The Tech Module Update

Hi everyone, our next Major Update has been released! This post will go through the latest additions and changes – but before that, I wanted to say a big thank-you to all our community members that helped playtest the beta branch. Once again the feedback has been invaluable in reproducing bugs and providing information that helps our balancing and polish passes.

As with any Major Update, it’s worth covering some logistical information regarding the update:

Steam should auto-update to the latest version, which is 0.9.27757 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 it should update.

Your profile saves will carry over (i.e. all your equipment, uniform and campaign unlocks), 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 "0.8.26715 - Major Update 3").

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 the important information is covered, onto the new stuff!

[h3]Tech Modules![/h3]
This new system is the replacement for the old passive gear that we’ve gradually been phasing out. We originally had three pieces of passive gear. The Jump Jets became a default player ability, the armour became part of the Crew menu added in Major Update 3, while the Bandolier is now a piece of Tech.

Tech are small memory-card like items that you acquire at the end of each combat. You equip up to 5 of them in your loadout and they come in stackable (blue) or unique (purple) formats.

Their function is to allow you to lean into certain playstyles and provide each run with an additional layer of variety. For example this setup is great with the Auto-Turret and Assault Rifle:

The above tech modules give automatic weapons a chance of inflicting poison damage, along with doing increased damage to enemies suffering from poison. There’s Tech that repairs turrets each Preparation Phase, along with increasing turret health the longer they survive. The unique tech in this instance is the Bandolier, which we know was popular with some players so we didn’t want to lose it :)

The following tech combination would make a Stun Jet plus Traction Pad killbox particularly lethal:

This one deals increased damage to enemies that are slowed, while others increase the recharge speed of ceiling-based deployables, along with two stacked tech that increases the damage ceiling-based deployables inflict. To round things off, there’s one that deals increased damage if you hit enemy weakspots with a pistol (ideal when they’re also getting increased damage while slowed on traction pads).

We’ve also added tags on the equipment and loadout menus for each item so you can better understand what Tech can be used with which piece of equipment:

[h3]New After Action Report![/h3]
Because you choose your Tech at the end of battle, along with the new Optional Objectives system and reworked UI (both explained in the sections below), it was necessary for us to create a new After Action Report.

Once you’ve made your Tech choice you extract as normal.

You’ll also notice that the Materials reward has changed. You now receive a flat amount plus bonuses for each threat level, whether it’s a boss or you’re using the mining vessel. This means the further into the campaign you get the more materials you’ll receive each battle.

[h3]Optional Objectives![/h3]
Optional Objectives is another new system that provides additional variety in combat, and is a way to adjust your Tech choices.

They are randomised with each boarding party as it moves through your ship and can be seen in advance by hovering over the icon in the subsystem information box:

They are also displayed in the HUD.

Upon completion of an Optional Objective, you will be given one of the following rewards on the After Action Report:

An expanded choice of Tech
An extra action, so you can choose two pieces of Tech rather than the usual one
The option to re-roll the Tech selection

You can therefore help get the Tech build you want by completing these Optional Objectives.

We plan on expanding the choice of Tech and Optional Objectives in future updates.

[h3]Major UI Rework![/h3]
We’ve made some changes to the HUD and the font for this update.

The font was suffering from legibility issues particularly at lower resolution. It also had problems with upper case ‘D’ and ‘O’ looking too similar – for example “RETURN TO POD” amusingly looked like it said “RETURN TO POO”, so we’ve replaced it with something that we feel is generally nicer to read. It pretty much touches every area of the game though, so if you see anything janky please let us know.

Regarding the HUD, we’ve added the new Optional Objectives, made the Prep and Action phases clearer and improved the messaging around Secondary Fire. We’ve also simplified the Breach Bars so they don’t say “BREACH BREACH BREACH” one on top of the other.

[h3]Status Effects Rework![/h3]
Because a lot of Tech relates to status effects, we’ve done another pass on Burn, Bleed and Poison to inject more interesting behaviour to them. While they all do differing types of damage over time (some constant, some in stabs) there are additional layers to them such as:

Burn has a chance to spread between nearby targets, can be extinguished if affected by venting and additionally if the player rapidly crouches and stands
Poison reduces accuracy, eats away at armour at an increased rate and can be immediately stopped by healing
You’ll be immune to bleed if you’re wearing armour, but if you sprint around while bleeding it’ll do increased damage. Bleed can also be stopped by healing. We’ll make some of the existing enemies cause bleed damage in a future update, so right now it’ll only affect the player in co-op with friendly fire turned on (although enemies will suffer bleed as normal).

[h3]New Enemy![/h3]
Our latest enemy was designed to perform differently from any of the others in the game. Here’s a screenshot and the original concept art:

The primary function for this enemy (codenamed ‘Ghost’) is that it can disable deployables within a radius, which allows nearby allies to move past those traps unhindered. If there’s a turret within the radius it’ll have its health continuously depleted.

It fires a homing projectile for its attack and when sustaining damage can turn incorporeal for a period of time. This phase shift ends once the blue flames on each hand have dissipated. While in this state it won’t disable deployables, so it's important to consider target priority when you come up against them in Starfarer.

[h3]New Levels![/h3]
There are two new levels you can fight in: Habitation and Conduit.

Habitation is another level where clever use of doors can re-route enemies along your preferred paths, with plenty of opportunities to fling them into bottomless pits.

We know how popular it is to throw aliens to their deaths, so Conduit has a fair few chasms too. The upper routes have some great choke points, while the A and B spawns have a split route that’ll test your defensive abilities.

[h3]Other Stuff![/h3]
There’s a huge amount of other changes that have gone into this Major Update which you can find below.

Levels:

Fixed some holes in various levels
Fixed a wall you couldn’t build on in Hallway

Equipment:

Secondary ammo (like underslung grenades) is no longer replenished from dispensers, but is restored during each Prep phase. This stops the exploit where you could stand by a dispenser and constantly replenish your AR grenades, which was an easy way to dominate the game
Tweaked SMG, AR and DMR accuracy
P9 renamed to P9X
Buffed P9X explosion force
Buffs to all pistols
Minor buff to AR grenade
Fixed reload camera anims on Peacekeeper and Flameshot
Improved Peacekeeper weapon swap speed
Buffs to Stun Stick, and toned down some of the wacky enemy flinches from hits
Buffs to Vortex Glove
Fixed the DMR not doing critical damage on weakspots
Made the lights on bolts flash at an increased pace as their time runs out
Adjusted the upgrade path on all equipment. While most have one less upgrade, some equipment such as Gear, one-shot deployables and dispensers have half the upgrades which allowed us to remove a lot of the underwhelming ones. This allows players to get higher-level upgrades with more equipment rather than going all-in on one or two.

Enemies:

Slight buff to Raider health
Minor nerf to Fodder health
Adjusted Raider behaviour to more closely follow pusher, pinner and breacher archetypes based on their weapons
Reduced attack damage on most enemies
Increased speed of Grub and Matriarch. While this won’t eliminate issues with them lagging behind other enemies, it will at least reduce the severity of it
Reduced Grub health so that a single hit from a Flak Turret will kill one
Adjusted the amount of scrap that the Wardens drop
The Stalker ship now has some variation in boarding party enemies depending on which sector you fight it

Campaign:

Grunt, Veteran and Elite (i.e. grey, blue and red versions of main enemies) are now spread across threat levels rather than being a hard transition
Removed starting Materials from campaigns
Increased Battle-hardened and Tight Budget hazards so they’re more suitable to single encounters (as opposed to the original stacking system)
Removed the ‘Disrepair’ hazard as it wasn’t very fun
Added new Merits that grant an additional weapon or deployable slot
Removed the bonus to collecting equipment you already have the blueprint for, as this was confusing
Adjusted starting scrap values
Did a balancing pass on upgrade costs
Repairing subsystems now starts at only 400 materials, but increases in cost each time they’re used. Similarly, crew revives increase in cost each use.

Co-op:

Fixed an intermittent issue where the co-op player could break dispensers for the host
Fixed an issue where the co-op player could sometimes load into a level with the Build Tool showing they had zero scrap
Added some suit VO for when a co-op player dies, or the client disconnects
Fixed an issue where the co-op player didn’t see the correct uniform in first-person

Audio:

The Suit VO provides a warning for low ammo, low health and no ammo
Additional suit VO lines for reworked status effects, trying to place deployables with no scrap, or trying to place deployables that have reached a cap (i.e. turrets)
Fixed the issue where the Railgun overcharge sound wasn’t resetting when the bar started increasing again

Miscellaneous:

Re-worked the Loadout menu to accommodate Tech and latest UI changes
Updated the engine to gain latest performance enhancements
Renamed “Encounter Rewards” to “Merits”
HUD control UI now limited to 5 characters for when keys are rebound to ones with a long name, so they don't overrun/look bad
Reworked Hazard and Merit tooltips to new tooltip system
After Action Report is no longer shown if a level is lost due to all the crew being dead
Lowered armour absorption rate
Improved text legibility at lower resolutions
Implemented a highlight over the Navigator button when the player can move on the navigator
Added latest newsletter names to the potential crew names that can be generated

Bug-fixes:

Stopped melee attacks also causing damage behind the player
Fixed the projectile spread getting smaller the as you aim down
Fixed a hang where the Stalker ship would land on an area where another boarding craft was already located

As ever we’ll be keeping an eye on our various channels for your feedback. We’ll do the usual follow-up patch to include the translations for the new text, but if anything massive comes up we’ll do hot-fixes as needed. We read and document all feedback even if we don’t manage to personally respond to each post – and we really appreciate it, because the game has so many levers to pull and we’re such a tiny team that we literally couldn’t do this without you.

We hope you like the latest additions to SENTRY. There’s a lot more to come and we’re already excited about moving onto what we have planned.

If you like what we’re doing please leave a Steam review, and thanks for the support!

The Fireblade Crew