Status report 2026.07.22: the desks get faces, surplus auctions and the codex

Desk officers you can actually talk to, open surplus auctions, and a codex filled with voiced audio logs and a fresh season of lore.

Since the Corporate Desks, the mobile arena and the cinematic camera, three big things landed. The desks you trade against now have officers you can actually talk to, the surplus auctions we teased last time are open, and the codex filled up with voiced audio logs and a fresh season of lore. Plus a Top Builds leaderboard, a live rank ladder, and a market you can buy from directly.

The Corporate Desks

Gave the three desks their officers. June runs Red Mountain Salvage, Liv runs Borealis R&D, and Kaori runs Zenkoku Clearing Authority. Each has her own page under CORPS with a profile and a distinct voice, and each speaks up in the community as the fight and the market move.
Added correspondence. The officers now write you letters on their own stationery, sometimes with concept art enclosed and the occasional voiced memo. Where you stand with a desk shapes what turns up in your mail.
Added subsystem donations. You can hand parts straight to a desk instead of listing them, and the officer thanks you in the channel. Each desk values donations its own way, so route your salvage to whoever pays best.
Opened the surplus auctions. The desks now clear their hoard in live subsystem auctions, each in its own style:
- Red Mountain dumps bulk mixed lots, cheap by the crate.
- Borealis sells single high-tier pieces.
- Zenkoku sells matched sets, ready-made combiner fuel. Every lot has its own page you can link and bid on.

Codex & Lore

Voiced the audio logs. Audio-log fragments now play back in the codex with a real waveform player, a full cast of 76 recordings across the archive.
Expanded the season. Added roughly a season’s worth of new lore fragments pulling toward the Archivist mystery, with a progressive reveal that unlocks each entry as you decode it.
Rebuilt codex browsing. Added a relationship map view on desktop, clickable tag filters, a Completed filter, permanent catalogue codes, and deep links so any entry or tag is shareable by URL.

Top Builds & Rank

Added the Top Builds leaderboard. Browse the strongest player assemblies, inspect any build’s loadout and combat record, and read its scaling tier at a glance.
Added a persistent rank ladder. Ranks now hold across sessions, recalc per faction every 30 minutes, and update live. Player rank badges also show next to usernames in chat.

Workshop & Market

Added a real BUY button to the market. Listings show a clear price and buy in one tap, and sellers can attach a note that buyers see.
Grouped subsystem selling by kind. Selling from your inventory now stacks matching parts and lists them in one row.
Added the FOUNDRY skin tab with varied skin names, art, and descriptions.
Rebuilt crate opening into a full-window reveal with rich batch results, and gave each subsystem crate its own distinct art.

Combat & Balance

Doubled AIRSTRIKE and NUKE damage so the spectator ordnance actually swings a fight.
Landed SCRAMBLE on the real fight. The barrage now drops its chaos where the mechs actually are, inside the current storm ring.
Switched on pack hunting. Allied AI now coordinates focus fire instead of splitting targets.
Fixed the 20k-HP mech. A high tier no longer inflates a percentage-based utility’s whole magnitude, so tier scaling stays sane.

Chat & Safety

Added report and block. You can report or block from any chat message, blocked users are filtered from your view, and a Terms gate now sits in front of posting. Admin moderation rails sit behind it.

Stability & Polish

Fixed a broad wave of reliability issues. Reconnects no longer strand on the uplink screen, zombie streams stopped double-delivering, late joiners always see mechs spawn, terrain seams and grey-lake artifacts are gone, and the HUD survives a backgrounded tab.
Unlocked the full battle soundtrack for everyone, added UI button sounds, and put an audio mixer in Settings. Mobile arena audio plays cleanly again.
Simplified alerts. The bell and push notifications are now one tier, the repair-complete alert deep-links straight to the mech, and wallet and correspondence lists paginate.

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