Beltrunner

Beltrunner

One ship against the belt.
Fly your ship through an asteroid belt, upgrade it in the hangar, survive dangerous space events, and beat the bullet-hell boss at the end of each sector. Play alone or with up to eight players.

When you clear the first three sectors, two endless modes open: The Void (Endless), where you survive as long as you can, and Event Horizon (Waves), where you fight wave after wave inside a ring you can't leave.

What is Beltrunner?

Beltrunner is a roguelite space shooter. It mixes three kinds of games:
Horde survival - your weapons fire on their own, and your build gets stronger as you level up.

Bullet-hell - boss fights full of bullet patterns that change as the boss loses health.

Classic arcade space shooter - you fly freely in open space.
You only steer. Your weapons fire by themselves. Each sector is an 8 to 10 minute fight to stay alive. Over time, more asteroids appear, enemy ships arrive, and space itself turns against you. When you level up during a run, you pick new weapons and upgrades. Between runs, you spend the Scrap you collected on permanent ship upgrades. Boss attacks get harder as the boss loses health, so you have to keep moving.

Features

Upgrade your ship in the hangar. Collect Scrap in every run. Between runs, spend it on permanent upgrades: a stronger hull, stronger guns, more luck, more weapon slots, and even a one-time escape pod. Unlock eleven different ships, from the Skiff you start with to the Sovereign flagship. Each one plays differently.

Fly through seven sectors. After the third sector, the map splits into two paths, and each path ends in a harder sector.

Survive space events. Eighteen events can happen during a run: black holes that pull everything in, rotating pulsar beams, moving walls of plasma, gamma-ray bursts that charge up before they fire, toxic clouds with loot inside, ion storms that slow down your weapons, and a drifting planet you can hide behind. There are also pirate ambushes, elite raiders, and a huge Dreadnought warship you must destroy before it escapes.

Build your weapons. You steer, and your weapons do the shooting. Choose from thirty weapons, from the basic Pulse Blaster to legendary weapons like the Singularity Core and the Solar Annihilator. Max out a weapon while you hold the right attachment, and it can evolve into one of twenty-one much stronger weapons.

Beat the bullet-hell bosses. At the end of each sector, a giant boss appears. There are five of them: Kernabos the Locust, Pulsar Heart, the Broodmother, the Leviathan, and Ouroboros. The last two sectors bring back the Leviathan and Ouroboros with much more health. Each boss has several phases, and it gets faster and more dangerous as it breaks apart. Dodge the rings, spirals, and beams, and destroy it.

Every run is different. Each run starts from a random seed, so the belt is never the same. Each level-up gives you three upgrade cards to choose from, and rarer cards show up less often. You can reroll cards, or banish the ones you don't want. Enemies, events, and loot are random every time.

Two endless modes. In The Void, there is no timer: survive as long as you can while bosses keep coming. In Event Horizon, you fight wave after wave inside a ring you can't leave, with a daily run where everyone plays the same arena. Both have high-score boards.

Play with friends

The belt is more fun with friends. Play with up to seven friends and join through a Steam lobby with one click.

Each player picks their own upgrade cards, so every ship in the team ends up different. One player can hold a line with a Rail Driver, another can hit enemies on the side with Tesla Arcs, and a third can fire missiles from far away. Risky, one-sided builds that would fail alone can work very well in a team. The game also gets harder with more players: asteroids and enemies are tougher for each extra player.

Nobody has to sit out. If your ship goes down, you come back twenty seconds later, as long as a teammate is still flying. Beating a boss brings the whole team back. You can always see your teammates' names, ships, and last known positions. The run only ends when every ship is destroyed, so protect each other.

Weapons

You start with four weapon slots and four attachment slots. You can get up to seven of each: buy both levels of Expanded Bays in the hangar and fly a ship that has an extra slot. All weapons fire on their own. What you choose is which weapons fire. Every card you take fills a slot, so you have fewer choices later, but your build gets more dangerous.

Legendaries

There are nine legendary weapons, and they are the rarest cards in the game. A common card is forty times more likely to show up. You can improve your chances with Luck from the hangar and with jackpots during a run. Legendaries take much longer to recharge than other weapons (tens of seconds, not a few seconds), only go up to level 6, and never evolve. They don't need to.

Singularity Core - Creates a black hole that pulls everything in, then explodes. It pulls enemies into one spot, then blows that spot up.

Solar Annihilator - A huge beam sweeps a full circle around you. It reaches across the whole screen and turns slowly.

Chrono Stasis - Stops time for everything except you. The whole sector freezes. You can still move.

Starfall Protocol - Calls down a rain of meteors across the sector. Sixteen hits, each one marked just before it lands.

Neutron Comet - Calls down a comet that crosses the sector and leaves a burning trail. The trail keeps killing long after the comet is gone.

Blink Barrage - Teleport to one enemy after another and explode on arrival. Six targets, six explosions, and you end up somewhere new each time.

Quasar Beacon - Rings of light freeze the sector, then shatter what they froze. Frozen enemies take more than double damage.

Fission Protocol - Marks every target. Anything that dies while marked explodes. One kill can start a chain reaction.

Dreadnought Broadside - A ghost warship appears and fires everything it has. Five volleys, twelve shells each.

Evolutions

Max out a weapon while you hold its matching attachment, and the next chest can combine them. There are twenty-one evolutions, one for each base weapon. An evolved weapon is a whole new weapon in the same slot. It can't evolve again, so once your build is finished, it stays finished.

Nova Lance - A piercing shot across the whole screen, aimed at the nearest enemy.

Meteor Storm - Nonstop bursts of shrapnel in every direction.

Solar Lance - A wide, burning beam that melts whatever it locks onto.

Ring of Ruin - A thick double ring of shards that cuts everything it touches.

Singularity Mines - Mines that collapse into a huge, crushing explosion.

Hydra Barrage - A swarm of homing missiles fills the screen.

Pulsar Burst - A huge shockwave that pushes enemies away and sets them on fire.

Twin Comets - Two long-range shards that spiral out and come back.

Plasma Wake - A stream of piercing bolts behind your ship.

Storm Cage - Nonstop lightning that fills the area with arcs.

Absolute Zero - A cone of ice that freezes enemies solid.

Swarm Protocol - Five drones attack the nearest enemies together.

Annihilator Rail - A shot across the whole screen that wipes out everything in its line.

Event Horizon - A huge gravity well that swallows the battlefield.

Inferno Lance - A big column of fire. Anything it hits keeps burning.

Relativistic Driver - Shots that go through everything and hit harder the faster you fly.

Executioner - Instantly kills badly damaged enemies, and fires almost nonstop.

Debris Storm - Pulls in scrap from across the sector and fires every piece back at enemies.

Sawblade Storm - Saw blades that bounce until nothing is left to hit.

Cluster Barrage - Groups of three shells that burst into walls of piercing shrapnel.

Overwatch Grid - A network of strong turrets that never stop firing.

Weapon and attachment pairs

Each of the twenty-one base weapons has a matching attachment. This table shows what each pair evolves into. Weapons max out at level 8 in the sectors, level 10 in The Void, and level 12 in Event Horizon. Attachments max out at level 6 or 7. Attachment bonuses are per level.

WeaponMatching attachmentEvolves intoPulse BlasterTargeting Array (+15% range)Nova LanceScatter CannonOverclocked Coils (-7% cooldown)Meteor StormMining LaserFocus Lens (+11% damage)Solar LanceOrbital ShardsGyro Stabilizer (+15% area)Ring of RuinProximity MinesVolatile Payload (+12% explosion & area)Singularity MinesMissile PodGuidance Chip (+12% projectile speed)Hydra BarrageIon WaveDeflector Plating (+3% damage reduction)Pulsar BurstComet FlailTether Coupling (+15% projectile duration)Twin CometsTail GunAfterburner Injector (+5% move speed)Plasma WakeTesla ArcCapacitor Bank (-6% cooldown)Storm CageCryo SprayerCoolant Loop (+12 hull, +0.5 hull/s)Absolute ZeroAttack DronesDrone Uplink (+1 projectile every 2 levels)Swarm ProtocolRail DriverLucky Beacon (+3% crit chance)Annihilator RailRicochet DiscSlipstream Coil (+2% damage per 100 speed)Sawblade StormFlak CannonShrapnel Casing (+1 pierce every 2 levels)Cluster BarrageGraviton SnareSalvage Magnet (+18% pickup range)Event HorizonSentry PodFabricator Core (+12% turret, drone, mine & well damage)Overwatch GridPlasma TorchCatalyst Coil (+18% effect strength & duration)Inferno LanceMomentum DriverThruster Array (+25% boost capacity)Relativistic DriverReaper CannonOvercharge Cell (+0.30x crit damage)ExecutionerSalvage HaloSurvey Scanner (+10% XP)Debris Storm
Three more weapons never show up on cards: the Ram Prow, the Aegis Array, and the Harpoon Tether. They come built into the ships that carry them, and they level up like your other weapons.

Events

Space doesn't wait for you. The longer a run goes, the more the belt throws at you: dangers to survive and enemies to hunt.

Space hazards

Black Hole - A black hole pulls everything toward it. Fight the pull, or feed asteroids to it for XP.

Pulsar - Rotating beams sweep across the sector. Time your boost to get past the two spinning beams.

Solar Flare - Walls of plasma move across the sector. Get through the safe gaps before they close.

Meteor Shower - Small explosive rocks rain down. Lots of little rocks, all aimed at you.

Wormhole Pair - Two linked portals. Each jump costs hull and causes an explosion at the exit. Every trip damages you, and you arrive with a blast that hits whatever is waiting there.

Derelict Freighter - Stay in the cargo zone to salvage it. Stay near the wreck long enough and it opens up with loot.

Comet - Chase its tail for a trail of scrap. Follow it and collect everything it drops.

Supply Drop - Protect the pod until it opens. Hold your position to get the reward inside.

Binary Stars - Two suns spiral toward each other. Get out of the blast zone. When they meet, everything nearby explodes.

Gamma-Ray Burst - A beam is charging up. Get out of its path. One beam, with a clear warning, that destroys everything in its line.

Nebula Clouds - Toxic clouds hide loot in the middle. Take the damage to reach the chest in the center.

Solar Wind - A strong wind pushes the whole sector in one direction. Asteroids and ships drift with it, and your loot blows away fastest of all. To collect it, you have to chase it.

Kessler Cascade - Every rock you break shoots out shrapnel. Be careful where you shoot. Your own guns make the area more dangerous.

Coronal Mass Ejection - Ion clouds slow down your weapons. Stay out of them. Inside a cloud, your guns fire slower, but so do enemy guns. Fight inside, or leave the area to them.

Rogue Planet - A planet with no star drifts through. It blocks shots and crushes anything in its way. It is the only solid cover in the game. Stay close to it, don't run from it.

Enemy events

Pirate Ambush - Pirates appear. Defeat them for loot. Destroy the whole group to get a chest.

Elite Marauder - A strong raider comes for you. Kill it before it es