Fourteen house weapons and the living Kin

Seven releases, v0.10.305 to v0.10.311. Your Flagship has fourteen new weapons to choose from, and each one fights in its own way. The creatures of the galaxy now live out their days around you. The day's events pay, and once a week there is a hulk to race for.

Fourteen new house weapons

Four families, and a new way to fight in each.

Until now most Flagship weapons were a stream of hits on one target. The fourteen house weapons change that. Each comes in Mk I to Mk V, and each wears its maker's colours whoever fires it.

Beams

• Spacer Hullcutter Beam: a short cutting beam you hold on the target. It ignores armour and is weak on shields.
• Veilborn Hush Lance: hold for two seconds to charge, then release. It reaches 4 km and carries on into a second ship in line.
• Solari Choir Prism: bolts that leap to two more ships within 700 m.
• Synthari Furnace Beam: a held beam that hits harder the hotter it runs. Overheat it and it scorches your own hull.

Missiles

• Gobbo Rokkit Pods: no lock, twelve unguided rockets a volley.
• Hegemony Siegebreaker Torpedo: one slow torpedo that ignores armour and hits for 900.
• Synthari Static Lash: EMP missiles that only hurt shields, and keep a struck shield from recharging for three more seconds.
• Veilborn Gloam Mines: four mines laid astern for whoever chases you.

Kinetic

• Hegemony Lineholder Railgun: a slug at 7 km a second out to 5 km. It ignores armour.
• Gobbo Scrapblasta: eight pellets in a tight cone, at its best inside a kilometre.
• Hegemony Flak Curtain: a turret of bursting shells that shoots at missiles, torpedoes, rockets and mines first.

Biological

Bio is the fourth damage type. It does half damage to shields and 110% to hulls, and only a quarter of a ship's armour counts against it.

• Nereid Tendril Lash: a held tendril that latches on and stacks venom, up to five deep.
• Fungus Rotleech Siphon: leech turrets. 30% of what they deal feeds your own shield.
• Fungus Sporecaster: a pod that bursts into a 360 m cloud for ten seconds. The cloud eats armour and slows every hostile inside by 15%.

How you get them

Earn a house's trust, build your own, or get lucky.

• House offers. A faction's Garrisons, Shipyards and Market hubs sell its house weapons at Mk I once you are Friendly with that faction. Prices run from 2,600 to 4,400 GC, and Trusted standing takes 5% off.
• Level. Each weapon needs Star Captain level 4, 6, 8 or 10 to buy and to fit. The two heaviest hitters, the Hush Lance and the Siegebreaker, sit at level 10.
• Workshops. Every weapon is a house recipe at its faction's workshop, Mk I to Mk III, with the maker's touches you already know. Tear one down and you learn its pattern.
• Rare drops. Bounties, wrecks, caches, ambushes and anomalies can all drop one. So can a daily event's module reward and the weekly hulk's sealed crates.
• The Black market sells the Rokkit Pods, the Scrapblasta and the Gloam Mines to anyone, at 25% more.

No weapon is a straight upgrade. Each gives something up against the Charter fit: reach, damage for its power, or what it can hurt.

Every weapon has a counter

The tooltip tells you how to beat it.

Faction security, patrols and fleets now fly their own house's weapons, and so do some pirates in faction space. So every tooltip, and the new Field Manual topic on weapon families, says how to answer each one.

Move while a Hush Lance charges, because its glow gives it away. Boost sideways from Rokkit Pods, which fly straight. Fly out of a spore cloud. Turn hard to break a Tendril Lash. Do not chase a Veilborn straight down its wake. And if missiles are your plan, look for a Flak Curtain first.

The Kin come alive

Every creature has a food, a day and a family.

The Lightmote shoals and Scrap Moths now have company. Void whale pods, belt rasper herds, ring mite colonies, the Lantern Angler and Gasbell blooms all live in flight.

Every system has its own day, and the Kin keep to it. Whale pods are families: a lead cow, one to three others and a calf or two, each keeping to its mother. They feed on Lightmote shoals at dawn and dusk, and you can watch a shoal stream into the lead whale's mouth. Raspers graze ore-rich rock in herds of five to ten behind a lead animal, puffing ore dust as they chew, so a herd is a good hint of where the rich rock is. Shoals spread thin by day and school tight and bright at night, when the Lantern Angler lures hardest.

They notice you. Shoals part round your hull. A pod startles if you come in fast or on boost and swims hard away. Fly slowly and a calf may come to look at you. Raspers clamp to their rock as you pass, gasbells jet away and ring mites boil off their ice.

Your scanner lists every herd and what it is doing. The first scan of each creature goes into your Kin log, and the Field Manual has a new bestiary to go with it.

Leave the whales alone. Firing on a pod makes it flee, costs you 10 standing with the Nereid and pays nothing.

The Long Migration

One pod, one system a day, and the map shows the road.

On the first day of each 28-day season a pod leaves Thalassa and travels the Leviathan Road, one system a day. It comes home by the same road and calves near Thalassa. The Galactic Map draws the road, where the pod is today and where it will be tomorrow, and the Bulletin carries a headline when the pod enters a faction's space.

Weapons with a voice

Every faction's guns look and sound like that faction.

The effects and sound pass came first, in v0.10.308. Every bolt is now a hot core in a faction glow, with muzzle flashes and impacts to match: Solari light rings, Hegemony breech smoke, Nereid water mist, Fungus spores, Synthari arcs, Spacers brass sparks, a Veilborn implosion and Gobbos junk-fire. Faction ships fire and shield in their own colours.

Shields show their strength. They flicker as they fail, break with a flash and a ring, and knit back as they recharge. Explosions take the ship's colours, with a shockwave and embers, and heavy hits land with a short jolt. Each faction has its own gun voice, no two shots sound quite alike, and fire is placed left and right and dulled by distance.

Today in the galaxy pays

Every daily event has a reward, once for each Star Captain.

In the last post the day's events paid nothing. Now they all do, and dangerous space pays up to twice as much.

• Derelicts: cut in and choose a hold: Salvage and Metals, rare parts, or the captain's log with extra Credit chips and research data. Some hide a sealed module crate. Some have Scrap Moths to wait out, and some have claim-jumpers to fight first.
• Distress calls: rescue the crew, tow the lifepods or hold off the raiders. You earn Credit chips and standing with the people you save. Some calls are traps.
• Bounty sightings: a named clan captain with escorts. Bring the captain down for a 650 GC bounty.
• Comet passes: fly within 20 km of the head during its six-hour pass and hold B to scan it.
• Kin sightings: scan the herd that brought the sighting.
• Rich rock: four or five extra ore-rich rocks, or a crystal bloom, in the belt for the day.

The Galactic Map, Near you today and your arrival banner show each reward with Set course, and mark it Claimed once it is yours.

Comets and the weekly hulk

Fly the tail. Race for the vault.

A comet is now worth more than a scan. During its near pass, target it, press 6 and fly into the tail. Your mining beam scoops Comet volatiles, which sell at Refineries and Mining Platforms for five times the price of Ice, or refine into Helium-3 at a Refinery.

Once a week a great derelict drifts into one system of the Expanses, the same one for every captain. Each week runs the same way: the hulk is announced on Monday, drifts in on Friday and is gone by the Monday after. Four stages lead from the outer hull through the cargo decks and the engine core to the vault. The whole hulk holds 32 cuts and the vault only four, so the first captains to cut in strip it. Each captain can cut each stage once. The inner stages are guarded, and the engine core and the vault hold sealed module crates. The Galactic Map and the Bulletin show it live as it is stripped.

Salvage for the beam

Your mining beam now runs on Salvage. A service rebuilds its lenses from 2 to 6 Salvage for every 1,000 units mined, depending on the beam's Mk. Salvage in your Cargo bay is used first, and the crew supplies the rest at 4.5 GC each. The price you see is the price you pay.

Beam upgrades from Mk II to Mk V also take Metals and Salvage. So miners have a reason to refine their own ore, and captains who hunt pirates have something miners want to buy.

Smaller fixes

• Every module bonus works. Each bonus on a module now does something, and the tooltip says what.
• One of each Utility module. Two copies of the same Utility module no longer stack. A spare copy moves to your Cargo bay and is never deleted.
• Mining drones share a fitted Rootvein Assayer's ore and crystal, and belt hauls use your mining beam's pace and yield.
• Lane Snare. It works within its range, which grows with its Mk, and has a 75 second recharge.
• Moving while signed in. If you are signed in on the old address, your progress already lives on your account: open ultrawar.io and sign in. Moving without signing in now says exactly what went wrong, with Try again.

Galactic Credits are in-game only. They are never bought, never sold for money and never cashed out.

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