The Phase Jump wasn’t an unpopular button — it was a dead one. Telemetry showed it as the most-equipped and least-used tool in the game: equipped in 19 of 20 runs, and in 17 of those, never triggered even once. The cause was a single line deep in the jump code: in the sector, it silently did nothing as long as no point was spent on it in the skill tree. The loadout screen still let you pick a jump anyway, the button then did nothing, and nothing told you why. All three runs that actually used a jump were Orbit runs — there it always worked without a skill point, and two of those runs had no point in it at all.
- The jump now works from the start, in both the sector and Orbit. The idea was always right — a loadout slot that stays silent until the first skill point is worse than no slot at all — it just only applied to Orbit until now.
- It’s now shown in the HUD, under the nova: the chosen jump’s name, a cooldown bar, and, once it’s ready, the key to press. Without this, anyone who doesn’t already know it exists would never find it. On phones there’s no key hint — the button sits in the touch bar there instead, and it now also dims while the jump is on cooldown.
And the first skill point actually made it worse. This only came to light once the jump became usable at all without a skill point:
- The cooldown was 2.6 s with no point spent, and 3.0 s with the first point — worse, not better. The value ladder was defined in two separate places that had drifted apart: the actual numbers, and the skill’s own description text. It’s now defined in exactly one place: 2.6 s with no point, then 2.3 s, 1.9 s, 1.5 s.
- With no point spent you also jumped farther than with one (0.3 s vs. 0.22 s of jump duration — at 1,100 px/s that’s 330 px vs. 242 px). Now every rank jumps the same distance; the point only affects cooldown — which is exactly what “sluggish without the skill” is supposed to mean.
Every sector run now having a real dodge tool is a noticeable relief, especially early on. Worth a look in the next round of measurements.