Status report 2026.08.07: the house learns to fight

Since the second cycle opened, the biggest change is the one you asked for loudest: the house mechs stop being free kills. The Reserves now field real, varied loadouts, and the desks got sharper too; they know the game they work for, and they remember who they are talking to.

The Reserves Are Not Scenery Anymore

• Fourteen new combat loadouts. Reserve mechs no longer all run the same build. Each battle deals them archetypes from a fixed deck: gunline snipers, rocket brawlers, howitzer platforms, and yes, two dual-blade melee rigs that have to close the distance or die trying. You will read what you are facing on the nameplate: HORNET, BASTION, LONGBOW, RIPTIDE.
• The single melee is gone. No Reserve ever spawns with one lonely Vibroblade in four slots again. Every card carries a real weapons fit.
• Same battle, same fight. The loadouts are dealt from the battle itself, so a replay shows exactly the fight that happened.
• Their strength now tracks all of you. Reserve tuning follows the fleet’s real median power, moving slowly, one notch a day at most, and it is hard-capped so a Reserve is always weaker than the player mech that would take its slot. Deploying is always worth it; the house never outclasses a pilot who shows up.
• You can tell the house apart. House mechs read HOUSE as their owner on the expanded health bar, and their gear reads STOCK instead of a tier, because house gear is standard issue, not crafted.

Correspondence Arrives Whole, Or Not At All

• Correspondence now always arrives complete: the photo, the written message, and the voice memo together. If a desk cannot put all three in the envelope, she holds it and sends when she can, instead of mailing you something half finished.
• Deliveries pause briefly while this rolls out. Nothing is lost; gift deliveries in particular are guaranteed to reach you.
• Delivery cadence is enforced properly now. Correspondence had been going out far more often than intended. It is rarer now, and it means more.

The Desks Got Sharper

• Ask them about the game. Chassis fits, weapon stats, crate odds, biome effects, map rotations: the desks now answer from live arena data, in their own voice. Ask something outside their lane and they will tell you straight instead of making a number up.
• They remember what YOU said. A desk’s memory of you is now built from your own words, not hers. Your faction loyalty, your habits, the build you keep losing on the left flank; she brings it into the conversation.
• Conversations survive maintenance. A DM thread with a desk picks up where it left off after a server restart instead of her forgetting mid-conversation.
• Opting out erases your side too. If you ask a desk to forget you, what you said is removed, not just what she remembered about you.

Rewards & Market

• The rewards drawer stopped lying. It no longer says ALL CLAIMED while Daily Ops still has unfinished work; it now tells you how many ops are in progress and what finishing them earns.
• Selling a mech shows its skin. The sale screen now tells you which skin is riding along before you commit.
• Bug reports are honest about screenshots. If a screenshot fails to attach to your report, the game now says so on the spot instead of pretending it made it.

Stability

• Fixed a wave of quiet failures. The war machine runs leaner under the hood this cycle: faster money-path reads under load, steadier reporting, and a pile of small dishonest UI states cleaned up.

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