Dead Reckoning: The Long Drift · published
A hotfix for several player-reported ways to get stuck — plus fixes to the survey/colony readout, the Captain's Brief, and the Steam Deck layout. If your save hardlocked after rejecting a planet, this build should recover it automatically on load.
Rejecting a planet could break the star chart and strand you. After rejecting a world the chart could stop working and you couldn't select a new destination — and it survived restarting the save, because the broken state was written into the save itself. Navigation data is now stored correctly, and existing saves caught by this recover automatically the next time you load them — no lost progress. (Thanks, BigBrainTimeThanos and Efflixi.)
A late-voyage hardlock near the end of a long journey. On a very long, keep-searching voyage you could reach a point where the year wouldn't advance — the only way through was reloading to inch forward one year at a time. The voyage now closes out cleanly when there's nowhere left in range. (Thanks, BigBrainTimeThanos.)
"Call a Vote" could freeze the arrival crisis. On the "a faction will not descend" arrival decision, choosing CALL A VOTE could leave you unable to pass time. It now returns you to the landing decision as intended. (Thanks, BigBrainTimeThanos.)
A surveyed world no longer contradicts its own terrain readout. A world surveyed as habitable — breathable air, oceans — could show a "vacuum / no surface water / sterile" readout once you landed. The colony world now carries the same survey it was found with.
The Captain's Brief reads like a real decision again. Ship-maintenance briefs (hull welding, the AgriDeck) no longer surface after you've established the colony, and every brief now shows what each option does and confirms the outcome. (Thanks, Strato and BigBrainTimeThanos.)
The "failed landing" ending is reachable again for a genuinely catastrophic descent — a wrecked ship onto a lethal world.
Watch-log work goes to the right hands. A mission-log entry describing hands-on engineering — welding a coolant run — is now narrated through an engineer or technician on the watch, not whoever happened to be most senior. (Thanks, Jello and Wombri.)
Genetic effects on choices are clearer, and the archive helps. Preserving the last Earth-born's samples for the genetic archive now correctly improves genetic diversity (it was lowering it), and a choice's genetic cost now shows on the choice instead of only on hover.
Menu and intro text stay on screen. Expanding the Mission Briefing no longer pushes the launch controls off the bottom; the boot-log status lines stay on one line; and the cinematic intro's "PRESS ANY KEY TO SKIP" and the CREDITS label are no longer clipped. (Thanks, Strato.)