## New Features
**The planet persists between trips**
- Tunnels you dig stay dug — the world remembers your excavation across trips
- Each run pins a single world layout instead of regenerating one
- Shipping reseeds ore rather than rebuilding the world around you
**Trips replace days**
- The day countdown is gone. Earthquakes are scheduled events with causes, not a clock
- Ore converts to money only when loaded onto the shuttle
- The shuttle holds its window and waits for your quota; its departure ends the trip
- Cargo loads ore by ore on contact — no confirmation prompt
**Hangar tutorial** — a full guided intro before you ever land: service beat, a fog-of-war lesson, the real shuttle, and a pause menu
**Faction endings and the Engine economy**
- Route commitment at the third divergence beat, with cross-tree gating
- Communion expanded into a six-tier Engine economy
- Ending devices exist as real items, with a distinct resolution per ending
- Corp credit: debt accrues, compounds and escalates, and the quota measures your ledger
**The envoy** — the thing riding your hull is a character now: its own pose grid, behaviour system, and a head that tracks your cursor
**Controller and Steam Deck support** — full bindings, device-aware prompts, and copy that names the right button
**New visual systems** — parallax 3D structures for the shop, sell, refuel and shuttle pads; split surface and underground backdrops; two-layer surface ember weather; pixel-art caldera backdrop and sky
**Quality of life** — periodic auto-save; radar and planet map share one fixed window; save slots show cash and time played; hub facilities open on an interact key
## Improvements
- The envoy's voice rebuilt as a small alien creature rather than a fluent speaker — broken from first contact onward, and it never learns your sense of time
- Corp no longer counts shipments at you; deadlines read as time remaining, so the work feels indefinite
- Depth takes the primary instrument slot
- HUD readouts glow through real post-processing, with an emissivity slider
- Bay lighting rebuilt to come from the ship's interior, and light now soaks into solid rock instead of stopping at a hard line
- Hard rock only slows digging a little; ore pickup reach widened
- The ship sits properly on the surface it rests on, and the sell shuttle clears the caldera floor
- Radio volume cut — the hangar teaches mechanisms, the planet carries the story
- Neutral tonemapping and a hard-edged vignette to scope the view
- Dig debris and engine smoke read as pixel chunks
- Facilities moved into the shop; shipping no longer opens a panel
- Prebaked maps compressed 29x and covered by tests
## Bug Fixes
- Fixed a death-on-load caused by lava filling the world during generation
- Fixed empty prebaked maps loading, and added validation so it cannot happen again
- Fixed the ship deadlocking permanently when breaching the surface
- Fixed the ship sinking into terrain its drill could not clear
- Fixed Corp re-charging standing for debt already on the books
- Fixed the quota counting money earned instead of ore delivered
- Fixed runaway cargo drain and an empty-hold edge case
- Fixed the sell prompt outliving the sale and following the wrong object
- Fixed labels showing missing glyphs; every label now has a font fallback
- Fixed worm-channel messages appearing off screen
- Fixed resolved objectives reopening and flashing FAILED
- Fixed salvage wrecks not drawing in the world
- Fixed typing in the report box firing gameplay actions behind it
- Fixed lava_world saves flattening the HUD layout table
- Fixed the debug sonar cooldown never actually reaching zero
- Fixed the envoy appearing before the alert announcing it
- Fixed earthquake lava rising high enough to touch the ship
- The quake objective now resolves when you reach the surface, and the copy tells you to climb rather than run for the shuttle
## Technical
- Shared HUD Canvas prefab across gameplay scenes
- Gameplay scene package: profile-driven scene construction and bootstrap
- Single source of truth for faction gating
- Numerous domain-reload crash fixes in the editor