SkyChart: Airline Executive Playtest · build 23055236 · published
A Bulgarian player spotted English still poking through after last patch's sweep: the Settings volume sliders, the Quarterly Report's executive summary, the Save Campaign window, the date pills on every save row, the news-ticker tooltips, the Help & Controls tabs, even the title and artist on the in-game soundtrack. All wrapped now.
Seasonal route-suspension reasons translate too. No more half-English notifications when London fogs in for the winter or Tokyo curfews kick in.
235 new strings landed in every supported language in one pass.
An Arabic player flagged big slabs of English on the HUD, Quarterly Report, Settings, and Market Share. Casey audited every panel: every dropdown item, tooltip, section header, and button label across the cockpit now speaks your language.
The deeper plumbing got the same treatment. Achievement names, era subtitles, scenario blurbs, executive titles, crew tier names, customer service blurbs, PR campaigns, city brand campaigns, research tech, time scale labels, airport names. All run through the translator at the moment they're drawn instead of sitting in English, where the language pipeline couldn't reach them.
Every supported language now sits at 98% baseline coverage. Human translators on Weblate refine from there.
Hit F12 anywhere in the game (or Settings → Send a Report to Casey) and a report card slides in. Tell Casey what happened, how often, and what you were doing.
The boring details (version, hardware, era, route count, fps), Casey grabs himself and shows you in the "What's being sent" panel before you hit Submit. Nothing leaves the game except what's listed there. No passwords, no browsing data, no tracking.
Attach what helps: the diagnostic log, the crash log, your current save, a screenshot, or any other file. 25 MB cap, five reports per session.
Reports go to a private inbox tagged by type: crash, freeze, UI, gameplay, suggestion. Steam Deck reports get an extra tag, so controller issues are triaged separately.
A 600-route player reported the game tarmac-locking to 12 fps. The little green +$X floaters above each route were spawning one per route per month tick. Beautiful at 20 routes, a runway pile-up at 600. Capped at 50 alive at a time. Framerate stops nosediving when your network gets enormous.
The Route Information panel was opening past the right edge of the viewport, leaving the resize grip somewhere off in the Bermuda Triangle. The window now stays inside the screen no matter how much content it's holding. Edge cases get a horizontal scrollbar instead of an unreachable corner.
Steam Cloud writes were quietly failing every save without explaining themselves. Casey now checks the cloud's free space up front and skips the call if your save won't fit. Local saves were never affected; you'll just know why next time the cloud refuses your file.
About 50 UI windows had stray English in their title bars and dropdown labels. Rounded up. Every panel header reads in your chosen language out of the box.
Clicking on a route was sometimes warping the cursor to a different spot. The map was capturing the cursor the instant you pressed the mouse, so a tiny tremor between press and release shifted the world a few pixels. Your click was then tested against a moved map and missed. The cursor stays free until you've actually moved past the click threshold now. Clicks hit what you clicked.
Cabotage and slot-block messages were rendered as a vertical column of single letters down the middle of the screen. The toast had no width to wrap against. Fixed. Messages read left to right as English intends.
Bulk actions like Buy All Routes were stacking "Need $X" toasts on top of each other near the cursor. They share a single channel now: new toast replaces the old, identical retries within a third of a second are a no-op.
Jedao spotted something cheeky on Discord: ordering a plane straight to the hangar made it appear in the rack the same frame the button clicked. Meanwhile, every other plane order on the books has to wait the full 1-9 months for the factory to actually build the thing. Casey did some clipboard math, declared this "a free time machine," and filed an aggrieved memo with the manufacturers.
Hangar buys now place a real manufacturing order on the same delivery clock as everything else. Cash leaves your account, the order joins the global backlog (so other airlines feel the squeeze too), and the airframe lands when it's actually finished. Open the Hangar panel, and you'll see a new PENDING DELIVERIES section listing every order in flight.
The button on the spec sheet now reads ORDER FOR HANGAR with the wait baked into the label. Capacity counts pending orders against your slot total, so no queueing 50 widebodies into a 20-slot rack. Used-market planes still show up immediately; those are off-the-lot, not built-to-order.
ClassyKraken spotted little aircraft icons cruising along routes whose planes hadn't even been delivered yet. The route was on the books, the order was placed, the delivery clock was ticking, and somehow a phantom was already flying the line. Icons stay parked until the real airframe shows up now, on brand-new routes and on aircraft swaps alike. The delivery ring still spins; just nothing flies until you've actually got something to fly.
If you've already finished Chapter 1, you don't need Casey hovering over the era, and difficulty pickers like it's your first day. The tutorial card stays quiet during campaign setup for anyone past the opening chapter, then picks back up at your saved step the moment you land on the world map. New players still get the full setup walkthrough.
On Steam Deck, scrolling the map with the left stick quietly switches the cursor into focus mode. Lining up on a city, pressing A, and getting nothing back, until you nudged the right stick to wake the cursor up. Fixed. Click on a city now lands every time, no matter how you got the crosshair there.
The unread counter sits in the top-right corner of the envelope now, on top of the icon instead of behind it. The pill grows leftward into the button as the count climbs into double digits, with a thin dark outline so it reads against any envelope state.
The envelope's gentle pulse switches to red whenever a block lands in the comms log, and stays red until you open the panel. The previous one-shot blink kept getting missed when your eyes were on the map.
The unread counter on the envelope was a tiny red number floating in space. Now it sits in a proper, rounded badge with a bigger font, readable from across the screen.
The envelope at the bottom of the HUD does a slow, gentle glow whenever there's mail in the Comms Log you haven't opened yet. Important blocks were scrolling past in the corner of the screen, and Casey was tired of you missing them. Open the log, and the breathing stops.
Patch notes load as you scroll. Casey was hauling the entire stack of clipboards every time you asked for one, which is why the panel used to hang for a beat. The first few entries hand off immediately, and the rest stream in as you read down the page.
City Panel tutorial step now uses the actual labels (Population, Economy, Tourism) and explains that all three multiply into demand. Tourism by itself isn't the whole story, just the destination-pull piece.
The time-controls step spells out that the number keys are the only keyboard speed shortcut, so you don't go fishing for TAB.
Aircraft Delivery tutorial used to leave players staring at a card with no NEXT button when the auto-advance got tripped up. NEXT is now visible whenever the auto-advance can't fire, on every chapter.
Research panel cards used to read "(4000 RP, unlocks 1950)" even when you were standing in 1961 with the tech ready to research. Ready cards now say so. Pnowkr called this one out, thanks for the squawk.
Cities now stay locked to their spots when you drag the map around. They had been sliding off their airports a few pixels at a time whenever the demand layer toggled, or a panel resized, and only a save+reload would put them back. Welded down. Won't drift again.
Click-drag-pan got a safety latch. If a pop-up, toast, or focus steal eats the mouse-up event, the map would think you were still dragging, and every twitch would slide the world. The map checks every frame whether the button is actually held now, and lets go if it isn't. Same patch for route-drag and for airplane sprites that detached from their routes during pause-pan.
Click and hold to pan now anchors your cursor to the spot you grabbed, instead of letting it drift halfway across the screen. Release and your pointer pops right back where you started, like pinning a finger on a paper map.
Once a month, an inspector walks every city marker and every route line and checks they're where they ought to be. If anything has crept out of place, it gets quietly re-locked on the next frame. You won't see it; Casey will just have a note ready for the next bug hunt.
UI Scale just got rebased. The setting that used to be called 75% is now 100%, the new default, so out of the box, you'll see more of the world map without diving into Settings. Every other entry in the dropdown shifted with it, smaller across the board.
If you'd already picked a UI Scale you liked, your relative preference rides along. Whatever you were on (50%, 67%, 100%, 125%) keeps the same label and the same effect on the screen. One-time migration, no clicks needed.
If you had a save from before yesterday's Fleet Expansion patch, any aircraft you'd already bought from the retired manufacturers (Embria, Lockford, Comix) would have quietly vanished on next load. Casey now re-keys those references on the way in: routes flying an Embria E195 wake up as a Tupi T-195, hangars holding a Lockford TriStar find a Pacifica Triton on the apron, used-market Comix listings re-title to Yangtze. Same machines, fresh paperwork, no dropped routes.
The roster just got fatter where it needed it most. 18 new aircraft, all clustered in the short-haul and medium-haul slots that were going hungry. Turboprops (Mistral M-42 and M-72, Cascadia Q-400 Whisper, Falken F-200 Friendship, Norden N-34 Commuter, Tupi T-120 Pampas), regional jets (Cascadia Regional 200, Tupi T-175, Tupi T-190), historic narrowbodies (Turlov Tu-134 and Tu-154, Volga V-42, Hartfield Trijet, BAX Quad-100, MacDawson Skyliner 82), plus three mainline gap-fills (Bering 717-200, Bering 757-300, Skybus A321). Total fleet now stands at 84.
If you've ever stared at the 1985 picker and felt like there was nothing between a 737-200 and a 747, that hole is filled. Routes that wanted a 50-seat regional jet have one now. Routes that wanted a 78-seat fast turboprop have one too. AI rivals reach for the new stock with the same archetype rules they always used: budget carriers scoop up cheap turboprops, legacy carriers eye the trijets.
Three nameplates were retired in a brand audit. Embria became Tupi Aviation, Lockford became Pacifica, and Comix became Yangtze Aero. Same machines on the runway, fresh paint on the tail. Save files load through the rename without losing a route. Casey signed every transfer slip personally.
The new social-bar tooltips (Wishlist, Discord, YouTube, Bluesky) now show up in your language. Every supported language got a baseline, so no one stares at English placeholder text. Human translators on Weblate polish over time.
Backstage tidy-up on yesterday's social bar. Nothing visible to players today; the next icon Casey adds will just take fewer rivets to bolt down.
The Discord door from yesterday now has neighbors. Top-right of the main menu has a small stack of icons: Steam wishlist (hidden if you're already on the Steam build), Discord, YouTube, Bluesky. Hover any of them for a card that tells you why you might want to click. Click, and your browser opens straight there.
All four icons are drawn in the menu's sunset palette, not their brand colors, so they sit in the layout instead of shouting over it. Casey insists.
A Discord door now sits in the top-right of the main menu: amber chat-bubble badge, hard to miss. Hover over the invite card, click to open the server in your browser. Come help shape the game with Casey, the dev team, and your fellow airline tycoons.
Bulk Replace now lets you pick the exact aircraft on every row. Each route shows a dropdown with every legal candidate (sorted cheapest first), defaulted to whatever your global policy chose. Keep the auto pick on most rows, override the few that matter, and watch the total update as you change them.
For the lazy: an Apply to All picker at the top of the sheet drops one aircraft into every compatible row in a single click. Routes that can't fly that model get left alone (too far for the range, banned, or already on it), and the status line tells you how many landed and how many got skipped.
The 5-year retirement gate is gone. A new Show toggle flips between At-Risk Only and All Routes, so you can replace anything early when you want to upgrade the fleet, not only when paperwork forces you. The Fleet Risk panel button is always visible: REPLACE ALL AGING when there's something at risk, BULK REPLACE FLEET when the fleet's clear.