Desk Space: Idle Spacefleet clicker news & patch notes

New patch for you space captains!

Main attraction here is a new idle/cinema mode. If you let the game idle for 2 min the game will fade out its HUD, zoom and pan, and follow random ships around. It is perfect if you want to use it as a screensaver or background visual during the day, or while waiting for resources to generate. You can also toggle this on and off in the settings.

I also changed some pirate behavior to make them more useful and bounties more plausible + some expedition ui improvements.

Changelog:

• Cinema Mode

• Pirates

  • Player Pirates now match enemy pirates' speed to be able to catch up to them.

  • Player Pirates can now attack enemy pirates that are raiding; previously, these could not be targeted. You can now rescue civilian ships.

  • More consistent resolutions in battle

• Expeditions

  • Minimum ships is now 1 and not 0

  • Slider don't reset if a new ship is bought

  • Numbers are now text input if you want to type in how many ships you want to send

  • Note: these are UI QoL, some more systematic changes to expedition is coming later

• Bug: Nano Drone prestige updated correctly updates it's UI now for ore/s

• Performance: Nano drones' glow and shaders turn off at low zoom

• UI: Metal amount moved from Refinery Command to Fleet Command. All resources are now collected in one place, and you can see your metal before unlocking refineries (e.g., from expeditions or bounties).

Let me know what you think in the forums or on Discord! It makes me so happy that more and more of you are enjoying the game, the improvements are all thanks to you and the feedback you have provided.

SEE YOU IN SPACE, CAPTAINS!

Edit 2026-07-24: Hotfix. v1.1.2a

There were some bugs that crashed the game with wormholes and cinema mode.

• Wormhole portal rendering optimization to avoid crashing at large ship amounts

• Cinema Mode toggle now actually works (lol)

• Prevent edge case where game would soft-lock if the camera decided to follow a pirate that was trying to chase a freshly spawned civilian

Thank you for the great response to Endless Mode! I'm so glad you guys are enjoying it, I'll keep building on it if you guys keep playing, so it's cool to see everyone's opinion.

Some quick fixes for Endless Mode and other various things for clairty:

• Removed dead space in the Fleet Command which created a ghost scrollbar

• Cleaned up various tutorial and UI text for clarity

• Missing translations for Corruption flavor text and refineries

• Hide Wormhole and ShipAGI hint in Endless Mode since they are disabled

• Pirate Salvage console message fixed

• Pirate Salvage correctly gives pirate ships more consistently, small bug prevented it at specific scenarios

• Master Rank EXP numbers now shortened with letters

• Scavenger Drones now correctly go after different dropped cargo

• Bounties

  • Correctly filters out Alien Relic bounties if you don't have SR5

  • Aborts now recharge individually instead of both

• Fleet Fusion

  • Fleet Fusion added missing translations for hints, upgrades and console messages

  • Fleet Fusion UI shows how many super ships you have now in fleet command and Fleet Manifest

  • Super ships show their effective ship value in their Neurolink

  • Super Nano Drones correctly calculate cost and metal creation

  • Ship sacrifice correctly shows the effective amount of ships including super ships

  • Game now correctly uses effective count in various calculations

  • Fleet Fusion excludes ships on expedition

We’ve got a banger today, folks!

I’ve updated the game with the first iteration of Endless Mode. The number one piece of feedback was that you wanted to keep playing after the game was "done". I hope this mode is a good first step in addressing that request. It's relatively small/simple but a good foundation.

Endless Mode is unlocked by either:

• Beating the Campaign (the first run of the game).

• Selecting it when starting a fresh save.

• Entering it via the settings menu.

Choosing any of these options resets your progress to loop 0, but you can now keep growing forever. There is a new Mastery bar in your fleet command that progresses as you play. Each level-up grants a mastery point to spend in the new Mastery Matrix, which features 17 new incremental upgrades (some with multiple effects) that impact most parts of the game (including the stocks!) to create synergy between different systems.

For each Singularity, you gain a multiplier to your experience gain. You can stay in your current loop to build out your fleet, play the stock market, or watch your ships, or you can reset to start over. Each loop increases your XP gain rate, but also makes corruption slightly harder to cleanse. It’s simple for now, but provides a meaningful "numbers-go-up" feel. If you enjoy it and keep playing, we can build it out further together with more ideas!

There are also a bunch of other changes and fixes. See the changelog below:

ENDLESS MODE & GENERAL CHANGES

• ENDLESS MODE: Note that some upgrades like ShipAGI and Wormholes are turned off/repurposed in this mode

  • You will now gain experience to a new mastery bar. Leveling up grants you a prestige point which you can spend on the new upgrades.

  • Level requirements scales, every time you trigger singularity you gain a multiplier which makes leveling easier. The idea is that you build fleets and when you feel like you want more experience you trigger and start over. Numbers go up!

  • Every prestige makes corruption and black holes slightly harder to cleanse. Black Holes spawn randomly now.

• Fleet Fusion: A new upgrade that lets you merge 100 ships into 1 super ship to clear.. space.

• New Achievement Handler: I’ve rewritten how achievements are stored and called. Hopefully, this resolves the previous issues (see note at the bottom).

• Background Throttling: Added a backup system if the game is covered and the game gets throttled. Hopefully this makes background running more consistent. If you're still having issues let me know, as a workaround you can use the pin icon and shrink the window in the corner of your screen.

• Campaign Completion: Finishing the game now preserves your settings instead of erasing everything.

• Tutorial: Added an in-game tutorial for new players to guide them through their first purchases.

• UI/UX: Upgrades now display the correct dollar signs.

• Refinery: Nano Drones now feed the refinery correctly.

  • ... Refineries don't have any buffer anymore. The meta had became to put it to 10% for a bit and back to zero, the abundance of ore made this redundant. Refineries will now work as long as you have ore in your fleet command or you can turn them off.

• Trading: Humanity has grown; Signal Range 4 now features space stations for traders.

• Boundaries: Space now has a boundary so you can’t scroll infinitely and lose your station.

• Navigation: Clicking the zoom number now resets the camera position to your station.

• Sorting: Void Cleansers are now sorted numerically, regardless of placement order.

• Upgrades: Added a new upgrade for drones to generate metal instead of ore + Fleet Merge.

• Balancing:

  • Ships' max speed is slightly slower.

  • Dyson Beam metal dump cost halved

• Asteroids: Asteroids HP now scales with your fleet, this is to avoid every late-game ship one-shotting asteroids and the game creating thousands of asteroids instantly.

• Performance: Various minor changes to make performance better such as scaling back static, station effects depending on zoom, culling and stars update rate

Regarding Achievements

I have rewritten how achievements are stored and triggered. On each boot, the game now queries Steam to fetch your unlocked achievements and compares them against your local files to ensure everything is in sync. Previously, the system assumed an achievement was already unlocked if it existed locally, which prevented retries if a previous trigger failed. Note that this data file may be wiped if you clear your save from the settings menu which should have prevented the bugs previously but who knows with Windows.

I’m so happy to see more of you enjoying the game! Your reviews and kind forum posts give me the motivation to keep working on it. Let me know what you think, hopefully this update didn't break anything important (and I’m sure you guys will find a bunch of bugs, haha).

Until next time, SEE YOU IN SPACE CAPTAINS!

I just wanted to quickly share a post to express my gratitude to everyone who has decided to play Desk Space. I really didn't expect this much attention for my little game, where I was just experimenting with some different ideas after the release of my previous game.

I joined Next Fest with very low expectations, but the game got over 10k wishlists, which was mind-blowing. It also put some pressure on me to actually make the game fun. As is often the case with video games, a lot of the pieces came together just days before release (even though the systems and designs were always there). And now, over 3,500 of you have decided to give the game a chance, and that's really humbling. Big, big, big thank you.

For some of you, it didn't live up to your expectations, and I will do my best to correct that. For others, it's really been clicking, and I've seen screenshots of players with dozens of hours and thousands of ships flying around in the space aquarium. Super cool!

A week after launch, I've released 5 patches, fixing tons of bugs and refactoring some systems to run better. I really appreciate all the feedback, and it's cool to see people getting happier with the game as time goes on. I will keep working on the game for a bit as long as there are players playing it, so no worries there. I've heard the requests for an endless mode and better metal balance (...and better UX).

FYI: As the game has changed and grown, I will be disabling the Next Fest demo. It's a bit too different now, and saves don't carry over, which has frustrated some of you. So, when the Steam Summer Sale ends on July 9th, the demo will be removed for now.

To wrap up, feel free to join the Discord, review the game (this really helps solo indies with zero budget), and keep being active in the forums and part of the community.

Until next time, SEE YOU IN SPACE, CAPTAINS!

I couldn't stop myself, so here's another relatively big patch before the weekend! Main fix here is that I believe Steam Cloud save should be fully fixed (hopefully). It was working for most but for a sub-set of users it didn't sync correctly.

UI

• Collapsible "done" section in the upgrades menu. Hide whatever upgrades you have bought or maxed out.

• Metal values in buy buttons are now shortened

• You can now hide the console in the settings menu (rip console my beloved)

• Moved ship AGI to sit with the rest of auto-buyers

• Rank-up message moved to center of screen

• Alien Tech icons now visible on Green Flat and CRT themes

• Added missing translations for refinery and other parts of the game I missed for all languages

Gameplay and Balance

• Expedition cap reduced to 3 instead of infinite.

• Drones, replaced exponential metal cost with flat tiers, first 5 only cost credit and then low amount of metal

• Signal Range 5 now only requires 8 freighters instead of 10

Bugs

• Steam Cloud: Moved to an API solution instead of Steamworks folder solution. This should now fix cloud support for everyone. Let me know if it doesn't, in that case I will have to find someone from Steam to help me out. NOTE: Before you update and launch the game you might get a sync error in Steam, launch the game and it should sort itself out. Playing around with saves is always risky, hopefully it doesn't overwrite anything but if you love your savefile, i recommend backing it up first.

• Asteroids now correctly spawn in their range on prestige 1+. Little known fact, when you handmine an asteroid they have a % chance of becoming upgraded to another tier. This could cause the first signal range of being void of asteroids on prestige. This has now been fixed.

• Added safety check for Signal Range 1 if no asteroid exists, one will spawn in

• Added missing Step 4 string to the Dyson upgrade

• Black holes now die at exact HP instead of one point over

• Fixed trade bounty zone detection using correct zone index. In certain cases Trade bounties would count to the wrong Signal Range, so if you wondered why you didn't do progress, this is why.

• Fixed prestige-safe persistent flags for Armada, Red-on-Red, and Astroids achievements

• Improved "Not a Cookie" and signal range achievement triggers

Achievements keep being stubborn, I've added safety triggers now to make them more consistent, but I will keep working on it until no more issues exist. Sorry about that!

Still working on UX as we go.

The response to the pirate changes in the last patch has been great, happy that you guys like it!

As always, thank you for the feedback and playing the game. We have a dedicated channel in the discord for bugs and feedback so if you have any ideas and want to share you're welcome to join (I'm still reading the Steam forums!)

SEE YOU IN SPACE CAPTAINS!

Thank you for all the engagement and feedback, I'm reading it all even though I can't respond to everyone right away. I've collected a bunch of fixes in this patch that addresses several of the big complaints. Please give the game another chance if you previously stopped, hopefully you'll have a positive experience this time!

Performance & Optimization

• Skip sub-pixel stars and station variants at low zoom levels.

• Skip refinery/cleanser beam details and cleanser shadows at low zoom levels.

Bug Fixes

• Crashing when sacrificing ship fixed. This was happening if you sacrificed ships that killed the black hole but ships where already en route. They lost their target and looped infinitely trying to find something.

• Traders now correctly apply their Cargo Size when selling product. Bringing their profits way up. Previously they for some reason skipped that in the calculations making them quite useless.

• Expeditions reset correctly if prestige mid expedition.

• Black Market Contacts trade boost to +10%.

• Ship manifest now shows correct ship IDs on very large fleets

• Auto-buyers no longer force-reactivate on level-up.

Gameplay & Balance

• Pirate Rework, I've heard you loud and clear, pirates are a money sink and not good. This is a first step just to give them a more permanent purpose. Defeated pirate ships enter a 15-second repair state instead of dying permanently.

• Halved Void Cleanser metal consumption rate (from 0.2 to 0.1 /s).

• Expedition rebalanced overall risk.

• Removed credit-based bounties from Signal Range 5 (SR5).

• Prevented refinery placement in locked signal ranges.

UI & Quality of Life

• Moved the Bounty Board inside the Fleet Command panel instead of being alone. Not final or the best solution but works for now. Instead of the bounty board disappearing off-screen and requiring the player to collapse the Fleet Command, player can now scroll down in the panel to see everything.

• Improved clarity of Void Cleanser UI buttons.

• Engine Overclock displays decimal values after level 40.

• Reworded Void Cleanser descriptions for clarity.

• Shortened large numbers for better screen readability. After a billion numbers will now be lettered, buttons will always be shortened.

• Added bootup instruction message for on boarding new players. Goal of the game is to prestige multiple times.

• More adjustments to triggering achievements.

Note: Achievements keep being stubborn and refuse to trigger for a small subset of players. I will keep trying, but one thing that has worked for people in discord is to manually delete their save file and starting over. Especially for "not a cookie" and Signal Range 2 achievements. Save file can be found in %APPDATA%\\Roaming\\desk-space

Issues I'm aware of:

• UX is still not up to standard based on your feedback, this is a bigger task and a revamp will take time. I do hope we are close enough and the tweaks and changes make it easier to play

• Console spam. I want to add message filter and the ability to turn off the console, this will come a bit later

• More options for pirates. Today's patch fixes them being a money sink and they don't permanently disappear. Pirates have a 40% chance of losing their battle that's why people thought they "instantly" died before. Now they will go back to base for repairs. A bigger refactor takes time I want to do it properly.

• Upgrade confusion. Some of it is on purpose, some of it is bad text. Will tweak this as we go on.

• Metal bottleneck. I'm following this, and have to think about what the best choice is. Games need friction but this might be too much, we'll see which direction we'll go.

As always, thank you for playing and thank you for all the feedback!

Slightly bigger patch - Bounties: Metal rewards adjusted down to their correct values. They were too big and broke the entire pace of the game. You can now abort two bounties before a cooldown. - Background throttling: Players reported that the game didn't run correctly when covered by other windows, added a fallback system that should fix this. Please let me know if it doesn't. - Wormhole: Unlock hint corrected - Wealth Path: Correctly resets on prestige - Console: Messages correctly resets on prestige - Prestige: Added a nudge for the first unlock and that you should keep going (really guys, keep playing and prestige at least one more time, the game is not over lol). Also added unlock hint on how to unlock prestige. - Stocks exchange: Fee now only applies on selling and is lowered. More gains for the people. - UI fix for \ meter. - Bug: enemy pirates were counted into your fleet size

With this patch + earlier hotfixes I think most urgent launch day bugs have been addressed. There are still bugs that I'm looking into, mainly why some achievements aren't popping up. I will update as soon as I have a fix.

I'm also looking into overhauling pirates, I've heard you loud and clear that they are pretty... weak. Overhauling UI and making it better on larger screens is also on my to-do. But these are bigger changes that I want to do properly so it will take a bit of time.

Thank you for your great feedback and nice words! Keep it coming on the Steam forums, Discord or Twitter.

Thank you for all the feedback after launch! What a great start.

The most urgent fixes:

• Money/Ore/Metal counter now correctly update after closing/opening the menu

• Achievements should trigger correctly now. Please let me know if you still has issues with these, hard to check all of them quickly.

• Signal Range level correctly shown in the console

• Changed "M" to "Me" when ships or upgrades require metal

• Zone Targeting UI correctly shows highlighted buttons

I'm reading everything and there's a lot of feedback in the forums and Discord, I will work and fix stuff as quick as I can.

Sorry for the trouble and thank you for sticking with me!

Desk Space was supposed to be a small side game before I found a main project but the Next Fest love blew me away. I’ve spent the last two weeks fixing bugs, adding endgame content, rebalancing upgrades and polishing the game. 

• Buy ships to trade and mine ore

• Unlock and buy upgrades for new gameplay and abilities

• Slowly take over space with your flightpaths

• Make a lot of money

• Enter \

If you are enjoying your time in space, please consider leaving a quick review. It is the absolute best way to support a solo project and helps the Steam algorithm show the game to more people. As always I’m looking forward to your feedback, thoughts and stories. Especially as you hit prestige levels and explore the new content.

You can tell me what you think on X, the Steam forums or join the Discord. 

A note for demo players: A lot of things changed and was added after Next Fest, sadly that means your saves wont carry over. If the demo is kept up in the future I might update it but for now you have to restart. But you will catch up quick and get to experience the new balance and new things.

Can not believe we are so close to release! 

The game officially releases tomorrow, and I’m aiming to press the launch button around 12:00 CET.

• Base Price: $5.99 USD (with Steam's regional pricing to keep it affordable worldwide).

• Launch Discount: 15% off for the first 14 days!

The great reception during Next Fest really made me want to step up and deliver a fun game for you guys and girls. So I’ve been crunching over the weekend rebalancing things, fixing up the end-game, adding achievements, cloud saves and fixing bugs. I want to send a big thank you to everyone that’s been active on the forums, it’s been really nice and wholesome. I love reading the feedback, ideas, and stories from everyone.

Releasing during the Steam Summer Sale is definitely a crazy choice, almost everyone told me to delay it! But I’d rather get the game into your hands now and iterate and improve it together as we go. If you want to support the launch, telling your friends or sharing the game makes a massive difference. Also, leaving a positive Steam review after playing helps me immensely with visibility!

You can tell me what you think on X, the Steam forums or join the Discord. 

THANK YOU AND SEE YOU SOON

During the demo, some people were rightfully curious about the progression of Desk Space. There’s no secret that all of these games have some sort of prestige mechanic, and so does Desk Space.

I didn’t want to show too much since I want it to be a nice surprise for the players, not that it's a revolutionary mechanic, but I personally think anything that can be left to be discovered is a good thing.

My game design style is to try for gameplay variation with mechanics that exist in the game, making it a relatively meaningful change instead of doing smaller changes just to bloat content.

The overall goal for each loop is to trigger a singularity, which triggers a universe reset… and gives you a permanent upgrade that can help or speed up the loop in certain ways.

As you trigger a singularity, the universe \ and introduces more friction until you can trigger it again. There are a couple of ways you can \ the \, ranging from passive ways to more active choices that require resources of different kinds.

Desk Space is still made to run relatively passively (if you want), but the game also introduces extra gameplay choices to give variation, such as running refineries for metal, playing the stock market or sending crews on time-based expeditions. All this, and you can still watch your ships zoom around with their flight paths. I’m glad so many players found the joy and calmness in that, just as I did when I was prototyping. Someone called it a "space aquarium" and I loved that comparison lol.

Here's a sneakpeak at refineries (which you can manually place out, pretty cool!)

I’m working hard on putting all the nuts and bolts together for release on the 30th. The Next Fest support really blew me away, so I’m crunching to put in content and variation. I hope you will enjoy it, some will probably be disappointed, but hopefully most will find the fun in it!

More info soon!

Last nights performance patch introduced a regression.

• Accidentally included an endgame resource from the full game as a requirement for ships. This has now been rolled back. If you were quick enough I guess you got a hint for the full game.

• I've added some more variation to the pilot models.

This will most likely be the final patch for the Next Fest demo (unless something breaks of course).

As noted before, the bottleneck for performance was the flightpaths of the ships. When the player zoomed in the engine tried to draw a set amount of dashes squeezed together sending the math haywire.

I've now adapted the dash amounts to your zoom level and in my own tests this runs several times better.

Here I'm spawning 1000 miners

Here are another 500 traders

Hopefully this brings us 90% there :)!

Let's enjoy the last days of Next Fest!

Hello!

Got another patch for you guys. I'm continuously working on performance and by now the biggest bottleneck is actually the flight paths. In the last patch, I offloaded the drawing from the CPU to the GPU. That helped, but the game can still slow down if you zoom in close and have a lot of ships.

• Fixed a bug that would sometimes draw the paths twice, overlaying them.

• Merged draw calls into one large render call instead of processing them individually for each ship.

• Added a setting to disable flight paths. If you still experience performance issues, you can now turn them off in the settings.

• Added a fleet defense score to Fleet Command.

• Locked positions for pirate warnings and defense probability in Fleet Command. This prevents the buy buttons from moving around and causing accidental misclicks.

• Individual module scaling: You can now resize each UI module individually in the settings.

Finally, I want to thank everyone who played, left a review, provided feedback, and shared the game! Somehow, we passed 4500 wishlists and hit 121 concurrent players (last I checked, we were the 130th most popular demo!), which is crazy to me.

Truly humbling! Okay, now back to work...

Quick hotfix

• Fleet command module is now scrollable when it's larger than the window. Should help players with large screens that put text size on max.

• Text scale now enlarges the pilot pop-up text

• Added French and German translations

Wow guys, what a wonderful response to Desk Space! We passed 1,500 wishlists which is awesome, THANK YOU so much everyone!

I've gotten some feedback that performance can chug as you buy more ships and your network grows. This is something I will continually work to improve, but here are some quick fixes:

• UI Refresh Rate & Garbage Collection: Instead of updating every single frame, UI calculations are now on a throttled timer. This should be the same to the eye, but offers 90% less overhead and eliminates random stutters (especially when switching application windows).

• Pathlines Optimization: Changed the math behind how flight paths are drawn, utilizing the GPU instead of the CPU. This should be way more efficient while keeping the same visual look. Pathlines are often the biggest performance bottleneck, especially when zoomed in on a base with many ships. It also avoids drawing them entirely if they are off-screen.

• Better Frustum Culling: The engine now checks more aggressively if ships are on-screen, skipping rendering effects, engine flares, and trails for any ships that are out of view.

• Background Memory Leak Fix: Capped popup numbers to prevent memory leaks and stutters when the game is left running in background browser tabs or minimized.

• Ship Label Toggle: You can now disable ship labels globally for a solid performance boost. You can find this toggle in the settings menu.

• Low Graphics Toggle: Disables nebulae background rendering, ship trails, and cargo load particles. You can toggle this in the settings menu.

Other Additions:

• Settings Button: Some people didn't realize you could press Escape to open the settings, so I added a dedicated button directly on the UI.

• Exit Button: There is now a dedicated "Exit Game" button in the settings menu... no more Alt+F4!

• Consistent UI Zoom: Fixed an issue where the UI scale differed depending on whether the window was pinned or not. They are now completely consistent.

I've also gotten a lot of good feedback on balancing, pace and gameplay additions, I've avoided changing this for now but got some solid ideas for the future, I want to let the demo live as-is for a bit longer to see patterns.

Keep the feedback coming, and again, THANK YOU!

Hey everyone!

I soft-launched the demo for Desk Space two weeks ago to gather initial feedback, and the response has been largely positive! However, the main piece of feedback was that it was too short, so I've updated the demo to be almost double the length.

The demo now takes you near the end of the first "run". It hints at the prestige gimmick, but the mechanic itself and certain endgame upgrades remain locked for the full game. Hopefully, this is enough to give you a fun taste of what's there and what's coming. The average playtime for the demo on Steam currently says 38 minutes, so you can expect a similar amount of playtime.

There are still some limits on how many ships you can buy to prevent things from snowballing out of control (mostly because I haven't decided if save files will carry over to the full release yet).

Enjoy the demo and have a great Next Fest! :) Feel free to send me your feedback on the Steam forums or on Twitter/Bluesky.