postmark--07.02.2026
Ironfront Industries would like to thank you all for playing the Ironfront Express demo. You helped us get the word out about our <mining operation antics>, and our ultimate goal of [REDACTED].
With those gratitudes out of the way, we are pleased to relay that we have taken all of your feedback and used it to help improve the playable demo of Ironfront Express. Below, we have outlined every major bullet point going into the update that is live now. We wanted to especially apologize sincerely to every player who encountered the bug where the playable experience would crash at the end of the boss fight. Thanks to your feedback and help, we've been able to squash this one. IT IS TIME TO COMMAND THE IRONFRONT EXPRESS.
PLEASE CONTINUE TO GATHER RESOURCES OR ELSE.
Gameplay Changes
Overhauled the Module Upgrade system, as players rightly stated that the card upgrades were not very interesting. The random reward module upgrades now incorporate the special abilities. Several more upgrades were performed on each active module. Module upgrades on the Overworld (using Upgrade Cores) were replaced with the more generic limit increases.
Removed the Upgrade Core reward node and replaced it with the Module Upgrade reward. Other nodes provide the regular stat upgrade rewards.
Overhauled the fire mode input to reduce the number of clicks required. Removed the need to toggle fire mode on and off, as it was set to be the default. The input mode will contextually switch based on the player's actions. The tutorial was updated to reflect this.
The primary weapon continues to fire if the fire button is pressed after firing off a successful active reload
Made a non-intrusive virtual cursor visible during normal play so the player doesn't lose track
Cleaned the lube off the tracks and tightened the train's brakes (for free)
Optimizations
The video quality settings were improved upon, resulting in significantly better performance for the lowest graphics setting.
A heavy optimization pass was completed throughout the game (too many to list out one by one) - performance on mid-range systems should be greatly improved.
Fixes
Fixed an unfortunate crash that tended to happen during the demo's boss fight.
Multi-threading fixes and stability improvements were made to reduce crashes.
Fixed a bug where modules could be duplicated using the temporary (swap) cargohold.
Fixed a crash that was potentially caused by an error with the Guardian.
Fixed a bug where the turret ghost/indicator was not showing up during turret placement if the cursor was too far. The indicator now follows the mouse if there's nothing to snap.
Fixed a bug where the wave objective condition had a mismatch with the actual wave count of the level.
Fixed an issue where the confirmation screens and tutorial pop-ups sometimes open twice.
Fixed a bug where an event-specific active module (Overload drone) was not being provided at the end of the event.
Miscellaneous tooltip fixes.
Fixed a bug causing the Luminet Commander ads to be indestructible.
Fixed some issues with enemy hitboxes.
Misc
Set tutorial videos to be partially unskippable, as players instinctively closed the one-time 5-second video explaining the game modes.
Increased the clarity of the explanations of some help prompts.
Allowed the game to load/run while alt-tabbed.
Added an "Off" setting to the Camera Shake settings to completely disable the shakeyshakeys to avoid any swimmies.
Renamed Shaft Hound to Harrier Hound because Shaft Hound sounds like Lot Lizard.
Made Engineer mode the default and clarified that this mode is the intended difficulty. Standard mode was renamed to Cadet.
A slight nerf was introduced to the Conflagrator to make it less effective against larger enemies.
Lowered XP gain by enemies - hitting mostly combat nodes skewed the XP gain too much.