Welcome to the Relay Network

Generators are gone. The Relay Network is here.

For years, Generators were a passive BC faucet you bought, leveled, and forgot about. The Relay Network keeps that BC flowing, but now it also burns surplus inventory into a new material, runs hot under load, and gives you real decisions about how to push it.

Here is what changed, what is new, and what to do first.

TL;DR

Your old generators are decommissioned at launch and migrate one-for-one into Mint modules at the same level. You get a final BC payout.
Two bay families ship at launch: Mint (produces BC, same baseline as legacy generators) and Refinery (burns surplus inventory into Salvage).
Salvage is the new relay-only material. It funds research, bay upgrades, and new module crafting. Leftovers can be used as Mint fuel for a bonus.
Heat is the new throttle. Bays generate heat while they run. You manage it with bay modes and DX Coolant.
An account-wide research tree unlocks Salvage-paid upgrades that apply everywhere.
Per-bay bay upgrades add local capacity, heat resistance, and quality-of-life perks.
A new quest season, a new pet (raccoon), 6 new trophies, 3 new skins, and 6 new leaderboards arrive alongside the launch.

What happens to your generators

Your old generators are decommissioned at release. You have not lost anything.

Every legacy generator becomes one Mint module at the same level. A level-15 generator becomes a level-15 module.
You get a final BC payout for whatever your generators had earned at the moment of decommission, capped by the usual idle window. Same maths as any other generator claim.
Your DX Coolant stockpile is preserved. It now has a real job (see below).

One gate: to migrate, you first need to buy a Mint bay. Until you do, the Legacy Migration page tells you so. The first bay costs 50M BC. Once it is built, hit migrate and collect.

Bays, modules, families

The Relay Network is built around bays. Each bay holds modules of one family. You can own at most one bay per family.

At launch there are two families:

Mint: produces BC. This is where your old generators end up.
Refinery: burns surplus inventory and outputs Salvage, the new relay material.

Bay prices follow a steep curve. The first bay is 50M BC, the second roughly 89M, scaling up to 20 billion at the top. Three more families are designed and queued for later updates: Action Prep, Buffer, and… We’ll see later!

The Mint, in plain terms

At Normal mode, a Mint module pays out the same BC per minute as the equivalent legacy generator did. Migrated whales are not nerfed at baseline, but heat puts a hard ceiling on what they can sustain (see below).

Fueling the Mint with Salvage adds roughly a 30% BC bonus on top of baseline. Fuel is optional. An unfed Mint bay still earns its full base rate. If you finish all the relay progression and have leftover Salvage, the Mint is a perfectly fine place to spend it.

Mint module crafting is free of Salvage for the first 10 modules, so new players can build a Mint without a Refinery.

The Refinery, in plain terms

The Refinery turns items you do not want into Salvage. You build a deposit basket, commit it, and the bay drains it over time, filling up a Salvage buffer that you claim.

The important details:

The Refinery is intentionally lossy. You burn through a lot of BC value to get Salvage out. The payoff access to relay progression and benefits, not BC profit.
Items are grouped into four categories: Raw, Crafted, Gear, and Consumable. Some items are explicitly excluded from refine list (boosts, bounties, DX Coolant, rare loot).
There is no item cost cap, other than the basket size. You can refine very expensive items. Pricier items yield more Salvage per item, but slightly less Salvage per BC of value.
A new Refinery bay starts with 5 module slots, expandable to 25 across 5 upgrade tiers.
Each additional module contributes a little less throughput than the last. Stacking still helps, but not linearly.
You can withdraw a committed basket at any time. You get back whatever has not started to burn yet.
Warning: withdrawing a single item that started burning yields absolutely nothing. You get no Salvage from it, you get no item back. Be mindful of what you’re adding to the basket!

When the Salvage buffer fills up, you click to claim. With the Overflow Cutoff research unlocked, the bay pauses when full. Without it, the bay keeps burning through items and the excess Salvage is discarded.

Salvage

Salvage is the material the relay system runs on. It is not a market item and it does not live in your inventory. It has its own balance, shown on the Relay Network page and on a new Relay Network section of your Inventory page.

Salvage funds, in priority order:

The research tree (account-wide upgrades)
Bay upgrades (per-bay upgrades)
New module crafting
Mint fuel (overflow use, optional bonus BC)

You can earn Salvage four ways: the Refinery, daily and weekly Refined leaderboards, the new Relay Network Launch quest season, and a small passive trickle from specialized explore and mine pets (see below).

Heat, Coolant, Overclock

This is the new timing layer. Every bay has a heat percent. It ticks up while the bay runs.

There are four bay modes:

Off: no heat, no output.
Underclocked: half output, much less heat.
Normal: baseline.
Overclocked: double output, much more heat, plus a cooldown after.

Three network-wide thresholds:

Unstable. A warning. Nothing breaks.
Critical. Things are about to go wrong.
Shutdown. The hottest bay gets forced Off and cannot run again until it cools all the way back to zero.

Heat dissipates passively when you switch to a cooler mode. DX Coolant gives you an instant temperature drop plus a temporary reduction in heat rate. The size of the drop scales with how many coolants you apply at once, one to five. Only one coolant application is allowed per overclock session, so you cannot stack them indefinitely.

Heat is what keeps very large legacy migrators in check. A 600-plus-module Mint bay will be forced to operate Underclocked most of the time, landing roughly at half of legacy output. Smaller bays barely feel heat at all.

One small note: most of the heat readouts on the bay card are gated behind the Bay Telemetry research node. Until you unlock it, you see only mode, module count, and stored totals. Once unlocked, the rates, time-to-shutdown projections, and mode comparison rows all appear.

The research tree

The research tree is account-wide. Once a node is unlocked, every bay benefits. Unlocks cost Salvage plus a basket of items, and they cannot be undone.

There are 18 nodes plus one completionist apex.

The four cosmetic apex titles (Thermal Master, Economic Engineer, Status Watchdog, Relay Architect) each require finishing their full branch. Each one gives you a trophy and a research-themed title you can set.

Network Sovereign sits on top of all four apexes. It also requires every bay upgrade maxed out across your bays. It is free to unlock once you qualify and is the ultimate “you have done everything” flex.

Nodes worth knowing about up front:

Capacity Foundations unlocks the Refinery output buffer and the Mint fuel buffer. Without it, the Mint will not accept fuel and your Refinery only earns into a tiny starter pool.
Batch Operations lets you claim every bay in one click and unlocks bulk pause/resume and bulk module level-ups.
Bay Telemetry reveals all the heat readouts, time-to-shutdown projections, and mode comparison rows.
Auto Deposit lets you pre-allocate up to three slots of items into your Refinery’s auto-refill list. When a committed basket empties, the next basket gets queued up automatically.
Overflow Cutoff stops your Refinery from burning items when the Salvage buffer is full.

Bay upgrades

Bay upgrades are local. Buying Local Heat Resistance on your Mint bay does not affect your Refinery bay. There are six upgrades in the catalog:

Local Heat Resistance (10 tiers): up to 15 percent less heat on that bay.
Overclock Cooldown Reducer (5 tiers): down from 10 minutes to 5.
Mint Fuel Buffer Expansion (10 tiers, Mint only): bigger fuel reservoir.
Module Capacity Expansion (5 tiers of plus 4 slots, max 25, Refinery only): more module slots.
Refinery Output Capacity Expansion (10 tiers, Refinery only): bigger Salvage buffer.
Refinery Deposit Category Slot (5 tiers, Refinery only): more custom category presets.

Modules: crafting, leveling, pausing

Modules are the workhorses inside each bay. Crafting installs a new module at level 1, leveling makes that module pull more weight, and pausing takes a module offline without uninstalling it.

Crafting costs Salvage plus a basket of items, with the price climbing as your bay fills up. Two onboarding discounts soften the entry: the first 10 Mint modules cost no Salvage, and the very first Refinery module is also Salvage-free. New players can stand up a working Refinery before they have any Salvage saved up.

Leveling costs Salvage plus items per level, up to a max level of 15 in both families. The payoff is real:

A level-15 Mint module produces roughly 4x as much BC per minute as a level-1 module in the same slot. Salvage fuel consumption scales similarly if you choose to feed it.
A level-15 Refinery module’s throughput factor is also about 4x its level-1 value.
Leveling improves your heat budget in both families. Mint modules earn an outright heat discount at every fifth level. Refinery modules do generate more heat at higher levels, but throughput scales faster than heat, so the heat you pay per BC refined drops as you level up.

One thing to watch on Refinery stacks: each additional module contributes a little less throughput than the previous one, ranked by level. The bay still scales as you add slots, but the curve flattens. Once your stack is wide, leveling existing modules beats crafting new low-level ones.

Pausing lets you sideline a module without uninstalling it. A paused module contributes nothing to heat, fuel burn, output, or any buffer cap, but it still occupies its slot and can be leveled up while paused. Handy when you need to cool down a hot bay without dismantling progress, or to park spare modules until you decide what to do with them.

Idle window

The whole network shares one idle window. The base is 12 hours and the Hypervisor perk adds 4 hours per level. The idle timer resets on any bay action, not just claims. Switching modes, depositing fuel, buying an upgrade, all of it keeps your bays earning.

Past the window, BC and Salvage accrual halts, heat dissipates at the regular rate as if bays were manually switched off. Come back, do anything, and you are back online.

XenoServer

XenoServer is now a universal module chassis. Using one installs a fresh level-1 module in the bay of your choice, waiving the item costs, charging only half of the Salvage cost. XenoServers also ignore your Refinery’s module cap, so they can install slots above the upgrade-derived limit. Mint has no cap anyway, so this matters mostly for Refinery players sitting at or near max capacity.

Pets: a new way to earn Salvage

Pets with the explore or mine adventure type, on a species that natively specializes in that type, can drop Salvage from their sync. Fish and hunt pets do not qualify. The bonus only triggers from pet sync; your own explore and mine actions produce zero Salvage.

This is a real but small income stream. Ten specialized pets running flat out gives you 4 Salvage a day for free. Do not expect pets to cover everything for you!

Faction-level relay stats

Faction pages get a new 📡 Relay Network section. Daily, Weekly, and Total tabs show BC Minted and BC Refined across the faction’s members. The faction browser lets you sort factions by any of those metrics.

Salvage itself is deliberately excluded from faction stats. Joining or leaving a faction does not reset your relay stats; they follow you.

Trophies and leaderboards

Three new lifetime stats now track for you forever: BC Minted, Salvage Earned, and BC Value Refined. Each has Daily and Weekly counters as well.

Six new leaderboards are live: daily and weekly versions of Salvage, BC Refined, and BC Minted. Top finishers in the Refined ladders get rewards directly:

Daily Refined: the top 10 split a DX Coolant ladder (1 up to 10 coolants, 55 total) plus a 666-Salvage lottery.
Weekly Refined: the top 3 each get XenoServers (1, 2, 3).

The five apex unlocks plus a one-shot Founding Engineer trophy (migrate within 30 days of launch) and the tiered Decommissioner / Liquidator / Last of the Generators trophies (50 / 150 / 300 modules at migration) round out the new trophy list.

DX Coolant in your daily reward

DX Coolant is now a possible drop from the Exquisite Trunk loot pool. It is naturally rare given how the loot table works, but it will trickle in over time as part of your normal daily play.

The Relay Network Launch season

A new quest season replaces Relay Preparation and runs for roughly three months, until midnight of September 1st (UTC).

New rewards:

6 new trophies: Initiate, Tinkerer, Engineer, Operator, Architect, Overcharged, at quest levels 100, 250, 500, 1000, 2500, 5000.
A new raccoon 🦝 pet, awarded every 100 quest levels with no cap. The raccoon is explore-type, so it qualifies for the pet Salvage drops above. Supporters can also pull raccoon eggs from the egg pool.
3 new pet skins: Overclocked (hot, glowing), Signal (greenish-cyan phosphor), Static (washed-out CRT). Static at level 50, Overclocked at 100, Signal at 200.
3 new pet auras: deepskyblue, magenta, white. Quest rewards only; not in the random Auralyzer pool.
4 Gemerald tiers (Green, Amber, Purple, Red) at levels 50, 100, 150, 200.
DX Coolant drops at every quest level 25, scaling from 1 up to 10 per claim.
Salvage drops directly from quest rewards at every level 100, scaling from 5 up to 50 per claim.

What is coming after launch

Three more bay families are designed and queued, no sooner than two weeks after v1 has been live and stable:

Action Prep: bounded support for one type of action. Designed to add bursty utility, not a permanent multiplier.
Buffer / Logistics: holds value that would otherwise be lost to downtime.
???: reserved for future content.

Quick start

Open the Relay Network page (where Generators used to be).
Buy your first bay, which is automatically Mint.
Hit Migrate Legacy. Confirm and collect your final BC payout.
Save up for a Refinery bay (around 89M BC worth of items).
Start refining. Even at default settings, a fresh Mint plus a fresh Refinery starts generating BC and Salvage immediately.
Spend your first Salvage on Capacity Foundations to unlock both the Mint fuel buffer and the Refinery output buffer.
From there, the order is up to you. Research, bay upgrades, more modules, more bays.

Welcome to the Relay Network. Don’t let it overheat.