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A generation ship is a long argument about how to live. For the last stretch of development, everything we've built has served one idea: the crossing should change who the crew is, not just how much food is in the hold. That work is nearly ready to leave the experimental beta and land on the default branch as 0.4.0 — we're aiming for the coming week. Here's what's come together, and what's still ahead.
Your decisions across the voyage now converge into a named identity the crew becomes — eleven of them across two lines. Six ways of ruling: officer rule, shared rule, ship religion, engineer rule, family rule, charter rule. Five ways of forgetting: by the manual, machine worship, hand skills, improvised repair, forbidden knowledge. At a threshold the ship lays out the decisions that formed it, year by year, and asks whether to make it official. A formed identity hardens through three tiers and never switches — it recolours events you already know, adds options you didn't have before, and eventually replaces the neutral ones entirely.
An identity isn't a renamed menu. Officer rule spends named people and keeps a list. A commune's assembly takes its time — and sometimes decides without you. A ritual technocracy scores its offerings to the drive as uptime. The guild-houses hold a weld to one bloodline. A recited charter is obeyed long past the point of sense. Where one of the six ways of ruling meets one of the five ways of forgetting, you get a distinct society — with decisions no other crew will see, and its own account of itself at journey's end.
The complaint we heard most was that choices moved numbers and nothing else. So:
A directive that changes the watch now changes the watch — the rotation, the ship's AI's authority, a mandated curriculum, the birth policy. They move the setting, not just the stat.
Authority handed to the ship's AI can be taken back. A colony that shuts it down keeps it down.
What the voyage did to you waits for you at landfall. Founding options close off according to how the crossing went, and the record tells you which roads are shut and why.
The crew count is honest. A ship with twenty people left no longer eats, draws power, and stands a watch as though a hundred were awake.
Some commitments don't come due for decades. A hard call made in the opening years can detonate long after the people who made it are gone — the ship keeping its own account of what you decided, and presenting the bill when it chooses.
Genetic diversity can now end the voyage. It drains across generations; a depleted pool kills colonists and suppresses births, and when a founding line's last carrier dies childless, that line is gone for good. Two endings record where the genome went.
The science team works long projects — drive harmonics, closed-loop agronomy, a hull-fatigue atlas — decades-long efforts whose pace follows the living staff and slows as knowledge regresses. Field data recovered along the way joins the same queue and takes years to master. What you finish goes on the record, with its year and its source.
Arriving at a star opens a top-down map of its system — the star, its worlds on their orbits, the belts — with the candidate world marked. A world keeps its habitability to itself until you run the surface scan; a probe gives only a rough read beforehand. Every system you chart stays on the map, and you can always set a course back to it.
A new PERFORMANCE section: a frame-rate cap (default 60, to cut GPU heat and laptop battery drain) and a REDUCE EFFECTS switch that turns off the CRT overlays on lower-end machines.
The star chart reads cleanly — one marker and one label per body, and labels that scale with your Font Size setting instead of smearing over each other.
HIGH CONTRAST and COLORBLIND MODE, and a great deal more of the interface, now read in German, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian — six languages, with the Russian pass corrected by a community translator.
We're promoting all of this from the experimental beta to the default branch as 0.4.0, targeting the coming week. Still on the bench and rolling out after it: more of the settled-society endings written out in full, a readable ship's-log so you can look back over the decisions that formed your crew, and continued work bringing every language level with the English.
Everything above is already live on the experimental beta if you want a head start: Steam → Dead Reckoning → Properties → Betas → experimental. Bug reports and arguments about how to run a starship are both welcome on our Discord.
Thanks for continuing on the journey with me!
— Garan Lorn/Selenodrome
Three updates that together rebuild how you arrive at a world: the star chart learns to move between the far view and the near one, a system becomes a place you can see, and a world keeps its secrets until you look. Along the way the plotted course reads true and the colony's dead are named.
The star chart switches between the interstellar view and a system's top-down map. Arriving at a world opens straight onto that map — the star, its worlds on their orbits, the asteroid belts, the candidate world marked — and drops back to the star field when you move on. No ship in the frame; the view looks out from it.
Any system you've charted can be reopened from the star chart — hover a star and select \.
The interstellar view holds its full star field for the whole voyage, past the heliopause.
Arriving at a system presents its several candidate worlds to weigh, not a single one — and the number of candidates varies, with better sensors improving the odds of finding more.
A world keeps its habitability and details to itself until you run the surface scan on arrival. A probe gives only a rough read beforehand, never the number.
Every system you visit stays on the chart, and you can always set course back to it — to the same world you left, not a re-rolled one.
The outbound course plots as one straight line to its star. Through the solar transit the forward leg holds the ship's heading instead of bending toward the destination's true bearing — the route and the ship's nose agree.
A probed world's estimated habitability reads the same figure on the star chart as in the probe report.
Colonists lost in the landing are entered in the register by name, each with a cause and the year of death, alongside those lost in transit.
Settled colonies stand under an enclosed dome again — a sealed shell on airless and hostile ground, a glassed biosphere on ice and temperate worlds — with the horizon cleared of a stray warm band.
A ship reading 0% power, food, or hull now genuinely faces the consequences instead of coasting at zero.
The ship's systems hold their bid for expanded authority until the voyage has outrun most of the crew's lifetimes, no longer in the opening decades.
Locked founding directives read as complete, dimmed cards rather than losing their borders.
Returning to a pending decision from another tab no longer leaves the year unable to advance.
The faction readout columns line up, and the world-survey card no longer clips its labels.
An editing pass on the founding-era passages and the account of those lost in transit.
German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian brought level with the corrected text.
Four systems land in 0.3.0: named identities the crew hardens into, the departure board, genetic decline as a force that can end the voyage, and the science team's long projects. The voyage also runs materially longer before it comes apart.
The ship becomes something, and it has a name. Ideology and the loss of knowledge now converge into named identities the crew forms from the decisions you already make. At a threshold the ship shows you what the crew has been becoming — the actual decisions, by year and outcome — and asks whether to make it official.
Eleven identities across two lines. Six are forms of rule — officer rule, shared rule, ship religion, engineer rule, family rule, charter rule. Five are what is left when the knowledge goes — by the manual, machine worship, hand skills, improvised repair, forbidden knowledge. A run can hold one of each, and the pair is its own society.
Identities harden; they do not switch. A formed identity moves through three tiers — Emerging, Established, Total — and only ever deepens. The crises you know grow options in its voice, appended at the second tier and replacing the neutral answers at the third; a standing action spends from the same yearly work budget as ship maintenance.
Refusing the identity breaks a faction. The faction carrying the strongest lean walks out and its remnant resists for the rest of the run. Refuse at every fork and the crew stays only a crew — a rarer arrival, with its own ending.
The readouts, the log, and the ending all speak it. A formed identity's name and tier show on the readouts; at the Total tier the log rereads its old entries in the identity's register; and what the ship became steers which ending fires and how the epilogue reads, down to a line for each founding practice that survived the crossing.
The ship commits its departure corridor at the launch board. Year 1 offers three corridors on file — the nearest reachable system, the most promising world in the far window, and the densest cluster of onward stars — each a named, real star with its class, distance, and contact year. The choice sets your first system and the shape of the early voyage.
The pre-launch founding log lists the same board. The corridor you commit at Year 1 is the one the launch record promised. Holding course keeps the maiden heading — the cluster corridor.
The Sol system holds still when you commit. The drive keeps the maiden heading through the solar transit — the planets stay where they loaded, the flybys happen — and the committed corridor's course change executes at the heliopause exit, shown as a bend in the plotted route.
The Sol-transit briefings run on every corridor, not just the default heading.
Genetic diversity can now end the voyage. Decline drains the pool across generations; a depleted pool kills colonists and suppresses births.
Founding bloodlines are load-bearing. When a founding line's last living carrier dies childless, that diversity is gone for good.
Two new endings record where the genome goes: GENETIC EXTINCTION, and ONE LINEAGE — a colony that survives as a single genome.
The science team works decade-scale studies. Three standing projects begin at launch — a drive harmonics study, closed-loop agronomy, and a hull fatigue atlas. The pace follows the living science staff and slows under knowledge regression and class stratification; field data found during the voyage joins the same queue.
Found technologies are on the record. Everything acquired mid-voyage lists under SHIP LOADOUT with its year and source; live projects show progress and an estimated completion year.
The voyage runs longer before it comes apart. The choices that erode the crew's knowledge now cost less per decision, so a well-kept ship holds together decades further into the crossing.
Crossing a social threshold no longer ends the run on the spot. Several endings that once fired the instant the crew's cohesion or knowledge crossed a line are now a yearly risk that climbs the deeper the ship goes; a ship near the break carries a warning that escalates.
The late voyage is no longer empty. The back half of a long run now carries decisions of its own, set past year 200.
Lists scroll by trackpad drag, with a wider scrollbar to grab.
The Mission Archive closes when you click outside it, and its BACK button stays pinned in reach.
A ship that loses power gets its ship-loss ending rather than a survival coda.
The abandoned-lifeboat line appears only on runs that landed.
A collapse epilogue no longer repeats its "eleven years" line.
The intro sequence keeps its aspect ratio on 16:10 screens instead of stretching to fill.
Deep ideological drift now calls the ship the ark; the identity-total announcement names the identity that became total.
A number of new lines temporarily read in English in German, French, Italian, and Spanish while their translations are refreshed.
Three systems land on the experimental branch: the departure board, genetic decline as a force that can end the voyage, and the science team's long projects. This build ships to the experimental beta branch (opt-in) only — the stable branch stays on 0.2.125.
The ship commits its departure corridor at the launch board. Year 1 offers three corridors on file — the nearest reachable system, the most promising world in the far window, and the densest cluster of onward stars — each a named, real star with its class, distance, and contact year. The choice sets your first system and the shape of the early voyage.
The pre-launch founding log lists the same board. The corridor you commit at Year 1 is the one the launch record promised.
The Sol system holds still when you commit. The drive keeps the maiden heading through the solar transit — the planets stay where they loaded, the flybys happen — and the committed corridor's course change executes at the heliopause exit, shown as a bend in the plotted route.
The Sol-transit briefings run on every corridor, not just the default heading.
Genetic diversity can now end the voyage. Decline drains the pool across generations; a depleted pool kills colonists and suppresses births.
Founding bloodlines are load-bearing. When a founding line's last living carrier dies childless, that diversity is gone for good.
Two new endings record where the genome goes: GENETIC EXTINCTION, and ONE LINEAGE — a colony that survives as a single genome.
The science team works decade-scale studies. Three standing projects begin at launch — a drive harmonics study, closed-loop agronomy, and a hull fatigue atlas. The pace follows the living science staff and slows under knowledge regression and class stratification; field data found during the voyage joins the same queue.
Found technologies are on the record. Everything acquired mid-voyage lists under SHIP LOADOUT with its year and source; live projects show progress and an estimated completion year.
Lists scroll by trackpad drag, with a wider scrollbar to grab.
The Mission Archive closes when you click outside it, and its BACK button stays pinned in reach.
A ship that loses power gets its ship-loss ending rather than a survival coda.
The abandoned-lifeboat line appears only on runs that landed.
A collapse epilogue no longer repeats its "eleven years" line.
The intro sequence keeps its aspect ratio on 16:10 screens instead of stretching to fill.
Deep ideological drift now calls the ship the ark; identity announcements are clearer and sound less like bad copy (yeah that's me; some of these were late night writing sprints, and I need to clean them up — but they're a start).
Note: A number of new lines temporarily read in English in German, French, Italian, and Spanish while their translations are refreshed.
Opt in under Properties > Betas > experimental, and let me know your thoughts.
Pre-launch screens are on the experimental branch now, if you want to look. This is part of the roadmap announced two weeks ago, and I promised to keep things updated.
Before the crew goes into cryo, you set what the ship carries and why it left Earth — the charter, the research, the crew you wake first, the ship's fittings. It's the part I'm working on next. Fair warning: it doesn't do anything yet. You can open the screens and look around, but none of the choices are wired up. The game's still in early access, and when I started I said I'd keep posting and show the work as it happens — warts and all — so you could weigh in while things are still taking shape. This is me keeping that promise. I'd rather put it out unfinished and hear what you think than wait until it's done and find I built the wrong thing. To see it: Steam → Dead Reckoning → Properties → Betas → experimental. If you have thoughts — on the idea, the charter framing, or just how it looks — I'd like to hear them. Thanks for sticking with the in-progress version.
I'll be posting updates like this to keep the Early Access crowd involved and let them know the design decisions. I feel those who do like this game understand the kind of game I'm going for, and although I will make a final decision based on my overall vision, I do want input. If possible, I try to accommodate any playing style.
I'll be on a break from July 1st to July 5th, and I'll be off-grid so I won't be able to reply. I'll be sure to read all messages when back, but for now I thank all of you for your patience at this time; it's been an exhausting release week but I feel the ship is becoming stable.
After that, I plan on finishing up a basic pre-launch and moving on to setting up the six (6) ideology flavours and five (5) regression flavours. Very simply, here they are:
- Officer rule — the chain of command becomes the government; order over dissent, the "true crew."
- Shared rule — no hierarchy; everything pooled, the council decides together.
- Ship religion — the voyage turns sacred; the dead become ancestors, the log read as scripture.
- Engineer rule — the experts run everything; every life measured by how useful it is.
- Family rule — the crew splits into bloodline houses; berths and roles pass by descent — alliance and feud.
- Charter rule — keep faith with the original mission, to the letter, and resist any drift from it.
For regression, it's more of how they forget how to run the ship — what's left when the knowledge starts to go:
- By the manual — keep the procedure, lose the reason; the manual recited like catechism.
- Machine worship — appease what you can't repair; the reactor becomes a god.
- Hand skills — knowledge survives as craft, taught hand to hand, master to apprentice.
- Improvised repair — no theory left, only working hacks — brilliant until one isn't.
- Forbidden knowledge — rules with the reasons stripped out: "never open that hatch." Some fun society x regression combos: - Engineer rule × Machine worship — ritual technocracy
- Ship religion × Forbidden knowledge — taboo-bound theocracy
- Officer rule × By the manual — by-the-book command
- Family rule × Hand skills — hereditary craft guilds
- Shared rule × Improvised repair — make-do commune
- Charter rule × By the manual — rigid mission rule
- Officer rule × Machine worship — military theocracy
- Family rule × Forbidden knowledge — taboo-bound clans
- Ship religion × Hand skills — monastic order
- Engineer rule × Improvised repair — hand-to-mouth technocracy
- Shared rule × Forbidden knowledge — taboo-bound commune
- Charter rule × Relearning (growth) — reviving mission rule
Once these are in, it'll just be a slow process of wiring them up, reworking events to follow templates based on the above, making unique events to show each individual flavour as well as combination flavours, as well as unlocking new decisions based on the regression and ideology (like authoritarian ideology being high enough to blow dissenters out an airlock).
Anyways, it's going to be a long haul, but once those two are in, there is a solid foundation on which to build.
See you guys soon.
— Garan Lorn/Selenodrome
A Steam Deck legibility pass, a clearer ship-maintenance readout, a real reason to wake the crew, an option to skip the intros, and a batch of fixes to the research display, the mission archive, and the early flyby logs.
Note: I will be off-grid as of July 1 to July 5. I'll be silent during this time, but I will be back to read your bugs, comments, and suggestions. Ping me on Discord or here if you haven't seen things resolved.
Cheers!
Boxes and panels keep their borders. Buttons, cards, and panels no longer drop their outlines on the Deck.
The bottom action bar fits. The shaded gap under the buttons is gone, and the WARNING / CAUTION / ALARMS indicators no longer run off the right edge.
Star names are readable. Map labels are larger and grow as you zoom in.
The top status strip stays on one line.
Colony Status scrolls, so "Close The Archive" is always reachable.
"ACT" is now "WORK." The yearly maintenance indicator read like a story act; it now reads "WORK 3/3," with a WORK THIS YEAR line beside the repair controls and a tooltip that explains it.
Waking crew is a real choice. Thawed crew work the hydroponics — more food while life support and the farm decks hold, at the cost of more power draw and faster hull wear. On a failing ship the food gain falls away while the costs remain.
Skip the intros. A new "Skip Intros On Startup" toggle opens straight on the menu; ESC during any intro jumps to the menu.
Research reads true. Committing a research no longer flashes a one-time effect as if it were a yearly rate.
Past runs log once. A landed run no longer records two Mission Archive entries; existing duplicates collapse on your next completed run.
The Jupiter flyby reads right. The waypoint sighting and the probe's return are told on the same year, the planet is described once, and the Jupiter log can no longer appear during the Saturn pass.
The return-to-Earth estimate fits your voyage instead of a fixed "six centuries."
Smaller touches. The colony school waits until there are children old enough for it; the star-chart map button no longer covers the readout; the ALARMS toggle no longer resizes/
The music ships with the game, each track tagged with its title, artist, and license, alongside a credits file.
Thanks to Strato, Caelum, Efflixi, and the Discord crew for the reports.
A balance-and-readout pass: colonist lifespans now follow a real human curve, the settled-colony epilogue tells the truth about who arrived and how the colony fared, endings match how you actually played, and a batch of clarity fixes.
Realistic lifespans. Mortality follows a real human curve — living past 110 is rare, 120 nearly unheard-of. Ship-born colonists rest in cryo between watches like the founders, so a long voyage no longer ages anyone past a human lifetime.
The epilogue tells the truth. A settled colony no longer reports a population frozen at the landing count a hundred years on — it shows who actually reached the ground, a count at colony year five, and the hundred-year figure clearly marked as a projection.
"Arrived intact" means it. No longer claims every name on the departure roster reached the surface when the voyage took losses.
Less repetition, a tighter read. The founding decisions are each told once instead of two or three times over, and the failing-colony epilogue is meaningfully shorter.
Forced landings show the world you settled. The split-the-colony ending and the harder landing outcomes show the same terrain readout as a normal landing.
Endings match how you played. Ship-loss endings no longer fire after you've founded the colony; the AI-contact ending only arrives if you saw the contact that sets it up; the cargo-cult ending only befalls a colony whose beliefs fit that story.
Your choices stick. Choices that protect genetic diversity hold instead of bouncing back, and a late-voyage choice's previewed resource cost matches what actually happens.
The first building matches your founding priority instead of always a gathering hall.
A tended garden helps the colony — it now reads as a benefit, not a cost.
Fusion Optimization reads true — its effect now matches its description.
Steam Deck: boot text and menu fit the screen.
The Jupiter flyby is described once — the probe-calibration and waypoint logs no longer both describe the same view a year apart.
Clearer Wake Crew tooltip, explaining its real cost.
A hotfix for several player-reported ways to get stuck — plus fixes to the survey/colony readout, the Captain's Brief, and the Steam Deck layout. If your save hardlocked after rejecting a planet, this build should recover it automatically on load.
Rejecting a planet could break the star chart and strand you. After rejecting a world the chart could stop working and you couldn't select a new destination — and it survived restarting the save, because the broken state was written into the save itself. Navigation data is now stored correctly, and existing saves caught by this recover automatically the next time you load them — no lost progress. (Thanks, BigBrainTimeThanos and Efflixi.)
A late-voyage hardlock near the end of a long journey. On a very long, keep-searching voyage you could reach a point where the year wouldn't advance — the only way through was reloading to inch forward one year at a time. The voyage now closes out cleanly when there's nowhere left in range. (Thanks, BigBrainTimeThanos.)
"Call a Vote" could freeze the arrival crisis. On the "a faction will not descend" arrival decision, choosing CALL A VOTE could leave you unable to pass time. It now returns you to the landing decision as intended. (Thanks, BigBrainTimeThanos.)
A surveyed world no longer contradicts its own terrain readout. A world surveyed as habitable — breathable air, oceans — could show a "vacuum / no surface water / sterile" readout once you landed. The colony world now carries the same survey it was found with.
The Captain's Brief reads like a real decision again. Ship-maintenance briefs (hull welding, the AgriDeck) no longer surface after you've established the colony, and every brief now shows what each option does and confirms the outcome. (Thanks, Strato and BigBrainTimeThanos.)
The "failed landing" ending is reachable again for a genuinely catastrophic descent — a wrecked ship onto a lethal world.
Watch-log work goes to the right hands. A mission-log entry describing hands-on engineering — welding a coolant run — is now narrated through an engineer or technician on the watch, not whoever happened to be most senior. (Thanks, Jello and Wombri.)
Genetic effects on choices are clearer, and the archive helps. Preserving the last Earth-born's samples for the genetic archive now correctly improves genetic diversity (it was lowering it), and a choice's genetic cost now shows on the choice instead of only on hover.
Menu and intro text stay on screen. Expanding the Mission Briefing no longer pushes the launch controls off the bottom; the boot-log status lines stay on one line; and the cinematic intro's "PRESS ANY KEY TO SKIP" and the CREDITS label are no longer clipped. (Thanks, Strato.)
Brings Dead Reckoning's interface, input, and saves up to Steam Deck standards. Most of this is Deck-specific and not visible on desktop.
Fullscreen by default on Deck. Fixes the mouse-input misalignment. The cursor now lines up with the UI everywhere, not only at the top of the screen.
Larger, legible text. The UI scales up on the Deck so body text and labels clear Valve's readability floor at 1280×800.
Controller prompts. The Deck shows gamepad glyphs (\ / \ / \) instead of keyboard and mouse hints.
On-screen keyboard. Naming your vessel and editing the crew cryo bay now summon the Deck's on-screen keyboard.
Cross-platform cloud saves. Saves sync through Steam Cloud across Windows, Linux, and Steam Deck (one namespace, no more Windows/Linux split).
Expand the star chart. A new EXPAND MAP button opens a larger, clearer view (available on every platform).
Two distinct Jovian beats. The Jupiter pass (~Y5) and the calibration-probe data return (~Y6) now read as two separate moments instead of one stacked beat.
The Fullscreen setting now persists across launches. It was silently resetting; fixed for every platform.
An edit pass across the ending epilogues and a set of event-timing fixes.
The epilogue reads in order. The end-of-voyage write-up nod now reads in order, and closes on the hundred-year projection — instead of flashing back to the launch after the ending
The ending no longer contradicts or repeats itself. A colony is no longer described as both a thriving town and a struggling remnant in the same write-up; and a lone-survivor ending no longer restates "one person" five times over.
Milestone announcements fire once. "The last Earth-born" could each be declared two or three times across a long voyage; each now lands a single time.
Event-timing fixes. A reactor-cascade emergency no longer fires unnecessarily, and a "Year 50" anniversary that could surface as late as year 137 now keeps to its window.
Some issues still persist; cards are missing. This is a top priority and another hotfix is coming; my DeepL usage was running over limit without informing me, so certain fixes weren't reported. Thanks for your patience.
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)
An end game calc fix plus a few writing fixes. Thank you for the reports.
New
The colony's year-100 population now reflects its century. The settled end screen used to show your landing headcount, fixed no matter the world or your choices. It now projects the population across the hundred years the screen describes, from the world's habitability and type and the drift your society carried down to the surface. A generous world grows the colony toward what it can hold; a marginal or sealed one contracts it. The outcome tier (Outpost, Foothold, Colony, Settlement, and so on) is read from that figure, so where you landed and how you governed finally shows in how the colony ends. (Indus)
Fixes
The crew's formal probe demand now asks for another probe, not a second one. The ship already launches with a two-slot bay, so the petition reads as one more slot beyond what you carry. (Tygre)
The Engineering Guild's negotiated-charter outcome now reads as the guild's prediction of the next five years rather than stating a future as settled fact. And a year-100 colony account no longer tells a colony that grew that its numbers had dwindled. (Tygre)
Localization
The changed and new lines are translated into German, French, Italian, and Spanish.
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.
A follow-up to v0.2.105; more fixes straight from your reports. Thank you for the detail, as always.
No more soft-locks after you land. Settling a world left the voyage running underneath the colony — probes still in flight, the navigation window still open, ship events still queued — and any of those could jam the game once you were on the ground. Landing now closes out the voyage cleanly, and probe launches are disabled once you've settled. This was the root cause behind several of the post-landing lock-ups you reported.
"The air does not support a person" no longer appears on breathable worlds. A world you could actually breathe on could still throw the sealed-habitat warning if its habitability was merely marginal — the two were tangled together. That warning is now tied to genuinely sealed worlds only.
Empty systems can't strand you. Arriving in a system with no obvious heading could leave you with nothing to pick and no way to advance. Navigation now always offers a way onward, and a nav window that somehow opens with no route recovers on its own.
Electromagnetic surges and binary stars. EM-surge events now correctly draw down power and hull; binary systems use their real star names; and binary / twin systems no longer share state with each other.
The star chart stops hiding your route when you pan it — for real this time. Last patch fixed the route forks, but the heading line and your destination marker still vanished while you dragged the map. Every route indicator now stays visible while you pan. (Caleb)
The "Crew Will" tooltip reads cleanly now. Its description was breaking in the middle of sentences ("...a long voyage with / no world in hand"). It now breaks only at natural pauses. (Tygre) Note: this indicator currently is in progress and does not affect gameplay.
Tooltips are the right size. Every tooltip stretched to nearly the full height of the screen no matter how little it had to say. They now fit their text. (Tygre)
New regression tests for the post-landing hand-off, the sealed-habitat air check, the electromagnetic-surge and binary-star behaviour, and tooltip sizing — plus a new audit that keeps stale tests from hiding in the harness. The classes of bug above are now guarded against recurrence.
Another batch straight from your reports — thank you for the detail.
Anniversary events now wait for the actual anniversary. Events that look back on a past decision — the fifteenth anniversary of the night of arrests, the chaplaincy's twentieth year, the engineering guild's twenty-fifth report, the seceded ship's faint signal — were becoming eligible the moment the year-floor passed instead of once the time had truly elapsed, so a "fifteenth anniversary" could surface a year after the event it commemorates. They now fire only when the stated span has actually passed. (thanks kikocrespillo2)
The comet intercept has a decline option again. You can hold course and let the comet pass instead of being forced to harvest it. (thanks Kyzarin)
The calibration probe comes back. The Year-2 Jovian calibration shot is a near out-and-back run, so the drone is now recovered to the bay when it returns — it no longer permanently costs you your starting probe. (Probes you fire ahead into deep space are still one-way; that scarcity is intended.) (thanks Strato)
Pronoun fixes in crew events. A personnel record could read "the research logs them helped build," and several events referred to a crew member as "she" regardless of who they actually were. Events now use the crew member's correct pronouns. (thanks Strato, VERMILLIONAIRE, kikocrespillo2)
Thanks for the flood of reports today — a fast batch of fixes.
Crew counts now show your living colonists. The register and roster were still counting colonists who had died, so your totals read high (e.g. register 1023 vs. a true 998). (bug-1551)
Landfall and First Refusal achievements now unlock on Steam, and any you already earned are granted automatically the next time you launch. (bug-2076)
Fixed a Year-100 softlock. When an information event arrived right after a decision, the game could lock on "Directive Required" with no directive to issue. The same fix covers a probe report arriving after fast-forward. (bug-2077 — thanks rand, avocadotoast2021)
Fixed a softlock where a recurring power or food shortage could starve your ship's arrival at a system and leave it drifting forever. The arrival now resurfaces once the crisis clears. (bug-2078 — thanks Caelum)
Setting course for a probe-scouted world now works — the ship no longer sails past it with no chance to arrive, and turning around no longer hits the same wall. (bug-1556)
The "last founder has died" event no longer fires while founders are still a large part of the colony. (bug-2079 — thanks kikocrespillo2)
Research events no longer cite impossible timeframes (e.g. "twenty years ago" early in the voyage). (thanks Caelum)
Colony ending text no longer ignores your build choices or contradicts itself about who remembers Earth. (thanks 555strat)
The Mars flyby no longer overstates how many colonists are awake to see it.
First-night and other early events no longer repeat a line of text.
Each fix ships with a regression test, and the release gate now hard-fails on any of these classes recurring (including event text that cites an impossible elapsed time).
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
Well, it's here.
4 months ago I had a tiny, broken game that I had put on itch. I had started making it as a way to relax from starting a theatre festival from the ground up, never thinking that it would be interesting to anyone. The most I was hoping for was a little feedback. Over the next few months, what I received was something more valuable: a community. This post is a huge thank you to everyone who ever took the time to write a comment, good or bad, harsh or gentle, about this game. Your comments of encouragement helped lift me up when I felt like stopping; your criticisms and suggestions helped me push myself to never say "good enough". Now it's releasing on Steam, arriving much different than when it started, and that's because of each one of you who were passionate enough to say something.
This game is for you, and if it doesn't meet your standards, please continue to say something. I read every post and take in every comment.
To Wombri, Jello, and Kyzarin. Thank you for your constant edge-cases and prompt bug reports on beta testing. It's really improved the launch and taken a weight off my shoulders.
To Shadow Wolf, SC_Reaper, Major_Mood, Caelum, Big Brain time Thanos, LazarusBlack, and Yindiram The Fairie Dragon, SHVAKS, thank you for your detailed write ups and criticisms. I've already incorporated your feedback, tweaked some things, and adapted. I still have my vision, but I really took in your feedback which I felt kept me on track. Thanks again.
Launching a game is pretty daunting for a solo developer. I'm not used to putting things out there, and I'm probably not ready for the deluge of criticism. Some people won't like my game, and that's totally fine. The art, the writing, the gameplay; they all have something that can be incredibly off-putting to most modern gamers.
But for those who think I missed the mark on a great game — I understand, and the only thing I'd ask for is your patience. I'm trying to get there; every day I add another event, work on another spec, fix another bug, and incorporate another idea. I'll be keeping the demo in lockstep with the game, so check in every so often and see if it's gotten any better.
Once the game arrives, updates will arrive slower, but I will start up a next/beta branch, where I'll have the work in progress living; you can always check in on the next work, but fair warning: it'll be a work in progress.
Steam Deck compatibility is actively being worked on. So far it's 30% of the way there, but I am committed to having it ready by end of July/early August. Ping me if I go off course.
Future localizations are being looked at, and I've already been in discussions with Korean and Chinese localization experts. I don't yet have a timeline as it all depends on budget, but I do hope to have updates very soon. Please comment down below if you'd like to see those translations.
Thanks again to everyone. Here's to a good launch.
— Garan Lorn/Selenodrome
The poor, procedural art depiction up here isn't the future; it's the past. This was the first asset I built in Dead Reckoning. It was the start of a concept, and I hope it shows how far it's come — and that it's these iterative steps that will take the game to the next level.
Here's what I'm working on next. The basic game logic runs end to end now — the voyage, the drift, the endings, five languages (minus a few bugs on all) — but the weak spot has always been the moment-to-moment: between the big decisions, you mostly read and click. The next stretch is four systems aimed squarely at that. Not drifting in the dark — four things, done properly.
Right now your ship's ideology and its slow decline are just numbers you watch tick. I'm turning both into something you decide. When the ship has drifted far enough that you can't pretend otherwise, you choose what these people have become — a command hierarchy that rules by the captain's line, a commune that shares everything and answers to no one, a faith that grew up in the dark, a rule of engineers who keep everyone breathing and expect to be obeyed, a people who've cut all ties to Earth, or a people fighting to stay exactly who they were. Running alongside it: how the colony copes as it forgets things it can no longer fix — following the old manuals by rote, keeping the knowledge alive as craft and song, or treating the reactor like something to be appeased. You don't pick any of it off a list. You get there through the choices you've been making the whole voyage, and once it sets, you can slow how deep it goes — but you can't take it back.
The crew stop being passengers. Morale becomes something you spend and rebuild, not a meter that drifts on its own. Every livable world you fly past to keep searching costs you some of their patience — and they remember it. Sabotage goes in too: a named crew member, pushed far enough, can wreck a system or burn the one manual that kept it running, and knowledge lost like that doesn't come back easily. Push them past the point they were willing to go, and the helm stops being yours. They might force the ship to turn for home, or mutiny and put down half the crew on a world you'd never have chosen — and you find out years later, on a faint signal, whether they made it.
Before the ship ever leaves, you set who these people were. Why they left Earth — fleeing a dying planet, a slow exodus, a sealed lifeboat — what they packed, and what they already knew how to do. You get a fixed budget and you spend it by trading: take on a real weakness to afford a real strength, because no expedition leaves deliberately broken. A research head start, the kind of people aboard, the cracks they launched with. The point is to let you build your own backstory and have it actually shape the run — without it becoming a way to stack the deck.
More ways for a run to end, and the endings you can already reach paying closer attention to how you got there. What you believed by the end, who ended up holding the power and the rations, how much the colony forgot, who you left behind on some rock along the way — all of it should read back in the final word, instead of a generic finish. The people you cast off might even send word back, long after, that against the odds they made it.
Further out, there's deeper colony life after you land, and more to see on the approach to a world — both come after this set.
This is a draft, and I'd rather hear from you before it's locked. Which of these four matters most to you, and which leaves you cold? What's missing — the thing you've been wanting from Dead Reckoning that isn't on this list at all? Tell me, and I'll try and help shape it into the game.
Cheers!
— Garan Lorn / Selenodrome
A narrative-correctness and clarity release. This folded additional minor releases into this release. The demo and the full game both ship from v0.2.96.
Losses are counted from your actual colony. Impact strikes, cryo failures, and other disasters now report a toll that scales with how many people are really aboard, instead of fixed numbers — a catastrophe on a full ship and one on a near-empty ship no longer read the same.
Voyage and ship events name the people they are about. Recurring crew — the medical officer, a schoolteacher, the colonist filing a report — are drawn from your living manifest, with the right names and pronouns, instead of a faceless role or a stand-in name.
How a landing goes now shapes how it is remembered. The number who die in an emergency descent scales with the world and your ship's condition, and the colony's hundred-year memorial reflects the real toll.
The first-building scene now matches the planet's air. On a world you can breathe, the colony watches the roof go up out under the open sky; on a sealed world — no breathable air — they watch from behind the shelter ports and from inside suits. No more standing "under open sky" on a toxic world, or watching "from the airlocks" on a temperate one.
Landing, voyage, and endgame writing tightened to the dry register. The first-season accounts, the recurring voyage beats, and the endgame decision deck were rewritten.
KNOWLEDGE is now labelled KNOWLEDGE LOSS. The readout rose as knowledge was lost, which read backwards; the label now names what the number actually tracks.
The CAMERAS bay feeds no longer come up blank in some builds. The feed assets now ship reliably, and a release check guards against the gap.
Operations-tab tooltips no longer show internal key names. Hovering a power-allocation mode (CRYO / BALANCED / HULL REP) or a subsystem action (PWR SURGE, RATION PROTO, and the rest) used to show the raw string key instead of its description; they now read as proper, translated text.
Wider German, French, Italian, and Spanish coverage. The new and rewritten event and ending text is now translated.
Everything new since the last update: a wider star chart, a run that's harder to break, the soundtrack and the typing under your control, and a great deal of writing pared back to the bone. The demo and the full game both update to v0.2.93.
Set course for distant stars. Past the heliopause you can steer for far-off named stars — centuries-long voyages are allowed, hard-capped at four hundred years. The ship makes one light-year a year, so a four-hundred-light-year world is a four-hundred-year crossing: a real gamble, and one that will almost certainly cost the colony.
Dozens of new real catalogue stars fill the middle distance on every bearing. Anything past your reach shows locked.
The opening leg holds its course out to the heliopause, and habitable worlds no longer turn up right beside Sol — they're rarer overall, a truly green world is rare, and the scarcity scales with the difficulty you chose.
Music Player. Under Settings → AUDIO, turn the music off entirely, randomise the running order, or choose which tracks stay in rotation. A SOUND FX on/off switch silences effects outright. Five new ambient tracks have joined the rotation.
Gentler typing sounds. TYPING SOUND now offers SILENCE, CLASSIC, SOFT BLIP or LOW PULSE — two softer ticks for anyone who finds the classic clack grating. All of it is remembered between sessions.
Drier landing and colony writing. The first-season-on-the-ground accounts and the late-voyage decisions were tightened to the game's plain register.
Wider German, French, Italian and Spanish. The founding directives, the landing choices, and the mood-shaded variants of voyage events now read in native language rather than falling back to English.
A softlock is gone — certain crisis and governance decisions could leave the game waiting on a prompt it never showed, blocking the year and even saving. They always clear now.
Cryo-pod failures only claim colonists actually in a pod — never a child or an awake watch-stander.
Quiet years on the ground read as the ground, not as if you were still under way, and the landscape view holds until you dismiss it.
The low-power crackle is now a reactor thrum that spins down as power falls, and vessel names with accents render cleanly.
Name your ship — or let the void pick. A RANDOM button on the title screen draws from a pool of 62 vessel names: colony and community names alongside nods to famous ships from science fiction and the great expeditions.
Achievement pop-ups stay up long enough to read, and no longer vanish when you click.
Smoother landscape pan at planetfall, and the colonist manifest reads exactly 1000 at departure.
Thank you for playing — and for the reports that drove most of this list. — Garan Lorn, Selenodrome
I've said I made Dead Reckoning as a "solo developer"; that's not really true. I made it and coded it on my own. But a game this size doesn't get built by one person, and every screen you sit in front of is held together by people I've never met — people who were passionate enough to do the work, then put it out, sometimes as Creative Commons to build on. I had a tiny budget, so there are some paid commercial usages, but most of it was free. So before this game releases into Early Access, I want to put the spotlight on them. Support their work, if you can.
None of this exists without Seedship (which you can buy at the link provided). John Ayliff's little text game about steering a sleeper ship to a new home knocked around in my head (and on my phone) for years before I ever opened a design doc. After reading some forum posts, I got scared I'd crossed the line from "inspired-by" into "copied-from", and I emailed John, expecting to possibly get told off. Instead he was nothing but warm, thoughtful, and kind. He said he'd be honoured by a shout-out, and that he's still "amazed whenever I see people say ... it inspired them to make something."
John makes games as Space Goblin Games now and he's put out a proper successor to Seedship, Beyond the Chiron Gate. If you like what I made here, go play what he made first. I owe many people thanks for being the shoulders that I stood on to start this game, but John is the start. I really appreciate it John, and I hope you know that being called "seedshiplike" is one of the biggest compliments I can receive, because that game is untouchable to me, and it's brought so many people joy over the years.
I can't write a note. These people can, and they let me use theirs.
Scott Buckley — "The Long Dark," "Decoherence," "Permafrost"
Nihilore (James Opie) — "The Lights In The Sky Are Stars," "Crux," "Dreams of Escape"
Kevin MacLeod — "Stay the Course"
TinyWorlds (Rick Hoppmann) — "Narrow Corridors," "Grief and Anger," "Space Graveyard"
Maxstack — "Awakening," "Inevitable," "Deprecation," "Advanced Simulacra"
Christian DeTamble — "Timebender"
Hitctrl — "Drifting Beyond the Stars"
Ruskerdax — "Pondering the Cosmos"
Vitalezzz — "Claimed by the Void"
Stefan Grossman, Tsorthan Grove & migfus20 — "Continuum"
SRG774 — "Airy," "Title"
yd — "Out There"
Every beep, klaxon, and hull groan in the game were created by these people:
Kenney — the interface bed: clicks, confirms, the UI hum
rubberduck — sci-fi SFX: probes, research, alerts
inconsequentialist / Unicae Games — the soft typewriter keys
Bart — the cryo-wake steam release
NASA / Houston Audio Control Room — the real STS-87 Columbia launch
Freesound's CC0 crew — the ship's stress and alarms: bumpelsnake, SieuAmThanh, wrstone, Engineer_815, NachtmahrTV, Lewooz, belanhud, brunoboselli
The ship interiors and the ending scenes lean on models these folks built and shared.
Mixmamo.studio — "Spaceship 003 Control Room"
neilken — "Colony Ship Explorer"
the_table — "Spaceship Corridor"
Epilogue Ronin — "Cryopod"
wpanayides — "Server Racking System"
jakuza — "Sci-Fi Crates"
Binkley-Spacetrucker — "TF-DS-ENGINEERING" & "Cargo Commodities"
Tronin Dmitry (kosmotron) — "Sci-Fi Terminal"
tnnv — "Spacesuit"
Domenico D'Alisa — "DISCOVERY" astronaut
engine9 — "Solar System Planets Scale"
martinjario — "Skull"
offbranddoodles — "Crowbar"
chanmagomed — "Pipe Wrench"
agung.ihackstuff — "Mechanical Room"
sbastuff — "Scifi Room Interior"
Lumoize — "Fusion Reactor"
Jason_Phillips — "Low Poly Habitat" kit & greenhouse
overboy — OVERSTELLAR animated pixel planets & stars
Screaming Brain Studios — seamless space backgrounds
Solar System Scope — planet surface textures
Poly Haven — HDRI skies & PBR metal/rust textures
NASA, ESA & the Hubble Heritage Team — "Mystic Mountain," the Carina Nebula
These are the people that took this ship out into the stars. Thank you again. — Garan Lorn
This game is dedicated to my childhood friend Franco.
I met Franco in Grade 7, and we bonded immediately. The common ground was video games, and it turned into a fast friendship. We were about one thing, really: games. Baldur's Gate II. Betrayal at Krondor. Dark Sun. Fallout. System Shock. King of Dragon Pass.
Then there were the endless sleepovers — chugging Coke, gathered around the CRT TV and playing GoldenEye, Mario Kart 64, Bomberman, and WCW vs. nWo until the sun came up.
And the tabletop stuff. D&D 2nd Edition. Cyberpunk 2020, where the chrome manuals were the holy grail — if we found something that spoke to us in those books, it had to go into a session.
But we drifted, the way most friends do. We lost touch in high school, then reconnected here and there over the years, always waxing nostalgic about that brief stretch of childhood when games were everything — when you kind of wished you could just play them forever.
I took a different path and ended up not touching games for years. Franco followed his passion: he went to Sheridan College for development and became a developer at HitGrab, where he stayed. He worked on MouseHunt, one of the first Facebook games. I remember reconnecting around then and being in awe of him — the sheer will, mixed with the talent, to break into the industry at a time when that was genuinely hard to do.
Then I lost touch again, for over a decade.
The message came out of nowhere during COVID. I heard from a lot of old friends in that stretch — it was a reflective time for a lot of us. I'd been shut in and was slowly rediscovering games, and we ended up talking for ages about old ones and new ones, laughing about stuff that happened 25 years before.
We connected on Discord, then the phone. We caught up one night for hours, and the next weekend we jumped on Discord to play King of Dragon Pass. We killed ourselves laughing at the ridiculous extremes we'd push things to — that shared gallows humour at some genuinely galling options — and it brought it all back: being in his basement at night, huddled around his desktop, his little brothers coming downstairs to watch Frank make some insane call in Fallout.
He told me about a book he'd written, Rocketship Ride, for his kids. It was a great catch-up.
But I missed something. He asked to reconnect a few more times, and I didn't make the time. I wish I had. I didn't know Franco was sick. Knowing Frank, he wanted to keep it low-key. He always just powered forward.
Frank died after a long illness in November 2024. I was shocked, taken aback, a little devastated. It felt like a fond memory had been ripped away — and even though we rarely talked, something in the world got a little colder. His death reminded me how fragile and short our time on this rock really is, how small and grateful we ought to be, and that we should be lifting each other up and going after what we actually want.
If you sit through the intro, you'll see this game is dedicated to him. The idea had been kicking around for years — inspired by John Ayliff's Seedship — and when I finally sat down to write the design document, the questions in my head were always "Would Frank have liked this?" and "What kind of insane thing would make him laugh if he found it?"
The sad part is knowing he'll never get to play it, because I know he would've loved it. That was Frank. He was just happy to create, and to talk to other people who created. It was the world he lived in — and now he lives on as a crew member in my game.
Franco is the first founder, the one who got me here.
Miss ya, Frank. See you planetside.
You can pick up Franco's book, Rocketship Ride, on Amazon.
A roll-up of five builds (v0.2.86–v0.2.90). Major additions: a top-to-bottom interface overhaul, a searchable crew manifest, ship-born colonists who live real lives, and a run of fixes spanning Steam achievements to landing.
Help consolidated in one place. Mission framing, system advisories, and controls are now a single CAPTAIN'S BRIEFING (? button or Settings), laid out as STANDING ORDERS → SYSTEM ADVISORIES → CONTROLS. First-run tips became one-line pointers into it, each with a DON'T SHOW TIPS opt-out.
One typeface, and text-size scaling applies everywhere — tabs, buttons, menus, and the skip hint, not just body text. Unified on JetBrains Mono; the old font-style toggle is retired.
The layout holds at any window shape. Ultrawide, tall, and small windows no longer clip or shrink panels. Settings, the briefing, the changelog, credits, the custom roster, the decision log, and the restart confirm all lay out responsively. 1920×1080 is unchanged.
Quitting always asks first — ESC, title screen, and Settings all route through one confirm dialog with consistent button order and the safe choice focused.
Ship Condition tooltips fire across the whole card. Hover anywhere on the FOOD, POWER, or HULL panel for its detail. The ship-systems list no longer shows a misleading clickable cursor on rows that are readouts only.
You can find anyone. The manifest has a search box; sort by role, name, status, or notability. Colonists who joined post-launch carry a +, long-serving crew a *.
Two ages when they differ. Dossiers now show both physical age and years since launch — e.g. "29 phys · 109 chrono" for someone who spent most of the voyage frozen. Translated into German, French, Italian, and Spanish.
A post-landfall roster lists the colony's dead alongside cause of death.
Children born aboard are part of the living crew — raised awake, coming of age at sixteen (correcting a contradiction with the ship's prose, which always used that age). The first child born on the voyage gets a one-time milestone.
Quiet years feel quieter. Optional APPROVE/DENY decisions in the Captain's Brief now appear rarely, as genuine moments, rather than filling every uneventful year.
Planet-matched colony deaths. Colonists who die after settlement now die of causes that fit the world you landed on.
Landing reliably opens the colony phase. A timing bug could advance the mission clock during the founding sequence — most easily on WATCH or auto-advance — and drop you back into ship decisions and a premature ending. Fixed.
Navigation reflects the outbound voyage. No habitable worlds exist within ~10 light-years of the Solar System. Turning back now costs real transit time, power, hull integrity, and crew confidence.
Settled endings read correctly — fixed text describing the wrong world type, a contradictory "crew was uploaded" ending, and a single-survivor grammar error.
Achievements unlock again. The Steam connection was being called with arguments in the wrong order, silently failing every unlock. Endings, survival milestones, drift thresholds, faction and research achievements all fire correctly now.
The in-game unlock banner now shows pixel artwork and lingers slightly longer.
The cryo pod grid is clickable again — on some window shapes it had collapsed to zero width, leaving pods unresponsive.
Switching crew-rotation watch policy no longer stacks extra cultural drift on each toggle.
The research net-rate readout is legible again.
The drive-ignition signal delay reads correctly in seconds across all four translated languages.
All new interface text is translated into German, French, Italian, and Spanish. Crew morale now recolors the prose of certain voyage events (same facts, steadier or more strained voice) — English only for now; other languages read the fully-translated neutral version. Some text remains English-only due to localization budget constraints.
This is a large one. I finally took the plunge and merged a huge branch, which ended up breaking the game after I added it, so we've jumped to v0.2.81 into a single push. New late-game content, a new ending, the entire colony individuated, a real accessibility pass, the localization finally finished, an editorial sweep over the writing, and a long stack of fixes.
All of this has been through harness testing — hundreds of automated playthroughs, real-build checks across all five languages, and the full test suite, all passing. But Dead Reckoning is still actively evolving, and I also rely on a small group of playtesters, and a release this large almost certainly still has bugs. If something crashes, reads wrong, or looks off, please report it — on the Discord or the discussion boards. Your reports are genuinely how the rough edges get found and fixed.
A thousand people, not a sample. The crew manifest used to follow a representative sample and infer the rest. Now every one of the thousand colonists is a real individual — named, aged, given a role and a lineage, carried on the manifest from departure to the end of the run. A hundred stand the watch at any time while the rest sleep; children are born and named in transit; and when the actuarial tables take someone, a specific named person is gone, not a statistic. The Cryo Bay register, the colonist dossiers, and the colony status screens all read against the full roster now.
New ending: The Perpetual Voyage. An oligarchic ship that survives long enough, drifts far enough into class, and never lands now reaches an ending of its own. I don't want to spoil it, but I'm sure if you get it, you'll recognize the homage.
The Endgame Deck. Twenty new events that fire late in a run, once the ship has gone long and started to come apart — ten "clinical horror" beats and ten "dark cluster" beats. Deliberately bleak and dry: this is the stretch where the systems and the people are both failing, written to sit in that without being melodramatic.
Their trigger windows are tuned to land across the survivable stretch rather than all at once.
Note: This is the first half of a planned 50-event deck; Acts III–IV are coming.
A named crew, and a ship that teaches itself. The officer who reads the departure order, the pilot who lays the asteroid-belt routes, the comms officer who logs Earth's final broadcast — all real members of this run's manifest, different every run, and the archive remembers one of them at the end. And seven ADVISORY notes now appear once each, the first time a system actually matters (your first directive, the heliopause watch order, the first nav window, research, drift, repairs, the first power dip). A read-anytime CAPTAIN'S BRIEFING in settings holds the mission framing and every advisory for re-reading. The standing watch is a hundred strong. The ship was always written as a working community, and now the simulation agrees: about a hundred colonists are awake and posted at any time, aging the years they serve while nine hundred sleep. Your watch policy now visibly shapes who your colony is when it lands — a short-rotation ship arrives having spent far more waking years than one that held the long watch.
Clearer instrumentation. Every drift axis has a tooltip explaining what it measures and what moves it, and the POWER readout itemizes its per-year draw, including what your engine research gives back.
Rebuilt research readout + a reshaped survival curve so the back half of a run reads more honestly.
The translation work is finished and audited. Every event title, every decision outcome (~1,000 of them), the full research tree (~110 strings), the end-of-run recap titles, and the new Perpetual Voyage ending are all translated into German, French, Italian, and Spanish — no more English falling through where the rest of the UI was localized.
One honest note: I don't have the budget for localization, so this is off the shelf. Much like the difficult decisions in this game, this balances accessibility with compromise. In the future, if this game succeeds, I'd like to hand this off to localization contacts (many of whom I have from my time as a technical writer), who are far more valuable and personal than translation software.
Still — I hope this leads this game to at least being more accessible.
Several editorial passes over the prose — events, decisions, outcomes, endings, survey and research text — to add some flavour while keeping the deliberately spare, clinical voice the game is built on. Ship-systems and disaster beats stay terse; the human beats (governance, colony life, births, memorials) breathe a little more without going sentimental. Meaning and outcomes are unchanged — voice only.
Crew who stay awake now age. Founders kept on watch instead of in cryo were frozen at their launch age — a long-serving officer could read as 31 "physical" next to 111 "chronological." Fixed.
A landed colony that dies out gets its own ending instead of being handed the in-transit epilogue. Endings are still in flux from before I reworked the colony phases due to adding the post-landing phase; expect more and please report them.
Research effects read correctly. Food/power/hull tech effects were displayed ~100× too large and mixed two unit styles; all ongoing rates now show the real per-year change, labelled "net."
Decisions stick exactly once. Returning to an already-decided event (or hitting LOG mid-founding) could re-open it and apply the effects a second time — and the LOG button could throw you back to planet-selection and make you redo the whole landing. Both fixed; the founding phase is now fully restorable.
You can back out of the descent screen — a "RETURN — RECONSIDER THIS WORLD" option; nothing's committed until you choose a descent protocol.
Founding decisions update the readouts immediately instead of only at the end of the sequence.
The heliopause watch-order briefing now matches the standing watch (no more "skeleton watch" left over from the old eight-awake model).
Colony map no longer pans up over the tab bar — it's clipped to its own panel.
Map feature markers (Coral Atoll, supercell paths, and the like) no longer spill over the top UI bar; they stay on the map.
Habitability reads consistently before a probe: the discovery screen and the Star Chart show the same sensor estimate — unconfirmed until you survey — instead of two different numbers.
Cleaned up a population-count log error surfaced by the full-roster work.
Plus sixteen further confirmed bugs caught in QA.
Thanks for playing — and for every bug report. It really means a lot. If I haven't thanked you in the comments or on Discord, I'd just like to say it again.
— Garan Lorn
I made and coded Dead Reckoning on my own. But a game this text-heavy doesn't get sharp by itself. An artist and three writers gave their time to read drafts, critique them, polish the prose, and shape the narrative, and to weigh in on the art and design. Kelly went further than feedback: the achievement art is his, and it's the feather in the game's cap. So before the next ship launches, the spotlight goes on them.
Kelly's the artist. He's been a furniture builder, an auto mechanic, a lead singer, a truck driver, a fine artist, and a graphic designer: pixel work is just the current chapter. His own line on it: "to make art in as many forms as possible, for as many people as possible, for as long as I can keep doing it." He gave art and design feedback throughout, and he made the achievement icons. More of his work is at kellytaylorartist.com.
Mark is the author of Operation Isekai Liberation (OIL), a satire about U.S. nation-building in a generic fantasy kingdom, among other lighthearted works. Day job: hazmat tech at a university. Before that, CBRN defense in the Marines.
A computer science grad who bounced through tech roles and landed, somehow, in sales for chip-design software, until his team was cut last August. He's spent the time since reading, writing, and working out what he wants to do next. His line, which stuck with me: "I don't think I'll have the skill to make a living off art anytime soon. That shouldn't stop me from creating."
Gen X, the first in his family to finish college, ten years in programming before he walked away from it. Now he keeps the servers, the network, and everything attached to a wall outlet running for a 75-person company. Off the clock he collects retro PCs and all their assorted parts, plays PC games, and is currently setting up three retro machines for permanent use.
To Kelly, Mark, Nico, and Michael: none of this was your job. Thanks for spending your time on it anyway. Garan Lorn
Landing beats + failure-cause paragraphs (first pass)
Transit / sleeper / lost / failed-landing endings → 206/566
Cargo-cult / fork / AI-vessel / theocratic endings → 236/566
Oligarchic / tribal / theocratic endings → 266/566
Digital-colony / structures / resource / pivotal paragraphs → 296/566
Planet-naming + surface/arrival descriptions → 326/566
feature_narrative paragraphs → 386/566
feature_narrative + decision_consequence → 416/566
decision_consequence → 446/566
decision_consequence + landing_beat → 476/566
landing_beat + tier_coda + watch_roster → 506/566
research_coda + abandoned_lifeboat + years_ahead + deck_uprising → 536/566
Final batch → 566/566 complete, plus repair of 3 DeepL spec-character drops
Phase 1: wrapped ~75 hardcoded UI strings in _t/TextDB.ui
Phase 2: localized roles / posts / milestones / classifier labels
Phase 3: localized all 256 PlanetData type / feature / POI / danger names + descriptions
Phase 4: localized 15 DriftSystem threshold events + PROBE log lines
Phase 4b: wrapped and translated all 51 inline YearProcessor events
Phase 6: rewrote watch-roster memorials pronoun-free (so they read correctly in every language) and localized their fragments
SplashScreen boot sequence + Main bridge diagnostics localized
Final sweep: remaining UI display strings localized via TextDB.label(); ~480 swept strings hand-translated across all four languages (now 1,061 label keys per language)
Full translation audit + update across de/fr/it/es
Semantic review of existing UI translations, fixed prior mistranslations
EpilogueGenerator localization infrastructure stood up (new TextDB.label() gettext-style system underpinning all of the above)
Dual ages in the colonist registry. The cryo-bay dossier now shows each colonist's biological age (the body, since frozen sleepers don't age) and chronological age (years since birth, cryo included). The two only diverge for colonists who actually slept.
bug-952: crew ages were wrong (player report: ship-born "coming out the womb already 12," appearing to age twice a year). Two age-storage conventions collided: founders store age at launch, ship-born store current age (recomputed yearly by design). The cryo-bay readout added the mission year to both, double-counting ship-born years. Fix: add state.year only for non-ship-born colonists; tools/repro_aging.gd proved the fix (5,936 mismatches → 0). Surfaced as the dual-age feature above.
bug-955: out-of-bounds crash on German ocean-world endings. (50-run build QA: a flood of "Index 9/10 out of bounds (length()=9)") The i18n auto-wrapper had localized a hash-seed input: the loop ran over "Ocean World".length() (EN = 11) but the body indexed the translated label "Ozeanwelt" (DE = 9 chars). Fix: reverted the seed to the raw English literal so the loop bound and the indexed string match.
bug-954: untranslated English fragments leaked into localized epilogues. (500-run / build QA, e.g. FR: "…sur un monde viable avec sufficient resources") Six dynamic resource/reserve note fragments were raw English literals inserted via %s. Fix: wrapped all six with _e() and added translations to all five epilogue.json files; verified 0 English-resource leaks across fr/de/it/es.
bug-946: settled-ending epilogue leaked English mid-sentence. (e.g. "…war controlled. A temperate world") Descent-quality words ("controlled"/"managed"), module status, and _planet_phrase() output were raw English inserted into otherwise-translated paragraphs. Fix: wrapped those literals with _e(); _planet_phrase() now localizes the lowercase "a temperate world" phrase before capitalization. Added 10 planet phrases + 5 fragments to all five epilogue files.
bug-939: localized epilogues silently rendered in English despite epilogue.json containing the translations. The key-extraction step used .encode().decode('unicode_escape'), which converts n correctly but re-corrupts every non-ASCII UTF-8 byte into mojibake (em-dash → âx80x94), so Godot's lookups missed and fell back to English. Fix: fix_epilogue_keys.py reverses the double-encoding across all five locale files; verified bijective against the 566 source _e() literals. (Lesson logged: never unicode_escape GDScript literals containing non-ASCII.)
The broad auto-wrapper that inserted TextDB.label() around display strings also hit places it shouldn't. Three distinct hazard classes were caught and reverted:
bug-944: comparison sites. Wrapping matched literals on the right of ==/!= (e.g. if planet_type == TextDB.label("Twin System")), which are logic keys, not display strings, silently false in non-English. Reverted 35 sites. Rule: localize at display only, never at comparison.
bug-945: const blocks. The wrapper put a runtime call inside const declarations (FACTION_NAMES dict in FactionStatus.gd, TITLE_FULL in StartMenu.gd) → parse error not caught by --quit, only by binary import. Reverted to bare literals (these strings stay English anyway) and scanned all of ui/ for the same pattern.
Plus assorted wrong-reference / null-safety fixes from the same cleanup pass: bug-941 (_cls→TextDB, EventsPanel), bug-948 (planet_type→TextDB, ColonistStatus), bug-935 / bug-940 (TextDB null-safety), bug-934 (CamerasPanel font-size key).
Cross-screen font consistency sweep with live font-size propagation; raised the minimum readable-font floor (bug-933: min now size−2, ≥11 instead of size−6, ≥7).
New translation-QA tooling: per-locale autoplay sweeps (qa_locale_sweep.gd), localized UI-capture harnesses, a hardcoded-English auditor taught about the new _e/TextDB.label paths, plus 500-run and build-battery render harnesses (tuned to 60-year games landing at year
A quick definition, because the game is named after it. Dead reckoning is how you navigate when you've lost your fix. No stars, no landmark, no signal from outside, just your last known position, your heading, and your speed. You estimate where you are from where you were. It works. It gets ships across oceans. But every hour without an outside reference, the error compounds, quietly, and you can be certain of a position that's drifted miles from the truth. I want to talk about that, because it's also what making this game solo has felt like, and I'd rather you go into launch knowing exactly what kind of ship you're boarding.
There's no test team here. There's me, and there's a pile of scripts I wrote to test the thing I wrote. When you read that Dead Reckoning ran through thousands of simulated playthroughs hunting for events that fired at the wrong year or endings whose prose contradicted the run, that's real, and it caught hundreds of problems. I'm proud of that net. But here's the honest part: the net has holes shaped exactly like my own blind spots. A few weeks ago, two release-blocking bugs sailed straight through all that automated QA. The restart button crashed the game, and you literally couldn't select a planet on first arrival, because nothing in my test suite clicks the actual built executable. My sims tested the simulation. They never tested the button. I'd been so busy proving the math was right that I never checked whether a human could press the thing that runs the math. That's dead reckoning. The instruments all read green while the real position drifts.
This is the one that actually scares me, and it's the thing the title keeps reminding me of. When you've run your own game hundreds of times (and I have, both by hand and by script), you stop reading it. The opening lines I once agonized over a word at a time are now a wall I click through to get to the part I'm debugging. I cannot tell you anymore whether the first ten minutes are gripping or a slog, because I haven't experienced the first ten minutes in months. I've only inspected them. You lose your fix on your own work. Typos hide in plain sight because your eye fills in what it expects. A confusing screen reads as obvious because you built the mental model it assumes. A joke stops being funny on the four-hundredth pass and you can't tell if it was ever funny or if you've just worn the humor off it like a coin. The author is, eventually, the single worst-qualified person to judge whether their own game is any good. I've drifted miles from the player's position and I can't always feel it.
A fresh pair of eyes is the outside reference. It's the fix. It's the star you take a sighting on to find out how far you've actually drifted, and for a solo dev, getting that fix is hard. I'm not a studio with a research budget. I'm one person asking strangers to spend an evening on an unfinished thing and then tell me the unflattering truth about it. The handful who've done it have been genuinely priceless. Every one of them saw something I'd gone blind to: a research tooltip multiplying a number by a hundred, landing text that assumed you were Earth-born when your colonists were three generations into the dark, a screen I thought was self-explanatory that nobody could parse. None of that came from the thousands of automated runs. All of it came from someone playing it once, fresh, the way you will.
So if there's one thing this post is actually asking for: I need more of those sightings. The demo's on Steam right now. If you play it and something feels wrong (confusing, slow, broken, dumb), that reaction is the most valuable thing you can give me, and the Discord door is open for you to come say it to my face.
I'll be straight about the shape of solo development, because "solo dev" gets romanticized and it shouldn't be. There is no one to hand a problem to at 1 a.m. There's no second opinion in the room. The arguments about whether a system is good happen entirely inside my own head, and some of them get loud. There are bugs I've fixed three times that came back a fourth, features I've torn out and rebuilt because the first version was quietly wrong, and whole nights lost to a single misplaced state flag. Every programming wall in this project, I walked into alone, and I had to be the one who got back up and tried the next thing.
I'm not saying that for sympathy. I'm saying it because you deserve to know that what you're about to play was made by one set of hands, with all the strangeness and rough edges and stubborn personality that implies, and none of the smoothing-over that a team provides. The seams are there. I've left the hood up on purpose this whole time so you could see them.
If you've played to the end, you know Dead Reckoning doesn't grade your century on a pass/fail. It reads what actually happened and sorts you onto a ladder: No Survivors, Critical Remnant, Struggling Outpost, Pyrrhic Foothold, Colony Established. A thousand people left Earth and the game just tells you, honestly, what became of them. Launching this thing is the same ramp coming down on the same uncertain ground. I genuinely don't know which ending I'm walking into. It could be a Colony Established: people find it, it lands, it means something. It could be a Pyrrhic Foothold: it gets out the door, some folks love it, but it costs me more than it gives back. It could, honestly, be No Survivors: a thing I poured years into that the world simply walks past.
And I'm landing the ship anyway.
That's the whole spirit of the game and it's the spirit I'm trying to launch in. You don't make this kind of journey because landfall is guaranteed. You make it because the alternative is never leaving orbit, and a Pyrrhic foothold on a real world still beats a perfect ship that never dares the atmosphere. So: this is a solo project. It is made with everything I've got and it is not made by a team, and both of those things will show. I've lost my fix on it more than once. I'm asking you to be the stars I navigate by from here. The ramp's coming down. Whatever's out there, I'm honored you're on the ship for it.
For most of development, "you land" was the end of the game. Now it's a hinge. You pick a descent protocol, the CRT latches over to a warm amber palette and never goes back, there's a short storm cinematic with the hull-strain warnings scrolling past (DESCENT INITIATED → ATMOSPHERE INTERFACE → HULL STRAIN -- NOMINAL → TOUCHDOWN IMMINENT), and then the ship tabs you've stared at all game quietly retire. SHIP CONDITION / CRYO BAY / CAMERAS slide out; COLONY MAP and COLONY STATUS take their place.
The simulation doesn't stop at touchdown anymore. It keeps rolling a dedicated colony-event pool (first harvest, first dispute, the long winter, founders' passing, a memorial wall, a covenant breach) until the colony either closes out its archive or dies. The same backend resources get reframed on the ground: food becomes food stores, power becomes the generator grid, hull integrity becomes shelter. Even the ship-side event text runs through a translation pass: "the reactor" becomes "the generators," "the bridge" becomes "the council chamber," so an event written for transit still reads correctly on dirt.
The star chart used to be one flat interstellar view from year zero. Now it's two layers in one tab. From launch until you cross the heliopause (~year 11-13), you're looking at a top-down schematic of the solar system: Sun in the middle, the nine planets on compressed orbital rings, asteroid and Kuiper belts as speckled bands, your traced trajectory riding past Mars, the Belt, Jupiter, Saturn. The moment you cross the heliopause it flips, permanently, to the deep interstellar scope: real stars by spectral class, deep-sky objects, galaxy beacons at the rim, and clickable course selection when a nav window opens.
The ship is now anchored to its actual position in space instead of being welded to screen-center, so when you pan the chart, the view slides and the ship stays put out in the dark where it really is. That sounds like a small thing. It was not a small thing (see below).
This is the connective tissue. A handful of separate threads all landed in this window:
The founding sequence grew from 2 decisions to 6. The choices you make in the first season now actually establish a disposition for the colony.
14 planet-specific crisis chains (volcanic vent rotation, toxic filtration order, ice-shelter rationing, and so on), where a landing vote becomes a thing the colony remembers a hundred years later.
You name the planet now. A first-season event lets the founders pick a name from a per-biome themed pool (Volcanic → EMBER / FORGE / CALDERA, Ice → WINTERFALL…), and that name threads through every epilogue paragraph.
Watch Order: at the heliopause you choose long-watch, rotation, or short-watch, and it pays off in a Watch Roster coda at the end.
Crew morale ("will to continue"), distinct from cultural regression, surfaced as CREW WILL in SHIP CONDITION, and it's the thing that actually drives why you finally decide to land.
You can see the shape of it in the star-chart shot above: that EVENTS & DIRECTIVES panel on the right (PERMIT IT / EXPAND / RECLAIM) is the new directive format, and the choices carry tagged costs that feed the same disposition the ending will read back to you.
The settled ("100 years later") endings got a top-to-bottom rewrite, in two halves.
The prose (v3) now traces back to what you actually did: the founding disposition rides through to the closing frame, decision consequences are written in pairs (the vote at year X became the colony's shape), resource scarcity turns into culture ("the children grew up smaller than the founders intended"), and habitability stopped being a percentage in the narration: it's smell, breath, sky, and work-hours now. The sensors panel still shows you the number; the story doesn't talk like a spreadsheet.
The art is where I want to set expectations honestly. Every procedural polygon on the horizon (the triangle mesas, the cone volcanoes with circle ash-plumes, the stilt-platform rectangles) got ripped out and replaced with hand-authored pixel-art sprites: buttes with real strata bands and caprock overhangs, stratovolcanoes with glowing craters and lava streaks, tree lines, ice crystals, kelp. There's one clean shared horizon now (it used to draw a photo backdrop behind a separate procedural ground plane at a different height, which left a crooked second horizon line cutting straight through the rock formations, the infamous "line through the buttes"). And the sealed habitat domes are back, reading as a thin lit rim instead of a green haze washed across the rooftops.
Here's the caveat: this art is still being iterated, and right now it can read as mixed. Some biomes are clearly further along than others. A clean temperate settlement (above) looks the way I want; a FAILING volcanic colony at night (below) is doing a lot with a little, and the hand-drawn sprites don't always sit in the same visual register as the older pieces around them yet. I'd rather show you the in-between than quietly hold the post until it's perfect, so consider the endings a work-in-progress you're watching evolve, not a finished gallery.
This is the part that doesn't screenshot well but is most of the actual work. When you add a colony phase after the ship phase, and a settled ending after the colony phase, you suddenly have three discrete handovers of game state that all have to be airtight, and every one of them was a bug farm for a while.
Alarms that wouldn't shut up. The condition-warning sirens (food/power/hull critical) own their own audio players and self-loop while a resource is in the red. They didn't know the game had ended, so on a game-over the warning siren kept re-firing through the entire "100 YEARS LATER" ending crawl. There's now a hard silence_alarms() that kills the tweens, stops both players, and latches a flag so the re-loop is a no-op, called for every ending reason (settled / failed landing / extinction / cargo cult). Quiet endings, at last. (bug-703)
Clean state handoffs. Landing now flows through explicit latches: landing_initiated (amber CRT + descent cinematic) → colony_founded (tab swap, colony events begin) → game_over with a typed reason (settled / extinction / failed_landing). The settled-ending pipeline catches the reason and renders the right closing frame. No more state leaking across the boundary.
Other triggered endings still fire correctly through that same pipeline: a catastrophic landing (90%+ loss) ends the run as a failed landing; pop hitting zero ends it as extinction; the signal/paradigm endings gate on the right conditions (the Signal ending was firing 31% too often on one path alone, that gate's fixed now).
You can actually select a planet on first arrival again. The candidate-world buttons had a stale March label still advertising an old probe cost, and were stuck disabled waiting on a typewriter callback that never fires on that screen. (bug-698)
The restart button stopped crashing the game (bug-697), the save format got type-safe accessors so a corrupted save can't take the loader down with it, and a name-pool shuffle that was leaking into the main RNG (and quietly breaking run-to-run determinism) got isolated.
And the honest meta-lesson from all of it: both of the release-blockers above slipped through my headless QA because nothing in my test suite clicks the actual built executable. That's the next piece of infrastructure: a scripted smoke test that drives Start → first arrival → each decision button in the real build. A bug hunt teaches you where your net has holes.
Still on the workbench
Out in the open, the things I know still need refinement:
Ending art register isn't uniform across all ten biomes yet (above).
A few ship-only scripted events still leak into the colony phase where the text substitution can't fully rescue them.
The colony-phase epilogue prose is still a little generic about the years you just played on the ground.
Watch rotation currently behaves a lot like long-watch in the numbers, and it needs an explicit forced-cycle cadence to feel distinct.
The assets/cameras/ GLBs are heavy; a decimation + HDR-downsize pass is queued to shrink the build.
Because I'd rather you see the seams than read about them: the demo builds are refreshed on both Steam (App 4602130) and itch.io, across Linux / Windows / macOS, tracking the current v0.2.x line: colony phase, new star chart, new decisions, and the in-progress pixel-art endings all included. If you hit something broken, that's genuinely useful; file it, or come yell about it in the Discord:
Next up is that real smoke test, smoothing the ending art register across biomes, and giving watch-rotation its own teeth. More soon. Hood stays up.
Garan Lorn / Selenodrome
A v0.1.329 hotfix shipped earlier today, and almost immediately the
new build started reporting CAMERAS broken on Steam — every bay
flipping to STATE: OFFLINE / "Feed unavailable. Camera node not
responding." I want to write up what was wrong because the cause
was a stupid one and the diagnosis took longer than the fix.
When you opened CAMERAS on the Steam build, all four bays — Bridge,
Cryo, Engineering, Hydroponics — showed an empty black feed and the
caption strip flipped to OFFLINE. Locally (running through the Godot
editor) every bay worked fine.
The fix in v0.1.329 had patched a missing-enum bug in the bay decay
controller, so that part was real. But the OFFLINE state pointed to
something else: `ResourceLoader.exists()` returning false for every
bay path on the shipped build but true locally.
Every export preset had this exclude pattern:
exclude_filter="assets/blender/*, ..."
That pattern was catching the four bay scenes — `bridge_cctv.glb`,
`cryo_bay.glb`, `engineering_bay.glb`, `hydroponics_bay.glb` — and
the viewscreen HDR alongside them. They never made it into the
shipped PCK. Locally Godot fell back to the source files on disk.
On Steam, the source files don't exist; the PCK is the only path,
and the PCK didn't have them.
Move the four bay scenes and the HDR into a separate folder
(`assets/cameras/`) that the exclude pattern doesn't touch. Update
five path constants in `CamerasPanel.gd`. Done.
I also did a quiet repo cleanup at the same time — Blender source
files (.blend / .obj / .fbx, ~1.2 GB worth) and unused .glb props
moved out to `~/Documents/dead-reckoning-source-art/`. The shipped
download grew about 500 MB (the four bays plus their textures had
genuinely never shipped before), but the repo itself shrunk a lot.
The new bay decay system kicks in once reactor power drops below
specific thresholds. At PWR 10 every bay is on emergency strips:
- **Bridge** — main ceiling cut, viewscreen flickering, only the
forward console rim and a couple of red emergency strips are lit.
- **Cryo** — pod aisles dark, two of the strip rows show the
intermittent brownout pulse, magenta pod lights muted to a low
cycle.
- **Engineering** — reactor down to a slow dying pulse, turbines
no longer running, blue console glow gone, only the corridor
emergency strips are alive.
- **Hydroponics** — grow lamps off, pumps stopped, the magenta wash
that normally runs the whole bay is replaced by red strip lights.
Honest answer: I haven't been able to verify these are working on
Steam yet. The libraries ship correctly, the GodotSteam GDExtension
loads, and a diagnostic report writes to
`user://achievement_diagnostic.txt` on every successful Steam boot.
If you've installed v0.1.330 and an achievement you should have
unlocked didn't fire, that file pinpoints whether the issue is
library load, init, or a code/dashboard name mismatch. Drop it in
Discord and I'll dig in.
Verify achievements path-to-path with the diagnostic.
Bay decay tooltip when you hover an offline bay (right now you
just see "OFFLINE", which doesn't tell you *why*).
More icons for the achievements that are still placeholder.
— Garan Lorn
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This page aggregates Steam news feeds, patch notes, and developer announcements for Dead Reckoning: The Long Drift, sourced from official Steam community posts.
Major updates, balance changes, and seasonal events often correlate with player-count spikes — cross-reference announcements here with the live charts on the main Dead Reckoning: The Long Drift statistics page.
Articles link back to Steam for full changelogs. SteamScope refreshes news entries as new posts are published to the game's Steam hub.