The Forge — feed one gun to another

Merging used to be a lottery. You could only combine two of the same weapon, which almost never happened, so the COMBINE button sat dark for most of a run — and when it finally lit up, the reward was a bigger number. A Rare Plasma Bolt was a Common Plasma Bolt with the damage scaled up. Nothing about the gun had changed.

So now weapons can eat each other.

Chassis and donor

Pick any two weapons of the same rarity. One is the chassis — it survives, keeps its model, keeps how it fires. The other is the donor, and it is destroyed. Before it goes, it hands over its signature aspect.

Every weapon in the game donates something, and what it donates is what that weapon is:

• Feed a Tesla Coil to something → its hits arc to two nearby enemies
• Feed a Mine Layer → rounds that run out of range settle into mines
• Feed a Railgun → +1 pierce and 50% armour ignored, with a doppler trail
• Feed a Torpedo Launcher → rounds stick and detonate a beat later
• Feed a Void Blaster → the whole weapon converts to Void damage

Twenty-nine weapons, twenty-nine aspects, and any of them can end up on any chassis. A Plasma Bolt that chains is not a Plasma Bolt anymore.

Forge or combine — pick one

Here's the part we changed late and are happiest with. Forging does not raise rarity. Combining two identical weapons does, and grants no aspect.

> Bigger numbers, or a new behaviour. You don't get both from one merge.

For a while forging gave rarity and an aspect, which made it strictly better than combining on every axis — COMBINE had no reason to exist. Splitting them turns every full weapon rack into a real question. And climbing rarity now does a second job: higher rarity buys room for more aspects.

One slot too many

A weapon holds one aspect at Common, two at Uncommon, three at Unique, four at Legendary. New room opens every second tier — and the tiers in between are the point.

When a forge hands you an aspect you don't have room for, the game stops and makes you choose which one to give up.

Whatever you release lands in your aspect inventory, so nothing you paid a weapon for is ever destroyed. You can socket it back onto a different gun later — which opens a genuinely dirty little strategy: forge cheap weapons purely to harvest their aspects, then bolt them onto the gun you actually fly.

We thought about closing that loophole. We decided we liked it.

Nothing happens by surprise

The donor is destroyed and none of it is reversible, so the forge tells you exactly what it's about to do and then waits.

Everything that matters is on that screen before you commit — what survives, what dies, the aspect you gain, whether you'll be forced to release something afterwards, and whether the pair is unstable.

Because some pairs are. Cross-tech fusions — strapping a plasma core to an ordnance chassis — cost +25% mass and −10% fire rate, permanently. That tax is what stops "feed everything to one gun" from being the obvious answer. Although if you're flying the Juggernaut, which pays you damage per tonne of mass… we'd understand.

⚡ Resonant pairs

Fifteen specific pairings aren't generic at all. They're hand-authored, they're named, and the rack marks them with a gold ⚡ the moment you own both halves — so you don't sell one by accident.

• Railgun + Void Beam → Singularity Rail, a rail shot that drags everything it passes into its wake
• Void Singularity Cannon + Plasma Bolt → Vortex Battery: impacts open a vortex that pulls enemies in and fires plasma beams at whatever it catches
• Tesla Coil + Firewall → Ion Storm, a moving electrical field
• Torpedo Launcher + Fatboy Nuke → City Killer, with a real mushroom cloud
• Void Lance + Antimatter Lance → Unmaking: pierces everything, ignores shields and armour alike

Ten more where those came from.

The same aspect isn't worth the same twice

This one we didn't design — it fell out, and it's our favourite thing about the system.

RELIABLE grants damage as a share of the gun's own, so it's worth double on a fast little popgun and almost nothing on a Fatboy Nuke. SPLITTING adds a projectile, so it's huge on a single-shot cannon and nearly pointless on a Scatter Shot that already fires seven. IMMOLATING burns for a fraction of one hit, which makes it the exact inverse — it wants one enormous hit, not many small ones.

And fire-rate aspects are worth precisely nothing on the handful of weapons already sitting on the engine's rate ceiling. That one caught us out during balancing, on a signature fusion of our own making.

So "which aspect do I want" genuinely depends on the gun in your hands. No restrictions, no hard locks — just a lot of combinations, and some of them are much smarter than others.

Go break something.