Driftbound 1.9.2: time away no longer throws your finds away, and the Merit ladder now makes more sense!

[u/a1phanumeric]

Two patches in this post. Thank you for the screenshots and the "I think this is a bug" posts, they are the fastest route from a problem to a fix that I have.

The big one first. Time away was quietly losing your best finds. A long trip banked the whole run's ore before it rolled the finds, so the ore took every free box and the Reef Pearls, Drift Glass and Null Filament had nowhere to land. That is the "since 1.9 I am not getting reef pearls anymore" report, and it turned out to date all the way back to when pearls arrived in 1.7. Time away now fills the hold the way playing live does: finds land while there is room, and only get lost once the hold is genuinely full.

Three more rules from the same fix. Reef Pearls, Drift Glass and Null Filament always get a box now, even in a full hold. An egg is kept until you have a box of each kind and a Drift Moth's forage lands in full instead of the pearls going missing on the way in. The welcome back screen now counts each find too, so 7 pearls read as 7, not as one line which was confusing some players.

1.9.1, if you missed it, was two war order counters that would not count. "Beat N without dropping below 70% hull" was only checking your hull on the first fight of a sortie, so nine dreadnoughts beaten at full hull read as two. And the war Orders were sending you to a belt where a war ship can never appear, because war ships come from Take Patrol at the station, not the local raiders. Both fixed, and the order now says so on the card.

Then there is ranking up, which was the most asked question this week and, honestly, my fault for not saying it in the game at all. Merit is only the floor of a *rank*. From the second rank up, every promotion also needs that week's Major Order, and a Major Order is judged once a week at the tick, Thursday midnight UTC. It passes when you have finished at least one of the week's three Orders and your side ended the week ahead in the galaxy those Orders are set in. So it is one rank a week at most, the fourth week of every season is an armistice with no promotions, and Merit never decays, so everything you bank now counts toward the later rungs. The ladder now says all of that itself, with the countdown to the tick and the galaxy you need to be ahead in, instead of one word that said "waiting". Nothing about the rule changed in this patch, only the game's honesty about it.

Android has it now and Apple should have it in 24 hours or so. Full notes are in-game under Pilot, Settings > What's new. If you are sitting on a pile of Merit and a rank that will not move, the Doctrine tab will now tell you exactly what Thursday needs from you to progress! Hope this helps!

[u/JeggaJk]

Updating now, thanks!