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Railhead: Dust Sea

First-person hypervelocity artillery. Crew the Ridge Battery above an 8 km alien canyon: laze the range, read the dust devils for wind, charge the rails, and put a slug on a machine six seconds of flight away.

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Updated Jul 24, 2026
gameartillerysniperfirst-personballisticswave-defensesci-fidesertsingleplayerco-op

You crew the Ridge Battery — a fixed hypervelocity railgun cantilevered over the head of an eight-kilometre canyon called the Dust Sea. Below you sits the Rig. Machines climb the canyon toward it in twenty escalating waves. You are the only gun that reaches them.

The loop

Spot → laze → read the wind → lead → charge → FIRE → watch it fly → vent heat.

A slug takes between one and six seconds to arrive. In that time gravity drops it, crosswind pushes it sideways, and whatever you were aiming at has moved. The dust devils drifting down the canyon floor are the wind readout — there is no magic arrow, just the same vector the game applies to your shot.

Charge sets muzzle velocity. A full charge flattens the arc and shortens the flight, and it dumps far more heat into the rails. Redline the barrel and you are locked out for six seconds with a klaxon in your ear — that is how runs end, far more often than the Rig falling.

The flash of an impact reaches you instantly. The sound arrives late, at the speed of sound, so a hit at four kilometres cracks twelve seconds after you see it.

The roster

MachineWhereCounter
Crawler Swarmcanyon floor, fast, chews the Riglow-charge ground burst for splash
Haulermid-canyon, armoured, shields the packmax-charge penetrator into the core
Skiffrim, strafes laterally at speedthe hardest lead — fire well ahead
Burrowersurfaces near the Rigspot the plume, kill the mound before it breaches
Spire Mortarfar rock spires, shells YOUR batterycounter-battery before its third shell cracks your scope
Monolithcanyon centre, every fifth wavehit a plate twice to strip it, then the core

Controls

  • Hold LMB / Space — charge the capacitor · release — fire
  • Hold Shift / R — laser rangefinder
  • RMB / V — scope · F — spotter cam · scroll / Q,E — magnification
  • C — coolant purge · 1–3 — slug select · B — armory (between waves) · Esc — menu
  • Mouse — traverse and elevate · WASD — fine trim

Built in Zero

Everything here is world content — Luau components, zui screens, WGSL post-process shaders — and everything is generated rather than imported:

  • the canyon is a 384 × 576 heightfield baked from domain-warped ridged noise, with a three-tier gorge profile, terraced walls, discrete rock spires and a boundary massif that closes the basin
  • the whole sound bank is synthesised from first principles — every cue is an oscillator, a filter and an envelope, encoded straight to the engine's audio payload
  • the look is a six-pass post stack: height fog with sun inscattering and volumetric shafts, heat shimmer off the barrel, bloom, motion blur, scope depth-of-field with chromatic aberration and barrel distortion, then an ACES grade with anamorphic flare, vignette and film grain
  • the firing solution the lead computer paints runs the same integrator the slug flies through, so the marker and the shot agree by construction

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