Status report 2026-08-13: the power bill comes due

The registry has been asked to summarise the machine. Filed as follows.

Headline

Your power core stopped being a stat and became an economy. A core now generates power and stores it, and everything you bolt on draws against it: guns bill per shot, shields bill just to stay projected, legs bill to change speed. Overdraw it and the mech browns out, its guns slow, and if the shield goes unpaid for a second the bubble collapses outright and every shot after that lands on hull. Compact is the burst core, Fusion is the sustain core, and picking the wrong one is now a consequence instead of a shrug.

Damage types decide fights now. Energy spends itself harder against a shield and softer against bare hull, kinetic is the mirror, explosive treats both alike. Bringing a plasma rifle to a shielded mech is the right call. Putting a railgun into a fresh bubble is the wrong tool, though never a dead one. The storm and the abilities you trigger stay neutral, so nothing in the arena itself counters a build.

A full ability is ARMED, and any pilot who funded it fires it for free. Your contributions also carry across battles now, so a pool you filled in the gap between fights is still full when the next one starts. No more paying twice for one trigger, no more pouring good NXR after bad because the battle ended at the wrong moment. It still will not go off by itself; somebody has to pull it.

New

• Added an energy row to the arena health bars, on the panels and on the mech itself, so you can watch a tank drain and refill mid fight.
• Added an amber lightning bolt beside that row while a mech is browned out.
• Added a POWER order to the behaviour dials: RUN IT DRY, PACE IT or PULL BACK decides when your mech breaks off to let its core refill.
• Added a POWER readout to the hangar that states whether a build can run what it mounts, as SUSTAINED, seconds of fire, or OVER COMMITTED. An over-committed build still deploys.
• Added a next-tier preview under each owned subsystem’s stat row.
• Added discrete damage blocks to mech health readouts, so you can see how much repair a mech owes at a glance.
• Added the crate family that fills an empty subsystem slot to the picker, with a button straight to the crates shelf.
• Added an attention dot on REWARDS and its VETERAN leaf when a linked legacy payload is sitting unclaimed.
• Added station daily life to the three faction lore cards, and moved the desk art decks off Earth and onto their stations.

Changes

• Rebalanced weapon power draw so no build outdraws every core in the game. Railgun was 90.00, now 22.00 MJ per shot; Beam Laser was 22.00, now 5.50 MW, and billed only while it fires.
• Changed kinetic and explosive weapons to fire in bursts instead of ticking out one round every few seconds.
• Changed your weapons, movement and shields split to decide which of the three gives way first when the core runs dry.
• Changed Overclock and Afterburn to draw from the power buffer, so a dry core cuts the window short.
• Changed house Reserves to run on the same power physics you do. A brawler that fires slower than it did a minute ago is out of power, not dialled down.
• Lowered where HEAT parks when a gated push cannot blow, from 99 percent to 80 percent. HEAT still does not decay through the cooldown.
• Changed the repair beam to about 15 HP per second and to pay for every point of it, was up to 51 HP per second on screen against 6 ever credited. Earnings land at roughly 2.5 times a free bay slot.
• Replaced the star glyph on the deploy queue’s pin-to-top control with a pin.
• Changed the desks to resolve a follow-up question against the conversation you are already having, instead of asking you to repeat yourself.
• Reduced the first load, was 1,446 KB, now 939 KB.

Fixes

• Fixed mechs walking into a wall and staying there, or turning back and forth on the spot, while a fight went on around them.
• Fixed mechs retreating from a storm that was not hurting them, which left half the endgame arena as ground nobody would fight on.
• Fixed the winning side occasionally receiving its 30 credit deploy fee back instead of a winner’s payout.
• Fixed a batch crate open failing entirely when one crate in it had already been opened.
• Fixed a restart opening two skin auctions at once, splitting bids across a lot that was never meant to exist.
• Fixed claiming an accrual reward that is gone or belongs to somebody else showing an internal error instead of saying so.
• Fixed the menu’s HEAT sliver blaming the crowd when the horn was simply cooling down.

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