Course Plotting & Autopilot — Planet Epoch patch notes, 16 May 2026

16 May 2026: Course Plotting & Autopilot

Multi-hop autopilot · Mission board restored · iPad command-strip swipe

Set any system as your destination. Open the system panel, click the new ⊚ Set Destination button in the header. Your target is remembered until you pick a new one.
Auto-route from the jump screen. When you trigger a Jump with a destination set, the map highlights your target with a pulsing purple bracket. If it's out of single-jump range, a purple line draws from your source to the first waypoint inside your range circle, with a clickable ring labelled Auto-Pilot to <destination>.
Engage autopilot in one click. Pick either the first waypoint or the final destination from the jump screen. The confirmation modal tells you you're starting an autopilot: ships jump leg-by-leg until they arrive.
Live route on the galaxy map. Ships on autopilot trail a dashed purple line through their remaining legs, drawn in the same style as the green hyperspace transit lines you already know. Other players can't see your plotted course.
Cancel any time. Click your in-flight transit on the map, then Cancel Course. The current leg completes; the ship lands at its next waypoint and stops. No further auto-jumps.
Group autopilot. Multi-ship selections plot one shared route, using the slowest ship's speed and shortest ship's range for every leg: same fleet-physics as a manual group jump.
Pre-computed nav data under the hood (a faithful port of the Epoch 1 model): multi-hop routes resolve instantly, the tick loop never recomputes distances.

Mission board fixed. The Missions endpoint had been returning Server Error for every player on every galaxy since the previous deploy: a stray quote character in a database comment broke the file load entirely. Live again everywhere, no data loss.
Hamburger menu now works on Patch Notes, Lore, every per-race page, and the legal pages. The button was rendering but the click handler wasn't loaded on those pages. Mobile users can navigate around the site again.
iPad command-strip swipe. The top bar on iPad now lets you drag left and right to reach buttons that fall off the right edge: same affordance that phones have had for a while. iPad-sized viewports were previously treated as desktop and missed the scroll fallback.
Mobile / iPad Play button no longer hangs on a blank tab. On touch devices, the dashboard now uses same-tab navigation to launch into a galaxy. Earlier attempts at the placeholder-window trick failed because mobile browsers background the dashboard tab the moment a new tab opens, throttling the join-token request indefinitely.

System Panel header buttons (Designate Capital, Set Destination, Next System, Focus, Close) are now proper SVG icons that inherit the race-theme colour instead of unicode glyphs that rendered grey on some browsers.
Cancel Course confirmation uses the in-game themed modal instead of the browser's native confirm dialog: same chrome and feel as the rest of the game's prompts.
Equip / Unequip errors now show as in-game toast notifications instead of the browser's native alert dialog.