➰ Main Game Loop Completed

The ability to accumulate points from destroying vehicles and installations when in hot war with Metal Clan has been added. After destroying enough of Metal Clan's forces, a message will appear challenging the player to a more advanced battle. The boss installation will spawn near a very powerful grid. Once defeated, a message will appear acknowledging the player's victory, all points for cold and hot war are reset, and the player returns to the original cold war state with Metal Clan.

Voxel clearing has also been fixed for the boss bunker and Tank Foundry.

🔝👾⚔ Metal Clan Boss Encounter

Note that the mechanism to score boss points is not implemented (more on that below), so this must currently be manually spawned into a game.

The first boss encounter for Metal Clan is the Axion Anvil - an underground missile bunker. A player will need to get 100m deep below the surface and eliminate the control unit to stop the endless barrage of strategic nuclear warheads.

The bunker also uses rockets for striking offensive targets and defending itself.

Every so often, 1 or more large missiles will spawn and seek out the most threatening target they can find, and attempt to destroy it. The number of missiles will scale with the player's threat score of the surrounding area. Lots of point defense is necessary, as these missiles are far more powerful than anything Metal Clan has unleashed before.

Before the base can be destroyed, players will have to destroy additional boss-level vehicles, such as a heavily armored railgun tank, and new rocket truck. The latest rocket truck will also periodically fire tactical missiles, destroying any weak targets in the area.

Expect to defend against waves of ordinance, while trying to penetrate a deep bunker boss!

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At this time there is a bug with MES and voxel clearing for underground bases. The Tank Foundry and Axion Anvil are affected. Players will need to tunnel through underground rooms to find RAI control blocks, or use heavy ordinance from the surface. This is not intentional, and will likely be fixed before beta testing ends.

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To spawn the boss encounter (there needs to be about 700 threat score in the local area - near a well defended base):

/MES.Debug.ChangeBool.MetalClanWar.true
/MES.Debug.ChangeBool.MetalClanBoss.true
/MES.Debug.ForceCombatPhase
/MES.SPI.Metal-Axion-Anvil-Boss-SG

⚔ Mechanism for War Mode

When players are in cold war with Metal Clan (the default state at start), destroying some of their vehicles and stations will provoke Metal Clan into war.

In war mode, more difficult encounters will spawn which have better loot.

Most smaller vehicles will add a low number of war points, rocket stations add more, and the heavy base and supply truck will add the most. After destroying two supply trucks, the player can expect a message within 3 minutes that Metal Clan is ready for war.


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TBD are boss points when in war mode, which will allow boss spawns. Defeating a boss will reset to cold war state. Once a boss encounter is released, Metal Clan will move from alpha to beta testing phase.

🐞Fixed issue with Vehicles broadcasting their despawns but not despawning. Vehicles now despawn after a period of time as expected.

💰⬇ Loot pass for Cold War spawns

- everything reduced except Supply Truck and the FOps Base. Most loot is basic ingots, basic ammo, or basic components, with some grids having a little advanced of each.

⏳ All vehicle spawngroups (that is not, RAI spawns) will now time out and despawn after a fuzzy time period based on the spawngroup's difficulty level

==== Phase-In of New Advancement Mechanics

Today's release is the start of developing the advancement from Cold War -> Hot War -> Boss Spawns for Metal Clan.

The Triggers for automatically advancing are not yet developed, as they will leverage a brand new MES feature known as "Events," which was just released yesterday.

Additionally, spawns have been separated into Combat and Passive phase spawns. Generally speaking, grids that will directly attack a player will be Combat phase, and Grids that require the player attack them are Passive phase.

Currently, the "MetalClanWar:false" Sandbox Variable will be assumed at start, and will allow only "Cold War" spawns such as cargo trucks when Passive, and Rocket Trucks and similar bases when Combat phase.

When "MetalClanWar:true", the advanced, or Hot War spawns are eligible, with motionless and spawnless tanks and simple turret grids will spawn in Passive mode, and stations and vehicles that spawn ordinance will spawn in Combat phase.

Eventually, destroying critical grids, such as the Supply Truck or Missile Silos, will have a large % to enable Hot War. Other grids will only have a small % chance to start war with Metal Clan. Destroying specific numbers of Hot War structures and tanks are the planned mechanism for enabling bosses, and destroying a TBD boss will reset the mod to Cold War.

Testers can use the following MES commands to enable/disable Hot War or Cold War:

/MES.Debug.ChangeBool.MetalClanWar.true
/MES.Debug.ChangeBool.MetalClanWar.false

==== New Encounters

Given the split into Combat and Passive phase spawns, there are fewer grids available for some levels and phases. More will be released in the future.

Supply Cache - simple gatling turreted grid that has some loot in Hot War Passive phase

Tungsten Gazer - beefed up version of the Gazer with a custom autocannon turret for Hot War Passive phase

==== New (Simple) Encounters

new "cargo" trucks can spawn, which have weak defenses, and some decent but low-level loot

==== Many ground vehicles have higher spawn locations

to avoid voxel collisions, many of the vehicles, including all "Simple" encounters, will spawn higher into the atmosphere. This may still result in some voxel collisions on spawn, so more improvements will happen over time.

===== New Advanced Encounter

The Tank Foundry is a surface installation that spawns tanks. When a target gets close, it spawns the ordinance tank, which provides significant air defense to the Tank Foundry. The Tank Foundry will also spawn a rocket when it takes damage.

===== New Advanced Encounter

The Iron Obliterator (Ordinance/Missile Tank) is much like the Iron Spear (Rocket Truck), except that its armored like a heavy tank, and occasionally launches a Tactical Missile. The rest of the behaviors are same as Iron Spear - it spawns 0-4 companion tanks, and fires 3-5 rockets at nearby targets every so often.

Tactical Missiles are a new Missile behavior which simply target the lowest value target in the area - small defenses, mining outposts, or cargo ships in the air.

===== Redesigned Advanced Ordinance Prefabs

Up until now, Metal Clan has been re-using the simple encounter ordinance, "Small Rocket" and "Small Missile", for the advanced encounters. These prefabs are very simple and the "Small Rocket" doesnt even fly very well, which is fine for the simple encounters.

Now the "Rocket" and "Missile" prefabs have far more thrusting power, and larger physical grid size, which allows them to navigate better and accelerate faster. Theyre more successful at hitting targets as a result. They also tend to produce less debris as they have more warheads distributed throughout the grid body.

Its highly likely that Void Clan's torpedos are upgraded to match Metal Clan's new "Rocket" and "Missile" grids.