Upgrades
Five upgrade lines, all permanent, all bought with gold, all 1-indexed — level 1 is the base state you already have.
The five lines
| Upgrade | Per level | Cost | Max |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stronger Bullets | +10% damage | 10 × level² | 100 |
| Faster Bullets | +4% fire rate (additive) and +20% bullet travel speed | 10 × level² | 100 |
| Additional Bullets | +1 shot, fanned 5° per index each side of your aim | 10 × level² | 9 |
| Health Increase | +20 max HP, and the same amount added to current HP | 10 × level² | 100 |
| Class level | Depends on the ship — see Ships & Classes | Earned by flying it | 30 or 50 |
Your effective damage — base 10, scaled by Stronger Bullets, band buffs, buff balls and charge buffs — is what almost every class ability reads. The laser beam is 10× it, the Oktopodia whip 2×, a Flare bolt 4×, a Pinball hit 10×, a max Horridus storm 20×. Levelling Stronger Bullets levels your class ability at the same time.
Per-ship, and the shared 50
The four common upgrades are owned per ship, not per account — but the first 50 levels transfer freely. A ship’s effective level is:
max(that ship’s own earned level, min(your best level on any ship, 50))
- Levels 1–50 are effectively shared. Buy Stronger Bullets to 50 on the Laser and every other ship you own is topped up to 50 for free.
- Levels 51–100 are that ship’s alone. Pushing the Laser to 80 does nothing for your Tesla, which still sits at the shared 50 until you invest in it directly.
- Additional Bullets is fully shared — its cap of 9 is below the shared 50, so it can never be ship-specific.
- The start-screen Upgrades screen has a < Ship > picker (owned ships only) to choose which ship you are upgrading. Mid-run the menu is scoped to the ship you are flying.
Getting a new ship is much cheaper than it used to be: it inherits the shared 50 in every common line immediately. Going past 50 is a per-ship commitment, so spreading late levels across ships costs multiples of the same money.
Class levels are per-ship and unaffected by this — and they are not bought at all any more. They come from Ship Mastery.
Level-100 bonuses
Taking a common upgrade to its cap on the ship you are flying unlocks a second effect, in the same way class abilities get a max-level perk. These are gated on the active ship’s level, so they follow the hull you invested in.
| Upgrade at Lv100 | Bonus |
|---|---|
| Stronger Bullets | Each auto-attack bullet has a 10% chance to explode on impact, dealing its damage again in a small 10 px area. Only the real bullet explodes, and the kill is credited to whoever fired it. |
| Faster Bullets | A flat +10% fire rate on top of everything the per-level 4% already gave you. |
| Health Increase | Heal a random 5–10 HP after every wave clear. Per player in co-op, and it skips anyone who is dead. |
| Additional Bullets | No max-level bonus — it caps at 9. |
Cost formulas
- Normal upgrades:
10 × level²gold for the next level. - Class levels: not bought. They are earned by flying that ship — see Ship Mastery.
Because the cost is quadratic, the last few levels dominate the total. Getting Stronger Bullets from 1 to 50 costs about a seventh of what 50 to 100 costs.
Cumulative cost
Total gold spent to reach a level from scratch:
| To level | Normal upgrade | Class upgrade |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 5 | 300 | 600 |
| 10 | 2,850 | 5,700 |
| 20 | 24,700 | 49,400 |
| 30 | 85,550 | 171,100 |
| 50 | 404,250 | 808,500 |
| 100 | 3,283,500 | 6,567,000 |
Maxing all four normal lines (100 / 100 / 9 / 100) costs roughly 9,852,540 gold. A single class to 50 costs 808,500.
Buying and hold-to-repeat
- Open the Upgrade menu with Tab or the top-left button. The game keeps running behind it.
- From Ship › Upgrade the menu shows every class row. Mid-run it shows only your active class.
- Hold a cost button and it buys once immediately, then repeats every 0.1 s after a 1 s delay — until you release, it becomes unaffordable, or it hits MAX.
- On Android portrait the same hold-to-repeat works on the bottom upgrade bar cells.
- A locked premium ship shows
LOCKEDand cannot be levelled — that would otherwise be a free unlock, since level 0 costs nothing.
How the stats combine
Your final damage per bullet is the base 10 multiplied through, in order:
- Stronger Bullets — +10% per level above 1.
- Band buffs — the stacked
attacktotal, summed additively, floored at 0.05×. - Buff balls — +5% per stacked attack ball, up to 10 stacks.
- Party Damage — a flat ×1.50 while a teammate’s charge skill is running.
- Doppelgeschoss — a separate ×2 slot, so it multiplies with Party Damage rather than replacing it (×2.6 together).
Fire rate works the same way from Faster Bullets (4% per level, plus the flat 10% at Lv100), the band fire stat and speed buff balls. Bullet count is Additional Bullets plus the band bullets stat, which can be negative.