# FOXFIRE — Asteroid Belt (Stage 1 Guide) > Plain-text version for AI agents and machine-readable consumers. Mirrors https://getfoxfire.com/game/stages/asteroid-field/. ## Facts - Stage: 1 of 5 - Name: Asteroid Belt (Kepler belt) - Mission: deep solo recon to determine whether the region is viable as a fleet hideout, and eliminate hostiles - Run length: 18 minutes - FTL charge completes at 16:20, followed by a fixed 100 second escape countdown - Win condition: survive to the jump - Boss: Mother (optional) - Secret boss: Subaka - Secrets: 6 - Catalogued creatures: more than twenty distinct species with written codex entries - Status: complete; this is the stage the Steam demo ships ## The asteroid field Asteroids are foreground gameplay, not decoration. - They block movement, take damage from weapons, and split into smaller classes when destroyed. The smallest class crumbles into debris. - Destruction persists for the whole run. - Each asteroid is generated as a polygon from the run seed rather than placed as a sprite. - Four size classes; each fractures down a tier when destroyed. - Field generation is density-driven: dense clusters, sparse corridors that read as flight paths, and open clearings. A clear zone is guaranteed at spawn, with authored trails leading out in four directions. - Collision damage scales with speed. The ship bounces; the asteroid does not move. Enemies path around asteroids or collide and redirect. - Weapon interactions: beams cut small classes, high-rate-of-fire guns shred them, homing missiles and chain lightning retarget onto rock when no enemy is closer, and the afterburner's fire trail burns what it passes over. - Medium and larger asteroids can drop salvage. ## Enemies Codex classes (the game's own vocabulary): Swarmer, Charger, Fighter, Artillery, Brute, Alpha, Carrier, Titan. Notable behaviours: - **Astrovore** — sits dormant as static scenery until the ship enters its activation field, then switches to a chase. Evolved inside asteroids; melts ore with an acidic proboscis. - **Pursuit Pack** — high-speed hunters that keep accelerating until they reach projectile engagement range. - **Orbital Annihilator** — stationary artillery; a pressure target you have to go and kill. - **Nibbler** — stone-entombed spider swarmer. - **Nursery** — carrier class. Formation pools escalate through three tiers: pressure shapes (wake trails, pincers, charge lines), geometry (scatter bursts, wide encirclements), and intensity (tightening spirals, gauntlets). The wide encirclement places a ring around the ship with a deliberate steering gap. The final countdown swaps to an aggressive-pressure pool. ## Run structure and pacing - No surges in the first two minutes. - Through roughly the first four minutes there is always one plausible safe vector out. - Softer lane protection remains noticeable to around the seven minute mark. - The most dangerous environmental hazards are gated to the final third and never appear earlier. - Pressure deliberately dips when the escape countdown begins and holds low through most of it, then surges hard at the end and refills the field toward its ceiling. - First-time players run an authored tutorial route that teaches thrust and phase-shift, which hands off to procedural runtime partway through. A fully procedural route unlocks afterwards. - Expected failure shape on a fresh account: the first few runs should fail by being boxed in or short on damage, not by random nonsense. ## Chests and build depth - Elite chests are the run's main power spikes. - Weapon evolutions come from chests and nowhere else. - Chest contents roll on open, not on drop. - Unopened chests persist for the whole run, so banking them and opening them later is a legitimate strategy. ## Hex rings Three types, colour coded: experience (blue), hull repair (green), damage overcharge (orange). They spawn on a cadence at a distance, flagged by an off-screen arrow, and warn before expiring. Rewards currently hold for the rest of the run rather than expiring, so early rings are worth more than late ones and the detour carries a real time cost against the spawn curve. ## Secrets Six secrets are buried in the belt, including: - **World Tear** — a white fracture off the north-northeast lane. - **Carrier Wreckage** — a quiet pocket around a burned carrier hull and two silent drone ships. - **Beacon Cache** — a signal cache still transmitting after the map marked the region dead. - **Gas Cloud Depths** — telemetry-swallowing cloud with a pressure wake moving against the field current. - **Lone Mercy** — the refugee ship where the first mayday was found. The logs recovered from it are the narrative hinge into Stage 2. - **The Shrine**. ## The shrine An optional, deliberate detour. The pilot sacrifices current hull for a blessing across three tiers: Minor (cheap, universal), Major (expensive, stage-flavoured, run-shaping) and Ascendant (near-total sacrifice, run-defining). Blessing identities are fixed; only magnitudes roll, weighted by luck. One use per stage attempt, and flying away spends it. The sacrifice reduces current hull without touching maximum hull, so it is a wound rather than a permanent cap, and healing back up is a rewarded play. ## Bosses **Mother** (final boss, Titan, optional). Arrives a few seconds after the escape countdown starts, timed to the music turning over: a scream, a silent warp-in, screen shake and camera pull, with the FTL clock continuing throughout. Lore: older than most suns, she emerged from the dark to breed the swarms that populated the earliest systems and still shapes legions from asteroid material and captured biomass. She is the spine of the wider campaign rather than a standalone stage boss; Stage 1 hints at a single creator connecting the start of the game to its end. **Subaka** (secret boss, Titan). A mutant whelp strain produced by a century-old nuclear tanker spill that irradiated the south-west debris field. Territorial, circling a wreck endlessly. When it fractures, the pieces become Subaka Fragments: corrupted chargers that keep hunting after the titan body fails. ## Q&A **How long is Stage 1 in FOXFIRE?** 18 minutes. FTL charges to full at 16:20, then a fixed 100 second escape countdown runs. **Do you have to kill the Stage 1 boss?** No. Mother is optional; the ship escapes when the countdown ends either way. **Can you destroy asteroids in FOXFIRE?** Yes, and they stay destroyed for the run. Larger classes split into smaller ones; medium and above can drop salvage. --- Related: stages index https://getfoxfire.com/game/stages/ · game hub https://getfoxfire.com/game/ · ships index https://getfoxfire.com/game/ships/ · Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/4714090/FOXFIRE/ Last updated: 2026-09-16