4 September 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
The ladder is a screen now — see every champion, replay any you have beaten, and chase your best time.
- New CIRCUIT screen off the hangar: all eight rungs at a glance, with the ring each one is fought in, whether you have cleared it, and your best time and win count.
- Any champion you have already beaten can be fought again as a TITLE DEFENCE, in their own ring, straight from the circuit.
- Rematches are pure sport: no loot, no repeated unlocks, and the crown and the undisputed ending stay exactly as you earned them the first time.
- Every win now records a time, and the victory card shows this bout against your best for that opponent.
- Champions you have not reached yet stay sealed — the yard still names your next opponent and no one further.
- The circuit works the same on a keyboard, a controller and a phone, and beating a champion you already beat can no longer send you back to fight the wrong one.
26 August 2026ImprovementClaude Fable 5
The eighth and final challenger, The Parts King, joins the ladder with his own ending.
- A new boss waits after Slagheart: The Parts King rebuilds every plate you knock off him from the wreck piles in the yard, so the fight is a race to strip him faster than he repairs.
- Knock him over and his repairs stall; every rebuilt plate is weaker than the last.
- When he starts losing he tears his own armour off and doubles his rate of fire.
- Beating him plays a new narrated ending and marks your machine undisputed.
- His plate countdown shows in the enemy readout so you can see the clock you are racing.
22 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
Two new challengers come for your crown, and a sixth ring to fight the first one in.
- After you take the title from Colossus Rex, the yard sends contenders after it. Two new champions now wait at the top of the ladder.
- THE WIDOW mounts every gun below her waist and circles you at a fixed distance, hull square on, firing at your knees. All that plate on your chest and head does nothing here — refit low or lose.
- SLAGHEART is a furnace hulk who spends heat instead of managing it: the hotter he runs the faster he walks and the harder he hits, and he will wade into molten slag to stoke himself. Cook him and his guns lock out — that is your window, and he spends it swinging a maul.
- THE WASH is a rain-lashed flooded pan where footing never comes back properly: both machines recover their balance at half speed, so chip damage you would shrug off anywhere else will put you on your back. Its low spillway weirs stop a knee gun and nothing higher.
- Every champion in the game now speaks their taunt out loud on the VS screen, one voice each.
- Champions no longer get stuck walking into low walls, so they actually come and fight you.
19 August 2026ImprovementClaude Fable 5
Mechs run hot now — hulls, intakes and stacks glow as heat builds, overheating pulses and vents steam — and heavy hits stop the world for a beat.
- Heat is visible: the hull, intakes and exhaust stacks ramp toward glowing as a machine heats up, then pulse and jet steam when it overheats.
- Heavy hits and topples freeze the game for 45-70 milliseconds, so the big ones land.
- Guns flash with pooled muzzle bursts that light the scene, and a struck mech flashes on the part that was hit.
- Rounds leave tracers sized to the weapon, rockets leave flame and smoke, slams ring out shock waves and a wall of dust, and every footfall and landing throws its own dust.
- Debris bursts run through pooled particle systems so the count on screen can go much higher without cost.
- Mounts, part positions, hit zones and every named component are unchanged.
10 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
Four pilot techniques you have to win to earn — vent your heat, dodge a rocket, flatten a champion with your own tonnage, or plant your feet and refuse to fall.
- Beat Rustmouth and you learn PURGE VENT: dump 45 heat instantly on a long cooldown, so a build with big hot guns is finally a plan instead of a mistake.
- Beat Bella Donna and you learn SIDESTEP: a hard sideways burst that shells and seeker rockets pass straight through. It is the answer to being kited.
- Beat The Magistrate and you learn SHOULDER CHARGE: throw your whole tonnage forward. It barely scratches armour, but it wrecks balance — and how hard it hits depends on what your machine WEIGHS, so a slow heavy frame finally has something a light one cannot do.
- Beat Piledriver and you learn BRACE: hold it to plant your feet. Nothing topples you and balance damage is halved, but you cannot walk, jump or dodge while you stand in it.
- Every technique has its own sound, a cooldown pip on your HUD, and a full page in the hangar readout showing which champion teaches the ones you have not earned yet — plus a card and a line from the narrator the moment you win one.
- The phone controls were rebuilt around the new verbs: STEP joins the right-hand buttons, VENT, RAM, BRACE and AIM form a pad under your left thumb, and pause moved to a chip in the top-left corner.
5 August 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
Every champion now defends their own corner of the yard — five distinct rings, two of them actively trying to kill you.
- Each rung of the ladder is fought somewhere new: the open Scrap Yard, a canyon of stacked wrecks, a smelter floor, a cramped press bay, and Colossus Rex’s floodlit night ring.
- The ring decides what a good machine looks like. Some cover is chest-high, some is six metres tall, some is barely a kerb — so where you bolt a gun matters differently in every fight. In the Stacks, only a head-mounted gun sees over the car stacks; a shoulder gun will not.
- The Furnace Floor has pools of molten slag that flood your heat gauge and eat hull straight through your armour — a little under eight seconds in one will cook a standard machine. Jumping clears a pool.
- The Crusher Pit has three live hydraulic presses on a timer, and Colossus Rex fights under a magnet crane that drops crushed cars. Both flash a warning ring on the floor and sound a klaxon about a second and a quarter before they land.
- You can leap a press or a falling wreck, but only at the top of the arc. Jump a moment early or late and you take it in full — so the warning is a cue to time a jump, not just a cue to be in the air. Walking out of the marked circle works too.
- The magnet reaches the broken towers at the edge of the Crown Ring, so hugging the rim no longer keeps you safe from it.
- You are told which ring you are walking into before the fight starts — on the versus screen, on the hangar’s next-bout card, and as a banner as the bell goes — so you can go back and refit.
26 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 5
Scrap Colossus is now playable on a phone — a thumb stick, real action buttons, lock-on aiming with a height selector, and tap-friendly menus throughout.
- Turn your phone sideways and play: a walk stick under your left thumb, FIRE, JUMP and BOOST under your right, and a pause button you can actually reach mid-duel.
- Aiming on touch locks onto the champion you are fighting, and a new AIM button steps your shots between the legs, the body and the head — the difference between chewing through a plate and punching straight into the hull.
- The hangar works with a thumb: tap near a glowing mount point to line it up, then BOLT ON to fit the part, with arrows to step through every mount and a full-size list for anything the mech is hiding.
- Cinematics can be skipped with a tap, and the options screen gained proper minus and plus buttons so you can turn the volume down as well as up.
- Fixed a long-standing problem where the Options button on the main menu could not be clicked at all in a short window, which meant mute was unreachable.
- Fixed the hangar readout so Enter the Arena and Main Menu stay on screen instead of sliding off the bottom on smaller displays.
24 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8
Winning and losing are now real cinematics — the yard crowning you, or your own smoking wreck — instead of text cards.
- Beating Colossus Rex now plays a full crowning sequence: the camera prowls his burning hulk, cranes out to your machine standing over it, then lifts away across the whole yard while the narrator hands you the yard’s one law.
- Losing a duel is no longer a text screen. The camera drops to the dirt beside your own wreck, tilts up past the champion still standing, and names them — with two narrator lines that alternate so a bad night never sounds canned.
- The loser actually burns: firelight flickering across the dirt, soot and sparks coming off the hull.
- Both sequences use the same narrator as the opening, can be fast-forwarded or skipped on keyboard, mouse or controller, and stay silent when the game is muted.
- A little more debris now lingers on screen during heavy fire.
23 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8
Added quiet, privacy-safe gameplay analytics (run starts, progress milestones, deaths, and wins) so the studio can see how players actually experience the game.
- The studio can now see how far players climb the champion ladder, so future updates can tune the difficulty where people actually get stuck.
13 July 2026ImprovementClaude Opus 4.8
Added a jump, made the rocket champion actually dodgeable, and gave the game a real cinematic intro.
- New JUMP move — hop with Space (or A on a controller) to leap over trouble; you keep speed and can still aim and fire in the air, and you can't be knocked down mid-leap.
- Level 2's rocket champion now fires in dodgeable volleys instead of a nonstop stream, and her seekers turn slower — strafe, use cover, or jump the salvo and close in.
- Brand-new cinematic intro: a camera-directed scene of Colossus Rex looming over your bare frame, with narrated voiceover — no more static text slides. Fully skippable.
- On-screen controls reminder in the arena that shows the jump button and switches between keyboard and controller prompts automatically.
6 July 2026ImprovementClaude Fable 5
Guns now run hot, rockets hunt, and the yard learned to swing — heat management and melee weapons land in Scrap Colossus
- Every gun now builds heat when it fires — redline your machine and all guns lock while it vents steam for a few agonizing seconds, so pick your bursts
- Heat bars for you AND your opponent: champions now attack in waves, and you can see them redlining — that is your opening
- New melee weapons: the fast-shredding Ripsaw and the mech-flattening Breaker Maul swing for free when guns run hot — find one in the early loot, and mind The Magistrate, who now hunts you down hammer-first
- Rocket pods are now seeker rockets that launch, turn and hunt — even mounted on your back they swing around onto the champion, though a cover wall between you can still swat them down
- Back-mounted guns now actually point backwards and shoot that way; the hangar readout warns you, shows your heat-versus-cooling math, and the Radiator Bank now boosts cooling by 40 percent
6 July 2026ImprovementClaude Fable 5
Fixed the bug that made every bullet crawl — projectiles now fly at their true speeds
- Bullets, shells and rockets now travel at their designed speeds instead of drifting near the muzzle
- Shots connect at range for both you and the champions — standing still in the open is now punished
- Dodging is real: deliberate, unpredictable movement evades fire; camping does not