Career 2.0 Development Update

Ahoy, Cosmoteers!

I'd like to start with an apology: There has been way too little communication from me (Walt, Cosmoteer's lead developer) about the status of and progress towards the upcoming "Career 2.0" update. I've so often promised "we're working on it", but with so little actually shown, that's a hollow promise. Many of you have been rightfully disappointed and/or angry that no update is in sight with little-to-no communication from us. I would feel the same way if I were you. Many of you have been skeptical that we're even still working on Cosmoteer. We are , but given our silence, I completely understand the skepticism. That silence is completely my fault, not the fault of anyone else on the dev team. (Blame me, not them.) I'm sorry, and I promise to do better. This post is the beginning of that. (Buckle up, it's a long one!)

The rest of this post will try to answer three big questions you may have:

1. Why has there been so little news about Career 2.0, and will that be changing?
2. Why is Career 2.0 taking so long?
3. What progress has been made on Career 2.0?

But there's another question you may have which this post will not answer: When will Career 2.0 be released? And the reason I can't answer it is simply: I don't know. It'll take as long as it takes. I could make up a date or timeline, but I'd be lying to you. The only things I can say for sure right now are that it's not coming out within the next few months, and that we're working as fast as we can without sacrificing quality.

Why has there been so little news about Career 2.0, and will that be changing?

There are three things I screwed up that led to me not communicating enough about Career 2.0. None are excuses. Just acknowledgements of how I screwed up so that I can do better in the future.

1. I was scared of backlash if features I showed off didn't end up making it into the game exactly as I showed them. I thought of game devs like Sean Murray (of No Man's Sky) who talked about, showed off, and promised features that ended up being either very different or missing entirely, and players (rightfully) felt misled and angry as a result. I wanted to avoid that, and so I adopted a policy of not showing works-in-progress or announcing features until they were basically ready to ship. That works fine for updates that take days, weeks, or maybe even a couple months to develop. But for updates the size of Career 2.0 (and in hindsight, probably Meltdown Update as well), that policy means extremely long periods of no communication. So I've decided to relax that policy and trust that you all will be understanding if a feature I talk about or show ends up getting cut or changed.
2. And to the extent that I was communicating anything at all, it was within a bubble: The Cosmoteer Discord server. To be clear, I wasn't talking about or showing much Career 2.0 stuff on there either, but I was at least active and dropping occasional hints. It wasn't enough, but I think that active Discord members could at least tell that I was working on it. And for me that felt like I was being more communicative than I was, because of course only a small fraction of Cosmoteer players are active on the Discord. I wasn't communicating enough, and when I was, it was mostly only inside that bubble.
3. I let the Roadmap go far too long without being updated. At first this was because we were still figuring out how Career 2.0 was changing and I wasn't sure how to update the Roadmap. But eventually we did figure most of that out, and I still dropped the ball on updating it. I kept telling myself "I'll do it next week" or "I'll do it after we decide about feature X". Higher-priority things kept coming up, and I figured it wasn't a big deal, but in hindsight I think it should've been a much higher priority.

So, how will communication be changing going forward?

1. First of all, I finally updated the Roadmap*! (And will prioritize keeping it updated going forward.) The only changes are to the two sections covering Career Mode:
2. The Phase 3 update is now called "Career Mode 2.0" (previously "Career Mode 1.5"). I think that's more fitting for how significant an overhaul it will be. And I fleshed out the Career 2.0 feature list to give a better sense of what it will include. I will continue fleshing it out (especially the "Gameplay Systems Overhaul", which right now is very vague because we're still figuring out how to overhaul the mentioned systems) as we make progress.
3. We decided to defer a couple of features (Dynamic Economy and Configurable Ship A.I.) until a later "Career 2.5" update, currently planned for Phase 6. I'm sorry for the disappointment this causes for those of you looking forward to these features. (I'm disappointed too!) We felt that we needed to reduce the scope of Career 2.0 and these were the features that didn't synergize with our other plans.
4. And second, a promise to you: I will post at least one development update every month until Career 2.0 is released. (And likely continuing afterwards too.) The posts will be here on Steam like this one, and announced on the Discord as well. Consider this post to be the post for October 2026. To set expectations, future posts will almost certainly be nowhere near as lengthy as this one (this one has a lot of catching up to do!), but I'm confident we'll have at least one new cool thing to show off or talk about every month. (Unless I get hit by a bus. :P)

*NOTE: Only the English Roadmap has been updated. I just sent the updates off for translation. The other languages will be updated once I get the translations back.

Why is Career 2.0 taking so long?

I am as frustrated as anyone that development progress on Career 2.0 (and in general) has gone so slowly. No one wishes it were going faster more than I do, I promise. There are a multitude of reasons why, but unlike the lack of communication, it's hard to see most of them as clear screw-ups to be corrected (though there's always room for improvement) rather than as the natural product of a number of factors working against us. Again, none of these are meant as excuses, but for transparency, here are what I think are the six things slowing down development the most. They are in no particular order, other than the first two are specific to Career 2.0 and the remaining four apply to Cosmoteer development in general (with the final two specific to me personally).

1. Design churn and reboots. Our plans for Career 2.0 have gone through at least two full redesigns since Cosmoteer's early access launch. That's largely due to a lack of clear vision and poor scoping on my part. It doesn't help that content design (Career 2.0 is a content-focused update) is not really my strong suit as a designer; I'm much better at systems and interaction design. I wish my vision had been clearer much earlier, though arguably to a certain extent that's just a natural part of game development. I feel much better about the current vision and scope though.
2. Major new code/tech systems. Our plans for Career 2.0 required us to build major new code systems in order to support the desired features and content. The two biggest of those (multi-sector and mission scripting) I talk about below. They are both mostly finished and working at this point, but they each added months of work.
3. Cosmoteer is an extremely complex game. Most games have maybe 2-3 major gameplay systems that interact with each other. Cosmoteer has physics, combat, crew A.I., resource management, ship building, ship painting, ship destruction, ship A.I., user interface (U.I.), and multiplayer, just to name a handful off the top of my head. And most of those systems interact with most of the other systems, meaning even a simple change to one often touches several, and adding something like support for a new type of mission could involve changes to literally all of those (except painting... probably). That interaction between systems is Cosmoteer's greatest strength (how many other games have fully-flexible ship building and physics-driven combat and ship destruction and a crew simulation and resource management?), but as a result almost every change or new feature takes much longer than you'd think.
4. We spend a lot of time just maintaining Cosmoteer. By "maintaining" I mean things like fixing bugs, working on balance, and adding quality-of-life features. This is kind of related to the previous point, because a game this complex tends to produce more bugs and other issues than a simpler game, and those bugs and issues generally take more time to track down and fix. Plus there's all the time I personally spend reading player feedback, triaging bug reports, discussing balance changes, and answering questions. I estimate that I spend at least as much time doing maintenance as I do actually working on new features. But I feel it's necessary in order to maintain the game to my quality standards.
5. Maintaining a business takes time too. These are things like bookkeeping, paying people, marketing, filing taxes, filing other business forms, managing (awesome) contractors, reviewing work, writing news and social media posts, etc. None of these are huge time sinks individually, but they all add up.
6. Personal burnout. I've been working on Cosmoteer for many, many years now. I love and am extremely proud of this game, and I'm excited for its future, but I'd be lying if I said working on the same game for so long didn't take its toll on my energy. I've definitely gone through some periods of being a lot less productive than I'd like, which honestly I think is pretty normal on a project this long.

What progress has been made on Career 2.0?

Now for the fun part! What follows is a look at some of the biggest features we've implemented so far for Career 2.0. Almost all of this work was done since the Meltdown Update.

But first, I must emphasize, all of what I show here are works in progress. The screenshots and video are rough and unpolished. Some have debug visuals turned on. All of it is not just subject to change, but likely to. Some features may end up being very different or removed altogether by the time Career 2.0 releases.

Galaxy Map Restructuring

The foundation of Career 2.0 is a restructuring of the galaxy map that splits each star system into smaller individual sectors of various types such as planetary trade hubs, asteroid belt mining zones, and solar research stations. Here's an example of a local star system map (note that the icons and graphics are placeholder):

Splitting star systems into sectors allows us to make them more varied and purposeful with more interesting challenges, while the smaller size should improve performance, load times, and saved game sizes. While each of these individual sectors is smaller than a whole star system in Career 1.0, added up I expect each star system to have considerably more (and more fun/varied) content than before.

And here's a GIF showing the galaxy map and zooming into an individual star system. (Note that this is about as work-in-progress as you can get. We're still figuring out exactly how we want stars/sectors to connect to each other for hyper-jumping, and the visuals and zoom transitions need polish.)

Cosmoteer dev Celeste did most of the technical work on this restructure. It is essentially done, save for some polish and figuring out the new jump mechanics.

Sector Type Prototyping

Meanwhile, Cosmoteer dev Luke has spent much of his time prototyping different types of sectors.

One of the most common sectors will likely be Planetary Sectors , serving as the major trade hubs of star systems. Here you can see a large planet in the center with a couple moons in "orbit" (but no, they don't actually orbit) around it. That orange/red ring (graphics are placeholder) around the planet is an experimental new kind of nebula/cloud akin to a magnetic field or solar wind that blows/pushes ships within it in one direction, kind of like a boat in a river.

Another type of sector you'll likely encounter is an Asteroid Belt Mining Zone , where the local faction has set up an operation to mine an especially resource-rich region of an asteroid belt. In the screenshot below (where I have turned on a debug view so you can see each asteroid as a tiny white speck), you can see the belt running horizontally-ish through the sector. (Open it in full-screen if you can't see the dots.) The belt is dense and difficult to traverse (especially for large ships), but there are four pass-throughs that have been cleared for ship transit. Missions in asteroid belt sectors may involve capturing or defending these pass-throughs from pirates or other factions.

Many Cosmoteer players enjoy the difficult challenge of "sundiving", which inspired us to create Solar Sectors that are extremely near each system's star. The stars in these sectors feel far more appropriately massive . (This screenshot is zoomed out all the way, and you still can't see the whole star on-screen.) Expect new kinds of missions and challenges that take you sundiving into the star's heat zone.

Or at the opposite extreme, you may encounter Deep Space sectors at the edges of star systems. Dense with clouds and storms, these sectors are where pirate lairs and secret faction bases often hide.

(As a reminder, these sector types and their contents are still pretty experimental. Expect changes!)

Multiplayer Multi-Sector Support

Those of you who've played multiplayer Career mode likely understand the frustration of wanting to jump to a new star system before your co-op partners are ready, which Cosmoteer currently forbids for technical reasons. Indeed, this is one of the most frequent complaints, and if we don't fix it, then splitting star systems into smaller sectors will obviously make it even worse.

But thanks to Celeste's hard work, I'm happy to say that this is no longer an issue: Every player can now be in a different sector or even in different star systems. I know that sounds simple, but you'll have to trust me that it was a monumental amount of work requiring major refactors to Cosmoteer's code. And as a bonus, Cosmoteer can typically split the work of simulating each sector onto different CPU cores, which should hopefully improve multiplayer performance too.

This will definitely be supported in Career 2.0, but we're also tentatively planning to release multi-sector support early for Career 1.0 as soon as we iron out the last few issues.

Mission Prototyping

Luke has also been working on prototyping new, more interesting types of missions. I'll show you one example, which starts when you stumble upon a secret listening post inside a gas cloud near an enemy base. If you hail it, it'll offer you a mission to protect a scouting ship as it scans the enemy base for weaknesses.

You then escort the scouting ship to a position of your choosing near the enemy base. Once close enough, it'll hail you and ask to begin scanning. The scanning will alert the enemy base, so you'll need to be prepared to fend off several waves of attacks during the scan. For an extra challenge (and rewards), you can tell it to do an intensive scan before each wave, which will make the enemy's attacks stronger.

Fend off every wave, and you'll be rewarded for the valuable intel. Or if it's too much, bail early and leave with what you managed to get.

(Note that much of the text in the above screenshots, including both dialogue and mission objectives, is placeholder.)

Random Encounter System

The above mission is a "regular" mission of the kind that you typically get from a station's mission board. But we've also added a whole system for "random encounters", which are special missions or other events that happen occasionally at random as you fly around a sector. A simple such encounter might start when you detect a nearby distress signal:

You can choose to ignore it or go investigate. In this case, if you go investigate it, you'll find a trade ship that is being attacked by marauders. It hails you and asks for your help.

If you can destroy the marauders before they destroy the trade ship (or you), then the trade ship will thank you for your help, promising to tell the galaxy of your good deeds. (Hey, at least you got a few fame points for your efforts!)

This is just one possible outcome. Sometimes a distress signal could be a trap with enemies lying in wait to ambush you, or perhaps it's a ship that broke down, needing supplies for repairs or a tow to the nearest shipyard.

Mission/Sector Scripting System

The large majority of my own work on Career 2.0 has gone towards massively expanding Cosmoteer's scripting tools used to create those new sector and mission types. In Career 1.0, these tools were limited and inflexible, and they proved insufficient for the variety and complexity of activities and sectors we want for Career 2.0. They have been replaced with what is effectively a full custom scripting language built into Cosmoteer (and written inside the .rules files) that controls both sector generation/spawning and mission logic. It has various scripting features like triggers and events, variables, conditionals, arbitrary math/boolean/list expressions, compound shapes, and lots more. Things that would've been nearly impossible in Career 1.0, such as missions with branching paths or "a pirate base surrounded on three sides by ion storms with a heavily-guarded entrance", are now practical to implement in Career 2.0.

And yes, modders will absolutely have access to this new scripting system. To give you a taste for how it works, here is the rules code for the above distress signal encounter.

That's all for now!

Thanks for reading what has to be the longest post in Cosmoteer's history! I hope it helps you better understand where Career 2.0 is at and why it's taking so long. I'll be back near the end of November for another (much shorter) update.

Walt