Devlog

Ranged combat now uses ammo. Crossbows require bolts, bows require arrows — 8 tiers of each, matching the alloy progression. Ammo provides all of your ranged damage: the weapon determines accuracy, the ammo determines how hard you hit. Running out mid-fight means you stop dealing damage until you re-equip. The combat log now shows what ammo you're firing — "Iron Crossbow (Iron Bolt)" — so you can see exactly what's contributing to each hit.

Bows are a new weapon type — faster than crossbows, two-handed, and gated behind the Ranged skill. Eight tiers from Tin Bow through Neutronium Bow. Where crossbows are slow and hard-hitting (one-handed, pair with a shield), bows trade defense for attack speed. Both weapon types are crafted through the new Fletching lifeskill.

Fletching is a new crafting discipline that produces all ranged equipment: bows, arrows, and bolts. Recipes auto-generate from tier configs — same pattern as Forging. Arrow recipes yield 15 per craft, bolt recipes yield 10, reflecting their relative power. Fletching levels to 99 alongside the other lifeskills.

Quest XP rewards are no longer split evenly across all combat skills. When you claim a quest, a skill picker appears letting you choose which combat skills receive the XP. Dump it all into one skill to power-level, or spread it across several — your call. Level-up notifications now use the proper combat skill toast instead of the generic floating notification.

Enhancement now actually works. Previously, enhancing a weapon increased legacy stats that nothing in the combat engine read — your +5 sword hit exactly as hard as your +0 sword. Enhancement bonuses now apply to OSRS combat stats (attack bonuses, strength bonuses, defence bonuses), and the enhancement preview shows the real stats being boosted: Slash, Melee Str, Crush Def — not the old placeholder labels.

Boss kill quests now register properly. Previously, defeating a boss like Dregthar wouldn't progress your quest because boss victories went through a separate reward path that skipped quest tracking. Fixed — boss kills now advance quest progress and fire completion notifications.

Several save migration fixes: warhammers now correctly require Strength (not Attack) to equip, crossbows and bows get their ammo type requirements stamped on load so old saves work with the new ammo system, and weapon skill requirements stay in sync with current game rules across updates.

The idle combat screen now uses a two-column layout on desktop — stance and spellbook selectors on the left, protocol buffs on the right. No more scrolling to see your full combat setup before starting a fight.

Combat resource indicators are now visible on both the idle and active combat screens. Ranged users see their equipped ammo name and remaining count. Magic users see their active spell and how many casts they can sustain with current runes. Both indicators turn yellow when you're running low (20 or fewer remaining), giving you time to restock before you run dry.

Lifeskills now support multiple concurrent work orders. You can queue up smelting, cooking, and forging simultaneously instead of one at a time. The sidebar shows active indicators for each running skill.

The Crash Landing tutorial can now be skipped entirely. A "Skip Tutorial" button appears in the header for players who already know the game. Completed tutorials are hidden from the side menu — no clutter once you're past it.

Shops have been added to wilderness zones, giving players a local source for basic supplies without returning to the village.

New players now have a guided start: the Crash Landing tutorial walks you through 24 sequential tasks covering every core system — Mining, Smelting, Forging, Fishing, Cooking, equipping gear, gathering in the wilderness, killing in AFK and live combat, Signal Arrays, Combat Protocols, Pyrecraft, Rune inscription, and Gem Resonance. Each task unlocks only after the previous completes, so there's always exactly one clear thing to do. Every completed task pays out scrap, and finishing all 24 grants a completion bonus including a Crude Static Staff to get you started with signal magic.

The enhancement step is now part of the tutorial. After forging and equipping a Tin Sword, the tutorial asks you to enhance it. A new in-game modal after that step explains the full enhancement system — the risk of downgrade on failure, Protection Shards, and why pushing high-enhancement gear is the main long-term power path.

Each major system introduction is paired with a context modal that fires after the relevant task completes. The Protocols modal explains the full automation system. The Signal Arrays modal covers all three ways to gather signal data. The Wilderness vs AFK modal explains the tradeoff between active and passive combat. The Signal Combat modal covers staves, rune costs, and how magic builds work. These fire once and don't repeat — new players get context at the moment they first touch a system, returning players are never interrupted.

Under the hood, all 24 tutorial tasks are wired directly into the relevant game systems: gathering cycles, wilderness kills, AFK kills, crafting completions, equipping, enhancement, rune inscription, pyrecraft firing, and screen visits all fire events that the tutorial listens to. No manual "mark complete" buttons — progress tracks automatically as you play.

Three new lifeskills are live: Fishing, Tailoring, and Signal Runes. Fishing is a gathering skill that pulls raw catches from the wastes — Glowminnow through Genesis Kraken across ten tiers, feeding directly into Cooking. Tailoring weaves harvested biostock into fabric, then into robes — the first magic-specific armor in the game. Signal Runes is a gathering skill unlike the others: instead of idle work orders, you inscribe runes at wilderness Signal Altars.

Signal Altars are new wilderness structures scattered across the zones. Walk up to one, select a rune tier, and inscribe — each swing consumes signal data and has a chance to produce a rune based on your Signal Runes level. Higher tiers require higher skill and better data, but yield runes that power the strongest signal spells. The altar interface shows your success chance, session stats, and a live swing timer so you know when to act.

Robes are a new equipment type covering four signal magic schools: Volt (electricity), Cryo (cold), Toxic (poison), and Thermal (heat). Eight tiers total — Robe at lower quality, Vestment at upper — each boosting Signal and Fortitude in different ratios. All crafted through Tailoring using tier-matched fabric. Legendary variants with school-specific passive effects are earned from boss kills.

The enhancement screen has been rebuilt from scratch. The animation now builds tension through three variable-length phases before revealing the result — total buildup ranges from 1.4 to 2.8 seconds so no two enhancements feel the same. The result appears only after the sequence ends, not mid-animation. The selected item's artwork is now displayed in the enhancement slot, and a result overlay fades in with Success, Failed, or Destroyed depending on the outcome.

Alloycraft has been renamed to Forging. Same discipline, same recipes — the name better reflects what it does. All references in the UI, guide, and crafting screens have been updated.

We shipped a performance pass focused on making the game feel smoother on phones, especially when browsing large inventories. If you were seeing hitching or frame drops while opening the Materials tab or scrolling through bigger stockpiles, that should now feel much more stable.

The biggest wins are in inventory rendering. Material-heavy characters were forcing too much visual work during scroll, so we trimmed that cost down and optimized the icon assets used across the UI. In plain terms: less stutter when opening item-heavy screens, smoother scrolling through your materials, and faster recovery after switching tabs.

This optimization pass also reduced the size of many in-game icon assets used for items, crystals, lifeskills, crates, and other small UI images. That helps the game spend less time pushing oversized art through mobile rendering paths while keeping the look of the interface intact at icon scale.

You should notice the difference most on devices that previously struggled with large inventories or busy UI screens. We'll keep doing these cleanup passes as more systems come online, but this one was aimed squarely at making everyday play feel snappier.

Two new lifeskills have arrived. Woodcutting is a gathering skill — chop timber nodes scattered across all 12 wilderness zones to collect raw wood. Pyrecraft is a crafting discipline — tend signal-fueled fires that produce powerful buffs, fuel, and refined materials over time. Both skills level to 99 with the same exponential XP curve as the other lifeskills.

Every wilderness zone now has timber tiles. Each zone has one or two groves of alien trees — Sporeshelf Groves, Rotwood Stands, Frostbark Stands, Petrified Groves — matching the zone's tier. Walk to a timber tile, open the extraction site, and chop. Yields scale with your Woodcutting level, and each harvest grants Woodcutting XP. Timber tiles show a tree icon on the map grid and use "Chop" instead of "Gather" in the interaction panel.

Pyrecraft works differently from the other crafting disciplines. Instead of setting a work order and walking away, you kindle a fire, feed it fuel and materials, and tend it over time. Fires burn through stages and produce results based on what you feed them. Think of it as the campfire system — strategic, interactive, and slower-paced than the standard idle crafting loop.

The lifeskill cap has been raised from 50 to 99. Every gathering and crafting discipline now has a much longer progression curve with meaningful content all the way up. XP requirements scale exponentially past level 50 — reaching 99 in a skill is a serious long-term goal, not something you'll hit in a weekend.

Two new resource tiers are available. Tier 9 — Orichalcum, Cortex, and Deep Signal — unlocks at gathering level 58. Tier 10 — Void Alloy, Genesis Fluid, and Architect Core — unlocks at level 70. These are the rarest materials on the planet, and they take time to harvest. Expect 8-minute cycles for T9 and 10-minute cycles for T10.

Around 35 new crafting recipes have been added across all four disciplines, organized into item families. Each family is a single concept — healing tonics, power sigils, damage amplifiers — that repeats at increasing power tiers. If you've crafted a Spore Tonic, you already understand how Cortex Salve and Genesis Restorative work. They're the same idea, scaled up with better materials and stronger effects.

Biosynth gets upgraded healing, combat stims, multi-stat boosters, revive extracts, and pheromone lures up to level 65. Signal Etching gets new tiers of power, dexterity, and intelligence sigils, plus stronger damage amplifiers and protective wards. Alloycraft gets four new utility consumables — armor kits, honing stones, enhancement stabilizers, and overdrive modules.

Crystallography now has two new shard tiers: Supreme and Transcendent. Supreme shards are craftable starting at level 35 and offer 3x the base bonus for 180 battles. Transcendent shards unlock at level 55 with 5x bonuses lasting 250 battles. All five shard types — Echo, Gilt, Vein, Signal, and Hunter — are available in both new tiers.

All experience and drop-rate boosts now come exclusively from Crystallography. If it affects your XP, scrap, material drops, equipment drops, or elite spawn rates, you craft it through shards. The other three disciplines focus on what they do best: Biosynth handles healing and defensive buffs, Signal Etching handles offensive stats and combat utility, and Alloycraft handles equipment and tools.

Wilderness gathering got a full pass. Node cooldowns are now 2x longer (T1 nodes respawn in 1.5 minutes, T8 in 6 minutes), but yields are 2x higher — base harvest is 6 materials instead of 3, scaling up to 28 at high skill levels. Each resource tile also has roughly 50% more nodes. The net effect: each trip to a tile rewards more materials, but you wait longer between harvests. Less frantic clicking, more satisfying payoffs.

Crafting recipe costs across all four disciplines have been increased by 1.5x. This applies to Biosynth, Alloycraft, Signal Etching, Crystallography, and Masterwork recipes. The higher yields from gathering offset the cost increase, but stockpiling materials now matters more.

Wilderness node harvesting now requires the matching gathering skill level — same thresholds as the idle work order system (T1 at level 1, T4 at level 17, T8 at level 47). No more harvesting Neutronium deposits at Salvaging level 1. Locked nodes show a lock icon and the required skill level.

Yields now scale with your gathering skill level instead of your crafting discipline level. Salvaging 40 improves alloy node yields; Alloycraft level no longer matters for wilderness harvesting. This was a bug — the wrong skill was being checked.

All gathering and crafting balance values have been centralized in balanceConfig.ts for easier tuning going forward.

Signal Data nodes existed in the wastes, but there was no lifeskill to harvest them. Salvaging covered Alloy, Bioforaging covered Biostock, and Signal Data was just... there. That's fixed.

Signal Tapping is a new gathering lifeskill with 8 tiers of actions — Tap Static through Tap Architect Signal. It works identically to Salvaging and Bioforaging: set it, leave it, come back to a pile of signal data. Gathering signal data nodes in the wilderness now awards Signal Tapping XP instead of being a dead action.

Sporeveld and Miasma Flats now have signal data nodes on their maps. The gathering skill feeds directly into Signal Etching and Crystallography, closing the loop on the full lifeskill economy.

The old Fabrication screen and its NPC, Renn the Fabricator, have been removed. All crafting now runs through the lifeskill system — talk to Syl, pick a crafting discipline, choose a recipe, and start a work order.

This isn't a loss of functionality. Every recipe that was available in Fabrication is available as a lifeskill work order, with the added benefits of passive crafting, mastery progression, and offline accumulation. The work order system also guards against starting jobs you can't afford — if you don't have the materials, the button tells you.

Shards no longer drop from monsters. Instead, a new lifeskill — Crystallography — lets you craft exactly the shard you want. Talk to Syl, pick a recipe, and shape raw minerals into resonant shards through the same AFK crafting loop as the other disciplines.

There are 15 recipes across three tiers: Minor, Standard, and Greater. Each tier covers all five shard types — Echo, Gilt, Vein, Signal, and Hunter. Minor shards unlock at level 1 using low-tier materials, Standard shards require level 10+ and mid-tier resources, and Greater shards need level 25+ with high-tier inputs.

The old five-tier gem system (Flawed → Legendary) has been consolidated down to three tiers with clearer power curves. Existing shards in your inventory have been automatically migrated to the new tiers.

The fusion system has been removed entirely. No more hoarding duplicates and hoping the RNG cooperates — just gather your materials, queue the craft, and collect your shard.

Two lifeskills are now available: Salvaging and Bioforaging. Talk to Syl in the village to get started. Pick an action — "Salvage Iron", "Forage Root" — and it runs continuously in the background, producing materials and XP even while you're fighting or offline.

Each skill levels from 1 to 99, unlocking higher-tier actions as you progress. Every action has its own mastery track (1–99) that improves yield, reduces cycle time, and eventually gives a chance to double your output. Mastery is per-action, so "Salvage Tin" and "Salvage Iron" level independently.

Focus is an active check-in bonus available every 30 minutes. Activate it and your next 4 cycles produce 1.5x yield with a chance to trigger a Discovery — bonus resources, higher-tier material bursts, or rare consumable artifacts like Salvager's Cache (+15% scrap from kills) or Bioforager's Serum (+20% healing).

Materials accumulate while you're offline, capped at 12 hours. Come back, tap Collect, and receive everything at once — resources, skill XP, mastery XP, and any discoveries that triggered during focused cycles.

The old material system — twelve confusingly named substances like "spore sac" and "etching compound" — has been replaced with something you can actually understand at a glance. Three resource types, eight named tiers each.

Alloys run from Tin through Copper, Iron, Steel, Titanium, Carbon Fiber, Xenosteel, and Neutronium. Biostock goes Moss, Fiber, Root, Sap, Nectar, Enzyme, Marrow, Ichor. Signal Data spans Static to Architect Signal. When a recipe says "Iron x5", you know exactly what that means and where to get it.

Every zone now has gathering nodes matched to its tier. Sporeveld has Tier 1 nodes, Crucible has Tier 4, Genesis Laboratory has Tier 8. Higher-tier zones also have nodes one tier above and below, so there's always a reason to explore.

Existing materials have been automatically converted. If you had alien alloy, it's now Iron. Crystal shards became Titanium. Nothing was lost.

Every recipe in the game has been rebalanced around the new lifeskill economy. The goal: 12 hours of AFK lifeskilling should fuel hundreds of consumable crafts or dozens of gear pieces. No more agonizing over whether to use your last 3 materials.

Consumables now cost 3–5 resources. A Spore Tonic is 3 Moss. A Sigil of Dexterity is 2 Pulse + 1 Frequency. You should be batch-crafting these by the stack, not rationing them.

Equipment costs scale from 8–12 Tier 1 resources for starter gear up to 6–11 Tier 7–8 resources for endgame weapons and masterwork legendaries. Every tier of resource is now used by multiple recipes — no more dead tiers that nothing consumes.

Enhancement materials and essence costs on recipes have been cut roughly in half. The gate to crafting should be gathering the right resources at the right tier, not hoarding rare enhancement compounds.

Gathering nodes in the wilderness have been completely overhauled. If you're actively exploring, gathering should feel significantly more rewarding than AFK lifeskilling — that's the trade-off for your time and attention.

Base yield per gather: 1 → 3. With higher discipline levels, you can pull 5, 7, 10, or even 14 resources from a single node. Cooldowns have been slashed — Tier 1 nodes refresh in 45 seconds instead of 2 minutes. Tier 7–8 nodes dropped from 10 minutes to 3.

Gathering also grants lifeskill XP now. Picking up an Iron node gives Salvaging XP. Foraging Root gives Bioforaging XP. The XP per gather is roughly 3x what you'd earn from a single AFK cycle, making wilderness exploration a meaningful way to level your lifeskills faster.

New gathering nodes have been added to every zone that was missing them, including the endgame zones — Hollow Core, Incubation Vaults, Architect Necropolis, and Genesis Laboratory all have Tier 6–8 nodes now.

Enhancement was broken in a way that was hard to notice unless you looked at the numbers. If you enhanced an item with a low base stat — say 2 Intelligence — the stat wouldn't actually increase. You'd spend scrap, burn compounds, see the success animation, and the item would still show 2 Intelligence. This could happen all the way up to +8 before the math finally rounded up enough to add a single point. That's eight successful enhancements with zero visible improvement.

The root cause was how stat gains were calculated. Small base values multiplied by small percentages produced fractional results that got rounded down to nothing. We fixed this in two ways: enhanced items now always gain at least +1 over their base stat regardless of the math, and the rounding method was changed so gains show up at the level you'd expect them to.

We also doubled the power curve across the board. Enhancement was too conservative — even at +15, the stat increase wasn't dramatic enough to justify the risk and material cost of pushing past +10. The new scaling makes early enhancement feel immediately rewarding and high enhancement feel transformative. A +15 item now has roughly three times the stats of its base version, up from about double. The gap between a +0 and a +15 is now the kind of difference you can feel in every fight.

Added eight new consumables across all three crafting disciplines, filling gaps that left certain builds short on useful options.

Biosynth gets three additions. Concentrated Salve (level 5) is a mid-tier heal sitting between Spore Tonic and Neural Salve — crafts in batches of two, good for sustained runs. Adrenaline Surge (level 9) is a damage buff synthesized from apex predator chemistry, the offensive consumable Biosynth was missing. Essence Catalyst (level 14) triples essence drops for 8 combats — the best farming item in the game for players building gem stacks.

Signal Etching gets three. Sigil of Dexterity and Sigil of Intelligence (level 4, craft two at a time) are the DEX and INT counterparts to the existing Sigil of Power — Drifters and Signalborn finally have class-relevant buffs instead of defaulting to the STR sigil. Nullfield Glyph (level 13) is a four-charge death protection item, cheaper to craft than the legendary Void Anchor and available a tier earlier. Built for Conduit runs where losing progress hurts.

Alloycraft gets two. Combat Stim (level 6) is a straightforward damage buff injector — the discipline had one consumable before this. Overdrive Core (level 12) gives +6 Speed for 10 combats, useful for outrunning enemy attack priority and landing first.

Every boss fragment now has its own name, icon, and colour. Rootmother Fragment glows mint green with a mushroom icon. Pyrax Fragment burns orange with a flame. Vekthra's is frost blue and crystalline. Leviathan's is deep indigo. Each one looks like it came from the thing that dropped it.

The fragment tracker on your character sheet reflects this — when you're making progress toward a boss, their fragment's colour fills the progress bar. When you have enough to summon, the whole row lights up in that boss's colour instead of a generic gold. You can see at a glance which fights you're close to and which you're still working toward.

Bounty rewards have been increased across all zones — roughly five times what they were before. Sporeveld bounties now pay out 500–1,250 scrap. Miasma Flats 1,000–3,500. Resonance Caves 2,000–3,500. Core Rift 2,500–4,500.

The old numbers made bounties feel optional — a small bonus on top of the scrap you'd earn from combat anyway. The new numbers make them worth planning around. If there's a bounty active for the monsters you're already farming, completing it now pays out in a way that actually moves the needle.

The power number shown on weapons was being calculated without your class passive bonuses. A Signalborn comparing two staves was seeing scores that didn't reflect their 20% magic damage multiplier. A Rogue's dagger scores were off by 22%. A Soldier's were overstated. The comparison was directionally correct but the numbers were wrong.

Power scores now run through the same damage formula the combat engine uses — including class damage multipliers and weapon proficiency bonuses. When a Signalborn picks up a staff, the power score reflects what that staff actually deals in combat for them specifically, not a class-agnostic baseline.

If your corporation has open applications waiting, a badge now appears on the Corporation entry in the side menu showing the count. Officers and leaders see the number. Regular members still see a dot when they have pending invites. You no longer have to open the corp screen to know if anyone is waiting to join.

Opening a nomad camp now flushes any pending local changes to the cloud before the screen loads. This means your scrap count, material inventory, and bounty progress are always current when you're trading or turning in bounties — no more submitting a bounty and seeing the reward not reflect your actual state.

Every reward display in the game — crate openings, quest completions, tower run summaries, nomad camp trades — was showing the wrong icon for items. If you opened a salvage crate and pulled a ring, it showed a sword. If a bounty paid out enhancement materials, every material type showed the same generic shape regardless of tier. Fixed.

All item and reward icons now pull from a single source of truth. A weapon shows a sword or a two-handed cross depending on handedness. Armor shows a shield. Rings, necklaces, helmets, boots — each has the right icon. Enhancement material tiers have distinct shapes so you can tell crude from primal at a glance. Every context that displays rewards — crates, quests, tower runs, trade screens — now uses the same mapping.

Crafting and enhancement were throwing authentication errors after a session had been open for a while. The game's auth token was expiring in the background and server operations — the ones that actually matter — would fail silently or show a generic error. You'd tap Craft, see an error, and have to reopen the app to fix it.

The fix: before any server operation, the client now checks whether your token is close to expiring and refreshes it automatically. If the token is fresh, no network call is made and the operation runs immediately. If it's stale, it refreshes first, then proceeds. You shouldn't see auth errors from normal in-session play anymore.

Every time you opened the shop, the inventory was regenerating. Sable's stock was supposed to refresh on a timer — check back after enough time has passed and she'll have new items. Instead, every open was treated as a new session and the stock reshuffled immediately.

Now it works as intended. The inventory generates once and holds until the restock window elapses. If you close the shop and open it ten seconds later, you'll see the same items. Come back after the timer is up and the selection will have changed.

The gem shard breaking mechanic — where you can dismantle a gem to partially recover its materials — was not hooked up. Tapping the break button did nothing. It's wired in now. Breaking a gem runs through the same server-side validation as all other economy operations, so the material return is legit and immediately reflected in your inventory.

Health bars in combat now react to everything that happens — not just damage. When your character heals mid-fight, the bar fills back up. When a shield skill activates, a teal segment appears next to your health showing exactly how much absorption you have. As hits land and the shield takes damage, it shrinks. When it breaks, it's gone. You can finally see your defensive skills working in real time instead of just reading about it in the log.

Lifesteal effects are visible too. Land a hit with a lifesteal weapon or skill and your health bar ticks up as the enemy's ticks down. The combat display now tracks every source of HP change: direct heals, lifesteal procs, shield creation, and shield decay. If your health moved, the bar moved.

Wherever you see your scrap count — the nav bar, the shop, your inventory, the character sheet, merchant screens — you can now tap it to jump straight to the vault. No more navigating to The Wreck, finding Korr, and opening the bank screen manually. One tap from anywhere.

Your vault balance is now visible in the top nav bar too. If you have scrap banked, you'll see it next to your carried scrap with a safe icon. Both numbers are always one tap away from the full deposit/withdraw interface.

Behind the scenes, every scrap display in the game now uses the same component. Same icon, same formatting, same tap behavior. Consistency you don't have to think about.

Depositing or withdrawing scrap from the vault now shows a spinner on the action button while the server processes your request. All quick-amount buttons and the custom input dim and disable during the operation so you can't accidentally double-tap. Previously, the buttons looked clickable during server calls — now the state of the transaction is always visible.

Every save now carries a version number. When your client saves to the cloud, it checks that no other session has written since your last load. If two devices save at the same time, or a background sync races against a server operation, the conflict is detected and the newer data wins. Previously, a slow save could silently overwrite a newer one. That can't happen anymore.

This matters most for enhancement, crafting, and shop transactions — operations where the server is the source of truth. The server bumps the version on every write, and your client tracks it. If the versions don't match, the client re-fetches the latest state instead of pushing stale data.

The chat system got a thorough engineering pass this week. The most visible change: unread counts are now tracked per tab instead of globally. The chat button badge still shows a total, but opening chat and landing on Global no longer clears your Corp or Private unread indicators. Each tab tracks its own count and clears only when you actually look at it.

Under the hood, the realtime subscription architecture was tightened. Guild channel handlers now explicitly reject whispers — Supabase Realtime doesn't apply row-level security, so the client has always been responsible for filtering messages not meant for it. That guard is now explicit and documented rather than implicit. The subscribe-before-fetch ordering that prevents message loss at startup was already in place; the pattern is now codified so it doesn't get broken accidentally.

Cooldown state was simplified from two variables (a boolean flag and a countdown) to one number. Zero means ready, anything higher means cooling down. The send button renders the countdown directly. An interval cleanup on unmount prevents timer leaks.

FlatList render performance improved by memoizing the renderItem callback and the reversed message arrays used as list data. Previously, every state change that touched chat context would force a full list re-render. Now rerenders are scoped to actual message changes.

The item linking flow that shipped last week also got a fix: linked item previews now use snapshot data, so enhancing or discarding an item after you've shared it doesn't retroactively change what recipients see.

Every transaction that matters now runs through the server. Buying from a shop, selling gear, crafting items, enhancing equipment, and breaking gem shards — all of it is validated and executed server-side before your character state updates. If the server says you don't have the materials, the craft doesn't happen. If you don't have the scrap, the purchase fails. No exceptions.

This is a big shift from how things worked before. Previously, your client handled economy operations locally and synced the result. That was fast but exploitable — a modified client could grant itself free items or infinite scrap. Now the server is the single source of truth for every economic action. Your client sends an intent ("I want to buy this sword"), the server checks your balance, deducts the cost, adds the item, and sends back the updated state. The client just renders what the server tells it.

Enhancement rolls happen server-side too. The RNG that determines whether your +14 weapon succeeds or shatters runs on our servers, not your device. Same odds, same system, but tamper-proof. Protection modules, material costs, rarity penalties — all validated before the dice roll.

For players, nothing changes about how the game feels. Shops, crafting, enhancement, and gem breaking all work exactly as before. The difference is under the hood: your progress is legitimate and verifiable. When you see a +15 legendary on the leaderboard, you know someone earned it.

Signal Decay now requires a connection to play. Your character data lives on the server, and every session starts by loading your latest cloud save. Local storage acts as a fast cache so the game loads instantly, but the cloud is always authoritative.

If you had an offline save from before this change, it migrates automatically the first time you sign in. Your characters, your inventory, your progress — everything carries over. The old local-only key is cleaned up after migration.

Connection errors on the login screen now show a clear message with a retry button instead of silently failing. If the server is unreachable, you'll know immediately and can try again when your connection is stable.

A round of interface improvements inspired by what makes dense game UIs actually readable. The goal was clarity without decoration.

The bottom tab bar now shows labels only on the active tab. Four tabs show an icon; one shows an icon and a name. It takes up less space, trains your eye to use the icons directly, and makes the active state unambiguous. A two-pixel line at the top of the active icon reinforces it.

Badge counters on inventory and chat are now pill-shaped. This is a small thing that was quietly wrong.

The side drawer gets color-coded section headers: a red left border for Combat, blue for Social, amber for Knowledge, gray for System. You stop reading section titles and start recognizing them by color.

Notifications already had a left border — it just wasn't as visible as it should have been. The color now matches the notification type precisely: rarity color for drops, gold for level-ups, red for deaths.

The font is new. We've been running on system sans-serif for body text since the start. It was fine. The Nomad typeface is better — more intentional, more consistent with the world. It's used everywhere now: all body text, labels, buttons, and headings.

The Conduit had mutators, path choices, essence buff purchases, permanent upgrade trees, and rest floors. It also had a bug where dying on floor 37 dropped you back to floor 1. We fixed the bug and removed everything else.

The new design: descend as deep as you can. Die, and your progress is preserved — next run starts where you fell. The only variable is how far you can push. No modifiers to pick, no resource economy to manage inside the run. Just you, the floor, and the thing waiting on it.

Rest floors are gone because you can already heal at The Wreck. Heading back to the surface is a real choice with a real cost — one of your daily descents. Sectors still divide the Conduit into 25-depth chunks, and clearing a sector gate boss still unlocks it as a future starting point. That structure stays. Everything else was complexity that didn't add decisions.

Rewards scale with depth. The further you go, the better the materials and essences. There's nothing to optimize except survival.

The village tab used to be three pill buttons — Shop, Craft, Forge — floating in a void. No sense of place. You were tapping UI, not visiting somewhere. That's gone.

The settlement is called The Wreck. It's the crash site where the first survivors built something permanent out of hull plating and desperation. When you open the village tab now, you see it: a scrollable hub of NPC stalls, each one a person with a name, a role, and something to say.

Sable runs the shop. She's blunt about the markup and she doesn't apologize for it. Renn handles fabrication — he talks about alloys like they're alive. Voss is the forgemaster, and he will let you know if what you brought isn't worth his time. Doc Caelum patches you up, and the anesthetics ran out months ago. The Duty Board is a literal board with assignments tacked to it.

Tap an NPC to enter their service — same shop, same forge, same crafting screen, but framed as a conversation instead of a floating menu. There's a back button that says "The Wreck" because that's where you are. The medic view shows your health bar, a heal button with the scrap cost, and a random line from Doc Caelum that changes each visit.

The Conduit entry screen used to look like a settings page. Stats, buttons, a depth chart. Functional and completely lifeless. Now it reads like you're standing at the mouth of something that goes down further than anyone has survived.

"THE CONDUIT" is etched across the top in tracked-out caps. Below it: "Architect Structure — Depth Unknown." A line of italic serif text shifts each time you visit — observations about the hum, the walls, the way the air changes. The whole screen feels like a location briefing, not a menu.

Renamed everything to match. Floors are now Depths. Runs are Descents. The retreat button says "Ascend." Rest floors are Resonance Alcoves. Path choices happen at Branching Corridors. Bosses are Guardians. When you hit a new record, the text reads "Uncharted Depth" instead of "New Record!" Monster encounters are prefixed with "THREAT DETECTED" or "HOSTILE CONTACT."

Sectors divide the Conduit into 25-depth chunks. Clear the gate guardian at the bottom of a sector and it unlocks as a future starting point. You can skip the early floors once you've proven you can survive them. Each sector escalates enemy stats by 15%, so depth 50 hits meaningfully harder than depth 25.

Cloud saves now pass through a server-side validation layer before they're written to the database. Every insert and every update runs through a PostgreSQL trigger that checks your character data against the game's rules. If something doesn't add up, the save is rejected.

The checks are intentionally generous — we're not auditing rounding errors. But if your level 12 character has 900 stat points, or you gained 15 levels between two saves that were 10 seconds apart, or your boss kill count went backwards, the save doesn't go through. Scrap income is rate-limited so you can't script rapid small deposits. Your class can't change mid-save. Enhancement levels can't exceed the system cap.

Delta validation compares each incoming save against the previous one. Absolute bounds catch the obvious stuff — stats outside the possible range, negative values, invalid class IDs. Delta checks catch the subtle stuff — incremental manipulation that stays within absolute limits but moves too fast to be legitimate play.

If you're playing normally, you'll never notice this exists. That's the point.

Boss fights now have real phase transitions. Push a boss below its threshold and its behavior changes mid-fight — the Rootmother gets faster, Dregthar hits harder. Each boss has a unique transition with a combat log callout so you know when the fight just got serious.

Legendary cooldown reduction effects now work properly. The Hive Mind effect on Rootmother's Embrace actually reduces your skill cooldowns each turn as intended. At higher tiers, this meaningfully speeds up your skill rotation.

DoT stacking is now capped at 3 concurrent effects. Reapplying the same bleed or poison refreshes its duration instead of stacking copies. If you're already at the cap, the oldest effect gets replaced.

Skill AI is smarter about when to use abilities. Burst damage is prioritized when an enemy is close to death instead of wasting turns on buffs or DoTs that won't tick enough times to matter.

Corporations now earn tax from their land. Kill monsters on a corp-owned tile and 8% of your scrap goes to the tile owner's treasury automatically. No exceptions — your own corporation's tiles tax you the same as anyone else's. Unclaimed land is free. Owned land has a price.

The territory tab shows today's tax income so corporations can see what their land is actually earning. Tapping a tile in the Wastes now shows the tax rate when the tile is owned, so you always know what you're farming into before you start.

DoT ticks in the combat log now show which skill caused them. "Rending Strike deals 13 damage" instead of the generic "poison deals X damage." When you have multiple bleeds and poisons ticking, you can finally tell them apart.

Regular fights now have a skip button to jump straight to the result. Boss fights still play out in full. Added player-vs-enemy color tinting to log entries so it's immediately obvious who is acting, and a skull icon on kill lines.

Fixed a bug where the Sign In button could hang indefinitely on a slow connection. It now times out and shows an error instead of spinning forever.

Endgame farming was way too fast. A well-geared player could clear enhancement costs and territory prices in minutes, not hours. Epic items were dropping so frequently they stopped feeling special.

Pulled back XP, scrap, and material rewards across the board. Kill streak bonuses at high thresholds were toned down. Enhancement material drop rates were reduced, especially from elites and minibosses. Epic drops are rarer and feel like actual finds again.

The endgame economy now paces out properly. Enhancement materials are the real bottleneck for gear progression, which is where it should be. Prices and costs weren't touched — the income was the problem, not the sinks.

Kill streaks were resetting inconsistently. Dying in a boss fight or the Conduit didn't always reset your streak, and sometimes boss kills would cause your streak to expire moments later even though you were actively fighting. Both are fixed — streaks now behave predictably across all fight types.

Fixed a display bug where regular monster encounters showed "Boss fight in progress…" instead of the correct label.

Alloycraft has been completely expanded. The discipline now has weapon options for every build type starting at level 1 — a dagger, ranged launcher, heavy bludgeon, catalyst rod, and tome offhand are all craftable with nothing but scrap metal and crystal shards. No more grinding to discipline level 6 just to craft something your class can actually use.

Added a Crafting Challenges system. Some of the most powerful Alloycraft gear is now locked behind combat milestones: kill 250 monsters to unlock epic boots, complete 3 quests for an epic ring, kill 3 unique bosses for the Fracture Blade, discover 4 zones for the Signal Choker, reach 500 kills for the Void Chassis, and 1000 kills for the Etched War Plate. Each locked recipe shows a live progress counter (e.g. "Kill 250 monsters — 127/250") so you always know exactly how far you are. Challenges unlock automatically when the threshold is crossed.

Introduced recipe scrolls — rare data-slate drops from elite monsters and minibosses that permanently unlock endgame fabrication recipes unavailable any other way. Four scroll recipes to find: Voidhunter Blades, Void Catalyst, Apex Resonance Cannon, and the Architect's Compendium. A Scrolls tab appears in your inventory when you carry one. Tap "Learn" to consume the scroll and add the recipe permanently.

The Fabrication screen's recipe list now sorts challenge-locked recipes to the bottom, below level-locked and material-locked entries. Locked cards show the padlock icon, hint text, and progress counter in both collapsed and expanded state.

Rewrote every quest description in the game — all 40+ across 8 zones. The old text was functional but flat. Every quest now reads as dialogue from the NPC giving it. Mara speaks in data and probability. Krix is terse, almost hostile. Echo uses "we" because it's not entirely sure it's singular anymore. Vaal gives orders, not requests. The Collector treats every specimen like a religious artifact. Each NPC has a distinct voice that surfaces through the work they ask you to do.

Overhauled how bounties work entirely. The old system had a handful of static bounties you'd accept once and forget about. Now every NPC offers 3 bounties that rotate daily — all players see the same selection. No accept step. Progress auto-tracks as you kill. Walk into any nomad camp, claim what you've completed, and keep going.

Bounty rewards lean heavily into crafting materials — the resources you actually need to enhance gear and fuse gems. If you're grinding a zone anyway, bounties pay out on top of it.

Kill progress now surfaces in the floating text system. A kill that counts toward a bounty shows an amber toast with your current count. When the goal is hit, it reads "Bounty ready" so you know to stop by the camp.

Reworked how player identity works in chat. Previously players could toggle between showing their character name or their account display name, which created confusion around whispers and player inspection — especially for accounts with multiple characters. The toggle is gone. Chat now always shows your display name, the account-level identity that persists across all your characters.

Whispers now resolve by display name only. Typing /w followed by a character name no longer works. This removes ambiguity: you always know exactly who you're talking to, and the target can't change by switching characters.

Clicking a player name in chat still opens the full inspection modal, but the layout is restructured. Display name is now the primary header with role badge and corporation tag. Below that, an "Active Nomad" section shows what character they're currently playing: class, level, title, and all the usual gear and stats. Your account identity is permanent and visible, your character identity is what you're playing right now.

Removed equipment set bonuses. The idea — equip pieces from the same boss for a passive bonus — added complexity without adding real decisions. Each legendary already has a unique effect, and that's the right level of depth.

Fixed a bug where weapon enhancement wasn't increasing damage. A +15 sword was hitting exactly as hard as a fresh one. Enhancement now properly scales weapon damage for both main hand and off-hand.

Most classes had no real weapon choices. Flayer weapons were all slight variations on raw STR. Drifter's two rare daggers were nearly identical. Signalborn had one staff and one catalyst with no tradeoffs.

Added six new weapons that create actual decisions. Bulwark gets a tank sword. Drifter gets a dodge dagger. Flayer gets a crit maul. Signalborn gets a glass cannon staff and an aggressive catalyst. Every class now has at least two viable build paths per weapon slot.

New legendary: Bloodtide Axe drops from Dregthar in the Miasma Flats. Flayer-specific lifesteal weapon — 8% sustain that doubles below 40% HP, at the cost of reduced constitution. The tradeoff is real.

Weapons now show their damage type in the slot tag — "1H Physical", "2H Magic", etc. You can tell at a glance whether a weapon scales off INT or STR without opening the detail modal.

Rebuilt the Wastes screen from the ground up. The map now dominates the viewport. Tiles are larger, the grid fills available space, and the old ScrollView layout is gone. The zone background image stretches full-screen at low opacity, giving every region a distinct atmosphere without obscuring gameplay.

New top HUD overlays zone and tile info in a translucent bar: zone name, tile bonuses, territory ownership, active buffs, gem effects, and kill streak. It stays out of the way while keeping critical info visible at a glance.

Monsters and tile interactions are pinned in a bottom panel that's always visible. No expanding, no collapsing, no extra taps. You walk onto a tile, see what spawned, and tap to fight. Portal, merchant, camp, and gather actions show as compact icon buttons. Boss lairs display the full fragment count and summon button inline.

Current tile pulses with an animated glow. Unvisited tiles get a fog overlay. The player beacon is now a pulsing ring instead of a static icon.

Kill notifications now slide in from the top instead of overlapping the monster list at the bottom. Victory and defeat banners show rewards inline with rarity-colored item names.

Players can now share items directly in chat. Type /link in the message box to open the item picker, which shows your equipped gear by slot and your full inventory, with live search. Select an item, optionally write a message, and send.

Linked items appear as rarity-coloured pills in the chat log. Common items show in grey, epics in purple, legendaries in gold. Tap any pill to open the full item detail view, the same modal you get from your own inventory, with all stats, enhancement level, legendary effects, and gem info.

Linked items are snapshots — the preview shows the item as it was when shared, even if the sender enhances or discards it later. Works with all item types: weapons, armour, consumables, gems.

Added a ? help button to the chat header that opens a quick reference covering all chat commands, whispers, item linking, corporation chat, and rate limits.

Fixed a bug where the Whisper button in the player detail modal (accessible from the leaderboard) would open chat without pre-filling the target. Tapping Whisper now correctly opens chat in private mode with the target already set.

Corporations are live. Create a corporation with a name and 2–5 character tag, invite players, and build a roster of up to 20 members. Three roles — leader, officer, member — with tiered permissions for invites, kicks, and promotions.

Corporation treasury lets members donate scrap to a shared pool. Corporations earn XP from member activity and level up to unlock higher member caps. A corporation leaderboard ranks all corporations by level.

Every corporation gets a private chat channel. Messages are scoped so only corporation members can read and write. Corporation tags display next to player names in chat, leaderboards, and player inspection.

Full management suite: transfer leadership, promote/demote officers, kick members, disband. Invite system with pending/accepted/declined states and duplicate prevention. Search corporations by name or browse the leaderboard to find one to join.

Clicking a player on the leaderboard now shows that specific character's details — not just the player's most recent save. Equipment displays enhancement levels (+3, +7, etc.) so you can see how invested a build is.

Equipped skills are shown with their rank. Combat stats at a glance: total kills, boss kills, zones explored, bounties completed. Everything another player might want to know about your character without revealing your stat distribution.

Built a full global chat system. Messages appear instantly for all players. History loads on scroll with pagination. Level-gated at level 5 to keep bots out.

Whisper support via /w username — private messages between two players, styled with a purple accent so you never confuse them with public chat. Tap a whisper to reply instantly.

Tap any username in chat to inspect their character: class, level, equipment, active title, tower record, and kill streak.

Role system with visual badges — moderators get a purple shield, admins get a red crown. Full moderation tools: message deletion, warnings, mutes, and bans at various durations.

Characters now sync to the cloud automatically. Multiple character slots supported — all synced independently.

Five competitive leaderboards: Highest Level, Most Scrap, Deepest Conduit Floor, Bosses Defeated, and Longest Kill Streak. Scores update on every cloud save. Top 3 get trophy icons. Your own rank is always visible even if you're not in the top 50.

Leaderboard submissions are blocked for game-banned accounts. No cheating your way to the top.

Renamed "Salvage" to "Scrap." Currency should feel tangible. You pick up scrap metal from dead things on an alien planet — that tracks. Existing saves migrate automatically.

Renamed "Spinal Column" to "The Conduit." The old name was too literal. The Conduit is the structure descending into the planet's core — a channel for the signal, not a spine.

Buffed Conduit rewards significantly. Scrap and XP now scale with depth, bosses give bonus rewards, and enhancement materials drop regularly with increasing chances the deeper you go. The Conduit should be THE place to farm materials.

The Conduit got a complete redesign. What was a linear corridor of fights is now a branching dungeon with three floor types: combat, choice, and rest.

Every 5 floors you pick your path — safe (standard encounter), hard (+30% enemy stats, +50% rewards), or gamble (random blessing or curse). Before each boss, a rest chamber lets you heal, swap equipment, and buy temporary essence buffs.

Four run modifiers let you customize the difficulty: Standard, Fractured Signal (harder enemies, double scrap), Deep Resonance (buffed bosses, materials every floor), and Architect's Trial (no healing, no retreat, doubled milestones).

Permanent upgrades are now purchasable with Conduit Essences: extra daily attempts, floor skip privileges. Class-specific high scores track your best run per class.

Added a full run summary screen showing stats, rewards, paths chosen, and new record notifications.

Fixed a major balance bug: legendary items from boss drops weren't getting level-scaled stats. An epic at level 35 was getting a 3x stat multiplier while legendaries stayed at base template values. Legendaries now properly scale with boss level and feel like the tier-defining drops they should be.

Renamed the Bestiary to Xenopedia — you're cataloging alien species on Khael-Vorath, not woodland creatures. New icon to match.

Overhauled the item detail modal: stat bonuses now display as clean rows instead of the confusing "+X to Stat" format, and the power score on item cards gives you an instant read on whether something is worth equipping.

Existing legendary items in your inventory are retroactively rescaled. Your old drops just got a lot stronger.

The website is up. The game has a name. And you're reading the first devlog entry.

Signal Decay started in June 2025 as a weekend experiment: what if you built an RPG where the lore wasn't decoration? Where the difficulty curve was a clue, the flavor text was load-bearing, and the planet felt like it was watching you?

Nine months later, it's a full auto-battler RPG with 12 explorable zones, 5 classes, 40 skills, a 100-floor tower, a crafting system, gem fusion, boss hunts, combat protocols, a codex, a xenopedia, an achievement system, and a story about fifty thousand years of alien genetic engineering.

We'll be posting updates here as new features ship. Follow along.

Built the landing page. Dark, atmospheric, text-forward. The page itself should feel like opening a terminal log from Khael-Vorath.

Added a full story page with all 14 chapters of the game's narrative, a devlog (you're here), skill tooltips on class cards with real game data, and a zone showcase that doesn't spoil discovery.

Renamed from "Land of Nomads" to "Signal Decay." The signal was always the point.

Damage reduction reworked. DR now applies cleanly to your full stats instead of stacking in ways that made armor feel inconsistent. Weapons actually feel different from each other now.

Enhancement system rebuilt. Items can be enhanced to amplify their stats, and the curve is tuned so that investing in a rare item you like can outperform an unenhanced epic. Meaningful choices over rarity chasing.

Fixed off-hand penalty applying twice, weapon speed now properly affects combat timing, and enemy scaling matches what players can actually build so fights stay competitive.

Added four new zones to the exploration map, each with unique creature hierarchies, bosses, and atmosphere. The world of Khael-Vorath just got significantly larger.

Full balance pass across all zones. Monster stat scaling now follows a curve that rewards building correctly rather than just grinding higher. Every zone should feel like a new challenge, not just bigger numbers.

Implemented the cooldown system for all combat skills. Each skill now has a turn-based cooldown that forces you to think about sequencing rather than spamming your strongest ability.

All 40 skills across the 5 classes are now fully implemented with rank progression and unique mechanics. Bulwark gets damage reduction walls. Signalborn channels alien frequencies. Flayer trades health for devastation.

Wrote the full game narrative: 14 chapters covering the Exodus Meridian's journey, the crash on Khael-Vorath, and the slow discovery of what humanity actually is. The story is woven into every zone, every boss, every codex entry.

Built the Conduit, a 100+ floor endless tower with escalating difficulty, daily runs, and milestone rewards. This is the endgame grind for players who've cleared the zones and want to push their builds to the limit.

Each zone now has its own visual atmosphere: fungal greens in the Sporeveld, volcanic reds in the Crucible, crystalline blues in the Resonance Caves.

Added a guided tutorial that walks new players through their first zone, first combat, first equipment swap, and first skill without being patronizing. It teaches by doing, not by walls of text.

Major UX pass. Redesigned the tab navigation, added the side drawer for knowledge screens (codex, xenopedia, guide, achievements), and cleaned up the character sheet to show what matters at a glance.

Built nomad camp encounters: random NPC events in the Wastes where you can trade, hear rumors, and unlock codex entries. The world feels lived-in now, not just a series of combat tiles.

Combat protocols are live. Build conditional rule sets that control how your character fights. "When health < 40%, use salve." "When no shield active, cast Ironwall." "Pre-combat: consume Primal Shard." The right protocol turns a losing fight into a clean grind.

Your progress now saves automatically and survives app closes, crashes, and restarts. Multiple character slots supported.

Built the village hub with merchants, rotating inventories, quest givers, and the first version of the crafting fabrication system. Players now have a reason to come back between exploration runs.

Combat engine rewritten from scratch. Stat-driven auto-battles with damage types (physical, magical), critical hits, dodge, block, lifesteal, and debuffs. Fights feel crunchy and readable.

Implemented the gem shard system: 7 gem types across 5 tiers that slot into your build for stat bonuses. Primal shards boost raw power. Vital shards add survivability. Arcane shards amplify magic damage.

Built the fusion lab where you combine lower-tier gems into higher ones. The RNG is tuned so that fusion feels like gambling with purpose. You're always progressing, but a lucky roll changes everything.

The project starts. A React Native app with a text input, a combat loop, and a question: what if the planet was waiting for you?

40 files. 16,000 lines. Five character classes. One alien world. No idea how deep this would go.