Build v0.8.39-alpha
Sept 9, 2026
Big one. Bosses are now generated from parts instead of hand-built, mods have a real capacity limit, and there's a difficulty ladder. Plenty to break — notes on what to poke at are at the bottom.
Breach Depth — the difficulty ladder
- Depths are chosen at the flight deck and numbered from 0. Depth 1 (Hard) starts locked and unlocks by clearing the one below it; a third depth chains off that.
- Higher depths raise enemy health, damage, and the elite variant ceiling, and multiply your score to match.
- Leaderboards stay shared across depths rather than split — a deeper run scores higher on the same board.
- The panel stays hidden until you've unlocked something to pick.
Procedural bosses
- Bosses are now assembled from pooled parts — bodies, tentacles, spikes — against recipes, so silhouettes and attacks vary between runs.
- Two recipes in so far, including the Chrono Warden. Body plans (Serpent, Anchored) drive movement, and limbs can lash, deal contact damage, and be severed.
- Status-effect zones, shield orbs, and lasers are all in the recipe pool.
Mod capacity
- Mods now occupy slots — 4 to start, growing to a cap of 8 via level milestones and a constellation node.
- Each mod has a stack cap set by rarity, so you can't pour a whole run into one mod any more.
- At full slots the next pick auto-swaps instead of prompting mid-fight. Draft cards show the cap and name the mod being displaced before you commit.
Credits
- Clearing wave 20 rolls credits the first time, then the results screen. Replayable from the victory screen.
Performance
- Flow-field pathfinding no longer regenerates faster than it can finish — the main cause of late-run slowdown.
- XP orbs merge into occupied cells instead of spawning one per kill, fixing pool exhaustion in heavy waves.
- Native tentacle sim staggered, weapon fire pooled, and the horde swept once per frame instead of per weapon slot.
- Game-over screen no longer drops to ~45fps behind the blur.
Fixes worth naming
- Player crit stats never actually reached projectiles — three crit mods were doing nothing. They work now.
- A saved run could hijack a newly started one.
- Breach depth persists in the run save.
- Forcefield obstacles block horde enemies again.
- A late pickup could freeze the main menu on quit.
- Boss health bars, enemy fire sounds, elite mass scaling, and shield/hull effects clearing on death.
What to hammer on
- Mod auto-swap — it's deliberately instant with no confirmation. Tell us if it ever eats something you wanted.
- Procedural bosses — do they read as fair? Shout if a generated boss feels impossible or trivial, and say which run.
- Breach depth — is depth 1 a real step up, or does it just take longer?
- Late-run framerate — the perf work targets wave 12+. If it still chugs, we want to know where.
Crit being broken means every balance read before this build understated player damage — expect things to feel stronger.