Dead Reckoning: The Long Drift · published
The navigation overhaul has landed. Every star you can steer toward is now a real catalogued star, the departure chart reads like an actual course, and a long list of playtest snags are gone.
And with that, the last graphical vestige of Dead Reckoning 0.1 is gone.
Real stars, everywhere you steer. Nav candidates, the maiden course, and mid-flight diverts all resolve to real catalogued stars — 61 Vir, q1 Eri, γ Lep, β Com, 12 Oph and more in the 30–35 ly band. No more abstract "System B."
A named maiden voyage. At launch the ship is aimed at a specific real star ~30–35 years out — named in the mission briefing and marked on the chart from the first year.
A different galaxy every run. World habitability is now seeded per-run, so there's no fixed "paradise map" to memorise — and genuinely green worlds stay rare. The difficulty setting controls how rare.
Captain-cult beats reframed. The Reckoner / mutiny arcs now read as off-list diverts from the charted course (translated across EN / DE / FR / IT / ES).
The solar-system course is drawn waypoint-to-waypoint — Sol → Mars → Belt → Jupiter → Saturn → Heliopause — solid for the legs already flown, dashed for the legs ahead, and it now scales correctly at every zoom instead of a fixed stub.
Launch star marked on the chart during the solar-transit leg; departure path straightened; deeper zoom; the departure readout shows your course star and ETA.
ESC now cancels a staged chart course (it used to open Settings); the quit confirmation was decluttered.
The maiden voyage no longer overshoots the launch star. The ship eases in, arrives exactly on schedule, and holds at the system while you decide — instead of drifting past it.
Slowdown should occur on the chart; this still needs refinement but the actual year listed should be correct.
The Year-2 calibration probe returns as one beat with Jupiter (~Y5), not stranded out past Saturn.
Empty-system arrivals can no longer soft-lock the run — you always get a world (even if barren) and a way forward.
The "crisis medicine" research now actually applies its death-rate reduction.
The food advisory fires on your real trajectory and shows a live years-to-empty figure.
The epilogue no longer contradicts the ship-disposition choice you made.
"Quit to Menu" keeps your (autosaved) voyage; the run archive no longer double-records an ending.
Green worlds are rare and their scarcity scales cleanly with difficulty (Archival → Standard → Dead Reckoning).
Steam Deck compatibility, UX/UI, and more narrative beat fixes (some endings still hard-coded)