The Escape Hatch Update

This whole update came out of one review. A pilot who knew Continuum installed Redux, could not recommend it, and wrote down exactly why — four specific things, none of them unfair. Three of them are fixed below and the fourth turned out to be us.

Escape Does What Escape Does

Escape only ever closed an open window. With nothing open it did nothing at all , and the only way to leave was a numbered key on the action bar you had to go and find.

Escape with a window open closes that window, as before.

Escape with nothing open opens a Game Menu — Options, Support, Log Out, Exit Game, Return to Game. The rule every player already arrives knowing.

Settings are reachable in flight for the first time. Before this you could only change anything from the main menu — undock, and the whole settings screen was gone until you quit.

Exit is off the action bar. Nobody should have to discover which number key logs them out. It stays in the catalogue, so anyone who wants it back can put it on any slot.

The Galaxy Map took the freed station, promoted from the second bar. In a hundred-sector galaxy the map is the panel you reach for without stopping, and it belongs beside the cargo hold: where am I, and what have I got.

Logging out still runs the safe-zone countdown it always did — leaving is not an escape from a fight.

Your Own Flag Is Not A Wall

Ships were solid to each other, all of them, always. That is a tax on exactly the play this game is for: in a corridor the pilot in front is a wall, and holding a formation costs more attention than the fight does.

Pilots under the same flag now fly through each other. Stack, attach, thread a corridor as a unit — your own side is never in your way.

Everyone else stays solid. Ramming an enemy is still a tactic and a blockade is still a real thing to fly into.

Drones and pirates fly under no flag, so they are nobody's ally and keep bumping as before.

It works the same everywhere , deliberately. A rule that changed at a border would turn a stacked wing into six solid hulls the moment it crossed one.

Every Key On The Bar, Shown

The second action bar showed "?" on every slot — as if Missions, Journal, Social, Talents, Tracking, the Technical Order and Issue Report answered to nothing at all. They all ship with a key, and now every cap says which one.

Slots you have rebound show your key, not the default.

Empty slots show nothing instead of "?". There is nothing to be unbound from.

An Hour, Every Time

The warning before a restart used to be attached to the big builds and not to the quick ones. A small server-side update could take the world down with no notice at all — which is exactly what happened to one player, who then spent the evening being told Steam had rejected his login when in truth we were restarting the servers underneath him.

Every kind of update now announces itself , not just the long ones. An update cannot go out until players are being counted down.

You get at least an hour, then reminders at 30, 15, 10, 5, 3 and 1 minutes, and again at 30 and 10 seconds.

Smaller Things

Pilot creation arrives with your class's recommended attribute spread already filled in. Change every point if you want to, or press Next. You were being asked to spend permanent points before you had flown once, which is a decision nobody can make well.

The hangar's power presets now show which one is selected — it was a tint you could not see — and INTERCEPTOR fits its button instead of being cut to "INTERCEP…".