Orbital Strike
What it is
A unique-category artifact bound to the kill-streak milestone signal. Every milestone past the threshold rains a burst of small ground explosions in a square spread around the ship. Each strike point is its own short-lived damage hitbox — there is no ship-centered ring on this artifact; the rain itself is the damage payload. This is the bomb-damage member of the kill-streak milestone family alongside the fire-rate, defensive, magnet, and luck siblings on the same signal.
Identity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Display name | Orbital Strike |
| Category | Unique |
| Icon | comet |
| Primary color | ff6600 |
| Secondary color | cc4400 |
| Bright/highlight color | ffaa44 |
| Damage tag | Bomb |
| Proc audio cue | Flavored cue plays on every proc (routed through the game audio bus with low-pass and reverb, treated as a spatial world event). |
| Banner on first proc | Yes |
| Passive flat bonus | Luck (flat additive percent, scaling by tier per the engine-wide flat-bonus table). |
Per-rarity values
Four authored tiers are indexed uncommon through legendary. A fifth common tier is prepended at runtime and reuses the uncommon row’s named values — the only common-vs-uncommon difference is the passive flat luck bonus.
Each proc carries three named magnitudes: the strike count (how many explosion points rain in one proc), the per-strike flat damage, and a duration value carried in the values record.
| Rarity | Strike count per proc | Per-strike flat damage | Duration value (s) | Flat luck bonus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Common | 18 | 120 | 4 | +10 |
| Uncommon | 18 | 120 | 4 | +20 |
| Rare | 25 | 200 | 5 | +30 |
| Epic | 35 | 320 | 5 | +40 |
| Legendary | 50 | 500 | 6 | +50 |
The square spread of the rain (300 px half-extent from the ship in each axis), the per-strike explosion radius (80 px), and the strike-point and combo-ring VFX are fixed across tiers; only the strike count, per-strike damage, and the duration value scale with tier.
When it triggers
The kill-streak milestone signal fires when the player’s running kill streak first reaches one of the milestone counts. Milestones are one-shot per streak — once a milestone has fired in the current streak, it does not re-trigger until the streak breaks and rebuilds.
| Milestone | Streak kill count | Banner label |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 10 | STREAK ×10 |
| 2 | 25 | RAMPAGE ×25 |
| 3 | 50 | MASSACRE ×50 |
| 4 | 100 | UNSTOPPABLE ×100 |
| 5 | 200 | GODLIKE ×200 |
Orbital Strike’s gating condition requires the milestone count to be at least 10, so the artifact procs on every milestone in the table — the threshold is set to admit the first milestone rather than to skip any tier.
A streak breaks when the ship takes hull damage (shield damage does not break the streak) or when more than two seconds pass between consecutive kills. After a break, the streak rebuilds from zero and the milestone sequence resets.
When the signal fires and the condition passes, the artifact runs two actions in the same frame:
| Step | Action |
|---|---|
| 1 | Spawn the orbital-strike rain — strike count and per-strike damage from the per-tier table, distributed at random offsets inside a 300 px square half-extent around the ship’s current position; each strike point applies the per-strike flat damage to every enemy within an 80 px radius of that point, and spawns its own impact ring, spark burst, and smoke burst. |
| 2 | Flash the artifact’s HUD slot, play the flavored audio cue, and spawn a large red combo ring plus a starburst centered on the ship. |
The duration value from the per-tier table is consumed by the handler alongside the strike-count and damage values, so it scales with tier; it does not govern a separate persistent zone (the rain resolves on the same frame as the proc).
How it stacks
| Rule | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Stacking | None — Orbital Strike has no buff component, so there is no stack count to track. |
| Per-proc independence | Every milestone fires its own full rain. There is no cooldown between procs beyond the milestone signal’s own one-shot-per-streak gating. |
| Strike-point independence | Each of the strike-count explosion points is its own short-lived hitbox at a random offset inside the square spread; the points are not centered on each other and do not chain. An enemy standing inside the overlap of two strike radii is damaged once per strike point that catches it. |
| Sibling artifacts | Orbital Strike shares the kill-streak milestone trigger with the fire-rate, defensive, magnet, and luck-burst siblings on the same signal. All five can be equipped simultaneously and each procs independently on every milestone; they do not share 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
- The kill-streak milestone signal (threshold ≥10, milestone counts 10/25/50/100/200, banner labels, bonus XP, one-shot-per-streak gating, streak-break rules) is shared across at least five artifacts on this signal. Belongs on a single
concepts/kill-streak-milestone.mdpage rather than repeated per artifact. - The “fifth common tier reuses uncommon’s values and differentiates only via the flat passive bonus” rule is a general artifacts-system fact and belongs on the artifacts roll-up page.
- The 10 / 20 / 30 / 40 / 50 flat-bonus per-tier ramp is shared by every artifact and belongs on the artifacts overview or an
concepts/artifact-tier-mapping.mdpage. - The proc-audio-cue routing rule (game bus, low-pass + reverb, treated as a spatial world event, default silent when omitted) is engine-wide and belongs on the artifacts roll-up or an audio reference page.
- The banner-on-first-proc and HUD-slot-flash feedback primitives are shared behavior across all triggered artifacts and belong on the artifacts roll-up or a
concepts/artifact-proc-feedback.mdpage. - This artifact is implemented through the unified-effect-engine “custom” action escape hatch (named handler) because its scatter-fire geometry isn’t expressible with the engine’s stock actions — the lineage note and the relationship between built-in actions and custom handlers belong on a shared authoring-guide or effect-engine reference page, not in per-entity prose.
- The 300 px square spread half-extent and 80 px per-strike radius are content-specific to this artifact but the broader pattern of “rain of independent flat-damage hitboxes scattered around the ship” is a candidate primitive for the effect engine if other artifacts adopt it; for now they live here, but flag for promotion if a sibling reuses the geometry.