Desolate Frontiers - Update v0.5.4

It has been a long five months. This is the first major update since v0.3.16 went up in March, and it is a big one - roughly 230 commits across thirteen development sprints.

The short version: settlements work completely differently, trading was torn down and rebuilt, part installation went from broken to functional, the tutorial was rewritten to match the new game, and the interface was rebuilt to work on whatever screen you are actually playing on.

Highlights

Settlements are now a hub

Rolling into a settlement used to drop you into one big tabbed menu that tried to be everything at once. Now a settlement opens onto an overview: every vendor as its own card, your convoy's fuel/water/food and a Top Up button in one place, and your warehouse right there. Pick a vendor and you get that vendor's screen - not a wall of tabs to hunt through.

Trading, rebuilt

The vendor screen was rebuilt from the ground up. Item rows expand inline instead of hiding behind a tree widget. Stats are shown as readable chips rather than dense text. Vehicle inspectors now match the convoy pages - seats, make and model, color, shape, plus a description popup. Delivery cargo shows your profit both per-unit and for the whole order. Buy and Sell is a single flip button. And when you buy something out, it actually leaves the list.

Cargo space that tells you the truth

This one was subtle and it caused a lot of grief. Your convoy was being modeled as one big pooled container, but cargo has to physically go into individual vehicles and a single item cannot be split across two of them. So "Max" would offer you more than would really fit, and the capacity bar would cheerfully read 96% while the server refused the order outright.

The client now plans the real per-vehicle packing. Max respects it, typed quantities are checked against it as you type, and if an order genuinely will not fit you get a one-tap retry at the quantity that does - rather than an error dialog or a silently shrunken order. On the server side, vehicles are no longer over-filled past their actual capacity.

Mechanics and part installation actually work

Part installation was non-functional. The whole flow was rebuilt: parts install, money comes out immediately, and a cart spanning several vehicles applies in one pass. The vehicle dropdown now shows [N ↑] - how many slots on that vehicle have a compatible upgrade available - swap buttons glow green where an upgrade fits, and the Available Parts list tells you which of your vehicles each part fits, sorted most-compatible first.

A tutorial that matches the game

The tutorial was taught against a UI that no longer exists. It has been rebuilt against the settlement hub over ten rounds of on-device testing, and now plays start to finish in portrait, landscape, and on desktop. Several softlocks are gone, including the one where resuming a level from the map - with no menu open - left you with nothing to press.

An interface that fits your screen

Scaling was reworked project-wide onto a single global content scale, which killed an entire family of bugs where fonts were being scaled twice and menus came out oversized, cramped, or scrolling when they should not have been. Menus now rebuild in place when you rotate your device. The old chrome was replaced with a consistent palette, and each menu got its own layout tuning rather than sharing one set of numbers.

Map and journeys

A gear tab on the map opens an overlay panel for toggling map layers, and your choices persist. Labels no longer clip off the screen edges or hide behind that gear box, and they nudge themselves out of the way of a route you are planning. Your selected convoy's journey line always draws now. The journey menu was revamped, trips over a day show an arrival date, the delivery preview shows only what you are dropping at that stop, and Cancel Journey is always available when you are in transit.

PC and Steam specific

• Fixed the launch bug where the entire interface was shoved down and to the right with background art showing through the gap. The safe-area inset was being read as a margin when it is actually an absolute screen rectangle - on a multi-monitor desktop that turned your second display's position into a huge phantom border.

• Fixed the related first-launch case where only the background art rendered.

• Fullscreen now has a keyboard shortcut: F11 on every platform, Alt+Enter on Windows, Cmd+Ctrl+F on macOS. The settings checkbox stays in sync with it.

• Feedback / Report a Bug is now reachable at all times - including before you log in, during the tutorial, and behind modal dialogs. Previously it was blocked in exactly the places bugs are most likely to be found.

• The UI Scale and menu-width sliders now show live numeric values and cover a usable, calibrated range. The UI Scale slider was previously discarding most of what you set.

• Fixed a significant framerate cost while sitting on the pre-login screen.

• DF+ gated purchases now open a proper upgrade prompt instead of dumping a raw server error at you.

• Network and connection failures now produce readable messages rather than unexplained failures.

Added

• Settlement overview hub - vendor cards, convoy resources with Top Up, and warehouse access on one screen

• Single-vendor menus, replacing the tabbed settlement mega-menu

• Map overlay settings panel on a gear tab, with per-layer toggles that persist between sessions

• Always-available Feedback / Report a Bug overlay

• Fullscreen keyboard shortcut (F11 / Alt+Enter / Cmd+Ctrl+F)

• Numeric readouts on the UI Scale and menu-width sliders

• [N ↑] upgrade counts on the mechanics vehicle dropdown, plus a green glow on swap buttons where an upgrade is available

• "Fits:" compatibility preview on Available Parts, sorted most-compatible first

• Vehicle description popup in the vendor inspector

• Profit shown on delivery cargo, per-unit and whole-order

• Delivery preview button in the vendor menu

• One-tap retry at the quantity that fits when a purchase is too large

• Sign in with Google

• Startup loading bar

• Menu persistence - reopening a menu returns you to where you left it

• Consistent navigation bars across convoy submenus

• Settlement label toggle on the map

Changed

• All interface scaling unified onto one global content scale factor; per-node font scaling removed entirely

• Portrait layouts for every menu, and live re-layout when you rotate

• New consistent color palette replacing the old chrome

• Per-menu layout ratios instead of one shared set of numbers

• Journey menu revamped

• Warehouse menu rebuilt as a full-width bottom sheet in portrait; landscape dead space removed

• Vendor list uses inline expanding rows instead of a tree widget

• Buy/Sell segmented control replaced with a single flip button

• The map overlay hides itself while you are planning a journey, so the route stays readable

• Your selected convoy's journey line always draws; the "Delivery Targets" toggle now only controls the destination arcs

• On touch, settlement labels reveal on an explicit tap rather than flashing under your finger as you pan

• The map can be panned and zoomed while a menu is open

Fixed

Trading

• "Max" over-buying by treating the convoy as one pooled container instead of individual vehicles

• The capacity bar reporting a comfortable fit for orders the server would refuse

• The server silently over-filling vehicles past their cargo capacity

• Buy button stuck on "Processing…" after a failed purchase

• Vendor stock not decrementing until you left and re-entered the vendor

• Sold-out cargo, resources, and vehicles lingering in the list - and bought vehicles reappearing about a second after being removed

• Buying an item clearing your selection, so buying it twice required re-selecting it

• The vendor panel being destroyed and rebuilt constantly, including mid-transaction

• The vendor menu blanking or crashing after a purchase

• A crash when re-entering a vendor menu

• Vendor vehicle stats showing blanks, and fuel efficiency always reading 0

• Part prices showing $0 in the footer and in row labels

• Bare cargo not being classified as parts

Mechanics

• Part installs doing nothing at all - the wrong identifier was being sent to the server

• A crash when applying part swaps

• Multi-vehicle carts only applying to the selected vehicle

• Cart slot conflicts when re-picking a slot

• Purchase cost using an item's intrinsic value rather than the vendor's price

• Incompatible slots (a turbo on an ICE, for instance) appearing on every vehicle

• Money not updating until the next background refresh

• Non-removable inventory parts being offered in the swap chooser, where they could never be accepted

Journeys and the map

• Journey ETA showing no date at all on trips longer than a day

• The delivery preview listing your entire manifest instead of that stop's deliveries

• Cancel Journey going missing when the convoy data omitted the journey id

• Map labels clipping off the screen edges and hiding behind the gear box

• Labels sitting on top of a planned route line

• The camera panning to a convoy's old position after the tutorial relocates it

• Camera limiting and mode-switching bugs

• Route fitting and endpoint handling

• A black screen on the map under certain conditions

Interface and layout

• Fonts double-scaling in modals, popups, receipts, and tip dialogs

• Five menus that never re-laid out when the device rotated

• The top bar forcing every menu beneath it past the edge of a portrait screen

• The warehouse menu cramping and clipping off both edges

• Landscape navigation buttons squeezed into the middle by a notch inset that did not apply in landscape

• Login screen status text nearly filling the screen

• The connected-accounts page overflowing on high-DPI displays

• Button-mashing between menus leaving the interface in a stuck state

• The settings menu showing stale values after logging out and back in - which is why the pan-direction toggle appeared to flip on its own

• Vendor cards clipping under the navigation bar in landscape

• The settlement name being clipped in the top bar

• The new-convoy dialog being a fixed size, hiding behind the top bar, and colliding with the on-screen keyboard

Tutorial

• A softlock when resuming a level from the map with no menu open

• Confirm Journey not being clickable through the tutorial overlay

• The back button never highlighting, making the return path impossible to find

• The Top Up highlight blending into the button it was highlighting

• Highlights firing before menu cards had settled into place

• The supply step not registering Water Jerry Cans

• The tutorial text box flashing to near-full-screen for a frame, and overlapping the vendor menu in landscape

Accounts, errors, and performance

• The new-convoy dialog running in an endless loop for an account with no convoys

• The delivery receipt listing consumed fuel, water, and installed parts as if they were deliveries

• An idle-login bug

• Node leaks and general performance work

Thank you for sticking with us through a quiet few months. Nearly everything above came out of play-testing and bug reports - the Feedback button is now reachable from anywhere in the game, and we read every one of them.