Citadel Zero news & patch notes

Season 0 · Patch 0.2.4

🎰 THE SUMMON REVEAL, REBUILT

• Total mystery — the entire carousel now spins FACE DOWN. Nothing reveals a card's rarity or rank until it flips: same neutral card back for everyone, white cracks leaking light, a heartbeat of freeze… and the colour is born the instant the card turns.
• Every rarity earns its moment — commons flip quick and clean, epics crack open in violet, legendaries and champions get the full ceremony: fissures, hit-stop, shockwaves, screen shake.
• ×10 saves the best for last — all ten cards land sealed, commons cascade open first, and the highest rarity in the batch ALWAYS reveals last. No more spotting your legendary in slot 2 and sleepwalking through the rest.

🎯 UNIT PITY — CHAMPION GUARANTEED

• The unit banner now has a real pity: a guaranteed CHAMPION every 70 unit pulls (any natural champion resets the counter). Effective champion rate roughly doubles.
• Two pity bars, one per banner — each fills with a gradient that heats toward its reward: legendary gold for towers, champion crimson for units. Past 85% the bar starts sparking; at the threshold it flips to a reward-coloured GUARANTEED badge.

🌟 TALENTS

• Unspent points call out to you — the talent-point medal on the ARSENAL tab (and the TALENTS sub-tab) now glows with the same selection shine as your cards whenever you have points waiting.
• Investable talents glow in the tree — talents you've unlocked but not yet picked pulse softly in their tree's colour, whenever you have points to spend. No more scanning the tree for where your points can go.

🐛 FIXES

• Removed the big white halo that lingered behind the card grid during ×10 reveals.

Season 0 · Patch 0.2.3

⚔️ ASCENSION — MATCHMAKING

• QUICK MATCH replaces "PLAY VS BOT". One button: it queues you against a real Architect, and offers you a bot if nobody turns up. No code to copy, no friend to wait for — hosting a shard by code is still there for playing with someone specific.
• You see who you're facing — the "opponent found" screen now shows both players' real Steam name and avatar.

🎴 CHAMP SELECT REBUILT

• The whole pool, at a glance — towers and units are grids now instead of one row hiding two thirds of the roster behind a sideways scrollbar. You can finally compare what you're banning against.
• Filter by rarity on BOTH pools — units included, champions too.
• Cards that move — towers play their idle animation in the pool, in your deck and in the info panel, instead of standing still.
• Read a card without waiting for it — hover anything and the details appear instantly next to your cursor. No more one-second hold under a 15-second timer.
• The ban reveal is a moment — the opponent's bans and the four cards leaving the pool now land one by one instead of silently greying out.
• Drag targets light up — start dragging a card and every slot it can go into announces itself.
• Search boxes behave like search boxes — Ctrl+A, copy, paste, undo, Home/End, arrow keys, double-click to select. All of it, finally.

✨ NEW

• Creator codes — got a favourite Citadel Zero creator? Enter their code in the Stellar Cores shop: you get +300 Void Shards the first time, and a share of anything you spend goes to them. You can switch codes any time; the shop shows who you're currently supporting.
• Promo codes — codes handed out in announcements, videos and events can now be redeemed in-game for Void Shards, Stellar Marks and Fragments. Same box as creator codes: type it, we work out what it is.

🐛 FIXES

• Unit summons now correctly spend Void Shards — pulling PvP units wasn't deducting VS (and the pulled units weren't saved server-side). Unit pulls are now fully server-authoritative like tower pulls: the cost, the odds, pity and your unit collection all live on the server. No more free unit summons; your pulled units persist properly.
• Fewer dead clicks and a smoother menu — closing the code window could swallow the next click for a moment, and some menu animations kept running invisibly after their element was gone. Both cleaned up.

Season 0 · Patch 0.2.2

✨ IMPROVEMENTS

• Redesigned in-game tower panel — click a placed tower and you now see its stats as base → effective with a colour-coded delta chip (green buff / red debuff), an effective-DPS line, and a live buff/debuff tray. In Contracts every augment boosting that tower gets its own chip, and the tray scrolls (mouse wheel over it, or drag) when there are a lot. Icons read at a glance — the glyph tells you the kind of modifier, the colour tells you the direction, the name tells you which one. Shared across Chronicle, Contracts and Ascension.

🐛 FIXES

• Background runs now respect your game speed — leaving a run going in the background while it's minimised no longer throttles it. Before, a run left at ×4 in the background crawled along near ×1 (and returning to the window took a moment to catch back up). It now runs at the speed you actually set, minimised or not.
• Game speed is now uniform at ×1 / ×2 / ×4 — status effects (stun, root, fear), damage-over-time, the Phoenix window and other timed effects used to run on real time instead of game time, so at ×4 crowd-control lasted ~4× longer (in game terms) and behaviour drifted from ×1. Every gameplay timer now scales with your chosen speed, so a build performs the same whether you play at ×1 or fast-forward at ×4. Cleaner balance, fairer leaderboard.
• Augment "cap reached" label stays on-screen — in Contracts, the caption under a maxed augment card could run off the bottom or side of the screen. It now positions itself smartly (flips above the card when there's no room below, and stays inside the viewport).

Season 0 · Patch 0.2.1

Sharper augment choices, a menu you can read, and a way to tell us when something breaks. 🔥 MAXED-OUT AUGMENTS BURN OUT OF THE POOL Some augments used to overstay their welcome — RIFT SPLINTER's card read 100% and it was still eating a slot in your three choices. That's fixed, and now it's a moment.

• They leave the instant another copy would be pointless — not at some round percentage, but the moment one more pick would add less than a single point. Every offer you get is worth taking. (RIFT SPLINTER, WARDEN'S GRIP, TERROR PULSE and FROZEN VEINS were the repeat offenders.)
• And now you SEE (and hear) them go — cap an augment and its card burns away to embers with a crackle, a line naming the ceiling you just hit, instead of quietly never showing up again.
• Shared ceilings burn together — the damage augments all draw from one +500% budget, so filling it retires every one of them at once. Two cards burning side by side tell you they fed the same ceiling — no guessing.

⚖️ DIFFICULTY IS A REAL RISK AGAIN

• Stacking DIFFICULTY now stays dangerous — mob count is still uncapped (it's the leaderboard lever), but the danger used to top out fast: past a handful of stacks the mobs kept coming with no extra bite, so difficulty was free score. Mobs are now much tankier (HP up to ×7, was ×4) and breaches hit harder (up to ×4 Core damage, was ×2.5), so pushing difficulty is a test of your build, not a free ride.

🌍 CHANGE LANGUAGE FROM THE MAIN MENU

• A flag button, top right — the game speaks 7 languages, but switching was buried three menus deep, which is no use at all if you can't read the menus you're digging through. There's now a flag next to the settings gear: click it, pick your language from the list, done.

🐛 REPORT A BUG FROM INSIDE THE GAME

• A button in the settings, and in the pause menu — describe what happened, attach a screenshot or three (pick a file, paste, or drag one in), send. It lands with us instantly.
• It reports itself, so you don't have to — your build number, which mode you were in, the wave and kill count, and any error the game logged are attached automatically. That is usually the difference between "we'll look into it" and a same-day fix. Every player report we handled this month started with us asking which version you were on.
• Your writing doesn't evaporate — once you've typed something or attached an image, a stray click outside the window asks before throwing it away.

🏆 THE LEADERBOARD IS WATCHED

• Impossible runs still don't reach the board — and now we hear about it immediately — the server has always recomputed what a run could physically have produced and refuses to post a result beyond it. Those detections used to sit in a mailbox; they now reach us the moment they happen, so a score that shouldn't be there doesn't get to spend the week at the top.

A bug, an idea? There's now a button for it. — Sentinel-7

Season 0 · Patch 0.2.0

Your rivals just became readable, Architect. 🏆 LEADERBOARD — INSPECT A RIVAL'S FULL BUILD

• Their talents, as the actual talent tree — inspecting a player on the Contracts board now shows their build as the real tree: the three lane backdrops, the full node hierarchy, and the connectors lit along the exact path they took. You read a rival's spec the same way you read your own. Hover any node for its name and rank.
• Their towers, as ornate cards — rarity-coloured frames, rank and level badges, animated tower art. The whole loadout reads at a glance.
• …and the board now tells you it's clickable — rows light up as you pass over them, and a line under the tabs spells it out. If you'd never realised you could inspect a rival's build, that's why.

📖 AUGMENT CARDS NOW TELL THE TRUTH We audited all 40 Contracts augments against what the code actually does. Four cards were lying. Twelve more were hiding their cap. Here's the honest version.

• MIRROR PROTOCOL said the clone dealt "+50% damage" — it deals 50% OF the tower's damage. And the "at ×4" it promised was unreachable (3 stacks is the max; the clone overtakes the tower at 150%).
• SENTINEL PROTOCOL said its cap was +100% — the cap actually GROWS with each stack (+200% at two), and the bonus is damage. It never said either.
• The shared damage ceiling — PULSE OVERCHARGE, CORE RESONANCE and OVERWATCH all draw from ONE +500% budget. If you were already at the ceiling from one of them, the other two were doing literally nothing. All three now say so.
• Twelve caps that were never written down — STEADY AIM, EXTENDED REACH, PIERCING SHOT, CHAIN REACTION, MARK OF THE HUNT, REGENERATIVE PLATING, AEGIS BARRIER and the three damage-over-time augments now state their ceiling on the card.
• Two effects that were never mentioned — VOID BURST's blast deals 60% of the projectile's damage (the card only gave its radius), and RIFT SPLINTER's fork only finds a target within 200px (with nothing in range, nothing happens).
• Flying enemies — FROZEN VEINS never slowed them, and never said so. It now does, and points at AETHER, the tower built to bypass that immunity. TERROR PULSE is clearer too: flyers ARE pushed back, they're just not slowed.
• EMBER FORGE — its bonus belongs to the TOWER that earned it, not to your run: sell that tower and the stacked damage goes with it. And extra copies make it ramp faster, not higher — unlike SENTINEL PROTOCOL, whose ceiling does grow.
• HEART OF THE RIFT — its exclusion list was wrong (APEX EMPOWER is not amplified at all), and it compounds per stack rather than adding a flat +25%.
• TERRAFORM PROTOCOL — "up to 4 tiles, one per quadrant", since a quadrant with no free ground near the path simply doesn't get one.

⚖️ BALANCE

• BOUNTY MARK legendary now actually gives +200% XP — a hidden ceiling was clipping it to +150%, so the rarest version of the card paid out barely more than the epic one. The ceiling was raised to match what the card promises.

🐛 FIXES

• Chronicle — beating your own star record now sticks — replaying a quest you'd cleared with 1 star and earning 3 could silently revert to 1 the next time you launched the game. Your new record is now recorded properly. (Already fixed server-side — no update needed for this one.)
• Runs no longer go missing — the PLAY AGAIN bug — this is the big one. Starting a run from the PLAY AGAIN button (rather than going back to the menu first) meant that run was never registered with the server: no rewards, no leaderboard score, no warning. Chronicle replays could lose their first-clear rewards the same way. Fixed, and the server also recovers runs that slip through for other reasons.
• Claimed rewards no longer appear to vanish — a claimed mission could credit your account correctly while the menu kept showing your old total, which looks exactly like losing the reward. Your currency display now re-checks itself against the server on every refresh.
• Buff icons no longer sit on the level bar — placing a PARAGON next to a tower put its damage/fire-rate icons right on top of that tower's level gauge.
• DPS meter — buffed towers no longer break the layout — a buffed tower printed its raw number ("1300000 +45000") and overflowed the panel. Buffed rows now use the same compact format as everything else ("1.30M +45k dps").

✨ QUALITY OF LIFE

• Update notice — faster and more reliable — the game now checks for a new patch at the moments that matter (arriving at the menu, finishing a run) instead of waiting on a background timer. If a patch ships while you play, you'll know as soon as your run ends — never in the middle of it.

A bug, an idea? We're listening. — Sentinel-7

Season 0 · Hotfix 1.2 (0.1.2)

Recalibrated the long guns, Architect. Duels should be fought, not deleted. ⚔️ ASCENSION BALANCE These changes apply ONLY to the Ascension mode (1v1 duels, vs-bot and Training). Chronicle and Contracts keep the full-power versions — nothing changes in PvE. MONOLITH It could one-shot nearly every unit from across the map — and pierce an entire lane doing it.

• Damage in Ascension: full PvE damage ⇒ ×0.45
• Pierce in Ascension: up to 20 units in line ⇒ up to 4
• Range in Ascension: ×0.75

RAILGUN

• Damage in Ascension: ×0.60 — still the long-range scout killer, no longer deletes upgraded units
• Range in Ascension: ×0.85

🐛 RELIABILITY

• End-of-run rewards — even more robust — if your connection hiccups the very moment a run ends, the game now quietly retries instead of giving up. A single unstable moment can no longer cost you a run's rewards ; the "network issue" message is reserved for genuine outages.
• Mission claims — clear feedback — the cryptic "Claim failed: not ready" is gone. If a mission isn't actually complete on the server (very short runs don't count, and the weekly reset happens at midnight UTC), the game now tells you the REAL progress — e.g. "server progress: 21/30" — so you know exactly where you stand.

✨ QUALITY OF LIFE

• Leaderboard — rival arsenals get the full card treatment — when you inspect a player on the Contracts board, their towers now display as the game's ornate cards : rarity-coloured frames, rank and level badges, animated tower art and name. The build reads at a glance, exactly like your own collection.
• Leaderboard — rival talents, visualized — the talent section of a rival's arsenal is no longer a wall of text. You now see three tree gauges (Offensive / Defensive / Economy point split) plus the player's key talents rendered as the actual talent-tree nodes — same shapes, same icons, same colours as the Arsenal tree. Hover a node for its name and rank.
• DPS meter — buffed towers no longer break the layout — placing a PARAGON (or ECHO) next to a big tower made its meter row print the raw number ("1300000 +45000") and overflow the panel. Buffed rows now use the same compact format as everything else ("1.30M +45k dps") and the text always fits its column.
• The game now tells you when a patch ships — Steam quietly caches game updates, so you could keep playing an old build without knowing. From this version on, the game checks for updates on its own : you'll get a heads-up toast when a patch is available, and on breaking patches a clear "restart Steam to update" screen when you return to the menu or press REPLAY — never in the middle of a run, and always after your reward screen.

A bug, an idea? We're listening. — Sentinel-7

Season 0 · Patch 1.1 (0.1.1)

Tightened the response times, Architect. The citadel now answers the instant you speak. ⚡ RESPONSIVENESS Your account lives on the server — that keeps every reward and score cheat-proof, but some actions waited on the server round-trip with no feedback. They now react the moment you click.

• Summons — clicking SINGLE PULL / ×10 PULL now reacts instantly : the portal dims and charges while the server rolls, then flows straight into the reveal. No more dead click.
• Contracts — core destruction — the battlefield now freezes the very instant your Core hits 0 HP. Previously the fight visibly kept running for a moment before the results screen appeared.
• Tower repair — repairing now flashes on the tower itself and refills its HP bar immediately.
• Stellar Core purchases — a persistent "⏳ Processing purchase…" indicator now stays on screen from the Steam overlay until your Cores are credited, and crediting itself is faster (we check the transaction more than twice as often).

🐛 BUG FIXES

• "+0" rewards — fully fixed — some runs showed "+0 Stellar Marks / +0 Fragments" on the end screen even though the server had actually paid (your wallet was always right — the screen wasn't). The end-of-run sequence could fire multiple times during the server round-trip and the screen rendered the wrong response. It now fires exactly once. If you ever saw a "+0", check your Marks : they were there all along.
• End-of-run rewards, leaderboard writes and mission progress are now fully reliable across mode switches (a leftover token from replaying a Chronicle quest could previously starve a Contracts run of its rewards).

Season 0 · Patch 1 (0.1)

First report's in, Architect. Adjustments follow. ⚖️ BALANCE WANE Its max-HP drain had no real cap — a single tower could strip nearly a target's entire health pool, trivializing tanks and bosses. It's now rank-capped, and stacking multiple WANEs is bounded.

• Per-tower drain cap: 99% (flat) ⇒ 12% / 15% / 18% / 21% / 24% / 27% (D → SS)
• Level 5 — Soul Siphon cap bonus: none ⇒ ×1.5
• Stacking multiple WANEs: shared 99% cap (effectively unlimited) ⇒ cumulative with diminishing returns (×0.6 each extra WANE), hard 50% ceiling
• Per-hit drain rate: 0.5%–1.5% by rank (unchanged)

HOWL Its fear knockback fired on every hit — with HOWL's high fire rate (and stacked HOWLs) that shoved enemies backward almost non-stop, hard-locking lanes. The knockback now has a short per-enemy cooldown. Fear and slow are untouched.

• Fear knockback: every hit ⇒ at most once per 0.7s per enemy (shared across all HOWLs)
• Fear chance / slow / duration (unchanged)

🐛 BUG FIXES

• Chronicle — replaying a quest for a better star rating now correctly saves your new record. Previously an improved rating (e.g. 1★ → 3★) could revert after a reboot.
• Contracts — a run now counts toward the "100 Contracts" goal even when you lose early (any genuine run that ended, win or death).
• Achievements — several in-game milestones that weren't tracking are fixed: 100 Contracts, 30-day login streak, Apex Climber (weekly Top 100), and the unit collectors.
• Leaderboards — your true Contracts kill count now shows on the weekly board, uncapped (extreme scores were previously capped).
• Leaderboard — inspect a rival — click any player on the Contracts board to see the towers + talents they ran, and jump straight to their Steam profile. Your build is public by default; a one-click toggle keeps it private.
• Contracts — runs record reliably — a timing hiccup could make a genuine run pay 0 Stellar Marks and drop off the leaderboard entirely. That path now retries and self-heals, so your score and rewards land ; if it truly can't reach the server you're told clearly instead of shown a silent "+0". The run-reward screen also shows your real kill count.
• Upgrades keep your card — upgrading a tower or unit no longer consumes your LAST copy and makes the card vanish from your collection. An upgrade now keeps at least one copy (it needs one spare beyond the cost — the button shows "keeps 1").
• Progress reliably in sync — your collection now always reflects the server's latest state at launch. Fixes a rare boot race where an out-of-date local/cloud copy could win over fresh server progress.

✨ QUALITY OF LIFE

• Buying Void Shards now asks for confirmation before spending your Stellar Cores.
• Placed towers now glow with a soft outline when you hover them.
• Chronicle — a tower you can afford to upgrade now pulses with a gold halo, so your next upgrade is easy to spot at a glance.
• At the tower cap, your loadout keys still open a placed tower's info panel instantly — with the ◀ ▶ selector to cycle duplicates — for quick inspecting and upgrading, and no dead "build" cursor with nowhere to place.
• Story dialogue now fades in and out cleanly instead of typing out line by line.
• Damage-type tags in the tower panel (Physical, Kinetic, …) are now larger and sharper.
• The Quit button in Settings carries a power icon so it clearly reads as "close the game."
• Hold R to instantly restart your run (Chronicle & Contracts).
• Smoother gameplay and reduced input latency.

A bug, an idea? We're listening. — Sentinel-7

// SENTINEL-7 // OPEN FREQUENCY // ORIGIN: CITADEL ZERO The planet is dead. The cities are dust, the sky the colour of old rust. Out in the ruins the watchers are moving — patient, mutated, closing on the one structure that still holds power. The last citadel. Its lights are still on. Its archive still answers. It has been waiting a long time for someone to take command. That's you. The Architect.

• CHRONICLE — The citadel lies at the end of a long road, across the worlds the disaster left behind. You cross them one by one — ash-choked ruins, fields of bone, a forge still burning among the stars — and at the edge of each, something vast and patient stands in your way. Bring it down, and the next world opens. Cross them all, and the gates finally rise before you.
• CONTRACTS — You reached the citadel. Now you never leave it. The dark pours out its numbers, again and again, and there is no final one to defeat — only the walls, and you, and how long you can keep them standing.
• ASCENSION — You were not the only one who lived. Somewhere in the wastes, another Architect raised their own citadel — and now they've come for yours. Will against will, until one still stands and the other is dust.

You do not hold those walls with your bare hands. You call your defenders up out of the citadel's old archive — no two the same, some far mightier than others, a rare few waking with powers all their own. What answers your call is never quite what answered anyone else's. The gate is open, Architect. The citadel remembers what the planet forgot. Stand ready — and hold the line. — Sentinel-7