Magnetar Pulse
What it is
The rare physics-flavored tier of the world-prop catalog. A violet swirling singularity that joins the off-screen spawn pool, breaks on ship contact or under bullet fire, and emits a guaranteed gravity-pull field that drags every nearby enemy toward the break point. Designed to feel like a crowd-control tool the player hunts down — every break is the marquee crowd-control beat (100% proc), and the prop is one of two tiers that ship with a screen-edge HUD arrow so it’s findable like a Supply Pod. Sits between Volatile Crystal (risk-reward) and Mineral Vein (sustained-DPS) in the catalog’s HP ladder, with the smallest XP drop bundle of any rare-tier prop on purpose — the value is in the pull, not the XP. Sprite is rendered as a baked emoji sticker with a violet rim halo that matches an astronomical “neutron-star” palette family.
Identity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Max HP | 35 |
| Visible silhouette radius | 32 px |
| Density multiplier (vs crate slider) | 0.20 |
| Orb drop count on break | 6 |
| XP per orb (fraction of current level bar) | 0.020 |
| Total drop value (level-bar fraction) | ~12% |
| Sticker emoji | swirling singularity glyph |
| Rim halo color | violet (#a050ff) |
| Edge-arrow telegraph | yes |
Spawn behavior
Magnetar Pulses share the typed prop pool with every other prop kind (pool cap 48, max simultaneous active 10 at slider=100). Type selection uses a weighted roll where each prop’s density multiplier is its weight in the bag. With Magnetar Pulse at 0.20, it lands among the rarer entries — less common than Scrap Pile (1.0), Drone Wreck (0.6), Comet Fragment (0.4), Volatile Crystal (0.35), or Mineral Vein (0.25), but more common than Supply Pod (0.15). The expected steady-state population is roughly Supply-Pod frequency, ~1-2 active at a time. Spawns are gated to be off-screen (never visible-spawn), pushed roughly 500-1400 px from the ship, biased 70% of the time into the player’s heading cone, and reject when too close (under 160 px) to another active prop.
Per-planet active count is driven by the planet’s destructibles.crates slider mapped onto a 0-10 active prop ceiling.
Magnetar Pulse is also seeded by cascade synergies on other prop breaks: the Mineral Vein chain-cascade (30% proc on Mineral break) spawns 1 Magnetar Pulse alongside 1 Comet Fragment, and the Supply Pod multi-prop cascade (100% proc on Pod break and on boss defeat) includes 1 Magnetar Pulse in its 5-prop ring. Both are routed through the pool’s forceSpawnAt primitive — placement bypasses viewport-gating and density caps in those cases so the cascade reliably seeds the crowd-control tool.
Magnetar Pulse ships with the edge-arrow HUD telegraph (one of two prop tiers with this flag, the other being Supply Pod). When an active Magnetar Pulse is off-screen, the HUD draws a screen-edge directional arrow toward it that fades as the player brings it on-screen.
Break behavior
On ship contact the runtime applies max-hp damage in a single hit — the ship one-shots regardless of the 35 HP figure. Bullets do their listed damage per overlap with piercing idempotency (a single piercing bullet cannot chip the same slot twice in one tick). The 35 HP figure sits between Volatile Crystal (25) and Mineral Vein (40); a typical pistol bullet stream chips the magnetar down over several hits, so the prop has real “weapon-fire response” presence and the kite is short on purpose — players who burst it down quickly win the field-control beat.
Non-fatal bullet hits play a chip-flash on the rim and emit a small spark cloud; reaching 0 HP triggers the full break sequence.
Break sequence (in order): fire prop_break signal → play the per-type audio cue → telemetry record → spawn XP orbs → spawn break VFX → roll synergy → deactivate slot.
The XP-orb drop is intentionally a smaller bundle than the workhorse and mid tiers: 6 orbs at 0.020 fraction each. The six orbs fan out in 6 evenly-spaced spokes around the break point with mild jitter. The reward asymmetry is by design — Magnetar Pulse trades XP wealth for the guaranteed crowd-control pull.
| Break VFX layer | Value |
|---|---|
| Spark cloud particle count | 26 |
| Spark RGB | (180, 110, 255) — violet sparks |
| Chunky debris count | 5 |
| Chunk RGB | (110, 50, 200) — deep purple chunks |
| Rim shockwave color | #a060ff |
| Outward ring burst count | 16 |
| Audio cue id | per-type magnetar-pulse recipe (gravity-field collapse); falls back to generic prop break |
Per-type synergy (gravity-pull field)
Magnetar Pulse is the crowd-control cross-system synergy of the props lane. On break the runtime scans the active enemy list and, for every alive enemy within the pull radius, applies a one-shot inward velocity impulse PLUS a one-shot position displacement toward the break point. The position displacement scales with proximity (closer = bigger yank) so the field has a real gravitational feel even if enemy AI overrides velocity on the next frame. The iconic beat is “the magnetar collapsed — every enemy near it just got yanked in.”
This is the first prop break-synergy that engages enemy velocity as the engine primitive (other synergies route through ship-state, the XP-orb subsystem, or the pool’s own spawn pipeline).
A violet particle swirl spirals tangentially-inward at the break point to sell the pull visually. Particles spawn on a ring at near-radius distance and travel mostly inward with a small swirl component along the tangent, reading as “matter falling into a singularity.”
Telemetry records the number of enemies pulled per proc so the radius, speed, and displacement can be tuned later. The proc is fail-safe — if the engine world has no enemies array it skips the pull loop silently and still emits the particle swirl.
The same gravity-pull primitive is publicly exposed (alongside the private break-time call) so other systems can reuse it without duplicating the loop body — the Vortex sub-event dispatch is the second consumer.
| Synergy field | Value |
|---|---|
| Proc chance per break | 1.00 (every break) |
| Pull radius | 220 world px |
| Inward velocity impulse | 360 px/s |
| Max position displacement (at zero distance) | 28 world px |
| Displacement scaling | linear with 1 - dist / radius |
| Particle count (violet swirl) | 24 |
| Audio cue id | reuses warpy whoosh + click “object snaps inward” recipe |
| Telemetry recorded | enemies pulled per proc |
VFX palette
| Channel | Value |
|---|---|
| Rim halo | violet (#a050ff) |
| Spark cloud | violet (180, 110, 255) |
| Chunk debris | deep purple (110, 50, 200) |
| Rim shockwave ring | #a060ff |
| Outward ring burst | reuses spark RGB, 16 particles |
| Pull-field swirl | reuses spark RGB, tangentially-inward motion |
| Hit-flash duration | 0.18 s |
| Chip spark particle count per non-fatal hit | 6 |
EXTRACT-CANDIDATE flags
- Weighted prop-type roll mechanics — the density-multiplier-as-weight pattern is shared across every prop kind; canonical home is the props roll-up page. Only the resulting Magnetar Pulse frequency claim belongs here.
- Shared off-screen spawn pipeline rules (pool cap 48, max density 10, spawn distance 500-1400 px, 160 px minimum gap, 70% velocity-cone bias, off-screen gating, planet destructibles slider mapping) — all common to every prop kind; canonical home is the props roll-up page.
- Break sequence ordering (signal → audio → telemetry → orbs → VFX → synergy → deactivate) — applies to every prop kind; canonical home is the props roll-up page.
- Bullet collision rules (piercing idempotency via per-bullet hit set, non-piercing consumed on hit, chip-flash on non-fatal) — same for every prop kind; canonical home is the props roll-up or combat page.
- XP-orb drop scheme (fraction-of-level-bar scaling via per-level bar size, fan-out angles, per-orb speed) — same for every prop kind; canonical home is the props roll-up page or the XP-orb page.
- Three-layer break VFX skeleton (spark cloud → chunky debris → rim shockwave ring → optional outward ring burst) — same template for every prop kind; canonical home is the props roll-up page. This page only documents Magnetar Pulse’s per-layer numbers and the fact that it uses the optional outward burst layer.
- Edge-arrow HUD telegraph system (off-screen-only, fades on-screen, color-per-type callback) — canonical home is the HUD or props roll-up page. This page only documents that Magnetar Pulse is one of two tiers that opt in.
forceSpawnAtpool primitive (bypasses cadence + viewport-gate + velocity-cone bias, returns false on pool-cap exhaustion) — canonical home is the props roll-up or world-spawn page. This page only mentions that Mineral cascade and Supply Pod cascade use it to seed magnetar spawns.- Mineral Vein chain-cascade composition (proc chance, 1 Comet + 1 Magnetar list, particle bridge) — canonical home is the Mineral Vein page.
- Supply Pod multi-prop cascade composition (5-prop ring, 100% proc on Pod break and on boss defeat, amber palette cloud) — canonical home is the Supply Pod page or the boss-reward / encounter page.
- Vortex sub-event reuse of the public gravity-pull wrapper — canonical home is the Vortex sub-event page. This page only documents that the magnetar pull primitive is exposed publicly for that use.
recordDirectorPhasetelemetry channel + tuning contract — canonical home is the telemetry page.