Every weapon gets its own identity. Before, they differed in numbers, not in feel — six ways to press roughly the same button at roughly the same speed.
Heavy Gun (formerly Spread Shot) is now a shotgun. Fire rate drops from 6–8 shots per second to about one, and damage per pellet rises to match — the DPS budget stays the same, but the feel changes completely. It now has pierce (1 to 3 enemies) and knockback: enemies hit get shoved back and recover their position over half a second. Deliberately built as a decaying speed rather than a teleport, so enemies don’t lose their pattern. Measured: a single pellet pushes a fortress-class enemy back 39 px.
The reload now shows as a ring around the ship, not at the edge of the screen: a full second of silence between shots is meaningless without a visible countdown. The ring glows just before it fires. The sound now has four layers instead of one — impact, body, shockwave, tail — the old one was 90 ms long and sounded like a pea shooter.
Ion Laser: four seconds to reach 5× damage instead of two seconds to 3×, but it starts at only 0.7× its old cold strength. In the first few seconds it’s the weakest weapon in the game; after that, the strongest. Staying on target is now the actual point of the weapon.
Snake Gun: range up from 560 to 900 — the longest after the laser. Every hit now applies Decay: 70% of the hit’s damage keeps ticking over three seconds and stacks up to eight times. It uses its own separate damage pool, so both effects apply side by side. Because the stacks are capped, it now rewards tagging many targets rather than burning down one — and the DPS display reflects that now too.
Homing Missiles: now always fire exactly one at a time. Before, level 4 and up fired two simultaneously, which blurred the moment the weapon is built around. In exchange it carries the full damage budget alone, and blast radius grows from 44–70 to 48–92.
Pulse Gun stays the baseline everything else is measured against: medium range, medium rate, medium damage.
All 48 measured data points (6 weapons × 8 levels) were re-tested against the rig; the single-target damage display still holds within a few percent.
Weapons can now only be bought, never handed out for free. Three achievements used to grant weapons outright, bypassing the ship-level gating from 0.81.0. They now contribute ions toward the purchase instead of replacing it: Guardian Hunter 12,000 ions, On the Knife’s Edge 15,000, Path Chosen 5,000.
Analysis: new sections for difficulty × build progress, and weapon-cap hits by difficulty. Difficulty, hangar tier and ship level had been tracked for a while — they just weren’t analyzed yet.