Orbit+: the loot hunt begins (package A). Destroy the Core in Orbit and you unlock a new mode: Orbit with loot, space-Diablo style.
- Danger levels 1 to 5. Enemies have more hull (up to ×3.2) and hit harder (up to ×1.9). In return the loot gets better, up to Legendary on level 5. The next level unlocks when you destroy the Core on your highest one.
- Items with rarity and properties. Nine slots: weapon core, reactor, hull, drive, shield system, mining, targeting and two sensor slots. Each item carries up to three properties such as damage, fire rate, crit chance, damage against guardians, hull, shield recharge, speed or ore. Legendaries have a name of their own.
- Loot in space. Guardians, the Core, bandit positions, contracts from ★★ and elites drop capsules, colored by rarity, from Rare upward with a beam of light. The tractor beam pulls them in.
- Cargo hold and storage. Ten items fit in the hold. They are stored when you dock, when you are recalled and at the end of a flight. If you die, the cargo is lost, but what you have equipped stays. Storage holds 30 items.
- Equip in the menu (ORBIT+ card → EQUIPMENT) or at any station in the new LOOT tab, with a comparison to the equipped item. Surplus gets scrapped into components.
Smoother on weaker machines. Measured in a dense Orbit fight with a laptop-class CPU: from 46 to 74 frames per second, in an Arcade fight from 57 to 101. Three brakes are gone: texts were redrawn and re-uploaded to the GPU every frame even when nothing changed, sprites reset their frame every frame, and the HUD rewrote around 30 values into the page every frame, forcing the browser to redo its layout.
Automatic resolution (new default). On a MacBook M1 in Chrome the game ran at 34 to 43 frames with “Sharp”. The GPU could not render the full Retina area plus the glow within 16.7 ms, and every frame that is just too late waits for the next refresh. “Automatic” measures the frame rate in flight and lowers the render resolution in 15 % steps until the game runs smoothly. Below 80 % the glow also uses half as many blur passes. A previously saved “Sharp” is switched to “Automatic” once. Pick “Sharp” deliberately afterwards and it stays.
Show frame rate (Options → Graphics): frames per second, milliseconds per frame and the render resolution in the bottom left corner.