Every update leaves here in perfect condition. We test it, we're pleased with it, we write confident words like "tuned" and "balanced" in the notes. Then it meets actual Pioneers, and inside a day we find out that the enemy turrets had never once fired at anybody, the wanderers were flying tight little circles admiring their own spawn point, and one shell to the hitch could fold a tender inside a locomotive and leave it there.
None of that was in the design document. All of it was in your reports. So: thank you. Genuinely. Including for "they seem to be spiraling towards high up into the sky", which is a bug report and, we'd argue, a poem.
Here's what you found, what we did about it, and the one thing we added while we were in there.
New: take the gun yourself
You know the feeling. You're lined up on a Dreadnought, the shot is right there, and your turret is serenely tracking a balloon. You have opinions about this. The turret has never once asked for them.
So now you can just take it. Click a gun on your train and it's yours: you aim it, you fire it, you choose the target. Tab and Shift+Tab hop you along the other guns on that car, for when the one in your hands is reloading, or pointing entirely the wrong way, or is simply not the weapon this situation called for. X holds fire for when you'd rather wait for the good shot. One turret at a time, because we have met you.
Let go and the gun goes back exactly how you found it, auto-fire and all. It's borrowed, not reconfigured.
And then there's Focus Fire. Arm it while you're holding a turret and every other gun on the train points wherever you're pointing, each one working out its own arc to get there. One aim point, the entire consist, all at the same moment. Switch it off and they go back to thinking for themselves.
It is, we freely admit, an enormous amount of ordnance to hand somebody whose main complaint was that the guns weren't doing what they were told. Every weapon you own, aimed at exactly the spot you picked, on your say-so.
So there's really no excuse any more. If the shot still misses, that one is between you and the sky. Enjoy.
Enemies that had, on reflection, never attacked anyone
- Wanderer turrets never fired at players. They were armed, hostile, auto-firing and in range. Then they measured the distance to where your train spawned rather than where it is, decided you were miles away, and dropped you. Every pass, all match. They now shoot at you, which we're told is the intended experience.
- Wanderers spiralled into the sky instead of attacking. Each craft was reading its own gun mounts as an obstacle dead ahead, escalating to the emergency climb-out, and then doing it again forever. Both halves are fixed: the probe ignores its own turrets, and the climb-out can no longer ratchet the ceiling upward one detour at a time.
- Craft launched by a fortress spent their first twenty seconds sightseeing. They were burning their free-roam timer in a tight sphere around the fortress that built them. Anything a town launches now latches onto the nearest hostile train immediately.
- EMP guns stripped a shield beautifully and then stalled. Damage against armour and health went from 0.10 to 0.25. Measured on six tier-2 turret mounts, the Ion Cannon's kill times drop from 13.7s / 31.2s / 27.8s / 21.2s to 5.5s / 12.5s / 11.5s across tiers 4, 5, 7 and 9.
Trains that were being thrown around the map
- Shells could fold your consist. A hit could shove a car hard enough that the couplers gave up and re-settled with the tender inside the locomotive, stuck there permanently. Nothing was knocking them on purpose: it was the physics solver's contact response landing on the one axis the rail leaves free. Consists no longer take the impulse at all.
- The coupler bar is no longer a target. It's short and light, so a single round on the hitch was the fastest thing in the train and dragged the locomotive and tender along with it.
- Head-on hits rang like a bell. Cars flinched and then slingshotted back and forth. The flinch stays, because a landed shell should read as one, and the ringing is damped out.
Capture, which turned out to cost about four times what it should
- Three quarters of every mender rocket was being thrown away. A rocket that finished off the corruption gauge spent everything on the cleanse and healed nothing, so the repair needed an entirely separate rocket. Over one measured capture: 10,563 points delivered, 2,528 credited, and 45 of 60 rockets moved the capture nowhere at all. The overflow now carries through to the heal in the same shot.
- Captured towns get a minute the Rust can't touch. Flooring a town now opens a 60-second window where corruption can't regrow and wanderers can't re-corrupt it. Taking a town is a task with a deadline instead of a tug of war you could lose by standing still.
- Capture progress is staged, not binary. Shut down, cleansed, taken. All that work stops reading as zero until the instant it's done.
- A heal could outrun the cleanse and hand a half-taken town straight back. It can't now.
Things that were quietly wrong on your screen
- Focusing a locomotive put the camera underground. The pivot measures the bottom of the hull, and the chimney's smoke plume counted as hull, so it faithfully orbited the bottom of the smoke, 1,867uu below the engine. Tenders were fine, which is what gave it away. No particle effect can define a body any more.
- Wanderers stepped and blinked at the edge of sight. The smooth-motion radius was a constant that didn't match the fog's actual reveal distance, so there was a shell where craft were still drawn but already moving in six-frame steps. It reads the fog directly now, and the show/hide edge has hysteresis so nothing strobes.
- New: picture saturation, 1 to 5, in settings. 3 is the grade as authored: below drains toward grey, above enriches. Saves written before this read as "leave it alone".
Multiplayer
- Mirrored trains could bind to the wrong rail and never recover. The correction was answering sideways error with the throttle, which cannot fix sideways error, and then drove the mirror backwards while its owner came forward.
- Peers in a region you'd never visited stayed ghosts for up to three minutes: health bars and collision, no train. A held proxy now asks for the region it needs instead of waiting for you to wander over there.
- Six of seven celebration fireworks were dying in the barrel on the other machine, because a mirror's purely cosmetic reload state was vetoing a shot the authority had already fired.
- Standing lag is gone from mirrored trains. Every position report now advances by its own age on arrival, which erases the 90–130uu of lag that was sitting invisibly inside the convergence deadband. A parked owner stays exactly where it said it was.
Tutorial
- The tutorial sky is capped at three live wanderers per settlement, so it reads as a handful of aircraft you can actually follow rather than a swarm. The scripted ninety-second raid is deliberately exempt, because an ambush should arrive on top of the ordinary pressure, not instead of it.
That should be enough to get a full night's sleep and let the ego reinflate to roughly its original shape. We give it until the weekend, when one of you will take a train somewhere no train has been before and the whole cycle starts again.
Please keep doing that. It's the only thing that actually works.
See you out there, Pioneers.