This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
Full notes
Full Heat Signature update
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What changed
0 fixes5 additions0 changes0 removals
Gameplay
Performance
addedThis post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details. Today we're announcing not so much one new feature as seven: all the new hazards you'll start seeing on missions with the Space Birthday Update. Like any hazards, the mission generator only uses these when they're appropriate for the mission's difficulty level - we didn't make the game harder overall. We did, however, add some ultra-hard missions at the top end of the spectrum that we'll be talking about later.
addedTelepadsMost ships now have telepads - if you're in a tight spot, you can use it to teleport yourself into space. In fact, when you use a telepad everything on it is teleported, so you can get a Rescue or Capture target out this way, or even use it to deal with a enemy. But more often, you'll be dealing with how the enemy uses them. Specifically:
addedFleeing TargetsSome missions now feature new type of alarm response: instead of starting a countdown to your capture, the person you're here for makes a break for the telepad. If they get there, they'll teleport out and you've blown it. So before you do anything risky, it's worth looking at the ship's layout and figuring out the route they'll take if they're alerted. Can you intercept them? Can you get there first? Can you crash the telepad so they can't get out? Can you hack it? Where do they go if they use a hacked telepad?
addedReinforcementsSome ships don't need to fly to the nearest station to take care of an intruder. With a telepad, they can just teleport in the reinforcements they need, who'll then search the whole ship looking for you. Once the alarm is tripped, new contractors teleport in every few seconds, so dealing with them faster than they arrive is usually not practical. How many arrive, how quickly, and how nasty they are varies depending on the mission: Light Reinforcements are infrequent and run dry before long, so you may be able to take them all out. Heavy Reinforcements, though, means dealing with a rapid stream of the most dangerous contractors in the galaxy. What are contractors? A thing we're not talking about today!
addedJammer GatesSome pilots in the Drift are frankly sick of you flicking on a Shield or a Slipstream and dashing through their ship before they can do anything about it. So they've installed jamming fields in every door on the ship - passing through will crash any active gadget effects you have going on. We can only thank the voidmother that there isn't some terrible new type of enemy that can deploy this jamming technology over a wider area as far as you know.
Heat Signature changes
addedThis post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details. Today we're announcing not so much one new feature as seven: all the new hazards you'll start seeing on missions with the Space Birthday Update. Like any hazards, the mission generator only uses these when they're appropriate for the mission's difficulty level - we didn't make the game harder overall. We did, however, add some ultra-hard missions at the top end of the spectrum that we'll be talking about later.
addedMost ships now have telepads - if you're in a tight spot, you can use it to teleport yourself into space. In fact, when you use a telepad everything on it is teleported, so you can get a Rescue or Capture target out this way, or even use it to deal with a enemy. But more often, you'll be dealing with how the enemy uses them. Specifically:
addedSome missions now feature new type of alarm response: instead of starting a countdown to your capture, the person you're here for makes a break for the telepad. If they get there, they'll teleport out and you've blown it. So before you do anything risky, it's worth looking at the ship's layout and figuring out the route they'll take if they're alerted. Can you intercept them? Can you get there first? Can you crash the telepad so they can't get out? Can you hack it? Where do they go if they use a hacked telepad?
addedSome ships don't need to fly to the nearest station to take care of an intruder. With a telepad, they can just teleport in the reinforcements they need, who'll then search the whole ship looking for you. Once the alarm is tripped, new contractors teleport in every few seconds, so dealing with them faster than they arrive is usually not practical. How many arrive, how quickly, and how nasty they are varies depending on the mission: Light Reinforcements are infrequent and run dry before long, so you may be able to take them all out. Heavy Reinforcements, though, means dealing with a rapid stream of the most dangerous contractors in the galaxy. What are contractors? A thing we're not talking about today!
addedSome pilots in the Drift are frankly sick of you flicking on a Shield or a Slipstream and dashing through their ship before they can do anything about it. So they've installed jamming fields in every door on the ship - passing through will crash any active gadget effects you have going on. We can only thank the voidmother that there isn't some terrible new type of enemy that can deploy this jamming technology over a wider area as far as you know.
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details. Today we're announcing not so much one new feature as seven: all the new hazards you'll start seeing on missions with the Space Birthday Update. Like any hazards, the mission generator only uses these when they're appropriate for the mission's difficulty level - we didn't make the game harder overall. We did, however, add some ultra-hard missions at the top end of the spectrum that we'll be talking about later.
Telepads
Most ships now have telepads - if you're in a tight spot, you can use it to teleport yourself into space. In fact, when you use a telepad everything on it is teleported, so you can get a Rescue or Capture target out this way, or even use it to deal with a enemy. But more often, you'll be dealing with how the enemy uses them. Specifically:
Fleeing Targets
Some missions now feature new type of alarm response: instead of starting a countdown to your capture, the person you're here for makes a break for the telepad. If they get there, they'll teleport out and you've blown it. So before you do anything risky, it's worth looking at the ship's layout and figuring out the route they'll take if they're alerted. Can you intercept them? Can you get there first? Can you crash the telepad so they can't get out? Can you hack it? Where do they go if they use a hacked telepad?
Reinforcements
Some ships don't need to fly to the nearest station to take care of an intruder. With a telepad, they can just teleport in the reinforcements they need, who'll then search the whole ship looking for you. Once the alarm is tripped, new contractors teleport in every few seconds, so dealing with them faster than they arrive is usually not practical. How many arrive, how quickly, and how nasty they are varies depending on the mission: Light Reinforcements are infrequent and run dry before long, so you may be able to take them all out. Heavy Reinforcements, though, means dealing with a rapid stream of the most dangerous contractors in the galaxy. What are contractors? A thing we're not talking about today!
Autopilot
Sometimes in Heat Signature the question wasn't so much "How do I avoid tripping the alarm?" but "How do I get to the captain fast enough that it doesn't matter if I do?" On ships with Autopilot, there is no captain. Tripping an alarm will always trigger the consequence - whether that's a countdown, the target fleeing, or reinforcements. And once it does, there's no way to disable it. Be very careful.
Jammer Gates
Some pilots in the Drift are frankly sick of you flicking on a Shield or a Slipstream and dashing through their ship before they can do anything about it. So they've installed jamming fields in every door on the ship - passing through will crash any active gadget effects you have going on. We can only thank the voidmother that there isn't some terrible new type of enemy that can deploy this jamming technology over a wider area as far as you know.
Random Kit
Very rarely, one type of guard aboard a ship will not all have a predictable set of equipment. Each guard of this type had just grabbed a random bunch of stuff, so you'll have to bring a versatile loadout and scope out each one as you come to them.
Inventory Lock
Ever wondered how you can carry 8 shotguns? If your answer was 'videogames', you were correct, that was our reasoning too. But now we're claiming that it's some kind of glitch-based storage system, because we discovered it's really fun to figure out how to do a mission without it. On Inventory Lock missions, the ship you're infiltrating can detect these inventory systems, so you've got to pick just two items to take with you. Everything else gets stashed and returned to you when you're done. This is, of course, massively harder than almost any other kind of complication a mission can have, so you'll only see this on the toughest missions in the galaxy. This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
