🗺️ Exploration — The Hollow Sphere

• There is a delve in the game. The Ancient Gate in Barnard's Star sends you to the Hollow Sphere: a hollowed asteroid eight chambers deep, sealed inside a 20 km containment lattice. The gate only sends. The way home is at the end.
• Every chamber is garrisoned. These pirates hold their rooms: they post up, come looking when something wakes them, and brawl in close quarters. Cleared rooms refill on a 15 minute clock while the run is open.
• The Hollow King holds the vault. Every cast is telegraphed by colour. Red: get away or break line of sight. Orange: get close. White: drop your lock or it hits you. Dodge a burst and he runs hot for a few seconds: that is the window to hit him.
• The vault door is one-way. In is easy. Out is through the King.
• Killing the King unseals the exit: a shaft out of the vault to four one-way vents 5 km apart, and a wormhole home to Barnard's Star. Everyone on the same run comes out at the same spot.
• The run is shared and resets on a timer once the vault falls. During lockout the Ancient Gate refuses and says so.
• Cruise does not work inside. The whole pocket sits in an interference field.
• Ships you have spotted inside stay visible for a moment behind rock. Two seconds, then they fade. Ships you have never seen stay hidden.
• The Hollow Sphere is on the universe map, off the main lanes. The only way in is through Barnard's Star.

🏠 Home Station

• Pick a home station. Station Services has a new HOME tab. Set it while docked; it holds until you set another.
• Dying inside the delve sends your pod home. No flying a pod out of the rock. Death anywhere else is unchanged: the pod ejects at the wreck and you fly it back yourself or self destruct pod and return to home.
• No home set? A delve death routes your pod... somewhere.

⚔️ Combat

• Your locks on pirates no longer break behind cover. Once you have an AI target locked, rock between you does not end it.
• Player-on-player locks hold longer behind cover: 2 s → 3.5 s. Pirates locking YOU still lose it after 2 seconds of cover.
• Missiles lose you behind cover. Keep something solid between you and an incoming missile for two seconds and it gives up.
• The HUD tells you when your guns cannot reach. A line reads "OUT OF RANGE — 3.1 km to Autocannon II": how much further to close, and which weapon it belongs to.
• Enemies stop firing shots that cannot possibly reach you. Pirates used to open fire on lock from up to four times their weapons' real range. Those rounds always fell short. They also now arrive with full magazines, so expect a real fight.

🎒 Inventory

• Your ASSETS are viewable from anywhere. Everything you own across every station has its own tab now. It used to be visible only while docked.

🖥️ UI & Quality of Life

• The tactical radar follows your head. Free-look turns the radar with the camera; distances stay centred on your ship.
• Gate refusals say why. One-way anchors, delve lockout, and every other refusal reads as a sentence instead of a silent no.
• Column headers and category rails stay put when you scroll (corp storage, kill board, bounty board).
• Trade offers past the eighth item are no longer invisible. The limit is enforced up front, and overflow from the other side is called out.
• Item warnings refresh when your skills change instead of showing the old answer.
• Corp storage is visible from other systems, read-only. Deposits and withdrawals still happen at your corp's home station.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fixed the Hollow Sphere rendering as one blank sphere. Early flyers on the first build saw the container but none of the interior.
• Fixed the combat log reporting a hit after the ship was already destroyed. Damage lines now land above the kill they led to, with the ship's name instead of "a hostile". Both directions.
• Fixed the tutorial relaunching for veteran pilots after a delve death routed them to a new system.
• Fixed cruise flickering inside suppression fields. Engaging in a bubble made the drive stutter over and over. It refuses cleanly now.
• Fixed a memory leak in the tactical radar that grew the longer you played. If long sessions got heavier, especially on lower-end machines, this was a likely cause.
• Fixed a weapon-effects slowdown that scaled with the busiest fight of your session. Long fights stay smooth now.
• Fixed tutorial highlights that never appeared on some inventory steps.

This update includes a new client build — restart Steam if it has not downloaded automatically.