Band Buffs
From wave 6 on, every five-wave band opens with a vote on a stacking buff. Each option bundles two stats with independently random signs, so a “buff” can be pure upside, a trade, or simply bad.
The vote
Band starts are waves 6, 11, 16 … 96. The wave does not spawn while a vote is open. The sequence is:
- A one-second “Vote starting…” lead-in.
- Three choices appear. Two show their icon and a two-line description. The third is a “?” mystery — a real, pre-rolled buff shown blind.
- You have 10 seconds. Not voting picks one at random.
- A 1.5-second suspense pause once the winner is locked, then the result flashes for 2.5 seconds showing what you actually got.
- The wave starts.
Slot three is rolled exactly like the other two — it is simply hidden until the result flash. It is not weighted better or worse. Take it when both visible options are bad.
Anatomy of a buff
- Every buff bundles two different stats. Requiring them to differ is what stops a buff from cancelling itself out.
- Each of the two gets its own randomly signed magnitude. So an option can be (good, good), (good, bad) or (bad, bad).
- Percent effects roll a fresh magnitude of 1–5% with a 50/50 sign. Bullet count, pierce and enemy shield are always ±1.
- Player stats — attack, health, fire, bullets, coins — help you when positive. Enemy stats — enemy HP, speed, damage, shield — help you when negative.
- Buffs stack for the whole run. Every pick you have taken stays active until the run ends. They are not saved between runs.
The ten stats
| Stat | Icon | Positive means | Negative means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Attack | Bullet | More player damage | Less player damage |
| Health | Heart | More max HP, and the increase is added to your current HP | Less max HP, and your current HP is scaled down with it |
| Fire rate | Gauge | Faster shooting | Slower shooting |
| Bullets | Two bullets | +1 shot in the fan | −1 shot |
| Pierce | Arrow punching through | Bullets pass through +1 more enemy | −1, netting against any pierce you already stacked |
| Coins | Coins | More gold from kills | Less gold from kills |
| Enemy HP | Heart + skull | Tankier enemies (bad) | Weaker enemies (good) |
| Enemy speed | Chevrons + skull | Faster enemies (bad) | Slower enemies (good) |
| Enemy damage | Impact star + skull | Harder contact hits (bad) | Softer contact hits (good) |
| Enemy shield | Shield + skull | +1 absorbed hit on every non-boss enemy (bad) | −1, netting against any positive shield you already stacked (good) |
The coins stat multiplies kill gold, boss gold, Goldie gold and gold balls. It never applies to daily-bonus grants.
Reading the icons
Every icon is composed at runtime, and the composition tells you the whole story before you read the text:
- Each of the two glyphs is stroked in its own sign colour — green if it helps you, red if it hurts.
- A red glyph always takes the upper-left slot and a green one the enlarged lower-right foreground slot, so a mixed buff leads with the bad news.
- Any enemy stat carries an off-white skull tag. A buff can show zero, one or two skulls — that is how you tell “heart” meaning your health from “heart + skull” meaning enemy health.
The top-right stack shows one square per buff you have taken, filling right to left, five per row — with the combined net total listed underneath. The same grid is used on the Game Over dialog.
The stack is not only band buffs. It also carries a colour-matched square and readout line for each of these, so everything currently acting on your ship is in one place. They appear in a fixed order, worst news first, and band buffs sit in the middle of it:
| Order | In the stack | Icon | Readout |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Planet hazard | A weather glyph in the planet’s colour, on a warning-orange border | The hazard name and a compact effect such as Spd+40%, marked as a penalty. No countdown — it runs the whole week. |
| 2 | Reinforcement Pass | A gold ticket | Remaining days / hours / minutes — it runs on the wall clock, not the run. |
| 3 | Daily Ship Buff | Its own square | Remaining duration. Earned outside the run, so it can engage or expire mid-fight. |
| 4 | Band buffs | The voted buff’s own icon | One square each, plus the combined net total underneath. |
| 5–6 | Buff balls and charge skills | Their own colour | Everything ticks live. Party Damage and Charge Doubler show the seconds left as Ns; Focus Fire and Doppelgeschoss show how many of their 100 counts remain. |
| 7 | Reinforcement Clone | The clone’s ship art | A live Ns countdown on a cyan duration border while the clone is out. Its summon button hides for as long as the square is up. |
Each line reads its magnitude from the icon above it, so the text beside a timed buff is the time left rather than the size of the effect.
Colorblind Buff Signs (Settings › Video, off by default) adds a check or cross shape badge to the vote icons and to the net-total readout, so an option reads as good or bad without relying on red against green.
How the stack combines
Everything stacks additively, not multiplicatively: net = 1 + Σ(magnitudes).
- +5%, +5% and −5% health nets to exactly +5% — 105 HP, not a rounded-off 104. There is no multiplicative residue.
- Bullet count and enemy shield sum as whole numbers. Enemy shield is floored at 0.
- Every percentage multiplier is floored at 0.05×. A heavy negative stack can cripple you but can never take attack, fire rate, health or enemy HP to zero.
There is no rule that the vote must be net positive, and stacks last the entire run. Late in a long run the net readout is the number that matters — check it rather than remembering individual picks.
The vote runs in single-player too, with the same three choices and the same 10-second timer — earlier builds skipped the solo vote screen and silently applied a buff when the timer ran out.
Voting in co-op
- Every player votes. The host tallies.
- A strict majority locks it early, and once everyone has voted it resolves immediately.
- An AFK player just falls back to the 10-second countdown, then most votes wins. Ties — including nobody voting — resolve randomly among the tied choices.
- Every peer ends up with an identical stack, and a player joining mid-game receives the whole stack in their join snapshot.