This update rebuilds the charge attack around one button, rebalances every aircraft's primary fire with measured data, and fixes a long list of things that were drawn in the wrong place — boss warning markers, the charge ring, the boss HP bar, and where enemies actually aim.

One-Button Charge

• Primary fire is automatic. You no longer hold the fire button to shoot.
• The fire button is now the charge button (Z / Space / pad A). Hold to charge, release to fire. The old charge key (X / pad square) still works.
• Primary fire continues at 100% while charging. Charging used to stop your shots completely, which made it a damage loss.
• A short tap fires Level 1 immediately as long as you have gauge.
• Pressing without enough gauge now plays a deny sound and flashes the gauge red instead of doing nothing.
• Auto-fire can be switched off in Options to restore the old scheme. A one-time notice explains the change on first run.

Charging Feedback

• An aura surrounds your ship, colored by level: grey while building, cyan at Lv1, orange at Lv2, magenta at Lv3 — pulsing faster and brighter as it rises.
• A progress ring shows how far you are from the next level, and locks full when your gauge cannot reach it.
• Reaching Lv3 triggers a white flash ring, sparks, a short screen shake and controller rumble.
• New audio: a charge loop that rises in pitch per level, plus three level-reached chimes.
• Gauge blocks, level text, aura, progress ring and release effects now all share one color language. Level text reads "CHARGE 1 / 2 / 3" in all 7 languages.

Release Feedback — Levels Now Feel Different

• Lv1: light shake, short rumble, quiet release sound.
• Lv2: stronger shake plus a low-frequency rumble, 0.03s hitstop, orange screen edges, louder sound.
• Lv3: strongest shake, 0.08s hitstop, full white flash, longest rumble, loudest release sound with added sub-bass, and a large centered popup.
• Each aircraft's own charge sound now drops in pitch and gains volume with level, with a tail at Lv3.
• The shared release sound is now split per level — previously Lv3 was actually quieter than Lv1.
• Screen flashes respect the "show flash" accessibility option.

Per-aircraft reinforcement

• IronBird — shockwave takes the level color; Lv3 scatters gold shards from every bullet it clears.
• Vanguard — rail beam widens 1.0 / 1.3 / 1.8x; Lv3 ends with a shockwave.
• Hornet — drone trails take the level color; Lv3 adds a blast per drone.
• Spectre — a ring shows how much invulnerability is left and blinks before it ends; Lv3 fires 1.5x larger bullets.
• Apollo — blast radius now varies per level (2.4 / 2.7 / 3.2) and some bombs home toward the nearest enemy.
• Titan — Lv3 pulse clears enemy bullets in range.

Charge Balance — Holding Longer Now Pays Off

Damage per gauge now increases with every level on every aircraft, measured with a new in-game bot tool.

• IronBird 100 / 240 / 450 (was 100 / 120 / 140 — higher levels were a loss)
• Falcon 133 / 333 / 719
• Rayce 150 / 330 / 600
• Vanguard 250 / 700 / 1280 — beam 4.0s, invulnerability capped at 3s
• Hornet 80 / 320 / 600 — 40 / 80 / 150 per drone, Lv1 spends only half the swarm
• Bastion 250 / 600 / 1125 — invulnerability 10.5s to 3s, compensated with damage
• Spectre 120 / 330 / 720 — invulnerability 1.5 / 2.0 / 2.5s, and it now clears bullets that touch you
• Apollo 100 / 325 / 750
• Prism 112 / 288 / 600
• Titan 80 / 200 / 400 — pulse multiplier 1.0 / 2.5 / 5.0

• Charge invulnerability is capped at 3 seconds across the board.
• Hornet drone damage and Titan pulse damage were ignoring their configured values entirely. Both are now applied.

Charge Gauge — 30 / 60 / 100

• Charge levels now unlock at 30% / 60% / 100% gauge, and the three gauge blocks are drawn at exactly those widths. The middle block used to be half the width of the others because the thresholds were 40 / 60 / 100.
• Every aircraft now reaches each level at the same point. Rayce, Vanguard, Prism and Titan needed more gauge than the markings showed, so their charge was quietly more expensive. Their Lv1 and Lv2 costs are now in line with the rest — a straight buff for those four.
• Your first charge is available sooner (30% instead of 40%).

Primary Fire Rebalance

Every aircraft's primary fire was measured against a single target and against a group, at every shot level.

• Vanguard — movement lock fixed. Each shot locked your movement for 0.5s. With automatic fire that meant you could not move at all from shot level 2 onward. The lock now scales with fire rate, so you always keep roughly half your movement while firing.
• Upgrades now apply to every aircraft. Vanguard's column, Prism's chain lightning and Apollo's rocket blast never received the hangar weapon upgrade or cosmic power damage bonuses. All player damage now runs through one path.
• Three cosmic power effects did nothing. The critical system's damage bonus, the boss damage bonus and the explosion damage bonus were calculated but never applied. The critical system's extra shot also skipped Apollo, Bastion, Hornet and Vanguard entirely.
• Shot level 4 was dead weight for two aircraft. Titan stopped gaining bullets at level 3 and Hornet stopped gaining drones. Titan now fires its fourth bullet; Hornet fields 10 drones at level 4.
• Falcon bullet damage reduced 20% — it led both single-target and group damage with no drawback.
• Apollo rockets deal 1.8x damage to a target they hit directly, and blasts now benefit from explosion bonuses. Single-target output nearly doubled.
• Rayce bullets now pierce — 2 enemies at shot level 1-2, 3 enemies at level 3-4.

Enemies Now Aim at Your Ship

• Aimed shots, homing bullets and tracking attacks were targeting a point slightly below your hitbox — for IronBird and Spectre, almost exactly its bottom edge. 107 targeting points across every enemy and boss now use the ship's true center.
• Aimed attacks are therefore genuinely accurate now, so expect those patterns to be a little tighter than before, especially on IronBird.

Boss Warning Markers — 22 Fixes

Warning markers were drawn at the wrong size or place on many boss attacks, so the danger zone you saw was not the zone that actually hurt you. Damage values and warning times are unchanged; only the markers were corrected.

• Vanguard Titan — crossfire quadrants and turret strikes drew at one eighth of their real size. Dangerous quadrants now fill properly and explode at the same size the instant the marker disappears.
• Aegis Overlord — the judgment cross was a third of its real width.
• King Gravity Well — the event horizon blast reached twice as far as the marker showed. Outside the circle is now genuinely safe.
• Storm Herald, Void Ascendant, Gravity Warden — storm convergence, annihilation and singularity had no danger marker at all; their kill zones are now shown.
• Gravity Warden — stellar erosion detonated with no warning; it now telegraphs each blast.
• King Iron Veil — the left and right danger bands of fortress lockdown were never displayed.
• King Storm Caller — safe circles were half their real size and did not follow the boss.
• Shield Crusher — the rotating beam swept through its own "safe" arc. It now leaves that arc clear.
• Marker sizes were also corrected for Judgment Omega, King Mirror Shade, Phantom Colossus, Stellar Devastator, Eclipse Engine, Twin Serpent, King Silent Fang, Crystal Sovereign, Railstorm Nemesis and Fortress Prime.

Interface

• Every boss callout now appears in one place — a dedicated band under the boss name at the top of the screen. Boss arrivals, phase transitions and attack names used to flash in the middle of the bullet storm in red, fading from the first frame, under 0.7s in total. They now hold on a dark plate at a smaller size, and never stack on top of each other.
• The boss HP bar and alert band no longer overlap the side panels in non-16:9 windows.
• Blackhole encounters rebuilt. The choices were pushed to the right, spilling past the play area while the left third sat empty, and the NPC portrait was hidden behind the dim overlay two seconds after arriving. The NPC now stays on screen with a name plate on the left, with the offer and choices on the right. Option cards size themselves to their text instead of leaving a hollow gap.
• Panel borders no longer lose a side. On any window that is not 16:9, one edge of a framed panel could round away to nothing.
• Notifications no longer cover the menus. Popups triggered inside the route map, shop or reward screens froze in the middle of the screen and stayed there until the game resumed, sitting on top of the buttons underneath. They now appear one at a time in a band along the bottom.
• The unlock screen was missing its artwork. The aircraft image never loaded, the screen behind it was never dimmed, and a black box sat in the middle of the panel. All three are fixed, and the panel no longer crowds the aircraft name.
• New title screen — a drifting digital fog of glyphs with readable fragments surfacing out of it, replacing the horizontal code stream.
• First launch now starts borderless at your monitor's resolution instead of a 1280x720 window. Existing settings are untouched.
• New option: show hitbox — marks the exact point where your ship can be hit. Off by default.
• Blackhole encounter prompts are localized in all 7 languages and show your actual bound keys instead of a hardcoded "Z / X".

Controls

• Space can now be bound to fire or charge. It was silently rejected in the key settings.
• Long key names no longer overflow the control hint in the side panel — they are shortened (LEFT SHIFT reads as L.SHIFT) and shrink to fit.
• The D-pad now moves your ship. Only the left stick was read before.

Visual Alignment

• The charge ring and aura were centered on a point below your ship instead of on the ship itself. Fixed, along with 8 other player-centered effects: death explosion and debris, orbit ring and guardian ring sub-units, surge core shockwave, repair unit beam, graze text, the charge blast hit area, and cosmic power effects.

Other Fixes

• On-screen popups now actually appear. Power-up pickups, cosmic power activations, stage clear, anomaly results and sub-unit picks were never being shown at all.
• Charge levels now account for the gauge each level actually costs. A failed release no longer plays effects or triggers passives and sub-unit charges.
• Titan Lv3 is no longer worse than Lv1 and Lv2.
• Rayce dash damage against boss parts no longer depends on frame rate.
• Vanguard beam now ticks 10 times per second as intended, instead of about 8.6.
• Hornet no longer spends gauge when it has no drones or no target.
• Charge hitstop now respects pause.
• Your ship stops firing when an event begins. Shots fired during the hangar docking sequence froze on screen and stayed there for the whole visit. Entering the hangar, shop, anomaly, blackhole or treasure now holds your fire and clears any shots still in the air.
• A boss that failed its death sequence could leave a stage unfinishable. A watchdog now ends the fight.
• Aircraft descriptions were corrected in all 7 languages to match what the weapons actually do.