Incursions brings new events, legendaries, modules, and more to EVERSPACE 2
Greetings, Pilots!
We’ve pressed buttons and now the EVERSPACE 2 Incursions Update is rocketing towards PC and PlayStation, with Xbox to follow!
Let’s dig into everything contained in this massive free update.
New Incursions Events
Past a certain rift-related point in the EVERSPACE 2 story, Incursions beacons will begin to appear as events on player maps. We’ve added a small portion of story in-game explaining how rifts came to be—perhaps Adam and crew shouldn’t be so flippant about playing with the fabric of space.
These new horde-mode style combat challenges pit pilots against fleets of enemies that are spawned in by Beacons. Destroy enemy ships to drain a Beacon’s shields, but be quick! You’ll have only seconds to strike.
Defeating all the beacons in an area completes the Incursion and rewards players with a large loot drop including chances at new legendary gear and Reliquary treasure chests.
New Legendary Gear
Fifteen new legendary items can be found in Rifts and Reliquaries. Legendaries also have a chance to drop in rare, superior and legendary High-Risk Areas. Tier four ships can equip one additional piece of legendary gear.
Read on for loot spoilers!
Rime – Pulse Laser
Has a chance on hit to freeze targets, turning them “Icebound” for a few seconds. Killing an icebound enemy creates a frost explosion that deals radial damage.
Last Rites – Rail Gun
Each successive, fully charged hit increases the damage. Resets after a few seconds or after missing a shot.
Grim Reaper – Blaster
Critical hits with this weapon will instantly kill targets with low hull.
The Scourge – Scatter Gun
Charging this weapon will absorb armor and shield from nearby enemies and add it to the shot as kinetic and energy damage respectively.
Hunter’s Fang – Thermo Gun
After hitting an enemy, the projectiles will continue to track consecutive targets within range, dealing reduced damage with each jump.
Perfect Hatred – Gauss Cannon
Killing an enemy with this weapon grants a charge of “Seething Wrath”, increasing damage for each stack. When you stop firing, the charges are consumed, granting damage reduction for a few seconds and recharges a portion of shield, boost and weapon energy.
Figure of Eight – Mine Launcher
Creates a singularity that pulls in smaller enemies within range. Afterwards, the mine explodes, damaging nearby targets.
Ritual – Homing Missile
Unleashes a swarm of autonomous homing missiles, seeking random targets in front of you. The damage is increased for each targeted enemy.
Zero-K Boomer – Rocket Launcher
The rockets are equipped with a proximity sensor that triggers frost explosions along their way, dealing damage to enemies in a range radius and freezing them for a few seconds.
Pestilence – Sensor
If the initial target of the Annihilator Virus survives the infection, it will remain infected and suffer another burst of damage after a few seconds. During this time it will be able to infect new targets.
Equilibrium – Energy Core
Consuming one type of energy (shield, boost or weapons) will recharge the other two for a portion of the amount spent.
Fields of Mayhem – Cargo Unit
Sticky Turret consumables gain unlimited charges and their projectile range is increased. The maximum number of turrets active at a time is significantly increased.
Ragnarök – Plating
After you damage an enemy for the first time, they become destabilized for a few seconds, increasing the damage they take.
Epicenter – Thruster
Teleporter creates a shockwave at the target location, dealing damage to enemies within range and stunning them for a few seconds.
Momentum – Thruster
While in combat, boosting forward builds up space debris around your ship. Upon stopping, the debris is launched, dealing damage to enemies within range in front of you, depending on the amount of debris collected.
Legendary Catalysts
Legendary Catalysts are new rare catalysts that can only be applied to Legendary equipment. Discover these by completing new High-Risk Areas that can be found using new Legendary Signal Decoders. These new Catalysts can be used to improve gear attributes, break Legendary equipment limits, and make Legendary gear part of certain item sets.
Flawless – All
Sets all randomized attributes to their maximum value.
Peripheral – All
Allows this legendary to be equipped despite the limit being reached. Can only extend the limit once.
Chaos – All
Randomly shuffles ALL attributes and stats of the item, for better or worse.
Sovereign – Weapons
Gains +2 item levels, reduced by 0.5 per active set bonus
Thunderous – All
Counts as part of the “Stormchaser” item set
Contaminated – All
Counts as part of the “Blightmonger” item set
Tidal – All
Counts as part of the “Tides of Siren’s Sea” item set
Devoted – All
Counts as part of the “Redemption” item set
Imperious – All
Counts as part of the “Commander” item set
New Treasure Boxes: Reliquaries
New legendary lockboxes called Reliquaries can be found after completing Incursion events. Each contains a legendary piece of gear!
These sealed chests can be unlocked by completing rifts at certain lunacy levels which can be modified by spending Tears of the Mad.
When carried into a rift, Reliquaries provide special Blessings that can heavily modify weapons and abilities or provide additional fire support—there’s nothing quite like having an Ancient Warden on your side for a change.
With all the new legendaries added, we’ve increased the number a ship can equip by one.
Find out more about reliquaries in our recent Radiant & Reliquaries blog.
Lunacy 2000 Rifts
Elite pilots from the community have been clamoring for even greater challenges. The rift lunacy cap has been increased to 2000, allowing for even more madcap runs and we’ve also added new stage mutators and more boss variation. Make sure to bring Reliquaries for Blessings that will improve your chances of survival!
Scout Ultimate Change
The Scout’s Shadow Strike Ultimate has undergone a major change. While active, Shadowstrike cloaks your ship and greatly increases both critical hit chance and critical hit damage. Firing weapons or using devices breaks cloak, but killing an enemy restores it and extends its duration by 2 seconds, to a maximum of 20 seconds.
Read more about the change in our Ship Maintenance blog.
STEAM – PS CONTROLLER SETTING / WEB BLOG – CONSOLE BUTTON MAPPING
Improved Controller Support on PC and Consoles
Button mapping options have been our number one request from console pilots since EVERSPACE 2 debuted on PlayStation and Xbox last August. Incursions overhauls controller setting options to allow for full customization, close to what is available for PC players.
On PC, native PlayStation 4 Dualshock and PlayStation 5 DualSense support has been added for players on Steam, GOG, and the Microsoft Store.
Photo Mode Improvements
We are in absolute awe of the shots virtual photographers have taken of EVERSPACE 2, capturing the fantastic vistas and stunning spaceships in our game. Incursions adds community-suggested improvements to photo mode, mainly on the UI/UX front.
We’re surfacing more information for photographers by adding a progress bar for min/max values and navigation bar to see all changeable camera settings like FOV, aperture and exposure. Many smaller tweaks should make it easier for photographers using controllers.
Photographers will also be able to save their favorite settings and make them their default when opening the photo mode. Finally, we’re adding some SFX and VFX to the feature that’ll make it more fun to use.
New Cosmetic Ship Modules
A variety of stylish ship modules have been added for pilots to find and customize their ships with. In addition to new front and rear modules, a new cockpit type has been added.
Unreal Engine 5
A large part of the development team have spent the last few months migrating EVERSPACE 2 from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5.3, and we will be polishing right up to the last possible second before release. We’re aware that the community is concerned about introduced bugs and reduced performance—both have been our two main focuses during this massive endeavor and we are doing everything we can to ensure the best experience possible.
For pilots on high end PCs, EVERSPACE 2 will never have looked better. With UE5, we’re able to enable Lumen GI on DirectX 12, Nvidia DLSS 3.5 upscaler with Frame Generation, Nvidia Reflex latency reduction, AMD FSR 3.0, and Intel XeSS upscaler to really make the stars shine. All these new settings are togglable and completely optional.
Changelog 1.2.39656
Features
- Added new endgame activity: Ancient Incursions
- Added new legendary items
- Added new front and rear ship modules
- Added new type of ship module: cockpit
- Added legendary catalysts
- Added new item bonus attributes
- Added new Ancient Rift stage mutators
- Added new Ancient Rift boss variations
- Added option to enable Lumen GI on DirectX 12
- Added option to save photo mode settings
- [PS5, Xbox Series X|S] Added controller button remapping
- [Windows: Steam, GOG, Microsoft Store] Added native DUALSHOCK®4 and DualSense™ wireless controller support
- [Windows: Steam, GOG, Microsoft Store] Added new plugins: Nvidia DLSS 3.5 upscaler with frame generation, Nvidia Reflex latency reduction, Intel XeSS upscaler, AMD FSR 3.0 upscaler
Tweaks
- Legendary items can now roll as “Radiant” grade with superior, but randomized, attributes
- Legendary items will now rarely drop from High Risk Areas (Level 15+, “Rare” decoder quality and above)
- Reworked Scout ULT “Shadow Strike”
- T4 ships can now equip 3 legendary items
- Ancient Rift stage mutators are now associated with varying loot quality bonuses
- Increased “Nightmare” difficulty scaling curve
- Increased the maximum Lunacy in Ancient Rifts from 1000 to 2000 and changed the step size from 50 to 100
- Removed damage and shield regeneration increase in sunlight bonus attributes
- Removed “Dismantling Quality” attribute from cargo units
- Changed Opulence Treasury Unit effect
- Dismantling will now always yield all lower rarity resources
- Reduced tractor beam range bonuses provided by sensors, energy cores and cargo units
- Removed “5% chance to drop Credits with each hit” bonus attribute
- Changed critical hit chain attribute calculation
- The following mutators will now scale with the Lunacy level in Ancient Rifts: “Enemy Regen”, “Corrosive Death”, “Explosive Death” and “Mines on Death”
- Nanobots and Nano Injectors can no longer be used when hull is at 100%
- Balancing: Reduced Destabilizer Missile damage bonus
- Balancing: Reduced Okkar Protector orb damage
- Balancing: Reduced “Rapid” Affix/Catalyst effect from 20% to 15%
- Balancing: Increased Kinetic/Energy damage Catalyst effect from 25% to 30%
- Balancing: Reduced “Barrage” Catalyst damage bonus and increment from 40%/4% to 30%/3%
- Balancing: Slightly increased Gauss Cannon energy consumption
- Balancing: Increased “Utility” device damage scaling
- Controls Customization Menu: Improved usability through collapsing headers and improved binding validation
- Add options to GameUserSettings.ini to customize the framerate limit in menus (defaults to 60fps)
- Added lock-on sound for Outlaw Sniper Drones
- Sticky Turrets will now be deployed towards the aim direction
- UI: Photo mode UX and UI overhaul to improve usability (especially with gamepad)
- UI: Added option to choose previous ship in hangar when using gamepad (was ‘next ship’ only)
- UI: Added confirmation prompt if player tries to skip the tutorial
- UI: Tweaked ship buying process to hide popping of purchased ship in some situations
- UI: Added recenter action to map tab when using gamepad
- UI: Added weapon range hero stat sorting option to equipment item selection
- UI: Improved display logic of loot message log entries within containers to make it more consistent
- UI: Added numerous fade in animations for many (sub-) menus and modal widgets including SFX for a more responsive user experience
- UI: Improved internal handling of changing the active player ship to avoid memory issues after extensive usage
- UI: Introduced caching of many widgets to eliminate hiccups and improve performance on repeated usage and ultimately avoid freezes in rare cases
- UI: Hiding truly empty blueprint slots within crafting tab
- UI: Shop buy action button rendered inactive for already unlocked devices on offer
- UI: Sorting inventories with keyboard actions now results in implicit display of static item tooltip (stat card)
- UI: Improved logic of augment and device shine animation
- UI: Speeding up shop inventory view style action when switching from list to grid view and vice versa
- UI: Fixed that no error message was shown when trying to store multiple items to a fully occupied storage inventory
- UI: Fixed overlapping of stat card hero values in space and item shop in rare cases
- UI: Fixed cutoff unlock banner description text in some languages
- UI: Fixed unassigned ship cycle action button when using joystick input in some cases
- UI: Fixed that slot highlight frame could flicker while expand cargo inventory animation
- Integrated community suggestions for translation improvements from Crowdin
Bugfixes
- Fixed that when viewing a ship in the hangar that was not used last time and had 3 “Escort Duty” items installed, your current ship would get damaged
- Fixed High-Velocity Catalyst description
- Fixed freighters in distress calls not playing jump out sound when leaving
- Fixed that Interceptor regarded destroying mines as a “kill” to extend weapon overdrive for +1s
- Fixed that equipment that had been damaged before entering a Rift was not correctly damaged when returning
- Fixed that the description of the 4th orb perk did not mention ship speed
- Fixed that devices/consumables could be selected (but fortunately not used) when remote-controlling a drone
- Fixed right-hand-side UI elements disappearing when remote-controlling a drone and stopping any of the hacks before they’re finished during “The Eye”
- Fixed that Energized Boost did not move player ship forward when there was no boost energy left
- Fixed crash when entering a location or using cruise drive without having a thruster equipped
- Fixed Madcap Pods being hostile towards other player enemies in Ancient Rifts
- Fixed item duplication bug in rifts
- Fixed Quantum Tether not forwarding corrosion damage
- Fixed that re-rolling attributes could sometimes produce two identical mining attributes
- Fixed that boosting buffs were only applied/removed on new boost start
- Fixed that pilot radio chatter events were triggered constantly when healing events took place
- Fixed that energy shield condition falsely removed damaged and overheat debuffs, leading to permanently damaged and overheated items states
- Fixed Gauss Cannon having wrong weapon mesh
- Fixed that hitpoint bars of turrets were shown in rifts and HRAs when hidden HP modifier is active
- Fixed wrong amount of cargo slots when switching ships in hangar
- Fixed that Reactive Radar was only dropping in Union
- Fixed that G&B allies in high-risk areas died too easily
- Fixed G&B Fighter, G&B Light Fighter and Coalition Fighter having almost no hitpoint and damage increase coming with their Elite rank
- Fixed that Interceptor passive refunded secondary ammunition without activated ultimate
- Fixed an edge case in which after loading a savegame a “return from rift” animation at Spatial Bypass locations was played
- Fixed that the Execution Effect of Grim Reaper and Executioner could be transferred via quantum tether
- Fixed that the dogmatic scanner web effect did not apply when using Sentinel ult and probably other effects not applying using sentinel ult
- Fixed Redemption 2-Set bonus working too well
- Fixed that System Recovery Routine consumable and Unyielding Assault perk would not completely remove overheated status from items
- Fixed that Quantum Entangler would switch targets when player switches targets
- Fixed that scorpion missiles would not teleport beyond base weapon range when using a Scout with increased weapon range
- Fixed that Maddocks’ freighter looked different during “Paving The Way” compared to other missions (always has the “Paving the Way” look now)
- Fixed missile defense system attacking sticky turret capsules
- Fixed that hidden cargo drones were attacked by enemies
- Fixed TrackIR not working correctly in some locations
- Fixed that analogue input for scrolling would not work in all menus, and rebinding it did not work.
- Fixed that missile lock HUD marker animation was still showing after switching to a secondary weapon without homing/lock ability
- Fixed that shadow creatures gained weight after returning to their initial position, which made them more difficult to move
- UI: Fixed a crash when moving large quantities of items between ships & storage
- UI: Fixed level and demand info within item icon which wasn’t refreshed properly in some cases
- UI: Fixed that decal reward items did not show the proper icon in loot message log
- UI: Fixed an issue that impacted performance after hovering between two items in quick succession
- UI: Fixed wrong or missing item amounts of some loot message log entries (e.g. after “Take All” from containers)
- UI: Fixed possible flickering of action buttons within team credits while scrolling with gamepad
- UI: Fixed minor issues while selection style slots in ship customization menu
- UI: Fixed potential bug in tutorial in case a player uninstalls devices before a certain main mission
- UI: Fixed missing sfx when clicking inventory sorting buttons
- UI: Fixed missing “new” indication for mission relevant shop items in some missions
- UI: Fixed that storage items were not listed in item selection of inventory tab when docked on homebase
- UI: Fixed that the unlock banner could still be overlapped by dialog boxes in rare cases like job completion chatter
- UI: Fixed a couple of smaller issues within equipment item selection
- UI: Fixed a couple of smaller issues within save game info widget
- UI: Fixed issues in modify tab when selecting a category with an empty item list
- UI: Fixed that opening and closing the in-game menu simultaneously could render the game unresponsive in some cases
- UI: Fixed that the modify progress circle in re-rolling panel covered item attributes
- UI: Fixed different icon sizes of loot message log entries in some cases
- UI: Fixed that switching the shop inventory view style from list to grid might crash the game in some cases
- UI: Fixed that device charges could show up for every item in a loot container if at least one item is a device with charges
- UI: Fixed that device inventory item charge indication count wasn’t updated when adding extra charges by selecting a specific device mode
- UI: Fixed that the shine animation of a fully stacked mainframe component was accidentally displayed on other items after sorting
- UI: Fixed that the item price isn’t refreshed after modifying item level or rarity
- UI: Fixed a bug that cargo space wasn’t properly updated after crafting a cargo unit into an empty cargo unit slot (might have led to negative cargo ratio)
- UI: Fixed that item tooltip in shop was sometimes not showing
- UI: Fixed that price label of a device was accidentally displayed in mastery preview
- UI: Fixed that modify action could be executed twice under some circumstances
- UI: Fixed broken ‘other ships’ category navigation of item selection in case of two owned ships
- UI: Fixed loss of focus when selling or buying ships with gamepad in some situations
- UI: Fixed that purchase and sell options dialog window actions could be executed multiple times
- UI: Fixed that credits animation in perk invest overlay wasn’t colorized correctly on first use
- UI: Fixed issues within ship dealer in case menu tab was changed immediately after opening sell- or purchase dialogs
- UI: Fixed potential crash or exploit when changing the crafting slot while holding craft action button
- UI: Fixed potential loss of focus (freeze on consoles) in rare cases when opening 2 (cargo full) loot container screens in small succession
- UI: Fixed that device preview and item compare action were shown in footer when using mouse even though no item info was visible
- UI: Fixed that item info within catalyst selection wasn’t scrollable using spacebar + mousewheel
- UI: Fixed accidental catalyst selection list refresh after installing one
- UI: Fixed that wrong perk slot details could be shown after returning from invest screen in some cases
- UI: Fixed that no error message was shown when trying to store multiple items to a fully occupied storage inventory
- UI: Fixed numerous minor visual glitches like overlapping elements, color adjustments and unintentional clipping
- UI: Fixed multiple issues with stuck animations especially when closing in-game menu and changing tabs within it
Known Issues
- Due to the Engine migration, all controls have been reset to defaults
- Due to the Engine migration, the game’s language might revert to your OS language
With such a massive content update and engine migration, we will be closely keeping an eye on community feedback and reported bugs for any required follow up hotfixes. Please report issues found in our Discord and Steam forum.
If you’re looking for more customization options and want to further support the team as we work on future DLC, check our new Supporter Pack! Our designers put together some very cool cosmetics for superfans who really want to trick out their ships.
There’s plenty more to come for EVERSPACE 2. The team is hard at work building whole new adventures for Adam and his motley crew, we’ll share more when the time is right.
See you in the stars,
Lee and your ROCKFISH Games Team