Dead Reckoning: The Long Drift · published
A Steam Deck legibility pass, a clearer ship-maintenance readout, a real reason to wake the crew, an option to skip the intros, and a batch of fixes to the research display, the mission archive, and the early flyby logs.
Note: I will be off-grid as of July 1 to July 5. I'll be silent during this time, but I will be back to read your bugs, comments, and suggestions. Ping me on Discord or here if you haven't seen things resolved.
Cheers!
Boxes and panels keep their borders. Buttons, cards, and panels no longer drop their outlines on the Deck.
The bottom action bar fits. The shaded gap under the buttons is gone, and the WARNING / CAUTION / ALARMS indicators no longer run off the right edge.
Star names are readable. Map labels are larger and grow as you zoom in.
The top status strip stays on one line.
Colony Status scrolls, so "Close The Archive" is always reachable.
"ACT" is now "WORK." The yearly maintenance indicator read like a story act; it now reads "WORK 3/3," with a WORK THIS YEAR line beside the repair controls and a tooltip that explains it.
Waking crew is a real choice. Thawed crew work the hydroponics — more food while life support and the farm decks hold, at the cost of more power draw and faster hull wear. On a failing ship the food gain falls away while the costs remain.
Skip the intros. A new "Skip Intros On Startup" toggle opens straight on the menu; ESC during any intro jumps to the menu.
Research reads true. Committing a research no longer flashes a one-time effect as if it were a yearly rate.
Past runs log once. A landed run no longer records two Mission Archive entries; existing duplicates collapse on your next completed run.
The Jupiter flyby reads right. The waypoint sighting and the probe's return are told on the same year, the planet is described once, and the Jupiter log can no longer appear during the Saturn pass.
The return-to-Earth estimate fits your voyage instead of a fixed "six centuries."
Smaller touches. The colony school waits until there are children old enough for it; the star-chart map button no longer covers the readout; the ALARMS toggle no longer resizes/
The music ships with the game, each track tagged with its title, artist, and license, alongside a credits file.
Thanks to Strato, Caelum, Efflixi, and the Discord crew for the reports.
A balance-and-readout pass: colonist lifespans now follow a real human curve, the settled-colony epilogue tells the truth about who arrived and how the colony fared, endings match how you actually played, and a batch of clarity fixes.
Realistic lifespans. Mortality follows a real human curve — living past 110 is rare, 120 nearly unheard-of. Ship-born colonists rest in cryo between watches like the founders, so a long voyage no longer ages anyone past a human lifetime.
The epilogue tells the truth. A settled colony no longer reports a population frozen at the landing count a hundred years on — it shows who actually reached the ground, a count at colony year five, and the hundred-year figure clearly marked as a projection.
"Arrived intact" means it. No longer claims every name on the departure roster reached the surface when the voyage took losses.
Less repetition, a tighter read. The founding decisions are each told once instead of two or three times over, and the failing-colony epilogue is meaningfully shorter.
Forced landings show the world you settled. The split-the-colony ending and the harder landing outcomes show the same terrain readout as a normal landing.
Endings match how you played. Ship-loss endings no longer fire after you've founded the colony; the AI-contact ending only arrives if you saw the contact that sets it up; the cargo-cult ending only befalls a colony whose beliefs fit that story.
Your choices stick. Choices that protect genetic diversity hold instead of bouncing back, and a late-voyage choice's previewed resource cost matches what actually happens.
The first building matches your founding priority instead of always a gathering hall.
A tended garden helps the colony — it now reads as a benefit, not a cost.
Fusion Optimization reads true — its effect now matches its description.
Steam Deck: boot text and menu fit the screen.
The Jupiter flyby is described once — the probe-calibration and waypoint logs no longer both describe the same view a year apart.
Clearer Wake Crew tooltip, explaining its real cost.