May 2026 Dev Update

Hi everyone!

It's been a busy month. May featured a ton of new things from upgrades, to re-vamped abilities, to ascension work. Here's a summary of all we got to in the last month:

New Features

Upgrade Encounters

New special encounter (on the order of vendor and mystery encounters). Allows players to upgrade ships in their fleet. This was the “last missing vector” for roguelite progression. We added 4 encounters for these.

First 5 Ascension Levels

We will do the other 5 in a future milestone, but the real ascension content for the first 5 levels is in. This makes Free Play considerably more interesting. Steam post image

Localized Fonts

Added fonts for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This should be the complete set of fonts we need, but obviously we will need loc QA to verify.

Sell Ships at Vendor

Another long-awaited feature. Unlocked with a Discovery (and upgradeable with further Discoveries).

Engineer Ability Redone as a Triggered Explosion

The old version of the Engineer lay traps ability just wasn’t fun enough. You had a limited number of uses and the traps exploded automatically. The new version lets you control when the traps explode, so there is some skill/timing. Then you can immediately lay a new trap field.

Iteration

• Added an option for 3 ships to roll as post mission loot. This gets “more ships” in the game.

• Better map region expansion during generation (loots and path width are improved)

• Added more colony techs in the Cobalt Tradepost

• Vendor strings have more flavor

• New vendor loot tables for buying credits and science

• Walls

  • Final art

  • AI builds some walls now

  • Changed wall placement/obstruction handling to work better

• Some better testing console commands for resource management

• Stations can finally be constructed on top of ships

• Mothership Retreat is now an unlocked feature (via Discovery)

• Synergy System

  • Relics and relic drops are fully considered in the synergy system

  • Squadron deployment is an input to the synergy system

• Changed health-per-pip on hitpoint bars to make them smaller

• CP AI improvements (walls, general attacking, mission priorities, etc.)

• Toned-down the Corrupter ingame FX

• The big Discovery unlocks have a literal bigger button

  

• Flux (metagame resource) income doubled for missions

• More

  • Warp boons (3)

  • Backstories (6)

  • Icons

  • Metagame Discoveries (15)

  • Enhancements (9)

  • Relics (4)

  • Missions (1)

Key Balance Changes

• All enemy ability delays are at least 4 seconds now. We also added some randomization and delays in to make the gameplay more interesting.

• Starting boons are better overall

• Rocket turrets got pierce and shoot faster. Rocket and Bombard turrets are much better (with commensurate price increases).

• Attack Drones got instant-hit projectiles

• Shredders are not as good

• Free Play sectors are 1 column shorter

Key Bugfixes

• Fixed several drone targeting issues

• Fixed issues with region merging during map generation

• Fixed ascensions not stacking

• Fixed a crash during unit spawns

• Wall minimap icons work correctly now

• Fixed issue where dead squadrons would not be included in the relic affects text in post-mission rewards

• Fixed issue where death-spiraling drones were counted as being alive

• Fixed several issues in the synergy system (code and data)

• Fixed several unit actions/abilities that were never meant to be shown to players so they are hidden

• Colony details support embed data lookup

• Many, many bugfixes for scrolling, navigation, and focus, especially with gamepad

• Fixed relic encounters to have safeguards to disallow players from picking the same reward they might have previously picked in the same run

• Adjusted exploration around objective goals to avoid turret placement exploits