Status report 2026-08-22: sell your steel, keep your flag

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

Headline

The faction that is losing has put money on the table, and anyone can take it. Every deploy fee now feeds a war chest for each corporation, shared out by who is losing hardest, so the side winning most funds it and draws least. Buy a mercenary contract at a rival’s desk and you fight for them while keeping your own badge and your own team, paid a slice of their pot for every battle you win. One contract runs per faction at a time. It ends after 100 deploys or 24 hours, whichever comes first, and you can sell your remaining tenure on to another player with the clocks still running. All three pots open at 20,000 NXR, so the first contract on each costs 2,000 and pays 2,000 a win. Joining the losing side stops being charity.

Everyone will know. Arena chat names every purchase, every resale and every expiry: who sold their steel, which corporation bought it, and what the pot was worth. The three pots sit live beside the WarHorn strip on desktop and in the mobile console tray, and they announce themselves as they grow. A MERC chip marks a hired mech on the health bars, the mech deck and the focus panel, so you can see exactly who is fighting under someone else’s colours.

A mech turns before it shoots, and the round leaves the barrel. A weapon holds fire while its turret is off the aim point, and the shot travels out of the muzzle it was fired from instead of teleporting onto the lead point. Holding costs nothing: no cooldown, no burst, no energy. Torso rotation speed used to buy a chassis an animation and nothing else, and now it decides whether a fast mech can bring its guns to bear at all. A mech that cannot get around in time misses for a reason you can see, instead of firing sideways and hitting anyway.

New

• Added health values to the left side of the battle roster, so both sides read the same.

Changes

• Changed a Spoils epoch to retire everything uncollected to the house when its drain window closes. It used to be handed to whoever was still online, of any faction, so backing the losing side and staying at your desk paid you out of the winners’ stakes. Collecting your own share still needs you there.
• Locked a mech on Tour station out of deploy, squad, market and Rotation actions, so it cannot be committed twice.
• Changed peak power to price a shield relight once instead of charging steady upkeep for it.
• Changed the Rotation and repair panels to tell time the same way.

Fixes

• Fixed a mech that draws no power having its damage throttled anyway in its combat rating.
• Fixed the free release tap appearing on ability pools you never poured into.
• Fixed Tour substitutions losing the damage a mech took, so a destroyed Tour mech now rotates out for the next in line.
• Fixed subsystems gifted by a corporate desk being impossible to feed into the Combiner, which had been stuck since the gift shelf opened in July.
• Fixed repair jobs staying on the public board after the owner’s daily standing order cap was spent, so a mechanic cannot start work the first credit will roll back.
• Fixed a low balance blocking a Rotation deploy that the house was paying for.
• Fixed social chat lines being pushed out of the feed by battle markers.
• Fixed a desk offering catalogue entries for house issue gear that does not exist.
• Fixed a desk speaking ambient prose when it was meant to stay quiet.
• Fixed players being unseated from the arena when a rules read failed.
• Fixed deploy feeds staying open after a run ejected them.
• Plus 6 smaller fixes across the arena, the hangar and the desks.

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