ECHIDNA · published
Hello pilots! This is the biggest ECHIDNA demo update so far, and it lands right before Steam Next Fest (October 19). Since the last patch the mother ship has grown new stations, carcasses fight back with surprises, every run has more to chase, and the whole game is now in 30 languages. Here is everything that changed.
Every carcass every player strips now counts toward one shared number. Build the Satellite Uplink on your mother ship and open the Community Relay to watch the global count climb.
100,000 carcasses: golden Community carcasses start to drift in for everyone, a gift from every pilot, with triple loot.
500,000 carcasses: a third boss joins the demo for every player.
1,000,000 carcasses: a free new boss for the full game.
Only carcasses stripped from this update onward count, so every one of yours from today on moves the bar.
CARCASSES STRIPPED leaderboard. A live Steam board sits in the corner of the main menu with Global and Friends tabs. It can be folded away if you prefer a clean menu.
Key Draw. Finish the demo (slay its bosses) and you get a personal entry code. Send it with the form behind the gift button on the menu and you are in the draw for full game Steam keys.
New Steam achievement for completing the demo.
Satellite Uplink. Brings in contracts: optional goals for the current run (chain gas sacs, hit gold veins, strip elites, slay a boss overcharged...). Finish one, claim it at the console, collect APEX.
Autopsy Table. A catalogue of every species you cut open. Fill a species' dossier, then research it with crystal.
Merchant Dock. A trader named Bram docks at the rim of your ship with goods for sale. Watch the docking, browse, buy, and he flies off again.
Cargo Hold. What you buy waits in a cargo bay and is used whenever you want (keys 1-9, a click, or X on a controller). The hold starts with one bay and grows up to a 3x3 grid. First two goods:
Cryo Cartridge: vents all gun heat at once, and your guns cannot overheat for a few seconds.
Magnet Pulse: every loose chunk of ore and salvage on the field flies straight into your ship.
Crew Deck (preview). The hull turns see-through and reveals the rooms inside. Grow your first crew in the clone tank and put them to work in the Drone Workshop. The full deck (more rooms, training, friendships, events) is waiting in the full game.
The opening is clearer, too: hull stations wait until your Research Lab is up, and NEXT GOAL points you at your first module.
After your first boss, buy Overcharge in the Pilot Bay: one button, and for a few seconds every weapon you have hits twice as hard.
Three upgrade ladders (Burn Time, Recharge, Surge) plus Full Circuit, which also speeds up your harpoon and collect field.
A ready chip, a shockwave, embers around the arena and its own sound, so you always know when it is up.
They react. Fresh cuts twitch, wounds slowly dry into dark scabs, and zero-g blood, coolant and molten metal leak out of the cuts.
Gas sacs burst and chain into each other. Gold veins pay out 25 times the ore.
Shiny carcasses (1 in 150): prism-coloured and worth triple.
Elite carcasses: Bloated (packed with gas), Armored (tough hide, double ore), Crystalline (veined with crystal) and Infested (cuts shake parasites loose, catch them).
Mid-run events, short and rare, always announced a few seconds ahead:
Solar Flare: laser salvage x2.
Meteor Shower: free salvage rains down and craters the carcass.
Awakening: the carcass is waking up. Destroy its heart before the timer runs out for bonus APEX, or it tears free.
Your ore is visible: collectors leave a glowing river back to the ship that thickens as your income grows.
Boss deaths are a moment now: slow motion, letterbox, the camera closes in as the beast shatters.
Run timer with splits. Your time to every boss is saved. Beat your best and the clock turns gold.
Trophies. Every boss you slay can be grafted onto your mother ship as living creep and clawed limbs that spread as your collection grows. Each grafted trophy adds yield. Graft or remove them on the construction screen.
Optional Challenges. Glass Hull (one hit and you are out of the Hunt), Rush (shorter Hunt clocks) and Famine (half yield). Clear one and its handicap flips into a permanent reward, plus a new part bolted onto your ship for good.
Discoveries. A notebook of hidden mechanics (weapon synergies, boss behaviours) that fills in as you stumble on them.
Nemesis. A boss that escapes you remembers. It comes back scarred, angry from the first second and carrying a bounty.
Flight Log. Finished expeditions unlock automations: Collector and Research Lab arrive prebuilt, housing buys itself, Overcharge fires itself in boss fights, and your drones go after an awakening heart on their own.
Veteran drones. Mining drones earn ranks, callsigns and a small yield bonus as they work.
Run recap card. At the end of an expedition: time, best chain, shinies, fastest boss, your best drone and an ore/s graph. Save it as an image with one button.
Photo mode. Freeze the action, hide the HUD, move the camera and zoom in up to 4x.
Buy x1 / x10 / MAX, with a preview of exactly what you get. Hold the button to keep buying, faster and faster.
NEXT GOAL in the HUD always shows what to save for, and chimes once when it is ready.
Unit milestones. Owning 5, 10, 25, 50 or 100 of a unit boosts that unit's own harvest.
Ore/s graph for the whole run, with boss kills marked, plus a trend arrow next to your income. Big numbers change colour as they grow (gold at a million, magenta at a billion).
Tooltips show the next value ("cut 5 > cut 9"), and a gold pip marks a console that has something new to buy.
Consoles now speak in icons: what a row does, whether you can afford it, and which row is the recommended next buy.
Hover any HUD resource to see what it is for. Systems appear step by step instead of all at once.
Boss health shows as pips, and the Log page of the help card now has 9 small live scenes that show each mechanic instead of describing it.
The salvage panel shows each weapon's share of the work, so you can see what actually pays off.
Playtesters told us the demo was over too fast and too easy: bosses melted in seconds and money piled up with nothing to spend it on. So:
A full demo run now takes about 45-60 minutes (it was around 25).
Carcasses are tougher (and climb faster from the third species), and bosses have twice the health.
Guns heat up per shot. Fire nonstop and they lock for a moment, so your drone fleet matters. Holding the trigger without firing no longer heats them.
Pilot damage upgrades now work, and Cryo multiplies damage instead of skipping a carcass's toughness outright.
APEX stacks with diminishing returns, so hoarding it no longer explodes your yield.
Bullet drones deal half damage, the rocket blast was reined in, gas sac chains were toned down, and new Move Speed upgrades let your drones keep up.
Every on-screen prompt names the right button for what you are holding right now (controller, keyboard or mouse-only), including keys you have rebound.
Controller: X uses your cargo, RB cycles bays, LT fires the right weapon. Pop-up cards no longer catch stray stick input.
Keyboard: the focus cursor shows even with no controller plugged in, and Enter works on the main menu.
Mouse-only: the Launch box can be clicked, the help card turns pages with a click, and new corner buttons cover photo mode and the action key.
ECHIDNA is now fully translated into 30 languages, up from 13: English, Turkish, German, French, Italian, Spanish (Spain and Latin America), Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Malay. On first launch the game picks your Steam language.
Buying a Burn or Cryo beam now equips it right away.
The x10 / MAX preview could give you a never-bought upgrade for free. Fixed.
Floating numbers are crisp again, the HUD no longer turns see-through over the carcass, and the orbit ring fits its band.
Trophy grafts no longer get cut flat on a max-size hull.
Thank you for playing, for every bug report, and for every carcass you are about to add to the community count. If you enjoy the demo, a wishlist helps us more than anything else. See you at Next Fest!