🚀 New Feature
📜 See how many builds a blueprint has left before you buy it. Thanks to Snorrsen for pointing out that a blueprint for sale on the Galactic Exchange never told you how many builds it had left. Plenty of captains sell copies they have already used a few times, so that matters. Open any blueprint’s market and the list of captains selling now shows each copy’s builds left out of its builds when new, right next to the price and the seller.
Copies that have already been used are shown in amber, so they stand out. A blueprint cannot be used while it is listed, so the number you see is exactly what you get. We have also given the Exchange list a little more room: the Sale, Wanted and Sell columns are wider so their headings no longer run into each other, and “On Sale” is now simply “Sale”.
⛏️ Meet your local miners.
They might need a favour. The miners working the asteroid belts used to be the same handful of faces all over the galaxy. Not any more. Every system now has its own regulars, between four and six of them, with their own names and their own ships, and you will only ever meet them in their home system. Federation, Alliance, Confederation, Independent and the mysterious folk out in Unknown space each have a style of their own.
Hover over a miner to see who they are and who they mine for. Their ships now match what they fly, too: a little Grubstake is a lot easier to patch up than a big Prospector. **And sometimes, they will hail you.** When things are quiet and you are working a belt whose station has been repaired, one of the locals may call you up and ask a small favour: • bring them some ore they are short of • find them an item or a drone • give one of their crew a lift somewhere in the system Accept and it goes in your mission tracker and your Active Missions. Hand items, ore and drones in at that field’s station, and passengers step off when you dock at their stop.
Favours pay credits, Captain experience and **Social experience**, and a bigger ship out on the frontier asks for more and pays more. You will never be hailed while a pirate is on you, at most once every 30 minutes, and you can hold two favours at a time. Prefer to be left alone? Turn them off in **Account, Settings, Miner Hails**. Anything you have already accepted stays yours to finish. A big thank you to Droffy for testing them first.
📡 Repaired stations will not stay repaired for ever. You have done a fine job putting the asteroid field stations back together, and the pirates have noticed. A repaired station now stays up for a good spell, but sooner or later raiders will catch it on a quiet night and knock it offline again. When that happens it goes dark: its contracts stop, the local miners stop calling, its guns fall silent, and its crew put out a brand new shopping list of repair supplies.
Raiders are cowards, though. They only strike a field when nobody has been around for a while, so a station will never go dark while you are working its belt, and you will not nip off to unload and come back to find it in pieces. **Your jobs are safe.** Anything you had already accepted at a station before it fell is still honoured.
Open the station and you will find it under **Jobs you took on before the damage**, ready to hand in as normal. New contracts wait until the station is repaired again. **You will hear about it.** When a station falls, ISN News reports it in **News & Events**, so you know where the work is. Hail any station that has been hit and you will see when it was **Last attacked**, right beside its name. Time to get those repair crews moving again, Captains.
🔧 Bug Fix
🎁 Sending festive items is clearer now. Thanks to Droffy for testing this one. Sending festive items to a friend always worked, but it did not feel like it: you had to type their name from memory, and nothing told you it had gone. **Name suggestions.** Start typing a captain’s name in the Send box and matching captains appear underneath, just like writing a mail. Click one to fill it in. **A receipt for you too.** The captain you send to has always had a mail saying what arrived. Now you get one as well, confirming what you sent and who to. **Where it lands.** The Send window now says it plainly: festive items go straight into the Missions & Festive tab of the other captain’s cargo, not their normal hold. Happy gifting, Captains. 🎃