The Depot opens, the sky fills up, and fireworks means "Hello!"

Hey Pioneers.

Time for the first big update! The Depot is open and it has opinions about your train. There are 189 wanderers in the sky and they're finally the right size. And you can now form a guild with someone by pulling up alongside them and asking.

The world out there is still corrupted. It isn't lost, it's waiting for someone to go and clean it up. Here's what you've got to work with now.

The Depot

The Depot is where you build your train. Parts hang off named mount points, and mounts nest inside other mounts, so a lamp sits on a bracket, the bracket sits on a hood, and the hood sits on the engine. You're assembling a machine, not decorating a box.

New this update: it talks back.

• It critiques your car. Name a design and you get a verdict. Fourteen voices, all with opinions, all arguing over your shoulder while you work.
• Same car, same verdict, every time. It reads the actual design. Darken a lamp two shades and the line about the lamp changes. You can absolutely sit there poking at it until it says something nice.
• RANDOM and RANDOMS are different buttons. RANDOM gives you a clean matched car you could take out right now. RANDOMS gives you chaos, mismatched ends, bare mounts, and every so often something brilliant.
• Templates for every slot in the build menu, so you're never staring at an empty chassis.

189 wanderers, finally the right size

Twenty-seven airframe families, nine tiers each. Argosy, Balloon, Biplane, Carrier, Catamaran, Dart, Dirigible, Dragonfly, Dreadnought, Fortress, Galleon, Gantry, Gimbal, Gnat, Grampus, Gyrocopter, Kite, Leviathan, Lugger, Maelstrom, Manta, Monitor, Packet, Skiff, Trireme, Tug, Wisp. That's 189 distinct craft, and yes, they're all out there.

Here's the bug we fixed. The middle of the tier ladder had gone stale, a tier-3 wanderer was flying around with pods sized for tier 1. It looked like a small problem right up until it opened fire. Pods now scale properly the whole way up, 70uu at the bottom to 366uu at the top, and the prop discs grew with them.

Mid-tier enemies now look as dangerous as they always were. Not sorry about that. It's better this way.

Your banner is yours

Take a train into a shared world and you're flying your own colours, pulled from your Steam identity. Same banner every session, on every world. Two strangers who meet at a water stop are enemies by default, and they'll still be enemies the next time they meet.

Co-op and PvP aren't separate modes. Co-op starts everyone on one team, which is just one big guild. PvP gives everyone their own colours. Same world either way, and a free-for-all can turn into something else halfway through.

Guilds happen in the world, not in a menu

Drive up to another Pioneer's train and ask. They have to say yes. You can't add someone without their agreement and they can't add you, so both trains have to list each other before anything changes.

Once you're in:

• Your shots pass straight through each other. No ricochets off a friend's boiler, no stray shells, no turret quietly locking onto someone on your side.
• Leaving is instant, and loud. Walk out and every train that was flying with you knows immediately.
• Kicking is the same. Drop someone and you're hostile again in the same tick, both ways.
• Nothing is spent. Leave, re-form, leave again. Nobody's counting.

And the trains announce it themselves. A green firework goes up over the train that joined, and the whole session sees it. Say no and a red one goes up instead. Leave or get kicked, and you burn red over your own roof. Subtlety was never on the table.

Playing together

A world is a seed and a difficulty. Share those and a region, and your friends land in the same one. Add a PIN if you'd rather keep it yours.

Drive far enough and the region border gives way to the next one. On an open world, the players already out there just become audible. No loading screen in between.

Two to eight Pioneers a session at launch. Bigger crews do work and we want to push it further, but we'd rather give you a number we've watched hold than one we're hoping for.

That's the update. Go build something ridiculous and take it out, there's a lot of good ground still sitting under all that rust.

See you out there, Pioneers.