VoidCraft Playtest · published
The void shifts. The Steam playtest signs in again, the Void Monument opens, and a long list of fixes lands.
Steam sign-in on the playtest works again.
Every playtest build since the middle of August was put together for the wrong Steam app, so when you launched from Steam the game could not start its sign-in at all, and no amount of verifying files or reinstalling could fix it on your side. A build made for the playtest app is live now. Let Steam update the Playtest install to pick this up, then launch again and sign-in starts on its own.
Bounties are for hunting commanders, not machines.
The bounty you collect for destroying the fleet of a commander marked as a griefer was also paying out when one side of the fight was an independent world rather than a real person. That was never the intent - the marker that brands a griefer already ignores raids on independent worlds, so the bounty should have ignored them too. From now on a bounty only pays when both sides are real commanders. No balance you hold changes: nobody had ever collected one of these.
The battle report tells you when the fight was actually decided.
A battle keeps running after one side has lost everything that can shoot back, and until now the report only showed the total length - so a sixty-second wipe that took eight minutes to finish looked like an eight-minute fight. The report now shows both: when the outcome was settled, and how long the mop-up ran afterwards. Nothing about the battle itself changed, including how long it takes and who wins. On web and Steam.
The ships circling your planet are the ships you actually own.
Your planet view drew every small hull as a Light Fighter, so a world holding one Light Fighter and one Recon Drone showed two Light Fighters in orbit. Anyone counting what was flying was counting a ship they did not have. Every ship in close orbit now flies as itself. This was not a rare case: it was happening on almost every planet in the game with small craft stationed on it. On web and in the Steam client.
Diplomacy no longer blacks out the game when your motion setting changes.
If your device switched its reduce-motion setting while the Diplomacy screen was open, the whole game could go black rather than just that panel, leaving nothing to click and no way back except a reload. The orbital preview was reusing a display surface it had already shut down. That no longer happens, and if the preview ever fails now, it shows a message in its own panel while the rest of the game keeps working. On web and Steam.
You can see what crawlers cost to run before you buy them.
Crawlers have raised your mines' energy demand since the middle of the month, but their card only mentioned what they add to your output, so the running cost came as a surprise. The card now states it plainly: a crawler raises mine energy demand by the same share it adds to mine output. The warning before an order that would push you into the red is unchanged. Live on web and Steam now, mobile with the next app update.
Every ship's combat profile draws its own shape again.
The four-point chart on a ship's dossier had been drawing almost the same outline for nearly every hull in the game, so putting two ships side by side told you nothing. It was measuring each ship against the largest thing in the fleet, and the Deathstar is so far ahead on hull and shields that everything else got squashed to the same tiny mark. The chart now scales so a ship's real strengths and weaknesses show, and no two hulls draw the same silhouette. Live on web and Steam now, mobile with the next app update.
Recycling crawler wrecks pays what crawlers are actually worth.
Crawlers went up in price at the end of July, but the wreckage they leave behind was still being valued at the old price, so recycling a field full of crawler debris paid out about a fifth of what it should have. Every other hull was unaffected. Debris and combat losses now use the crawler's real cost, so a recycler run over a crawler-heavy field returns what you would expect. Your existing crawlers are untouched.
Battle reports now say what you sent and what you lost, separately.
The report listed ship counts without making clear which was your fleet and which was your casualties, and at least one commander read an opponent's losses as the force that attacked him. Attacker and defender rows now spell it out side by side, as ships sent against ships lost with a percentage, and the defender's are labelled as stationed rather than sent. The resource figure is now under a heading that says resources destroyed, so it is no longer the biggest unlabelled number on the page. On web and Steam now, mobile with the next app update.
Bash protection now measures a fleet by what it actually shoots with.
The rule that stops much stronger commanders farming much weaker ones works off a strength score, and that score was reading an old stats table instead of the one combat actually uses. Light Fighters counted for more than four times their real firepower, so a fleet built around them looked far stronger than it was. That cut both ways: you could be flagged for attacking someone you had not really overmatched, and a defender flying mostly Light Fighters could look strong enough to make a genuine mismatch look fair. The score now reads the same numbers your ships fight with. This one is server side, so it is already live everywhere.
Asteroid belts show up in every sector you can see, not just your own.
The flat map was only drawing belts in your home sector. Reach any other sector by jumping with the chevrons, by following a fleet, through a shared coordinate link, or by clicking a planet in the 3D view, and its belts were simply not there. They were in your data the whole time and just never got drawn. Only one route into a sector, picking it out of your discovered-sectors list, happened to work, which is why the map looked like it worked some of the time. Every route now shows the same belts. On web and Steam.
Answering an ally's distress call no longer costs you ships you did not lose.
If you flew to defend an ally whose planet was over its ship-parking limit, the penalty they owe for going over could reach into your returning fleet and change what came home. It could hand you back ships that had been destroyed, and with the numbers the other way around it could take ships that had survived. That penalty is theirs to pay, and you can neither see their parking situation nor fix it, so it should never have touched your roster. It does not now. This one is server side, so it is already live everywhere.
Moon builds you already had running now use your planet's real speed.
When moon construction started taking its pace from the planet below it, that only reached builds you began afterwards. Anything already under way kept the countdown it was handed before your Nanite Factories counted for anything, so two moons on very different worlds could crawl along at exactly the same rate. We have re-timed every moon build that was still running against the planet it is actually attached to, so some are finishing a great deal sooner, nothing got slower, and no progress you had already made was lost. This one is server side, so it is already live everywhere.
Derived materials no longer vanish on a one-way trip.
Send a fleet out to deploy ships somewhere, or to settle a new colony, and any derived materials in the hold were taken from the planet you left and then arrived nowhere. They simply stopped existing. Both trips hand them over properly now: a deploy delivers what the destination has room for and sends any surplus back to the planet it came from, and a colonisation brings the whole load home, because a brand new colony has nowhere to store it yet. This one is server side, so it is already live everywhere.
Skipping the intro now actually skips it.
On mobile, tapping a button on one of the first-run intro screens and then tapping Skip straight after could drag you back into the intro a moment later, on a screen you had just chosen to leave. The app was finishing the first tap's work after you had already moved on. It now checks that you are still on that screen before acting, on all three intro screens this could happen on. This one is in the mobile app, so it arrives with the next app update.
The Monument now shows the Dark Matter you actually hold.
If you committed Dark Matter to the Void Monument and came back to the panel later in the same session, the balance shown was the one from when you first connected, not what you had left. The MAX shortcut could then line up a commit bigger than your real balance, which the server would refuse. The panel now reads your live balance every time it opens. What you committed was always recorded correctly; only the number on screen lagged.
The Monument offers you an amount you can actually commit.
The Void Monument opened with a commit button set to 100 Dark Matter whatever you were holding, so anyone with less than that met a dead button quoting a number they did not have, next to a field showing a different one. It now starts at whatever you can afford, and the button and the field always agree. If you hold 100 or more it still starts at 100. Live on web now; it reaches the Steam client with its next build, and mobile with the next app update.
Collect a colony's resources in one click.
Hauling a colony's stockpile home used to take three moves: send transporters out, switch to that planet, then send them back loaded. Every colony in your planet roster except the one you are viewing now has a Collect button, and one press does the whole trip. It loads every idle hauler stationed there, fills them, and sends them home; if there is more than they can carry it takes an even share of metal, crystal and deuterium and leaves the rest behind, and it tells you what it left. Derived materials are not picked up, so those stay on the colony. Your warships stay where they are. Live on web now; it reaches the Steam client with its next build, and mobile with the next app update.
Finished contracts are out of your way.
Completed contracts used to sit between your active ones and the board you accept new ones from, so you scrolled past finished business to reach anything you could act on. They now sit at the bottom, under the board. On a small window that is a whole screen of scrolling saved, which is exactly the reason the commander who asked for this gave. Live on web now; it reaches the Steam client with its next build, and mobile with the next app update.
The Void Monument is open.
At the galactic core, where the first stars collapsed, something was built to remember. Commit Dark Matter to it in any amount you choose and it is consumed inscribing your name, ranked publicly against everyone else who has. It buys nothing at all: no stat, no resource, no faster timer, no queue slot, so a commander who never touches it is not behind one who has. Committing is permanent, the standing lists only those who have committed, and it resets when the universe does. Live on web now; it reaches the Steam client with its next build, and mobile with the next app update.
Deploying a fleet can bring its derived materials along.
Moving ships to another one of your worlds and moving derived materials there used to be two separate trips: transport the materials first, then send the fleet after. A deploy now offers the same forged-materials picker a transport has, so one dispatch does both. They share the hold with your other cargo, the destination keeps what it has room for, and anything over its storage limit goes straight back to the planet it came from rather than being lost. Live on web now; it reaches the Steam client with its next build, and mobile with the next app update.
Defences are worth building now.
Every static defence could absorb roughly a tenth of what it cost you, so a defensive line evaporated in the opening seconds of a fight and contributed almost nothing to it. Six of them now soak about what they cost, the same rule your ships have always followed: a Rocket Launcher that costs you 3,000 metal now takes 3,000 damage to kill instead of 350, and a Plasma Turret 150,000 instead of 15,750. Shield domes are unchanged, because they were always meant to be siege walls rather than guns. This does change who wins fights - a defence line that used to lose to a cheaper attacking fleet now beats it, which is the whole point. This one is server side, so it is already live everywhere.
Graviton now costs the energy it was always meant to.
Graviton asks for no metal, crystal or deuterium on purpose - energy was always the intended gate, and that gate was never actually being checked, so the research finished the moment you queued it. It now needs 300,000 spare energy on your home planet, and if you are short the game tells you exactly how much by rather than just refusing. Levels you have already researched are untouched.