Ground Burst

Exotic weapons and their own assembler, an anti-missile defence, and upgrade chips for the machines.

New weapons

• Antimatter ICBM: an Antimatter Trap built into an intercontinental missile. Where it lands, a white sphere 67 blocks round erases everything in it (blast-proof blocks too; only bedrock stays), with nothing dropped and no fallout. Its gamma flash kills anything in the open out to 90 blocks; walls of stone, concrete, lead or obsidian stop it.
• Singularity ICBM: a Singularity Core built into an intercontinental missile. A black hole opens where it lands and lives for a minute, pulling everything in and tearing the ground loose. It grows by what it eats: on open ground it digs a hole about 67 blocks round in rock; in a mountainside or the sea it grows bigger still. Then it implodes, pulling harder than ever as it shrinks to a point and vanishes.
• Storm ICBM: a Storm Core built into an intercontinental missile. Where it lands a supercell gathers over a whole region, 160 blocks round, for a minute and a half: lightning comes down six times a second on whatever stands in the open or stands tallest, chaining from creature to creature. It is born in a burst of lightning shooting up from where the missile lands into the sky where the clouds gather. Every strike explodes where it lands, leaving a small crater with fires round it, and knocks out machines nearby, while the wind drives everything round its eye. A lightning rod inside the storm draws its strikes safely.
• All three are built at the new Special Weapons Assembler, a bay with three glowing containment rings that turn round the missile as it is put together. They fire like any other intercontinental missile, from a Launch Complex or a Missile Silo. They are only ever built whole: there are no exotic bombs.

Anti-missile defence

• Interceptor Battery: a launcher turret on a two-block pedestal that shoots down missiles coming down near it. Load it with Interceptor Missiles; its four cells fill from its store. It fires when an interceptor can meet the missile in time: the turret swings round, the interceptor climbs out and curves over onto the missile, and they meet in the sky. A missile shot down breaks up in the air and its warhead never goes off.
• It reaches 256 blocks for missiles a working Radar Array is tracking, and 96 on its own seeker. Each interceptor kills a small missile 80% of the time, less for bigger ones (40% for an intercontinental one), without radar, against a missile coming back down hot, or against a superweapon's. Big missiles draw two interceptors.
• Missiles flying out from near it, bound elsewhere, it lets go, so it never shoots down your own launches.

Upgrade chips

• Speed, Efficiency and Balanced chips on each circuit tier, basic to quantum. A speed chip makes a machine 10% faster a tier (40% at quantum), an efficiency chip makes it use 5% less power a tier (20% at quantum), and a balanced chip does half of each. Every processing machine and assembler has an Upgrades tab on the left of its screen with three slots, and the chips in them add up.

Changes

• The Strategic Assembly Hall is now the ICBM Assembly Hall, so it is no longer confused with the Strategic Missile Assembler. Halls already built keep working. It builds the thermonuclear, cobalt and Tsar ICBMs.
• The Large Silo Door has a sound of its own that lasts as long as its doors take to open or close.
• Lattice Frames and Steel Grating no longer hide each other like glass does: looking into a stack of them you see its far side and its sides from inside, while the faces between them stay hidden. The lattice frame is now framed on all four edges of each face.