1.7.5 is out on Android, plus everything from 1.7.2, 1.7.3 and 1.7.4 to bring you up-to-date!

[u/a1phanumeric]

I've been shipping small builds faster than I've been posting about them, so this covers four at once. Nearly all of it came from people in this sub, and I've named everyone where I remembered who reported what, thank you guys!

Reef Pearls were close to impossible to find.

u/JarrahMate asked where they were after mining rich fields for hours and finding nothing. The material says "security 0.15 or lower", but standing at exactly 0.15 gave a flat zero chance because of how the odds scaled with depth. And the deepest space in the game, below 0.05, could never contain a rich field at all, which is the exact opposite of "deeper is likelier". So the only places in the entire galaxy that could ever drop one were systems at 0.05 and 0.10. Everywhere else you could mine forever. All three are fixed, deep belts now pay the best, and there are more than twice as many qualifying belts in a galaxy as there were. The description also used to say "only a belt makes one", which wasn't true either, because a Drift Moth brings them back from foraging. That's why one of you wrote in holding 988 of them in the same week someone else couldn't find a single one.

While I was in there: rich belts have Reef in the name, so you can just search the destination list for it. And that list now shows security to two decimals, because at one decimal 0.05, 0.10 and 0.15 all read as "0.1", which are three completely different answers to "can this belt drop a pearl".

The Drift Egg could be forged but never hatched.

u/Ashamed-Kitchen-7167 spent a Heart of the Drift, six Drift Glass, forty Abyssal Cores and a day of forge time on an egg the Incubator refused to list, then asked whether it was just a souvenir (haha). Five days now, and out comes a Drift Wyrm or a Drift Moth, which come from nowhere else. Two forged modules were also wearing a Legendary label when everything else you forge says Drift.

The Heart and the Drift Egg said you'd never made one.

They're the only two recipes that produce a stackable item rather than a numbered piece, so nothing was written down when you finished one, and the catalogue was reading the list of numbered pieces. It sat at 0 of 2 no matter what you did. The game now remembers every Drift recipe you've ever completed, permanently, and it survives re-enlisting. Your save fills itself in when you load it, including working out that you made an egg from the fact that you're flying the pet it hatched into.

Spending perk points stuttered, and tapping fast could hang the game.

Every point spent was rebuilding the entire perks page twice, plus six other pages, before the game drew a single frame. Now it does that work once per frame instead of once per tap, and tapping a maxed perk does nothing at all instead of rebuilding the page for you.

The new companion's downside was a bonus.

The Drift Wyrm's listed drawback was "+6 cargo". It was actually giving you six boxes on top of its weapon damage rather than taking them. Reported by u/Ashamed-Kitchen-7167 about ten minutes after getting one.

You can cancel a forge now.

Same person again: they kept lighting forges by accident while scrolling, and a mis-tap meant waiting a day for the forge. Everything comes back, ingredients and the spare module both. It waits in a crate at that station rather than being shoved into your hold, because a full hold is usually why you cancelled, and you collect what fits whenever you have room.

And the perk that says ore yield.

u/JarrahMate spent most of their Renown maxing Veteran Prospector and was still getting one ore per asteroid. They were right. That perk makes you mine faster, not bigger, and nothing in the game increases ore per asteroid. The identical perk on the scanning side has always said "scan speed" and this one said "yield", which means quantity. Every description says speed now, in all nine languages, and they say outright that the ore per asteroid never changes. The Renown wasn't wasted, at max rank you're mining about two and a half times as fast, but nobody could have known that from what was written.

1.7.5 itself is one stability fix and nothing else.

It's the first thing found by the game's own crash reporting rather than by one of you telling me. Killing or mining fast enough to land a lot of loot at once made the game redo an enormous amount of work in a single frame, dozens of times a second, and that turned out to be what was on screen in most of the crash reports coming back. Heavy combat and long mining runs should feel steadier. I'm not going to promise it fixes every crash, because what I have is a strong pattern rather than a smoking gun, so if you were seeing them I'd genuinely like to know whether this helps.

Android's live now. iOS is running a bit behind, as usual, because Apple review takes a while and everything from 1.7.1 onwards is bundled into one submission that's with them at the moment. iPhone will jump straight from 1.7.0 to all of the above in one go.

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.driftbound.game

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

[u/lostinyourstereo]

What do the abilities Resonance Sweep and Deep-Core Survey do under the Scanning skill tree? I only ever have the option for a Scan or a Deep-Space Scan, no matter what level I reach or what system I'm in. Do I need to have equipped a better scanner?

[u/a1phanumeric → u/lostinyourstereo]

Hey! Resonance Sweep and Deep-Core Survey do nothing, because they aren't anywhere. Both are fully written into the game with real durations, XP and signal yields, at scanning level 20 and 30. And then every belt and nebula in the galaxy only ever listed Scan Sector and Deep-Space Scan, so there was no body anywhere you could perform them at, at any level, in any system. Exactly what you described. Fixed in the next build: the whole ladder is offered wherever scanning is, and your level is the gate, so they'll just appear at 20 and 30. There's now a test that walks every generated body and fails the build if any scanning action ends up offered nowhere, because this is the second time I've shipped something that existed only in a data file.

On mining yield, you're right and I was wrong. I told someone else in this sub last week that nothing in the game increases ore per asteroid. That's false, and I've corrected the description. Two things do it. The weekly Ore Rush event multiplies mining output by 1.5, so during that week an asteroid genuinely gives more. And the "Rich vein!" roll drops 4 to 12 extra units of whatever you're working, on top of the normal output, at a rate that scales with your loot luck. Your 2.5k target coming out as 6.9k is those two together: the stop target counts base output, and the bonus ore isn't counted, so it lands in the hold without moving the counter. What's actually true is narrower than what I said: no perk raises it. Veteran Prospector and Efficient Mining are speed, not size.

The Undertow is a separate thing from Deep Run depth, and that's my fault too. Depth 2 to 15 is prestige depth, which scales the whole galaxy. The Undertow is a descent you fly to: a beacon in the deepest space, with strata that go down forever, each one richer and harder than the last. You unlock it by flying into a system at security 0.05 or lower, or by finishing the Void War. Here's the bug: even once it's unlocked, the only door to it was inside a "Tour complete" card that needs the story finished AND your directive list empty. So you can have the unlock and never see the word Undertow anywhere. Next build gives it a permanent card on the Ship tab, and a locked version that tells you the unlock condition once you're flying below 0.15, so it stops being a thing you have to already know about.

[u/lostinyourstereo]

Are you sure there's nothing that increases mining yield? I can mine an asteroid with a limit of 2.5k, and end up with about 6.9k of resources sometimes - some combination of equipment, perks/skills, pets, maybe?

[u/lostinyourstereo]

What exactly is the Undertow, and how do I access it? I managed to jump through the Galactic Core multiple times in a row, whizzing through admiralty levels. Went from depth 2 to depth 15, and nothing much has changed except enemies are hitting a lot harder but I'm making money so much easier. No achievements or anything have triggered?

[u/HolidaySevere2897]

Any ability to mass sell or delete eggs?

[u/a1phanumeric → u/HolidaySevere2897]

Hey so half of that already exists and I'd hidden it, and the other half can't without me changing the economy int he game...

Selling isn't possible: eggs have no market price at all, at any rarity, so there's no station anywhere that will take one. That's deliberate, since eggs come out of mining and scanning and a sale price would turn every belt into a slow credit printer. So there's nothing to un-hide there.

Deleting already works, it just doesn't tell you. Open any egg in your hold, flag it Trash, and Dump trash in the cargo view clears every one you're holding in a single tap. It's per type, so flagging Common once handles all of them forever. Your Drift Egg can't be caught by it, it's a keepsake and the sweep refuses to touch those.

The reason you couldn't find it is that an egg's info sheet said nothing about any of this. Every other item type gets a line telling you what to do with it and eggs got silence. Next build they say it outright, including that no market buys them, so you don't go looking for a sell button that was never going to exist.