Every boon now works with every weapon. Re-measured with fixed targets in front, behind, to the side, at an angle and in groups — all six weapons against Spiral Fire, Homing, Rear Guns, Cross Fire, Volley Fire and the crit skill, old build against new:
- Snake Gun: Homing, Spiral Fire, Rear Guns and Cross Fire had no visible effect. The snake recalculates its flight direction every frame from its main axis, but the boons only rotated its velocity. Rear and cross copies ended up flying dead-on top of each other, straight ahead. Now the main axis picks up the rotated direction on the first frame, and Homing strengthens the axis’s pull toward the target (damage on an angled target: 0 → 180).
- Ion Laser: none of the shot boons worked, and neither did the crit skill, Core Break or Ionization, because the beam was calculated without crits at all. Now: Spiral Fire sweeps the beam, Homing bends it onto nearby enemies, Rear Guns ignites a second beam pointing backward, Cross Fire adds three more at intervals, Volley Fire makes it pulse (pauses, but hotter in between). Beam damage is now tallied per enemy in eighth-second ticks and settled as a hit with crit applied. Without boons the damage stays the same (measured 264 vs. 264), with crit skill rank 3: 264 → 463.
- Drone Swarm: no shot boon worked. Now: Rear Guns adds an extra, weaker drone, Spiral Fire makes strikes graze nearby enemies too, Cross Fire has every few strikes chain to up to three enemies, Volley Fire gives double strikes with a pause between, Homing increases hunting radius and speed.
- Homing Missiles: Homing makes them more maneuverable and quicker to accelerate.
- The boon card now shows, under its description, what the boon actually does with your current weapon.
New missile art. A graphite nose cone with a seeker head, warning band, plate seams, canard fins, swept tail fins, and a thruster. Plus a flickering flame whose length depends on speed, and thin gray smoke. The amber glow circle behind the missile is gone. Enemy missiles keep their old look.
Hangar prices now match their effect. Weapons have fixed prices: Spread Shot 45,000, Ion Laser and Homing Missiles 50,000, Snake Gun and Drone Swarm 55,000 ions. They no longer make the rest of the hangar more expensive. Everything else scales with its strength: ×2.5 for Lives, Revival, Weapon Core, Workbench, Ion Collector, Foreknowledge and Cargo Hold, ×1.25 for Engine, Tractor Coils and Resonance Hull, ×1.7 for everything else. Worked out in full, the entire hangar costs around 693,000 ions — at 20,000 per hour, that’s 35 hours. The Ion Collector cuts that down noticeably.