Hello everyone, this is the Retroid: Cartridge Protocol team!

We’re thrilled to announce that Early Access for Retroid is about to begin! 🚀
Thank you so much for your patience and incredible support so far.

This isn’t just a test — it’s the beginning of a journey we’ll complete together with our players.

During Early Access, you can play through Chapters 1–3,
and fully experience Retroid’s unique combat and exploration systems.
Your feedback will directly help us improve and expand the game in future updates.

🎮 Let’s make Retroid deeper and stronger together.
Join the discussion on Steam Community or on Twitter (X) — we’re listening!

We’re a small team, but we truly believe that your voices
make Retroid a living, evolving experience.

That moment is almost here—
the journey of Retroid: Cartridge Protocol begins soon.

— The Retroid Dev Team 🎮

Balance

• Chests are now guaranteed to have at least one core in them.

• Chests have had their spawn distances overhauled.

Changes

• Cores no longer have a chance of rolling gear above their rarity. EG Nori no longer rolls above Nori.

• Slipstream has been changed to multiply gamespeed.

• Tasks now show their chance to spawn in the tasks screen.

• Tasks can be toggled on to double their weight which increases their chance to spawn.

• Seasonal leaderboard has been retired and replaced with a total tasks completed leaderboard.

• The base leaderboard now tracks the fastest completion of all the quests.

Minor changes

• Crystal Chest is now named Erif, Golden is now Dlog, Metal is Nori, and Wooden is Eznorb.

I am definitely looking for feedback on this one guys! Thanks to everyone who plays and enjoy!

Addressing recent feedback, this patch addresses the following:

• Covered up multiple strange holes in the floor where you could get accidentally stuck, forcing a reboot of the game. (Please report these if you see them!)

• The Upgrade Computer in the Office will no longer be out of focus.

• The Phone UI should now be more readable on lower resolutions (Steam Deck*).

• You can now rotate while taking a selfie!

• Going up and down stairs should feel smoother.

• Tourists have gotten a significant overhaul and should require much less CPU, which should help a lot with middle and late game performance issues. (More to come here)

Thanks to all of you for diligently reporting issues and grievances!

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!

This update fixes most of the remaining issues blocking the Milestone 6 public release, but there are still problems with the Abductor UFO outer hull not hiding properly that we need to fix. Hopefully we can finish that up tomorrow and release another quick hotfix, but there's no point holding back this batch of fixes while we wait.

Balancing:

• ENDGAME part 1 reinforcement timer increased by 1 turn, and four extra alien Praetorian-ranked aliens added to the mission. There's also now dedicated spawn points for the enemy noncombatants, so they always spawn inside buildings.

Bugfixes:

• Fixed Sentry Guns being automatically assigned to ENDGAME / UOO mission strike teams, and crashing the game if you actually tried to bring them on the mission.

• Fixed various display issues for the multi-level UFOs in the tactical combat (except the Abductor, which we're still looking into).

• Fixed the game completion achievement not always correctly unlocking after you win the campaign.

• Fixed the engineering screen UI resizing itself when you add the MARS / ARES rebuild projects to the queue.

• Fixed the default soldier arrangement for the Pegasus dropship spawning a couple of soldiers inside diagonal wall tiles.

• Fixed the roof tiles on the ENDGAME part 1 mission not being properly destructible.

• Fixed some of the walls in the UOO Sabotage mission not visually updating their appearance when destroyed, and still looking undamaged.

• Fixed the vehicle Heavy Reinforced Armour incorrectly being called the Heavy Ceramite Armour.

• Fixed the ENDGAME part 1 intro incorrectly referring to the Pegasus.

• Added new AI Upgrade for compute fighter spec loadouts

• Improved compute fighters optimize, now considers time left and has a better tie breaker order

• Added visual bar for reactive armor in the battle area to better convey the damage reduction amount

• Reduced some very late game reactive armor amounts

• Buffed Synth Booster core

• Final artifact nodes in Galaxy 7 and 8 now give the same cost per artifact as the other nodes

• Reduced several Galaxy 8 battle scrap rewards by 5

• Fleet battle practice on nodes with a base that causes a hazard now keep the base and hazard settings linked

• Improved fleet advisor behavior when bases are involved

• Fleet advisor check now occurs sooner and doesn't require a loss

• Fleet added damage type icon for 2x damage vs both armor and shield

• Improved color difference in late game synth tiers

• Fixed Residuum gain bonus not applying to offline time on load

• Fixed cost of the Synth Speed Residuum upgrades

• Fixed hold position not working right if a retreat goes through a sector split

• Fixed incorrect shard drop rate in sector 58

We are temporarily removing the Olympus map from the Control game mode as a bug is preventing players from capturing point A. We have a fix in the works and will have it out as soon as we're confident it has resolved the issue. Thank you for your patience.

These last couple of months have been intense and we're incredibly excited to bring you all the new good stuff – this update is truly magical!

There are too many updates to count but the major things are:

• New enemy behaviors and animations

• Parry system with the mana shield

• Physics system (preparing for more interactions)

• Lots of easter eggs and fun stuff

• Menu juice

• Dialog tweaks and fixes

• Quest flow and economy system

• Performance optimizations

• etc

As always, thank you for your feedback! Let us know what you think of these updates. For the best experience please delete any old save files you have. Save files are located here:

Happy dungeon crawling!

• Added the capability to reorder your heroes’ ability bars. When managing your party, you can now drag abilities to other slots on the bar to set up their ordering as you please.

• Paladin’s active aura is now saved. When loading a save, the last used aura will be active.
  
• Knight’s active stance is also now saved
  
• Monk’s ally target for her trait, Ancient Defender, is also saved
  
• Improved the fading of walls and trees to improve visibility of characters during combat
  
• Reduced the distance ranged enemies such as archers would run away from you. This will make chasing them less tedious while having the ranged AI enemies still kite melee heroes.

• Fixed an issue where selling items wasn’t tracking progress for the Enchanted Diamond artifact
  
• Fixed extra upgrade tokens bonus from soul shards not showing in Upgrade events
  
• Improved responsiveness of clicking to skip text in events
  
• Fixed an issue with the mage tower level getting stuck loading
  
• Fixed an issue where the mage tower would only appear if you took the bottom most path. It should now appear (by chance) in the mid to late stages of the map
  
• Fixed an issue with walls and trees staying invisible after fading away
  
• Fixed Mighty Throw tier 4 to properly hit 2 targets
  
• Fixed an issue with the villager in Village Patrol from reshowing an active dialogue after he’s been saved
  
• Improved wording on multiple artifacts to better show what effect gets upgraded
  
• Fixed an issue with ability previews not showing correctly when receiving a starting gift
  
• Fixed an issue where tiers past the max of 4 could show up in ability rewards and re-rolls
  
• Fixed an incorrect display of token costs for abilities when Upgrading them

• Combustion: now scales with the amount of burn on the primary target
  
• Firebolt: reduced the damage on tier 3 and 4 but increased burn.
  
• Holy Shock: tier 3 no longer targets 2 enemies but deals AoE damage instead
  
• Blinding Powder: tier 3 now applies additional vulnerable instead of increasing AoE size. AoE size has been slightly increased for all tier levels instead.
  
• Increased Soul Shard costs to the re-rolling and upgrade bonuses

Hello! Hope you are all doing well. This will be the fourth monthly community update. There isn't a ton of specific news so I will keep this one a bit on the shorter side. But work continues on the game and especially on the demo, which is now having builds tested and the game's content balanced around player experience.

Some notable things I did add from this month's workload are an archaeology mini game for finding loot, a revamped level streaming system to heavily reduce Unreal's hitching, some fun environmental beats for the player to uncover while they explore, and polishing the game's in and out experience (main menu, "end of demo" segment at the end, the main boss fight, a bit of story in the tutorial, etc)

The game's demo is still on track for early playtesting at the start of December which will be conducted through the game's discord which can be joined here: https://discord.gg/XqAHecRhDs

As always, here are some more shots from the game, bit of a collection of work from this month's efforts in getting the demo into a playable shape.