Fire Trail

What it is

Fire Trail is an uncommon projectile-family weapon that drops a stationary fire-tagged damage patch at the ship’s position on every fire. The weapon fires regardless of enemy presence, so the trail of patches paints out behind the ship as it moves. Each patch persists for several seconds and applies its damage as a damage-over-time zone within a blast radius.

Stats

Per-level stat table

Raw stat values resolved with the linear scaling curve. See concept-scaling-curves. Damage shown here is the pre-multiplier base damage stat; final per-patch damage also multiplies through the global damage curve in concept-damage-multiplier-curve. Per-patch DPS at runtime is the final per-patch damage divided by linger duration.

Stat	L1	L10	L20
Damage per patch (pre-mult)	70	416.5	801.5
Damage multiplier	1.30	2.50	7.50
Damage per patch (final)	91	1041.25	6011.25
Fire rate (Hz)	1.00	1.45	1.95
Blast radius (world units)	75	97.5	122.5
Linger duration (seconds)	4.0	4.9	5.9
Acquire range (world units)	200	236	276

Fixed properties

Property	Value
Family	projectile
Damage tag	fire
Behavior	flame_drop
Target mode	closest
Collision mode	first_hit
Travel range multiplier	1.0
Warmup (seconds)	0
Always-forward fire	true
Rarity	uncommon
Scaling curve	linear
Area mode	blast
Can hit destructibles	true

Horizontal modifier rates

Modifier	Rate per H
Damage	0.04
Fire rate	0.10
Area mode	blast

Cadence and feel

Property	Value
Cadence pattern	[1]
Cadence step (seconds)	0.1
Ship pulse strength	0.15
Sonar pulse scale	1.0
PostFX duration (seconds)	0.04
Chime timbre	bronze
Recoil sx	0.92
Recoil sy	1.06
Recoil duration (seconds)	0.08
Recoil kick	2
Fire shake amp	0.5
Fire shake duration (seconds)	0.06
Hit shake amp	0.4
Hit shake duration (seconds)	0.04

Behavior

Fire Trail uses the always-forward firing flag, which means the weapon fires on its own cadence regardless of whether any enemy is within acquire range. On each fire it spawns a stationary flame zone at the ship’s current position via the shared flame-drop behavior.

Each flame zone is a circular damage patch defined by the current blast radius. Enemies that overlap the patch take the patch’s total damage spread across its linger duration, so the per-second damage rate is final damage / linger seconds. Increasing linger does not raise total per-fire damage potential — only the rate at which it is delivered. The patch can also damage destructibles.

The target mode is closest, but it is only consulted by the HUD and AI for effective-range reporting; the actual patch always spawns at the ship’s position, not at a target. See concept-target-modes.

There is no warmup delay before the first fire. Each patch resolves enemy hits using the first_hit collision mode for entry into the zone.

The weapon emits a bronze chime timbre, an orange/yellow/red VFX palette, and a moderate recoil profile with paired fire and hit camera shake.

Scaling

Stat progression uses the linear scaling curve, so the effective level equals the raw level and stats grow as base + scaling × (level − 1) across the L1–L20 range. See concept-scaling-curves.

Final damage per patch is the product of three things: the raw damage stat resolved at the raw level, the global damage multiplier resolved at the raw level (see concept-damage-multiplier-curve), and any active horizontal modifiers (damage horizontal contributes at 0.04 per H, fire rate at 0.10 per H, area at the blast area mode).

Fire rate, blast radius, and linger all rise linearly with level. Linger growth means later levels deliver each patch’s damage over a longer interval, lowering the moment-to-moment DPS of a single patch but increasing the area-time footprint of overlapping patches as the ship moves.

The fire tag drives interactions with fire-keyed artifacts, effects, and damage-tag signals. See concept-damage-tags.

EXTRACT-CANDIDATE flags

• concept-scaling-curves — page should document linear and the other five curves (exponential, steep_exp, front_loaded, s_curve, linear_fast) with their formulas, and explain getEffectiveLevel remapping from raw level 1–20 through the curve.
• concept-damage-multiplier-curve — page should document the piecewise-linear damage curve anchors (L1=1.00, L4=1.25, L8=2.00, L12=3.00, L16=5.00, L20=7.50), the low-level damage buff (+30% at L1, −5% per level, 0% at L7+), and the legendary baseline (legendary L1 ≈ normal L20).
• concept-target-modes — page should document closest, furthest, flanking, low_hp target modes and which weapons use each, including the always-forward override that bypasses targeting for ship-anchored spawns.
• concept-damage-tags — page should document the four base tags (bullet, energy, bomb, fire), legendary dual-tag pairing, and how damage-tag signals fire for artifact/effect lookups.
• concept-weapon-behaviors — page should document all 19 named behaviors, including flame_drop which spawns a stationary flame zone at the ship’s position on each fire and shares the flame-zone runtime with other zone-spawning weapons.
• concept-horizontal-modifiers — page should document the H system: dmgPerH, ratePerH, the eleven AreaMode values, and how horizontals stack.
• concept-weapon-cadence — page should document cadencePattern, cadenceStepSec, shipPulseStrength, sonarPulseScale, postFxSec, chimeTimbre, recoil profiles, and shake profiles as a shared juice system across all weapons.
• concept-flame-zones — page should document the shared flame-zone runtime: how zone DPS = total damage / linger duration, how zones interact with destructibles, and which weapons spawn zones (flame-drop weapons and any legendaries that leave persistent fire paths).
• concept-always-forward-firing — page should document the _alwaysForward flag that causes a weapon to fire on cadence regardless of enemy presence, and the corollary that target mode is consulted only for HUD/AI effective-range and not for actual hit resolution on these weapons.