Hey folks! Big one this time. I've been heads-down on making your first hours smoother and giving you actual reasons to fly around the galaxy. Here's the rundown.

Escort missions are a real thing now

This was the headliner. When you take an escort contract, you're now protecting an actual ship that flies with you, warps with you, and can absolutely get blown up if you slack off. Pirates will ambush your convoy mid-jump (with a sane cap, I'm not a monster :D), prioritize the ship you're guarding, and warp out gracefully instead of magically vanishing. Lose the escort and the mission fails - you'll know about it. Get it home safe and you get paid.

Missions & contracts overhaul

- New Contracts panel with clearer requirements and decision hooks, so you actually understand what you're signing up for.

- Mission deadlines now scale with distance. Long-haul delivery across multiple warp jumps? You get the time you deserve. No more impossible runs.

- Mission route preview now shows you exactly where you're going with a click-to-locate affordance.

- You get a notification on every mission completion path now, properly localized.

First-session clarity (a.k.a. "wait, what do I do?")

- When onboarding wraps up, the mission board lights up with a smoke signal so you've got an obvious next step.

- New game setup, resource tooltips, and decision feedback copy all got a clarity pass. Less guessing, more playing.

- Surface actions now show progress feedback so you're not staring at a colonist wondering if anything's happening.

Miscellanous

- Fade-to-black transitions for "go to" jumps instead of the camera flying you across the system. Snappier and less nauseating.

- A pile of mini-map and system map fixes during warp and in planet/sub-hex views.

- 100 new flavour lore notes scattered around the galaxy, plus new message-themed points of interest to find them at.

- Dead Drops now carry thematic loot - cash, intel, contraband. Worth the detour.

- Fixed a bunch (22+) of POI and event outcomes that didn't match their descriptions. What it says is now what you get.

Relationships & family

- Family members will never weirdly show up as "Married" to each other anymore.

- Relationship tiers for blood relatives now follow the actual score instead of a hardcoded ceiling, and legacy bad data gets cleaned up.

- Fixed diary spam and some badge overflow in the character panel.

Under the hood

- Hardened combat cleanup so orphaned fights actually end instead of lingering.

As always - thanks for playing the demo and sending feedback. A lot of this came straight from you. Keep it coming. o7

Hey, Explorers! I’ve just pushed another demo update. This one is not a “big new content” patch. It is mostly a “the demo should stop fighting you while you’re trying to learn it” patch. :D After the first release I got a lot of useful feedback about the opening minutes being confusing, especially around scanning, finding resources, landing, understanding what the planet actually contains, and coming back to a save without losing the thread. So this update focuses heavily on that.

• The first steps should be easier to follow now. Early onboarding now does a better job of pointing you toward the actual next target instead of just telling you what to do in text.

• Water and fauna objectives now have clearer targeting. The game can now guide you toward specific planet/sub-hex locations for early survival objectives, which should make “find animals” and “secure water” much less vague.

• The starter planet is less chaotic. I changed the demo starter planet logic so it should avoid weird starts like ocean-heavy worlds with mostly aquatic life, barren planets, or ecosystems that make the first survival steps unnecessarily awkward.

• Planet markers got a big readability pass. Resource, flora, fauna, POI, ship, and settlement markers were redesigned to be more compact and readable. Empty labels should no longer appear just to add noise.

• The planet legend is now more useful. Category pills such as Minerals, Flora, Fauna, POI, and Ships can now work more like quick filters, helping you focus on what you’re actually looking for.

• Player settlements should stand out better. The player colony marker now gets clearer treatment instead of blending into NPC settlements.

• Scanning planets should be easier to understand. Scan progress is more visible, and completed/stale scan orders should be less likely to block a new scan attempt.

• Save/load got more hardening. I fixed several cases where loaded saves could restore UI, resources, quest targets, crew state, or order state incorrectly.

• Startup and loading should feel less weird. Some of the empty/half-loaded UI states during load were cleaned up, and the game should be better about keeping time/state under control while loading.

• Quest pill and tooltip polish continued. The bottom quest pill, rich tooltip, and quest target restoration got more fixes so returning to the game should be less disorienting.

• Sub-hex UI got another pass. The detail modal, bottom bar, order buttons, and scaling behavior were adjusted to be clearer and less prone to overlap.

The short version: the demo has a lot of systems, and the first version expected players to connect too many dots too quickly. That was not great. So this patch is about making the opening less hostile to curiosity. You should still be exploring, making decisions, and figuring things out, but you should not be fighting the UI just to understand where the water is or why a scan is blocked.

I did improve save/load behavior, but if you started a save in the very first demo build and something still feels strange, starting a fresh expedition will give you the cleanest version of the updated onboarding flow.

If you try the new version, I’d love to know how the first 20-30 minutes feel now. Especially:

• Do you understand what the game wants you to do next?

• Are planet markers readable enough?

• Can you find water/fauna without feeling lost?

• Does performance feel okay on your machine?

• Does loading a save behave as expected?

As always, feedback in reviews, Steam Discussions, or Discord helps a lot.

Have fun!

Szymon