Hey everyone
time for another update on the experimental branch, with a Brittle balance change, Individual card upgrades, and a healthy round of bug fixes (including a nasty elite soft-lock). Let's get into it.
Individual card upgrades
This is a big one: you can now upgrade cards individually on your Mk.II equipment. Instead of having to remove and redraft upgraded version of cards, you pick which cards to upgrade, one at a time. You now no longer have to avoid drafting cards on equipment you want to upgrade, as you can upgrade already drafted cards as well.
For now this is enabled on five equipment families: Resource Bays, Shields, Flak, Railguns, and Beam Lasers. The rest are coming as we roll upgrades out family by family.
To make that clear at a glance, cards that can be upgraded now play a slight animation when you inspect them in the hangar. Since not every equipment type has upgradable cards yet, this tells you exactly which ones you can upgrade.
Resource Bays
The Smelter and Centrifuge resource bays are now correctly added to the game. If you've been wanting to try the high-card-volume Centrifuge or the run-hot Smelter builds, they're properly in the pool now.
Area damage change
Area damage now only gains the Brittle damage bonus against unshielded targets. Brittle represents hull that's been softened up, so it shouldn't be paying out while the enemy's shields are still absorbing the hit. Break the shields first, then let Brittle do its work.
One caveat for now: a launched missile keeps the damage it had at launch, so it won't recalculate its Brittle bonus mid-flight if the target's shield state changes. That's temporary behavior — we'll revisit it during the upcoming missile design pass.
Bug fixes
- Sector start events and sector end shops now correctly spawn in the second and third sectors.
- Fixed the meta-progression unlock display — locked/unlocked states are now shown correctly.
- Meta-progression unlocks no longer keep counting damage dealt (and similar stats) toward things you've already unlocked.
- Fixed some enemy cards not updating and displaying their damage properly when playing cards like Suppressive Fire.
- Fixed a soft-lock that could happen when fighting an elite if no fitting subsystem could be awarded. For now the game simply awards nothing , a stopgap while we track down why the engine sometimes finds no relevant subsystem to hand out.
- Fixed some Quad-Flak equipment starting with a malfunctioning Mark card in their initial drafted cards.
As always, your Steam reviews, bug reports, and feedback on Discord are what point us in the right direction.
Thanks for playing and supporting us. o7
The Breachway Team