Release notes for 0.2.71
Until this release, large stretches of in-game text still surfaced in English even with a language selected: the entire dynamically-assembled epilogue, colonist/ship status panels, the faction report, planet survey readouts, and the arrival/ending screens. This release closes that gap.
Epilogue prose, hand-translated in stages, 0 → 566/566 paragraphs (×4 languages)
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
Full-game localization (phased rollout)
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)
Translation groundwork (June 6)
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)
✨ New feature
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.
🐛 Bugs fixed: QA-surfaced runtime issues
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.)
🐛 Bugs fixed: i18n auto-wrap hazard cleanup
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).
🔧 Other updates
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