v0.5.2: Contracts pay coins · familiars scale with your build · controller fix

Contracts now pay coins, your drones inherit your weapon build instead of ignoring it, the base screen's top buttons work on a controller, and a long list of things I found by playing my own game are fixed.

This is the first patch since launch. Most of it is me going back through the game with a notebook, which is exactly what Early Access is for.

Your familiar drones fight like part of your build now.

If you've ever picked up a drone item, watched it do good work for two waves and then quietly forgotten it existed, this is why: drones were sealed off from everything else you were building. Fixed damage, fixed bullet speed, none of your bullet effects. Your cannon scaled all run and the drone next to it never changed. By the time you were strong, it was decoration.

Now almost everything carries across:

• Your damage. A drone's bolt is its own damage times yours, so every cannon upgrade and damage item makes your drones hit harder too.
• Your bullet speed. LONG MAGS speeds up drone bolts as well as your own.
• Your bullet effects. PIERCE, SPLIT, RICOCHET, BOOMERANG and HEAVY CALIBER all stamp through onto drone bolts.

The one thing that doesn't carry is shot count. TRIPLE SHOT and the rest won't add bolts to a drone. That's deliberate: multiplying drones by a 13× spread ladder would turn every run into the drone build and nothing else. A drone fires what its own design says it fires.

Three drone items were also just lying about themselves, and that's fixed:

• SEEKER SWARM now actually has drones. It promised "twin drones" and had none: it fired bullets out of thin air beside your ship, and there was never anything to draw. It now fields two real drones, their bolts seek (the item is called SEEKER and they used to fly dead straight), and they count toward DRONE SWARM and LOCK-ON like every other familiar. This takes it from one of the weakest rares in the game to a strong one.
• SNIPER DRONE fires one heavy aimed bolt for triple damage, and its card now says that bullet count items don't apply to it, which is the honest version of what you were seeing.
• SIDE PODS, TWIN CANNON, SCATTER POD, OMNI CANNON and PULSE CORE now describe what they actually do. Their behaviour hasn't changed; their text was describing a version that never shipped.

Launching without a contract now asks first.

It used to just drop you on the Contracts tab with no explanation, which mostly felt like you'd misclicked. Now you get a prompt with two options: go pick one, or select a random one and launch straight away for when you want to be flying, not shopping. You can still dismiss it and fly with no contract at all. Contracts are optional and I want to keep them that way.

Fixed: OPTIONS and TITLE SCREEN were unreachable with a controller.

On the base screen, the ⚙ options button and TITLE SCREEN sit in the top-right corner, and the D-pad could only move around the panel below them. There was no way to reach either one without a mouse. That's been true since the screen was built and I never caught it, because I test with a mouse next to me. Sorry: if you play on a pad, that was a bad first hour.

Now you can get up there two ways: press ▲ from the top row of whatever panel you're in, or press B (ESC on keyboard) from anywhere on the screen, which jumps the cursor to the header and back again on a second press. It only moves the cursor. B will never press TITLE SCREEN for you. The footer hint lists the new binding.

Contracts now pay coins.

Until now, finishing a contract paid blueprints and universe mastery XP. Both are good, but neither is the currency you spend most: coins are what buy drones, drone upgrades and research. So the objective you deliberately chose to pursue advanced everything except the thing you were saving up for. Playing a good run paid coins. Chasing the goal didn't.

Now every contract pays coins as well, scaled to the universe you're in: Universe 3 cards pay roughly four times what Universe 1 cards do, and Endless keeps climbing with your Gauntlet rank. The nine special contracts each pay a one-time bounty on top of their item and blueprints, from 150 ¢ for the Universe 1 ones up to 600 ¢ for UNTOUCHABLE ACE.

The payouts are deliberately sized at roughly a third of what a run of that universe earns on its own. A contract should be a reason to go after the harder objective, not a way to skip playing well: if the card paid more than the run, farming easy contracts would beat getting good, and that's the wrong game.

Your existing save picks this up immediately. Contracts you'd already completed keep their old entries in the history; anything you finish from here shows the coin payout on the card.

Balance

• TURBO overheats much faster. It fires 2.67× quicker than any other drone but was only paying double the heat for it, and the coolant upgrade made that far worse: coolant subtracts a flat amount per shot, so on TURBO's tiny base it was cutting heat by 60% where a TANK only loses 19%. Fully upgraded, TURBO could hold the trigger for 12.5 seconds; every other drone cooks in two to four. It now pays the full 2.67× ratio and is the fastest-overheating drone in the game at every upgrade level (~0.5s cold, ~2.9s fully cooled). It's meant to win fights in short brutal bursts.
• HOMING can miss again. It was snapping onto targets: any heading error bigger than its turn rate produced a full-rate turn, so it corrected instantly and connected essentially always. It now eases into the last few degrees, which means it lags a target crossing in front of it and can slide past. Long-range acquisition is unchanged; a shot fired at something far off to the side still swings over just as hard. This is a nerf and I know it, but an item that never misses isn't a build choice, it's an aimbot.
• OVERDRIVE CORE runs cooler per shot and hotter per second. Heat per shot drops from ×1.7 to ×1.5, but it now also fires a frame faster, about 20% more shots every second, and firing more often generates heat on its own. Net: you overheat roughly 16% sooner than before. It's the hot-and-fast option and it now pushes harder in both directions.
• SNIPER hits for ×3, up from ×2, and your bullet effects finally reach its round. RICOCHET, BOOMERANG, SPLIT and HOMING all did nothing on SNIPER, the one drone whose entire output is a single bolt, so four items were blanks in its hands. They work now. Shot count still doesn't apply, and the card says so.
• FLAK BURST fires 50% of the time, up from 40%. At 40% it read as "rarely" and the item felt dead in the hand.

Fixes

• Only the VAMPIRE drone heals on a boss kill now. Every drone was quietly getting hull back after every boss, which made the one drone built entirely around healing pointless. Heads up: this makes Universe 3 harder on the other seven drones, because that was a lot of free healing nobody knew they were getting. If it's now too much, tell me. I'd rather hear it than guess.
• Drones no longer start a run with hull already missing. If you finished a run holding GLASS LATTICE, the next run started two hull down, on any drone.
• UNTOUCHABLE ACE no longer fires in a run where you took damage. If a REPAIR DRONE patched you back to full before the universe ended, the game counted it as flawless. It now tracks whether you were ever hit, not whether you finished at full hull.
• The pause screen fits on the screen again with a big item build. The list scrolls now, so your synergies stay visible at the bottom instead of falling off the edge.
• DASH READY and SHIELD READY actually make a sound you can hear. They were pitched right on top of your own gunfire, so they were being drowned out completely.
• A contract you finish mid-run stays on the pause screen, ticked, instead of blanking to "no contract" the moment you earn it.
• The CONTINUE RUN card doesn't overlap itself any more. The universe label and the DISCARD button were sitting on top of each other in the corner, which is a poor place for the one control that throws a checkpoint away.
• CAPACITOR now says what it does. It read "+45", which was 45 frames, a number from inside the engine that meant nothing to anyone. It's "+0.75s shield uptime".
• Maxed turrets patrol properly instead of freezing. They were getting stuck against an asteroid until it drifted away, and parking in the middle of the screen instead of sweeping back. Both were the same bug.
• PERFECTION now actually means 100%. It was firing at roughly two-thirds: it could pop before you'd even collected all the items. It now requires every single other achievement, which makes it meaningfully harder. If you already have it, you keep it.

Smaller things that were annoying me

• The end-of-run report tells you about boss mastery. It always showed the XP a run earned the drone and never mentioned the bosses you'd just killed with it, which made retreating look like it threw that progress away. It never did: the kills bank the instant the boss dies. Now the report says so, BOSSES 11/24 · +3 NEW.
• DISCARD on a saved run asks before it deletes. It fired on a single click, and it's irreversible. The confirmation also spells out that your XP, coins and boss mastery are already banked either way, which is the part people were actually worried about.
• The loadout picker has a search box. Picking a starting item out of ~70 icons meant hunting through a wall of glyphs with no names. Type to filter by name, description or tag, in either language, and the grid is reachable on a controller now. It wasn't, so the reward for maxing a drone was mouse-only.
• Your Gauntlet Rank shows on the launch screen, next to the universes, instead of being something you had to open the Contracts tab to find out.
• The drone cards stopped describing each drone twice. Every drone had a green flavour line and then a coloured perk line under the stat bars saying the same thing. Now there's one, in the drone's colour, at the top.

Keep the feedback coming. This is my first released game and I'll keep reading the Steam Discussions and the Discord and patching from there. If something feels bad, tell me. Especially the boring stuff: a menu that's confusing, a number that doesn't make sense, a run that ended in a way you didn't understand. That's more useful to me than anything. Most of this update came from exactly that: a notebook of my own complaints plus the ones you sent me. The drone change in particular is a big swing and I'd rather hear early that it's too much than find out from a review. Discord: discord.gg/KwqxGtnHEd