Hey drifters,
This one's a big one and it's landing early.
⚓ Boarding Actions. Roughly once an hour, a derelict drifts into your scan range. Open the new Docking Queue on the Warfare page, pick up to three idle crew, and go inside. Every derelict is a short push-your-luck crawl — five to seven rooms, forks where you choose a door, and one running question the whole way down: *extract now with what you're carrying, or push for the vault?* Your crew's roles matter (gunners force things, engineers finesse them, scientists keep everyone's nerve), the team shares one Integrity pool, and if it runs out — nobody dies. Your people limp home rattled and half the haul stays behind, and honestly, that's the fun part.
There are four kinds of derelict out there, each belonging to somebody: a husk still running its dead crew's routines, a Warden bastion holding a road that closed four hundred years ago, a picked-over Ashfleet prize, and a passenger liner from before the Severance. I'll let that last one speak for itself.
A few practical notes: derelicts bank while you're away (up to eight, so a night offline isn't wasted), your first contact gets a pointer in the Adventure Log so you know where to look, and nothing about this touches your existing loops — it's all bonus salvage, artifact fragments included.
🌱 Hydroponics, fixed. One of you got every skill to 100 except Hydroponics and asked why it was stuck in the 50s. You were right — the math was wrong. Better strains grew slower at almost exactly the rate they paid more XP, so every tier earned the same per hour and the curve outran you. Higher-tier strains now genuinely pay off, level 100 is genuinely reachable, and your bay keeps growing exactly where it left off. Thanks for the report — this is what those do.
Also in this build: the boarding UI got a proper animation pass (and respects reduced-motion settings), and a pile of small text and sound touches.
If you're enjoying the game, a Steam review is the single most useful thing you can give a ship this small — it's how the algorithm decides we exist. And keep the reports coming; the last three patches all started as one of your messages.
See you in the Drift,
KptKittyBucket