Infiltration, Droneworks and new flight gauges

Two new skills arrive: Infiltration, free for every pilot, and Droneworks for Vanguard members. Harvesting gets a full rebalance, the flight gauge comes in three styles, and a long list of fixes rounds out the update.

New

• Infiltration. A new core skill, free for everyone. Fit a Splice Rig, park beside a sealed vault and play a short splice: a timing ring, then signal grids and a hold-and-release surge in the deepest vaults. Every miss raises an alarm, patrols arrive if it climbs, and a vault that locks out costs you part of the loot. Seven vault grades run from Drift Lockers to Black Vaults.
• Veil, Skims and Dead Drops. Switch the Splice Rig to Veil to slip past patrols, lift crates from NPC haulers with a Skim, or carry sealed parcels for Syndicate fixers. At Infiltration 99 your engines leave the Veil Contrail. Assist timing, reduce motion, one-button play, controller and touch are all supported.
• Droneworks. A new Vanguard skill. Build companion drones at the Drone Bay of your home station: ten frames from the Quadlet scout to the Halcyon flagship frame, each with its own paint, pattern and lamp color. Builds grow in real time, also while you are away, and nothing is ever destroyed or set back.
• Companion drones. A finished drone can fly beside your ship where every pilot sees it. Frames built to carry hold a small utility pod. Companions have no weapons and no loot or market edge, and frames come from time and credits, never from Aether or real money.
• Flight gauge styles. Settings > Gameplay > Interface > Flight gauge: choose Arc (the default), Hex core or Stacked bars. Each has its own phone layout, shape cues for low and critical layers, and a position you can move per layout and style, with Reset position to bring it back.
• Keep windows open. A new setting keeps your open windows when you dock or undock and shows each one in its equivalent in the new place. It is off by default and resets after a death, a hull change or an eject.
• Clan sigils. Clans choose from 12 holographic emblems in 9 colors.
• Ship transfer, both ways. Send away moves ships from the hangar you are docked at to any station where you keep a ship, with a destination list showing jumps and arrival time. Bring here still moves ships to you.
• Market listings. One selected stack opens the single listing page with price hints, and several open List many. You can switch between the two either way.
• Effects strip. The row of active effects above the HUD can be turned off in Settings > Interface, placed per layout, and shows hostile effects first with a +N chip when there are many.
• Smoother warp and arrival on WebGPU. Warping and arriving in a new system stutter less on GPUs that ran them slowly.

Improvements

• Repair projectors. Barrier Projector M and Nanite Projector M now need Engineering 15. A new small version of each fits small utility and turret mounts from Engineering 6.
• Toggle switches. Settings toggles are now switches, with centered controller glyphs and darker selects.
• Level-up on phones. The level-up moment is centered between the safe areas and shrinks to fit short screens.
• Friends and Territory windows. Cleaner layouts, with the white border on Territory removed.
• Ships that fail to download. A ship model that fails to download is retried instead of being remembered as missing.

Fixes

• Effects strip. It went silent after you signed in, jumped a gate or reconnected. It now refreshes every time.
• Rankings > Universe First. The board could fail to open. It works again, and a skill record shows its level once, such as First to 99 Hunting.
• Hangar fuel boom. The boom's housing hung off the edge of its tower and a truss cut through it. It now sits on the collar.
• Top bar buttons. Labels were padded after a class name clash. Sizing is back to normal.

Balance

• Harvesting rebalance. The ladder has 12 resources and each pays more Harvesting XP an hour than the one below it, so the newest resource you can reach is always the best. A volcanic resource no longer pays less than Bio-Organics. Level 99 takes about 300 hours of active gathering.
• Discovery XP. The first haul of each resource pays a one-time bonus, 24,850 XP across the whole ladder.
• Fresh Survey. Switch to a resource you have not gathered for an hour and get +40% Harvesting XP for your next 15 collector cycles, up to 6 times a day.
• Harvest yield. Harvest tools and hull bonuses now stack up to six times the base yield.

Thank you to every pilot who reported a problem or suggested a change. Questions and feedback are welcome on Discord. The Game Guide is updated for everything above.

New to XETODUS? The Game Guide explains how the game works, chapter by chapter.