Offline Reinforcement

Single-player does not have to be single. Once you are deep enough into a run you can spend gold to call in another player's ship — a real loadout, flown by the AI, while its owner is offline. They get paid for it.

When you can call

The feature is single-player only — a co-op party already has real people in it. All of these have to be true before a summon is possible:

• You are past wave 5, and alive.
• Your Stronger Bullets is at least 30. That is also what you are matched on — see the pool.
• You have fewer than 3 allies out. Three plus you is a full party of four.
• Two minutes of gameplay have passed since your last summon, and no band-buff vote or revive window is open. A Reinforcement Pass cuts that wait to 30 seconds.

There are two ways to call once that is satisfied:

What a summon costs

The price is your own Stronger Bullets level times 500, multiplied by how big the party is about to become:

A full party of three therefore costs SB × 3,000 altogether, and it gets more expensive as you upgrade. It is priced against late-run gold, not early gold — or skipped entirely, since a Reinforcement Pass drops every summon to zero while it is active.

What the ally does

It is a real player’s saved loadout — their ship, their upgrade levels, their charge skill, and their decals and afterburner colours — flying one of the co-op flank positions. Its name is drawn in amber, and that colour is the only marker that a ship is a reinforcement: there is no longer an [RE] tag on the name plate, the bottom HP stack or the Settings › Players roster. The join and leave war toasts still spell out [RE]. An equipped charge-skill badge sits to the right of every avatar, on both the solo health bar and the reinforcement stack. The stickers are the owner’s active preset, cropped to the hull and rotating with the ship exactly as they do on your own, so a called ally arrives wearing the ship its owner actually built.

• It auto-fires a bullet fan scaled by its owner’s Stronger Bullets, and it casts its ship’s class ability on that ship’s own cadence — Tesla lightning, Clavier notes on the beat, an Oktopodia whip, a Laser beam, Flare bolts, Pinball, Whale ripples, the Horridus storm, Flammenwerfer and Einfrieren. A class with no periodic weapon just fires the fan.
• An ally has no class level of its own, so the ability lands in its full form, scaled off the ally’s own damage rather than a level.
• It triggers its own charge skill whenever the meter fills — you cannot set it off yourself, which is why that meter is drawn in dim cyan rather than your bright cyan. The cast reads like a co-op ship’s: an inward ripple, the buff name rising off the hull and an afterburner surge.
• The team-wide casts reach the whole party no matter who casts them: Party Damage and Charge Doubler from an ally now buff you and every other ally, exactly as they would from your own ship. The rest stay self-only — Focus Fire tightens its fan, Doppelgeschoss doubles its bullet damage, and Clone Ray spawns a real, damage-dealing clone of the ally’s own ship.
• It holds its charge skill during a band-buff vote, so no cast animation covers the vote overlay.
• If the owner’s ship is an on-kill class, the ally works that class on a cadence rather than on its own kills. A Healer heals the whole party and shows the heal aura on everyone; a Shielder grants the party a base absorb shield plus the max-level orbiting pushback pair. Bomber and Assister fire on the same cadence. Allies now absorb shields themselves when hit, and a human Shielder or Healer in single-player likewise covers the whole party.
• It does not collect balls and does not vote in band buffs — but it does fight under them. The run’s accumulated band-buff stack applies to an ally exactly as it does to you, feeding both its bullet fan and its class ability, and a buff won mid-run reaches every ally already on the field. A max-HP buff tops up its current HP on the spot, though nothing will revive one that has already died.
• Allies’ charge meters fill on staggered timers. They each take a slightly different time and start out of phase, so a full party does not cast in unison.
• It has its own HP, enemies target it, and it can be shot down. Losing one does not end your run.
• A heal ball heals the whole party, allies included.

Three thin bars sit under each ally: HP, the dim-cyan charge meter, and a yellow lifetime bar counting down its five minutes. While any ally is out, your own HP readout along the bottom becomes the stacked party bar you would see in co-op.

The Reinforcement Pass

A timed pass sold from Shop › Equip that makes calling allies cheap and frequent. You buy it through a confirmation modal, and a green (Active) sits beside the section header while one is running. It is stored on your account, so it survives a restart and follows you across your linked devices.

Passes stack, and can be prepaid. Buying one while another is running adds its duration to the time you have left rather than being refused, so every variant keeps a Buy button at all times. The section header shows the running total remaining, and the confirmation modal shows what your total will be after the purchase — so you can stack three 48-hour passes into a six-day run if you want to stop thinking about it.

It was briefly called the Solo Reinforcement Pass. The name went back to Reinforcement Pass when it took over the clone as well — one pass, both buttons.

While a pass is active, four things change:

• Summons are free — the per-ally gold cost below is waived entirely.
• The wait between summons drops from two minutes to 30 seconds.
• Each ally stays for 10 minutes instead of five.
• Reinforcement Clone summons are free too — the same pass covers both kinds of help, and that button shows a green Free in place of its price.

Kicking and expiry

An ally leaves after 300 seconds — five minutes of gameplay, so it pauses when the game does, or 10 minutes with a Reinforcement Pass active. You can also dismiss one early from Settings › Players with Kick.

Kicking is therefore the worse of the two: you lose the ally, the gold and any chance of calling that player again this run, and they keep the reward either way.

Being summoned yourself

The other half of the feature is passive. Offline Reinforcement in Settings › Gameplay is on by default, and while it is on the game keeps a snapshot of your current ship in a shared pool, written whenever you finish a run or exit.

• You are only listed once your Stronger Bullets is above 30.
• You only appear to players whose Stronger Bullets is within 50 levels above yours, so you are never called into a run wildly out of your league.
• You have to have been offline for at least 20 minutes. Nobody flies your ship while you are playing it.

Your loadout is encrypted before it leaves the device, and a summoner never receives anything identifying beyond the name on the plate — the Privacy Policy lists exactly what is stored. Switching the toggle off deletes your entry.

The 5% reward

Every player you summoned during a run is paid 5% of the gold that run earned, banked to their account when the run ends. It is paid by the game rather than taken out of your pile — you lose nothing by calling people in.

On your side, anything owed to you is collected the next time you open the game, folded straight into your coins with a notice on the start screen. The reward follows the account rather than the device, so it survives an account transfer.