Status report 2026.07.10: corporate desks, mobile arena and the cinematic camera

Since the HEAT, biomes and Howitzer update, three big things arrived. The Corporate Desks opened a public trading floor, the battle arena now runs on phones without crashing, and an AUTO cinematic camera can direct the whole fight for you. Plus rolling terrain, slicker loading, and a mountain of polish.

Corporate Desks

• Meet the Corporate Desks. Three faction-run trading houses now have their own tab, one per faction:
  • Red Mountain Salvage, the collector. Buys almost anything off the market and never pays top price, so it sets the floor. Whatever junk you are sitting on, RM will take it.
  • Borealis R&D Requisitions, the researcher. Only wants high-tier and exotic subsystems, but pays a premium for them. Sit on good tech and Borealis is your buyer.
  • Zenkoku Clearing Authority, the fixer. Sweeps cheap clutter on a schedule in narrow price bands to keep the market tidy.
• They are house-run market actors, not players, and every appearance is badged as such. A desk that buys your listing shows up as a corporate desk in your wallet, never disguised as a person. What they buy they mostly scrap, so they set a price floor and a premium ceiling without ever reselling to undercut you. Learn each desk’s pattern (what it wants, what it pays, when Zenkoku sweeps) and you can route your salvage to whichever desk pays best. The DESKS page shows each one’s live activity, its daily budget bar, and its favourite item kinds, so the patterns are readable on purpose.
• Coming soon: surplus auctions. The desks will occasionally clear part of what they have hoarded in an announced auction, and each one auctions in its own style:
  • Red Mountain dumps in bulk. Expect big mixed lots of everyday parts sold as one, cheap by the crate.
  • Borealis sells single high-tier pieces. The exotic tech it paid a premium for comes back as premium lots.
  • Zenkoku sells order itself. It bundles matching sets, three of the same kind and tier, so its lots are ready-made combiner fuel. Watch the desk you are farming; those matched lots are exactly what combiner hunters are chasing.

The Mobile Arena

• Fixed the battle arena crashing on iPhone. The arena used to load, crash, reload and crash again on mobile because it was blowing past what the phone could hold. It now runs cleanly, with lighter textures, capped effects, and a live memory watch so we can keep it healthy on real devices. If you bounced off the arena on your phone before, come back.

Cinematic Camera and Arena Presentation

• Added an AUTO camera director (the AUTO/MANUAL switch, bottom-right on desktop). Flip it to AUTO and the camera runs the show: ground-level orbits, over-the-shoulder follows of the hottest fighter, and hard cuts to nukes and deaths, all paced so it never whips around. Your choice is remembered. MANUAL is unchanged.
• Added rolling terrain. The painted arenas now have gentle hills where the mechs fight and real hills out to the horizon, with rocky, textured ground instead of a flat plane.
• Reworked the battle intro. The commencement screen now shows all nine mechs as a three-across faction parade, one dossier per side, instead of a slow single-file crawl.
• Added proper loading screens. The menu and the arena now settle behind a clean sci-fi boot sequence instead of popping models and flashing panels into place.

Combat

• Fixed the end-game standoff. Mechs carrying a blade now close in and brawl once the storm ring collapses to knife-fight size, instead of standing at range trading potshots.
• SCRAMBLE now respects the ring. The barrage (the artist formerly known as FLARE) keeps its ordnance inside the current storm circle even after it has shrunk, and it feeds the HEAT meter like any other spend.

Polish

• Fixed a broad quality pass across the menus and arena. One clean heading per page with its help line under the title, panels that no longer flicker on quick loads, a calmer storm-versus-obstacle flash that is easier on the eyes, tighter chat with right-sized system messages, sharper cut-corner borders, all-caps referral codes, and the ALPHA badge now reveals the build on hover.

Spotted something off? Drop it in Discord, playtest feedback is shaping every one of these.