What changed

2026-09-22

• The station menu marks every door that is shut, and says which kind of shut it is: not here, a licence you do not hold, or no hull for the job.
• Open one anyway and the station answers properly — a readout with the refusal code on it and the full list of what the work needs, with the ones you already have ticked off.
• Each thing you are missing links to where you fix it: the academy for a licence, the yard for a hull or a rig, the chart for somewhere that has the place at all.
• Nothing is locked away that was not locked before. This only stops the game refusing you in silence.

2026-09-20

• The “Plot a route” button on a system page was a link to the chart. It now plots the route: the jumps, in order, with what they cost and roughly how long they take.
• You can hand the whole thing to the ship. Autopilot flies every leg while the tab is closed and you arrive at the far end.
• It costs half as much fuel again on every jump. That is the price of not being here for it, and the screen shows you both numbers before you choose.
• It does not make the lanes any safer. Each jump is rolled exactly as if you flew it, and if somebody comes alongside the run stops there — you land, and the rest of the route is off.
• A route only ever goes through systems you have already been to. There is no way to plot a path through the dark; that is still one lane at a time.

2026-09-20

• The ice shelf on a belt has always given you Water Ice. With a Shelf Drilling Licence and a containment rig you can drill one instead, and get Deep Brine.
• It is less material, not more — one unit where the laser gives you two — and no station buys it. What it is for is Lithium Salt at a smelter, three brine to one, and that goes into a Shield Generator.
• The licence is 22,000 and needs the Containment Licence first. That is on purpose: it is the same rig you bought for the gas giants, doing a second job. Kepler and Rigel teach it.
• At Vega, Tycho and Deneb the dock board has a seventh kind of work. A shift in the growing halls pays nine units of Culture Biomass an hour and no credits at all.
• It is the one posting on that board you cannot take on foot — stock needs a hold, and the board says so. Two methane and one vat stock make Synthetic Rubber, which goes into a Cargo Expander.
• Two fittings cost more to make and are worth more: a Cargo Expander is 6,090 and a Shield Generator I is 3,744. They went up by exactly what their new ingredients cost, so making one clears what it always did — and both are still cheaper than the refit they replace.

2026-09-20

• A gas field has always given you Helium-3 and nothing else. You now tune the rig before you start it, and it will draw hydrogen, methane slush or noble gases instead.
• The field does not care which. A field-unit is a unit of whatever you asked for, at the same rate, so the choice is about what you want rather than how much you get.
• Only Helium-3 sells at a station counter. The other three are feedstock — nobody at the dock will take them off you, and the screen says so before you commit an hour to it.
• What they are for is three new smelter processes. Three silicates and a hydrogen make a Silicon Wafer; three methane make Polymer Resin; four ore and a noble gas make Titanium Stock.
• And those three go into the fittings you already know. The wafer into a Mining Laser, the resin into a Shield Generator, the stock into a Cargo Expander. Every one of them now needs something that came out of a gas giant.

2026-09-20

• The two amber rocks on every belt used to give you the same things as the rock beside them, only faster. They now give you Platinoid Gravel and Rare-Earth Sands, and nothing else on the map does.
• So the Deep-Core Certificate stopped being a rate and started being a door. What it costs has not changed and what a seam hour pays has not changed either — what changed is that two materials exist behind it and nowhere else.
• The smelter learned two more processes to match. Two gravel make a Platinum Sponge; two sands make a Neodymium Ingot. Both go into fittings — the sponge into a Shield Generator, the ingot into a Mining Laser.
• Neither is gated at the smelter. If another pilot sells you the gravel, you can run it. The certificate decides who can cut it out of the ground, which is a different question.
• And the belt screen finally draws the last four rock kinds properly. Carbonaceous rock and regolith have been wearing the rubble outline and printing their own name in lowercase since they arrived. They were the right shape of wrong — nothing broke — and they were still wrong.