Combat mechanic — not covered elsewhere
Ammunition Types
Rather than more guns: incendiary, piercing, spread. Cheaper than modelling weapons and deeper
Press [=] and [-] to cycle forward and backward through six ammunition loadouts — reachable at any time, including mid-fight, though how comfortable that actually is in practice is an open question (see Trivia below). Every type besides Standard trades away some raw damage for a specific effect on impact — the game's own design notes frame this directly as a cheaper, deeper alternative to simply adding more weapons: six ways to load whatever gun a player already owns rather than six more guns to design, model, and balance separately.
The six types
| Ammo | Damage | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | 1.00x | The baseline — and the only one that's never scarce. |
| Incendiary | 0.70x | Applies Burn for 6 seconds — less on impact, more over time. |
| Shock | 0.85x | Applies Shock for 3 seconds — interrupts, and chains to a second nearby target. |
| Piercing | 0.90x | The shot carries on through two more targets behind the first. |
| Spread | 0.45x per pellet | Fires 5 pellets at once at short range — more total damage than a single standard shot, spent all at once. |
| Cryo | 0.75x | Applies Freeze for 5 seconds at half power — fire it after Incendiary for a Shatter combo, or before it for a Thaw. |
Standard genuinely has no ammo count at all — it's the fallback the loadout always has to return to, and deliberately unlimited on the game's own stated principle that "ammo scarcity is a different game, and not the one this is." The five special types are unlimited too, for the more practical reason that crafting them as a real, spendable resource was planned as a separate, later addition rather than something to fake in the meantime.
Composes with weak points and headshots, doesn't replace them
An ammo type's damage multiplier is applied to the base hit before it reaches any other multiplier in the chain — so a weak point hit or a headshot still applies its own bonus on top, rather than one replacing the other.
How Piercing and Spread actually work
Unlike the three status-based types, Piercing and Spread aren't things that happen when a shot lands — they change how the shot is created and how it collides, which meant they couldn't be built through the same single impact hook the other four ride. Piercing shots carry a counter that lets them pass through up to two targets beyond the first before finally stopping. Spread genuinely fires five separate projectiles in one motion, each with its own small random deviation and a much shorter range than a normal shot — each pellet is built as a fully separate object rather than sharing geometry, specifically because the game's own cleanup code frees whichever pellet lands first, and freeing a shared mesh out from under the others would have made the rest of the volley invisible.
History
- Ammunition types added (cycle 1) — Standard, Incendiary, Shock, and Cryo, covering every type that resolves entirely at the moment of impact through the game's shared status layer. The design notes call this "nearly free" specifically because that shared layer already existed to build on.
- Piercing and Spread added (cycle 2), through real changes to how a shot is fired and how it collides, once a dedicated way to fire and measure a real shot existed to verify them against.
- Fixed the switch being genuinely undiscoverable for a full cycle after it shipped — [=] and [-] worked from the moment ammo types were added, but neither key appeared on either of the game's own controls references, so a player would have had to already know the keys existed to ever try them. Both the title screen's controls card and the in-game [F1] help panel now list the switch.
Trivia
- The switch keys — Equal and Minus — were chosen specifically because they were among the very last genuinely unbound keys left in the entire game; virtually every other key on the keyboard was already claimed by something.
- Whether Equal and Minus are actually comfortable to reach mid-fight without taking a hand off WASD is, according to the development log, a genuinely open question rather than a settled design choice — flagged directly as something only a real player fighting a real creature can answer, with alternatives like Shift-plus-number or a modifier on the mouse wheel already considered as fallbacks if the answer turns out to be no.
- Cryo is the one ammo type whose own description points directly at status combos — landing it in either order against Incendiary produces a different, named result.