Hitting beta March 20, and launching on March 25th, this update adds long awaited gear and mods to the game, many of which were suggested by our community. As always, a bunch of bug fixes and balance changes are included. Here are the highlights:

Nova Drift is a “Roguelite” space shooter that merges an exemplary arcade involvement with present-day activity RPG components. Your ship quickly advances as you rout foes, enabling you to shape its capacities and weaponry to your wants in merely minutes. Nova Drift distills the mechanical depth of an action RPG into classic arcade space combat. Control an endlessly evolving bio-mechanical ship, face legions of strange and deadly foes, and ride the wake of a dying star across the void. Nova Drift received a huge overhaul to the way text and descriptions are handled. It is now very easy to maintain, write, and translate. The stage has been set for international localization! Balance Changes. 2% - 1.5% Essence Sap recovery; Self destruction has had its scaling adjusted, and now hits once instead of.

Changelog Updated

New Gear

Weapon: Thermal Lance

Charge up and sustain a focused lance of heat to burn targets and make them vulnerable to further damage
While sustaining Thermal Lance, you also fire twisting sparks that are affected by your projectile mods
Thermal Lance and its sparks ignite targets for 120 burning damage /s
Damage from Thermal Lance and its sparks apply vulnerability to targets
Vulnerability increases the damage targets take from all sources. After targets stop receiving vulnerability for one second, the effect falls off over time
-35% thrust and -50% rotation speed while charging
Damage: Thermal Lance damage scales with its charge level
Spark damage: 8
Spark count: 1
Spark rate of fire: 7.5 /s

Shield: Shockwave

Shockwave releases waves that ebb and flow, pushing targets and projectiles around it
When your shields reset after its cooldown, Shockwave releases a forceful wave which deals 120 damage and applies +20% vulnerability to targets it hits
Shields: 60
Cooldown: 7 seconds

Body: Carrier

You automatically assemble and deploy Swarm Constructs, which apply vulnerability to targets
While a damaged shield protects you, a portion of your Swarm Constructs are assigned to recover your shields
While your shield is down or you have no shield, Swarm Constructs gain increased movement speed and rate of fire
-10% rate of fire
Hull: 110
Thrust: 75
Swarm Constructs: Type: Basic construct. Rarely created as standard or advanced constructs with improved abilities
Construct limit: 4 + 1 for every 2 of your levels
Hull: 8 Damage: 5. Applies 0.25% vulnerability
Rate of fire: 1.5 /s Assembly time: 1 second

New Super Mods

Charged Mines

Your mines charge your weapon at 100% of your charge rate
Charged Shot no longer applies to you
-25% mine trigger radius
Your mines constantly take 2 damage /s

Mortar

Your mines are deployed at high velocity, in your firing direction(s), when you fire
Your mines detonate at low velocity instead of detonating within a trigger radius
-20% mine damage and mine effect
If you fire with no mines assembled, a mine is deployed and 15% + 5 of your current hull and shields are removed. This removal cannot be mitigated, but also can not reduce hull or shields below 1

Reworked Mods

Loaded Mines

On detonation, your mines fire your weapon in a radial spread
The number of weapon instances produced by Loaded Mines is determined by your rate of fire and projectile count
For weapons that charge innately, your mines charge your weapon at 75% of your charge rate. Additionally, they constantly take 2 damage /s

Minefield

Your mines are deployed all at once in a cluster
+3 mine construct limit
+50% mine assembly speed
-50% mine maximum hull
-25% mine damage, total mine effect, and mine trigger radius
Your mines cause a chain reaction when they detonate

Other Notable Changes

Loaded Mines and Retribution have switched places on the tree, allowing mine builds to have access to this key mod earlier
Auto Mines has been replaced by Minefield
Interceptor Allies can now properly utilize innately charging weapons (Vortex and Thermal Lance)
New battle BGM added: Superlumen and Superlumen (Warped), for Endless and Wild Metamorphosis, respectively
Rancor has been reworked. It now has quite an explosive effect when triggered (roughly 5 times its previous magnitude), but wears off over time
Dozens of bug fixes and minor adjustments

Up Next: Enemies 2.0

The player character has outgrown its opponents. With nearly 200 upgrades in the game, it's time to turn the focus of developments to the enemies we face. It's time to bring enemies and their capabilities up to the standard of quality that has been given to the player character.

Enemies, and the ways they spawn are some of the oldest and most outdated systems in the game (Nova Drift is 5 years old and grew from a small hobby project.) Many players have voiced concerns about enemy spawns, diversity, bullet-hellishness, and the relatively narrow build options for surviving past wave 200. With Draft Mode and Boss Rush coming up on the road map, I see this as an opportunity for a rework that satisfies these issues while also improving fun and choice.

I'll break it down:

Older enemies will get a new coat of paint, while new enemies will be introduced to the game, both early game and late game. The quality bar for how an enemy looks and behaves will be raised.
Enemies will spawn with 'roles' within formations, such as a protector or support of another unit.
Steps will be taken toward removing the need for a 'spammy' late game. Enemies will trend toward tactical, dangerous, and diverse instead of numerous. In other words, encounters will be deadly for reasons which are better than 'there were too many mines and bullets on the screen.' As a result, the rate of spawns and the speed scaling of enemies at high waves can be reduced without being made easier.
The above fits better with Nova Drift's upgrade system, which incentives builds that require set up and timing. Right now, 'area clear' strategies are overwhelmingly more important than intended, while dealing single target damage isn't as viable.
Enemy spawns will be revised. Instead of always entering from the edges without warning, enemies might fade in from the depths of space, warp in from a portal, or enter via the borders with a HUD warning.
The wave spawning system will become more dynamic and procedural, allowing greater variance while being easier for me to tweak.

Rather than one big update that attempts to fix all these issues at once, these changes will be rolled out over a series of updates, mixed in with the usual content updates (albeit less of them).

An Example of Enemies 2.0

A Peek At An Upcoming Enemy

In Other News: We're Now Using Feature Upvote for Feedback and Requests

This message is from V2Blast, our Community Manager:

We appreciate all the feedback and feature requests you've given us! As the community continues to expand across more and more platforms, though, it's becoming trickier to make sure all of your ideas get the attention they deserve. We want to make sure all of your ideas get seen. We'd also love a way for everyone to see which requests are the most popular and which are already planned or in progress.
We want to have one central place where we can gather feature requests from the whole community - Discord, Steam, itch.io, GOG, and any other platforms that the game may expand to in the future. As a result, we're moving to a single centralized platform for managing feature requests, called Feature Upvote: https://novadrift.featureupvote.com/
You can suggest your own ideas there, and upvote or comment on others' requests as well. In order to post, you only need