Build 25424653

Ships now take standing economic assignments and carry captains, inter-system travel takes real time, and your selection gets three quick-access slots. Saves from earlier versions are not compatible.

⚠️ Saves
The world format changed. Saves made by 0.1.26 or earlier will not open in this build — you will need to start a new game. The load menu says so up front; the file itself is left intact.

Ship command — one window instead of three

The old "Fleets", "Fleet manager" and "Captains" windows are now a single Fleet window (F) with "Ships", "Groups" and "Captains" tabs.

• A ship's economic work is set by an assignment: an employer ("Station" or "Area — system + radius") and a role ("Mining", "Trade", "Logistics").
• From there the ship runs the trip itself: finds a source, buys, hauls, unloads. If it is standing still, it says exactly what it is waiting for — "no surveyed deposits in range", "stations need nothing", "out of funds".
• Multi-select: drag a box, Shift+click, or double-click one of your ships to select every ship of that class on screen. An order goes to the whole set.
• Stations gained a Personnel tab: who works for them, throughput per hour, what the station needs against what is actually arriving, and its money.
• Multi-jump routes — right-click on the galaxy map.

Inter-system travel now takes time

A fleet used to appear in the neighbouring system instantly. Every pair of systems now has a jump point: the ship flies to it, spends the transit in warp — invisible, unable to fire, and untouchable — and comes out at the paired point. The maps draw jump points and a countdown, and the Fleet window has a "Between systems" filter.

This applies to AI factions too: a long haul now costs time. There is less freight moving around the galaxy, but factions stopped going bankrupt on logistics and the upper links of the production chain grow more reliably.

Captains

A captain is a person drawn from a station's population, not an abstract bonus.

• A ★1 rookie arrives with a hull built at your own shipyard (the station's population drops by one — an empty station has nobody to give).
• Experienced captains (★2–★3) are hired at a station with an academy or a headquarters: for credits, and for training time.
• Stars affect working range, how often the captain makes decisions, how wide it looks when picking a target, and throughput. Outside its specialisation a captain counts as one star weaker.
• Experience grows with deliveries. A captain dies with the ship.

Station money

A station now has a wallet with a mode of its own: the shared imperial account, or a separate budget. The "do not spend below" reserve defaults to 20% of the wallet at the moment of the assignment — so a station's trader cannot drain the account during the first half hour.

Quick access to ships

Three bookmark slots sit at the bottom of the screen. 1/2/3 select, Ctrl+1/2/3 store the current selection, right-click frees a slot; you can also store by clicking an empty slot, by right-clicking a ship, or from a row in the Fleet window. A slot remembers the whole selection, group included, and survives a save.

Time controls moved to the numpad in the same pass: Space pauses, Num −/+ slows down and speeds up, Num 1…5 pick a speed tier. Both sets are now rebindable under "Settings → Controls".

The context menu offers only what the ship can do

Right-click no longer offers "Found a station" to a miner. Entries are checked against the selected fleet's abilities: founding needs a constructor, the market and wreck recycling need cargo space, mining needs a miner, surveying needs a scout.

Combat ships get standing tasks straight from the sector view for the first time: "Patrol this system" on empty space, "Defend this station" on one of your own, "Intercept in this system" on a hostile ship. And the menu no longer opens as a rectangle left over from the previous one with empty space inside.

Tutorial

The tutorial is now a guided tour with highlighting: it walks you through a ladder of six tasks, shows which window to open and which key to press at every step, and clears a step by itself if you reach the goal your own way. Input is never taken away — the guide points, it does not lock.

Co-op and networking

• An invite is one code instead of a session id plus a token. Copy it, your friend pastes it, they are in.
• Steam invites work in both directions now, including while the game is already running.
• Server IP fields are gone from the menus: the server is simply named "official".
• Connection errors arrive in your language instead of an English string from the server.
• Chat lives in two sizes — a collapsed line with the latest message, and the full log — and no longer covers the HUD panels.
• If the network cannot keep up, the game lowers the speed itself and tells you, instead of quietly freezing.

Fixes worth naming

• A starting position belongs to the faction, not to its slot in a list: the Trader Guild and the Stellar Pact no longer begin in the same system.
• Stations in your starting sector arrive surveyed — your own faction's capital could previously sit hidden in the fog two steps away from you.
• The resource panel, the overview and the encyclopedia counted a system's reserves differently, and some of it was shown before you had scouted anything. There is one answer now, and it respects the fog.
• HUD panels stopped overlapping each other, and "Stations (0)" no longer holds a column while you have none.
• Officer hiring is validated by the simulation instead of a greyed-out button — in co-op that was a hole.
• Captain experience is no longer lost on short runs.
• The debug screen is out of the release build: it read every faction's wallets and plans straight past the fog of war.

The game is in early testing. The most useful thing you can send is a screenshot plus what you were doing — that is how most of the defects get found, the ones automated checks cannot see. Thanks for playing.