An asynchronous space colonisation strategy game in the OGame lineage. Short check-in sessions, everything progresses while the app is closed: exponential cost curves, distance as travel time, permanent fleet loss. v1 is local single-player against scripted AI empires; multiplayer is the destination. iPhone is the delivery target, desktop is the dev loop.
All rights reserved. No license is granted for reuse of this code.
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| Colony — a fleet on its way home, what your plant supplies against what your facilities draw, and every facility with its level, cost, build time and countdown. Upgrades run in parallel. | Galaxy — the worlds you know, nearest first, each with the name the seed gave it and a disc drawn from what it is: the fill is temperature, the size is gravity, the banding is pressure. Search it, filter it, or switch to the map to go and find another. |
A dispatch costs 150 metal wherever it goes, so the only thing you are choosing is a duration — which is why the band across the top is a ruler measured in hours rather than a list of coordinates. All 250 systems of the galaxy at once, one tick each: short and faint for a dim star, tall and bright for a bright one, blue for yours and amber for a probe already out there. The marks say how long a flight to that part of the map would take, so the question the screen answers is what can I reach in the nine hours I am about to be asleep?
The galaxy is not symmetric around you, and the ruler says so without a word of copy: from a home near one edge, the hour marks simply run out on that side.
Drag the band to move; tap one of the seven cells to open a system. The cell beside the lit one is what the ± stepper used to be — still one tap, except it now tells you what you are stepping onto before you step. Crossing a galaxy used to be 249 taps.
Everything the probe says lands in the card that owns the star it is about: the price and the flight, then a countdown, then what it found.
"None settleable" is the honest answer about fifty-nine times in sixty, and the screen says it in the same breath as the count rather than burying it — a run of them should read as calibration, not as bad luck. The notification you get while the app is closed says the same words off the same count, so the lock screen and the card can never disagree about what your probe found.
A surveyed world carries a verdict — settleable, blocked, barren, occupied — and two stocks rather
than two richness figures. Worlds run out: a run takes from a finite deposit and a stripped world
comes back at five percent a day, so a row reading metal full crystal 174/819 is the difference
between a rock worth flying to and one worth skipping this week.
A blocked world names the ladder that would unblock it and the level it would take, which is what turns 98% of the galaxy from a wall into a shopping list:
Tap any world and the dispatch sheet comes up. Pick metal or crystal, how many hulls to send, and how long until you want them home — one hour, three, six, twelve or a day. The figure under the rule is what actually lands, and it moves as you touch the controls: it is capped by the hold you sent, by what the deposit still holds, and by how long the fleet gets to work once the flight is paid for. The legs line spends the trip in front of you — out, on station, working, home.
Send a fleet bigger than the world and it says so — the figure becomes the whole deposit and a clause under the stepper names the ships that would come home with nothing. Send it too far and the short windows disappear rather than greying out, because the flight has eaten them.
The Shipyard is a price list: what the hull is for, what it costs, and how many you own, how many are idle and how many are away. Every hull costs the same at every depth — orders queue and the yard works through them one at a time, so what makes a fleet expensive is the afternoon, not a bill that grows while you read it.
The Fleets tab is one card per run, with a bar carrying all three phases — out, on station, home again — and two marks where the flight ends and begins. Under it, what has landed and what it brought:
One project at a time, and everything competes for it. Four technologies on the main branch —
including Prospecting, whose payoff is measured in a run rather than in an hourly rate — and three
adaptation ladders that share the very same slot. Each ladder row says what the next level would
actually unlock, counted against the worlds you have surveyed, so unlocks 5 worlds, 1 worth taking is a price you can weigh against a mine:
Five destinations across the bottom, on a phone:
The three resources, accruing while you read them — above every tab, and amber when a power shortage is holding the rates down:
A facility row per state — building with a countdown, affordable, not yet affordable (the resource you're short in red, and when you'll have it), and locked:
Energy is not a resource — it never accumulates — so it is a ratio with a consequence attached rather than a fourth cell in the rail. The empty tail is headroom you have not spent; the amber tail is draw your plant cannot cover:
These are the committed Roborazzi baselines, not exported marketing shots — the same images CI
verifies the UI against on every push, so a screen here cannot drift from the screen that ships.
Recording them is the workflow in the screenshot-testing skill.
Kotlin Multiplatform monorepo. Compose Multiplatform UI, no game engine.
| Module | What |
|---|---|
core |
KMP (jvm, iosArm64, iosSimulatorArm64, android). Pure model + rules; kotlinx-serialization is its only dependency, carrying the save format. |
protocol |
KMP, core's target set. What the client and the server say to each other: the verbs as data, the sync envelope, the rejection taxonomy, the sign-in pair and the API version. Depends on core and nothing else, and holds no I/O — it does not know what a network is. |
sim |
JVM. Headless balancing harness, fast-forwards weeks in milliseconds. Never ships. |
client/* |
KMP + Compose Multiplatform: desktop, iOS, Android. Directory of modules — :client:shell (composition root, navigation and the resource rail), :client:design:* (tokens, icons, components, formatting), one directory per feature holding its layers: colony, research, shipyard, galaxy and fleets are each a :ui (the composables and the models they render) plus a :presentation (the mapping from core state into those models). Then :client:save:data (the JSON snapshot on disk), :client:net:data (the only module that opens a socket: the Ktor client, the outbox that keeps a verb tapped with no signal, and the sync loop that reconciles what the server made of it), :client:notifications:data (the local alerts that are the check-in loop), :client:debug:* (the shake-to-open debug menu), :client:tilt:* (which way the device is being held, for the sky behind every screen). |
server |
JVM + Ktor. The engine, over HTTP: POST /v1/colony founds a colony and mints its galaxy, POST /v1/sync replays whatever the client queued through the same core the phone runs and hands the authoritative colony back. The colony lives in three Postgres tables and survives a restart; two devices syncing at once are settled by a compare-and-set on the colony's version. A colony belongs to an account: POST /v1/auth/apple and POST /v1/auth/google verify a provider ID token against that provider's own key set and mint a session this server signs, POST /v1/auth/refresh renews it, and DELETE /v1/account deletes — cascading to the colony and every spent idempotency key. |
iosApp |
Xcode wrapper around the client framework (pending). |
Eight module rules are enforced by the build, and break an IDE sync rather than a review. A module
cannot contain another module. domain cannot depend on data, presentation or ui;
presentation cannot depend on data; data cannot depend on presentation or ui; and ui
cannot depend on data or presentation — it draws and decides nothing, so it is a leaf, and
presentation depends on it rather than the reverse. A -testing module can be reached
only from a test source set, so fakes never ship. And the graph points inward with both ends
sealed: core depends on nothing, nothing depends on :client:shell, and sim/server never
reach into client/*. A module's layer is the last segment of its Gradle path, so :client:shell
— the composition root, the one module that may see every layer, precisely because nothing sees
it — is not one.
./gradlew build./gradlew check./gradlew :client:shell:run # desktop client (dev loop)
./gradlew :androidApp:installDebug # Android, on a connected device or emulator
./gradlew :sim:run # balancing harness
./gradlew :server:run # server stubiOS: open iosApp/ in Xcode. The project is generated — edit project.yml and run xcodegen generate rather than touching project.pbxproj.
oltre.space carries the latest Android build and what it changed.
Android builds are published as GitHub Releases. Take the latest APK from Releases and open it on the phone; Android asks once for permission to install from your browser. Updates install over the top.
iPhone builds go to TestFlight on every merge to main, for internal testers.
oltre.space is generated, never hand-written: site/index.html is the
template, .github/scripts/build_site.py fills it from the release GitHub reports as published
and the README changelog entry for that version, and pages.yml pushes the result to the
gh-pages branch.
gh release view --json tagName,publishedAt,url,assets > /tmp/release.json
python3 .github/scripts/build_site.py build --release /tmp/release.json --out build/siteEdit site/; never the gh-pages branch, which every build overwrites. The screenshots on the
page are the committed Roborazzi baselines — the build fails rather than the page if one moves.
site/static/CNAME is byte-identical to the one GitHub wrote when the custom domain was set —
no trailing newline, deliberately. It is what keeps oltre.space pointed here, and a deploy that
drops it unsets the domain.
The app icon is an SVG master; every platform asset is generated from it and committed.
python3 art/icon/generate.pyEdit art/icon/*.svg, rerun, commit the result — never hand-edit generated PNGs. See
art/icon/README.md.
- docs/ui-mockup.html — UI design brief: Colony + Galaxy screens at iPhone size.
- .claude/docs/brief.md — distilled project brief; points to the Notion design page.
- .claude/docs/balance-log.md — every round of balance tuning: the numbers, the feedback that changed them, what is still open.
.claude/docs/— architecture, decisions, status.
- You are Dead Reckoning until you say otherwise. Tap your name or your mark on the strip above the resources and the settings sheet opens on your own face: a name you type, and a mark you pick. Both belong to the account rather than to the phone, so a name chosen on one device is the name the next one opens with.
- Six marks, drawn and not photographed. Threshold and five others, each a different shape rather than five versions of one idea — one diagonal, one disc, one horizontal, one corner, one nest of arcs, one plumb line. There is no picture to upload and no colour to choose: every mark is the same hue, because every other colour in this game already means something.
- Or build one nobody else has. A second face is a composer — four bodies, four paths and three ends, laid in three regions of one box so no two parts can ever collide. That is forty marks from eleven drawings, and the mark above the grid redraws as you tap, at the size the strip will draw it.
- The name is free text, and there is nothing it can get wrong. Up to twenty-four characters; the counter appears at eighteen and the field simply stops accepting at twenty-four. Two commanders may share a name, so there is nothing for it to refuse. Empty is not a mistake either — the field shows Dead Reckoning in your own text's size and weight, so an emptied name is already showing you what saving it does.
- A mark commits when you tap it; a name gets a button. Nothing about a keystroke means done, so Save name appears the moment your draft differs from what is saved and is gone again once it does not.
- The strip says it is a door. Your mark, your name and your level are one target now, marked by the arrow the game already uses in → LV 13. The strip is exactly as tall as it was and the gear beside it is where it was.
- With no signal the sheet still opens, and it does not pretend. The marks and the field go quiet, the save button is absent, and a line in amber says what is missing — a name is the account's, and the account is not reachable. Nothing is red and nothing is queued behind your back: a rename waits for you rather than for the network.
- In Italian throughout — the six marks by name, and a composed one by the three parts it is made of.
- Your colony lives on a server now, and the game opens with a way in. Sign in with Apple or with Google and the colony comes back to you on any device you sign in on. There is one screen before the game and nothing else changes: the colony you had is the colony you get.
- A tap with no signal is kept and says so. An upgrade, a project, an adaptation, a hull or a bell tapped with no network goes amber and reads held — it starts the moment the network is back. Pressing the amber button again takes the request back, because nothing was sent.
- A run and a probe are the two things that cannot wait. They aim at a galaxy other players are in too, so instead of promising to send them later the game says so at the tap and names the fact that stops it. Nothing is queued and nothing happens behind your back.
- A line above the game says when the network went and how much is waiting. It carries the connection and the count and never the state of a control — what is held is written on the card that is holding it.
- You can delete your account from inside the game. Settings has an Account section: it shows what the account holds in your colony's own numbers, then says the thing the numbers cannot — signing in again starts an empty colony. Two steps to cross, and Keep it is the wider button.
- Opening the game clears the alerts it has already sent you. Everything waiting in the notification tray is about something the colony is now showing you properly, so it stops asking to be dismissed by hand. Alerts still to come are untouched — nothing you were promised is lost.
- The galaxy is dark now, and your ships are what light it. The star map has a third tier under the two it had: a system nobody has been near is drawn as grain — a point you can see, at an address you can read, with a flight time on it, and nothing else. No name, no star class, no region, no world count. Surveying does not buy a star's existence. It buys its character.
- A probe charts everything nearer than where it went, and an hour further. Every landing lights the systems within an hour's flight either side of it — thirty each way — and the light only ever grows. So the shape of what you can read is a record of where you have actually sent ships.
- You open on sixty-one systems of two hundred and fifty. A new colony has the hour of grace around its own doorstep and nothing else, in one galaxy of four. The other three are 250 grains and a price until a hull lands in one — and a first landing there opens sixty-one at a stroke.
- The longest flights pay the most map. Because the light is one stretch with two ends, a probe sent past everything you have — to the far end of your own galaxy — fills in the whole gap behind it as well as the hour in front. From your first evening that is worth well over a hundred systems in one flight, against thirty for walking the frontier out a step at a time. Two long probes, one each way, chart the galaxy entire.
- The dark answers when you touch it. A grain star takes the selection, fills the bar and offers
the same probe every other star does. What it says instead of a name is where it is and what a
flight there would buy —
uncharted · charts 49 systems— which is the reason a far star is now worth more than a near one. - A region tells you its name the first time your ships reach it. Until then the row above the
band carries its address —
1–25,226–250— so the map never has a hole in it, and a region arriving by name is something that happens about nine times in a galaxy's life. - The weather is knowledge too. A band is tinted only across the stretch you have charted, so a half-known region looks half-known.
- A star with nothing around it can now be probed. It used to refuse, on the grounds that you could already see it was empty — which stopped being true the day the map had to be earned. It charts what it charts and comes back with nothing, and only then does it say so.
- Everything you have already surveyed stays lit. A colony carried forward wakes up charted around every system it ever reached, not around home alone.
- Distance is the one thing the dark does not take: the hour marks run to the edge of the galaxy through it, because how far away something is is what you choose a target with.
- The game tells you what changed. A sheet of releases, one page each, newest first — swipe sideways through every version Oltre has ever shipped. Sixty-six of them, back to the first commit, each with what it did and the day it landed.
- It opens itself the first time you launch a new build, and not again. A colony that has already read this one stays where it was; a brand new colony is not handed nineteen days of history before its first mine.
- Every page draws its own sky. The version number is the picture: one body per minor line you have lived through, filled for the ones that settled and hollow for the patches riding on the current one, laid on a spiral over a world's limb. Nobody drew sixty-six of these and nobody will draw the next one — 0.19.1 has its own the moment it is cut.
- The first week looks like the first week. Those releases have no minor line at all, so their skies are empty rings, and the rail at the foot of the sheet — one tick per minor line — carries its longest gap there.
- The rail is a control, not a position: sixty-five swipes is not a way to reach the first week, so tap it or drag it and the run moves under you.
- The gear's sheet has a BUILD row now, carrying the version you are running and what it did. Tapping it turns that sheet into the changelog rather than raising a second one on top.
- In Italian throughout, including all sixty-six pages.
- The gear opens something. Tapping it raises a settings sheet with two controls on it, and the first is where you answer the question tell me when this lands — on each job, as it works today, or once for a whole kind of job. Choose By category and seven switches decide what your colony announces: facilities, research, adaptations, hulls, probes, fleet returns and prices reached. The bells on your rows go, because you have already answered.
- The second control says how many notifications the answers arrive in. One each, one per category, or one in total — and one in total is one notification that keeps being brought up to date rather than a second buzz: your mine finishing says so, and when a ship follows it half an hour later the same notification says both.
- New colonies start louder and quieter at once: everything announcing itself, arriving as a single notification. A colony you have already been playing keeps exactly what it does today — nothing you never asked for starts talking.
- Under the sheet's second control the line beneath the ladder tells you when your next alert is actually due, computed from your own colony rather than described in general.
- "Coming soon" is gone, along with the card that carried it.
- Your name gets the whole line. The experience gauge has moved off the strip and become the strip's own bottom edge — a thin accent line under your name that runs as far as your level has got. It takes no width from anything, so even the longest name now fits whole on the narrowest window the game runs in.
- At level 0 the edge is just an edge, so a new colony sees a plain line rather than a bar stuck at nothing.
- "Coming soon" now answers where you can read it. Tapping the settings gear used to blank out your level and gauge for a moment; it now says so on a card above the tab bar, for four seconds. Tapping again restarts the four seconds instead of doing nothing.
- The gauge fills. Everything you finish now pays experience — a facility level, a technology, an adaptation rung, a hull off the slipway, a probe landing, a fleet coming home — and the badge above the resources counts it. A deeper level is worth more than a shallow one, and a probe that finds a full system is worth more than one that finds an empty one.
- You are already several levels in. Opening this build reads your colony's whole history once and credits you for everything you did before the level existed. Nothing was reset and nothing was invented — every survey, run and upgrade you have ever finished counts.
- It pays for finishing, not for starting. The bar moves when the thing lands, which means it moves while the app is closed: come back in the morning and the level has moved with the mines.
- Roughly: a day in gets you to about level 3, a week to 10, a fortnight to 15, a month to 25.
- The game knows who is playing. A strip above the resources carries your mark, your name, your level and how far through it you are. It frames every screen, exactly as the resources and the tab bar do.
- You are Dead Reckoning, at level 0. The name is a navigation term — a position computed from a known start, an elapsed time and a speed — which is precisely what this game does to your colony while the app is closed.
- Nothing awards experience yet, so the gauge reads empty and stays there. What fills it is the next piece of work.
- The settings button says it is coming soon, because it is.
- Flights now tell you when they are over, if you ask them to. There is a bell beside the Dispatch button — on the sheet that sends a fleet, and in the map card that sends a probe. Tap it before you send, and that flight will say so when it lands.
- A flight you did not ask about no longer buzzes. Fleet returns and probe landings were the last two things in the game that announced themselves uninvited; every alert Oltre raises is now one you asked for.
- The ask belongs to the flight, so it is fixed the moment you send: unlighting the bell for the next run does not silence the one already in the air. The bell itself stays where you left it, so wanting to hear about everything is one tap rather than one tap a dispatch.
- Runs and probes already in flight when you update will come home quietly, because nobody asked about them.
- Hulls now tell you when they are done, if you ask them to. Every Shipyard card with something on the slipway has a bell beside its Build button. Tap it once to be told when the whole order is finished; tap it again — the bell doubles — to be told about every hull as it leaves the yard; tap it a third time for silence.
- A hull you did not ask about no longer buzzes. Deliveries were the last thing in the game that announced itself uninvited; they now follow the same rule everything else has followed since 0.5, which is that you hear about what you asked to hear about.
- Each hull is asked about separately, so waiting on a hauler does not mean hearing about the skiffs queued in front of it.
- Fixed a second crash on the dispatch sheet. Picking a hauler for a target it is too slow to reach closed the app. The hauler is no longer offered for a world no window lets it fly to.
- A fleet of haulers is counted in berths again, rather than being described as skiffs the colony does not own and a pool of "0 idle".
- A colony whose only ship is a scout is told so, instead of being told every hull is away while the scout sits in the yard.
- The probe countdown notices a scout being built. With one probe already out and another scout on the slipway, it quoted the probe's landing and overstated the wait.
- Runs that were in flight during the 0.15 update print their legs correctly — they were reading a negative time on station.
- Italian: the deposit is masculine, quantities inside sentences get their di, and a vein with one unit left agrees with itself.
- Fixed a crash on distant worlds. Opening the dispatch sheet on a world nothing you own can reach inside a day closed the app. It now says so, and points at Propulsion — the technology that shortens the trip. With the drive at zero this is any world two galaxies out, which is well inside what a probe can survey on your first day.
- A fleet of haulers alone can be sent again. Send your skiffs out, keep a hauler home, and the sheet used to tell you every hull was away.
- Fixed the note under SEND on a lone hauler, which counted its four berths as four skiffs and told you the fourth was bringing nothing.
- Older saves carried into 0.15 no longer receive twice the scouts they should.
- Distance takes real time now, and a new technology buys it back. Flying anywhere costs twice what it used to, so the far end of the map is genuinely out of reach: a colony that has researched nothing cannot order a run to the next galaxy at all, because no window is long enough to get there and back. Propulsion is the answer — a fifth row on the Research screen that makes every fleet faster, and each level hands window rungs back to worlds that had refused them. The first level alone returns your ships to the speed they flew at before this release.
- It pays where you are going, not where you live. Propulsion is worth nothing on the rock next door and everything at the frontier: a hop to the next galaxy goes from eighteen hours and twenty minutes down to nine and a half on the first level, while a neighbour in your own system stays the ten minutes it always was.
- Surveying costs a ship. A probe now flies a hull and takes it out of your fleet until it lands, so ten systems can no longer be surveyed in one tap-and-wait: they need ten ships, or ten trips.
- The Scout is that ship, and it is the cheapest thing in the game. 200 metal and 50 crystal — affordable in your first check-in, out of the stock a new colony wakes up with. It carries no cargo and has exactly one job. A skiff cannot survey and a scout cannot gather, so what you own decides what you can do, and the Galaxy tab says which you are short of before you tap.
- A scout comes home. It is spent for the flight rather than used up by it, so one scout will survey the galaxy given time — the cost is the waiting, not the hull.
- The Hauler is on sale: 2,400 metal and 600 crystal. Four holds for what three skiffs cost, traded against half the speed — it flies every run at its own pace, so a hauler in the fleet is a slower trip for all of it.
- The dispatch sheet can send two kinds of ship at once. One stepper, counting holds rather than hulls, and two cells under it naming the two speeds you can fly at — because however many ships go, a run has one clock and the slowest ship sets it. Tapping a cell says what it would do before you tap it.
- A window the hauler cannot reach is dimmed rather than gone, and tapping it is the undo. A window that is simply too far away is still absent, which is how the ladder has always taught distance. The difference is whether you can do anything about it: dim means not with these ships, and one tap leaves the hauler at home and takes the window back. Add the hauler and the window yields; tap the window and the hauler yields — and the sheet says which happened, in one line.
- The sheet opens on the smallest fleet that empties the world, the hauler packed first so your skiffs stay home for somewhere else.
- A colony already in play keeps everything it had and picks up one scout for each probe already in the air. Its ships are slower until it researches Propulsion, which is the point.
- The game speaks Italian. Every word it says — five screens, both sheets, the resource rail, the tab bar and every lock-screen alert — now has an Italian form, and a phone set to Italian gets it with nothing to switch on. There is no language picker and there is not meant to be one: the game follows the system, so changing your phone's language changes the game's, and the alerts it had already booked are rewritten the next time you open it. Every other language still gets English.
- Numbers are written the way the language writes them. Italian groups thousands with a point
and marks decimals with a comma, so a price reads
12.150and a gravity reads2,62. Durations keephandmand count days ing. - The fleet is Italian too, and so is everything in it. The six facilities, the four technologies, the three adaptation ladders and the hulls all have Italian names — a Scialuppa leaves the Cantiere, a Miniera di Metallo reaches its next livello, and the Galaxy tab reports a world as Colonizzabile or Bloccato.
- Worlds are named in Italian too. The two words every surveyed world carries — veiled furnace, iron frost, temperate world — are computed from its temperature, gravity and pressure rather than written down, so they used to stay English whatever the phone was set to. Now a world is a fornace velata or a gelo ferreo, with the adjective after the noun and agreeing with it, the way Italian puts it.
- One line does not fit yet, and the game will show you. The Shipyard's pool line — how many hulls you own, how many are in port, how many are out — runs off the end of a 320dp window in Italian where it fits in English. It is recorded rather than papered over; the fix belongs to the layout, not to worse Italian.
- Buttons no longer flash a square. Every rounded card, button, pill and chip in the game drew its tap highlight as a rectangle, so pressing anything painted the corners its own shape had rounded off. The highlight now stops where the control does, everywhere, and the two buttons that claim more height than they draw keep it on the button rather than smearing it across the gap.
- Switching tabs is a move rather than a cut. A destination now arrives from the side the tab bar says it is on and the one you left goes the other way. The Galaxy tab's four views — the fold, the universe, a system, your worlds — cross-fade into each other instead of replacing each other between frames.
- Controls turn over instead of snapping. A selected pill, a booked alert, the highlighted galaxy, the resource you picked for a run: anything that changes colour because you tapped it now takes the length of the tap to do it. A facility card is deliberately not one of them — its colour tracks your stocks and your builds, so it would change while you sat and watched, and this game does not draw itself happening.
- The worlds list settles rather than jumping as you type in the search box.
- Nothing here loops or repeats, and nothing runs on its own: every one of these is a single response to something you did, and the game is as still as it was when you are not touching it.
- The dispatch sheet opens on the fleet that will actually fill up, not on every hull you own. A
world only holds so much: past a certain size every extra skiff flies out, sits on the surface,
and comes home empty. The sheet now starts at the last one that brings something back — and the
pool is still stated beside it, so
+still reaches the whole fleet whenever you want it. - Choosing a different window, or the other resource, moves that number with it. A longer stay means fewer skiffs take the same vein, and the two deposits are different sizes — so the count follows what you just asked for instead of describing the run you were looking at before.
- Hold
−or+to run the count. It picks up speed the longer you hold it, so crossing a big pool is one gesture rather than fifty taps. - On a world you have already stripped, the sheet now opens on a single skiff — which is the soonest date it can offer you rather than one no world will ever reach.
- The Fleets tab remembers where you have been, and takes you back. What used to be a receipt of the last five landings is now a list of the worlds your fleet has worked — one row each, newest first, with the world's name, its drawn face, how many runs you have sent, what it has paid you in total, and what is left in the ground.
- Tap one to send another run. The same sheet the Galaxy tab raises, opened on a world you already judged worth going to. It opens at its own defaults rather than repeating your last run: the list is a shortcut to the world, never to the decision.
- A world whose vein you have finished says
emptyon the row, so a door that leads nowhere says so before you open it. - The dispatch sheet leads with the world's name instead of its coordinate, on both tabs — the address moved beside the hazards, and the richness readings live on the two resource cards that were already printing them.
- Runs from before the app recorded where a fleet had been are collected into one line at the foot of the list. They still count what they brought home; they just have nowhere to send you.
- Adaptation and technologies no longer take turns. Each branch has its own queue, so a Gravitic ladder and an Extraction level run side by side instead of one waiting for the other. Reading a blocked world and buying the ladder that fixes it no longer costs you the mine upgrade you were in the middle of.
- Each branch is still one at a time on its own: one project, one ladder. Picking which is still the decision — you just get to make it twice.
- The Research screen says so. The ADAPTATION heading carries its own rule instead of pointing at the one above it, and a ladder stops greying out because a technology is running.
- The bar under the map is back on the screen. On a phone the galaxy was drawn at its full height and the bar that names the star you picked — and offers the probe — was pushed off the bottom, so tapping a star selected it and there was nothing you could then do. The map now folds into whatever room the screen has left after the bar, rather than taking the room first.
- The stars keep out of the region names. With a shorter map the bands are shorter too, so how far a star drifts from its lane now shrinks with them instead of wandering up into the name above.
- The Galaxy tab opens on a map you can actually look at. Two hundred and fifty stars, drawn, in ten named bands — one band per region — so a Deep really is a dark stretch and a Blaze really is a bright one, and you can see which is which without reading a word. Your own star, the places you pinned and anywhere a probe is heading are all marked. On day one, before you have surveyed anything, you can already tell that you live in a dark region and that the bright places are three bands away.
- Near on the map is near in the game. The bands fold left to right and back again in the order the systems run, so two stars drawn close together really are a short flight apart. Four hairlines across the map mark where a probe's flight crosses each hour — and from your own star you will see three of them to one side and one to the other, which is the map telling you that you live near an edge.
- Drag to pick a star, and the bar at the bottom tells you what it is. Its name, its class, its region and how many worlds it has, plus a probe you can send from there. Nothing zooms and nothing scrolls: the whole galaxy is on one screen at every size the app runs at.
- One tap up shows all four galaxies, each drawn the same way, with what a run to it costs out and back. It is nine hours and twenty minutes to a neighbour and eighteen hours and twenty to the far one, against three and a half to cross your own galaxy — so a hop is a decision rather than a journey.
- The filters and the sort are gone from your worlds list. They narrowed and reordered a list of worlds when the question you were asking was about where to go next, which is a question about systems — the map answers it now. Search stays, because finding a place you have already been by name is what a list is for, and your pinned worlds stay at the top. A pinned world's system is also what gets a name printed beside it on the map.
- The tab remembers which of the two you last used and opens there next time. The reach strip under the orbit page and the ten-row region index are both gone; the map does what they did.
- A new colony no longer starts with a ship. Genesis hands you the stock, the mines and a surveyed home system, and nothing to fly. The first hull is the first thing you buy from the Shipyard — so the fleet is something you decide to have rather than something you were issued.
- Which makes the first hull a real purchase. It costs 800 metal against an opening stock of 500, so it is a few hours of saving away if you want it now, and further if you would rather put the metal into the mines. That is the trade: the fleet and the colony are asking for the same metal from the first minute, and until now the game answered the question for you.
- Nothing is taken from a colony you have already opened. The skiff a save was granted when it migrated stays exactly where it is; this changes what a new colony receives and nothing else.
- Worlds hold four times as much. A plain doorstep world now carries 5,800 metal, or 2,900 crystal, and a hazardous one in another galaxy carries up to 15,950. The deposit was sized for a single skiff back when a single skiff was a fleet; since hulls went flat-priced there is no ceiling on how many you own, and a real manifest was stripping a world in under four hours and then sitting in dock. A check-in should now end with your hulls dispatched rather than with nowhere to send them.
- A fleet still empties a world in a day — it just takes four hulls to do it. That was always the rule the deposit was built around, and it now describes a fleet instead of a ship. One skiff on its own takes four days. Refill is unchanged at five percent of the deposit a day.
- This does not make your map bigger. If you check in every few hours you still reach the same six worlds; each of them is simply worth four times as much now. Reaching further is what the drive technology is for, and it is not built yet.
- Tapping a world in the ledger opens that world. It opened the same slot number of whichever
system the map was last on instead — usually your own — so a row reading
crystal fullraised a sheet readingdeposit empty, about somewhere else entirely, and the run would have gone there.
- The map has places instead of addresses. Every system and every world has a name now — Calianova, Kragith, Velovae IX — generated from the seed, unique inside a galaxy, and free from the first launch. The coordinate survives as the subtitle. You can search for a name and get one world back, which is the whole answer to finding somewhere you have been before.
- The Galaxy tab opens on what you know. A ledger of every world you have surveyed, nearest first, with filters — reachable in six hours, still holding, one adaptation level away, settleable, by region — a sort, a search, and pinned worlds at the top. The map is one tap away and is where you go to find something new rather than where you go to look something up.
- A surveyed world has a face. A drawn disc where every channel is a real trait: the fill is temperature, the size is gravity, the banding is pressure, and the marks are the hazards. An unsurveyed world is an empty socket, so a list of them reads as somewhere to go rather than as a table you have already read. About one world in two hundred wears a ring, which means nothing at all.
- And a name for what it is. iron giant, deep frost, drowned shroud, temperate world — derived from the three axes, so the words can never disagree with the numbers beside them.
- The galaxy has regions. Ten per galaxy, twenty-five systems each, each one named and each one genuinely different: a Deep runs sixty percent dim stars, which moves its habitable orbits inward and makes its deuterium good, and a Blaze does the opposite. That is readable off the strip before you have surveyed anything, and there is an index of the ten that says what each is for. Your map has changed to make room for it, and it will not change again.
- Every hull costs the same. A skiff was priced against the fleet you already had — half again as much each time, so the fourth cost three times the first and the sixth was out of reach of anything but a week of saving. It is a flat 800 metal and 200 crystal now, at every depth. What makes a fleet expensive is the yard: hulls are built one at a time, about two hours each before the Robotics Factory shortens it, so buying four is a commitment of the afternoon rather than a bill that grows while you read it.
- Worlds run out. Every world holds a finite metal deposit and a finite crystal deposit, and a run takes from them. A plain world at your doorstep holds about 1,450 metal; a hazardous one in another galaxy holds nearly three thousand. One skiff strips an average world in a day, or two runs at the twelve-hour window, and never lifts more than the planet has. Sending the same fleet back to the same rock is no longer the answer to anything.
- A world comes back at five percent a day. Twenty days from empty to full, which is slow on purpose: the planet you stripped this morning is not worth visiting again this week. What that makes valuable instead is the map — how much of the galaxy you have surveyed is now an income stat rather than a one-off errand, and a probe buys you veins as well as verdicts.
- Every surveyed world says what is left in it. The row that used to print two richness figures
now prints two stocks:
metal full · crystal 174/819, in words at the ends and a fraction between, so a galaxy nobody has worked reads as a shape you skip rather than thirty numbers you compare. The verdict badge is back on every row, and the world you can settle is no longer a special case. - The dispatch sheet says when your fleet is bigger than the world. Send eight skiffs at a vein two can empty and the figure is the vein, the line beside it reads "the whole deposit" instead of a share per hull, and a clause under the stepper names the ships that would come home with nothing. The legs line gained a fourth segment — how long the fleet is actually working — and it reads the same on your doorstep as it does in the next galaxy.
- A stripped world counts down instead of refusing. The sheet keeps its chips, its stepper and its ladder, and swaps the figure for how long until the world holds what you just asked for. Ask for less and the wait shrinks; ask for more than any world of that size can ever hold and it says so rather than naming a date.
- Prospecting. A fourth technology on the research branch, behind Extraction 1, and the first whose payoff is measured in a run rather than in an hourly rate: every hull pulls more out of every world. It shares the one research slot, so it competes with the mines and the ladders.
- Ships take time to build. Order a hull and it goes on the slipway with a countdown on its card, the way a mine upgrade does. Orders queue: tap Build as many times as you can pay for and the yard works through them one at a time, so a check-in with full stores can commit the lot and find them waiting. The Robotics Factory shortens the wait, exactly as it shortens a build.
- Ships cost ten times what they did. A hull was three station-hours of its own work to pay back — half of one six-hour run — for something that then pays back forever. It is thirty now. A new colony can no longer buy a second skiff out of its opening stock; it has to earn one, and the fleet grows over days rather than over a single afternoon.
- Your fleet is worth having and no longer worth everything. At the old price a player who bought hulls before anything else ended up with a fleet delivering nearly three times their own colony's crystal. It is under two thirds now, at the same rate per ship — the runs pay what 0.7.2 said they pay, and the fleet that carries them is a decision again.
- You are told when a hull is done. A skiff leaving the yard buzzes like a probe landing or a fleet coming home, so an overnight order is something you come back to rather than something you find.
- You can buy ships. The Shipyard tab is a price list: what the skiff is for, what the next one costs, and how many you own, how many are idle and how many are away. Every hull costs half again as much as the one before it, so the fleet has a ceiling you can see rather than one you find. Until now a colony had the one skiff it was given at genesis and no way to get a second.
- The Fleets tab shows what is away. One card per run, with a bar carrying all three phases —
out, on station, and home again — and two marks where the flight ends and begins. Under it, what
has landed and what it brought. The Colony strip has said
2 more awaysince 0.7.0; this is what it was pointing at. - No tab says "nothing here yet" any more. All five destinations have a screen behind them.
- A fleet now brings home six times what one ship did, at the same rate per ship. 0.7.2 tripled what a run pays; this release is what lets you have more than one ship carrying it. By the second day a four-a-day player is sending six skiffs instead of the single one the game used to grant — and the run itself still reads what 0.7.2 said it would.
- A gathering run brings home three times what it used to. The first run a new colony can order went from 66 metal to 198, and the sheet states the new figure before you commit exactly as it did the old one.
- Dangerous worlds now pay more instead of less. Every point of danger used to take a tenth of the hold; it now adds a third to it. A world with two hazards on the far side of your galaxy is worth two and a half times a safe rock in your own system, where before it was worth half — so the reason to read the map is that the interesting places are the ones that pay.
- The dispatch sheet says
+70% of the holdwhere it used to say20% of the hold, and readsnothing addedon a completely safe run.
- The dispatch sheet is a real bottom sheet. It shipped as a panel drawn inside the Galaxy tab, which meant it stopped above the row of tabs instead of covering them, it could not be dragged away, and a swipe over it scrolled the map behind it. It now behaves exactly like the sheet a facility or a technology opens: it covers the window, the handle drags, and a scroll on it is a scroll of it.
- You can send a ship somewhere. Tap any world on the Galaxy tab and a sheet comes up that will fly your skiff there, sit on it, and bring back metal or crystal. Pick which of the two, how many hulls to send, and how long until you want them home — one hour, three, six, twelve or a day. The figure under the rule is what lands, and it moves as you touch the controls.
- A world you cannot live on is still worth going to. Hostility gates settling and never gathering, so the 98% of the galaxy that reads as blocked stops being a wall and starts being a shopping list. A blocked world now leads with what it is rich in rather than with what is wrong with it, and says how long the round trip takes.
- The map says how far away you are, once. Under the system header: how many units out, what the distance costs you in danger, and the round trip. Hazards stay on the worlds that carry them, with their own arithmetic — nothing prints the total except the sheet that spends it.
- A run is free. The hull was the price. There is no cost line on the sheet and nothing to be short of.
- Send it too far and the short windows disappear rather than greying out. A trip to the next galaxy is nine hours and twenty minutes out and back, so only the twelve- and twenty-four-hour windows are offered, and the sheet says why.
- The Colony strip names the next thing that happens, not the next thing that comes home — so a skiff still on its way out reads "On station at [3:185:4]".
- Your first skiff was granted at the founding of the colony and has had nothing to do since. It has something to do now.
- Every row now says what the level is worth to you. A mine has always told you what it costs and how long it takes, and never whether it was worth taking. It does now, in one line, in the same shape on all thirteen rows: what the level hands you, and when you have your money back. A level-13 Metal Mine reads "+122/h metal · back in 102h" — four days to repay 12,458 metal is a fact worth having before you tap.
- The three technologies are finally comparable. 1h 42m against 33h against nothing is the choice the Research screen exists to present, and until now the screen showed you three percentages instead. Percentages are not something you can spend.
- Two rows now admit they are worth nothing. Photovoltaics multiplies energy supply, and while your colony has power to spare that multiplies nothing at all — so the row says so, rather than offering you a true number you cannot use. The Solar Plant beside it says the same thing in the same words.
- The Robotics Factory and the Nanite Factory stopped being silent. Neither raises a rate, so neither has ever had a line. Robotics now states what a level takes off your longest build and which gate it opens next; the Nanite Factory states what it is worth from day one, twelve days before you can build it, under the requirement that was previously the only thing it said.
- A row that would slow your colony down says so before you buy it. At genesis a second Deuterium Synthesizer level draws more power than your one plant makes, which throttles every mine you have — the row now reads "throttles every mine · Solar Plant 2 covers it" instead of looking like every other upgrade.
- Tap a row to open it. A new sheet carries the arithmetic behind the verdict, the numbers the verdict displaced — the rate pairs and the percentages — and, where a building gates something, the whole ladder of what opens at which level, including the levels you already hold. It never says do not buy this: the action stays live, because a player who wants it anyway is not wrong.
- Nothing about the balance moves. Same prices, same durations, same rates — a colony is worth exactly what it was worth yesterday, and saves carry forward untouched.
- The Nanite Factory does something. It has been in the build tree since the first economy slice, priced at 20,000 metal and 10,000 crystal and 4,000 deuterium, gated behind Robotics Factory 10 — and until now nothing in the game read it. Buying it made your colony strictly poorer. It is now the only thing that shortens a deep build, and each level takes a third off the wait.
- Deep upgrades are much slower, and only deep ones. Past level 18 — which is roughly where your mines stand when the Nanite Factory unlocks — every further level costs progressively more waiting than the income that pays for it. A level 25 Metal Mine used to take a few hours and now takes the better part of a day unaided; a level 30 takes over a week.
- Nothing before that moves at all. The first fortnight is untouched to the minute: the first build still lands at two minutes, the research tab still opens around hour 6, the adaptation ladders still open at hour 9, and a colony still stands where it stood on day 1, 2, 3, 7 and 14. The long waits arrive with the Nanite Factory that answers them, and not before.
- The Nanite Factory is an answer, not an exemption. Six levels of it take a deep build from 186 hours to 16 — an eleven-fold cut — and what is left is still hours. The late game is meant to be something you check in on while there is a fleet to move, not something you buy your way out of.
- Saves carry forward untouched: no stored value changes, and a colony keeps every level it has.
- Your neighbours are worth looking at now. A new colony starts in a system that has somewhere to go: one of the worlds beside you is either already somewhere you could stand, or a single adaptation level away from it. It used to be the luck of the draw, and the draw was bad — the middling home system asked for seven levels across two different ladders before anything on the Galaxy screen would say something new, and four in five colonies were asked for four or more. Virtually every colony now opens a neighbour with its first purchase.
- What that neighbour is worth has not changed, and that is deliberate. It is usually a world that passes every band and is still not worth settling — the good ground is still further out, behind technology nobody has bought yet. What you are given is somewhere to point at, not somewhere good.
- The three adaptation ladders open at Robotics Factory 2 instead of 4. That is about half a day in rather than most of two days. Nothing else about them moves: same prices, same durations, same one research slot shared with the production technologies.
- Existing colonies keep the home they were founded on. Your map, your system and your neighbours are all exactly where you left them; the new rule only applies to a colony that has not started yet. Saves from 0.5.0 carry forward untouched.
- Every row now carries a bell, and every alert is one you asked for. Tap the bell on a row you cannot afford and the game tells you the moment you can. Tap it on a row that is building and it tells you the moment that lands. Tap nothing and the game says nothing — completions no longer announce themselves.
- The same bell, two questions, and the row decides which. Any number of things in flight can be asked about at once, but only one "when can I afford it" in the whole empire: pointing that one at another row moves it, and both screens name what it is pointed at beside their heading, so a watch set on Research is never a thing that vanished quietly from the Colony tab.
- Several finishing together arrive as one alert. Anything you asked about that lands within five minutes of the one before it collapses into a single line — "Three upgrades are done" — instead of three buzzes for one check-in.
- The instant stays true. Spend the resources on something else and the alert slides later on the same tap that spent them; finish a Solar Plant that lifts a shortage and it slides earlier. While the app is closed nothing spends, so an alert can only ever fire early.
- A narrower window loses no words. In a Slide Over pane the bell drops under the time instead of beside it, the resource rail puts each rate under its stock, and the Robotics Factory goes by Robotics — which is what the game already calls it.
- Saves from 0.4.4 carry forward untouched. Anything already building when you update lands quietly, because nobody has tapped its bell yet.
- Tilting the phone sideways moves the sky the right way round. It went the wrong way: drop the right edge and the stars slid left, away from the edge you dropped, which is the opposite of what your hand expects. They now go the way you tip it. Tipping forward and back was always right and is untouched.
- Nothing else about the effect changes — same distance for the same movement, same wrist, same everything. Only the direction of one of the two axes.
- Saves from 0.4.3 carry forward untouched.
- The sky answers a sideways lean as readily as a forward one. Rolling the phone used to move the stars a fraction of what tipping it did — a quarter as far on a phone held at thirty degrees, half at forty-five — because the sideways reading was being weakened by the angle you happen to hold the phone at rather than by how far you turned it. The two directions now travel the same distance for the same movement, from every pose a hand rests in.
- There is no longer an edge to the effect. It used to stop about twenty degrees out, so anything more than a small wrist flick arrived in the same place and the sky went dead in your hand. Roll the phone now and it just keeps going, right round and round again. Tipping it forward and back tracks the whole way from flat on its back to flat on its face, then retraces as you carry on over — the sky can follow a roll for ever, but it can only follow a tip through the poses you can actually see the screen from.
- A sideways roll no longer drags the sky diagonally. It always did a little; once the limit came off, a big roll dragged it further up than the roll itself moved it sideways. Rolling now moves the sky sideways and nothing else.
- Put the phone down and the sky stops. 0.4.2 spent about ten seconds drifting back to level after you stopped moving, which was the price of the old limit; there is no limit and so no drift. Wherever you leave it is where it stays, however long you leave the game open — and putting it flat on a desk and spinning it leaves the sky alone, because from down there your phone genuinely cannot tell it is being turned.
- Still off entirely if you have asked your phone for less movement, and a phone with no motion sensor still holds still.
- Saves from 0.4.2 carry forward untouched.
- The sky behind every screen leans with the phone. Tilt it and the three planes of stars slide against each other and against the cards in front of them, the near ones travelling further than the far ones — which is the whole of what makes a flat black background read as distance rather than as an empty window. It is a small movement on purpose: less than an eighth of what one screen of scrolling already moves the same field, and meant to be noticed on the third session rather than the first.
- Nothing up there ever starts on its own. The sky only moves when you move the phone; after you stop, a lean settles back to level over a few seconds and then holds, however long you leave the game open. Which also means every way of holding it works the same — flat on a desk, at an angle on a sofa, overhead in bed — rather than the sky sitting shoved to one side because of how you happen to be lying.
- Off entirely if you have asked your phone for less movement. The system's own reduce-motion setting switches it off on iOS and on Android, and a device with no motion sensor simply holds still.
- Saves from 0.4.1 carry forward untouched.
- Nothing you can see or do changes in this build. The fleet that landed in 0.3.0 is still underneath the game rather than on a screen, and this is the round that measured what it is worth before any screen offers it.
- A gathering run brings back half what it used to. The rate was written from arithmetic and had never been simulated; simulating it showed that a player who bought ships before buildings would have had a fleet out-producing their own colony. Halving it means three or four ships match a mine rather than replacing it — the fleet is a second income, never the income.
- Saves from 0.4.0 carry forward untouched.
- The colony floats over a sky now. Three planes of stars sit behind every screen and drift against each other as the list scrolls, so the black reads as distance rather than as an empty window. It is a hundred and one stars where there were twenty-six, and none of them move on their own — the field is a function of where the list is, exactly as the list is.
- A running row wears a dial instead of a bar. The hairline that used to run under a building facility or a research project is a 34dp ring beside the countdown, lit round to how far the job has got, with the level it is on now in the middle of it. It says the same thing in a tenth of the ink and takes the level with it.
- The Galaxy screen is a system rather than a strip. The fifteen ticks on a line are now orbits around a star with a corona, your colony carrying a halo of its own, and a probe in flight drawn as the arc it is flying. Each body still carries its slot number; the world list below is unchanged.
- The app tells you what happened while you were away. Stocks count up from the figure you last saw rather than simply being different, the dials and the energy meter fill into place once, and the one row that finished while the app was closed takes a band of light across it and changes its level behind the light. All of it plays exactly once per launch and then holds — a colony closed for two days still opens onto a screen with no clock ticking anywhere on it.
- The resource rail is ruled. A hairline between each pair of resources and one under the bar, so three figures side by side read as three columns rather than as one crowded line.
- Every card takes the press. A tap now shrinks its target by a hair under the ripple, which is the whole of what the app was missing to feel like it was being touched rather than read.
- Nothing on screen changes in this build. Your colony can now send ships to a world it has surveyed and get cargo back, and the whole thing is playable in the simulation — but no screen offers it yet. The Galaxy tab still only lets you send a probe. The screens are the next slice.
- What landed underneath: you own a fleet, and a run is one commitment — a world you have already surveyed, whether the ships bring back metal or crystal, and how long until they are home. They fly out, work the surface for whatever is left of the window, and come back. What they bring is stated exactly before you commit and never rolled; nothing is hidden and every run comes home.
- You can work a world you could never live on. Hostility still decides where you can settle, and it no longer decides where you can send a ship — so the 98% of the map that reads BLOCKED stops being a wall. The richest worlds are the ones you cannot stand on, which is what makes this worth doing rather than a consolation prize.
- Far is dangerous and hazardous is dangerous, and a run says so before it leaves: a world's hazards and how far it sits from home each cost a tenth of the hold. Your own system, with nothing wrong with it, is a completely safe first trip.
- Runs never cost deuterium and never bring it back, so the Robotics Factory stays the thing you save for.
- A new colony opens with one skiff, the way it opens with 500 metal — the first session is a decision rather than a wait.
- Colonies carry forward. Saves from 0.2.7 migrate: your colony arrives with one skiff and nothing away.
- The first hour of a colony is a different game. Upgrades in the opening cost a tenth of what they used to, and the first taps finish in two or three minutes rather than twenty. A player who sits with the app for ten minutes now watches seven things finish instead of nothing at all.
- The discount and the clock both run out, and they run out where the galaxy opens. By the ninth level of a mine the price is the price it always was and a build is back to half an hour, so nothing about the middle or the late game has moved — the whole change is spent on the opening, which is where it was needed.
- The research and adaptation branches are on the same tenth, so a technology never quietly becomes the expensive way to spend an opening the buildings are discounting.
- The debug menu's two verbs now take a hold rather than a tap, and the button fills across as you hold it, with a buzz the moment it acts. The panel opens by shaking the phone — a gesture a pocket can perform — so neither skipping the colony forward nor deleting it should ever be one stray tap away. Reset no longer needs arming first; it just needs holding.
- And the panel is a proper bottom sheet. Drag it down to put it away, tap outside it, or use the back gesture — all the things a sheet is expected to do, because it is now the platform's own sheet rather than a panel drawn to look like one.
- Resetting now clears the "debug used" mark instead of setting it. The mark answers whether this colony's clock has been moved by hand, and a colony founded a moment ago has no history at all. Skipping is the only thing that sets it.
- A debug menu, for developing the game rather than playing it. Shake the phone to open it (Ctrl+D or Cmd+D on desktop). It can skip the colony forward to the next thing that happens — a build finishing, the lab freeing up, a probe landing — and it can delete the colony and start a new one, which takes two taps because it cannot be undone. It also shows what the colony is doing underneath: the two clocks, the save's version, the galaxy's seed, what is in flight.
- It ships to everyone rather than to debug builds only, so that it works on TestFlight. Nothing opens it by accident, and skipping ahead is the only thing on it that changes the game.
- Saves now record whether the menu has ever touched the colony. Saves from 0.2.4 carry forward untouched and read as never debugged, which is what they are.
- The adaptation ladders join the opening discount. They were the one thing left at full price, which made the first ladder cost nearly six times the technology beside it — a wall exactly where you first meet the galaxy. A first Thermal level is now 300/200/300 instead of 900/600/900, and the ladders settle back to full price alongside the rest.
- Nothing in the game can quietly overflow any more. Every cost, duration and stock is a 64-bit integer, and a 64-bit integer that runs out does not fail — it comes back negative, and a negative price is one the game reads as free. Every curve now refuses to produce one.
- A colony you leave for years no longer breaks on the way back. Returning after a very long absence — or with a device clock that has jumped — used to compute a number too large to hold before it capped it at your storage. It now caps the time instead, so a full store is a full store whether you were gone a week or a century.
- The whole opening is on a discount. Everything you can buy in the first days costs exactly a third of its full price at level one — a first Metal Mine level is 20 metal instead of 60, the first Extraction is 200/133/66 instead of 600/400/200 — and the discount shrinks with every level until it is gone. Deep upgrades cost exactly what they always did; only the opening moved.
- It runs out when the galaxy opens. Full price arrives at facility level 9 and technology level 4, which is the same session the adaptation ladders unlock and your probes' findings become something you can act on rather than only read.
- Research is cheaper and quicker early, not just cheaper: the first Photovoltaics takes 20 minutes instead of an hour.
- You get about a day further in the same four days, and roughly twice as much research done — day four now finishes nine projects where it used to manage four.
- The Research tab opens on day one instead of day two, and the adaptation ladders on day three instead of day five. No requirement changed: the Robotics Factory is simply cheaper at the start like everything else.
- Resource production is untouched. Mines produce exactly what they produced yesterday.
- Upgrades stopped outgrowing your income. A build used to take as long as it cost, and because costs climb faster than mines do, the wait ran away from you: a sixth Metal Mine level took 3h 07m to build against 1h 50m to earn, and a sixth Deuterium Synthesizer took twelve and a half hours. A build now takes about as long as earning it does — 1h 32m and 3h 08m for those two — and it stays that way at every depth instead of only near the start.
- You no longer have to have guessed that the Robotics Factory is the clock. It still halves your builds, but skipping it used to cost a player two building levels over the first two days and a six-and-three-quarter-hour wait for a single tap; now it costs neither, and the worst wait in those two days is 2h 20m.
- Same progress after two days as before, and rather more after a week.
- Oltre runs on Android. The whole game, on any phone running Android 8.0 or newer — the same colony, research and galaxy the desktop and iPhone builds have, with the save kept in the app's own storage and carried across a reinstall by Android's backup.
- Every version is downloadable. Merging to
mainnow publishes a GitHub Release with the APK attached, the way it already ships the iPhone build to TestFlight. The release page carries this changelog and the commit it was built from; the download is a direct link that installs from a phone browser with nothing else needed. - The game tells you when to come back on Android too. The same alerts iPhone has — a build finished, the lab is free, a fleet has landed — booked in advance at the instants the simulation already computed, and re-derived from your colony after a reboot. Android may hold one back by a few minutes while the phone is dozing; nothing else about them differs.
- Saves from 0.2.0 carry forward untouched.
- You can send a probe now. The system page has a footer under the orbit map: what it costs (150 metal, the same everywhere) and how long the flight takes to this star, which is the only figure that changes. Tap Dispatch and it becomes a countdown, then a landing that tells you what the probe found — usually that none of it was worth taking, which is the honest answer about fifty-nine times in sixty.
- The ± buttons are gone, and good riddance. Crossing a galaxy used to be 249 taps. In their place is a band showing all 250 systems at once, marked with how long a flight to each one would take — 1h, 2h, 3h — so you can answer the only question a dispatch really asks: what can I reach in the nine hours I am about to be asleep? Each tick is a star, drawn short and faint for a dim one and tall and bright for a bright one; yours is the blue one, and a probe in flight is amber. Drag the band to move around, then tap one of the seven cells to open a system.
- The galaxy is not symmetric around you, and now the band says so without a word of copy: if your home sits near one edge, the hour marks simply run out on that side.
- Every build now takes as long as it costs, instead of a flat time per level. Early upgrades are longer — a first mine level is 37 minutes rather than 20 — and the colony stops standing around: over the first two days it now has something in flight 31% of the time instead of 12%. Same progress by day two, and about three levels fewer by day seven.
- Each adaptation ladder says what its next level would unlock among the worlds you have actually surveyed, and how few of them are worth taking.
- A probe that lands while you are away sends a notification — and the game will no longer let a crowd of probes push your long builds off the end of the notification queue.
- Saves from 0.1.2 carry forward untouched.
- Nothing on screen changes in this build. The galaxy can now be explored — you send a probe to a star system, it flies for hours, and when it lands every world around that star stops reading "Unsurveyed" — but no screen offers the dispatch yet. The Galaxy tab still shows the four worlds of your home system and nothing else. The screen is the next slice.
- What landed underneath: a fourth thing you can do, and the first one aimed at a place rather than at a row in a list. A probe costs 150 metal flat however far it goes; only the flight time changes with distance, from half an hour to the system next door up to a night's worth across the galaxy. So the question it asks is "how long will I be away" — and a player about to be gone nine hours has a better answer than one who is not.
- Probes never expire and never punish you for being away. A landed report waits as long as you need it to, nothing decays, and a system you already know cannot be paid for twice.
- Research will tell you what exploring was for: each adaptation ladder can now say how many of the worlds you have found its next level would unlock, so the choice between Thermal, Gravitic and Atmospheric stops being arbitrary once you have seen more than your own back garden.
- Saves from 0.1.1 carry forward untouched, including every world you had already surveyed.
- Crystal accrues half again as fast: 30/h becomes 36/h at level 1, and every level above it rises in step. Crystal was the only thing anyone was ever waiting for. A week of play spent 130 of its 168 hours with an upgrade that was affordable in every currency except crystal, and ended holding 49,544 metal with nothing to spend it on. The mines were tuned against the cost of the whole early tree, which counts the Robotics Factory and the Deuterium Synthesizer — the two most metal-heavy things in the game, and the two you buy a handful of times rather than every session. They are now tuned against the basket you actually repeat: a level of Metal Mine, Crystal Mine and Solar Plant.
- The Crystal Mine stops being the worst buy on the screen. Priced against the Metal Mine it paid back 1.6× slower at every level, so the answer to a crystal shortage was the least rewarding upgrade available. It is now 1.3× — still the patient one, no longer a penalty.
- The resource rail says the same thing in one line less. Metal, Crystal and Deuterium each carry their own colour as a small orb beside the name, and the hourly rate moves up alongside the stock instead of sitting under it. The bar gives the 12dp back to whatever screen is below it. In a narrow window the rate drops under the stock rather than being cut off — which is the one thing the old three-line bar could never get wrong, and the new one had to be taught.
- Six identical rectangles become a foreground and a background. Every row catches a light along its top edge, and what a row can do now sets how bright it sits: one you can start comes forward, one waiting on stocks or on a prerequisite falls back, and the one in flight is the only lit thing on the screen. From four rows away that is the answer to "why can nothing else start".
- The two Research branches read as two bands. "TECHNOLOGIES · one project at a time" and "ADAPTATION · the same slot" now carry their clause out to the right edge with a hairline between, instead of two runs of grey text stacked above two lists.
- There are stars behind the game. A fixed starfield sits under every screen and under none of the chrome, so the black reads as space rather than as absence. It does not move, does not twinkle, and does not cost anything while the app is closed.
- You can buy an adaptation ladder, and watch a world open up. The Research tab grows a second section — Thermal, Gravitic and Atmospheric, under the three production technologies — so the ladder every blocked world has been naming is finally on sale. Buy the one a world asks for, wait it out, and that world stops reading BLOCKED.
- Tap the technology on a blocked world to go and buy it. "Gravitic 3" on the Galaxy tab is a link now, and it lands on the section that sells it. It stopped looking tappable in 0.0.16 for one reason — nothing sold it — and that reason is gone.
- One project at a time still means one, across both branches. An adaptation ladder and a production technology compete for the same slot, so starting either stops the other five rows, and every one of them shows the same wait the running row is counting down. Climbing a ladder costs you the production level you did not research.
- A ladder shows the band it widens. "0.65 … 1.40 → 0.60 … 1.52 g" — what you tolerate now, and what the next level would make it, in the same units the Galaxy tab measures worlds in.
- The Galaxy header stops apologising. "Adaptation research lands later. You are at level 0." was true until this build and is gone from it.
- Nothing on screen changes in this build. The three adaptation ladders every blocked world points at are now built and playable in the simulation, but no screen sells them yet — the Research tab still shows three technologies and the Galaxy tab still says you are at level 0. The screens are the next slice.
- What landed underneath: Thermal, Gravitic and Atmospheric Adaptation are real technologies. Each level widens the tolerance band on its own axis, so a world blocked on gravity stops being blocked at the level its row already names. All three open on a level 4 Robotics Factory, all three cost the same — priced in the resource their own axis makes rich — and all three compete for your single research slot, so climbing one costs the production technology you did not research instead.
- Colonies carry forward. Saves from 0.0.16 migrate: your research levels survive untouched and the three ladders start at zero.
- A blocked world now says what it is worth, not only what it costs. The yield sits beside the verdict, so a world you cannot reach is one you can price: most of the ones in your home system are richer than home.
- A screen full of BLOCKED reads as the galaxy rather than as bad luck. Each row counts the bands it fails against the same bar a barren world names — "Fails 2 of 3 bands, worth it at 0.92" — so the answer has a scale behind it. Nearly every surveyed world fails at least one band, and that is the design.
- The Galaxy tab admits that the technology it names cannot be bought yet. The adaptation ladders every blocked row points at are not built, so the header says so and the technology on the row no longer wears the colour the app uses for "go and tap this".
- The galaxy exists. Four galaxies of 250 systems, fifteen orbits each — about 4,700 worlds, all of them generated from a single number saved with your colony. Nothing is stored but that number and what you have changed, so the map is the same every time you open the game and costs the save file nothing.
- An easy world is a poor world. Every world has a temperature, a gravity and an atmospheric pressure, and the same extremes that make one hostile are what make it rich: the coldest worlds hold the deuterium, the heaviest hold the metal, the thickest atmospheres hold the crystal. Each of the three blocks about three worlds in four, so which hostility you learn to survive first is a real choice rather than a ladder.
- You can see the whole sky, and almost none of it in detail. Coordinates, star class and who holds a world are free from the first launch. Everything else needs a survey, which needs fleets — so for now your home system is the only place you know anything about.
- The Galaxy tab is real. One system fills the screen: its fifteen orbits drawn once, left to right, hot to cold, with the worlds it holds listed underneath. The map shows the empty slots too, which is how you learn that the outer orbits are the cold ones without being told.
- A world you cannot settle tells you what would change that. "gravity 1.78, you tolerate 1.40 g — Gravitic 4" is the whole sentence, one line per axis that fails. Your own home system is likely to hold two or three of them, richer than home every one: the good ground is behind technology nobody has bought yet. Those adaptation technologies are not built, so for now it is a shopping list you cannot spend against.
- Roughly one world in three hundred is worth settling before you research anything — about four in your home galaxy. Surveying is supposed to disappoint; a world that passes every test and is still too thin to bother with says so, and says what it would have needed.
- Nothing changed for the player. This release is entirely internal: the pieces the Colony and Research screens share — the bolt that marks a throttled rate, the coloured cost figures, the progress bar under a job that is running, and the way the game writes durations and groups large numbers — were each written out two or three times, once per screen. They are now written once. Every screen draws exactly what it drew before, down to the pixel, and the screenshot tests are what proves it: not one of them changed.
- Why it was worth doing anyway: two copies of "what a price looks like" are two things that can drift apart, and when they do, the Colony and Research screens start quietly disagreeing about how the same number should read. That reads as the game being inconsistent rather than the code being duplicated.
- Research is playable. The Research tab is real: one branch of three technologies — Photovoltaics raises what your Solar Plant makes, Extraction what both mines make, Enrichment what the synthesizer makes. Each one costs metal, crystal and deuterium, takes hours, and every level you finish shows up in the rates on the resource bar and in everything the colony produces while the app is closed. A finished project tells you, the same way a finished building does.
- One project at a time. Buildings still go up in parallel; research does not. The colony is limited by what you can pay for, research by what you can wait for — so every time the lab frees up, the question is which of the three, and it has a different answer on day four than on day eleven.
- The branch is legible before you can use any of it. All three technologies are listed from the first launch, dimmed, saying what they want: Photovoltaics and Extraction open with your first Robotics Factory, Enrichment once Extraction reaches level 3. A row you cannot start yet says when you will be able to, never just "no".
- Every row shows what the next level actually buys — "+36% → +47%" — because a level is only meaningful against the one before it.
- Your stocks now follow you across the app. The resource bar sits above every tab instead of only the Colony, so you can price a research project without switching back.
- Colonies carry forward. Existing saves keep their buildings, stocks, builds and fleets and simply start with nothing researched.
- Your mines tell you when they are running at half power. The colony has always throttled every mine when the solar plant could not keep up — a colony producing 50 energy against 90 consumed was quietly losing 45% of its metal, crystal and deuterium — but nothing on screen said so, and it read as the game being slow rather than as a solar plant being needed. The colony screen now opens with a power card: a bar of what your plant supplies against what your facilities draw, and a plain reading of the consequence — "room for 1 mine level" while you have headroom, "every mine at 55%" once you do not. Each facility carries its own energy figure while a shortage lasts, the resource rail marks the rates it is holding down, and the Solar Plant says on its own card when one more level would end it.
- Metal arrives at the rate the game spends it. Metal was produced at twice the rate of crystal while the early build tree costs about three times as much metal as crystal, so metal was the bottleneck for every decision no matter how you played, and crystal piled up with nothing to spend it on. A mine now starts at 90 metal an hour instead of 60.
- The game has its five destinations. A bottom bar carries Colony, Research, Shipyard, Galaxy and Fleets, and the game opens on the Colony as it always has. The four that are not built yet say so and say what will be there, rather than being hidden until their screen exists — so the shape of the game is visible from the first launch. The bar keeps its tabs on the same centred column as the content on an iPad or a wide desktop window, and fits five destinations in a Slide Over pane.
- The game tells you when to come back. Every build you start and every fleet on its way home now books a notification at the exact moment it lands, so a colony left running while the app is closed reaches you instead of waiting to be checked on. The alerts are rebuilt from the colony itself whenever anything happens, so one that has been overtaken — a build that finished early, a colony reloaded from a save — is gone rather than stale, and starting three upgrades at once gets you three separate alerts. On iPhone permission is asked once, on the first launch; declining costs you the alerts and nothing else. On desktop the schedule is printed to the console rather than raised, because the dev loop already has the app open.
- The version on TestFlight is the version in the repo. 0.0.8 shipped labelled 0.0.7; the build number and the release label are both written from their real sources now, so a build cannot go out mislabelled again.
- The game is a real iPad app. It no longer runs in the letterboxed iPhone compatibility window: it fills the screen in every orientation, resizes freely, and works in Split View, Slide Over and Stage Manager alongside another app.
- The colony reads the same at any window size. Past a phone's width the content stops stretching — it caps and centres, with the resource bar still spanning the top edge — so a facility row on a large iPad or a wide desktop window is as readable as on a phone. On a phone nothing changes.
- Upgrades run in parallel, and the numbers are human. Every facility builds on its own — start a mine, a plant and a factory at once — and each row carries its own countdown, target level, finish time and progress bar instead of a single card at the top of the screen. The economy was rescaled to numbers you can hold in your head: a level-1 mine makes 60 metal an hour rather than 3,600, an upgrade raises output by a quarter instead of doubling it, and costs grow by half per level instead of doubling. A new colony now starts with enough metal and crystal to make its first choice immediately.
- Colonies from 0.0.7 start over. The rebalance is too deep to carry an old colony across — stocks earned at sixty times these rates would take weeks to earn now — so the save format moved to version 2 and version 1 saves are retired rather than converted: opening 0.0.8 on an older save begins a fresh colony. Saves written by 0.0.8 onwards load normally.
- Your colony survives closing the app, and keeps working while it is closed. The game saves itself and reloads on launch: levels, stocks, the build in progress, a fleet still on its way home and the event log all come back, and every hour the app spent shut is credited on the way in — a build queued last night is finished by morning, and a fleet that landed overnight has already unloaded. The save is a JSON snapshot in the platform's app-data folder, rewritten only when something actually happens, and a save that has been corrupted or written by a newer build starts a fresh colony instead of crashing.
- Returning fleets are visible. A fleet flying home sits in an amber strip under the hero card — where it's coming from, what it's made of, and a live countdown to arrival. When it lands, its cargo joins your stores (up to the storage cap) and the return is logged. Ship names are placeholders until the v1 ship set is decided.
- The Colony screen is playable. The resource rail shows all three resources with live rates. Every facility lists its level, per-resource upgrade cost (deuterium included) and build duration — the exact resource you're short turns red, and instead of a dead button an unaffordable upgrade shows when you'll be able to afford it; the Nanite Factory stays locked until Robotics 10. Tapping Upgrade starts the build, and the one in-flight build sits in a hero card with a live countdown, progress bar and local finish time.
- Oltre has a face. The app ships an icon — a planet's lit limb with a single trajectory
rising past it into empty space — on iPhone, macOS, Windows and Linux. The artwork is an SVG
master in
art/icon/; every platform asset regenerates from it. Android's launcher assets are generated and staged, ready for the app module when it lands.
- The economy is real: six buildings, a build queue, and energy. All three resources accrue from their mine levels; upgrades cost exponentially more per level, take time, and complete through the simulation as logged events; the Robotics Factory speeds construction and the Nanite Factory unlocks at Robotics 10; mines slow down proportionally when the Solar Plant can't feed them; storage caps at 10M per resource (placeholder). The sim harness fast-forwards a week of greedy play in milliseconds.
- The Colony resource rail is alive: metal accrues in real time while the app is open. First vertical slice through every layer — the pure simulation core (guarded by the advance-composability property test), the Colony feature module rendering the rail, the desktop shell ticking the clock at the boundary, and the sim harness fast-forwarding a week in milliseconds. First screenshot baseline committed.
- Initial project scaffold: KMP monorepo (core, sim, client, server), CI, branch ruleset.