Dev Diary #2: The balance pass, explained

The 0.2.128 patch notes list what changed. This post covers why, with the numbers. It's a long one.

The problem: the snowball

IdleVoid is meant to be a long game: the middle sectors should be somewhere you build towards and farm for a good while, with the deeper sectors as the push. Instead, some of you reached Sector 6 within a couple of days. Three things caused it:

1. Milestone VS scaled with each sector's TE bonus. The wave-20 milestone in Sector 5 paid 12,540 VS, and wave 4,000 paid 83,600. That VS bought Armory systems, the Armory cleared the next sector, and the next milestone paid even more. 2. Prestige snapped you back almost instantly. Prestige resets your Workshop, but you keep sector access, so you could prestige and jump straight back into your deepest sector, where even wave 1 paid the full sector bonus (×104 in Sector 6). Cheap early Workshop levels rebought your power in minutes. 3. Moving up a sector paid about 2.2× more for the same enemy health. Everyone was pulled upwards as fast as possible.

We modelled all of this with a bot that plays an account forward day by day on the real game engine, running thousands of waves per run as you do, and tuned against it.

Sectors and prestige

Sector TE now builds up with depth. A sector's bonus starts at ×1 on wave 1 and reaches its full value by wave 150. Prestiging into a deep sector no longer pays out instantly; the deep farm you lost is what pays.
Each sector pays about 1.65× the one before:

| Sector | Before | Now (full bonus) | |---|---:|---:| | 2 | ×2.75 | ×1.65 | | 3 | ×6.6 | ×2.72 | | 4 | ×16.5 | ×4.49 | | 5 | ×41.8 | ×7.41 | | 6 | ×104.5 | ×12.23 |

Moving up still pays: about 1.2–1.5× more for the same enemy health, more the deeper you farm.

Gates: Sector 2 at wave 250, Sector 3 at 500 and Sector 4 at 1,000 are unchanged. Sector 5 now opens at wave 2,500 in Sector 4 (was 2,000) and Sector 6 at wave 5,000 in Sector 5 (was 4,000). Long runs are the farming loop, so these are long-term goals. Any sector you've already unlocked stays open.
Kills pay at the wave the enemy arrived in, so letting enemies pile up can't inflate rewards.

Milestones

VS from milestones is now a fixed amount per sector, at most 100 per milestone, plus the one-off 150 VS Armory starter at Sector 1 wave 20.

| | Sector 1 | Sector 2 | Sector 3 | Sector 4 | Sector 5 | |---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:| | Before | 4,100 | 11,276 | 27,060 | 67,650 | 171,380 | | Now | 350 | 325 | 350 | 375 | 400 |

Across Sectors 1–5 that's 1,800 VS instead of 281,466. Rows you'd already claimed keep what they paid. Tournaments are now the main VS source (see below).

Research

Regen, shield regen and haste research had a units bug. Each level of Repair Protocols added 2.5% of your max hull per second. Level 99 regenerated 247.5% of your hull every second, more than four times the entire 800-level Workshop ladder. Each level now multiplies your Workshop value by +2.5%, plus a small flat bonus equal to one Workshop level, so it helps even with no Workshop investment.
Deflect and Super Crit research no longer overshoot their caps. Deflect is now +0.15 points per level (was +1.25, dead after level 28), and Super Crit +0.8 (was +1).
Late research takes longer: levels 61–80 take twice as long and 81–99 three times. The whole catalogue went from about 3,300 to about 8,100 base lab-days, so your build-defining lines still mature while the full catalogue stays a long-term project. TE costs are unchanged.

Every stat we touched

| Stat | Before | Now | |---|---|---| | Hull regen (Research) | +2.5% of max hull per second, per level (247.5%/s at level 99) | +2.5% of your Workshop regen per level, plus one Workshop level's worth | | Shield regen (Research) | +2.5% of max shield per second, per level | +2.5% of your Workshop shield regen per level, plus one Workshop level's worth | | Haste (Research) | +2 points per level (1.98 at level 99) | +2% of your Workshop haste per level, plus one Workshop level's worth | | Deflect (Research) | +1.25 points per level; levels past 28 wasted at the 35% cap | +0.15 points per level | | Super Crit (Research) | +1 point per level; went past the cap with Workshop | +0.8 points per level, ending just under the cap | | Fire rate | Anything above 25 shots/s wasted | The excess adds 25% as shot damage | | Crit factor, fire rate, range, TE income, GC income (shared Workshop tracks) | Workshop and in-run levels multiplied each other; moving levels to the Workshop could lower the stat | One ladder for both sides, multiplied by Research and Matrix; the split doesn't matter | | Crit on Foundry, Arc, Executioner | No crit at all | A quarter of your average crit bonus on direct hits | | Stasis bonus damage | Amplified everything, including max-health damage | Direct hits only | | Damage vs Warden/aura targets | Gun held fire too early | Gun accounts for protection and keeps shooting | | Kill rewards | Paid at the current wave | Paid at the wave the enemy arrived in |

Workshop and combat maths

Shared upgrade tracks are fixed. Autoloader, Focus Lens, Sensor Array, Survey Array and Salvage Intake share a level cap between Workshop (TE) and in-run (GC) levels. They used to multiply each other, so moving levels into the Workshop could lower your stat. Now both sides count as one ladder, multiplied by your Research and Matrix bonuses, and the split no longer matters.
Fire rate past 25 shots a second now adds damage. The gun can't physically fire faster than 25/s, so extra fire rate used to be wasted. It now adds 25% of the excess as shot damage: 50 shots/s worth of fire rate deals ×1.25 per shot.
Foundry, Arc and Executioner share in your crit. Their direct hits now get a quarter of your average crit bonus. With an average crit multiplier of ×5, they hit ×2 as hard. The Executioner's max-health damage is excluded.
Your gun no longer holds fire on protected enemies. Under a Warden or an aura, it used to think its shots in flight were enough to kill and stopped shooting. It now accounts for the protection.
Stasis amplifies direct hits only, not max-health damage, thorns or reflection.

Armory

Claiming systems follows The Tower's order: 5, 50, 150, 300, 800, 1,250, 1,750, 2,400, 3,000, 3,750, 4,500 and 5,500 VS. The first few are nearly free, so the 150 VS starter grant covers two. Owning everything is a long-term goal.
Upgrade tracks are repriced to a fixed budget per system on a curve where early levels are cheap and late levels carry the cost. The full catalogue went from about 207,000 VS to 144,000.

| System | Before | Now | |---|---:|---:| | Beacon | 24,579 | 25,000 | | Cascade | 33,218 | 16,000 | | Arc | 13,321 | 15,000 | | Ghost | 46,422 | 15,000 | | Foundry | 16,350 | 12,000 | | Aegis | 16,747 | 12,000 | | Executioner | 3,162 | 10,000 | | Graviton | 19,417 | 10,000 | | Mirror | 2,370 | 10,000 | | Stasis | 2,967 | 8,000 | | Wormhole | 26,090 | 6,000 | | Temporal | 2,766 | 5,000 |

Levels you've bought are kept. Mirror, Stasis, Executioner and Temporal were badly underpriced for what they do.

Mirror no longer doubles kill rewards during its window, which stacked with every other reward bonus. Its pulse dealt 65–90% of an ordinary enemy's health; it's now 12–30%, and bosses take a quarter of that.
Wormhole pulled trailing enemies towards your station. It now just slows enemies near the lead one.
Ghost only checked at the end of a tick, so a single big hit could kill you before it fired. It now catches a lethal hit, before Lifeline does.

Matrix

The first 60% of the Matrix fills exactly as before. Beyond that, points arrive more slowly: completing the full Matrix now takes about 8.6× the lifetime TE of the 60% mark, instead of about 2.85×. The last stretch stays a long-term goal rather than something an accelerating account fills in weeks.

Keystones

You can now craft the Unique you want: 20,000 Keystone fragments buys an Epic copy of your chosen Unique, and three still fuse to Legendary. At typical boss rates that's roughly a week of farming per Epic for a dedicated player, so your favourite few become a target you can work towards, with Mythic as the long-term goal. Fragments also pay for rerolls, so it's a choice.

Tournaments

Two 24-hour tournaments a week, Wednesday and Saturday (UTC), in brackets of 30 pilots.
Rewards follow The Tower's tournament table, with SC as the main reward. First place pays 100 SC and 20 VS in Drift Colony, up to 675 SC and 375 VS in the top league.
The top 4 promote, and places 25–30 drop a league from Stellar upwards. The first three leagues never demote. A bracket with under 10 pilots pays no better than 5th–6th, so a near-empty bracket isn't a shortcut. Ties pay the lower place.
Tournament runs happen in their own sector and no longer count towards milestones or your best wave.

Daily rewards

Salvage debris: 10 pickups a day (was 30), each needing a fresh pickup from the game.
Remove Ads signals need you to be playing, or to have finished a run in the last few minutes.

What's next

We'll watch how the new pacing plays out over the next couple of weeks and fine-tune the numbers. Next up: Sector 1 should feel snappier for new players, and defensive builds need some love, because they currently progress much more slowly than glass cannons. Tell us how it feels in Discord.