silly bug where one half of Eclipse chassis had their rarity bonuses applied twice, and the other had none
• Fixed the possibility of Retribution occurring if you can't assemble and deploy constructs
• Fixed some strange scaling with some blast radii
• Fixed several cases where weird things could apply Essense Sap
• Fixed Hives being trapped off-screen
• Dart projectiles now disable wrapping and destroy-outside behavior while lodged in something
• Made the knockback modifier from Polar Inversion work on a case by case basis so things like enemy recoil and comets aren't affected
• Things that worked in a circular range have been made more accurate, using real pixel values
• Included some missing Simplified Chinese characters
• Wild Mod: Winnow can no longer banish THE VOID and does not grant rerolls or size reduction for them

What's Next?

With this update complete, we are now prepared to focus fully on the "Enemies 2.0" updates we discussed earlier. To be released over many small incremental updates, Enemies 2.0 will bring new enemies, fresh enemy behaviors and formations, enemy support roles, alternate bosses, new power ups, secrets, and reworks to existing enemy content, both mechanical and visual. It's a Nova Drift renaissance!

Version 0.30.1 Azimuth Update

November 12, 2020

Over the last few months, we've been working on the exciting tech needed for Enemies 2.0, which includes enemy behaviors and formations. While the tech is finished, we haven't had the time to implement it yet. This will be a big design challenge, and any change to enemies this large is certain to incur a lot of rebalance needs. Additionally, it'd be nice to have new enemies and bosses ready to take full advantage of the tech. For these reasons, this will be included in a later update. That said, there are plenty of improvements in this update that are ready for you:

Major Features

• Added localization for Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, and Polish!
• Certain advanced enemies can now enter the battlefield via a spooky portal
• Certain enemies now enter the battlefield via emerging from the background (The intention with these two new entrances is to reduce the instances where deaths occur by being blitzed off-screen)
• Overhauled Celestial enemies, making them more visually interesting and intimidating. Additionally, variety has been added to their attack patterns, especially for champion Celestials. All rarities' "celestial fireball" attacks will alternate between two patterns, and champion "bomb fiestas" are no longer full-screen random and are instead selected from 4 different bomb patterns. The intention with this overhaul is not necessarily to make Celestials easier, but to give you time to react to their appearance, easily recognize them as a dangerous foe, and prioritize accordingly.
• If you have Charged Shot, Siege Weaponry and/or Saturation Fire, Allies with Integrated Weaponry will use them
• The BGM track "Fire in Zero Gravity", found in non-Wild playthroughs, has been replaced by a new BGM track, "Nograv"

Minor Features

• You can now rebind the "Banish" ability, gained from the Research body gear
• Enemy entry speed no longer scales with wave speed or temporal effects, preventing enemies from blitzing you at incredible speeds at high waves, while also maintaining intended enemy positions
• Improved radial and spiral spawns to better match the shape of your screen

Improvements & Balance

• Grandeur was enabling players to reach level 100, and so has been nerfed and rebalanced. Most notably, Grandeur now has a small malus to rotation speed
• The bulk of Strafe's thrust power now scales with modifiers to thrust, added to a very slight base value
• Improve Ally, Drone, and Swarm edge behavior. They now wrap at the edges of the screen like the player does
• Orbital shield orbs now screen wrap per-orb
• Allies with the Interceptor mod no longer love to spend time off-screen
• Construct formations properly handle per-construct wrapping
• Constructs above the limit will now be destroyed after changing body gear
• Newly-added drones now slot into position neatly
• Projectiles reflected by reflect shield now propagate their allegiance to "child" projectiles
• Leviathan's hidden ability to resist sitting in burn damage over time (up to an additional -50% total) now ramps up more quickly
• Siege Weaponry now deals ~15% less base damage to the player
• Barrage malus and randomization now applies to Loaded Mines, in addition to giving the added projectiles

Cosmetic Changes

• Added about a dozen new instances of rainbow cycling for the BOOST power up
• Made various visual improvements to rainbow cycling effects

Fixes & Under the Hood

• Fixed Railgun's hitbox rotating, making the weapon more accurate while sniping
• Similarly fixed the hitboxes for Blade Splinters and Blaster blasts
• Fixed Death Blossom granting zero spread for its duration
• Fixed orbital shield getting too many orbs orbs when it reset before the previous orbs expired
• Non-player-launched Blade projectiles now don't accumulate Orbital orb size
• Swarm constructs no longer try to defend while the player is not in control or is invulnerable, also preventing off-screen "snapping"
• Bastion shield code has been standardized, making it far less of a special, volatile snowflake
• Created a better, more modular standard for enemies, to be utilized with the upcoming behaviors and new enemies moving forward
• Projectiles reflected by Reflect shield now have a speed cap, based on their hitbox size, that prevents them from "skipping" their target
• Made further changes to help prevent Leviathan by being "yeeted" by Minelayer shields
• Fixed a bug where Bastion Shield protecting Blades would assemble even if the assembly limit was reached
• Fixed a bug where Saturation Fire was dealing more damage to the player than intended

Version 0.29.8 - OUROBOROS Update

September 28, 2020

A good deal of progress has been made for the first wave of Enemies 2.0, but it isn't ready yet. Please enjoy this content & quality of life update, while focus fully shifts to enemies 2.0.

Major Features

• Added a new Body Gear: Leviathan (Nova Drift's most requested feature!)
• Major rework: Helix Shield has been replaced with Orbital Shield, and has been given entirely new mechanics and visuals (Nova Drift's second most requested feature!)
• Rework: Assault Body has been granted new power: There is an 8% chance for weapons fired by you to be "empowered", greatly increasing the stats of the attack. As with all unique body powers, certain mods can scale this power
• Rework: Assault Body now resists mobility-reducing effects from weaponry by 15%
• You gain additional gear choices at account level 25 and 50, to a maximum of 7. This means that with 7 choices, it will never cost more than 1 reroll to get the gear you want
• Added the above "Empower" mechanic to a few Wild Mods: Outrage Module & Phantom Strike. More mods will gain this keyword later
• Added a new BGM, "Recursor", to both Standard and Wild Metamorphosis modes
• Added the game credits to the main menu. If I missed anyone, please don't hesitate to mention it

Wild Metamorphosis Adjusments

• Added a new Wild Mod: Evolutionary Niche
• Added a new Wild Mod: Grandeur
• Added a new Wild Mod: Maelstrom
• Added a new Wild Mod: Quantum Decoherence
• Added a new Wild Mod: Spontaneous Generation
• Rare Wild Mods are now slightly more common (1 in 4 -> 1 in 3.5)
• If Chaotic Ambition increases your maximum Wild Mods per level by more than 7 it will begin to increase your minimum Wild Mods per level instead
• Transmogrification now grants +1 level
• Obsession penalties -1.25% / level -> -1% / level
• Phantom Strike is now an empowered attack
• Outrage Module is now an empowered attack

Improvements & Balance

• Research hull 90 -> 85
• Research shields -10% -> -15%
• Research can no longer banish THE VOID (Void banishes you)
• Research must now pay 2 rerolls in order to banish a rare Wild Mod
• Rare Wild Mods now say "RARE" in their titles
• Added shake and sound feedback for failing a Banish
• 110 -> 115 shields for Reflect Shield
• There is now a hard level cap of 100. If you manage to somehow reach this, we've got a problem, please report it
• Homing projectiles now seek enemies and targets equally
• You can now toggle healing numbers in settings for you and your constructs, off by default
• You can now toggle self-damage numbers in settings for you and your constructs, off by default
• Drones now spread out their firing sequence evenly
• If you have an old corrupted save file, the game will attempt to fix it
• Experience orbs now scatter a bit from enemies
• Experience orb probabilities change as waves progress, resulting in less but more valuable orbs for the same value. This reduces visual clutter
• Increased base exp needed per level a touch. This only really impacts the first dozen waves or so
• Increasing your level by a mod no longer affects the EXP curve at all. You will be treated as though you are your base level
• Added a border and some breathing room to owned mod displays
• Retribution gained a new rule: If Retribution causes your mines to exceed your mine construct limit, an existing mine is detonated
• Charged Mines gained a new rule: -1 to mine construct limit
• Antimatter Rounds is now stronger but only affects weapons fired by you. This change was made because it enabled insane shenanigans with mines, especially when charged. Additionally, the game could use more incentives for self-firing builds
• Since it is now possible to achieve +50%, or even +100%, for unique body powers, Engineer's added construct limits now respects this modifier (rounded down)
• Courser & Battery now scale their added projectiles with modifiers to body unique powers (rounded down)
• Warp Strike total damage -35% -> -30%
• Homing Strike has been given a more informative description
• Homing Strike total projectile damage -80% -> -70%
• Homing Strike total blast, velocity & size modifiers -70% -> -60%
• Homing Strike grace degeneration time extended from .6667 -> 1 seconds
• Changed how targeting affects various weapons. Most notably, very fast projectiles are now better at targeting
• Modifiers to thrust now have a minimum value of 0%
• Rampage now scales with modifiers to thrust, and the text has been changed to "You gain constant added thrust power"
• The pause menu now reports your size modifier
• The pause menu now reports your plating

Construct Improvements:

• Interceptor allies with Salvo now build up stockpile count and fire a spray of missiles of at least 10
• Improved construct targeting behavior, especially for Guardian Allies:
• Guardian targets the objects closest to the player
• Guardian tries to stay between the player and its combat target
• Turret with Counter-Artillery tries to shoot down projectiles heading toward the player
• Construct aiming rotation now has more damping so they don't overshoot
• Swarm Constructs now deal 6 -> 7 damage
• Swarm Constructs cap their firing range at 240 units so they don't fire out of range
• Swarm Construct attack scaling based on their target's distance is now more likely to hit
• Swarm Constructs consider the average of sprite width and height for the purpose of range, instead of the larger
• Swarm Constructs are allowed to clump up a bit closer
• Swarm Construct target range is now slightly shorter

Enemy Changes

• Triangle mines, from Pulsars, now spray projectiles 3 at a time with wider spacing (Because triangles)
• Enemy serpents use degrees for sinusoidal movement and reduce sinusoidal movement when near a screen edge to avoid leaving the screen. If they do leave the screen, they now wrap
• Bolt-Throwers linger a bit longer after firing
• Interceptor Champion charge speed ramps up more slowly, and they spend more time "charging". They drop mines less frequently for longer. As a result, mines are dropped farther apart, and you have more time to react to the charge
• Saucers now require wave 10 to be elite and wave 15 to be champion
• Saucers now screen-wrap more tightly
• Spitfire grants you an extra half-second to react to its arrival and deal with other waves before charging its orb
• Saucers give +25% orbs

Fixes

• Fixed a silly bug where enemy knockback would apply twice from collisions, resulting in about +25% more effective knockback from all crashes than intended (I'm so sorry)
• Interceptor Ally aim now takes firing direction modifier from Propulsive Munitions into account
• Fixed a crash with Ally
• Overseer's movement penalty now works properly
• Blades created by allies can no longer take blast or beam damage to their non-existent shields
• Made global damage calculations more sensible
• Fixed a bug where Scion wouldn't drop its rewards
• Fixed a bug where Settings would become stuck if you tried to go to the online leaderboards, but they aren't available on that game version
• Having both Overseer, a construct that can use your weapon, and Rapid Reconstruction no longer results in no Weapon Gear being offered
• Removed an exploit where you could enable Mayhem mode and disable the other modes by editing your save file
• Fixed a bug that would cause certain effects and objects to be deleted if you pause while the player is in a black hole
• Various performance optimizations

Version 0.28.12

Updated May 25, 2020

Please note: Due to the settings overhaul, you may need to rebind your custom controls.
The next major update will focus on sweeping changes to enemies and waves, improvements to Wild Metamorphosis, and improved game balance!

Major Features

• Added French, Russian, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese localization, which you can toggle between in the Settings menu. The game will attempt to detect your OS language settings and otherwise default to English
• Added a menu to the pause screen. You can now resume, quit, change your settings, or view Super Mod requirements during a game. The pause menu has also been improved, displaying more stats about your build. Quitting from the pause menu now requires a confirmation
• Overhauled the Settings menu
• "Mouse Mode" and "Keyboard Mode" have been consolidated into one mode. Both always work. The toggle for WASD or Arrow Keys has been removed, but you can reset to the defaults for either one in the customization menu. You can now assign two bindings to both thrust and fire, which accepts mouse or keyboard inputs. If you were previously using Mouse Mode, or Customized Mouse Mode, you may need to rebind your custom controls
• Updated Gamepad and Keyboard / Mouse customization menus to be more intuitive and consistent
• You can now choose which gamepad stick is used for steering, which works with all 3 aim styles
• If you are already using directional aiming, it will default to the right stick, and otherwise default to the left stick
• Gamepad Stabilize is now PRESSING the stick, because down doesn't make sense for the directional aim setting
• Gamepad can now rebind Stabilize
• There are now multiple toggles for windowed resolution. The game will also accept any resolutions that you manually input into your save file
• Rewrote Nova Drift's system for handling audio. Music, SFX, and global volume can now all be adjusted separately from settings
• The Challenge Modes you used are now displayed on your High Score list! However, this addition isn't retroactive for old scores
• Added new BGM: the Infinitum remix, Infinitum (Genesis), now plays in Wild Metamorphosis

Improvements

• Removed the delay when switching from mouse aim to keyboard/gamepad aim
• Reduced the delay when switching from keyboard/gamepad aim to mouse aim (This delay exists so that accidentally brushing your trackpad or mouse doesn't interfere with keyboard controls)
• More mouse buttons are now supported for customization
• Whenever avoidable, text is no longer used in tutorials to increase the ease of localization
• Collapsed a few tutorials into one
• Framed tutorial buttons now have a few discrete sizes to make localization easier (There is a known bug with this where the button is larger than needed)
• Added hue cycle offsets to Super Mods
• Reworked sound effects for huge explosions, large explosions, Torrent, Saucer enemy shots, and several EMP blast sfx
• Barrage variants have been added for Blade, Torrent, and Dart
• Addes SFX for Champion Beamcasters

Game Balance

• Salvo can no longer stockpile while your weapon is on cooldown, but the base damage has been increased 60 -> 90
• Salvo now unloads your stockpile faster for each stock you have remaining
• Salvo's diminishing returns for high levels of stock are now more favorable
• Thermal Lance base damage has been increased by 10%
• Charged Shot now properly considers Rancor if benefiting from extra projectiles from Charged Shot
• Constructs pursuing targets do so faster and more efficiently. This is especially meaningful for Swarm Constructs

Fixes

• Fixed a bug where Singular Strike always considered you having one more pre-existing projectile than it should (so it does 10% more total damage now)
• Added a very small cooldown to Player wrapping, to prevent a bug where Singularities could cause you to wrap dozens of times per second
• Fixed Viper's burn duration not applying to Incendiary Strike
• Fixed Incendiary Strike not benefiting properly by increased Burn Duration
• Warden plasma shots generate smaller "splinters" after being degraded by Counter-Artillery
• Optimized trail performance
• Optimized construct performance

Version 0.27.20

Updated April 29, 2020

A great deal of this month's work is not featured in this update, as it is part of a larger update coming in May, focusing on menu overhauls, better settings, quality of life, controls, and localization. Thank you for your patience! But, hey, we obliterated the bug queue!

Visibility, Features, and QoL

• Started improving the pause menu. It has a bit more info, and it is partially dynamic to your loadout
• Asteroids now have a slight outline to differentiate them more from the background
• Added a finder circle and a finder pointer for when you're near the edges of the screen
• Grenade explosion artwork has been made less occlusive
• Salvo explosion effects have been made smaller (the blast radius is the same)
• When you screen wrap, the pulsing effect now moves with you, making the player object easier to locate
• The volume and pitch of the crash sfx now changes depending on how hard you are knocked back
• Added some pitch randomization to a few other sfx to try it out
• More fonts are now retina friendly. All fonts now scale at 50% for non-retina to reduce distortion
• Enemy missiles no longer screen flash if fired rapidly
• Firing direction no longer modifies your forward-facing aim scope

Enemy and Wave Balance

• Made the wave speed modifier from Danger Zone and Mayhem a little less crazy compared to the previous adjustment
• Added considerably more wave time padding for early waves, before wave 30 (was 20), up to 8 seconds
• Enemies now start becoming stronger at wave 100 instead of 120
• Reduced the scaling value, and the maximum value, of enemy knockback dealt to the player based on their hull
• Serpent Elites fire their spines a little less frequently
• Serpent Elites won't appear in the wild before wave 25 now, up from 20
• Wardens and Interceptors now allow a little more time to defeat them
• Pulsars now chase you somewhat less quickly
• Normal and elite Pulsar shots have a little less targeting
• Spitfires now won't introduce more Pulsars if there are already 2 or more
• Spitfire is a little harder to trick into not firing, now
• Eclipse champions won't spawn randomly before wave 45 (was 40)
• Eclipse shield retaliation cooldown 2 frames -> 3 frames
• Small asteroids now push less hard
• Small asteroids are more likely to contain orbs
• Small Asteroids deal 10 -> 5 damage

Game Balance

• Grenade's knockback has been halved, making it easier to hit with clusters
• Grenade base damage: 75 -> 85
• Salvo base damage: 50 -> 60
• Salvo's stockpile rate from projectile count now works consistently with other sources of rate of fire, and also has been improved from 5% -> 15% per projectile (If you go this route, I recommend Convergence over Fusillade)
• A previous buff to Salvo's stockpile diminishing returns was accidentally a nerf. I have inverted this and buffed it further
• Barrage now properly affects projectile count for the purposes of Loaded Mines (with all projectile-based weapons) and Stockpile
• Mine hull 30 -> 25
• Charged Mines now prevents mines from using a trigger radius. They will still detonate on impact (This is a huge buff for this mod in most set ups)
• Mine trigger radius decreased by 25%
• Loaded mines now take 2 -> 4 damage for innately charging weapons
• Swarm Construct damage 5 -> 6
• Interceptor Ally now uses a larger cone angle for targeting integrated weaponry. It is now more likely to start charging Vortex, more likely to start or keep firing Thermal Lance, and more likely to fire other weapons near enemies
• Vortex base damage 4 -> 3.4 (-15% base damage)
• Loaded Mines last rule has been modified: "For weapons that charge innately, your mines charge your weapon at 75% of your charge rate. Additionally, they constantly take 4 damage /s and pay +100% charge costs" (Note that Thermal Lance does not have a "charge cost", only Vortex does)
• Mine effect, for innately charging weapons, has been made consistent with other forms of charge rate scaling instead of being multiplicative

Explanation: Vortex is most fun when it has a high risk vs reward element. Recent changes to its scaling allowed it to become monstrous without ever really putting you at much risk, due to increased levels of crowd control and charge rate. This reduction in damage will require that you spend longer charging and taking damage to reach those huge damage numbers from huge vortexes. As for the mine changes, Architect was on another level, with Vortex Mines being substantially better than any other kind of mine (or maybe even any other Architect choice). This was because of both mine hull being disposable, unlike the hull of the player or allies, as well as some explosive scaling with Architect's mine effect. Combined, these changes affect Vortex considerably, and Thermal Lance mines only a little.

Fixes

• Fixed Adrenal Module setting a value where it should be adding a value, overwriting the global damage gained from Masochism
• Homing Strike now works properly with Burst Fire for Allies
• Construct formations no longer flip out if the player teleports or is schlorped into a singularity
• The finder no longer activates if the player does the above
• Fixed some description formatting
• Gemini + Shielded Drones + Discharge now properly ignores Gemini
• Architect charging a blade doesn't detonate other constructs until it actually fires
• Prevented the Ludicrous Speed achievement from being earned in debug mode
• Phantom Strike and Outrage module now work with Homing Strike
• Fixed a crash with Outrage module
• Square Drift no longer crashes (perfectly square aspect ratios)
• Grenades with Hyperboost are now less occlusive
• Fixed Grenade's damage being misreported
• Gemini Protocol now indicates that your shield must protect you, as was the case
• Allies using Thermal Lance no longer discontinue the charge if a valid target exists
• Ally burst fire homing strike no longer breaks projectile count
• Halo + Gemini no longer works with Shielded Constructs, as intended
• Prevented Bastion + Architect from detonating mines when it is assembled but not deployed (using Shielded Constructs)
• Fixed Shockwave not creating a shockwave when your shield cooldown completes, but your shield capacity is full
• Fixed Echo Strike misreporting that it hits twice
• Fixed Carrier text colors
• Blade now informs you that its construct limit is equal to your projectile count
• Fixed Shockwave depth sorting
• Stabilize now works while thrusting if Thrust and Up are bound to the same input
• Defensive Drones prioritize hazards in Orbit formation
• Orbit and Rampart formations prefer targets in the direction they're facing
• Vortex charge and Thermal Lance beam now take directional offset from Propulsive Munitions into account
• Antimatter Rounds proced with Salvo's stockpile now divides its added self-damage by your burst fire count, preventing unintentional massive self-damage from burst fire
• Antimatter rounds with Salvo's Stockpile was additionally being applied a second time at a value far greater than intended. This has been removed
• Clamped Bastion Shield's sprite index to prevent a crash when it gets too high
• Prevented a crash involving enemy beam charges being unable to find their leader (when its cleaned up for being off-screen for too long)
• Prevented Sanctuary from (improperly) working with Shielded Constructs
• Fixed cases of Gemini Protocol (improperly) working with Bastion Shield when you have Shielded Constructs
• Fixed some cases of Bastion using base damage instead of current damage to trigger hull-threshold-based mods
• Prevented hull-damage-threshold-triggered mods (that they themselves trigger self-damage) from overwriting the original hull damage you were intended to take (?!)
• Siege Weaponry self-damage now reports in the combat log
• Outrage Module trigger now reports in the proper place in the combat log
• Architect now properly triggers detonate on your constructs when a blade is produced by Phantom Strike or Outrage Module
• The pause menu now properly reports ignite duration modifiers from body gear
• The singularity doesn't blot out the pause menu anymore
• The singularity doesn't draw in front of the darkness anymore
• Fixed excessive Volatile Shield / Tempest Break with Blade + Bastion + Shielded Constructs + Burnout Reactors
• Blade + Burst Fire + Courser / Battery can no longer cheat blade count and fire extra projectiles
• Blades with Shielded Constructs no longer do less damage after taking damage
• Visual Warp Shield radius now works with shield radius modifiers
• Essense Sap can no longer leech from Asteroids and such using Force Armor's blast
• Thermal Lance beam now resets its color after Hyperboost ends
• The Blink reticle no longer disappears if you pause during a blink
• Champion Juggernaut displays its hull bar
• Fixed cargo train box hull bars
• Hidden Power now prevents Mortar
• Rancor charge slow down no longer persists with Mortar
• Swarm Constructs will now attack Eclipses properly. When targeting, they have more accurate ranging (it was using square hitboxes, so oddly shaped enemies were an issue)

Version 0.27.11 GENESIS Update

Updated March 20, 2020

Please note that the new gear in this update is available to all players, regardless of account level, despite their relative complexity. The new super mods are available as soon as the first super mod is unlocked.

We'd like people to immediately begin testing them, but it won't remain this way. The next major update will likely comprehensively overhaul which upgrades are unlocked when.

New Features:

• Weapon gear, Thermal Lance has been added to the game!
• Shield gear, Shockwave has been added to the game!
• Body gear, Carrier has arrived!
• Added a new super mod: Mortar
• Added a new super mod: Charged Mines
• The mine tree has been reworked and mines have been adjusted
• Auto Mines has been replaced by a new mod: Minefield
• Loaded Mines and Retribution have switched places
• Two new BGM tracks have been added to the game: Superlumen (and its Wild Metamorphosis remix, Superlumen (Warped)), and Infinitum
• Large or dangerous enemies are now announced with a HUD warning, similar to what comets use. This feature will be further iterated on in the future as enemies 2.0 progresses
• Allies that can fire your weapon can now utilize innately charging weapons (Vortex and Thermal Lance)
• Mines that can fire your weapon can now utilize innately charging weapons (Vortex and Thermal Lance) while deployed

Mechanical Changes:

• Vortex uses new, more sensible logic to calculate its damage and charge rate
• Vortex charge rate now additionally scales with weapon blast radius mods
• Power Reserves now reduces the malus from turn rate penalties (presently only Thermal Lance while firing)
• Rancor now works differently. Instead of the increased charge level gained being permanent, it now falls off over time. The charge level gained is ~5x greater than before
• Retribution now has a 0.5-second internal cooldown
• Mines now have a shorter fuse, which no longer resets when you upgrade
• Mines check their proximity detonation more often
• Architect now detonates all constructs if there are more than one when you switch to it
• Blades not produced by the player no longer screen-wrap
• Firefly + Rampage now combos as you'd expect
• Mayhem and Danger Zone have been adjusted, along with small aspects of the difficulty curve. The first 20 waves grant additional, but decrementing, bonus time per wave instead of only the first 10 waves. Danger Zone now affects wave speed by a factor of 0.65 again, down from 0.70. As a result, Mayhem is fast and more hardcore again, but the very early waves are a little less overwhelming

Balance Adjustments

• Drones in Predator formation move 33.33% faster than they previously did
• -5% -> -7% recovery and shield cooldown on Twin Strike
• +70% -> +80% regeneration rate on Rapid Reconstruction
• +30 -> +35 base hull on Rapid Reconstruction
• +15% -> +10% hull damage resistance on Shielded Constructs
• Galvanic Outburst does considerably less damage
• Pulsar's blast attack now has far less knockback
• Temporal Shield's effect has been made ~11% stronger

Bug Fixes and Optimizations

• Fixed a case where Gemini + Absorption actually creates lethal damage with shields up by splitting a damage value less than 0 and then increasing it to 1
• Made many major improvements to game terminology and text descriptions
• Streamlined the player upgrade script and removed a lot of redundancies
• Blades now use "dynamic trails" which is far more performant, especially in extreme cases
• Medicharge takes Hypermetabolism-reserved shield and hull into account
• Fixed a crash with Priority Zero
• Vortex + Gemini now properly soft-triggers shield cooldown
• Having no weapon now prevents any mobility-reducing effects from your weaponry
• Fixed a problem where shielded constructs would be counted at the wrong moment
• Temporal shield now properly slows Pulsar enemy dashes
• Fixed many instances of things apply Corrosion but shouldn't. Player constructs, their abilities, and even some enemies self-inflicting
• Fixed some cases where Corrosion would last forever
• Fixed a mistake with how mine projectiles / Thermal Lance mines are calculated. You should see a smooth progression of projectiles, thermal lances, or pulses as your rate of fire and mine effect increases

Version 0.26.12 APEX Update

Updated February 3, 2020

Major Changes: Turret

• Turret has been given its own mod tree and removed from its original
• Turret has been given new visuals, sfx, and effects
• Added 3 mods to the Turret tree: Point Defense, War Machine, and Counter Artillery
• The turret T2 mods scale with your level, so the turret has quite a high power ceiling. Its new incarnation is designed to be stronger with less up-time, making it a construct you want to deploy tactically. To that end, its assembly time has been made longer
• Created a new mod to replace Turret in its old tree: Priority Zero
• Turrets can now be pushed around a little by the player

Major Changes: Allies

• Allies and their evolutionary trees have been retooled to give them earlier utility, more meaningful mods, more individual identity, and better interaction with construct super mods
• The Ally tree has been altered: The Ally mod, Double Team, has been removed from the game and Evasion has taken its place. Evasion was previously found in the Interceptor Tree
• The Interceptor Tree has been reworked. Integrated Weaponry, previously a T3 mod, is now included in the T1 mod, Interceptor. Interceptor has also been reworked
• Ranger has been removed from the game. The Ranger functionality is now innate to Interceptors. Flak, Torrent, and especially Pulse have closer ideal ranges, modified by either your blast radius or velocity, depending
• Outmaneuver has been added to the game to replace where Evasion previously was
• Wingman has been added to the game to replace where Ranger previously was
• Overpower has been added to the game to replace where Integrated Weaponry previously was
• The Guardian tree has been reworked. Service, previously a T3 mod, is now included in the T1 mod, Guardian. Guardian has also been reworked
• Echo Strike has been reworked
• Decoy has been reworked
• Medi-Charge has been added to the game to replace where Service previously was. Note: Medi-Charges produced by the guardian count as power-ups for the purpose of the Research gear's ability
• Allies and their evolutions now have their own projectiles and firing patterns
• Ally Specialist has been reworked. It no longer adds additional assembly and instead offers specialized benefits
• Turret Specialist has been reworked. It no longer adds additional assembly and instead offers specialized benefits
• Behavior scripts for all allies have been polished

Balance Changes

• Overseer now calculates after Engineer's bonuses, as you'd expect
• Adjusted Architect powers 45% -> 50% construct stats, except hull. Construct hull is now 45% -> 30%
• Courser hull 90 -> 100
• Courser damage blast radius and projectile size -15% -> -10%
• Essence Sap: 1.5% -> 1% hull stored as essence. Essence now recovers hull at a rate of 10% of your maximum hull /s and can store a maximum of 5% of your maximum hull
• Bastion 130 -> 120 maximum shields
• Bastion now stores energy at 75% the rate it previously did
• Bastion innate regen formula is now less explosive at very high durability
• Galvanic deals much less damage in light of its recent ability to stack damage
• Armor Stacks once again always give at least 1 stack for "hit" damage
• Armor Stacks grant 50% stacks for self-damage
• Burning damage when used with Corrosion now generates 3 -> 2 corrosive stacks /s
• Dying Star is now considered an "ignite", not burn, and thus does not work with Essence Sap or Corrosion
• Damage scaling from Masochism and from advancing waves is now the final damage scaling event. Previously, it preceded Barrier, making Barrier (and shields by extension) feel mandatory at high waves
• Tactical Link now reduces damage from Burnout Reactors and Turret self-damage
• Vital Bond 50% -> 60% of your regeneration
• Tactical Link's damage reduction is now additive (this is a buff) (to be clear this doesn't mean it stacks with multiple sources of Tactical Link, it means it interacts additively with other sources of damage reduction)
• Vortex damage has been returned to its pre-nerf values: ~+10%
• 7% -> 10% Heavy Caliber buffs
• Leaf on the Wind time to reach full power 90s -> 60s
• Salvo base damage 45 -> 48
• Split Shot innate blast damage 50% -> 30% of base damage
• Dart now penetrates targets destroyed
• Deadly Wake is now a burn and an ignite for 120 damage /s instead of only an ignite for 240 damage /s
• Ignites now always last 3s base duration unless otherwise stated. As a result, removed some text describing ignite duration. Some ignite damage has been adjusted to compensate
• Corrosion burning damage is now considered an ignite
• Celestial Surge now ignites enemies in the same way that Celestial Lance does
• Dart, being burn damage, now applies corrosion stacks over time as per the recent change
• Halo's self-damage while burning enemies now applies armor stacks

Enemy and Wave Changes

• Shredder Mine spikes no longer fire in random directions. They now align with the spikes in the artwork. This also means that they never shoot more projectiles than are displayed
• Shredder Mines now flash when they're going to explode soon. They also project the direction of the spikes they will shoot with an effect
• Shredder Mine projectiles now degenerate, but not enough to destroy them before they leave the screen unless you have Temporal Shield
• Shredder Mine projectiles now have trails
• Shredder Mines now declump from one another
• Shredder Mines do very slightly more damage
• Shredder Mines now enter the screen more quickly but quickly slow to an overall slower movement speed
• A pair of Champion Celestials participating in a "Bomb Fiesta" was a bad time. Now, bomb frequency is lesser with more Champion Celestials on screen
• Removed the potential Elite Enemy mode Champion Eclipse spawn from wave 35. A spiral of Shredder Mines can spawn in its place
• Added a new Elite Enemy mode spawn to wave 45: It will create either a Champion Eclipse, an Elite Juggernaut, or a huge asteroid field + Vanguards
• The Elite Enemy mode spawn at wave 65 which spawns an Elite Juggernaut now also spawns a pair of Beamcasters with it
• Improved a weirdly non-threatening Beamcaster wave
• Saucers grant a little more time to defeat them
• 18 -> 12 damage for enemy Eclipse "Torrent" projectiles
• Increased wave speed scaling
• Reduced enemy damage scaling

Minor Changes

• Turbo Tortoise has been changed from 3.0s to 3.5s since Bastion's assembly time has been increased and this was no longer possible
• Added combat log support for Discharge
• The combat log now displays construct shield damage resistance with shielded constructs on all hits
• Named the construct key bindings in customization by construct
• Purge text clarified to show how it interacts with both burns and ignites (it works with both, but benefits differently)
• Clarified various other strings

Fixes and Optimizations

• Refactored, organized, and optimized the gigantic script which updates the player when you upgrade
• Ataraxia updating your stats no longer messes with anything other than the stats it affects
• When you leave the upgrade menu, your stats are no longer refreshed unless you've actually purchased something within the "chain" of upgrades
• Banishing with the Research body now immediately updates your defenses, not just when you buy an upgrade
• As a result of the above notes, several exploits, bugs, and hiccups are corrected: Sanctuary scales properly with Bastion, Ataraxia no longer deletes or creates anything unintended, Last Stand problems are resolved, the order of operations problems are addressed (e.g. Essence Sap was calculating max hull wrong), and more
• Gemini was skirting enemy damage scaling from advancing waves for the hull portion of the damage
• Bastion was skirting enemy damage scaling from advancing waves entirely
• Gemini with Bastion Shield was also double dipping defenses for the shield portion of the damage
• Bastion no longer burns up faster than intended with multiple shielded-Bastion-constructs
• Many cases of ignites erroneously working with the Essence Sap mod have been corrected. Only "direct contact" burn damage is meant to work with Essence Sap or Corrosion
• In cases where degenerations ticked once every 4 seconds, the proper number of corrosive stacks from burning are now granted
• Fixed a mistake where enemy explosives damage would be set to 15% of the damage you did when you shot them
• Gemini now takes enemy damage modifiers and scaling into consideration for whether or not it is able to split the damage
• The achievement for Turbo Tortoise now requires you to actually be using Bastion
• The pause menu now properly reports the damage of projectile explosives
• Dart Splinters now degenerate as intended
• Fixed a few enemies missing jet streams either on spawn or wrapping
• Added a failsafe so that Armor Stacks cannot become lower than 0
• Refactored the settings menu so its cleaner and easier to maintain. In a future update, this menu and controls customizations will be overhauled

Version 0.25.3 Update

Updated December 20, 2019

Major Changes

• The exp curve has been smoothed out. The climb to level 20 is a bit slower, and the average player should be able to reach a maximum of about 5 levels higher than before
• The game text was given a sweeping overhaul, adjusting grammar, readability, spelling, and consistency. Localization efforts can now ramp up!
• Changed many game terms in minor ways. For instance, Hull Strength is now Hull, Shield Durability is now Shields

Balance Changes

• Blade: Blades not generated by the player no longer collide with enemy projectiles
• Blade: 1/s -> .8/s rate of fire. Player assembled Blades bypass this restriction
• Blade now works properly with Barrage, gaining the appropriate number of projectiles from Engineer and other sources
• Homing Strike Blades no longer collide with enemy projectiles
• Homing Strike Blades now use the 3 prong blade graphic
• Homing Strike: Now adds additional time before projectiles begin degenerating
• Armor Stacks no longer require damage to "hit" in order to generate. Any damage taken will do. Damage to proc an armor stack is accumulated fractionally
• Corrosion Stacks can now be gradually applied by burn damage (not damage from ignited enemies). Hits still generate 1 stack per hit
• Essence Sap has been reworked for clarity: When you damage an enemy, store 1.5% of your damage as Essence. Essence causes your hull to recover over time. You recover hull from Essence at a rate of 7% of your maximum hull /s. The amount of stored Essence cannot exceed 7% of your maximum hull
• Masochism: +4% -> +3% damage taken from enemies
• Dying Star: 10 -> 11 self damage /s. (To compensate for constantly having Armor Stacks)
• Sanctuary: ~+20% maximum recovery rate (achieved at minimum shields)
• Charged Shot: Adds even more damage and velocity with charge time. In many cases, this is now actually a DPS increase
• Salvo: +4% Stockpile rate for each additional projectile
• Salvo: Stockpile rate now correctly uses rate of fire (this was a long-standing bug)
• Barrage: Low and high damage have been lowered by 10%
• Barrage: Barrage now extends the time before projectiles begin to degenerate, compensating for some of the range lost to projectile size
• Fusillade: -20% -> -15% blast radius and total projectile damage. +20% spread -> +15%
• Antimatter Rounds now considers 10 stockpile worth 1 projectile for the purpose of calculating self-damage, instead of 5
• Siege Weaponry: self-damage has been reduced by 10%
• Adjusted the degeneration system, making it more consistent across different weapons
• Railgun: Base damage 155 -> 165
• Flak: Fussed with the effective range in light of degeneration changes
• Self Destruct: 50 -> 25 base damage
• Overseer: -2.5% -> -2.0% thrust per your max construct assembly
• Dart: 15% -> 50% Splash damage from base damage. This isn't intended to do more than provide quality of life
• Drones & Allies: Improved avoidance of dangers. This works with and without Evasion
• Changed the logic for whether weapons are offered with Overseer. If you have Overseer, they're now offered only if you have Integrated Weaponry or Loaded Mines, but not Hidden Power
• Seraph orbs and Station Omega orbs now ramp up to their full damage over 1 second. Because these are spammed, this helps with being "insta-gibbed" by them if they're spawned on top of you
• Scion uses the new beam-lance artwork from Reflexive Shields, turns a little faster, maintains its beam a little longer, and can spawn more Beamcasters a little more frequently
• Increased some enemy base hull values. Beamcasters: 150 > 175. Tentacles: 60 > 75. Serpents: 140 > 160
• Reduced Eclipse core base hull 750 > 700
• Cargo boxes can now screen wrap for 2 seconds after their creation

Input Improvements

Improved directional steering behavior for game pad

• Fixed the odd "jerking" motion when starting to turn
• Turn intensity compensates for the size of the dead zone
• Refactored and minimized a bunch of the player input code
• Player input handling now performs directional strafe logic
• Directional steering mode allows arbitrary strafe/blink angle

Bug Fixes

• Ataraxia now recalculates by refreshing the loadout, which fixes some problems with it. This appears to also solve the weird Research-Banish interaction
• Gamepad Controls tutorial now shows the correct right stick used for steering
• Fixed a bug where small orbs could not screen wrap

Version 0.24.4: FISSION Update

Updated November 16, 2019

Major Changes

‌‌* Harnessing mysterious cosmic powers, the Stealth body gear has been divided into two separate body gears: The Spectre and the Firefly‌‌* The Spectre body gear represents the stealth aspect of the original Stealth body. It is able to cloak faster and enjoys up to a +200% weapon damage buff when fully cloaked. It is able to move at low speeds without breaking cloak and can apply a partial damage buff while partially cloaked‌‌* When you cloak, enemies behave a bit more naturally. They will first target the location they last saw you, and then start guessing where you might be. Some enemies even fire in every direction, if able‌‌* The Firefly body gear represents the speed, thruster burn, and self-damage resistant aspects of the original Stealth body. Its thrusters are now larger, deal more damage, are more wide-spread, and are more unique looking‌‌* The Firefly body and the Spectre body are both available without unlocks‌‌* The Split Shot weapon has been reworked. It has been given several new visual effects and animations, and its damage and spread has been increased while its degeneration now accelerates. Additionally, the weapon now innately deals 50% splash damage on hit to targets behind its point of impact ‌‌* Added a new recursive common Wild Mod: Masochism. Masochism grants +8% self-damage resistance, but increases damage taken from enemies by 4%. It also provides a stackable "Adrenal Module-like effect", at up to +15% increased global damage‌‌* The effect that reduces hull damage by a flat amount has been named "plating". Descriptions have been updated to refer to this effect as such ‌‌* Reworked how waves are spawned under the hood, removing several problems. Very late waves are less chaotic and spammy, but enemies are more powerful‌‌* Enemies now scale up their hull and damage values increasingly higher, starting at wave 120. This scaling won't be present in modes where "Endless" is not enabled, once disabling it becomes possible

‌‌New Tools

‌‌* Created a combat log, which you can enable any time during the game by pressing the Backtick key, which is the key just below Escape. This feature will log all of the hits you take, and show you exactly what your defenses are doing. Currently this feature does not report self-damage or burn damage, but may in the future as I continue to iterate on it‌‌* Created a new debug tool, the wave log. This will help us diagnose any problems with the enemy wave system, as well as show you exactly what's going on with them. If you've enabled debug mode by pressing Delete, you can toggle the combat log (detailed above) by pressing Shift + Backtick

‌‌Quality of Life Changes

‌‌* If you have stored more than one upgrade, you can choose them all before the menu closes. You can disable this feature in the settings menu‌‌* You can now select "Directional Steering" as a gamepad control mode from the Settings menu. This makes the player attempt to face the direction you are holding on the right stick. The controls for stabilize and displace still work with the left stick. In a future patch, this too will be made directional. This has been a popular request, but I recommend instead becoming accustomed to the default steering controls‌‌* Added support for analog thrust. Thrust strength is proportional to trigger value and Stabilize strength is proportional to stick value‌‌* Reserved hull and shield values are now depicted with a different color on the hull and shield bars‌‌* Burst Fire delay between firing has been capped at 1/5 of second‌‌* Player bullets dispose in a wider range outside of the game boundaries, giving them a bit more time to reach their targets if they swing wide

‌‌Upgrade Changes

‌‌* Reflexive Shields has been reworked and given a visual upgrade. Additionally, it does considerably more damage‌‌* Sources of burn such as Discharge, other lightning mods, and Helix Orbs which did not previously stack damage from overlapping instances now do so‌‌* In addition to its attack now stacking, Galvanic Outburst provides an additional +2% shield effect power. However, it can no longer be self-triggered in order to differentiate it from Discharge‌‌* Regenerative Shields now applies its effect 75% to shields and 50% to hull, up from 70% and 30%‌‌* Death Blossom and Emergency systems now require your shield to protect you, not your constructs. Shielded Constructs now blocks Emergency Systems from appearing in the upgrade pool ‌‌* Shielded Constructs flat hull and hull increases +5 -> +10 and +5% -> +10% respectively‌‌* Hypermetabolism has been reworked. It now reserves hull and shields instead of reducing them. Its increased regeneration values have been reduced, but since the maximum value from which they are derived is no longer reduced, the resulting values are similar‌‌* The Defiance mod has been reworked, as it was allowing certain builds to achieve immortality. It turns out that "plating" is an extremely strong modifier when stacked high‌‌* Defiance self damage reduction +7% -> +4%‌‌* Defiance plating 1 -> .5‌‌* Defiance now additionally resists recoil and thrust-reducing effects by 4% each‌‌* Celestial Lance damage and self-damage have been reduced by 10%. The damage and self-damage now ramp up over time the longer the aura is maintained through fast movement‌‌* Loaded Mines and Death Blossom were scaling more than intended from added projectile modifiers. These mods now use a new formula‌‌* 4% -> 5% global damage per unspent mod for Ataraxia‌‌* 85 -> 90 base hull for the Research and Engineer bodies‌‌* -15% -> -10% shields for the Research and Engineer bodies‌‌* 80 -> 100 base shields for Siphon Shield‌‌* 65 -> 70 base shields for Temporal Shield‌‌* Blade splinters no longer collide with enemy projectiles‌‌* Blade splinters now degenerate and decelerate faster‌‌* Blade splinters now reduce hull by an additional 25%‌‌* Warp Strike damage malus for screen-wrapping 5 + 15% of your defenses -> 5 + 10%‌‌* Velocity and Snipe each provide 5% less of an increase to projectile speed. To compensate, the base velocity of most weapons has been increased by 10%. Railgun, instead, had its base damage increased. These mods felt like too much of a shoe-in for certain weapons to hit a usable threshold‌‌* Antimatter Rounds self-damage decreased about 5%‌‌* Rupture now does what it says it does (3% of enemy maximum hull as blast damage. Was actually 2.25%, and erroneously reported 3%)

‌‌Minor Changes

‌‌* Drones, Allies, and Turrets take their target's size into account, which increases their likelihood of firing when close or overlapping‌‌* Gyrogun bullets accelerate and have a lower starting speed. They degenerate, as well‌‌* Barrage now fires from a circular spread instead of a rectangular one‌‌* Rewrote the "declumping" code which prevents enemies from stacking on top of you. It now looks nicer and more elastic‌‌* Reduced the damage over time from Spitfire orbs. They also take considerably longer to explode / hatch‌‌* Spitfire now moves and reverses less quickly, making it less punishing for close-range builds‌‌* Seraph hull reduced a bit‌‌* The logic for choosing a common and rare Wild Mod in the upgrade menu has been rewritten

‌‌Bug Fixes

‌‌* Fixed a long-standing bug where the wave would elect to advance despite there being an enemy spawner present (but no enemies)‌‌* Fixed Hives getting trapped off-screen (fourth time is the charm?)‌‌* Purification wasn't healing the player in most cases, it is now functioning again‌‌* Dart now triggers Eclipse Shield retaliations‌‌* Pausing doesn't interrupt Death Blossom anymore‌‌* Prevented Skirmish from proccing in edge cases where you can't fire, but somehow do anyway‌‌* Fixed several strange interactions of Bastion Shield and Reflexive Shields‌‌* Fixed a crash related to Ally targeting‌‌* Fixed a "leak" with Celestial Shots getting stuck off-screen causing slowdown‌‌* Fixed odd Minelayer shield behavior‌‌* Fixed a typo preventing strafing or displacing left from working on game pad

Version 0.23.8: WILD METAMORPHOSIS Update

September 30, 2019

New Features

• Wild Metamorphosis has been added to the game! It can be enabled from the Loadout menu. At least temporarily, this Challenge Mode is not gated behind any unlocks
• 12 common Wild Mods have been added to the game!
• 12 rare Wild Mods have been added to the game!
• Wild Metamorphosis now plays the remixed version of the 6 standard BGM tracks! Later, this may change to be a mix with the other tracks, and may not play in this order
• The Research ship has learned a new ability. It now gains 1% total Hull Strength and Shield Durability for every banished mod (through any means)

Quality of Life Changes

• Hidden Power now refunds your Weapon Gear upgrade point, if you spent one
• Rapid Reconstruction now refunds your Shield Gear upgrade point, if you spent one
• Shield Gear is now selected before Body Gear
• Improved the visuals and transitions for upgrading

Blade Weapon Changes

• Blade has been reworked. Blade can now be utilized by other constructs, Burst Fire, Siege Weaponry, Saturation Fire, and Barrage
• Blade's stats have been changed. As a result, Blades created by the player are effectively the same power they previously were, and 25% weaker and 15% smaller when deployed by other constructs. Blades deployed by constructs also do not fire submunitions
• A Burst-Fired blade is deployed one at a time instead of in a spread
• Blades (and any future constructs) not deployed by you cannot be shielded or employ shield effects from the Shielded Constructs mod
• Blades have a rate of fire of 1/s for the purposes of all calculations. When deployed by the player, this is effectively bypassed at the cost of using assembly and construct limits, as usual
• Blades attempt to return to their launcher. If a launcher doesn't exist, they take 60 hull damage /s
• Architect stat bonuses and limitations only apply to Blades it directly created (For example, Blades created by an Ally construct won't be beefy or be detonated by Architect's ability, but the Ally construct which fired the blade will be)

Pulse Changes

• Pulse has been reworked and has received new artwork, which occludes visibility less
• Blast-based weapons (currently only Pulse) now fire in a cluster when used with Loaded Mines. The number of Pulses created depend on your rate of fire and mine effect modifiers
• Pulse now works with Barrage (As it has no primary projectiles, it will Pulse once and then barrage the secondary projectiles)
• Pulse secondary projectiles are now affected by most anything that would alter size, homing, velocity, and so on (including Cloaking, Charged Shot, Skirmish, etc.)
• Pulse secondary projectiles are now affected by Splinter Shot
• Pulse was double-dipping modifiers to blast radius. This is no longer true. The base size has been made larger to compensate, especially the outer ring, which is now considerably larger
• 135 x2 -> 180 / 90 Pulse base damage. This means that the inner ring now deals twice as much damage as the outer ring (66.67%)
• Pulse shards are now smaller and deal 50% of the damage of the inner pulse

Gear Balance Changes

• Vortex has been made more consistent with other weapons
• Vortex base damage has been reduced ~10%
• Shields, apart from Bastion, have had their cooldown made faster by .5 seconds
• Shields with cooldown are now more resistant to having their cooldown reduced by damage
• Helix shield spawns 3 orbs at a time instead of 2. A full rework of this shield is pending
• +3% -> 2% total construct assembly speed per downed construct for Engineer body's innate ability, Priority Zero
• 90 -> 100 Halo shield durability
• 135 -> 130 Bastion shield durability
• 90 -> 85 Research body hull strength
• -10% -> -15% Research body shield durability
• 80 -> 90 Courser body hull strength

Other Balance Changes

• Essence Sap max hull rate recovered 6% -> 5%
• Antimatter Rounds base and scaling self-damage has been reduced slightly
• +30% -> 25% total bonus for Singular Strike
• Apex Machinery malus for construct assembly time +100% -> +70% (this is a buff). Bonuses to constructs 25% -> 30%
• Tactical Link is now a binary buff. If you're in the radius of an Advanced Construct, you and that construct have 8% hull damage resistance. It works on Bastion, even though it does not display a radius
• Player and drone projectiles don't collide with dead objects anymore. This makes a difference with weapons such as Flak which fire many projectiles at once
• Loaded Mines now uses a different formula for calculating how many projectiles it should create. It works similarly to the Wild Mod, Death Blossom. Projectile count scaling and a projectile floor results in roughly the same power level for heavy weapons and a stronger result for high projectile count or high rate-of-fire weapons
• Loaded Mines now varies the speed of projectiles with most weapons
• Weapon recoil is now an additively stacking property
• Burnout Reactors no longer increases the damage of Self Destruction. Adding the ability to scale with burn damage is more than enough
• The mechanic which governs how much shield effect and radius is lost based on how many constructs it is spread across has been made less generous
• Capped player speed at 75 pixels per second
• The enemy boss, the Seraph, has had the damage on its orbs and Tesla mine reduced
• The enemy boss, the Spitfire, now summons Pulsar enemy adds

Version 0.22.4: MAYHEM Update

June 27, 2019

Major Features

• Increased the maximum Account level to 59
• Added a new super mod at Account Level 54: Displacement
• Added a new super mod at Account Level 55: Burnout Reactors
• Added a new super mod at Account Level 56: Singular Strike
• Added a new super mod at Account Level 57: Barrage
• Added a new body gear at Account Level 58: Courser
• Added a new challenge mode at Account Level 59: Mayhem
• Changed the default windowed mode size to 1440 x 810
• Nova Drift received a huge overhaul to the way text and descriptions are handled. It is now very easy to maintain, write, and translate. The stage has been set for international localization!

‌‌Balance Changes

• 2% -> 1.5% Essence Sap recovery
• Self destruction has had its scaling adjusted, and now hits once instead of twice
• Most instances of weapon blast radius scale less from damage
• Vortex now scales with rate of fire modifiers, and has had its base charge rate reduced proportionately
• Vortex can now be used with Burst Fire, with a behavior identical to Burst Fire Charged Shot with other weapons. As a result, it also works with Barrage. Folded its firing logic into the standard script
• Flak now has a slightly improved range, and waits a moment to begin degeneration. Its spread has also been reduced slightly
• Siphon's base shield radius has been slightly increased
• Purge now uses 100% of an enemy's ignite instead of 75%
• Drone movement speed 5 -> 6
• +25 -> +30 Rapid Reconstruction base hull
• Flak waits additional frames before degenerating, making it more resistant to size-reducing effects

Version 0.21.6

June 4, 2019

‌ Upload

• ‌

Major Features

New Gear and Mods:

• Added a new Body Gear: Viper
• Added a new Weapon Gear: Dart
• Added a new Shield Gear: Siphon
• The Efficiency and Thruster trees have been restructured and have become three trees, with four new mods. The trees are now called: "Kinetics, Efficiency, and Movement"
• Added a new mod: Kinetic Boost (tier 1 Kinetics)
• Added a new mod: Blink (tier 3 Movement)
• Added a new mod: Conversion (tier 2 Efficiency)
• Added a new mod: Regression (tier 3 Efficiency)
• Aegis, Celestial Lance and Emergency Systems moved to the Kinetics tree
• Blink replaces Emergency Systems in the Movement tree
• Conversion replaces Celestial Lance in the Efficiency tree
• Gemini Protocol becomes a tier 2 mod in the Efficiency tree, replacing Aegis
• Regression becomes a tier 3 mod in the Efficiency Tree, replacing Gemini Protocol
• Rebirth and Magnetism have been removed from the standard mod pool (they are slated to possibly become Wild Mods)
• Base magnetism has been increased to compensate for the loss of the Magnetism mod
• Ally takes the place of unlocking Magnetism
• Kinetic Boost takes the place of unlocking Rebirth
• Dart, Viper, and Siphon shield are unlocked at Account Level 51, 52, and 53 respectively. You will need to play a bit to earn them

Other Major Features:

• Enabled Steam and game screenshots with F12. The game will add your screenshot to your C:\Users\USER\AppData\Local\NovaDrift\ folder (not ideal, but it's a temporary solution) Steam screenshots are kept on your profile
• Mouse, Keyboard and Gamepad now cohabitate without changing the settings. If you want to use the mouse or gamepad, just start moving it. Keyboard controls resume if you stop moving the mouse or gamepad stick. If automatic mouse aim detection is interfering (or you have a track pad) you can disable it in settings with "Disable Mouse Aim Detection"
• You may now cancel an upgrade at any time. If you do, you will be offered the same mods as the last time when you do upgrade
• If you do not cancel your upgrade, rerolls and successive levels will never show you the same mods in a row if it can be avoided
• Added new sfx for big bosses approaching, the player's launch, Dart, caustic Barrier, Venom Strike, and Siphon

Minor Features:

• The score menu now accepts up to 16 characters, like its 1990
• Calibrate has new artwork
• Added a colorful, more noticeable aim-scope
• Mouse controls now uses a proportional derivative controller
• Lowered the base friction of the player about 5%
• Updated the pause readout. It now shows your DPS, which also has a section for the DPS assuming all projectiles hit. It also calculates doubled projectiles (Torrent and Blaster) and burst fire in the equation. It does not consider secondary effects or projectiles from weapons, such as Dart's burn or Grenade's cluster munitions
• You can now hold control to add larger increments in the debug wave interface. Hold Ctrl for +/- 10 waves at a time. Hold Alt for +/- 100 waves at a time

Balance Changes

• Sanctuary's recovery now scales with shield durability. The result is about 30% better at very high durabilities, and about half of what it was at the lowest durabilities
• Hullbreaker now must face its target to penetrate (Just as Viper must face its target to deliver Caustic Barrier)
• The sub-ability of Omnishield which enables a partial shield cooldown when you've taken damage during an existing shield cooldown has been made a core ability, at a lesser power level. Taking Omnishield now doubles the effectiveness of this ability
• Shield Size now scales visually with both your base ship size and ship size modifiers, including Bastion size and distance from your nose
• -15 -> -10% body size modifier for Streamline (in light of the addition of Regression)
• Purge has been reworked. The formula has been adjusted to properly consider the individual duration and potency of each burn instead of multiplying everything together. Purge's size now uses a square root value to prevent it from growing out of control. Using purge now results in 75% of the damage you would have dealt, had the damage over time been allowed to run its full course
• Warp Strike continues to have far too much sway over the balance of the game, so I've dealt with it in a different way. Its damage penalty now applies only to projectiles which have screen wrapped. These projectiles deal -35% damage. It is still very powerful
• Warp Strike penalty now deals you 5 flat damage to hull and shields in addition to 15%. This cannot reduce you to below 1 hull and shields
• -10% -> -12% rate of fire for Warp Strike
• Barrier has been reworked. The new rules are: Barrier removes damage to your shields exceeding 35% of your maximum shield durability, up to a limit of your maximum shield durability
• -50% -> -30% Rocket Drones fire rate penalty
• +25% -> +30% drone hull from Reinforced Drones
• 7 -> 6s Drone Assembly time
• -90% -> -85% Omnishield hull penalty (this might limit the insanity of self-triggered retribution mines builds)
• +50% -> +45% architect bonuses
• 1s -> .75s Emergency Systems duration
• 10 -> 12 iFrames for collision on Non-hullbreaker bodies
• -10% -> -15% projectile size for Convergence
• Burst Fire has been reworked. It now adds a flat delay between burst fires (.04 seconds) and a general +20% increase to rate of fire. The result is that mod has different values for different loadouts. Generally speaking, it is now slightly detrimental for very fast firing weapons, and efficient for very slow weapons. Middling weapons like Dart benefit reasonably well from it. The rate of fire increase also benefits things like Charged Shot, Salvo, and Loaded Mines, etc. The pause readout will show you the effect on your DPS for your particular set up. I realize this has strange implications for a few things, which can be addressed moving forward
• Incendiary Strike no longer has a rate of fire penalty
• Blink is now a prerequisite to Warp Strike instead of Guidance (This seems more thematic to me, and adds an effective higher mod count requirement for builds that really want to push weapons to the limit)
• Calibrate rate increased slightly
• 15 -> 18 Antimatter Rounds damage bonus
• Antimatter rounds deals 5% less self-damage
• Antimatter Rounds self-knockback reduced considerably
• Corrosion deals +10% base damage
• -15% -> -10% weapon damage for Corrosion
• Saturation Fire is now considerably better at reducing weapon spread

Bug Fixes and Optimizations

• Myriad syntax, text, and UI improvements
• Optimized texture atlas
• Optimized homing code
• Optimized discharge code
• Optimized trails, it is also now possible to taper and use multiple colors in jet trails
• Fixed Scion projectile origins
• Fixed a bug with splinter strike where it was improperly inheriting size modifiers from whence it came
• Fixed a bug where you couldn't detonate your Bastion with Hidden Power Architect on gamepad
• Fixed a freeze with the gamepad with Architect Bastion under weird settings circumstances
• Fixed another gamepad freeze related to construct selection
• Fixed a bug with Volatile Shields excluding the initial target
• Fixed a problem where partial cooldowns didn't work at all with Omnishield
• Fixed a problem with reroll powerups being deleted
• Split shot now degenerates properly
• Fixed a bug where Turret utilized Rocket Drones explosions
• Fixed a bug where parts of Station Omega could be Terminated
• Fixed Antimatter Rounds text exceeding its bounding box
• Overseer now properly displays itself as a prerequisite to construct Super Mods
• Fixed a crash with Blade's artwork
• Clarified and corrected a few achievements
• Fixed Stealth jet stream alignment
• Fixed a crash relating to trails and Blade Drone
• Fixed a bug with infinitely wrapping Warp-Strike Railgun projectiles
• Fixed some incorrect tags on descriptions.
• Elite chance is now correct if you teleport using debug cheats

Version 0.20.11

May 8, 2019

We've successfully migrated the game from GameMaker Studio to GameMaker 2! This is a huge leap forward in stability, portability, support, and performance. Additionally, we can now compile to Linux and OSX using the native compiler, and its a step closer to console ports!

Naturally, with an engine transition comes different problems for different hardware configurations and software. I can say with confidence that more people are now able to play on this version than than before, but some people did encounter new problems. Most of them have easy solutions, such as restarting, disabling third party software, white listing on antiviruses, or reinstalling. Problems with OBS can be solved through OBS configuration settings. Failing that, please contact Chimeric directly with problems:

Email: chimericgames@gmail.com

Discord: https://discord.gg/Zp2MkPJ

Construct Balance Changes

• Made a large revision to how construct rate of fire and assembly speed modifiers are applied. Modifiers now actually do what they say they do. Previously, a large amount of this was misleading and resulted in the critical mass of construct power we saw in the previous patch
• Constructs now aim at targets using a PD (proportional-derivative) controller. It gives aiming some ease in and ease out (Its smoother in appearance)
• The Engineer and the Architect have been further balanced. While there may appear to be a huge defensive gap between them, this comes as a result of the comparatively huge "effective defense" increase of spamming constructs everywhere. Additionally, Architect's overlarge size has been considered
• 90 -> 85 Engineer base hull strength
• -10% -> -15% Engineer shield durability
• 40% -> 50% Architect construct bonuses
• 115 -> 120 Architect base hull strength
• Overclock now ramps up-- and back down-- more gradually
• +50% -> +40% total rate of fire increase from Overclock
• 180 -> 150 Ally hull, back to their original hull values (to compensate for their enhanced functionality)
• Ally basic weapon rate of fire 3/s -> 2/s
• Overseer has lost its generic 10% increase to assembly speed, but retains the scaling aspect
• Shielded Constructs +10 to base hull becomes +5 to base hull and +5% hull strength
• Amp shield's effect now fully benefits shielded constructs, gaining additional benefits from being near hazards. Note that this works for Blade Drone
• 25 -> 22s Turret assembly time
• 32 -> 30 Ally assembly time
• 8 -> 7s Drone assembly time
• Turret hull strength 70 -> 100
• Pursuit formation drone speed 2.5 -> 5

Gear Balance Changes

• Research has been overhauled, and no longer provides an experience bonus. It turns out this benefit was mostly illusory anyway, due to the nature of the exp curve. Instead:
• Research now allows you to banish mods from the mod pool by spending a reroll
• Research no longer gives you double rerolls
• 70 -> 85 Research base hull strength
• -30% -> -15% Research shield durability
• Added a banish tutorial element / button
• Torrent has been overhauled, and is now handled as a "twin" projectile, like the default Blaster. The following changes make it less "spammy" and more performant, while remaining effective with greater damage and more useful bullet positioning
• Torrent spread now affects pairs of Torrent projectiles, and not individual projectiles. This results in a more aesthetic and useful spread, especially at very high projectile counts, or when used with spread-reducing mods
• 8 -> 3 x 2 Torrent projectiles
• 16 -> 20 Torrent damage per projectile
• 5.25 -> 4.25 Torrent velocity
• Torrent projectiles degrade more slowly, but also start slightly less large. They are overall more persistent.
• Targeting rate has been accelerated for fleeting projectiles which degrade (Torrent, Flak, and especially Pulse secondary projectiles)
• 65 -> 75 Grenade base damage
• 10% slower Grenade base fire rate
• Grenade proximity detonate radius 25 -> 20 (trying to find the right balance between utility and allowing the enemy inside the blast radius)
• Grenade clusters have ~5% more range
• 16 -> 17 Split Shot base damage
• 11 -> 13 base spread / projectile for Railgun
• 6.75s -> 7s Amp shield cooldown (Still tier 1, but tied with Warp)
• 7s -> 7.5s Default shield cooldown (Still tier 2, now tied with Halo)
• 18% -> 15% velocity and spread improvement for the Assault body

Balance Changes

• Changed the way Blast Radius works for non-blast innate weaponry. The added splash damage now ignores the original target (As a result, Blast Radius no longer results in Corrosion getting double the stacks for such weapons)
• Blast Radius no longer decreases the damage of the initial hit at all
• Splinter projectiles now exclude the original target as well. Screen wrapping projectiles are able to hit once again. This also helps with Torrent's corrosive tyranny
• Corrosion spread works differently now. When an enemy with corrosion stacks dies, it adds stacks equal to its hull times .02, and then divides the stacks evenly across all targets in its radius
• Corrosion radius increased 160 -> 175
• Corrosion base damage per stack .02 -> .035
• Corrosion decay rate factor per duration .92 -> .85
• TL;DR Corrosion changes: It's less extreme with spammy weapons, and less bad with heavy weapons. Blast radius matters far less for optimizing it. Its worse at single target damage and better at proliferation and clearing, though it no longer proliferates out of control
• Hidden power, regenerative shields, and several upcoming Wild Mods now use a new percentile modifier to regeneration rate instead of adding a flat rate like other regeneration mods
• 12 -> 15% Convergence velocity and rate of fire penalty
• +50% -> +75 weapon spread increase from Convergence
• 0 -> +10% weapon spread from Homing Strike
• Rancor's charge boost has been reduced considerably
• 25% -> 20% total damage boost for Blitz
• -18% -> -20% hull and shields for Apotheosis
• 4 -> 3 base rerolls
• 35% -> 30% of your shield cooldown for Emergency Systems' minimum duration
• 9000 -> 9001 singularity damage per second to enemies, as per request
• Seraph boss warp blast radius increased
• Scion boss accelerates after spawning a black hole
• Scion are now immune to the pull of black holes
• Scion spawns Beamcasters slightly more often
• More hull for Pulsar, Spitfire, Scion, Tesla Mine, and some Warbringer parts
• Pulsars and Wardens enter with less speed
• Less hull for Constructor Barrier-Drones
• Champion Serpents turn less quickly while firing their laser
• Enemy speeds and chances to become elite or champion above wave 100 advance faster. This is a temporary solution until stronger enemies and uber bosses are added
• Set a new, more consistent precedent for Splinter Shot's projectile count and power levels

Additional Changes

• The game settings now have a new toggle for controls style: Analog and digital. Digital is how it previously worked. Analog lets you get a little ramp up on keyboard, and on Gamepad it utilizes the stick sensitivity. Analog controls allow finer aiming, but take some getting used to
• Added a few more tips to the game over screen
• The Warbringer music "Ares" has been updated
• Random asteroid adds are 10% more frequent
• Comets spawn with greater position variance
• Dozens of optimizations and improved game structure
• Toned down the brightness of the red sun background element which was causing visibility problems
• Hidden Power and Mastery now have more useful descriptions

Bug Fixes:

• Thanks to the engine migration, the game no longer crashes at restart or game end!
• Interceptor's bonuses were accidentally applied in Integrated Weaponry instead of Interceptor, this has been fixed
• Turret no longer cease fires at very high rates of fire
• Fixed a Blade blast radius interaction crash
• Fixed a problem with Scion and the temporal effect
• Fixed a problem with Terminate proccing over and over on Station Omega (and actually potentially healing it!)
• Rapid Reconstruction no longer blocks Emergency Systems from being selected
• Fixed a crash with emergency systems being unable to find a dead player
• Retribution no longer bypasses Architect's one construct limit rule
• Fixed a bug with Railgun blast radius scaling from damage for both the base size and the growth rate
• Fixed a problem with Splinter and Homing Strike projectiles escaping the screen boundaries
• Fixed massive slowdown encountered at very low fire rates with Discharge. This is also a general optimization to Discharge
• Blade splinters can no longer be an emitter for discharge using Shielded Constructs
• Rewrote the high score save system, fixing a problem with saved scores being scrambled or misrepresented. Unfortunately, we cannot restore previously corrupted scores
• Removed the Early Access buttons until we can prevent the game from being flagged by antiviruses for opening links
• Fixed a problem where the player could be deleted if you paused during a certain time inside a black hole (!)
• Fixed a problem with the pause menu being invisible at a certain time while inside a black hole
• Players inside a black hole are invulnerable to further damage from other sources once they've entirely lost control
• Hives should no longer get stuck off screen
• Fixed dozens more caused by the transition from GameMaker 1 to 2. Too many to list

Progress Update:

• Nearly completed the upcoming changes in the following mod trees: Movement, Energy Manipulation (formerly Efficiency), and a new tree, Kinetics. This change includes restructuring of these trees, and four new mods: Kinetic Boost, Blink, Regression, and Conversion. These changes are coming soon
• Made some progress on the upcoming Wild Metamorphosis game mode and Dart weapon. 7 Wild Mods have been completed.
• Created an upcoming Super Mod: Barrage
• Coming soon™: Directional facing controls as a third option for Analog and Digital control styles

Version 0.19.0

April 6, 2019

This is a very aggressive batch of changes. Expect various tweaks to these values as we play test over the next few weeks, and probably a hot fix or two.

General and Quality of Life Changes

• The game has been zoomed out 5%, providing more room to maneuver. This feels right to me, but the change has a lot of subtle effects on game balance, so overall difficulty is something to observe moving forward. (Dynamic zoom is planned for the future.)
• The Settings menu now asks for confirmation before wiping your progress or high scores.
• Some of the faster enemies enter the arena with less initial speed. This, combined with the previous change, should make getting blitzed from off-screen somewhat less of a concern.
• Added an early access popup menu to the game providing useful links and information for new players.
• Burn damage numbers will display your burn damage over 1 second if you have "Show Damage Numbers" turned on in the settings.
• Salvo missile stockpiles now have a graphical HUD element.
• Experience orbs from enemies scatter a bit depending on the size of what spawned them.
• The default values for settings have been changed, defaulting to "Auto Deploy Drones" and "Show Enemy Hull Bars".
• Windowed mode, when toggled from the Settings menu, sets the window to a 16:9 aspect ratio instead of scaling from your monitor dimensions. More dynamic options are planned for the future.
• Added a better "finder" for when you screen wrap. There is much more work to do regarding player visibility.
• You won't lose your experience orbs as easily during the Scion boss fight.
• The Warbringer now has its own boss music: "Ares."
• Salvo jet trails have been optimized, and now are also included on Salvo Splinters. Drone Rockets also now have jet trails.
• The OSX version of the game can now enter debug mode.
• Game controls are now displayed longer.
• The Game End menu now displays your damage taken and highest damage dealt.
• Confirming your Upgrade with "fire" no longer fires your weapon.
• Continued to reduce the most excessive screen flash and blending cases.
• Further preparations for the engine switch to GameMaker 2 have been made.
• Various optimizations, particularly to jet trails, projectile targeting, Essense Sap, and constructs.

Game Balance: Constructs

• Drones and Allies now lead targets with their weapons, and are far more accurate as a result.
• Drones and Allies try to stay outside of the radius of their targets.
• Drones and Allies attempt to avoid hazards slightly.
• Allies with Integrated Weaponry have a less severe rate of fire penalty for your weapon, (potentially achieving very high values with Overclock, Architect, and other construct rate of fire boosts).
• Drones and Allies are better at multitasking. Defense Drones can target in Rampart formation, and Guardians can fight while approaching a healing target.
• Constructs have smoother transitions when moving between formations and targets.
• Elegant Construction now has +.4% total construct assembly speed per your level.
• Overseer now has +10% faster construct assembly speed in addition to its construct count scaling element. Additionally, its slowing debuff has been increased from -2% -> -2.5% per standard and advanced construct assembly total.
• +18% -> 20% hull damage resistance for Shielded Constructs. It now also has +10 base hull.
• Apex Machinery now has +15% shield effect power.
• 110 -> 115 architect hull.
• In light of changes to assembly speed, 12 -> 14s Bastion Shield base assembly time.

Game Balance: Self Damage

• Siege Weaponry has been revamped. It no longer damages you until you've fired twice in succession. It now uses a different formula for dealing self-damage independent of when you fire, meaning it is equally aggressive regardless of your rate of fire or chosen weapon. Additionally, the rate of fire curve has been reworked, providing large increases up-front and tapering off over time.
• Saturation Fire now fully replaces the calibrate effect, calibrating while you're ramping up siege weaponry and granting reduced spread, increased velocity, and increased targeting at a reduced value compared to standard calibrate.
• Antimatter Rounds has been adjusted. The flat self-damage it deals has been increased. This mod is potentially extremely strong, and was designed to be a balancing act of value between rate of fire, projectile count, and DPS. As a result, its less "safe" on very rapid fire weapons.
• Antimatter Rounds is less exploitable by Salvo, which now uses a modified formula to compensate for the fact that its base cost is almost entirely circumvented by the stockpile mechanic.
• Weapon self-damage that scaled with your adjusted rate of fire now scales with your weapon base rate of fire.
• Previously, a bug existed where your self-damage resistance didn't work on Siege Weaponry and Antimatter Rounds. This has been fixed.
• +5% self-damage taken from Celestial Lance.
• 25% -> 20% self-damage resistance for the Stealth body gear.
• Self-damage resistance for hull and shields are now displayed on the pause menu.
• Drones with your shield receiving self-shield-damage hits (discharge) now properly create Helix orbs on them instead of you.

General Game Balance

• Temporal Shield's shield effect has been reworked. It is now integrated better with the global enemy speed increases over high waves. Additionally, Elites, Champions, and Bosses resist the effects in more consistent ways.
• The Stealth body gear now gains +20% total weapon damage from breaking stealth.
• Channeling 2% -> 1% total shield effect per armor stack. As a multiplicative effect with a max stack of 50, this was way over tuned.
• Knockback Resistance now also resists any recoil from weapons and mods.
• Certain enemy powers were hit too hard by the inclusion of i-frames. To compensate, Scatterdrone, Pulsar, and Seraph bullet damage has been slightly increased.
• -15% -> -18% hull and shields from Apotheosis.
• -80% -> -75% hull and shields from Last Stand's reincarnation. The explosion damage has been increased greatly, and you have three seconds if i-frames after being reborn.
• 15% -> 12% Terminate "cull" threshold.
• 20% -> 25% Blitz bonus on full hull.
• -10% -> -15% rate of fire for Splinter. Splinters deal slightly more damage. This change was made to improve performance and reduce screen clutter.
• Splinter is now more generous with submunitions, for instance allowing Grenade more clusters per splinter.
• Hullbreaker's recovery rate bonus now works on Sanctuary, as it should (hooray?) And text describing this bonus has been made more consistent.
• 115 -> 120 base hull for Battery.
• Vortex is now able to trigger Terminate.
• Rancor has been toned down considerably. It's still very potent.
• Warp Strike no longer reduces your hull and shields. Instead, it has a new drawback: Screen wrapping yourself removes 15% of your current hull and shields. Removal can't be mitigated and doesn't count as a hit. Warp Strike is incredibly powerful; My hope is that this change makes choosing it more situational and less of an auto-choose for weapons like Salvo.
• Singularities pull harder (affects everyone), and the player is slightly less resistant to the effect than they were.

Bug Fixes

• Windowed mode should now properly center on game start.
• Improved various syntax to be more accurate and consistent.
• Fixed a crash relating to Blade and Splinter Shot.
• Fixed a crash relating to Architect detonating Bastion Shield.
• Fixed a crash while toggling constructs with Architect and Shielded Constructs while using a gamepad.
• Smarter selector system for selecting constructs on gamepads.
• Fixed several instances of the mods claiming they unlocked the wrong mod next.
• Gamepads can now be detected being plugged in or unplugged if the game is paused.
• Fixed the broken link to the Leaderboards from the Settings menu.
• Fixed several cases of songs playing mono when they should be stereo.
• Fixed some memory leaks relating to jet trails.
• Fixed a bug where your self-damage resistance didn't work on Siege Weaponry and Antimatter Rounds.