Dead Reckoning: The Long Drift · published
Fixes — the star chart, a cluster of soft-locks, event timing, and a balance pass. Thank you all.
The star chart keeps your route and target while you move it. Panning or dragging the chart no longer drops the dashed trajectory line or the NEXT SYSTEM marker — they stay put (the marker rides the screen edge if you pan past it). The real cause this time was the target being culled off-screen, not the panning itself. (Caleb)
No more advancing past a system you haven't answered. Arriving at a planet — sometimes alongside a same-year probe report — could leave ADVANCE YEAR clickable; pressing it skipped the system and stranded the ship with no target and a stuck pop-up. ADVANCE / WATCH / FAST now stay locked until you land, pass, or pick a route after rejecting all worlds. (Rad Banker)
"Sustainability Year Ten" now actually arrives in year ten. The Engineering Guild's tenth-anniversary report was firing the year after you signed the charter. It now waits the full decade. (Tygre)
Non-food cultivation, rebalanced. Formalizing the crew's garden into a wellness program is now clearly worth its cost, and reclaiming the space is a sharper trade — you get the efficiency, but the crew feels the loss. (Rad Banker)
Saving mid-landing no longer strands you on reload. A save taken during the descent or founding sequence now reloads straight back into the directive you were on, instead of dropping the ship into a broken half-state.
A rare unwinnable run is closed. In an uncommon case the ship could pass the heliopause without the game registering it, after which no planet would ever appear. It now always registers.
The Engineering Guild reads truer. It now only forms once the ship has drifted enough to warrant the name, and the outcome of negotiating its charter is told in the present — the consequences are yours to play out, not foretold.
The event-timing audit now also catches anniversary events gated by "this event happened" (not just by "this decision was made"), so that class of bug can't hide again. New regression tests cover the advance/navigation lock, the star-chart pan, and save/new-game state hygiene.