We're excited to announce the first major content update - VIRULENCE:

Major Features

New Gear and Mods:

• Added a new Body Gear: Viper
• Added a new Weapon Gear: Dart
• Added a new Shield Gear: Siphon
• The Efficiency and Thruster trees have been restructured and have become three trees, with four new mods. The trees are now called: "Kinetics, Efficiency, and Movement"
• Added a new mod: Kinetic Boost (tier 1 Kinetics)
• Added a new mod: Blink (tier 3 Movement)
• Added a new mod: Conversion (tier 2 Efficiency)
• Added a new mod: Regression (tier 3 Efficiency)
• Aegis, Celestial Lance and Emergency Systems moved to the Kinetics tree
• Blink replaces Emergency Systems in the Movement tree
• Conversion replaces Celestial Lance in the Efficiency tree
• Gemini Protocol becomes a tier 2 mod in the Efficiency tree, replacing Aegis
• Regression becomes a tier 3 mod in the Efficiency Tree, replacing Gemini Protocol
• Rebirth and Magnetism have been removed from the standard mod pool (they are slated to possibly become Wild Mods)
• Base magnetism has been increased to compensate for the loss of the Magnetism mod
• Ally takes the place of unlocking Magnetism
• Kinetic Boost takes the place of unlocking Rebirth
• Dart, Viper, and Siphon shield are unlocked at Account Level 51, 52, and 53 respectively. You will need to play a bit to earn them

Other Major Features:

• Enabled Steam and game screenshots with F12. The game will add your screenshot to your C:\Users\USER\AppData\Local\NovaDrift\ folder (not ideal, but it's a temporary solution) Steam screenshots are kept on your profile
• Mouse, Keyboard and Gamepad now cohabitate without changing the settings. If you want to use the mouse or gamepad, just start moving it. Keyboard controls resume if you stop moving the mouse or gamepad stick. If automatic mouse aim detection is interfering (or you have a track pad) you can disable it in settings with "Disable Mouse Aim Detection"
• You may now cancel an upgrade at any time. If you do, you will be offered the same mods as the last time when you do upgrade
• If you do not cancel your upgrade, rerolls and successive levels will never show you the same mods in a row if it can be avoided
• Added new sfx for big bosses approaching, the player's launch, Dart, caustic Barrier, Venom Strike, and Siphon

Minor Features:

• The score menu now accepts up to 16 characters, like its 1990
• Calibrate has new artwork
• Added a colorful, more noticeable aim-scope
• Mouse controls now uses a proportional derivative controller
• Lowered the base friction of the player about 5%
• Updated the pause readout. It now shows your DPS, which also has a section for the DPS assuming all projectiles hit. It also calculates doubled projectiles (Torrent and Blaster) and burst fire in the equation. It does not consider secondary effects or projectiles from weapons, such as Dart's burn or Grenade's cluster munitions
• You can now hold control to add larger increments in the debug wave interface. Hold Ctrl for +/- 10 waves at a time. Hold Alt for +/- 100 waves at a time

Balance Changes

• Sanctuary's recovery now scales with shield durability. The result is about 30% better at very high durabilities, and about half of what it was at the lowest durabilities
• Hullbreaker now must face its target to penetrate (Just as Viper must face its target to deliver Caustic Barrier)
• The sub-ability of Omnishield which enables a partial shield cooldown when you've taken damage during an existing shield cooldown has been made a core ability, at a lesser power level. Taking Omnishield now doubles the effectiveness of this ability
• Shield Size now scales visually with both your base ship size and ship size modifiers, including Bastion size and distance from your nose
• -15 -> -10% body size modifier for Streamline (in light of the addition of Regression)
• Purge has been reworked. The formula has been adjusted to properly consider the individual duration and potency of each burn instead of multiplying everything together. Purge's size now uses a square root value to prevent it from growing out of control. Using purge now results in 75% of the damage you would have dealt, had the damage over time been allowed to run its full course
• Warp Strike continues to have far too much sway over the balance of the game, so I've dealt with it in a different way. Its damage penalty now applies only to projectiles which have screen wrapped. These projectiles deal -35% damage. It is still very powerful
• Warp Strike penalty now deals you 5 flat damage to hull and shields in addition to 15%. This cannot reduce you to below 1 hull and shields
• -10% -> -12% rate of fire for Warp Strike
• Barrier has been reworked. The new rules are: Barrier removes damage to your shields exceeding 35% of your maximum shield durability, up to a limit of your maximum shield durability
• -50% -> -30% Rocket Drones fire rate penalty
• +25% -> +30% drone hull from Reinforced Drones
• 7 -> 6s Drone Assembly time
• -90% -> -85% Omnishield hull penalty (this might limit the insanity of self-triggered retribution mines builds)
• +50% -> +45% architect bonuses
• 1s -> .75s Emergency Systems duration
• 10 -> 12 iFrames for collision on Non-hullbreaker bodies
• -10% -> -15% projectile size for Convergence
• Burst Fire has been reworked. It now adds a flat delay between burst fires (.04 seconds) and a general +20% increase to rate of fire. The result is that mod has different values for different loadouts. Generally speaking, it is now slightly detrimental for very fast firing weapons, and efficient for very slow weapons. Middling weapons like Dart benefit reasonably well from it. The rate of fire increase also benefits things like Charged Shot, Salvo, and Loaded Mines, etc. The pause readout will show you the effect on your DPS for your particular set up. I realize this has strange implications for a few things, which can be addressed moving forward
• Incendiary Strike no longer has a rate of fire penalty
• Blink is now a prerequisite to Warp Strike instead of Guidance (This seems more thematic to me, and adds an effective higher mod count requirement for builds that really want to push weapons to the limit)
• Calibrate rate increased slightly
• 15 -> 18 Antimatter Rounds damage bonus
• Antimatter rounds deals 5% less self-damage
• Antimatter Rounds self-knockback reduced considerably
• Corrosion deals +10% base damage
• -15% -> -10% weapon damage for Corrosion
• Saturation Fire is now considerably better at reducing weapon spread

Bug Fixes and Optimizations

• Myriad syntax, text, and UI improvements
• Optimized texture atlas
• Optimized homing code
• Optimized discharge code
• Optimized trails, it is also now possible to taper and use multiple colors in jet trails
• Fixed Scion projectile origins
• Fixed a bug with splinter strike where it was improperly inheriting size modifiers from whence it came
• Fixed a bug where you couldn't detonate your Bastion with Hidden Power Architect on gamepad
• Fixed a freeze with the gamepad with Architect Bastion under weird settings circumstances
• Fixed another gamepad freeze related to construct selection
• Fixed a bug with Volatile Shields excluding the initial target
• Fixed a problem where partial cooldowns didn't work at all with Omnishield
• Fixed a problem with reroll powerups being deleted
• Split shot now degenerates properly
• Fixed a bug where Turret utilized Rocket Drones explosions
• Fixed a bug where parts of Station Omega could be Terminated
• Fixed Antimatter Rounds text exceeding its bounding box
• Overseer now properly displays itself as a prerequisite to construct Super Mods
• Fixed a crash with Blade's artwork
• Clarified and corrected a few achievements
• Fixed Stealth jet stream alignment
• Fixed a crash relating to trails and Blade Drone
• Fixed a bug with infinitely wrapping Warp-Strike Railgun projectiles
• Fixed some incorrect tags on descriptions.
• Elite chance is now correct if you teleport using debug cheats