Straight from the build
Changelog
Every shipped Gunmetal Orbit version in player language — synced from the same changelog the Steam builds are cut from. If it's here, it's in the game.
v1.27
CHANGES
- Your choices survive a break. Returning to a saved Outfitter or talent choice keeps the same cards, sold slots and reroll price. A new wave earns fresh shop stock; reopening the screen no longer grants free rolls.
- Talent fishing gets more expensive. Each paid talent reroll adds that choice's starting price. Picking your next earned level starts a fresh ladder.
- The Outfitter updates prices after a purchase. Union Card discounts the remaining hand immediately, and buying a duplicate updates the price of its other unsold copies. Continue Run resolves pending talents and outpost choices before the shop.
- Risky upgrades pay their costs. Negative armor now increases incoming damage. Hull-cost items and talents require enough maximum hull to pay the full cost while leaving at least one hull.
- Fewer dead purchases. Pure stat upgrades stop appearing when their permanent benefit is capped. Mine-only and saw-only builds no longer get Range as their guaranteed useful talent. Capped ramp items show copy limits once further copies could never help.
- Stat limits are visible. Capped item and talent effects state their maximum, and build readouts respect that cap while preserving earned overflow points. Purchases save their wallet, equipment and updated shop cards together.
- Overcharge Coils keeps its charge. Saved runs preserve the full 150% ultimate charge and power, and the ultimate prompt shows your live overfill percentage. Older runs with excess copies of the newly limited items normalize those copies and their associated bonuses and penalties when loaded.
- Luck, armor, attack-speed and life-steal explanations now describe their actual rules; Salvage Insurance states its one-chunk spill minimum.
- Two small menu strings are easier to read on Steam Deck. The `SPACER //` callsign on every Spacer Roster card and the version stamp in the title screen's corner both sit above the 12px legibility floor at 1280×800 now.
v1.26
CHANGES
- The Outfitter's COMPARE readout is a compact strip again. Landing on a weapon offer no longer throws up a huge empty panel over the cards; the three-line readout sits under the hand where it belongs.
v1.25
CHANGES
- Mine comparisons now use deployments per second; drone comparisons include your current Hive Link bonus.
- Owned weapon details wrap their combine instructions so the full text remains readable.
- Beams and saws cut armored enemies consistently, without losing short contacts to a damage timer.
- Attack speed now increases beam and saw damage, including mining and beam forks.
- Reinforced Suit now grants +5 armor at a heavier -6% movement-speed cost.
- Scrap Instincts now grants +24% harvesting for -4% ranged damage.
- Overclocked Drill now grants +25% attack speed for -2 armor.
- Glass Reactor now grants +30% damage for its -6 hull cost, making the risk pay off.
- Life steal now follows damage actually dealt after enemy defenses, without credit for overkill.
- Every drone mount now contributes escorts, including full racks of high-tier swarms.
- Champion's Charter no longer appears on Hazard 0 contracts where it cannot grant a bonus.
- Ronin's Monomania Lens and Void Ronin Plate now count locked mounts too, rewarding the space his focused build leaves unused.
v1.24
CHANGES
- Mouse movement no longer spins your spacer. Right-click dodges toward the cursor, sharing the dash charge with Shift. WASD steers; directional supers follow flight heading.
- Flick the right stick to dodge. Burst in any direction while your weapons keep aiming and firing automatically. Recenter before another flick; stick dodges and the dash button share the same charge. Your spacer faces their flight direction, and directional supers follow that heading.
v1.23
CHANGES
- One pilot, one run. The three save slots are gone. Your progress is a single profile now: unlocks, the Service Record, commendations and the flight log were always shared, so the title screen simply shows CONTINUE RUN when a run is parked, with the run right under it (spacer, mode, hazard, wave, level, credits, last played), and NEW RUN takes you straight to spacer, belt and mode select.
- Starting over asks once. With a run parked, NEW RUN opens a single ABANDON CURRENT RUN? prompt. Keeping is the default; abandoning archives that run to your Service Record with its full wave log, exactly as an overwrite did before.
- Existing saves carry over. On first launch the run you played most recently becomes your saved run. Any other runs that were parked in the old slots are archived to the flight log as abandoned so nothing is lost; you may see their commendations land at boot.
v1.22
CHANGES
- Win Matrix cells you've cleared glow gold again. The unified menu theme had painted every earned cell in the same brass as an ordinary selection.
v1.21
CHANGES
- Menus share the new title screen's calmer look. The Outfitter, pause menu, Options, save slots, spacer roster and outpost blueprint choices use warm ivory text, charcoal panels and brass focus markers. Offer cards are larger, descriptions stay readable when you cannot afford them, and settings use a clear category rail.
- Controller focus stays where you left it. Returning from Options or View Build restores the matching pause command, resuming the Outfitter restores your selected offer, and blueprint choices keep focus when they open over the dock.
- Power grows, but not at an insane rate. After the audit of a Magnate run that felt unstoppable from wave 12, the game adopts the brakes that keep Brotato honest: attack speed keeps its full value up to +100% and half value beyond, and can never exceed 3x your base fire rate; life steal now heals at most 10% of your max hull per second instead of a percentage of unbounded damage; OVERDRIVE is a 6-second burst you earn every 40 kills in a streak instead of a permanent state.
- Item cards say how many you can own. Capacitor Bleed, War Drum and Fabricator Arm are limited to 2, Hollowpoint Slugs to 4, Ore Scanner to 5; cards show UNIQUE, LIMIT N or 1/4, a maxed card reads MAXED and buying it is refused instead of silently charging you. The Outfitter never offers a card you cannot use.
- Income tightens late instead of exploding. Harvesting now boosts ore value only, kill scrap decays 1.5% per wave from wave 5 down to half, and a reroll costs 30% of a 100-credit card at that wave's price (30 at wave 1, 82 at wave 10, 196 at wave 20) instead of a flat trickle.
- Tier IV single-shot guns lose their free second projectile and are retuned so tier IV is about 4.5x tier I instead of 7x, and still a clear step up from the two tier IIIs it consumes.
- Magnate's greed cap is 1.5x instead of 2x, and corsairs hunt a heavy Magnate hold harder.
- The game finally explains itself. A new HOW TO PLAY screen (title menu, two pages, shows your controller's real buttons or your keys) covers flying, docking, GREED, streaks and OVERDRIVE, GRAZE and the ULTIMATE, and every Outfitter verb: BUY, LOCK, COMBINE, REROLL, RECYCLE. Six new one-time hints fire the first time you build a kill streak, ignite OVERDRIVE, fill your ultimate, graze a bolt, fly a heavy hold, or open the Outfitter. The level-up screen says "Pick one upgrade" and shows its buttons. Hazard blurbs now state the run length in waves.
- Easier to read on the Deck. Larger HUD text for the outpost chips, objective, hull and streak; the streak chip says what its bonus applies to (STREAK ×12 · +36% SCRAP); a heavy hold reads HEAVY — BANK IT; the ultimate and dash meters are taller and labelled ULT and DASH, the XP bar is labelled; idle prompts use a higher-contrast colour; Outfitter card tags, stat rows, synergy chips, compare lines, TRADE-IN headers and the prompt rail are all a size up; the callout pill and flight hint now follow the HUD Scale option.
- Elites and bosses are a real check. Elite hull climbs steeply with the wave, the final boss has roughly five times the hull it had (about 20,000 at wave 18 on Hazard 2, a 15 to 20 second fight for a solid build), elite waves are guaranteed around 60% and 85% of every Hazard 2+ contract, and each weapon picks its nearest target so movement guides your focus.
v1.20
CHANGES
- Every run now keeps its full flight log. The run history records the complete build at the end of each run (spacer, every weapon with its tier, every passive item and how many copies, outpost modules, the final stat sheet) plus a wave-by-wave timeline of credits, kills, level, items owned, damage, attack speed, armor and hull. Quitting and resuming keeps the log, and old history entries still load unchanged.
v1.19
CHANGES
- A new view of the belt. The title screen now looks out across a vast orbital refinery, layered asteroids and a distant planet, with a spacer watching from the hangar.
- A calmer, clearer menu. The left-side menu uses warm ivory text, charcoal selection and brass accents. The bright cyan command panel is gone, while Continue, save slots and controller navigation remain available.
- A little life in the scene. Sparse drifting dust adds motion behind the steady artwork and menu, with the quiet startup soundtrack continuing through setup.
v1.18
CHANGES
- Item cards now tell the truth about stacking. Ballast Rounds, Adrenal Feed, Dividend Engine, Escrow Plating and Dock Fever cap at the number printed on the card no matter how many copies you own — extra copies reach that cap faster instead of raising it. Dock Fever's card now shows its +40% ceiling.
- Core Tap, Phase Rebate and Pressure Manifold are one-per-run. A second Core Tap never did anything, and the other two would have been dead purchases under the honest cap, so the Outfitter no longer offers duplicates.
- Hull can't go negative. Stacking hull trade-off items past your base hull no longer produces a zero or negative max hull.
- Curse-heavy runs stay inside the Steam Deck frame budget. The number of enemies alive at once now has a hard ceiling, so stacking Enemy Count items on Rush at high Hazard can't flood the arena past what the game is tuned for.
- The download is a third of the size. The install dropped from about 2.9 GB to about 1.0 GB. Nothing you can see changed: weapon, station and spacer textures were shipping at 4K for objects that are 40 to 100 pixels tall on screen, and half a gigabyte of concept art, store art, review captures and retired models was being packed into the game for no reason.
- Spacers load lighter. The Valkyrie, Wrecker and Magnate bodies were carrying their skin as raw uncompressed image data; they now use the same GPU-compressed textures as everything else, so they take a fraction of the graphics memory on Steam Deck.
- VFX Detail: Reduced now also lightens the backdrop. The option used to thin only sparks and glow. On Reduced, the deep-space gas volume samples half as densely and the dust field draws half its motes. Full is untouched and remains the default.
v1.17
CHANGES
- The Outfitter's button prompts sit in their own lane. The A BUY / X LOCK / COMBINE / B LAUNCH / Y REROLL rail no longer runs under the HOLD TO LAUNCH plate on Steam Deck. It is centred between the build slate and the plate, trimmed to fit even with a three-digit reroll price, and the redundant "HOLD TO" wording moved off the rail because the plate beside it already says it
v1.16
CHANGES
- A quieter welcome to orbit. The splash and title screens now randomly choose between Deep Navy Space and Loading Screen, easing in slowly at a subtle background volume.
- The music stays with you. The studio splash holds while the game loads, then reveals the title without restarting the song. Launching a run crossfades into the combat soundtrack; returning to the title brings back the quieter atmosphere.
v1.15
CHANGES
- Credits have their own sign. Every price, wallet, payout and refusal now reads as the credit sign followed by the amount, one electronic post-Earth currency everywhere, instead of a "cr" suffix. The sign is a C struck through with a vertical bar, drawn into both of the game's fonts so it can never come out as a box
- The rack always finds its way back to the hand. After buying a card, going down to your weapons and pressing up returns you to the offers in one move. It used to dead-end when the first card had been sold, and only RIGHT twice to HOLD TO LAUNCH then up would get out
v1.14
CHANGES
- The SMG sounds like a gun. Its fire sound was authored as an electronic "energy tap" and read as a laser blip on Deck speakers. It is now four real ballistic gunshots, hard gunpowder cracks with a deep thump, chosen by ear from three candidates rendered at the SMG's real rate of fire
v1.13
CHANGES
- The Outfitter's stray crosshair is gone. A small reticle sat at dead centre of the shop with nothing to aim at. It was an artifact of the first-person concept frame the room was modelled on, not a design choice, and it has been removed
- Shop cards stay put. Buying an item no longer nudges the three remaining cards a few pixels down and right. The hand was being pinned to its pedestals while the cards were still animating in, so every card sat slightly off its beam until a later refresh snapped it into place
v1.12
CHANGES
- A new studio opening. Gunmetal Orbit now opens with the LineCrush Games signature inside an orbital dock, with a "Brought to you by LineCrush" credit.
v1.11
CHANGES
- Flying feels sharper. Thrusters answer faster: you hit full speed in about a quarter second instead of nearly half, a left-right reversal takes a third of a second instead of most of one, and letting go of the stick stops you in well under a second instead of a long slide. Top speed is unchanged, so enemies and hazards play exactly as before
v1.10
CHANGES
- The trade-in card no longer opens as a blank slab. On Steam Deck, pressing REPLACE on a weapon offer with a full rack showed the Outfitter's trade-in comparison as an empty teal panel stretching above the top of the screen until you nudged the stick. The card now lands correctly sized and filled on the very first frame
v1.09
CHANGES
- An arsenal you can hear. Every weapon type has its own modern electronic voice that complements the dubstep soundtrack, with a controlled mix when six different weapons fire together.
- More satisfying mining and rewards. Compact rock and armor hits replace constant clanging, while collecting, banking ore and leveling up get clearer, more rewarding sounds.
- New Gunmetal Orbit artwork. A closer six-gun firefight over the Industrial Belt welcomes you at startup, with a small "Created by LineCrush and LineCrush Games" credit.
- The Outfitter's trade-in card now reads the way you swap. When you buy a weapon onto a full rack, the card shows YOUR gun on the left → the NEW gun on the right, the change for each stat sits beside the new value it belongs to, the title asks the actual question ("REPLACE SCATTERGUN WITH SMG?"), and the verdict names every gain instead of just damage. The old card put the new gun on the left with the numbers floating between, so a straight upgrade read like a downgrade
- Nothing draws over the numbers. The centre reticle steps aside while the trade-in card is up, and the three different "pick a slot" prompts collapsed into one
- Combining weapons never strands the controller. Merging two weapons from any rack slot now lands focus on the upgraded weapon, and the tier-up ribbon plays on the right slot. If focus is ever lost anywhere in a menu, the next stick or D-pad press recovers it instead of going dead
- The Outfitter is easier to read and understand. Card text is bigger with a dark backing, tags spell out RANGE and SHOTS, tiers explain themselves (Tier I: combine two for Tier II), one verb (COMBINE) replaces MERGE and UPGRADE, ROUND is now WAVE everywhere, and the NEXT WAVE preview is back so you know what you are buying for
- Button prompts tell the truth. The rails show every action for your input device, COMBINE is always listed and greys out until a pair is ready, a selected slot shows how to deselect, and a refused purchase says why in a readable toast
- VIEW STATS no longer covers the first shop card, and the Outfitter's prompts hide while the Outpost is open
- Outpost fixes. Pressing X while moving a module no longer secretly buys an upgrade, B on a blueprint milestone no longer forfeits the free blueprint, the overlay has its own prompt rail, the socket colour legend sits where you choose, and cores are always called Fabrication Cores
- Records has a visible BACK, the end-of-run screen fills its panel with every stat readable and explains Endless before you pick it, and earned unlocks show on their own row
- The in-run HUD matches the menus. Caps display font, a hull readout you can read over the green bar, a countdown clock that heats up in the last seconds, KILLS instead of an ambiguous count, glyph badges on the dash and ultimate rails, a visible XP track, and no more boss bar or outpost label collisions. The boss bar also hides the moment a boss dies
- Credits read as credits. The currency symbol that rendered as a box is now cr everywhere; greyed buttons are legible; the pause menu is compact with a plain LAST SAVE line
- Menus polished on Deck. Glyph badges on every rail, HUD Scale shows 1.0x to 1.3x, RESET SAVE is red and out of the way, the title rail fits on one line, save slots show LAST PLAYED, character select names the ultimate's button and calls the pickup stat PICKUP RANGE, sector select no longer prints its note twice, hazards are H0 to H5 everywhere, and the first tutorial line says BANK ORE like the rest of the game
- A real hazard ladder. H1 and H2 are now genuine steps instead of H0 with more waves: H1 gains a second special wave and ambient elites from wave 6, H2 adds hull, damage and crowd. H0 and H3 to H5 are unchanged
- Late-run economy keeps its bite. The outpost tier-II price and the flawless-wave bonus now scale with weapon prices instead of falling behind; Endless mutators start at wave 18 and rotate every 4 waves; the Carnage Core and Dreadnought Ledger relics unlock at 4,000 kills and 4 bosses so there is always a next goal after the opening runs
- Every sound sits right in the mix. All 149 cues normalized to consistent loudness by class, fourteen weak cues re-authored (the hull hit and ore pickup were nearly silent), and eleven new sounds: weapon combine, recycle, menu confirm and back, card reveal, cargo full, cargo spill, low hull, outpost blueprint, unlock earned and commendation earned. The Blaster shot is back in line with the other kinetic weapons
- Save safety. Every save now carries the writing session's identity so the cloud-sync guard can never mistake the game's own writes for a cloud pull
v1.08
CHANGES
- Every weapon now looks like itself. Tracers, muzzle flashes, trails and hits are authored per weapon family: kinetic streaks with a dark slug, railgun lances that leave a trail, plasma orbs, finned missiles trailing smoke, cryo shards shedding frost, chain lightning that actually arcs and branches, mining beams with a hot core that bite where they cut, and real cutting fans on the drills
- Explosions have weight. Every blast is a hot flash, a spray of embers and sparks, a shockwave on the deck, dark ore dust, tumbling debris and a scorch mark, in four sizes from a trash pop to a boss detonation. Rings land exactly on the damage radius they promise
- Enemies die like they mean it. Small enemies pop, elites break apart, and bosses charge up, pop in stages across the hull, then go up in a full detonation
- Every ultimate is its own event. Nova Charge, Bullet Storm, Motherlode, Bastion Slam, Lance Drive, Shock Core, Margin Call, Iaijutsu and Blink Veil each have a bespoke effect that replaces the old shared shockwave
- Hostile fire reads as hostile. Enemy bolts are dark-headed red streaks with their own muzzle flash, and mortar telegraphs sit exactly on their blast
- A real combat soundtrack. Over a hundred new authored sounds: each weapon family fires with its own layered shot, enemies and bosses have a harsher voice of their own, hits differ by surface, deaths by tier, each ultimate has its own cue, and beams and saws are audible on contact. Sounds come from where they happen on the field, the music ducks under big explosions, and a master limiter keeps peaks clean
- Hits, dashes and crits land harder. Taking damage shows a red rim from the side the hit came from with a short lens pulse (both respect the Screen Flash setting), dashes leave a streak and cinders, crits get a tiny freeze and gold sparks, and screen shake is smoother, tilts the camera slightly and scales with distance
- A darker, hotter picture. Bloom is retuned for a black canvas: only genuinely hot things glow, halos stay tight, the mortar warning ring no longer outshines the blast it warns about, and missiles are amber so they never read as enemy fire. Ultimate flashes are a clean white pop instead of a full-screen colour wash
- Damage numbers stay out of the way. At most six enemy hit numbers float at once; extra hits on the same target fold into the number already showing, and they clear faster. Enemies also lost the big red pool under their hulls, so the fight reads from the ships, not the floor
- New option: VFX Detail. REDUCED thins embers, dust, debris and scorch marks for extra headroom on Steam Deck without removing anything you read the fight from
v1.07
CHANGES
- Combat performance improvements. Enemy movement and projectile collision checks do less unnecessary work during fights
v1.06
CHANGES
- Space now has motion and depth. Subtle drifting gas and dust at different distances bring the space around the Industrial Belt to life as you fly
- A richer deep-space backdrop. Detailed blue-violet nebula banks, finer stars and darker open space give the action a clearer, more atmospheric setting
- Background motion pauses with the game. The layers resume together when you return to the fight
v1.05
CHANGES
- The station and bridge now meet with fitted steel supports. Flanged brackets, girder seats and capped service connections give the Industrial Belt junction a more convincing construction
- More natural surface detail at the station end. Recessed seams, worn edges and varied metal finishes improve the connection while keeping the flight lane clear
v1.04
CHANGES
- The Industrial Belt now has a solid station-to-refinery bridge. Deep steel girders, weathered deck panels, pipework and fitted supports make the connection read as part of a working orbital facility
- The bridge holds its shape as you fly past. Its deck and supporting hardware change detail together with distance, while keeping the flight lanes clear
v1.03
CHANGES
- The Industrial Belt refinery has been rebuilt. Weathered ceramic processing vessels, layered gantries, pipework and a basalt foundation bring sharper detail and more convincing materials to the first map
- The refinery is alive. Cooling louvers cycle as you fly past, with consistent lighting and solid geometry as detail changes with distance
v1.02
CHANGES
- Launch build. The title screen now shows the plain version number; the pre-release "dev" tag is gone. No gameplay changes from 1.01
v1.01
CHANGES
- Pausing now truly pauses the fight. Scheduled elite waves, boss telegraphs, and rich-ore veins no longer spawn into a frozen arena while the pause menu (or a Steam overlay auto-pause) is up
- Fixed: weapon sounds haunting the menus. Dying with a mining beam locked on or saws spinning left their hum playing behind the results card and every menu until the next run — the audio now goes silent with the ship
- Fixed: piercing weapons shredding rocks. Shots that pass through, bounce, or boomerang were re-hitting the same asteroid every single frame (roughly sixty hits per second instead of one per pass) — rock damage now lands once per pass, and all bolts honor their range stat
- Fixed: Service Record navigation on gamepad. Reopening the Records screen left the D-pad dead — every reopen now lands focus properly. The Outfitter's weapon-compare strip now also opens from gamepad focus, and a stale mouse hover can no longer override where you're pointed
- Your career stats count everything now. Runs overwritten at the title screen (abandoned or won) were silently dropping grazes, boss kills, delivery streaks, and the actual sector flown from your lifetime commendation progress — all of it is recorded now. Waves are also credited as *cleared* waves (dying in wave 5 counts 4, not 5), which tightens Daily Contract scores too
- The Daily Contract is honestly one attempt per day. A run quit mid-attempt no longer frees the day up for unlimited retries
- Fixed: buying a hull trade-off item can't leave your hull bar reading past full (e.g. 50/46)
- Menu keys are protected from rebinding. Options refuses a rebind that would steal Esc, Enter, WASD menu navigation, or the Outfitter shortcuts, and stops advertising the never-used Mine binding
- Pinned sectors stay alive. In a pinned sector, crystal clusters regrow and derelict wrecks return wave after wave instead of the zone's bonus going permanently silent after its first wave — and the sentry turret no longer claims kills on enemies that were already dissolving
- Reclaimers can't yank a chunk that's already flying to you, and several smaller fixes: stray key presses no longer flip the control prompts off a gamepad mid-run, the blast-effect pops read correctly on enemies that die mid-animation, and ambient shop room events survive a visit to the Outpost
v1.0
CHANGES
- The entire spacer roster now belongs to one powered-flight exosuit family. Rookie, Prospector, and Bulkhead have been rebuilt to the same grounded, high-detail Javelin-class standard as Gunner, with shared human proportions, sealed flight hardware, paired main thrusters, and role-specific armor instead of four unrelated character styles. Valkyrie, Wrecker, Magnate, Ronin, and Phantom inherit the same coherent family through their established body and identity-kit paths
- Bulkhead finally moves like the rest of the roster. The heavy spacer's repaired action rig replaces the old static-body safety fallback, so hover, thrust, dash, recoil, ultimate, and hit reactions now carry through the complete suit and its armor
v0.79
CHANGES
- Internal controller testing access is available again without an exposed shortcut. The Control Deck can be armed from the main title screen through a deliberate session-only input, while ordinary controller use has no single chord or visible hint that can open it accidentally
v0.78
CHANGES
- The Gunner has a brand-new exosuit. The assault spacer's body is rebuilt from the ground up: a proper Anthem-class powered flight suit with a real twin-canister thruster backpack, a black visor with glowing cyan eyes, brass ammunition across the chest, and full physically-based materials — painted navy armor, bare gunmetal mechanisms, rubber joints, and working suit lights — replacing the old flat gray body. Flight animations carry over in full
- The hero now reads in dark arenas. A dedicated character rim light rides the suit so the Gunner stays separated from the background at the fixed camera, and suit materials now honor their authored roughness/metal maps instead of being flattened to one matte finish
v0.77
CHANGES
- Your progress now survives Steam Deck sleep/wake. Suspend the Deck mid-session and resume later - or pick the game back up on your desktop after Steam Cloud has synced a newer save - and Gunmetal Orbit now spots the newer save and loads it instead of writing your older state over the top of it. If a cloud update lands while you're in the middle of a wave, the game holds off until the wave is over so your run is never yanked out from under you
- The developer console is no longer reachable in release builds. The hidden cheat/testing console (and its Control Deck) opened with the tilde key or an L3+R3 gamepad click - trivially discoverable on a Steam Deck. It is now compiled out of shipped builds entirely: there is no key, button combo, or menu that can summon it. Development and internal test builds keep it exactly as before
v0.76
CHANGES
- Fixed: the Service Record's commendation list no longer cuts off its own text on Steam Deck. Commendation names, descriptions, and progress counts were being chopped at the edge of the panel — "ORE BARON" read as "ORE BAR…", "Earn 1,000,000 credits in total." stopped at "credits in to", and progress figures like "7,360 / 1,000,000" were sliced mid-number. Every commendation now shows its full name on its own line, with the progress figure sitting beside its bar where it always has room
- The Service Record's three columns are rebalanced so the commendation list gets the width it needs instead of leaving it empty beside the career and win-matrix columns
v0.75
CHANGES
- The dev console now unlocks a hidden Control Deck. Type `panel` (or pick it from the quick menu) and the whole cheat surface opens as a browsable UI: every catalog laid out as cards with its real icons, rarity colours and live owned-state — stat increments, the passive-item list with a rarity filter, the full weapon rack grantable at any tier, outpost modules, evolutions, protocols and contracts, and an enemy spawner with normal/elite/boss strength. Session flags, run resources, hazard and wave controls sit on the front page. Tabs switch with LB/RB, so the entire cheat set is reachable on a Steam Deck without typing a command. Once unlocked, the tilde key and L3+R3 open the deck instead of the prompt; its CONSOLE button goes back to text
v0.74
CHANGES
- The dev console grows teeth. New cheats: god mode, one-hit kills, free shop, wave jump, instant win/lose, hazard and seed control, cargo fill, delivery streak, free rerolls, enemy spawning, kill-all, time scale, construction-objective completion, and a one-shot unlock of every spacer, weapon, item, and sector. The console itself gains Tab completion, colored output, persistent command history, and a gamepad quick-cheat menu (d-pad + A) for keyboard-free Steam Deck testing
v0.73
CHANGES
- Fixed: continuing a saved run no longer breaks the Gunner's animation. Loading an old save could leave the Gunner's arms windmilling with the guns spinning in circles the moment they aimed at an enemy; resumed runs now animate exactly like fresh ones
v0.72
CHANGES
- Hidden dev console for faster testing. Pressing the tilde key (`) on a keyboard — or L3+R3 together on a gamepad — opens a cheat console with commands for credits, level-ups, outpost modules and evolutions, construction cores, hull, ultimate charge, items, weapons, and ending the wave instantly
- The Gunner now flies on real authored animation. Hovering, flying in every direction, and boosting play professionally authored jetpack flight performances on the Gunner's actual body instead of code-generated posing. Aiming, recoil, and head tracking still react to the fight on top of the authored motion (requires the licensed animation install; other spacers unchanged for now)
v0.71
CHANGES
- Spacers keep one intact human silhouette. Bulkhead no longer collapses into a pile of overlapping armor and limbs, and every animated spacer keeps their elbows, knees, hands, and boots in believable order while hovering or accelerating
- Standing still now holds a compact, living low-ready pose with bent elbows and separated legs, without a T-pose, crossed feet, a hand through the helmet, or a limb punched toward the camera
v0.70
CHANGES
- Standing still now looks like controlled zero-G flight. The spacer holds a compact low-ready posture with both boots clearly separated instead of crossing their legs, punching one arm toward the camera, or falling back to a T-pose
- The hover stays alive with restrained hand, shoulder, leg, and breathing motion, then flows into thrust, strafe, dash, firing, hit, and ultimate reactions without a frozen-pose snap
v0.69
CHANGES
- Spacer flight is stable again. Automatic fire, boosts, hits, and Bullet Storm can no longer flip, corkscrew, or crumple the entire exosuit while the player keeps moving underneath it
- Jetpack hardware, maneuver jets, and weapons stay with the spacer instead of being pulled away by an incompatible full-body pose
v0.68
CHANGES
- Every spacer now flies and fights with authored full-body performances. Hovering, directional flight, turns, boosts, combat stance changes, rapid fire, charged shots, hit reactions, and Bullet Storm flourishes now use the new animation set instead of relying on the old procedural body pose alone. One-gun and two-gun loadouts get their own performances, so a starter spacer no longer mimes a missing second weapon
- Weapons still aim and recoil independently on top of those performances, while the jetpack, maneuver jets, and loader arms stay locked to the moving exosuit through hard turns and attack poses
v0.67
CHANGES
- Booting up is no longer laggy. The game's boot-loaded 3D texture set dropped from ~5.4 GB to ~400 MB of GPU memory (it was overcommitting the graphics card and causing stutter that lasted past the menus), and the twenty enemy war-machine bodies now stream in on background threads behind the title screen instead of stalling the first frame
- Your first run makes its own choices. A brand-new pilot now starts straight into slot 1 (no save-slot picker on an empty profile) with one clear path open — the Drifter, THE DRIFT, Standard mode — instead of being asked to pick between spacers, belts, and modes they know nothing about. Everything else stays visible with exactly what it takes to earn it: a new spacer and a new belt unlock after each of your first three runs, Endless opens after 2 runs, and the Daily Contract after 3 — win or lose, flying counts
- Hazard levels were already earned the hard way; that hasn't changed
- You can tell the ore apart now — and apart from the scenery. Mineable rocks carry a resting glow and a real tier color from the moment they spawn: Dust is plain grey stone, Ferrite warms brown, Cobalt reads blue, Plasma reads purple — no more shooting into a field of identical black lumps to find out what's valuable. Background belt debris has been darkened and de-rimmed so the rule is simple: if it's lit and colored, mine it; if it's flat and dark, fly past it
- Even the cheapest Dust rocks now show a small unlit mineral seam so they read as "ore, just not much," and a half-mined Dust rock no longer glows the same orange as a fresh Ferrite
- Menus click like they should. Hovering a mission profile, hazard rung, or sector card now only previews it — your actual choice is made by clicking (or pressing Enter / the A button) and stays put until you pick something else. No more silently switching hazard on the way to the LAUNCH button, and the chosen card glows gold so it's obvious what you're about to fly
- Hovering and choosing look different now. A card under your mouse gets a quiet highlight; the card you've actually picked keeps the full gold treatment — across Run Configuration, sector select, and the Spacer roster (whose focus chip now honestly says VIEWING instead of SELECTED)
- Your mouse cursor comes back reliably. With a controller plugged in, slow mouse movement now re-summons the cursor instead of leaving it hidden until you flicked the mouse hard
v0.66
CHANGES
- The Industrial Belt has room to breathe. The base arena is 25% wider, the refinery landmarks and asteroid field have been spread across the larger footprint, and the center is protected as a real combat lane instead of a squeeze between scenery
- Low scenery is honest overflight space now. Fly straight across the station bridge, sunken rocks, and perimeter shelves; only the station and three unmistakably tall hero islands stop you, with rounded collision that glides around their silhouettes instead of catching on invisible box corners
v0.65
CHANGES
- Every hostile is a war machine now. The whole enemy roster — all twelve field kinds, the five deep-run specialists, and the three rotating bosses — has been rebuilt as hostile industrial hardware from the refinery's own civilization: quad-rotor swarm drones, hovering railgun sentries, kamikaze missile-drones with glowing red warhead cores, a hydraulic mortar walker, a crescent blade interceptor, a plasma-loom strafer, a drone-carrier mothership, a shield-projector platform, an EMP skiff, a salvage skiff, a gravity gyro, boarding cutters and pursuit frames — plus three enormous boss machines: a tracked siege fortress, a ring-vaned storm caster, and an asteroid-eating dreadnought. No more critters, and no more recolored look-alikes: every enemy you face has its own body
- Hostiles glow red and orange. Enemy eyes, cores, thrusters, shield walls, death bursts, and warning markers all live in the red/orange family now — cyan and amber belong to your station, so danger reads at a glance
- Derelict hulks are real dead ships. The graveyard zone's cover wrecks are now authored broken mining barges — snapped spine, exposed decks, dead engine block with a dim reactor ember — instead of floating boxes
v0.64
CHANGES
- Flying feels open again. Collision across the rebuilt belt now matches exactly what you see: every island's physics hugs its visible rock, two phantom walls at the north rim are gone entirely, and boxes that had drifted away from the new architecture (the ore island's was five units off) are re-seated — no more bumping into invisible stuff in open space
- The ore pipeline and the low mid-field rocks sit clearly below your flight path now, so crossing over them reads right
v0.63
CHANGES
- The Industrial Belt is a real place now. The first map has been rebuilt as one orbital mining installation constructed through the asteroid field: a refinery complex joined to the home station by a truss bridge, a crane-and-drill extraction island in the foreground, an ore processor with glowing teal crystal seams, cargo depots, comms towers, a broken habitat ring on the horizon, and rugged stratified rock the machinery is actually built into — replacing the old scattered-props arena
- Everything casts real shadows. The islands and machinery self-shadow under the star key, so the whole arena has depth and weight it never had
- Deep space looks the part. A new hand-graded nebula backdrop: near-black navy field with confined indigo-violet cloud banks and fine stars, instead of the old electric-blue streaks; ambient light pulled down so amber work lamps and cyan systems light actually pool
- Mineable asteroid spawn points were re-seated around the new architecture so rocks never appear inside structures
- New visual North Star for the whole game. The first-map acceptance frame (`reference_images/first-map-gameplay-target.png`) is now a dense orbital mining/refinery installation built *through* a realistic asteroid field — machinery structurally merged into photoreal rock, real PBR materials, cool star key + amber practicals + restrained cyan, deep blue/purple nebula. The previous target is archived as `first-map-gameplay-target-v1-archive.png`; three supporting guides (`first-map-composition-guide.png`, `first-map-material-lighting-guide.png`, `first-map-production-pipeline-guide.png`) explain how to reach it
- Blender-first environment authoring. Primary static gameplay environments are authored in Blender from Meshy 6 high-detail source pieces (reference target → Meshy source → Blender-authored world → optimized GLBs → Godot gameplay); GDScript never builds visible primary level art from procedural primitives
- Real-time 3D requirement locked in. The main arena's camera holds a fixed 2.5D angle but moves, so the environment must be full real-time 3D with real parallax — baked plates remain valid only for truly static cameras (e.g. the Outfitter)
- Low-poly is optimization, never style. "Steam Deck first" means invisible optimization (LODs, baked detail, retopo, material consolidation, culling, collision proxies) that preserves the approved silhouette and material language — never low-poly hero assets
- Enemies are hostile industrial AI hardware. The roster reads as corrupted/weaponized machines from the same civilization as the refinery — drones, security bots, siege platforms — never cute creatures or generic aliens (archetype visual table in `DESIGN.md`)
- The art factory now teaches the new style. `tools/gen_models.py` global style, hero body, and enemy guard rewritten to reference-locked industrial realism (Overwatch/collectible/chibi language removed; "alien" enemies converted to autonomous hardware; legacy cozy-station and cute-drone prompts corrected); `tools/gen_assets.py` enemy/achievement icons now read as hostile drones, not creatures
- Native-resolution acceptance frame. New `reference_images/first-map-gameplay-target-1280x800.png` — art-directed 16:10 derivative of the 16:9 master (vertical extension, never stretched) for full-frame engine comparison at the game's real 1280×800 target
- Missing production art is loud now. Every procedural fallback in `models.gd` (astronaut, station, weapons, saw, drone, mine) fires a `PRIMARY ART MISSING` `push_error` instead of silently shipping placeholder geometry
v0.62
NEW
- You can actually see your spacer now. The exosuit carries a warm edge light that cuts its silhouette out of the starfield, so the way it flies — the trailing legs, the shoulders absorbing recoil, the torso leading a turn — finally reads at gameplay distance instead of disappearing into the nebula
- The home outpost reads like an instrument, not a circle. The landing ring is now a layered cyan scale — a bright core line bracketed by hairlines, with a slow graduation crawl — instead of a flat teal hoop, and the tractor field around your spacer has dropped back to a faint hairline so the two no longer compete for your eye
- Deep space got deeper. The nebula's midtones fall away between its bright cloud banks, so the belt reads as dark space with hot accents instead of one continuous blue wash — asteroids, ore, and weapon fire all sit clearer against it
v0.61
NEW
- The Plasma Drill actually drills. Its bit cone now spins while the weapon is out — the first of the "everything that should move, moves" pass bringing authored motion to gear and machinery that used to sit frozen
v0.60
NEW
- The deep-space belt got real rock. The distant asteroid ring and the small fragments drifting under the play area now mix in photogrammetry-scanned moon rocks — actual stone silhouettes and surface detail instead of only generated shapes. Purely visual; mining, spawns, and balance are untouched
v0.59
NEW
- Mining finally sounds like mining. Rocks tick with sharp chips as you work them, groan and crack deeper as they weaken, and crystal outcrops and derelict hulks now spark and glint under your guns instead of soaking damage in silence — with a burst of color when they finally give
- Every weapon has a voice. The mining laser and Starfire Lance hum while they cut, the Saw Arm whirs as it spins, drones fire with their own rapid pew, and mines latch audibly as they leave the rack
- LEVEL UP lands the moment it happens. A stinger, a banner, and a green shockwave at your spacer the instant you level mid-fight — no more finding out at the wave-end menu
- Bosses die like bosses. A boss kill now detonates with a massive explosion sting, a hero shockwave, and a screen flash; elites go up in a real layered blast. Bosses also announce their phase-2 escalation and their enrage instead of just quietly speeding up
- Your hold tells you when it's full. Ore that won't fit buzzes the refusal and the cargo readout pops red — bank it
- Healing you can see. Every hull point restored shows a green +N at your spacer, with the repair surge sound on meaningful patches
- Menus push back. Rerolls you can't afford, locked modes, hazards, sectors, and a spent Daily Contract all refuse with the standard denial buzz instead of silently doing nothing
v0.58
NEW
- Steam Cloud saves. Your run slots, run history, and career record now follow your Steam account across devices — start a run on desktop, keep flying it on the Deck. Options stay per-device on purpose
v0.57
NEW
- THE ORE TYRANT. A fourth boss joins the rotation — a molten dreadnought that eats the belt out from under you. Every few seconds it tractor-locks the nearest asteroid and swallows it to heal its hull; mine the locked rock out from under it and it staggers, wide open to bonus damage. It stalks CRYSTAL REACH, FURNACE BELT, SCRAPLINE, and the open drift
- Aim with your mouse. On keyboard and mouse, your guns now track the cursor — true twin-stick aim for the desktop. Controller aim is untouched, and switching between pad and mouse mid-run keeps working
- Rebind your controls. Options › Controls now lets you rebind every flight and combat action — keyboard keys and controller buttons each get their own row — with a press-to-capture flow, conflict protection, and RESTORE DEFAULTS. The options screen scrolls now, too
- See your build, finally. A VIEW BUILD panel shows your full loadout — spacer, weapon rack with tiers, every passive item, your headline stats, and the outpost ring — from both the pause menu mid-run and the run-end screen. Run-end also shows your run's SEED
- Elite waves and hordes field the whole roster. A scheduled elite can now ride any real combat body instead of always the same bulwark, hordes mix support gunships into the swarm instead of pouring one body type, and higher hazards sprinkle surprise elites into Standard and Mining Rush runs
- The game teaches its own tricks now. Six one-time callouts explain the greed multiplier, cargo spills, delivery streaks, weapon merging, and your first outpost module the moment each one first matters — and a REPLAY HINTS button in Options brings them all back. Edge-of-screen chevrons now point at telegraphed spawn lanes, live rich veins, and the dock when your hold is heavy
- The Daily Contract finally has a global scoreboard. Your score posts to a per-day Steam leaderboard, with your rank and the top pilots shown on the mode screen and in the Service Record
- Accessibility pass. COLORBLIND ASSIST swaps the hull and streak danger ramps to a colorblind-safe palette, HUD SCALE grows the combat HUD up to 130%, and a MAX FPS cap (30/40/60/120) joins Video for Deck battery control
- The Spacer Roster breathes again. The hangar now pages four spacers at a time on the lit platforms — no more nine cards crushed into one row — with page chevrons and your current spacer's page opening first
- Outfitter cards hold their shape. Card text can no longer push the price out of the frame, every card in a hand renders at one height, and buying a card no longer shuffles the survivors — SOLD cards keep their exact spot with a clean stamp
- Your spacer can finally wear the record you earned. MAGNATE, RONIN, and PHANTOM now fly in their own identity kits, while FULL SPREAD, ALL HANDS, and GRAND SURVEY each unlock a 3D mastery piece you can equip from the Service Record — fitted across the entire roster and saved between launches
v0.56
NEW
- WIN MATRIX 2.0. The Service Record's spacer × hazard grid is now alive: sweep the cells with stick or mouse and a detail strip reads each one back — CLEARED with the date you first won it (veteran marks from before records kept show as exactly that), OPEN with the ask, or LOCKED with the spacer's condition. A hazard accent ramp (teal to red) runs across the columns, the header carries your total — every spacer, every hazard — and each row counts its own six
- Three new commendations. FULL SPREAD (win at every hazard with a single spacer), ALL HANDS (win at the same hazard with every spacer), and GRAND SURVEY (fill the entire win matrix) — all tracking the live roster, all syncing to Steam at ship time
FIXED
- A Daily Contract started before midnight no longer burns tomorrow's attempt. A run launched at 23:55 and finished at 00:05 now logs against the day you took the contract, and the next day's contract stays open
- NEXT UNLOCK picks the goal you can actually reach first. Ties at zero progress now break toward the smallest remaining ask instead of the top of the list, so a fresh pilot is pointed at the nearest rung
v0.55
NEW
- The belt is yours to choose. Pick your sector before every run: THE DRIFT rotates the belt the way it always has, while SCRAPLINE, ION STORM, CRYSTAL REACH, THE GRAVEYARD, and FURNACE BELT each pin one identity for the whole run — their own skyline, field, hazard mechanic, and boss threats. Two of them you have to earn. Your sector shows on the launch banner and on a chip at the Outfitter
- The WIN MATRIX. The Service Record now carries a permanent spacer × hazard grid — every win your career has ever logged, gold where earned, and it never forgets (the old crest line quietly lost wins past the 50-run history; the matrix is forever). Character select reads from the same permanent record
- Three new spacers that bend the rules, not the stats. MAGNATE doubles down on greed — the multiplier builds twice as fast and caps twice as high, but spills are catastrophic and corsairs come hunting harder. RONIN flies with three weapon slots and hits harder for every empty one. PHANTOM charges the super by grazing bolts and taking hits — kills give nothing. Each brings its own ultimate: MARGIN CALL, IAIJUTSU, BLINK VEIL
- DAILY CONTRACT. One seeded run per day — the same spacer, sector, and hazard for everyone — one attempt, score on the record, next contract at midnight. Find it on the mode screen; your log and best score live in the Service Record
- The game always shows your next goal. A NEXT UNLOCK line now surfaces on the title screen, the run-end screen, and the Service Record — and the unlock ladder has grown to 17 rungs, including five new keystone relics and two earnable sectors
v0.54
NEW
- The belt holds still when Steam pulls you away. Opening the Steam Overlay with the controller Home button now pauses the wave instead of leaving your ship drifting under fire, and unplugging the controller you were flying with pauses too. Alt-tab already did this; the overlay and a yanked pad were the two ways the swarm could keep chewing on you while you weren't looking
- The mouse pointer stays gone while you're on a pad. A stray nudge — a bumped desk, or Steam Input's own synthetic mouse motion — no longer flips the game back to keyboard prompts and drops the cursor in the middle of the arena. A deliberate mouse move still hands control back instantly
v0.53
NEW
- The field fights back past wave 9. Four new hostiles join the deep-run roster: the HUNTER (wave 10+) slips through the rocks and runs down anyone kiting the field, the BROODMOTHER (wave 12+) keeps birthing drifters until you crack her, the AEGIS BEARER (wave 14+) shrugs off frontal fire behind an energy arc — flank it — and the DISRUPTOR (wave 16+) fires EMP bolts that slow your thrusters
- Two new bosses, and the run picks your fight. The SIEGE CRAWLER shells the field with mortar volleys and plants turrets — punish it while it vents — and the STORM HERALD blinks across the arena laying plasma lanes and radial fire. Every boss wave now draws from the three-boss pool on the run's seed (the original Mega-Bulwark stays in the rotation), and Hazard 5's twin finale always pairs two different bosses
- Endless mutators. From wave 21 in Endless, every five waves rotates in a new rule — DOUBLE ELITES, ORE FAMINE, LOW GRAVITY, SWARM, HUNTING PARTY — telegraphed at the dock and on the wave banner
- Three new sectors. The belt now drifts through six zones: the original three plus CRYSTAL FIELD (mine the crystal clusters for bonus ore), DERELICT GRAVEYARD (wrecked hulks for cover, scrap, and ambushes), and RADIATION BELT (a telegraphed hot sector that pays credits and ore to anyone bold enough to ride the pulse)
- Earn the arsenal. The first unlock ladder: VALKYRIE (win at Hazard 2+) and WRECKER (win a run as Bulkhead) join the hangar with their own ultimates; the ARC REPEATER, COMET LANCE, and DRONE HIVE enter the Outfitter pool by winning Mining Rush, winning at Hazard 4+, and winning with three different spacers; and two new Relic items — CHAMPION'S CHARTER and CARNAGE CORE — unlock through Service Record milestones. Locked gear shows its unlock condition, and new unlocks are called out on the run-end screen
- Tiers III and IV change how guns fight. Every weapon family evolves at high tiers: rifles gain pierce and then a second barrel, shotguns stack pellets, the saw arm orbits extra blades, beams fork into extra targets, cones widen and shove, drone bays field extra drones, mines raise their cap and pull harder — and chain, burn, freeze, gravity, and boomerang effects all deepen. The tier ladder is printed on every weapon card and dossier
v0.52
NEW
- Your commendations now count on Steam. All 24 pilot commendations — from SUIT UP to APEX PILOT — sync to Steam achievements, popping the moment a run enters your Service Record. Commendations you already earned catch up automatically the first time you launch through Steam
IMPROVED
- Your spacer moves like a body, not an action figure. Arms and legs got a full lifelike pass: elbows and knees trail a beat behind the body on thrusts and turns, each leg streams independently instead of scissoring in lockstep, held weapons breathe and sway instead of freezing in a vice grip, and sustained flight settles into a relaxed soft-kneed glide with a loose straddle — no more ramrod legs or mirrored mannequin arms
v0.51
NEW
- Trading a weapon is no longer a blind pick. Buying a weapon with a full rack now raises a TRADE-IN panel: the incoming gun and the one leaving the focused slot side by side — icons, names, tiers, and damage / fire rate / range / DPS with green/red deltas — plus a plain verdict line ("Higher damage — a straight upgrade" / "a sidegrade"). It follows your focus live as you sweep the rack, warns before you break up a MERGE pair, and the rest of the hand dims so the decision owns the room
- Your own weapons answer at a glance. Focusing any rack slot (stick or mouse) now shows that gun's full dossier above your slate — name, tier, damage, fire rate, DPS, range, tags, and its combine status — no select needed
- Bug fixes and performance improvements. (Online co-op groundwork lands under the hood — nothing player-visible in this build)
FIXED
- Card prices could vanish mid-visit. On Steam Deck, a session's worth of buys and rerolls could leave the REPLACE verb and price permanently blank on otherwise healthy cards — the offer footer is now rebuilt fresh on every refresh so it can never stick
- Replace mode is fenced in. While picking a slot to swap, focus can no longer wander up into the offer hand or down onto LAUNCH mid-trade; B/ESC backs out, the recycle row states the task, and MERGE badges stay lit so you can see what a swap would break
v0.50
IMPROVED
- Ore chunks and credit motes got a full remodel. Dropped ore is now a real fractured basalt chunk with a cluster of sharp glowing crystals in the ore's tier color — Dust gray, Ferrite orange, Cobalt blue, Plasma purple — instead of a bare floating prism, and the Reclaimer's cargo rack now carries the same chunks when it steals from you. Credit motes are now spinning emerald chips: a faceted deep-green gem gripped in a gunmetal clamp, tipped toward the camera and slowly rotating so the money-green read is unmistakable at combat range
NEW
- Nine new build-defining items across four families. GRAZE turns near-misses into a resource — Static Harvest banks ultimate charge when an enemy bolt slides past you, Phase Rebate cashes clean dodges into stacking damage, and Deathwish Coils keeps your kill streak alive while you thread the pattern. SURGE makes the ultimate meter a build axis — Capacitor Bleed pays you for holding a charged super, Overcharge Coils lets the meter overfill to 150% for a bigger blast, and Discharge Loop ignites OVERDRIVE every time you fire it. BANKER pays for the credits you refuse to spend — Dividend Engine converts your wallet into damage, Escrow Plating into armor. And the Monomania Lens rewrites the rules: +12% damage and +8% attack speed for every weapon slot you leave empty
- The Corsair. A pirate boarding cutter that hunts miners with heavy holds — fly light and you'll never see one, run a stuffed hold and it comes for the cargo. Its slashing pass cuts your straps, knocking extra chunks loose. Kills pay well, and the first one each wave is announced
- Two new elite powers. SIPHON latches a visible drain tether onto you and pulls a carried chunk every two seconds — break the line or kill it (it carries your ore, and killing it drops every chunk back). WARPING blinks away from heavy single hits, the anti-burst mirror of PLATED's anti-chip armor
v0.49
FIXED
- Title screen colors restored. v0.48's title-jank fix accidentally washed the key art dark and muddy in the shipped game (the drift shader rendered differently on the real renderer than on the test renderer that verified it). The drift now moves the plate itself at sub-pixel precision with no custom shader involved — full art fidelity back, smooth drift kept
v0.48
IMPROVED
- The Spacer Roster is a real hangar now. Choosing your exosuit happens in the lit roster bay from the key art — all four spacers standing full-body on their own platforms — instead of a row of flat cards on a dim background
- The roster cards read cleanly at a glance. Every card's ultimate sits on the same line across all four spacers, so you can compare supers by scanning across instead of hunting for them
- Rookie is now the Drifter. The starter spacer's old name read like a difficulty setting next to the Hazard tiers; every suit on the roster now carries a role name. Existing runs and saves carry over untouched
- The title screen stopped twitching. The key art's slow idle drift used to freeze and visibly snap a pixel sideways every second or so; it now glides smoothly
- Your chosen Hazard level glows. On Run Configuration the selected H-tier lights up gold with a halo — no more reading the fine print to confirm what you picked
- The Outfitter got out of your way. Your build slate now shows just your spacer and the six-slot weapon rack; the full stat dashboard and passive-item list live one press away behind VIEW STATS (which also fixes the passives line clipping off the slate's fold)
- Weapon slots and offer cards got bigger. The rack's slots grew about a third, offer cards grew and now sit evenly spaced across the bay instead of drifting with the camera perspective
- Your guns shoot what's actually closest. Auto-targeting now compares the nearest enemy and the nearest rock and fires at whichever is physically nearer (enemies win ties) — no more shooting past the rock you're pinned against. Combat drones still ignore rocks
v0.47
IMPROVED
- BULLET STORM actually looks like a bullet storm. The Gunner's ultimate now pours a swarm of homing tracer rounds out of the astronaut into every enemy on the field — no more thin lasers strobing — with a muzzle flare per volley, heavier minigun audio, and a cracking finisher on the last volley
- The Gunner plants while the storm runs. Movement and dash freeze for the ~1.3-second channel (the guns keep firing), so unleashing the super is a commitment instead of a free kite
- The ultimate meter glows when it's charged. A soft gold halo pulses around the full meter — alongside the existing READY banner and audio cue — so you can feel it's ready without staring at the bar
- Ultimates charge a little slower. All four supers cost about 20% more kills to charge, so they land as wave-turners instead of an always-up button
v0.46
FIXED
- REPLACE / COMBINE prices no longer spill out of the Outfitter cards. With a full weapon rack, the action word now sits on its own line above the price, so the whole footer stays inside the card on the Deck
v0.45
NEW
- Options got a real settings menu. The old three-slider panel is now a proper tabbed menu — AUDIO, VIDEO, GAMEPLAY, CONTROLS — that you flip through with LB / RB (or by clicking the tabs), with every setting applying instantly and saving automatically
- AUDIO: Master Volume joins the Music and SFX sliders, so you can turn everything down with one rail
- VIDEO: Fullscreen / windowed display mode, V-Sync (off by default), and an FPS counter overlay
- GAMEPLAY: Damage Numbers, a Screen Shake strength slider, and a Screen Flash setting (Full / Reduced / Off) for photosensitive players
- CONTROLS: Invert Aim Y for the right stick and an adjustable stick deadzone, alongside the live input-device readout and control hints
- The main menu has been rebuilt to match the game's key art. The title screen now opens on the full Gunmetal Orbit hero shot — the six-armed exosuit, the orbital station, the planet and the belt — with the chrome GUNMETAL ORBIT logo across the top and a slow drift that keeps the frame alive
- The menu hardware is real hardware now. COMMAND DECK and the run-status readout sit on the art as dark smoked glass instead of boxy grey panels, and the active entry glows instead of just changing outline
- Your run-in-progress panel actually reads like a status board. A station schematic and crew glyph light up beside a wave-progress rail that fills as you push deeper into a run
v0.44
IMPROVED
- The ultimate hits like the biggest weapon in the game now. Charging your super and unleashing it both play authored, hard-hitting audio — a deep dubstep detonation on fire and a confident armed-and-ready cue — instead of the old thin synth beeps
- Every sound in the game is now authored audio — no synthesizer music anywhere. The soundtrack is the real dubstep jukebox in every phase; the old placeholder synth music beds are gone for good
v0.43
FIXED
- Analog stick menu navigation is now smooth and reliable on every screen. Push to move, hold to scroll — the title menu, Spacer Roster, Run Configuration, Options, the Outfitter, level-up picks, and the Outpost blueprint all respond identically, with no dead pushes and no double-steps. The D-pad also repeats while held
- Button prompts can no longer get stuck showing keyboard controls while you play on a controller. Pressing any pad button in the Outfitter, level-up, or Outpost screens flips the prompts and glyphs back instantly
- Steam Deck now gets a real gamepad out of the box. The game's Steam Input default is set to the Generic Gamepad template, so sticks, glyphs, LB dash, X lock, and hold-B launch behave exactly like the Xbox pad — no more keyboard-emulation weirdness
IMPROVED
- Docking is smoother on Steam Deck. The game no longer renders the entire invisible arena behind the Outfitter, and the one-time stutter the first time you docked each session is gone
- LAUNCH is instant. Holding B (or clicking LAUNCH) departs immediately — no departure delay
v0.42
IMPROVED
- The central cargo station is now half its former footprint. The dock no longer dominates the combat frame, leaving the astronaut, enemies, and surrounding Industrial Belt room to breathe while keeping the same generous cargo delivery ring
v0.41
FIXED
- Steam Deck stick navigation works across every setup screen and the Outfitter. Normal left-stick movement now changes focus without needing near-full deflection, and the D-pad follows the same explicit routes
- Holding B launches reliably from the Outfitter. Steam Input repeat packets can no longer restart the hold timer and leave the launch plate stuck
- Controller back navigation is complete. B now returns from Spacer Select and Run Configuration instead of trapping the player in setup
- The Deck-native layouts fit again. Spacer cards stay above the controller rail, and the Outfitter slate shows the weapon rack and recycle action instead of cutting them off at the bottom edge
- PC menu controls match their prompts. WASD now navigates menus alongside the arrow keys, with the full controller and keyboard layouts shown in Options
v0.40
NEW
- The Outfitter bay is alive. Docking now wakes the room around you: the left-wall monitor is a real operations terminal (scrolling stock manifest, telemetry trace, rotating item scan, transfer/maintenance bulletins), fans turn behind the wall grilles, status LEDs breathe on every cabinet, the airlock runs a slow diagnostic ring, and three counter readouts track pedestal power, stock, and station feed. Dust drifts through the window light and the projector beams, a floor vent purges coolant every half minute or so, and passing traffic outside sweeps a soft reflection across the deck
- Every shop action plays out in the room. Entering docks the pedestals up left-to-right before your offers materialize. Hovering an offer spins its projector ring up and strengthens its light. Buying compresses the hologram into its pedestal and sends a charge to your wallet. Locking clamps the pedestal into an amber secured state. Reroll dissolves the hand into scanning noise and rebuilds it in sequence. An unaffordable offer is refused physically — the pedestal knocks back and spits red. Launching dims the whole bay into departure mode with clearance on the terminal before the round starts
- The dock has a voice. A low electrical-and-ventilation bed loops under the jukebox, with quiet terminal chatter, relay clicks, distant hull groans, a muffled rumble when a craft passes the window, and a projector tone per offer tier — commons hum low, prototypes chime bright
- A maintenance drone occasionally drifts the counter, pauses to scan a pedestal, and moves on; a rare station tender silhouette crosses the far window
IMPROVED
- The Industrial Belt finally looks like the place in the key art. A monumental layered station, attached cargo and relay works, armored bridges, cranes, docking machinery, and antenna structures now form one working outpost instead of a few disconnected props
- The first map has real rock and real space. Dark fractured crags, jagged overhangs, compact mineable asteroids with restrained cyan seams, and a deep navy-blue nebula replace the soft prototype rocks, oversized purple crystals, and flat background treatment
- Home base has clearer physical boundaries. The solid station core, cargo sell ring, and eight-module construction ring now each use their own readable footprint, while enemy spawns sweep for a collision-safe point around every industrial structure
FIXED
- Bug fixes and performance improvements.
v0.39
NEW
- Bosses announce themselves — and show their health. Boss waves open with a "⚠ BOSS — NORTH RIM ⚠"-style banner naming the compass front, an authored menacing braam sounds as the boss materializes, and a boss HP bar rides under the wave timer while one is alive (the Hazard-5 twins share one bar)
- You can pause at the dock. MENU/START now works in the Outfitter with the same resume/options/quit menu as mid-wave — and since the dock IS the save point, the quit confirm honestly says your run is saved right there instead of warning about lost progress
IMPROVED
- The flight-controls hint actually reaches new pilots. It used to fade out behind the title menus before anyone ever launched; now it appears when wave 1 starts and only marks itself seen once you've had the full read. The gamepad hint also finally mentions docking at the pad to sell
- Alt-tabbing no longer gets you killed. The game pauses itself when the window loses focus, so you come back to a held wave instead of a fresh hit
- Locking a shop card sounds like locking a shop card. The authored heavy steel-latch cue replaces the reused buy blip
- The pre-boss warning now says "BOSS INBOUND" instead of colliding with the Hazard difficulty dial's name
FIXED
- Banked free rerolls ride the save schema properly. Express Contract's banked rerolls were round-tripping through the save's foreign-key side channel instead of the whitelisted schema; they're covered now, with a regression guard so no future field drifts the same way
v0.38
IMPROVED
- The Outfitter now looks like a modern station bay. A dense armored interior, panoramic planet window, layered hull panels, warm ceiling practicals, cool hologram light, and a polished deck replace the prototype-looking room
- Every offer feels physically projected into the space. Four detailed hex plinths throw animated scan rays and colored light into the room, with a white-hot cyan focus state and restrained amber accents on idle offers
- The whole shop is framed like the approved target. Four readable glass offer cards, a compact handheld build slate, a centered controller rail, and an unobstructed launch action keep the room visible while preserving buy, lock, reroll, compare, and launch controls
v0.37
IMPROVED
- The display pedestals are the real thing now. Rebuilt as faceted hexagonal columns — dark armored graphite panels, twin teal light bands, a glowing hex ring at the floor, and warm orange chamfers at the base — matching the target look instead of reading as round drums
- The bay got its final light pass. Hologram beams read teal down their whole length (hot only at the projector lens), the warm ceiling ribs glow like recessed station lighting without competing with the card labels, the planet vista shines clearly through the bay window, and the polished deck mirrors the pedestal rings and beams
- The Outfitter bay finally fits on screen — and looks alive. The camera pulled back so you see the whole dock: all four display pedestals base-to-top, the ceiling, and the reflective deck stretching out in front of you. The hologram projections got real presence — bright streaked cones of light rising off every pedestal with a hot projector ring at the lens, warm orange light pooling at each pedestal's base, and the planet vista glowing through the bay window
- Cleaner, glassier holo cards. Offer cards shrank to a tighter reference size and now read as true glass — the bay and the beams show through them — with a proper header band (item type + rarity), ruled stat tables, corner ticks, and a gold price strip. The big mid-screen COMPARE box is gone; comparisons now appear as a compact strip beside your build slate so they never hide the room
- A tighter cockpit-style HUD. One centered button-hint pill (BUY / LOCK / REROLL), a compact wave preview, a restyled reroll pill, and a new center reticle — plus your build slate now fits every stat and the weapon rack without scrolling
v0.36
NEW
- The Outfitter went holographic. Offers now beam up out of the pedestals as teal hologram projections: every card floats on its own cone of light (with a live projector flicker), the selected card's edge snaps white-hot, and buying an offer powers its beam down. Your build readout is a translucent handheld holo-slate at bottom-left, the weapon-compare readout is a matching hologram band, and the old dark menu overlay is gone — you're standing in the bay looking at its projections, not reading a screen drawn over it
v0.35
NEW
- The Outfitter is now a real place. Docking drops you into a dark station bay rendered behind the shop screen: four hexagonal display pedestals light up with your offers (ring color matches the item's rarity, the weapon itself slowly turning on top), warm light pools spill onto the deck, and the bay is dressed with a vendor counter, a dubstep jukebox, a relic display case, cargo crates, and the launch airlock — its status bar flips green while you hold LAUNCH
- A real view of space. The bay's viewport window looks out on a planet turning below — city lights glittering on its night side — with a distant sun and nebula beyond
- Every prop in the bay carries AAA-grade painted textures (armored hull plating, worn deck plates, brass trim) with normal-mapped surface detail, bloom, soft shadows, and floor reflections
v0.34
IMPROVED
- Bug fixes and performance improvements (development test tooling can no longer touch any real save file, on any machine)
v0.33
IMPROVED
- Ultimates now LOOK like ultimates. Firing your super slams a full-screen flash in your spacer's colors, punches a pillar of light into the sky, and rolls a double shockwave ring out to the real blast radius — and your spacer visibly throws it with a crouch-and-pop flourish instead of the blast just happening nearby. NOVA CHARGE and BASTION SLAM now spark every enemy they hit, BULLET STORM's volleys pour out of the Gunner with a muzzle flare, MOTHERLODE's seismic pulse is a gold field-wide wave worthy of the name, and BASTION SLAM pops a green +hull number so the patch is felt where you're looking
v0.32
NEW
- Ultimates — every spacer now has a super. Kills feed a new gold charge meter beside your dash bar (elites and bosses fill it fast). When it reads READY, press RB (Q on keyboard) and your character's signature move fires: the Rookie's NOVA CHARGE detonates a massive shockwave around you, the Gunner's BULLET STORM rakes every enemy on the field with eight minigun volleys, the Prospector's MOTHERLODE cracks every rock on the map in one seismic pulse and drags the loose ore home, and the Bulkhead's BASTION SLAM hurls everything back and patches 30% of the suit. Charge banks between waves and survives a save/quit, and every super scales with your Damage (and Explosion) stats — the meter matters at wave 20, not just wave 2. The Spacer Roster cards now advertise each super, and firing one has its own authored-weight blast cue
v0.31
NEW
- Synergy items — builds now live in how you fly, not just your stat sheet. Twelve new Outfitter items key off what you actually do in the field, in five families the cards call out loud: GREED pays for flying with a heavy hold (Ballast Rounds turns carried ore into damage, Pressure Manifold spins the guns up while you're half full, and the relic Midas Hold removes the greed cap entirely — but real hits spill harder), COURIER pays the delivery route (Dock Fever adds float speed per streak step, the relic Gilded Circuit turns the streak into damage, and Express Contract banks a FREE shop reroll the first time each wave you deliver at max streak), SPILL turns getting hit into a plan (Salvage Insurance spills less and gives you longer to recover it, Volatile Cargo detonates your spilled chunks into nearby enemies), RAMPAGE rides the kill streak (Adrenal Feed feeds hull back per streak step, Hot Barrel adds pierce and damage while OVERDRIVE is hot), and MINING makes the rocks fight for you (Core Tap keeps your kill streak alive when you break a rock, Seismic Charges detonates every rock you crack). Blast items scale with your Explosion stats; stackable ones stack
- Synergy cards read at a glance. Each family has its own color chip on the card and states its rule in plain words; the Outfitter's REROLL button shows FREE ×N while Express Contract rerolls are banked
v0.30
FIXED
- Your progress survives every update, for good. Installing a new build can no longer wipe or reset a run. Saves from older versions always load forward (nothing you earned is dropped), a save written by a newer build than you're running is never quietly overwritten, and a bad launch can't stomp your slot with a blank profile — the game now refuses to save until it has actually loaded or started a real run. A hidden per-version backup is also kept as a last-ditch safety net
v0.29
IMPROVED
- No more random mid-flight freeze. The game could lock up for a second or two at seemingly random moments during a wave — while you were scooping ore, banking scrap, or trading hits. That stall is gone: the soundtrack and every sound effect now load up front behind the loading screen instead of stopping the game the first time a song rolls over
v0.28
NEW
- Magnetar — the gravity well. From wave 8, a floating gyroscope of three counter-rotating armored rings parks at mid range and charges its core behind an honest ground ring that marks the exact pull radius. Then it drags — you and any loose ore chunks bend toward it for a second before it snaps a radial pulse with real knockback. Your thrusters always overpower the pull and your guns never stop working; killing it during the wind-up or the drag cancels the attack on the spot. Lazy circle-kiting now has a counter that isn't just another chaser. Two wells maximum at once
- Ore Reclaimer — the thief. From wave 5, an industrial salvage scarab swoops in hunting the ore chunks you haven't scooped yet. It grabs up to three (you can watch them lock into its cargo cage), then bolts for the arena rim. Kill it before it crosses and every stolen chunk drops right back; let it escape and the haul is gone. It barely fights back — it doesn't have to. It never touches ore you've banked or the chunks knocked loose from your own cargo, and no more than two thieves work the field at once
IMPROVED
- Four enemies got their own faces. The Reaver, Weaver, Juggernaut, and Aegis Warden now fly unique production bodies instead of placeholder shapes or borrowed hulls: the Reaver is a low crescent predator with forward sickle blades, the Weaver a four-fin plasma loom with glowing spool drums, the Juggernaut a colossal near-black dreadplate ram with a furnace-red visor, and the Warden a steel-blue gunship behind two canted shield vanes. Every silhouette reads at a glance on the Deck
- Enemies move like machines now. The Reaver pitches into its committed slashing pass and folds out of it, the Weaver sways through its strafing runs and compresses at each turn, the Juggernaut sways heavy and recoils when its ram connects, and the Warden widens its stance through its firing tell and kicks with each rail shot — all honest reads of what each enemy is actually doing
v0.27
IMPROVED
- Smoother, steadier combat frames — second slice of the locked-60-on-Deck pass, aimed at the frame-time spikes of dense late waves. Same aim feel, same balance: verified by the full autoplay loop and all 25 weapons landing damage with zero script errors
- Bug fixes and performance improvements (third locked-60-on-Deck slice: sustained fire no longer allocates)
- The title screen now hangs in real deep space. The menu backdrop is the game's own sky — drifting nebula, stars, and a distant landmark planet — instead of an empty gradient with a hard seam across the middle. The hero statue is haloed against the dark, its jets read as tight thrust plumes instead of puffs, the GUNMETAL ORBIT marquee glows like a lit sign, and the whole screen fades up in a quick staggered entrance on boot
- Sharper title hero. The menu statue now ships from the higher-fidelity Studio export with best-quality texture compression and stronger anti-aliasing on the menu stage
FIXED
- The Flight Record plate no longer wraps the best-run line mid-word ("MINING RUSH H0" used to break into "RUSH HO")
v0.26
IMPROVED
- Smoother frame rate, same look — first slice of the locked-60-on-Deck performance pass: cheaper anti-aliasing and the removal of an invisible ambient-occlusion pass and debris shadows. Verified pixel-for-pixel that combat and the Outfitter read identically before and after
FIXED
- Service Record selections now read as one clean focus frame. The selected commendation keeps its complete white clamp and even gold halo instead of clipping into disconnected stripes at the edges of the scroll panel
v0.25
FIXED
- The end-of-run screen always fits on the screen now. A run that earned a double-digit commendation haul used to push the GO ENDLESS / END RUN (or NEW RUN / MAIN MENU) buttons clean off the bottom of the display — on the Deck and on desktop alike (Austin's Deck photo, 2026-07-15). Big hauls now read as a compact gold pill row under "COMMENDATIONS EARNED" (the tail folds into "+N MORE" — the full list always lives in the Service Record), and pressing B/Esc on the screen always backs out to the safe choice
- The outpost's module detail panel now scrolls inside its frame instead of pushing its BACK button below the screen on a fully built Endless station
- Outfitter build-panel stat numbers no longer clip on the right once the build grows long enough to scroll
- Spacer cards no longer spill the VICTORIES win-marks row past the card's bottom edge once a spacer has several hazard wins
- The title screen's run-status plate now grows upward, so three active save slots with long mode names can't walk its last lines off the screen
v0.24
NEW
- Sector shifts keep the belt fresh (Jay's playtest, LC-5574): from wave 4, every few waves the run drifts into a new sector, announced with an "ENTERING: …" banner. Scrap Drift turns the field warm amber with denser rocks and slightly richer ore; Ion Storm bathes the belt in electric blue-violet and hurls a telegraphed ion surge at one zone of the arena every 15 seconds — a warning ring gives you 3 seconds to clear out (or to herd the swarm into it: enemies caught in the surge mostly die). Waves 1–3 are always the calm Open Belt
IMPROVED
- Mousing over a spacer or a mode card now moves the same highlight the sticks and arrow keys drive — the mouse and the controller finally agree on what's selected (Jay's playtest, LC-5574)
- The hazard ladder is now a real ladder: a fresh profile starts with Hazard 0 only; win it to unlock H1, and each victory opens the next rung. Mining Rush and Union Rules are now visible-but-locked goals on the mode screen — Mining Rush opens with a Hazard 1 win, Union Rules with a Hazard 2 win. Nobody loses anything already earned: every hazard you've ever flown stays unlocked
v0.23
IMPROVED
- The outpost finally shows its work (Austin's Deck read: "feels like it does nothing"). Every built module now reads as YOURS at a glance: a glowing family-colored plinth ring at its socket, a powered beacon light, and a floating name holo (SENTRY, AEGIS II, DRONES…) in the same vocabulary as the HUD badges. Tier-II modules glow brighter and wear their rank
- Module work is credited on screen as it happens: sentry and aegis kills pop a gold/teal tag on the target, every aegis interception calls "BLOCKED", drone deliveries pop "DRONE +ORE" at the pad, and Repair Wing announces its hull patch instead of healing silently
- A new SENTRY ×kills badge joins the in-wave outpost readout, and the wave-end banner now carries the outpost's shift report — "OUTPOST: 4 KILLS · 6 ORE HAULED · 2 BLOCKED" — so every wave ends with proof of what the station did for you
FIXED
- Every run now counts toward your Service Record, not just the ones you finish. Starting a New Run over an old save used to erase that run as if it never happened — its waves, kills, credits, and flight time now land in your career stats, commendation progress, and the flight log (shown as SCRUBBED) the moment you overwrite it
- Going Endless no longer forfeits your victory. Clearing a contract and pushing into Endless used to log the run as a plain loss if you eventually went down — the win, the hazard unlock, and the spacer's victory crest are now recorded the moment the final wave clears, no matter how the run ends
- Continuing a save that was docked at the start of the final wave no longer skips straight to the victory screen — you fly the last wave for real
v0.22
IMPROVED
- The game now boots to its own splash screen — the Gunmetal Orbit emblem and wordmark on the deep-space navy — instead of the stock Godot logo
BALANCE
- Run length now scales with hazard (Austin's call, top tuned down the same day): Standard and Union Rules runs are 10 waves at H0, then +4 per hazard level — 14, 18, 22, 26, and 30 at H5 — so a low-hazard run is a quick patrol again instead of a 20-wave victory lap, and the high-hazard runs are real campaigns. Mining Rush stays a fixed 10-wave sprint; Endless stays uncapped
- Long runs are paced, not stretched: campaigns past 20 waves field a mid-boss every 10th wave (skipped within 5 waves of the finale so bosses never stack back-to-back; the twin boss stays an H5 final-wave flourish) and schedule extra elite/horde special waves spread across the whole run instead of crammed into the back half
- The outpost keeps pace with any run length: station milestones now land at 20/40/60/80% of the run (2/4/6/8 on an H0 patrol, 6/12/18/24 on the H5 campaign), with construction objectives still arriving the wave before each milestone
- The run setup screen shows the real wave count live as you move across the hazard row
v0.21
NEW
- Every commendation now carries its own HD emblem — 24 unique machined-hardware icons in the Service Record ladder, glowing gold in a lit socket when earned, dimmed steel while locked, with a live progress bar on every locked card
- New commendation: FULL ROSTER — win a run with every spacer. The Service Record career panel now tracks it ("Spacers mastered 2 / 4")
IMPROVED
- Save hardening: the flight history and options files now recover from their backup generation after a corrupted write, the same protection the run slots and lifetime record already had
- Saves now live in a permanent home (`GunmetalOrbit/` in your OS profile) that will never move again — and is Steam Cloud-ready for the day the game ships on Steam. Existing progress is found and carried over automatically on first launch
v0.20
NEW
- SERVICE RECORD — a new RECORDS screen on the title menu shows your whole career: lifetime totals (runs, victories, critters cleared, credits earned, time in the belt), your best wave, streak, and haul, your last five flights, and a 23-commendation ladder. Locked commendations show honest progress ("7,214 / 10,000"); unlocked ones carry the date you earned them
- Commendations — 23 named career achievements, from SUIT UP (finish your first run) to APEX PILOT (win at Hazard 5). Fresh unlocks are celebrated right on the run-end screen as gold pills
- Your career now survives forever: lifetime totals accumulate in their own record, so nothing is lost when older runs roll off the 50-run flight history. Existing pilots are migrated automatically — every run you've already flown counts from the first boot
IMPROVED
- The save-slot picker now shows when each run was last saved ("07-14 22:36"), so you know which spacer you left where
IMPROVED
- The run's ending is a moment now: HULL BREACH lands in ember red and SECTOR CLEARED in triumph teal — a colored verdict rail, an animated entrance, stats that read out one by one with kill and credit totals counting up, and death lines that rotate so the hundredth breach doesn't read like the first
- Combining weapons finally FEELS like the tier-up it is: the upgraded slot punches and a gold "SMG III ONLINE" ribbon rises off the rack with the level-up sting — on the rack merge and on full-rack twin purchases alike
- The end screen now brags your hottest kill streak of the run ("Best kill streak ×17") — shown once a streak was worth talking about, archived with the run history
v0.19
NEW
- RICH VEIN events: every third normal wave (from wave 3), a cluster of high-tier ore surfaces at a called compass point — "RICH VEIN — EAST RIM — 25s" — and collapses when the countdown ends. Cross the arena, mine it under fire, get greedy: purposeful movement every few waves instead of the same orbit (Austin's engagement feedback)
- Two new elite powers join VOLATILE, REGENERATING, and PLATED: PHALANX projects a standoff field that soaks shots fired from range — dive inside its bubble to hurt it — and BERSERKER erupts into a one-way speed rage below half health, glowing hot so you see it coming
- Banking at the pad now shows its math: every delivery pops a payout breakdown — "+214 ¤ · GREED ×1.22 · STREAK ×1.15" — so the reward for flying home mid-wave is visible, not a mystery (Austin: "wasn't sure if returning was rewarded." It is: streaks only build on real trips, and hauling risks a spill — now the pad says so)
v0.18
IMPROVED
- Floating damage and crit numbers are ~15% smaller (Austin's Deck read: they crowded the fight) — still readable at arm's length, less noise over the action
v0.17
BALANCE
- A well-played first wave now buys something (Austin's v0.16 report: nothing affordable until round 4): Dust chunks pay 3 instead of 2, a FLAWLESS wave 1 pays 31, and the round-2 shop hand is guaranteed to contain at least one offer within a good opener's budget — work hard in wave 1, walk out of dock one with a purchase
IMPROVED
- Waves no longer go quiet before the bell (Austin's v0.16 report: wave 9 emptied out with time left): once a wave's spawn budget is spent, normal enemies keep trickling in at a relaxed pace while there's still ore to mine — you work the leftover rocks under fire, not in silence. Mine the field out and the trickle stops, so clearing everything early still ends the wave and still pays FAST CLEAR
v0.16
BALANCE
- Getting rich no longer levels you up (the LC-5495 headline fix, confirmed by two independent audits): scrap XP now measures the threat you killed, while Harvesting, the run economy, and your kill streak pay out as credits only. Income builds still print money — they just stop printing free stat picks with it
NEW
- H0 and H1 runs finally have a wave worth talking about: every low-hazard run now schedules one real special wave (elite or horde) in its back half, with the full kit — the compass-lane telegraph, the dock preview warning, the affix banner, and the outpost reacting. H2/H3 step up from one scheduled special to two, so the ladder reads 1/1/2/2/3/3
v0.15
BALANCE
- Gear prices now track the wave economy (Austin's round-two report: ~10K by wave 10 on H2 still bought everything). Shop offers keep their sticker price early, then cost curves upward through the run — about ×2.7 at wave 10 and ×6.5 at wave 20 — so a mid-run dock buys a meaningful few upgrades, not the whole shelf. You still get rich; the shelf just keeps pace
- High-tier ore arrives a touch later and saturates slower: Cobalt and Plasma odds climb more gently through the mid-game, so the ore income curve rises instead of exploding — Plasma is a prize again, not the default rock by wave 8
v0.14
IMPROVED
- Every icon in the game — stat upgrades, weapons, credits — has been redrawn in the gunmetal-industrial look: dark machined steel, luminous cyan energy, ember-orange heat. The soft cozy-era icon set is gone
- The character roster portraits now match the game: hard heroic exosuit spacers instead of the old cozy art
- Level-up cards now light their art the same way Outfitter cards do: a rarity-tinted glow socket sits behind every icon, quiet steel on Commons, louder as the tier climbs
- The title screen and pause menu command decks now sit in a modeled equipment-cabinet frame — machined bevel, amber rail, corner screws — instead of a flat bordered panel
- Icons and portraits no longer shimmer or alias when drawn small on the Deck's screen
v0.13
BALANCE
- The credit firehose is off (Austin's Deck report: "tens of thousands per wave"). All income — ore sales and scrap alike — now runs at its real tuning instead of the 2× debug generosity the project had been playtested on
- Harvesting now pays full value up to +100%, then half value beyond it — greed builds still scale, but harvesting can no longer buy itself into a runaway. The build panel shows your real effective bonus, and the stat's description says so up front
- Waves now genuinely climb: enemy contact, bolt, and boss-sting damage all ramp +3% per wave (about +57% by wave 20), and past wave 10 enemy hull gains a compounding kicker on top of its normal growth — so a snowballing build keeps meeting opposition worth respecting
v0.12
FIXED
- Upgrading a tiered weapon with a full rack actually works now (Austin's Deck report: an SMG II with an SMG I on offer had no path forward). With all six slots filled, any offer of a weapon you already own now arrives AT your owned tier — so buying it is a straight COMBINE toward the next tier instead of a pointless downgrade-replace. With open slots nothing changes: cheap low-tier copies for slot-filling builds still roll
v0.11
IMPROVED
- Combining weapons is now one press (Austin's first Deck-session feedback): merge-ready slots light up gold with a MERGE badge on BOTH twins, and LB combines the focused slot on the spot — from anywhere else in the shop, LB jumps you straight to a merge-ready slot. The old hunt (select a slot, deselect, try the next, navigate to the COMBINE button) is gone
- Replacing a weapon on a full rack is now a guided flow: press A on any weapon card and the rack lights up — pick the slot to swap with A, or back out with B. The dead "SELECT SLOT" no-op and its manual round-trip are retired; full-rack weapon cards now always show their REPLACE price
- The build panel finally scrolls with the stick: moving focus below the fold pulls the passive-items strip into view, so long-run builds are actually readable on the Deck
- The shop's button hints now follow what the pad can do right now — replace mode, a merge-ready slot, or the normal buy/lock/reroll set — and keyboard players get C to combine
v0.10
NEW
- Your hull now rides with you: a health bar floats under your spacer all fight long — green, amber, then red — so you always know how close the run is to ending without looking away from the action
- Every real hit shows its cost: a red damage number pops off your spacer with exactly what that bolt or contact took
- Critical hull is a state you can feel, not a flash you can miss: below a quarter hull the screen edge breathes red and an alarm sounds until you heal back over the line
- OVERDRIVE: pin your kill streak at its cap and your guns fire 10% faster until the streak breaks — the banner calls it, the streak chip burns red, hold the heat
- Elites now roll an affix, named in the wave banner so the counterplay is announced: VOLATILE dies in a death nova (respect the corpse), REGENERATING heals itself whenever you leave it alone, PLATED wears Juggernaut-grade armor that taxes chip fire
- The Hazard ladder: H0 and H1 are open from the start — win a run at a hazard level to unlock the next. Every hazard you've already flown stays unlocked, so nobody loses access they had
- Spacer victories now show on the roster: each character card lists the hazard levels it has won at, so the "clear every hazard with every spacer" campaign is visible at a glance
v0.9
IMPROVED
- The Outfitter got a real card design: every offer now carries a colored rarity rail across its top, a tinted light wash down the card face, and a glowing backplate behind its art — Refined, Prototype, and Relic offers read from across the room while Commons stay quiet steel. The selected card glows in its tier color, the SOLD stamp lands at a tilt, and your credits sit in a proper wallet chip
- Your spacer's portrait now sits in a frame tinted to their suit color, and the build panel's sections are divided by clean hardware rules instead of floating labels
- Every enemy now rides an accent-colored light pool that lifts its silhouette off the dark void — you can read a threat crossing the deepest nebula pocket, and elites and bosses burn wider and hotter
- Asteroids stopped cloning themselves: every rock now varies in tone, warmth, and silhouette, and richer ore tiers tint the whole boulder so a Plasma rock reads purple at a glance, not just by its crystals
- The combat frame is now graded with a subtle cool edge vignette, so the arena reads like a finished game instead of a raw viewport
FIXED
- Five pieces of shop art that had shipped as corrupt generations (the Mining Laser and Orbital Wrench icons, plus the Explosion, Melee, and Luck stat icons) are now proper painted icons matching the rest of the set
v0.8
NEW
- Kill-streak combo: chain kills within four seconds and every scrap drop pays more — up to +60% hotter at a twenty-kill streak. Take one real hit and the streak dies with the bonus. A STREAK chip under your kill counter heats from gold to red as it climbs
- Wave-end skill payouts: finish a wave without taking a single hit and a FLAWLESS credit bonus lands at the bell (worth more the deeper the wave); empty the field before the timer and FAST CLEAR pays for every second left on the clock
- Elite and boss kills now burst a high-tier ore jackpot on top of their scrap — Cobalt from elites, Plasma from bosses. Scooping it mid-fight swells your hold and your Greed multiplier right when the field is most dangerous: bank it or risk it
- Last stand: when a wave's spawns are all out and only a few stragglers remain, they stop kiting and come finish the fight — faster, closer, committed. No more chasing one strafing Stinger around the rim to end a round
v0.7
NEW
- Two armored heavyweights join the deep waves: the Juggernaut, a slow dreadplate hulk whose plate eats flat damage off every hit (rapid-fire streams tickle it — bring real per-hit punch), and the Aegis Warden, a plated fire-support platform that anchors mid-range and pounds you with slow heavy bolts while shrugging return chip fire
- Enemy armor is a real mechanic now: plate reduces each hit by a flat amount but can never absorb more than 75% of it, so heavy single hits punch through while pea-shooter spam gets taxed — and bosses at higher Hazard levels grow plate of their own
- Your outpost now reports in mid-fight: small HUD chips under the XP bar show live Aegis interception charges, the drone recovery budget, and Forge / Launch Rail boost timers (with "BANK 6+" reminding you how to trigger them), plus a Redline overdrive readout
- New OUTPOST screen at the dock (RB on controller, TAB on keyboard, or the new Outfitter button): a top-down schematic of your station's build ring where you inspect every module, drag them between the eight compass sockets, and see the next wave's incoming lane drawn on the map — arrange your defense to meet it
- Tier-II module upgrades can now be bought with credits on the OUTPOST screen — skip a gun this dock to harden the station instead
- Horde, elite, and boss waves now close in from one telegraphed compass front: the Outfitter's next-wave preview and the wave banner both call the lane ("HORDE — WEST RIM"), and most of that wave's contacts really do come from there — turn your outpost's defenses to face it
- Outpost modules now live on a real eight-socket compass ring around the station — and position matters: the Sentry Spire fires from its own tower, the Aegis Pylon's intercept bubble covers its side of the dock, and cargo drones sweep their hangar's flank of the field
- Space Miner is now Gunmetal Orbit across the title screen, project metadata, build artifacts, and SteamPipe setup
- The main menu is now a live 3D scene: the six-armed hero from the new key art — guns in both hands, four weapon arms fanned off his back — floats in real space with jet plumes, a nebula backdrop, and a slow drifting camera, under a native GUNMETAL ORBIT marquee (the old painted title card is retired)
- Two new hunters join the deep waves: the Reaver, an acid-green interceptor that flies to where you're GOING and commits a slashing pass to cut you off, and the Weaver, a fuchsia wake-layer whose strafing runs leave a lingering plasma trail across your flight lanes — kill it fast or watch the arena silt up
- Enemies got smart about your movement: Stingers lead their shots, Lancers lunge where you're headed, Poppers sprint to intercept, Siege Turret mortars land ahead of your flight path, and the boss half-leads its aimed bolt — flying one steady circle all round is no longer a free win; change direction and every attack is still cleanly dodgeable
- Your world grows with your outpost: placing your first module, choosing an evolution, and committing a command protocol each physically widen the asteroid field and ease the camera out for a broader view — build your base to see and roam further
- Gunner now wears the new hero armor in-game: matte-black segmented plates with blood-red accents and a glowing amber visor, straight from the new key-art direction — athletic proportions, sharper silhouette, fully rigged and alive under the flight animator (new portrait art follows with the other spacers)
- The whole soundscape went hard: every laser, impact, asteroid shatter, pickup, payout, and alarm is a new hard-hitting studio-grade sound effect
- Two original dubstep tracks now drive the soundtrack — heavy drops in the belt, front to back
- Dash through the asteroid belt with Shift or LB; tap for an instant burst or hold to chain another dash when its visible charge refills
- Three independent save slots now live on the title screen, each showing its spacer, wave, level, mode, Hazard, and credits before you continue or overwrite it
- Gunmetal Orbit has a new HD game mark — a luminous armored miner helmet breaks through an asteroid-and-crystal crest, replacing the old placeholder in the window, taskbar, and project list
- Build your orbital outpost during a run: choose one of three free station blueprints after milestone waves, then watch the station physically grow
- Six outpost modules create distinct routes — dock sentries, bolt shields, stronger delivery streaks, deposit overclocks, cargo drones, and launch boosts
- Outpost progression now grows with the run: build modules first, choose one of twelve specialist evolutions, then commit the whole station to one of three command protocols
- Construction objectives appear before milestone waves; completing one banks a Fabrication Core that rerolls the entire three-card blueprint hand
- Horde, elite, and boss waves now wake up different parts of the outpost — including one capped Sentry cannon strike earned by making two large boss-wave deliveries
- Deep Endless runs offer stackable contracts every ten waves, pairing stronger station effects with more enemies, faster threats, or heavier cargo
- Carrying ore now builds a live Greed multiplier; taking a real hit spills part of the hold for a four-second recovery scramble
- Repeated deliveries build a payout streak, while a full hold adds up to 15% weight until you bank it
- Six advanced weapon variants join the Outfitter: Rotary Cannon, Flak Array, Cryo Repeater, Starfire Lance, Hydra Rockets, and Breach Driver
- Twelve new passive items add cargo builds, defensive tradeoffs, specialist damage picks, and dangerous high-reward contracts
- Every shop card now says WEAPON or ITEM at the top, with its firing style or passive category beside it
- The deep-space arena is now a handcrafted industrial asteroid belt with HD crane, cargo, relay, ore, and rock-island landmarks framing clear flight lanes
- The home station now connects to its cargo works through a detailed armored bridge, so the opening reads as one industrial installation instead of floating props
- Character select shows the new hero portraits — all four spacers in their new look
- Space flight is back as the main arena — layered stars, nebula, dust, distant rocks, and a landmark planet surround the asteroid field
- Flying has been rebuilt around responsive thrust, readable coasting, body banking, zero-G limb drift, stronger jets, and smooth arena-edge glides
- Every primary combat model uses the HD set now — all four spacers (including the new Gunner), all six enemies, the station, and all 19 weapons
- Asteroids have denser sculpted geometry and now float around their real collision centres instead of inheriting a ground offset
- New runs launch straight into wave 1 — no more empty-pocket shop stop before the first fight
- The pause menu has QUIT TO MAIN MENU (your run save is kept — Continue picks up at your last dock)
- Weapon COMPARE panel in the Outfitter: focus any weapon card to see it stacked against the right owned weapon (your copy of the same gun, the one it would replace, or your weakest) — DPS/range/rate/tier deltas in green and red plus a plain-language verdict
- Buying a weapon you already own now fills an open slot — run six SMGs if you want. Combining two same-tier copies is a new COMBINE button in the Outfitter's build panel, next to Recycle; a purchase only merges when all six slots are full
- Credits flow more generously across the board (scrap and ore sales roughly doubled)
BALANCE
- Packs run denser now: up to 44 enemies can share the field late-run (was 36), the biggest waves bring more total bodies, Hazard 3+ fields genuinely bigger packs (H3 +15%, H4 +40%, H5 +50% enemies), and about a third of spawns now arrive AHEAD of where you're flying instead of always trailing behind you
- Dash is a fixed-strength exosuit burst now: Speed builds still dash a little farther, but only 35% of speed above base feeds the dash — no more blinking across the whole map on a maxed Speed build
- Union Card and Reroll Subscription are now one-per-run finds — no more stacking shop discounts to the cap
- Buying the same passive item over and over gets pricier: each copy you own raises the next one's price by 25% of its base, so first purchases cost the same but a sixth Nanoweave Suit costs over double
- Leveling now slows down as you climb: early levels cost about the same, but deep-run levels take real work — a wave-15 pilot was hitting level 102 and banking ten level-ups per dock, which turned every run into an unstoppable stat avalanche
- Waves push back harder at every Hazard level: enemies toughen ~15% faster each wave, waves bring more of them (and the biggest late-game waves got bigger), and up to six more can be on the field at once deep in a run — the recent credit boom made runs snowball past the danger
IMPROVED
- The four backpack weapon arms are real robotic hardware now — a new segmented industrial manipulator (shoulder mount, articulated elbow, gripper) replaces the old placeholder arm, repainted per spacer: near-black gunmetal on the Gunner's hero suit, class colors on the rest
- Hand weapons now track your actual aim: the palm guns and the arms holding them swing with the target and settle back into a forward brace when the target is gone, instead of freezing off-axis
- Guns look like hardware now: every mounted weapon runs ~15% bigger with a real gunmetal finish — metallic surfaces that catch the light, a stronger silhouette edge, and brighter powered accents
- Fresh asteroids now drift into the field mid-wave while the fight is on — long late-game rounds no longer strand you in a mined-out belt
- Maximized and ultrawide windows now fill edge to edge in combat — the deep-space backdrop covers every aspect ratio instead of showing black flanks
- The Outfitter's build panel is wider so ship stats breathe, and the passive items header now answers the question everyone asked: there's NO LIMIT
- The Outfitter's stat dashboard now always shows the damage stat for every weapon class you own — run drones or turrets and Engineering appears at +0% instead of hiding until you buy a point of it (same for Ranged, Melee, and Elemental)
- Controller menu navigation no longer skips: flicking the stick toward an upgrade card can't bounce focus down to REROLL anymore — diagonal stick drift is filtered on every menu and the upgrade hand keeps focus inside the row
- Explosions now hit in layers: a white-hot core, radial spark spray, and an expanding damage-radius shockwave replace the old single-ring pop
- Flight animation blends smoothly through thrust, coast, reversal, aim, and bank changes without threshold chatter or frame-rate-dependent snapping
- Sound effects now default to half volume so the soundtrack comes through — the new set runs hot (adjustable in Options as always)
- Jukebox songs now hand off with a smooth crossfade when the playlist shuffles instead of a hard cut
- Blaster fire, plasma impacts, character level-ups, dash ignition, and dash recharge now use premium authored sci-fi sound effects with a mix tuned for stacked weapons
- Level-up, outpost, Outfitter, victory, and title screens now fully lock flight controls and clear zero-G drift; launching the next wave restores control cleanly
- Saves now keep a validated backup generation, recover from a damaged primary, migrate the old single save into Slot 1, and reliably resume mid-wave quits from the last secured dock
- Controller shortcuts now show real Xbox or Steam Deck button glyphs in the Outfitter and upgrade hands instead of text-only A/B/X/Y labels; Deck and Xbox/PC artwork switches automatically
- The Outfitter now has direct controller shortcuts: Y rerolls, X locks offers or can be held to recycle a selected weapon, LB combines a selected twin, and holding B launches; upgrade hands use Y to reroll too
- The game has a real soundtrack now, played as one continuous jukebox: the dubstep tracks "Core Breaker" and "Gravity Drop" shuffle end-to-end, and whatever is playing keeps playing straight through the Outfitter, pause, menus, and round changes — tracks never restart or switch just because you opened a screen
- Pausing no longer cuts the music to dead air — the soundtrack keeps playing under the pause menu
- Xbox controllers, Steam Deck/Steam Input, and compatible PC pads now hotplug and switch prompts automatically; D-pad flight, always-available pause input, drift protection, and an Options device readout make the active control path explicit
- A full six-weapon build now reads as one exosuit: two weapons ride the astronaut's hands while four compact articulated backpack arms carry the rest, then fold away when they are not in combat
- The void has depth everywhere now — the landmark planet and distant rock belt are back around the industrial arena, drifting debris reaches under the flight lanes instead of hugging the rim, and the dust haze breathes a little more
- The tractor field and landing pad are proper energy rings now — a soft glowing core with a light sweep — instead of flat drawn circles
- Enemies feel alive: every mover shows a propulsion trail in its signature color, banks into its turns, and warps in with a flash of its own hue instead of quietly inflating
- Firing has body now — the astronaut's arms visibly absorb each volley's recoil, and heavier guns kick harder than the SMG
- Rapid fire sounds like individual shots instead of one buzzing sample: one-shots vary slightly in level, and identical sounds landing in the same instant no longer stack into a louder pop
- Spacers no longer hover in a seated mascot pose: they hang naturally in zero-G, dive into thrust with their legs streaming, and vector their exhaust opposite every strafe and reversal
- Hovering in place looks like a fighter riding his jets now, not a mannequin or a floating teddy bear: legs extended long under the thrusters with a staggered soft knee and boots pointed into the twin plumes, chest open, guns held in a low ready carry at the chest instead of arms locked straight out at shoulder height, and a free hand drifting relaxed at the hip (Dev notes: BASE_POSE reauthored — legs near extension with IDLE_FOOT_POINT toe point, slight chest-open spine arch; BRACE_UPPERARM raise 0.72→0.38 with thrust now raising the carry via HERO_ARM_RAISE instead of releasing it)
- Flying finally looks like the key art: under thrust the whole body pitches into a diagonal hero dive — helmet leading the travel vector, chest joining the line, both legs streaming long behind with pointed boots — instead of staying upright and throwing one knee high; dashing straightens the dive even harder (Dev notes: retired the THRUST/DASH_KNEE_LEAD one-knee split in AstroAnimator for symmetric leg extensions + one soft lead knee; _lean() pitch sign flipped to dive with LEAN_PITCH_CAP 0.85 + dash bonus, spine pitch-counter axis-split down to 0.10/0.06; flight_check now asserts the dive and fails on any knee-raise/boot-fold regression)
- Your first weapon is now held in the astronaut's braced gun hand and rides every pose — no more gun floating alongside the suit
- Direction changes visibly punch the jetpack — thruster glow and trail kick with acceleration, not just speed
- The arena is brighter and more colorful — a stronger warm sun, a cool blue fill light, and richer ambient bring out the sculpted rock and station detail that used to sink into darkness (Dev notes: main.tscn ambient 0.24→0.85 + FillLight, saturation 1.22; asteroid stone tint lightened 6b625c→a89a8e with a stronger ore-color lean toward the doc'd Overwatch-luminous render language)
- Asteroid island textures now load GPU-compressed, cutting video memory use with no visible change (Dev notes: Godot detect_3d resolved the crag/ridge Color/NormalGL/ORM maps from lossless 2D to VRAM-compressed s3tc_bptc on first editor import; committing the .import flip stops it dirtying every fresh checkout)
- The title, Outfitter, pause, spacer, run setup, options, upgrade, and results screens now share one luminous industrial command-deck presentation built for gamepad focus and Steam Deck readability
- Menus keep the asteroid belt visible behind clear run status, stronger type hierarchy, cyan focus hardware, safer leave-run confirmations, and readable unaffordable shop cards
- Level-up hands always lead with one upgrade that matches the weapons currently equipped
- The asteroid belt is now a wider 32-unit playspace with a soft tracking camera, solid station/island collision, and authored industrial landmarks around the expanded perimeter
- Asteroid islands now use two distinct 50k-triangle fractured silhouettes, while mineable rocks use their own compact 42k-triangle model instead of a shrunken island
- Live enemies now enter around the player inside the wider arena, keeping the onslaught readable without sacrificing exploration space
- The void now uses a painted deep-navy nebula backdrop with target-matched midtone coverage, restrained stars, deeper shadows, and stronger warm/cool separation
- Rookie now uses the approved bulky orange-and-white hero model in-world, with authored flight-idle/thrust motion layered over reactive zero-G posing
- A closer fixed camera, richer PBR material response, warmer industrial lights, sparser stars, and clearer enemy/station scale make the combat frame read like one finished place
FIXED
- Inspecting weapons in the Outfitter works every time now: pointing at any weapon — a shop card or one of your equipped slots — reliably shows its readout. Equipped slots get a new EQUIPPED panel with DPS, range, rate, tier, special behavior, and exactly what COMBINE needs; the panel no longer sticks to a previously clicked card
- Weapon levels always show now: every equipped slot wears its tier badge and every weapon card states its tier, including Tier I
- The recurring one-to-two-second freeze every few seconds of combat is gone — enemy arrivals no longer stall the whole game, so fights hold a smooth frame rate (including on Steam Deck)
- Siege Turret mortars no longer spam an invalid-position error after landing or crash a fight
- Internal: the alien regolith/ship-deck comparison remains available behind `SPACEMINER_ARENA=world` plus `SPACEMINER_WORLD=<id>`; it is no longer the default arena.
v0.6
NEW
- Two new enemies: the Lancer, a fast predator that telegraphs and dashes in a straight line you can sidestep, and the Siege Turret, which plants at long range and lobs mortars onto marked ground rings
- The wave-20 boss now fights in phases — radial bolt volleys once it's hurt, and a furious enrage when it's nearly dead
- Your best run shows on the title screen, and beating your record earns a gold NEW PERSONAL BEST on the results screen
IMPROVED
- Enemies are much bigger and pop off the backdrop — everything reads at a glance
- The camera sits closer to the action
- The battlefield has a real floor now: dust haze and distant rock silhouettes anchor the space instead of empty void
- The astronaut finally moves like an astronaut — weightless floating and drifting, no more walk-cycle look
- Combat sounds hit harder: weapon fire cracks, explosions boom, the boss alarm means it — while the shop and dock stay cozy
- Ore chunks and XP motes are easier to spot and grab
FIXED
- Big performance pass: shooting and flying no longer stutter (weapon fire, impacts, and kill effects were rebuilding graphics resources every shot)
- Guns no longer keep firing sound effects on the shop and level-up screens after a wave ends