Knights and mercs, we've got another screaming hot update touching down in the New Boston Zone! Update #252 adds a introductory slide show to help set the lore context for your team, improves enemy agent ability to follow through on security events, rebuilds Dade to be much better, adds a Withdraw button to immediately fail a mission, improves some Traits, adds Face Handling Attribute effects (+Team XP and Stress Res), and fixes a metric ton of community suggestions and F10s!
If you have enjoyed the progress on the game during Early Access and our small team's relentless pace of updates, please take a moment to drop a review!
Thanks to @AlphaFox Discord for providing the screenshot for the update tonight through the community Photomode event.
New Game Slides
To help better tell the starting story of your team and to give new players a better sense of their place in the world and what it means to become a Cyber Knight, we've added a set of 6 introductory slides before the start of every New Game. We hope you like them, that is all.
You can easily skip and turn these off, skip them, or hit space to move through them faster - lots of options for veteran players who don't want to see them every time (also see Options > Gameplay > Tutorial and Intro to change it manually).
Better Enemy Agent Follow-Through
After the High-Stakes Heist update a few updates back where the AI security/stealth game got a lot better, we've still been hunting a few last issues. We've closed one of the most important ones tonight - vastly increasing the enemy agent's ability to pursue a security event across longer distances. In the past, if the event was far enough away, they'd usually quit moving toward it after 1 to 2 Turns and start to hunt locally. This reduced pressure on the action point of the event, on your team to keep moving, and reduced the chance that a body would be found, etc.
With Update #252, unless they are interrupted, the enemy agent will move all the way until they are near the event before starting to hunt around. This is a great boon for anyone using security events to distract enemies (Prank or just leaving a trail of events to throw them off) but also more pressure for everyone trying to avoid being seen.
Also, just more fun and immersive, as an agent might cross the map, chatting to other agents as they go and warning them of their Suspicions.
Dade Retooled
We've completed a project to rebalance and improve the starting Hacker, who starts as "Dade" in default games. In all games, your starting Hacker (be it Dade or your own designed character) will have an upgraded backstory Trait "Digital Thief Ex-Con" that now comes with better bonuses (+HP instead of -HP) and a set of specific Hacking bonuses.
In addition, any new starting Hacker who is created after Update #252 will have a Digital Rush Trait along with the Calm Trait, giving them even more Hacking-focused bonuses while still keeping them as a more combat-viable Hacker option than you're likely to find elsewhere (+HP, Ignore Recoil, Stress Res).
Withdraw from Heist
With Update #252, we have added a new option for aborting and throwing in the towel on missions that are going to be a loss. Instead of forcing you to duke it out with your enemies until your entire team is dead, you can now use the Withdraw button in the pause menu to declare defeat and immediately drop out of the level. Of course, there are other ways to achieve this as well with restart turn, level and restoring to the safehouse before the mission so you don't take a loss.
Face's Handling
We have wrapped up the missing bonuses for the Face's Handling Attribute. This team-focused Attribute now adds XP bonus % for the entire team as well as Stress Res % for the entire team.
We've also fixed all the Attribute icons in the Face's class tree and ensured that the face will trigger a "Training" tag on the Roster in the main Safehouse view.
Load Game Turns / High / Low
With Update #252, we've improved the load game UI to always show the exact Game Turn. Each Turn is 6 hours, so 4 Turns is a day. The game date (like May 26, 2231) is still shown but the turn is included now as well to make comparison of slots easier and faster. We've also fixed all reported bugs with the Highest and Lowest markings to ensure they are useful for their original purpose.
Mission Cleanups
With Update #252, we've hit a couple important mission issues - first up we've fixed Fadelight Blades mission that was always reporting you didn't find the valuable loot files -
Next up, we fixed Meteoric Hotdrop to correctly show that there is no hacking in this multi-stage mission -
And finally, we fixed Face's Handpicked Talent to work with recruits like the Eleventh Hour Scourage.
F10s by the Oodles
We also just fixed over 100 user F10s with this update. Many were small map changes, typos, little Talent description updates and more. We're working hard to improve the game on every single piece of feedback you send in so thank you! Check the changelog for the big list of changes.
And remember to drop a review to tell a friend about our hard work.
v1.10.69 - Update #252: - 5/25/2025
- Added short introductory slide show before New Game to help set context (easy to skip/disable)
- Improved enemy agent ability to follow through on a far away security order, will get closer before hunting
- Rebuilt Dade's Traits Digital Thief Ex-Con (adds HP, Matrix Dmg, Deck Armor) and Digital Rush (now granting more Matrix AP as well as IO)
- Added withdraw button to ESC menu - immediately forfeit any mission and take a loss
- Increased Stress Res granted by Calm Trait at each level (1-4), boosted Endurance Trained Trait to include +HP
- Finished Face Handling Attribute effects - adding to Mission XP and Stress Res for entire team
- Fixed class node icons for Face to match their icons (Cunning, Persuasion, Handling)
- Updated load game list to directly include game turn number to help improve clarity
- Fixed Highest and Lowest Turn notes on load game lists being incorrect (only considers Game Time/Turn now)
- Fixed bug with Eleventh Hour recruit and a few other recruits who were not getting the Face's Handpicked Bonus
- Fixed issue with Fadelight stolen Faked Citizenship Files always failing to be counted in mission victory
- Fixed bug with Meteoric Hotdrop mission incorrectly showing tags that it had hacking optional
- Improved dialog in some of the legwork stories
- Renamed Neural Accelerator to Synaptic Accelerator for entire cyberware line
- Further down-balanced Eleventh Hour, swapping 2 Long-Range Cameras for regular Cameras
- Fixed bug where Face would not trigger the "Training" tag on the safehouse Roster tag list
- Fixed bug with Eleventh Hour if restored mid-mission after update 1.10.67
- Fixed bug with enemy agent sometimes getting stuck in an elevator