What changed

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.

2026-09-25

• Raided cargo has never been usable at a workshop — it has no manifest, and the bench wants papers. What was wrong is that the bench did not say so: your hot stacks simply were not in the tray, and if they were all you were carrying it told you your hold was empty.
• Now it names them, the way the smelter already did, and a recipe that needs something you are carrying hot says why it still reads zero.
• Nothing changed about what you can do with hot cargo. It still sells at a rim fence and nowhere else — that is the point of taking it.

2026-09-24

• Every recipe on the workshop bench now sits under the field of enquiry it belongs to — microcircuitry, optics, machining and the other six. A field you have found something in is open; the rest are headings you can fold out.
• What you have already discovered is paged four at a time, so a field with a dozen recipes in it is no longer a dozen recipes tall.
• The rungs nobody at this bench has found yet are folded into one line per field, and that line says how many of them you could start an enquiry on today — which is the number worth knowing when you are deciding where to spend the next week of training.
• They are still there rather than hidden. A bench that showed only what you already know would be blank the day you arrive and would never tell you what training is for.

2026-09-24

• The sensor mount shipped last release with nothing to fit on it. There is now a Comms Suite — a transceiver, a second aerial and somewhere to keep what they pick up — and it takes the mount to tier 3 without paying a yard for the first three rungs.
• Three new things to make underneath it: an antenna array, a memory module and a transceiver. The antenna is two aluminium extrusions and a circuit board, and it is the cheapest component in the game to make.
• Five of the nine hulls stop at sensors 2 and cannot take the suite. The Kestrel goes to 4, so even with one fitted there is still a rung left to buy.
• The first two sensor tiers are still yard work, deliberately. Early on, the choice between another cargo tier and knowing where the trade is should cost money rather than a workshop clock.

2026-09-24

• A yard will fit you a sensor suite. Each tier reads the market one more jump away — so a tier-2 suite tells you what every station within two jumps of here is paying, on the market screen, under “Within sensor range”.
• Only stations you have already been to. A suite is not a map: somewhere you have never flown is silent at any tier.
• Every hull can take at least tier 1. The Kestrel goes furthest at 4, which is the second thing a Kestrel is for; the Prospector’s Tug stops at 1.
• Tier 1 costs 3,125 credits — the same as a second cargo tier. On a starter hull that is a real choice, and it is meant to be.
• Prices you read from a jump away are live when you read them and will have drifted a little by the time you land. The panel shows the best spread it can see per station so you can decide whether the trip is worth it.