Dead Reckoning: The Long Drift · published
Stable. Everything the experimental branch has been working on since v0.4.7, in one build.
Landing used to be the end of the game. It isn't any more. The colony now has a century of its own — decisions, resources, its own way of failing, and endings that answer to what you actually did on the ground rather than to how you flew.
The departure has changed too. Year one used to be a button. It is now twelve months you play through, aboard a ship still being proved, and the shakedown is where you learn what every system on board is for.
If you have been playing on the default branch, this is eight experimental releases arriving at once. The list below is what a run will feel different for.
The departure runs in months. Twelve of them, from the drive lighting at 06:00 ship time to the corridor heading locked. Each month is a real decision on a ship nobody has flown yet: the standing watch, the succession order, the cold banks, the probe rack, the optics.
The beats are specific now. Everyone takes the qualification test, it is marked by hand, and where a colonist lands is up to their score. The manifest is eight banks and a hundred and fifty cradles. The probe rack holds two and you launch with one. At perihelion the ship passes 0.29 AU from the Sun, inside Mercury's orbit and on the far side of the star from the point it left.
More information about ship systems — Event cards now walk you through each system. There are more to come, but this is a solid foundation.
The intro now illustrates the solar path — out from Earth, in to perihelion, round the star and back onto the corridor heading, with Mars, the Belt, Jupiter, Saturn and the heliopause passed where the log says they are.
The century is played, not summarised. The colony runs to year 100 with decisions of its own instead of a closing paragraph, and the years between choices are yours to spend.
Ground life is not ship life. The colony has its own resources. What you built in transit is not what keeps you alive on a planet, and buildings cost upkeep — a settlement that overbuilds early feels it later.
The colony can build. A generator, sealed growing decks, shelters, storerooms, its own material. A posted clinic slows the narrowing of the gene pool. Open ground has to actually be ground: a low-habitability world goes sealed-only, and that is a hard requirement to reach.
A settlement that is losing has decisions. It used to produce a log line. It now produces seven decisions about who eats, who is counted, and what the colony is willing to become in order to survive.
A colony that dies on the ground gets its own ending, and it is drawn as ruins on the ground. This was implemented earlier, but it's now working in the code.
What you do with the ship after landing is a choice. Reclamation and vessel disposition are mechanical now, not description — and you see the consequence from the ground.
All twelve are complete on both rails. Every ideology-and-knowledge pairing has events in the ship phase and in the colony phase, and an ending written for it. Once both halves have formed, the faction readout tells you what your ship has become rather than describing one axis of it. Six colony cards press on what each formed order finds hard, and a clannish ship's grudges outlive the people who started them.
This is still foundational, which means it will be built and iterated on.
The postings table is interactive. It used to show an assignment you never made. Post someone to a station, or relieve whoever holds it and let the ship fill the vacancy its own way. It costs a piece of the year's work, so it is a decision rather than a chore.
You choose by what right a vacant post is filled. BY ROSTER hands it to the best qualified. BY SENIORITY hands it to the longest-served. BY LINEAGE passes it to the holder's own — and that one widens the class divide every time a station changes hands. A ship that has become clannish fills posts this way and cannot do otherwise.
How many people are awake at once is yours to set, and it moves the numbers it names. Time held at a panel is worth something.
The colony records how it lost people, not only how many. Causes of death are kept, named and read back. Obituaries name the crises a colonist stood through instead of counting them. Colonists read as people rather than table rows — origin, trait and habit, drawn from who they actually are — and ship-born children get ship-born names once the culture has drifted far enough to stop naming them after Earth.
The settlement is drawn to scale. A capital is bigger than the town it grew out of. Eleven new structures appear in the settled endings; the elite spire and the founders' pod cluster were redrawn.
Pull far enough back from the colony map and it hands over to the planet itself, in the round. Oceans, weather-worn ground, ice at the poles, a day side and a night side with the terminator between them, and whatever moons the world keeps. It turns while you watch it.
The world from orbit is the world underfoot. The sphere is generated from the same seed the survey map is, floods to the same amount of ocean, and the colony is marked at the point where the ground matches what the map shows — coastal if the map is coastal, inland if it is inland.
The colony shows as a light on the night side. A settlement with its grid up burns pale and steady. As power fails the light reddens, dims and begins to gutter, and how wide it spreads is how many people are down there. It is only lit while the site is in shadow, so it comes and goes as the world turns.
The ship is up there too, on a track of its own, and what you told it to do is what you see. Under power it runs a beacon. Left as a memorial it is dark and holding its attitude. Stripped for parts it is a hull frame with nothing correcting it, so it tumbles, catches the sun at odd intervals, and its orbit walks.
How well any of that can be seen is still the instruments. A poor reading loses the moons and flattens the light to a lit half and a dark half.
Pull back far enough and it becomes the Milky Way. Four arms, the bar across the centre, and the disc they sit in, drawn to the measured spiral. The Sun sits two-thirds of the way to the rim, and at that range the view finds the core. The range rings run out to 2,500 light-years and the catalogue runs to 180 named stars. A star the ship cannot reach reads as locked.
Zoom the other way and the solar bodies are worlds. Nine of them carry their own surface — Mercury, Earth, the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn with its rings, Uranus — lit from the Sun, with a terminator and a night limb that stays visible instead of thinning to a crescent and disappearing.
The turn out of the solar system is an arc. The ship used to hold its launch heading and then pivot through as much as 155 degrees in a single year — a right-angle corner on the chart. It now comes round over several years, and the log names the corridor when the last of the turn is flown.
The ship arrives where the countdown says it will. On the nearest corridor the approach used to crawl for fifteen years and then cross nearly three light-years in the final one. The chart lurched at the moment the readout said the ship had arrived. The approach is paced now: the distance left tracks the years left, the whole way in.
The ship diagram is a deck plan. It was a flat silhouette with five rectangles laid over it. It now draws the compartments a crew actually lives in — the bell cluster aft, the reactor block, the eight pods flanking the spine, the quarters, the commons, the medical bay and the bow — each named, each anchored to the ship's own geometry, with the awake watch marked as dots that move as the years pass.
A mark on the plan is a person. Quarters, the commons, the medical bay, the stores, the cryo bays and the growing decks are partitioned into rooms, with a corridor into each and a door into every room along it. Click a mark and it gives their name, trade and age, the station they hold or that they are off watch, and their line.
The reactor could never show a warning. Of the five zones on the old diagram only four could be coloured, and the reactor was the one left out — so the subsystem whose failure cascades into everything downstream was the one part of the ship that always looked fine. The hull was in the same position. Both are compartments like the rest now.
The bench chooses its work. Three standing studies used to open on the launch tick and run side by side to the end, so every voyage got all three in the same order. Past the edge of the solar system the bench passes to you, and SHIP LOADOUT is where a study is entered against it — one at a time, each proposal carrying the years it would take at the pace this crew can actually keep.
What the bench can do narrows as the crew forgets. A study takes longer as knowledge is lost, and the estimate on the screen lengthens with it. Past the point where the reading is no longer taught, no new study can be opened at all. Work already in hand is never taken away — it slows.
The population projection was reading the wrong death rate. It took the environmental figure on its own while the year that followed applied four more terms and then an entire second pass for old age. Over a long run it was under-counting the dead by more than a quarter.
Waking crew costs power. SHIP CONDITION has listed an awake-population load since the panel was itemised, and there was no such term in the model — a sixty-hand watch and a four-hundred-hand watch drew exactly the same.
A second reactor survives a single failure. That is what its founding card has always said it does, and until now its entire effect was eight points on the opening gauge. With the first reactor lost, output holds at half rather than falling with it.
Stations stopped going to whoever was nearest dying. BY ROSTER filled a post from the crew list in the order people were born, so every vacancy went to the oldest founder still alive. Measured across two centuries, the average station-holder was sixty-three on a crew whose average age was thirty-one, and more than half of all handovers were deaths.
A sleeper does not eat. EXPANDED CRYO BANKS and AUTOMATED SCHEDULING both say fewer people are awake to feed, and the food model was counting the whole manifest. Food follows the watch now — a thin watch really does cost less. Power still follows the complement, and that difference is deliberate: the pod is drawing its load to keep the sleeper under.
A LARGE COMPUTER CORE and MANUAL CONTROLS THROUGHOUT do something. Opposite answers to the same question, and neither had ever been connected to anything. Both run through the duty stations now, and each turns on you as the thing it rests on gives way — the core as the bridge degrades, the crew as technical literacy thins.
ADVANCE YEAR tells you when it will not work, and locked options say why in your language.
The demo is a complete short run now, not the opening years of a long one. It reaches its world in the first dozen years, lands, plays the colony's first decade, and then closes on the same ending the full game writes — generated from your own run, naming the world you took, the people you woke and the works you raised.
Refusing a world no longer ends the demo. The old cutoff was stamped the moment the first planet came into range and never moved, so flying on to look for something better — the judgement the whole game is built around — meant spending the rest of the demo in transit, never landing and never seeing an ending. The clock starts at landfall now. Passing on a world costs you time instead of the rest of the demo.
It ends on a real ending. It used to stop on a card. It closes on the settlement's own epilogue and illustration, with a note about what the full game carries beyond it.
Saves from 0.4.x load. A mid-voyage save written by 0.4.7 opens in 0.5.10, carries its year, its population and its full roster including the dead, and plays on from where it stopped. The systems added since — the colony century, the science bench, the watch roster, the outfitting budget — start at their defaults for that run. A 0.4.x save has no record of them.
Thanks to everyone who played the experimental branch for eight releases and wrote up what they found. Most of the repairs above started as somebody's report.