NuclearPhobia welcomes two new maps: Nuclear Core and Forest. Nuclear Core takes you inside a reactor filled with electrical discharges and energy anomalies. Forest is a nighttime woodland with a lake, a cave, new enemies and crystals to discover.
The update also introduces a Glock wielded by the player, diving with a limited oxygen supply, the city's transformation after the catastrophe, and improvements to controls, saving and level loading.
Key changes
- New map — Nuclear Core: a reactor interior with moving rings, electrical discharges, plasma and beams of light.
- New map — Forest: a nighttime forest with a lake, a cave, uneven terrain, a fallen tree and alien robots.
- Implemented the city's transformation into its destroyed version after detonation, including collapsing buildings, dust, fires and persistent saving of the catastrophe's aftermath.
- Expanded the alien robot's patrols, scanning and laser attacks, and added another alien robot that splits into two parts to attack.
- Added a Glock controlled directly by the player, with aiming animations, recoil, a muzzle flash and smoke.
- Left ALT toggles aiming mode with a single press, so it no longer needs to be held while choosing a direction.
- Added five Cristaltoryt variants and unified item pickup animations.
- Strengthened save and backup handling, fixed Quick Save and resolved a forest loading stall.
- Expanded the forest's audio and changed the music in Nuclear Core and the underground bonus level.
New map — Nuclear Core
Nuclear Core is a new map set inside a reactor. Its visual design combines an active core, energy installations and changing light anomalies.
- Brought the core to life with rotating, pulsing rings and deformation of its energy-filled interior.
- Added irregular flashes and pulse sequences to vary the installation's activity.
- The reactor arms emit Cherenkov beams and trails, along with glowing particles.
- Expanded the background with curtains of light, plasma bursts and branching electrical discharges. The arrangement of effects changes between visits to the scene.
- Added parallax to the reactor background, spreading echoes of light disturbances and brief red-and-cyan image separation.
- The detail of the new reactor and city destruction effects adapts to the selected graphics quality.
New map — Forest
Forest is a new nighttime forest map, with a lake, a cave and paths at different heights. Alien robots and five collectible Cristaltoryt variants await the player.
- Added multiple forest parallax layers, varied background segments and gaps between the trees.
- Refined the scene's cool nighttime palette, silvery moonlight and rim lighting on characters.
- Character shadows account for the moon's actual position in the sky.
- Added brighter twinkling stars, shooting stars and small fireflies with soft glows.
- Layered drifting fog and diffuse moonlight give different parts of the forest more variety. Effect density follows the graphics quality settings.
- Smoothed the moon's drift, parallax and gradual recession, removing abrupt changes in how it moves.
- Refined the aliens running through the forest: their animation, arrival from outside the view and appearance in front of or behind the scenery.
Lake and water
- Added a lake surface shown in perspective, with translucent water and animated waves.
- Reflections of trees and the moon respond to the scene's layout and the moon's actual position.
- Expanded the lake's banks and bed with modular environmental elements.
- Refined the transition from wading in shallow water to deeper immersion, including how the player's body disappears beneath the water.
- Deeper water slows the character and changes how they move.
- Added diving by holding CTRL in deep water. While submerged, the stamina bar shows the remaining oxygen supply, which replenishes after resurfacing.
- Running out of oxygen causes rapid health loss and can lead to drowning. The dead character's body sinks to the bottom.
- Added splashes when entering the water, wading and landing, along with surface ripples, movement trails and small bubbles.
- Diving and resurfacing create rings on the water; when moving underwater, small air bubbles replace the surface trail.
- Splash droplets travel in arcs, and effect intensity reflects the strength of the splash and the selected quality settings.
- Improved transitions between the water and the shore, removing blocked exits onto the path and incorrect avoidance of the lake area.
Movement, ladders and camera
- Improved movement along sloping paths, jump trajectories relative to the slope and falling from broken sections onto a lower level.
- The character can lean with a slope without changing how they collide with the ground and obstacles.
- Improved grabbing ladders and climbing down them with the arrow keys and W/S.
- After jumping away from a ladder, grabbing it again requires a fresh upward input, preventing the character from immediately sticking back to it and interrupting the jump.
- Extended the maximum camera zoom-out to a 3840 × 2160 view in Forest, the city, Nuclear Core and the training area.
- Set the forest's default view to 1600 × 900 and organized camera limit settings for individual levels.
Cave and fallen tree
- Rebuilt the descent into the cave and the routes through its interior, improving movement over slopes and local terrain irregularities.
- Fixed dropping from an upper path so the character falls and lands correctly on the lower ground.
- Removed blocked leftward movement around the cave.
- The interior is revealed through a soft, localized transition. It stays revealed while the player is inside the cave or its left entrance area and fades out after leaving.
- Walking along the upper path no longer reveals the cave unnecessarily.
- The fallen tree received a soft contact shadow and collision shaped to match its trunk.
- The player can jump onto the trunk, walk along and across it and walk off freely. Thin branches do not create an invisible wall.
- The character now passes correctly in front of and behind the fallen tree.
Alien robot — scanning and laser
- Expanded the alien robot's behavior with patrols, environmental scanning, player detection, pursuit, shot preparation and a return to flight.
- Smoothed movement and transitions between attack phases. The robot retains inertia, and its recovery after firing is part of the animation.
- Brought the body, arms, inner blades and lights to life, including during calm patrols.
- Gave the scanner soft edges, pulsing and a clearer laser charging phase.
- Pursuit does not stop at the lake boundary. Once the player has been detected, the laser can track and hit them underwater as well.
- Aligned aiming with the position of the visible character.
- Laser impacts now include a flash, shockwaves, sparks and a cooling scorch mark on the body.
- After death in deep water, the body sinks to the bottom.
Alien robot that splits into two parts
- Added an alien robot that splits into two parts and placed it in the forest.
- The robot splits into two halves and prepares a synchronized attack along curved paths.
- After passing the target, both halves swap sides below the map and physically rejoin.
- Smoothed pose transitions and flight speed along curves, reducing abrupt stops and animation jumps.
- Added trails and effects over the water to emphasize the path of each half.
- Improved the accuracy of attacks when both the robot and the player are moving quickly.
- Fixed a display error affecting the alien robot that splits into two parts.
Glock, aiming and player animation
- Added a Glock held and fired directly by the player.
- A Glock bullet deals 20 points of damage.
- Added animations for holding the weapon, aiming while standing and running, and pointing the barrel in different directions.
- Brought the running character's entire body to life and preserved continuous leg animation when changing the aiming direction.
- Shots now include a flash that lights the character and surroundings, muzzle smoke, slight recoil and a short, warm-colored bullet trail.
- Aligned the bullet, flash and smoke with the barrel, including when firing left and diagonally.
- Resolved conflicts between shooting and carrying items while preserving diving and camera zoom.
- A stationary character with the weapon drawn can aim upward without first enabling ALT aiming mode.
Weapon controls
- 7 / Num 7 — draw the Glock.
- 0 / Num 0 — holster the weapon.
- CTRL — fire.
- Left ALT — one press enables aiming mode; the next disables it. Releasing ALT leaves the mode active.
- Arrow keys or WASD — choose the aiming direction. After toggling the mode, you can release ALT and press, for example, left + up.
- SHIFT in aiming mode — allows horizontal running while maintaining the selected weapon direction.
Movement and aiming now respond to the same directions consistently. Holding ALT does not repeatedly toggle aiming mode, and AltGr does not cause accidental toggling or firing. Aiming mode resets when the weapon is holstered, the game is paused, the window loses focus or the player temporarily loses control of the character.
Companion robots
- All five companion robots keep a greater distance from the player and move more smoothly, with small variations in their flight paths.
- Added mechanical blinking, occasional double blinks and brief glances around while idle.
- Responding to the player's actions and attacking take priority over idle animations.
- Corrected the first robot's blinking and made each robot's small idle movements behave more reliably.
Items, Cristaltoryt and inventory
- Added five Cristaltoryt variants, recognizable icons and dedicated collection slots in the inventory.
- Collected crystals are saved and do not reappear when the level is restored.
- Crystal slots are displayed in the interface while the player is in the forest.
- The access card, medkit, Geiger counter and wallet share a pickup animation with a flash, a small hop, trails and a gradual dissolve.
- Collected items rise straight upward and cannot be collected twice or reappear after loading.
- Centered the medkit icon in the inventory, including while dragging it.
- Corrected alien corpse scaling to match the size of the living character.
The city after the catastrophe
- The intact city now transforms into its destroyed version. Buildings, the distant skyline, the street and selected objects change appearance as the detonation wave advances.
- Synchronized the environment's transformation with character and vehicle reactions so the world's destruction forms one coherent sequence.
- The environment remains solid and usable after its appearance changes in the blast.
- Added irregular pieces of building debris, including fragments thrown toward the camera.
- Expanded the curtain of dust and the spatial distribution of effects across the city's successive depth layers.
- Added persistent fires and smoke on destroyed facades. Flames move irregularly and shed fragments, with their scale varying by distance.
- Improved the anchoring of fire and smoke to buildings during camera movement and removed sudden disappearances of effects within the visible area.
- Refined the brief color shift after detonation and the smooth return of the image.
- Organized the buildup of effects from distant layers toward the foreground, along with the coordination of pressure, rumble and destruction sounds.
- Improved sky occlusion after the explosion, removing visible effect edges between buildings.
- Removed the empty strip exposed beneath the street during strong camera shakes, including after the level's transformation.
- Saving and loading preserve the transformed surroundings and the destroyed city's new appearance.
Pedestrian panic
- Added pedestrian panic during the rocket attack. Characters flee, accelerate, and some run to the opposite side of the street.
- Fleeing NPCs continue to account for obstacles, scene perspective and saved state.
Menu, saving and loading
- Added the forest to chapter selection and prepared five lightweight level thumbnails, reducing the load when the menu is first opened.
- Strengthened save checks, backups and recovery of a working save if something goes wrong.
- Save thumbnails now stay matched to the correct save.
- Fixed F5 saving failures caused by saving the thumbnail. Failed saves now display a clear message.
- Extended saves to include the moon's position, movement phase, parallax, recession and visibility so loading restores the scene's progression.
- Loading safely resets ongoing attacks from both alien robot types, along with their sounds and effects, while preserving their patrols.
- Added a saved option to reduce flashes.
Music and audio
- The forest received a new musical score and continuous environmental sounds.
- Alien robot encounters trigger alarm music that smoothly fades the forest score out and restores it afterward.
- Added new music for Nuclear Core.
- Added new music for the underground bonus level.
- Improved music selection and loading in both locations. Older saves no longer bring back their previous tracks.
Loading, performance and stability
- Improved loading for each location so its scenery is ready when the level opens.
- Fixed the forest getting stuck on the loading screen.
- Improved handling of large backgrounds without changing their appearance.
- Improved lighting efficiency and reduced unnecessary work during gameplay.
- Fixed corrupted Polish characters and missing interface translations in the Polish and English versions.
- Fixed sound failures and made the start of level loading more reliable.
- Fixed sound problems while paused and a crash in the camera's visual effects after restarting the game.
Update overview
The update adds two new maps — Nuclear Core and Forest — and expands the world's transformation after the catastrophe, enemy behavior, player animation, weapon controls, items, inventory, saving, sound and loading. The project remains in Demo Alpha.
Key takeaways
- Nuclear Core and Forest are two new maps available in this update.
- The post-catastrophe city artwork is now part of a working level transformation and saved world state.
- The Glock expands combat with a weapon held by the player; ALT toggles aiming mode.
- Save and loading fixes address specific problems with Quick Save, state restoration and entering the forest.