SENTRY News

Major Update 3 Beta Test (and May Dev Transmission)

Hi everyone,

A beta version of Major Update 3 is now available!

The new hazards and rewards feature has exponentially increased the various gameplay systems so we’d massively appreciate you letting us know your thoughts, along with any bugs you may find.

To gain access to version 0.8.26211, you’ll need to switch to a beta branch:

Find SENTRY in your Steam library and right-click on it, selecting “Properties”
In the menu that pops up, choose “Betas”
Select “Beta Branch” in the “Beta Participation” drop-down list
In your Library you should see “[betabranch]” appended to the game name

When you play the new version, the most important thing to consider is that while your profile saves will carry over (i.e. all your equipment you’ve unlocked thus far), your current escape run will not – so if you’re in the middle of a run 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.

It’s also generally good practice to back up your profile saves ahead of any Major Update, just in case you’re the one that finds an obscure bug. You can find your profile and save folder here:
C:\Users[Username]\AppData\LocalLow\Fireblade Software\SENTRY\Saves\Steam\[SteamID]

[h3]Hazards and Rewards[/h3]
The headline feature in this update is the Hazards and Rewards system.

The idea is to provide greater variety and spikes to the difficulty throughout your escape runs. A personal favourite is the “Barricades” reward, which places defensive positions throughout levels for a set number of battles.

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
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 will 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

We’d love to know your thoughts on the meta, individual hazards and rewards and any combinations that stand out – our Discord Playtesters already highlighted a bunch of particularly brutal combos which we’ve re-balanced for this version but you may find others.

There's some clearer messaging of these that we have planned, plus we have a long list of other hazards and rewards we’d like to implement. We can’t wait to hear your own suggestions!

[h3]Other Big Additions[/h3]
A few other things that may interest you…

There are two new levels: Junction and Thermal Vats – the latter has a lot of lava pits waiting to consume enemies you throw into them…

We’ve implemented melee weapons: The HF Blade and Stun Stick:

The Navigator and Overview UI have been reworked. This was largely to allow the new Deploy box to contain useful information about what you’ll face in combat.

There’s a bunch of smaller changes worth calling out because previous behaviour has now changed, just in case you were wondering if that was intentional or not:

When blast doors are closed the enemy will choose an alternate route. If no alternative is available they’ll attack the door. This means you can still close them to buy you some time, but in certain areas you can now re-route them.
We’re trialing having any piece of equipment appearing in any Supply Beacon
The Giant Slug now spawns Grubs upon death
Jump Jets are no longer a Gear item and are something you have all the time. They now double-jump more predictably too.

There are loads of other smaller changes and additions, but I’ll collate the changelist when we officially release MU3.

In order to not mix up beta branch feedback with the main game, there’s a dedicated area on the Steam forums to post your beta branch comments: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1252680/discussions/0/

We endeavour to respond to comments and feedback as much as we can, but rest assured that even if we don’t personally reply we do read and note everything. Here’s a bunch of useful links to where you can reach us:

As always your feedback is essential and helps determine our focus. We’re very interested in reading your thoughts; so please drop them in the comments below, in a separate post on the Beta Branch forum or on our Discord.

There are some additional systems we originally had planned for MU4 that we’re thinking of bringing forward. They are not only a net positive for the game but also compliment the new hazards and reward systems, so we’re going to investigate those next (along with working through your feedback).

Overall though, once we feel MU3 has had sufficient testing and we’ve accommodated your feedback we’ll officially release it. As always we’ll keep you updated :)

Thanks for your continued support!

Dev Transmission (April 2025)

Hi everyone,

Our current main focus is on what will be the headline addition for Major Update 3. This aims to give a greater amount of variety and ‘spikiness’ in campaigns and individual battles.

To elaborate on that, enemy boarding parties will be infected with randomised Combat Hazards, something that will pass to you when you engage them in battle and stack up throughout a campaign. To offset this, they’ll each carry an Encounter Reward that will be granted when you defeat them.

We’ve been having great fun coming up with dozens of hazards and rewards, and the nature of how they tie into a campaign can provide some fantastic combinations and surprises along the way. I’ll avoid going into too much detail on this right now, but we’re looking forward to hearing about your own suggestions for hazards and rewards once you get your hands on the update.

In order to communicate this new system, we’ve taken the opportunity to rework how the Ship Overview is presented. This not only allows us to provide extra information that will result in more meaningful decisions, but also lays the groundwork for some new features coming after MU3. Here’s a sneak peek, although bear in mind some visuals are placeholder:

This required quite a bit of unpicking of the old format, so for SENTRY veterans some of the changed locations of buttons/UI may take a bit of getting used to!

You’ll be pleased to know the Deploy box will now show what enemy types are present in that boarding party – and if the sub system is below 100% health, then the repair information is always displayed, not just when you have the resources to make the repair!

[h3]New Deployable![/h3]
The Flechette Strip is a straight-forward damage-dealing deployable that spits out metal projectiles:

As you can see from the concept, rather than the usual square deployable shape this is long and thin. Because it can be rotated to place horizontally or vertically it offers a lot of flexibility in its potential placement locations.

[h3]New Enemies![/h3]
Alex has created a higher and lower tier variant of the Storm Warden, which brings it in line with the other enemy archetypes with tier variants.

A few people have asked where the higher (red) tiered enemies went in the last update – don’t worry, they will be making a return…

[h3]Polishing New Levels and Melee Weapons![/h3]
In our last update we mentioned that we had created two new levels plus two melee weapons –these have been with our Discord Playtesters who have been providing their thoughts, so Sean has been working through their feedback and making the necessary adjustments.

If you missed the last update and want to read about what those new levels and melee weapons were, check out the post here:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/534345939582715877

[h3]Devlog![/h3]
In case you missed it, Sean also created a video covering the co-op update:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Abandon Ship![/h3]
I’ve been occasionally grabbing a bit of time to do a free content update to our previous game:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/551860/view/528718979655533049

While our focus is very much on SENTRY, I thought it worth mentioning to show that we still like to support our last game even though it’s over 5 years old now. Expect SENTRY to receive that kind of love even when it’s several years beyond full release!

[h3]From the Community![/h3]
This month Discord member Busy Bee (who also goes by LittleMissCalculated on DeviantArt) has mocked up their idea for a new Electric Flamethrower type weapon they’d love to see. They explained that while it wouldn’t do weak spot damage it would do increased damage to armoured enemies and require getting up close to be most effective:

Keep sharing anything cool with us!

If you’d like to provide any feedback you can do so through our channels below – we try to respond as much as we can, but even if we don’t personally reply we read and note everything. Here’s a bunch of links to where we can be reached:

Thanks for your continued support!

New SENTRY Devlog!

Hi everyone, we've made another Devlog that delves into the details of our last Major Update and explains some of the thinking behind our approach. Check it out:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
And don't forget to smash that like button :)

Dev Transmission (March 2025)

Hi everyone,

Our main priority in March has been working on what we’re considering to be the headline feature of Major Update 3. While we won’t spoil the details now, the idea of this addition would be to provide much greater variety when playing campaigns.

How we present this new feature ended up combining with some other areas we’ve been working on, such as showing more information in the Deploy box (like threat levels, enemies in that boarding party etc.) as well as our plans for later in Early Access (adding a Crew Menu and Codex) so we took the opportunity to rework the menus so that it accommodates all these changes and future ideas. That has been quite time consuming, however it means that they should all be more intuitive. The danger with Early Access is that sometimes you can keep bolting on features to the user interface and it becomes a poor experience to use, so we wanted to avoid falling into that trap. It's shaping up quite nicely!

Here’s what else we’ve been up to this month:

[h3]New Weapons/Gear![/h3]
Major Update 2 was very code heavy, so while Adam was focusing on that Sean and Alex were laying the groundwork for future content creation. Now various dependencies have been freed up we’re going through and implementing some of these queued up assets – those who have followed previous Dev Transmissions may remember seeing concept art for some of these:

Melee weapons are 1-slot, so while they have limitations they still conform to the general rule in SENTRY; that any weapon should feel good to use and be perfectly viable for certain situations.

The HF Blade stores a number of charges that can be expended on ranged attacks, while the Stun Stick becomes more powerful when it’s fully charged – which can only be accomplished by smashing props or enemies. You can also choose to unleash this charge in an explosive secondary attack.

We’ve also introduced the Shuriken as a new Gear item. When thrown, this bounces to nearby enemies – something that can be increased as you upgrade it.

On the subject of gear, we’ve moved the Jump Jets to be a permanent player ability so you can now double-jump all the time (we’ve also made the double-jump more reliable, so it feels like you’d expect it to). This leaves the number of passive gear items quite low, but is in advance of a change we’ll likely make after MU3 to how passive items are assigned to crew.

[h3]New Levels![/h3]
We’ve got two new levels that should imminently be going out to our Discord Playtesters: Junction and Thermal Vats.

The former has echoes of Hallway, in that it is compact with some short distances between the breach points and exit, so can be quite intense when facing larger forces. The main corridor is wide and a natural defense point for 3 out of the 5 breaches, but it’s split in the middle so can present a challenge!

Junction is partially built on a layout we created very early on in development, so it’s been great to revisit it. This area appeared in some of our earliest (and now nuked) screenshots on the store page.

Thermal Vats has several areas of molten metals scattered around the level, ideal for using Conveyors or the Vortex Glove to push enemies into :)

[h3]From the Community![/h3]
This month Discord member TheCartoon1st has created an image of them and their friend playing co-op together:

We absolutely love seeing this stuff, so keep sending anything cool to us!

Keep giving feedback via our channels below – we try to respond as much as we can, but even if we don’t personally reply we read and note everything. Here’s a bunch of links to where we can be reached:

Thanks for your continued support!

Updated Translations for 0.7.25599

We've updated the translations for build version 0.7.25599

Because the text files are outside of the packaged game this means the build version number hasn't been updated from the last patch.

Steam should auto-update, but if you're running the game in any language other than English and you're still seeing non-translated text, try validating your files to nudge Steam into downloading them.