March 2026 Monthly Dev Update

New Features

Archive

This is our “codex” where you can see all the things you’ve discovered/unlocked. There is still a missing section and a lot of UX to improve, but you can certainly get the idea.

Barrier Stations (walls)

Available to build in missions once you buy the unlock at your Starbase (Cobalt) or Hive (Slaraash). We’re still deciding if we like the way they get built, but we like what they do for the game. The CPAI is not very savvy with them yet, though.

Warp Boon/Gift (name TBD)

You used to start each run with an intro mission. We’ve replaced that with the so-called “Warp Boon”. It’s akin to how Slay the Spire starts; you get a choice of 3 mostly unique options to immediately start setting up/customizing your run.

Starting Squadrons

We used to just start you with a single Scout squadron. Now we give you all of the 4 main ships:

• Scout (Specialist class)

• Talon (Assault class)

• Sentinel (Guardian class)

• Rail Cannon (Siege class)

This gives players a better ability to respond to the starting RPS relationships and was actually just a necessary change given the Warp Boon. But we like it more than we expected to like it.

2 Pages of Mothership Abilities

Long overdue but also required given the Walls. This lets players have up to 8 mothership abilities slotted for each mission, restoring their desire to get more all the way throughout a run.

Multi-select Improvements and Gamepad support

It works “the same” between MKB and gamepad now. MKB lost “command all” in favor of it becoming “select all”.

Iteration

• Free Play progression is better now and stretches across all three sectors.

  • Progression in a Free Play run is slower than in Story mode (given that Free Play is 3 sectors to just 1 sector for Story mode).

  • Related, the boss meter techs got a big once-over and more rarity levels to help support the Free Play changes and to make the earlier story chapters easier to play.

• New Starmap backgrounds for Chapters 1 and 2.

• Loads of new icons.

• New FX for Talon death bloom, Mirror Finish relic, and a few others.

• Vargoth boss battle

• We remember what squadron you had equipped as your starting squadron. If that dies in the mission, we re-requip it once the mission is over. This should reduce some confusion/frustration for players.

• Squadron Refit (refilling a squadron’s ships when it dies during a mission) is now tied to metagame discoveries.

• All the enemies are the same color in a given mission. We’ll be changing the colors more in M28.

• Scientists and Warlords got more differentiated. Warlords can beeline for your colonies now.

• More differentiation between the three types of PDCs: Bullet, Bombard, and Rocket

• Prelude (FTUE) got some love. Better missions, etc.

• More backstory content.

Key Balance Changes

• Prisma sites have a lot more prisma

• Buffs to Talon, Rail Cannon, and Launcher specials

Key Bugfixes

• Fixed bad sector map generation where you could not get off the starting zone.

• Fixed the known instances of the “double drone” enhancements.

• Fixed a load of text and embed typos (as always).

• Fixed a horrendous double-buff bug with loading checkpoints in the mission of a session. Admittedly this is a tester bug, but it was critical to get fixed.

• Fixed placements that were showing as invalid when they were not.

• Prelude (FTUE) mission losses show the reason for losing again.

• Fixed CPAI trying to explore off the map. Whoops.

• Squadron selection panel is consistent about what it shows now.