In our last post, we alluded to the fact that you may need to spend something other than Crowns to upgrade your ability and gear cards. Coming in next week's alpha, you'll be able to obtain new rare resources from bosses and new minibosses, aided by a new tool - the extractor.

Your extractor can unlock the ability to harvest specific rare resources. Unlocking a resource on your extractor costs crowns, but once you do it, that unlock is permanent, and you'll be able to harvest that specific resource forever. Unlocking a resource on your extractor only gives you the ability to harvest, it doesn't actually give you a copy of that card. To do that, you'll need to head out into the field. Each boss now drops a specific rare resource. There are also new minibosses available in the shop for you to add to the deck in adventure mode - these minibosses also drop rare resources. If you're looking to get your hands on that Irradiated Core, you'll need to tackle the new Radioactive Minibehemoth after upgrading your extractor.

Upgrading your cards is designed to be a long-term goal with intermediate steps that benefit all of your characters account-wide. Alongside the more achievement-oriented leveling system that's very character-driven, and the rare card hunting baked into adventure mode, we hope we've struck a balance in giving you lots of different paths to rewards and goals! Help us test it out next weekend - our September alpha is September 27-29. Don't have a key? Join the Discord, dummy!

As our players are already discovering, abilities and gear that felt super strong in the Wastes are barely strong enough to get you through the Dunes. And with more zones incoming very soon, each way harder than the Dunes, we thought you might want some upgrades. Specifically, card upgrades.

For the September alpha, you'll be able to permanently upgrade most ability and gear cards to a "Level 2" version. In the above image, Backup Singer has been upgraded to Level 2, increasing the CP it grants from +2 to +4. This upgrade is permanent on your account so long as you have at least one copy of that card. Some other upgrades you'll be able to unlock:

• Tempo Shift: The target party member that taunts now also heals 1 injury
• Ready 4 Round 2: Also grants +2 CP for the rest of the day
• Shorter Fuses: Everyone in your party (not just you) can use an additional consumable per turn

Right now, over 20 cards have Level 2 upgrades, and we'll be adding the rest in future alphas. 

Now, upgrading cards ain't free. Nothing is out here. You're gonna have to pay through the nose for it, and not just with crowns. But that's for another blog post.

You'd think we'd know by now that we're making a card game, and rule #1 is that things should be cards! That means even the most basic things like attack. So for the next alpha, you won't be dragging your portraits to attack anymore - you'll be playing a card, just like everything else.

Drag the card and it acts like any of our other "targeted" cards, where you can target the monster you'd like to attack. Once you play the card, it acts just like before - dice will roll, animations will play, robots will be smashed! Each character starts the session with a brand new attack card, and (just like ability cards) it doesn't go away when you play it.

Notice that Mods section? Attack cards opened up an opportunity for them to be modified as you play, so we added a bucket of new consumables to do just that. These can be found right now only as drops from monsters - either directly from bio monsters, or when you bust up a mech monster. Possible modifications right now include:

• +1 to CP
• +1 to Damage
• Double Damage to Bio or Mech units
• Half Damage to Bio or Mech units

We've got a long list of additional ones that will be added as we go, but we wanted to make sure the system works first. So playtest the crap out of it in the next alpha - and if you don't have an alpha key, join the discord already!

PS: We're also doing the same thing with the Escape action ^_^