The Clone Update

The dummies on your range were never dummies. The Institute grows them in the Vat Hall, a fresh batch for every test. This update lets you design your own clones, put them on any map and paint them in anything from cotton to Blastite. The main menu now opens inside the Institute, the buildings you blow up have rooms in them, and the AA turret fires real heat-seeking missiles.

Design your own clones

Main menu › Clone Lab

The Clone Lab is a new button on the main menu. Every template you make there can be grown in the Sandbox and in your own maps. Five are ready to go: Crash-test, Riot cop, Clown, Suicide vest and the Gravium knight.

The Clone Lab's Paint tab: a clown clone in striped Fabric, with colour swatches and quick-clothes buttons Paint: any material on any pixel. Fabric comes in any colour.

• Look. Name it, give it a name tag of up to 16 characters to float over its head, and pick a skin tone. Leave the tag blank and each clone wears its own batch code instead, like CL-0471-B.

The Look tab with the Riot cop template: name, name tag and skin tone Look: the Riot cop's name tag and skin.

• Armour. Helmet, vest, heavy plate, bomb suit and riot shield. Keep each one standard issue or make it from any solid material, one to three layers thick. The Lab shows how much each piece stops.

The Armour tab: helmet, vest, plate, bomb suit and riot shield, each with its material and layers Armour: every slot in any solid material, one to three layers.

• Paint. Brush, fill a body part, erase with right-click, pick a colour off the clone with Alt-click, and mirror left and right. Quick clothes does shirts, sleeves, trousers, boots, gloves, hair and hoods in one click. Hair, faces and clothes are all paint. Ctrl+Z undoes.
• Pose. The four standard poses and eight more: Hands up, T-pose, Dab, Wave, Facepalm, Star jump, Running and Flamingo. Or drag the joints yourself. With IK on, pull a hand or foot and the whole limb follows; drag the hips and it crouches with its feet planted. Bend limits and a 15° snap keep it tidy. On the range a clone holds its pose until it's knocked over, then gets back up into it.

The Pose tab: a yellow crash-test clone mid-stride, with orange joint handles Pose: drag the joints. This one is running.

Every pixel is real

Clone Lab › Paint

Paint isn't just a skin. A pixel painted in steel stops rounds like steel plate, and a pixel painted in Blastite is Blastite. Turn on Armour view in the Paint tab to see what you've built.

Armour view on the Suicide vest clone: its torso band in red as explosive, its clothes in grey as Fabric Armour view on the Suicide vest: red goes off, grey is cloth.

| Painted in | Behaves like | On the range | | --- | --- | --- | | Ferrosteel, Gravium… | Armour | Rated against standard steel plate. Layers stack, and heavier gear makes a clone harder to throw. | | Blastite, Snapite | Explodes | Goes off on a knock or a little heat, along with every explosive pixel connected to it. | | Duranite, Crackite | Explodes | Shrugs off a knock. Needs a booster or a long fire, just like in a round. | | Kickplate | Kicks back | Blows outward when a round or jet hits it, three pixels at a time. | | Timber, Emberite, fuels | Burns | Catches fire and spreads along the paint. | | Fabric | Cloth | New, and only in the Clone Lab. Any colour you like. Stops nothing. |

To the same bomb, a clone painted in steel lost 0 pixels where a plain dummy lost 20. Clones in Blastite vests lost 265: their vests went up too.

Clones on your maps

Map Designer · Sandbox › Build

The dummy tools in the Map Designer and Sandbox Build now have a Clone picker: a plain dummy or any of your templates. Hostages and marked targets work as before.

The Map Designer's Dummies panel with the Clone picker open and a clown clone placed on the map The Clone picker in the Map Designer.

Five clones and a plain dummy on the Sandbox range: a clown tagged Bozo, a crash-test clone, a riot cop behind its shield and the Gravium knight tagged Sir Clonealot Bozo, a crash-test clone, a riot cop behind its shield, Sir Clonealot and a plain dummy.

• Give each one a name. A placed clone can wear its own tag, so five riot cops can be Dave, Steve, Kev and the rest.
• Maps bring their clones. A shared map carries a copy of every template it uses, so it plays the same for someone who has never opened your Clone Lab, or after you change the template.
• Riot shields are made of whatever the template's shield is, ten centimetres a layer.
• Name tags on the range. They float over the head, fade when the clone dies and go with the head. Settings › Show clone name tags turns them off for clean clips.
• The shot log uses names. "Vesty lost its head" instead of "a dummy lost its head".

Welcome to the Institute

Main menu

The main menu now opens on the shop floor. Four painted scenes take turns behind the menu, cross-fading about once a minute. Staff breathe, write, point and carry crates, and the machines run: a shell conveyor, a crane with a swaying bomb, a robot arm, a filling hopper and a thumping press.

The new main menu over the R&D lab: scientists in white coats, a test clone, a big shell in a stand, a chalkboard and shelves of coloured jars The R&D lab behind the menu.

1. R&D lab. The round in the vice cooks off, or a stray round comes through the window.
2. Assembly hall. A shell drops off the line and rolls, or the crane's sling lets go.
3. Test bay. 3, 2, 1, and the rig fires into the plate and its clone.
4. Vat Hall. Where the clones come from.

The assembly hall: a crane holding a bomb overhead, shells on a conveyor past a press, a robot arm and a filling hopper The assembly hall: crane, press, robot arm and hopper.

The test bay: behind the blast chamber's glass a clone waits by a bolted post while scientists stand at the console The test bay, before the countdown.

Anyone close is thrown and everyone else braces. Then the hazmat crew comes in and drags the bodies off by the ankle, replacements walk in to their stations, and the room is put back together.

The lab after a stray round: a shattered window, smoke and two staff thrown to the floor A stray round through the lab window.

A hazmat crew in yellow suits arriving to drag away the bodies while the other staff carry on Then the hazmat crew comes in.

The painting stays sharp at any window size or resolution, and on first launch a quick picture shows at once instead of a black screen.

Where they come from

Main menu › Vat Hall

Clones grow in three green vats. When they're ready they ride the line on their backs into a kitting machine, which stamps each one into a helmet and flak vest. At the end of the belt each clone slows, sags over the roller with its arms dangling, and slithers off onto the floor. The hazmat crew takes it from there. The incident board reads 0.

The Vat Hall: green growth vats, clones lying on a conveyor, the kitting machine stamping one, and a kitted clone sagging head-first off the end of the belt The kitting machine at work. The one at the end of the belt is about to go over.

The paperwork catches up

Career

The Head office: Foreman Hurst explaining that the dummies are clones, and a Ninefold Security letter with a PS about Vat Hall clones Foreman Hurst comes clean, and the letters mention the clones.

• Foreman Hurst now tells you on your first test what the "dummies" really are.
• Vat Hall bulletins turn up in the weekly report every fifth week.
• Client letters mention how many clones a test uses. Directorate memos file it under Annex B.
• Ninefold Security tests its armour on Vat Hall clones.
• After-action reports list the test clones, grown at the Directorate's expense.

Furnished buildings

Sandbox › Random building · Structure Designer

Generated buildings now have rooms behind their walls, drawn at 1.25 cm detail. Houses and flats get kitchens with a fridge and stove, studies lined with bookshelves, bedrooms and bathrooms. Offices get desks, filing cabinets, whiteboards and a meeting room, and warehouses are full of racking. Every window has its blinds drawn.

Inside a generated apartment block: a wardrobe, a framed landscape on panelled wood, and a dummy standing in front A bedroom and a study, three storeys up.

• Paint your own rooms. The Structure Designer has a third layer, Backdrop, for the wall behind a structure's empty space. Brush it on, or use Fill room to paint a whole room at once; it stops at doorways. Stamps keep their backdrop when you place them in a map or in the Sandbox, and undo takes it back off.

The Structure Designer with the new Backdrop layer: a two-room hut, one room in warm wallpaper and the other in slate blue The new Backdrop layer in the Structure Designer.

• It comes down with the building. Blasts tear ragged, scorched holes in the back wall. When a building collapses, its rooms fall with the sections they belong to, and any wall left with nothing holding it up breaks off and crumbles where it lands. The backdrop you paint in the Map Designer tears the same way.

A thermobaric round going off inside a furnished building, the rooms behind its walls coming down with it A thermobaric round bringing a furnished block down.

Real heat-seeking missiles

Stamps › AA turret

The AA turret used to throw something closer to a homing spark. Now each interceptor is a real missile, built from pixels at your shot's own detail: a white casing, tail fins and canards, a seeker dome and a Blastite warhead under a red band.

An AA missile just off the rails, climbing on its motor flame and turning toward the incoming round Off the rail and turning onto its target.

• It comes off the rails at the rails' angle, the turret turned to face the threat, and boosts away on a burning motor with a flame and a smoke trail.
• Its heat seeker leads your round. A round with its motor burning looks hotter, and a burning flare still outshines anything, so decoys still work.

The AA missile in level flight at 86 m/s, its motor plume streaming behind it Seeking, motor still burning.

• The warhead goes off on a proximity fuze. Its blast is real: it kicks your round and anything else close by, and a round with a touchy charge goes up with it.
• A missile that misses self-destructs, and one that flies into a structure goes off where it hits.
• The motor is hot, so your own heat-seekers can see it as well.

The AA missile's warhead bursting beside the incoming round, the round's trail ending in the blast Proximity fuze: the round is shot down 14 m up.

A new face

Desktop · taskbar · Steam

The new Blast Factory icon: a wide-eyed clone in a green helmet with its hands up, as a steel round streaks in at dusk

The game has a new icon: a clone with its hands up, as a steel round streaks in at dusk. The small sizes are a simpler cut with a bigger head, so the face still reads on your taskbar.

Fixed

• Missile and bomb runs: after a strike in slow motion, FIRE no longer sits on "…" for minutes while the jet flies off. The next run can start as soon as the result is in.
• Servo fins: a round with servo fins that broke apart in flight no longer throws an error.
• Sandbox: building on a field damaged by a shot no longer piles hundreds of structure labels into jumbled text.
• Staff: Let go of Larry.

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Vat Hall bulletin

A reminder that test clones are grown fresh for every test and are not to be named, fed or taken home.

New template approved: "Standard Test Clone, Mk. 7", now with 4% more torso.

Facilities is hiring a janitor.

Mind the drop. See you on the range.