The Founding Update

You can put your name to something now. A House takes a charter, fifteen signatures and a million credits — and once it stands, it is yours.

Houses

A House is a guild, and it belongs to your faction.

File a charter for 100,000 credits. It reserves the name while you gather your people, so nobody takes it out from under you halfway.

Collect fifteen signatures from other pilots of your flag. This is the real barrier: credits are a question of how long you grind, but fifteen pilots who want to be in your House are not.

Register for 900,000 and it exists. Everyone who signed is a founding member — they already said yes.

Ranks : Head of House, Officers, Members. Officers admit and remove; the Head promotes, hands over, or disbands.

A Head who vanishes does not strand the House. After thirty days away, an officer can claim it. Nobody should need to write to us to get their own House back.

Hockey

One puck. Two nets. Most goals wins. Hockey is a League now, not a battleground — you do not queue for it. Your House plays a fixture against another House, and the result goes in a table.

Fly into the puck to take it. Your ship carries it — but not for long. Hold it too long and it slips, so nobody skates the length of the rink alone. Hockey has always been a passing game.

Your gun is your stick. Fire shoots the puck, hard, wherever your nose is pointing. Bomb is the softer touch — a pass a teammate can actually take. No new keys to learn.

The boards are live. A pass banked off the wall keeps most of its pace. It is a real play, not a mistake.

Your net is the one behind you — red at one end, blue at the other, so you always know which way you are shooting.

There Is A Referee, And He Is Watching

He is a bot, he does not miss, and he will not be argued with.

Camp the crease and your goal is waved off. Stand in the goalmouth and the whistle goes; the puck comes back to centre.

Shoot a goalie in his own crease and you get two minutes. Straight to the box, out past the boards, while the other side plays a man up. The power play is the best thing in hockey.

Dump it the length of the rink and that is icing — face-off back in your own end. You gave up the zone you were trying to clear.

Nobody is appointed goalie. Whoever is standing in the crease is the goalie while they are standing there, exactly like every pick-up game ever played.

Every call is announced, so you always know what just happened and why.

A Ladder Worth Climbing

You could reach level 17 in an afternoon. One daily mission was worth two and a half levels at level 15, and would have been worth almost nothing at level 90.

Level 100 is about six months of real play , four hours a day. Level 15 is about two hours, so the early game still moves.

Every level costs more than the last — steeply to level 70, then more gently. The last stretch should be long, not a wall.

Mission rewards are a share of your level now , not a slice of the credit payout, so a daily is worth the same progress at level 8 and level 80.

The cap never moves. An expansion will not ask you to climb past 100.

Quest Givers Stay Put

Hail a story NPC and they would fly off along their patrol while you were still reading the first sentence — and the conversation closed itself when they got far enough away.

They stop. For everyone: another pilot can fly over, see them parked, and hail them too.

They carry on from exactly where they stopped. The time you spent talking simply never happened for them.

A follow-up quest opens in the same window instead of hanging up and making you hail the same person again.

Pirates Have Names Again

Pirates were all called "Pirate Raider". They have fifty-five names now, carried over from Bounty Hunters, and they are exactly as dignified as a pirate deserves. Faction patrols keep their proper callsigns.

Safe Zones Are Actually Safe

No loot ever spawns inside a safe zone. Loot is deliberately dropped near players, so a pilot sitting still in a zone was the easiest target it had — items were landing on people who had docked to be left alone.

Typing Is Just Typing

Key binds no longer fire while you are typing. Writing "map" in a chat or report box opened the galaxy map mid-word. Every text field is covered, including ones added later.

Escape gives things up in order — the window you have open, then your selected target, then the game menu.

Leagues

Hockey is not a battleground any more. It is a league, and your House is the team.

A team is a House. Four factions would be four teams and a round robin finished in an evening. Houses give a table with dozens of names in it.

A fixture is cross-faction. Your House still flies one flag; who it plays ignores that entirely. Vanguard's Iron Wolves against Void's Night Runners is a normal Tuesday.

Fixtures have a week, not a kickoff time. The season draws the whole list in advance and each one is played whenever both Houses can field a team before its deadline. Nobody has to be online at 8pm on a Tuesday.

Enter with three or more. Name a squad from your House's own roster; it can change during the season, because one pilot going quiet should not end everyone else's.

The table is a table. Played, won, drawn, lost, goal difference, points. Press X .

Seasons

The game now runs on a calendar. A season is 180 days and ships as an expansion of three chapters — the main story plus the faction lines and side quests that hang off it — and the chapters open 60 days apart rather than all on the first day.

Chapter one opens with the season , the next two follow, and the last still has months left to be played rather than landing in the final week.

When a chapter opens is decided by the server , so everyone gets the same answer to "is chapter two out yet" — not a different one depending on who has patched.

The Succession, Chapters Two and Three

Season 1's story is finished. Two new chapters for the main arc and for all four faction arcs — 120 new quests , bringing the game to 214.

Chapter Two, "The Siege." Admiral-Regent Duur closes three battle groups on Sanctum Reach and declares the Neutral Zone a protectorate. Eleven days of running a cordon, and then the discovery that the fleet besieging you is not being paid by the Concordat. Somebody wants this succession contested, loudly, in the open — and it costs you the one person who vouched for you.

Chapter Three, "A Candidate of No House." The Charter test convenes. The claim against you is entirely legal, and you cannot out-fight it. You have to out-record it: trace one account number across twenty years and six jurisdictions before the test closes.

Each faction sees it from its own side. On the night the array is held, the Concordat is ordered to fire on it, the Void gives up the best raid it will ever be offered, the Path carries the statements out, and the Shroud keeps four lanterns lit and loses three routes doing it. Same four minutes, four vantages, and no one flag sees all of it.

Run all four flags and you get something extra. Each faction ends Season 1 holding one fragment of the same answer. Alone each is a shrug. Together they are what Season 2 is about.

A Library You Write By Flying

There is a Factions door in the Cantina now, and behind it is every flag in the galaxy — including the three you did not take.

Read any of them. Homeland, leadership, how their pilots fly, what they are good and bad at, and who they count as an enemy. The same words you were shown when you chose, so nothing drifts.

The galaxy's own story sits above the four , because the Succession belongs to everybody.

The story fills in as you fly it. A chapter's entries are the missions you have finished, in your own order of events. A chapter you have not touched is listed but blank — you can see there is more without being told what it is.

The cast arrives the same way. Somebody joins your list of notable figures once you have actually worked with them. Until then they are a number, and the story keeps its turns.

A pilot who reads nothing loses nothing. A pilot who reads everything ends a Season with a record of what they personally did to the galaxy.

Flying

Ships bank into turns again. They had stopped, quietly, when steering moved to the ratchet: banking was reading the stick rather than the ship, and on a server-authoritative world most ships — often including your own — are drawn from the network instead of from your input. It now watches what the hull actually does, so anything that turns leans, whoever is flying it. The harder you turn the deeper it goes, and the faster you are going the more of it you get: a ship pivoting on the spot barely tilts.

The camera sits a little closer , at 65 units instead of 75.

Station menus wear the station's colours. The buttons in a Trade Depot were coming up in your faction's colour inside an amber frame, which read as controls from another window.

A Title That Burns

The main menu wears the real thing now. REDUX is a model, not a picture — scratched steel plate, molten seams, rivets — lit and turning under its own light rather than sitting flat on the background.

It is on fire. Not a filter over the logo: the flames are placed on the letters themselves, found from the shape of the word, so the gaps between letters stay dark the way they should.

Tick Hardcore and the mark bleeds. Drips form on the low points of the letterforms — the underside of a C, the foot of an R — and fall slowly, because blood is heavy. Untick it and the bleeding stops cleanly.

One splash screen instead of two. The game title card is gone; the studio logo stays.

Everything Looks Like It Was Made

If the ships, stations and orbitals have ever looked flatter in game than they did in the art, this is why — and it is fixed.

Colour grading was running in low dynamic range while everything else rendered in high. Every highlight was being crushed flat before the grade ever saw it.

Gameplay had no tonemapping at all , alone among every other scene in the game.

Nothing had an environment to reflect. Metal takes almost all of its colour from what it reflects, and every scene was set to reflect a sky that was never there — so hulls fell back on bare highlights and lost their depth.

The menu is lit properly. The local star has moved: the planet now sits half in light and half in dark, and orbitals brighten as they come round before passing behind it again.

Under The Hood

"Alliance" is now "Faction" everywhere you read it — pilot creation, the chat channel label, the delete warning. It was always called a faction in conversation and an alliance on screen.

The daily reward button stays put and says "CLAIMED TODAY" rather than vanishing once you have taken it.

Two pilots on one account no longer share a record. A second pilot could inherit the first one's bounty.

Prediction is a server setting now , set once by the main admin. Two pilots on different models are not watching the same fight.

Restart countdowns work properly , and the game will tell you when a newer client is out.