New — Challenge Rooms
Every generated world now hides 24 challenge gates — amber rifts you'll find tucked into ship sections and grounded zones. Fly (or walk) into one and you're warped into a hand-built arena with its own rules.
12 ship rooms and 12 on-foot rooms, each placed exactly once per world, in a different spot every time.
Three kinds of trial: destroy everything, collect every orb, or reach the exit. Some are on a clock. Two are one-hit.
Clear a gate for a Skill Point or a Module Point, once per gate. Replays are free.
Dying restarts you at the start pad with full health — no death penalty, no lost orbs. Time up? The room executes you. Same restart.
Want out? Step off the start pad, step back on and hold. You return to the gate you came in through with the health you had when you entered.
Orbs collected inside a room stay inside the room — they never feed your level.
The map only shows gates you've found (or all of them once you hold the zone map). Cleared gates seal green.
The ship rooms: Extermination, Orb Rush, Gauntlet Run, Crossfire, Event Horizon, Asteroid Belt, Spawner Nest, Lattice, Boss Rush, Blackout, Cargo Sweep, Razor Storm.
On foot: Pit Fight, The Needle, Boarding Action, Vent Run, Spore Garden, Salvage Yard, Bike Run, Shield Wall, Borer Nest, The Long Dark, Titan's Forge, Pylon Yard.
New — Grounded bosses and Echoes
Eight multi-stage on-foot bosses, each in its own arena: Smelter Titan, Aegis Warden, Conduit Nexus, Hull Render, Brood Matron, Singularity Priest, The Maw, Phase Stalker. Every grounded section rolls two of them.
Each boss drops an Echo on its first defeat — a new on-foot collectable, the human counterweight to the Vey shards, with its own memorial wall.
New — On-foot elites and Hunters
Six health-barred elites now roam normal grounded levels: Ramhorn (corridor charger), Bombard Walker (artillery tripod), Pavise Sergeant (tower shield, hastens its friends), Gloom Tender (healer — cut its tendrils first), Deck Borer (hunts by tremor), Pylon Shepherd (shock fences).
Three Hunters that come looking for you: The Shrike (mines in its wake), The Chorus (tethered drone pods), The Herald (warps in and mends an escort).
Elites drop richer orbs and can drop the new Invincibility power-up: two full minutes of shrugging everything off.
The Scythe Pylon's beam now throws electric sparks wherever it lands on a wall or on you.
Spore Blooms fire heavy, curling slug rounds; several shooters gained heavy-round variants.
Grounded zones
Grounded zones now have a zone map pickup and fog of war, like the ship zones.
New hazards: timed shock zones and drifting gas clouds; plasma vents restyled as electric floor jets.
Brush plants — shootable, non-blocking foliage in eight shapes and seven palettes. Shred it for a clear line; it regrows later.
Parked vehicles no longer spawn wedged against walls, and boarding unsticks itself.
Auto doors that parked their panel across a neighbouring doorway ("the door shut on me and won't open") are fixed.
Containment-maze decks got a decor pass: shader-lit floors, half the clutter, more enemies.
Weapons and modules
Ship weapon Tier 5 capstones: max a damage track for a signature bonus. Rapid: +25% fire speed and a MEGA round every fifth shot. Dual Shot: MEGA rounds in both lanes.
On-foot weapon Tier 3 signatures for all ten grounded weapons.
On-foot modules now use the ship-style Passive / Active two-column loadout with their own keybinds, plus a side-by-side compare picker.
Charge Shot has a new orb visual, and a MAX-charge round splashes on impact.
Atmosphere
Weather: wind gusts, spore drift, ash fall, static storms, fog banks, lightning, heat haze, aurora, gravity ripples, sandstorms — and minutes-long cloud cover on foot. Events follow you across level hops and never stack.
Dynamic music (Settings → Music: dynamic / on / off): the score swells for bosses, shards and hunts, then gives the silence back.
Fixed: generated worlds were completely silent. They now play the campaign soundtrack.
Enemy Roster
A new Roster tab in the menu: every kind you've met, with a portrait and your kill count. Ninety-plus entries.
Visual passes
Detail rigs for the Battleship (side rocket bays and plating), Twin Reavers, the Weaver and the Rift Racer — same silhouettes, far more ship.
Challenge gates, the win banner and the challenge HUD are new art.
Level editor
For campaign makers: the map editor's toolbar is reorganised into sixteen tabs, and every object the game can build is now placeable, including challenge gates and start pads.
Thanks for playing — the gates are waiting.