✨ Improvement
The word SAFE has been quietly lying to you, and it took us longer than it should have to notice. It used to be perfectly true. Before the combat rebuild, a system marked SAFE really did mean you, the rocks, and nothing else with an opinion. The only fights that could find you in one were the ones we wrote by hand and dropped in as events.
Those events retired when combat was unified, and the asteroid fields quietly took over the job of deciding who turns up. Every field now posts guards of its own, and there is no field anywhere in the galaxy that posts none. Even the quietest belt in Feris has a couple of them loitering at the ends. Which left us with a cheerful green SAFE badge sitting above systems whose belts will absolutely put pirates on your screen.
So SAFE and LAWLESS have gone. In their place the header now shows the system’s actual law level, coloured from green through amber to red, so you can tell at a glance how far from civilisation you have wandered. Higher law is calmer. Feris is 14. The places people lower their voices about are 1 and 2.
The threat bar has been reworded to match, because it was the third opinion in a two opinion argument. It used to say Low or Moderate or High on a scale of its own, sitting next to the word Threat, sitting next to a badge that said something else entirely. There is now one set of words for danger and it is used everywhere: Calm, Watchful, Unsettled, Hostile, Dangerous and Critical, with the percentage alongside it inside the bar.
Worth saying plainly, because we know how this sort of thing reads. Nothing about the game itself has changed. Not one pirate, not one spawn, not one fight, not one field. Every belt is exactly as busy as it always was. This is only the display finally telling you what the galaxy has been telling you for weeks. Fly carefully in the low numbers.
🔧 Bug Fix
A confession to open with. Mining drones have a durability rating that ticks down while they work, and at zero the drone is finished. What we never noticed is that nothing was actually stopping them. A drone sitting on zero carried on mining exactly as though it were fresh out of the crate, and well over half the drones deployed in the galaxy have been doing precisely that. No excuses, that is a plain miss on our part.
It is fixed. A drone at zero durability now stops. We are not just switching them off and leaving you to work it out, though. Every worn out drone is being collected up and put back in your ship inventory, and you will get a message telling you which ones came home, where they had been working and how much ore they pulled while they were out there.
Look for it in the new Notifications folder in your mail rather than the Inbox, since that is where station traffic lives now. A drone at zero durability cannot be redeployed as it is, but it is not scrap either. Take it to a Ship Repair Office and the materials will put it back to full, ready for another tour. Or take it to a Recycling Centre and get the materials back instead.
🔧Mission Hand in
If you have ever tried to hand in a mission and had absolutely nothing happen, this one is for you. When a hand in fails because you are in the wrong place or short on cargo, the game is meant to tell you which it is. That message quietly stopped appearing a while back, so instead of explaining itself the button simply sat there doing nothing.
Not my finest bit of communication. It works again. Try to hand in a contract you cannot complete and you will be told exactly what is wrong, whether that is where you are standing or how much more of something you still need to find. The same fault had also been keeping the Cargo Expander, Reactor and Manufacturing panels quiet when they should have been speaking up, so those are fixed too.