Dead Reckoning v0.2.96 — Living Death Toll, Named Voices, Landing-Scenes
Dead Reckoning: The Long Drift · published
A narrative-correctness and clarity release. This folded additional minor releases into this release. The demo and the full game both ship from v0.2.96.
Casualties, and the people behind them
Losses are counted from your actual colony. Impact strikes, cryo failures, and other disasters now report a toll that scales with how many people are really aboard, instead of fixed numbers — a catastrophe on a full ship and one on a near-empty ship no longer read the same.
Voyage and ship events name the people they are about. Recurring crew — the medical officer, a schoolteacher, the colonist filing a report — are drawn from your living manifest, with the right names and pronouns, instead of a faceless role or a stand-in name.
Landing
How a landing goes now shapes how it is remembered. The number who die in an emergency descent scales with the world and your ship's condition, and the colony's hundred-year memorial reflects the real toll.
The first-building scene now matches the planet's air. On a world you can breathe, the colony watches the roof go up out under the open sky; on a sealed world — no breathable air — they watch from behind the shelter ports and from inside suits. No more standing "under open sky" on a toxic world, or watching "from the airlocks" on a temperate one.
Writing
Landing, voyage, and endgame writing tightened to the dry register. The first-season accounts, the recurring voyage beats, and the endgame decision deck were rewritten.
Clarity
KNOWLEDGE is now labelled KNOWLEDGE LOSS. The readout rose as knowledge was lost, which read backwards; the label now names what the number actually tracks.
Fixes
The CAMERAS bay feeds no longer come up blank in some builds. The feed assets now ship reliably, and a release check guards against the gap.
Operations-tab tooltips no longer show internal key names. Hovering a power-allocation mode (CRYO / BALANCED / HULL REP) or a subsystem action (PWR SURGE, RATION PROTO, and the rest) used to show the raw string key instead of its description; they now read as proper, translated text.
Localization
Wider German, French, Italian, and Spanish coverage. The new and rewritten event and ending text is now translated.