In The Black Major Content Update - 1844
In The Black - Heat Death Heat is now a weapon, a warning light, and a way to die. This patch rips out the old approximated heat model and replaces it with a brand-new, ground-up thermodynamics system. Your coolant loops, armor panels, radiators, and core systems now trade energy
In The Black - Heat Death
Heat is now a weapon, a warning light, and a way to die. This patch rips out the old approximated heat model and replaces it with a brand-new, ground-up thermodynamics system. Your coolant loops, armor panels, radiators, and core systems now trade energy realistically, and your cockpit finally tells you which part is cooking before the reactor does anything dramatic.
Here’s everything that’s new, everything that got better, and everything we fixed.
NEW: Thermodynamics & Heat Damage
New Thermal System. We built a high-performance high-fidelity thermal system from scratch. Our system perfectly mirrors real-world thermodynamics and current aerospace designs to deliver an unmatched level of realism to In The Black's thermal combat mechanics:
Heat Generation: weapons, engines, and other ship modules generate heat and dissipate it with varying efficiency. As you watch your weapons heat up and cool down in the top left of your HUD, you'll see your Module Coolant Loop (MCL) rise in temperature, shown below.
Active Cooling System: cooling networks move heat away from modules toward the radiators via Active Coolant Loops (ACL). Having utility modules on the same cooling loop as reactors and engines would certainly fry something like a targeting computer, so we keep them separate. The Module Coolant Loop (MCL) is your low-temperature cooling network displayed as MCL. It pumps heat from weapons and utility modules uphill to the high-temperature Reactor Cooling Loop (RCL). This loop syncs heat between the MCL, reactor, power generators and engines before sending it to the radiators for dissipation.
Radiative Dissipation: radiators and hull armor bleed waste heat into space, displayed as RAD. Radiators work very efficiently at high temperature, to the fourth power, so even hot running ships will stay cool unless these radiators are significantly damaged. That can result in a ship-wide thermal meltdown where reactor loop heat slowly bleeds into the rest of the ship rendering modules inoperable as they cook off.
Boost System: select ships now sport a boost system capable of turning waste ship heat and propellant into stored boost propellant, displayed as BST below. Boost propellent significantly reduces the energy required to create thrust plasma increasing engine propellent throughput by 4x. Producing boost propellent via electrolysis is energy intensive, meaning your boost tank will not charge if your main engines are active, including when TDAMP activates them. Note that boost propellent does not increase thrust efficiency, so keep an eye on your propellent reserves.
Thermal Features Breakdown
NEW - Armor phase change & vaporization. Sustained hits heat the exact panel you’re shooting, and the overflow pushes into the ship’s cooling system. Heat ablation calculations have also been added to determine damage caused by laser weapons. Once a panel’s laser impact patch heats up past its vaporization temperature, it literally starts boiling away simulating realistic structural mass loss. This means that focused sustained laser fire on one armor panel is much more effective vs intermittent bursts on disparate armor sections. "Do a barrel roll" is now a viable strategy while under laser fire.
NEW - Glowing hull visuals. You can now see heat on ships without the aid of the MFD ship status thermal mode. A 6-direction gradient system samples live armor temperature across the ship and renders real blackbody glow onto the hull. Take sustained fire to your port side and watch that side turn red-hot, then cool down slowly over the next several seconds.
NEW - Radiators that actually radiate. Radiators now follow physically accurate blackbody radiative equations.
NEW: Pilot Vehicle Interface (PVI), PilotFX & Audio
Situational awareness got a serious upgrade, plus the first pieces of PilotFX — a new framework for pilot senses and physical feedback.
NEW - Thermal View in Ship Status Display
NEW - PilotFX perception system. Sustained G-forces now affect your cockpit instruments and your pilot’s body. Hard maneuvers cause grey-outs (desaturation), boost shake, and spring-physics head movement when you take a big collision.
NEW - DSS Betty verbosity settings. You can now tune how chatty Betty is from the game settings menu.
IMPROVED - Wwise audio pass. Thruster and weapon audio has been cleaned up and rebalanced. Cockpit sound now shifts dynamically between internal and external camera views and reacts to G-force impairment. Thermal audio alerts now fire on a genuine critical reactor or module coolant-loop emergency instead of generic weapon overheating.
NEW: Station Defense
Station Defense is a new type of contract in which you must protect an orbital facility. The version we're adding in this update features some additional new mechanics involving an enemy cyber attack to subvert the station's automated defenses. If their hack succeeds those defenses will turn on you!
IMPROVED: Module & Armor Damage Model
Repairing the structure didn’t always clear degraded states. Now it does.
NEW - Lasers have more realistic thermal effects on armor now. As the armor soaks up heat it becomes more vulnerable to kinetic damage. Combining lasers and cannons together is more effective than either alone.
IMPROVED - Globally armor damage has been made more predictable and reliable.
FIXED - Engine damage mitigation. Reus Titaan and HoneyPot engines were taking full unattenuated damage and randomly exploding under incidental fire.
IMPROVED: Weapons, Overheat & Ordnance
Ballistic waste-heat is retuned so chain guns and railguns feel distinctly different.
NEW - Ballistic overheat recovery buffers. Once a rapid-fire kinetic weapon overheats, it has to cool enough to buffer at least 10 continuous shots before it’ll fire again. No more instant re-overheat when you’re holding the trigger through cooldown. Heavy hitters like railguns use a 1-shot buffer instead for predictable volleys.
NEW - Data-driven ammunition heat. Waste heat per munition is now defined per ammo-table row. Chemical kinetic rounds subtract mechanical energy from chemical potential first, so absorption figures reflect real muzzle gas, case ejection, and heat retention.
NEW - Longbow missiles are back. By popular demand, missiles are officially restored to the Kolibri Longbow standard loadout. Happy hunting.
IMPROVED - Objective thermal scaling. Thermal damage against destruction objectives and generators is reduced. Bring kinetic and explosive payloads for hard installations because a sustained laser sweep won’t cut it anymore.
IMPROVED: Flight Automation & AI
Bot pilots and scripted flight got a big optimization and safety pass.
FIXED - AI tendency to fly into walls. Automated pilots no longer shove open-loop thrust straight into asteroids and stations. Fly-bys, orbits, and dodges now route through collision-aware guidance. They still do occasionally collide but it is much less frequent than before.
IMPROVED - Throttled pathfinding. Global pathfinding is now rate-limited by a world-scoped controller to about 4 requests/second, killing calculation spam with no hit to responsiveness.
IMPROVED - Smarter braking and turns. Bots plan turn speed ahead of tight corners (Mining Tunnels) instead of clipping them, and brake into a controlled arrival envelope at capture zones (The Belt) instead of overshooting.
FIXED: Netcode, Performance & Stability
We profiled hard against 10-bot combat to hunt hitches and multiplayer edge cases.
FIXED - Gimbal snap. Weapon gimbals would jump 90° off-target right as your nose lined up on the target. Replaced an unstable rotation-matrix conversion with great-circle vector interpolation - gimbals now track smoothly through convergence and across lag.
FIXED - Empty client thermal HUDs on spawn. Added a module-count network handshake so clients don’t initialize a vehicle before all its systems have replicated. Cures the zeroed-out readouts.
IMPROVED - Async match-recovery snapshots. Crash-recovery stat serialization moved fully off the game thread. Recovery files now save on a background thread pool every 5 seconds with atomic replacement - worst-case game-thread save time dropped from ~1,600 ms to under 2 ms.
IMPROVED - Thruster FX optimization. Idle thrusters skip redundant FX parameter updates (transition-to-idle resets still fire). Median module CPU cost during fleet combat dropped over 22%.
IMPROVED - Super-sampling safety cap. Removed super-sampling from the options menu and added startup enforcement to stop multi-frame stalls.
FIXED - Post-match stat attribution & contract races. Fixed a race between manual contract completion and match-stat finalization that caused duplicate API submissions. Scoreboards now attribute kills, friendly fire, and assists by authoritative Player Net ID instead of display text and is 100% accurate across players, bots, and turrets.
What’s Next: The Weapons Patch
With thermodynamics in place, the next major update turns its attention to ballistics and loadouts. We’re still shaping it, so treat everything here as direction rather than a promise - some of it will land in the Weapons Patch, some may shift or grow.
New Ballistic Hardware. We’re building out a new heavy cannon line and a dedicated railgun family spanning most weapon sizes, each with a spread of caliber-scaled shells - armor-piercing, high explosive, APHE, fragmentation, shaped-charge, and more exotic rounds are under evaluation.
Ammo Selection in the Loadout Screen. The goal is to let you pick ammo types and presets per ballistic weapon from the hardpoint editor, favorite the configs you run most, and see clearly what each shell costs to resupply.
Rearm on Demand. We’re prototyping resupply pods that can be summoned during a mission. When it arrives it will provide a partial repair and rearm scaled to your ship’s size.
Better Impacts. A VFX/SFX pass focused on explosive ballistic payloads and module damage/destruction effects.
Loadout. Longer-term investigations include a per-ship default settings page in the Ship Frame Editor along with a unified vehicle loadout manifest.
Targeting Groundwork. We're reworking the MFD to include and support multiple new features: sub-component targeting with visual feedback, a new missile view, refreshed gimbal models and revised ordnance MFD page.
Unreal Engine Upgrade. We’re evaluating a move to Unreal Engine 4.27 for run-time performance gains and reduced development friction.
More details as these firm up.
