Steam News9 April 20262mo ago

Demo launches April 16!

We are releasing a demo on April 16! Dead Reckoning is a specific kind of game — terminal UI, permadeath, 400 years of slow civilizational drift. The demo covers the first 30 years of the voyage.

Full notes

Full Dead Reckoning: The Long Drift update

Read the full published notes in a cleaner layout. The original post stays linked below.

What changed

0 fixes5 additions2 changes0 removals

UI and audio
Server
Performance
Gameplay
Events
Store

changedDead Reckoning is a specific kind of game — terminal UI, permadeath, 400 years of slow civilizational drift. The demo covers the first 30 years of the voyage. Enough to know whether the style and atmosphere are for you.

changedLanding used to be something that happened to you. It's now the most consequential decision sequence in the game. You choose a landing protocol. Things go wrong in ways that have names attached to them. There are catastrophe tiers, a first-night sequence, and then the actual work of building something. Post-founding events carry the story past the moment of arrival into the first decades on the ground. It took a long time to get right.

addedEvery ending was reviewed, classified, and tested for whether it was actually reachable. The_fork ending has a new Blender-rendered ship illustration. The turn_around ending has a 3D-rendered Earth with flickering city lights. Drift conditions now color the epilogue text at the century mark — the same ending reads differently depending on what happened on the ship.

addedNEW STORIES

addedRoughly 25 new events were added across the voyage. Late-run events, research-triggered sequences, a Genetic Bottleneck arc. There are three new chain arcs to find on long runs. Players who replay should notice the world feels denser.

addedThe research tree was rebuilt from scratch as a UI. Category sidebar, prerequisite visualization, drift costs surfaced explicitly, progress indicators. A new Field Research category unlocks through events rather than purchase. It's a tool now, not a wall of text.

We are releasing a demo on April 16!

Dead Reckoning is a specific kind of game — terminal UI, permadeath, 400 years of slow civilizational drift. The demo covers the first 30 years of the voyage. Enough to know whether the style and atmosphere are for you.

Two and a half weeks since the last update. Here's where the ship is now.

LANDING

Landing used to be something that happened to you. It's now the most consequential decision sequence in the game. You choose a landing protocol. Things go wrong in ways that have names attached to them. There are catastrophe tiers, a first-night sequence, and then the actual work of building something. Post-founding events carry the story past the moment of arrival into the first decades on the ground. It took a long time to get right.

ENDINGS

Every ending was reviewed, classified, and tested for whether it was actually reachable. The_fork ending has a new Blender-rendered ship illustration. The turn_around ending has a 3D-rendered Earth with flickering city lights. Drift conditions now color the epilogue text at the century mark — the same ending reads differently depending on what happened on the ship.

NEW STORIES

Roughly 25 new events were added across the voyage. Late-run events, research-triggered sequences, a Genetic Bottleneck arc. There are three new chain arcs to find on long runs. Players who replay should notice the world feels denser.

RESEARCH

The research tree was rebuilt from scratch as a UI. Category sidebar, prerequisite visualization, drift costs surfaced explicitly, progress indicators. A new Field Research category unlocks through events rather than purchase. It's a tool now, not a wall of text.

EVERYTHING ELSE

Controller support (Xbox and PlayStation), difficulty presets, full localization in five languages with OS locale auto-detection, a pre-launch briefing for new players, a skip bar for returning ones, Steam achievements, and a screen degradation system: when power or hull fail, the UI itself starts to corrupt.

Source

Steam News / 9 April 2026

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