Balance Pass, Unique Crafting and Twice-Weekly Tournaments

A big balance pass, new ways to chase the gear you want, and a new tournament schedule. Thanks for all the reports in Discord.

⚖️ The balance pass at a glance

Progress was snowballing: deep sectors paid out from wave 1, milestones paid tens of thousands of VS, and prestige put you straight back past your old farm. This update rebalances every sector, stat and reward around a longer, steadier climb:

Sectors pay a gentler bonus that builds with depth, and Sectors 5 and 6 open later.
Milestone VS is a fixed amount per sector; tournaments are now the main VS and SC source.
Research, Workshop and Armory maths are fixed where stats were overshooting caps, stacking wrongly or doing nothing.
The Armory is repriced with cheap early levels, and you can now craft the Unique Keystone you want.

Want the numbers? Dev Diary #2: The balance pass, explained has every before-and-after.

✨ New and quality of life

Craft Unique Keystones. Spend 20,000 Keystone fragments to make an Epic copy of the Unique you choose. Three copies still fuse to Legendary. Find it under the Unique Keystones panel.
Your first Armory systems are much cheaper. Claims now cost 5, 50, 150, 300 VS and rise from there, so you can try a second or third system early. Systems you already own stay owned.
Armory upgrades repriced across the board. Early levels are cheap and late levels carry the cost. Most systems are cheaper to develop, and the four that were badly underpriced (Mirror, Stasis, Executioner and Temporal) now cost in line with their power. Levels you've bought are kept.
Tournament rewards appear as soon as an event closes, and a run still going at close is scored against that event.
Patch notes are now in the game. You'll see what's new when an update lands, and you can read past notes under Settings → Patch notes.
Remove Ads owners no longer wait for an ad to load before claiming rewards.
Crate rewards show in your balance straight away.
The Cascade counter now sits with the run controls.

🏆 Tournaments

Two 24-hour tournaments a week, on Wednesday and Saturday (UTC), in brackets of 30 pilots.
Bigger SC rewards, scaled by league and finishing place. The top league pays up to 675 SC and 375 VS per event.
The top 4 promote, and places 25–30 drop a league from Stellar upwards. The first three leagues never demote.
Small brackets (under 10 pilots) pay no better than 5th–6th place, so a near-empty bracket isn't a shortcut.
Tournament runs play in their own sector, so they no longer count towards milestones or your best wave.

⚖️ Progression

Prestige no longer snaps you back past your old farm. A sector's TE bonus now builds up over its first 150 waves instead of paying in full from wave 1, and each sector pays about 1.65× the one before rather than up to 2.5×.
Deeper sectors open later. Sector 5 now opens at wave 2,500 in Sector 4, and Sector 6 at wave 5,000 in Sector 5. Sectors you've already unlocked stay open.
Milestone VS is a fixed amount per sector (100 at most per milestone). Rewards you've already claimed are unchanged.
Late research takes longer: levels 61–80 take twice as long, levels 81–99 three times. TE costs are unchanged, and research already running keeps its timer.
The last part of the Matrix takes longer to fill. Nothing changes until about 60% of the Matrix; after that, points come more slowly.
Salvage debris is limited to 10 pickups a day.

⚔️ Combat

Fire rate above the 25 shots/s cap now adds damage instead of being wasted.
Foundry, Arc and Executioner hits gain a share of your crit bonus.
Research regen, shield regen and haste now boost your Workshop upgrades instead of adding a large flat bonus. Each level still gives a small bonus on its own.
Moving upgrade levels between Workshop and in-run no longer lowers the stat.
Your gun no longer holds fire on enemies protected by a Warden, an aura or Stasis.
Kills pay at the wave the enemy arrived in, not the current wave.
Mirror no longer doubles rewards, and its pulse now deals 12–30% of an enemy's health (a quarter of that to bosses).
Wormhole now slows nearby enemies without pulling stragglers towards your station.
Ghost now catches a lethal hit, before Lifeline does.
Stasis now amplifies direct hits only.