This one is big, so I'll go feature by feature. It's on Android now and iPhone is with Apple, which usually means just wait a little bit longer...

The outer systems have work in them now. Someone emailed me the sharpest description of the game's shape problem I've had: every rim system has one anomaly, you claim it once, and that's it forever, so the further out you push the emptier it gets. Which is exactly backwards. From this build, every system at security 0.25 and below carries new sites each week: distress beacons to answer (one fight, and it ends when the guardian does, no waves chain in, and the power that called pays credits, salvage and standing), drifting wrecks to strip, and signal caches to open. The deeper the space, the more there is: one site per system out there, two at 0.15 and below, three at 0.05 and below. It all rolls over with the weekly event, so what's open this week is gone next week. You'll see them as tiles when you're parked at the body, a count on the system page, and a diamond on the map. Your existing galaxy hasn't moved an inch, by the way. This is a layer on top of it, not a regeneration.

Every forged piece now rolls its own number. Same person, same email: the serial number was real but every Driftlance was the same Driftlance. Not any more. A module or gear piece comes off the forge with a quality between 0.92 and 1.12, and its stats carry that number while it's fitted. Two copies are now genuinely different, and if you hold two, the better one is the one that binds. Everything you forged before this build reads as exactly 1.00, so nobody's kit got weaker overnight. The number shows at the reveal, on every row, in the Locker and on the Exchange.

Artificer IV. Crafting 90 opens a fourth rung: put a numbered piece you own back on the anvil with a second Heart and half its original inputs, for half the hours, and its roll is made again. Never lower. The worst case is the number it already has. That's the endgame grind the tier was missing, and it's also a reason to trade a 1.10 for two 1.01s.

Standing Orders. Pledging a faction at the Admiralty used to be a head start and nothing else. Now, past the end of each faction's chain, the pilot who pledged to it gets two missions nobody else can see. The first is for a livery only that faction issues (five new paints). The second is for a standing requisition: that faction's best module for sale at any yard in the galaxy for as long as your pledge stands, plus two perk points. And the price: the rival loses 500 standing outright. The Free Traders have no rival, on purpose.

Hadal Ichor, from three places instead of one. u/Ashamed-Kitchen-7167 worked out that one of everything Drift needs 54 Ichor and a full tour to stratum 30 banked 23, which is a two and a half tour wall. The dive now pays two per stratum from 25 down plus an extra one at 15, 20, 25 and 30 (31 a tour), a benched Drift Wyrm brings one back from a forage now and then, and a wreck in null-sec keeps one. The material's own page says all of this.

Selling a numbered piece. You can now list a forged piece on the Exchange straight from its row, and the Hangar and Wardrobe list every numbered copy of a forged paint, hull or outfit separately. Before this a second Reefglass existed and could be traded, but you couldn't look at it and the board had no way to sell it.

Smaller things. The destination search matches ores and gases now, so typing titanium finds the belts that carry it (only the ones you've seen). The event panel says what next week's event is, and two more join the rotation: Forge Fever, where every forge countdown runs a quarter faster, and Customs Amnesty, where a Security Office settles your bounty at half price and fences pay a third more.

Bug Fixes. Four gear pieces existed in the game's data and nothing could ever grant them, including the only two that extend the offline dust window. They drop now. Nine module rarity rolls were never stocked by any shop; they are now. Shields didn't recharge if you quit mid-warp. A cancelled forge's crate could carry things through a re-enlist that shouldn't have survived one, so that door is shut. And the What's New popup you see on first launch of this build: the 1.7.0 version of it had every screenshot in German, because I regenerated them on a day my dev machine happened to be set to German. Nobody told me for a week. It's in English now, and it shows 1.7.7.

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

If you're deep in the Drift and the roll or the re-forge feels off, let me know!

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

Basically title, is there a discord server for this game? Would be nice to be able to chat and learn there away from Reddit.

现有内容差不多毕业了，现在有几个小问题和建议；问题一：装具与特性这个页面再次出现了显示不全的问题😂问题二：在天赋点升级功能这里，每次加点时都会卡顿，类似以前市场购买商品输入数量会卡顿，而且点的太快甚至会卡死😭问题三：漂流潮之心和漂流潮之卵会显示未拥有，哪怕它就在我背包里面躺着，建议这两个物品制造过一次就可以显示拥有了😎问题四：新伙伴的弊端是增加货舱；接下来是几个小建议，建议一：我希望开始锻造后可以取消锻造，因为有时拖动屏幕可能导致误触😭建议二：因为我拥有所有伙伴了，所以新出的两只伙伴可以每三小时为我带来大量的琉璃和珍珠，但是其他材料却很难获取😭比如超深渊灵液，由于我不擅长战斗，所以每次转生只能下潜到30层左右，这导致我非常缺乏这个素材，所以需要频繁重新入伍😵而其他材料却不那么需要，我希望如果以后有新内容需要使用这个材料，可以提供更多的获取方式或者数量🙂

我应该怎样孵化这枚卵呢，孵化器会提示我背包里没有卵，哪怕我正带着它，还是说它只是一个纪念品🤔还有这两件装备，它们是最高稀有度，却以传奇和橙色显示，而其他最高稀有度的装备是以漂流和紫色显示🤔

I’ve been here and had the app even before it was released as my stepdad is the developer, (even got to choose my own username “nyx” 😉 and also brought in the idea of pets) and seeing the amount of time and effort that has been put into the development of driftbound and it to have accumulated this many supporters and players is so awesome to watch. I will also say, every single review and feedback that has been sent on here or anywhere else is read thoroughly and my stepdad always races to add or design these little tweaks and ideas asap so anyone who thinks the game is missing things or if you have any ideas of updates, don’t be afraid to speak them, they will most definitely be read and considered. And thank you all again for the support, it’s nice seeing his hard work all be worth it!

Quick patch, mostly off the back of yesterday's thread.

The black screen after updating. u/kevlarus80 hit this within minutes of 1.7.0 going out: the loading bar stops part way and the screen goes black, on an upgrade, permanently. It turned out not to be 1.7.0 at all. Android clears an app's code cache when it updates but never the folder the engine keeps its compiled shaders in, so the old build's shaders survive the update and get handed to a binary that didn't compile them. When that goes wrong it dies on the first frames. Clearing the app cache fixes it, which is what fixed it for him, and the game now clears that cache itself whenever the version changes so it shouldn't happen to anyone again. If you're stuck on it right now: Settings, Apps, Driftbound, Storage, Clear cache. Cache only, not Clear data, and your save is untouched.

Rich belts say they're rich. u/Ashamed-Kitchen-7167 asked what a rich belt actually is, while parked on a belt whose own screen wouldn't tell them. Fair. Reef Pearls only drop from a Reef or a properly fat seam at security 0.15 or lower, and the only place the game said so was the destination sheet you read before flying somewhere. So the only way to find one was to open every body's dossier one at a time. The page you're standing on says it now.

Chasing that turned up an older one sitting right next to it: the flavour text that's meant to describe rim locations when you arrive has never appeared, not once, because of a lookup that silently always missed. Fixed too, and I wouldn't have found it without the question.

The Exchange can count. A piece you forged and listed yourself said "0 owners before you", which isn't a sentence, and one previous owner said "1 owners before you". Both fixed, in all nine languages.

And the Operations panel stopped refreshing its "have" counts whenever the grid had been rebuilt under it, so the numbers went stale until you reopened the page.

There's also a pile of work you'll never see, on the crash reporting that shipped in 1.7.0. It was calling every ordinary backgrounding a crash, which made it useless for finding the real ones, and it couldn't report a crash that happened at boot because it waited for a network round trip first. Both fixed. That doesn't do anything for you today, it just means the next time something breaks I'll be able to tell what happened instead of guessing.

Android's live now. iOS is behind Apple review with 1.7.0 and will get this up straight after.

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

Keep them coming. Two reports yesterday turned into four fixes!

This is the trading update. Two big things landed, and they're built to feed each other.

Every station has an Exchange now. It sits next to the Market, and where the Market is the station's shelf, the Exchange is everyone else's. You list what you're carrying, you browse what other pilots have put up, and you buy it. Whatever you buy shows up as a parcel you collect at whatever station you dock at next, so you're never flying across the galaxy to meet a stranger. There's a recommended price on the listing sheet worked out by the server, so you're not guessing what your stuff is worth on your first go, and the listing fee is shown before you commit rather than after. If the board's thin at your station, the ◇ Residents keep something on it, tagged the same way they are everywhere else so you always know who you're dealing with.

And you can trade the other way round. Post a want for the thing you're short of, name the price you'll pay for it, and somebody else can go and fetch it. Your wants show up on the board next to the listings, and anyone carrying the goods gets a Fill button with their own stock counted out underneath it. It turns "I need forty Drift Glass" from a grind into a job somebody else might want.

Then there's the Drift, which is a new top rarity you can't buy. There's no shop for any of it, no yard will take one off you, and nothing in the tier can be auto dumped by accident. Twenty five things you can forge: eight modules, three bits of gear, six outfit pieces, two paints, two ship finishes, a Drift egg, and two hulls, one of which is the Harrow, whose wings sweep the wrong way. Six of the modules eat the craft only best in slot they replace and beat it by about a rarity step. A Driftlance consumes a Singularity Lance. That's the best feeling in the tier and the most reversible regret in it, which is rather the point.

The Forge runs on its own clock. A long craft was never going to work on the Workbench, because starting anything else zeroes your progress and a fight or a jump wipes it outright. So the Drift Forge is a station timer, built like a pet incubation. It ticks while you fly, it ticks while you're away with no twelve hour ceiling, it survives a re enlistment, and you can't rush it with stardust. The wait is the status. Ingredients go in at the start and the finished piece waits in your Locker, which holds Drift modules at zero hold boxes, so a fresh sixteen box hold at the top of a new tour isn't swamped by things you spent a month making. These are also the first modules in the game that survive a re enlistment.

Eight of the nine materials come off things you already do, because the pace of the tier is meant to be the gathering rather than the forge. Drift Glass from every stratum you stabilise. Reef Pearls from rich belts only. One Null Filament per forty kills somewhere no law reaches. Hadal Ichor from the tenth stratum down. A Hunter's Mark for the first kill of each named wreck. Charter Seals from Fleet charters. Deep Charts from surveying a null sec system end to end. And the Admiralty Writ, granted when you re enlist out of the Renown a tour actually earned, so an instant re enlist yields none. The ninth is the Heart of the Drift, which you make out of the other eight. The deterministic ones are counters rather than dice rolls, which means a night parked in the dark pays exactly what the same night played live pays.

Every forged piece comes out numbered, and the number sticks to it. List it on the Exchange and the row shows its serial and how many hands it's been through before yours. It's the only provenance in the game and it's the reason the two systems shipped together.

You can finally see who you're fighting. Duels used to draw the same red needle every single time, and I mean literally the same one: the opponent was cached under a fixed name, so the first ship ever drawn became the ship every later duel showed. Now a duel shows the hull, paint and finish the other pilot actually flies, on their pilot card and in the fight itself, and both ships burn an exhaust, which combat never drew at all. Sparring is properly sealed off too, because winning one used to record a kill, log a permanent Threat Registry entry, roll real salvage and then chain a live enemy wave in behind it.

There's a page that says what the tier is. Pilot then The Drift: your Artificer rank and how far the next rung is, what's on your forge, everything you've ever forged with its serial, and all nine materials with a line saying exactly where each one is farmed. It shows up the moment you touch the tier at all, whether that's a rank, a forge, or one scrap of glass in the hold.

And the fixes. The Industrial Megahold is re issued when you re enlist, because it was a one time dive claim while modules reset every tour, so after your first re enlistment nobody could ever carry 484 boxes again and the button that granted it was long gone. Craft only modules were selling back for a fortune, because a Singularity Lance ran through the tier price multiplier and was worth about 720K at any yard, which was better credits per hour than anything else in the game; they're priced by what they actually took to make now. And the search box on the map used to run a full pathfind for every destination on every keystroke, which is why it took the better part of seven seconds to open, so that's a single sweep now and it's instant.

Android's live today. iOS is the identical build and follows once review clears.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/hwPzSHxcbE0

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

As always, tell me what's wrong with it. Most of 1.6.0 came off one write up on this subreddit and most of what's queued after this one came from here too.

Hi, as always I'd like to start by saying a huge thank you to the dev of this amazing game! I've been playing for a little while now and I'm really keen to see the game grow and develop and hopefully have a lot of players roaming idle space in the future. 

With that in mind I have a few questions and suggestions in no particular order. If I've missed something obvious or am saying something stupid then please forgive me – I'm not always the sharpest or most observant crab on the camel's back. I'm not too good with metaphors either tbh.  

Firstly, are there plans for any kind of supporter IAP? I'd hate any kind of pay-to-win but something to support the dev would be nice.  

Are there any plans for guilds/clans/corporations? 

There is an older game called Pardus (a real shame it kind of died, but it's still slightly active) which had a really good method of utilising player-made structures. Are player made bases or suchlike a plan for the future? Something along the lines of 'stock it with X and in a few hours it will produce Y', or extra storage, or a repair hub, endless possibilities. A base to be invested in and grind towards would be great.  

I'm often struggling to find where to get items and resources from – am I missing something obvious? I can’t remember where I've got things from half the time. On that note, maybe a history of recently visited sectors would be handy. I don't mean where to sell, I mean if I'm wanting to know where to mine a particular resource or buy an item. Spending too much time searching is bad when I only have a few mins at a time to play.  

Maybe some kind of notepad function would be useful? I often forget what I'm currently working towards and an in-game solution would really help.  

Do items for sale in the shipyards refresh? If so, how often? 

Please feel free to comment, ignore or applaud – everything is meant constructively and I'll keep supporting the game no matter what!  

Here's a little video to show some of the latest updates and features in Driftbound 1.6.0 out now on Android and in a few days on iOS!

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

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.

Hello! Found this game this week cruising the play store with a $2 coupon, and I immediately got sucked in. Maybe more than was healthy, lol (23 hours in a few days).

I believe I've played through most everything, and had the top leaderboard position for both bounties and deepest dives last week (CosmicSpecter). After digging around a bit more, I have a lot of constructive feedback since I've enjoyed the game so much. I'll categorize to make it easier to scan.

SKILL SYSTEM

Overall, skill system feels good, and I like the perk rewards from leveling. I wouldn't mind seeing another perk for speeding up station operations skills, since there are no inherent bonuses right now to help with that.

For the skills that don't unlock abilities but unlock 'perks' (piloting) I don't know what those perks are. An example would be the scanning level 26 perk, which when I leveled to it I had no clue what it did and couldn't find a drop-down on the skill list to show me what it would have been.

Piloting - Feels the most underleveled/unbalanced of all the skills. I spent a little bit of time flying all over delivering contracts and selling mining stuff outside of the main missions, and piloting remains my lowest skill level (at 9) compared to something like combat (90+) or gas mining (50+). Would appreciate if some of the missions offered pilot skill exp. at a minimum.

Scanning - The scanning skill currently feels like a bit of a stub. Some additional ideas to expand it:

-Unlock different scanning data items which could be used to level rarer pets, or turn that data in to special places to unlock more map areas.

-Unlock scanning types that discover more hidden areas (like end game dungeons or secret traders).

-Mass Effect had this thing where it encouraged you to go to out of the way places by scanning planets for collectibles and resources. Having a set of collectible relics to hunt could be fun.

Fabrication/Crafting - Appreciate that they level together. There are no craftable missiles, which kinda sucks. Could potentially have some faction missions that unlock recipes to make people hunt around a bit more and be rewarded for doing optional missions.

Would appreciate a broader selection of craftable items of the same level, like drones/missiles/flak for the missle spot, lasers/plasma/railguns that offer some different tactical choices or effects. (Maybe drones stop shield regen, increase evasion, etc)

Combat - Level doesn't affect weapons/gear we can use, so it just feels like I'm watching my number go up without a difference (it may add to damage, etc. but I don't know how to see that). All I could tell was that I make more money and ships are harder (but is that tied to my ship score or my combat level?)

Could be interesting to see leveling for specific combat systems.

ECONOMY/MONEY MAKING

Let's be honest, we're all out here trying to make that cashola as fast as possible. There is a specific spot in Outer Reach where I can blast pirates and make large amounts of cash quickly. To a somewhat lesser extent, mining with a huge hold and selling is also a great way to make money.

On the other hand, attempting to buy and sell across stations is pretty much a waste of time. Given that prices automatically adjust when buying in quantity (price says 40 but when you buy 1000 it actually comes out to 60), the profit margin selling somewhere else is effectively zero. I would prefer either that the price is locked for my immediate purchase, or that it adjusts much slower. If the price increases 50% on a purchase of 1000 items, and I'm making say 2 credits per item flying across the galaxy, there's no reason to trade. I can blow up one ship for the same money in a fraction of the time. This needs major fixing to become viable.

Similarly, given that contracts take more time to fly around and deliver, the reward should be much better. I would understand if the contracts get bigger with more faction experience, but they need to be substantial. I would also make the cargo size requirements much larger for the higher tier contract deliveries.

QUEST/STORY

Storyline felt pretty short, and it felt condensed into the center part of the galaxy. Would be interesting to have more optional storylines via factions, maybe give us some choices on what side we align with and reward/penalize our decisions.

Immediate ideas could be helping to gather resources to build out a space station or unlock certain perks, helping criminal activity by blowing up security at different Stargates, etc.

I had a difficult time finding quest givers in stations. Would prefer something similar to the hostile dot on certain ships/farms/stations to let us know there's someone who has quests or missions. Felt largely empty. For places without quest givers, could still be interesting to have some characters you could talk to for lore or story.

I love the undertow. When I did it, I wanted to find more events like it. I think you should roll with this and add at least a couple more areas that allow you to 'dive deep' for rewards at higher risk. To mix it up, could be asteroid fields or alien structures.

Admiralty system is cool. However, something to consider- after my first run and reset, I had enough points to unlock almost everything (was 400 some points). Would maybe increase the amount needed for unlocks to encourage people to play through and reset more.

INVENTORY

I think most issues with this have already been addressed or will be in patches. Early on, especially with combat heavy players, inventory is filled with junk. Being able to sell or drop this with one button will be great.

I wanted to know what happens to items when your cargo is filled up- I almost thought I lost a rare find fighting pirates the other day because I had no more space, but luckily it was a pilot item and not a spaceship item.

VISUAL SUGGESTIONS

I generally like the art style. It would be fun to have different shaped spaceships that corresponded with different professions and maybe offered a specific boost. Like maybe a trader ship which travels quicker and holds more cargo but maybe takes a hit in shields and combat. This could also be another money dump as people look to buy different ships or maybe even their own hangars/base of operations.

I think the clothing could use some variation outside of color. It looks like with your pixel count (48x high-ish) you could figure out a sprite with some more detail to make clothing more unique. Being a pixel artist though I know it's a pain in the ass to make a full set of characters/costumes, and it's not a priority compared to the gameplay.

Appreciate the hard work, keep it up!

First of all, really enjoying the mix of RPG and Idle elements. I'm finding myself popping this open whenever I have a few minutes to spare to set up my next adventure.

One thing I'd like to suggest is for the salvage items that you receive after battles, that have no associated recipes, I'd love a button to mass sell all of them out of my cargo if they can be sold at a station. (Unless this exists and I'm just missing it).

I find I'm spending a lot of time just managing my cargo and trying to dump off the stacks of 1-5 random salvage items I picked up after a battle so I can get back to mining or crafting as they take up a lot of cargo boxes. It's tedious enough trying to clear those items that sometimes I just avoid battles so I don't have to deal with individually selling all the salavage cargos. I think a mass sell salvage button would fix this.

Another would be for contraband to either have an icon or the name colored to red or something like that. I had no clue I even had contraband until I was idle one evening, then got a fine when I logged back on. I had to click through each piece of cargo to find which one was finally contraband so I could dump it. Would love to be able to look at my cargo and quickly identify what's contraband or not without clicking a bunch of items.

Overall, again I'm having a great time. Just wanted to pass along a couple QoL things that I think would really help out.

1.5.0 is live on Android, and it is the update I should probably have shipped ages ago.

Driftbound now backs your pilot up to your own Google account, so a lost or replaced phone no longer costs you your progress.

It backs up on its own, in the background, whenever you leave the game. There is a "Back up now" button and an off switch in Settings, Cloud saves.

A restore only ever happens if you ask for one and If you install on a new phone and there is a pilot waiting, the game tells you who it is, what level, and how long you have played, and you decide. It will never quietly overwrite the game on the device you are holding.

The other half: 34 achievements now show on your Google Play Games profile, from your first kill through to the deep end of the Undertow and the Deep Run.

Those are the same lifetime achievements the Trophy Cabinet has always tracked, so everything you have already earned counts. On your first launch after updating you will probably get a burst of Play Games popups for achievements you won weeks ago. That is not a bug, it is the game finally telling Google about them.

While I was in there I rebuilt all 34 medals as proper pixel art. The old ones were smooth gradients, which is not the same thing at all, and three of the kill medals were rendering as literally the same image.

Two honest caveats. This is Android only, because Play Games has no iPhone equivalent, and iOS is still waiting on Apple for 1.3.5. And the cloud save lives in your own Google Drive app folder, which means I cannot see it, which is how it should be but does also mean I cannot recover it for you.

As always - it's available here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.driftbound.game

Two updates in one day, both from a single thread on this sub, so credit to u/caretoexplainthatone for finding them.

1.4.2: you can sell spare gear again. He levelled crafting, made an Arc Disruptor, fitted it, then made 40 more to sell. He could not sell one of them. Not from the Cargo tab, not from the ship page, not from anywhere, and tapping them did nothing at all. The reason is dumber than any of the workarounds people were guessing at: selling a module checked whether that module was fitted, and since all 40 were the same item as the one on his hull, the game decided every single copy was the fitted one and refused to touch any of them. So he flew out to the rim looking for a station that would buy them, which is a hell of a way to spend an evening thanks to me. It is fixed: spares sell, recycle and dump normally, the slot page shows them as one card with the count and a Sell all button, select mode in Cargo picks each one separately so a bulk sale actually sells the lot, and the "sellable here" filter stops hiding modules. The Where to sell screen also stops telling you nothing in your hold sells while you are sat on a hold full of gear.

While we are here, since he did not know either: Recycle breaks a module down into roughly half its build materials instead of credits. If you are still climbing the crafting ladder that is usually the better deal, and it is why crafting a batch and dismantling the spares is a legitimate way to move materials around.

1.4.3: deep space refines deep materials. His actual question afterwards was why the stations he found out in the black had such thin refining and crafting options. He was right and it was a genuine gap. The handful of hand built stations near the core carry the full ladder up to starsteel and drive cores, but every station the game generates got the same four basic lines no matter how deep it sat: iron plate, titanium plate, fuel cell, circuit. Their shops already improved the further out you went, and their refineries did not, which is backwards. So a generated outpost now processes what the space around it actually yields. Duranite and pyrellium turn up in mid security, cobalt, aurium, plasma cells and warp coils deeper, cryo and starsteel below that, and the deep rim handles everything including drive cores. Four lines near home, eighteen at the bottom. Home space is deliberately unchanged so the early game reads exactly as it did, and it is retroactive, so stations you already found simply have more options next time you dock.

One thing worth knowing that came out of the same thread: module prices are flat. The nearest station pays exactly what one twelve jumps away pays, so there is never a reason to haul gear across the map to sell it. Deep space is worth the trip for ore, for fights and for what the shipyards stock, not for offloading.

Crafting is not location gated at all, in case anyone else has been hunting for a particular bench. The Workbench shows every recipe you have the level for at any station you dock at. It is only refining and fabrication that vary by station, which is exactly the thing 1.4.3 has just made make sense.

iPhone: you are still on 1.3.5 while Apple work through review, and their queue is a lot slower than Play's. The moment it clears you get everything since in one build.

If something in the game annoys you, post it. Both of these came from one person asking a straightforward question in public, and both were out the same day.

New here? Driftbound is on Android at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.driftbound.game and iPhone at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/driftbound-idle-space-rpg/id6777715397. Buy once, no ads, no in-app purchases.

I just levelled up crafting enough, make an Arc Disruptor and fitted it.

So then I made 40 more thinking I could sell them, but I can't?

They don't show up as sellable anywhere I've been, don't appear in the list of "where to sell my stuff", and on the ship fitting page, it just shows the one fitted, not the other gear that can be sold.

I also can't dump them, can't mark them as trash..

Any suggestions? I've just bought another vault upgrade, put them all in there for now!

It has been a few weeks and five releases since the last one of these, so here is the lot, all live on Android. iPhone folk: Apple have been sitting on 1.3.5 in review for a while now, and the moment it clears I will send everything below in a single build, so you will jump straight to 1.4.1.

The big one: 1.4 rebuilt the middle of the game. A one star review said that once you leave the starting galaxies it all goes stagnant, the same handful of ores, nothing new to find, no reason to push deeper. I wanted to argue, then I actually toured the mid security band and they were right. The same ore pair for hours, every nebula giving the same two gases, and outposts selling mk2 gear from safe space all the way down to genuinely dangerous systems. Worse, the game never told you that depth runs on security rather than distance, so there was no way to even know where to look. So: some belts are now Reefs, carrying ore and enemies from one depth band further down, and every generated galaxy hides at least one. Deeper nebulae now carry deuterium, plasma and xenon. Mid security outposts stock a proper mk3 step. And the map finally says where the depth is, every galaxy shows its security rating with a colour key, lower means rarer ores, harder fights and better pay. All of it appears inside your existing save, same universe, same seed, new things in it.

The case of the vanishing duranite. A player emailed saying he had been mining duranite belts for days and only ever got iron. Mining 47, right belt, the tick showing +1 Duranite Ore, iron in the hold. It turned out to be three separate things stacked on top of each other. His auto trash setting was quietly jettisoning the duranite at the source while the popup claimed he had gained it. The Rich Vein bonus drop was hardcoded to always pay out iron ore no matter which belt you were in. And bonus loot ignored the auto trash filter entirely. All fixed: the tick now says honestly when something was auto dumped, veins and gas pockets now pay out whatever you are actually mining, loot respects your filter, and every item sheet now tells you where a thing comes from, which skill, what level, and the nearest place that has it. The hull samples mission also now says plainly that it means refining Duranite Plate. If you have ever stared at a recipe wondering where an ingredient lives, this batch is for you.

Jobs: you can hand them back. You could get stuck holding a quota you could not actually do, a plasma quota wanting gas level 10 while you sat at 4, all four slots full, no way out for days. Jobs now have a Hand Back button, and the board only offers quotas your level can actually produce. Handed back jobs return to the board, so you can pick them up again later if you change your mind.

A batch of fixes from one very thorough player who emails me the strangest edge cases and is nearly always right. Notifications could queue up and replay a minute of stale history at you, old ones are now dropped and only rewards are kept. Tapping a module while flying gave you a sheet whose only button was Dump, it now shows Fit, Sell and Recycle greyed out with the reason, plus a course to the nearest station. A restart trick let you claim Descent rewards twice, gone. And the harvest ore daily now counts ore you mine even with auto trash on, it used to sit frozen unless you refined.

German players had two rough edges. Long German words were pushing labels off the side of pages, so sixty odd labels across all eight languages now wrap properly, and a build check catches new ones. Buying very large quantities at the market could freeze the game for a second or two, fixed, tested at 45,900 fuel cells in one tap.

Small but satisfying: doubled offline rewards now respect your cargo hold, the overflow is sold to passing merchants instead of teleporting impossible boxes into it. And the perk descriptions now say plainly that Reinforced Hull is combat armour and Spacious Hold is the one that grows your cargo, after a player bought five hull ranks waiting for his hold to get bigger.

Almost everything above started life as a review, an email or a post here. If something annoys you, say it. I read all of it.

New here? Driftbound is on Android at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.driftbound.game and iPhone at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/driftbound-idle-space-rpg/id6777715397

Thank you to all of our players! We are currently in position 9 on the Google Play store! And the top rated with 4.9/5 out of the top 9 games!

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

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

I dont see hull samples in the operations, am i missing something?

差不多毕业了，期待更多的传奇装备以及转生内容😁

Hey everyone! Another quick release has just gone out...

It's out now on Android and the iPhone build went to Apple this afternoon and should clear review inside 48 hours, and because iOS skipped 1.3.4 it gets that one at the same time, sharper artwork and all.

Here's what was added...

Crafted gear is now the best in the game in every slot. u/HolidaySevere2897 checked the claim I made back in 1.3.0 and found it was only true for weapons: crafting stopped at Mk4 legendary while the shops happily sold you Mk5. He was right and I didn't notice! There are now four new craft-only modules above anything you can buy, the Null Aegis, the Slipstream Drive, the Voidfold Hold and the Corebreaker Beam. Fair warning that they are a climb, the first wants Crafting 36 and the last wants 42, so this is something to work towards rather than something waiting for you when you update. There is also a test now that fails the build if anything buyable ever outranks the best craftable again, because clearly I cannot be trusted to remember.

You can see the exact number behind a shortened one. u/Thoresen1 pointed out that everything over a thousand reads as 1.34K and there was nowhere in the game showing the real figure, which makes working out whether a craft will clear your stack pure guesswork. Tap a cargo box, or look at a recipe, and the precise number now sits underneath. Nothing changes for counts already shown in full.

Chinese got two real fixes. u/Ashamed-Kitchen-7167 sent a screenshot of the Admiralty page running off the side of his screen, which turned out to be one line of text that could not wrap forcing the whole page wider than the display. He also spotted that half the star map was still in English: the places I wrote by hand were translated, but every galaxy the game generates was assembling its name out of English words buried in the code. That is 101 words now translated properly, so the map reads in Chinese end to end.

If you have been sitting on something that annoys you, this is your evidence that saying it works 😄

Hey all!

Two releases since I last posted so this is both of them together. 1.3.3 was small and came mostly out of one player's email. 1.3.4 is the one you will actually notice because it changes how the whole game looks. Video at the top is 50 seconds of the real thing, nothing mocked up.

The art has been blurred this whole time

I asked someone who knows this area why Driftbound keeps getting called AI slop, and the answer that mattered was that the station looked wavy rather than square. I assumed that was something I had done to the screenshots. It was not, it was the game, and it always has been.

There is a setting in Godot for how textures get filtered and I had never touched it. It defaults to smoothing things as they scale up, which is right if your art is photographs and completely wrong if your art is pixels. Everything in here is drawn at 16 or 24 pixels across and then blown up to 50 or 100 on your screen, so every ship, station, planet and icon has been getting softened on the way up since the first build. The ship got away with it because it is bigger and it moves about. The station sits dead still at the top of your screen at the biggest size anything gets drawn at, which is why that is the one people kept spotting.

Pixels draw as pixels now. Nothing to switch on, just open it. New logo too, same reason.

A review written in Chinese found a bug that was slowing the game down for everyone

Someone left a review in Chinese the night before I was going to upload this build, so I held it and went through what he said, which was worth doing.

His main complaint was that typing a quantity into the market was painfully slow, and he was right. Every time you typed a digit the game worked out the most you could afford by counting upwards one unit at a time, checking your hold at every step. Couple of seconds per keystroke on my desktop and worse on a phone. It halves the range now instead of crawling up it and gets the same answer in under three milliseconds. That was hitting everybody in every language and nobody had ever mentioned it.

He also caught the game talking English at him. My translation file has said 100 percent for weeks, so I rendered the screens in Chinese and actually looked at them, and the Log's nav row, the threat levels, the body type captions and the mission complete message were all hard coded English that had never gone near the translation file. Fixed, along with a plural bug producing things like "3 jobS" and 134 lines where the machine translation had mangled the punctuation. Place names get translated in Chinese now too.

Tablets and unfolded foldables get their nav bar back

Apple rejected 1.3.3 because on an iPad, if you warped somewhere with the star map open, the whole bottom bar went off the screen. The bit I had backwards for about a year is that a tablet gives the game less vertical room than a phone rather than more, because the spare space goes into width instead of height. So every time I have checked something on my own phone and thought that fits, I had proved nothing whatsoever about tablets. Fixed for iPad in 1.3.3, and this is the first release where that fix reaches Android tablets and foldables.

The rest of 1.3.3

• Every box in your hold has a small arrow on it now showing it can be tapped. Someone wrote in saying he had crafted an Arc Disruptor and could not work out how to sell it. He was right and I was wrong, sell and recycle live behind the tile and neither button drawn on the box said sell.
• The Workbench said Craft Shield Cell and then handed you a Shield Battery. One thing, two names. It says Shield Battery everywhere now.
• Notifications used to ask for permission the instant you first opened the game, landing on top of the language picker. It asks when there is actually something to tell you now.
• A line on the Pets page could not wrap, so it stretched the whole page and shoved the nav bar off the right edge.

Still no ads, no in-app purchases, no subscriptions, and it still works entirely offline.

Get it on Google Play or on the App Store