Dead Reckoning: The Long Drift · published
Everything since 0.5.15, gathered in one place. A number of these came from reports here and on Discord — thank you for writing them up. Six more tracks in the voyage soundtrack. Three by Scott Buckley — Phase Shift, Solace and Hiraeth — and three by Alexandr Zhelanov: Space Atmosphere, Space and Star Flow. The Zhelanov tracks sit closer to a held drone than to a piece of music, which is what several of you asked for after saying the soundtrack was too narrow to sit under a long run. All six appear in the Settings track list under their own names, and each can be switched off on its own. All six languages are complete. Around a thousand passages — colony chronicle entries, the choices themselves, the logs that report what they cost, several endings — had never been translated. A line the game cannot find in your language is shown in English rather than not shown at all, so the gap never announced itself; it just arrived as an English paragraph, usually somewhere in the second half of the century. Every one of those is now translated in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Chinese. Screens that told you to open another screen sometimes named it something that is not on any tab. A tutorial in Spanish sent you to ESTADO DEL BARCO; the tab reads ESTADO DE LA NAVE. French offered two different buttons for advancing the year, neither matching the one you press. German and Chinese each called the cryo bay one thing on its tab and another in the places that describe it. Nineteen of these across five languages. They agree now. A set of Russian lines whose meaning had drifted. A course change in mid-flight was labelled an average departure. Engine burns — the ship firing its drive — read as the kind of burn you get from acid, in seven places. The marker for the galactic centre put Sagittarius A* twenty-six years away rather than twenty-six thousand light years. Every craft master aboard had become a captain, and the servants who rank below the vowed had become computer servers. DELETE and DELETE ALL asked you to confirm and then did nothing. Saves you had cleared were still on the list at the next launch. If you play on more than one machine it was worse: a save deleted on one came back on the other as a row that would neither load nor delete, so the list only ever grew. A deleted save now stays deleted, everywhere. The founding directives could only be answered with a mouse. The options after landing are numbered, but the number keys did nothing and nothing took focus, so on a keyboard or a controller there was no way to answer them at all. They answer to both now. Barren worlds were green, with a cloud deck drifting across them — beside a survey readout saying the world has no atmosphere and no water. They are rock now, on the star chart and in the endings. The machine-translation notice fired every time you switched. The notice that tells you Chinese and German are machine-translated appeared on every arrival at one of those languages instead of once. It is now shown once per language and remembered between sessions. Separately, five rebindable key rows in Settings kept whatever language the screen was first opened in while every other row changed; they change now too, along with their tooltips. More Russian corrections, several of them sent in by a player. A schematic reading OFFLINE agreed with nothing. The three survey verdicts on a candidate world were adjectives in three different genders, and the one for POOR was the word for destitute. RECLAIM > POWER offered physical strength. MISSION BRIEFING was two nouns with nothing joining them, and the button that collapses that panel said the word for ruin. ON and OFF now use the words a Russian switch uses. The second reactor's description undersold what it does. It promised roughly double the power, and survival of a single failure. What it actually guarantees is a floor: generation never falls below half, however badly the first reactor is damaged. It now says so.