Hi everyone, our next Major Update has been released! This post will go through the latest additions and changes – but before that, I wanted to say a big thank-you to all our community members that helped playtest the beta branch. Once again the feedback has been invaluable in reproducing bugs and providing information that helps our balancing and polish passes.

As with any Major Update, it’s worth covering some logistical information regarding the update:

Steam should auto-update to the latest version, which is 0.9.27757 or later (this is visible in the bottom-right of the main menu). If the version number is lower, verify your install from the Steam Library and it should update.

Your profile saves will carry over (i.e. all your equipment, uniform and campaign unlocks), but any in-progress escape run will not – so if you’re in the middle of a campaign and you don’t want to lose any new blueprints you haven’t banked, reach a gate and bank them before switching to the new version. If the game detects you’re trying to load an older save, it’ll give a reminder message in case you want to finish the run and bank any equipment on that old version, which is available as a beta branch (called "0.8.26715 - Major Update 3").

If you want to back up your profile saves for whatever reason, you can find them here:

C:\\Users[Username]\\AppData\\LocalLow\\Fireblade Software\\SENTRY\\Saves\\Steam\\[SteamID]

Now the important information is covered, onto the new stuff!

This new system is the replacement for the old passive gear that we’ve gradually been phasing out. We originally had three pieces of passive gear. The Jump Jets became a default player ability, the armour became part of the Crew menu added in Major Update 3, while the Bandolier is now a piece of Tech.

Tech are small memory-card like items that you acquire at the end of each combat. You equip up to 5 of them in your loadout and they come in stackable (blue) or unique (purple) formats.

Their function is to allow you to lean into certain playstyles and provide each run with an additional layer of variety. For example this setup is great with the Auto-Turret and Assault Rifle:

The above tech modules give automatic weapons a chance of inflicting poison damage, along with doing increased damage to enemies suffering from poison. There’s Tech that repairs turrets each Preparation Phase, along with increasing turret health the longer they survive. The unique tech in this instance is the Bandolier, which we know was popular with some players so we didn’t want to lose it :)

The following tech combination would make a Stun Jet plus Traction Pad killbox particularly lethal:

This one deals increased damage to enemies that are slowed, while others increase the recharge speed of ceiling-based deployables, along with two stacked tech that increases the damage ceiling-based deployables inflict. To round things off, there’s one that deals increased damage if you hit enemy weakspots with a pistol (ideal when they’re also getting increased damage while slowed on traction pads).

We’ve also added tags on the equipment and loadout menus for each item so you can better understand what Tech can be used with which piece of equipment:

Because you choose your Tech at the end of battle, along with the new Optional Objectives system and reworked UI (both explained in the sections below), it was necessary for us to create a new After Action Report.

Once you’ve made your Tech choice you extract as normal.

You’ll also notice that the Materials reward has changed. You now receive a flat amount plus bonuses for each threat level, whether it’s a boss or you’re using the mining vessel. This means the further into the campaign you get the more materials you’ll receive each battle.

Optional Objectives is another new system that provides additional variety in combat, and is a way to adjust your Tech choices.

They are randomised with each boarding party as it moves through your ship and can be seen in advance by hovering over the icon in the subsystem information box:

They are also displayed in the HUD.

Upon completion of an Optional Objective, you will be given one of the following rewards on the After Action Report:

• An expanded choice of Tech
  
• An extra action, so you can choose two pieces of Tech rather than the usual one
  
• The option to re-roll the Tech selection

You can therefore help get the Tech build you want by completing these Optional Objectives.

We plan on expanding the choice of Tech and Optional Objectives in future updates.

We’ve made some changes to the HUD and the font for this update.

The font was suffering from legibility issues particularly at lower resolution. It also had problems with upper case ‘D’ and ‘O’ looking too similar – for example “RETURN TO POD” amusingly looked like it said “RETURN TO POO”, so we’ve replaced it with something that we feel is generally nicer to read. It pretty much touches every area of the game though, so if you see anything janky please let us know.

Regarding the HUD, we’ve added the new Optional Objectives, made the Prep and Action phases clearer and improved the messaging around Secondary Fire. We’ve also simplified the Breach Bars so they don’t say “BREACH BREACH BREACH” one on top of the other.

Because a lot of Tech relates to status effects, we’ve done another pass on Burn, Bleed and Poison to inject more interesting behaviour to them. While they all do differing types of damage over time (some constant, some in stabs) there are additional layers to them such as:

• Burn has a chance to spread between nearby targets, can be extinguished if affected by venting and additionally if the player rapidly crouches and stands
  
• Poison reduces accuracy, eats away at armour at an increased rate and can be immediately stopped by healing
  
• You’ll be immune to bleed if you’re wearing armour, but if you sprint around while bleeding it’ll do increased damage. Bleed can also be stopped by healing. We’ll make some of the existing enemies cause bleed damage in a future update, so right now it’ll only affect the player in co-op with friendly fire turned on (although enemies will suffer bleed as normal).

Our latest enemy was designed to perform differently from any of the others in the game. Here’s a screenshot and the original concept art:

The primary function for this enemy (codenamed ‘Ghost’) is that it can disable deployables within a radius, which allows nearby allies to move past those traps unhindered. If there’s a turret within the radius it’ll have its health continuously depleted.

It fires a homing projectile for its attack and when sustaining damage can turn incorporeal for a period of time. This phase shift ends once the blue flames on each hand have dissipated. While in this state it won’t disable deployables, so it's important to consider target priority when you come up against them in Starfarer.

There are two new levels you can fight in: Habitation and Conduit.

Habitation is another level where clever use of doors can re-route enemies along your preferred paths, with plenty of opportunities to fling them into bottomless pits.

We know how popular it is to throw aliens to their deaths, so Conduit has a fair few chasms too. The upper routes have some great choke points, while the A and B spawns have a split route that’ll test your defensive abilities.

There’s a huge amount of other changes that have gone into this Major Update which you can find below.

Levels:

• Fixed some holes in various levels
  
• Fixed a wall you couldn’t build on in Hallway

Equipment:

• Secondary ammo (like underslung grenades) is no longer replenished from dispensers, but is restored during each Prep phase. This stops the exploit where you could stand by a dispenser and constantly replenish your AR grenades, which was an easy way to dominate the game
  
• Tweaked SMG, AR and DMR accuracy
  
• P9 renamed to P9X
  
• Buffed P9X explosion force
  
• Buffs to all pistols
  
• Minor buff to AR grenade
  
• Fixed reload camera anims on Peacekeeper and Flameshot
  
• Improved Peacekeeper weapon swap speed
  
• Buffs to Stun Stick, and toned down some of the wacky enemy flinches from hits
  
• Buffs to Vortex Glove
  
• Fixed the DMR not doing critical damage on weakspots
  
• Made the lights on bolts flash at an increased pace as their time runs out
  
• Adjusted the upgrade path on all equipment. While most have one less upgrade, some equipment such as Gear, one-shot deployables and dispensers have half the upgrades which allowed us to remove a lot of the underwhelming ones. This allows players to get higher-level upgrades with more equipment rather than going all-in on one or two.

Enemies:

• Slight buff to Raider health
  
• Minor nerf to Fodder health
  
• Adjusted Raider behaviour to more closely follow pusher, pinner and breacher archetypes based on their weapons
  
• Reduced attack damage on most enemies
  
• Increased speed of Grub and Matriarch. While this won’t eliminate issues with them lagging behind other enemies, it will at least reduce the severity of it
  
• Reduced Grub health so that a single hit from a Flak Turret will kill one
  
• Adjusted the amount of scrap that the Wardens drop
  
• The Stalker ship now has some variation in boarding party enemies depending on which sector you fight it

Campaign:

• Grunt, Veteran and Elite (i.e. grey, blue and red versions of main enemies) are now spread across threat levels rather than being a hard transition
  
• Removed starting Materials from campaigns
  
• Increased Battle-hardened and Tight Budget hazards so they’re more suitable to single encounters (as opposed to the original stacking system)
  
• Removed the ‘Disrepair’ hazard as it wasn’t very fun
  
• Added new Merits that grant an additional weapon or deployable slot
  
• Removed the bonus to collecting equipment you already have the blueprint for, as this was confusing
  
• Adjusted starting scrap values
  
• Did a balancing pass on upgrade costs
  
• Repairing subsystems now starts at only 400 materials, but increases in cost each time they’re used. Similarly, crew revives increase in cost each use.

Co-op:

• Fixed an intermittent issue where the co-op player could break dispensers for the host
  
• Fixed an issue where the co-op player could sometimes load into a level with the Build Tool showing they had zero scrap
  
• Added some suit VO for when a co-op player dies, or the client disconnects
  
• Fixed an issue where the co-op player didn’t see the correct uniform in first-person

Audio:

• The Suit VO provides a warning for low ammo, low health and no ammo
  
• Additional suit VO lines for reworked status effects, trying to place deployables with no scrap, or trying to place deployables that have reached a cap (i.e. turrets)
  
• Fixed the issue where the Railgun overcharge sound wasn’t resetting when the bar started increasing again

Miscellaneous:

• Re-worked the Loadout menu to accommodate Tech and latest UI changes
  
• Updated the engine to gain latest performance enhancements
  
• Renamed “Encounter Rewards” to “Merits”
  
• HUD control UI now limited to 5 characters for when keys are rebound to ones with a long name, so they don't overrun/look bad
  
• Reworked Hazard and Merit tooltips to new tooltip system
  
• After Action Report is no longer shown if a level is lost due to all the crew being dead
  
• Lowered armour absorption rate
  
• Improved text legibility at lower resolutions
  
• Implemented a highlight over the Navigator button when the player can move on the navigator
  
• Added latest newsletter names to the potential crew names that can be generated

Bug-fixes:

• Stopped melee attacks also causing damage behind the player
  
• Fixed the projectile spread getting smaller the as you aim down
  
• Fixed a hang where the Stalker ship would land on an area where another boarding craft was already located

As ever we’ll be keeping an eye on our various channels for your feedback. We’ll do the usual follow-up patch to include the translations for the new text, but if anything massive comes up we’ll do hot-fixes as needed. We read and document all feedback even if we don’t manage to personally respond to each post – and we really appreciate it, because the game has so many levers to pull and we’re such a tiny team that we literally couldn’t do this without you.

We hope you like the latest additions to SENTRY. There’s a lot more to come and we’re already excited about moving onto what we have planned.

If you like what we’re doing please leave a Steam review, and thanks for the support!

The Fireblade Crew

Hi everyone,

Major Update 4 is on the way and there is a beta branch version of it available to play!

As ever your feedback is crucial in helping us refine the latest set of additions, so please have a go and tell us your thoughts. To access version 0.9.27593, you’ll need to switch to a beta branch:

• Find SENTRY in your Steam library and right-click on it, selecting “Properties”
  
• In the menu that pops up, choose “Betas”
  
• Select “Beta Branch” in the “Beta Participation” drop-down list
  
• In your Library you should see “[betabranch]” appended to the game name

When you play the new version, please remember that while your profile saves will carry over (i.e. all your equipment and campaigns you’ve unlocked thus far), your current escape run will not – so if you’re in the middle of a run and you don’t want to lose any new blueprints you haven’t banked, reach a gate and bank them before switching to the latest version.

It’s also generally good practice to back up your profile saves ahead of any Major Update, just in case you find an obscure bug. You can find your profile and save folder here:
C:\Users[Username]\AppData\LocalLow\Fireblade Software\SENTRY\Saves\Steam\[SteamID]

These are two new systems that help provide additional combat variety and we’d absolutely love to hear your thoughts on them.

Tech is the replacement for the old “Passive Gear” that we’ve been phasing out. It takes the form of memory cards that you apply in your loadout to help lean into specific playstyles.

You earn a single choice of Tech from a randomised selection in the After Action Report that you get at the end of each battle, whether you won or lost.

You can influence the Tech that appears by completing Optional Objectives. These are randomised tasks that provide different challenges during battle. By successfully completing them you’ll be given one of the following Tech-related abilities:

• An additional piece of Tech will appear with the other choices
  
• Choose to re-roll the Tech choices
  
• You can make two choices of Tech instead of one

You can see a preview of the Optional Objective, along with the associated reward as a tooltip when hovering over the icon next to the Mission Type in the top left of the Sub System Status UI when an enemy is occupying that level. These randomise each time the enemy moves through the ship, so provide an additional consideration when choosing which battle to fight next.

Because a lot of Tech relates to status effects, we’ve done another pass on Burn, Bleed and Poison to inject more interesting behaviour to them. While they all do differing types of damage over time (some constant, some in stabs) there are additional layers to them such as:

• Burn has a chance to spread between nearby targets, can be extinguished if affected by venting and additionally if the player rapidly crouches and stands
  
• Poison reduces accuracy, eats away at armour at an increased rate and can be immediately stopped by healing
  
• You’ll be immune to bleed if you’re wearing armour, but if you sprint around while bleeding it’ll do increased damage. Bleed can also be stopped by healing. We’ll make some of the existing enemies cause bleed damage in time for the release of MU4, so right now it’ll only affect the player in co-op with friendly fire turned on (although enemies will suffer bleed as normal).

Oh – a few people have asked about what’s happening to the Bandolier – no need to worry, it’s been swapped to a piece of Unique (i.e. purple) Tech.

We have a long list of both extra Tech and Optional Objectives that we’ll continue to work through in later updates, so expect to see more in future.

You’ll find a new enemy waiting for you in Starfarer Campaigns:

This floating creature flings homing projectiles at you, can phase out when under attack and disables nearby deployables, which is a tricky combination!

There are two new levels you can fight in: Habitation and Conduit.

Habitation is another level where clever use of doors can re-route enemies along your preferred paths, with plenty of opportunities to fling them into bottomless pits.

Because we love throwing aliens to their deaths, Conduit has a fair few chasms too. The upper routes have some great choke points, while the A and B spawns have a split route that’ll test your defensive abilities.

There’s a huge amount of changes and as usual we’ll provide a list for them in the final MU4 release post. The following are worth calling out now though, either because they’re big changes from how they worked previously, or are things we’re especially keen to hear your thoughts on.

• As you’ll see in the After Action Report, your materials reward is based on the threat level of the enemies you fought. This means the harder the fight, the greater the reward.
  
• Upgrades have had an overhaul. Most have had one level removed, while some – such as dispensers, land mines, barrels and Gear have had three levels removed. This means that your path to the final upgrade is swifter, and condensing the upgrades removes filler. It’s also one part of a cool change coming in the next Major Update
  
• Repairing levels start off cheaper, but increase with each repair you conduct.
  
• Similarly, reviving dead crew in the Crew Menu increases the more you do it. All of the above are quite hefty changes to the campaign economy, so getting your feedback on whether you now have too much or too few of a particular resource would be great.
  
• We’ve changed the font, along with the HUD. This was to provide clearer information, do a better job of messaging secondary fire and to look nicer. A change like this pretty much touches everywhere in the game so will feel like a big difference to what you’re used to. If you see anything janky, or text appears too small – let us know!
  
• There’s been the usual rebalancing of enemies and equipment that accompanies a Major Update. You’ll also notice the starts of campaigns are a bit faster with Sector 1 predominantly sticking to 3-wave battles. Right now, the Initiate campaign benefits from all of these changes, while you’ll likely find Starfarer far too easy – especially in co-op – so bear that in mind while playing. We’ll have completed work on Starfarer in time for the MU4 release.
  
• The tutorial hasn’t been updated to drip-feed in the new systems yet, so Optional Objectives and Tech will be available from the first encounter. Again, that’ll be sorted by the time MU4 is ready. I doubt many Beta Branch players play the tutorial, but am mentioning it just in case :)

Discord or the Steam forums are the best place to provide feedback, but any of the channels listed below are welcome.

In order to not mix up beta branch feedback with the main game, there’s a dedicated area on the Steam forums to post your beta branch comments: https://v1.steam.hlxgame.cc/app/1252680/discussions/0/

• Steam forums
  
• YouTube
  
• Twitter
  
• Facebook[www.facebook.com]
  
• TikTok[www.tiktok.com]
  
• Instagram[www.instagram.com]
  
• Discord[discord.com]
  
• Newsletter signup[sentrygame.com]

We’re still working through a list of tasks, so once we’ve done that and had the chance to action any important community feedback we’ll release Major Update 4. As we’re such a tiny team your comments and feedback are utterly invaluable to the process, so we really appreciate the continued support.

Thanks everyone!