The largest update StarFrame has shipped: two server releases and a client update. The theme: what your equipment does, what the AI can see, where your money went, and what just happened. Restart Steam to pick it up.

🕶️ Stealth finally works against the AI

• Cloaks and Signature Dampeners now hide you from pirates and guardians — the same concealment rules as against players. Outside your concealment radius they cannot acquire or hard-lock you.
• Going dark mid-fight doesn't erase the fight: your hunter keeps hunting, but can't re-lock until it closes inside your radius. Station guardians play by the same rules. Loud hulls stop drawing chases from beyond 20 km.
• Cloaked flight is smooth. The client was predicting your uncloaked top speed while the server held you slower, so cloaked pilots were corrected every step. And dropping out of warp while cloaked no longer freezes your ship.

🎇 NPCs fight back properly

• The Lock Breaker works against NPCs: one pulse drops their hard lock — guns and missiles both go quiet for the window. They keep chasing and re-lock when it lapses.
• Belt patrols, the heaviest hideout pirates, and guardians now pop flares at your missiles. Your combat feed tells you when your missile was decoyed.
• NPC ammunition resupplies (~5 minutes empty to full) — a guardian can no longer be drained dry and left permanently harmless.

🎯 Targeting & scanning

• Targeting Computers I/II/III now extend lock range on every hull (+15%/+30%/+50%) — and the description finally says what that buys: holding a lock on a target pulling away. The inert "accuracy" stat is gone.
• Scan-range rigs work for the first time: they extend contact range AND lock range. Their roll bracket moves to the standard combat row (no existing rig carried the stat, so nobody's roll changes).
• Fixed: pilots in Siege, Support and other large hulls were refused locks past 10 km by their own client, even though the server allowed them. Your ship's real lock range is now used.

⚔️ Faction warfare can be won

• Contested nodes can flip. Drifting outside the 20 km ring costs a slow fade (half fill rate), not your whole hold; an exactly-tied fight no longer resets the bar; a server restart mid-capture no longer voids the fight or its contributor roster.
• The capture readout names the faction attempting it and reads FADING while an empty ring drains — it used to hide at exactly that moment.
• Doing what faction warfare asks stops making you a criminal: kills on enemy militia in the warzone can no longer be reported. Neither can killing an Outlaw, a war target, or in self-defense — anywhere. The death-report card warns you when a warzone kill looks sanctioned.

🚨 Bounties & your own standing

• You can finally see your own record: the BOUNTY screen shows your Infamy, whether you are an Outlaw, and when your next point burns off. Being an Outlaw strips high-security protection — anyone may legally kill you — and until now nothing told you it had happened.
• A bounty that won't place tells you why (insufficient credits, under the 100,000 minimum, target no longer Outlaw, and the rest). One that places is acknowledged with the new board total. PLACE dims when you can't afford it.
• Bounty escrow that comes back to you is announced as what it is — as is your share of a kill paid out from another system.

💰 Money

• Credits that arrive while you're away now name themselves: a market order that settled, bounty escrow returning, a warzone capture payout, a cross-system bounty share. Every one of them used to be announced as "a remote sale".
• Corp tax is visible: the bounty toast shows the deduction, and the corp wallet shows the income. The tax has always been taken — this is the first build that says so.
• Cancelling a build says what came back — materials and the build fee were always refunded; nothing said so.
• Corp business works from inside a rift: founding, deposits, withdrawals, disbanding — money routes to your pocket wallet instead of silently vanishing. Disband storage refunds land safely at the hub station.

🏭 Belts & structures

• Belt-ambush pods are capped (two waves per belt cell) and a belt you leave cleans itself up — no more endless piles.
• Structure upkeep is real: fuel burns (with a grace window after this update), Low Power warns its owners — including personal depot owners, who never heard it before — and a structure left Abandoned for 7 days is cleared, its contents scattering as salvage. Keep your depots fueled.
• An unbound structure is now siegeable everywhere, including high-sec. Bind your outposts.
• Derelicts read "cleared in 6d 22h" instead of raw seconds, and you can retrieve what you stored inside one — nothing is ever trapped.
• A partial transfer into a structure's hold says how much stayed behind.

🔧 Fitting & skills

• A mining laser whose skill fell below its effect ramp now visibly STOPS and names the exact exit (restore premium, adjust keep-active, clear a Lock, or fit a lower tier) instead of silently faking empty cycles forever. You're told at login if any fitted gear is inert.
• The fitting ring marks INERT modules in red, naming the skill and level needed against what you have.
• Lowering a skill with −1 warns you first when it would disable fitted gear, and names the gear.

🆘 The tutorial can't dead-end you

• The replacement-ship kit actually arrives now — delivered to the system's station (a short pod cruise; that's the intended sting). Station-less systems refuse honestly and your claim is NOT consumed.
• The claim can be retried: the screen tells you what the station answered and offers REQUEST AGAIN until your kit is real.

🖥️ Interface clarity

• EXPAND STORAGE quotes the real escalating price (it said "from 100,000 cr" while charging up to 1,500,000), confirms it, dims when you can't afford it, and explains refusals. Storage moves name their refusal reason.
• A job finished in another system reads READY with where to collect it, instead of sitting at a bare 100%.
• War declarations answer: refusals say why, declarations are acknowledged, ended wars are announced, and the WAR tab no longer blanks on a hiccup. The codex stops claiming corp chat dies at the system edge.
• The front door speaks your language: no more "node offline" or "cross-node state unavailable" — and "the server is full" now correctly says "that system is full". A refused login no longer renders as "Jump refused".
• After a disconnect, RECONNECT re-routes instead of retrying a dead address forever, and there's a RETURN TO TITLE button.

⚙️ Under the hood

• A server inefficiency introduced on Aug 15 (periodic sim hitches) was found and fixed the same day; idle systems now run at a fraction of the cost.
• The event log is indexed with enforced retention, ship-crash recovery after system moves is self-healing, and dozens of internal counters now catch problems loudly instead of silently.

Restart Steam to pick up the update. If something surprises you — a refusal message, a tax line, an Outlaw tag — it was almost certainly already true and is being said out loud for the first time.