StarFrame Update — July 25, 2026

25 Jul 2026Developer post

💎 Rigs — Full Rework

Every rig now rolls its own stats when you study it. Two rigs of the same tier are no longer the same item — each one is rolled per instance, so what you pull out of a cache is genuinely yours.
Tier decides HOW MANY stats you get, not how big they are. A Verdant rolls 1 stat, an Amber 2, a Cinder 3 — and never the same stat twice on one rig.
The tier brackets overlap on purpose. Weapon damage rolls +6–12% on a Verdant, +10–16% on an Amber, +14–20% on a Cinder — so a lucky Verdant can beat a poor Amber on any single line. The higher tier buys you more lines, not a guaranteed bigger number.
Rigs drop UNIDENTIFIED. You know the quality band and nothing else. Dock at a real station, open STATION SERVICES → STUDY, and studying it rolls what it actually does. Selling one un-studied is a gamble both ways.
Rigs survive your ship. If you're destroyed, every fitted rig goes into your wreck — and it loots straight out, with no salvager needed and no salvage cycle to run. Get back to the wreck and they're still the same rolled rigs.
Every ship you can fly has a Rig slot. One per hull, across the whole roster.

Party rifts work. The MULTIPLAYER option previously did nothing at all on a Faded key — it lit up, took the click, and sent nothing. Faded and Charged runs now open for groups properly.
Party size is 2–5, and the deepest strata are party-only. Enemy counts scale with how many of you actually enter, so a five-man run is meaningfully heavier than a three-man one.
Only the pilots near you come with you. Using a key at the gate takes the party members inside a 10 km perimeter — no more being pulled into a sealed pocket from across the system without warning.
Clearing a rift now pays out. Each surviving participant gets their own reserved cache at the end — nobody can take yours, and you don't have to race for it. It always contains salvage components a rung above what the rift's own enemies drop, and has a chance of an unidentified rig matching the key you opened with.
You have to finish it to be paid. The cache goes to participants who are still alive and in their own ship when the rift completes. Podded or gone means no cache.
Wrecks inside rifts are lootable. They never were — every attempt answered "Nothing to loot here" no matter what was floating in front of you.
The game tells you why a rift refused you. Wrong key tier, security too low, wrong party size, out of range, already in a rift — all of it used to fail completely silently.

Finishing the tutorial now earns you a ship blueprint. Pick a career at graduation and claim the first frame of that line — the Burrow I, the Talon I, or the Wraith I. One per account.
Three careers instead of four. Support and Exploration are now one path: the exploration kit needs two Support slots and the Wraith is the only frame that has them, so they were never really separate choices.
The tutorial stays in high-security space. It no longer starts or resumes somewhere it can't be finished — a faction-warfare arena has no station, which quietly made half the run impossible.
Lost your ship at the pirate camps? You get a replacement. The one-time relief kit no longer refuses you because you happen to own another ship parked somewhere else.

Fixed the tutorial being impossible to complete. The mining targets had drifted out of step with what the build order actually needed, so the ore goals could go green while the refining goal stayed permanently out of reach.
Fixed cache hacks failing silently. A refused hack now tells you the reason instead of simply doing nothing.
Fixed the pirate-camp reinforcement call. READY — NEXT WAVE was aimed at the wrong camp and the request was dropped without a word.

Tutorial combat lesson corrected: against pirates your rounds hit whatever they pass through — the lock requirement is player-versus-player only.
Tutorial power lesson corrected: each of ENG / WEP / SYS now states what it costs you as well as what it gives.
Free look is now taught before your first fight — hold right mouse to hold your heading and aim anywhere, including behind you.

Restart Steam to pick up the update. Pilots still on the previous client will not see the new rift and cache refusal messages until they do.