Plugins, keygens and keys
Keys are the currency most players misunderstand. You do not buy plugins with coins or XP — you find keys inside keygens, and keys only do anything when you feed them to a plugin installer. Sit on five keys and you have five unused plugins.
The loop is short: open a keygen, take the key, find an installer, pay the key, choose a plugin. The interesting part is what the different installers charge and what you do with the keys you do not spend.
Installer types
| Installer | Key cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Cracked installer | none | A plugin, no key required |
| Standard installer | one or more keys | A plugin, filtered by what it asks for |
| Legendary installer | 3 keys | A legendary-tier plugin |
Cracked installers exist so that a run cannot be starved by bad key luck — you always have a path to more plugins. Legendary installers are the opposite: a deliberate three-key commitment to one large effect. The demo's plugin pool is 37 items and the launch build's is 62, and the same three tiers apply.
Plugins come in three behavioural flavours, per the developer's own description of the system: conditional, triggered and permanent. A permanent plugin is a stat you now have. A triggered plugin fires on an event. A conditional plugin pays out only while some state is true. Two runs with the same weapon set can diverge completely here, which is the point of the system.
The keyBuy store
Demo 1.2 added a store inside the Safe Folder called keyBuy, where leftover keys can be sold. This is the part of the economy that is easy to get wrong.
The decision is not "keys good, coins bad". It is about timing:
- Early run: keys are worth more than coins. You have no plugins yet, and your biggest power spike comes from filling plugin slots.
- Mid run: a third or fourth key that has no installer attached to it is dead weight. If keyBuy is open and you are already holding three, selling the surplus converts a wasted pickup into something you can spend on levels or weapons.
- Before a boss: coins buy run-time power, keys might buy nothing if no installer spawns. Selling into a coin spike right before a hard fight is often correct.
Do not sell down to zero. Cracked installers are free, but the good tiers are not, and walking into the late game with no way to take a legendary installer wastes the strongest single pickup in the game.
Small things that matter more than they look
Demo 1.1 (the "warmfix" build) tightened up the installer flow and a few of those details are worth memorising:
- Clicking during an installer or a BigWave download speeds the process up. Holding the button is faster still, the same way the boot sequence works. Installer time is dead time where enemies keep moving, so this is not a cosmetic preference.
- Skipping an installer refunds the key. You are never punished for looking and declining. Use this to check what is behind an installer before committing a legendary's three keys to something that does not fit your build.
- Plugins have rarities, and those rarities get rebalanced. The
damage_level_scalingplugin was adjusted from Epic to Legendary in Demo 1.1, which is a warning: plugin rarity is a live balance number, not a fixed promise. - Rarity colours show up on upgrades in BigWave, and the installer screen has tooltips on every button. Read them once; you will never need to guess what an option does again.
How to sequence a plugin build
- Open a keygen the moment you see one. Uncollected keys are the most commonly wasted resource in the demo.
- Spend the first keys on anything that applies status stacks. Stacking scales with Power, and Power plugins compound with it.
- Check installer tooltips before paying. Two clicks now beats a refund later.
- Hold three keys for a legendary only if your run has a defined core. Three keys into a plugin that supports a build you never finished is the most expensive mistake in the game.
- Sell the surplus at keyBuy when you are floating four or more. Convert the tail of your key economy into coins you will actually spend.
Plugins are the system that makes two runs with identical weapons feel different, so treat the key economy as a build decision rather than a shopping trip. If you have not read how stacking works yet, start with Heat, Lag and Infect — most plugin value runs through those three statuses.