2026-05-18 — Dev Update: Manual, Capacity Pools, Vocabulary (May 16-18)
📖 Manual (NEW)
A real in-game manual landed. Press "?" anywhere or hit a triggered codex popup and you get a full-window panel with a captioned screenshot of the actual UI, arrows pointing at the relevant buttons. 54 authored entries across First Steps, Builder, Tactical, Galaxy Map, Empire Command, and Research. 47 annotated screenshots auto-captured by a new visual-harness annotator. Old advisor hints route through the same pipeline now — one content store, two surfaces.
💰 Capacity Pools — Builder Overhaul
Modules and struts are free at placement. Build-time credit math is gone. Two pools gate what you can fit on the chassis:
Module Slots — earned by Tendril milestones. Spend the right kind of progress, unlock the right kind of module.
Frame — silhouette budget tied to your Core tier. Larger ships need a bigger reactor at the heart. The convex hull of your strut layout is the cost.
Live Frame preview at the cursor, budget bar turns orange before it goes red, shape tools refuse curves you can't afford. Leviathan and Titan thresholds dropped so they're reachable through normal progression.
🔤 Vocabulary Sweep
Shards → Module Slots
Structure → Frame
Energy → Supplies (player-facing only — Sliver Energy stays Sliver Energy in the lore)
🌿 Research Tab Polish
"Core/Tendrils" tab renamed to "Research."
4-cell Leader fragment ledger at the top of the Tendril Tree.
Next-tier progress chip in the header.
Hover a milestone, see what unlocks.
Locked synergy bridges are clickable so you can read the requirement before you meet it.
Splinter Core tier chip on bonded captain rows in Diplomacy.
Builder stats panel previews the next Core tier so you know what you're climbing toward.
🎨 Polish
Dead modules char visibly and tint progressively as damage stacks — corpses read as corpses now.
First-launch audio bus defaults set sensibly (Master 75 / Music 65 / SFX 85 / UI 85) so new players don't get an eardrum check on the main menu.
Main menu modes renamed Tutorial Campaign / Conquest Campaign.
Sol M1 intro wall folded into the mission briefing — one less UI layer to click through.
🐛 Fixes
Builder redraws immediately on strut-edit selection and node-drag motion (highlight + node position used to lag a frame).
Art Adjuster right-side panel no longer clips when blueprints expand vertically.
Galaxy map HUD codex button cleared from the TopBar right edge where it overlapped other controls.
Doubled "+" sign in the Builder Power row.
Codex editor's upload modal no longer appears on page load; switching collections no longer leaves the previous editor stacked on top.
🛠️ Dev Tooling
A new web-based codex editor — load the JSON, edit hints/briefings/sequences inline, upload replacement screenshots, kick the annotator. A big chunk of the three-day output is the tooling that made the manual content possible.