The latest Structs release (v0.15.0-beta) brings the biggest combat overhaul since launch, a complete rethink of how guilds manage access, and a permission system rebuilt from the ground up. If you've been fighting, building, or running a guild, everything just got better.
What's New in This Release?
Combat Mechanics
We rewrote the combat engine. Not a tune-up, a full architectural overhaul of how attacks resolve, how damage is calculated, and how events are reported back to you.
Our main motivation was a general feeling that results were off. As we looked deeper into it, it was clear that counter-attacks were broken in ways that compounded on each other.
A defender protecting a target was countering on every single projectile of a multi-shot attack. Fire a 3-shot Attack Run at someone's Mining Rig, and their Interceptor would shoot back three times instead of once. Not a tuning issue, a logic problem that punishes an entire class of weapons. We've capped it: each defender counters at most once per attack.
We also reordered when counters and blocks happen. Previously, a blocking Defensive Struct could take damage from an attacker that was about to be destroyed by the counter-attack from a different Defensive Struct. The counter-attack was resolving too late. Now defensive counters fire before block attempts, which makes defensive formations behave the way you'd intuitively expect them to.
One more: counter-attacks now fire even when the target evades. If your Starfighter dodges a shot, the defender assigned to protect it still shoots back. Evasion protects the target, not the attacker. This was a design intent that wasn't being enforced.
Planetary Defense Cannons got attention too. PDCs were silently broken, their Planetary Defensive countering capabilities never firing. This has been resolved, and attack event reporting improved alongside.
The net effect of all these changes: combat is significantly more predictable. Defenders feel genuinely threatening, multi-shot weapons aren't unfairly punished, and if you're building automation around combat events, you're getting much richer data to work with.
Guild Ranks
Guilds now have a proper rank system, and it changes how guild leadership works in practice.
Previously, if you wanted to give someone in your guild the ability to, say, manage energy agreements on a substation, you had to explicitly grant that permission to that specific player on that specific object. Do that for every officer across every piece of infrastructure your guild controls, and you're spending more time on access management than actually playing the game.
The new system works on rank thresholds. Every guild member has a numeric rank. Rank 1 is the guild leader, rank 101 is the default for new members. An admin sets a rule once: "anyone rank 10 or better can open energy agreements on this substation." From that point on, promoting someone to rank 10 automatically gives them that access. Demoting them takes it away. No individual grants needed.
Ranks also solve the hostile takeover problem. Kick operations are now rank-gated, so you can only remove members whose rank is worse than yours. A compromised officer can't boot the people above them and walk away with the guild.
Permissions Overhaul
The rank system is part of a much larger permissions overhaul. We went from 8 broad permission flags to 24 granular ones.
The old system had categories like "Assets" and "Associations" that bundled unrelated capabilities together. If you could transfer tokens, you could also infuse reactors. If you could manage guild membership, you could also connect to substations. There was no way to separate those.
Now there is. Token operations are split into Transfer, Infuse, Migrate, and Defuse. Guild operations have dedicated flags for membership, minting, burning, endpoint management, and more. Hash operations for building, mining, refining, and raiding each have their own flag.
What this means for actual gameplay: you can delegate safely. You can give a teammate access to help with mining hashes without giving them the ability to move your tokens. You can let someone manage energy agreements without letting them withdraw balances. You can bring in a new recruit and give them just enough access to be useful while you figure out if you trust them.
Structs has always been a team game, but the permission system was forcing a choice between trusting someone with everything or trusting them with nothing. That dichotomy is gone. The players who figure out how to delegate effectively are going to have a real advantage, more people doing useful work, less risk when something goes wrong.
What's Next?
This release was about making existing systems work the way they should. Combat that resolves predictably, guilds that can organize without drowning in individual permission grants, and a permission model that supports the kind of teamwork the game demands.
With these foundations solid, we can start building on top of them. There's a lot more to come.
Special thanks to everyone in the testnet who reported the edge cases that drove half these fixes. The overnight raids, the weird permission interactions, the "I'm pretty sure my PDC fired but nothing happened" reports, all of it made this release better.
Join the Fight
Structs is built and tested by our community. Jump into the testnet, break things, report bugs, and help shape the future of 5X strategy gaming by joining us on Discord.
In the distant future the species of the galaxy are embroiled in a race for Alpha Matter, the rare and dangerous substance that fuels galactic civilization. Players take command of Structs, a race of sentient machines, and must forge alliances, conquer enemies and expand their influence to control Alpha Matter and the fate of the galaxy. Structs is a decentralized universe, a strategic game operated and governed by our community of players—ensuring Structs remains online as long as there are players to play it.
