Hunter
What it is
Hunter is a stat-category artifact that procs on a sustained-fire counter. Every N shots fired by the ship, the artifact surges the ship’s luck stat for a window and simultaneously detonates a wide damage ring centered on the ship. It is the luck specialist within the family of shot-counter artifacts that share the weapon_fire signal — the same signal also feeds a damage-burst sibling and a speed-burst sibling. Hunter trades trigger frequency for payoff: it procs the least often of the three siblings and pays out the widest ring, the longest buff window, and the strongest per-proc luck bonus.
Identity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Display name | Hunter |
| Category | stat |
| Icon | bullseye |
| Damage tag | none (type-agnostic) |
| Trigger type | counter |
| Trigger signal | weapon_fire |
| Counter behavior | resets to zero on every proc |
| Proc audio cue | artifact_hunter |
| Banner on proc | yes |
| Trigger conditions | none |
| Primary color | ffaa00 |
| Secondary color | cc7700 |
| Bright color | ffcc55 |
The counter is the number of shots fired by the ship; each shot increments it by one regardless of weapon, damage, or hit/miss outcome. When the counter reaches the per-tier threshold the artifact procs and the counter resets to zero.
Per-tier values
Tiers indexed 0 to 3 map to uncommon, rare, epic, and legendary. A fifth common tier is prepended at runtime via the engine’s flat-bonus layer and shares the uncommon values record; common-vs-uncommon differentiation comes from the artifact-wide flat passive bonus rather than from the per-tier table below.
| Tier | Rarity | Shots-per-proc threshold | Luck bonus (flat) | Buff duration (s) | Ring center damage (flat) | Ring edge damage (flat) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Uncommon | 50 | +50 | 6 | 45 | 22 |
| 1 | Rare | 42 | +75 | 7 | 70 | 35 |
| 2 | Epic | 35 | +110 | 8 | 100 | 50 |
| 3 | Legendary | 30 | +160 | 10 | 130 | 65 |
Every per-tier value moves with tier: the threshold drops (procs become more frequent), the luck bonus grows, the buff duration lengthens, and both ring damage numbers rise. The ring radius, the ring falloff curve, the counter-reset behavior, and the VFX shape are fixed across tiers.
Effect
When the shot counter reaches the tier’s threshold, the artifact resets the counter and fires four actions in the same frame, then refills the counter from zero on subsequent shots until the next proc.
| Element | Value |
|---|---|
| Stat modified | luck |
| Stat mode | flat additive |
| Stat source tag | artifact:hunter |
| Stat duration | tier’s buff duration |
| Ring radius (px) | 240 |
| Ring center | ship |
| Ring damage mode | flat |
| Ring falloff curve | linear |
| Ring damage at center | tier’s center damage |
| Ring damage at outer edge | tier’s edge damage |
| VFX type | burst-and-ring |
| VFX particle count | 20 |
| VFX scale | 4.8 |
| VFX lifetime (s) | 0.45 |
| VFX color | ffcc55 |
The luck buff is applied to the ship as a flat additive on the luck stat for the tier’s duration. The ring detonation is a separate per-proc action: every enemy inside the 240 px radius around the ship takes flat damage interpolated linearly between the center value (full damage at the ship’s position) and the edge value (half-strength at the outer rim). The artifact icon flashes on proc and the flavored audio cue plays through the spatial world bus.
The 240 px radius is the widest in the family of ship-centered ring artifacts. The wider ring is paired with the lowest per-proc cadence of the weapon_fire counter-trigger family — the design intent is that the per-proc payoff scales up to compensate for the lower proc frequency.
Stacking rules
| Rule | Value |
|---|---|
| Luck buff stacking mode | refresh |
| Luck buff max stacks | 1 |
The luck buff cannot accumulate. A second proc while the first buff is still active resets the remaining duration to the full tier-defined window without adding a second stack of magnitude. The ring detonation is a separate per-proc action and fires every time the counter reaches the threshold, independent of buff state and without any cooldown beyond the threshold itself.
Hunter shares the weapon_fire counter signal with two sibling artifacts: a damage-burst sibling and a speed-burst sibling. The three counter thresholds are deliberately staggered so the siblings proc at different rates over a run. All three can be equipped simultaneously and each procs independently on its own counter and threshold; they do not share counters, cooldowns, or stacks.
Tier upgrades replace the per-tier values record wholesale. Tier is set at run start by meta-progression and does not change mid-run.
EXTRACT-CANDIDATE flags
weapon_firecounter-trigger family. The shot-counter signal, per-counter reset semantics, the deliberate threshold staggering across the three siblings, and the inverse-frequency design rule (rarer procs get larger per-proc payoff) are shared facts. Belongs on a singleconcepts/weapon-fire-counter.mdpage or on the artifacts roll-up, not duplicated per artifact.- Counter trigger semantics. “Counter increments per shot, resets to zero on proc, threshold is per-tier” is a general trigger-engine fact and belongs on
concepts/effect-triggers.mdalongside thesignal,interval, and other trigger types. - Ship-centered AoE ring. The geometry (radius + flat damage centered on ship position, optional linear falloff between center and edge values) recurs across multiple artifact families with deliberate radius variation. Candidate concept page:
concepts/centered-aoe.md. - Ring-bearing sibling radii. The radius ladder across the ship-centered ring artifacts forms a single design table (heal-trigger 160 px → kill-streak 140/160/180/200 px → shot-counter 240 px and its damage/speed siblings). Belongs on the artifacts roll-up or a dedicated family page, not duplicated on each per-entity page.
- Linear falloff with explicit center and edge values. The two-value falloff representation (full at center, named value at edge, linear in between) is a reusable AoE primitive. Candidate concept page:
concepts/aoe-falloff.md. - Refresh stacking with max stacks = 1. Recurring buff-stacking mode across the stat-burst artifact family. Candidate concept page:
concepts/buff-stacking-modes.md. - Luck stat composition. How the
luckship stat composes with other sources, what game systems consume luck (drop rolls, reward rarities, etc.), and the runtime cap behavior are not specified in the artifact file and belong on a stats / loot-pipeline page. - Common-tier flat-bonus layer. The runtime adds a fifth common tier that shares the uncommon values record and differentiates only through a per-artifact flat-bonus field; Hunter declares no flat bonus, so its common-tier behavior depends on engine defaults. Document once on the artifacts roll-up.
- Banner, flash, and proc-audio actions.
showBanner: true,flash_artifact, and the routedprocAudioCuethrough the spatial world bus are shared UI/audio primitives across many artifacts; their exact behavior is engine-side and should live on the artifacts roll-up or aconcepts/artifact-proc-feedback.mdpage.
Summary
Hunter is a counter-trigger stat artifact: every N shots fired by the ship (50 / 42 / 35 / 30 across uncommon → legendary) it surges luck by a flat +50 / +75 / +110 / +160 for 6 / 7 / 8 / 10 seconds and simultaneously detonates a 240 px ship-centered ring that deals flat damage with linear falloff from the center value (45 / 70 / 100 / 130) to the edge value (22 / 35 / 50 / 65). The luck buff refreshes rather than stacking. Hunter is the wide-ring, slow-cadence member of the shot-counter trigger family — its ring is the widest in the ship-centered ring catalog, paired with the lowest proc frequency of its sibling group.