Gravity Well
In the dev build SALVO's Surge, in the dive.
It crushes a crowd into a zone, holds them there and finishes with a slam.
Fold the room into a fist and close it.
Dives
A crew of one to four goes down into a stretch of the works nobody has serviced since the door was locked.
How a dive is told
The city has its own words for a run.
A dive is a maintenance crew of one to four, licensed or not, extending inherited permission into a section of the Lattice that has not been serviced since ROOT locked the door.
To extract is to disengage clean, and the Lattice then releases the banked salvage back into the diver's custody. All the while the Lattice's immune system decides, moment to moment, how hard to fight back. A storm is that response spiking hard enough to announce itself with a visible sky-glitch first.
The run as built
Partly built One solo site runs in the development build: Substation 7's roof deck, in Shallownet. In the build, every Legend fights with SALVO's kit.
A dive in the build is solo and runs in the browser. It follows the sequence below. A server-side dive room exists and nothing joins it yet, so a crew of two to four is still the game's design.
- Briefing
The deck is laid out
The objective and the ICE are named before the first wave. The briefing is printed on the Lattice page.
- Wave 1
Sweep
Hounds and Spitters: runners that flank and shooters that hold ground.
- Wave 2
Pressure
Bulwarks and the Surveyor: a wall that walks and a mortar that marks the floor.
- Wave 3
Control
Vipers, Phantoms and Chaplains: tethers, blinks and a unit that undoes your work.
- Wave 4
Black Ice
A Foreman and Stingers, with everything else at once.
- Uplink
Hold the ring
A forced storm runs while the ring charges.
- Boss
The CERBERUS Process
Three heads and three phases. Read its entry.
- Jack out
The run is paid
The browser reports the run and the server prices it in XP and creds, with a limit. It does not mint items.
The run as designed
Designed The loop below is the game's design. One site of the first stratum is all that runs.
The design is a run down through four strata: Shallownet, the Stacks, the Black Vault and ROOT Core. In every stratum the crew finds an Uplink and charges it, then faces the Choice. If nobody chooses, the dive extracts on its own, so a dropped connection is never punished.
A Legend who dies loses the unbanked haul and keeps skill XP and blueprints. Below BLACKICE, the Lattice keeps the diver.
Three difficulty modes are planned: Drift, Undertow and Cascade. A crew can also take Overclock contracts, opt-in modifiers that raise the loot: Glass Legend, Feral ICE, Blackout, Encrypted World, No Insurance, Hunted and Thin Air.
There is a daily seed too, one shared layout each day with a leaderboard. See Ways in.
- ArriveA crew drops into a stratum, from the Junction or from an Uplink out on the street.
- FightExplore, clear what comes and look for the Uplink while the Threat gauge climbs.
- UplinkCharge the Uplink under a forced storm. The charge only advances while someone stands in the ring.
- The ChoiceA window opens, and the crew picks.
- ExtractBank the haul and jack out.
- DescendGo deeper with a growing multiplier, and risk everything unbanked.
Sync
In the dev build Sync runs in the dive in the development build. The street has no Sync yet.
Sync fills from kills, kills made in quick succession, kills made in the air, damage to a boss, staying unhit, revives and assists. A hit costs a great deal, and a pause lets the meter drain. The street reads Sync the way it reads a fighter's rhythm, as rank pops that anyone nearby can see and hear.
The design adds more ways to fill it: a kill by an explosion, a wall-run or a falling piece of debris, a perfect dodge or parry, a weak-point break. Kids across the city play at it, miming the rank poses from D to S. See Growing up and Sync.
- D
Rank D
Every run starts here.
- C
Rank C
- B
Rank B
A Surge can fire from here.
- A
Rank A
- S
Rank S
A full meter. The music changes to its own stem, and anyone nearby can hear the rank pop.
Sync is nervous-system synchronization depth — how deeply a Legend's body is currently talking to the Lattice's permission layer. Flow-state play deepens it; getting hit breaks it, the way a bad connection drops a call mid-sentence.
Surge
Partly built Gravity Well runs in the dive in the development build. The other Surges are designed.
A Surge is hardware running at full administrator spec for a few seconds, paid for with the Sync a Legend has built. Firing it empties the meter, and the fuller the meter was, the harder the Surge hits. A Legend's first Surge arrives at Operator 15.
Every Surge is a maintainer briefly holding the master key, and every Surge ends the same way: the key is handed back, and the works notes who held it.
Chrono Lock
Designed
A bubble in which enemies and their projectiles slow to a crawl.
Helios Protocol
Designed
Three sweeping beams. Two Legends whose Surges overlap can combine them, which is the design for tandem Surges.
How a hit lands
In the dev build Hit feel runs in the dive in the development build. The street has flashes, numbers and sound and no hitstop yet.
Every hit has a freeze, a flash, an effect, a sound and a number. The sound is lettered and loud: KRAK, THUD, SHNK, WHUMP, TSSK, KLAK. Nothing in Catena says POW.
The freeze lengthens with the weight of the hit. The designed ladder is a chip, a standard hit, a heavy, an elite kill, a weak-point break, a Surge finisher and a boss changing phase. A heavy adds a single impact frame, and a Surge finisher inverts the palette.
Subroutines
Partly built Dozens are defined in the game's data. The dive in the development build does not hand them out yet.
Subroutines are the run's power. They reset every run, they never drop outside a dive, and a Legend borrows them for the length of the job.
Fragments are the in-run currency, and the works reclaims them at jack-out. Relics drop only from bosses.
| Rarity | Some of the names |
|---|---|
| Common | Splitter Rounds, Overclock Chip, Ripcord Servo, Kinetic Cell, Nanite Patch, Hardened Plating, Magnet Coil, Static Sheath |
| Refined | Spike Cache, Glass Driver, Chain Daemon, Adrenal Loop, Siphon Array, Cold Compile, Afterimage Coil |
| Exotic | Mirror Fork, Blink Fuse, Ghost Protocol, Null Mirage, Redline Kernel |
| Relic | BLACKICE Shard, Auditor's Ledger, Hive Node |
Loot and the decrypt
Designed No decrypt and no gear drops exist in the build. The dive pays creds and XP only.
Gear drops encrypted, as a beam and a pillar in the colour and shape of its rarity. It is banked at extraction and revealed one card at a time, worst first, so the best is never spoiled. See rarity, crafting and Gear and money.
Decrypt. Gear drops encrypted because the Lattice doesn't hand a maintenance crew live tools mid-job; the run-summary Decrypt sequence is that crew finally being cleared to open what they carried out.