White Dwarf · published · build 24887005
Hey everyone.
Almost everything in this patch came from you. People told us Plasma Burst felt like it wasn't doing anything, that Debris Ring wasn't the ring they thought they were buying, and that the late game gets so crowded there's nowhere left to run. All three were fair, and all three got fixed.
Here's what changed.
Beat all six bosses in a single run and the roster is done with you. The next boss wave doesn't spawn something across the field. It lands on you. Everything else on the map is gone in the same instant, a wall comes up around where you're standing, and the camera pulls back to show you exactly how much floor you have left. Eclipse is the first thing in this game that isn't a crowd. No adds. No reinforcements. No waiting for it to walk into your build. It has three and a half times the health of any other boss on that wave, it does not move, and it spends the entire fight drawing shapes on the floor and asking you to not be standing in them.
This is the part that makes it a fight at minute forty. Every other threat in the game does a flat number, which is terrifying at level 5 and confetti at level 50. Eclipse doesn't. Its patterns take a fifth to a third of your maximum HP whatever that is, whenever you meet it.
Two hits in a row kills anyone playing greedily. One hit is a mistake you can come back from. That ratio holds for a fresh build and for a monster, and it's why no amount of stacking makes the floor safe to stand on.
They arrive one at a time, never the same one twice running, and each one is drawn on the floor before it lands. Nothing here kills you without warning you first.
Five marks, one after another, each one aimed at where you're going rather than where you were. The first lands exactly under your feet, on purpose.
The arena splits into eight wedges and all but a couple of them go up at once.
A burning wedge that sweeps the arena. The one pattern you answer by running instead of by standing somewhere. In the last phase there are two of them, opposed, so running in a straight line stops being an answer.
The inner arena burns. Same circle, read the other way. They look identical until you read the star.
The outer arena burns.
A lane straight through the arena, aimed at wherever you happen to be when it's drawn. Wide, fast and the heaviest hit in the fight. This is the punishment for having stopped.
The same slam three times, the gap walking one wedge around the circle each time. Every individual slam is survivable where you're already standing. Standing still through all three is not.
The two ring patterns are the ones worth learning first, because the boss tells you which is coming before the floor does. Watch its corona. It banks down to a deep ember for one of them and goes white-hot for the other — and in the second and a half that buys you, that's the whole mechanic.
Halfway down its health bar, Eclipse stops.
It pulls to the centre of the arena, stops taking damage entirely, and starts a nine-second cast. Four anchors appear around the rim. All four have to be broken before it lands, and there is no out-damaging this one the boss is untouchable for the duration, so the check is the check.
Break them all and Eclipse is staggered for five seconds and takes double damage for every one of them. This is your window. It is the only bright, resolving sound in the entire encounter. Miss one and it takes most of your health, heals a chunk of its own, and carries on. No dodge, no footprint, no argument. And Starfall keeps falling the whole time, because the run between anchors has to cost something. It happens again near the end, when the fight has one word left to say.
Patterns are added as its health drops, never swapped out, nothing you learned in the first phase stops being true, it just arrives faster and with company. The gap between patterns closes from five and a half seconds to three. Then, in the last quarter, the arena itself shrinks. Same questions. Less floor to answer them on.
A third arrangement, written for the only fight in the game against a single thing. It is not the wave track with more layers on it - it's a riff, hammered flat out, and it starts the moment the wall comes up.
The Eclipse star. The star that went out and kept burning, the boss's own palette, worn. It is the only cosmetic in the game with no price on it. You cannot buy it at any amount of stardust. It is taken from the thing of the same name, or not at all.
Eclipse Breaker — a new achievement track. The thresholds are 1, 5 and 15, and they're that low on purpose. One kill is already a real milestone.
Anchors Held — clear it without ever losing a Collapse Protocol.
Totality — clear it without being caught by a single mechanic. Not one. This is the hardest thing in the game by a distance, and it carries the holographic treatment reserved for that class of thing.
Beat it and it returns every seventh boss wave, for as long as you last. It never becomes the run's normal rhythm that's the whole point of it. Good luck. Watch the corona.
The complaint was that you had to be practically inside an enemy for it to do anything, and even then it barely scratched them. Turns out both were true. Against the fastest enemies the pulse literally couldn't fire before they were already touching you. So it reaches further, hits harder, and - this is the big one - it now scales with your weapon damage. Every point of Sharpened Edge you pick up makes your Plasma Burst hit harder too. It was the only damage source in the game that didn't grow with your build, which is exactly why it fell off a cliff after wave fifteen.
At two minutes in, that's a basic enemy dying in two swings instead of four.
The old effect was a puff of white sparks - the same white sparks as every hit, every kill, and every pickup in the game. No wonder people thought nothing was happening. It's a proper shockwave now: a ring that snaps outward to exactly the edge of your reach, with tongues of plasma thrown off the star as it goes. You can see how far it hits, which also means you can finally learn where to stand. If you play with Reduce Flashes on, the shape is all still there - only the brightness comes down.
This one got a full rework, because the honest version of the old one was "two pebbles that mostly miss."
Two rocks orbiting at arm's length hit an enemy standing in them about once every two seconds. That worked out to less damage per second than your starting weapon - for a 500 Stardust unlock. And it orbited so close that it sat inside your own pickup radius.
It's a belt now. Dozens of rocks spread across a proper band, with the inner ones sweeping around faster than the outer ones, a swept-clean gap running through it, and bigger chunks scattered among the small ones. Anything standing in the belt gets ground down - no more watching rocks whiff past something parked right next to you.
"Capture one more rock" doesn't mean anything when there are already sixty-four of them, so the upgrade line changed too.
Ring Velocity(new, replaces Orbital Capture) - the belt spins faster and grinds more often. Those are the same thing, so it's a real damage upgrade, not just a nicer-looking one.
Ring Spread(new) - pushes the belt's outer edge further out. If reach was your complaint, this is the answer.
Roche Limit(changed) - the second belt now sits outside the first instead of inside it, turning the other way. Same price, same unlock. If you already own it, you didn't lose anything - you just got something better.
The one that came up most: late in a run, with the field packed, there's just nowhere to go. That was never really about the crowd. Enemies spawn near you and follow you, so you don't escape a swarm by outrunning it - you escape it by having room to keep moving. The thing taking that away was the wall. So the play area is now double the radius. Same enemies, same spawn rate, same pressure - you just have a lot more room to work with. The chunk of the map where you can feel the boundary breathing down your neck went from about half of it to about a quarter.
The edge of the world used to be a scattering of sparks. It's a real wall now, built out of the same containment field the Eclipse boss seals its arena with - and like that one, it lights up under you when you lean on it. Cold blue instead of red, so you'll never mistake one for the other.
Someone asked for this and it was obviously right: the game could tell you what you ended with, but never how you got there. There's a new Build tab on the death screen now. Every skill, stat, perk and pact you picked, in order, with the level you picked it at. Great for working out what actually carried a run - and for showing off a build that went completely sideways.
Fixed a large rock sitting motionless at the centre of the map that couldn't be damaged and didn't damage you. It wasn't an enemy - it was every rock in your Debris Ring, stacked in one place. Which also means the belt you were seeing was only its dust trail.
XP on the HUD no longer shows numbers like 100.03402342423. It was always counting correctly; it just had no manners about it.
Volatile elites' death blast reaches a little further, so it still matters now that Plasma Burst outranges it.
Magnet pickups now appear near you instead of anywhere on the map. With the world doubled, the old ones would have been effectively unreachable.
Keep the feedback coming - it genuinely is where this stuff comes from. If you want to help shape the next patch or just hang out with us, come join our Discord.
Also, if you're enjoying the game and these early changes, [b]leaving a Steam review[/b] is the absolute best way you can help us right now. We're a tiny team and every single review helps the algorithm notice us.
See you in the field.