Until now, past the rocks and the stations there was only backdrop. Handsome, but identical whichever way you turned: nothing told you where you were heading. From today every sector has celestial bodies of its own, in plain sight and at real distance.
A different world in every place
This is not one planet repainted in seven colours. There are three kinds of world, and you tell them apart instantly by the way light falls on them:
| Kind | How it reads |
|---|---|
| Gas | Turning bands of cloud, sometimes a great spot, and a rim of air at the edge |
| Rock | Craters and dark seas, and the shadow falls knife-edged: no air to soften it |
| Ice | A smooth mantle with fractures and polar caps |
Some carry rings — with the planet’s own shadow thrown across them — and some carry moons.
Who gets what: Zeta System has a ringed giant, Axios Base a vast rock, the Human Base an icy world with its moon, the Alcyone Veil a smaller icy one, Earendel a distant ochre gas giant, and the Crucible a banked-ember giant with a spot.
And the sun is visible. It had been lighting the sector all along, but there was no way to tell where the light came from. Now it is there, and the glint that runs along your hull as you turn agrees with it.
They work as a compass
They sit more than twelve thousand units out, well beyond the sector boundary: you cannot reach them and you cannot collide with them. That is deliberate. Since you never close the distance no matter how hard you fly, they barely shift — which makes them a fixed reference. Leave the station with the giant on your right, and you know you are on your way back when it sits on your left.
Sharp stars
The sky is now drawn in two layers: nebula gas behind, and the stars in front, point by point. They stay fine at any resolution, the brightest ones bloom the way a lit engine does, and there is a Milky Way band where they gather.
You can see who is in front of you
This is the change you notice most in flight. Hulls are now drawn at the size they would have up close, so a frigate at fifteen hundred units reads as a frigate rather than a grey dot. Each class has its own setting, and fighters get the least help of all: they stay small and slippery, which is their trade.
The diamond that marked every contact now appears only when a hull is too small to read. If you can see the ship, nothing covers it. The box around your locked target stays exactly as it was.
Aim does not change. A lock tracks the centre of the ship, not its outline, and clicking with the mouse still lands precisely where you see it.
Dust, and fields that announce themselves
Space dust now passes at three different distances: the near layer crosses the screen far faster than the far one, and that difference is what reads as speed. Hold still and it fades.
And every asteroid field carries a veil of dust that makes it visible from a long way off, so you can see where to go and mine before you get there. Fly into the field and the veil steps aside.
Enemies no longer look like wreckage
Patrolling ships now move at twice the pace when they are not fighting — enough that you can tell they are alive from across the sector. And no crewed ship shows up with its engines dark any more: even holding position, the drives are lit.
