The Hazards and Crew Update

Hi everyone, our next Major Update has been released and there’s a bunch of new systems which improve the variety and replayability of the campaigns, along with some changes to existing systems which lift the entire experience.

I’ll cover everything in detail below, but first I wanted to extend a huge thank-you to all our community members that helped playtest the beta branch updates we’ve been releasing. The feedback has once again proven invaluable in tracking down bugs and providing data to help shape our balancing and polish passes.

As always it’s worth covering some important logistical information regarding the update:

Steam should auto-update to the latest version, which is 0.8.26678 or later (this is visible in the bottom-right of the main menu). If the version number is lower, verify your install from the Steam Library and Steam should update.

Your profile saves will carry over (i.e. all your equipment you’ve unlocked thus far), but any in-progress escape run will not – so if you’re in the middle of a campaign and you don’t want to lose any new blueprints you haven’t banked, reach a gate and bank them before switching to the new version. If the game detects you’re trying to load an older save, it’ll give a reminder message in case you want to finish the run and bank any equipment on that old version, which is available as a beta branch (called "0.7.25599 - Major Update 2"). Some of the changes we’ve made could mean moving back and forth between previous versions and this could introduce bugs though, so only go back if you really have/want to.

If you want to back up your profile saves for whatever reason, you can find them here:

C:\\Users[Username]\\AppData\\LocalLow\\Fireblade Software\\SENTRY\\Saves\\Steam\\[SteamID]

Now that’s covered, onto the exciting bit – the new stuff:

[h3]Crew Menu![/h3]
Crew were previously just a numbered resource, whereas they are now characters. Characters whom you can rename, equip with armour, revive deceased ones and swap to new uniforms (aka skins).

Armour can be purchased with the materials resource and replenished as it gets depleted through combat. Or you can forgo it if you’d prefer to spend materials on something else – or are hardcore enough not to need it :)

This means armour is no longer a piece of Passive Gear, and as we’ve also given the Jump Jets as a default player ability means only the Bandolier remains. Passive Gear is being phased out for a replacement system with much greater depth and gameplay possibilities that’ll come in a future update.

You can also now spend research to revive a deceased SENTRY, which is a benefit to those who have been losing campaigns due to running out of crew. It’s also helpful to those in co-op who have one crew member and don’t want their friend to be in spectator mode until they find a crew pod on the map.

There are now a variety of uniforms you can switch each SENTRY to. You can get additional uniforms in two ways: unlocking a new vessel (each one comes with its own uniform) or by collecting the rescue pods. In future we’ll add more ways to get uniforms.

Uniforms are banked in the same way as equipment, and in co-op all players get access to the uniforms from both players while they're in a session together.

The crew names are generated from both a default database and one with names provided by newsletter subscribers. There’s the option to rename them if you want to name the crew after your friends. If you don’t want newsletter names in your game you can toggle them off in the Settings menu.

We also include an occupation for the crew. This is partly for fun, but also we wanted to help establish that the crew are civilians, something we’ve seen the occasional person mistake – someone even referred to them as robots, so hopefully this’ll make things clearer.

Each crew member has a rank which is increased by completing a battle. In future we plan to tie a gameplay modifier into this, but we’ll discuss that at a later date.

When you enter combat, you’re now taken to a screen where you choose which SENTRY to deploy. A simplified version of this is presented when you die and are waiting to respawn. In co-op, if there is only one crew-member available then you can choose which player occupies the Guardian Camera (previously it was always the client). We plan on expanding Guardian Camera functionality in a future update.

If you’re interested to learn more, we talk about the crew menu and how you can get your name in the game in greater detail here:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/534354183830111022
[h3]Hazards and Rewards![/h3]
Hazards and Rewards are a new system that provides random modifiers that get applied throughout a campaign. The idea is to provide greater variety and spikes to the difficulty during your escape runs. The rules for this new system are essentially:

Each boarding party has a hazard and a reward
These re-roll when the enemy takes over a sub system and moves onto the next – so help influence which dual-ship boarding party you'll decide to take on first
When you fight a boarding party, the hazard gets applied to you
When you beat a boarding party you gain a reward (these last either a number of uses or are one-shots)
If you lose a battle, the boarding party doesn't generate a new hazard (but the reward will be re-rolled)
The boss encounters before a gate have a harder “boss” hazard
When you go through a gate, your hazards are wiped
Some hazards and rewards stack, so for example if you are infected with the ‘Tight Budget’ hazard (where 25% of enemies will no longer drop scrap), this would increase to 50% if you were infected with another ‘Tight Budget’ hazard

One of my personal favourite rewards is “Barricades”, which places defensive positions throughout levels for a set number of battles:

We’ve tried to make the hazards not just provide difficulty spikes but also make you play in slightly different ways. For example the ‘Fabricator Glitch’ hazard will remove one random deployable each wave from your loadout, or the ‘Set in Stone’ hazard that disables the recycle function, which really forces you to think about your placement.

We’ve got plenty of ideas for future hazards and rewards that push the concept further, but we’re always keen to hear your own ideas.

[h3]Major UI Rework![/h3]
One thing you’ll notice as soon as you play a campaign is the major rework we’ve done to the Navigator menus.

There was a long list of issues we wanted to solve with the old version, and combined with the new menus for crew, showing the hazards and rewards and to be suitable for our future plans we tackled it all in one go.

The biggest change is to the box that appears when you select a level. It of course shows new information, like the type of hazard and reward you’ll get in that battle, but also surfaces useful information that has been requested by the community. For example you’ll now see which enemies are in the boarding party before you go into combat, so you can adjust your loadout accordingly.

[h3]New Equipment![/h3]
Two new weapons and a deployable join the roster!

The HF Blade stores a number of charges that can be expended on ranged attacks, which are useful for hitting enemies fleeing to the exit point, or throwing an opening salvo before charging in. The Mastered version of that ranged attack is particularly fun to use on groups of enemies.

The Stun Stick becomes more powerful when it’s fully charged – you can also choose to unleash this charge in an explosive secondary attack.

The Stun Stick is powered by smashing props, enemies or corpses. That last one was a very macabre but fun request from a Beta tester :)

The Flechette is our first non-square traditional deployable. It can be placed on walls and rotated 90 degrees so has a greater degree of control than other deployables. Clever placement combined with some of the piercing upgrades can tear through groups in long corridors!

We greatly enjoy seeing the discussions around weapons and deployables (not least because they shape future balancing), so we’re looking forward to you getting your hands on these new toys!

[h3]New Levels![/h3]
There are two new levels to defend:

Thermal Vats has several large pits filled with molten lava that are ideal for throwing enemies into and taking daring shortcuts via the double-jump.

Junction has a tricky split corridor leading from three breach points in close proximity to the exit, however utilising the doors is a good way to re-route enemies the long way.

[h3]Popular Requests![/h3]
We’ve implemented a collection of changes based on the most popular community requests. Starting with some of the smaller ones:

Closed blast doors now reliably re-route enemies (unless there is no other route, in which case they’ll destroy the door)
Ensured that new runs always start with at least one main damaging deployable (no more rolling dispenser + traction pad or explosive barrel)
Equipment banking now occurs automatically at gates but slots are no longer persistent across runs. We’ve increased starting deployable slots to 4 and in future we’ll add extra ways to increase slots through ship selection and the new passive system we have planned.

Now, some of the bigger changes:

[h3]Breach Point Selection[/h3]
We’ve changed the rules around Breach Point Selection.

This is probably something you’ll be familiar with in combat where you’ve just defended an attack from the A and B breaches, but the next wave is at C and D breach points. Oh, and the wave after that? Back to A and B…

This created a bit of fatigue and frustration by having to fully sell all your deployables and reposition them multiple times through a single battle, every battle.

The changes we’ve made mean that now there should be a general sense of escalation across fewer breach points in a battle. Full rotations will still occasionally happen, but they’ll be rarer and a hell of a lot less when measured across entire campaigns.

In our testing thus far this has felt much better, but as ever we’re keen to hear what you think.

[h3]Supply Beacon Changes[/h3]
Supply Beacon types are no longer separated by campaign, so any equipment could be found in any beacon type. On top of that, we’ve made the following adjustments:

Common Beacons have three options, while Uncommon Beacons provide four options
There are an increased amount of equipment-related choices to make – previously this was just weapon, deployable or gear – but now includes turrets too
You can also choose specific upgrades for types of equipment
When you receive a piece of equipment you’ve previously banked but not built in that run, it’ll be at a fixed Mk2 rather than a random level. People would get frustrated if it was anything other than high level, and randomly receiving a high powered piece of equipment could throw off a run’s balance too much
There’s an increased amount of Supply Beacons across each sector

Overall, this increases the rate of getting equipment and provides greater control over what you want to try and get – whether that be aiming for a turret above all else, or focusing on getting an upgrade for an equipment type.

[h3]Pursuer Cameras[/h3]
As part of the Major UI Rework, we also changed the camera that shows pursuing vessels and missiles.

There’s been a popular request to provide an option to disable this camera, but we felt this had a couple of problems. First, not all players dive into the settings menu and so this could be missed by some people (particularly as our settings menus are populated with a lot of granular options). Secondly, there was a danger that not showing this information could result in negative outcomes – i.e. being surprised by a hunting ship suddenly boarding you, or not realising that a pursuing missile was getting close.

Ideally, we’d make this something that is acceptable to everyone – and so we’ve made the pursuing missiles and vessels now always appear in a picture-in-picture (PiP) format. This allowed us to make the following changes:

Make the entire sequence much faster. We no longer have to scroll the camera across to focus on the chaser, it cuts straight to and from what it needs to show – this alone at least halves the previous timings whilst retaining the information that needs to be shown
The player retains full camera control in the Navigator, so you’re not just sat watching it, you can scroll around and plan your next move while you wait
You can perform actions in other menus while the PiP is happening, so you can upgrade, look at crew etc.

All told, this makes the entire sequence less annoying. We know that there’s still more we can do here, and we’ll be looking at this – plus pursuers in general – in future updates.

[h3]Tutorial Updates[/h3]
When we originally released the game, we wanted to keep a sense of discovery for players. We certainly wanted to avoid tutorialising mechanics which most players should know – i.e. the whole “Press Ctrl to Crouch into the vent” type of tutorial.

However after watching some players struggle with understanding the game we realised we’d gone too far in this direction and needed to do a better job of teaching mechanics that are unique to SENTRY. So we’ve done a pass on the tutorial messaging that should improve this.

What that means is there are now additional messaging in the following areas:

On a new profile on the Ship Launch menu explain that you’re about to play a tutorial sector
Explain how to trigger secondary fire and melee
Added some signposting on the breach and exit icons on the first combat
A reminder about dispensers for when you’re first low on health or ammo
A prompt for when the first enemy escapes
A message when the breach points swap for the first time, explaining the concept of recycling deployables to relocate them for more efficiency

Hopefully this helps people that were struggling without being too hand-holdy for players that weren’t finding this a problem. We’ll watch streams to see if we need to provide more assistance and react accordingly.

Some of these tutorial messages are global, which helps those who skip the tutorial (we really don’t recommend this, but we know some new players just want to jump into playing with their friends in co-op). This means existing players may see some new messages appear outside of the tutorial sector - but they're one-offs so won't appear again on that profile.

[h3]Other Stuff![/h3]
Those were the headline changes in MU3, but there are a whole lot of other improvements and additions, which I’ll collate here:

Balancing Changes:

Revised the research and materials values in upgrades so it’s more of an upward curve over a campaign. This stops the weirdness around rushing to a mastered piece of equipment as soon as a run starts, and matches the more gradual difficulty curve the campaigns have been balanced toward
Increased starting scrap and per wave scrap so more deployables can be placed
Increased ammo drop chance
Buffed the P9
Minor buff to the SMG
Reduced solider health by a small amount
Lowered the amount of pistol carrying soldiers in the tutorial
Made some adjustments to reduce the instances when waves end with a bunch of Grub enemies. It doesn’t solve the issue entirely, it’s something we’ll continue to work on but it does at least make it occur less frequently for the time being.
Major balance pass across Initiate and Starfarer campaigns

Enemies and Weapons:

Matriarch spawns Grubs upon death. These are the red ones similar to the Worm Food hazard, so have a time-limited lifespan.
Adjusted the hold position of the shotgun soldier so that it’s more easily readable versus other weapons
P9 and Bolt Rifle Bolts no longer detonate automatically once their lifetime expires, but fizzle out instead. This gives full control to the player, reduces inadvertent friendly fire instances and stops new players being confused by what is happening with sudden explosions everywhere
Equipment with secondary fire modes that you can switch to (like the P9R, SMG, Build Tool) can now be toggled while sprinting
Introduced other tier versions of the Storm Warden

Levels:

Fixed holes in various levels
Adjusted breach point decals in various levels so their visuals don’t overlap with deployables
Added an extra place to put a wall deployable by C breach in Mainframe
Adjusted the window shutters so it’s easier to build on them

Audio:

Fixed an issue where the combat tracks weren’t commencing at the right points depending on whether it’s the first combat wave or not
New Navigator music for the final sector
Each combat music piece now has a new track that plays in the preparation phase before the final wave
New convoy combat music
New combat music track that only plays on core defense missions
The alien grenade now has a separate warning sound versus the player ones
Sounds now reverb in large areas
New UI open sound for when the run starts, or you arrive at a new sector
Mastered version of the Railgun now has its own firing audio for the plasma shot

Co-op:

Removed the “+” buttons on friends on the host co-op menu when they’re in combat (you can’t join mid-combat but the icons being there when they shouldn’t was making people think you could join in the middle of combat)
For players that skip the tutorial to play co-op immediately, they’ll now bank the SMG and Grenade blueprints as if they had played through the tutorial
Fixed the "Return to Pods" tutorial message not being marked as complete for the client
Players can now choose who occupies the Guardian Camera slot (previously it was always the client)
Crew acquired UI now shows for the client

Miscellaneous:

Updated the After Action UI to show all the latest changes to crew and rewards
Adjusted sector maps and added some new ones
Updated newsletter crew names
Boss ships now have their own model in the Navigator. In the Overview, both Boss and Hunter vessels have their own visuals
Added a new upgrade icon for the Rivet Grid
Improved certain UI support for non 16:9 aspect ratios
Moved the "Back" button on the upgrade menu to the bottom left so that it isn't covered by the tutorial pop-ups
Jump Jets now perform double-jumps more reliably
Show a variant line of text if the player finishes a campaign with no new banked items
Fixed issues with input changes breaking alignment on certain UI
Hovering over enemy vessels in the Navigator now shows their threat level
Escaping enemy icons are now shown by the level health bar

Bug-fixes:

Fixed broken lighting on the frag grenade loadout previewer
Various text refinements/polish
Added missing mastered weapon sprites
The save system is now able to delete save game files that it cannot load (because their JSON is corrupted)
Fixed an edge case where you won a battle but then died on your final crew member on the way back to the pod (previously it wouldn’t count as a campaign defeat)
Fixed projectile trails sometimes appearing to shoot off to the side

There ended up being a lot of new things to cover, so if you’ve read this far, well done!

We’ve got a strong idea of the remaining features we’d like to add in future, so we’ll turn our immediate attention to creating a roadmap for the remainder of Early Access, which we’ll share soon.

We’ll be keeping a diligent eye on our various channels for your feedback. We’ll be doing the usual follow-up patch to include the translations for the new text, but if any bad bugs crop up we’ll do hot-fixes as needed. As ever, we read and document all feedback even if we don’t manage to personally respond to each post so please keep it coming.

We hope you like the latest additions to SENTRY. We’re not done yet, so there’s a lot more to come – and if you like what we’re doing please leave a Steam review :)

Thanks for the support!

The Fireblade Crew