UPDATE 0.48 — THE CRADLE, TEN LANGUAGES, AND JETS THAT BITE
Another Black Hole Incremental · published
THE CRADLE — a new first five minutes
- New campaigns open in THE CRADLE: a hand-built sector where you play
with borrowed power — a grown singularity, a long clock, and Tidal
Pulse, Gravity Well and Horizon Drift already on your bar.
- Seven objectives, one at a time, each with its marker and trail: feed
on dust, strip a moonlet, tear another one off its orbital rail, gather
a planet's ring with Gravity Well, crack a moon with Tidal Pulse, then
collapse a real rocky planet through crust, mantle and core — and warp.
- Nothing you do there is kept: the loan ends at the warp and your real
hunt starts at Tier 1 with the main quest on the objective card from
your very first run. The old step-by-step checklist is gone.
- Running out of time inside the Cradle just rebuilds it where you were —
no death, no payout. Pause menu → SKIP TUTORIAL if you already know the
game; Settings → REPLAY TUTORIAL brings it back any time without
touching your campaign. Existing saves never see it unless you ask.
TEN LANGUAGES
- The whole game now plays in English, German, French, Spanish,
Portuguese (Brazil), Polish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese (Simplified),
Japanese and Korean: menus, cards, feed, objectives, the constellation,
the run summary. The game picks your system language; Settings →
LANGUAGE switches live.
- If a line reads wrong in your language, tell us on Discord — fixes ship
in the next update.
- Chinese, Japanese and Korean ship with their own fonts; line breaking
and letter-spaced headers were reworked for them.
STEAM DECK
- The seed field opens the Steam on-screen keyboard.
- A larger interface scale is applied on first boot on Deck, the smallest
HUD text got a size floor, and the trackpad no longer flips the button
glyphs to mouse prompts mid-run.
- Full controller support notes on the store page were updated to match.
STAR REAPER: RELATIVISTIC JETS
- From the Star Reaper stage your singularity fires two opposite plasma
beams that sweep a full circle every few seconds. Anything they cross
is stripped — roughly a tenth of your normal strip power on average,
on top of your band. Every gate you already know applies: too-cohesive
bodies shrug it off, sealed layers hold, and nothing parked at its
standoff ring gets fed for free.
- The beams are drawn as their hitbox: shock bands, plasma knots, an
impact splash on whatever they bite. Galactic Terror adds a lensing
ring.
THE OBSERVATORY
- Someone is watching the anomaly grow. A compact log card (top-left by
default, movable in EDIT HUD LAYOUT, click or V to skip) delivers a
line at the campaign's big beats — first contact, first collapse, the
first bent orbit, each new scale, the finale.
SMALLER THINGS
- Tier 1 fields now carry a captured moonlet on an orbital rail around a
dense rock. Orbital rails everywhere are drawn clearly, with a lead
showing direction of travel. Fly alongside a railed body and your
gravity bends the rail until it snaps.
- Objective wording uses the game's own verbs — Strip, Crack, Collapse.
- The constellation's stat previews and the language row share one
Settings pane; the settings screen rebuilds in place on a language
change.
FIXES
- Switching language mid-run now relabels the bottom controls hint at
once, like every other part of the HUD (it used to wait for your next
run).
- The RUNNING SLOW advice banner could repeat forever on struggling
machines after 0.41.3 — it fires once per install again.
- TODAY'S ANOMALY runs no longer show the tutorial objective chain
instead of the day's goal.
- The observatory card no longer covers the middle of the screen or
overstays (it was a 6.5-second centered panel for one build).
- Warp-arrival cards, route screens and freeze cards all respect the
paused world; the jets and other timed effects freeze with it.
Almost everything in this update started as a player report or a review.
Come say what should change next: https://discord.gg/Gbhs2m2xCf
— SorinBuildsGames