Convoy Breakouts, Rival Strikes and a Sharper Swarm

Thank you for the thoughtful forum reports, recordings and honest notes. This update is now live, and many of its changes came directly from what you showed us.

Two new encounters

• Convoy Breakout. Break both locks to free two fighters who join your wing for a short assault.
  
• Rival Strike. Rival ships bring breakable guns, an exposed core and a cool defeat sequence. A defeated rival releases a bonus score drone whose value grows in later sectors.
  

Changes shaped by your feedback

• Bosses and snakes. Onslaught boss arrivals preserve held focus. From sector 51, its bosses draw from a wider roster, and paired warnings stay aligned with their positions. Snakes appear less routinely, show clearer section damage, and departing hatchlings no longer delay a sector.
• Combat clarity. Flame attacks and tractor fields have clearer forms. The graze break flash is gentler, Pierce and Rift Shard shots are easier to read, wing hit sounds are quieter, and urgent voice warnings are less likely to be talked over. Enemy pressure has risen through several modest adjustments across the game.
• Builds and survival. Tactical Drafts offer more useful and varied choices. Extra Shot grants whole shot counts, drone and Chain effects reconcile properly, Impact Foam protects respawns again, and Ghost lasts longer. Moving bonus formations and more varied Mystery spacing bring more variety between fights. Late sector life rules are now applied consistently.
• Records and collections. The Personal Best medal now appears only for a genuine new best. Queued Onslaught scores show as pending, while local results are identified as local. Sector leaderboard details show the correct range. Serpent Duel checks lives lost when the snake is defeated. The achievement collection separates rank milestones and shows qualifying hulls and custom loadout progress more clearly.
• Settings and guidance. Partial Steam Cloud updates preserve existing settings. The Career Signal stops flashing after it has been read. How to Play and the Codex now explain the new encounters in supported interface languages.

What we are working on

We are investigating reports of repeated achievement rows, settings changing unexpectedly, and a Space Snake going down unusually quickly during Ghost. We also need to clarify Small Wings, Long Shadows: its current rule counts the first five ships in the roster. Quasar Fan is initially unlocked, but is outside those five.

For the next build, we hope to include clearer achievement wording and fixes for any issues we can reproduce. We are testing more distinct ship and weapon behavior, especially for wide and slower hulls, along with more interesting Draft choices. We will compare how those changes affect survival and scoring before deciding what is ready. More enemy variety and an optional tougher challenge are still ideas under review.

Thank you for helping us sharpen Nova Swarm. Please keep the reports and clips coming. The snakes, understandably, declined to comment.