Fleetbreakers July 2026 Recap

New Features

July Demo

Polish and bugfixe focus to get ready for the demo. By all accounts we’ve heard, it was a good success.

Massive Economy Overhaul

We’ve had a lot of nagging things we did not like. The playtest feedback helped convince us to pull the trigger on many of those. As you might imagine, this has thrown the whole game into a state of worse balance. We are rapid fixing that, though. It will be sorted out here in the next couple of weeks.

The highlights:

• Resource mission rewards are no longer done with crates. They’re awarded as you finish the mission. Moreover, the exact rewards are shown on the Starmap to create another layer of gameplay with player choice.

• Extractors are no longer limited by charges. Instead, they cost prisma like everything else you build in the game. This removes frustration about not being able to gather at more than a couple of prisma sites in each mission (at the cost of potentially hanging oneself with poor prisma management).

• Crates in missions are now more about extra prisma and in-mission bonuses (heals, buffs for squadrons). Credit, Science, and Flux crates may still drop, but they are more rare.

• Post-mission crate gathering is gone. Any resource crates that were uncollected during the mission are automatically granted to the player when the mission is over. This is a huge boon to the game’s pace and fixes the balance issues for players who were not collecting those crates.

Here’s a pic of the zone with their resource rewards showing. This really improves the strategic layer of the game since players can decide which resource areas to go after with more purpose and expectation Steam post image

Nexus V2

The Nexus is our ship/relic/etc. Inventory. It was overly complex and, in some cases, downright confusing. Players would often accidentally equip a squadron without meaning to. We’ve fixed all that with a streamlined layout. It’s like a dream. It’s really great.

Massive overhaul of Bosses and Boss Meter Techs

• All bosses work in Free Play with any faction

• All bosses jazzed up with better phases

• Bosses have much more unique feel/vibes. Roughly 35 new sets of techs to make that happen.

Giant Relic Pass

We killed some lame relics, added better relics, and jazzed up a bunch more. All told, we hit about 35% of the relic content with the goal of highlighting more gameplay areas, helping to differentiate runs, and drastically improving synergy potential. The new starting squadron relics (relics that buff whatever squadron is in the starting slot) are particularly exciting and work very well to make each run feel different than the last.

Drones V3

Refactored drone design to inherent vs. bonus drones. Carriers come with inherent drones. Most everything else is bonus drones. Droneries add bonus drones (on top of inherent drones). Rebalanced whole drone economy (Drone stats, Dronery stats/costs, Incubator colony stats/costs/techs).

Boss Oserath (Boss 5)

Administer Oserath is playable in story and free play modes complete with a unique boss model and behavior.

CPAI can build Droneries and Passages

They dynamically buff the AI’s play which means the player can affect things by destroying them (like shield generators when the AI is Cobalt)

Iteration

• Loads more icons (relics, enhancements, colony techs). Still loads to go.

• Many perf improvements. More to go.

  • Fixed big hitch at end of missions

  • More pooling (projectiles, impact FX)

  • Pathing/movement performance improvements

  • LOS perf improvements

  • Mine perf improvements

  • Many fixes for across-the-board slowdowns

• Swizzled bosses so that all the bosses can work in Free Play mode with any faction

• Computer Player AI changes with base spawning to support new boss behavior

• Savegame file size reduction

• Acid bubble visual improvements

• We only play the reinforce train sound for selected squadrons

• String iteration to fix/unask plurality issues

• More teaching (ships heal between missions, forward spawn teaching, teaching objective to build a warp conduit colony)

• Pass on all maps for general improvements

• Various in-mission art improvements

  • Health crates and icons

  • Improvements to the 4th sector environments

  • Acid bubble improvements

  • Iteration on impact FX, particularly to make them scale for fancier relics

• UI improvements

  • Discovery tree can be zoomed out all the way

  • Font improvements

  • Start of new UX flows around end of mission rewards and bounties

  • Corrupted faction name back in the sector map UI

  • Fixed several bad word wrapping instances across the UI

  • Convert more strings to have embeds so we have less issues with rebalancing and loc

  • Construction ability costs now show everywhere you’d expect them to

  • Spent extractors convert to a different minimap icon

• Number-based content

  • Achievements (19)

  • Missions (3)

  • Encounters (5)

  • Enhancements (-3 net, roughly 20 changed/improved)

  • Relics (20 new, roughly 40 changed/improved)

  • Sector backgrounds (1)

  • Bosses (1)

  • Discoveries (3)

Key Balance Changes

• Chapters 1 and 2 are easier

• Boss Ciron is easier

• Notably OP things knocked down (launchers, shredders, stingers, acid bubbles)

• Single ship upgrade option in the upgrade encounters now costs Science

• Corrupted energy nodes back to buffing bosses

• Mel’s black market encounters can happen more often

• Onslaught missions can only happen once per sector

• Runs Completed achievements changed to Runs Won to avoid cheesing

• Armory colony down to 1 science with a few cheaper tier 1 techs

• Resource Center colony requires extractor unlock

• Mass Repair mothership ability is purchaseable in Starbase tier 1

• Upgrade slot machine option averages risked rarity with a change at +1 or +2 rarity rewards

• More relic encounters in Chapters 1 and 2

• Enemy tanks train slower

• 25% resource burn when collectors (extractors or assimilators) are destroyed is turned off

• Enemy Agents cannot start within 3 hexes of the player

Key Bugfixes

• Fixed various achievement tracking bugs

• Fixed motherships not getting updated stats in the Nexus after colony tech purchases

• Fixed upgraded ships getting their enhancements re-applied (making them OP)

• Fixed defense drones and fields being attackable

• Fixed bug where first convo step was needlessly delayed

• Motherships and stations show drone details

• Fixed issue where too many acid bubbles could spawn per squadron

• Fixed issue where AI could get stuck and not build things

• Tiny Stun ability no longer stuns everything

• Fixed stunned Shredders doing damage and making noise like they are doing damage

• Death Bloom projectiles home again

• Fixed several embeds not working

• Fixed a few techs/relics not showing the correct affected units

• Fixed bad logic in CPAI that was causing them to not build the primary focus units in the right quantity

• Gather missions require an extractor ability to be equipped on the mothership

• Default attack relic no longer buffs all attacks

• Fixed bug where the mystery crates were not revealing correctly when the mission started

• Fixed some bugs where conflicting enhancements could get put on the same ships

• Fixed bug where the fail message for the Warp Conduit limit was not showing up on the UI in the colony build menu

• Several crash fixes

• Lots of fixes to push things out to later acts and restrict things with ordering so players don’t get content (boons, stories) before they are meant to

• Loads of map-specific fixes and generation improvements

• Loads of string bugfixes

• Fixed some unlocalized pieces of the game discovered by the playtest