Every commander now stands somewhere with the two powers. Your character carries a reputation with the Nexus Protectorate and the Crimson Corsairs, starting neutral with both. Destroying a faction's ship lowers your standing with it and raises it with the other by exactly the same amount, weighted by what you actually killed — a stray novik in patrolled space moves it a little, an elite in a stronghold several times more, on the same scale that decides experience. Some contracts pay reputation on top of what their kills already move. Fighting other commanders moves nothing: a duel between players is not a faction matter. The profile card gains a **Factions** tab listing both powers with your current value and where it puts you — Hostile, Unfriendly, Neutral, Friendly or Allied. The Tournament wipe clears it with the rest of your progression, so every run starts neutral.
Standing changes how the galaxy treats you. Fall to Hostile with the Protectorate and its patrols stop waiting to be provoked: sentinels in your sector open fire on sight, and the stations that fly its colours refuse to trade, repair, buy your hulls or show you their contract board. Earn the Corsairs' friendship and their raiders leave you alone — no more ambushes in lawless space, until you shoot at them again. Short of those extremes, standing shows up at the till: prices and repairs run from a thirty-percent surcharge when you are hated to a tenth off when you are trusted, and cargo you sell moves with you. Contracts are offered only by an issuer that thinks well enough of you, with every contract shipped today available at neutral, so a new commander sees exactly what they saw before. **The docks always stay open** — a delivery you accepted can always be unloaded, whoever holds the station.
A Broadcast board in every universe. The Broadcast tab of the Captain's Journal now carries a shared board for everyone playing the same universe: transmit a message to all commanders, reply under someone else's, and page back through older transmissions. Collapsed, the journal shows the five latest threads; expanded, it grows into a full board with a page of twenty threads, the open thread with its replies, and a compact compose box. Messages support bold, italic, underline, six HUD palette colours and web links; new transmissions land live for everyone connected. To keep the channel readable, each commander can open one new thread every 30 seconds and post one reply every 10 seconds, up to 40 transmissions an hour. Threads carry a category: commanders' posts always land in the built-in commanders' category, while the admin console can create further categories (bilingual label, palette colour, sort order) and publish transmissions under an in-world persona — an institution or a non-player character, with an optional portrait — either as a new thread or as a reply. When more than one category exists, the expanded board shows a filter row and tags threads outside the commanders' category. Admins can also recategorise, edit, hide or delete any transmission. Transmitting is a Premium perk: reading, paging and filtering the board stay free for every commander, while posting and replying need live Premium clearance, checked on every attempt so an expiring card closes the transmitter straight away.
A passive skill tree that grows with your commander. Every level past the first grants one skill point, spendable across seven branches grouped in three doctrines: Warfare sharpens your combat hulls (fire, hull, shield), Industry hardens and enlarges your miners and freighters (cargo, hull, shield), and Endurance speeds shield regeneration on everything you fly. Each rank costs more than the last — one point for the first, five for the fifth — so a deep specialist and a broad generalist are genuinely different builds. Bonuses apply to every ship you already own the moment you buy a rank, and to every ship you buy, earn or start with afterwards; current shield and hull scale with the new maximum instead of jumping or lagging behind. Respeccing is free and unlimited: reset the tree and every point comes straight back. The window opens on an overview tab (points, next point, effective bonus per hull class) with one tab per doctrine, so the panel stays compact. NPC fixtures can declare the same branches, so an elite or a threat band can be tuned with the same vocabulary players use.
The level-up sound now has something to look at. Gaining a level lights up the whole footer cluster in one gesture: a bright band sweeps along the XP bar, the LEVEL badge's number punches once, two rings of the badge's own outline expand and fade around it, and the skill-tree button's point counter picks the pulse up — so the reward you hear is the reward you see, and the eye is carried straight to where the new point is spent. It lasts a second and a half, long enough to still be running by the time the sound has made you look, and it is skipped entirely when your system asks for reduced motion.
Critical hits. Every shot now has a 10 % chance (15 % in the tournament universe) to land as a critical hit for one and a half times its normal damage, rounded up — a 2-fire ship crits for 3, a 4-fire ship for 6. NPCs crit too, so you can take one as well as deal one. A critical hit reads unmistakably: the number turns violet and grows, a four-pointed impact mark with a broken lock ring snaps in behind it, the caption "Critical" appears under the number, your tile shakes (or the enemy recoils) harder, the combat log gets its own critical-hit lines, and the volley plays a heavier, dedicated cue in place of the usual one. The odds were set on a simulated time-to-kill sweep so blowouts are unchanged while close duels gain real tension.
Critical misses. The mirror of the critical hit: every shot now also has a 5 % chance (7.5 % in the tournament universe) to go wide and deal nothing. Misses are rolled per ship like criticals, a shot that goes wide cannot crit, and the rate is exactly half the critical chance so that on average the two cancel out — combat keeps the tension of the critical without dealing more damage overall. Being shot at and missed still counts as being engaged: the target returns fire and its escorts wake, but a volley that missed entirely does not slow the target's shield regeneration. A fully missed volley reads as an absence rather than a blow: no number, a ghosted open-reticle mark that slips aside, the caption "Miss" beneath it, no shake, its own quieter pair of cues — your shots going wide, a volley passing your hull — and its own captain's-log lines. When only part of a volley lands, the number is simply lower. Measured on the same simulated ladder as the critical hit: blowouts keep their exact time-to-kill, decided fights stay decided, and only fights that were already on a knife's edge get closer.
Stations that offer a repair service can now put a damaged hull back to full, instantly, for credits. A new repair panel in the station's services lists your damaged ships, previews what each one would cost and totals it before you confirm; a ship already at full hull can't be selected. The price scales with how much hull is missing and with the ship's own value, so buffing out a scratch on a cheap hull stays cheap while rebuilding an expensive one does not. The captain's log confirms the repair, or explains why it was refused — not enough credits, or nothing that needed repairing.
The eleven gameplay entries in the Codex now have their own illustrations. — Minimap, Commander Creation, Sector Movement, Extraction, Station Trading, Combat, Contracts, Autopilot, Fleet Grouping, Gate Travel and Reading Your Bridge each get a full illustrated scene instead of a small monochrome badge, and the Mechanics category finally has cover art on the Codex index instead of an empty tile.
The Wayfarer Concordat has its own illustration. It previously borrowed Vela's portrait for lack of one, which made the Institutions and Characters tiles show the same picture on the Codex index; that portrait is now hers alone.
Ordering your fleets to move, or to start extracting, is now acknowledged with a sound. A distant drive catching answers a move order; a distant extraction machine biting into rock answers an extraction order. Both are deliberately quiet, play once the order is accepted and only when at least one ship actually took it, and follow the events volume setting like every other game cue. The move acknowledgement then lets the ship leave: after the drive catches, the sound recedes for about a second and a half, dimming and darkening the way a departing engine does, and washes out to silence instead of stopping.
Destroying an enemy unit is now answered with a sound. A muffled, cavernous explosion that loses its intensity quickly, followed by small residues scattering away like distant debris. It is deliberately not a real blast: destruction happens often enough that a literal explosion would wear the ear out, so this one is soft, dark and slightly digital instead. It trails the volley that caused it by a third of a second, so the shot and its consequence read in that order, plays once however many units a single volley destroyed, and sits above your own gunfire but under the hits you take, following the events volume setting like every other game cue.
Reaching a new character level is now announced with a sound. A quick harp sweep upward that lands on a chord — deliberately the brightest, most joyful sound in the game, since it marks the one moment the player has been working toward, and now also the moment a skill point is earned. It plays whenever the level rises, whether the experience came from combat or from a completed contract, and follows the events volume setting.
Improved
The commander sidebar shows what your ships are busy with, not just that they are busy. Each sector line already listed the things it holds — planet, station, belt, gate, container — as small icons you can click. Now the belt your ships are actually mining pulses amber in that row, in time with the fleet tile above it, so you can tell at a glance which rock is being worked even in a system you are not looking at. A fight adds its own icon to the same row, beating red, and clicking it opens the Intel window on the ship you are engaging; when a sector holds several separate engagements the icon carries their count and opens the first. Both icons disappear the moment the order ends.
The commander roster in account settings is now a wall of slots. Each universe gets its own block, headed by that universe's own artwork and name, so the three worlds no longer run together in one undifferentiated list. Under each one sit three commander slots, always three, so the limit is something you can see rather than something you discover. A slot holding a commander shows their portrait, name and race, and takes you straight into that universe when you click it. An empty slot you can use carries the same plus tile as the commander-selection screen and opens character creation. A slot your clearance does not reach is dimmed and marked Premium, and clicking it opens your subscription, saying so once, inside the slot, in a word that brightens as you reach for it. The separate "Premium clearance required" paragraphs and the repeated Upgrade buttons are gone: the slots say it where it is felt. A commander left behind in a universe your clearance no longer covers stays visible on standby rather than disappearing.
The pricing page shows what you get, and what it costs. The page is rebuilt around three bands: two clearance cards of equal weight, a full comparison table listing every capability side by side, and the time cards laid out in the open. The Free card is no longer a half-empty panel next to an illustrated Premium one, and the time cards no longer sit in a cramped carousel that cut them in half. Each card now carries its price and, past the 30-day one, what that works out to per month, so a longer card's advantage is visible instead of implied. The comparison table also answers the question the page never did: what Free actually gives you, universe by universe, commander by commander, down to reading the Broadcast board without being able to transmit on it. Prices are shown on the web shop only, since Steam sets its own regional prices.
The three deepest elite raiders have learned to take a hit. Brazen Tollmaster, Cinder Enforcer and the Voidglass Sovereign now carry the same defensive training players buy in their own skill tree — reinforced plating and heavier shielding, and nothing else. They hit exactly as hard as before; they simply stay standing longer, so the fights at the bottom of the map run a beat longer instead of ending on the opening exchange. The Sovereign changes most: it was winnable by two ships on a lucky roll and now takes a real wing to bring down. None of the three was ever beatable single-handed, so nothing that was open has closed. The elites a new commander meets first — the tutorial's Rustjaw Chancer and the opening contract's Crimson Skiff Raider — are untouched, as are the mid-ladder targets and the sentinel Warden Kael.
The commander column now runs the full height of the screen. On wide layouts (1055 px and up) the footer bar — portrait, XP, session clock, action buttons, captain's log — sits under the sector window and the fleet panel instead of stretching across the whole width, so the commander roster on the left gets every pixel down to the bottom edge. The footer's blocks are reordered portrait → buttons → log; when the right column is too narrow for all three on one line, the captain's log drops onto its own full-width line beneath them, and the sector window gives up the matching height so nothing overlaps. The single-column layout stacks the same three blocks in the same order, and now keeps the full character block — portrait, level, power, credits, session clock — down to 600 px instead of collapsing it to an icon, and now keeps the portrait and the action buttons sharing one line down to 640 px instead of stacking them the moment the single-column layout kicks in. On the widths where the portrait and the action buttons share a line, the space between them now grows with the screen instead of sitting at a cramped fixed gap, and the action buttons hug the same right edge as the captain's log below them instead of leaving a stretch of empty panel to their right. The footer bar now always sits flush against the bottom edge, absorbing any leftover vertical space above itself instead of below — it no longer leaves a gap of empty panel under it when the sector window and the fleet panel don't fill the full height.
The footer action rail is a fixed six-icon grid, three across and two down, at every screen size. Skill Tree, Contracts, Minimap, Corporations, Codex and Settings, in that order, all sit together in the footer again — Corporations is back there instead of tucked inside the commander card — and the rail no longer folds down to fewer visible buttons on a narrower screen. The Corporations preview it opens is unchanged, still marked as coming soon.
Fleet stat readouts show one decimal once a skill applies. A firepower of 4 boosted by a rank reads 4.1 in the fleet table and the entity panel, with a tooltip stating the bonus, so a small rank never looks like it did nothing. Gauges keep rounding as before. The cargo branch is a balance input: it enlarges holds on miners and freighters, which shortens hauling loops but leaves belt extraction cadence untouched.
Damage numbers in combat now move differently depending on who is being hit. Damage you deal punches in digit by digit on the enemy ship, opens an impact ring and jolts the target before drifting away; damage you take slams down heavily on your own fleet tile, flashes red behind the number and shakes the tile. Both scale with how hard the blow lands relative to that ship's shield and hull — a scratch stays small, a hit that takes half the ship or more grows, adds a second ring on the enemy, widens the flash on your tile and shakes harder. Both sides open the same impact ring around the number, so the shape carries the reading on your own fleet tile as much as on the enemy — there the hull ring is white, so it stays visible over the tile's red combat halo. Nothing lingers past the next combat tick, and every motion still collapses to a static number under reduced-motion.
Damage numbers now tell shield hits from hull hits. The combat report carries how much of each blow the shield absorbed and how much reached the hull: a hit the shield took entirely reads in cyan with a dashed energy ring, a hit that went through keeps the hull colour on the number but opens the cyan ring first, and the volley that collapses a shield raises a larger flickering ring with a "Shield down" caption under the number — on the enemy you are breaking as much as on your own fleet tile. The caption never drops below a readable 11 px, even on the small commander tiles. Because shields regenerate a few points every tick, the trace a broken shield absorbs in front of a hull hit is not counted: it neither turns the hit cyan nor raises "Shield down" again — only a shield that was at least a quarter up can fall. The shield ring is a drawn six-panel hexagonal facet rather than a plain circle, and a heavy hull hit on the enemy bursts into shattered plating around the number.
The Fleets window title now stands apart from its tabs. "Fleets" sits behind a thin vertical rule with a wider gap before the Movements / Loading tabs, so it reads as the window's name rather than a third tab.
The commander roster and commander commissioning screens no longer carry the website footer. Once you have picked a universe you are on the way into the game, and the site's navigation links, tagline and rights line under those two screens read as a leftover from the marketing pages; they now fill the frame on their own. The footer is unchanged everywhere else.
A Codex entry that has its own illustration now shows it, instead of a small monochrome badge. Gameplay and tech entries were pinned to a HUD glyph even when real artwork existed — the asteroid-belt entry now shows its belt art too.
Two Codex mechanics entries changed their French URL. `/fr/page/codex/mecanique/extraction` became `/fr/page/codex/mecanique/extraction-miniere`, and `/fr/page/codex/mecanique/combat` became `/fr/page/codex/mecanique/combat-spatial` — both French slugs were spelled exactly like the entry's own internal name, which the address table has to be able to tell apart from every translated slug. The old addresses still work: they redirect permanently to the new ones on their own, with no redirect list to maintain, and English addresses are untouched. One caveat, stated plainly: this is a one-way move — a French address a search engine already indexed now reaches the page through that redirect rather than directly.
Combat damage numbers no longer flash a starburst behind them. Both the damage you deal to a target — player or NPC — and the damage your own ships take now show just the amount, cleaner and less busy against a crowded sector.
An open Broadcast thread now lines up. Reading a transmission used to push the original message a little to the right of every reply beneath it, because the back arrow took its space out of the message itself — portraits, names and timestamps each sat on their own column. The back arrow now has a column of its own, and the original message and every reply start on exactly the same line, portrait, name and text together. The timestamp moved to the head of the message text, so it too holds one fixed spot on every message instead of drifting with the length of the commander's name. The back arrow became a proper HUD control, wearing the same bracketed frame as the Reply button below it, and it no longer loses its top edge when you hover it.
Fixed
Skipping a walkthrough no longer leaves its contract stranded. Pressing Skip on a tutorial only silenced the walkthrough; the paired contract stayed in the journal, promising guidance that could never come back, and nothing in the game could restore it — the walkthrough was gated on a flag no in-world action could clear. Skipping now stands the contract down with it, so the two halves can no longer disagree. And any active tutorial contract carries a Resume walkthrough button in its detail view, which lifts the dismissal for good and starts the guidance again where you are.
The sector view no longer comes up empty after a page reload. Reloading straight onto a sector could ask the server for its contents before the connection had been tied to your universe and commander. The server turned that request down and, worse, never registered the view for updates, so nothing ever arrived afterwards either — the window sat on "No celestial bodies" however long you waited, while the fleet panel and the journal carried on normally. The request now waits for the universe to be confirmed before it goes out, which in the ordinary case is already true and costs no delay at all.
Opening a target that has since disappeared no longer strands the view. Following a link to a contact, planet, belt, gate or station puts that object in the address, and hostiles in particular move or die within seconds. When the object could not be found at all — typically after reloading an address that had gone stale — the view showed the sector's "no celestial bodies" message, which was misleading since the sector was not empty, and stayed there for good. It now falls back to the sector view. Watching a contact that leaves while you have it open is unchanged: its dossier still stays frozen on screen rather than snapping away.
The captain's log now says why a ship sale was refused. Every other refused service already explained itself — a hull sale alone answered with a flat "Ship sale rejected", swallowing the reason the server had actually sent. It now reads the same way as the rest, so "You cannot sell your last remaining ship" reaches the log instead of being thrown away.
The fleet panel's header label sat against the wrong edge when a target offered a single order. Facing a belt you can only fly to, the panel pushed "Movements" hard against its right edge, while a target offering two or three orders lined their tabs up beside the FLEETS title. The lone label now starts exactly where the first tab does, so the header holds its place whatever the target offers.
A skill ladder could spill out of its branch card. In the skill tree, the rank rows of the longest-labelled branch pushed past the card border instead of fitting inside it. The ladder now shrinks with its column, so every doctrine holds its frame in both languages.
Damage numbers landed on the wrong fleet when you fielded two fleets of the same ship type in different sectors. — both tiles showed the hit (and the "Shield down" caption). Every combat report entry now carries the sector it happened in, and the tiles only show their own.
Damage amounts always add up now. A hit's shield and hull parts could sum to one more than the total, and several attackers sharing one kill could each be credited a rounded-up share that together exceeded what the target actually lost; a low-fire contributor could also be dropped from the report entirely. Shares are now allocated so they always sum exactly to the total, and every contributor gets a line.
Shields regenerated at full speed under fire whenever the server tick ran long. The half-rate window for a ship hit last tick was measured on the wall clock; it is now measured on the tick counter, so a slow tick can no longer bring back the old "fire ≤ regen" stalemate.
Two combat animations kept playing for players who asked for reduced motion. (the heavy-hit shards and the shield-break ring), and the enemy's recoil had no reduced-motion path at all. Every combat motion now honours the setting, and the shake/recoil wiring emits its own opt-out by construction so this cannot regress silently.
A ship's level could be set back to 1. in the rare case where it was only the target of a mutual fight (its experience was missing from that query), and a failed experience lookup during a combat tick could drop that tick's contract kill progress and announce a false level-up. Both paths are closed.
Engine tick cost in combat trimmed. : the two ship queries run in parallel, per-kill lookups are indexed instead of rescanned, cargo spilled from a destroyed ship is written in one batch, and the two NPC factions no longer receive a combat report and a persisted log line every tick.
Named pirates and sentinels now show their face on the radar hover card and in the Intel panel, not just the top of their head. Those two frames are wide and short while the elite portraits are tall, and both anchored the picture to its top edge — so the Voidglass Sovereign, the Cinder Enforcer and the rest showed a crest and a forehead — while zooming in on the top suited the full-length figures (Rustjaw Chancer, Warden Kael) and would have cut their heads off had it moved. Both frames are now portrait-proportioned and show the top of the picture at its full width, so every character keeps its face whether the artwork is a bust or a standing figure; the contract-board thumbnails follow the same rule.
A tutorial step that asks you to click something can no longer vanish for good if that thing disappears first. In a system with several asteroid belts, the mining tutorial's "pick the belt" step only recognises the belt it is pointing at; clicking a different belt closed the minimap, took away the highlighted marker and — because the panel had already found its target once — silently removed Vela's panel with no message and no way to skip, leaving the tutorial stuck in progress. Steps that wait for a click now keep their safety net: if the target goes away the panel falls back to its centred "preparing…" state and, after a while, offers Skip; the moment the target is back on screen (reopen the minimap), the panel anchors to it again.
Every table's header row now sits at the same height as its own data rows. Fleet rosters, contacts, admin lists, the leaderboard and every other table in the game had a header row a few pixels taller than the rows beneath it — an unintended default from the UI toolkit, now aligned everywhere at once since every table shares one styling rule.
The fleet window's tables (Movements, Extraction, Combat and the rest) now size their columns intelligently instead of leaving it to chance. The Ship and System columns had no rule at all governing their width, so the browser split the leftover space between them however it saw fit — inconsistent across window sizes and often leaving the ship name and thumbnail squeezed while System took the lion's share. Every column but the selection checkbox now grows evenly when there is room to spare and shrinks to exactly what its own content needs when there isn't, the same way at every window size. Its header row now also stays pinned in place while you scroll through a long fleet list, instead of scrolling away with the rows beneath it.
The bottom bar now stacks cleanly into three rows — commander, Captain's Journal, action buttons — on narrower desktop windows, instead of hiding the journal and cramming everything else into too little space. At the widths right in between "wide desktop" and "phone", the journal used to vanish entirely and the surrounding content could overlap: the Fleets window, its own action button included, was sometimes rendered underneath the bar and impossible to click. The page now scrolls to fit whenever the bar needs the extra room, exactly as it already did on phones. On phones themselves, each of the three stacked rows now spans the bar's full width with its own contents centered inside it, instead of shrinking to fit its content and leaving empty space on both sides.
Cargo containers in busy sectors no longer hoard loot forever. A container was meant to expire two hours after its last activity, but every new item dropped into it pushed that deadline back — so in a sector where the fighting never stopped, the container never expired and salvage piled up without limit instead of clearing on its own. A container now expires two hours after it first appeared, whatever happens to it in between.
Moderately dangerous space (security 7-8) pays slightly better salvage than fully secured space again, as intended. The reward tier meant to make that band a little richer was silently having no effect, the way its value landed on the loot-rarity curve — so it paid exactly the same as the safest zones. Ambient salvage there is marginally richer once more, restoring the intended gradient from safe to dangerous space.
The seven pirate-warlord relics no longer sell for more credits than every other salvage item. The rarest elite-boss trophies in the game were missing the routine price-list entry the rest of the loot carries, so they skipped the standard trade markdown every other sale takes. They now sell at the same standard rate as everything else. Ops note: existing databases need `node scripts/sync-loot-stock.mjs` run once against production, or those seven relics keep selling at the old inflated price there even though the fix is live in the code. Additive-only and idempotent: no reseed, no progress, credits or fleets touched.
Your fleet no longer vanishes from the screen for a few seconds after you give an order. Once a play session had been running long enough for the server to reload your session, every order — move, jump, mine, attack, dock, buy, sell, repair, autopilot — answered with an empty fleet, so the ship list and the sector emptied out until the universe's next heartbeat put them back. No ship, order or credit was ever actually lost; the server was simply looking your ships up with the wrong kind of identifier and finding none.
e-xode: ROM — v0.27.0 · E-xode: ROM Playtest patch notes · SteamPeaks