v0.5.24 — mods, and two endings

Mods

• The game reads mods. There is a MODS button on the title screen. Put a folder with a manifest.json in it into the mods directory. The game finds it, checks it, and says in plain words if something is wrong.
• A pack can change content, art and text. All seventy-one content pools are open to it: events, planets, names, balance, research, ending prose. A pack can add records, patch single values, replace them or remove them. Packs apply in a fixed order, so the same set always gives the same result. A pack can swap any of 1,646 art assets and ship its own translations.
• A pack that changes balance turns achievements off for that run. The Mods screen names the pack. Saves record which packs were loaded and warn you by name if you load without them.
• Workshop items you subscribe to load like local folders. The Workshop button opens the page in the Steam overlay, or in a browser.
• This is the first step. The loader, the pack format, the validator and the Mods screen are done. Publishing still goes through the Workshop uploader rather than the game.
• The Workshop side is not fully tested. Subscribing and loading work here. No mod has gone up on the Workshop and come back down yet. We will put one up in the next few days and find out. Until then, treat Workshop mods as unproven. A local folder is the path we have used.
• Mod loading is tested on Windows and Linux.

No script mods this time — data, art and text only.

Endings

• Two endings held back for two months are now reachable. A ship whose founding pool ran out gets its own ending. So does a colony that came through on one bloodline.
• Both are set in the crew berth — one room, two states. In the colony that survived, two people work a shift between the bunks. In the ship that did not, the bunks are made, nobody is in them, the air still runs and the archive is still lit.
• The art for both is still being worked on and will change.
• A colony that empties out on the ground used to draw a wrecked hull, over a paragraph saying the hull held. It draws the settlement now.

Languages

• Another two thousand six hundred lines of Russian come from an updated CoreForgeLabs translation. Lines a player had already corrected by hand were left alone.
• Fourteen fields still showed English to Chinese players. The Chinese was written and unused.
• French now has its space before : ; ? and ! — seventy-two lines were missing it.
• Spanish had ano where it wanted año, in the last seven strings.
• The ending's milestone list translated the labels and left the values in English.

Interface

• At larger interface sizes the and tags pushed FACTIONS and CAMERAS off the tab bar. The tags shorten until the row fits.
• SHIP LOADOUT now shows what each founding pick moved at launch. A full food store leaves an oversized garden with nothing to give, and it still draws power. The card read +8 either way.
• DRIFT MIX cut off the values its own strip rounds.
• COLONY ROSTER counted children born on the planet as ship-born.
• Two windows had no exit but CLOSE and ESC.
• COLONY MAP labels were cut mid-word.
• A save taken partway through founding came back on the planet screen with ADVANCE dead.
• Thirteen of thirty-nine achievements unlocked silently.

Elsewhere

• A failed salvage run reported crew lost when nobody died. The log counts what the attempt actually costs. When the team comes back whole, it says so.
• The ship's core rewrites what you read as it drifts. The substitutions ignored plurals and left sentences a word short. They agree now.
• The closing record dated the same settlement twice, once from launch and once from landfall. Every date now counts from the same year as the rest of the run.
• The first look at a new world reported how many people came down with you, even on runs with no such number. The first child born on the ground was announced again in later years.
• The demo says up front that it does not save, and that only first-tier technologies are available.

Next

Two new writers join on September 7. They will write colony events. A proper announcement follows.

Meta progression and persistent state between runs is the next system: what carries from one voyage to the next.