Corerun
MARQUEE
▶ Grab the core. Run for the board.
VELA's raider nest is holding something that glows — a core torn loose from a colonized hulk, and it wants to go home with you. Punch in, get your hands on it, and haul it back to CINDER's board to score it. Every foot of the run is contested: raiders live on the nest now, not just around it, a few of them can actually hit what they're aiming at, and the ones talking on the radio mean it.
This is CORERUN — the extraction mode we've been building VELA's teeth around. Lift the core, survive the carry, bank the score. Simple to say, a fight every time you try it.
REF · #353 · #354 · #355 · #356 · #357 · #358 · #359 · #360 · #361 · #362
NEW
-
Ghosting past the nest is over. A knot of raiders now lives on the core itself, not just patrolling around it — sprint through and you're dead. A handful of them can actually hit what they aim at, too. Expect a real fight on the way in and on the way out.
· #474 -
The nest scales with the crowd. Bring three friends in and it isn't the same fight as going in solo — raider numbers and your ally crew both scale with how many pilots are working the core, so a two-pilot skirmish and a full squad brawl both stay playable.
· #369 #356 #359 #372
IMPROVEMENTS
-
The core's home is a landmark you can spot from across the field. No more squinting at an unmarked patch of space to figure out where the nest is.
· #370 -
Carrying the core has consequence. Your ship handles heavier while you're hauling it, and you light up brighter on radar — the run is supposed to cost you something, and now it does.
· #381 -
CINDER talks plain to new pilots. No more parsing report-voice riddles on your first run — CINDER tells you straight what to do and why it matters.
· #371
FIXES
-
The core can actually be dropped now. The break threshold was tuned against combat math that made it nearly unreachable — you could take fire all day and the core would never fall. Retuned so a few solid hits actually knock it loose.
· #376 -
Fixed: a carried core would never drop, period. The recovery funnel was code-correct but the trigger wasn't firing for a pilot carrier. It fires now.
· #368
CONTENT
-
VELA burns hot, permanently. The old crest-and-cool cycle is retired — VELA now runs at max intensity all the time, the chart's permanent burning frontier and the richest sustained payday in the galaxy. The fire doesn't care that you're winning.
· #316
PILOT'S NOTE
This is the patch CORERUN was built toward: lift the core, survive the
carry, bank the score. The engine work spans the whole chain — the
capture-objective entity and its state machine (#353), the drop-and-recover
resolver for a lost core (#354), the senses and NPC behaviors that key
off it (#355), the phase controller that runs the whole bout (#352),
the ambient hostile layer that keeps the field dangerous even between
fights (#356), the durable scoring service that banks what you earn
(#357), and the reinforcement-wave and elimination-attribution plumbing
underneath (#358, #359, #360). The content and UX passes on top
(#361, #362) are what turned the engine into something you can
actually go play in VELA today.
Two playtest-driven fixes landed alongside launch. Ray’s first live runs
found the nest too easy to run past and the carry too easy to hold onto
forever — both fixed. A few raiders now live on the core and can
actually hit their target (#474), and the break-damage math got
retuned against the real combat economy so the core is genuinely
losable, not just theoretically (#376, closing out a bug where a
carried core wouldn’t drop at all, #368).
The crowd-scaling question got a real answer too: what happens when
twenty pilots are all chasing the same core? Raiders and ally crew both
scale with the number of humans working the nest (#369, #372), so
the fight holds together whether it’s a duo or a full squad.
One galaxy-level change rides along: VELA’s crest cycle is retired.
It’s always at max intensity now — the chart’s permanent burning
frontier (#316). The fire doesn’t care that you’re winning.
— Ray