s&box

0.4

17 August 2026

25 changes in this update

Doctrine, a second progression tree.
Research and Doctrine are now also reachable from the main menu under Progress, as tabs.
Supply crates drift on the open sea. Click one for money, steel and timber. Never more than three at once.
Six stats the meta layer could never reach: blast radius, shell velocity, incendiary, snare, island integrity, repair.
Patch notes now appear in the News panel on the title screen.

Enemy fleets cross open water at cruising speed and only slow in front of your guns. 25 to 37 percent less approach time.
Bigger opening: 560 money, 165 steel, 230 timber.
Base income raised by more than half, and it now grows with the wave number.
Waves come faster: 28 seconds instead of 40, first wave at 16 instead of 25.
Bigger waves from wave 1: six hulls instead of four.
New hull types from wave 4 instead of wave 10. Every roster band moves four waves earlier.
The mortar is buildable from wave 1 and costs no research.
Support actions are free. Only the cooldown gates them now.
Hold bounty up from 35 to 55, call wave bonus raised.
Unspent research is carried into your next run instead of sitting in an unspendable bank.
Bigger, readable doctrine grid that actually scrolls sideways.
Salvage crane output raised to match the new base income.

Repairing a structure could take health away instead of adding it. Anything built with structure research was truncated to its base value by the first repair it received.
Large UI frame time cost: every build tile rendered its own 3D scene to an offscreen texture 60 times a second, for a picture that never changes.
The minimap redrew itself completely every frame, fog grid included, whether or not anything had moved.
Several closed menus were still doing full work every frame while shut.
The research tree showed a balance of 0 in the main menu and priced every node as unaffordable, because it read the run purse instead of the bank.
Three of the four support actions required oil, which made them unusable without an oil platform.

Pacing & Doctrine Update