Beacon patch 2.6 is released adding the new Item Recycling feature, a handful of new Ammo Mod Passive Items, and a 30% average performance boost! 

Item Recycling allows you to recycle leftover Weapons, Grenade Mods, Pickups, and Auxiliary items in return for more useful loot. Ammo mods and grenades are much more plentiful now, and exploring for Stockpiles in later levels is more rewarding with the ability to continue stacking Ammo Mods from recycled Weapons. The full rules of the Item Recycling system are described below in the patch notes. 

Many fixes and optimizations have made this patch, improving performance in many areas of the game by 30% or more. Even more optimizations will be done for build 3.0 as well, as performance still dips down in some of the larger areas and arenas. 

With the release of this patch the team will return to focusing on the 3.0 release build which will include Level 6, Boss Mutations, and the final Act 2 Boss Fights. We’ll likely release one or two more minor patches before then so let us know if you have any issues with patch 2.6 or any balance suggestions! 

Kovus Salvage

Item Recycling

• A new Item Recycling feature has been added to make exploring for Stockpiles more rewarding. Duplicate or unwanted weapons, auxiliaries, and pickups can now be Recycled from the Swap UI allowing you to convert them into more useful loot.
• Weapons - Recycles into a random ammo mod from its faction
• Pickups - Recycles into one Grenade Ammo
• Auxiliaries - Recycles into full Grenade Ammo
• Grenade Mods - Recycles into +1 Grenade Container

New Items

• Passive: Energy Casings - Gives your bullets a chance to penetrate through enemies
• Passive: Sonic Ammo - Gives your bullets a chance to knock back and stun enemies on hit
• Passive: Boneslivers - Gives your bullets a chance to deal heavy physical damage to the target 
• Passive: Rotneedle Clusters - Gives your bullets a chance to release a cluster of Rotneedles on impact
• Passive: Nightshroud Pustules - Gives your bullets a chance to deal a heavy knockback on impact
• Passive: Qullslivers - Gives your bullets a chance to release a cluster of Quills on impact

New Enemies

• Prism: Repair Drone - The largest manufactured Prism drone, all Droids nearby are healed until the drone is destroyed.

Miscellaneous

• Removed 20 items from the Research unlock list, making the max research reward level 100 now and unlocking more basic items to spawn in the game by default.
• Added Crown icon near healthbar to indicate a Champion enemy
• Updated Item/Weapon Swap UI visuals
• Updated Options dropdown visuals
• Added tooltips to Reset and Recycle on the Reconstitution screen when moused over
• Statistics on the Reconstitution screen are now updated with statistic changes from any current Mutations
• Health and Stamina stats on the Reconstitution screen have a lower cap of 50 now to match the in-game statistics lower limits
• When Reset is activated, it rolls through your empty genome before continuing to a new life
• Added Vibration option to toggle Controller Vibration on and off
• Research is displayed as a percentage on the Index screen now
• Added Explosion Radius ring notifiers to cluster grenades and a few other explosive bullets
• Player fog replaced with Radial Fog for all weather types. This should fix fog not working for players on DX11 or lower cards.
• Dodging and entering Water has a 100% chance to remove the Burning debuff
• Added flashing red telegraph to malfunctioning Light Bridge pieces
• Zipline now quickly detatches the player at the end instead of forcing a drop animation 
• Added secret bonus crate spawns to Start level accessible with certain Leg mutations
• Added warning to Reconstitute screen if you sequence an empty genome while DNA is still in your inventory.
• Factions now display correctly on all item and weapon index entries
• Add animated ring notifier to Keys to make them more noticeable
• Updated many Notifier descriptions to be more descriptive or fitting and fixed a handful of Notifier errors
• Added initial support for PS4 button icons on the HUD
• Removed Tesla Drone pickup item 

Balance

• Loot - Moved Auxiliary Item drops from equipment spawns into Munitions/Large crates. Exploring an Equipment Cache will almost always grant a Passive item now. 
• Loot - Removed Ammunition Mod drops from Munitions/Large crates
• Loot - Removed 1-Handed Weapon drops from small crates
• Loot - Adjusted placement and drop rates of Pickups from crates
• Player - Increased Player minimum move speed after movement fix that slowed overall movement. 
• Enemies: Increased Champion spawn chances for all difficulty levels
• Trap: Drop Pod - Decreased damage and radius of drop pod impact explosion (No longer a 1 hit kill for lower health players)
• DNA Skill - Reduced Auxiliary Cooldown Paramount DNA Skill from -5 seconds to -3 seconds
• Mutation: Rotspore Heels - Added landing impact explosion with minor damage and stun. Reduced horizontal boost distance to make it easier to jump up to close platforms and view the landing zone
• Passive: Teleleech Ammo - Recuded chance to apply to bullet to 5%
• Passive: Hailfrost Ammo - Increased chance to apply to bullet to 10%
• Passive: Explosive Ammo - Raised explode damage
• Grenades - Adjusted radius of many grenades and added ring notifiers to more grenade types
• Grenade: Rotspore Sticker - Reduced detonation time
• Weapon: Shotguns - Updated a handful of Shotgun weapons to use a flat bullet spread to prevent bullets flying over enemies
• Weapon: Magrail Weapons - Increased size of bullet collisions and tweaked size of magrail gib explosions
• Weapon: Explosive Crossbow and Quiverer (Variant) - Reduced explosion damage
• Weapon: Laser Carbine and Last Word (Variant) - Decreased damage of both shot types and set base laser projectile to penetrate enemies and objects.
• Weapon: Energy Weapons - Reduced upper damage values on all Ship Energy weapons 

Audio

• Weapon fire and explosions now duck ambient sounds
• Ambient sounds duck more aggressively

Fixes

• Fixed player movement being calculated incorrectly, causing moving diagonally and other situations to make the player move at the wrong speed
• Removed Velocity Inherit function from many weapon types, fixing awkward situations that changed the bullet velocity too much
• Fixed expensive garbage collection issue with debuff triggers and player hurt triggers
• Fixed garbage collection spike during some UI animations
• Optimized animators, model settings, particle settings, and light settings on hundreds of objects 
• Optimized all Item, Weapon, and DNA prefabs and replaced item indicators with new nested prefabs
• Optimized many bullet projectiles
• Optimized rigs on many animated models 
• Fixed positioning, scale, and materials on many Codex models
• Disabled highlight on enemies when they are behind cover. The additional outline effect was expensive and rarely ever showed up
• Updated navmesh generation to give pocket worlds their own smaller navmeshes
• Fixed overly long basalts and fortress walls on many levels causing the navmesh to generate too large
• Set up Level 3 to delete and prevent backtracking once the Boss arena platform is reached to improve performance
• Set up Level 4 to delete and prevent backtracking once the final arena platform is reached to improve performance
• Optimized Level 5 Intro and Core lighting
• Fixed Level 5 intro area floor bouncing gibs and items around
• Fixed Expunge Barrier trap in Level 5 killing Prism enemies, causing it to 1 hit kill the Spider Droids tied to the door lock
• Removed enemies from the Level 5 exit lower containment shelves temporarily to reduce level navmesh size
• Fixed Level 5 Map getting cut off at the edges
• Fixed Gib Delete volumes below levels not deleting gibs or items when they fell off the map leaving them to fall infinitely
• Fixed Level 2 rarely generating with outdated/missing cap tiles at the edges of levels
• Fixed issue with Shipping Containers where if opened and the Prism small crate variant spawns it would break the highlight shader, draining performance and highlighting random objects in the scene
• Fixed Containment Chamber doors being too tall after bursting open, making bullets hit them while on the floor
• Fixed Shipping Conveyor wall holo barriers allowing the player to be pushed through them by containers, making the player stuck inside of the wall
• Fix null debuffs breaking ShotDebuffItem, causing unwanted interactions between different ammo mods stacking
• Fixed Start and Guide being rebindable on controllers
• Fixed Critical Hit tooltip being incorrect on Tab Screen and updated Luck tooltips
• Fixed Highlight shader not updating when an object is moving
• Fixed orbiting player drones being targeted more often than the player
• Fixed Radiation Debuff not hurting player when applied
• Fixed Heavy Weapon indicators often being rotated in the world
• Fixed Icosatron Uncharted enemy being too easily pushable by the player
• Fixed Tesla Barrel and Pyro Barrel aim positions being too low making them difficult to hit in some scenarios
• Fixed a few Crystal Prisms being mispositioned slightly, causing the energy beams meant to hit them not colliding and breaking them open
• Fixed Level 3 Acidic Hivemind boss triggering on level start instead of when the Boss platform is reached
• Fixed Level 3 Quill Hivemind Boss Brain skipping its unburrow animation after the first attack
• Fixed many waypoints from Act 2 loot zones showing up on the map
• Fixed Brass Beast weapon projectiles not colliding with enemies
• Fixed Rotspore Cannon projectile not sticking into enemies or the environment
• Fixed outdated fall triggers intersecting with areas of the Level 4 Hydro Headquarters fortress
• Fixed a few item descriptions displaying the wrong amount of charges for pickup use
• Fixed Waypoints for Stockpiles spawned inside of Shipping Containers not disappearing
• Other misc. level fixes