Dead Reckoning: The Long Drift · published
The demo and the full game both ship from v0.2.101. The headline since the last notes: survey probes became a real system — a scarce bay you fabricate and aim, and now you can target actual stars and get back their real worlds. Plus the Mars flyby returns, planet temperature finally reads sensibly, and a batch of crash/freeze/save fixes.
A small follow-up over v0.2.100.
The asteroid-belt waypoint is back. Since v0.2.99 it had quietly stopped appearing: only one event fires per year, and the new Year-2 calibration-probe tutorial took the Year-3 slot the belt needed. The belt now co-fires as a second decision the same year — you resolve the calibration shot, then continue straight into the belt's route choice (the safe arc, or the direct line through the rocks). No knock-on to the Jupiter or Saturn waypoints. (bug-1475)
Save files no longer balloon on long runs and replays. Starting a new run or replaying under the same mission kept appending that run's entire dead-colonist roster to the same hidden sidecar file — one real save had grown to roughly 613 MB, which is also what drove the late-game disk hitching. A new per-run marker clears a stale sidecar when a fresh run begins, and loading now de-duplicates and prunes foreign records, so existing oversized saves shrink by about 33× the next time you load them. No colonist data is lost. (bug-1496)
"Next system" no longer reads a false OVERDUE. The star-chart ETA didn't account for the heliopause-crossing buffer that actually gates your first arrival, so the header could show "OVERDUE" for several years before the ship could possibly reach the next system. The countdown now reflects the real arrival floor. (bug-1497)
Saves are now crash-safe. The yearly autosave used to write straight over your save file, so a crash, force-quit, or power loss mid-write could leave it corrupt and unloadable. The new save is now written off to the side and swapped into place only once it's complete, so an interrupted save can never cost you your run. (bug-20260620)
The build version now shows in the bottom-left corner of the title screen and options menu — so screenshots and bug reports are unambiguous about which build you're on.
Aim survey probes at real stars. Targeting a probe locks onto an actual catalogued star on the journey map — the reticle snaps to the nearest named star and the launch panel names it. The probe brings back that star's real planet (type, habitability, full readout), within a margin of error that tightens the closer the star is (and with the Sharpened Telemetry research). Travel there later and you arrive at exactly the world the probe found. Probing open space still works as a cold, generic shot.
The Mars flyby is back. The early-voyage solar waypoints could be silently skipped — only one event fired per year, so the Mars flyby (window: the first two years) always lost its slot to the launch and the first ship-born birth. A second beat can now share a year, so the Mars flyby reliably turns up around Year 2.
Probed worlds report their full readout again — atmosphere / water / temperature / resources / biohazard no longer read 0, and a divert lands on exactly what the probe found.
Planet temperature now reads as a habitability-appropriate band — FROZEN / COLD / TEMPERATE / WARM / HOT / SCORCHING — not a misleading number; a habitable world can never read "85°C, scorching." Also retires a latent Volcanic-landing hypothermia bug.
Probe reports show the real margin of error (it scales with distance) instead of a fixed "±15%."
Fixed a freeze when launching a probe at a distant star past the heliopause — the chart was drawing the probe's whole trajectory every frame; trajectories are clipped to the view now, so any target is safe.
Late-game save stutter & ballooning save files fixed. On long runs the yearly autosave had begun writing a snowballing block of duplicated state to disk — a multi-second hitch each year and saves swelling toward half a gigabyte. The save is lean again; old saves heal on your next decision.
Frame rate is now capped at 240 FPS — no more running the GPU flat-out for no visible gain.
A new survey-probe system. Probes are a small bay you draw from. You start with one, the foundry rebuilds them slowly (years per probe, slower as the hull wears), and you aim each one at a target on the star chart in a two-step launch instead of a flat-cost button. A pre-departure calibration shot at Jupiter's moons in Year 2 teaches the loop, and a map drone animates out to the target. A research line and the crew's "second probe" demand expand the bay over a run. Fully localized (DE/FR/IT/ES).
Off-course routes now carry transit hazards too — plotting your own heading no longer skips the nebula, debris, and dead-zone events the recommended routes run.
Emergency crisis and major governance decisions apply their consequences again — answering a power/food/hull crisis (emergency refit, food-to-power, forced cryo) and the deck-uprising / knowledge-loss / homecoming decisions had been resolving without changing anything on the ship. They apply their real costs and gains again now, exactly once.
Survey probe returns no longer vanish silently — a finished probe could fail to surface its "PROBE DATA RECEIVED" report; returns are now held in saved state and always surface.
After landing, a colony could be shown a ship failure ending (lost power, starvation, hull breach) when the ship's run-down voyage stats carried into the colony phase. Once the colony is founded, the mission can no longer fail as a ship loss — those endings are gated to the voyage now.
A candidate world could turn up too early, while the ship was still inside the solar system (one report saw worlds flagged in Year 9). No world surfaces now until the heliopause crossing is behind you and a decade of deep space with it — every route obeys the same rule.
Now I rest until tomorrow.
— Garan Lorn / Selenodrome