Update 0.20.0 — Nine Languages, a Job Board, Flares & a Graphics Menu

The first big update since 0.16.0 — four internal versions rolled into one. Highlights: nine languages, a job board, full control over repairs, flares for the night, and a proper graphics menu.

⚠ Saves from 0.16.0 still load — no format change. Two things affect running saves retroactively: modules now take different amounts of punishment based on their mass, and the big generators (turbine, twin diesel) finally output their real values — an existing cruiser with a turbine now makes more power but also burns more fuel.

🆕 New

• Nine languages. Alongside German and English: Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Turkish and Simplified Chinese. On first launch the game picks your system language; you can switch in the options with no restart. The manual is fully translated too, with dedicated fonts for Japanese, Chinese, Cyrillic and Turkish characters.
• A job board shows what the crew is doing and what's waiting — sorted by state (active, waiting, open, disabled), each with a count, filtered by work type, every row showing its location on board. The game keeps running while it's open.
• Repairs are now controllable — set wear, module battle damage and hull damage separately: automatic, never, or only once you approve the job in the board. The setting is kept when you save.
• Flares light up the night. A new FLARE row in the combat console: FIRE launches a flare that floods roughly a kilometre in light and drifts down on a parachute. At most three hang in the sky at once, and you craft the ammo yourself at the ammo fabricator.
• Core drilling is now hands-on — a shift profile instead of a timer: you hold the pressure in each shift's target band, cut into ore veins, get quiet night runs and seized drill heads that you respond to with a button. An experienced crew member in the extraction seat widens the target band for you.
• A drone landing pad as its own build module — placed only on open deck under open sky, with its own storage field beside it that only the harvester drone unloads into. Drone bays now require landing pads.
• The camera shakes when you fire and when you're hit — a directional kick from heavy artillery, a rumble from lighter calibers that fades with distance. Its own slider under Options ▸ Gameplay ▸ Shake, fully switchable off.
• The manual finally has an entrance — F1 in-game, or the "Manual" button in the pause menu, opens all 39 articles. While it's open the simulation is paused: the cruiser doesn't roll on, and the clock, wear and swarm all halt.
• A dedicated graphics menu with 22 sliders instead of four, across three tabs: render resolution (100/85/75/50 %), frame-rate cap, shadow distance, terrain and foliage shadows, foliage view distance, anti-aliasing, texture resolution and filtering, brightness. Volumetric fog, volumetric clouds, ambient occlusion, contact shadows, bloom, film grain, vignette and motion blur can each be turned off individually. One button resets everything to factory settings.
• On first launch the game picks a quality level based on your GPU instead of always maxing out.
• A Discord button in the main menu links straight to our server.
• The cruiser's guns in the main menu look around — they pan, pause, and pick a new point to watch; the heavy barrels slowly, the point-defenses quickly.
• A shift-change hint on the speed instrument. When the driver at the helm changes, the speed instrument briefly shows a "shift change" note.
• Clusters of crew afflictions are reported in batches — for sunburn, hypothermia, heatstroke, dehydration or starvation, each affliction gets one combined warning with the number of those affected.
• Swarm nest state is saved — cleared-out nests and the columns travelling between them now carry over in your save.
• A chair and a second potted plant are in the colony build menu — the chair couldn't be built before.

⚙️ Changed & Balance

• Modules take different amounts of damage based on mass — a wall lamp bursts on the first artillery hit, while drives, big generators and heavy guns soak up many times more.
• Artillery does less damage — Mk. 4 and Mk. 6 now deal a quarter of their previous value per hit.
• The turbine and twin diesel output their real values — nearly double and triple the power respectively, at double and quadruple the fuel thirst.
• The swarm now attacks everyone, not just you — enemy cruisers get swarmed and fire back at the columns with their own guns. A column will also break out in daytime if another ship nearby is in a fight, not only you.
• Enemy formations now appear at least in pairs instead of alone.
• Swarm columns travel more slowly across the map.
• A new game starts with more supplies (minerals and scrap roughly doubled, plus five flares), with its own power generators on board and a storage zone already set up.
• Heat shimmer only kicks in during real blazing heat instead of nearly all day.
• Air conditioning cycles the room air twice as fast.
• The key hints are now a single bar at the bottom center — laid out the same in driving, shipyard and colony, with the mode switch always in the same spot. An active build tool adds a second row with its keys.
• ESC now closes the last-opened fullscreen window first (map, manual, options, build catalog and so on) and only then opens the pause menu.
• Press T to pause and resume the autopilot as long as a course is set and the helm is manned — the course is kept. If a helmsman or course is missing, the key now tells you what's missing. A permanent line in the scanner shows whether the autopilot is driving, paused, or has no course.
• Flak and artillery guns throw a much bigger muzzle flash with smoke; the Phalanx Mk. 7 shows it on both barrels, and its impact effect on the target is twice as large.
• The cargo container has its own crate model and no longer looks like a fuel tank.
• The cookspot is called "Galley" throughout the game — previously it read "Kitchen" or "Galley" in different places.
• Trees have a simplified collision shape — ramming into them feels coarser, but costs less compute.
• The night battle is mixed more calmly — "Clash On The Dunes" is quieter, and the high-intensity night combat music draws on fewer recordings.
• A different cruiser is shown in the main menu.
• On the highest graphics tier, V-Sync is off by default — higher frame rates, at the cost of possible tearing; it stays on for the other two tiers.
• Shadows reach 500 m out of the box instead of 150 — this applies to existing saves too; you can dial it back in the graphics menu.
• The game starts on the medium graphics tier instead of the highest.
• Textures only load at the resolution actually needed — this lowers memory use, especially with little video memory.

➖ Removed

• The large, collapsible CONTROLS box in colony mode is gone — the colony keys now live in the shared key bar; the camera commands it used to list have been dropped.

🔧 Fixed

• The metrics overlay at the top is no longer shown from the start — in 0.16.0 our development metrics tool ran visibly in the finished game and cost frame rate on its own. Still toggled with F3.
• The image runs smoother, especially while stopped — the tracks no longer redistribute every frame, several readouts no longer compute at once, and the supply balance is worked out once instead of per window.
• Newly opened windows light up immediately, instead of sitting dim for a moment.
• The main menu was missing anti-aliasing entirely — fixed. The desert backdrop is now drawn with the same lean method as the game world, and the trees are no longer computed individually out to five kilometres.
• The unfinished, freely arrangeable instrument surface no longer sits over the cockpit — it now stays off in every case, even for anyone who once turned it on; you can still view it via "Edit UI".
• In the manual, clicking a group name now opens a topic — the arrow next to it expands and collapses the group.
• The ammo fabricator no longer lists the 180 mm ammo twice.
• Supply no longer stalls — full magazines and buffers used to spawn endless hauling jobs until nothing moved; now only a few stay open per target, and a job left waiting a long time jumps ahead of the rest. Wall lamps no longer starve behind ammo resupply.
• From a distance, drives and suspension no longer look twisted after a turn.
• Pulse waves, echo rings and the jolt on the sonar screen come back after every seismic pulse — they used to stop the moment you'd built something in the shipyard during the same session.
• Settlement markers no longer vanish for good from the map when swarm nests are detected nearby; the first wreck markers no longer flicker.
• 80 mm and 180 mm ammo show up in the goods catalog — they were missing before.
• Many UI spots that stayed German despite another language are now translated — periscope, build HUD, map notes, instrument range units; angle values now use the decimal mark of the selected language.
• The German text has been proofread — correct ß, consistent terms; "Load last save" wording was cleaned up.
• Window-header titles and subtitles no longer overlap, and the climate readout's metrics box no longer runs off screen.

⛔ Known Issues

• The "Harbinger", "NPC Harbinger" and "Viking" blueprints are missing their generators — a cruiser loaded from them produces no power until you install one yourself.
• Hull damage (craters and breaches) can't be repaired yet — the repair drone station can't be built yet. The crew repairs modules and wrecks as before.
• The language you pick in the menu doesn't survive a restart — it reverts to your system language.
• The new graphics sliders haven't been verified in a running game — please tell us if one of them does nothing or breaks something.
• The drone landing pad still has placeholder art and isn't balanced yet.
• The job board never shows medical and nursing work as "active", even while it's running.
• An in-progress core drill doesn't survive a save — after loading it's gone, though the deposit is untouched.
• The cargo of a harvester drone in flight can be lost on save, and nest state occasionally gets lost on load anyway.
• The drone bay still counts as ship storage and accepts resupply, even though it's no longer meant to be storage.
• The gas-bottle tank is built as a fuel tank — it stores correctly but looks wrong. The cargo container now overhangs its old, narrower footprint.
• With Turkish special characters (ş, ğ, İ) the display falls back to a substitute font, and Chinese characters still mix two typefaces within a word.
• Instrument numbers show a decimal point in every language, even where a comma would be correct; the area readout in the build measuring tool shows no number except in German, English and Turkish.
• The Flak Mk. 7 gun is unfinished — it costs nothing to build and takes as much punishment as a wall lamp.
• Every translation except German is machine-made and hasn't been read by native speakers yet.
• The remaining points from 0.16.0 still apply — except the cargo container, which is fixed.

Tell us what you think. Above all: how do the first 10 minutes feel — is it clear what to do? And do the new graphics sliders work on your hardware?
👉 Discord: https://discord.gg/BxjvUUcJEC