Michi looks back at December and January: gateway success, maintenance work, new features, and new player improvements.
After the holiday break and a productive January, it's time for a recap of the past two months' development.
We've been in maintenance mode since the big gateway update at the end of November, which went remarkably smoothly despite its complexity.
A few post-release bugs popped up, like persistence issues, APEX loading glitches, and mobile quirks. We were able to fix most of the smaller issues quickly. We even hosted a livestream celebrating 10 years of PrUn and peeking ahead.
The focus shifted to performance and maintenance. Server restarts revealed slow entity loading times for big planets and populations. In some extreme cases loading them can take up to two minutes! Michi implemented snapshot support, storing periodic state snapshots in the database alongside event streams. Now, loading just needs the latest snapshot plus recent events, slashing loading times dramatically.
On the Steam front, we rolled out a new client that adds font size/zoom support, fixing complaints about tiny texts on large monitors. You can change the zoom factor with the CTRL - and CTRL + shortcuts.
Preparing for the upcoming maintenance release, we have been working on several smaller and larger changes and bug fixes. As usual, you can find the full release notes on the forums and also here on Steam once the release is live.
Players have clamored for better storage, so the upcoming maintenance release introduces four new buildings:
- STA Auxiliary Storage: 2500t / 2500m³
- STV Volume Storage: 2500t / 7500m³
- STW Weight Storage: 7500t / 2500m³
- STE Extensive Storage: 10000t / 10000m³
We also fixed gateway progress visibility in GTW, show a progress indicator for under-construction gateways, and smoothed company creation with sticky footer buttons.
Inspired by Archiel's PoC, it supports selecting multiple stacks with new drop targets like MAX WGT (lightest-first by weight), MAX VOL (by volume), plus refined AMT, numbers (based on largest stacks), and HLF.
There are several operational gateways now! But setting them up and providing fuel and upkeep materials for them uncovered some bugs in the infrastructure inventories and with the unload actions. Michi implemented fixes for all the issues.
Martin overhauled our email system for smart notifications, like PRO expiry warnings.
We're easing the "too slow" feedback without gimmicks:
- FREE license holders can now accept simple loans.
- More starting buildings and materials as well as luxury consumables as rewards for the introductory contracts.
- First production order and flight sped up (with hints) to hook players early.
FX trading simplified: disabled redundant upper-matrix brokers (e.g., only CIS/AIC, not AIC/CIS) for cleaner pairs.
We dropped two economic reports (for December and January), now also showing the active companies by faction.
You can find the individual devlogs here:
- Maintenance Mode - Development Log #509
- Freeing Up Space - Development Log #510
- Additional Storage - Development Log #511
- Happy Holidays - Development Log #512
- Scheduled Maintenance - Development Log #513
- Speedy Start - Development Log #514
- Timing is Everything - Development Log #515
Thanks for an amazing community, we are looking forward to a great 2026!
As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!