Hi everyone, the main priority this month was the release of MU4, which you can read about here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/514102575975368846 Thanks to everyone who has been playing the game and providing their feedback!
As is usual after releasing a Major Update, we spent some time planning what our next areas of focus will be. We’ve got some cool things in the pipeline that we’re excited to move onto – and we’ll show more as that all starts to take shape.
We’ve also started to properly tackle gamepad support. Since our early access release it’s been functional in combat, but the majority of the UI didn’t work on controller. The initial phase required design work to specify the controls on each menu, as well as PlayStation and Steam Deck button image artwork (we only had Xbox buttons thus far). Now code are working their way through everything and once the menus are done we’re planning on revisiting the implementation of gamepad controls in combat to further improve them.
The work above isn't the sort that generates lots of exciting images for me to post, but it is important nonetheless!
From the Community!
As always, we finish off the Dev Transmission with some cool images from the community. For this month we have Discord-user Busy Bee’s comic, where there were some special guest appearances…
It’s always cool to see stuff like this, so please send anything you have our way and we may feature it in a future Dev Transmission :)
Providing feedback is really important in helping us shape the game. Here’s a bunch of useful links to where you can reach us:
The team will be taking a bit of time off over Christmas, but I’ll continue manning our various community channels in case anyone needs assistance or has questions.
However you spend this time of year, everyone at Fireblade wishes you a great end to 2025!
The Tech Module Update
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:
Now the important information is covered, onto the new stuff!
Tech Modules!
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:
New After Action Report!
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!
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.
Major UI Rework!
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.
Status Effects Rework!
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).
New Enemy!
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.
New Levels!
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.
Other Stuff!
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
The Beta Branch for Major Update 4 is now available!
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]
Tech and Optional Objectives
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.
New Enemy and Levels
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.
Important Notes
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://steamcommunity.com/app/1252680/discussions/0/
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!
Big changes in the new MU3 Beta!
Hi everyone,
Major Update 3 is close now, so we’ve uploaded the final beta for testing – and there’s a lot of big and positive changes!
The latest version is 0.8.26631 and to gain access you’ll need to switch to a beta branch. The instructions to do so are as follows:
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 your profile saves will carry over (i.e. all your equipment you’ve unlocked thus far), but 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 new version.
It’s also good practice to back up your profile saves ahead of any Major Update, just in case you’re the one that finds an obscure bug. You can find your profile and save folder here: C:\Users[Username]\AppData\LocalLow\Fireblade Software\SENTRY\Saves\Steam\[SteamID]
Previous Betas
There have already been a couple of betas, so if you’d like to know what else has been added you should read the posts here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/534352273139040758 And here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/534354183830113715 The general top-level info is:
Hazards and rewards system to improve variety and replay value
A major reworking of the UI (allowing things like the level information boxes to display what enemies will be in the levels etc.)
Doors now reroute enemies
Jump Jets are now a default player ability rather than a gear item
Two new melee weapons
Two new levels
Equipment banking is now automatic at Gates, but slots are no longer persistent across runs
A crew menu where you can rename crew, revive them and equip them with armour. More details on that (as well as how you can get your name in the game) can be found here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/534354183830111022 Since then we’ve used July to make a lot more changes which I’ll detail below…
New Deployable
We developed the internal version a while ago, but the Flechette is now ready for action! This is our first non-square traditional deployable and so gives greater flexibility on where it’s placed. I personally have very much enjoyed the piercing upgrades when placing it looking down the length of a corridor – but let us know your thoughts too:
Reworked Crew Menu
Once we had a bit of perspective on the latest Crew additions, we wanted to do another pass on the Crew and Crew Select menus and we’re much happier with them now.
You can see the original one here:
And the revised one – which has much less information repetition – here:
Part of this rework includes the addition of SENTRY Uniforms (aka skins). You can obtain skins through unlocking vessels in the campaign, or random uniforms through rescuing crew pods in the Navigator. Uniforms are banked automatically at gates, the same as equipment. We’ll be adding more uniforms and more ways to unlock them in future.
If you’re wondering how this works in co-op, all players get access to the uniforms from both players while they're playing together.
Supply Beacon Changes
We’ve made changes to three existing systems which have a big enough effect to warrant being called out specifically :)
The first of these is to Supply Beacons.
In a previous beta we changed Supply Beacons so that any equipment could be found in any beacon type. Building on top of that, we’ve made the following changes:
Common Beacons have three options, while Uncommon Beacons provide four options
There are an increased amount of equipment-related choices to make – previously this was just weapon, deployable or gear – but now includes turrets too
You can also choose specific upgrades for types of equipment
When you receive a piece of equipment you’ve previously banked but not built in that run, it’ll be at a fixed Mk2 rather than a random level. People would get frustrated if it was anything other than high level, and randomly receiving a high powered piece of equipment could throw off a run’s balance too much
There’s an increased amount of Supply Beacons across each sector
Overall, this increases the rate of getting equipment and provides greater control over what you want to try and get – whether that be aiming for a turret above all else, or focusing on getting an upgrade for an equipment type.
We hope this improves Supply Beacons for everyone. We’ve got plans for future higher tiers of Supply Beacons which will build on these new foundations, but we want to hear what you think of these latest changes too!
Breach Point Selection
The second of the changes to existing systems which has had a big impact on general gameplay is the tweaks we’ve made to the Breach Point Selection Rules.
This is probably something you’ll be familiar with in combat where you’ve just defended an attack from the A and B breaches, but the next wave is at C and D breach points. Oh, and the wave after that? Back to A and B…
This created a bit of fatigue and frustration by having to fully sell all your deployables and reposition them multiple times through a single battle, every battle.
The changes we’ve made mean that now there should be a general sense of escalation across fewer breach points in a battle. Full rotations will still occasionally happen, but they’ll be rarer and a hell of a lot less when measured across entire campaigns.
In our testing thus far this has felt much better, but as ever we’re keen to hear what you think.
Pursuer Cameras
The third of these changes is to the camera that shows pursuing vessels and missiles.
There’s been a popular request to provide an option to disable this camera, but we felt this had a couple of problems. First, not all players dive into the settings menu and so this could be missed by some people (particularly as our settings menus are populated with a lot of granular options). Secondly, there was a danger that not showing this information could result in negative results – i.e. being surprised by a hunting ship suddenly boarding you, or not realising that a pursuing missile was getting that close.
Ideally, we’d make this something that is acceptable to everyone – and so we’ve made the pursuing missiles and vessels now always appear in a picture-in-picture format. This allowed us to make the following changes:
Make the entire sequence much faster. We no longer have to scroll the camera across to focus on the chaser, it cuts straight to and from what it needs to show – this alone at least halves the previous timings whilst retaining the information that needs to be shown
The player retains full camera control in the Navigator, so you’re not just sat watching it, you can scroll around and plan your next move while you wait
You can perform actions in other menus while the PiP is happening, so you can upgrade, look at crew etc.
All told, this makes the entire sequence less annoying. We know that there’s still more we can do here, and we’ll be looking at this – plus pursuers in general – in future updates.
Hazards and Rewards Feedback
We’ve done a pass on messaging the hazards so their effect on gameplay is clearer. There’s also been a bunch of changes based on your feedback and bug reports, so thanks for sending those through. Here are the changes:
Added a glitch effect to denote the Loadout Glitch hazard
Pod Shortage is now messaged in the spawn messaging and the crew lives icon
Enemy health bars now have dividers. These stack up for the Battle Hardened hazard
Loadout UI now messages the Disrepair hazard
Fabricator Glitch hazard is now easier to tell which deployable is temporarily disabled
Stopped the Disrepair hazard always being applied
Fixed the Set in Stone hazard also making deployables more expensive
Scientific Discovery and Military Decoration rewards now work for the client
Pod Shortage and Instant Action hazards would only appear on Boss encounters, but they were displaying the non-boss icons
Stopped the client disconnecting when they receive the Hostage Rescue reward
Convoy escape bar now gives an indicator of which enemy just escaped. We’ll add something to this for messaging the Strong Influence hazard
Every subsequent Major Update should include a collection of new hazards and rewards that build on the foundations of what is established here. We’ve got some cool ideas but love hearing those from the community too, so keep them coming.
Miscellaneous
There’s a bunch of other changes which I’ve noted below:
P9 and Bolt Rifle Bolts no longer detonate automatically once their lifetime expires, but fizzle out instead. This gives full control to the player, reduces inadvertent friendly fire instances and stops new players being confused by what is happening with sudden explosions everywhere
Fixed the Equipment shortcut button when receiving equipment from supply beacons. Also added a shortcut button to the Crew menu on the UI where you pick up a pod in the navigator view
Crew pickup UI now shows for client
Revised the crew pickup UI to factor in the latest changes to crew (names, uniforms)
Revised the Supply Beacon UI that shows what you picked to accommodate the changes to Supply Beacons described in the section above
A whole bunch of tutorial changes to improve the messaging for new players – basically stuff we’ve seen people struggle with, so hopefully these changes (with more on the way) will help those people. Some of these tutorial messages are global, meaning existing players may see them appear - but they're one-offs so won't appear again on that profile.
Plugged some level holes
Added breach letter decals to Thermal Vats and Junction
Added an extra wall near the C breach point in Mainframe
Fixed the Crossing D breach decal overlapping with floor-based deployables
Removed the “+” buttons on friends on the host co-op menu when they’re in combat (you can’t join mid-combat but the icons being there when they shouldn’t was making people think you could join in the middle of combat)
Updated the After Action UI to show all the latest changes to crew and rewards
Adjusted sector maps and added some new ones
Major balance pass across Initiate and Starfarer campaigns
Updated newsletter crew names
As ever your feedback is important in helping shape the areas we focus on, so please let us know what you think!
You’re welcome to post your thoughts in this thread, our Discord or our dedicated beta branch feedback Steam forum, which is located here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1252680/discussions/0/
Assuming there’s nothing major that crops up, we should then release Major Update 3 soon.
Once MU3 is out I’ll also create an updated roadmap, as we have an increasingly clear idea of the remaining work for Early Access.
Thanks for your continued support :)
New Major Update 3 Beta Test (and June Dev Transmission)
We’ve made an updated beta build available, which we’d like your feedback on so we can incorporate it into Major Update 3!
I’ll list everything new below, but first some important logistical information about playing beta versions:
The correct version is 0.8.26435 and to gain access you’ll need to switch to the 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, the most important thing to consider is that while your profile saves will carry over (i.e. all your equipment 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 new version.
It’s also generally good practice to back up your profile saves ahead of any Major Update, just in case you’re the one that finds an obscure bug. You can find your profile and save folder here: C:Users\[Username]AppDataLocalLowFireblade SoftwareSENTRYSavesSteam\[SteamID]
This build has some changes to how equipment slots are handled, so I’d avoid switching between the beta and default versions of the game unless you’ve backed up your saves.
To read up on the additions to the first MU3 Beta, read this post here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/534352273139040758 In summary, there was a new hazards and rewards system, two new levels, two new weapons, and an extensive rework to how we present information in the Overview menu.
When we were testing the previous beta – and combined with your feedback – we felt that one of the systems we had planned for MU4 was needed sooner rather than later, so we spent a lot of June working on this new crew menu feature...
The Crew Menu
The biggest new system in this Beta update is a new Crew menu. I recently posted an announcement that goes into the details of that here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/534354183830111022 Essentially you can now provide your crew with armour, rename them and revive dead ones. Once we’ve implemented the skins system, this is where you’ll be able to change uniforms too.
What else is new?
The crew menu was a big recent focus, but we’ve been incorporating your feedback on the last beta build too, with a mixture of individual fixes plus broader balancing across the entire campaign, such as:
Revised the research and materials values in upgrades
Increased starting scrap and per wave scrap so more deployables can be placed
Increased starting deployable slots to 4
Increased ammo drop chance
Buffed the P9
Minor buff to the SMG
Did a pass over melee values (normal weapons and melee ones)
Boss hazards now have special icons to differentiate them from normal hazards
Instant Action and Pod Shortage no longer appear on normal enemy ships, they are boss hazards
Halved the Worm Food red Leech lifespan and nudged up their spawn chance from 20% to 25%
Buffed Military Decoration reward
Bosses will no longer roll the Long Range Scan reward
Fixed a sign in Junction blocking the Tank
Made it easier to place deployables on the closed vent doors
Added an extra place to put a wall deployable by C breach in Mainframe
Lowered the amount of pistol carrying soldiers in the tutorial
There’s a bigger change you may notice too: Equipment banking now occurs automatically at gates and slots are no longer persistent across runs.
There'll be ways to increase slots beyond just picking them at gates. Additional ships plus slot-granting rewards are planned, and in the Crew menu post linked above we talked a little about a new player passives system scheduled for MU4 which will replace the old Passive Gear. Some of these will provide extra slots too.
[img src="https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images/38973288/3c5c57ef9b7808d5336d601fa75e9410d29fca25.png"][TAG-50] The last push to Major Update 3 is focused around polish, bug-fixing and balancing so your feedback is crucial in helping guide our efforts. Please post them in the comments below, in a separate post on the Beta Branch forum or on our Discord.
I thought I’d write a post that covers the new Crew Menu as it’s an addition that doesn’t deserve to be buried in a monthly Dev Transmission. It also relates to how you can get your own name in the game, something which we’ll detail below.
First, a bit of context: We had a rough plan for what Major Updates 3 and 4 would entail, fleshing out the core loop of the game and providing greater depth and variety. The first part of this was the Hazards and Rewards system, which we made available to test on a beta branch at the start of the month. Hazards essentially made combat spikier, with Rewards predominantly providing bonuses in the areas outside of combat.
For MU4 we’d planned a Crew Menu and a new player perks system that would replace Passive Gear, providing an additional layer to combat. Combined, all these systems should lift the core loop to a much better place whether it’s your first campaign or you’re a veteran.
While we were working through the much-appreciated feedback you’ve provided for the Hazards and Rewards system, we felt that the general impact of this new feature on the campaign meant the Crew Menu was needed sooner rather than later, so we’ve brought it forward into MU3. Our Discord Playtesters have this new system to test now – and the public Beta Branch should be updated once it's had some testing.
The Crew Menu
Crew were previously just a numbered resource, whereas they are now characters. Characters whom you can rename, equip with armour, revive deceased ones – and once we’ve implemented it, equip with new uniforms/skins. Here’s a glimpse of the latest WIP version of the Crew Menu:
Previously, armour was a piece of Passive Gear equipment that – once discovered – started at level 1 and you could upgrade to much greater effectiveness. Now, for a small materials cost that SENTRY gets the top level version and you can choose to replenish it in the crew menu as the armour gets destroyed over the course of your escape run.
This means armour is no longer a piece of Passive Gear, and as we’ve also given the Jump Jets as a default player ability means only the Bandolier remains. As I mentioned earlier, Passive Gear is being phased out for a replacement system with much greater depth and gameplay possibilities.
We had fun making a more beefy armoured SENTRY, while ensuring that the base version still looked cool. We did see what a SENTRY looks like with zero armour plating and just wearing the red jumpsuit, however this basically looked like they were wearing pajamas. Not cool, but it was amusing and I’ll share an image of that someday…
You can also now spend research to revive a deceased SENTRY, which is a benefit to those who have been losing campaigns due to running out of crew. It’s also helpful to those in co-op who have one crew member and don’t want their friend to be in spectator mode until they find a crew pod on the map.
These changes to armour and revivals provides much greater control over how you want to play your campaigns.
Getting Your Name in the Game
Which brings me to the crew names. On our previous game, we allowed crew names to be taken from a special database derived from our newsletter subscribers:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/551860/view/3580850447657046527 This proved very popular, so we’re doing it again!
(Please note as Abandon Ship released several years ago and is updated infrequently, we closed new newsletter signups for that game. Just mentioning that in case you go to sign up on the link in the post above, as it’ll lead nowhere)
If you sign up to our SENTRY newsletter then the name you submit will be added to a database that crew names are drawn from. We’re running this in a similar way to our first game:
Newsletter names are added to a special database, and crew are assigned names split between this and the “default” database
Names are randomly picked from each database
If you don’t want Newsletter names in your game, then there is an option in the “Interface” part of the Settings menu where you can stop them from being generated
All names can be manually edited in the Crew Menu
Our Newsletters are occasional (a handful a year) and not spammy in nature
Any bounces or unsubscribes get their names removed from the database
Every time we update the game we’ll update the Newsletter Names database so that it is current
Any rude names won’t be added to the database. This relies on me picking up on them though, so if you spot any please let me know – on Abandon Ship someone snuck past “Dickson Balzac” and it was several months before I twigged…
We’ve been running the newsletter for a while now, but haven’t really pushed the whole “getting your name in the game” aspect until the Crew Menu was ready.
When you see the Crew Menu, you may note that we include a randomly generated occupation for each crew member – this is a bit of fun, but also helps to reinforce a narrative purpose; that a SENTRY is an escaping civilian drafted into service – not a soldier, and certainly not a robot/android that we’ve heard the occasional person mention! We’re happy to receive suggestions of occupations from the community too :)
As I mentioned earlier, once we’ve got our Discord Playtester feedback and had the chance to do any fixes we’ll get this rolled out onto the Beta Branch for some broader community testing – and as usual there’ll be a monthly Dev Transmission soon that rounds up all the other latest SENTRY news.
Thanks for your support!
Major Update 3 Beta Test (and May Dev Transmission)
Hi everyone,
A beta version of Major Update 3 is now available!
The new hazards and rewards feature has exponentially increased the various gameplay systems so we’d massively appreciate you letting us know your thoughts, along with any bugs you may find.
To gain access to version 0.8.26211, 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, the most important thing to consider is that while your profile saves will carry over (i.e. all your equipment 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 new version.
It’s also generally good practice to back up your profile saves ahead of any Major Update, just in case you’re the one that finds an obscure bug. You can find your profile and save folder here: C:\Users[Username]\AppData\LocalLow\Fireblade Software\SENTRY\Saves\Steam\[SteamID]
Hazards and Rewards
The headline feature in this update is the Hazards and Rewards system.
The idea is to provide greater variety and spikes to the difficulty throughout your escape runs. A personal favourite is the “Barricades” reward, which places defensive positions throughout levels for a set number of battles.
The rules for this new system are essentially:
Each boarding party has a hazard and a reward
These re-roll when the enemy takes over a sub system and moves onto the next
When you fight a boarding party, the hazard gets applied to you
When you beat a boarding party you gain a reward (these last either a number of uses or are one-shots)
If you lose a battle, the boarding party doesn't generate a new hazard (but the reward will be re-rolled)
The boss encounters before a gate have a harder “boss” hazard
When you go through a gate, your hazards are wiped
Some will stack, so for example if you are infected with the ‘Tight Budget’ hazard (where 25% of enemies will no longer drop scrap), this would increase to 50% if you were infected with another ‘Tight Budget’ hazard
We’d love to know your thoughts on the meta, individual hazards and rewards and any combinations that stand out – our Discord Playtesters already highlighted a bunch of particularly brutal combos which we’ve re-balanced for this version but you may find others.
There's some clearer messaging of these that we have planned, plus we have a long list of other hazards and rewards we’d like to implement. We can’t wait to hear your own suggestions!
Other Big Additions
A few other things that may interest you…
There are two new levels: Junction and Thermal Vats – the latter has a lot of lava pits waiting to consume enemies you throw into them…
We’ve implemented melee weapons: The HF Blade and Stun Stick:
The Navigator and Overview UI have been reworked. This was largely to allow the new Deploy box to contain useful information about what you’ll face in combat.
There’s a bunch of smaller changes worth calling out because previous behaviour has now changed, just in case you were wondering if that was intentional or not:
When blast doors are closed the enemy will choose an alternate route. If no alternative is available they’ll attack the door. This means you can still close them to buy you some time, but in certain areas you can now re-route them.
We’re trialing having any piece of equipment appearing in any Supply Beacon
The Giant Slug now spawns Grubs upon death
Jump Jets are no longer a Gear item and are something you have all the time. They now double-jump more predictably too.
There are loads of other smaller changes and additions, but I’ll collate the changelist when we officially release MU3.
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://steamcommunity.com/app/1252680/discussions/0/
We endeavour to respond to comments and feedback as much as we can, but rest assured that even if we don’t personally reply we do read and note everything. Here’s a bunch of useful links to where you can reach us:
As always your feedback is essential and helps determine our focus. We’re very interested in reading your thoughts; so please drop them in the comments below, in a separate post on the Beta Branch forum or on our Discord.
There are some additional systems we originally had planned for MU4 that we’re thinking of bringing forward. They are not only a net positive for the game but also compliment the new hazards and reward systems, so we’re going to investigate those next (along with working through your feedback).
Overall though, once we feel MU3 has had sufficient testing and we’ve accommodated your feedback we’ll officially release it. As always we’ll keep you updated :)
Thanks for your continued support!
Dev Transmission (April 2025)
Hi everyone,
Our current main focus is on what will be the headline addition for Major Update 3. This aims to give a greater amount of variety and ‘spikiness’ in campaigns and individual battles.
To elaborate on that, enemy boarding parties will be infected with randomised Combat Hazards, something that will pass to you when you engage them in battle and stack up throughout a campaign. To offset this, they’ll each carry an Encounter Reward that will be granted when you defeat them.
We’ve been having great fun coming up with dozens of hazards and rewards, and the nature of how they tie into a campaign can provide some fantastic combinations and surprises along the way. I’ll avoid going into too much detail on this right now, but we’re looking forward to hearing about your own suggestions for hazards and rewards once you get your hands on the update.
In order to communicate this new system, we’ve taken the opportunity to rework how the Ship Overview is presented. This not only allows us to provide extra information that will result in more meaningful decisions, but also lays the groundwork for some new features coming after MU3. Here’s a sneak peek, although bear in mind some visuals are placeholder:
This required quite a bit of unpicking of the old format, so for SENTRY veterans some of the changed locations of buttons/UI may take a bit of getting used to!
You’ll be pleased to know the Deploy box will now show what enemy types are present in that boarding party – and if the sub system is below 100% health, then the repair information is always displayed, not just when you have the resources to make the repair!
New Deployable!
The Flechette Strip is a straight-forward damage-dealing deployable that spits out metal projectiles:
As you can see from the concept, rather than the usual square deployable shape this is long and thin. Because it can be rotated to place horizontally or vertically it offers a lot of flexibility in its potential placement locations.
New Enemies!
Alex has created a higher and lower tier variant of the Storm Warden, which brings it in line with the other enemy archetypes with tier variants.
A few people have asked where the higher (red) tiered enemies went in the last update – don’t worry, they will be making a return…
Polishing New Levels and Melee Weapons!
In our last update we mentioned that we had created two new levels plus two melee weapons –these have been with our Discord Playtesters who have been providing their thoughts, so Sean has been working through their feedback and making the necessary adjustments.
If you missed the last update and want to read about what those new levels and melee weapons were, check out the post here:
While our focus is very much on SENTRY, I thought it worth mentioning to show that we still like to support our last game even though it’s over 5 years old now. Expect SENTRY to receive that kind of love even when it’s several years beyond full release!
From the Community!
This month Discord member Busy Bee (who also goes by LittleMissCalculated on DeviantArt) has mocked up their idea for a new Electric Flamethrower type weapon they’d love to see. They explained that while it wouldn’t do weak spot damage it would do increased damage to armoured enemies and require getting up close to be most effective:
Keep sharing anything cool with us!
If you’d like to provide any feedback you can do so through our channels below – we try to respond as much as we can, but even if we don’t personally reply we read and note everything. Here’s a bunch of links to where we can be reached:
Hi everyone, we've made another Devlog that delves into the details of our last Major Update and explains some of the thinking behind our approach. Check it out:
And don't forget to smash that like button :)
Dev Transmission (March 2025)
Hi everyone,
Our main priority in March has been working on what we’re considering to be the headline feature of Major Update 3. While we won’t spoil the details now, the idea of this addition would be to provide much greater variety when playing campaigns.
How we present this new feature ended up combining with some other areas we’ve been working on, such as showing more information in the Deploy box (like threat levels, enemies in that boarding party etc.) as well as our plans for later in Early Access (adding a Crew Menu and Codex) so we took the opportunity to rework the menus so that it accommodates all these changes and future ideas. That has been quite time consuming, however it means that they should all be more intuitive. The danger with Early Access is that sometimes you can keep bolting on features to the user interface and it becomes a poor experience to use, so we wanted to avoid falling into that trap. It's shaping up quite nicely!
Here’s what else we’ve been up to this month:
New Weapons/Gear!
Major Update 2 was very code heavy, so while Adam was focusing on that Sean and Alex were laying the groundwork for future content creation. Now various dependencies have been freed up we’re going through and implementing some of these queued up assets – those who have followed previous Dev Transmissions may remember seeing concept art for some of these:
Melee weapons are 1-slot, so while they have limitations they still conform to the general rule in SENTRY; that any weapon should feel good to use and be perfectly viable for certain situations.
The HF Blade stores a number of charges that can be expended on ranged attacks, while the Stun Stick becomes more powerful when it’s fully charged – which can only be accomplished by smashing props or enemies. You can also choose to unleash this charge in an explosive secondary attack.
We’ve also introduced the Shuriken as a new Gear item. When thrown, this bounces to nearby enemies – something that can be increased as you upgrade it.
On the subject of gear, we’ve moved the Jump Jets to be a permanent player ability so you can now double-jump all the time (we’ve also made the double-jump more reliable, so it feels like you’d expect it to). This leaves the number of passive gear items quite low, but is in advance of a change we’ll likely make after MU3 to how passive items are assigned to crew.
New Levels!
We’ve got two new levels that should imminently be going out to our Discord Playtesters: Junction and Thermal Vats.
The former has echoes of Hallway, in that it is compact with some short distances between the breach points and exit, so can be quite intense when facing larger forces. The main corridor is wide and a natural defense point for 3 out of the 5 breaches, but it’s split in the middle so can present a challenge!
Junction is partially built on a layout we created very early on in development, so it’s been great to revisit it. This area appeared in some of our earliest (and now nuked) screenshots on the store page.
Thermal Vats has several areas of molten metals scattered around the level, ideal for using Conveyors or the Vortex Glove to push enemies into :)
From the Community!
This month Discord member TheCartoon1st has created an image of them and their friend playing co-op together:
We absolutely love seeing this stuff, so keep sending anything cool to us!
Keep giving feedback via our channels below – we try to respond as much as we can, but even if we don’t personally reply we read and note everything. Here’s a bunch of links to where we can be reached:
