For a long time, you've stolen shiny looking Blueprints on your heists into corporate territory. These manufacturing matrices are infused with printing nano, capable of being processed by a NanoForge - the giant nano-3D-printer of 2200s - to fabricate high technology devices to the molecular level. All you need is some Nano-Bearing Substrate Cubes - large plastic gallons filled with blue, red or gold pellets - to dump into your loud, power-hungry and nanite-dust-puking NanoFab.
With major milestone NANOFAB, we've unlocked a new Safehouse room that shares the name and grants the ability to craft your Blueprints into real live weapons, weapon mods, armor and items. And the loot tables are massively updated, pouring Blueprints and NBS Cubes into your heists - adding over 10 new items, 50 new Armors, 150 Weapon Mods and 50 new Weapons through Blueprints for the mid-to-late game.
Our Early Access roadmap is on fire 🔥🔥🔥 ... Head Hunters are next! 🔥🔥🔥 If you like the pace of updates and improvements and the continued expansion of the game, please leave a review!
NanoFab Room
NanoFab crafting is not cheap or easy and most Knights will not start on it early in their career. Powerful blueprints are hard to find, you need a steady supply of NBS cubes and all of this costs credits. But once you've got a few million under your belt and you're ready, convert one of those toxic waste dumps in your Safehouse into a shiny new NanoFab.
For those Knights riding the edge for long and dangerous careers in the NBZ, the proc-gen mission system and the NanoFab crafting system mix together to help extend the fun, depth and options of your career. The extended ramp of your own equipment power will allow us to further extend the difficulty ramp on missions in the future and redefine what perfecting your team means with late-game gear.
Ongoing Balance and Contact Services
NanoFab crafting is a major new feature we're excited to splashdown in the New Boston zone. If you look at the continuum of equipment in the game, your Contacts and their services start at the bottom with Power Level 1 and 2 services and can currently stretch up to Power Level 4. Blueprint crafting picks up around Power Level 3 and can stretch to Power Level 6.
There is a lot of ongoing balance work to ensure that the two systems stretch together and each stays relevant through the right part of the game. Our work is not done here, it is just starting. Crafting is a big weight on one side of the scale that will - for a time - throw things off balance. We'll be making some big steps to bring the city back into balance over the next month as Contacts expand service offerings, can Limit Break into new services altogether and more stories are added that help them expand and alter their offerings to keep up with new Blueprint goodness.
Craft 'em
Each NanoFab can support up to 5 crafting benches once fully upgraded. Each bench can perform a single crafting operation and is built by type - Weapon, Weapon Mod, Armor and Item. Once your bench is constructed, you can start to create your equipment with the Blueprint, money and NBS Cubes required.
Each type of crafting allows for some different rules, and some allow for supplemental blueprints to be added:
- Item and Weapon Mod crafting are the simplest. You need money, Cubes and the Blueprints and each crafting run produces a clean result of the equipment.
- For Armor, you can use a supplemental Blueprint - a second Armor Blueprint - to merge the nanoproperties of the armors together to create unique and powerful combinations, push Evasion bonuses onto Heavy Armor, push HP bonuses on to Stealth armor and more. In addition, using Gold Cubes in crafting increases the chance that a random Intrinsic booster effect will be crafted into the Armor, making it even more resilient.
- Weapons are the most complicated of crafts. You can craft a weapon blueprint without any supplements, or you can include up to 4 supplemental blueprints. You may include blueprints for real Weapon Mod Blueprints (like a Sniper Rifle Scope) which become fused to the weapon permanently (can never detach) but grant a chance of rolling a random Intrinsic booster effect for each Weapon Mod fused. Or you can supplement with a new type of Intrinsic Blueprint you will find out on your heists that just adds to the weapon's stats without fusing to any slot but lacks the extra roll for an Intrinsic booster.
We've included helpful instructions below the crafting plan screen for each type individually to guide your crafting adventures and we're excited to hear your feedback!
Or Sell 'em
Over the last few updates, we've buffed up the ranks of Contacts interested in buying your blueprints, so if you aren't ready or don't want to craft a blueprint, sell it! You won't make extra money crafting a blueprint to get the real item and then selling the real item; you're better off selling the blueprint.
Improved Matrix Balance
With this update, we're continuing to address issues with how the Matrix Q-Sec selects its Escalations. We found and fixed a bug that was feeding the Q-Sec Tally (a large number, like 25) into the selection process, and was therefore ignoring all the cards that shouldn't execute below a certain Q-Sec Level (like 4). Anyway - the result is good, Q-Sec Escalation actions like Wake Global IC no longer appear before Q-Sec Level 4, and about 50% of the Q-Sec Escalations only turn on as you progress through Q-Sec 1-3.
We've also made a minor adjustment to the HP for IC at higher Power Levels. This won't be a huge change for your hackers, but HP has been reduced 10-20% as the IC ramp up to Power Level 10.
As always, please let us know what you think!
Improved Enemy Talents
Enemy types - as in: distinct, cool and functionally different - hinge massively on their Talents and equipment choices. As we march into summer we are working on a wide variety of new enemy capabilities and types for the game.
With this update we've added new Talents to allow enemies to heal themselves and repair their own armor. This can help put pressure on taking out tough enemies, who if you don't finish off quickly or take them down by surprise, may get themselves back on their feet with a medkit or a patch kit.
Some enemy corporate captains, Brave Star captains and some of Brave Star's infantry drones have these healing and patching capabilities. So don't waste time when taking out these leaders; their high armor and HP values make them difficult to bring down already but now they are even more of a priority target.
Improved Timeline Stopping
We've fixed some issues with how the timeline might stop if there are interrupting events. This should prevent things like a dialog and a Hype Limit Break from appearing at the same time. It also fixes an issue where sometimes a mission wouldn't warn that it was about to expire if it was in a certain configuration or timeline events, or another mission had recently warned.
v1.8.1 - 7/8/2024
- New Safehouse Room NanoFab allows creation of up to 5 crafting benches
- Crafting benches take Blueprint, money and NBS Cubes to create resulting item
- Combine Blueprints from Weapons and Weapon Mods or multiple Armors to create completely unique results
- Added over 300 new items, weapons, mods and armors to the game via Blueprints
- Blueprints range from Power Level 1 to 6; Contact services will be expanding to catch up soon
- Improved Talents for corporate captains, corporate infantry drones, Brave Star faction
- Some enemies now capable of using medkits to heal themselves, others using Patch-X kits to restore Armor Protection
- Fixed Matrix Q-Sec Escalations were not using their minimum Q-Sec Level limits correctly; Global IC now only appears at 4+
- Small adjustment for balance for high Power Level IC, reduced their HP by 10-20%
- Improved Safehouse timeline timing and pausing around pop-up events; preventing Dialog and Limit Breaks at the same time
- Fixed issue with Safehouse timeline mission expiration warnings not always working
- Fixed formatting issues with over use of "When Matrix Hacking," in class tree and other places