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 century
The 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.
A colony chronicle screen. The record of the century is somewhere you can read it, and it feeds the ending you get.
The dying colony has decisions. A settlement that is losing used to produce a log line. It now produces seven decisions about who eats, who is counted, and what the colony is willing to become to survive.
What you do with the ship after landing is a choice, with consequences, rather than a line of description.
Crew postings
The postings table is interactive. It used to show an assignment you never made. Post someone to a station, or relieve whoever holds it and let the ship fill the vacancy its own way. It costs a piece of the year's work, so it is a decision rather than a chore.
You choose by what right a vacant post is filled. BY ROSTER hands it to the best qualified and starts their service over. BY SENIORITY hands it to the longest-served. BY LINEAGE passes it to the holder's own — and that one widens the class divide every time a station changes hands. A ship that has become clannish fills posts this way and cannot do otherwise.
Staffing depth is a lever. How many people are awake at once is yours to set, and it moves the numbers it names.
Service becomes competence. Time held at a panel is worth something.
The twelve societies
All twelve are complete on both rails. Every ideology-and-knowledge pairing has events in the ship phase and the colony phase, and an ending written for it.
The society is named to you. Once both halves have formed, the faction readout tells you what your ship has become rather than describing one axis of it.
Six colony cards, one per formed order, each pressing on what that particular society finds hard.
Houses carry feuds. A clannish ship's grudges outlive the people who started them.
The people
The colony records how it lost people, not only how many. Causes of death are kept, named, and read back.
Obituaries name the crises a colonist stood through instead of counting them.
Colonists read as people rather than table rows — origin, trait and habit, drawn from who they actually are.
Ship-born children get ship-born names once the culture has drifted far enough to stop naming them after Earth.
Worlds and survey
Habitable worlds are scarce again, and the difficulty settings reach them.
A world's cost is visible before you commit — at the survey and on the readout.
A world that cannot hold a colony says so before you land on it.
Language
Six languages ship complete alongside English: German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Simplified Chinese. Every string added in this release was translated in the same change, including the colony century, the postings table and all twelve societies.
Repairs
Over a hundred fixes since 0.4.7. The ones most likely to have affected a run:
ADVANCE YEAR tells you when it will not work. It had four reasons to refuse a press and only one of them greyed it out. The other three left the button looking normal — the press did nothing, played no sound, and left you with nothing to report except that the game had stopped.
A colony that dies on the ground gets its own ending. It used to close under the notice written for a crew that died between stars, printed over an account of a settlement emptying on a planet you had already landed on. It reads SETTLEMENT LOST now, and it is drawn as ruins on the ground.
A sealed cryo bay stopped discarding the rest of its own outcome. Sealing the bay recorded the seal and silently dropped every other consequence of that choice.
The first night on a new world stops describing a collapse that has not happened — engineers who cannot read the manual, on a voyage nowhere near that far gone.
Text stops rendering at two sizes at once. Changing font size or interface scale mid-run left some controls at the old size.
The colony roster reads like the cryo bay — filter, search, sort, and click anyone to read their record.
Locked options say why in your language. The red line under an unavailable choice was written only in English, in every language the game ships in, on the most decision-dense screen there is. All forty read in yours now.
Endings no longer print a guess as an observation, and the settled ending reflects the society depth you actually reached.
Named people are drawn from the live roster, so a card never names someone who is dead, asleep, or unborn on your run.
What is still wrong with it
Every one of these is real and currently in the build you would download:
The star chart's labels stack into an unreadable pile, worst in solar view. Fixed on the branch; it will be in the next build rather than this one.
The cryo dossier is a three-line window holding about twelve lines of text. You meet a scrollbar instead of a person.
The colony knows what killed it and never says so. The dominant cause of death is recorded and nothing reads it back to you.
A prohibition declared over a sealed place is recorded and nothing later acts on it. The decision registers; the taboo does nothing.
A regression identity forms in roughly one run in five. An ideological one forms in most. That gap is not intentional.
The possessive pronoun is ungrammatical in Italian, French and Spanish in the places a colonist's belongings are described.
The game freezes on ARM64 Windows (Qualcomm Snapdragon X). Reported, not yet reproduced here.
The colony roster's new grid has not had a human play session on it. It passes its tests, but I haven't had time to play test.
Where this leaves us
0.5 is the largest drop since the experimental line opened, and it is a beta in the honest sense: the colony century has been played through far more often by the test harness than by people. I would rather hand you the list above than have you find it a run at a time.
So — warts and all again, which is how this should have been running the whole time. The rough edges stay in the notes, named, until they are fixed. If you hit something that is not on the list, that is the most useful thing you can send me.
Thanks to everyone playing the experimental branch and writing up what they find. It is the reason this list is as specific as it is.
Steam → Dead Reckoning → Properties → Betas → experimental