Patch Notes

The dead zones are closed

• Galaxy generation now guarantees full connectivity. The random scatter in galaxy generation used to do two bad things: drop the occasional single star into a 60+ LY dead zone, and (rarer but worse) leave whole clusters of stars sitting hundreds of LY out from the main galaxy. A starter Crusader, Drone or Nester couldn’t reach either kind. Two new generation post-passes close both gaps:
• 1. Tighten outliers. Any single star whose nearest neighbour is more than 39 LY away is snapped along the line toward that neighbour to land at exactly 35 LY. Run until no isolated stars remain.
• 2. Bridge disconnected clusters. Any cluster of stars not reachable from the main galaxy by 39 LY hops is translated as a rigid body toward its nearest main-galaxy partner, so the closest cross-cluster gap closes to 35 LY. The cluster keeps its internal shape: the 9 stars stay 9 stars in the same arrangement, just docked onto the map. Run until the whole galaxy is one connected component.
• Threshold: 39 LY. Comfortably inside the 60 LY minimum jump range every starter ship now has (since the starter-range bump on 22 May). Outliers snap to 35 LY, leaving headroom.
• Existing galaxies have been retroactively fixed. Both passes ran once on every live galaxy as part of the update, and the precomputed adjacency cache that drives the autopilot was rebuilt afterward so the nav system sees the new coordinates immediately. Map shape and named systems are preserved, in-flight courses self-recompute, surveys survive untouched. If a star you remember being on the far edge has slid inland, that’s why.
• Idempotent and safe. A galaxy where every star is already reachable is a no-op for both passes.