- 0.6.6–0.6.11: Colonies, landscapes and skies - 15 September 2026
New features Settlements 0.6.6: Colonies with suitable land and supplies can grow. Population readouts separate births from losses to age, illness, accidents, hereditary disease and the environment. Shelter readouts identify buildings left without enough workers. 0.6.7: The gene clinic uses the finite cryogenic gamete bank brought down from the ship to widen the colony’s gene pool. It costs salvage, needs staffing and competes with other structures for maintenance. Once the bank is spent, it cannot provide further diversity. Colony landscapes 0.6.8: Layered terrain, vegetation, weather and moving activity enrich colony views. Buildings reflect the settlement’s development and condition. Hycean and Eyeball worlds gain distinct environments and animated map art. 0.6.9–0.6.10: New terrain includes glacial walls, polar shelves, deep moon craters, broad desert buttes, western woodland and un…
- What's next — September 2026 - 10 September 2026
Two new kinds of world are coming to the survey, the ground is getting a new look, and two writers have joined the colony. New worlds Hycean. A world-sized ocean under a thick hydrogen sky. There is no shore. A colony here lives in sealed habitats hung below the surface, joined by pressure walkways. Eyeball. A world locked to its star, one face always in the light. The only ground that can be lived on is the thawed ring between the burnt dayside and the frozen night. The star never moves in the sky. The colony sits on a terrace above the shoreline, joined by a heated corridor. Each gets its own portrait on the star chart, its own arrival view, and its own colony scene a century on. Earth gets a new portrait too. The new look The settled scenes are being rebuilt. The colony you see at the end will be the colony you built: every habitat from the roster, in its condition, and a struck shel…
- 0.6.5–0.6.6 — Colonies can grow - 7 September 2026
New features No new features in these patches. Bug fixes Colony Colonies can grow. The ground's birth rate sat below what age and illness take, and every settlement declined however well it was run. A colony with land and full stores now bears children at a settler's rate. The population card itemises each year's births and losses: illness and accident, age, hereditary disease, the ground. COLONIST STATUS shows the same figures under the trajectory. A shelter that goes dark for lack of hands is named on the SHELTER card, with how many works the colony can keep. Chronicles Delete unwanted Chronicles from the picker after confirming. Cloud synchronization keeps them deleted. Saved voyages and historical records are preserved. Deleting the selected Chronicle returns the next launch to Classic. Entering its share code adds it back. Text and readouts Ending accounts follow recorded choices m…
- 0.6.3–0.6.4 — Chronicles and records - 6 September 2026
0.6.3–0.6.4 — Chronicles and records New features Chronicles Choose a named Chronicle to keep the same stars between voyages. Read each voyage's file at the station or from its ending screen. Chronicles are available in the full game. Bug fixes Population and resources Cryo purge now removes actual sleepers and records their deaths. Landing casualties also update the population and death register. The watch target now scales with living crew. Birth totals no longer count bonus newborns twice. Cryo now suspends age-related mortality. Pod failures and other hazards still apply. Population forecasts preserve crews already above rated capacity. Mortality reports distinguish age-related deaths from other losses. Colonies no longer pay the ship's extra watch power cost after landing. Colony decisions and records Workshops can be restored when the restoration itself provides the required capac…
- v0.6.0 — colony salvage, German text pass - 4 September 2026
Promotion of the experimental branch to the main build. Includes everything since 0.5.26. Colony survival: salvage is now signposted Players reported colonies failing on worlds the survey rated green, with food and power in surplus. One run: 66% habitability, nobody left after eight years. Another finished with 368 colonists of 1,000; another with one. Cause: salvage from stripping the landed ship is the only material a shelter or infirmary is built from, and nothing in the game said so. The work is on the COLONY STATUS tab, under RECLAMATION. Measured over 24 runs — 1,000 colonists, 66% habitability, half-full stores: Panel never opened: 17 of 24 colonies lost, average final population 46. Three works per year: 0 lost, average final population 654. Changes: Three decisions now fire in the first years after landing. The stripped landers and what to do with the plate; the population coun…
- v0.5.24 — mods, and two endings - 2 September 2026
Mods The game reads mods. There is a MODS button on the title screen. Put a folder with a manifest.json in it into the mods directory. The game finds it, checks it, and says in plain words if something is wrong. A pack can change content, art and text. All seventy-one content pools are open to it: events, planets, names, balance, research, ending prose. A pack can add records, patch single values, replace them or remove them. Packs apply in a fixed order, so the same set always gives the same result. A pack can swap any of 1,646 art assets and ship its own translations. A pack that changes balance turns achievements off for that run. The Mods screen names the pack. Saves record which packs were loaded and warn you by name if you load without them. Workshop items you subscribe to load like local folders. The Workshop button opens the page in the Steam overlay, or in a browser. This is th…
- v0.5.23 — the second Russian pass - 30 August 2026
RussianA hundred and sixty-three more lines of the interface, corrected by hand by the player who did v0.5.22. The cryo bay, the charters, the tutorial, the status readouts and the faction registries move to the newer wording. The tutorial named the four gauges in the wrong order, and used a word for power that means wattage. Both match the line on screen now. The crew's watch was a clock in fourteen lines. A watch that stood on deck read as eleven names of the hours. The tinker cards' bridge was a road bridge. Those cards are about a wire bridged across a dead pump. The ship's own bridge had the same word in eight more places, and the main bus was a passenger bus. Five lines said the wrong thing outright. Offerings left at the reactor were business proposals, PRESERVE BOTH read as preserve the wallpaper, and the first year on the ground was a university freshman. Seven typos, and a Lat…
- v0.5.19 — fixes and additions - 28 August 2026
Everything since 0.5.15, gathered in one place. A number of these came from reports here and on Discord — thank you for writing them up. Six more tracks in the voyage soundtrack. Three by Scott Buckley — Phase Shift, Solace and Hiraeth — and three by Alexandr Zhelanov: Space Atmosphere, Space and Star Flow. The Zhelanov tracks sit closer to a held drone than to a piece of music, which is what several of you asked for after saying the soundtrack was too narrow to sit under a long run. All six appear in the Settings track list under their own names, and each can be switched off on its own. All six languages are complete. Around a thousand passages — colony chronicle entries, the choices themselves, the logs that report what they cost, several endings — had never been translated. A line the game cannot find in your language is shown in English rather than not shown at all, so the gap never…
- Русская локализация — что с ней не так - 26 August 2026
Коротко: русский текст в игре сейчас плохой. Претензии справедливые, спорить не буду. Русскоязычных игроков за последнее время стало заметно больше, поэтому переводом я занимаюсь в первую очередь. Сейчас присматриваюсь к Яндексу и другим вариантам — нужно то, что даст нормальное качество уже сейчас, а не через полгода. Чего я пока сделать не могу — заказать полную профессиональную локализацию. Игра всё ещё меняется: тексты переписываются, события добавляются и вырезаются каждую неделю. До 1.0 заметная часть строк успеет измениться, и оплаченный перевод устареет ещё до релиза. Бюджет у меня один, и разработчик тоже один. Потратить эти деньги я хочу на текст, который перестал меняться. Что будет дальшесамое плохое исправляю сразу, как только о нём сообщают; ищу вариант, который поднимет качество до нормального уже сейчас; заказываю живой перевод, когда текст устоится, ближе к 1.0. Если по…
- v0.5.10 — Colony century moves to stable, and Shakedown: A New Tutorial - 24 August 2026
Stable. Everything the experimental branch has been working on since v0.4.7, in one build. Landing used to be the end of the game. It isn't any more. The colony now has a century of its own — decisions, resources, its own way of failing, and endings that answer to what you actually did on the ground rather than to how you flew. The departure has changed too. Year one used to be a button. It is now twelve months you play through, aboard a ship still being proved, and the shakedown is where you learn what every system on board is for. If you have been playing on the default branch, this is eight experimental releases arriving at once. The list below is what a run will feel different for. The year you leaveThe departure runs in months. Twelve of them, from the drive lighting at 06:00 ship time to the corridor heading locked. Each month is a real decision on a ship nobody has flown yet: the…
- Dead Reckoning 0.5 — The Colony Century - 14 August 2026
Experimental branch. Opt-in public beta. Landing used to be the end of the game. You spent a century and a half getting a ship somewhere, a closing paragraph told you what became of the people who stepped off it, and that was the run. 0.5 gives the colony a century of its own — decisions, resources, a record of its dead, and endings that answer to what you did on the ground rather than what you did in transit. It is also unfinished. What is wrong with it is listed at the bottom, by name. The colony centuryThe century is played, not summarised. After landing, the colony runs to year 100 with decisions of its own. The years between them are yours to spend. The colony has its own resources. Ground life is not ship life. What you built in transit is not what keeps you alive on a planet. Buildings cost something to keep. Upkeep is real, and a settlement that overbuilds early feels it later.…
- Devlog update - 07.08.2026 - 7 August 2026
Hey all! Just some updates. Colony work is going well and scope is expanding. As well, identity wiring has now begun as I have the scaffolding in place to start having impactful events. The biggest changes are to resource management in the colony; I don't want to explicitly declare things as this round will go through much more rigorous testing as it will have a large content update, but the colony phase will now be 100 years. As the scope creep is huge, this will be a release outside of the cadence I've been delivering on. Identity in 0.40 was completed, but there are still 7 society paradigms I need to flesh out and integrate (which I just discovered won't fire in 0.40 because of work needed in 0.50). I estimate an end of August release for 0.50 on main, and I'm aiming for the scaffold 0.50 to go up on experimental next Friday. Once again, suggestions and comments are always welcome.…
- 0.40 release - The crew society changes are live! - 30 July 2026
Devlog — The crew becomes a society 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 here. It has left the experimental beta and is live for everyone as 0.4.0. Here's what's come together. The crew forms a named society 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…
- Devlog — 0.40 — The crew becomes a society - 23 July 2026
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. The crew forms a named societyYour 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 ident…
- Dead Reckoning — the approach, up close (v0.3.1–0.3.3) - 15 July 2026
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. Seeing a systemThe 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. Arrival, and what it tells youArriving at a system presents its several candidate world…
- 0.30 is now on main! - 11 July 2026
Notes are the same from 0.30 experimental — now on main. 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. Named identitiesThe 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…
- Dead Reckoning v0.3.0 — Corridors & Bloodlines (experimental) - 8 July 2026
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 departure boardThe 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, t…
- Pre-launch screens are on experimental - 30 June 2026
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 ha…
- v0.2.116 — Steam Deck legibility, WORK & wake-crew, skip intros - 30 June 2026
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! Steam DeckBoxes 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. The ship & your…
- v0.2.114 — Hardlock hotfix - 29 June 2026
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. Hardlocks fixedRejecting 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…
