v0.6.23 — Stories on the ground

14 Oct 2026Developer post

New features

Twenty new colony cards from the writing team: century events, a poisoned household, a contested grave, an adulterated ration, a homicide, a violent student, waste treatment and a child adapted to the planet.
A thirteen-card expedition storyline. A story the colony has already started now takes the year's slot before a random event, so it reaches its next beat.
A colony whose power grid fails is now in crisis, and decisions keep coming. Three new cards deal with the dark: who sleeps in the one warm room, what the last stored charge runs, and whose walls give up their copper.
Treating the colony's waste puts treatment works on the grid. While they run, fewer people die of untreated illness.
A failed colony's ending names what ran out: the stores, the shelter against the weather, or the clinic.
A ship kept in orbit as a lifeboat now relays a share of its reactor's power to the ground. Colony Status shows it beside the upkeep.
The landing choice for the ship says what each option leaves the colony to build with.
Decommission orders now take the listed works off the maintenance schedule or dismantle them for material.
When the colony record closes, it names the limit that ended it.

Each faction now makes a late demand when the ship keeps agreeing with it, and acts alone when the ship refuses. The Deck Assembly can speak once it forms.
Eight research dilemmas now share the opening years, four of them new. Each voyage meets four.
When the chief engineer's post falls vacant, named crew are put forward for it.
The success chance shown on a choice now includes the shift of the crew posted to it.
The bridge camera feed shows five crew at their seats, and the watch changes with the year.
Outfitting picks print the figures behind them, and the second reactor's power floor is named.
Screens now explain births, the status strip, OPTIMAL readings under machine authority, star colours and surveyed worlds.

Custom-named people take parts in events when they are awake and fit the part.
Both people screens show a person confined to quarters. The voyage screen shows offices.

The ending names each compartment the crew declared forbidden, with the year, and the year it was measured open again.
Landing closes the stories the voyage began, with one dated record for each.
Arriving at a world an earlier ship settled shows how that colony's record closed.
Research that stops being taught on the ground is named in the log the year it goes.
Unanswered assembly questions carry across landing.
The start menu's voyage archive pages ten voyages at a time.

The ship's screen wear no longer draws scan lines and dead pixels over the colony screens.
Follow-up observations that answer an earlier event no longer wait for an empty year.
After landing, a research trial that needed the ship in flight reads as closed, not paused.
Older refugee records that counted departures as deaths are amended when the save loads. The original entries are kept beside the correction.
New text from this update is translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Chinese.

Landing on a world an earlier colony settled shows its record before landing and nothing after.
Waste treatment has no building on the colony map yet.
Some older Russian text still uses English while the community translation continues.
Demo limits are unchanged: ten colony years, or voyage year forty without landing. Saving remains disabled in the demo.