Solar System Bridge, crises & balance — Planet Epoch patch notes, 7 June 2026

7 June 2026: Solar System Bridge, crises & balance

First-person bridge view · Crises scale with overreach · Knosson recyclers rebalanced · Bots fight back

Step onto the bridge of your own ships. A new first-person HUD sits over the 3D Solar System view. Press C to cycle cockpit views across your ships in the system and watch combat unfold from the bridge in real time.
Targeting computer, Fire Control feed, structure targets. The bridge displays whom you're locked onto, who's firing back, and a hit-shake jolt whenever your hull or shields take damage.
Diplomacy stance feeds the contact panels. Enemy ships route to the HOSTILE list, allies to FRIENDLY, everyone else stays neutral in the scene with blue brackets — what counts is who you've marked, not who's marked you.
Mobile too. A dedicated navigation toolbar (Back · Scan · Bridge), trail-fade artefact fix, and an idle-fade on the bottom controls so the view doesn't get crowded on phones.
Desktop chips. New Bridge Link (eye/iris) and Exit chips on the map controls — visible only in Solar mode.

One system per day → up to ten. Used to be a single system crisis per Unstable day, no matter how far over your Tier allowance you were. Now: for every 10% over Tier, one more system can go into crisis on a successful daily roll, capped at 10 systems per day. A Tier-5 Imperium running 50 systems can lose up to 10 in a single GST day; one running 28 systems risks two.
Lower-tier Unstables finally feel it. A Tier-3 Hearth-Concord pushing past its allowance used to be marked Unstable but never actually suffered. Crisis pressure now reads against your own Tier ceiling, so the warning has teeth at every tier — not just at the top.
Feon-Tar pressure now uses fleet value. Aligns crisis odds with the tier title shown in State of the Nation, instead of the unrelated MP figure that used to drive it.

Going over the pool no longer kills ships at random. Instead, you bleed RP per hour proportional to the overage. Healthy → no cost. War-burst zone → sustainable for a multi-day campaign. Extreme → arrears spiral into permanent paralysis.
New MP card shows the band you're in, your current bleed rate, and how close you are to the next band — with cleaner copy across the labels and band table.

Knosson Advanced Recycling Station: 70% → 40%. Stacked Advanced recyclers were effectively printing RP. Still meaningfully better than the basic 30% tier shared by Humans, Sharne, Derulons and the basic Knosson station — just no longer outpaces the mining economy.
Super Heavy Cruiser self-repair recalibrated. Less degenerate; still tough.
Defence Stations get the ARGUS Tactical action. Five race hulls now have access.
Scan rebalance. 20% of scans return nothing, combat outcomes rank-gated, Vatari combat scan swapped to Osgul, and base RP rewards dropped 60% to match the rebalanced loot.

Bots fight back. When you set an NPC as enemy and have units in space with them, they respond at a skill-tier appropriate level — no more sitting ducks.
Pirate raids vary. Pirate spawns can now appear as any race's light cruiser, not always the same hull.
Placeholder NPCs don't issue missions. Pirates and the Vatari Cult never had any to give — the faction board no longer lists their empty headers.

Chapter 4: Find the Defector. Crown intel now narrows the hunt to three candidate systems with the real Defector Rapier guaranteed to be in one of them. No more scouting every neutral system blind.
Reserved names enforced at signup. “House Veliro”, “HCG Strike Force” and friends can't be claimed by players; existing stale NPC diplomacy rows have been backfilled so old relationships clear up.