Status report 2026-08-26: the stake, the seat, the bay drone

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

Headline

Deploying used to be a bet you could not lose. It is a stake now. A mech that dies is paid nothing, on any faction, whatever the scoreboard said. The share it would have won goes to the war chest that funds mercenary contracts on the losing sides, so the money leaves the winners’ table instead of being handed back around it. And every kill on a player-deployed mech pays: whoever kills it takes that mech’s deploy fee, winner or loser, steel or spectator ability, so a NUKE that kills a Rotation mech pays the player who fired it. A kill on house or Reserve steel pays nothing, since house and Reserve mechs stake no deploy fee to forfeit.

A mercenary contract now carries a price on its seat. Press the Tap on a faction’s contract board, or on the MERC chip beside a hired mech in the arena, and your money joins that faction’s standing bounty pot; kill a mech deployed under that contract and the pot pays a flat 250 NXR a head, on top of the deploy fee the kill already takes. Anyone may pledge on any seat, including the mercenary sitting in it, and nothing is ever refunded. A pledge expires into the war chest after 24 hours, so denial costs by the day instead of once.

The repair bay put you in a pilot seat. Taking a repair job now launches an FPV bay drone: fly to the damaged mech, hold the welding arc on its damage points, and ride the heat under the redline. The arc only jumps 3 metres, points you ignore keep decaying, and a crash costs you 400 milliseconds of control, never money. Pay is unchanged: per HP delivered, credited by the server, and a pilot who rides the redline out-earns a paid bay slot.

New

• Added BATTLES, YOUR BATTLES to the main menu: every battle you fielded mechs in, newest first, each opening the full report. Per mech: damage dealt and taken, kills including ability kills, what it earned, and what brought it down.
• Added a one-press bounty pledge to the MERC chip beside a hired mech’s healthbar, so you can put money on a seat without leaving the arena.
• Added a bounty block to each faction’s hiring-desk contract board, showing the pot, how many full heads it can pay, how many players hold a live pledge, and when the earliest one drains.
• Added the accruing NXR figure to the always-on arena readout, plus a notice when your spoils start draining and again when they land.
• Added a MEMBERS count to the Rotation panel, beside the existing IN FLIGHT count.

Changes

• Restricted ability pool funding to the line you are fighting for.
• Changed a mercenary’s spoils stake, Tug of War pull and War Horn HEAT to count for the faction that hired them.
• Unlocked REPAIR and SEND TO BAY on desktop while a mech is queued.
• Locked loadout editing on a market-listed mech until it is delisted, and its badge now reads IN MARKET even while damaged.
• Restricted Rotation membership to 3 mechs, 8 for Alpha Citizens. Over-cap pools kept their strongest and a one-time notice names every mech that came out, which you can re-add once a slot frees up.
• Moved mech-view PREVIEW beside the rename pencil, and UNEQUIP ALL SUBSYSTEMS under UTILITY.
• Reduced the Combiner’s base fuse cost was 250 NXR, now 100.
• Changed the House deploy seed to scale with how many arena seats players actually paid for, from a flat 120 NXR a battle.
• Changed a resold mercenary contract to re-quote its live bounty at the moment you buy, so the price on the board is the price you pay.
• Moved the mercenary contract board off the battle top nav into a right-panel widget with a tighter layout and a HOW IT WORKS explainer, and its fleet warning now states the real rule: a mercenary deploys a full hand, same as home colours.
• Changed a corporate desk’s public SALVAGED figure to count accepted donations, not just market buys.
• Reduced the time on every signed-in request by about 19 milliseconds.

Fixes

• Fixed the arena cancelling and refunding a battle you were still fighting every time a new server rolled out, which also put two battles on screen at once.
• Fixed ARENA LOAD FAILED firing on a normal quiet moment. The arena now states whether it is live, idle or faulted, and an offline screen clears itself the moment it comes back.
• Fixed a Tug of War round arming the previous round’s aim, so the bar could announce NUKE while you fired an airstrike. An ability the server has not named now arms nothing.
• Fixed a battle cancelled seconds after it ended keeping an ability stake that had already fired. Every affected contributor got the whole stake back.
• Fixed the REPAIR crate showing no ready glow during your own release window, and a second tap on mobile eating a guaranteed refusal.
• Fixed a live-looking DEPLOY on mechs the server would always refuse: on Tour, listed in market, or already in battle.
• Fixed duplicate battle records inflating a mech’s combat stats.
• Fixed the Combiner painting upgrades red and downgrades green on the subsystem stat chips.
• Fixed two challenges completing at the same instant eating one of your daily progress ticks.
• Fixed a panel silently never opening after a client update, which now reloads once on its own.
• Fixed NXR amounts and countdowns formatting differently from one panel to the next.
• Fixed the donate panel staying silent when a desk’s daily favour cap was already spent.
• Plus 14 smaller fixes across the hangar, the mercenary board, battle settlement and the arena.

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