Dev Update - v0.9.0

Quick note up top: the demo build today gets the bug fixes and a new finale mission. The big stuff - Acts 2 and 3 - lands when the Playtest opens after Steam Next Fest in June. This post is so wishlisters can see what's been cooking.

New for the Demo

• Demo finale: Loose Thread - a cliffhanger mission that closes the demo arc

• Mission_00 IRC kick-off now resumes mid-sequence if you quit and come back

• Tutorial polish

Bug Fixes

• rm on a remote server now immediately completes delete objectives - previously the game only checked on reconnect (thanks to the Vintage Shopping report)

• mission complete now works as a terminal command, not just the pane button

• mission accepted as shorthand for mission accept

Coming at the Playtest (June 2026)

• Act 2 of the campaign!

Five New Boxes to Find

A small sprint of hacker-owned servers tucked behind the campaign:

• Night Owl BBS - hosting a working Dragon's Den minigame. Combat, stats, level-up, a dragon at the end. There's a save file, and yes, you can edit it

• A defunct anonymous pastebin with the lights still on

• An HF radio numbers-station listening post

• graybrd's reading-room archive

• An anonymous deadman switch dump (47 days expired)

Note files cross-reference each other, so finding one tends to point at the next.

The Channel Notices You

• IRC /whois looks up channel members

• Browser start page now ships with community bookmarks

• Channel members DM you about boxes worth visiting at 3, 5, and 8 missions completed

Mission Variety

• 7 missions rewritten away from the standard shape - plant-and-cover, precision DB edits, multi-hop pivots, OSINT, counter-hack, staged escalation

• New objective type: reply - DM an NPC the right answer (OSINT missions)

• New objective type: scrub_log - cover your tracks, properly

Under the Hood

• Server state now persists across save/load - filesystem changes, scrubbed logs, unlocked awareness, all of it

• HTML renderer decodes entities (&, «, etc) instead of rendering them as text

• Tables render properly now (the column count was missing from the BBCode pass)

• Music swaps defer to the next bar boundary - no more mid-bar flicker on theme change

• Scripting: did you mean X? suggestions on unknown identifiers, time prefix, diff file1 file2

API Cleanup

• Removed check_banner - the free scan() already returns the banner

• Bundled scripts that called dead functions (read_log, write_log, get_ip) now actually run

• local_mkdir / local_cp / local_mv / local_rm log specific errors instead of silently failing

• The four local_* functions missing from the in-game reference are documented now

Chatter

• second_hand's voicing fix (was 3 lines across 228 chunks)

• Act 2 chatter rebuilt - 38 chunks to 70

• Pairing variety improved (gh0st and hexdump no longer dominate)

• Duplicate beats trimmed across #lounge and the act pools

What's Coming Next

Workshop ships at the full launch - server scaffolders, mission scaffolders, Steam publish/subscribe, attribution stamping. The plumbing is in; the doors open at 1.0.

Five new boxes. Three acts of campaign. The channel's been busy. Wishlist Blackdoor to be ready when the Playtest opens, and hop in the Discord if you want a heads-up the moment it's live. - Static