0.2.0 — Build Your Base

major update

Echo Mates Playtest · published · build 25482859

The biggest update so far. The shop yard is now yours to build on, and what you build there stays with you forever.

THE BASE


Contracts used to leave nothing behind but money. Now every run also brings back materials, and the yard above the lift is where they turn into something permanent.

Materials

  • The cargo van now pays you twice for the same haul: money and materials. Metal, electronics, biomaterial and research points.
  • Hand a load in and your tablet plays out what came back from it.

The build terminal


Walk up to the terminal in the yard, pick a building and place it anywhere in the yard. A ghost shows you exactly where it will stand. There are six buildings:

  • Research table — spend research points to permanently unlock new gear. This replaces the old blueprint system: research is no longer lost when a campaign ends.
  • Chip rack — suit chips are no longer sold in the shop. You craft them here with money and materials, and the finished chip goes straight into your quick slot.
  • Safe — keeps 25% (or 50% at tier II) of your bank when a campaign ends, win or lose.
  • Lab rack — unlocks cryo and acid grenades, crafted from materials you bring back.
  • Defibrillator in the lift — a wall unit inside the cabin. Drag a body back to the lift and bring them back. Point it at someone alive and it does the opposite. One minute to recharge.
  • Mini-game table — see below.

It's yours for good


Your base and your research live in your save slot and survive everything: starting a new campaign, losing a campaign, even a liquidation. Only deleting the save wipes them.

Arm wrestling


The mini-game table is the first thing in the game that has nothing to do with a run. Walk up, pick a game, take a seat, and a teammate joins by pressing use. Arm wrestling is two players hammering space and left click in turn, GTA-style, until someone's arm goes down. Cards, checkers and dominoes are next.

NEW GEAR

  • Bear trap — a floor trap with no glow and no warning, so your own crew steps in it too. It kills people and small creatures outright; big ones tear free and limp away with the trap still on a leg, clanking with every step. In the dark, the wet sound is the only way to tell whether it caught something.
  • Inhaler — three doses. Each one buys 15 seconds of speed, no fatigue, a wider view and waves you can see much farther, and the world goes strangely clean and close. Then you pay for it with a few seconds of helpless wheezing. Your voice goes up a pitch, and everyone can hear it.
  • Stones — lying around the yard, free, a handful at a time. Thrown, they make a small knock: enough to light a corner or pull something away, far quieter than a firecracker.

THE SHOP IS ON YOUR TABLET NOW

  • Walk up to the supply van and your tablet comes up with the full shop on it. No more aiming at a screen: mouse, keys, page through with the arrows or the mouse wheel.
  • The old shop terminal became a billboard: new stock, discounts and current wares scroll past on it.
  • During a liquidation, the billboard and the lift terminal flash red with the time left.
  • Picking your color moved to the pause menu, bottom left.

LEVELS & CREATURES

  • Power cells are wired now — a cable run under the ceiling connects each cell cabinet to the turret it actually feeds, so "take the cell that powers the turret" is something you can see and follow.
  • Warehouse gates open both ways.
  • Traps can't be placed on crates or barrels any more — the ghost turns red. No more traps left hanging in mid-air after someone carries the barrel off.
  • Signs and screens in the world now say the task and nothing else, in plain words.

Go build something.