Dead Reckoning: The Long Drift · published
Four systems land in 0.3.0: named identities the crew hardens into, the departure board, genetic decline as a force that can end the voyage, and the science team's long projects. The voyage also runs materially longer before it comes apart.
The ship becomes something, and it has a name. Ideology and the loss of knowledge now converge into named identities the crew forms from the decisions you already make. At a threshold the ship shows you what the crew has been becoming — the actual decisions, by year and outcome — and asks whether to make it official.
Eleven identities across two lines. Six are forms of rule — officer rule, shared rule, ship religion, engineer rule, family rule, charter rule. Five are what is left when the knowledge goes — by the manual, machine worship, hand skills, improvised repair, forbidden knowledge. A run can hold one of each, and the pair is its own society.
Identities harden; they do not switch. A formed identity moves through three tiers — Emerging, Established, Total — and only ever deepens. The crises you know grow options in its voice, appended at the second tier and replacing the neutral answers at the third; a standing action spends from the same yearly work budget as ship maintenance.
Refusing the identity breaks a faction. The faction carrying the strongest lean walks out and its remnant resists for the rest of the run. Refuse at every fork and the crew stays only a crew — a rarer arrival, with its own ending.
The readouts, the log, and the ending all speak it. A formed identity's name and tier show on the readouts; at the Total tier the log rereads its old entries in the identity's register; and what the ship became steers which ending fires and how the epilogue reads, down to a line for each founding practice that survived the crossing.
The ship commits its departure corridor at the launch board. Year 1 offers three corridors on file — the nearest reachable system, the most promising world in the far window, and the densest cluster of onward stars — each a named, real star with its class, distance, and contact year. The choice sets your first system and the shape of the early voyage.
The pre-launch founding log lists the same board. The corridor you commit at Year 1 is the one the launch record promised. Holding course keeps the maiden heading — the cluster corridor.
The Sol system holds still when you commit. The drive keeps the maiden heading through the solar transit — the planets stay where they loaded, the flybys happen — and the committed corridor's course change executes at the heliopause exit, shown as a bend in the plotted route.
The Sol-transit briefings run on every corridor, not just the default heading.
Genetic diversity can now end the voyage. Decline drains the pool across generations; a depleted pool kills colonists and suppresses births.
Founding bloodlines are load-bearing. When a founding line's last living carrier dies childless, that diversity is gone for good.
Two new endings record where the genome goes: GENETIC EXTINCTION, and ONE LINEAGE — a colony that survives as a single genome.
The science team works decade-scale studies. Three standing projects begin at launch — a drive harmonics study, closed-loop agronomy, and a hull fatigue atlas. The pace follows the living science staff and slows under knowledge regression and class stratification; field data found during the voyage joins the same queue.
Found technologies are on the record. Everything acquired mid-voyage lists under SHIP LOADOUT with its year and source; live projects show progress and an estimated completion year.
The voyage runs longer before it comes apart. The choices that erode the crew's knowledge now cost less per decision, so a well-kept ship holds together decades further into the crossing.
Crossing a social threshold no longer ends the run on the spot. Several endings that once fired the instant the crew's cohesion or knowledge crossed a line are now a yearly risk that climbs the deeper the ship goes; a ship near the break carries a warning that escalates.
The late voyage is no longer empty. The back half of a long run now carries decisions of its own, set past year 200.
Lists scroll by trackpad drag, with a wider scrollbar to grab.
The Mission Archive closes when you click outside it, and its BACK button stays pinned in reach.
A ship that loses power gets its ship-loss ending rather than a survival coda.
The abandoned-lifeboat line appears only on runs that landed.
A collapse epilogue no longer repeats its "eleven years" line.
The intro sequence keeps its aspect ratio on 16:10 screens instead of stretching to fill.
Deep ideological drift now calls the ship the ark; the identity-total announcement names the identity that became total.
A number of new lines temporarily read in English in German, French, Italian, and Spanish while their translations are refreshed.