Junkyard Saints: Scrapstorm · public · first seen
Update 0.2.0 is the biggest update Junkyard Saints: Scrapstorm has had so far. Graveyard Shift brings the first seasonal event, and alongside it come a rebuilt Hub, an effect of its own for every gear part, a voiced story and new art for almost everything you see in the game – from the starting Saint to all 131 Looks. Before we get to the new content, one more look at the data, because once again it showed me something I did not like at all: 62% of all players have not won a single run so far. Only 38% have ever cleared chapter 1 – and on average it took them around ten attempts. Of all places, the very first chapter was the biggest wall in the whole game. I found the cause, and it is on me: shortly before Early Access launched, I moved the campaign over to the new Entity Director. In the process, the grace period for the opening minutes that the old Director had got lost. And the relief from the last patch went into the old Director – the one that was no longer running the campaign at all. That is fixed with this update. The details are below under "Combat and difficulty".
Graveyard Shift runs from October 31 to December 1, 2026.
Rewards you have reached can still be claimed for one week after the season ends.
New arena: The Hollow Graveyard.
A moonlit cemetery full of tombstones, crypts and pumpkin patches. You survive eight minutes against the pumpkin horde and its five new enemy types, and then face the Headless Horseman.
Graveyard Shift runs cost no energy.
They pay Candy and Pass XP, but no Scrap and no account XP. Candy builds up on its own during a run and also drops from enemies. During the season, your Candy shows up in the resource bar at the top.
New Saint: Graven the Soulhunter.
Graven gathers souls to build Soulfire. His Pumpkin Wisp collects nearby souls and hurls burning pumpkins. On the premium path, Graven is yours for good – as a Saint and as a companion. On the free path, tier 20 unlocks a trial that lets you play him in the Halloween arena while the season runs.
The Battlepass is a path you walk through the graveyard.
20 tiers, a free and a premium path (€9.99 / $9.99), 41 rewards in total: nine Halloween Looks (four free, five premium), Crystals, Candy, Scrap and, on the premium path, the Headless Horseman as an announcer with 30 lines of his own. Every Crystal in the pass is an earned Crystal. "Claim all" collects everything you have reached in one go.
Pass XP from the arena is capped per minute survived.
So quitting a run before the Horseman never pays more than winning it.
Night orders.
There are four one-time orders and five new ones every week. You can catch up on missed weeks: progress from later weeks also counts towards the orders of earlier ones.
The Night Market.
Every day brings 24 new offers of Halloween gear, six per category, with 42 Halloween prefixes, suffixes and affixes of their own. You pay with Candy; higher rarities also cost Crystals. Each category can be rerolled on its own. Gear you buy stays yours after the season, and its effects work in every mode.
Its own music and title screen.
Three new arena tracks, a new menu theme and a Halloween title screen for as long as the season runs.
The Hub has been rebuilt from the ground up.
Instead of one long row of buttons there are now clear areas: Saint, Workshop, Intel, Supply and Operations. You start the campaign from the big deployment card in the middle, with the weekly Challenge and Graveyard Shift right beside it.
Garage, Dungeons and Raids already show up there as planned areas.
They are still locked and not playable yet.
The Outpost windows have been redesigned.
Companions, Workbench, Fusion, Job Board, Monster Codex and Endless Mode now each fit on one page – no scrolling and no explainer text.
Companions: one profile sheet.
Your companions and their status on the left, everything about the selected one on the right: role, combat behavior, stats and the path to awakening.
Workbench: one grid for everything.
Pick an item in the grid and upgrade it on the right – or switch to Scrap, mark several items at once and see the combined yield.
Fusion: the fusion chamber.
Base and material sit side by side in the chamber, with the expected result and every stat change below. On the right you add particles and see the stability.
Endless Mode: one timeline.
Affixes and rewards both depend on how long you survive, so they now share one timeline with your record marked on it. Weekly objectives and the leaderboard are on the same page.
Job Board: Sally's board.
Sally and your three active jobs on the left, the five offers as clear rows on the right.
Monster Codex: archive and dossier.
Pick a chapter, see its machines as portraits and click one to open its dossier. The German version of the Codex is now fully translated, too.
Equip with a double-click.
In the gear window, double-clicking an item equips it right away.
Prefixes, suffixes and affixes now do something of their own.
Until now they were just bundles of stats. From now on, all 42 regular parts and all 42 Halloween parts carry their own effect in a run – from corrosion to tracer rounds to healing on level-up.
Every part acts – and rarity decides how many parts an item has.
B has a prefix, A and S add a suffix, SS and U add one affix, UR two affixes. Each of these parts brings its effect along.
Stats stay just as high.
Since items now have fewer parts, their stats were raised so that an item of each rarity brings the same stats on average as before.
The name shows every acting part.
Affixes now appear at the end of the name, for example "Rusted Nail Gun of Panic with Sharp Barrel & Lucky Lens". In the Trade Bazaar, the Night Market and the gear window, every effect is also tagged as prefix, suffix or affix.
Comparisons show effects too.
When you compare items, you see which effects you gain, improve or lose with an item – worked out across your whole loadout. The same effect on several items only counts once, using the strongest copy.
How strong an effect is depends on the item.
Rarity, slot and item level work together: offensive effects are stronger on weapons, defensive ones on armor, control effects on modules.
Effects have caps.
Together, all effects give at most +80% damage, +50% fire rate and 45% damage reduction. Sustained healing from effects is capped at 1.2% of your maximum health per second.
Gear you already own keeps all its parts and stats.
It gets effects for as many parts as its rarity now allows – counting prefix, suffix, then the affixes. The remaining parts stay plain stat parts. Nobody loses stats, and the effects have actually made your existing items stronger.
Halloween weapons show their parts.
Prefixes, suffixes and affixes visibly change the body, barrel and attachments of newly bought Halloween weapons.
New art for every Saint and Look.
Mika, all 19 Season 1 Saints and all 131 Looks have new art. On top of that, the story characters have new busts.
15 Looks have been replaced with new figures.
If you own or wear one of them, you keep it. It just looks different.
51 Looks have new names.
If you own one of them, you keep it with everything that comes with it – only the name is new.
Looks have new rarity tiers: B, A, S, SS and U.
Look Signals work differently now.
A Look Signal costs 150 Crystals, the same as a Season 1 Signal. Looks only come as single Signals, at most three per day. A U Look is guaranteed by your 21st Signal at the latest – one week – and it will be one you do not own yet. S or better comes by your 10th Signal at the latest. Duplicate Looks now pay Crystals instead of Scrap, from 20 for B to 100 for U.
The Saints menu has been cleaned up.
Instead of nested tabs there is a menu with buttons, and the Signal screen fits on the screen without scrolling.
New pull animation: Signal Drop.
A flare goes up grey and bursts its way up the ladder step by step – grey, blue, purple, red – until it reaches the colour of your pull. Then a capsule slams down and the hatch blows open. Length and effects follow the rarity. One click skips the animation.
New character creation.
More compact and without scrolling: Mika stands free in the scene, next to one slim column with all the options.
The story is now voiced.
More than 460 English lines. In the German version the text stays German, while the voices are English.
Backgrounds with depth.
The main menu, Hub, story scenes, chapter art, character creation and loading screens are now built from several layers that shift against each other as you move the mouse – with fire, smoke, dust and matching lighting.
Light and shadow in the arena.
There is a new Lighting Quality option for it: Medium adds dynamic light, High also adds a glow to bright effects. Low matches the previous look. All characters and objects now cast shadows, and characters actually disappear behind tall objects instead of walking across them.
The weapon you hold is always visible.
When you aim upwards it moves onto the shoulder instead of disappearing behind your Saint.
Chapter 1 is easier for new players – for real this time.
The grace period for the opening minutes and the relief for new accounts now live in the Entity Director, the one that actually runs the campaign. As announced in the last patch, this relief fades out by account level 40. Nothing changes for experienced players or in Endless.
Your graphics settings no longer affect the difficulty.
How many enemies at least stand near you used to depend on graphics quality. On high quality, 40 enemies were already around you after four seconds. Everyone now gets the same value that low quality used before.
Your shots now hit the visible body.
The hit area for your shots used to be a circle that was often only about half as wide as the enemy. Now the enemy's actual body counts.
The Entity Director no longer has a ceiling.
Until now it reached its maximum after about ten minutes, while your builds kept growing. Now, if you dominate the field – good health, a clear field, a high kill pace – you get ever stronger enemies and more elites, without limit. If you get into trouble, it backs off again. It never sends more enemies, only stronger ones.
Endless: Overtime.
Some Endless runs went on for hours without the player ever being in real danger. The last hit in an Endless run dealt a median of just 1 damage. From minute 20, enemies now gain 7.5% health and 5% damage every minute – and that adds up.
Endless: Entity Lock-On.
Stay in the same spot for more than eight seconds and the Entity locks on to you. Its strikes are based on your maximum health, ignore armor and hit harder with every strike. Keep moving and you will never be targeted.
Companions level up more slowly.
Companions used to earn XP for every kill. With thousands of kills per run, a single win was worth 10 to 15 levels, and many companions were close to the level cap by the end of the campaign. Now they earn XP for the time they fight alongside you, plus a small bonus for a win. Reaching level 60 takes about 20 hours. Endless runs now grant companion XP as well. Levels you have already reached are kept.
Fixed regular stutters with lots of effects on screen.
With strong UR builds, the game hitched for up to 0.6 seconds every 5 to 10 seconds. The cause was large background images sitting invisibly in memory and slowing down every memory cleanup. Those pauses are now down to 20 to 40 milliseconds.
The Hub and menus load faster.
The main menu now loads its background first. Around 62 MB of old background art are no longer loaded up front, and images in closed Hub windows only load once you open them.
Fewer hangs.
A single internal error could freeze the whole game until now – the game now keeps running instead. After a graphics driver reset, the lighting comes back instead of staying off. And saving no longer waits for the Steam Cloud upload; that runs in the background and when you quit.
Local freeze log.
If the game noticeably hangs, it writes a short entry to %APPDATA%junkyard-saints-scrapstormsavegamesdiagnosticsstalls.jsonl. The file stays on your PC, is never uploaded and contains no profile data. If you report a freeze to me, it helps a lot.
The Endless result screen showed "+0 Scrap".
Gear now has German names throughout the German version.
The title screen shows the correct version number.
Companions were much bigger than the Saints in a run.
They are now 80 % of your Saint's size.
Long weapon names were cut off after one line in the Trade Bazaar.
The plus buttons in the resource bar were too big and covered names and values.
The Endless window was called "Endless Mode" in the German version.
Graveyard Shift is the first seasonal event I have built – with a Battlepass, orders, a market of its own, a new Saint and a season with a fixed end. A lot of it is new ground for me as well. Some values are still fresh, above all the new gear effects and the Director without a ceiling. I will keep a close eye on how they play out for you and adjust wherever it is needed. Thanks to everyone who plays, writes feedback, reports bugs or just does a few runs. For a one-person project, that helps more than you might think. See you in the graveyard.
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