Dead Reckoning — Big Update v0.2.81

This is a large one. I finally took the plunge and merged a huge branch, which ended up breaking the game after I added it, so we've jumped to v0.2.81 into a single push. New late-game content, a new ending, the entire colony individuated, a real accessibility pass, the localization finally finished, an editorial sweep over the writing, and a long stack of fixes.

⚠ A note before you dive in

All of this has been through harness testing — hundreds of automated playthroughs, real-build checks across all five languages, and the full test suite, all passing. But Dead Reckoning is still actively evolving, and I also rely on a small group of playtesters, and a release this large almost certainly still has bugs. If something crashes, reads wrong, or looks off, please report it — on the Discord or the discussion boards. Your reports are genuinely how the rough edges get found and fixed.

✦ Major New Content

A thousand people, not a sample. The crew manifest used to follow a representative sample and infer the rest. Now every one of the thousand colonists is a real individual — named, aged, given a role and a lineage, carried on the manifest from departure to the end of the run. A hundred stand the watch at any time while the rest sleep; children are born and named in transit; and when the actuarial tables take someone, a specific named person is gone, not a statistic. The Cryo Bay register, the colonist dossiers, and the colony status screens all read against the full roster now.

New ending: The Perpetual Voyage. An oligarchic ship that survives long enough, drifts far enough into class, and never lands now reaches an ending of its own. I don't want to spoil it, but I'm sure if you get it, you'll recognize the homage.

The Endgame Deck. Twenty new events that fire late in a run, once the ship has gone long and started to come apart — ten "clinical horror" beats and ten "dark cluster" beats. Deliberately bleak and dry: this is the stretch where the systems and the people are both failing, written to sit in that without being melodramatic.

Their trigger windows are tuned to land across the survivable stretch rather than all at once.

Note: This is the first half of a planned 50-event deck; Acts III–IV are coming.

A named crew, and a ship that teaches itself. The officer who reads the departure order, the pilot who lays the asteroid-belt routes, the comms officer who logs Earth's final broadcast — all real members of this run's manifest, different every run, and the archive remembers one of them at the end. And seven ADVISORY notes now appear once each, the first time a system actually matters (your first directive, the heliopause watch order, the first nav window, research, drift, repairs, the first power dip). A read-anytime CAPTAIN'S BRIEFING in settings holds the mission framing and every advisory for re-reading. The standing watch is a hundred strong. The ship was always written as a working community, and now the simulation agrees: about a hundred colonists are awake and posted at any time, aging the years they serve while nine hundred sleep. Your watch policy now visibly shapes who your colony is when it lands — a short-rotation ship arrives having spent far more waking years than one that held the long watch.

✦ Accessibility & Quality of Life

• Clearer instrumentation. Every drift axis has a tooltip explaining what it measures and what moves it, and the POWER readout itemizes its per-year draw, including what your engine research gives back.

• Rebuilt research readout + a reshaped survival curve so the back half of a run reads more honestly.

✦ Localization — now actually complete

The translation work is finished and audited. Every event title, every decision outcome (~1,000 of them), the full research tree (~110 strings), the end-of-run recap titles, and the new Perpetual Voyage ending are all translated into German, French, Italian, and Spanish — no more English falling through where the rest of the UI was localized.

One honest note: I don't have the budget for localization, so this is off the shelf. Much like the difficult decisions in this game, this balances accessibility with compromise. In the future, if this game succeeds, I'd like to hand this off to localization contacts (many of whom I have from my time as a technical writer), who are far more valuable and personal than translation software.

Still — I hope this leads this game to at least being more accessible.

✦ Writing

Several editorial passes over the prose — events, decisions, outcomes, endings, survey and research text — to add some flavour while keeping the deliberately spare, clinical voice the game is built on. Ship-systems and disaster beats stay terse; the human beats (governance, colony life, births, memorials) breathe a little more without going sentimental. Meaning and outcomes are unchanged — voice only.

✓ Bug Fixes

• Crew who stay awake now age. Founders kept on watch instead of in cryo were frozen at their launch age — a long-serving officer could read as 31 "physical" next to 111 "chronological." Fixed.

• A landed colony that dies out gets its own ending instead of being handed the in-transit epilogue. Endings are still in flux from before I reworked the colony phases due to adding the post-landing phase; expect more and please report them.

• Research effects read correctly. Food/power/hull tech effects were displayed ~100× too large and mixed two unit styles; all ongoing rates now show the real per-year change, labelled "net."

• Decisions stick exactly once. Returning to an already-decided event (or hitting LOG mid-founding) could re-open it and apply the effects a second time — and the LOG button could throw you back to planet-selection and make you redo the whole landing. Both fixed; the founding phase is now fully restorable.

• You can back out of the descent screen — a "RETURN — RECONSIDER THIS WORLD" option; nothing's committed until you choose a descent protocol.

• Founding decisions update the readouts immediately instead of only at the end of the sequence.

• The heliopause watch-order briefing now matches the standing watch (no more "skeleton watch" left over from the old eight-awake model).

• Colony map no longer pans up over the tab bar — it's clipped to its own panel.

• Map feature markers (Coral Atoll, supercell paths, and the like) no longer spill over the top UI bar; they stay on the map.

• Habitability reads consistently before a probe: the discovery screen and the Star Chart show the same sensor estimate — unconfirmed until you survey — instead of two different numbers.

• Cleaned up a population-count log error surfaced by the full-roster work.

• Plus sixteen further confirmed bugs caught in QA.

Thanks for playing — and for every bug report. It really means a lot. If I haven't thanked you in the comments or on Discord, I'd just like to say it again.

— Garan Lorn