Sector 7 got stuck — confirmed by real runs. Three of nine runs on version 0.82.0 got stuck in sector 7 or 8: 118, 127 and 467 seconds on a single wave, with hit rate collapsing from 38% to 3%. The cause: from wave 7 on, Arcade mixes in zone enemies borrowed from Orbit (Lance, then Driver from 9, Mirror from 12, Plague from 16). Those four only had movement logic built for Orbit — in Arcade they fell through the cracks, stayed stuck at their spawn point above the top of the screen, and were unreachable there. But a wave only ends once every enemy is gone.
- The four guest enemies now have their own Arcade behavior: fly in from the top first, then operate at their normal height — with the same signature as in Orbit.
- Safety net: every enemy now tracks how long it’s spent outside the reachable field. After eight seconds, it gets removed. No enemy type can ever block a run like this again, including future ones.
The difficulty levels now spread much further apart. Before, Cadet and Pilot played almost identically, and two players had cleared sector 50 on Veteran. The split now comes mainly from damage, not enemy hull: hull and shield come almost entirely from the hangar, while damage also grows from level and boons — so a high damage multiplier tests exactly what a fully upgraded ship is made of, making higher difficulties genuinely lethal instead of just spongy.
| Difficulty | Damage | Enemy pressure | Wall (unupgraded / half / full) | Hits taken (unupgraded / full) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cadet | 0.45× | 0.36× | 31 / 33 / 41 | 17.5 / 56.0 |
| Pilot | 1× | 1× | 21 / 27 / 31 | 7.9 / 25.2 |
| Veteran | 2.3× | 2.3× | 3 / 21 / 24 | 3.4 / 11.0 |
| Legend | 4× | 4.6× | 1 / 16 / 21 | 2.0 / 6.3 |
Live-tested: Legend, sector 1, bare ship — a single hit strips the whole shield and six points of hull.
Lightning Arc scaled quadratically. Every stack increased both damage and shortened the cooldown. Two boons could out-damage the main weapon without any aiming required. Player feedback called it “completely overpowered,” and the wave log from that same run showed high superiority across several waves with zero damage taken. Now only the damage scales fully; the fire rate is dampened instead — at one stack it’s still 75% as strong as before, at four stacks 38%.
The Nova becomes a find, not a stockpile.
- The “Nova Capacity” skill now only extends storage space and no longer refills it.
- Picking one up in the field now adds one charge, instead of permanently extending the max. If storage is already full, the pickup heals 30% hull instead. In exchange, novas appear more often: every third wave instead of every sixth in Arcade, and double weight in Orbit.
- 30-second cooldown. Storage alone wasn’t enough — anyone holding three fired them all within ten seconds. The cooldown shows in the HUD, and the pips dim while it’s active.
- The Nova Recycler perk drops from an uncapped 30% per stack (two boons made novas essentially free) to 12% per stack with a hard cap at 50%.
Large asteroids now act as cover. A large asteroid blocks shots from both sides. Enemy fire burns up against it without scratching it — only your own shots wear it down. It also absorbs your own piercing shots: otherwise a purchased pierce upgrade would bypass the rule entirely, and the rock would stop being an obstacle and become a free gift instead. Medium and small chunks stay passable, or every field would turn into a wall.
The ship only fires when an enemy is on screen. In sectors, that means the visible field; in Orbit, the sight radius. The rail shot now holds its charge instead of firing into empty space.
New skill points now show up on the ship. A pulsing ring, three rising angles and a “SKILL POINTS · TAB” prompt — in the middle of a bullet storm, nobody notices the edge of the screen. The marker stays until the skill tree has been opened once, not until the points are spent — players who deliberately save points up shouldn’t get nagged forever.
Telemetry: damage now tracked by source. Before, every hit was credited to whichever weapon happened to be equipped — satellites, auras, Lightning Arc, nova and ramming damage were all invisible. The source now comes along with every hit, split into two buckets: weapon and path damage (“which weapon is actually carrying the run?”), and boon, core, duo and environment damage (“what’s contributing besides the weapon?”). A first measurement from testing: Lightning Arc dealt 2,940 damage against 75 from the Pulse Gun — exactly the kind of number nobody could see before.
Balance data from before this patch is no longer comparable.