What changed

2026-09-25

• The smelter and the bench have a new kind of output: things that are spent rather than kept. Repair Nanites put twenty hull points back with no yard anywhere near you. Emergency Air ends a tow where it stands. A Ration Pack buys a scheduled service wherever you are, at the yard’s own price — it feeds the crew, it does not pay them.
• They are in your hold and they have a Use button on your ship’s page. One unit, one effect, and it is gone — so a hauler on a long run is deciding whether to carry a canister the way they already decide whether to carry fuel.
• If you are carrying a raided stack of one, that is the one that gets opened. Hot cargo only sells at a rim fence, and burning it through a repair is the better end for it.
• Four more things to make below them: purified water, oxygen, a bio culture and nutrient paste, all out of the cheapest goods on the shelf.
• And an Ion Cannon at weapon tier 5, cracked out of xenon — which the smelter will now pull from noble gas. It is the highest weapon anyone has been able to build.

2026-09-25

• Every yard now fits avionics. Each rung takes a tenth off what autopilot charges over flying the route yourself — 1.5× with none, down to 1.2× at the third. Three rungs, and there is no fourth because it would not change a single lane on the map.
• The Ferryman goes furthest, on its own. If you plot a route and walk away, that is the ship to do it in; the Picket and the Revenant get one rung, because a warship is flown rather than routed.
• Every hull takes at least one, so this is a decision from your first evening rather than something that arrives with a bigger ship.
• And an apology: the sensor suite has been buyable on the server since it shipped and there was no button for it, so nobody could. There is one now, on the same screen.

2026-09-25

• The smelter takes three more jobs: deuterium out of plain hydrogen, iridium stock out of platinoid fines, and tritium out of the deuterium you just made.
• The bench takes two more: a thrust chamber and a magnetic nozzle, both of them mostly iridium.
• And what they are for — a Fusion Drive I at engine tier 5 and a Fusion Drive II at 6, the two highest fittings anyone has been able to make. Six of the nine hulls can carry the first. Four can carry the second.
• An engine tier shortens every jump, widens the tank and refills it faster, so these are worth more to a hauler than anything else on the shelf — and the yard will still sell you the tier outright if you would rather spend the credits than the week.
• The drives sit at engineering 7 and 8. Nothing has ever needed either, and nothing above them exists yet.

2026-09-25

• Two of the three fights in this game happen while you are somewhere else. A raid settles on a timer and an ambush settles on the other pilot’s clock — so neither of them could ever ask you anything. You can now answer both in advance.
• Before you ride out on a raid, say how you are going in. Press it and your guns go against the escort for the whole load. Skim and it is your shield against their guns instead — in and out with under half of it, for a third of the damage and some fuel either way.
• On your ship’s page, leave a standing order for being jumped out on the rim. Fight and you shoot back, which is the only thing that makes robbing you expensive. Run and you are harder to catch, but it burns fuel whether or not it works and you get no shot in. Hand it over and nobody is hurt, and the hold is gone.
• Your order is read at the moment of the fight, not when they started waiting — so changing your mind still counts. Doing nothing leaves you exactly where you were: fight, which is what every ship in the game has been doing all along.
• And every fight now shows its working. The roll, both sides’ attack and defence, the damage and what changed hands — on the lane, on the raid report and on the ambush report. A raid used to tell you nothing at all: you just noticed the hold was heavier.

2026-09-25

• Hot cargo had one buyer in the whole galaxy: a rim fence, at 60%. It now has a second use. A workshop that keeps no manifest — Cygnus and Lyra, the same places that already buy it — will let you throw a raided stack onto a line of enquiry.
• It counts at what a fence would have paid, and it counts towards the odds only. It buys you no share of a payout: an enquiry funded on raided goods alone comes back as a recipe or as nothing at all, and the stack is gone either way.
• That is deliberate. Knowledge has no price and cannot be fenced, which is the only reason a workshop will touch goods with no papers. If a bench paid out materials for them it would just be a fence with a longer wait.
• Sol and Rigel still refuse, and say so. And a bench will now stop you before it takes your fee if the only thing the enquiry could possibly hand you is a recipe you have already found.