What changed

2026-09-24

• The weapon mount has had exactly one fitting since it opened, while shields and engines got three each. That was not a decision anybody made — we noticed it by counting. Two more now.
• A Railgun takes the weapon mount to tier 3 and every hull in the game can carry one: two field coils, a drive shaft and a capacitor bank. No beam, nothing to see, and whatever it hits was not expecting to be hit from there.
• A Missile Launcher takes it to tier 4 — a hull frame, a servo and a targeting processor. It is the first thing you can fit that does not care which way the ship is pointing. Four of the nine hulls stop at tier 3 and cannot take it.
• Three new things to make underneath them: a fastener set, a hull frame section and a drive shaft. The fastener set is a single steel plate and is, by a distance, the dullest object in the catalogue — it is also the thing more of the tree is waiting on than anything else.

2026-09-24

• Six new things to make, and they are the least glamorous objects in the game: aluminium stock at a smelter, then bearings, a servo motor, a pump assembly, a heat exchanger and the coolant loop they all end in. Nothing turns, holds pressure or stays cool without one.
• Two fittings at the end of the chain. An Afterburner takes the engine to tier 4 — above the warp coil — and costs a good deal less than the 12,800 a yard wants for that tier. A Mining Laser II takes mining to tier 4, and only a Prospector's Tug or a Pathfinder can carry it; it does not cut faster than the first one, it stops needing to stop.
• The research bench has a ninth field: Machining and Fluid Systems. Bring plate, stock and an abrasive — nothing in it is exotic.
• One thing worth knowing before you spend an evening on it: the middle of this chain pays badly. A pump assembly is worth 144 credits over what it eats, and the bearing two rungs below it is worth 162. That is not a mistake and it is not going to be "fixed" — a component is worth making because of what it becomes, and the whole chain saves nearly 8,000 credits against the refit it replaces. If you make pumps to sell, you will not enjoy it.

2026-09-24

• The bench learns the field coil — two superconducting coils and a neodymium core. It is not something you sell; it is what the next three things you want are made of.
• Two new fittings above it. A Shield Generator II takes a first-generation generator and two coils and stands the bubble at tier 4, which is a tier no yard sells and three of the nine hulls cannot carry. A Warp Coil raises the engine to tier 3, fits every hull in the game, and shortens every jump, widens the tank and refills it faster — the same three things the thrusters do, one rung higher.
• Both cost a good deal less than the refit they stand in for, which is the whole reason to spend a week at a bench instead of a morning at a yard.
• One recipe you may already know has been renamed. "Containment Field Coil" is now "Coilgun Armature" — it makes exactly what it always made, out of exactly what it always took. The old name now belongs to the thing that is actually a field coil.

2026-09-24

• Running a containment rig at a gas giant is now a job like any other: while it draws you cannot also work a belt, run a patrol, take a raid, lie in wait or pick up a dock shift — and none of those let you start a draw either. The same is true of stripping a wreck. Mining and the rest have worked this way since they shipped; gas and salvage had been left out.
• So gas gets a way out. You can walk off a draw and the giant takes the gas back; the fuel you burned starting it does not come back, which is how abandoning a mining run or a patrol has always worked.
• A wreck has no walk-off and that is deliberate — a strip is fifty minutes at most, and the pile is already set aside for you.
• Nothing about what a draw or a strip pays has changed. What changed is that you cannot collect two of them at once.

2026-09-24

• The workshop was ten phone screens of recipes you cannot build yet. The rungs above your engineering level now fold behind one line saying how many there are and how high they go — so you can still see how far the ladder runs without scrolling past all of it.
• Nothing is hidden that you could have used: a recipe you know, or one your training already reaches, is in front of you as before.