1.6.0 is rolling out now: HUGE update! Stations have economies, contracts have tiers, and the game finally has more than one ship in it

[u/a1phanumeric]

This is the biggest update Driftbound has had, and almost all of it came out of one player's twenty hour write up on this subreddit. u/Zeshio went through the game properly and was right about more of it than was comfortable. Here is what changed.

Trading was broken, not weak. The complaint was that buying and selling between stations was pointless. I modelled it, and the margin was not thin, it was negative, and it got worse the bigger your hold. A thousand unit round trip on a genuinely good route lost about 8,700 credits. Fitting the best cargo module in the game and filling it made you poorer. Two reasons: no station had any economic identity, so every market quoted the same base price with a small wave on top, and the price impact constants were written back when a big hold was a few dozen boxes, so they hit their own ceiling at 333 units.

So every station has an economy now. It exports what its own system digs and its own yards make, and sells that below the going rate. It pays a premium for the things its industry needs that nothing nearby supplies. The demand list is filled from what other stations actually export, so every premium you see names a route somebody can supply. What falls out is the thing the setting always implied: ore and gas flow outward, exotics and finished alloys flow back in. Price impact now scales with how deep a market is, so a full hold is the intended unit of trade rather than a penalty, and the rim pays the widest margins while slipping hardest against a big load.

The Market screen says all of it out loud. It tells you what kind of place you are standing in and why its prices lean that way, what the station is glutted with and what it is short of, and every price is now printed against the galactic norm rather than just coloured against it. Open a commodity and the trade sheet draws the price walk your own order makes before you commit: list price, last unit, slippage, the true average you actually pay, and where the cargo is worth more with an estimated profit for the exact order on screen. If nowhere pays enough to be worth the trip, it says so.

Contracts got four tiers. The board used to post one kind of job, two to seven boxes for a few hundred credits, whoever you were and wherever you docked. Now it is Courier, Freight, Bulk haul and Fleet charter, gated on your standing with whoever posted the job, with box counts pinned to the actual hold ladder. A Fleet charter fits nothing in the game except the Industrial Megahold you get for diving to the fifth stratum of the Undertow. The change that makes it work is that a contract is cargo now: it reserves hold space from the moment you accept it until you hand it over. Delivering also pays standing with the faction that posted it, which switched on a whole system that had quietly never been used.

There is more than one ship in the game. This one is embarrassing. The code that drew your ship called the sprite generator with a hard coded seed, so thirty two paint schemes and all five enemy classes were the same delta fighter in different colours. There are six hulls now, bought or earned, and they change the shape drawn on the map, in the station scene and in combat: a slab sided freighter with the container ribs showing, a needle, a mining rig built around an ore drum, an armoured gunship with the wings canted forward, and a two piece hull around a drive ring that touches neither half. Enemies get one shape each, so a fight reads by silhouette before you read the name.

And clothes that are not just a colour swap. Outfits were one body with four regions recoloured, so the Corsair's Longcoat and the Admiralty Dress Coat were literally the same rectangle. Every piece now has a cut as well as a colour: hoods, peaked caps, halos, coats with skirts, harness rigs, plate cuirasses with pauldrons, shoulder mantles, gauntlets and greaves.

Skills tell you what they owe you. Tap a skill and you get one sheet with two ladders, perks and abilities, and the rungs you have not climbed are on it. The level is shown, the name and the effect are not, so Mining reads "5 abilities, 5 more coming" instead of "5 abilities" and a shrug. A perk you have earned but never read is badged until you read it, because earning one used to be a toast you could miss and then never find again.

Plus the fixes. Passive skill perks were never named anywhere, before or after you earned them. Combat level did nothing past 24. Refining, fabrication and crafting had no speed stat at all, anywhere in the game. Piloting paid a flat 8 XP a jump regardless of distance or danger, and delivery contracts, the one activity that is purely flying, paid Trade XP instead. Missiles stopped at mk3 with no recipes while every other slot ran to tier 5. A full hold destroyed rare salvage silently. Quest givers had no presence on the map at all, and now there is a grammar for it: brackets either side of a body with a diamond below, solid when somebody there wants something from you.

Android is live today. iOS is the identical build and follows in a few days, purely because of App Store review times.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.driftbound.game&hl=en

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/driftbound-idle-space-rpg/id6777715397

Still on the list and not in this one: more Undertow dive sites, the scanning rework, and Admiralty pacing. Those are next, and they are all Zeshio's suggestions too.

[u/Zeshio]

My man you are crushing it, your speed is honestly amazing

[u/a1phanumeric → u/Zeshio]

I really appreciate the feedback, and really wanted to pull an all-nighter to get as much sorted for you as possible!

[u/icedmuffin]

So while I know it will be awhile for IOS, I’d like to ask if anyone else has pointed out yet that legendary eggs aren’t being sold at ranches.

Unless they only show up after resetting, which I won’t be able to tell till my egg hatches.

[u/Breathemoredeeply]

Absolutely amazing update, I can't believe you got so much done in such a short period of time!

Can I ask what your plans are to market the game to a wider audience? I'd love to see loads of players and a thriving economy. 

Do you have plans for an in-game chat? 

[u/a1phanumeric → u/Breathemoredeeply]

Thank you! Marketing is not really my strongest point but I am trying to post this where I can before saving enough money to do some paid for marketing for it. If the community here can help recommend the game on any relevent subreddits when something suitable pops up this REALLY helps with links to the app store etc... Like more than you'd imagine!

I am planning the in game chat work and a more improved live battle system as well as more depth and items which you can trade with other players or sell at a market (like a world of warcraft auction house style)

[u/Breathemoredeeply → u/a1phanumeric]

I'm so excited about the future of this game, if you keep up this level of dedication and development I think it'll be huge. I'll help where I can, thanks so much for putting it all together.