Orbit, round 2: five new job types and a client. Four types, drawn on by all three zones, weren’t enough for a second pass — and none of them put anything new into the world. Now every zone draws from its own pool, with Smoke Out still available everywhere:
- Mapping (Scrapyard): discover every location in the zone — get within 1,600 px of each once.
- Cargo (Scrapyard, Hangar): pick up a load at one station (free) and bring it to the next station in the zone. Along the way, two hunters show up every 9 s; get shot down and you lose the cargo.
- Convoy (Hangar): a cargo train — a fortress with four escort drones — travels from the nearest station to another one in the zone at 72 px/s, and only fires if you get close. Intercepting it gives ten ore and a capsule; if it reaches the station, the cargo is gone.
- Bounty (Hangar, Embers): a named wanted target appears 900–1,400 px away with 2.4× hull and comes straight for you. Take them down for a wreck part.
- Relic (Embers): two lie in the Embers of each system. Hold the ring for 20 s — it calls in enemies every 3 s while you do — for a boon.
Wanted targets, cargo trains and their escorts are exempt from the rule that pulls distant enemies toward the player. Otherwise there’d be no route to intercept — just enemies that suddenly appear.
Stations talk now. One line per zone and station when you dock; after finishing a job, the next station you dock at thanks you.
Arcade now has music from file, like Orbit does: if an Arcade track file exists, it plays; otherwise the Orbit track plays there too. The guardian theme carries over either way, and the old synth loop stays as a fallback.
XP cores are 3D crystals now. A six-faceted gem from the model forge, in the same green as the old cores. Not rendered live, though: hundreds of them as full meshes would cost more than the rest of the game combined. Instead, the model gets baked into a sprite sheet of 24 rotation frames; every core spins with its own phase, with a soft glow underneath. Looks three-dimensional, costs one sprite.