v0.5.4.0 Major 2026-08-19

Space Ports & Manifests — supply your whole frontier from a hub

• New Space Port building (unlocked by the Interstellar Logistics tech in the Industry branch): each one raises your empire's supply-route cap by 5, on top of the research ceiling of 10 — up to +20 across all your Ports, for 30 routes total. Built for the exact problem of pushing scarce ore like Caldon out to frontier shipyards that can't mine it. Needs a Capital Yard and is one per colony, so route capacity now scales with the logistics hubs you build, not just what you research.
• New Manifest route type, run from a Space Port: one convoy keeps up to 5 destination planets topped up with a material you choose, always servicing the highest-priority planet on your list that's still short (priority = list order). It's the direct answer to "get Caldon out to all my frontier shipyards from one hub" — set the origin Space Port, the material, a per-planet target and a reserve to keep at home, then order the destinations by how badly each needs it. A manifest counts as one supply line and is fully raidable like any convoy — run it with a squadron to bring escorts along.
• New "Logistics" building category on the colony build menu; the Supply tab hosts the manifest builder alongside supply lines and trade routes, and nudges you to build a Space Port when you hit your route limit.
• Faster loads: the game's scripts and styles now cache in your browser for the long haul (busted automatically when they actually change) instead of being re-downloaded on every visit — so after your first load the game comes up quickly.

v0.5.3.0 Major 2026-08-17

Xenotech expands: alien wargear, light-hull line & small Xeno guns

• New 🛡 Xeno-Defense branch on the Xenotech tree: the Xeno Garrison — a defensive building that raises more planetary army units than a Barracks (8 each) — and the Xeno Legion, a top-tier army doctrine that arms every planetary army with reverse-engineered alien wargear for a massive combat-power boost (at a steep upkeep). Set the doctrine in a colony's Govern panel.
• Xeno light-hull line (Xeno-Systems branch): reverse-engineered Xeno Scout and Xeno Corvette hulls. Both carry more bays for BOTH weapons and modules, hit harder, and pack deep fuel tanks for far-ranging cloaked raids — and the Xeno Corvette gains a Medium weapon bay so it can finally mount Xeno guns.
• Small Xeno guns: the Small Xeno Disruptor (energy) and Small Ravager Railcannon (kinetic) — S-slot versions of the pirate weapons, so corvettes, scouts and cloak-strike fleets can carry reverse-engineered firepower. They unlock automatically with their Medium siblings (no extra research).
• The Ship Designer's Derived Stats now shows an "Unlocked by" line naming the technology that unlocks each hull (and flags Xenotech-gated hulls), so you can see at a glance what to research.

v0.5.2.1 Minor 2026-08-17

Fix: escorted auto-miners stranded at a mined-out field

• Fixed an escorted auto-mining fleet getting stuck at a mined-out field and refusing to move: if any ship in the mining squadron had drifted to a different system, the "haul home" step silently failed and switched Auto off, leaving the prospector parked at the empty field. The fleet now warps the whole group home regardless of where its members are, and if a haul genuinely can't be routed it sends you a heads-up instead of stalling in silence.

v0.5.2.0 Major 2026-08-17

Shields recharge, shipping controls & shipyard polish

• Shields now recharge over time out of combat (hull still needs a colony repair) — no more running ships home just to restore shields. A fully-drained shield refills in ~20 minutes by default, sped up by two new Ship Systems techs: Regenerative Shields (~10 min) and Adaptive Shield Matrix (~5 min).
• Supply lines have a "wait until % full" option (Any / 25 / 50 / 75 / 100%): a convoy holds at its origin until it can load that share of its cargo capacity, so a Heavy/Superfreighter stops running near-empty trips. Set it when you create the line; "Any" ships whatever's available (the previous behavior).
• Fast clicks in the shipyard no longer get dropped — each click now queues and registers (a second click while the first was still processing used to be silently ignored, so you had to click several times to build one ship).
• Ship blueprints in the Shipyard are now grouped by class (all Destroyers together, all Cruisers, …), reading oldest → newest within each class, and each blueprint's resource costs are color-coded by material (Korrum/Selith/Caldon/Xenite in their icon colors) so you can see at a glance what it needs.
• Supply-line and trade-route colony pickers now group colonies by system (same-system planets listed together) instead of by colony age, so the one you want is easy to find.
• Selling on the player market now pops a "💰 Sold on the market" toast the moment it happens — previously the sale only arrived as a quiet mail that was easy to miss.
• A colony's resource readout now shows whole shippable units, so the sub-1 "dust" a cargo hold can't carry no longer reads as a phantom "1 left behind" after you ship everything off.
• Fixed the orbital-shipyard graphic flashing/glitching when a Shipyard finished building (a WebGL canvas that rendered a stale buffer the moment it was un-hidden).

v0.5.1.0 Major 2026-08-16

Post-launch polish: mobile, diplomacy & smarter patrols

• Strategic Patrol Network (new Shipyards tech): upgrades every patrol into an empire-wide rapid-response force. A patrolling fleet now flies out to intercept any raid or roamer it can beat anywhere across your colonies' combined scanner coverage — not just its own colony's ring — as long as it has the fuel to reach the fight and get home to refuel and repair. Fuel-thirstier, more efficient patrol ships range farther.
• Auto-mining now starts itself: turning on Auto for a prospector (or an escorted mining fleet) dispatches it to the nearest surveyed field in range and begins the mine → haul → return loop, instead of parking silently at home. If no field is in range, it tells you to survey one first.
• Patrol, more reliable and easier to find: a fleet carrying a Patrol Computer always offers a Patrol option and spells out exactly what's missing to enable it (research, module, an armed escort, or docking at a colony). Patrols also intercept inbound raids more dependably — they no longer hang back on raids they can actually catch and beat.
• Diplomacy with AI empires, overhauled: open diplomacy only with empires you've MET (seen one of their fleets in space); a new "Diplomacy" button and met-empire picker right on the star map; pact proposals now report their outcome instead of resolving silently; AI factions show their name (not "unknown") in your pacts; the active-pacts list scrolls; and typing an empire name or gift amount is no longer wiped by a background refresh.
• Mobile app polish: the colony HUD is rebuilt for portrait (two-column readouts, three-row header, scrollable, no more clipped title or queue bleed-through); custom bottom tab-bar icons; a vertical zoom slider on the star map; a dismissable chat/social dock; a way out of full-screen drawers; a right-sized colony centerpiece; music now pauses when you background the app; and a fix for a detection bug that could break the whole mobile layout.
• Star map upgrades: rich hover cards for your credits, colonies, fleet and science (matching the colony HUD); right-click a planet to set or edit a scouting note without flying there; and larger Titan/Colossus worlds in the system view so size classes read at a glance.
• Missions: you can now turn in a completed mission or daily from any screen, not just the colony view.
• Player market: added a passenger/crew guard when packing a ship into a tradeable card, plus broader coverage of baked-in ship stats.
• Fixed the Nyxium cache from a broken Warlord assault spawning exactly on your capital, so a freighter sent from that colony appeared to teleport onto it — the cache now drifts a short way off the world, a real hop to collect.
• Fixed a fleet (squadron) sent to collect salvage in another system arriving almost instantly — it was travelling at sublight speed rates over an interstellar distance. Squadron salvage runs now take the proper warp-paced time, matching a single ship and a normal move.
• Rebalanced pirate raid frequency for large empires: a calibration left over from an older threat scale had big empires raided roughly every 2.5 minutes. Raids now ramp smoothly from ~37 minutes apart (a young empire) to a ~15-minute floor at maximum threat — steady pressure, not spam.
• The Tanker is the fuel king again: its base tank was smaller than a Superfreighter's, so a fuel-fitted bulk carrier could out-hold the dedicated fuel ship. The Tanker hull now carries a huge base fuel reserve (before you fit a single tank), so a fuel-fitted Tanker out-holds a fuel-fitted Superfreighter — and grouped in a fleet it feeds the whole shared fuel pool.
• Mining is now consistently Prospector-only: the map already only offered mining to a Prospector, but the server would have accepted a mine order from any hull carrying a Mining Laser. Both now agree — only a Prospector chassis mines (Mining Lasers still speed a Prospector up).
• Rearming a fleet that's already at full ammo now says so ("Fleet ammo already full") instead of falsely reporting it's rearming — a squadron whose ships were all topped off used to show a misleading "rearming" toast.
• Sign in with Apple is now supported on the web and in the mobile app.
• Stability & operations: a season-aware maintenance screen (it now tells players whether it's a routine update or a season reset); fixed three MySQL-only bugs that affected the live server but slipped past the local test suite; hardened the game-state refresh against malformed planet data; and added a MySQL pass to the automated tests so those bugs can't recur.

v0.5.0.0 Season 2026-08-15

Season 5: The Living Galaxy

• A new season, a fresh galaxy — a new seed, cleared rankings, everyone starts over on new ground. And this season, the galaxy is alive.
• The Living Galaxy: the space around you is no longer empty. AI-run NPC empires settle worlds, grow their economies, research, build defensive fleets, sign non-aggression pacts and share vision, trade, and raid their rivals — all visible on your map and climbing the same leaderboard as you. Befriend them, bribe them, trade with them, or break them.
• Outer Rim Warlords — the destination. Three flagged bosses hold fortified seats in the deep wild: a Raider, an Industrial, and a Smuggler warlord, each with an endgame garrison, Aegis orbital defenses, and elite armies. Raze a Warlord's capital to break the faction — the crowning feat of the season.
• A player-to-player market. Pack a ship into a tradeable card and list it (or commodities) on a galaxy-wide board — gated behind a new Merchant Exchange building and the Free-Trade Accords tech. Buy another commander's ship even if you couldn't build it yourself.
• Missions & daily quests — always know what to do next. An onboarding chain that teaches the game step by step, milestones as you graduate each tier, a rotating contract board, daily quests with a weekly batch reward, and endgame directives with a reward you choose. Missions are now a sixth Empire Score pillar.
• Colony Development Policies. Set a colony to a goal — Sustain, Balanced, Extraction Hub, or Fortress — and its governor develops it for you, building and upgrading toward that goal within cashflow and workforce limits. It's the same brain that runs the NPC empires.
• The onboarding was rebuilt to teach the real game: research and design your first ships (a Scout and Colony Ship come ready to build), haul minerals between colonies, arm a corvette and mind its energy balance, group a fleet and clear a pirate camp, then reach outward.
• Governance, redesigned: the development-policy and army-doctrine pickers are now clear cards — each showing its effect and what it needs to unlock — and a new hover card breaks your credits down colony by colony.
• The Verdani minor race is reworked from a forgettable farming perk into a population + economy powerhouse: fast growth and rich tax income on a garden world (heavy industry still sours them).
• SpaceCiv on your phone. A new iOS build (via Capacitor) with a touch star map — pinch to zoom, drag to pan, tap to issue orders, long-press to group fleets — a bottom tab bar, tap-to-open info cards, and a portrait-friendly colony screen.
• Balance & fixes: early weapon/engine/power tech is far cheaper, so kitting out a corvette is no longer an hour-long wall; slow ore veins now credit mining missions correctly; hauls deliver their full cargo and refuel to the right tank; abandoning a colony redeploys your fleet instead of stranding it; and Warlords are kept off the player leaderboard.

v0.4.5.1 Minor 2026-08-11

Xenite is finite

• Xenite veins are now finite, like Caldon: once a vein is mined out it yields nothing — no tailings trickle. Xenite is a rare, exotic material, so a spent vein means finding a fresh one elsewhere. Common ores (Korrum, Selith) still trickle from tailings as before.

v0.4.5.0 Major 2026-08-11

Moderation tools — name filter, reports, chat timeouts

• Account names are now filtered when you sign up or rename: impersonation (like "God", "Admin", "Staff") and offensive terms are blocked. It sees through tricks like leetspeak and spacing, but won't trip on ordinary names that merely contain a fragment (Godfrey, Hancock, Essex all fine).
• See an inappropriate account name? Report it from a commander's name menu in chat ("Report name"). Staff review reports and can require the player to choose a new name — they're prompted to rename the next time they play.
• Chat can now be moderated: staff can remove individual messages and issue chat timeouts (from 10 minutes up to a permanent ban) to anyone who abuses it. A timed-out player is told how long is left and can post again automatically when it expires.
• For accountability, every moderation action is written to a staff moderation log — who did what, to whom, with a snapshot of the message — so the team can review its own calls.

v0.4.4.1 Minor 2026-08-10

Clearer resupply — partial top-ups now say so

• Rearming, refuelling, reloading a mine bay, and loading gas now tell you when a colony could only PARTIALLY top you up, instead of silently doing a half job that looked like a full load. You'll get a clear heads-up (e.g. "Only partially rearmed (3/960) — this colony is out of munitions") so you know to restock the colony or resupply somewhere better.

v0.4.4.0 Major 2026-08-10

Fleet patrols — automated colony defense

• Research Patrol Doctrine (Shipyards branch) and fit a ship with the new Patrol Computer module, then set that fleet to PATROL a colony. It automatically flies out to intercept inbound pirate raids and hunt roaming pirates within the colony's scanner range, then returns home to refuel, repair and rearm — so your frontier defends itself without you babysitting every raid.
• Patrols are cautious by design: a patrol only engages a threat it can actually beat. If an inbound raid out-guns it, it holds position to defend the colony rather than throwing itself away. A raid on any colony inside its scanner ring takes priority over hunting.
• A bigger Deep Space Array widens a colony's scanner range — and therefore how far its patrols reach. Set or stand down a patrol from the fleet menu on the star map; patrolling ships carry a small badge so you can see who's on duty at a glance.
• Fixed a bug where sending a fleet to intercept an inbound raid could send it veering off after a random roaming pirate instead — so it flew right past the raid and never engaged it. Interceptors now stay locked on the target you actually sent them after (raid or roamer).

v0.4.3.0 Major 2026-08-09

Orbital Defense upgrades + a defense breakdown card

• Orbital Defense is finally worth investing in past the first platform. Two new research techs — Orbital Batteries, then Aegis Platforms — make every ODS platform tougher AND hit harder (attack, hull and shields all scale). They stack: Batteries gives +35%, and Aegis multiplies on top for ×2.03 combat power with both researched. Research once and every colony's Orbital Defense hardens at once.
• New Defense breakdown card: click the Defense badge on any colony to see exactly why it's fortified or exposed — your Orbital Defense platforms and their power (including any researched upgrade), your planetary armies' power, upkeep and population under arms, any parked warships or native home guard, and your total defense rating measured against the current pirate threat.
• Fixed: a world sealed under a Settlement Biodome could not grow its population past the old hostile-climate cap, no matter how large the world was. A sealed world is now properly livable — its population scales with the world, and your housing (the dome's footprint) becomes the real limit. Doming a rich hostile world and expanding the dome now grows a genuine colony. Existing domed colonies correct themselves automatically.
• New artwork for the Barracks and Seat of Government buildings, and for the Planetary Defense Corps, Regular Army, Elite Corps, Orbital Batteries and Aegis Platforms research techs.

v0.4.2.0 Major 2026-08-09

Planetary armies — ground defense

• Research Planetary Defense Corps and build a Barracks to raise planetary armies — ground troops drawn from a colony's population that fight off raids alongside your Orbital Defense and fleet. Unlike ODS, armies scale with your people and treasury, so they're how a big empire actually holds its worlds.
• Armies cost you two ways: soldiers leave the workforce (less output and tax) and every unit draws credit upkeep — a standing army is a real, ongoing investment. Recruit and disband from a colony's Govern panel.
• Fund up their equipment: research Regular Army, then Elite Corps, to set your empire's army doctrine (Militia → Regulars → Elite). Higher tiers make every army far tougher but cost proportionally more upkeep — run cheap militia in peacetime and fund up for a war.
• Your armies (and Orbital Defense) now also hold the colony against a rival empire's assault, not just pirate raids — so a well-garrisoned world can survive an attack even when your fleet is away, instead of being razed the moment its defenders are elsewhere.

v0.4.1.0 Major 2026-08-09

Pirates: a deeper, self-scaling faction

• Pirate strength now keeps climbing with your empire instead of maxing out mid-game — a galaxy-spanning power faces a genuine late-game pirate war, with stronghold garrisons growing into fortress-scale sieges led by a Warlord's Dreadnought.
• The pressure ramps more gently through the mid-game, so a growing empire that hasn't built a war fleet yet gets room to breathe. Forced raids on an under-defended colony are now lighter — pirates probe a soft target rather than steamroll it, and hit harder as you build up Orbital Defense and a home fleet.
• Far more roaming pirate fleets now prowl your frontier — scaling with how much space you occupy — so there's always something to hunt. They come in beatable sizes and respawn faster, but pay out a little less each so hunting stays rewarding without becoming a grind.
• Frontier strongholds no longer appear on the map for free — discover them by scouting their system or reaching them with a scanner before you can strike (the raids they launch are still telegraphed, and your home-region den is visible from the start).
• Salvage from clearing a den now scales with the value of what you destroyed — heavier garrisons pay out more, matching every other pirate battle.
• Your Pirate War leaderboard standing no longer erodes when the war cools: it now climbs as you defeat pirates — every stronghold cleared, raid repelled and roamer destroyed adds to it permanently, like your battle wins.
• New pirate tactics: cloaked raider packs now prowl your space unseen unless a scanner pierces their cloak — and if one catches your fleet undetected, it decloaks into a first strike. Stronghold-tier dens ring themselves with minefields that bleed an assaulting fleet before you even reach the garrison, and their garrisons field EMP Disruptors that collapse your shields so the rest of the fleet hits bare hull — a shield-heavy fleet is no longer a safe bet against a hot stronghold.
• Fortress garrisons now field Boarding Craft that SEIZE some of your ships in a failed assault instead of destroying them — you'll get them back by returning and clearing the stronghold, so a beaten attack is a rescue mission, not a total loss.
• Pirate Lords are now recurring rivals. Clear a Lord's stronghold and he may slip away — the closer the fight, the likelier he escapes — to nurse a grudge and rebuild, angrier, when his stronghold repopulates. Win decisively and you finish him for good. Each Lord has his own name and character.
• And each Lord's character now shows in his stronghold: a Warbringer fields a heavier garrison; a Cloak-runner decloaks into an opening strike as you approach; a Siegemaster rings himself with a nastier minefield; a Ghost is slippery and hard to finish; and a Slaver takes prisoners — seizing your ships (recoverable by clearing him out) even from a lesser stronghold.

v0.4.0.6 Minor 2026-08-09

Ship models: freighters, biodome & climate ships

• The Superfreighter, Biodome Ship, and Climate Modulator now have their own 3D models instead of borrowing another hull's — each shows its true shape in the ship designer, colony orbit view, and star-map inspector.
• The Freighter has a new, better model.
• Fixed the Climate Modulator failing to render in the star-map inspector.

v0.4.0.5 Minor 2026-08-09

More building art

• Seven more buildings now have their own illustrated icons in the construction menu and build queue: the Ammo Works, Munitions Factory, and Xenite Extractor, plus the full Xenotech line — Xeno Reactor, Holo-Arcade, Dampening Field, and the Xeno Nexus capstone.

v0.4.0.4 Minor 2026-08-08

Auto-governor: native & domed worlds

• The auto-governor no longer wastes resources over-building housing on a world you share with natives — it now stops at the real population cap (the room left after the natives' share) instead of the full climate ceiling.
• It also respects a Settlement Biodome's building footprint, the same way manual building does, so a governed domed colony no longer builds past its sealed capacity.

v0.4.0.3 Minor 2026-08-08

Colony card shows habitability

• The colony's Environment card now shows the world's habitability tier (Hostile → Excellent) — the base of its population ceiling. A big world with a low tier no longer looks like it should hold more people than it can; terraforming the tier up is what raises the ceiling.

v0.4.0.2 Minor 2026-08-08

Art & UI polish

• The research tree is now fully illustrated — every technology across all seven branches has its own icon, replacing the placeholder glyphs.
• Planet cards now show a world's size class (e.g. "Medium") alongside its diameter.
• The Caldon Mine now has its own building icon.

v0.4.0.1 Minor 2026-08-08

Balance: Administration stacking

• Stacking Administration buildings on one colony now escalates unhappiness sharply — a few help your tax collection, but a wall of them turns the government authoritarian and chokes the world. This closes an exploit where mass-Administration multiplied tax income with little downside; a handful is still the right call.

v0.4.0.0 Season 2026-08-07

Season 4: a bigger galaxy, a living frontier, and natives worth mastering

• A new galaxy. The map is four times the size — roughly 20,000 light-years across and about 20,900 star systems — with a fresh seed, so everyone starts over on new ground. Local spacing is unchanged, so travel, fuel and scanners feel the same; the galaxy just goes much further out.
• No more twin systems: the naming overhaul gives systems distinct names, and every system also carries a coordinate designator (e.g. "Tyror · FZ-103") so two similar names are never confused.
• Planets now have a size class — Dwarf, Small, Medium, Large, Titan, Colossus. Size is a real trade-off: smaller worlds mine faster and hold richer ore, while bigger worlds house more people. Systems vary in shape too (one to six planets on a bell curve), and rare lone-planet systems tend to hold a giant.
• New Climate Modulator ship: research it to permanently nudge a surveyed, uncolonised world's temperature toward habitable before you settle it (±3/5/8°C by tier) — the way to prepare a too-hot or too-cold world in advance.
• Natives, reworked into a people worth mastering. They now feed from their own Preserves (a new building whose yield scales with how well the climate fits them), and they share the world's room with your colonists — but your colonists always keep at least half, so natives can never crowd you out. Click a native to open a full race card: climate band, happiness breakdown, food, population, and exactly what their perk is worth.
• Native perks now scale one clear way — with how established, content, and (rarely) matriarchal they are — so investing in them visibly pays off. New research weaves in Preserve upgrades, Symbiotic Terraforming (reshape a world and keep its natives), an Autonomy Charter (stronger, happier natives), and Integrated Housing (more of them per world). Grix and Verdani perks were buffed.
• New players now settle into a dense core that grows outward only as the population does, so you start near other commanders — reachable, contestable — instead of alone in an empty expanse.
• Combat, fleet and economy fixes gathered over the season: closed a couple of credit and powerless-mining exploits, fixed Heavy/Super freighter salvage and renaming, made battle damage and orbit tracking consistent across combined fleets, tidied the repair and refuel prompts, and let supply-line convoys auto-repair at their destination. The fuel-range readout now matches what a trip actually burns on every engine. Xenite is rarer and better placed.
• Worlds and pirates: a world you abandon or lose now keeps the reserves you stripped from it — a mined-out planet is never quietly refilled to full. Pirate hunts credit the right region and pay salvage consistently whether you catch a raider or it catches you.
• Under the hood: a performance pass for the bigger galaxy — the server does less redundant work each update (lighter database reads, cached ship and species data) so the game stays responsive as more commanders join.

v0.3.2.12 Minor 2026-08-05

Chat unread, simplified: opening chat catches you up

• Reworked the chat light to fit chat being a live, 7-day feed rather than an inbox. It now simply means "there's been new chat since you last opened it," and opening chat clears it — no per-message read tracking and no badge that could get stuck (e.g. a lingering "19").
• While chat is open, the blue dots still point you to whichever conversation has new messages, and a fresh whisper still pops its thread open.

v0.3.2.11 Minor 2026-08-05

Chat overhaul: reliable per-channel unread, tracked on the server

• The chat unread indicator ("blue light") is fixed. It used to be a single counter bumped in only one code path, so messages that arrived alongside a send, poke, or whisper reply were silently swallowed and never lit up. Unread is now computed from the messages themselves against what you've actually read, so it can't miss.
• Unread is now per channel: each channel (Galaxy, Alliance, and each whisper) shows its own blue dot when it has something new, plus a total on the Chat tab and the launcher bubble. Reading a channel clears just that one — new galaxy chatter no longer goes unnoticed while you're in a whisper.
• Read state is now tracked on the server, so the chat light is correct the instant the game loads and stays consistent across devices/sessions — not just after you open chat. New direct whispers still pop the dock open, now driven by the main game update.
• Chat is lighter on the network: it only polls for new messages while you're actually on the Chat tab — the always-on background chat poll is gone; the rest of the time the unread light rides on the normal game update.
• Removed the confusing chat minimize button that left an empty header bar hanging around — the chat bubble already is the minimized state, so Close tucks it back into the bubble.

v0.3.2.10 Minor 2026-08-02

Colony navigation arrows + tidier galaxy-overview notes

• The world-name arrows at the top of the colony screen no longer shift around as the name length changes — the name sits in a fixed-width area, so the arrows stay put.
• Navigation is now nested: the inner ‹ › (or the ↑/↓ arrow keys) step through the worlds in the current star system, and the new outer « » (or the ←/→ arrow keys) step through YOUR colonies across the galaxy — jumping systems as needed. So you can flip between all your colonies without leaving the colony view.
• Galaxy Overview notes: a world's note now shows right under its name (no hover needed), and editing it uses a proper in-game editor instead of the plain browser pop-up — Enter saves, Shift+Enter adds a line, Esc cancels.

v0.3.2.9 Minor 2026-08-02

Xenotech modules in the ship designer; clearer note markers

• Fixed: reverse-engineered Xenotech ship modules (Xeno Disruptor, Ravager Railcannon, Warlord's Lance, Xeno Cargo Hold, Xeno Capacitor, Xeno Drive, plus Cloaking Field, Mine Bay, Scatter Warhead and Tachyon Sensor) never appeared in the Ship Designer, so you couldn't fit them onto a hull. They now show up once you reverse-engineer them — tinted purple to mark them as exotic pirate tech. Until then they stay hidden (Xenotech isn't previewed as a locked row the way science modules are).
• Galaxy Overview: the per-world note marker is easier to see — white when a world has no note (click to add one), orange when it does (hover to read it).

v0.3.2.8 Minor 2026-08-02

Playtest fixes: mining, colonist loading, Xenotech builds & galaxy overview

• Fixed: saving a ship design tried to prototype it at your CAPITAL, so if you were working at a resource-rich frontier colony (say, one with caldon) it would fail with "not enough resources" even though the materials were right there. Prototypes are now funded at the colony you're currently on — the one whose shipyard and stockpile you can see. The Research button in the blueprint list names that colony too. (If you haven't opened any colony yet this session, a save just saves and tells you to open a colony to prototype it.)
• The colony view — and every "Colony" button and the C key — now returns you to the colony you were last on, instead of snapping back to your capital. This is remembered across page reloads, so a refresh no longer sends you home.
• Auto-mining now returns ore to the colony you sent the miner FROM, not just the nearest one. The loop remembers your launch colony (recorded when you switch Auto on) and hauls back there; if that colony is gone, it falls back to the nearest. Extraction Outposts do the same — they pipe their ore to the colony the Constructor was sent from.
• You can now load cargo and board colonists straight from the solar-system view — a Load action on a docked ship or fleet opens the same transfer panel the colony HUD and star map use. Previously that view only offered Haul or Load Gas, so colony ships couldn't take on settlers there.
• A ship's status window now shows "Colonists aboard N / capacity" for any ship with a Colonist Berth — previously a loaded berth looked empty because the status only listed cargo materials.
• Grouping mining ships now works as a team: EVERY miner in a fleet extracts (their mining tools combine), and the ore fills the whole fleet's cargo — including any freighters grouped in to carry more. Previously a fleet mined with only one ship while the rest sat idle. The fleet hauls home once its combined holds are full, and unloads every ship.
• Galaxy Overview: the planet list no longer snaps back to the top while you scroll (a background refresh was resetting it), and it now has sortable Size and Natives columns.
• Fixed: reverse-engineered Xenotech buildings (Xeno Reactor, Holo-Arcade, Dampening Field, Xeno Nexus) never appeared in the colony construction list, so you couldn't build them despite unlocking them. They now show under a Xenotech category — buildable once reverse-engineered, and clearly marked to reverse-engineer in the Xenotech tree until then.
• Galaxy Overview: each planet now has a note marker beside its name — hover it to read your scouting note in a card, click it to add or edit one. Notes are shared with the colony view, and you can now jot them on any known world (colonies, scanned, or enemy) right from the list.

v0.3.2.7 Minor 2026-08-02

Load cargo straight from the star map

• A cargo ship (or a fleet carrying one) parked in orbit of your colony now has a Load action right on the star-map fleet command rose — no need to open the colony first. It opens the full load/unload panel in place: pick a material and amount, load or unload, or load across a whole fleet at once. The same panel the colony view already used, now reachable from either place.

v0.3.2.6 Minor 2026-08-02

Alliance fix, clearer terraforming, and an income breakdown

• Alliances: founding one is now reliable. Previously the alliance row and your leader membership were written in two separate steps; if the second ever failed, a "ghost" alliance with no members was left behind squatting that name and tag — and every retry then reported the name/tag as "already taken" even though you weren't in any alliance, with no way to reclaim it. Creation is now a single atomic step (it can't half-succeed), any name/tag held only by a memberless ghost is automatically freed on your next attempt, existing ghost rows are purged on this update, and the alliance tables are re-verified so the feature works everywhere. The create form is friendlier too: the tag box auto-fills a suggestion from the name, cleans up whatever you type (letters/numbers only, uppercased), and the Create button stays disabled until the name and tag are both valid — so a blank or malformed tag can no longer silently block you.
• Terraforming: it was too easy to think land reclamation was broken. A Terraforming Array only reclaims land AFTER a world is fully terraformed to "good" AND you have researched Continental Engineering — on an already-good world without that tech, the Array just sat idle with no sign why. Now an idle Array shows a ⚠ on the colony's Land readout, hovering explains it needs Continental Engineering, and the Array's own description spells out both phases. Full path: terraform up to "good" → research Continental Engineering → the same Arrays reclaim land (+1% at a time, up to 80%) at a steep, climbing korrum & selith cost. Land above 40% is where it really pays off — that's where extra land starts multiplying the population ceiling.
• Income: the Income readout on the colony HUD now has a hover card (the ⓘ next to it) that breaks credits down — everything coming in (population tax, native tax, trade & commerce) and everything going out, with building upkeep itemised by building type, biggest first, so you can see which structures drain your treasury. It ends with the net per hour and, when a colony runs at a loss, what to do about it.

v0.3.2.5 Minor 2026-08-01

The in-game Guide caught up with the game

• The Guide (press J) has been expanded to cover systems it had fallen behind on: a new "Economy" section on credits, tax, building upkeep and how staffing/employment drives both output and happiness; a fuller "Native species" section (they work, eat, have per-species specialties, pay their own tax, and can decline if mistreated); asteroid mining (Prospector → Extraction Outpost); shipping colonists in to grow or repopulate a world; automatic supply lines; earning Xeno Fragments toward the Xenotech tree by killing pirates; the Rankings board (press L); and how reclaiming land multiplies a world's population ceiling.
• The Guide now opens in a wider, two-column layout so the whole reference fits with far less scrolling.

v0.3.2.4 Minor 2026-08-01

Fix: over-farmed worlds could starve above their own cap

• Fixed a bug where a colony with more farms than its housing/climate cap could allow would pin its population at the FULL farm output — blowing past its own population cap (by more than 2× in bad cases) and then permanently starving itself, since it had far more people than the world can actually hold. A safeguard meant to stop a food shortage from starving you below what your farms feed was using the whole farm capacity as the floor; with two populations sharing the food it should have used each population's share of the farms, respecting the cap.
• Now the floor is that population's share of the farms and never exceeds the cap, so pop can't overshoot. Affected worlds will collapse back to their real cap on the next update and stop starving — the farms comfortably feed the capped population. If you were terraforming to raise the cap, that still works: as the cap climbs, the population grows into it, fed.
• The native-population badge on the colony HUD now reads "declining" or "starving" (with the reason) instead of always showing "thriving" when a species is actually shrinking.

v0.3.2.3 Minor 2026-08-01

Natives no longer crowd Terrans off their own world

• Native species have been decoupled from the Terran population cap. Previously a fast-breeding species could fill a world to its ceiling and, because they shared one cap, squeeze the Terran population down to almost nothing — a world would quietly become native-run with no clear warning. Now natives run on their own carrying capacity and no longer eat into Terran room: a native world is a full Terran colony PLUS the natives' labour, not a competition for space. Existing worlds where natives had crowded out the Terrans will recover as the Terran cap frees back up.

v0.3.2.2 Minor 2026-08-01

Fix: native populations no longer breed themselves into famine

• Fixed a serious bug from the native-economy update: a fast-breeding species (Nautar especially) would multiply toward its world's full ceiling regardless of how much food the colony produced, overshoot the farms by a wide margin, and — because decline was deliberately slow — stay stuck there, starving the whole colony indefinitely. It also made "build more farms" backfire (more food just fed more breeding) and could balloon the workforce count far past the visible population.
• Natives now breed only into a real food surplus — never past what the colony can feed — and a colony that is over its food settles back promptly to the level its farms support, instead of freezing at a famine population. Existing colonies with a runaway native population will self-correct down to a fed, stable level.
• A newly settled world also gets a food cushion: the natives' food demand ramps in over the founding-grace window (the same way building upkeep does), so their starting population doesn't immediately begin falling to fit your Terrans' farms before you've had a chance to build any.

v0.3.2.1 Minor 2026-08-01

A starving colony now says so

• A colony that can't feed its whole population now shows it loudly: a red "⚠ STARVING — the farms can't feed everyone" line on the colony HUD, a big pop-up alert when it starts, and a "mouths to feed (Terran + native) vs farms sustain" breakdown on the Population hover. Previously the food warning only watched your Terran population, so a world whose natives (who now eat) outgrew its farms could bleed population with no obvious reason. Now the alert reflects everyone the colony has to feed. The fix is the same as ever — build Hydroponic Farms or ship food in.

v0.3.2.0 Major 2026-08-01

Native species pull their weight

• The indigenous species that share your worlds are now full members of the colony economy — but you manage them differently from your own people. THEY WORK: every native adds to your workforce (Nautar, the labour species, count double), so a native-rich world helps staff its own industry — and a colony staffed by natives no longer wrongly reads as "overworked." THEY EAT: natives draw on the same food, so a native world needs more farms or imports. THEY TAKE UP ROOM: natives need no housing (they're adapted to the world) but occupy its carrying capacity, so a heavily-native world has less space for Terran colonists — a real trade-off between a native labour colony and a Terran one.
• You steer natives with a different set of levers than Terrans: CLIMATE and TAX, not civic buildings. Keep a species in its temperature band and tax it gently and it thrives and works hard; push the world toward Terran comfort and the climate-extreme natives fade (or seal a Biodome to hold the climate and keep BOTH). Native tax is now convex like your own — a light tax barely stings, a greedy one bites — so there's finally a safe tax band instead of a death spiral.
• New colonies can no longer accidentally wipe their natives: a freshly settled world's natives are shielded during its founding-grace window (they can't decline while you get established). Out of grace, a mistreated native population declines only SLOWLY and REVERSIBLY — weeks of continuous neglect to actually lose them, and they recover the moment you fix the cause. If they do fall to a dangerous low, you get a clear "the [species] are dying out" alert with time to act.
• The Verdani (green-keepers) finally have a signature gift — richer harvests and faster growth — so the "plain" species earns its place and helps feed the extra mouths. The colony's native panel now shows their workforce contribution and, if they're declining, exactly why (climate, food, or unrest).
• Per-species perks rebalanced so the fragile, climate-extreme species are worth the risk and the room they cost. The Cryll no longer give a flat trickle of Science — their off-grid research now SCALES with the size of their frozen colony, so a big Cryll world is a genuine science powerhouse. The Pyrra (power) and Sethi (mining) payouts are bumped, and the Harpy see far further. A rare female (matriarchal) enclave still lifts a species' signature perk by +20% — now correctly across every perk, including the reworked ones.

v0.3.1.0 Major 2026-08-01

Accounts, colony legibility & travel fixes

• ACCOUNT — change your email yourself. Open Account settings, enter the new address and your current password, and we send a confirmation link to the new inbox — your email only changes once you click it, so a typo can never lock you out. A pending change shows on the page and can be cancelled; confirming it signs out your other sessions.
• IN-SYSTEM TRAVEL NO LONGER DRAINS FUEL. Moving between planets inside a system now costs fuel proportional to the tiny real distance travelled, instead of being charged as if it were an interstellar jump (a leftover from when in-system and galaxy travel were two separate maps). A scout can survey a whole system on a sip of fuel now — your tank is spent reaching new stars, not glancing at planets. Applies to every ship: surveying, repositioning, in-system hauling and mining. The pre-move ETA preview on the star map also read too fast (stale warp speed) and now matches the real arrival time.
• KINETIC AMMO COMES ONLINE FAR SOONER — the Ammo Works. A new early building produces munitions and unlocks right at Industrialization (the same point as the Fuel Refinery), so your fleet can rearm its cannons and railguns almost from the start instead of waiting on deep-industry research. The high-output Munitions Factory remains the upgrade for a large kinetic fleet — fuel and ammunition are now equally easy to get going.
• FOUNDING GRACE SHIELDS NEW COLONIES FROM PIRATES. A newly founded colony is protected from pirate raids for its founding-grace window — the same establishment period that already cushions its economy. Pirates skip a colony still finding its feet (both threat-driven raids and roaming war-parties), so expanding to a fresh world no longer means it gets hit before it can defend itself. Protection fades as the colony matures (a day for your capital, a few hours for an expansion colony).
• EMPLOYMENT BREAKDOWN ON HOVER. Hover the Employment readout on the colony HUD for a staffing breakdown — workers vs. the jobs your buildings need, the real staffed percentage, and (on a young colony) how much the founding-grace cushion is holding effective staffing up and how long until it fades. It also flags when jobs far outnumber people, which is what shows up as "overwork" on your approval.
• RAID INTERCEPTIONS NOW REPORT CLEARLY. Catching a pirate raid in the open used to resolve silently (mislabelled as a "den cleared" alert), so a successful intercept felt like the raid just vanished. You now get a clear notification — "Raid intercepted!" when you destroy it before it reaches your colony (tap to replay the battle), or "Raid broke through" if the survivors press on.

v0.3.0.0 Season 2026-08-01

Season 3 — The Pirate Frontier & Xenotech

• A new season: the galaxy has been reborn and every empire starts fresh. Three big systems land with it.
• ECONOMY OVERHAUL. Your whole population is now your workforce, and happiness peaks at an employment sweet spot — leave people idle OR overwork them and morale slips (overwork bites harder). Buildings now cost credits to run, with upkeep that scales with their power draw, so sprawling colonies have to pay their way. The tax curve is convex — the greedier your rate, the sharper the unhappiness — and output now eases down smoothly as happiness falls instead of collapsing off a cliff, so a struggling colony is recoverable. New colonies get a founding grace period that shields them while they find their feet, and there is now clearer readout of what is limiting each world.
• ABANDONMENT & FINITE MINERALS. A world you strip and abandon stays depleted — its ore does not magically refill. Minerals are a finite, empire-shaping resource now: choose where to dig deep, and reclaim or re-settle stripped worlds knowing what they cost.
• PIRATES ARE A FACTION, NOT A TAX. Roaming pirate bands drift through your space hunting exposed miners and convoys — escort them or hunt the raiders down with armed fleets. Tiered strongholds (Camp → Outpost → Stronghold → Fortress) are seeded across the frontier, each sourcing its region's raids and held by a named pirate Lord; scout them out and clear them to quiet a region. Waging the war stokes the pirates' heat: push a stronghold to Fortress and its Warlord launches telegraphed assaults on your capital — endure and repel them for loot, or mount an assault to end it. You can now intercept an inbound raid in the OPEN, meeting it on its approach before it reaches your colony (a cloaked strike force gets the drop on it). Beating pirate heavies pays off: exotic-material caches (Caldon / Xenite / Nyxium), scaling credit bounties, and a marquee bounty for cutting down a Warlord.
• XENOTECH — A SECOND TECH TREE. Killing pirate heavies and Lords yields Xeno Fragments — a currency you spend on a whole second research tree, separate from Science, that reverse-engineers captured alien tech (each project takes time to study). ⚔ Xeno-Warfare: Cloaking Fields (a fleet moves unseen and untargetable, then decloaks into a devastating first strike), Mine Bays (lay space mines that gut a passing raid), Scatter Warheads (anti-swarm splash that shreds a big pirate fleet), and exotic pirate weapons. 🏙 Xeno-Industry: the Xeno Reactor (huge power, almost no unrest), the Holo-Arcade, and mood-stabilising fields for your colonies. 🛰 Xeno-Systems: an engine that beats Antimatter, a folded-space cargo hold, a power capacitor, and a Tachyon Sensor that SEES THROUGH enemy cloaks. Each branch ends in a capstone — a fused reactor-and-habitat megastructure and an apex hybrid weapon — that also grant standing empire-wide bonuses.
• Open the Xenotech tree from the XENOTECH tab on the Research screen; hunt pirates to fund it.

v0.2.3.0 Major 2026-07-29

Galaxy Overview — empire data window

• New Galaxy Overview window: press V (or the roster icon on the nav) for a full-width, sortable, filterable table of your whole empire, with a Planets tab and a Fleets tab.
• Planets tab: every colony — plus scanned and enemy worlds — with temperature, world type, population, happiness, tax, credits/hour, Science and power, then a column per material. Each material stacks its stockpile, the ore still in the ground, and the production rate so the numbers line up down the column, with a ⛏ deep-mining marker that stays green while a vein remains and turns amber once it is drained and you are extracting past depletion. Filter by My / Scanned / Enemy and search by name.
• Fleets tab: every fleet and loose ship, with squadrons you can expand (click the arrow) to see their member ships. HP / Shield / Fuel / Ammo show as mini-bars with the percentage on the left and the current value on the right; alongside are Kinetic and Energy firepower, status, current location, destination with ETA, and cargo broken out per mineral (Korrum, Selith, Caldon, Xenite, Nyxium) plus Pop and Supplies. Filter by All / Idle / Moving / Attention.
• Both tables use resource icon headers and subtle zebra column shading for readability, and every column is click-to-sort.
• Colony HUD: the ship and building queue tiles now have hover ‹ › buttons to move an item earlier or later — an explicit alternative to drag-to-reorder, on both queues.
• Shipyard: removed the redundant build-queue strip from the Shipyard drawer — the colony HUD's peripheral shipyard queue (with cancel and reorder) already covers it.
• Hauling: an empty Heavy Freighter or Superfreighter now shows the one-click Haul shortcut on the star map too, not just the basic freighter (loaded ones already did).

v0.2.2.0 Major 2026-07-28

Fleet-run supply lines & HUD overhaul

• Supply lines are now run by a fleet, not a lone freighter with a separate escort. Assign a line a single cargo ship, or a whole squadron (extra freighters carry more per trip, and warships ride along) — one "Choose Ships" picker, no separate escort slot.
• Escorts now actually fight. When pirates ambush a loaded convoy, its warships defend it in normal combat — a strong escort beats the raid off (and takes some losses); too weak an escort loses, and the freighter is destroyed. No more free immunity, so keep your escort strong as your notoriety climbs.
• The logistics research ladder was reworked: Convoy Logistics now unlocks running a whole squadron on a line (plus auto-refuel); Escort Doctrine is retired; and a new capstone, Automated Requisition, rebuilds a raided line's freighters at the origin shipyard and gets it running again on its own (you still pay for the ships).
• Supply lines moved onto their own top-right nav icon. The Risk readout now reads "guarded" when your escort out-guns the current raid strength, "outmatched" when it has fallen behind.
• HUD & navigation overhaul: one consistent outline-icon set across the colony HUD and the star map — matched in size, brightness and position, so it barely shifts when you zoom between the two views.
• The star map's nav switched from text buttons to that icon set, with new Battles and Colony icons (Designer moved off the bar — still reachable from the ship builder or the D key).
• New Science readout in the top-left stats — your empire's total Science Power — on both screens, alongside redrawn Colonies, Fleet and Science icons.
• Every top-bar stat and nav icon now shows a styled hover card with live detail (e.g. "Science — 10.0 SP/hour across 5 labs", "2 of 15 total colonies") instead of a plain browser tooltip.
• Fixed the Heavy Freighter and Superfreighter not rendering their 3D model in the colony orbital view and the star-map ship inspector.

v0.2.1.1 Minor 2026-07-27

Chat-badge colours & hauler tweaks

• Staff chat badges can now be any colour — an admin picks it with a colour wheel on the account page, and it shows on that commander's badge in chat. No colour set falls back to the per-label default.
• The Heavy Freighter and Superfreighter now have a single engine slot, matching every other hull. Their cruise speeds (11 and 9) are unchanged.
• Fixed the supply-line builder resetting the "Ship from" colony back to your current world whenever the game state refreshed — your in-progress selections now stick.
• Open dropdowns in the Empire drawer no longer snap shut when the game state refreshes: a background update is deferred while you're picking from a menu or typing, then applied once you're done.
• Fixed the supply-line builder's Freighter dropdown showing no ships — its options were never being rendered.
• You can now assign an escort squadron right in the supply-line builder (when Escort Doctrine is researched), instead of creating the line first and setting the escort afterwards.
• Fixed the cargo transfer window reading 0 loaded after a fleet-wide Load when the material was scarce: in fleet mode the hold/capacity readout now sums across the whole squadron (matching the fleet-scale slider), so a "Load fleet" that lands the cargo in a sibling ship is reflected correctly.
• The Haul order now works for every cargo ship, not just the basic Freighter — a loaded Heavy Freighter, Superfreighter (or any ship with cargo aboard) now shows the Haul action on the star map so you can send it to deliver.
• Server performance: cut idle CPU by skipping the pirate-hunt pass when you have no roamers, memoising deterministic lookups (ship/hull/building tables, galaxy geometry, per-world ore reserves) instead of recomputing them on every request, and turning the exposed-prey escort check from O(fleets²) into a single indexed pass. No gameplay change.

v0.2.1.0 Major 2026-07-27

Logistics update — supply lines, bulk haulers & fleet hauling

• Reorder your queues by dragging: grab a build or shipyard queue tile on the colony HUD, or a slot in the research queue, and drop it where you want it. The ↑/↓ and cancel controls stay. A research reorder that would jump a tech ahead of an unresearched prerequisite is declined.
• Click any name in chat for a menu: Whisper, Add friend, Poke, Invite to alliance, Mute, or Report. Mute hides a commander’s lines for you locally; Report flags the message to staff.
• Staff can now wear a badge beside their name in chat — e.g. (Dev) — set by an admin.
• Fixed the Empire ▸ Colonies power column showing long decimals (e.g. 972.9999999999999) — power now reads as a clean whole number.
• Salvage wrecks now hold every haulable material (Caldon, Xenite, Nyxium, Fuel, Munitions, Food — not just Korrum/Selith), and scrapping a loaded ship now spills its whole cargo into the wreck instead of discarding it. The wreck label lists everything adrift.
• Supply lines: automate cargo between your worlds. Research Supply Lines (Industry branch), then dedicate a freighter to keep a colony topped up with a material — it loops the run for you. Set one up from the colony HUD or the new Empire ▸ Supply tab; the number of lines you can run grows with research (2 up to 10).
• Supply lines are a real risk: a loaded freighter can be ambushed by roaming pirates in transit — it's destroyed and its whole cargo spills as a wreck you must recover, and the line stalls until you reassign a freighter. Assign an armed squadron as an escort to deter raids.
• Supply lanes now draw on the star map as flowing arcs between the two worlds, tinted by danger (green safe → red under threat, cyan when escorted), and the Supply tab shows each line's risk (calm / exposed / under threat / guarded) so you can see an exposed lane before it gets hit.
• Supply lines can now backhaul: instead of flying home empty, the freighter carries a second material back — so one route keeps two worlds stocked both ways (e.g. ship ore out, bring fuel back). Set a backhaul material + target when you create the line.
• Each Logistics research now unlocks a real capability, not just more lines: Convoy Logistics → freighters auto-refuel at endpoint colonies; Escort Doctrine → assign escorts to lines; Backhaul Networks → backhaul; Integrated Logistics → evasive routing that halves your freighters' exposure to raids. (The line cap still climbs +2 per tier, to 10.)
• Two new bulk-hauler hulls: the Heavy Freighter (Tier-2, Orbital Drydock — 3,000 base cargo, 4S·4M·4L bays) and the Superfreighter (Tier-3, Capital Yard — 5,000 base cargo, 6M·6L bays + a big fuel tank). Both are L-class and unarmed — escort them. Researched via Heavy Freight → Container Ships on the Industry branch.
• Ship Designer: the T1/T2/T3 hull badge now reflects the shipyard tier a hull actually needs to build (T2 = Orbital Drydock, T3 = Capital Yard) — so Dreadnought and Titan correctly read T3 instead of T1. Hull slot chips now wrap to stay inside their card.
• Whole fleets of freighters now haul as a group: in the cargo transfer panel, "Load fleet ▸▸" / "◂◂ Unload fleet" spread a material across every ship in the fleet at once; Unload dumps the whole fleet's holds into the colony; and Haul sends the loaded fleet to deliver at another world — no more doing it one ship at a time. Every mineral/resource is haulable, not just Korrum.

v0.2.0.29 Minor 2026-07-26

Fix: hauling converted loaded cargo to Korrum

• The one-click Haul was hardwired to Korrum: sending a freighter already loaded with Nyxium (or any other material) wiped its hold and replaced it with Korrum. Haul now delivers whatever is loaded, untouched — and only grabs Korrum as a shortcut when the hold is empty.

v0.2.0.28 Minor 2026-07-26

Hardening: resource-spend + cargo-transfer guards

• Defense-in-depth from a full audit of the game actions: resource spending can never drive a stockpile below zero, and cargo loading can never run backwards from an over-full hold. No visible gameplay change.

v0.2.0.27 Minor 2026-07-26

Salvage drops where the ship dies + fleet scavenging

• Scrap wrecks and pirate-loot caches now float where the ship actually was — at the world or point in the system where it died, not snapped to the system star.
• You can now send a whole fleet to collect salvage: every cargo ship in it hauls its share, so a fleet clears a big cache in one trip (escorts just tag along). Nyxium caches now show their amount on the wreck label.

v0.2.0.26 Minor 2026-07-27

Anti-cheat: per-empire request serialization

• Hardened the server so rapid concurrent requests to the same empire can no longer interleave and desync resources — closing a duplication/double-spend vector. Also began stamping every newly built ship with its build time for auditing.

v0.2.0.25 Minor 2026-07-27

Pirate heavies drop exotic materials

• Destroying the pirate heavies now pays in rare ore, hauled straight to your nearest colony: Marauders yield Caldon, Ravagers yield Xenite, and the Warlord yields Nyxium — scaled by how many you kill. Pirate-hunting now feeds the very materials your heavy weapons and reactors need, on top of the credit salvage.

v0.2.0.24 Minor 2026-07-27

The Warlord marches on your capital

• Once your pirate war reaches Fortress heat, the stronghold periodically hurls a Warlord assault at your capital — the flagship plus a heavy escort of Marauders and Ravagers, warping in with a long, unmissable countdown. Muster your home fleet and Orbital Defense.
• Break the assault and the reward is immense: value-scaled salvage plus a Nyxium cache torn from the wreck drifting near your world. Leave the Fortress standing and the assaults keep coming — clearing the stronghold (a future update) will be the way to stop them for good.

v0.2.0.23 Minor 2026-07-27

Pirate fleets act like they have jobs

• Roaming pirate fleets now come in distinct kinds. Raider packs prey on unescorted miners and colony ships and flee when bloodied (as before). Marauder war-parties march on your colonies and never break off — reaching one, they launch a raid. Ravager hunts stalk your warfleets and attack them in the open, only fleeing when nearly destroyed.
• Which kinds roam depends on how hot your pirate war is: raider packs early, war-parties and ravager hunts once your notoriety climbs. Hover a pirate fleet on the star map to see its type and roster before you engage.

v0.2.0.22 Minor 2026-07-27

Pirates field different ship types

• Pirate forces are no longer just raider swarms. As a stronghold climbs its tiers, it fields heavier ships: Marauders (heavy armor that shrugs off flak), Ravagers (shield-bypassing artillery), and — at Fortress strongholds — a Warlord flagship. A flak-Destroyer wall alone stops being a universal answer; you need combined arms.
• You can see what you're up against before committing: hover a pirate fleet or stronghold on the star map to read its full roster, and the battle report now names each pirate ship type. Killing the heavier ships also pays more salvage.

v0.2.0.21 Minor 2026-07-26

Colony & Biodome ships now deliver their cargo

• Load a colony ship and its full hold now lands in the new colony when it settles (on top of the usual starter kit) — previously anything you loaded was discarded and replaced with a fixed 100 korrum / 40 selith.
• A Biodome ship's cargo now unloads into the colony it seals, instead of being lost when the ship is consumed — so you can ferry starter materials to a freshly-domed world.

v0.2.0.20 Minor 2026-07-26

Shift-drag to merge fleets on the star map

• The star-map box-select now grabs whole fleets, not just loose ships: shift-drag over any mix of ships and fleets, then press G to merge them into one (or fold them into a fleet you have selected). Fleets caught in the box light up so you can see what you've tagged.

v0.2.0.19 Minor 2026-07-26

Merge fleets from the Fleets overview

• You can now combine fleets: open the Fleets overview, and any fleet that has another idle fleet (or loose ship) in the same system gets a "Merge" button — pick what to fold in and they become one fleet. Previously you could only group loose ships on the star map, never two existing fleets.

v0.2.0.18 Minor 2026-07-26

Colony count on the leaderboard

• The Rankings screen has a new "Colonies" board that ranks empires by how many worlds they hold, and the Empire Score row breakdown now shows each empire's colony count too.

v0.2.0.17 Minor 2026-07-26

Fix: fleets can now move to a planet in another system

• Ordering a grouped fleet to a world in a different star system returned "that planet is in another system" instead of going. Fleets now warp across to the target planet and dock on arrival, exactly like a single ship already did.

v0.2.0.16 Minor 2026-07-26

Orbital defenses fire on hostile scouts

• Send a scout to survey a rival empire's colony and, if that colony has an Orbital Defense platform and you have no alliance, non-aggression pact, or friendship with them, its ODS shoots the scout down — no intel, and you lose the ship. Both empires are notified (so a defender learns someone is probing their borders). Sign a NAP (or befriend/ally them) to scout their space safely.
• This applies to Survey Automation too: an unwatched sweep doesn't know a world belongs to someone else, so it can fly a scout straight into a defended rival colony and lose it. Keep an eye on sweepers running near hostile space.

v0.2.0.15 Minor 2026-07-26

Survey Automation — auto-survey a whole system

• New tech Survey Automation (high difficulty, behind Deep Scanners) unlocks the Survey Computer — a module you fit to a ship. A ship carrying one gains a "Survey system" order: it auto-hops every unmapped body in its current system, planets AND fields, then parks. It never leaves the system on its own, so you still choose where to explore next — it just removes the click-each-planet busywork. Stops and notifies if it runs low on fuel; any manual order cancels the sweep.

v0.2.0.14 Minor 2026-07-26

Planet scorecard on hover

• Hovering a planet in a star system now pops a scorecard instead of a one-line label. Your colonies show population, happiness, income & tax, science, defense (ODS + stationed ships), biodome, and each held ore with its stockpile and per-hour rate. Uncolonized worlds show size/land, temperature, natives, and surveyed deposits (reserve + richness); rival colonies show the owner and visible world data (their defenses stay hidden); unsurveyed worlds prompt a scout.

v0.2.0.13 Minor 2026-07-25

New Caldon kinetic line: Railguns

• Kinetic weapons now mirror the energy split. Rifled Cannons and Siege Cannons (Medium/Large Kinetic Cannon) are back to Korrum-only — the whole Kinetic Cannon line is basic ammunition again.
• Added Railguns — a separate, stronger Caldon-fired kinetic line (Small/Medium/Large) gated behind Siege Cannons, unlocked by Railguns → Heavy Railguns → Mass Drivers. They out-damage Kinetic Cannons and still bypass shields, but cost Caldon to build and burn more ammo. This gives kinetics a 6-weapon roster, just like Energy Lance + Plasma Lance.

v0.2.0.12 Minor 2026-07-25

Fix: Caldon/Xenite colonies no longer read "No mining"

• A colony actively mining Caldon (or Xenite) showed "No mining" on the resource badge even as its stockpile climbed — the server was sending the density, reserve and deep-vein flags for those ores but had left them out of the per-second RATE map, so the HUD saw a rate of zero. The rate for every mined ore is now sent, and the badge reads the real output.

v0.2.0.11 Minor 2026-07-25

Prospecting: Caldon & Xenite fields read correctly

• A prospector mining a Caldon or Xenite belt was digging fine, but the star-map ship window showed its hold as empty (and "0 / cap"), and the cargo-transfer panel wouldn't let you load or unload those ores — the client's material lists still only knew Korrum, Selith and Fuel. Caldon/Xenite/Nyxium are now first-class everywhere: hold manifests, capacity math, the fleet-overview cargo column, and the field/outpost tooltips + field colours on the map.

v0.2.0.10 Minor 2026-07-25

Fix: Caldon & Xenite mines now actually mine

• Caldon and Xenite mines were sitting idle. Mining output is scaled by a per-ore throttle, and only Korrum and Selith were ever given one — so Caldon/Xenite defaulted to 0% and produced nothing. Ores with no throttle set now mine at full, and the colony Governance panel shows a mining slider for every ore a world holds (Caldon and Xenite included), so you can throttle them too.

v0.2.0.9 Minor 2026-07-25

Hunters lead their target

• When you send a fleet to hunt a roaming pirate, it now flies to where the roamer WILL be — a proper lead intercept — instead of chasing where it currently is, so it meets the raiders head-on in a single clean run. (If the roamer changes course at a waypoint before the meeting, the fleet re-solves and keeps after it.)

v0.2.0.8 Minor 2026-07-25

Roamers ambush colony ships in transit

• Roaming pirates can now catch a colony ship on the move, not just a parked one — but only by ambush. They're slower than a warping ship, so they can't run one down; instead, a colony ship that warps within a roamer's strike range gets hit where it flies. Route your colony ships clear of known raider activity, or send an escort along (an armed ship travelling in the same fleet keeps it safe).

v0.2.0.7 Minor 2026-07-25

Live interception — strikes now chase moving targets

• Sending a fleet to attack a roaming pirate band no longer whiffs when the raiders move. Your hunters lock on and CHASE — re-aiming at the roamer's current position until they run it down (your ships are far faster than a roamer, so it never gets away for long). Before, the fleet flew to where the roamer was at the moment you clicked, and arrived at empty space if it had moved on.
• Attacking another empire's fleet now pursues too. If the target slips out of range before your strike lands, your fleet keeps after it toward its new position for a while, so a target that stops, docks or turns to fight gets caught — though a ship of equal speed that runs in a straight line can still outrun you.

v0.2.0.6 Minor 2026-07-25

Roaming pirates prey on colony ships

• Roaming pirate bands now hunt your colony ships, not just your miners. Leave a colony ship sitting undefended out in a system — parked at a target world before you settle, say — and a roamer that reaches it will destroy it outright. The counterplay is the same as for mining: keep an armed escort in the system with it, or route colony ships clear of pirate activity. (A colony ship docked at one of your own colonies is safe.)

v0.2.0.5 Minor 2026-07-25

Search the research tree

• The research screen has a search box (press / to focus it). Type any part of a tech's name OR its description — so "reactor", "cargo" or "shield" finds the right tech even when you don't know its exact name. Results list with their status (done / available / locked); pick one (click, or ↑/↓ and Enter) and the tree pans straight to it and opens its details, while every match glows so you can see where they sit across the branches.

v0.2.0.4 Minor 2026-07-25

Escorted auto-mining

• You can now run Automated Extraction on a fleet, not just a lone prospector. Group a mining ship with a warship escort and flip on Auto — the whole squadron flies the mine → haul → return → refuel loop together, so your escort stands watch at the field the entire time instead of leaving the miner exposed. Auto is offered on any fleet that carries a mining ship; before, you had to choose between an unattended (but unprotected) solo miner and an escorted one you drove by hand.

v0.2.0.3 Minor 2026-07-25

Plasma Lances — a Caldon energy weapon line

• Energy weapons are now two distinct lines. Energy Lances (Small/Medium/Large) go back to being Korrum-only — your reliable baseline beam. On top of them sits a brand-new CALDON line: Plasma Lances, researched through Plasma Lances → Plasma Arrays → Plasma Annihilators (unlocked after you've mastered the full Energy Lance line). Every Plasma tier costs Caldon to build and hits noticeably harder than its Energy Lance counterpart — the tradeoff is a heavier power draw, so you'll want the reactors to feed them.

v0.2.0.2 Minor 2026-07-25

Mining Lasers show up in the Designer

• Fixed: Mining Laser modules (Small/Medium/Large) were missing from the Ship Designer palette, so there was no way to fit them even after researching them. They now appear under a Mining group — fit them on a Prospector (or any hull with module bays) to extract ore from asteroid and gas fields faster.

v0.2.0.1 Minor 2026-07-25

Reactors are a real investment

• Reactors are now the endgame power tier rather than a sidegrade to Batteries. They sit behind the FULL Battery research line — research Capacitor Banks (the Large Battery) before you can unlock Ship Generators — and every Reactor now costs Caldon as well as Korrum and Selith to build. Batteries carry your early ships and stay the cheap option; Reactors are the high-output upgrade you both tech and mine your way toward.

v0.2.0.0 Season 2026-07-25

Season 2 — The Shipwright's Overhaul

• A new galaxy, and a top-to-bottom rebuild of how ships are designed. Season 2 resets the map — every empire starts fresh in a new galaxy — so these structural changes could be made properly rather than bolted on. Your account, and everything outside the galaxy, carries over.
• Ships now have THREE separate slot pools instead of one shared bank: an ENGINE slot, WEAPON hardpoints, and MODULE bays. Guns only go in hardpoints, so a freighter can no longer bolt cannons into its cargo holds; and everything else — shields, reactors, cargo, sensors — competes for the bays. Bigger warships get a pyramid of hardpoints (many small point-defense mounts, a few big main guns).
• One engine per ship, sized to the hull. Small hulls take small engines and are genuinely fast; capitals are lumbering. No more bolting four drives onto a battleship — which is why a cross-galaxy trip is now a real expedition (tens of minutes to a couple of hours) while local hops stay quick.
• Shields are now module-only and draw power. Hulls have no built-in shields — you fit Deflectors, and each one needs a Reactor or Battery to run. Underpowered weapons AND shields fade together rather than cutting out, so a fully-gunned ship must spend real bay space on power. You genuinely can't have everything.
• Every module family — engines, weapons, shields, reactors, scanners, mining, cargo — is a three-tier Small→Medium→Large research chain, so your tech progression and your hull sizes advance together.
• New materials deepen the economy. CALDON (radioactives) is mined on rough worlds and feeds advanced weapons — the M/L kinetic and energy tiers now cost it, while Korrum stays your basic-ammo metal. XENITE is a rare prize found only on the best worlds (and the odd asteroid belt). NYXIUM drops from the pirate end-boss as a cache you scavenge with a cargo ship. Together they build two brand-new apex warships — the DREADNOUGHT and the TITAN — the most powerful hulls in the game.
• The colony HUD now has separate Text size and Icon size sliders (Settings ▸ Display), on top of the overall HUD size — so you can size the readouts and their icons independently to taste.
• Season rankings arrive. A new 🏆 Rankings screen (press L, or the nav bar) ranks every commander by EMPIRE SCORE — a balanced measure of your economy, expansion, military, science and pirate-war standing — plus separate Net Worth, Military and Pirate War boards. Your own row is always highlighted (and pinned even if you're outside the top 50), and /rank shows your standing in chat. The board is a fresh race each season — and each season's final champions are enshrined in a permanent Hall of Fame.
• Gameplay tips join the tutorial. Once you're past the intro, one-time contextual tips appear as new situations come up — the first time you can merge ships into a fleet, when a ship strands out of fuel, when natives share a world, when a raid is inbound, or when you open the Ship Designer. They never interrupt the tutorial and can be switched off (or replayed) in Settings ▸ Display. The Designer also now shows EVERY module family up front, with locked tiers spelling out which tech to research — so it's obvious there's far more to fit than cargo.

v0.1.14.0 Major 2026-07-24

Continental Engineering — reclaim land

• A new late-game tech, Continental Engineering, gives your Terraforming Arrays a second job. Once a world is fully terraformed, the Arrays begin RECLAIMING land — growing its landmass a percent at a time, up to a hard cap of 80%.
• It is a deliberate, generational project. Each point of land is a lump-sum of korrum and selith, and the cost climbs steeply the higher you push — the first points off 40% are cheap, but the last stretch toward 80% costs millions. Reclamation is slow, and Planning Centers (which finally have a real job) speed it up.
• The payoff is big: land now multiplies a world's population ceiling rather than nudging it, so a maxed-out 80% world can house more than double what it did at 40% — and it feeds more colonists and gains building room too. Existing high-land worlds benefit from the richer land model as well.
• Watch it happen: the colony's Environment readout shows live reclamation progress and the next point's cost, and the hero planet's continents visibly grow as you reclaim.

v0.1.13.12 Minor 2026-07-23

Build costs name their materials

• Build costs now say what they cost. Every cost was being abbreviated to a single letter — a Solar Collector read "K 50" instead of "Korrum 50" — so the material was anyone's guess. Buildings, ships, upgrades and prototypes all now name the material in full, tinted in that material's colour so a cost scans at a glance (and still turns red when you can't afford it).

v0.1.13.11 Minor 2026-07-23

The Tanker is visible again

• The Tanker had no model in game — it was the one ship exported with Draco mesh compression, which the client can't decode, so it silently failed to load and rendered as nothing. Re-exported to match every other ship; it now shows up on the map, in orbit, in the designer and in the ship window.
• Ship models are now cache-busted, so a re-exported model actually reaches you instead of your browser serving the old broken copy forever.

v0.1.13.10 Minor 2026-07-23

Tanker readouts fixed

• The Tanker (and any design-only hull) now shows its hull, shield and fuel everywhere — on the command wheel gauges and in the ship status window. They were coming up blank because those ships live in the designer hull list, not the buildable-ship catalogue, so the client had no stats to draw. It now reads their real values from the ship itself.

v0.1.13.9 Minor 2026-07-23

Refuel a ship in the field

• You can now refuel one ship from another out in open space — no colony needed. Park a Tanker (or any ship carrying fuel) alongside a stranded ship, select it, hit Refuel, and click the ship to top off its tank. This is the answer to "my scout ran dry in an empty system and my fuel-laden freighter was right there but couldn't help."
• It draws from the donor's freighted gas first, then its own tank, and fills the recipient up to capacity — so a Tanker's big reserve can keep a whole expedition moving far from home. The two ships just have to be parked together.
• This also gives the Tanker a real job on its command wheel: the Refuel action is its signature move.

v0.1.13.8 Minor 2026-07-23

Race card on the portrait

• Your race's climate tolerance now lives in a hover card on the population portrait, instead of an extra line cluttering the Environment readout. Hover (or focus) the portrait to see your ideal temperature and livable band — the same card will hold racial traits as they arrive.

v0.1.13.7 Minor 2026-07-22

Ammo on the ship & fleet status

• Ship and fleet readouts now answer the ammo question directly. A kinetic ship shows its rounds (🎯 loaded / capacity, flagged red when low); an energy-weapon ship reads "Energy · no ammo needed" so you know it never needs rearming — instead of showing nothing at all.
• A fleet's "Ships in this fleet" list and the Empire ▸ Fleets roster now show each ship's ammo alongside its hull and fuel.

v0.1.13.6 Minor 2026-07-22

Sequential prototyping

• The Designer queue now researches prototypes one at a time. Queue several and they line up — the one being worked shows 🔬 with a live countdown, the rest read as ⏳ queued — instead of all appearing to research at once (which is what actually happened before: they ran in parallel and finished together).

v0.1.13.5 Minor 2026-07-22

Ship combat stats

• The ship window now shows a Combat readout: attack (with its energy/kinetic split), weapon class and armour class, the power balance (draw vs supply), and ammo. You can finally size up what a ship actually brings to a fight.
• Open a fleet and its "Ships in this fleet" list now shows total firepower up top and each ship's attack alongside its hull and fuel — so you can compare fleets at a glance.

v0.1.13.4 Minor 2026-07-22

See a fleet's ships from the map

• Open a fleet on the star map and the ship window now lists every ship in it — name, count, hull and fuel — so you can tell at a glance what you grouped, without digging through the Empire panel to remember. (The Empire ▸ Fleets roster still gives the all-fleets overview, with rename, split, disband and scrap.)

v0.1.13.3 Minor 2026-07-22

Clearer world & building info

• The colony Environment panel now shows your race's comfort range — ideal temperature and the livable band — right under the world's temp. No more guessing how far a world is from ideal before you commit to terraforming or climate control.
• The Deep Space Array now explains what it actually does: reveal nearby stars, enemy fleets and incoming pirate raids around a colony on the star map — not just a bare "+45 LY".

v0.1.13.2 Minor 2026-07-22

Adjustable HUD size

• New Display setting (Settings ▸ Display): a HUD & text-size slider. It scales the colony HUD — text, icons and ships together — and the chat, from 70% up to 150%.
• This is the fix for "I have to zoom my browser in just to read the chat." Zooming the browser shrank the effective screen and made the colony HUD collide with itself; now you can size the text up in-game instead, and the HUD re-fits itself around your choice. Your setting is remembered per browser.

v0.1.13.1 Minor 2026-07-22

Readout fixes

• Ships now wear their design's name. If you rename a blueprint — say your "Scout" design to "Pathfinder" — the ships you build from it read as Pathfinder on the star map, in the roster, and in the ship window, instead of the bare hull class.
• The ship window now shows a fuel RANGE — how far the ship can warp on its current fuel, and on a full tank — so you can judge a jump before committing to it.
• Depleted ore deposits read honestly. A mined-out vein now says "Depleted" instead of showing a stale density, and a bare-tailings trickle is labelled as such — while a Deep Mine still working the vein is called out as a "deep vein" so you know why it keeps producing.
• The Fleets and Colonies attention badges are no longer stuck. They used to count every idle ship and every colony with an empty build queue — normal states that never cleared — so the number never went down. Now they flag only real problems (a stranded out-of-fuel ship; a colony in unrest, short on power, or understaffed), and clear the moment you fix them.
• A native species you've driven to collapse now actually dies out. Before, a minor race soured to zero population by heavy industry or hard taxation — rather than by a climate it couldn't survive — would linger forever at 0 pop, still reporting a mood ("0 · thriving · 18% happy"). Now any species dwindling with no way back is properly lost, and you're told it happened.

v0.1.13.0 Major 2026-07-22

Scrap & salvage

• You can now scrap ships you're done with — an obsolete Scout, a battle-worn corvette, a whole tired fleet. Open a ship (or a fleet) and hit "Scrap for salvage".
• Scrapping doesn't hand you an instant refund. Instead the ship breaks down into a salvage wreck holding 15–35% of its build materials, left floating in space exactly where the ship was. To get anything back you have to go and fetch it.
• Send a cargo ship — a freighter, prospector, or anything with a hold — out to the wreck and click it to collect. It loads what fits, hauls it home, and you unload the korrum and selith at a colony like any other cargo. A big wreck may take more than one trip.
• Salvage wrecks show on the star map as amber cargo markers with their contents, so you can always see what's still out there waiting to be recovered.
• Fleet management got easier to find, too: rename, split, regroup and disband your fleets from the Fleets roster in the Empire panel.

v0.1.12.0 Major 2026-07-22

The pirate war

• Pirates are now a faction you can wage war on — and the fight is yours to pick. Every den, raid and roaming band you destroy raises your NOTORIETY with them; leave them be and it cools back down over a day or so. It's an opt-in escalation: play peaceful and pirates stay a light nuisance, or hit them hard and stoke a real war — with real spoils.
• The frontier pirate den now grows with your notoriety, from a scrappy Camp up through Outpost, Stronghold and Fortress — each tier a heavier garrison than the last. The star map names it, so you can see at a glance whether that red emblem is a soft target or a fortress you're not ready for.
• The big strongholds are held by named pirate lords — Vex Kroll, Mad Sorla, Draxus the Pale and their kind. Storm a Stronghold or Fortress and you'll break the lord who runs it, called out by name in your reports.
• Clearing a stronghold finally pays. On top of the battle salvage, you haul home a bounty and a cache of materials scaled to the tier you broke — a Camp is pocket change, but a Fortress is a genuine payday in credits, korrum and selith delivered straight to your capital. The tougher the war you've stoked, the bigger the reward for winning it. (Rarer plunder, and one day captured pirate ship designs, will follow.)
• A pirate-war readout sits on the star map once you've drawn some heat, showing your current standing and the stronghold tier it's driving — so the escalation is never a mystery.

v0.1.11.0 Major 2026-07-22

The pirate menace

• Pirates have grown from a background nuisance into a proper threat you play against. The whole system is built around one idea: you should always see danger coming and get to decide how to meet it — never just get taxed by a dice roll.
• A calmer, fairer start. No raids at all for your first 40 minutes, so you can find your feet. When they do come, a raid warping toward one of your colonies is ALWAYS shown in its final minutes — even with no scanner in range — so you're never blindsided. Better scanners still spot them from much further out, buying you time to rally a defence.
• Danger now ramps up slowly and reaches higher. Pirate strength scales with how large and rich your empire is, but the climb is gentle while you're small and only turns steep once you're a sprawling power — and the ceiling is now much higher, so late-game raids are a real fight (your fleets and defences have grown to match).
• NEW — roaming pirate fleets. Pirate bands now prowl the space around your colonies, drawn as ☠ raiders on the star map. They aren't just heading for a colony — they hunt. Leave a mining prospector working out in the fields undefended and a roamer will run it down and strip its hold. The counters are yours to choose: escort your miners with a warship (an escorted miner is left alone), or go on the offensive — select an armed fleet, press A, and click a ☠ to hunt the raiders down for salvage. Catch them quick and they're yours; dawdle and they slip away. Bloody them badly and they break off and flee your space.
• Clearing a pirate den or driving off a raid still pays salvage — and hunting roamers adds a new bounty. (Bigger pirate paydays and a proper pirate faction are coming.)

v0.1.10.0 Major 2026-07-21

Clarity, control, and ships worth prototyping

• Prototyping a new ship design is now a real decision. You research a blueprint AT a colony — it costs materials (about 1.5× one unit's build cost) drawn from that colony. Once it's done the design is buildable across your whole empire, and a "Prototype ready" alert tells you so. Changed your mind? Cancel the prototype — from the Designer queue, the shipyard, or the Designer's blueprint list — and the full cost is refunded.
• Two separate queues now, each where it belongs. The colony HUD keeps the ship queue — the ships being BUILT at that one colony. The Ship Designer gains its own Designer queue, pinned along the bottom: every design you're prototyping across your whole empire, counting down live, so your R&D lives on the drawing board and your shipyards stay about ships.
• Save a blueprint and it starts prototyping in the same click — the button now reads "Save & prototype" and drops the design straight into the Designer queue, no separate Research step. (If it's already researched or mid-prototype, it just saves.)
• Every build now announces itself. Start a ship or a structure and a clear "Under construction" banner tells you it's underway — and every tile you click visibly depresses the instant you press it, so you never wonder whether it registered or end up clicking twice.
• You can cancel a queued building straight from the queue. Hover any item in the build queue and click the ✕ — it stops the build and refunds the full cost, exactly like cancelling a ship.
• Your colony world now has a name that fits its nature — a "Temperate ocean world", a "Scorched volcanic world", a "Frozen barren world" — shown in a highlighted panel on the colony screen, right above its size, land and temperature, so the place reads as somewhere real instead of a wall of numbers.
• Jump anywhere with a single key, from any screen: C colony, R research, M star map, I infrastructure, H shipyard, D designer — and J for the Guide if you ever lose the thread. No more hunting for the right icon; the tutorial now points you to the key.
• Happiness has been rebalanced so a new colony starts content and stays that way through your early game — the harsh, riot-on-the-edge opening is gone. What weighs a colony down now is what should: a sprawl of heavy industry and, above all, high taxes.
• Every building carries a fair-and-visible mood cost by how much it looms over people. A solar panel or a farm barely registers; mines, labs and factories weigh more; and a planet-remolding Terraforming Array is a genuine eyesore your colonists resent. Build Entertainment to keep a heavily-industrialised world content.
• Tax now bites in proportion — a 25% tax rate is a real 25-point hit to happiness, so squeezing your worlds for credits is a decision with teeth, not a free lever. Keep taxes modest and your people stay happy; crank them and you'll feel it.
• The colony's Approval breakdown (hover the ⓘ) now itemises exactly where the mood comes from — including the drag from all your buildings and industry as its own line — so you can see what's weighing a world down and what to build to lift it.
• Chat now opens on the newest message instead of scrolling you back to the top every time you close and reopen it.
• Two tutorial-friendliness fixes: chat no longer pops open over everything on a passing galaxy message — only a whisper meant for you opens the dock; anything else just lights the badge. And the tutorial card can now be dragged out of the way by its header, and stays where you put it.
• Feedback (press F) now takes a screenshot — paste one straight in with Ctrl+V, or attach an image. A picture of what you're seeing is worth a paragraph of describing it, and it reaches us right alongside your message.

v0.1.9.0 Major 2026-07-21

A kinder first hour

• Every new commander now starts somewhere worth living. Your home world is chosen to be a decent size, with real room to build, a climate your people can actually survive, and no native species already settled on it. Before this, a run of bad luck could drop you onto a scorching world where your population died the moment you arrived — that can no longer happen.
• You begin with a Scout already designed and ready to build — no need to visit the designer before you can put a ship in space. The designer is still there the moment you want to build something of your own.
• The tutorial has been rebuilt from the ground up. It now explains what actually keeps a colony alive — climate, housing and food — before asking you to build, then walks you through power, mining, farms, research (including how to chain a whole tech path in one click), happiness, your first ship, and your first jump between the stars. Replay it any time from the ⚙ Guide.
• You can start over. While you are still finding your feet — or if you lose your last colony — you can re-found your empire on a fresh world within the season, keeping your name, your friends and your contacts. A fallen empire now offers the way back instead of leaving you stuck.

v0.1.8.1 Minor 2026-07-21

Movement that matches its estimate

• Ship travel is fixed across the board. Crossing a solar system from just outside it is no longer near-instant; a galaxy hop now takes the time its estimate promised, instead of finishing in a second; and the travel estimate itself now accounts for your ship's engine, so it tells the truth. The stale figures behind fuel-range warnings were corrected too.
• Fleets can be sent to any point in a system, not just onto a planet — and a fleet sitting out in deep space can be sent home instead of being told it "has no ships".
• Your own whispers no longer show up twice in chat. (They were only ever duplicated on your screen — the person you were talking to always saw them once.)
• The game is lighter on the server, so it stays responsive as more commanders play at once.

v0.1.8.0 Major 2026-07-20

A place to see what happened — and what is about to

• The Empire drawer gains two boards next to your inbox. News collects everything your empire got done — buildings finished, ships rolled out, technologies completed, fleets arriving — counted separately from real mail, so a busy shipyard can never bury a message from another commander.
• Upcoming is the other half: one list of everything you are waiting on, soonest first. Build queues, ship queues, the technology in progress, fleets in transit and raids heading your way, each with a live countdown. Automated mining runs stay out of it, the same way they stay out of your news.
• Anything with somewhere to go now has a "Jump to" button — a completed building takes you to its colony, a finished technology to the research tree, an arriving fleet to where it is. Battle reports open straight into the replay.
• Both boards page properly: filter to unread, search them, and load older entries rather than losing anything past the newest page.

v0.1.7.0 Major 2026-07-20

The game finally tells you the good news

• Fixed a fleet-stranding bug: a fleet sitting between stars was told "this fleet has no ships" and refused every order, including the one that would bring it home. Sending it to dock at a planet now warps it to that world's system instead of refusing. Orders that genuinely need the fleet to already be in a system now say so plainly rather than claiming your ships don't exist.
• Until now SpaceCiv only wrote down the bad news. Raids, lost colonies and failed assaults landed in your inbox — but a building finishing, a ship rolling out of the yard, or a technology completing left no record at all. They were guessed at by your browser while you watched, which meant anything that finished while you were logged out was simply gone.
• Now every completion is recorded on the server the moment it happens. Come back after a week away and your inbox tells you what your empire got done while you were gone.
• Long absences arrive as a digest rather than a flood: instead of nine separate "ship completed" lines, you get "9 ships completed at Kepler II" with the full list inside. Single completions still read naturally — "Solar Collector completed at Kepler II" — and carry a link straight to the colony.
• Fleets now report in when they arrive — "Scout arrived at Ishyr I", or "3 fleets arrived at Ishyr I" when a squadron lands together. Automated mining runs stay silent, so your prospectors shuttling back and forth on their own never clutter the feed.
• Completion news is counted separately from real mail, so a busy shipyard can never bury a message from another commander.

v0.1.6.1 Minor 2026-07-20

Lighter, faster game state

• The game now sends far less data while you play. Your inbox and your battle reports used to be re-sent in full every couple of seconds — every message body, and every blow-by-blow replay — whether you were reading them or not. Now only the counts and headlines ride along, and the full text or replay loads the moment you open it. Everything looks and behaves the same; it just costs a fraction of the bandwidth, which matters most on mobile data and slow connections.
• Your unread count is now accurate past 50 messages — it used to quietly stop counting beyond the most recent page. The inbox also gained a "Load older" button, so your mail history is browsable instead of cut off at the newest 50.
• Fixed: the anti-spam limits on mail and chat were being measured in milliseconds instead of seconds, so they were never actually stopping anyone. Both now enforce what they always claimed — 8 messages per minute for mail, 8 per 12 seconds for chat.
• Old chat lines, read completion notices and long-past battle reports are now tidied away automatically on a schedule. Your mail is never touched — only the throwaway chatter.

v0.1.6.0 Major 2026-07-19

Settlement Biodomes — live on the hellworlds

• A new way to take a brutal world: research Settlement Biodomes and build a Biodome ship, then fly it to one of your colonies to seal it under a dome (the ship is consumed). The colony then survives ANY temperature exactly as it is — no cooling, no heating — which means it keeps the extreme world's rich ore instead of trading it away to terraform. It's the answer to the old catch-22: rich, scorching worlds you couldn't hold are now yours.
• The trade-off is space. A fresh dome is a cramped bubble — you're limited to a set number of buildings until you grow. Expand the dome (research Dome Expansion) for +10 buildings per level, and/or terraform the world up a tier to widen the footprint further. Pick what goes inside: with a tight cap, every mine, farm, lab and shipyard is a real choice.
• The colony screen shows it all: a "Settlement biodome" footprint bar (buildings used vs. cap) with an Expand button, and the Environment panel now reads a domed hellworld as "sealed — climate held, ore stays rich" instead of a dying-colonists warning.

v0.1.5.0 Major 2026-07-19

Asteroid & gas mining

• Space itself is now a resource. Scattered through every star system are asteroid belts and gas clouds — belts hold Korrum or Selith, clouds hold Fuel — most modest, a rare few motherlodes worth chasing. They show on the star map tinted by what they hold, but how rich and how deep is hidden until you survey them.
• New ship — the Prospector. Research Asteroid Prospecting to build one (or design your own on the Prospector hull), send it to a field with the new Mine order, and it parks in and extracts ore into its hold, then you haul the load home. Fit Mining Lasers to dig faster and Cargo Holds to carry more.
• Survey before you commit: send a Scout (or the Prospector itself) to a field to reveal its richness and remaining reserve, so you know whether it's a dud or a motherlode before you park a miner there. Hover any field to read it.
• Fields are finite — mine one dry and it's gone for good, so prospecting pushes you out across the map in search of the next rich belt.
• Fuel nebulae double as refuel stops: send any ship into a gas cloud and it tops off its tank straight from the cloud (draining it a little), so scouts and fleets can range far deeper into the frontier without a tanker in tow — pick the Refuel order and click a gold gas field.
• Mining is dangerous once you draw heat. When the pirate threat runs high, raiders will hunt a prospector parked out mining — they strip its entire hold and leave it crippled at one hull with no fuel, a long limp home. Park a warship alongside it to escort the dig, or work the safer fields until you can. A one-click Unload empties a returning hold straight into the colony.
• Automate the grind. Research Automated Extraction and a prospector gains an Auto toggle — flip it on and it runs itself: mine the field, haul the load to your nearest colony, drop it off, refuel, and fly back, over and over, until the field runs dry (then it parks and tells you). Pirates still get a vote: raiding an auto-miner knocks it offline, so escort the ones working dangerous space.
• For a rich field you want to work for the long haul, build it out. Research Extraction Outposts and the new Constructor ship carries a prefab rig — deploy it on a field and it becomes a permanent outpost that quietly pumps ore straight into your nearest colony, no ship, no fuel, no trips, until the field is spent. It costs a Constructor to build (it's consumed placing the rig), so pick your fields — then scrap the outpost for a partial refund once the vein is dry.
• Mining operations can be guarded. Group a warship into the same fleet as a prospector or Constructor and order the fleet to Mine or Deploy — the escort rides along and stands watch at the field. It matters: at high pirate threat, raiders now come for your outposts too, and an undefended one is destroyed outright (the whole rig lost), so keep a guard on the sites that are worth it.
• Planets are far richer in ore now, and how much a world holds is its own thing: a big world with plenty of land can hold a fortune (the rare motherlode approaching two million units), a small one a modest seam of 50–150k, and some worlds simply came up poor no matter their size — so a survey report actually matters. The trade-off is the tail: mine a world out and its shafts fall to a bare trickle, a hard nudge toward Deep Mining, asteroid fields, or fresh worlds. Your existing colonies are re-surveyed to the new, deeper reserves.

v0.1.4.1 Minor 2026-07-18

Battle alerts everywhere, and colony-ship passengers

• Fixed: battle reports (a pirate den cleared, a raid repelled, a fleet action) only alerted you while the solar-system view was open — so wins that happened on the galaxy or colony screen slipped by silently, and there was no way to replay them from there. Battle toasts are now always on in any view — tap one to replay the fight — a ⚔ Battles log button on the star map opens your recent battles anytime, and each replay now shows where the fight took place.
• Fixed: colonists boarded onto a colony ship (fit Colonist Berths, then load passengers) vanished when you settled — the new colony always started at the base founding population. Settling now adds the passengers you carried on top of the hull's founders.
• Climate buildings are now a flat, stacking temperature shift with no comfort cap: a Thermal Regulator always drops a colony's temperature by 5°C and an Atmosphere Heater always raises it 5°C (Mk II ±15°, Mk III ±30°), in either direction. You can now dial a world to any temperature — and even overshoot past the ideal — so build the one that moves you toward your target (heaters to warm, regulators to cool), and mind that over-shooting into an extreme will hurt habitability.
• Star map polish: incoming pirate & rival raids again flash a ⚠ warning and carry an on-map countdown plaque (who's coming, how strong, and their ETA); press Tab / Shift-Tab to cycle through your fleets and snap the camera to each; a docked freighter has a one-click Haul action (grab Korrum where it sits, deliver to a colony you pick); and enemy contacts trail a dashed line toward where they're headed.

v0.1.4.0 Major 2026-07-18

The forum — talk, report, shape the game

• A community forum is live. Anyone can read it; sign in to post. There are boards for Announcements and Updates from the dev, plus Ideas & Suggestions, Bug Reports, and General for everyone.
• Ideas and bugs double as a public roadmap: threads carry a status tag — Open, Planned, Building, Done — so you can see what's being worked on and what already shipped.
• You own your posts. Edit or delete anything you wrote, and flag anyone else's post for a moderator to review.
• Building slots are unlimited again — farms, mines, labs and housing no longer compete for room while we keep tuning the economy.
• Orbital Defense has its own quick Planetary Defense research now (right after Space Colonization) instead of being tucked behind Shipbuilding — defending a colony no longer means researching warship construction first.
• The ship designer explains itself now — hover any blueprint, hull, or module for a styled breakdown of its role, stats and loadout (with a combat matchup hint for warships), instead of a plain browser tooltip. The module palette is grouped by part type (Weapons, Engines, Power, Shield, Cargo, Fuel, Ammunition, Sensors) and every fitted part shows its type.
• Hover Land in the colony Environment panel to see what a Terraforming Array is doing — which tier it's raising (e.g. marginal → good) with a progress bar, the time left, and a clear paused warning when it runs out of korrum/selith or the world is still too hostile.
• Behind the scenes: hardened login and two-factor security against brute-force and code-replay attempts.

v0.1.3.0 Major 2026-07-16

The living economy — food, supply lines & empire strain

• A fresh galaxy. Every system and starting position is reshuffled and every empire begins again — your account, mail, and standings carry over; your territory does not. This reset is what lets the new economy apply cleanly to everyone.
• FOOD IS NOW A RESOURCE. Your colonies grow food on farms and eat it as they grow — surplus banks a stockpile you can ship between worlds. Run short and a colony simply stops growing and settles back to what it can feed; nobody starves overnight.
• BREADBASKETS & BARREN ROCKS. Lush worlds feed themselves and export; hostile and barren worlds can barely feed anyone — so a mining world must either farm hard or have food shipped in. Supply lines between your worlds finally matter in peacetime.
• HOUSING vs FOOD. Housing and climate cap how many can live on a world; food decides how many are fed. Balance Habitat Blocks against Hydroponic Farms — and mind that building slots are limited again, so farms, mines, labs and housing all compete for room.
• EMPIRE STRAIN. Governing many colonies now taxes your administration — spread too thin and every world's happiness dips. Research Civics and build a Seat of Government (your capital) to raise how many worlds you can run well. A strong, compact empire beats a sprawling, unhappy one.
• SEE WHY. New hover breakdowns on the colony screen explain your happiness (what's helping, what's hurting, and what it does) and your population limits (housing vs climate vs food) — so a thriving or struggling colony is finally readable at a glance.

v0.1.2.0 Major 2026-07-14

The research tree, redrawn

• A brand-new research screen. The tech tree is now a hex grid you pan and zoom — basic technologies sit low and advanced ones rise above them, and forks branch out so you can see every path at a glance. All 62 technologies now have their own illustrated icon.
• A research queue you actually manage: line up to five techs, watch the active one fill with a live progress bar and see when each will finish, and cancel any of them with one click.
• Click any technology and it queues the whole path to reach it — no more clicking through every prerequisite one at a time.
• Auto-research: flip it on and your empire keeps researching the cheapest available technology on its own, so the labs never sit idle.

v0.1.1.0 Major 2026-07-13

Deep Space — a slower, closer galaxy of engines & fuel

• A fresh galaxy. Every system and starting position is reshuffled and every empire begins again from a new home — denser and packed closer together than before. Your account, mail, and standings carry over; your territory does not.
• DEEP SPACE TRAVEL: interstellar cruise is slower and fuel goes further per light-year, so range is now something you plan. Crossing the map is a real commitment.
• ENGINE TYPES: fit your ships with a drive that suits the mission — Ion (baseline), Fusion (faster, same thirst), Antimatter (fastest but burns fuel hard), or Warp Coil (sips fuel for long hauls). Speed versus fuel is yours to trade.
• FLEET FUEL-POOLING & TANKERS: group ships into a fleet and they share one fuel reserve — a full tank can cover a dry fleetmate, and the fleet cruises at its slowest ship. The new Tanker hull (research Fleet Tankers) is a vast flying fuel depot that refuels a battle fleet mid-flight, extending its reach deep into open space.
• SCOUTS RUN ON FUEL: your Scout now carries a tank like everything else, so scouting the frontier is a range decision too.
• SCANNER REWORK: a colony sees only a short distance on its own. Build a single Deep Space Array (one per colony) and upgrade it for more range, then research Sensor Fusion and Subspace Relays to multiply every colony's vision — up to a hard limit. Vision is now something you invest in.
• RESEARCH REORGANISED into seven clear branches — Civilization, Industry, Worlds, Shipyards, Ship Systems, Weapons, and Engines — each a single connected tree, so the path forward reads at a glance.

v0.1.0.0 Season 2026-07-11

Season 1 — A New Galaxy & the Minor Races

• A brand-new galaxy. Every system, world, and starting position has been reshuffled, and every empire begins again from a fresh home system. Your account, mail, and standings carry over — your territory does not.
• MINOR RACES: many worlds are now home to an indigenous species — Cryll (frost-mind researchers), Pyrra (reactor-tuning ember-folk), Nautar (a vast, taxable ocean workforce), Sethi (desert ore-delvers), Grix (hardy shipwrights), Harpy (far-seeing scanners), and the placid Verdani. Colonise their world and they live alongside your Terrans.
• Each native species thrives in its own climate and grows a specialist workforce that boosts the colony — but terraforming a world toward Terran comfort pushes a climate-extreme species out of its band, and they die off. Keep it their way, or make it yours.
• Govern natives directly: each has its own happiness and its own tax rate. Tax them for credits (some resent it more than others), keep them content, and their bonus grows. A thriving native population also bolsters your planetary home guard.
• A rare few native worlds are matriarchal — spotted by the female portrait in the colony HUD — and give a 20% stronger bonus. A lucky find.
• This reset also brings the recent changes into a clean start: shipyard tiers (Drydock/Capital Yard) gate the bigger warships, kinetic weapons consume munitions, and Entertainment is a researched building.

v0.0.21.0 Major 2026-07-11

Diplomacy: pacts between empires

• A new Diplomacy tab in the social panel. Propose a pact to another commander by name — they accept or decline, and either side can break it later.
• Non-Aggression Pact: neither empire can attack the other. Breaking it warns your partner and holds you to a 30-minute cooldown before you can strike — no instant backstabs.
• Shared Vision: see each other's colonies and fleets across the galaxy, regardless of your scanner range.

v0.0.20.0 Major 2026-07-11

Munitions: the kinetic ammo economy

• Kinetic weapons now run on a real resource. Munitions is a new material your colonies produce at the Munitions Factory (unlocked by Advanced Materials) and stockpile alongside korrum, selith and fuel.
• Kinetic warships carry a munitions magazine and spend it in battle — about two fights empties a full load. A dry ship's kinetic guns fall silent (its energy weapons still fire), so you must resupply.
• Rearm a docked warship from your colony's munitions stockpile (a Rearm order on the fleet, next to Refuel). Munitions also ships between colonies in cargo holds.

v0.0.19.0 Major 2026-07-10

Building upgrades & the Infrastructure page

• Buildings can now be levelled up. Research an upgrade tech (Advanced Farming, Habitat Engineering, Overcharged Reactors, Laboratory Networks, and more), then upgrade your structures one at a time — a real investment that boosts output more than upkeep.
• New Infrastructure tab on the colony screen: see every structure you own as a tile with its level, how many you've built, and its stats — with Upgrade and Dismantle right there. Filter by category, and dismantle refunds 40%.
• Entertainment complexes now require the Public Entertainment technology.

v0.0.18.1 Minor 2026-07-10

New ship modules: Reactors & Deflector Shields

• Two new fittable module families in the Ship Designer. Reactors (Ship Generators tech) deliver high-output power — roughly double a Battery — so energy-weapon warships stop browning out.
• Deflector Shields (Ship Shields tech) add to a ship's shield pool, letting you build shield-tanks that soak energy fire before their armour is touched.

v0.0.18.0 Major 2026-07-10

Shipyard tiers & the Destroyer

• Bigger warships now need a bigger shipyard, not just the research. Two new tiers: the Orbital Drydock (Tier 2, builds Cruisers & Destroyers) and the Capital Yard (Tier 3, builds Battleships), each gated behind new engineering tech.
• New warship — the Destroyer: an anti-swarm screen whose flak batteries tear through light hulls (Corvettes, light craft) but bounce off heavy and capital armour. It protects your capital ships from the cheap-swarm tactics that shred them.
• The warship rock-paper-scissors now runs a full loop: light swarms beat Battleships, Destroyers beat swarms, Cruisers beat Destroyers, Battleships beat Cruisers.

v0.0.17.5 Minor 2026-07-09

Fix: ships warping to unexplored systems

• Fixed a navigation bug where sending a ship to survey/explore an unexplored star system sent it flying off out of the galaxy instead of to the system.

v0.0.17.4 Minor 2026-07-09

Live colony build queues

• The Shipyard and Building queues at the bottom of the colony view now show a tile for each item under construction, with a live countdown on whatever is building right now — plus a + tile to queue more.

v0.0.17.3 Minor 2026-07-09

Orbital shipyard station

• An orbital shipyard station now hovers above your colony — a slowly-turning 3D model floating over the hero planet in the colony view.

v0.0.17.2 Minor 2026-07-09

Designs replace presets

• Every empire now starts with six editable starter blueprints — Scout, Corvette, Freighter, Colony Ship, Cruiser and Battleship — instead of a separate list of fixed "standard hulls".
• Open any starter in the Ship Designer, tweak the fit, and save your own variant. Starters are pre-prototyped, so they build the moment you've researched their hull tech.
• The colony Shipyard now builds every ship from a blueprint; a locked chassis tells you which hull technology to research to unlock it.

v0.0.17.1 Minor 2026-07-09

Ship Designer polish

• The Ship Designer now shows your selected hull as a rotating 3D model — drag it to spin it around and admire your work as you fit it out.
• Hull cards now show a tech-level badge, armour rating and colour-coded S/M/L slot chips at a glance.
• The derived-stats panel now lists the blueprint's research time and build time.
• The colony Shipyard is now a tiled grid — class filters, a New Design tile, and a live build-queue strip showing what's under construction.
• Fixed: weapon modules (Energy Lance, Kinetic Cannon) now appear in the Ship Designer palette once researched — previously they existed in the engine but couldn't be fitted from the UI.
• The shipyard build queue can now be managed: reorder ships up/down, or cancel one for a full resource refund.

v0.0.17.0 Major 2026-07-09

Weapons: energy vs kinetic

• Fit real weapons in the Ship Designer. Energy Lances hit shields first and draw ship power; Kinetic Cannons bypass shields to strike the hull directly, but burn ammo.
• A counter-triangle: shields soak energy fire but do nothing against kinetic rounds — so Battery packs power your beams, Ammo packs feed your guns, and no single defence covers both. Mix your fleet.
• Research Energy Weapons and Kinetic Weapons in the Engineering branch to unlock them. Over-gun a hull and it browns out; forget the ammo and your cannons fall silent — the fit is the fight.

v0.0.16.1 Minor 2026-07-09

Thruster & scanner modules come online

• Thruster modules now do their job — a ship (or a whole fleet) fitted with thrusters travels noticeably faster between the stars.
• Scanner modules now reveal space around your ships: a scout with a scanner charts nearby systems as it travels and projects its own coverage circle on the star map.

v0.0.16.0 Major 2026-07-08

The Ship Designer

• Design your own ships. Open the ⚙ Ship Designer from the star map — pick a hull, fit researched S/M/L modules (cargo holds, fuel tanks, thrusters, scanners, batteries, ammo) into its slots, and watch the stats update live, then name and save the blueprint.
• Two build gates, like the classics: research a blueprint first, then build it at a colony's shipyard. Your custom ships appear under "Your blueprints" in the Shipyard tab.
• Research the six module technologies in the Engineering branch to unlock parts. Cargo and fuel modules are fully live — bigger holds haul more, fuel tanks extend range — with thruster, scanner and weapon effects rolling out next.

v0.0.15.0 Major 2026-07-08

Warships: cruisers & battleships

• Two heavier warship classes join the corvette. Research Heavy Hulls to build the Cruiser — a tough warship that out-guns light craft and shrugs off their fire.
• Research Capital Ships for the Battleship — a siege capital that tears through cruisers, armour and orbital defences.
• Combat is now rock-paper-scissors: corvettes fall to cruisers, cruisers fall to battleships — but a swarm of cheap corvettes can still slip a battleship's guns and bring it down. Build a balanced fleet.

v0.0.14.1 Minor 2026-07-08

Star map zoom feel

• You can now zoom in closer on the star map before it hands off to a colony — get a better look at a system and its worlds first.
• Zooming out of a colony now drops you onto that solar system up close — all its worlds framed in view — instead of the mid-range system view.

v0.0.14.0 Major 2026-07-08

Fleet command: roster, split & mixed orders

• A Fleets roster in the Empire panel — your fleets are now grouped as units, each showing its full composition (e.g. 4 Corvette · 1 Freighter), location and status, with Rename, Split, Disband and Jump controls in one place.
• Split a fleet: peel any ships off an existing fleet into a new one straight from the roster — no need to disband and rebuild.
• Mixed fleets can now Survey and Settle: a task force carrying a Scout can survey a world, and one carrying a Colony Ship can settle it — the right ship does the job while the rest of the fleet rides along.

v0.0.13.0 Major 2026-07-08

Planetary defense

• Colonies can now defend themselves. Build Orbital Defense platforms from the new Defense tab (unlocked by Weapons Systems research) and they fight off pirate raids in orbit — no more parking a fleet at every world.
• The colony Defense readout is live: see your platforms and any stationed warships at a glance, and whether the world reads undefended, exposed, or fortified against the current threat.
• Pirate threat now scales further as your empire grows — a sprawling, prosperous empire draws heavier raids, so it needs real defenses: platforms on your worlds and a warship fleet for the biggest incursions.

v0.0.12.0 Major 2026-07-08

Cargo holds & mineral hauling

• Your ships now have cargo holds. Click a ship sitting in a colony's orbit to open its transfer screen and move minerals — Korrum, Selith and Fuel — between the colony's stockpile and the ship, up to the hull's capacity.
• Cargo travels with the ship: load up at one world, fly to another, and unload there — perfect for feeding a young colony that can't yet mine or refine everything it needs. Freighters haul the most; every ship carries a fixed hold for now.
• New ship inspector on the star map: select one of your ships and tap the Status gauge on its command ring to open a larger 3D view of the vessel — its hull, shields and fuel, plus a manifest of exactly what it's carrying.

v0.0.11.2 Minor 2026-07-07

Navigation fixes

• Fixed the star map drawing an out-of-date galaxy: some systems showed up in the wrong place and couldn't be travelled to ("no system there"). The map now matches the real galaxy — unexplored stars sit exactly where they are.
• Ordering a ship to a specific spot inside another system now warps it to that exact point, instead of diverting to the system's first world.
• Move and Attack draw a guide line from the ship to your cursor with a live ETA that factors in distance and fuel — so you can see how long a trip will take, and whether you'll run low on fuel, before you commit.
• Ships in transit once again show a countdown to arrival.
• Your own fleet markers are white again (they had turned cyan).

v0.0.11.1 Minor 2026-07-06

Interstellar travel fix

• Fixed a movement bug on the unified star map: ordering a ship into another solar system could instead send it on a short hop inside its own system — or appear to do nothing at all. Clicking into a different system now correctly warps the ship there.

v0.0.11.0 Major 2026-07-06

The colony command deck

• Every colony now opens onto a redesigned command deck: your world rendered front and centre and framed by its orbit arcs, with its vital signs laid out in glowing rings around it — stockpiles and mining, environment, population, income, employment, science, power balance and orbital defence, all readable at a glance.
• The rest of the star system runs down the left as a list of worlds — click any planet to jump straight to it and manage a different colony without ever leaving the view.
• Your ships in orbit now appear as 3D models, parked in the ORBIT column beside the world.
• Orbit capacity: a planet holds up to 6 ships in orbit, and your shipyard won't lay down a new hull unless there's an open slot — build a fleet, and you'll need somewhere to put it.
• Build ships and structures from the new tile buttons at the bottom, and reach your Empire, the Star Map, Research, Infrastructure and Governance from the icon bar up top.

v0.0.10.0 Major 2026-07-06

The research tree

• Research is now a proper tech tree: five branches — Science, Society, Industry, Worlds and Engineering — grow upward from their roots, every technology wired to the ones it depends on so you can see exactly what leads where.
• Grab and drag to pan, scroll to zoom, and click any technology to read what it unlocks, how long it will take at your current Science Power, and queue it — its prerequisites queue themselves ahead of it.
• Deeper branches to chase: a Science-Power ladder climbing to the Nexus Laboratory, administration and commerce in Society, and an industry spine from the Fuel Refinery through Freight, Fusion Power and Deep Mining to Deep Selith extraction.
• Research now takes real time based on your Science Power, so stacking laboratories genuinely pushes the frontier faster.

v0.0.9.0 Major 2026-07-05

The galaxy gets social

• Mail is here: write to any commander by name from a new inbox, and battle reports, raid warnings, colony losses and settlement bounces now land there too — one place to catch up on everything that happened while you were away.
• Message empires you meet: click a foreign colony or fleet on the star map to see who owns it and mail them in one step, or save them to a personal Contacts list for quick access.
• Friends: send and accept friend requests, see who's active at a glance, and jump straight to messaging them.
• Alliances: found an alliance with a name and tag, invite members, and run it with leader / officer / member roles — promote, demote, kick, or hand over leadership. Alliance-mates can't attack each other (no friendly fire).
• Live chat in a floating dock by the settings cog: a galaxy-wide channel plus a private channel for your alliance. It stays out of the way until someone speaks, then pops open, and you can resize it to taste.
• Whispers: send a private message with /w <commander> <message>, or hit whisper on a friend — each conversation gets its own tab you can close when you're done.
• Chat slash-commands to check your stats: /played, /battles, /victories, /losses, /population, /colonies, /fleets, /credits, /online, /networth and more — type /help for the full list.

v0.0.8.0 Major 2026-07-05

One sky: the unified star map

• The galaxy map and the solar-system view are now a single, continuous star map. Zoom smoothly from the whole galaxy down onto a star's planets and back out — no more switching between separate screens.
• Known space unfolds as you zoom in: scanned and explored systems bloom into suns, orbits, and worlds, while unexplored stars stay faint points of light until you reach them.
• All your commands live on the one map — moving and attacking, surveying and settling, forming fleets, and reading your scanner range, system populations, and incoming raids at a glance.
• Fix: incoming pirate raids now warp toward the world they're actually attacking, instead of drifting toward the system's star.

v0.0.7.0 Major 2026-07-05

Hostile worlds & terraforming

• The galaxy has been regenerated — every empire starts fresh in a new procedurally-generated galaxy.
• Hostile worlds are yours to conquer: settle scorching or frozen planets, then build climate control — Thermal Regulators and Atmosphere Heaters — to hold back the deadly temperatures before your colonists die off.
• Terraform a hostile world up the habitability ladder (hostile → marginal → good) with the new Terraforming Array, unlocking a far larger population — but it never cools the planet, so the climate gear stays essential.
• A double-edged catch: the more extreme a world's temperature, the richer its ore — but the faster your people die. Run a world hot to strip rich veins before it collapses, or cool it to grow a stable colony. Your call, per world.
• New commanders get a guided tutorial through their first buildings, research, ship, and jump to the stars — skippable, and replayable from the Guide.
• Smoother navigation: scroll to zoom straight from a colony out to its system and the galaxy, and back in onto a planet.
• Fixes: the System Map opens the system you're actually in (not always home); mined-out deposits keep trickling instead of stopping; planets spread naturally around their orbits; auto-governed colonies respect building limits; and you can build shipyards on new colonies.

v0.0.6.0 Major 2026-07-05

Player-vs-player: the galaxy is contested

• Player-vs-player is live — send fleets to strike rival fleets and assault enemy colonies across the shared galaxy.
• Colony assault: defeat a colony's defenders to raze it, freeing the world and claiming salvage from the wreckage.
• New empires are shielded — you can't be attacked for your first days, or near your home system.
• Both sides get a round-by-round battle replay, and you're warned when your fleets or colonies come under attack.
• A more alive galaxy — rival fleets now glide in real time with visible headings, and battles resolve on schedule even while you're away.
• Anti-grief limits stop attacks from being spammed at a single target.
• Contested settlement: if another empire claims a world first, your colony ship is returned instead of lost.

v0.0.5.0 Major 2026-07-05

Early access & galaxy fleet command

• Early access is live — create an account and start commanding an empire.
• Command whole fleets from the galaxy map: select a named fleet and send it to another star, or anywhere in open space — every ship travels together.
• Incoming pirate raids now show in the solar-system view too, warping in toward the colony they're targeting (not just on the galaxy map).

v0.0.4.2 Minor 2026-07-05

Fleet movement & performance fixes

• Fixed interstellar fleets that looked frozen mid-warp in the solar-system view.
• Fixed fleets jumping to the wrong spot when re-routed in flight, and ships that stacked invisibly on top of each other.
• Fixed "fleet has no system" / "no ships" errors when redirecting a fleet between stars.
• Fixed an in-system-moving fleet showing at a bogus location on the galaxy map.
• New players get a more reliable, collision-free starting system.
• Returning after time away no longer causes a slow catch-up — the game fast-forwards efficiently.

v0.0.4.1 Minor 2026-07-04

"What's new" badge

• The settings cog now shows a dot when the game has updated to a version you haven't seen yet — open settings to catch up on what changed.

v0.0.4.0 Major 2026-07-04

Worlds & the new-player experience

• Two new habitability tiers above "good" — Great ("Prime") and Excellent ("Ideal") — rare, lush worlds with much higher population ceilings.
• Planet size now shows on the system map: bigger worlds are drawn bigger.
• Solar systems now hold 1–6 planets (was 1–4), so systems are richer to explore.
• New players are seated in a friendly starter system — two decent worlds plus a third — generated and saved just for them.
• Settings redesigned as a vertical menu with a slide-out panel, and a new "How to play" Guide.

v0.0.3.0 Major 2026-07-04

The shared galaxy

• Every commander now explores one shared, persistent galaxy with global planet ownership.
• You can see other empires' colonies and detect their fleets when they cross your scanners.
• Press F anywhere in-game to send feedback.

v0.0.2.0 Major 2026-07-03

Procedural galaxy & exploration

• A galaxy of thousands of procedurally-generated star systems to chart.
• Scanners reveal nearby systems; send scouts to survey worlds and colony ships to settle them.
• Pirate raids warp toward your colonies — your scanner warns you in time to defend.

v0.0.1.0 Major 2026-07-02

Fleets & combat depth

• Persistent, named fleets: box-select ships and press G to merge them into a fleet you command as one.
• Round-by-round battle replays with hull and shield tracking.
• Fleet-wide refuel, spare-gas reserves, and a Repair Bay to fix battle damage.
• Planet size now matters — it drives population, building slots, and ore reserves.