Cyl
She flies beside you, fights with you, and reads the dark ahead.
A crystal consciousness riding inside a drone body, with her own history with Megabot. She holds her own trigger, spends her own abilities to keep you alive, surveys what you find, listens for what you have not found yet—and wears every bit of it on her face.
18 abilities, 6 branches
Commands sit on your action bar, toggles run until you turn them off, and passives change her numbers the moment they unlock. Crystal memories open the nodes; skill points buy ranks on what she already carries.
Core
1 nodeLatch her to the hull or send her back out. Attached, she rides with you and mends herself.
Combat
7 nodesHer auxiliary rifle, firing on its own at whatever you are fighting.
She charges the selected target and lands a five-shot burst.
A Cyl-side lock that follows her own combat priorities.
Forces the target to focus her for a threat window.
She flanks as a decoy so the target tracks her instead of you.
Discharges all of her energy as an EMP that stuns and damages everything close.
Her fire deals +50% damage to mechanical foes.
Defense
4 nodesA standing loop that keeps the ship's shield topped up.
A green grid over the hull: 2% of every defensive layer back every 200ms for four seconds.
A crystalline barrier she raises for herself when a killing blow is coming.
Earthfall resonance: her Crystal Shield resolves +40% capacity and +35% duration.
Scan
4 nodesAn orbital identification pass. What she finishes is discovered and archived.
Always on: +25% scan range, surfacing more of the scan layer.
Khepri upgrades her scan speed, range, archive detail and tactical refresh depth.
Completed scans expose Megabot's eye-lance apertures as weak points.
Mobility
1 nodeShe phase-steps after you: +25% follow speed and acceleration.
Ultimate
1 nodeHalf her energy to become a healing force, mending you for ten seconds.
What she does without being asked
She shoots what you are fighting
Her trigger reads your weapon lock first, then whatever last hit the ship, then the direction the hit came from, then your own firing line. Every candidate is checked for hostile, alive and in reach before she pulls — a friendly station you happen to have locked is walked straight past.
She leads the shot
Her bolts are ballistic, so she solves the intercept: target velocity against projectile speed for the earliest point the two meet, then aims there. Crossing targets that used to fly through the gap now take the hit.
She keeps firing
2.40 shots a second, sustained — heat falls under continuous fire instead of stacking, so there are no dead stops mid-engagement. Her energy and heat both read off her profile card, so you can see what she has left.
She spends her abilities on you
Four lanes run on their own: the Healing Field on a hurt hull, Crystal Ascension when it turns critical, Energy Nova when a crowd is inside the blast and pressing you, and the Taunt/Distract peel on whatever just landed a hit.
She budgets the energy
The Healing Field draws on the ship, so she keeps 1.6× its cost in reserve and leaves you able to boost and shoot. The nova and the ultimate draw on her own pool, and the emergency always outranks the crowd control.
She surveys what you find
She flies a paced orbit around the target while her beam scans the surface beneath her, the reticle's arc filling with the ground she has actually covered. A finished scan is discovered, archived and counted by the discovery tree.
She listens past the fog
Her antenna is a crystal organ that grows with her, pulling contacts out of the dark as a bearing, a range and a promise — quests, caches, derelicts, relics, and the things hunting you — before you fly into them.
She grows on what you explore
Decoding a contact banks discovery XP; reaching the waypoint it plotted pays again. Crystal memories unlock new abilities, and skill points buy stat ranks on the ones she already has — volley size, attack cost, aegis regen, shield cooldown, scan duration.
She tells you when she is hurt
Below a quarter hull she flashes a smoky red aura and asks you to bring her in. Latched to the hull she recharges her shield and regenerates at 1/s, and her face settles to content.
She talks first
She introduces herself before the first quest arrives, asks what to call you, and teaches the thrusters, the guns and the camera in her own speech bubbles — naming the keys you actually have bound.
You can read her
Her visor is her mouth and her lens is her eye, and the face is resolved from her live state every frame—first match wins. A hit in the last half second is a wince. A quarter hull is hurt. Fleeing is scared, scanning is curious, a fresh discovery is delighted, a fight is determined, latched and safe is content.
Underneath it she carries a mood, and the mood only shades the default smile. She is an optimist: gloom can narrow it, but only her body can turn it into a frown.
The scan is a hologram
Her lens throws a beam onto the target and the object comes up inside a survey rig: a dashed outer ring and a counter-turning inner one, a radar sweep with a fading trail, corner brackets standing off the reticle, motes riding the ring, two readout cards typing themselves in, and at the contact point the beam painting an arc of the target’s own surface as she covers it.
Detail arrives with her. Close up she is a glass dome over a galaxy with a violet eye; far out she is a lit dot with an antenna, and nothing is spent drawing what nobody can see. The effect stays sharp at any zoom and cheap at any screen size.
As you explore, Cyl’s actions are meant to give you reasons to notice her, understand her, and eventually trust her.
Wishlist Explore the Universe 2175 on Steam and follow development as Cyl and the galaxy around her continue to grow.