SkyChart Patch Notes v0.6.101.80 -> v0.6.106.7

Casey's Very Big Update

CEO, this is a big one, and it has been a while coming. A hundred and thirteen patches have gone into the build you are downloading. Most of that time went to testing and debugging, and a good slice of the rest went to a summer cold that flattened the dev for the better part of a week. Casey brought soup, answered the phones, and used the quiet to reorganize the filing cabinet.

A new tutorial, seventy more aircraft, every aircraft in the game drawn and redrawn again, mixed fleets on a single route, airport lobbying, alliance blocs, crew hiring, and a world that finally behaves like the decade you are flying in. Here is what changed.

Casey Hands You a Checklist

The tutorial used to be a stack of pages you clicked through with Next. It is now a list of missions, with a tracker down the left of the map that ticks itself off as you go and never stops you doing something else first.

• Eight missions take you from picking a home city to three routes turning a profit. Casey briefs each one right before you do it, points at the button, then gets out of the way. No more reading about hub economics while you own one airplane.

• Two more cover the shape of a network. Build a web instead of a fan, then put a second hub somewhere your own routes already feed, which is the whole trick to hubs.

• Everything else Casey knows waits in a list until you can use it, and he now brings the right one to the top when you are struggling. Low on cash, two quarters in the red, a rival pulling away, or ten routes still flown by hand, and the briefing that helps moves up under CASEY NOTICED whatever your route count says.

• When the missions run out, the tracker keeps working and shows your era goals with live progress, so you always know what you are chasing.

• Every campaign setup screen now tells you what to do and holds NEXT until you do it. Players were clicking straight through the era screen without picking an era and ending up three steps ahead of themselves.

• Replay Tutorial works on an airline you have already built, and there is a new chapter on Automation and Delegation for the point where the job stops being strategy and starts being paperwork.

The World Grew Up

The game knew every city's population back in 1930 and grew it forward. It did not do the same for how much business a city does, so a city that became important later was treated as though it always had been.

• Sixty-one cities now move with the century. Dubai in 1930 was twenty thousand people and a pearl trade that had just collapsed. The game rated it level with London and New York. Fly into Detroit in 1935, and you find the automotive capital of the world, because that is what it was.

• Fifty-one cities were carrying the wrong 1930 population, usually a modern figure sitting where the historic one belonged. Las Vegas was down as 400,000 people against a real 5,165. Cancun and Sharm el-Sheikh had populations before either place existed.

• Airports read for the year you are in. Early on you get one short runway, a handful of gates, and no instrument landing at all. In 1938, the Airport Browser was showing New York with four long runways and a rail link to the city.

• Airport codes and names match the era too. New York shows Idlewild in 1950, Chicago shows Midway before O'Hare opened, and about twenty airports had their jet capability dates corrected against real aviation history.

• Your rivals belong to the era. Start in 1930, and you face the carriers that existed in 1930. They rename themselves partway through a campaign, and some of them fold on the date their real counterpart did.

• Chicago, Beijing, Buenos Aires, and Moscow have their early airfields back for 1930 campaigns, and Thailand goes from three airports to nine.

• Modern campaigns are untouched. Every city ends up rated exactly where it was before, so only the past has changed.

Seventy More Aircraft

The catalog has gone from 206 aircraft to 276, and the thin decades got the most attention.

• 1930 campaigns start with four aircraft choices instead of one. Trimotors, a tiny mail hauler, and a Soviet airliner fill the 1920s, and there are five flying boats now.

• Flying boats do not need a runway. They need water. All 538 cities have been sorted into coastal and landlocked, and if you try to fly a Clipper into Zurich, Casey will ask where exactly you plan to land.

• The 1960s and 1970s jet gap is filled, and the wartime and postwar piston era got reinforcements.

• The 2030s through the 2090s went from sparse to serious. Hydrogen regionals, electric widebodies, supersonics, a flying wing, and a sub-orbital that Casey insists is very comfortable for a bird his size.

Every Aircraft Redrawn

Casey spread all 276 aircraft across the hangar floor, walked the line with his clipboard, and checked every nose, middle, and tail against photographs of the real thing.

• Propellers were drawn so small a DC-3 looked like a jet with an unusual haircut. They now sweep a proper disc, and the engines behind them are actual cowls built into the wing.

• Concorde looks like Concorde. Thirteen supersonic aircraft were being drawn as ordinary four-engine airliners. They now have the long delta, the drooped nose, and no tailplane at all, because they never had one.

• Fins got their era back. A Convair 240 was wearing a swept tail that would not be issued for another fifteen years. Cabin windows come from how long the airplane actually is, so a DC-3 has seven and an A320 has forty.

• On the map, forty-three aircraft were flying around wearing the wrong shape, including ten four-engine airliners borrowing the 747's hump. Casey drew seven new outlines for the ones nobody had ever drawn.

• There was also a gold curve hanging under the belly of every aircraft in the game, attached to nothing. It is gone.

One Route, Two Kinds of Plane

• Routes can fly more than one type of aircraft. Open any route, find FLEET MANAGEMENT, and add a second type alongside the first. A widebody for the daily run and something small for the thin overnight, on one route instead of two.

• Each type earns its own trips, burns its own fuel, and sends its own maintenance bill. The list only offers types that can actually fly every leg, so if a plane is missing from it, it could not make one of the hops.

• Trade-in quotes, seat counts, and maintenance forecasts price each aircraft as itself rather than as whichever type you happen to have most of. Trophies count every plane you fly, so that supersonic sitting quietly at the back of a mixed route counts now.

Your Aircraft Have Names and Histories

• Every aircraft you take on arrives with a name on the nose. The name book went from 60 callsigns to 1,224, grouped by the naming traditions real airlines use. Clipper ships, birds, constellations, weather, mythology. Your Flying Cloud and Sea Witch sailed the China run long before anyone flew it.

• Every plane has a logbook. Hit History, and you get when it was built, hours and cycles flown, when it last had a C-check, what has been fitted to it, and every route it has ever worked. Buy one secondhand, and it remembers who sold it to you.

• Park a plane in the hangar, and it comes back the same plane. It used to come back factory fresh, with the hours wiped, maintenance reset, a cabin like new, and any modifications you paid for quietly gone, which also made closing a route cheaper than a refit.

Airport Negotiations

You can now lobby a city's airport for a longer runway or more gates instead of waiting for one.

• Three runway tiers and two gate tiers. You cover 10 to 50 percent of the construction bill, and the more you chip in, the faster they build.

• Fifteen negotiators for hire, each with their own era, specialty, and retainer. Some know runways, some know terminals, a few just know everybody.

• Thirty-eight things can happen during construction. Community support, environmental reviews, permit inspections, budget overruns, political changes. Ten of them put a decision on your desk: pay to accelerate, or pocket the cash and ride it out.

• Rivals lobby too, and they now pay their own share instead of collecting free runways while you funded yours.

• Finished negotiations at the 35 big hubs now actually deliver their gates. London, Tokyo, Dubai, and Atlanta were quietly handing you nothing, while smaller airports worked fine all along.

Alliance Blocs

• From 1990, AI rivals form multi-member alliances. Up to four blocs worldwide, with names generated from geography and aviation.

• Found your own, apply to join one, vote on invitations and expulsions, or get voted out yourself. Leaving costs reputation and a two-year cooldown.

• Membership pays. Hub discounts up to 40 percent, competition on shared routes down by up to 65 percent, a codeshare demand boost up to 18 percent, gate priority at each other's hubs, and pooled buying power for 5 percent off new aircraft.

• Airlines in opposing blocs face a competition penalty on overlapping routes. Casey has strong opinions about who sits where in the departure lounge.

Crew, Schedules and Sound

• Hire crew. Open Crew Bases and sign them in batches. They take three months to train and turn up green, so hiring fifty in a hurry pulls the whole workforce down with them. Leave a crew alone, and they get good, which shows up as fewer canceled flights. Named captains start with nothing and earn it in the air.

• Fixed departure hours. Pick a time in Route Details. Routes departing in the same bank at the same hub let transfer passengers connect between flights. Airport curfews are enforced, and there is a 24-hour departure board for every hub.

• Your airport has sound. A low terminal murmur that rises as your fleet grows, and the occasional takeoff rolling past. Props before the jet age, jets after, because a 1930 airfield should not sound like it has 737s on it. An empty airline gets silence, and it has its own volume slider separate from music.

The Map

• City dots were sitting off their cities when you zoomed in. The dots were right the whole time. The satellite imagery underneath them was being drawn about a tenth too large, so the coastlines slid away and snapped back at the edge of every tile.

• Your home city flies a flag, and every hub city wears a star. The campaign opens looking at your home region instead of the whole planet.

• Cities whose airport has not been built yet are drawn faint and hollow, and hovering over one tells you the year it opens.

• Colorblind mode now updates the entire map in real time. Route lines, city dots, heat map colors, and drag previews all switch the moment you pick a mode.

• Region and country labels are visible across a much wider zoom range, with 44 countries and every region filled in so the map reads like a proper atlas.

Saves You Can Trust

• Saving no longer puts your existing save at risk. The old way emptied the file before writing the new one, so a crash or a full disk in that gap took the campaign with it. Saves are written to one side, checked, then swapped in, and the one they replace is kept as a backup.

• If a slot ever loses its main file, the game finds that backup and puts the campaign back where it belongs.

• A save that fails now says so. It used to fail politely and silently, so you could save, quit, come back, and find yourself hours in the past with no idea why.

• Saving over an occupied slot asks first. The button turns to OVERWRITE? on the first click.

Faster

• Saving a big airline is about three times quicker. On a 2000 route network, the game used to lock up for two-thirds of a second building the save before it could start writing it. Save files are smaller too, and loading is unchanged.

• Big networks tick over faster. The monthly embargo check was reading the whole rulebook from scratch for every single route, and three more monthly checks were asking the same questions once per route instead of once per aircraft type.

• Alliance bookkeeping no longer redoes itself for every plane you own, so late-game months tick over noticeably quicker.

• Fixed a frame rate drop with the Strategic Advisor open, and a City Panel slowdown at hub airports with several routes.

Loopholes Closed

• Closing a route and reopening it no longer resets an aircraft's maintenance, cabin wear, and airframe age. That was a free refit and an inflated resale price.

• Stacking cargo contracts on one route no longer lets each contract pretend the plane is dedicated to it alone.

• The crew wage dropdown no longer wipes your negotiated wages. Picking None used to erase every union contract raise and strike settlement on the route, and the apply-to-all button spread that across the whole fleet.

• Buying a region's affection no longer works forever. Regions accept one donation every three months, and the friendlier they already are, the less your money moves them.

• Buying out a rival's gate now costs what it is worth, and rivals refuse to sell the gates at their last remaining hub.

• Losing the airline now ends the run. The game over screen used to offer a Keep Playing button that waved the whole thing away, and the clock kept ticking behind it with the autosave cheerfully saving over your slot after you had already lost.

Quality of Life

• Route defaults. Pick a pricing strategy and maintenance level once in Settings and every new route inherits them.

• Bulk route editing. Select routes in the Route Manager with the new checkbox column and set pricing, maintenance, or frequency across all of them at once.

• Airport Browser opens the whole map. Full details for all 538 cities instead of 37, and maintenance bases can be built at any airport in the world.

• The Strategic Advisor plans from anywhere. Tick Search every city and you can see what routes out of Cairo would be worth before committing a penny to opening there. There is a Market filter now too, so you can ask it for cargo and get cargo.

• Hangar stock comes first. The route wizard checks your hangar before quoting a price, and aircraft you already own show up labeled FREE with the count in stock.

• Plainer English. Airport slots are called gates everywhere. Slot Throughput is Flight Capacity, MRO is maintenance base, and the ETOPS row says Overwater Rating so you know what it does without Googling.

• Quarterly reports add up. Insurance, legal fees, missed connections, and crew positioning all have their own lines, and everything else lands in a named catch-all so the sub-items always total.

• Era-scaled costs. Hubs, cabin upgrades, and custom order options all cost what they should for the year. A cargo conversion was four million dollars whether you were fitting out a 1930s trimotor or a modern freighter.

• Charter and scheduled routes can share a city pair. Your 747 and your charter turboprop share the tarmac without arguing about who was here first.

• And a pile of smaller ones: music has an on-off switch, checkboxes are visible against the dark panels at last, Settings labels sit next to their values, Sandbox takes 20 rivals, achievement icons enlarge on click, and finished campaigns can be deleted from the Career Timeline.

Fixes

• Fixed a hard crash where two parts of the game reached for the same aircraft record at once from different threads, most often just after a month rolled over.

• Phantom aircraft that kept haunting Fleet Overview and the maintenance roster after you sold them are gone, and loading a save now sweeps out any that are already there.

• An export ban stopped you flying aircraft you already owned. It only ever meant you could not buy more.

• A supply chain event could ground the only aircraft type available in 1930, locking you out of every route on the map.

• Auxiliary fuel tanks were charged for and bolted on, then ignored by every range check in the game. Your custom-ordered planes now fly as far as the receipt says.

• Closing the tutorial card with the X was permanently killing the tutorial. It now tucks it away for the session.

• The game clock could freeze during the tutorial if a large panel auto-paused underneath it.

• Two San Joses were sharing a name, and therefore sharing a hub. Buy one, and you quietly owned the other. Searching for a city with an accent in its name also only worked if you typed the accent, which had made Düsseldorf and Malmö unfindable since the day they were added.

• Over 1,500 broken number placeholders repaired across all 29 languages, including a batch that crashed the formatter outright for Chinese and French players.

• Removing a stop from a multi-leg route now checks whether your aircraft can fly the merged leg, instead of sending a Trimotor across the Atlantic on a wing and a prayer.

Old saves carry straight over. Blue skies, CEO.

-Casey