Prop Cascade

The Supply Pod is the rarest prop in the catalog, and breaking one is treated as a marquee event: every break (100% chance) fans out five additional props in a ring around the break point. The visual language is “treasure chest cracked open” — an amber particle burst at the break point, then five new props evenly spaced outward at a 110px radius.

Cascade composition

The standard cascade spawns five props in this order around the ring:

1. scrap_pile
2. scrap_pile
3. mineral_vein
4. comet_fragment
5. magnetar_pulse

Two workhorse Scrap Piles anchor the ring; the other three are higher-tier props chosen so the cascade reliably seeds the player’s two key synergy beats — speed-boost (Comet Fragment) and CC pull (Magnetar Pulse) — alongside a Mineral Vein that can itself sub-cascade. The list deliberately omits a second Supply Pod (no infinite recursion) and the boss-tier Drone (its proximity-damage synergy would over-salt the moment).

Chain potential

Cascaded props are not cosmetic — each one rolls its own break-synergy independently when the player breaks it later. That means a single Supply Pod cascade can chain up to six synergies in one beat:

• Supply Pod cascade itself (the 5-prop fan).
• Three Scrap Pile rolls (magnet pulse on break).
• The Mineral Vein’s own 30% cascade roll (spawns Comet Fragment + Magnetar Pulse).
• The Comet Fragment’s speed-boost roll on break (35%).
• The Magnetar Pulse’s gravity-pull on break (100%).

The cascade is the second consumer of the engine’s forceSpawnAt primitive (after the Mineral Vein cascade) and composes cleanly with every other prop synergy because each spawned prop walks the normal break-roll pipeline.

Boss reward variant

The same cascade pipeline fires on boss defeat as a Hades-style reward chamber. Boss encounters call triggerSupplyPodCascade directly with an optional custom types list, reusing the fan-spawn + VFX + audio + telemetry pipeline without duplicating it. This is why the Supply Pod beat reads as “the loot piñata” everywhere it appears — same primitive, same amber visual signature, whether the trigger is a Pod break or a boss kill.

Why it feels like a piñata

Three layers stack at the break point:

• Spatial fan-out. Five props appear at evenly spaced angles (with small random jitter so the ring doesn’t read as a perfect polygon), each 110px from the break. Larger than the Mineral Vein cascade’s 70px because the Pod’s break-VFX is the biggest in the catalog and needs more breathing room.
• Amber particle cloud. 24 single-color spark particles in the Pod’s amber palette, fired outward at wide speed range so the cloud has depth. The visual variety comes later — from the five different props’ own break-VFX firing on their next break.
• Audio. Reuses the event_done “event completed” cue from the main director, because cracking a Pod is a sub-event finishing.

Related

• gameplay/props/supply_pod — the Pod itself.
• gameplay/concepts/mineral-cascade — the sibling sub-cascade that one of the Pod’s cascaded props can trigger.
• gameplay/concepts/magnetar-pull — the 100% gravity-pull on Magnetar Pulse break, the bottom of most chain sequences.