19.04.2026 - Post-Demo Patch Notes

First off -- thank you. Genuinely. The demo has only been out a few days and the feedback has already been incredibly helpful. Every bug report, every "this confused me," every "I abandoned my run because of X" -- all of it goes straight into fixes. I'm a solo developer, which means I'm writing the code, doing most of the art, balancing the systems, writing the narrative with a small team, and also trying to QA a game with 11 endings, 5 drift paths, branching research trees, and population dynamics that play out differently across 250-400 years. I miss things.

I have an automated QA bot that runs overnight playthroughs across five different play-styles, but it doesn't catch everything a human notices in five minutes of actually reading the tooltips. So I'm grateful for every pair of eyes on this.

Here's what's changed since demo launch:

Critical Fix: Research Effects Were Lying to You

This was the big one. Several players reported that research effects didn't match what the tooltips promised. They were right -- the displayed values were 100 times too high.

When a technology showed "+15% food/yr," the actual mechanical effect was +0.15 percentage points per year. The tooltip was multiplying by 100 before displaying, making every research bonus look enormously powerful when it was actually a modest offset to resource drain.

This was especially bad for Closed-Loop Ecology. The tooltip showed "+15% food/yr" with a penalty of "-3% per 100 pop over 800." A player at 1000 population would reasonably calculate: +15% - 6% = net +9%. Good deal, right? In reality: +0.15% - 6% = -5.85%. Immediate food crisis. At least one player abandoned their run over this, and they were completely right to be frustrated.

Status: Fixed. All research tooltips now show the actual values. What you see is what you get.

Narrative Fix: "None of Them Had Ever Seen an Ocean" (At Year 25)

A player pointed out that when they colonized a planet less than 30 years into the voyage, the landing text said things like "none of them had ever seen an ocean" and "the crew had grown up reading about Earth's single moon." At that point, roughly 80% of the colonists were still Earth-born. They'd seen plenty of oceans.

The game already tracked ship-born vs. Earth-born population internally -- it just wasn't using that data in the landing narrative. Now it does.

All 10 planet types have new early-arrival text variants (triggered when the majority of the population is still Earth-born, roughly year < 40). These acknowledge the generational split: the Earth-born who remember what a planet feels like, and the ship-born who are experiencing it for the first time. The contrast turns out to be more interesting than the original text anyway.

Research Confirmation (Two-Click)

Multiple players flagged that clicking a research advancement immediately activated it with no way to undo. In a game about careful decision-making, that's a trap.

Research now uses the same two-click confirmation pattern as interventions. First click highlights. Second click commits. You can click away to cancel.

Mission Archive

When your run ends, the game now saves a summary -- ending type, year, population, key decisions. You can view past missions from the start menu. No more "what happened last time?" guessing. Other Fixes Dynamic population numbers: Epilogue and event text no longer hardcodes "a thousand colonists" or "forty-three survivors." All figures now pull from actual game state. If you land with 867 people, the text says 867.

Landing hall event: The "first building" event (where the colony builds an assembly hall) no longer claims there are "140 seats for a colony smaller than that" when your population is 800+. Text now branches based on actual population and casualties.

Demo SFX bleed: The typewriter tick sound no longer continues playing behind the demo end screen. Export crash fix: The ship schematic was loading via a file path that only worked in the editor -- demo builds would hang on a black screen at startup. Fixed pre-launch, but documenting it here because it's the kind of thing that only shows up in exports.

Start menu overhaul: New title font (Orbitron), GPU starfield shader with parallax drift, cleaned-up button layout. What's Next

More of this. I'm reading everything, fixing what I can as fast as I can, and building toward the full release. The best places to reach me: Discord: https://discord.gg/p2xrKcQ7nD Steam Community Hub: Post in the discussions -- I check it daily Bug reports, feedback, "this felt weird" -- all welcome. You're helping me make this thing better, and I don't take that for granted.

-- Garan Lorn / Selenodrome