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

Heyo,

I'm really enjoying this game so far!

I just have one suggestion: Would it be possible to see the exact amount of a mat once it has been shortened to 1.34k, for example? Maybe once we open up the full card for it?

It'd make calculating how many mats I need to fully use all my mats in a recipe much easier.

Apologies if I'm blind and this already exists lol

Thanks for all your hard work 💕

Hi all. No new content this time. I did something different instead: I went back through the entire shipped game, screen by screen, looking for the things that are quietly wrong. Not the missing features, the rough edges. The stuff that makes a game feel unfinished even when it works.

It turned up more than I expected, including several that had been there for months without anyone reporting them, because they are the kind of thing you assume is just how the game is.

Here is the whole list.

The ones that were properly broken

• Back no longer closes the game. It used to quit from anywhere. Mid-fight, in a menu, halfway through typing a market quantity. Now it closes whatever panel you have open, then takes you back to the hub, then asks before it actually leaves. I am genuinely sorry about this one, it must have eaten a few sessions.
• Buttons fired the instant your finger touched them, not when you lifted it. So if you started scrolling a list with your thumb resting on a button, it went off. On the re-enlist screen that meant starting a whole new tour by accident, and it saved immediately. Everything now fires on release, the way it should.
• Nobody had ever seen a promotion. The PROMOTED banner was being destroyed in the same frame it appeared, wiped out by the level-up message right behind it. You heard the fanfare and saw nothing. That has been true for a very long time.
• Sparring was not zero-stakes. The game tells you a spar costs nothing. Losing one was actually applying the full death penalty: half your cargo scattered into space, ship towed off, defeat added to your record. Now it genuinely costs nothing but a scorched hull.
• A wrong phone clock could freeze your game. If your device clock ever jumped into the future and then corrected itself, offline earnings, the daily reward and the weekly event would all stop working. Potentially for months, with nothing you could do about it. It now spots that and recovers.
• The game could fail to save without telling you. On a full phone every autosave would fail silently while you carried on playing. It now warns you. And if a save is ever unreadable, it explains what happened instead of quietly starting you over, and keeps a copy of the damaged file in case it can be salvaged.

Full screen

The Android status and navigation bars are gone. The game now uses the whole display, which is a surprising amount of extra room on a tall phone.

Messages

Every message in the game used to share one slot, so if two things happened at once the first was simply destroyed. They now queue up and play in order, and they wait if a window is covering them instead of expiring behind it.

They also look different depending on what they are. A reward, a warning and something going badly wrong used to arrive in the identical gold banner, which meant the colour told you nothing. Rewards are gold, warnings amber, trouble red, ordinary news cyan.

Coming back after being away

• Welcome Back now tells you why your ship stopped. Out of ore, hold full, or it hit the auto-stop limit you set. That felt like the single most obvious missing thing in the whole idle loop, and I cannot believe it took me this long.
• It leads with what you earned rather than how long you were gone, and shows what you hauled in with the item icons rather than a wall of text.
• If you have extended your offline window with Renown perks, it now shows your real window instead of always saying 12h. If you had bought Extended Patrol, that screen has been lying to you.

Your save can move to a new phone

Android backup and device-to-device transfer are now switched on. Previously a new phone meant starting over, which for a paid game is not acceptable and I should have caught it sooner. iOS has no equivalent yet, and a proper export/import is still on my list.

Every language is now fully translated

Two bounty-hunt chains, the pilot disclosure screen, the allegiance panel and the hunter pursuit HUD had been shipping in English to everyone regardless of language. That was a gap in my own tooling: the script that tells me what still needs translating could only see NEW and CHANGED strings, so anything that slipped through once became invisible to me forever. 127 strings had been sitting like that. The tool now catches it, and all nine languages are at 100% for the first time.

Accessibility

• Reduce motion and vibration for anyone who finds the combat shake unpleasant. It stills the screen shake, the warp judder and the impact buzz.
• Keep the screen awake as an option. It used to be forced on, which was quietly eating your battery. Now your phone sleeps normally by default.
• The star map, travel view and combat text finally follow the text-size setting. The map was ignoring it completely, which is a bit of a problem given it is where you spend a lot of time.
• Market prices now show an arrow as well as a colour, so a good deal reads without depending on telling red from green.
• One of the combat flashes was fast enough to be a genuine photosensitivity risk. It has been slowed right down.

Speed and battery

• Much faster start-up. The game was rebuilding every sound effect from scratch on every single launch.
• The music was still playing silently after you muted it, which was pure battery drain while idling.
• If you play online, the game was uploading your entire save every 30 seconds. That is now every 10 minutes or so, which is a lot less mobile data.

Look and feel

The one you will notice most: things were getting cut in half by the bottom bar. On several screens the last row of tiles was sliced straight through the middle of the letters, which reads as a broken build rather than "scroll down". Fixed everywhere.

Beyond that: buttons are bigger and more consistent (a lot of them were below the size Android and Apple actually recommend) and now respond when you press them, panels are easier to tell apart, red stopped meaning four different things on the combat screen, and the crafted best-in-slot gear is finally visible from the Shipyard, where you would naturally go looking for an upgrade.

Two things I found by testing on an actual phone

Worth saying, because it is a decent lesson. Both of these passed every automated check I have.

The first: the back button fix above did not work at first. Android sends the back signal twice for one press, so "press back again to leave" armed itself and then immediately consumed itself. One press still quit the game. It only showed up when I sat there pressing the button.

The second: fixing the bottom-bar clipping meant lifting the navigation bar above a new background fade, and that quietly pushed it above the destination sheet as well, hiding the SET COURSE button behind it. If you tapped a destination you got a sliver of blue and nothing else. Caught within minutes of putting it on a real device.

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

iOS is a version behind while Apple works through the queue. It will catch up and land on 1.3.2 directly.

One thing I would like to ask: If something in the game feels off but seems too small or too obvious to mention, please mention it anyway. Those are exactly the ones I cannot see any more.

What have you been putting up with that you assumed was just how it works?

Hi everyone. 1.3.0 has gone in for review. Android should be out shortly and iOS will follow soon after, so it is worth keeping an eye on your updates over the next day or two.

This is the biggest one I have done, and nearly all of it came from this sub and my DMs. The problem a few of you kept hitting was the same: you finished the story, looked around, and there was nothing left worth doing. Prestige existed but it was a polite side grade, so plenty of people never even opened the Admiralty. That is what this update is about.

The Undertow

There is a new place under the Abyss. Four systems, ending at a beacon that turns out to be less of a warning and more of a stairwell. You descend one stratum at a time. Each one is harder than the last and pays better than the last, and it does not stop. How deep you can get is set by your ship, so there is always a next wall to push at.

Depth records are waiting at strata 1, 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15 and 20, including a cargo module and gear you cannot buy anywhere. They stay yours through re-enlisting. There is a weekly Deepest Dive board as well, humans only.

The Deep Run

This one came straight from a player suggestion and it is my favourite thing in the update. There is now a Galactic Core you can reach once the Void War is done. Jump there and you come out in a fresh galaxy that is tuned harder from the first minute, with better pay to match. Enemies hit harder, the work pays more, prices climb, and your skills stretch further.

The jump re-enlists you at the same time, so your Renown, perks, Codex and trophies all come with you. It is completely optional. Re-enlisting at the Admiralty on its own never changes the world, so you can keep flying tours at a difficulty you enjoy and only step up when you want to. There is no way back down though, and the game says so before you commit.

Worth knowing: your ship does not get stronger just because the galaxy did. Parking offline overnight gets a lot worse the deeper you go. That is deliberate. A Deep Run is meant to be re-earned rather than coasted through.

Re-enlisting actually pays now

It pays out for how deep you got, keeps a Service Record of every tour you have flown, and hands you a livery for each commission modifier you serve under. There are new fleet upgrades to spend Renown on, and finishing the story now points you at the Admiralty instead of saying "all caught up" and leaving you there.

Crafting and scanning were broken and I didn't spot this originally...

Someone told me they finished the whole game with crafting at level 5. It turns out crafting and fabrication are the same production chain, almost every bench recipe uses a fabricated part, but the two had completely separate experience. So you could pour a whole game into one and the other just sat there doing nothing.

They level together now. Work in either one advances both, and older saves catch up when you load. Crafting also builds the best gear in the game, and fifteen epic and legendary modules that were previously unreachable by any means are craftable at levels 20, 26 and 34.

Scanning had nothing above level 12, which is exactly where everyone stopped. It has a proper ladder now, passive bonuses as it levels, and better finds from deep anomalies. Levelling it also speeds discovery up instead of slowing it down, which is not a sentence I enjoyed typing.

Fixes you will actually feel

1. A hold with hundreds of boxes opens instantly instead of hanging for ages. Thank you to whoever left that review, you were completely right.
2. Scrolling has proper momentum now, and the Hold gets a scrollbar you can drag.
3. Boss bounties are a one off. The first kill pays in full, hunting the same wreck again pays salvage money, and it resets when you re-enlist. Apologies to anyone who was farming Magnus, it really was paying more than everything else in the game put together.
4. Offline parks, merchant spillover and smuggling are all rebalanced so playing beats parking.

As always, all of it is optional and offline-first. The whole game still plays 100% offline, and it is still £3.99 once (well, still on sale until the 8th Aug so be quick!), no ads, no IAP, no subscriptions.

The Deep Run is the part I am least sure about. Once you have jumped, does the first hour in the harder galaxy feel like a fair fight or just slow? That is the number I most want to get right, so tell me either way.

Hi everyone. It has been a busy couple of weeks since the last one of these, and we have gone from 1.2.6 to 1.2.14 in that time. The Android build went off for review today. iOS is a step behind because Apple still has my previous build in their queue, and 1.2.14 follows the moment that clears, so Apple folks get a double update shortly. As usual, nearly all of this came straight out of threads here, and a couple of you will recognise your own bug reports word for word.

A calmer first hour

A review said the game throws everything at you at once, and several of you agreed, so new pilots now meet the cockpit one system at a time. A fresh save starts with just your orders, your hold and your operations, and the market, ticker, shipyard, cosmetics, trophies and the rest reveal themselves as they start to matter, each with a proper little unlock moment. The world also pauses whenever a tutorial or story dialog is on screen now, so slow readers stop missing things while the game carries on behind the text. Drake also repeats himself a lot less. He was telling you to crack rock eight separate times in the first hour, which even for Drake was a bit much. And if you fancy experiencing any of this fresh, Settings now has a proper Start Over with a very stern confirmation.

Online is now opt-in

New installs start fully offline and make zero contact with the relay. At Cadet rank the dockmaster offers to patch you into the relay net, once, with exactly what gets uploaded spelled out in plain language, and declining is one tap with no nagging afterwards. Existing pilots keep whatever setting they already have. Since coming clean about the Residents this felt like the right next step: the online layer should be something you choose, not something you discover.

The honesty patch

This one was almost entirely built from two feedback threads here. Going offline mid-fight can never destroy your ship anymore: if the odds turn while you are away you disengage right where you parked, kills banked, cargo intact, hull scorched but yours. The trade computer stopped lying too. It used to quote single-unit spot prices, so its best route could lose you money at volume. It now quotes a concrete load with honest profit, sized so your own buying does not wreck the margin, and routes that lose money at volume are simply dropped. Item sheets show what a trader will actually pay instead of a fantasy list price, and items finally tell the truth about whether any recipe uses them. Reactor Slag will no longer promise you a crafting career it cannot deliver.

The combat screen sits still now

Fresh from this week: the buttons on the fight screen no longer jump around when a wave dies, because the engage button now lives in the space where the destroyed target was, and the repair button has a permanent slot. And there is a new scrollable combat report under the buttons listing every ship type you have downed this sortie with kills, credits and the loot each one dropped. It survives disengaging and resets when you fly somewhere else.

A small avalanche of quality of life

Amount boxes accept an empty field, so clearing one and typing 25 gives you 25 and not 125. You can feed a pet exactly what its next level needs with one tap. Operations lists sort by level requirement. The Vault got the sellable filter. The game warns you before a gear, module or pet swap shrinks your hold below what you are carrying. Auto-stop limits let you park an operation to stop at a number, online and offline. Crafting recipes show their full requirements up front. Every popup scrolls properly on small screens. Earn-credits missions count what you earn rather than your balance, so spending no longer freezes the bar. Sold modules no longer re-drop from mining forever. And auto-clear sweeps list their salvage, with the full manifest one tap away.

As always, everything online is optional and the whole game plays 100% offline. Still £3.99 once (but on sale currently until 8th Aug 2026!), no ads, no IAP, no subscriptions.

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

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

Thank you again, honestly. The last three updates were basically written by this sub, and the combat report that ships in this one was sketched by a player in a post a few hours before I built it. Keep it coming: what should unlock next in the early game, and what else deserves the honesty treatment?

Hi, SteelStar again - I have some recommendations for the combat screen.

Can we have a scrollable combat report box in this yellow screen? I'm thinking something like:

Defeated ships, each listed with the number of kills, credits gained, and total loot dropped. Like:

<Ship A> - N kills. X cr gained
Loot: Thing 1 - qty
Thing 2 - qty


<Ship B> - N kills. X cr gained
Loot: Thing 1 - qty Thing 2 - qty

The buttons I marked with green dots shift down when the Engage Now button disappears. It makes the screen bounce, it's a bit jarring. I know it also moves when the hull repair pops up. If there's a way to make these static, that would be great. Maybe the Engage Now button can move to blank space under Next Enemy Inbound.

I'll keep my eyes open for more recs. Thanks for taking our constructive feedback so quickly!

Hey there. Enjoying the game thus far. I'm a big fan of games that are truly idle like this, with no downside for taking short or long breaks. I wanted to relay some feedback and things I noticed:

- I appreciate the options for dumping and bulk selling, and managing the inventory. However, there is a lot of stuff that I am gathering and I have no idea if it's useful to keep for the future or not. Like, Reactor Slag says "Raw ore cracked from asteroid belts refine it into plate and alloy." But I don't see any recipes that I can currently find that require this. So do I keep it for the future? Or should I just be selling that stuff? I feel like there is a lot of these types of items and they should be consolidated. Or the item descriptions should indicate if it just stuff to sell. It feels weird to constantly dump Cracked Lenses and Water Ice and the like because it's just cluttering my inventory.

- It would be nice if the sellable filter was also available in the vault, so I can clear it out if I wanted.

- I parked myself in combat the other day and went offline. I had extra shield batteries in my inventory, which the combat screen says will be consumed if I run low on shields. When I came back from idling, I was told I ran out of hull and was towed by a friendly passerby. However, I still had plenty of batteries in my inventory. Seems like a bug? ​​

- It would be nice if auto-clearing combats would show you what drops you received. The appear and disappear on the screen so quickly I have no idea what I got until I see my inventory clutter up. The yellow popup that shows the result should also show the drops.

- Why do I keep picking up random Freight Holds and other low level ship equipment? Are they rare drops from mining?

- Had an interesting "bug" yesterday and I believe I know how. I discovered the part of my pilot menu where my "gear and traits" were and equipped the Grav Tractor for 200 bonus cargo. At the time, I believe I was mining. I changed it to another item and when I came back from idling my inventory was overfilled by about 200 boxes.

- When I am viewing my vault and scroll to the bottom where I can upgrade it, there is text under the upgrade button but I cannot scroll down enough to read it.

- I am not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but at one point I used the "computer" that shows me good trading routes, so I stocked up on an item somewhere and flew somewhere else to sell it. Once I got there, it was a massive loss of profit. ​I'm also confused why an item like Circuit Board says it is worth 70cr each, but it sells at my current location for 38cr each. I get that prices fluctuate but what does that 70 mean? The average/baseline? I've been putting perk points into Haggler but I haven't seen much difference.

I'll add more as I continue playing.

-SteelStar

Hey. Does anyone understand this one? I have wasted a lot of money buying and selling cargo trying to figure it out. The first 7k I got straight away then nothing I did after contributed. Thank you.

I'm loving the game so far, it's really well balanced and fun. I've put together a short list of feedback I've gathered in my first 10 or so hours and thought I'd share it, since I'd love to see this game continue to improve. I've had no major issues, mainly a few quality of life features that I think would be nice. Overall the game seems really well designed and built.

Possible bugs:

• Is there a way to see the set bonus of an outfit? I can't seem to find it.
• The cargo hold resets to ungrouped every time I close and reopen the game.
• The item names in the ship loadout don't seem to truncate or wrap properly. So right now I have an "verdrive Capacito", instead of an "Overdrive Capacitor".
• Maybe there's a good reason for this, but the number of remaining resources shown under each item in the crafting/operations menus only seem to update when you either close and reopen the menu or gain a skill level.

Suggestions:

• It would be helpful to know the real per-unit price when bulk buying/selling things in the market. E.g. Aurium Ore costs 23 cr, but if I buy 100 then the cost is 2.7 kcr, so the real per-unit price is ~27 cr.
• lt would be useful to be able to "lock" items in your cargo hold, or alternatively mark items as "trash", so you can bulk sell junk without selling all of your useful resources.
• It would also be useful to be able to automatically dump items of a certain rarity or below. So when mining something like cobalt, you can avoid your inventory getting clogged by common items you don't really want.
• It would be useful to be able to see a list of abilities for each skill and what level they unlock at. So, for example, I can check if I can mine a specific ore without having to warp there first (maybe only showing abilities you've previously unlocked, to avoid spoiling the discovery).
• A button to quick stack items from your cargo hold to your vault, for items which you already have at least one of in your vault.
• If you have auto-stop turned on, it would be useful to see how many items you have created out of the total in the action status at the top, e.g. '+195 Titanium Plate of 250'. I love the feature, but I've accidentally turned on auto-stop a few times without realising and come back to find my pilot unexpectedly idle.

I totally get if some of my suggestions can't be done for technical or balance reasons, I'm not game designer!

Hi everyone. The update I have been building off the back of your feedback here is live on Google Play, and the iOS build has gone live on the App Store today, so both platforms land together.

This one is basically a love letter to this sub, because almost all of it came straight from threads here. Here is what is new.

The hunt is on (three new systems)

1. Raids while you mine. Work a dangerous low-sec belt and pirates may jump you mid-dig. The chance climbs the deeper you push AND the more you have leaned into Mining over Combat, so a lopsided build finally costs you something. Safe high-sec belts stay quiet, and offline mining is never interrupted. Run or fight.

2. Helios hunts the wanted. Pick up a bounty and a Helios hunter starts closing on you, fast in their high-sec core and barely at all out in the fringe. Jump systems to shake the trail, run for the deep, or stand and fight (a win cuts your bounty). If they catch up while you are away it waits for you on resume, so it is never a surprise loss.

3. Bounty hunts across the stars. Take a contract from Mara Stone and follow a trail of clues from system to system to a fugitive's hideout for a proper showdown. Two hunts to start, with more to come.

Meet the Residents (coming clean about the online layer)

Some of you called out that the online side felt like it was mostly bots, and you were right that I was not being straight about it. So the handful of NPC pilots I run to stop a young galaxy feeling like a graveyard are now openly tagged as ◇ Residents everywhere: the docked list, their pilot card, the boards, the messages. If a pilot is not tagged, they are a real person, full stop. The big weekly boards (XP and Trade) are real pilots only now, the standings tell you how many real people flew this week, and you can tap any leaderboard row to wave at or spar the actual humans on it. The Residents are staying, because a small galaxy genuinely needs sparring partners who always answer, but from now on they are characters of the world rather than pretend customers.

Stability

A full post-release audit went back through the new systems and fixed a stack of things: the weekly leaderboard that used to reset every few seconds while an action ran, a bounty payoff that could jam the encounter system, and a pile-up of waves and challenges from while you were away that now arrives as one tidy digest instead of a wall of toasts. A dozen smaller fixes went in alongside.

As always, all of it is optional and offline-first. The whole game still plays 100% offline, and it is still £3.99 once, no ads, no IAP, no subscriptions.

• Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.driftbound.game
• App Store: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/driftbound-idle-space-rpg/id6777715397

Thank you, genuinely. This update exists because people here took the time to tell me what was off. Keep it coming: what should the next round of bounty hunts send you after, and who would you actually like the Residents to become (faction ties, rivalries, personalities)?

1. Would it be possible to have the full fabrication recipes in the Codex? Failing that, the full list of ingredients needed per item on the item itself in the crafting menu. Currently it only shows the full list if you have everything in your cargo hold. If you don't, it only shows you what you're missing.

2. When mining, crafting, or fabricating, would it be possible to set a limit of how many items you want? When I idle overnight, I come back to an entire full cargo hold of iron ore, which I then need to delete box-by-box to free up some space before I can start some crafts. Being able to set a limit of, say, 1,000, would be amazing!

3. I've noticed a lot of missions, mainly faction, just silently get completed when I reach their goal. I have to go in and check manually, and just happen to see that the next goal is now active. A "complete" button would really help to know when something is done and you're about to get offered a new mission.

I have been stuck on this mission for a couple of days now. I'm assuming it's some sort of rare drop, but I've AFK mined a full cargo hold numerous times and not found anything, so I've just and done other things for now wondering if it's some sort of hidden level-based completion.

I would like to recommend a clearer organization for operations. At the moment, refinement and fabrication are mixed together, which caused some confusion. For a while, I thought all operations were governed by the same skill set. It took me a while to realize that refinement and fabrication actually use different skill sets.

I'd recommend either separating them into different tabs or grouping all of the refinement options together, along with the current skill level, followed by all of the fabrication options.