The planet tore open in seven places. Time to go down.
Anomaly Runs is out of beta and fully live - the biggest single update Lost Vessel has shipped. This has been months in the making, shaped directly by everyone who ran the beta and told me what felt right and what did not. Thank you. This one is yours too.
What Anomaly Runs is
A run-based combat mode inside the idle game. You pick one of seven rifts - one beneath each zone, down to the seventh under The Hollow - and descend a shifting map of fights, hazards, choices and questions, deciding how much to risk at every step. At the bottom of every rift, something is holding the floor.
- Seven rifts, three levels each. Every level pays its reward bounty exactly once, scaled to its depth. No grinding one easy floor forever - the rewards live where the danger lives.
- Boss arenas. All seven tier bosses fight in fully staged 2.5D arenas, each with its own body, its own ground and its own moves. Normal fights can be watched in the arena too, or skipped instantly - your call.
- Bosses that disagree with you. Every boss has a distinct combat identity: weaknesses, resistances and status pressure drawn from its zone. One weapon type does not answer all seven fights. Build for the fight in front of you.
- Three dive charges a day - and a boss kill refunds its charge. Winning is free. Only the runs that beat you cost an attempt.
The Rift Engine
Loot is tunable. Calibration is a weekly meter you feed with Analysis data - the more stable the engine, the richer every dive that week. On top of that, every single dive can be tuned on the way in: Foresight scouts an extra row of the map, Bias the Rift skews the ground toward the kind of work you want to find, and Overcharge is the expensive one - a harder, elite-dense dive that guarantees a standout piece of gear if you survive to the bottom.
Rift Feats
The rift keeps a ledger of the things nobody sane would do in it. Sixteen one-time challenges on their own tab: cross every hazard field on your path, take every ambush offered, answer the Interrogator perfectly, pick only the relics that bite back, reach the boss without choosing a single fight. Each feat pays a gear piece once ever - and pays strictly better the deeper you prove it. Claim all sixteen and the rift concedes a title.
Endless Depth
Clear the whole campaign and the floor keeps going. The same rifts, wound tighter with every step down, each new depth paying a one-time bounty, your deepest clear on record. And for whoever beats every rift at full strength, the war has kept something aside. I am not spoiling it here.
Also in this update
A very large quality pass across the whole game, built from your reports: raid reports that tell the truth (real raw attack, visible tactic effects, fair MVP credit, local timestamps), expedition crews that vote on early launches, an expedition achievement that had been silently undercounting for months restored for everyone who earned it, job tokens that deposit themselves, smarter skill primers, a reachable Pacifist achievement, chat spoiler tags, a scrap search box, and a long list of interface fixes. Full notes are in the game under Transmissions and in the Discord.
Under all of it, a heavy round of backend work on save handling and stability - the kind of work you only notice by not noticing anything.
Free, as always
Lost Vessel is free to play, with cosmetics-only support packs. Anomaly Runs, like everything that affects gameplay, is free for everyone.
The rift is open. Bring the right answer, not the same answer.