Endless mode gets bosses, so it ends at a fight instead of bleeding out, and deep endless scales a little more gently on the way there. There is also a balance pass on the wave-20 finale, where the Breach Aegis had quietly been deciding runs on three maps and your operator could not do anything about it, plus six campaign stages tuned back to the difficulty they were signed off at, and seven new achievements. On top of that: a follow-up pass on 1.5.1's two big surfaces, where the controller support stops assuming you are holding an Xbox pad and stops telling you to click things, the tutorial is finishable on a pad at all, and Android gets three rendering fixes including the one that made enemies invisible. Leaderboards also stop showing your best run dozens of times over.
Endless mode has bosses now
Endless used to end the same way every time: the numbers climbed until your board could not keep up, and you leaked out somewhere in the fog. There was nothing to aim at.
The Breach Colossus now returns every 20 waves - absolute waves 40, 60, 80, 100 and onward. It is the same fight you know from wave 20, including your map's own boss variant, so a Tribunal map fields a Tribunal every time and an Aegis map fields an Aegis.
Three things work differently than they do at wave 20.
- A leak no longer ends the run on the spot. At wave 20 the sector falls and that is that. In endless the boss charges lives instead - 10 for the first one, 20 for the second, and so on up to a cap - and the run continues if you can pay. On Normal's 20 lives that makes the wave-40 boss survivable but crippling, and every boss after it lethal if it gets past you. The intent is that endless now ends at a boss, at a moment you can see coming, rather than by slow attrition.
- The boss does not get faster as endless ramps. Everything else in endless speeds up; the Colossus does not. It is the one body a stall board cannot hold - it ignores Undertow and Accordion outright and shrugs off half of any slow - so its walk from the gate to the exit is your entire damage window. Letting it inherit the speed ramp would have quietly cut that window in half by wave 100 while the patch notes said "more health".
- It gets tougher per boss, then eases off. Each boss carries more health than the last, but past the second one the curve flattens deliberately. Your board stops growing at some point - every card that stacks has a copy limit - and a boss curve that kept climbing past that point is not a challenge, it is a wall with a date on it.
Killing an endless boss does not end the run or re-award the wave-20 achievement; the wave clears and the next draft opens. Breach events stand down on boss waves, since two gate warnings at once is unreadable and the boss brings its own escorts.
Everything at wave 20 is untouched. The first Colossus is exactly the fight it was, so old runs, scores and saved games all still mean the same thing.
Deep endless scales a little slower
Endless enemy health climbs on three curves at once, and all three keep climbing forever. Your board does not: every card worth stacking has a copy limit, so board power flattens out around 25 premiums while the enemies never stop. One of those three curves was stepping harder than it needed to.
Enemy health past wave 26 has been eased back. In practice the curve now lands at roughly 95% of its old value by wave 40, 91% by wave 60, 86% by wave 80 and 82% by wave 100, so the gap between what you can build and what walks at you opens more slowly at depth.
Waves 1 to 20 are not affected at all, and neither is anything scripted. The step this changes does not begin until wave 26, which is past where a standard run ends. Waves 1 to 20 do change elsewhere in this update, but not here: see the two balance sections below.
One consequence worth stating plainly: deep endless scores set from here are not directly comparable to deep endless scores set before. Your existing entries are untouched and your placements do not move, but a wave-80 run now faces slightly less health than a wave-80 run did last patch.
The Breach Aegis is no longer the boss that decides your run
The wave-20 finale comes in three flavours. The plain Bulwark is the fight everyone knows; the Tribunal seals itself behind nodes you have to suppress; the Aegis raises armour that cuts your damage while it is up. They are meant to be different fights of roughly the same difficulty, and one of them was not.
The Aegis was the hardest variant on every single map, at both difficulties, without exception. Against the plain Bulwark it cost about 27 points of clear rate, which is not a variant, it is a verdict: on the three maps that field one, the boss was deciding the run before you drafted a card.
- Armour now cuts your damage to 70% instead of 50%. That lands the Aegis level with the Tribunal, both sitting about 13 points under the Bulwark, which is the gap a mechanic variant is supposed to carry. It is now the hardest variant on 13 map and difficulty combinations rather than all 32.
- The target was deliberately the Tribunal and not the Bulwark. At full damage the armour does nothing and an Aegis run is identical to a Bulwark one, so tuning to Bulwark parity would have deleted the variant rather than priced it.
The reason it needed a bigger number than the Tribunal, despite sealing less harshly, is that its answer is narrower. Suppressing Tribunal nodes is something almost any board does by accident. The Aegis answers to slow specifically, and over 862 finale runs, the boards that never landed a single slow on it cleared 19%, while the boards that did cleared 80%. That is not a fight that is slightly too hard, it is a fight with a pass and a fail written at draft time, and the multiplier only applies while the armour is up, so raising it targets exactly the boards that had no answer.
Your operator can now break the Aegis armour
If slow is the answer to the Aegis, then Warden and Astra, the two operators whose actives slow, should have been answers. Neither was, and the reason was arithmetic rather than anything broken.
Warden's Lockdown slows for 5 seconds. The Colossus walk is about 64 seconds. So one perfectly timed cast covered roughly 8% of the duel and the armour was back up before you noticed it had dropped.
A slow from an operator active now holds the armour down for 6 seconds after the slow itself ends, instead of the fraction of a second the armour used its anti-flicker grace for. One cast now buys about 11 seconds of the fight rather than 5.6, which makes saving your surge for the boss a real decision instead of a rounding error. It covers Warden's Lockdown and Astra's Singularity.
This is keyed on control, not on having cast something. A Detonator burst still cannot drop the armour, because the point of the variant is that it asks for slow. Drafted slow, from Chill Shot copies or an Undertow or Accordion tower, remains the full answer; the operator is a partial one on purpose.
Six campaign stages were harder than they were meant to be
Campaign stages play the real maps, so two changes aimed at skirmish landed on the campaign without anyone pointing them at it: the per-map Hard retune, and the Aegis assignment, which put that 27-point boss on three campaign maps at once. The campaign had been signed off before either, and it drifted well under its own targets afterwards.
Six stages are retuned back into band. The changes are to enemy health, enemy speed and starting lives, which act across the whole run rather than only at the boss.
- Fault Lines: enemy health 1.30 to 1.08, starting lives 6 to 8. The furthest out of band by a distance.
- Switchback: enemy health 1.10 to 1.05, starting lives 7 to 9.
- Ridgeback: enemy health 1.25 to 1.15.
- Double Back: starting lives 7 to 9.
- Crossroads: enemy speed 1.20 to 1.12.
- Perimeter Lock: enemy health scaled to 0.92.
Eleven of the thirteen stages now sit inside their intended difficulty band. Hourglass and Trident stay outside it deliberately: they are the two stages meant to be a wall, and that was decided on purpose rather than missed.
Your campaign progress is untouched. Stages you have already cleared stay cleared.
Seven new achievements
Three corners of the game had nothing to earn in them. They do now, and all seven are additive: none of them replaces or blocks an achievement you already have.
- Tribunal Down and Aegis Down for slaying each of the two finale variants at the end of wave 20. These sit on top of the existing Colossus kill rather than instead of it, so a Tribunal kill grants both.
- Rift Operative for clearing a Daily Rift, and Week of Rifts for clearing one seven days running.
- Loop Closed, Overcharged and Blind Fire for clearing Warp, Overdrive and Blackout, the three RIFT zones, on any difficulty.
If you have already done any of these, they unlock on your next run end rather than retroactively, since the game only checks at the end of a run.
The game now names the buttons on your controller
1.5.1 shipped pad support with prompt copy that still assumed a mouse, or assumed an Xbox pad. A DualSense player was told to press A, which is not a button their controller has, and anyone on a pad was told to "click" things.
- Every prompt resolves its button names from the pad you are actually holding. Confirm reads A / Cross / A, Cancel reads B / Circle / B, the operator active reads X / Square / X, and Start reads Start / Options / Menu. The surge-ready hint, the global surge hint, the placement confirm prompt, the draft ban hints, the post-loss tip, the tutorial callouts and the How To Play controls card all follow the detected device, and all of them read as mouse-and-keyboard copy when you are on mouse and keyboard.
- The pause screen's resume hint is live. It used to say "Press Spacebar" no matter what, which was wrong on a pad and had been wrong for anyone who rebound the key. It now reads your current binding, and carries the Start glyph on a controller.
- The Hotkeys screen is split into KEYBOARD and CONTROLLER tabs, cycled with LB / RB. The pad rows were previously crammed under the rebind table at a size that drew the face-button letters at about 11 px, unreadable on a Deck. They are now full size and legible, and the keyboard table fits all twelve rows on the card without scrolling.
- The Start glyph is drawn per device: a round key on Xbox, a wide lozenge for PlayStation's Options, a rounded square for the Deck.
The tutorial was unfinishable on a pad
Three separate blockers, each of which stopped a controller player cold.
- The targeting step only accepted a mouse click. Cycling the targeting mode with the pad, which is exactly what the step asks you to do, left the panel up with no way past it.
- The surge and speed steps ignored the pad. Both gates pause the game and keep the HUD live so a click still works, but the pad verbs were blanket-blocked while paused, so the operator active button and the speed shoulders were dead in the one place the tutorial demanded them.
- Three run-start rules popups had no focus at all. The campaign mandate briefing, the Daily Rift rules and the Mandate Protocol summary each built an OK button that nothing was focused on, so A had nothing to press and the run could not be started from a controller. They now take focus on open and accept B to dismiss.
More pad navigation gaps
- The main menu's PROFILE and Select Operator corner is reachable with the stick. It sits in a different part of the screen's layout than the button column does, and Godot's focus search does not cross that boundary, so it was mouse-only. It is now wired explicitly, and leaving it returns you to the button you came from.
- Profile tabs cycle with LB / RB. BADGES, RUN HISTORY and MOST USED had tabs but never read the shoulder buttons.
- The dev tests screen backs out on Esc and pad B like every other screen.
Fixes
- The boss bar's damage-guard tags are readable on every Colorblind Profile. During the boss fight the bar tags whichever guard is currently cutting your damage, LATTICE or ARMOURED, so "why is my damage low" is answerable from the HUD rather than guessed at. The two tags were an orange and a pink, which a player on the Tritanopia profile sees as the same yellow, leaving the text label to carry the distinction on its own. With a profile set they now resolve to an orange and a blue that stay clearly apart on all three settings. Off, the colours are unchanged.
- The demo's main menu keeps its Quit button on screen. The demo carries an extra Wishlist on Steam row, so with a saved run present the column ran past the bottom edge and cut off Quit. That one case is now laid out more compactly. The full game and the demo without a saved run are unchanged.
- Held-direction slot cycling, the map editor's modal stacking and the codex tab focus fixes from 1.5.1 are unchanged and still in place.
Found a bug?
Tell us. The Steam discussions and Discord both reach us, and Discord is usually faster. Controller support is still young, so pad reports remain the most useful thing you can send: your controller model, the screen you were on, and what you were trying to do. Crash reports upload on their own, so if the game hard-crashed we probably already have the stack.