25 May 2026Developer post

U21 - Modified

Hey Everyone! Update 21 is here and has a strong focus on the much-requested mods in co-op and introduces custom asset importing as well as many other improvements! 🔶 Gameplay Systems: New: Single Shell reloading now has a maximum duration This makes reload upgrades on single re

Hey Everyone!

Update 21 is here and has a strong focus on the much-requested mods in co-op and introduces custom asset importing as well as many other improvements!

🔶 Gameplay

Systems:

New: Single Shell reloading now has a maximum duration
This makes reload upgrades on single reload weapons much more desirable
Ammo gain effects now work when the weapon is completely empty
Ballistics Prediction Quest now only requires 5 cursed weapons found
Dodge chance is now capped, so stacking dodge bonuses can no longer exceed the intended ceiling of 70%, leading to the game becoming unlosable.

Balance Tweaks:

RPG Homewrecker perk damage scaling doubled. Max hp damage cap from 1000 to 2000
Fast Swap cooldown 15>12 seconds
Money shots reworked
Microwave Emitter damage from 140+ 4% current health + 4% max health to 6%/6%
Microwave Emitter now properly shows the % damage in tooltip
Liquid grenade now gains 1% > 2% power with each usage
Nitro Methadone now lasts 20 seconds instead of 10
Brawndo now properly works again
Commando blade kill resets now also count for charges
Sidewinder damage from 4.5 to 3.6
High Power now gives 60>70% power, clarified tooltip
Doomba Neutrino bomb drop rate 30% > 70%
Sniper LS30 Nightowl now has a reworked perk
Eliminator Beacon of light damage scaling tripled, base damage doubled + new sound
Eliminator Beacon of light stun is consistently 1.5 seconds in both enter and exit
Eliminator mastery now correctly causes the AOE effect
Eliminator Hitman custom kit now reduces projectile firing cool-downs by 1s on eraser usage
Eliminator Infiltrator Kit tooltip reworked
Eliminator Infiltrator kit now starts with the LS30 Blackout rifle
Fixed Reflector drone in co-op not dealing damage

New Eliminator starter:

LS30 Blackout

The LS30 Blackout gives Eliminator a bit more of a marksman type of specialization which was always intended but didn't really come across so well. The second kit already provided a perfect benefit for a precision playstyle but the framing didn't really work. Blackout now rewards careful play with powerful stat benefits and is a more rapid-fire variant of the Sniper version.

New Uncommon Machine Gun:

L8 Squad-LMG

The new L8 provides a sturdy and reliable mid-game option for Heavy gunner and other classes alike. It might not have the best accuracy but it's large capacity and consistent output allows it to kitted in a flexible way and potentially scale well.

New Legendary Launcher:

ANH-8 Annihilator

The classic Annihilator returns with powerful laser explosions and a new alternative ammunition type. Use at your own risk!

🔶 Mods in Co-Op are live!

You've asked for it many times and it's finally here!

U21 had a big focus on modding and we worked hard on making mods work properly in online co-op gameplay! When opening up a lobby, you can now select as host which mods to share with the lobby and joining players can conveniently and correctly download the latest version they need.

Tons of new community content is right at your fingertips!

(Remember you can press control on a character to inspect the actions, in case you suspect a mod spamming or see performance issues with a certain mod. Naturally we can not provide support for any custom mod content or performance issues coming from a mod)

🔶 Editor Overhaul

Varied elements of the editor have been improved and we made a general pass on the UI elements and menus. This is not 100% perfect visually yet, but under the hood a lot of clean-up has happened. The Editor was a quite old and complex UI but now got a lot more maintainable and much easier to use for everyone!

New: Audio Pitch Preview

This one is big, you can now easily try pitch effects in the audio selection!

New: Stat Preview

Stat elements now show the stat they contain, making things less obscure

New: Unified Navigation

No longer are buttons scattered randomly from screen to screen, all navigation is now at the same place.

New: Depot overview

You now have a much easier to understand depot overview
Additionally all the depot sub-menus have been reworked.

We will also follow up with some updated video tutorials soon.

🔶 Asset Importing

Asset importing is finally here!

You can now import:

2D Icons
Weapon Sprites
Sounds
Music
3D Models (Beta)
and more!

Check the Import Custom Assets button in the Depot Settings.

Note: While 3D Model importing is technically possible, for characters this requires more setup from us and is not as trivial. Weapon models can already be imported with the correct slots. A example GLTF can be found here:

https://www.file-upload.net/en/download-15598968/Mesh_Wepon_Example2.gltf.html

🔶 UX

We did a bunch of improvements all around UI and UX:

New: Setting to disable auto-reload
ESC now reliably closes in game menus
Improved navigation of the play button. Starting the game now always is in the top right
Improved disconnect message when quitting
Improved mod menus
Clamped Burst delay decimal display in the weapon menu
Chat is now accessible from the in game pause menu
Unlocking a class in the lobby now refreshes the menu immediately
Shooting range in tutorial now properly displays dialog lines again
ModifyAction result tooltips now show scaling and stats like ModifyStat results
Picking up a weapon no longer desyncs the Q-cycle slot order.
Difficulty selection is now disabled when entering the tutorial to reduce confusion
Improved difficulty selection UI:

Main menu backgrounds now have less contrast
Main menu intro scene performance slightly improved
Varied improvements to menu consistency
Fixed varied minor UI issues
Fixed popups having wrong sizes sometimes
Reload speed is now correctly shown in the weapon menu
Weapon AOE display got corrected in some cases
Databases have unused text removed
The compendium now shows:
Cursed items, alchemy items and only accurate attachments and loop perks
Weapons now show their weapon type in the menu (launcher, smg ..)
Weapons now show if they come from a mod

🔶 Co-Op / Networking

Improved reliability for important network messages

We’ve added an extra game-level reliability system for important messages, instead of relying only on Steam P2P’s built-in reliable messaging.

This should help fix cases where players could sometimes get stuck between levels, enemies or objects did not appear correctly, or other important game events failed to show up.

Late last year, we switched to Steam P2P for peer-to-peer support after many players requested it. Since then, feedback has shown that Steam P2P’s reliable messaging has not always been reliable enough for our needs, so we’ve built our own additional reliability layer on top of it.

Update 20 already added this system for entity spawning, which addressed reports of enemies not appearing. This update extends the same approach to all “must-receive” messages.

Other

We’ve also made intermediate disconnect messages in chat less noisy when the connection quickly recovers.

🔶 Fixes

As usual, we worked on a lot of fixes:

Minimap icons for summons now disappear when the summon de-spawns instead of lingering
Aiming Reset Strength UI visual bug fixed. The setting always worked as intended, but the UI sometimes displayed a different value than the slider showed.
X-57 Spider boss now waits longer to engage to prevent long networking coop delays to cause the spider to attack very quickly or in bad cases even during cutscene.
Explosion damage now respects a configurable application interval, so overlapping explosions can't tick damage every frame.
The Body Recoil Multiplier stat was being read but not applied in all cases.
Fixed a input keybinding issue where clicking multiple mouse keys could cause issues with charge firing weapons when the trigger is held.
Fixed the specific weapon-slot hotkey issue where when not having 3 weapons equipped, the hotkey would throw errors for 3rd empty slot.
Stacking weapon perks could underflow weapon power into negative values — capped and clamped.
Negative results from "Modify Shield" actions are now applied (previously silently ignored when the value was negative).
Audio settings now survive switching the OS audio output device — previously they'd silently reset to defaults.
Fixed random music crackling that built up over a session and used to require a full game restart.
Steam achievements that failed to register on the platform side are now retried on every game, so completed achievements no longer get stuck unawarded
(in these cases the game knew you have them but steam wouldn't show them.
Fixed lost & found giving variants which persist on all weapons
Fixed varied cases of tooltip typos

Save/load no longer overrides tileset order post game meaning starting a run after later, the tilesets wouldn't properly randomize
Reloading a save no longer reverts weapons that or on the floor or in chests to their base/standard variant.
After reloading a save, the minimap now properly shows the looted state of chests, previously would show them all as available.
Added safeties for potential attachment issues after loading
Fixed a performance degradation of enemy behaviour in some cases in the level post loading back in

We also welcome back a former Employee, Michal, which is has the role of a full time QA (Quality Assurance) Specialist, helping us from now on with finding and solving issues and improving overall Game quality : )

Have fun! - Team FFG

Original post

20 Mar 2026Developer post

20.1 - Game Update

Hey everyone! We whole-heartly welcome all new Players! Huge Shout-Out to the big Video Artist SsethTzeentach and all new Players from the Daily Deal! As you might have noticed, we were hard at work, pushing patches nearly every day . We will keep doing so and focus on Stability,

Hey everyone!

We whole-heartly welcome all new Players!

Huge Shout-Out to the big Video Artist SsethTzeentach and all new Players from the Daily Deal!

As you might have noticed, we were hard at work, pushing patches nearly every day.

We will keep doing so and focus on Stability, UX and Qol for the moment, but as a small goodie, we added a nice quality pass on the Handguns for you to enjoy:

🔶 Enhanced Handguns

Update 20.1 brings a quality pass on Handguns. While overall in a pretty balanced state, some had not the most interesting perks or were a bit more ambiguous in role than they should.

Roles of the different options are now more defined and their effects are more unique.
Meanwhile some weaker options have been buffed. Here are the details:

P33 Compact

New Perk

Military Stash

Virtually infinite ammunition.

+400 spare, +400 starting ammunition, +4 mag-size.

Base mag-size decreased by 4. This means, scaling the power of the perk will increase mag-size.

P33 and P20 have always been the balance baseline, but P33 had been suffering without optimal headshot chains, as such we are increasing the damage. With the new Perk, it will additionally shine as the best ammo efficiency option.

P33 damage 1.15x > 1.35x

X500 Ion Pistol

New Perk

Ion Overload

When ready, gains empowered shots for 2 seconds.

+200 weapon damage, +200 damage against armored.

This makes it more situationally powerful and helps it's usefulness in the late-game when swapped to.

CR-18

New Perk

Can-Opener

The first 12% of the magazine:

+40% damage to armored

+20% weapon damage

This overall makes CR-18 more useful and specialized as anti-material weapon.

Damage increased from 1x to 1.1x

RX0 Coil Pistol

New Perk	Coil Charge
	7% Chance to deal 100% bonus damage. Stacks up damage and heat, similar to the full RRX Coil Gun.

Coil Pistol was a bit under-tuned compared to other weapons.

Coil Pistol damage 1.9x > 2.1x

Coil Pistol Attachments now work again

Shooty

New Perk

Close Up

Gain 10% Critical chance and 5 armor pen when close to an enemy.

Tiggers below 7m in range.

Shooty will have more benefits now as a point-blank gun, offering high DPS at very close range.
A side effect of this is also that other abilities will benefit from the critical chance.

Shooty now also uses correct attachment slots.

Kaida Model H

New Perk	Venerable Handgun
	Kills stack up 2 damage and 2 elite damage, Stacking up to 100 times.

Model H is a more special commando sidearm and is now more rewarding to keep around.

P78H Fusion

New Perk	Shield Battery
	When ready (15s cool-down), grants 1000 shield recharge over 5 seconds.

New Perk

Random Perk

P78H Now comes with one random fusion perk

Now only offers one attachment slot.

This change fortifies the gun as a investment sidearm that is useful to keep around and switch to in times of need. Maybe this is slightly too strong but we'll keep an eye on it.

SK-9

Updated Perk

Shocking

Now additionally comes with 4 attachment slots.

Tooltip displays more details.

This gives SK-9 a more unique place as a solid upgrade foundation, which also makes sense given the bigger physical size of the handgun.

X3 Subsonic

Updated Perk	Prowler
	When switched to, gives a brief speed boost and a longer lasting speed benefit. Additionally has updated VFX and sounds for the effect.

X3 Subsonic is now more useful as a mobility option, which also helps with flanking and getting the powerful back-stab benefits of the subsonic ammo.

Revolvers / Other

Snub Revolver damage 2.2x > 2.6x

Patrol Revolver damage 2.25x > 2.6x

Patrol Revolver now also has +10% currency gain

This will make Revolvers more relevant as a high-skill, high power option.

Fixed Handgun upgrade starting with 0 stacks making the first upgrade not give damage.

Smart coil perk now ramps up per second instead of per 2 seconds

Smart coil no longer starts with -10% damage

Smart coil perk damage 4>5% per stack

Tec9 fire-rate 750>700

PXS ammo pickup 112 > 160

Note: Acid Pistol will likely get a rework

🔶 Misc

Unidentified Potion acid now is removed when below 450 health
Warthog no longer has a incorrect underbarrel attachment slot
Reducer now correctly reduces cooldowns by 100 instead of 1
Reducer now shows a small notification when triggered
Vsync setting is more clear about FPS cap
Shops now instantly react to currency changes while open

🔶 Fixes

Many Fixes from automatic reporting
Fixed one Leak that occured from toggling menus. This might be the minimap leak or not but definitely a good find.
Fixed barracks, medical tent .. checking for > instead of >= for unlock cost
Fixed Survey linking to the wrong form
Fixed varied minor action issues
Fixed Save and Load summons issues
Fixed Game Quit button having strange behavior on cancel
Many other fixes in the previous hotfixes

Minimap Issue:

Regarding the so called memory leak (minimap interaction causing performance degradation), at this point we can say for sure it is not a memory leak and we don't have a reproduction on any of our machines. We see a bunch of people complaining about so for sure something is going on. The code in this area in general at this point is very old but we suspect a workaround for a unity fog issue causing the screen to go white that plagued multiple games including S2 about two years ago could be causing issues for players so we removed it. Let us know if you have any issues going forward.

TLDR: Might be fixed - let us know

Known issues:

Certain languages don't instantly show text for some reason
Polish language has issues in certain fonts

🔶 Networking

Last week we were quite overloaded with the Player-count and our Lobby server didn't handle it so well, but we did massive improvements to the player load handling now and it's greatly improved.

For Co-op lobbies we've seen that once the game hit around 1k ccu the lobby system started to deliver messages not in the order players sent updates causing all kinds of mayham there including potentially leading to not all players getting the game is starting now message. So we think at least for some players not being able to connect to the P2P session may be due to the lobby system as well. We rolled out changes every day last week and starting Wednesday we are now seeing very healthy behavior so we consider the issue fixed. We had to do a bunch of rewrites so we continue to monitor the lobby situation going forward to ensure stable operations.

Greatly improved Matchmaking capacity under load
Fixed issues relating to matchmaking appearing offline.

Note: The game uses the Steam Peer 2 Peer system. How people are connected to each other or if they are disconnected is completely decided by the Steam system.

Connection Issues: If you encounter issues with starting the match, this point usually to a Steam P2P connection issue, which usually leads from a internet provider providing a route to another person - which is usually fixed with a VPN, as the VPN will take a different route on the internet. Make sure to check which player in the Lobby has the issue, often it is just one player blocking the others from starting.

We'll stay on our toes and keep pushing updates!
Our Highest priority is stability, fixes and UX improvements, then continue towards Update 21.

Have Fun! - Team FFG

Original post

09 Mar 2026Developer post

Update 20 - Iron Fortress

Hey everyone! We've got a long awaited update for you today with Update 20; 🔶 New: Iron Fortress It's finally here! A new alternative environment for the Arctic Base. Iron Fortress, codename "D-Day" starts with a beach landing area, transistions to heavily fortified trenches and

Hey everyone!

We've got a long awaited update for you today with Update 20;

🔶 New: Iron Fortress

It's finally here! A new alternative environment for the Arctic Base.

Iron Fortress, codename "D-Day" starts with a beach landing area, transistions to heavily fortified trenches and culminates in a heavily fortified fortress.

From the rocky beach, to the heavy trenches, missile launch zones and concrete reinforcements, the Fortress offers a very brutalist and very Synthetik style, with heavy cover, large open areas and a lot of action. Some assets you might remember from the first game :)

As the Iron Fortress is new, we need your feedback about issues, balancing and everything else!

🔶 UX

We did some improvements in the main menu and on the cursor.

Cursor visibilty improved when out of range
Cursor now has better anti-aliasing
Cursor now shows more clear reload indication
Varied minor cursor polish effects
Active reload fail now hides the active reload bar
Added mini-map icons for summons
Main menu - varied menus renamed for simplicity
Main menu - improved Armory Token user experience

🔶 Gameplay

Quality of Life

Removed fallback self targeting on Ion Cannon
Removed friendly targeting on dynamic reflector
Sticky bomb now can explode while stunned
Fixed Golden Boy removing itself still

Environments

Fixed around 20 suboptimal enemy navigation areas in environments
Normalized 3 maps which were far longer than others in terms of enemies

Other

ZB-26 Rex damage 1.2 > 1.3
Scavenger variant safety added & visual
Handful of minor action fixes

🔶 Networking

Second reliability layer

We added a second reliability layer for important gameplay events like spawning entities, weapon actions, and other critical interactions.

Previously, these events relied only on Steam P2P’s built-in reliability. In rare cases with very poor connections, that could still lead to issues like enemies or other entities not spawning correctly. To reduce this, the game now also resends critical events at the application level.

This should greatly reduce worst-case problems caused by packet loss or unstable internet connections.

Smoother movement on bad connections

We also improved movement smoothing for high-latency and packet-loss scenarios.

In poor network conditions, enemy movement could sometimes look choppy for clients. To improve this, bots now send pathing information as well, which helps the client interpolate their movement more accurately. In our tests, bot movement looks much more stable even at high ping, including around 200 ms.

🔶 Oil Splats

Recently we noticed that oil impacts on the ground had a sort of smooth fade-in. After noticing we couldn't unsee it anymore. Tuning this made weapon impacts noticeably more direct and punchy.

Oil splats are now more direct, leading to better impact feedback and feeling
Oil splats are now slightly more consistently visible

🔶 Performance

Boss performance was in some arenas quite lacking due to some oversights, this has now been resolved and the affected fights have significantly better performance.

Significantly improved Raptor Jet Boss performance
Significantly improved X57 Spider Boss performance
Significantly improved Hovercraft Boss performance
Significantly improved Last Defender Boss performance
Slightly improved Sawblade Boss performance
Slightly improved Arena Masters performance
Reduced pixel fill rate costs of most newer VFX
Reduced pixel fill rate costs of varied distortion effects
Reduced overdraw on Mortar Markers
Reduced overdraw on basic Mortar Explosions

Synthetik 2 is now getting close to 1.0

With over 100 weapons, thousands of actions (items, perks, buffs..), 10 classes, and around 4 times the maps of the first game, we are at a state where we are slowly preparing for launch.

Getting the game to this point was a hard battle, with many big plans, some wrong turns, innovations, learnings, experiments and refactors. We are very proud about our progress from the initial start to the current state and how we have advanced as a team.

To bring a little perspective to the amount of work going into these games and the general complexity of such a project, here are the windows folders of both projects.

Of course there is always more to do.
1.0 is by far not the end either but we are very glad that we finally reached this point.

We can't disclose too many details about console ports but generally speaking, the game works well on console and we are dealing with certifications and launch preparation there as well.

That's it for Update 20!

Up next: More polish, fixes, UX, class improvements, balancing and quality of life.

We are also investigating mods in co-op and seeing about per-class tokens amongst other things! Updates will continue, stay tuned for the 1.0 annoucement!

Stay tuned! - Team FFG

Original post

10 Feb 2026Developer post

Update 19

Hey everyone! We are very glad about the positive reception of the Engineer Update! Update 19 is a big spring cleaning update, with a heavy focus on fixes and quality of life. 🔶 Spring Cleaning Core Fixes Fixes varied issues with chat Fixed issues around turrets not shooting Fix

Hey everyone!

We are very glad about the positive reception of the Engineer Update!

Update 19 is a big spring cleaning update, with a heavy focus on fixes and quality of life.

🔶 Spring Cleaning

Core Fixes

Fixes varied issues with chat
Fixed issues around turrets not shooting
Fixed exploits around recycling
Fixed tutorial using difficulty modifiers
Fixed pickups not disapearing visually
Fixed negative health issue where players should have died but didn’t
Fixed issues around healing
Fixed issue with un-setting hotkeys
Fixed Power scaling not showing on buffs spawned by effects (scaling worked, but UI didn’t)
Fixed Mortar shots sometimes being visually offset
Fixed charges instantly granting another charge when used (e.g., Sabotage Package)
Fixed charge shader not flooring correctly (4 charges showing as 5)
Fixed charge recharge display not properly appearing on items
Fixed buffs from item upgrades (armor, speed bonus, ammo regen) not stacking correctly
Fixed varied Engineer related issues as described in the Engineer section
Many reported action issues were fixed
Fixed broken achievements
Fixed that trading jammed weapons made jamming unrecoverable
Fixed varied issues in end-screen
Fixed stat displays of certain power scaling stats such as variant power
Fixed clients not seeing Ping markers from the host
Fixed issues around currencies
Fixed an issue where you would gain doubled credits
Fixed explosive shots (60-stack version) targeting self as fallback for minor damage component
Fixed Laser Implosion bug
Last Defender shop opening now grants 4 seconds of invulnerability
After selecting a skill, the Class panel disappears, preventing class selection until clicking elsewhere.
Language selection: PortugueseBrazil is out of bounds for available themes; defaults to standard theme.
Fixed broken cinematic in Oilrig Hovercraft Boss
And more.

🔶 UX

Mortar Shots now have different visuals depending on the type of mortar
We added new visuals for different mortar type attacks, such as shock mortar, flame mortar, 3 different types of explosive mortars and more. This makes the enemy attack patterns visually more distinct and interesting, while also reduces confusion about friendly vs enemy attack patterns.
End-screen menu layout is now much closer to the main menu layout to reduce confusion.
Multiple minor UI improvements

🔶 Weapons

General

Lost & Found starter weapons now gain a random variant on first upgrade
Added sphere-cast for explosive ammo variants and Fireball Cannon ammo for better hit detection

Weapon Balance Changes

Industrial Breaching Cutter
- Damage: 0.8 → 1.2x (+50%)
- Ammo pickup: 180 → 120
- Firing slowdown reduced by 25%
Rubber Grenade Launcher: Improved ejection speed
Spike Fireball Cannon: Added alt ammo – Curveball
Area Saturator: Fire rate tripled; reload speed reduced
Switched GM6 Lynx and R2000H perks
KS-23: Added feedback to ammo unlock
Flak Cannon:
- Damage: 3.5 → 4.2x
- Ammo reduced by 25%
Tec-9 full-auto upgrade damage reduced by 10%
Breaching variant:
- Increased burst-fire delay
- Fire rates increased
- Scaling reduced
- Deviation no longer scales
Ninata Acid Shot cooldown: 6 → 4
General Acid Tick damage: 100 → 200
Rex:
- Starting ammo: 60 → 120
- Pickup ammo: 70 → 80
- Luck: 10% → 20%

Weapon Fixes

Fixed CR18 chance being inaccurate
Fixed ZB26 Spare Parts chance showing 33% instead of 45%
Fixed Double Barrel misleading tooltip
PPQ last-shot perk now applies only to the final shot (not last two); shield cost 150 → 100
Removed outdated cooldown from Hot Loaded
Abomination no longer has a hidden damage bonus
Fixed Ambusher incorrect check
Fixed Scavenger giving mismatched ammo types
Fixed Unstable Ammo ignoring cooldown
Improved Hot-Shot conversion scaling
Ion Quick Swap now correctly grants speed; removed ejection speed
Fixed Laser Divine Blessing affecting only laser perks
Nano Armor tooltip fixed (10 → 15)
Extra Shot buffs now grant an extra shot, not extra pellets
Ultracrit scaling adjusted
Varied other minor fixes

🔧 Attachments

Bulletstorm Trigger Assembly armor penetration: −50 → −50%
Chromatic Alloy improved
Fixed Weapon Super Recharger cooldown reduction
Auto-Loader reload amount: 5 → 3
Terror Lafette now also grants +50% projectile range
Fixed Tri-Bolt Carrier not granting extra shotgun stats
Fixed Golden Boy attachments disappearing
Commando weapon mastery changed:
- From 60% free extra shot
- To 60% no-ammo-cost chance

🟢 Healing Display

You can now see incoming healing very clearly, both in the HUD and on unit health-bars. This currently has a small side effect where you can see added extra health from health scaling of summons however.

🔶 Items

High Power changed from −200 shield to −10% max health, Power 80>60%
Disc of Justicia no longer stuns players
Kernel Shop cost: 2500 → 2000
Heat Ray:
- Damage tick range: 6 → 10 m
- Burn & slow range: 6 → 7 m
Fixed Stasis Sphere using outdated healing logic
- Invulnerability: 0.5 → 1s
Ignition Core can now ignite itself
Psionic Catalyst range: infinite → 20 m
Thunderstorm Uplink ranges improved
Guardian duration: 20 → 30s, cooldown 70 → 80
Ghost Spawner ghost duration: ~20 → ~10s

🧬 Classes

Machine Hunter

Snappy now has melee repel, dealing damage and stunning melee attackers
Synergy reloads 1 shot on HVAP / HEAT usage

Recon Sniper

New starter healing item: Life-Ripper Shots
Early game more dynamic; reinforces sniper fantasy
Target Laser hold time for guaranteed crit reduced

🔶 Engineer

Engineer perks are out of testing; level requirements enabled
Fixed Overdrive Station not being clickable
Improved sentry targeting and ranges
Improved Spider Mine explosion trigger range
Greatly improved range of area denial system
Improved cone of surge 3 area denial system
Fixed area denial system not using 3 charges
Overclocking now grants:
- 50% damage reduction for 1.25s (summons survive longer)
- Repair Kit doubles this effect
Summon health loss reworked:
- Uses damage instead of negative regeneration (more debuggable)
- Faster decay offset by damage reduction
Unidentified Potion:
- Negative effects now work again
- Stat upgrade chance reduced
- No longer always heals
Economy Booster: 300 → 200 credits
Fixed multi-overclock only working on summons and not on yourself
New Engineer Evolution: Ability Shuffle
Fixed Turret Shuffle spawning multiple turrets instead of rerolling
Gambling Kit:
- Higher chance for Epic / Legendary weapons
- Max recycle stacks capped at 25 (prevents infinite scaling)
Fixed Mortar firing without cooldown and clearing content instantly
Fixed Surge exceeding 3 and causing issues
Fixed Economy Booster exceeding 3 Surge
Suspicious SSeth Beholder:
- Duration: 30 → 20s
- Evil check interval: 4 → 3s
Spider Mines cooldown: 30 → 22s
Fixed currency validation issues (Missile Drone)
Fixed Metal Storm not correctly checking the cool-down

🔶 Entities

Added a concept of Squad formation for entities
This is currently in testing but already in use for mil-grade attack drones as example. Entities forming around a squad leader try to stay in one of multitude of switchable formations.
We now standardized the de-spawning to no longer use negative health regeneration which was technically quite "un-safe". The base summon durations might have increased a bit to compensate but the destruction phases are now more quick, to prevent massive amount of summons but most notably prevent too many damage packets being sent from constant damage ticks.
Varied item summons now properly de-spawn after a time which did not have proper duration set

Up next: Our priority right now will stay on stability, UX and polish. Additionally we are working on the new arctic-alternative, and a new boss fight.

Stay tuned!

Team FFG

Original post

18 Dec 2025Developer post

U18 - Engineering

Hey everyone! Update 18 is now live just in time for the holiday season! We hope you had a great 2025 and a we're wishing you a wonderful start to 2026 : ) 🔶 Highlights: New Engineer Class Steam Achievements Class Prestige Attachment Refinements Low End Performance & Loading

Hey everyone!

Update 18 is now live just in time for the holiday season!
We hope you had a great 2025 and a we're wishing you a wonderful start to 2026 : )

🔶Highlights:

New Engineer Class
Steam Achievements
Class Prestige
Attachment Refinements
Low End Performance & Loading speed
Quality of life changes

🔶 Weapon Balance

R2000H damage 7 > 8.2x
PPQ perk shield cost 250 > 150, damage 50>75%
Retuned Fusion pistol to have more burst damage upfront
KS23 now has a new Perk
Rayon new perk, Laser Calibration
Optimized mag for AM Tech now increases reload speed and ejection speed

🔶 Attachment Balance

Attachments v3 seemed to be a really good change in the right direction and there is a much clearer separation of the game elements now as a cause. However some categories of attachments were maybe struggling a bit with variation, and some attachments needed some tweaks. Overall the new changes should bring things in a really good state.

New Divine Attachment: Golden Boy Package - fills all attachment slots with random attachments
Blessed mag: 75% magsize -30% reload > +15 Magsize, +30% Class experience
Offload Cycler ultra now a legendary attachment in multiple categories
Ammo TP is now in multiple categories
ATP5 Ammo Teleporter is now in Mixed major category
Chromatic alloy is now a legendary attachment in multiple categories
Titanium Tripod reworked, is now a legendary attachment in multiple categories
Kill shot now has safety for 1 ammo, 15%>30% threshold, 100>50% damage
X-Shot receiver now increases extra shot count for other sources of extra shot
Tri-Bolt carrier removed -25% firerate
Fixed wildfire barrel not working
Turbo Chip now has 1x scaling
Testing: Zero pulse grip now adds 100% dmg to stunned
Kill counter now stacks the reload negative correctly

Other Gameplay:

Machine Hunter now rolls into cover (Turtle Shield) making it more fluid to use
Riotguard Judge bikes +1000 HP (*scaling), despawn 30>60s
Heavy Gunner custom-extended now only works on chest drops
Shield link cooldown adjusted
Metal Storm cooldown adjusted
New Item: Microwave Emitter

🔶 Class Prestige (Beta)

You can now prestige a class after reaching level 25.

This resets all class progression and grants a special prestige icon in the Lobby and Character menus to indicate your dedication. There are 5 different stages of icons.

Prestige is a purely intrinsic reward and might be expanded in the future.
In comparison with S1 we did not want to link a perk to prestige to not make people feel forced to reset their class to get the full benefit but let us know what you think.

For the next iteration we will change that it does not reset class data unlocks and add improved info UI.
Careful! Clicking the button will instantly prestige the class right now.

The new Engineer is finally here!

The Engineer is a advanced support class which relies heavily on summoned constructs, can repair and boost friendly units with his over-clocker likes to play in the backline.

For the class we wanted to do a real evolution of the S1 classic, with a wider loadout, more build choices and more depth.

⮩ Surge Mechanic

Engineer has a new Mechanic, ⚡️Surge, which is obtained from kills. You can have up to 3 Surge.

Surge offers special effects for basically all Engineer abilities if the ability is used at a certain Surge level.

Some Examples:

Mortar Turret - Now fires a flare and gains incendiary ammunition
Sentry Turret - Produces claymore mines and gains plating
Spider Module - Spawns a special Damage Absorbing Spider, which can soak a lot of damage and explodes in a huge radius based on soaked damage.

⮩ Loadout

The Loadout of Engineer is much more diverse now. Firstly the Engineer can pick from 3 different types of Turrets, a classic LMG all-rounder, a close range high burst Assault Turret, and a long-range, long-duration Mortar Turret.

The Overclocker returns as a mobility option but we also added the classic dash+item combo.

The Specialization Ability is where the Loadout really shines, with many highly different options:

🔶 Spider Module - Explosive Spider or ⚡️⚡️⚡️Damage Absorbing Suicide Spiders

🔶 Missile Drone - A long range damage dealer. Spam based on ⚡️Surge.

🔶 Area Jammer - Slowing Device / ⚡️⚡️⚡️Wall Piercing Stunning Emitter

🔶 Assault Mode - Offensive Boost and creates laser drones based on ⚡️Surge.

🔶 Sseth-Up Sentry - Pocket Turret. ⚡️⚡️⚡️Dangerous Beholder Unit which can change teams.

Additionally we have 3 utility options:

🔶 Unidentified Potion - Causes one random effect, including healing and stat upgrades

🔶 Overdrive Station - Heals in an area and grants ⚡️Surge on kills within proximity

🔶 Supply Box - The already known ammo box

⮩ Class Kits

The Engineer also offers 3 distinct Kits:

🔶 Repair Kit - The most classic kit. Strong repairs, and a Stasis Gun which offers unique utility

🔶 Technomancer Kit - Summons can have elite ranks and has a mind-control weapon.

🔶 Gambler Kit - Gains extra randomized benefits from recycling and taking risks!

⮩ Try it yourself!

Engineer is now live, so just give it a try! Keep in mind that this is the first version, and while we already got very positive feedback from the private testing, there will surely be more improvements and tweaks coming, so let us know what you think!

🔶Quality of Life

Many effects which could attack the player have been changed
(Lacerator, Bloodbane, Smart Ricochet, Shock Conductor..)
Fixed missing Tooltips in Armory & Escalation Settings
Improved clarity of Escalation buttons
Purchased Permanent Upgrades now show an indicator on the next open that its active
Added Quit Game popup
You can now quickly recycle items on the ground by pressing the button

🔶Performance

⮩ Binary Serialization

We did a rework of JSON configuration serialization to a binary serialization which is a speed up in initial loading times, especially on low-end.

⮩ Contact Shadows (Experimental)

For the "Minimal" Graphics settings we are testing screen-space contact shadows, which don't have to trace all the geometry in the game and are much cheaper than normal shadows, however they can have some noticeable graphical artefacts. If people don't like it we might revert this to classic shadow maps or even no shadows for the low end setting.

Screen-Space Contact shadows have performance similar to no shadows, but still offer shadowing of the scene. Keep in mind that the performance display in the screenshot is not fully accurate. Contact shadows have a also a GPU cost but they do not require to re-render all the geometry in the scene like classic shadows. They trace based on screen depth, so they also cannot have shadowing from objects off-screen, and they have significant artifacts & accuracy issues.

This is mostly for the super low-end. Let us know if this is adding any improvements to your framerate or if it just makes things look worse. If you are already CPU bound or bound by other factors, this might actually not be an improvement and just a visual downgrade, as such we need feedback based on your hardware.

🔶Achievements

We finally added steam achievements, in the first pass 34 in total. Let us know if anything is unobtainable or feels too hard to achieve.

🔶Tons of Fixes

As usual we made many small fixes based on things you reported. As we are doing exponentially less breaking changes, the game will become more and more pristine with every report and fix, so keep it coming!

🔶Work in Progress

We also worked on our unique graphic design tool pipeline, which allows us to make much faster graphical content on higher quality, including videos, gifs and more. This is a significant time saver in the long run and you can see some pictures in this post already being created with it.

We are also working on more controller improvements and console certifications which are quite challenging but doing great progress.

Up next: A brand new late-game Environment, item mirroring and more!

That's it! Have fun!

Team FFG

Original post

28 Oct 2025Developer post

17.1

Hey everyone! We've got a bunch of fixes and some tweaks for you, before we work on U18. 🔶 General Fixes Eject/reload whitelisted for double keybinding. Better handling of corrupted (mod) depotfiles, ignores specific broken configs instead of aborting full import. Fixed reviving

25 Oct 2025Developer post

Update 17 - RE-ARMED

Hey everyone! We were listening very close to your feedback and worked hard on a ton of fixes, QOL changes and improvements. U17 has a strong focus on Fixes, P2P and in-game progression. 🔶 Weapon Attachments V3 Attachments V3 and Synergy items are a long way coming. While the pr

Hey everyone!

We were listening very close to your feedback and worked hard on a ton of fixes, QOL changes and improvements. U17 has a strong focus on Fixes, P2P and in-game progression.

🔶 Weapon Attachments V3

Attachments V3 and Synergy items are a long way coming. While the previous attachments were well balanced and technically a good composition in a vacuum, attachments did overstep into items too much and strangely overlapped sometimes into item and ability effects, while often not having such direct effect on a weapon itself.

So we wanted to make weapon upgrades more weapon based, and have items define more your overall loadout. Attachments V3 is cleaning up the systems, refinding the upgrade progression and putting things where they belong.

⮩ Big Attachment Improvements

🔸New Attachments across the board!

🔸New Attachment Category for Energy Weapons: Cable

🔸New Attachment Category for Launchers & Shotguns: Loader

🔸New Attachment Category for Weapons with Underbarrel: Underbarrel

🔸New Attachment Category splits between Burst, Semi, Auto

🔸New Attachment Category for: Handguns / Starters

🔸Attachments look more like attachments and add more weapon based effects

🔸Attachments were sometimes overcomplicated, this has been improved

🔸Attachments which felt like items are now items

🔸Weapons now have more tailored attachment slots to their needs

🔸Weapons with historically poor choices (Launchers..) now have much better upgrades

🔸Improved Attachment UI with visible text for better understanding

⮩ More Interactions

3 Systems Problem: We had been feeling a strange dynamic with the in-game progression where it felt like we had 3 different systems, mostly independent of each other. Items and weapons barely interacted, while (in comparison to S1) we now had powerful Perks from Terminals, which in hind-sight seemingly are trying to compensate for the lack of interaction between items and weapons.

Attachments V3 & Synergy items are now here to add more interaction between the gameplay layers.
With the latest changes to item upgrades being more prominent, and more item synergies being added, we now have a much deeper interaction between systems, which leads to more variation in builds, more weapons being viable and more desireable item combinations.

⮩ Better Starters

Starter weapons were rarely upgraded and rarely worth so. With new starter-based attachments this is helped but not fully solved. However since now the categories exist, we may expand on this as needed.

We also liked the idea of having some "cross weapon" benefits which affect your handgun and all your weapons, like Recon Scope or Offload Cycler so we are testing these as optional Synergy items and which further benefit all your weapons.

🔶 Synergy Items

16 Synergy Items have been added through the Alchemy shop.

You also have a small chance to get one through the mystery (lost & found) crate.

Synergy items act as normal items but are sort of like a "glue" in between items, weapons and abilities, often offering effects which works across multiple parts of a build.

As example Ambrosia printer enhances all effects with the tag "Printing" and quickly recharges them.

Missile control triggers from all missiles, including abilities and things like the Object 29 launcher.

Synergy items allow for more synergistic builds and more build options and expand the item pool.

Items are and always were intentionally the main progression outside of weapons and they now take back their rightful place (together with the changes to item upgrade shop occurance), while previously the terminal perks have acted a bit as a "filler" to compensate for lack of item progression.

⮩ Flexible Healing Item / +1 Item Slot

We changed the healing ability to be an item and increased maximum item slots from 4 to 5.

This means you have more choices with your loadout with the potential to share or recycle your healing item, or have a dedicated healer on the team even.

If you prefer the previous hotkey behavior you can re-bind your key and or set the power slot setting to your liking.

🔶 Network Prediction Upgrade

Predicting what will happen / "Network Prediction" is a notoriously hard challenge and has been iterated over a long time. With the latest upgrades to our kill and damage prediction, the feeling while playing is now extremely direct and virtually instant.

You should feel an immediate improvement in the game feel when playing online!

🔶 Steam Peer-To-Peer (P2P)

After many player requests, we are testing a new Steam Peer 2 Peer (P2P) networking system to compare it against the current server-based solution, which includes improved prediction logic.

We have been seeing good results internally, but now we need your real-world data.

We are especially eager to get feedback from players who have historically had issues with disconnects or connection stability on the dedicated server system. Please let us know how the P2P based networking works for you.

The dedicated server system has been working solidly but a subset of players report repeated issues with connection to the servers. Next step for us to improve the situation would be to set up more locations and our own hardware instead of rented capacity, which is beyond the scope of Synthetik 2.

P2P also would allow us to add modding in co-op, as such we are looking at this for the way forwards.

🔶 Un-Locked Base

The base now has all buildings unlocked by default and is further streamlined!

Visuals have been improved and performance is greatly enhanced on most menus.

🔶 Optimizations

The main menu has seen many optimizations and also ingame we did a large pass on UI, to reduce spikes on low end from Interface updates. Since the game is already very optimized in most areas we are now going in very specialized areas.

As fun example; with a special shader, we encoded all these ability UI elements into just 2 materials:

5! different charges images, No Charges Overlay, Cooldown Bar, Cooldown Ready effect, Cooldown Started effect, Cooldown Overlay, Duration Bar, Stacks Display, Hover Overlay, Click Overlay

All of this is just in one shader. By abusing the RGB color values as 'sliders' for the effects we completely avoid having to set any expensive images or shader parameters. Previously even animating one of these effects would cause a expensive ui canvas re-build. The only thing not causing a re-build of the UI is changing a color, so we use that. If you have 40 of such actions on screen in 4P co-op, this could previously cause quite some drain on a low end machine in the late-game.

Networking also has seen varied optimizations across the board.

🔶 Keybindings

You can now clear keybindings in the settings.

Additionally the game now checks for duplicate bindings and blocks them correctly

This however now creates a inconvenience when switching weapons, as weapon switch and scroll is double-bound, we are seeing if we can add a further improvement. For now, we added buttons to switch weapons.

🔶 Fixes Fixes Fixes

Tons of general fixes based on your feedback! U17 had a large focus on Fixing bugs.

This update had a large focus on fixes, so we have a large list of things that have been resolved, and we'll continue on this path to get things really smooth.

🔶 Up Next

Next up we are getting Engineer ready, more fixes and refinements as usual and the alternative environment for Arctic Base is also in the works. We'll keep the short update cycle from now on.

Please report any issues you encounter with Update 17 on Steam or Discord.

Have fun!

Team FFG

Original post

25 Sep 2025Developer post

16.1

Hey everyone, we've got another small patch with more fixes and refinements. Fixes, Fixes, Fixes! UI Moved up item and weapon loot popup, reduced opacities, reduced weapon size Reworked Item and Weapon popup panel to a much more maintainable system The ability/item upgrade shop n

17 Sep 2025Developer post

Update 16

Hey everyone! Update 16 has a strong focus on fixes and improving on the menu user experience, but comes with a good amount of gameplay refinements as-well, such as new items, better and more loot and improved upgrade progression, which we personally feel are very noticeable. We

Hey everyone!

Update 16 has a strong focus on fixes and improving on the menu user experience, but comes with a good amount of gameplay refinements as-well, such as new items, better and more loot and improved upgrade progression, which we personally feel are very noticeable.

We have heard your feedback about the base of operations and have greatly streamlined the experience to be more smooth, easier to understand, faster and more convenient, while keeping all the new content that Grand Operations brought.

Streamlined Menu

🞙 We simplified the Menu UI and changed it to use a simple unified Tab-Bar

🞙 You can now easily switch to any menu while being in the lobby!

🞙 Cinematics also have been speed up and in general the menu is very fast to use

🞙 Blueprint and Data income has been increased for faster unlocks

🞙 Many other fixes and tweaks have been done.

Note: The menu background is mostly the same with a bunch of optimizations but with the changed camera angles we have some untapped potential for improvements left.

Loot Improvements

Our goal was to improve the overall sense and depth of progression. Early game is becoming more diverse, and we wanted to bring item and item upgrades back in focus as the main progression outside of weapons. We experimented a lot with the amount of loot and we think we now found a good balance in terms of depth of choices, both for weapons and for items.

🞙 The First map now spawns 100% an item and a weapon chest

🞙 Coop now properly spawns bonus item chests per player.

🞙 50% chance per player per map for one extra chest

🞙 Item rarities are now more randomized and you get higher rarities earlier

🞙 Item upgrade shops are now arriving earlier and more consistently

Other Loot Improvements

🞙 Medical shop has seen varied changes and improvements

🞙 Varied other shop improvements

🞙 New options have been added, including specific synergies with certain weapon types

🞙 Choices for non tinkerer shop are now 2 instead of 3

🞙 Most Perks which were Epic previously are now common

🞙 Varied Perks have been improved

🞙 Shops in the third map have been moved away from the end towards 2/3rds

🞙 Medical Chest: Now drops randomly either power rations, healing vial or morphine

New Items

We added some new common Items “Simple Straight forward damage items”

🞙 Ignition Core - Large area damage

🞙 Heat Ray - Self targeted sun ray

🞙 M12 Liquid Grenade - Explosive Grenade with scaling

🞙 Psyonic Spikes - Erupts powerful metal spikes from the ground

Item Upgrade Stats display

You can now see in item stats:

🞙 Double Occurance chance

🞙 Triple Occurance chance

🞙 Quad Occurance chance

🞙 Multi-Cast chance

🞙 Free Cast chance

🞙 No Charges Cost chance

Power Scaling Pass

We added power scaling to varied action effects which previously didn’t scale and we added the scaling to the tooltips.

🞙 Ammo gain to magazine now scales

🞙 Shield Gain now scales

🞙 Plating Gain now scales

🞙 Health Gain now scales

🞙 Stacks can potentially scale (will be used more in the near future)

This opens up many possibilities, like upgrading the amount of missiles an item fires or how fast a upgrade stacks or such things.

Item Balance

🞙 Pulsar repeater stacks 10 > 20

🞙 Shield dome now stuns enemies within at first

🞙 Roundhouse boots cooldown doubled, now deals way more damage

🞙 Roundhouse boots now gives 10% movement speed

🞙 Power array now shoots a cone burst

🞙 Crowd control gear now shoots a volley of grenades

🞙 Sidewinder fires 3 missiles with less damage

🞙 Shove is now Hypershovel, cooldown 7s > 0.75 seconds

🞙 Hypershovel now reduces ability cooldowns by 1s

🞙 Now deals 10% bonus max hp damage

🞙 Guardian moved to lost & found due too many summons

🞙 Slug Boots damage 8.5 > 10x

🞙 Fire Prism reworked - now actually acts like a prism and splits lasers on the

target

🞙 Heavenly Embrace minimum range 1>1.5m, max hp damage increased

🞙 Bloodrite reworked, now gains stronger with every usage until you will have

to throw it

🞙 Bloodbane now causes curse explosions too

🞙 Grappling hook stat buff 2s > 2.5s, enemy damage range 3m > 4m, dmg stacks 7

> 8 times

🞙 Grappling hook projectile speed 200% > 250%

🞙 SAT masterkey deals more damage

🞙 Flare gun gives a small speed bonus on activation as Qol

🞙 Flare gun base stats 70% > 80%, scaling 0.35 > 0.2

🞙 Sticky Bomb cooldown 10 > 5s due to misses from enemies being dead

🞙 Sticky bomb and healing drone have a “no friendly in range” popup

🞙 Magic mag now reloads up to 30 * scaling, now creates ammo for free, now

shows a buff

🞙 Stun mines renamed to P7 Concussion Mines - Cooldown increased, now has a

fixed 4 constellation, improved VFX. No longer uses charges

🞙 Cryo turret now has 2 charges

🞙 Disc of justicia damage doubled

Global / Coop Balance

🞙 Enemy damage per player bonus 5% > 3%

🞙 Enemy aiming speed per player 5% >0%

🞙 Enemy Health scaling per player from 55% to 40%

🞙 Enemy Health scaling per 100% Difficulty from 25% to 50%

🞙 Enemy Base Projectile speed multiplier from 55% to 50%

Tldr: Enemy health is higher in singleplayer and a little bit higher in 2 player high

difficulty, up to 16% lower in 4P on low difficulty. Enemy damage is reduced

overall and enemy projectiles / reactions are a bit slower.

Weapons

🞙 Seeker carbine damage 3 > 2.5x

🞙 Increased amount of visible weapon perk slots from 7 to 12

🞙 H200 Commando damage 1.9x > 1.75

🞙 Evo XS damage 1.15x > 1.05

🞙 C900 Pioneer upgear now increases weapon perk power as it was causing

technical issues

🞙 Divine ammo conversion now works on special and spewer type weapons

🞙 Sickle Variant now properly uses its cooldown to drop the pickups

🞙 Stun missile burst stun duration 2s > 3s

Other

🞙 Reduced loop effect in silo floor

🞙 Varied map fixes

🞙 Heavy Gunner ramping up changed from

-50%, +10% fire-rate per stack

to -35% +7% fire-rate per stack

🞙 Snappy movement speed 3 > 3.35

🞙 Metal Storm now places one on the left and one on the right

Data & Blueprint Chest

🞙 We added a new chest which can grant 2 Blueprints or 50 Data or 80 Data

🞙 Data per map completed 10 > 25

🞙 Data from Boss kill removed 20 > 0 (still gains per map change, so -5 total)

🞙 Increased data gain cap overall

Kill FX / Feedback

Enemy kill effects have been improved and are more satisfying now

🞙 Added kill oil sparks

🞙 Added kill metal fragments

🞙 Timed oil splats better

🞙 Rag Doll chance from 40% to 100%, now only explodes above 2000 damage

🞙 Rag Doll velocity tweaked

🞙 Damage Numbers ported to new MSDF Text, made more snappy

🞙 Kill X Effect Improved

UI

🞙 In coop, the item bar is now always shown for other players

Audio

🞙 Fixed playlists playing over each other

🞙 Out of combat now plays in a faded style

🞙 Fixed doubled music track playing in training

🞙 Removed some less good tracks in training, added S1 Training tracks

Enemy Compositions

🞙 Enemy spawner high now spawns 3 different archetype of units not 4 per map

🞙 Medium Spawner now only spawns 2 different archetype types not 3 per map

🞙 Low spawners now only spawn 1 enemy archetype

🞙 Low spawners no longer spawn special units such as tasers, wheels etc, these

are on medium or big spawners only

Overall this gives a much stronger identity to the compositions where groups previously felt random. We also gain a better contrast of types, so we have normal enemies, being mixed up with more special enemies instead of a permanent wild mix. This makes gameplay, visually and enemy attack patterns a lot clearer and more diverse.

Easier Early Game

🞙 Added new super low spawner for first 2 enemy groups per game

🞙 Reduced enemy count in first map noticeably, to make the game start easier

and faster

Other

🞙 Summons now hold you half as long in combat after enemies are already gone

🞙 Alarm wheels now are stunned for 1 second per spawn, max spawns 8 > 6

Bosses

🞙 Jet boss armor 30 > 0

🞙 Sawblade now spawns mini-sawblades when one of the 2 is destroyed

🞙 Last Defender now has laser beams,

🞙 Last Defender charge attack fixed / improved

🞙 Last Defender missile attack reworked

🞙 Last Defender no longer spawns secure bots and lightning wheels

🞙 Last Defender now spawns area denial drones and pacifiers

🞙 Added safeties for last defender loot and no longer shows the reward twice

Mod.io Update

We seemingly updated the U15 mod browser just when a much newer one came out, making the new U15 one instantly very outdated. We added now the latest Mod.io browser, there might be some issues with it left as this is quite a big task to integrate. The new ui is easier to customize and we have commited to sticking and further customize this UI as required and deal with API changes in the future by just fixing the modding backend as needed going forward.

Optimizations

MSDF High end, High performance custom Text rendering System

Up until U15, we’ve used the Unity Engine TMP Text system. While the glyphs rendered by this text engine look quite nice, the performance is pretty bad. This is especially noticeable in text heavy UIs in the main menu but also for example when new weapons are dropped and various text elements pop up in the same frame.

Unfortunately the Unity version is not fit for change so we took the time to write our own text rendering engine that is now included in the game.

The performance for creating text elements is roughly 2-3x faster than Unity’s TMP and renders glyphs with a higher quality algorithm called MSDF.

Asset loading

Synthetik 2 uses Unity’s Addressable system for dynamically loading content pieces meaning all the 3D models, Audio clips, Icons etc. This is great since this is the only real way in Unity to not preload all potentially referenced content when loading new levels, which would completely blow up RAM usage with the amount of content Synthetik 2 features.

Unfortunately the system is not very optimized for fast paced accessing of content.

Any instantiation of new content, for example throwing a grenade made the actual instantiation of the new content delayed by 1-5 frames, immediate instantiation of already RAM loaded content is not featured and the CPU overhead of actually using the RAM loaded content is also noticeable.

We’ve forked the Unity code and implemented our own Asset Manager that sits on top of the Unity code and can preload and recycle content much better and in most cases immediately instantiate accessed content with practically no overhead.

Raycast Targets

🞙 We cut raycasting targets in the UI by 90% which might improve frame

times when clicking

Muzzle Lights

🞙 Low quality setting no longer produces muzzle lights

🞙 Medium quality now has 60% shadowed muzzle lights

🞙 High quality retains full muzzle lights and shadows

🞙 Muzzle lights on medium and high quality now fade out over distance

🞙 Muzzle lights now have maximum ranges to avoid rendering to many objects

Arctic

🞙 Fixed a large snow particle effect which causes heavy overdraw in 2 maps

Controller Enhancements

We did significant work on controller support, with better aim-assist, a rework of the menu handling and a overhaul of the controller aiming system. More controller improvements are coming up.

Fixes

Many many fixes …

🞙 Refactor of weapons into a state machine for better handling of states

🞙 Fixed that summon upgrades don't work in co-op

🞙 Fixed varied other pick-up and weapon related co-op issues

🞙 Fixed a issue where certain effects stacked each map change, like no

cooldown chance on unstable current or critical chance on volley system,

causing people to reach 100% no cool-down chance and such things.

🞙 Fixed varied quest issues causing problems

🞙 Fixed pioneer breaking stats

🞙 Fixed a issue where items dissapear when picking up with full inventory

🞙 Fixed issues regarding minimap

🞙 Fixed Sniper Laser sometimes staying on

🞙 Fixed a issue with invisible enemies due to unreliable packages

🞙 Fixed a issue with bleeding effects causing enemies to break and bosses to

die instantly

🞙 Fixed a issue where things break when people drop weapons while attachment

shops are active

🞙 Fixed a issue where weapon switching did not properly re-parent actions,

leading to many bugs when trading weapons

🞙 Fixed depots not being switchable in the mod menu

🞙 Fixed doubled difficulty modifiers

🞙 Fixed many issues with U15 menu

🞙 Fixed Methadone coop issue / general action ownership issue leading to

potentially more bugs

🞙 Fixed many minor action issues

🞙 Fixed that WASD controlled menu buttons

🞙 Hopefully fixed last defender reward not appearing

🞙 Fixed Dialogs playing per player

🞙 Added fallback for last defender reward in next map

Known and investigating for next week:

🞙 Boss sometimes not dropping rewards in coop

🞙 Ability shop not usable in coop

🞙 Many more

We are now trying to follow up with an even shorter update cycle.
Up next are boss improvements, more improvements on items and more controller improvements as well.

Let us know what you think! We hope you enjoy!

Team Flow Fire Games

Known issue: Certain people report having a very bright daytime lighting instead of the intended night light in the menu - we looking into a fix

Edit2: It appears that there is an issue with Chinese, Japanese, Korean and maybe more font sets missing, we'll fix this ASAP.

Original post

01 Jul 2025Developer post

Update 15.1

⚙️Update 15.1 We've deployed a new patch with significant performance improvements, bug fixes, balance adjustments, and quality of life updates. Thank you for your continued support and feedback! 💬Performance & Stability Improvements Identified and applied a workaround for a

⚙️Update 15.1

We've deployed a new patch with significant performance improvements, bug fixes, balance adjustments, and quality of life updates. Thank you for your continued support and feedback!

💬Performance & Stability Improvements

Identified and applied a workaround for a Unity light rendering issue, causing major performance degradation over time.
Fixed an issue that was spamming error logs and significantly tanking CPU performance.
Fixed varied issues around lobby menus, more fixes to come.
Fixed the most commonly auto-reported random error messages.
Added character safety for chat to fix performance loss from incompatible text.
Fixed missing combat crosshair if setting was corrupted

🔉Escalation Mode Adjustments

Escalation 0 ammo pickup bonus increased from 25% to 50%.
Escalation 0 now gives 25% spare ammunition.
Escalation 1 ammo pickup bonus increased from 25% to 35%.
Escalation 1 now gives 25% spare ammunition.

💥Enemies

X1 Discus enemy is now spawning.
Armageddon Beholder enemy is now spawning.
Bosses now deal 5000 damage to friendlies on death.
Sawblade Boss now properly spawns mini sawblades when other sawblades die.
Fixed Chrono Chest spawning friendly Chrono units.
Mark Target now lasts 6 seconds (down from 8 seconds) and can no longer stack on players.

🎯Classes

Gunner

Global Minimum Fire-Rate increased from 25 to 35.
10% more base fire-rate.
Burst fire rate increased from 5% to 10% per stack of Ramp-Up.
Deviation reduced from 0.5 to 0.4 per stack of Ramp-Up.
Reloading now also pauses the decay for 2.5 seconds.

Sniper

Target Laser is now held only.
Target Laser now charges up a critical strike on maximum stacks.
Replaced Sniper Kit passive with a new one.

⚡Items / Shops / Weapons

Potentially fixed Hunter-Unit double revive issue. (?)
Heat Spreader now applies a first stack of burn in a large radius on first activation.
Plating Printer now triggers its explosion on activation as well.
Voltaic Gyroscope range and damage increased to make it more effective at close range.
RPG missile replaced with straight-fired missile.
All Coil Guns damage increased from 3 to 3.3.
Fixed Blessed tools not giving cooldown speed.
Loop shops now give a random selection in case someone teleports with the shop opened.

🎬UI / UX Improvements and fixes

Fixed new UI bugs and integration issues for mod downloads via mod.io.
Fixed Badges not showing in the end screen.
Lobby leaving no longer automatically switches back to global chat.
The chat disable boolean now properly blocks joining global chat (included in Sunday mini-fix); chat window and party chat are intended to stay open.
Fixed the loading screen background.
Fixed the Escalation Tower icon not showing.
Fixed the Learning Terminal camera doing an unnecessary spin.
Added class description text into the Android menu.
Fixed the Apocalyptic Survival Kit not showing its tooltip properly.
Replaced the intro cinematic with an Android UI style.
Disabled lobby join highlighting on private lobbies.
Increased scroll speed in the lobby browser window.
Fixed Armory UI not scaling properly on screens.
End screen quit button is now clearer.
Fixed armor not showing on enemy healthbars.
Added maximum plating to stats display.
Weapon burst delay in the fire-rate section now shows "s" for seconds for clarity.
Weapons with 0 damage and only AOE now show "AOE" for clarity.
Changed Terror Level sound to not use the radio voice mixer.
Renamed Control Center to Mission Center
Play buttons are now more visible
Android menu mentions after some time that you need mission center to play
Localization fixes.
Added Chinese font fallback for normal text.
Added a description on how to make mods in the mod browser enabler section.
Added small UniversEdit button for now in mission menu to access depots

🔥Known issues / Coming up:

Compendium dosn't save for some people?
Varied Lobby menu quit / ready wierdness
Boss one shot issue - any infos are helpful!
Quests are not saving in coop

🔧I have other issues:

Varied people have bad performance on DirectX12, please switch to DX11 in steam and/or update graphics drivers
People having crashes: Verify game files in steam. Crashes are 99% a faulty install.
People having really poor networking performance: Google for Speedtest and Packet Loss test, if these are good, please report to us

We are reading your feedback very closely and have more fixes and improvements on the list and coming up very soon!

Original post

26 Jun 2025Developer post

Grand Operations is live!

Hey everyone! Sorry for the very long wait. This is the biggest update we have ever done by a mile and left no stone unturned. We really put blood and sweat into this and tried very hard to provide you a much higher production value iteration of the Synthetik franchise. We really

03 Apr 2025Developer post

News Update

Hey everyone! We know it’s been a while since our last major announcement. While we've been sharing updates on Discord and the Steam forums, not everyone may have seen them, so here’s a larger write-up: 📅 U15 Grand Operations Status We’ve been rolling out new builds weekly, and

Hey everyone!

We know it’s been a while since our last major announcement. While we've been sharing updates on Discord and the Steam forums, not everyone may have seen them, so here’s a larger write-up:

📅 U15 Grand Operations Status

We’ve been rolling out new builds weekly, and we’re nearly ready to begin multiplayer testing. The latest builds are quite stable in singleplayer, though there are still a few issues to iron out. You can currently try out the beta of U15 – Grand Operations on the testing branch! See the bottom of this post for instructions on how to join!

📈 So what is all this 'U15 Grand Operations?'

As things naturally evolved, Grand Operations has now become a sort of "2.0" version of the game. We have tackled almost all the things we planned for the real launch and so much beyond. Almost everything in the game has been touched in a major way. All in all, Grand Operations is like a new game, even ignoring the home base entirely. From enemy, weapon, item, loot, shop and map reworks, to UI, multiplayer, localization and even settings, U15 is a huge overhaul of the entire game and far beyond.

Focus of the Update?

You've seen maybe some of the graphics and main menu changes. Some people voiced concern that all the development time is spent on the hub, which of course wouldn't be smart. Most of the development time actually went into everything around gameplay even with the hub being the biggest visual change - refactors, optimizations and in our new and improved systems and pipelines (a lot of code, networking, shaders, modeling, texturing, terrain, ui, animation, lighting, character creation ..). Update 15 marks the completion of many of our new workflows which were key in making Grand Operations a reality and getting the game in the best possible position for the full launch and beyond.

Anyways, here we have a spoiler of the many gameplay changes you will see with Grand Operations:

🛠️U15 Gameplay Improvements spoiler

🎯 Gameplay & Systems

Huge Cover Gameplay Overhaul for better tactical gameplay

Tons of Map Changes implemented for improved clarity and flow

Introduced the New Directives Mutator System

Added New Divine Blessings for Loop gameplay

New Enemies, New Enemy Abilities, and numerous enemy overhauls

Implemented a New AI State Machine for enhanced behaviors

Many Class Changes and balance adjustments implemented

🚀 Items, Loot & Weapons

Redesigned Upgrades & Shops, plus new Terminals

New improved Loot Distribution system & Campaign Drop redesign

Added New Weapons and improved overall Loot Table

Starter Handguns Overhauled & Re-shuffled

Complete Overhaul of Weapon Tech Perks

Dozens of Weapon Balance Changes pushed live

Tons of Item Improvements across the board

Added New Multi-Variant feature & Variant Override system

🧰 Visuals & UI

New Muzzle, Impact, and other Visual Effects (VFX)

New Cursor options and Damage Text styles available

Improved Healthbar design, features and clarity

Improved Unit Visibility on the battlefield

Better Hit Feedback for more satisfying combat

..New Graphics, Music, Networking and tons more!

🔧Base / Menu Upgrades

The new Base Hub in U15 is more than a visual overhaul — it’s a complete rework of the menu system, with tons of new functionality. Our goal was to introduce meaningful meta progression without disrupting balance. That means improvements across the board: from quality-of-life to lore, and even a bit of power scaling for long-term motivation.

🧱 New Additions:

Construction – Progressively build up your base and unlock new features

AI Core – Unlock new quests and unique in-run terminal events

Mail – Daily rewards, global notifications, and in-game news

Radio – Change music tracks and see community updates

Tech Center – Browse and learn all technologies in detail

Barracks / Medical / Shield Generator – Each includes new upgrade paths

📁 Legacy Menu Improvements:

Escalation – Now shows detailed info for every level

Armory – The item/weapon database, now with more types

Lab – New Android lab with improved UI and more style

Modding Menu – In active rework with the latest Mod.io framework

Mission Console – Quick restart after matches & new matchmaking

This is just the tip of the iceberg for U15— dive into the test branch now and check it out for yourself. Unlock the new features and let us know what you think!

🧬 Past U15?

Even after U15, most of the work on the upcoming Engineer class is already completed. The new “D-DAY” environment is nearly 90% finished and should be ready to follow soon as we move closer to launch. We’re also thinking about a revamped class perk/module system, along with plenty of the usual polish and refinements.

🚧 U15 Beta Test:

If you want to try the latest build and give feedback to the current version, here are the steps to enter the beta testing branch:

Warning: This is a Beta Testing Branch, is unfinished, single-player and potentially buggy!
Step 1: Go to your steam game settings
Step 2: Go to the Beta Tab
Step 3: Enter code SECRETTESTBRANCH, and you should gain access.

Please let us know what you think after unlocking all the new features and we'll keep you posted for the coop-test branch soon. Have fun!

- Team FFG

Original post

02 Aug 2024Developer post

Synthetik 2 Roadmap

Hey everyone! Today we want to give you a overview of what is to come. As you may have read, we are currently working on Grand Operation which is a really huge update and might need a bit more time, but it will be one of the biggest leaps we have taken as a studio. Keep in mind t

Hey everyone!
Today we want to give you a overview of what is to come. As you may have read, we are currently working on Grand Operation which is a really huge update and might need a bit more time, but it will be one of the biggest leaps we have taken as a studio.

Keep in mind that all things are never set in stone and we always do what is best given the current situation / plans might change.

Keynotes:

Focus on out-game elements
New Base of Operations
Construct varied Buildings
Unlock perks and features
Interact with NPCs
New difficulty system
Story elements
Quests
Rework on menus
Party System
Gameplay & Balance tweaks
Final Boss Blessings
and more!

In Grand Operation, the main menu is removed and you start as a android pilot from the human resistance. You are stationed on the stealth Resistance base "Phantom-One" near the coast of Vietnam, right at the border of the machine expansion.

The base allows free roaming and constructing varied buildings, containing menus you know but also new features and progression unlocks. The new resistance radio allows you to play music, barracks, shield generator and fusion reactor give you improvements to tackle the higher difficulties. The radar explains the environments in the world and the state of the machine expansion but that's enough of the spoilers.

Constructing buildings increases the war effort and progresses the timeline, adding a slightly flexible but clear campaign progression throughout all the old and new features of the game. Lastly the big main building (secret) will offer quests while at your mission and form a small storyline.

The Grand Operations update takes a lot of time since we first had to develop new systems to drive the walkable main menu, rework and split up the old main menu UI and set up unlockable base buildings. We are mostly finished with this and are now shifting towards adding a first batch of story quests with voice lines, some 3d characters with animations and more.

There is a lot more to tell but we don't want to spoiler too much, so stay tuned!

U15 Under the Hood

In the last months we have reworked and added many core elements of the framework, such as groundwork for the new Quest systems, dialogs and dialog chains, flexible currencies and action bars, NPCs, voice lines, interchangeable hud and menus, outgame saving and reward structures, networking and lobby changes, new shader and asset pipelines, character pipelines, skin shaders, icon workflows, particle system changes, major project cleanups and so much more. The editor has also seen major improvements.

All these things will be directly in use in the game in Grand Operations or will be important groundwork for future updates. We know this sounds quite obscure but there has been a lot happening under the hood. After grand operations we will be pretty much done with foundation work however and are planning on mostly spending time on content and polish.

Keynotes:

Planned around christmas holidays
Overhauled class perk / module system
Focus on in-game Game-play improvements & classes
Improvements on the base of operations
and more...

Ascendency will focus on further gameplay improvements and giving the classes more variation with a new perk system. We also want to really polish up the core gameplay and the enemy encounters. As usual there will always be plenty of unplanned improvements coming in.

Keynotes:

Early next year
The Engineer Class
Boss / Gameplay Improvements
and more...

After U17 we are intending to go quickly towards launch. Depending on how things go, the Engineering update might be integrated into the launch update. You can expect a new announcement for this when it's time.

We'll keep you posted about Grand Operations!
Thanks for stopping by, have fun!
- Team FFG

Original post

06 Apr 2024Developer post

Spring Devblog

Heavy Gunner Fan art by Vireyn Hey everyone! Since the next update is on the large side (well which one wasn't..) we want to give you some infos about what is coming up next. As we are getting slowly towards the 1.0 version, and are now finally tackling some of our long desired e

Heavy Gunner Fan art by Vireyn

Hey everyone!
Since the next update is on the large side (well which one wasn't..) we want to give you some infos about what is coming up next. As we are getting slowly towards the 1.0 version, and are now finally tackling some of our long desired elements. This is a more technical blog with not too many spoilers, so you can safely read.

Base of Operations

The Elephant in the room is the new base of operations. The old main-menu is completely replaced by the new base. This is a big operation and includes larger reworks of menu structure and the lobby structure.

Gameplay wise you can walk around the base and interact with different buildings and npcs.
Throughout your play time, you can unlock new buildings and the base will look more impressive over time. We also take this opportunity to add long missing elements to the franchise, such as NPCs, story elements, voice acting and more outgame progress.

Pic: Armory Building / Database

Since this is a lot of work, we gotta see how much we can really get done for the next update, but it is critial to take the next step, leap outside of our comfort zone and take things to the next level.
We don't want to talk or promise too much about it yet so we are keeping it short, but this is the main priority for Update 15.

Structural Changes

We planned for a longer time to do some overhauls related to the handling of the UI and general technical structure of the menus. Before, all menus were basically attached together, but we are now changing things to be "atomic" (independent) and more flexible in structure. This is much healthier to develop, debug and add new features down the road, as they are completely detached from the rest, and you do not have any complexity from intertwining features.

Pic: WIP of a world map menu

This also allows adding new menus much easier or do any other tweaks. A similar thing is being done for the HUD. Eventually it might even be possible to mod or expand some of the menus in the menu with this improved structure, although no promises.

Story Elements & Voice Acting

While you shouldn't expect huge questlines or heavy story elements, we are trying to get a basic structure and more worldbuilding with characters and more overall flair.

Voice acting might not be in the first version but we are planning to add voice overs for the NPCs in the base and also the events while playing, to add more flair and make things more immersive.

All our NPCs are being done with a intricate character sheet and a logical background. This not only lets us understand the characters better and create better dialog but also helps the voice actors to understand the characters. Maybe this might even be useful to create chat bots eventually. We also noticed that this helps fill in gaps in the story and logic behind the surroundings.

Character Sheet:

Name
Surname
Job / Role
Current Title
Previous Job
Age
Gender
Ethnicity
Language Primary
Language Secondary
Occupation
Previous Occupation
Born
Affiliation
Family
Height
Weight
Likes
Dislikes
Background
Personality Keywords
Strengths
Weakness
Lie / Belief / Want
Need / Absolving
Speaking Style
Taboo Theme

Human Character Models & Animations

Since we never really made humans before, we are also getting more in touch with making characters, animations and pipelines around such elements. It was only a matter of time until we needed human characters and now is the time to dig into these topics. This leads also into more questions about how clothing is setup, how it could or could not be switched, how hair and eyes are being done and such things.

Zir Chat

We did a quick test out of curiosity with a chat AI based on GPT3.5, letting people chat with Zir on our Discord. This turned out to be very fun and working way better than expected, however the provider of the bot did not allow a lot of background story and it was very easy to change its behaviour by asking it to change itself, which allowed "hacking" it very easily. As a cause we removed it again, but we will definitely make Zir and more return as chat bots, hopefully with enough context to also give you in-depth info about game elements if possible.

Rocks & Vegetation

The new base is also an opportunity and starting point for our future workflows relating to terrain, vegetation and rocks. We never have worked much with vegetation before and were digging into the pipelines and workflows. It turns out that our prior experience suits this very well and we were getting some great results in short time, however there is still much to learn.

This is a mixture of existing scans but some of the vegetation was also hand modelled by us, sometimes down to the very leaf, sometimes based on textures, sometimes procedually placed, sometimes manually cut out. There is really a wide variety of workflows in such vegetation assets possible.

Here is a hand modeled plant leaf:

And a handmade palm as example, which turned out quite nice.

Rocks are traditionally sculpted or hand modelled, but we did a procedual generation of the big rock set, which is based on a voxel volume system, using a mixture of shaders and displacers in 3D space.
Here you can see the input shape and the final rock highpoly model:

Improved Future Pipelines

A bunch of work has been done on next-gening our asset creation pipelines. Our end goal is that you can just make a 3D model and have it automatically be UV mapped, pivot corrected, grouped, baked, textured and exported, while having an extreme reduction in textures used.

We are doing some solid progress on a pipeline using "Houdini", a 3D software which is often used to create such automations, and has already been helpful in creating some of the new assets, such as the huge rock formation seen below. This would require a lot of work to unwrap and optimize manually but the tedious steps could now be done in a couple clicks as example.

For the rocks, we created moss by scattering cubes, voxelizing them, and melting them together to form a moss on top of the rocks. Then in the end, a mixture of highly optimized plants are scattered on top of the rock, using around 20 different types, all using the same single texture.

3D Libraries? Times have changed

We are now in the times of "Megascans" and freely available asset libraries (and soon AI generated 3D art), however most people make the massive mistake of just loading a trillion of redundant different assets and bloating their project.

Generally we do hand create all our assets ourselves, but for something like vegetation that might be out of our league, so we have to work with third party assets at least partially for the first time.

Often you do see videos where people just throw in 100 different megascans assets in their scene and it looks all great. Behind the curtains this is a disaster. Often importing a single assetstore asset is in the hundreds of megabytes on import. A single construction worker we bought was larger than the entirety of Synthetik 1. Such things need to be treated with extreme care.

Plant example from a popular library.
Looks good at glance, however there is 90% redundancy in there. And these would be 16 different textures just for one flower. Combined there are like 50 pieces, but realistically you would need around 6. Such things can go exponentially wrong if unchecked. The same counts for textures. Libraries lull you with 100 of variations of rock, while in reality you need to find and make the 1 perfect one.

We think assets are the same as lets say classes. Each needs a defined role and has to be carefully selected and optimized. We very carefully hand pick everything and often pack similar things together in texture atlases. All assets are also highly packed, so we reduce the texture count from 5 to just 2 per asset. For the vegetation on top of the rocks we packed 10 different ones together, so this uses 2 textures, while the Naive approach would have 50 textures in the project just for this. In the time of AI and huge free libraries, being able to pick well is going to be more important than ever.

Unified, Next generation shader pipeline

We always had a history with using custom shader pipelines within Unity, and the past 7-8 years of making custom shaders in engine does really pay off. We started Synthetik 2 with a flexible master shader, which allows us to recolor and damage everything on the fly, however it still required some tranditional painting in softwares like Substance Painter and didn't look as detailed as it could, sometimes looking maybe too juicy or plastic looking.

It took many hours and iterations, we now have all the components of a great texturing job formalized and replicated in real-time in engine, so we now get amazing quality results, without having to do any texture painting at all. We are also able to fully change all colors or damage or material properties in real-time. Here is an example of the new next gen shader:

(Random video from latest discord stream)

We also employ new texture packing and made node groups which are resuable within shaders, so the new terrain shader, the new prop shader and the remade Unit shader all use the same textures, variables and nodes, making them a very unified pipeline. The rocks as seem before can use the same special texture from the ground layers to create new visual combinations as example. The best thing is that the new shaders require very few textures.

All in all, these new improved workflows make things easier to create, on much higher quality, with better performance and are easier to maintain and scale up.

Weapons

We do not have a big focus on weapons right now as we have a quite huge arsenal already, however the next upcoming weapon is our rendition of the prototype G11, in resistance style. The image is not the latest version but you get an impression of it. It will likely get a feature where active reload enables fully-automatic, while non active reload keeps it in burst mode.

We have also designed resistance faction units for the new base, such as a Osprey inspired aircraft, replacing the old helicopter, a main battle tank and a smaller utility vehicle.

Networking Infrastructure Changes

There are many networking changes in the works, we cannot talk too much about it, but it is a larger endeavor. In the end it should be easier to control and maintain, cost less and have better loading performance.

Lobby Changes

We are also taking the opportunity to change the Lobby behavior. We are adding something similar to a "party" where you will first join the party, then queue for the game, and you will also return to the party after the game, making the matchmaking experience much more streamlined.

You will see people in your party in your UI while inside the base of operations.
The class selection menu is also changed so you can see your party while changing your load-out.

Divine Loop Blessings

You asked for some reward from the Last Defender, and of course something was missing.
In the future, you will gain a choice of 2 divine blessings, similar to how a class evolution would work.
With the new blessings you can start more powerful into loop. There are 8 different blessings, all with simple but useful effects. Some offensive, some defensive, helping certain builds, or in this case, give you a new chance with a new weapon to switch things up.

Loop Challenges

This hasn't been started yet, but the plan is that every map in loop (after the first one) has a cycling challenge modifier. This modifier is always single effect with a very strong implication, so if you want to get far into loop, you need to beat different scenarios. These do not stack but rotate.
One map might have very weak shields, one have no possible healing, or extreme jamming, things that will challenge your entire load-out and build over the duration of the loop.

That's it!
Stay tuned for Update 16 and have fun!
Team FFG

Cinematic Artwork from Happygull

Original post

14 Feb 2024Developer post

U14 - ELECTRIFY - MEGA UPDATE

Hey everyone! Update 14 is out and it's huge! We improved so many things for this update, it's crazy. It started as a "spring cleaning" but then spiraled into a massive change for the game. Check it out on our patch page! Have fun! - Team FFG

22 Nov 2023Developer post

U13 - ATTACHED

Hey Everyone! Update 13 is here with many great improvements. Attachments got a big upgrade, the new Endscreen makes runs more rewarding, improved co-op, our first pet class and a ton of other changes . Make sure to check out the full notes! (The pet is attached to you, get it?)

28 Sep 2023Developer post

12.2

Hey everyone! We want to bring some more improvements at a faster pace, so here they are; Overhauled Weapon Variants Weapon variants got an iteration and many have been improved, reworked or otherwise. They should overall feel noticeably better and gives finding weapons a fresh n

Hey everyone!
We want to bring some more improvements at a faster pace, so here they are;

Overhauled Weapon Variants

Weapon variants got an iteration and many have been improved, reworked or otherwise.
They should overall feel noticeably better and gives finding weapons a fresh new touch.
You can also now see a short description on pickup for better usability.

- Overhauled SAT Police Forces variants
- Overhauled Machine Military Forces variants
- Overhauled Human Raiders variants
- Overhauled Human Defiance variants
- Overhauled Soviet Brotherhood variants
- Improved Redguard variants (more to come)

Overhauled Tutorial / Firing Range

The tutorial got many fixes and improvements.
We removed the obstacle course and added new things for testing and playing with the game mechanics. You can also call in enemy waves to test weapons and items, as well as go outdoors to test on respawning dummies. Overall the firing range should be much more interesting to test out mechanics and interactions, and offer a much better playground for learning and modding.

- New lore-conform android lab area
- Improved firing range
- Improved combat area
- Shops for testing
- Advanced combat area with attack waves
- Beach for chilling & high health dummies for testing

Coop Improvements

We did varied more coop improvements and fixes.
Dead players now can spectate
3 / 4 Player coop now has 15% faster shield delay
Improved server performance again
Fixed leaving the lobby breaking the lobby slots
Fixed loop having too many loop debuffs
Fixed being able to join a lobby while the game starts, breaking the lobby
Fixed weapon upgrades going above 4
~~Leaving a lobby now requries a prompt~~ Coming soon.
Varied networking or coop related code fixes and improvements.

Gameplay Improvements

Players now have explosion damage resistance (50% from neutral / Enemies, 25% from friendly)
Class Evolutions can no longer roll the same evolution in the same run
Enemy Foam wheel ammo 0.5 > 0.25x dmg
Added Riot Gear upgrade to tinkerer shop
Reduced maximum damage number size
New ability in testing for Eliminator: Mangler
Fixed Refractor Sphere damage resistance scaling above 70%

Weapon tweaks

LR300 now starts with 60>90 ammo, pickup 60>75
LG3 heat increased from 1>1.1
Devastator kit now increases it's spare ammo by 4% per room
PSR2000 Ninata now has a new perk
Judgement now has a new perk, recoil slightly reduced
Road Warrior slight model adjustment

New Map

We added one new map for the last area of the police academy with a garden theme.

Controller Improvements

Added controller sensitivity setting
Reworked settings drop down menus
Buttons in ingame pause and weapon menu work properly again
Buttons no longer reset the selection positioning when pressed
Removed double binding of the weapon menu

Other Improvements

Removed content ID track from main menu
Improved some weapon models
Improved stat displays in varied areas
Loading the game no longer resets XP back to the previous saved state
Action recieved now supports categories
Fixed how flat damage, flat weakpoint damage, flat backstab damage applied
Tweaked afternoon lighting theme in Police Training Areas
Reduces impact effects on larger enemies which were overblown
Fixed Black Screens in loop
Varied 21:9 Adjustments

Starting Issue:

We Changed something about the starting of the game which might circumvent the starting issue some people are experiencing on the latest engine version, let us know. Otherwise please use the fix as described here on the forum pinned thread.

Edit: Known issue:

Elites don't drop upgradekills if they are stunned when killed

Have fun!
- Team FFG

Original post

12 Sep 2023Developer post

12.1

Hey everyone! We are very glad about the super positive reception of U12 and want to quickly follow up with some more improvements. NEW Weapon: AMD-65 The new AMD-65 is a hard hitting common assault rifle with brutal recoil and bleeding ammunition. NEW Weapon: RRX Coil Gun The cl

Hey everyone! We are very glad about the super positive reception of U12 and want to quickly follow up with some more improvements.

NEW Weapon: AMD-65

The new AMD-65 is a hard hitting common assault rifle with brutal recoil and bleeding ammunition.

NEW Weapon: RRX Coil Gun

The classic coil gun is a fast firing and accurate shotgun with powerful charged shot stacks.

NEW Item: Roundhouse Boots

Do the famed roundhouse kick with the roundhouse boots. Applies shock combos aswell.

NEW Shop: Weapon Upgrade Workbench

A new workbench with 3 strong weapon upgrade choices can appear in the late-game.

NEW Wall Oil Splats

Using the power of 3D, hitting enemies now can cause oil splats on the walls!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Online Coop

Server Performance / Desync

We made various improvements to server performance.
These changes aim to address the "desync" issues (invisible enemies, shop malfunctions, game breaking entirely, etc.). We need your feedback to determine if these changes resolve any issues you've experienced.

We continue to work on improving performance, but it's challenging to gauge the impact without your input since we cannot reproduce such problems in-house.

Other

- In testing: new region selection when opening lobbies.
- Dropping items no longer resets cooldowns.
- Fixed lobby ready button mismatching the player.
- Various minor improvements.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gameplay

Upgrades

Item and ability rarities have been adjusted. This results in healing abilities and items costing less to upgrade compared to other abilities. This change offers more choices in determining which items to upgrade, thus presenting players with more strategic options.

Loot

Further improvements to item and weapon shop rarities and some costs have been adjusted to be more logical. Varied costs are reduced a bit, but epics in the uncommon weapon shop now cost 200 more, highlighting the uncommon items.
Fixed the issue of the uncommon item shop having items of too low rarity.
Corrected the bug where scavenging yielded an excessive number of upgrade kits. We are still monitoring this.

Loop

Loop enemy movement speed reduced from 50% bonus to 30% bonus.
Loop armor bonus decreased from 40% to 20%.
Fixed the issue of players not receiving the loop debuff.
Further loop improvements and additional loot are planned for the near future.

Map Icons

New icons for weapon chests, item chests, players, pickups.

Shops

Variant Override added to the tinkerer shop.
Weapon tuning now provides +1 upgrade kit.
Mystery trader's power has been significantly increased.
Dodgy pills and Titanium legs have been upgraded to epic tier.
Grenade arm now also boosts ejection speed.
Chaos Technology Insertion now grants 2 perks.
Fixed issues with Ammo Refit.

New Greater Weapon Upgrade Workbench

A new workbench with 3 strong weapon upgrade choices can appear in the late-game.

Items

Twin link has been reworked.
Cryo Cannon is now automatically triggered.
Various fixes and improvements to the Shield Dome.

Classes

Chrono Interceptor: Fixed and enhanced various evolutions.
Power Kick/Breaching Kick now reduces damage taken by 50% during the kick.
Riotguard Crisis Medical Kit: Removed acid shot to prevent friendly fire, added handgun benefits.
Fixed the issue with the nano launcher restoring 3 shots instead of 0 upon ammo pickup; it now restores 1 shot (currently in testing).
Blockade Breaker cooldown reduced from 14s to 12s.
Guillotine now accumulates 2 stacks in games with 3 or more players.
Guillotine ejection speed bonus reduced from 40% to 25%.
Guillotine now grants a 5% passive speed bonus.
Sniper speed adjustment changed from -10% to -5%.
Smoke Discharge now also affects the main player.
Various improvements to Demolisher abilities and kits.
Dragon's Masterkey is now correctly classified as a specialization ability.
Damage for certain burning effects increased from 50 to 100 (includes Masterkey, Plasma grenade, among others).
Protector's Badge now additionally provides 10 armor; duration clarified.
Visual effects reduced on Nitro Methadone.
Negative effects of Blade Reflect no longer scale.

Weapons

Harpoon now stuns for 2 seconds and offers AOE suppression.
Enhancements made to the breaching shotgun's point-blank perk.
Squad-9 carbine received improvements and a new perk.
Acid Pistol ammo damage reduced from 0.5 to 0.3 due to new stacking mechanics.
Updated Tokko and C80, LR-400 visuals

Environments

Numerous improvements.
Introduced a new alternative style for the cooling floor.
Added a loop style for the cooling floor.
Removed traps in Cooling Chambers to optimize enemy pathing.

Enemies

Several improvements to arena masters.
Dogs have been refined: they now have appropriate visual effects, are slowed after one hit, and deal 40% reduced health damage afterwards for 3 seconds.
Multiple adjustments to enemy specs and attributes for better balance and gameplay.
Improved enemy impact animations.
Reduced certain oil effects upon impact.
Fixed the issue where shields dropped by shielded enemies lacked collision.

Other

Improved visuals for the bleeding effect.
Reduced gunshot sound intensity.
Reworked Acid debuff:
Can stack up to 2 times.
Offers up to -30/-60% armor reduction.
Fixed Chinese language showing wrong letters on class evolution.
Fixed other languages having certain wrong colors for UI elements.

Engine Minor Update / Game Start Issue

We updated from 2022.3.6 to 2022.3.9, which might or might not fix some engine issues people are having on Integrated GPUs / GPUs below minimum requirements where the game does not start. Let us know if things work better now.

Known issues:

The end boss appears twice.
Oil splats can appear on players.
AMD65 ammo says it has 20% bleed chance, which is 30%
Certain particles have a wrong setting, making them look boxy

Modders, take note: stuns and root results can now only target the user, similar to the modify stat action. To target others, create an action or use our existing stun actions.

Patchnotes of the U12 hotfix in case you missed them: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1471410/discussions/0/3819669865031720617/

We are following up with another update by the end of the month.
Have fun! - Team FFG

Original post

Updates & announcements

🔶 Gameplay

LS30 Blackout

L8 Squad-LMG

ANH-8 Annihilator

🔶 Mods in Co-Op are live!

🔶 Editor Overhaul

🔶 Asset Importing

🔶 UX

🔶 Co-Op / Networking

🔶 Fixes

🔶 Enhanced Handguns

P33 Compact

X500 Ion Pistol

CR-18

RX0 Coil Pistol

Shooty

Kaida Model H

P78H Fusion

SK-9

X3 Subsonic

Revolvers / Other

🔶 Misc

🔶 Fixes

🔶 Networking

🔶 New: Iron Fortress

🔶 UX

🔶 Gameplay

Quality of Life

Environments

Other

🔶 Networking

Second reliability layer

Smoother movement on bad connections

🔶 Oil Splats

🔶 Performance

🔶 Spring Cleaning

Core Fixes

🔶 UX

🔶 Weapons

General

Weapon Balance Changes

Weapon Fixes

🔧 Attachments

🟢 Healing Display

🔶 Items

🧬 Classes

Machine Hunter

Recon Sniper

🔶 Engineer

🔶 Entities

🔶Highlights:

🔶 Weapon Balance

🔶 Attachment Balance

Other Gameplay:

🔶 Class Prestige (Beta)

⮩ Surge Mechanic

⮩ Loadout

⮩ Class Kits

⮩ Try it yourself!

🔶Quality of Life

🔶Performance

⮩ Binary Serialization

⮩ Contact Shadows (Experimental)

🔶Achievements

🔶Tons of Fixes

🔶Work in Progress

🔶 General Fixes

🔶 UI & Visuals

🔶 Campaign

🔶 Balancing Changes

🔶 Variant Changes

🔶 Weapon Attachments V3

⮩ Big Attachment Improvements

⮩ More Interactions

⮩ Better Starters

🔶 Synergy Items

⮩ Flexible Healing Item / +1 Item Slot

🔶 Network Prediction Upgrade

🔶 Steam Peer-To-Peer (P2P)