This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
The Space Birthday Update goes live for everyone in 8 hours from this post, which is today at:
UK: 6pm
US Pacific: 10am
US East: 1pm
Your time: check here
Lastly, we have 10 more changes that just make the game nicer to play, better balanced, or provide more options for those who want or need them.
Gamepad controls
We have these now! They're designed for Xbox pads but others may work.
Much smoother ship collision
Oh my God, I didn't know how much this was bothering me until it was fixed. When you bump your pod into a big ship, there used to be a little hitch as you rebounded. Turns out this was a bug, John found it, and now it's fixed and ship collisions are so much smoother and nicer.
New item pricing
We've re-written the formulae for how items are priced, so you should see fewer weird outliers. And if you do, we can fix them much more easily.
New mission generation
The whole mission generator has been rewritten to more reliably provide a range of difficulties, and is a lot more intelligent in how it figures out how much pay is fair.
New shop interface and discounts
When you use a shop, you can now browse all shops without having to walk over to them. The one you accessed is at the top so it's still easy to get to what you want that way if you prefer.
Shops now also have one type of item that's discounted, and one that's more expensive than usual. This changes every 10 minutes, and when a station is liberated.
You can now crash doors, forcefields, and regular guards
Crash a door to lock it shut or keep it open for a while. Crash a forcefield to turn it off for a moment, sucking anyone in the room into space. Crashing any guard now leaves them unable to sound the alarm.
The Offworld Angel now reduces blood loss instead of preventing it
Making you immortal was probably a bit much.
Guard heat sensors now trip the alarm
Previously the guard would just run to you to investigate, which made them actually easier to deal with than guards with no sensors at all. Now they're a thing you actually need to think about and plan around.
New options
You can now turn off heirlooms if you like, which may be useful for speedrunners to give themselves an even playing field. You can also now adjust sound volume, not just music.
Liberation missions
In the last big update we added well equipped Liberator characters, to help out if liberations were going slowly. They served their purpose but some people felt this was too much of a helping hand, so we've replaced them with occasional Liberation missions - just a new objective type, the reward for doing the mission is liberating that station rather than any pay. These only show up if liberations are going slowly, and if you preferred the Liberator characters you can turn those back on in the options menu.
Personal mission loot
If your personal mission is to steal something, the item itself will be a very good item that you can keep. You don't need to turn it in to complete the mission. If your personal mission is to take someone out, they'll have some good kit you can take and keep too.
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
The Space Birthday Update: The Daily Challenge
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
As of tomorrow, Heat Signature has a Daily Challenge! Each day there's a special character with 3 missions that are the same for all players, and leaderboards to see how you did compared to your friends. Compared to other games, Heat Signature's daily challenge is quicker to play: it only takes about 15 minutes. And we're doing a few other things differently too:
The Daily Shop
I wanted the daily challenge to be challenging for even the best players, but I also wanted players of all skill levels to be able to enjoy it. That's tricky, because the whole point is the missions are the same for everyone. But I think I've come up with a system where people can still choose their challenge level, by paying for it with their score. Every day, the Daily Shop contains a whole bunch of great items, including many you can't normally buy in shops, and you can have all of them. The trick is, the value of what you buy counts against your score. So you can absolutely kit yourself out with the best stuff and have fun, you just won't score as well as your pro friend who went in with nothing but a Longblade and a dream.
Everything in the Daily Shop also gets 30% cheaper after each missions, since buying something later means you ultimately get less use out of it. So you're always betting on yourself: look at what the next mission entails, look at what you already have, and figure out what you really need, and if you really need it now.
Scoring
Each of the three missions has gets you an increasing number of points, and they also have a playstyle requirement - minimise kills, harm, sightings, alarms, or time taken. Unlike normal Clause missions, these are not all-or-nothing - if it's a no-kills mission, each kill docks you 10 points. So even if you break the rule, there's still an incentive to stick to it as best you can for the rest of the mission.
If you manage to complete every mission, never break the playstyle requirement, and spend nothing in the Daily Shop, that's a perfect score. Normally it would come to exactly 500 points, but we didn't want all the best players to get exactly the same score. So whenever you get a perfect score, we also give you a time bonus. This is 0 if you took more than 30 minutes of game time (which is rare) and 100 if you somehow did the entire thing in under one second (which is rarer). The bonus scales proportionally for everything in between.
Time ticks up when you're on or near the mission ship, so you're not penalised for travel time but you also can't entirely bypass it by dicking around outside the ship.
Re-playing
Only your first attempt at each day's challenge will be submitted to the leaderboards, but you're free to re-play it after that if you like. This is not an unusual feature, but it's unusual for Heat Signature, because until now there's never been a way to play exactly the same mission twice. Even Defector missions re-generated the ship each time you played. With the daily, the entire layout and the placement of every guard is the same each time, and it's a surprisingly novel experience to re-play a Heat Signature mission over and over until you figure out a way to do it exactly right. Entirely optional, of course!
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
The Space Birthday Update: Contractors
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
Our philosophy with enemies in Heat Signature was to allow every combination possible, so a Glitch-Dash guard can also have Heat Sensors and can also have Shields and so on. It leads to a huge number of possible configurations, some of which have interesting consequences, but it sometimes lacks flavour.
Contractors came about when trying to come up with enemies that would be a challenge even if you had the best kit in the galaxy, and we designed them with the opposite philosophy: there are just 4 types, and each one is completely different from the others. We want you to know exactly what each one does and not have to check a kit list each time. They each have a single specialty, but each one is something so formidable you'll need to rethink your usual strategies.
You'll only encounter Contractors on harder missions, and only a few per ship. But when ships call in Reinforcements, it's these guys who show up on the telepad. In order of how much they should worry you:
The Defender
A contractor who generates an impenetrable, uncrashable, unhackable shield for all guards near them. The only way to bring these shields down is to take out the Defender who, in one of nature's cruel ironies, only has a conventional shield.
The Jammer
A contractor who moves through the ship installing jamming devices that prevent any of your gadgets from working while you're inside their square of effect. The field also scrambles incoming teleportation, so glitching into it is not advised. The jammers can be destroyed up close if you can get to them. Crashing a Jammer prevents them from placing any more jamming devices. Subverting them... does something else.
The Tracker
A contractor with specialised sensors that track your exact location on the ship at any range. They will hunt you relentlessly, their reactions are instantaneous, and their high velocity rifle is virtually impossible to dodge. Watch for the red tracks leading to you. Crashing a Tracker disables their sensors, subverting scrambles them.
The Predator
The most lethal contractors in the galaxy. Step into their pulsing sensor range and they will instantly detect you, teleport to you, and kill you in the same move. Shields don't help, their blade is already in you when they glitch. Good luck. Crashing a Predator disables their sensor and teleporter. Subverting them... does something else.
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
The Space Birthday Update: Player Story Trading Cards
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
One Space Year ago, we said we'd do something different with our trading cards. We didn't want them to be about the game's story, we wanted them to be about player stories. But we needed you to play a bit first, and show us what you got up to. And then it also took a really long time to make them.
But now, on its first Space Birthday, we celebrate eight players and their moments of brilliance, stupidity and panic. They supplied us with clips of their antics, linked below, I wrote up their story as part of the game's lore, and John Roberts recreated their characters and situations to produce these lovely glamour shots of their moments of glory and/or shame.
The cards themselves will go live when the update launches on the 27th.
Thank you so much to all our players, for playing our strange game in smarter, wilder and funnier ways than we ever predicted.
August's objective was in a locked room. He looked at his options.
A Sidewinder teleporter can't get you through doors: it can only take you to places you have a clear path to.
And a Swapper teleporter can't get you into an empty room: it needs someone to swap with.
A guard with a keycard can certainly get you into a locked room, but you can't lure them in unless you're already there.
But August had an idea. The guard didn't need to ever set foot in the room for this to work. He stood in front of the locked door, close enough for it to deny his credentials, then swapped with the guard.
This solved one problem and created two more. The guard found themselves involuntarily right next to the door they had clearance to open, spinning around in confusion, and it opened for them. But now August was in a room full of the guard's friends, and the door would close again any second.
But now there WAS a clear path. And with a Sidewinder, that's all you need. One click took him out of the death room before the guards could react, behind the baffled keycard guard, and into the security room with his objective.
Cascara's mission was to capture Cleone Forrest, alive. She was close. She'd taken out the captain, found her target, took aim, and fired. WAIT! NO!
To say Cascara was a quick-thinker would perhaps be too generous. She had, after all, just shot at the person she was sent to take in alive. But she was a selective quick-thinker. In the limitless time she had to prepare and execute a plan for this mission, she didn't think to remind herself of her objective. In the time between her bullet leaving the muzzle of her gun and it striking the person she was supposed to be taking alive, though, she did.
It wasn't too late. It was extremely, ridiculously, comically late, but it wasn't TOO late. She had one option, and it wasn't good. But the mission comes first. The mission she didn't entirely read or remember comes first. So with a wince, she equipped her Sidewinder and teleported in front of the bullet.
There's a long, noble history of brave agents diving in front of bullets to save presidents, witnesses, loved ones, or their comrades in arms. For diving in front of her own bullet, to save the person she forgot she wasn't meant to kill, Cascara didn't think she'd be added to that list. But, she reflected as her target carried her bleeding body to the airlock, she'd probably be added to some kind of list.
Caeli's sister was always in trouble. But getting herself locked in a cell in the middle of massive and heavily guarded Foundry ship, this was next level. Getting to her was going to be a nightmare. Unless...
Caeli flew a Coldfire. It was almost undetectable. And she knew roughly where in the ship her sister was being kept. And she had a Swapper. This could work. It took a bit of bumping around and judging the angle, but eventually she was confident enough to eject herself right under the ship. As she passed her sister's cell, she aimed blind and hit the Swapper.
Bwap! She was in prison. And her sister was suffocating in space. This was an excellent plan.
She remote-controlled her Coldfire to catch her sister with 4 seconds of oxygen to spare. She was out of trouble. And Caeli was back in it - locked in a cell in the middle of massive and heavily guarded Foundry ship.
But Caeli was always in trouble too. She was just better at getting out of it.
Some people are legends for what they did. Genie is famous for doing nothing at all. All he did, all he had to do, was walk into a room. And set into motion a chain of events that killed five people without him lifting a finger.
He was seen, immediately, by a guard who promptly fired at him. At the sound of the gunshot, the guard's friends in the adjoining room immediately glitch-dashed to the danger. They glitch-dashed so fast the bullet hadn't even hit yet. They glitch-dashed in front of the bullet.
This was fine. The guard in the line of fire had a shield. The bullet hit the shield, and bounced back, toward - not the firer, no, this was worse. The window. The glass shattered and all four guards were instantly spaced, leaving Genie staring, stunned, at an empty room.
Kuiper had him: the man who tortured his son, slung over his shoulder. It was almost done. All he had to do now was carry him past the hail of gunfire from ten angry guards - doable - and past this shielded guard directly in his path - less doable. But Kuiper saw it coming, and Kuiper had a plan. He threw the unconscious body directly at the guard.
This, alone, achieved nothing - shields can withstand grenades, limp humans are not a concern. But the body would never hit the shield. Because next, Kuiper used his Swapper. Not on the body, but on the guard. Kuiper switched places with him just in time to catch the body coming his way, and ran on while the baffled guard watched a hail of gunfire bounce harmlessly off his shield.
As a ship’s security guard, especially as an armoured elite, you have to be ready for anything. This one saw Harris coming. He saw an Offworld Angel coming at his ship’s broken window full burn, and even though he knew it couldn’t dock, he was ready for whatever other nonsense they were about to try.
At the moment of impact, Harris hit eject. He threw himself from his pod, through the pressure-retention field, and skidded to a halt directly in front of the guard. The guard didn’t flinch. He fired. And Harris swapped with him.
The guard was not ready for this. He suddenly found himself staring at the blue glow of the forcefield Harris just came through. He couldn’t process the situation fast enough to realise what would happen next: his own bullet hit him in the back of the head. His heavy armour saved him from the lethal impact, but the force was just enough to nudge him one step forwards – into the pressure field.
What we don’t know is if, in the 15 seconds between being flung into the icy void and asphyxiating, he had time to figure out what the hell just happened.
It takes guts to teleport into a room and throw a shortblade at the only person rigged with explosives. But guts, Lyra had. She also had a Visitor, which was how she got in. Her knife hit home, the guard exploded, and the explosion took out every other guard in the room - and Lyra. It was a bold opening move.
Now Lyra is lying in a room full of dead guards, bleeding out, with every other guard on the ship running to the source of the noise, fast. But even unconscious, Lyra has some moves. She came here with a Visitor, and if there's one universal cosmic truth, it's that a Visitor always pulls you back. It doesn't care if you're conscious. So Lyra's bleeding body vanishes out of the room, just as a crowd of guards burst in to figure out what the hell happened here.
It takes talent, guts, and first rate equipment to break into a Siege ship, get to its cockpit, and set it on a collision course with an enemy stronghold before the guards take you out.
Cherry did it.
Getting out alive is even harder. You have a very short window to escape before the super fast, super powerful ship crashes into the super tough, super well defended stronghold and kills everyone on board.
Cherry did it.
The only easy part of taking out a stronghold is not breaking the siege ship. It would be hard to do that if you were trying. You can even blow up any single module on the ship, as long as it's not the cockpit, and it would still make it to the stronghold just fine. And to blow up the cockpit alone is wildly unlikely, you'd have to-
Cherry did it.
They... it's not clear if 'dropped' is the right word, but mistakes were made and an armed breach grenade remained in the cockpit after they vacated it. They did the one thing you must not do to the one module you must not do it to, and the whole ship was disabled. Cherry dangled in space as they watched it sail by the stronghold without making a scratch.
Cherry became a legend. Of sorts.
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
The Space Birthday Update: Upgraded AI & Reworked Alarms
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
Upgraded AI
First up, our programmer John Winder has upgraded the guard AI with some new tricks:
Errand buddies: if there are enough guards in a cluster, they'll take a buddy when they go off on errands. If the errand guard needs to check on a terminal, the other one watches their back while they do it.
New patrol patterns: as well as visiting terminals, guards will sometimes now check on key rooms in their sector, including any locked up loot.
Ship search: reinforcements that teleport in have a new search behaviour that lets them scour the ship for you.
Back to work: guards who left their post to investigate your antics will now eventually return to their original posts, but stay on high alert.
Lifelink: a new variable on some harder missions gives the guards in a sector an electronic link to each other - if any of them goes down, the others will sound the alarm and run to investigate. This prevents you thinning out a cluster by waiting for guards to wander off and taking them one by one (or two by two). Crashing a guard takes them off this network, subverting them crashes the whole network.
New UI
Usually when I die in Heat Sig I'm saying "oh god!" or laughing, but every now and then it felt unfair. I eventually traced these frustrating cases to a quirk of the UI. Guards show an alert bar that fills as they start to recognise you, and as soon as it's full they'll shoot. But if they're currently in the process of sounding the alarm, that indicator replaces the alert bar, so you're left with no sense of when they're going to fire. Dying to that sucks.
So we've redone the UI so we can show both the guard's alert level and their alarm indicator at the same time, when we need to.
We've also changed the alarm indicators themselves so guards now specify why they're sounding the alarm: a body? A gunshot? Or did they actually see you? If the alarm ever goes off unexpectedly, pause the game and zoom out - you should always be able to see who's sounding it and why they're spooked.
Quiet Guns
Alarms were also causing another subtle design problem I didn't put my finger on until after release. They often made the game feel... fragile. Guards take 0.5 seconds to recognise you as an intruder, and 1 more second after that to sound the alarm. It was meant to be tricky to take a group of guards out before any of them could fire, but easier to take them all out before they sounded the alarm.
In practice, though, it didn't work that way: if anyone fired at you, even if you dodged it easily, someone in another sector would always hear the shot and sound the alarm before you could possibly get to them. You effectively had 0.5 seconds to take out everyone.
We've done two things to solve this:
Guard's guns are now 'Quiet'
'Quiet' now means 'Can't be heard through walls'
You can still bring Loud weapons on a mission if you like them, but the ones the guards fire will never be heard through walls or closed doors. This means if you can take out a group of guards before any of them can sound the alarm, no matter how many shots were fired, no-one else will know anything is amiss.
I really like dodging my way through a slow motion gunfight, taking everyone out elegantly, then having that lovely stealth-game feeling that the situation has been contained.
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
The Space Birthday Update: Glory Missions & Clients
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
The original idea for this update was just to add some optional harder missions for really well-equipped characters played by really clever players. We ended up adding a lot more besides, but Glory Missions are exactly that. 5 new levels of much harder missions that you do just to prove you can. Here's the deal:
Glory missions come in 5 increasingly ridiculous difficulty levels, Glory I to Glory V
Glory I, the easiest, is harder than Mistake-level missions
Only characters who've completed a Glory I mission get access to Glory II missions, and so on
Instead of pay, they just have a Glory score that reflects their difficulty
Glory doesn't accumulate, it's just like a high score
The character who's completed the hardest Glory mission in your galaxy is immortalised in the Legends menu
There's also a leaderboard to compare your best Glory scores with your friends
Glory scores are also affected by your character traits: picking a character with loads of positive traits will get you less glory, and characters with lots of challenging traits get more
Glory V missions are special: we don't set a max difficulty for the mission generator, we just let it run wild
Glory V missions also come with two unique properties other missions don't have: Toughened Hull and Glitch-Proof Hull. That means you can't shortcut the challenge by attacking the ship from the outside or teleporting in. We love both those tactics, but the very hardest missions in the galaxy have to ask more of you.
Clients
As well as unlocking new mission types as you liberate the galaxy, you'll now unlock clients too. Each of these has their own mission listings board filled with missions of one particular type - to wit:
Clause Clients: there's one client for each of the special mission clauses, so if you particularly like Ghost missions, for example, there's now a place you can go to choose from a wide range of those.
The Thinker: none of this client's missions have a time limit or an alarm to worry about, you can always take as long as you like on these missions.
The Soft Target: if you don't like having to deal with armour or shields, this client offers missions where the guards don't have those.
Gloria: Gloria only offers Glory missions, and lots of them. Which is handy because these vary wildly in difficulty and reward.
Clients move around occasionally (each time the galaxy is loaded), just because we didn't want you to have to worry about unlocking them all in one ugly cluster and being stuck with that layout forever.
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
The Space Birthday Update: New Hazards
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
Today we're announcing not so much one new feature as seven: all the new hazards you'll start seeing on missions with the Space Birthday Update. Like any hazards, the mission generator only uses these when they're appropriate for the mission's difficulty level - we didn't make the game harder overall. We did, however, add some ultra-hard missions at the top end of the spectrum that we'll be talking about later.
Telepads
Most ships now have telepads - if you're in a tight spot, you can use it to teleport yourself into space. In fact, when you use a telepad everything on it is teleported, so you can get a Rescue or Capture target out this way, or even use it to deal with a enemy. But more often, you'll be dealing with how the enemy uses them. Specifically:
Fleeing Targets
Some missions now feature new type of alarm response: instead of starting a countdown to your capture, the person you're here for makes a break for the telepad. If they get there, they'll teleport out and you've blown it. So before you do anything risky, it's worth looking at the ship's layout and figuring out the route they'll take if they're alerted. Can you intercept them? Can you get there first? Can you crash the telepad so they can't get out? Can you hack it? Where do they go if they use a hacked telepad?
Reinforcements
Some ships don't need to fly to the nearest station to take care of an intruder. With a telepad, they can just teleport in the reinforcements they need, who'll then search the whole ship looking for you. Once the alarm is tripped, new contractors teleport in every few seconds, so dealing with them faster than they arrive is usually not practical. How many arrive, how quickly, and how nasty they are varies depending on the mission: Light Reinforcements are infrequent and run dry before long, so you may be able to take them all out. Heavy Reinforcements, though, means dealing with a rapid stream of the most dangerous contractors in the galaxy. What are contractors? A thing we're not talking about today!
Autopilot
Sometimes in Heat Signature the question wasn't so much "How do I avoid tripping the alarm?" but "How do I get to the captain fast enough that it doesn't matter if I do?" On ships with Autopilot, there is no captain. Tripping an alarm will always trigger the consequence - whether that's a countdown, the target fleeing, or reinforcements. And once it does, there's no way to disable it. Be very careful.
Jammer Gates
Some pilots in the Drift are frankly sick of you flicking on a Shield or a Slipstream and dashing through their ship before they can do anything about it. So they've installed jamming fields in every door on the ship - passing through will crash any active gadget effects you have going on. We can only thank the voidmother that there isn't some terrible new type of enemy that can deploy this jamming technology over a wider area as far as you know.
Random Kit
Very rarely, one type of guard aboard a ship will not all have a predictable set of equipment. Each guard of this type had just grabbed a random bunch of stuff, so you'll have to bring a versatile loadout and scope out each one as you come to them.
Inventory Lock
Ever wondered how you can carry 8 shotguns? If your answer was 'videogames', you were correct, that was our reasoning too. But now we're claiming that it's some kind of glitch-based storage system, because we discovered it's really fun to figure out how to do a mission without it. On Inventory Lock missions, the ship you're infiltrating can detect these inventory systems, so you've got to pick just two items to take with you. Everything else gets stashed and returned to you when you're done. This is, of course, massively harder than almost any other kind of complication a mission can have, so you'll only see this on the toughest missions in the galaxy.
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
The Space Birthday Update is out!
Heat Signature is one Space Year old! To celebrate, we've released a big free update we've been working on for five months, with over 20 features - including our own twist on a Daily Challenge.
The game is also 40% off this week, for the first time! The Daily Challenge and the new Glory leaderboards are best if you have some friends who play, so it's a good time to unfairly pressure everyone you know to buy it - or passive aggressively gift it to them.
This update is a one-off, we don't plan to do updates like this on a regular basis. You should only buy the game if you want it in its current state - we don't make promises about future content.
This update was made by
Tom Francis: design/code
John Winder: code
John Roberts: art
Dedicated to John Francis
We started this update in April this year, and my dad passed away in May. He was an electrical engineer, a software engineer and an inventor. He got me into computers at an early age, inspired me to be ambitious with his infinite faith in me, and protected me from the fear of failure by making me feel I could never disappoint him. I hope everyone reading this knows they deserve that kind of boost in life, whether you've been lucky enough to receive it or not.
Dad was extremely excited when my games took off, making his own graphs and projections from the sales figures I sent him. All of you who bought Heat Signature or Gunpoint made him so happy and proud. I hope this update can say thank you for that.
The Space Birthday Update: Character Traits
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
Character Traits
The characters you choose from at the start of a life in Heat Signature now have randomly chosen traits that change how they play - some helpful, some challenging. So one character might be:
Whereas another might be:
These affect your playstyle as I'd hoped, but I didn't realise they would tell little stories. In testing I got a character who was 'Weak: can't use melee weapons' and 'Ex-Sovereign: bonuses to blade attacks'. I was about to tweak the game to prevent that combo, since one overrules the other, but then I found myself thinking about who this person might be. Maybe being too weak to use a blade is why they were kicked out of Sovereign? Or maybe they were an expert blademaster before an injury left them weak? Every version was interesting, so I didn't end up prohibiting it.
We've also added a button to 're-roll' newly generated characters - mouse over them and hit F (or the Loot button) to send them home and get a new one. Characters still have a chance to have no traits, so you can get a standard one this way.
For every challenging trait a character can have, there's a new achievement for completing their personal mission despite it. You can get several of these at once if you manage it with a character who has multiple challenging traits.
Traits also serve as a difficulty choice, of sorts: we don't try to balance positive and negative traits, some characters just have a tough time of it and others much less so. It's up to you what kind of life you're interested in living this time.
The most challenging traits of all are the vows: some characters have sworn never to kill, never to harm, or never to be seen. Completing your personal mission with these intact is tough. But if you do break your vow, it's not game-over: we just tell you it's broken and let you keep playing as normal. In many ways, that character's story is just as interesting as one who stuck to their word.
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
Two weeks to find two weapons left by two legends in love
It's on this day, the 13th of Space February for some reason, we remember the assassin Cherry Ash and her lover, muse, and arresting officer Tesh Domina. Two legends of their professions, two glittering careers brought crashing down in glorious flames when they hooked up instead of doing their jobs. Today we celebrate their professionally disastrous and ultimately fatal love, partly because it has something to teach us about the human condition, and partly because their sweet custom weapons are still knocking around here somewhere.
For the next two weeks, two unique shipments are passing through the Drift. Look for a ship with a flashing gold beacon, and raid it to find either Cherry's Fatal Attraction or Tesh's Instant Connection. Each shipment will keep flying around until you steal it, or until the end of February. After that, whether you stole them or not, both items will be available to find as very rare random loot.
Cherry's Fatal Attraction
Stabbed through the heart
And you're to blame
You give teleporting swords into people
A bad name
Cherry's Fatal Attraction is a melee weapon that teleports you to your target with your blade already through their heart. It's long range and penetrates anything - even shields - but needs recharging after one use. When it's out of charge, it still works as an armour-piercing longblade.
Tesh's Instant Connection
Tesh Domina was known for being able to pacify a room full of criminals faster than any other Offworld Security Officer. Ever the supportive partner, Cherry thought Tesh's kit was holding her back. So she had this wildly expensive custom concussion club made for her, with zero recovery time and a Slipstream effect on every strike. After that, Tesh wasn't known for much - everyone she took out thought they'd been hit by some kind of blurry grenade.
Unrelatedly!
We've added the option to disable Liberators, the well-equipped characters who show up in the bar to help anyone struggling to liberate stations.
Because we're slow and bad, there's still time to get on our trading cards! Tweet a GIF, GFY or short video clip of something extraordinary you did or that happened to you in Heat Sig, mention @HeatSig in the tweet, and we'll make trading cards about the best. We have 3 we're definitely going to pick so far, and we need at least 2 more.
