SkyChart patch Notes v0.2.43.23 to v0.2.43.98

Playtest Update — v0.2.43.98

The playtest has moved a long way since it opened. Dozens of new systems, a lot of stability work, and Casey's red pen all over the patch notes. Here's what's new, grouped so you can skim.

Bigger Systems

• R&D Lab. Spend cash on research projects in four branches: Operations (cost cuts), Service (prestige and cabin bonuses), Fleet (earlier aircraft, more range), Analytics (better recommender, high-load-factor yield). Techs gate by era, stack by branch, and every branch has a capstone bonus that fires when you finish its non-capstone techs. Your rivals research too. Queue up projects so funding auto-starts when one completes. Find it under HUD → Routes/Analysis → Research.

• Carrier Strategy. New campaign picker asks what kind of airline you want to be. Balanced runs like a normal SkyChart campaign. Low-Cost cuts operating costs 15% at the price of 10% lower fares. Full-Service pays 10% more per plane and charges 10% more per seat. Cargo Specialist is neutral in passenger mode but crushes it in Cargo with -30% operating costs and +15% revenue. Stacks with your executive bonuses.

• Cabin Product Quality. Your cabin config decides how many seats of each class you sell; quality decides how good each seat is. Push fares up (+20% on max-quality Business) and pull passengers in (better seats steal competitors' bookings). Monthly upkeep scales quadratically with quality, so maxing everything drains cash fast. Rivals arrive with archetype-seeded quality — premium carriers already run top-tier First and Business.

• Financial Markets. Every airline is now publicly traded. Share price tracks your book value, profits, reputation, debt, and dividend policy. New Markets panel (HUD → Routes → $ Markets) shows your price with an 8-quarter sparkline, dividend stepper, issue/buyback buttons, and a rival leaderboard. Markets pill on the HUD shows your live share price next to your cash.

• Credit Rating. AAA to D letter grade computed every quarter from debt, profit, cash runway, and whether you've been bleeding red. Rating changes your effective loan cap (AAA borrows 1.5x the base, D borrows nothing) and your monthly interest rate (AAA pays half, D pays 3.5x). Rivals get rated too. Watch their ratings slide and their borrowing dry up.

• Hostile Takeovers. Let your rating slip into junk and rivals with cash start circling. When one of them can cover 120% of your market cap, you get a three-month ultimatum. A pause-the-game modal offers Emergency Buyback (30% of the offer, +10 rep), Poison Pill (permanent 50% share dilution, -5 rep, stock price takes a lasting hit), or Accept (game over). Miss the deadline and they win by default.

• CO2 Emissions Market. Starting 2005 the flat carbon tax becomes a market price that drifts between $50 and $300 per quota. New CO2 Market panel lets you buy quotas when the price is low, hold them, and draw down when the market spikes. Shortfalls cost double. Carbon Offset investments still halve the base before the market kicks in, so an offset-plus-crash combo is cheap and a no-offset-plus-spike is brutal.

• City Brand & Advertising. Every city has a brand awareness score from 0 to 100. Buy campaigns from the City panel to push it up: Local Spot $100K/+5, Regional $500K/+15, National Blitz $1M/+25. Brand compounds across both endpoints of a route. CMO executive makes campaigns 50% more effective. Decays 1 point/quarter — marketing is a subscription, not a one-time buy.

• Codeshare Agreements. Pick an alliance partner on any player route for a +10% demand bump from their frequent flyers. Partner takes 30% of that route's revenue as a distribution fee. Great on busy hub routes; questionable on quiet leisure runs.

• Noise Regulations. Every aircraft has a noise rating now. Stage 2 caps from 1970, Stage 3 from 1985, Stage 4 from 2006. Non-compliant aircraft still fly but lose 15% of their passengers to night curfews and slot restrictions. Aircraft spec sheets show a green tick or red cross against the current stage.

• Bilateral Agreements. From 1946 onward, cross-region routes need a signed agreement with the destination country. Cost depends on relations: friendly nation $100K, neutral ~$500K, hostile up to $2M. One agreement covers every future route between that region pair.

• Freedoms of the Air. Optional sandbox toggle on the campaign picker. With it on, cabotage (both endpoints inside one foreign region) is blocked unless you have +75 relations with that region. Off by default.

• Corporate Espionage (offensive). $300K gets you a PR hit piece on a rival. Lands three times out of four, chipping 5 points off their prestige. The fourth time you get caught, your reputation drops 3 and relations with their home region drop 10. Three-month cooldown.

Fleet & Strategy Tools

• Hub Investment. Every hub you own has six dimensions of monthly spend: Hangar Slots, Parking Discount, Transfer Efficiency, Maintenance Discount, Market Prestige, Range Bonus. Spend on a diminishing-returns curve — early dollars beat late dollars. HQ gets a 20% boost on every dimension.

• HQ Designation & Relocation. One of your hubs carries the HQ flag. Auto-assigned on your first hub buy. Move it later from the Hub Investment panel, but moving costs 25% of current HQ investment, with a recency multiplier (5x within 2 years, 3x within 5, 2x within 10). HQ also grants +5 hangar slots on top of the per-hub-level bonus.

• Hangar. Buy aircraft without putting them on a route. Every spec sheet has a new BUY TO HANGAR button. HUD pill shows [Hangar N] whenever you have planes parked. Monthly parking fees scale by size and era ($1K for a DC-3, $24K for a modern jumbo).

• Used Aircraft Market. Planes you sell and fleets of dissolved rivals stay on the market instead of vanishing. 6% depreciation per year with a 25% floor. Listings expire after 24 months.

• REPLACE ALL AGING. Big button at the top of Fleet Age & Retirement. Opens a confirmation sheet with one row per at-risk route: old aircraft, proposed replacement, fleet size, net cost, opt-out checkboxes. Three replacement policies: Cheapest That Works, Best Range + Capacity, Same Model Family. Old fleet goes to the hangar — nothing destroyed.

• Never Buy Again. Every aircraft spec sheet has a toggle. Banned aircraft disappear from every player-facing picker (route creation, swaps, recommender, bulk-buy). Still shown dimmed in the catalog so you can un-ban. Two lists — per-campaign and profile-wide — so your 2020 DC-3 ban doesn't pollute your 1930 prop-tour save.

• Capital Actions. Issue shares to raise cash (dilutes and drops price, capped +25% per action). Buy back shares to concentrate ownership (raises price, capped -30%). Both charge a 3% round-trip fee. Find them below the dividend stepper in the Markets panel.

• Research Queue. Line up techs to auto-start when an active project finishes. Reorder with up/down arrows, remove with X. Queued techs show a badge on their cards.

• Strategic Advisor cleanup. The New Routes tab no longer suggests routes that lose money on every aircraft in range. Worst Routes got a CLOSE ALL NEGATIVE button so you can shutter every loss-maker in one click. Indexing bug where buttons paired to the wrong row after a sort change is fixed.

AI Rivals Got Smarter

• Era-scaled bankruptcy. Rivals used to die in the jet age because the bankruptcy threshold was flat at -$500K for every era. Now it scales: -$300K pre-war, up to -$2M modern. Jet-age widebody operators can survive a bad month.

• Emergency loans. Rivals can borrow against their route network and hubs when cash slips below threshold. Same interest rate you pay. Keeps healthy airlines from dropping dead over a temporary cash crunch.

• Replacement rivals. When one dissolves and the field drops below three competitors, a new airline walks in — curated name pool 70% of the time, procedurally generated the other 30%. Their starting cash scales with both era and your success.

• Subsidiary acquisitions. Acquiring a bankrupt rival no longer absorbs them on the spot. Buy them as a subsidiary (they keep their brand and leaderboard slot, stop competing with you, routes fly your flag). Integrate later for 10% of their total assets to fold them completely.

• Real-time auction. Acquisitions are now a live bidding modal. Game pauses. Three buttons: Bid +10%, Bid +25%, Walk Away. Rivals react on archetype-tuned timers — budget carriers snap fast, premium carriers deliberate. Reserve is 60% of target book value.

• Legacy rivals stockpile new aircraft. When a fresh type hits the market, legacy archetypes pile up copies in their hangar. Budget and regional carriers still buy just-in-time.

• Smarter R&D picks. Rivals rank available techs by bang-for-buck instead of walking the registry in file order. Premium carriers finish Service, then cross over into Ops instead of idling.

Stability & Performance

• Bankruptcy cascade fix. Chapter 11 with a big route network used to lock the game for 10+ seconds. Emergency restructuring was parking aircraft in the hangar instead of selling them, so cash never recovered and the loop closed every single route. Now it actually sells planes, recovers cash, and stops the moment you're above the -$500K line.

• Stacked-modal freeze. Hostile takeover plus quarterly report at the same moment used to deadlock the game — the takeover paused the tree, the report's Continue button stopped responding. Fixed across all modal windows (settings, save/load, achievement popups, tutorial, incident reports, 14 total) so no future combination can wedge you.

• Spacebar pause. Pressing SPACE sometimes didn't pause, or paused and immediately unpaused. SPACE is bound to both the generic confirm action and the pause toggle, so clicking the pause button then pressing space fired the toggle twice per frame. Debounced now.

• Routes vanishing from the map. Between in-game 1956 and 1958, route lines slowly disappeared. Save-and-reload brought them back. Two internal route tables were supposed to agree and occasionally didn't. Now if drift happens the map rebuilds itself on the next frame.

• Route Recommender threading. Rewrote the scanner so workers never read live GameManager state. Fixes the Mac crash in the dictionary get path and the rare Windows autosave-while-scanning crash.

• Save format migration. Every save now carries a format version and runs through a migration gate on load. Older saves automatically pick up a retrofit hub investment grant so your existing network actually benefits from the new investment system.

• Perf passes. Monthly route math cached hub and cabin quality lookups inside the competitors loop (thousands of dict ops saved on big networks). World map skips tile updates when the camera isn't moving. AI cash drips moved off a dict lookup onto instance fields. Markets panel batches its refresh so a quarterly snapshot rebuilds it once instead of 13 times.

• Signal leaks fixed. Upgrade Recommender and Worst Routes had lambdas that could fire on freed rows, flooding the log and locking the game during bulk operations. Both cleaned up.

UI & Quality of Life

• New theme: Sunset. Warm navy and amber replace the cold cyan cockpit. The main menu, HUD, every window's chrome, and every panel picks up the new palette.

• Two more themes: Midnight Cockpit and Daylight. Midnight is the old cold-cyan look. Daylight is a proper light mode for reading under actual sunlight. Settings → UI Theme switches between them live.

• Theme authoring. The full UI palette lives in a single editable resource file. Drop a new .tres into data/themes/ and it shows up in the picker.

• Weather severity dial. Settings slider from 0 (no weather) through 1.0 (realistic baseline) to 2.0 (monsoons hit harder, airports close more often). Per-campaign override in the new-campaign picker.

• Steam Deck campaign load. Clicking New Campaign used to stall for around 7 seconds before the Era Select card appeared. Now the loading overlay paints immediately and city markers batch in across frames. Click-to-card is under 1.5 seconds on Steam Deck.

• Steam Deck virtual cursor. The controller cursor was rendering beneath the tutorial card — had to fall back to SteamOS's trackpad cursor to see it. Fixed. Cursor now renders on top of every overlay.

• Cloud save conflict UI. When your local save and Steam Cloud disagree on timestamp, a dialog pops up with both dates and three buttons: Use Cloud, Keep Local, Cancel. No more silent overwrites when you play across devices.

• Seven new HUD hotkeys. Aircraft Timeline (Y), Hub Investments (H), Subsidiaries (J), Cabin Quality (C), Markets (K), Research (G), CO2 Market (O). Help & Controls now correctly shows [F1].

• Draggable window recovery. Double-click any title bar to reset the window to default size and recenter. Windows that open bigger than the viewport auto-snap back inside.

• Tutorial expansion. Six new tutorial chapters covering R&D, modern aviation levers (carrier strategy, cabin quality, city brand, CO2, noise, bilateral agreements), network cooperation (codeshare, freedoms, espionage, cloud conflicts), and financial markets. 21 chapters total now.

• Help Guide rewrite. Hit F1. Thirteen new sections covering every feature shipped this playtest, plus corrected AI aggression numbers and the current R&D effect values.

• Translations. All 29 supported languages now have baseline machine-translation coverage on every tutorial step and patch note. Weblate's human translators polish from there.

Known Followups

• Per-class transfer-pax routing (connecting passengers carrying their class through the whole journey) is wired but only takes effect on routes with custom cabin overrides. Default all-economy routes are unchanged.

• A few Tier.MODAL panels (achievement popups, event explainer, incident report, save/load, settings, tutorial, win condition, and a handful more) still need their process-mode flag retrofit. A new smoke test catches any new modal shipping without the flag, so this class of freeze is fenced going forward.

Thanks for playtesting. If something breaks, attach skychart_diagnostics.log from your user data folder to your report — Casey's flight recorder is finally verbose enough to point at exactly where things went sideways.