🔧 Bug Fix
We Spotted a Bug (And Had to Make a Call)
Thanks to Porrima for flagging something odd in the Research & Development Office last week: the research skill level shown in R&D didn’t always match what he saw on the Skills screen. He’d look at R&D, see Level 9, then visit the Skills panel and watch his level jump to 11 — go back to R&D, and now it was 11 too. Classic “which screen is lying?”
Puzzle…
Digging in, I found the bug — and honestly, it was worse than I thought.
What was actually happening
The Research skill has its own XP-progression curve (100 XP base, steady 15% per level) that gets used when you complete a research plan. That’s the intended curve for Research — a meaningful long-game skill.
But the Skills screen had a safety-net routine that recalculated your skill level whenever you opened it — and it was using a generic fallback formula (50 XP base) because research had been accidentally left off its list. That generic curve is about 1.5× faster than the real Research curve.
Result: every time you visited the Skills screen, it was silently bumping your Research level higher than it should be. The R&D Office, reading the “real” value, would then correct it back down after your next plan completed, which is exactly the flip-flop Porrima reported.
The decision
I had two choices:
Give every affected player enough XP to legitimise the inflated level they were showing
Revert everyone to the level their XP actually earned under the correct curve
I went with option 2 — honesty. It felt wrong to permanently enshrine a bug’s effects, especially for a skill that gates meaningful progression. Better to have the numbers be real.
What changed for you
If you’ve been researching, your Research level may have dropped by 1–3 levels today. Your XP is unchanged — the level you now see is exactly what your accumulated Research XP supports under the correct formula. From here on, R&D and the Skills screen will always agree, and your progression continues normally.
Some research plans you previously had access to may now be locked until you catch up. For that, we apologise — you weren’t doing anything wrong, it was our bug.
Under the hood, I also
- Fixed the Skills screen’s safety-net so Research uses its proper curve.
- Made the R&D Office run the same safety-net on open (no more “go to Skills to refresh”)
- Added protection so this class of bug can’t silently demote anyone again
Huge thanks to Porrima for the detailed bug report — the “it changes when I switch screens” clue is what made this one solvable. That’s the kind of report that saves us days.
See you out there, pilots.