What's new since 0.73: the Century Campaign, new combat and Versus

0.73 went live on 30 September with the new look. Since then we have shipped over 300 patches on top of it, so here are the big ones in one place. The full list is in the in-game patch notes.

The Century Campaign is open

The story mode now sits at the top of the title menu, above the Pilot Campaign, and anyone can play it. You command one carrier through a hundred years of war on the Alliance or Empire road, and the story is written all the way to Year 100, across five eras, with one of four endings decided by what your family line did along the way. When command passes down, your old Commander hands the ship to their heir and flies on in the squad until they retire.

• You run the war from your bridge. Six officers sit along the bottom of the map, so you talk to the navigator to move, comms to pick who launches, and gunnery to fire at long range.
• Sector map orders work like a tactics game. Click any hex for Move, Attack, Pursue, Dock or Land, and the war only moves when you press End week.
• Cities, starports, stations, factories and mines are 3D models now, with glowing windows, lava and crystal fields, and every place has its own name.
• Fly your own mech, or choose Command from the Bridge and run the fight from an order wheel while your squad and ship fight on their own. Formations unlock as your Commander levels up.
• The Hangar works the G Generation way: every mech you own is in one list, any pilot can fly any mech, and saved squads decide who launches. Squads that aren't fighting can go out on patrols, salvage runs or training drills.
• There's an economy to play with. Ports have trade counters with prices that move, factories buy your spare mechs and weapons, five weapon makers sell their own trade-off guns, and Reputation tracks where you stand with both empires, the pirate clans, the Traders' Guild and the Port Authority.
• Custom parts (boosters, plating, AI chips and nine more kinds) come in grades 1 to 5 and fit into up to four slots per mech.
• Pick Easy, Normal or Hard when you start. On Normal nobody dies in battle, so a downed wingman spends two weeks in the medbay. Hardcore ends the story if your Commander is shot down or your ship is lost.
• Story scenes are voiced in English, Chinese and Japanese, with text in Korean too. The voices are AI voices for now, so they start switched off, and you can turn them on in Settings.

Combat and weapons

• Your mech carries as many weapons as its lift and reactor allow, and LB (or C) swaps your main trigger to the next gun.
• Weapons do different jobs. Rifles and machine guns tear off arms, legs and heads, beams go for the hull and missiles overheat the target, and a damaged arm or leg makes a mech aim worse or fly slower before it breaks.
• Every weapon has a rating out of 100, measured from test fights, and moving up a grade inside a weapon family is now always an upgrade.
• Shots fly from the gun you see, and the reticle and lead pip sit on the line your next shot takes, for every weapon on your mech. Aim assist is off by default, with Light and Full under Settings, Accessibility.
• Target view keeps your mech and your target on screen together and splits the screen when they drift apart.
• Charge beams lock their aim when the charge starts, so you can see them coming and sidestep them.
• The afterburner builds up to 30% more speed over about two seconds, and the blade dash closes about 40% faster.
• About 95 mechs have new combat animations, melee combos and boosts.
• Battles now have dynamic lighting. Shots, beams and explosions light up the mechs and the ground around them, and every stage has its own light (High and Medium quality, desktop).

Versus

Versus is on the title screen with a fighting-game style select screen. Every mech and every weapon is open from the start, only Bravecores have to be collected, and you can set each AI pilot from level 1 to 10 or hit EQUAL GEAR to put it in your exact loadout.

Pilot Campaign

• Choose Easy, Normal or Hard when you start a run.
• Every battle gives you a grade from S to D, read only off how you flew, and your record stays with you through every year.
• Between battles you stand aboard your own carrier, and everything Configure Squad used to do now lives in the ship's rooms.

Controllers, phones and PC

• A bar along the bottom of every menu shows what each button does, with your pad's own button names for Xbox, PlayStation and Switch.
• The battle controller layout changed: RT fires, X swings the blade, A boosts, and holding LT opens your systems.
• On Android, battles run much smoother. A Redmi Note 14 Pro+ went from about 65 fps to 90, and a Redmi Pad 2 Pro from about 50 to 75-90.
• New settings for a frame rate cap (Uncapped, 60 or 30) and a Light animation mode that uses far less memory on PCs with 8 GB of RAM.
• 29 new music themes, new recorded sound effects, and 17 new pilot voices so squadmates no longer share one.

The Steam demo runs the Pilot Campaign up to the first gate and the first 30 weeks of the Century Campaign. If you like what you play, a wishlist is the one thing that helps us most.