Slot Theory 1.6.0 - Update Notes
Co-op is here. Two, three or four commanders, one shared lane, one pool of lives, and seven maps built for nothing else. Your partner's leak is your leak. There is no polite way to say "that was your end".
Also: 68 badges (up from 51), 50 titles (up from 14), and we found a 16-damage tower doing 74% of a run's total damage. That one is further down.
Co-op
Everyone stands on the same road. You each own a stretch of it with your own hardpoints, your own draft stream and your own bans. What you do not get is your own lives. On a dual-spawn map both ends open at once and the waves walk toward each other, so there is no back row and nobody is on support. The map decides how many players a run is for; picking 2, 3 or 4 filters the roster to the maps built for it.
MapPlayersSlots eachWhat you are in for
Orbit Relay23One lane, two shifts. The front takes the outer sweep; the back holds the core.
The Crossing26Two fronts. Both ends breach, and they are not going to take turns.
The Relay34The ends breach. The middle player decides which end keeps its lives.
The Confluence33Three doors along the floor, each with its own climb, all emptying into one long shared throat.
The Quadrant43Four quarters and nowhere to hide a weak stretch. Everyone can see your DPS.
The Crossroads Vault43The lane crosses the middle three times, so a soft quarter is instantly everyone's problem.
The Four Gates43Four gates, one lane, every corner a breach, and two of them open behind you.
Every portal fields a full wave, so The Four Gates runs four quotas where The Quadrant runs two. The wave counter is being honest with you. The map is not.
Getting in. Mode Select gains a CO-OP card: host public or private, browse open games, join a friend, or rejoin a run you got thrown out of. Steam invites work from chat, the friends list, and cold start. Empty seats fill with AI, and a human who joins an AI-flagged seat simply takes it. Hosting has never needed Steam at all: with Steam down the lobby goes local and the AI is your whole roster.
Drafting together. Every board drafts its own offers and the wave waits for all of them. Rerolls come out of the shared life pool. Bans are per player, so you cannot ban a card because your partner keeps taking it (we considered it). Auto-pick is available from wave one, since one person answering the door stops the run for everybody, and it means "stop waiting for me" rather than "pick now": your board still resolves last, so you keep the full window to change your mind. Go quiet for 45 seconds and it hands over for you. Mandate Protocol runs on co-op Hard, host-chosen in the lobby and applied per board.
The run. Always endless. There is no win at the map total; the run tips into endless there and keeps going until it does not. Your clear is banked at the crossing, so the eventual loss cannot take it from you. The eventual loss is coming. One operator meter per player, aimed rather than merely pointed - and you may aim it at your partner's stretch, which is the one genuinely co-operative thing you can do in a mode whose boards otherwise share nothing but the lane and the lives. Drop a connection and you get 60 seconds of retries behind a banner that counts down and tells you the AI is holding your board; lose the whole game and the mode screen offers REJOIN YOUR GAME while your seat is still live.
Afterwards. The end screen names the cast: one card per board, Steam avatar in that player's seat colour, with the tower and DPS rows tinted to match so nobody has to match colours by eye during an argument. Co-op has its own leaderboards where both players submit and each entry records who the others were, and its own badge category (ten rows, squad stats, no achievements and no lifetime counters). A bot-held board disqualifies the run: three friends and a robot is a great time, but it is not a leaderboard entry.
Both machines must be on the same build. A mismatch is refused at the handshake rather than connecting and producing a run that is subtly wrong.
Balance
- The Accordion Engine was hitting every enemy it compressed. Its pulse ran a full damage resolution against every enemy in range, so cards that fire on every hit with no target cap (Blast Core above all) detonated once per compressed enemy, into the tightly packed ball the Accordion had just personally created. Quadratic, and the tower supplied its own multiplier: compress harder, hit more per splash, repeat. One measured run came to 505,680 DPS and 74% of its total damage, off a 16-damage tower with a 2.3 second cooldown. The pulse now damages its target plus that target's chain and split follow-ups, like every other tower in the game. Consolation prize: Split Shot actually works on it now. It never did. It was riding the blanket damage and taking credit.
- Astra's Singularity could not be cast at the size it is balanced around. Automatic casts used the full 440 px collapse radius; a human press-and-drag was clamped to a range borrowed from a different ability that stopped at 340, and a plain press fired at 264. Reach is the whole lever on that active, so players were getting 39 to 63% of the ability every one of our benchmarks was rating Astra on. A press now fires the full radius and dragging shrinks it, and the overlay draws exactly what will fire (the bottom half of the drag used to be a dead zone that visibly did nothing).
- Expanded Chassis is weighted in premium rolls, on a decaying per-copy ladder from 2.0 to 1.2, so the slot card turns up most when your board is most desperate for slots.
Fixes
- The Rift Sapper barely planted on wave 1 of every run. It lays its mines against a cached read of the lane, and on the first wave of a run that cache had not been written yet, so it fell back to planting wherever an enemy happened to be standing in range. A tower that should spread up to eight mines along the lane put down a handful in a clump instead. Wave 2 onward was correct, which is why it presented as a tower that needs to warm up rather than as a bug. It had been doing this since May.
- One tap was activating everything twice on a desktop touchscreen. A Steam Deck, or any Windows touchscreen, describes a single tap several times over. The speed button went 1x to 5x in one tap, and anything that was a toggle turned on and immediately back off, which is why it reported as "touch does not work" rather than "touch works twice". Two descriptions of one gesture on the same pixel within 60 ms now count as one. A real double tap is hundreds of milliseconds apart and still works, so two-tap placement is untouched.
- The mouse wheel scrolls again. Having taught the game that two identical clicks in quick succession are one gesture, we discovered that a mouse wheel is thirty identical clicks in quick succession. It was eating ten of every eleven ticks. Wheels are exempt now.
- Two Steam accounts on one PC stop suppressing each other's leaderboard uploads. The record of what had already gone up was shared between accounts, which left one real 598,093 personal best stranded off the second account's board while sitting intact on the same machine. Local high scores were overwriting each other for the same reason. Both are per-account now, old data is migrated rather than orphaned, and each account re-uploads its own history once to heal the gap.
- Reverse-walker enemies stop confusing your towers for a tick. A lane sampler was never actually connected, leaving the enemy's position stale for a tick after every jump, so towers fired at where it used to be by up to 102 px.
- Cold Circuit no longer advertises a ladder it cannot climb. The text promised 30/34.5/39/43.5% across copies while the card is capped at one copy, so only the first rung was ever reachable. It read as broken because it read as a lie.
- Deadzone had no icon, no colour and no tag. Three of the four tables that describe a modifier to the player had no row for it, so a draftable full-game card turned up as a plain circle in a generic lavender labelled "MODIFIER" - on the draft card, in the codex and in How to Play. It now carries its own mark, a containment ring closing inward on a pinned core, in an indigo that means exactly that. The modifier palette is categorical (green is multi-target, orange is damage, violet is range), so the whole set is now pinned pairwise: no two cards may sit within perceptual reach of each other, and none may claim another's category.
- Voltspear printed a blank role. The end-of-run breakdown named every other tower - "Single-Target", "High Impact" - and left an empty space beside the one that shoots at range, while its draft card showed a generic "TW" where the others show their own initials. It reads Distance Sniper now, which is what a tower that cannot shoot up close is.
- Neither of the two above was reported, and neither ever errored: each of those tables has a working fallback, and a fallback is indistinguishable from a correct answer. They were found by a new check that walks every table in the codebase keyed on a card, tower, map or enemy, and fails the build unless it covers everything that exists or states in writing what it leaves out. Four live gaps on its first run, none of which had ever been noticed.
- 68 badges and 50 titles, and the badge grid finally has a material: lit bevels, enamel faces, and unearned badges drawn as engraved empty sockets rather than dots. An unearned badge should look like the place a badge goes.
- The game mode grid has been repainted so its tightest colour gap went from 14 degrees to 44, which is the difference between "distinct cards" and "two cards you keep clicking by accident".
- The demo shows Daily Rift and Co-op as locked rather than hiding them, so what the full version adds is visible instead of merely absent. Co-op has also stopped calling itself a two-player mode in the corners of the UI that predate three and four.
- Leaderboards show 8 entries per page, training data no longer ships in the build, and every log records which version wrote it.
Found a bug?
Tell us. The Steam discussions and Discord both reach us, and Discord is usually faster.