Devlog — 0.40 — The crew becomes a society

A generation ship is a long argument about how to live. For the last stretch of development, everything we've built has served one idea: the crossing should change who the crew is, not just how much food is in the hold. That work is nearly ready to leave the experimental beta and land on the default branch as 0.4.0 — we're aiming for the coming week. Here's what's come together, and what's still ahead.

The crew forms a named society

Your decisions across the voyage now converge into a named identity the crew becomes — eleven of them across two lines.

Six ways of ruling

officer rule, shared rule, ship religion, engineer rule, family rule, charter rule.

Five ways of forgetting

by the manual, machine worship, hand skills, improvised repair, forbidden knowledge. At a threshold the ship lays out the decisions that formed it, year by year, and asks whether to make it official. A formed identity hardens through three tiers and never switches — it recolours events you already know, adds options you didn't have before, and eventually replaces the neutral ones entirely.

Every society runs on its own rules

An identity isn't a renamed menu. Officer rule spends named people and keeps a list. A commune's assembly takes its time — and sometimes decides without you. A ritual technocracy scores its offerings to the drive as uptime. The guild-houses hold a weld to one bloodline. A recited charter is obeyed long past the point of sense. Where one of the six ways of ruling meets one of the five ways of forgetting, you get a distinct society — with decisions no other crew will see, and its own account of itself at journey's end.

Decisions that reach the ship

The complaint we heard most was that choices moved numbers and nothing else. So:

• A directive that changes the watch now changes the watch — the rotation, the ship's AI's authority, a mandated curriculum, the birth policy. They move the setting, not just the stat.

• Authority handed to the ship's AI can be taken back. A colony that shuts it down keeps it down.

• What the voyage did to you waits for you at landfall. Founding options close off according to how the crossing went, and the record tells you which roads are shut and why.

• The crew count is honest. A ship with twenty people left no longer eats, draws power, and stands a watch as though a hundred were awake.

The long fuse

Some commitments don't come due for decades. A hard call made in the opening years can detonate long after the people who made it are gone — the ship keeping its own account of what you decided, and presenting the bill when it chooses.

Bloodlines and the genome

Genetic diversity can now end the voyage. It drains across generations; a depleted pool kills colonists and suppresses births, and when a founding line's last carrier dies childless, that line is gone for good. Two endings record where the genome went.

Standing science

The science team works long projects — drive harmonics, closed-loop agronomy, a hull-fatigue atlas — decades-long efforts whose pace follows the living staff and slows as knowledge regresses. Field data recovered along the way joins the same queue and takes years to master. What you finish goes on the record, with its year and its source.

The approach

Arriving at a star opens a top-down map of its system — the star, its worlds on their orbits, the belts — with the candidate world marked. A world keeps its habitability to itself until you run the surface scan; a probe gives only a rough read beforehand. Every system you chart stays on the map, and you can always set a course back to it.

Comfort, clarity, and language

• A new PERFORMANCE section: a frame-rate cap (default 60, to cut GPU heat and laptop battery drain) and a REDUCE EFFECTS switch that turns off the CRT overlays on lower-end machines.

• The star chart reads cleanly — one marker and one label per body, and labels that scale with your Font Size setting instead of smearing over each other.

• HIGH CONTRAST and COLORBLIND MODE, and a great deal more of the interface, now read in German, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian — six languages, with the Russian pass corrected by a community translator.

What's next

We're promoting all of this from the experimental beta to the default branch as 0.4.0, targeting the coming week. Still on the bench and rolling out after it: more of the settled-society endings written out in full, a readable ship's-log so you can look back over the decisions that formed your crew, and continued work bringing every language level with the English.

Play it now

Everything above is already live on the experimental beta if you want a head start: Steam → Dead Reckoning → Properties → Betas → experimental. Bug reports and arguments about how to run a starship are both welcome on our Discord.

Thanks for continuing on the journey with me!

— Garan Lorn/Selenodrome