Greetings Fellow Sky captains and Crews! Congrats to the first leaders of the Icarus Faction War! New titles have been granted to honor this historic event. The title of First Leader has been granted to all four factions’ leaders, and the title of First Grand Leader has been granted to all four faction's overall leaders. First lore entry commemorating the first week of war is coming shortly, and so is a new leadership emblem to be worn on costumes. Stay tuned! In addition to fixing bugs critical and small, brewing in our lab today are a number of exciting things. New Game Mode: Ambush We are set with the mechanics of Ambush, where ships work together to intercept and ambush enemy airships making bomb runs to bases. These bomb carriers would be supported by other enemy ships and even a boss. You need to race to intercept and kill them in time before they destroy your base. If you kill enough of them, you win. If your base gets bombed into oblivion, you lose. Mechanically, the mode is playing pretty well. It’s intense under fire and also a race against time. It takes coordination to see who chases down what.
But as typical in any testing, things break! Somehow, we managed to spawn into the matrix today… Next up in this mode, we’re starting to make the first map for it! Muse MKII Program: In our weapons lab (Eric’s desk), we’re prototyping new faction MK2 guns, and here’s a glimpse:

The goal of the MKIIs are to create vastly different versions in how they play and work, but still maintain that consistency with faction technology and theme. The Gas Mortar MKII is a rapid fire, multiple canister launcher, but the gas dissipate much more quickly. With the Lens Array MKII, think shotgun laser. Next week we’ll preview the Coil and the Missile MKIIs, so stay tuned! Updated Stormbreaker:
The Stormbreaker will be retrofitted with a heavy gun slot, so you can mount the Cavitation gun! In today’s testing, the retrofitting was deemed satisfactory by us, and you shall see it in Dev App to test drive soon! Also, we are testing quite a few client side fixes that we’ll deploy asap, and these are the things we made fixes for. - Fixed several memory leaks that eventually led to crashes on all platforms - Handled some previously unhandled NULLs that could cause crashes on Linux - Improved visibility and added distance counter to objective indicators on Assault - Fixed missing event leaderboard title text - Corrected some text referencing "Preorder Alliance" to "Buy Alliance" - Fixed a music playback error caused by attempting to seek to an invalid time Once we run through these fixes, we’ll deploy a new client build (no server restart required), and announcement will follow. What’s on the docket next week: Endless Seek & Destroy Single Ship Infiltration Missile Circus MKII Coil MKII Yeshan Ship Thanks everyone and stay safe in the treacherous skies! -Bubbles