Patch Notes

Manual Fire Control — pull the trigger yourself

• M on the bridge takes your guns off the automatic queue. Each Space press fires one gun at your locked hostile, resolved on the spot with the automatic round's odds plus a +10 initiative edge for hands-on fire control. A three-gun cruiser gets three trigger pulls before the recharge reloads the magazine; a slipped firing solution sprays wild tracers but still spends the round.
• You'll feel every shot. Cannons fire from your own cockpit with recoil, scaled to the range of the target — point-blank brawls read differently from long-range sniping. The weapons bar counts your remaining rounds, then flashes CHARGING until the magazine is back; hold Space and the ship fires the instant it's ready.
• Fire Control keeps the log. Engagement announcements — weapons free, weapons returning to automatic, reloads — now land inside the Fire Control feed instead of popping toasts over the action.
• The ship hands back the con. Weapons return to automatic fire when you leave the bridge, disconnect, or go five minutes without a shot — firing extends your session.

Sub-light movement — your ships, where you put them

• M in the solar view moves your fleet, Homeworld-style. With ships selected, a placement reticle drops onto the system plane: aim with the mouse, hold Shift to raise or lower the mark into the third dimension, click to commit. A course line runs from your formation to the mark with live distance and arrival time, and the ecliptic grid lights the sector under your reticle.
• Positions are real now. For the first time, every player sees your ships in the same place. Move your battle line to the far side of the sun and everyone watching that system sees it happen. Ships you haven't ordered anywhere keep their patrol drift; jumping to hyperspace clears a ship's movement orders.
• Fleets fly together. A group order keeps formation on the way in and settles the wing around the mark — no more thirty ships fighting over one point in space.
• Engine trails behave. Wakes stay attached to the hull, draw smoothly at the tail, and retract when a ship parks.

Nebulas — the galaxy gets weather

• Coloured nebulas now drift across the galaxy map, named in the classic style and glowing in their own hues. Every galaxy carries at least three; operators can seed more.
• Fly into one and the sky changes. Systems inside a nebula get a full Homeworld-style sky: aurora sheets in the nebula's colours wrapping the whole system, with the void showing through the thin patches.
• A real starfield behind everything. Every system — nebula or not — now has a proper pinpoint starfield behind its planets. Look closely: it was never actually there before.

Homeworld-style controls in the solar view

• Left button commands, right button flies. Drag a box to select your ships — they keep green brackets until you deselect. Shift-select adds to the selection, double-click grabs every ship of that class, and the camera orbits on the right mouse button.
• Right-click a hostile to attack it with everything you have selected. Hold Ctrl for the targeting reticle: click one hostile, or drag a red box over several, and your ships split the targets between them.
• Control groups. Shift+1–9 stores the selection, 1–9 recalls it, F focuses the camera on the selection.
• On phones, touch does what you expect. One finger pans the view — no more accidental selection boxes on mobile.
• Hold Tab for the command reference anywhere in the Solar System view — bridge commands on the bridge, fleet commands on the overview. Release to dismiss.

Every weapon is now a laser or a missile

• Lasers have colours. Equip a Particle Beam Laser and your ship fires violet; a Long-Lance Plasma Driver burns green; Mark-series gun batteries glow amber. Your strongest equipped laser sets your beam colour in the Solar System view and on the bridge. Nothing equipped fires the classic red (orange tracers on a miss); defence platforms fire cyan. Every ship with an attack carries the default laser, so upgrades stack on top.
• Missiles fly like missiles. Ordnance weapons launch visible rounds with smoke trails that arc across the system, slower than beams, in salvos true to the launcher: a Cyclone Torpedo fires one heavy round, a Hydra Pod ripples out four, a Saturation Pod six. Misses sail past and fizzle; hits detonate on the mark.
• Reduced-motion respected. If your device asks for reduced motion, combat stays beams-only.

Bridge: command the whole fleet from one chair

• F — focus fire. Every ship of yours in the system that can hurt your locked target is ordered onto it, in one keypress. The Fire Control panel shows your standing ORDERS line, and fleet pills carry an amber dot while a ship holds an order.
• P — fleet target prioritisation. A seven-slot menu: damaged units, system defences, weakest targets, constructions, interdictors, jump gates, or same-class duels. Pick with 1–7 or click; Esc closes. The whole armed fleet in system adopts the doctrine.
• Target the planets and the sun. T/Y now cycles past enemy ships into the system's worlds, sorted by orbit, with the star last. Lock a planet and your bridge ship flies there and parks in orbit outside moon range; lock the sun and it holds station outside the corona. The locked world appears in the targeting computer and wears the target box in the scene.
• Direct orders for everyone. Direct-target orders are no longer restricted to commandships — any armed unit can hold one.

Fixes from your reports

• Transport Authority jump gates finally open for business. Faction gates demanded a formal alliance the Authority never grants, so nobody could use them. They're now the public infrastructure they were always meant to be — any captain in good standing can transit gate-to-gate in a single hop. Make an enemy of the Authority and your access is revoked. (Player-built gates keep their owner-and-allies rules.)
• Group jumps stopped rejecting healthy fleets. Selecting the same ship twice — easy to do picking a fleet plus one of its members — made the whole jump fail as “unavailable” even though every ship was fine. Jump errors also now tell you the actual reason instead of a wall of database text.
• The Comms unread badge tells the truth. Reading your reports only cleared the newest page, so a deep backlog kept the badge counting thousands forever. Opening Reports now clears the lot.
• Feon-Tar can read their own economy. The RP dossier only counted income from systems you own — and the Lost own nothing by design. It now reports the yield from wherever your collectors actually are, claimed or not.
• Launch All / Recall All show up in foreign systems. Your carriers answer to you wherever they're parked; the buttons no longer hide outside your own space.
• Ghost ships exorcised. Destroyed ships no longer linger in the solar view after the wreck settles, and a ship you've claimed in battle changes sides on screen immediately instead of haunting you as a hostile.
• Build errors talk like people. A refused build order now says why — limits, requirements — instead of “Internal error”.
• State of the Nation numbering straightened out. Sections run I through X in order; no more duplicate section V.
• “An unnamed polity is now a…” news retired. Empire tier announcements no longer publish for empires that haven't finished forming, and the broken headlines have been cleaned out of the archive.
• Kycer Corvette description corrected to quote the ship's actual hyperdrive range.
• The Resource Finder finally does its job. Auto-explore hulls (the Resource Finder and the Ki Thur Class Explorer) now genuinely wander: an idle probe picks a system within its jump range — preferring space it hasn't charted — jumps there on its own, and files a probe report the first time it visits somewhere new: resource yield, remaining reserves, and who holds the system. Reports arrive under Comms → Reports → Intel. Probes respect your arrangements — one that's docked, in a fleet, on an autopilot course, or stuck under an interdictor stays put.
• The Kiban knows what it is. Its description called it a Command Ship, but the hull has never carried tactical command — that's the Asona XB511's job. The text now says so (and the sentence that trailed off mid… is finished).
• No more teleporting fleets. Coming back to a backgrounded tab (or any long pause) made moving ships lurch instantly down their course and gave fresh move orders a head start. The movement clock now snaps cleanly instead of overshooting.