What changed

2026-09-23

• You can drag a stack onto the research bench with a finger now. The old drag only ever worked with a mouse — not because of a bug, but because the browser feature it used does not exist on a touchscreen at all.
• Dragging one back off the bench works the same way, and tapping still does everything dragging does.
• Every page is signed at the foot with the year, the build you are playing and who made it.

2026-09-23

• SELL on the market is a whole button again. On a narrow phone the quantity box was pushing it off the edge of the card, so the row read “BUY, S…” and the second half of the market was unreachable.
• Same for the widest rock at a belt: on a 360-pixel screen it hung over the edge of the field and was clipped, which meant you could not survey it.
• The academy was twelve phone screens long. A career you are not in is now a heading you can open, a licence you already hold is one line instead of a card, and a faction’s history folds away behind its standing.
• What changed lists five releases a page instead of ten — the page had quietly grown to nine phone screens.
• The menus that scroll sideways now look like they scroll, instead of ending in a word cut in half.
• Dragging a stack back out of the research bench works. On a phone, tap — dragging has never worked there and the bench says so.

2026-09-23

• An enquiry is now opened in a field — microcircuitry, optics, power, materials, propulsion, cryogenics, reclamation or prospecting — and each one wants different materials.
• Only the goods the field actually wants move the odds. A hold of ceramic powder is worth a lot to a materials enquiry and nothing at all to an optics one. Anything else you stake is still consumed and still raises what a find pays back — it just buys you no chance.
• The bench is a bench now: drag a stack across to stake it, or tap it. Every stack is marked wanted or no use here against the field you picked, and the odds move as you load it.
• The band is 25% to 85%. The floor is up from 10%, because picking the wrong field now puts you on it.
• Prospecting — looking for a good nobody has ever made — is a field like any other, so you can aim at it by name again.
• Your ledger records which field each enquiry was in and how much of your stake it wanted, so a run of failures tells you something.

2026-09-23

• The Shield Generator I no longer wants a hold full of raw stock and salvage. It takes two Shield Emitter Nodes, a capacitor bank and a fuel cell — parts you make, not ore you shovel.
• It lists at 2,136 credits against the 5,000 a tier-2 shield refit costs. It was 4,636, which meant building one barely beat buying the tier. Now it comfortably does.
• Three new things underneath it: Samarium Stock at the smelter, and Superconductor Coils and Emitter Nodes at the workshop.
• If you have one fitted already, nothing changes — same module, same tier. It is the recipe that got shorter.

2026-09-23

• Nothing you can see changed. A rule about what a research commission is allowed to hand back was written down the wrong way round, and it was quietly setting a price floor on every module in the game.
• Research still cannot hand you a module, and never could — a commission pays out in things the station you are standing at trades, and a module is not one of those anywhere.