// Development Log

Gatewake News

Updates from inside the build — what we're working on, what's changing in Demo Alpha, and deep dives into the systems taking shape underneath Sol.

Dev Update · 2026-08-24

New Light Across Every Theater — and the Brood Learn to Grow

The whole game got a lighting overhaul. The globe now has true moonlight on its night side, city lights that come on wherever it's locally dark, baked ambient shadowing across the terrain, and day/night moods that follow your camera. Underwater picked up sunlight shafts, drifting particulate and real depth; the tunnel networks glow with ember light and settling dust.
Orbits are readable — and commandable. Any ship or satellite parked in orbit now wears a turning orbit ring in the system view, and stays fully commandable from space: move it, put it on orbital patrol, or park it back in orbit without ever leaving the star map.
The 3D model library has its own home. Every faction card on the Factions page now links to its Faction Model Previews — rotate and inspect the working Terran and Mycelith Brood model sets, with a reserved berth for every roadmap faction.
The Mycelith Brood joined the design board. The mechanics editor's red band now holds a full Brood roster designed on one principle: a living species doesn't drive tanks. Barracks are Breeding Dens, factories are Evolution Pits where stock creatures evolve into war-forms, solar farms are vast Sun Canopy groves that double as food, and nothing filters water — the hive drinks raw and metabolizes it. Every Terran building and station has a grown counterpart; every vehicle role is a creature that works similarly, from the Cracklehide Behemoth to the Titan Strider.
And they fight by body plan, not by button. Brood theater rules are terrain-based: surface beasts can't leave the ground without wings or a Void Matron transport, while void creatures use thrusting organs to dive into atmospheres, land on the surface — and, once Pressure Adaptation is evolved, slip beneath the waves. See the board on the Gallery page.
Orbital space filled out with about a hundred new installations. Stations, satellites and ships now cover the jobs a real spacefaring civilization needs done: ice harvesters sublimating comet water, regolith plants that hand back breathable oxygen as a by-product, cryogenic depots fighting boil-off, gas-giant skimmers, and zero-g foundries growing crystals that gravity would ruin. Power comes from kilometre-wide solar collectors beaming energy to the ground, orbital fusion whose real problem is shedding its own heat, and radiator farms that exist purely to glow.
Habitats spin, farm and heal. Stanford Toruses and O'Neill Cylinders turn for gravity, agricultural rings use that spin to make irrigation actually drain, algae reactors close the air loop, and quarantine, nursery and low-gravity medical stations handle the things a colony can't do on a planet. Sensors reach further too — radar arrays, interferometry nodes flying in formation as one giant telescope, starshade coronagraphs, neutrino detectors that see straight through a world, and a sunward sentinel that spots a solar storm an hour before it lands.
And the rest of the sky: mass drivers, particle beams, minefields, trade exchanges, bonded warehouses, Lagrange outposts, skyhook tethers that fling cargo to orbit without a rocket, mass catchers, cycler habitats, salvage yards and debris sweepers. Fifteen new satellite types — radar imaging, hyperspectral prospecting, gravimetric mapping, decoys, orbital mirrors — join a fleet of tugs, ice haulers, refinery ships, hospital ships, solar sail clippers and railgun frigates. Everything is grouped by purpose on the board, so the roster reads as a shopping list rather than a wall.
Then the roster got audited, trimmed, and given rules. Thirteen entries that duplicated each other were merged away — a second drydock, a redundant navigation beacon, four comms nodes down to three, customs and the bonded warehouse into one building — and the three ring habitats became an explicit tier ladder instead of three similar options. What survived had to answer a harder question: what does this actually do?
Seven new orbital mechanics answer it. Debris makes every kill in orbit leave wreckage that all sides then live with, so a decisive battle can poison the prize — and point defense, which shreds incoming rounds into fragments, becomes a trade rather than a free save. Waste heat limits every orbital industry by radiator area, because vacuum only lets you shed heat by glowing. Detection ties stealth, jamming and comms to one rule: nothing is invisible, only quiet, and firing a beam weapon lights you up for everyone. Crew health makes habitats a system — people degrade without spin gravity, fresh food and shielding, and orbital population only grows where a nursery ring provides real gravity. Occlusion lets fleets hide behind worlds, which is what makes neutrino and gravitational-wave observatories worth their cost. Transit gives skyhooks and cyclers their payoff in cheaper journeys forever after. Continuity lets archives and embassies buy back what a defeat would otherwise erase.
The Brood set, the orbital roster and its mechanics are design data on the board, not live simulation yet — same as the utility systems, they get tuned there first.

Dev Update · 2026-08-23

The Colony Gets Real Utilities — Power, Water, Oxygen and Five More Systems on the Design Board

A visual mechanics editor now drives Gatewake's design work. Every unit, building, technology, world and station in the game — 164 of them and growing — lives as an editable card on one pan-and-zoom board, with the real research requirements drawn as wires you can drag between cards. It reads the live game's actual numbers, so what you see is what the simulation runs.
Eight colony utility systems were designed on it this week, grounded in how the real world works. Power flows from real sources — coal, wind, uranium, fusion, steam, hydro — through generators and batteries to distribution stations and out along power lines. Water splits into a civil system (fresh water through filtration, salt water through desalination, both through pumps) and a fully closed industrial loop: once water touches industry it is contaminated, cycles through retention ponds, purifiers and toxin removal, and never comes back to a home.
Oxygen comes from ice. Ice melting plants feed both the drinking-water system and electrolysis, which splits water into hydrogen and oxygen — oxygen to sealed buildings and habitats, and both gases to the launch pads as rocket propellant.
Waste heat is a mechanic, not flavor. Hot buildings defrost the ground around them on frozen worlds — or set their neighbors on fire if you place them badly, calling out emergency crews and, if nobody answers, losing the building. Pump the heat away with water instead and it becomes steam power, a boost for the ice-melting and desalination plants, or a thermal dump into the nearest water source — with environmental consequences.
Mines, sewage, food and fuel round out the eight. Underground haulage carries ore to sorting: waste rock becomes terraforming fill, tunnel backfill or cheap building material, while useful ore refines into copper, iron, steel, aluminum, lithium, uranium and plutonium for the factories, shipyards and construction sites. Sewage either recycles through filtration or dumps into the water sources — polluting them. Food runs farms → distribution centers → stores → homes and restaurants, and the fuel network pulls oil, uranium and bio-renewables from underground, underwater and surface extraction into tank farms, shielded bunkers and hydrogen refineries.
One rule ties every network together: liquids need pipes, solids need cargo. On the design board, piped and wired flows draw as solid arrows, cargo hauls draw dashed — and the systems interconnect: farm surplus becomes biofuel, refined uranium feeds the fission plants, recovered heat re-enters the power grid. See the full board on the Gallery page.
The editor works on your phone now too. Pinch to zoom, drag cards and wires by touch, and the whole layout reflows for small screens — designing game systems from the couch is now a supported workflow.
The new facilities already have real 3D models. Every designed facility went through the concept-to-3D Model Forge pipeline — the model library is being reorganized and will get its own home soon. A cleanup pass also stripped accidental flat ground-planes from 13 older models.
These systems are design blueprints, not live simulation yet — the numbers and connections are being tuned on the board before any of it is built into the game.

Dev Update · 2026-08-20

Rival Empires, a Living Colony, and Your Fleet in Orbit Around a True Globe

You are no longer alone in Sol. The demo now runs separate AI empires alongside you — each with its own economy, its own fleets, and its own appetite for conquest. They expand, they build, and they will take territory if you let them. Skirmishing against the map is over; you're sharing the system with rivals who want it too.
The colony simulation got real depth. Land now has fertility that matters to your farms. Roads carry actual traffic. Your population grows through tiers with their own demands, migrates toward opportunity, and your buildings can be upgraded — and damaged. A diplomacy layer connects you to the other empires, and the research ladder now runs five tiers deep.
Veterancy and fleet-wide upgrades. Units that survive combat now earn veterancy and get better at their job, and the new Fleet Engineering research line lets you upgrade whole classes of units at once — your fleet in the field improves the moment the research lands.
Choose where your story starts. Expeditions now begin with capital site selection: pick your landing site from real candidate locations, and in co-op the countdown to launch starts once every commander has chosen. No more being thrown onto an arbitrary shore.
The globe is now the default. The planet surface renders as a true sphere out of the box — with real raycast unit selection on the curved ground, a genuine day/night terminator sweeping the surface, polar ice caps with north/south markers, and continuous longitude wrap: fly east for long enough and you come back around to where you started.
A camera built for a sphere. The globe now orbits on a proper trackball camera with a north-up lock, so the world turns naturally under your cursor without ever leaving you upside down — and dragging the globe moves the globe, not the whole page.
Your fleet hangs in orbit. Zoom out from your capital and the ships and stations stationed at that world now render in real orbit around the globe itself — the space layer and the surface layer are becoming one continuous view, and this is the first visible piece of that merge.
Theater changes wait for you to mean it. Zooming across a boundary — surface to seafloor, surface to space — now pauses at the threshold with a hint, and only a deliberate, sustained scroll carries you through. Accidentally diving to the ocean floor mid-battle is gone.
New: a proper How to Play guide. The demo picked up a full tutorial page — How to Play — covering your first ten minutes, reading the screen, camera controls, all four theaters and how to unlock them, research, fleets, and co-op. The in-game UI also got quieter: panels with nothing to say now get out of the way until they're needed.
The command card now follows your selection. The surface command bar was rebuilt RTS-style: select a factory and you get its Deploy buttons with costs right on the card (no more hidden right-clicks), select units and you get their orders, select nothing and you get a clean build ribbon organized into categories — Infrastructure, Housing, Food, Industry, Energy, Military, Science — with Esc backing out of anything, one step at a time.
The deep theaters got their 3D bodies. Seafloor habitats, kelp farms, vent mines, sub pens, cavern habitats, vaults, bunkers and the rest now stand as real 3D structures in the ocean and tunnel views — and your submarines finally show their hulls gliding over the seabed instead of hiding in the murk. Ground vehicles across the whole new roster also snapped to their proper size.
Orbit is now a battlefield. A new Laser Satellite can be steered from the surface view: park it geostationary over any point on the globe, then aim and fire — a visible energy lance from orbit with real area damage on the ground. The counter exists too: the new Orbital Defense Battery (plus AA trucks and missile launchers) are the only surface weapons that can reach up and shoot things off the orbital shell. Nothing else can touch an asset in orbit.

Dev Update · 2026-08-19

Sol Is a Real 3D System Now — Lit Worlds, Modelled Fleets, and the Surface Camera Angle

The planets are actual spheres. Every body in the system view — Sol, the eight planets, Luna and the major moons, the belt and Kuiper rocks — is now a lit 3D sphere instead of a flat painted disc. Each one gets a procedurally generated surface built for it: oceans, continents and ice caps on Earth, churned storm belts on Jupiter and Neptune, cratered regolith on Luna and Mercury, fractured ice on Europa, and irregular, lumpy silhouettes on the asteroids so they read as rocks rather than marbles.
Day and night are real, and they come from the Sun. A single light sits at the Sun's own position in the system, so the terminator across each world is genuine geometry — the lit face always points at Sol, wherever you pan or zoom. Earth carries a separate cloud deck turning slightly faster than the ground beneath it, and worlds with atmospheres — Earth, Venus, Mars, Titan, the gas giants — get a limb glow in their own colour.
Saturn's rings are geometry, not a picture. Banded, tilted, with a real Cassini division, and they lean with the planet's axial tilt like every other world's does.
Your fleet is modelled. Ships and stations in orbit now use the real models from the 3D gallery — corvettes, defense cutters, cargo shuttles and haulers, colony and construction ships, survey and mining vessels, plus space stations, orbital shipyards, refineries, habitats and defence platforms. They keep the exact on-screen size their old sprites had, so nothing about reading the tactical picture changed. Hulls with no honest match in the gallery keep their 2D art rather than wearing a wrong-looking stand-in.
Cities light up at night. Every completed building now glows with warm window and lamp light after dusk — coming on ahead of full dark the way real streetlights do, each building's cluster slightly different, and unpowered construction sites staying dark.
The seafloor is alive. Marine snow drifts down through the water column, jellyfish pulse past, fish schools roam the open water, bubbles stream from hydrothermal vents, seafloor structures glow cyan against the dark — and sunken wrecks of real hulls lie keeled over in the trenches, waiting to be found.
Fog of war is real now. The map starts dark. Your buildings and units each hold a live vision bubble — installations see further than rovers — territory you've explored stays dimly readable after you leave, and a rover driving into the unknown reveals as it goes.
Your capital is a town, not an archipelago. Starting buildings now found a clustered city on one real landmass, streets between them, port on the nearest shore — instead of being strung across thirty cells of coastline.
The land got real. Steep slopes break to bare rock, peaks carry ragged snowlines, coasts get sand, deserts get dune banding, farmland shows cultivation rows, and forests are actually crowded — every tree individually placed and coloured, with darker swamp stands and sparse tundra conifers. Volcano craters glow. And the air itself behaves: haze now follows the camera like real aerial perspective — crisp up close, atmospheric at the horizon — instead of drowning the whole map in soup.
Worlds got big — and Jupiter is finally the biggest. Authored worlds now upscale through a domain-warped resample with Anno-style sub-cell detail: straight map-editor coastlines become organic shorelines with bays and headlands, and large plains break up into copses and rocky patches. Gas and ice giants scale to their real relative order for the first time — Jupiter's platform layer is now the largest map in the game, half again wider than Earth, with Saturn, Neptune and Uranus stepped in between.
Every world has its own config file. A new worlds/ folder holds one file per world — scale, class, and the rules that world lives under — so tuning a single planet no longer means digging through the main bundle.
The galaxy re-rolls between expeditions. Star systems beyond Sol are now generated from a per-expedition seed, fused with a fingerprint of your starting system — its worlds and your commander count are the base factor for how outer worlds generate. Confirmed real exoplanets and star types stay fixed; everything procedural rolls fresh each game, and anything you've already surveyed stays exactly as your probes found it.
The three layers of a world finally agree with each other. Dive beneath a continent and there is no seabed there — the seafloor view now shows the underside of the landmass rising out of the water, so the ocean floor is the true negative of the land above it. And the tunnel network below follows both: thicker rock under a mountain range, dropping away under an ocean trench, instead of sitting at one flat depth everywhere.
The seafloor shimmers. Sunlight filtering through the water above now casts a slow, drifting web of caustics across the seabed — draped over every trench, cliff and rise rather than floating flat above them, so the light bends with the ground it lands on. It drifts, sways and breathes on three different rhythms, so it never visibly loops.
The deep theaters are earned now, not just zoomed into. A world's tunnel network stays sealed until you build a Mine Entrance on its surface — and when it opens, the first shaft comes up directly beneath the entrance you placed, not at some arbitrary map centre. The seafloor stays sealed until you build a Construction Submarine at a Shipyard / Wharf, which itself can only be placed on a coastline. Locked theater tabs are marked with a padlock and tell you what opens them. Worlds where you already have tunnels or a seafloor base are unaffected — nothing you have built can be taken away from you.
The system view has the surface view's camera angle. Space is no longer locked flat and top-down: it now sits at the same adjustable pitch the planet surface uses, on the same R/F keys, anywhere from 30° to straight down. Orbit rings, order lines and range rings lie in the orbital plane instead of floating flat over it — and because the whole view is pitched together, clicking a planet or a ship still lands exactly where you'd expect.

Dev Update · 2026-08-08

The 3D Concept Roster Grew From 3 Tanks to Nearly 70 Units

The image-to-3D pipeline from our July 23rd "first look" post has been running hard. What started as three tank hull concepts is now a real, browsable "3D Unit Previews" section on the Gallery page — rotate-and-zoom models you can inspect yourself, not just static renders.
Infantry and mech line: marine, medic, sniper, and worker, alongside a full bipedal mech family — construction, battle, missile, heavy enforcement, scout, and survey variants, plus an artillery mech with a mobile/sieged mode toggle right on the card.
Ground vehicles: two heavy tank variants, an AA truck, artillery vehicle, radar and shield trucks, a scout buggy, and a run of support vehicles — medevac, fire, and medical rovers, a command vehicle, colonist bus, and construction/constructor rigs.
Air and sea: a VTOL gunship, plane, and cargo airship in the sky; a corvette, patrol boat and ship, warship, defense cutter, anti-sub vessel, mining submarine, and deep-sea rover on and under the water.
Orbital and colony structures: an orbital shipyard, space station, shield station, and defense turret in orbit; full colony and Mars colony center pieces, habitat/mining/reactor/refinery districts, survey stations, and an underground miner on the ground.
The production-chain buildings that were the biggest gap now have concept art too: Barracks (trains Marines), Factory (builds Tanks), Airport (produces and launches Planes), Shipyard (a real dry dock for Warships), and a Rocket Facility launch complex — the buildings that actually produce the units above, not just the units themselves.
The core colony hub buildings followed right after: Command Center (the colony's HQ), Research District (a lab-dome cluster), Spaceport (an orbital transit hub), City Block (civilian housing), and a Landing Pad. A full asset checklist for what's still missing — across Terran surface/ocean/underground buildings and a first roster for the upcoming Mycelith Brood faction — now lives in the art bible for anyone tracking what's next.
The tier-upgrade economy chain is now visually complete: Underground Mining Complex, Copper Refinery, Small Farm, Medium Farm, and Habitat Complex — the researched upgrades that sit alongside their base-tier counterparts (Mining District, the basic farm, Habitat District) rather than replacing them.
The Terran surface roster is now essentially done, plus the ocean and underground theaters got concept art for the first time: Rover Bay, Drone Control Hub, Repair Yard, Propellant/Fuel Depots, Surface Trade Hub, Coastal Port, Fishery, Windmill, Solar Array, Wave Generator, Service Road, and a full Atmospheric Platform / Floating Platform Core / Skydock Deck / Atmospheric Collector set for gas-giant colonies on the surface side; Seafloor Habitat, Kelp Farm, Vent Mine, Sub Pen, and Tidal Generator underwater; Cavern Habitat, Deep Mine, Geothermal Plant, Secure Vault, Artifact Lab, Hardened Bunker, and Security Research Lab underground. The 3-Satellite Transport ship — the one confirmed gap in the fleet roster — is also done, rendered floating in deep space instead of on the ground.
Two buildings (Surface Sensor Array, Comm Relay) hit a repeatable rendering-pipeline limitation on thin tower shapes and are still pending a different approach — noted honestly in the art bible rather than shipped broken.
The entire Mycelith Brood faction roster now has concept art — all 22 units and structures, in the "Mycelith Brood Concept Previews" section on the Gallery page. The full unit line: Spore Scout, Harvester Drone, Tendril Repairer, Colony Spore Vessel, Stinger Skirmisher, Brood Corvette, Hive Frigate, Ravager Destroyer, Nexus Cruiser, and the Broodmother Battleship flagship. The full structure line: Hive Heart Core (their Command Center equivalent), Brood Hive, Spore Nest, Biomass Pit, Mutation Chamber, Synapse Grove, Feeder Nexus, Defense Spines, Rooted Landing Bed, Orbital Spore Cradle, Sense Cluster, and Mycelial Relay. Organic red/black chitin, toxic green bioluminescence throughout — deliberately nothing like the Terran ceramic-plating look.
Both faction pages on Factions link straight to each race's own 3D model gallery section — Terran Coalition to the existing unit previews, Mycelith Brood to its section above.
Same honesty note as last time: these are concept-stage renders from the local 3D-generation pipeline, evaluated for the faction's visual identity — not shipped in-game assets yet.

Dev Update · 2026-07-23

A Real Visual Language, and a First Look at 3D-Generated Armor

The UI now runs on one real color and type system instead of ad-hoc values scattered across stylesheets — panels, borders, and text all pull from the same palette, and headings switched to a sharper display face that actually loads (a missing font link meant it silently fell back before).
Tested an image-to-3D pipeline for future unit art. Generated three tank hull concepts — a light scout, a medium battle tank, and a heavy siege tank — end-to-end from text prompts through a local 3D-generation service. These are concept renders for evaluating the pipeline, not shipped in-game assets yet.

Dev Update · 2026-07-22

Commander Colors Actually Show Up Now, and Every Unit Got a Pass

You can finally tell whose unit is whose. Per-commander color-coding existed in the code for a couple of days but a styling conflict was quietly cancelling it out — every unit rendered identically no matter who trained it. Fixed: a real colored ring now sits around every surface and ocean unit, in your co-commander's assigned color, and units that aren't yours are dimmed.
Marine icon was a broken sprite sheet. The old marine art was actually four overlapping soldiers stacked in one image file — it rendered as a smeared cluster instead of a single clean icon. Replaced with one properly isolated marine matching the rest of the roster.
Warship got its silhouette back. The old warship art shipped with a baked-in white background and ocean spray, breaking the transparent-silhouette look every other unit uses. Redrawn as a clean top-down hull consistent with the rest of the fleet.
Pick your own color. The lobby now has a real hex color picker — choose your commander's identity color instead of a fixed assignment. Colors are validated on launch: anything too close to white (reserved for AI/NPC identity) or already taken by another seat gets swapped for a default automatically.
AI and ambient life read as neutral now. Ambient civilians/wildlife and space-view raiders both get a white identity ring, so "not a commander's unit" is visually obvious at a glance.

Dev Update · 2026-07-20

Real Co-Op Lobbies — Host, Share a Code, Play Together

Actual multiplayer staging, not just local splitscreen. Host a lobby under a name you choose, set it public or private, and share a join code or passkey with up to three other commanders.
Public or private, your call. Public lobbies are discoverable to anyone browsing; private ones only open to someone with your exact code.
Ownership follows you into the match. Everything you build and train in a shared session is tagged to your commander seat from the moment you join — see this week's other post on commander colors for how that now actually shows on screen.

Dev Update · 2026-07-20

Research Is Now a Real Web, Not a Shopping List

See the whole tree, not one tier at a time. Research is laid out as connected branches across Colonization, Sensors, and Ship Engineering, with lines showing exactly what unlocks what — instead of a flat list of whatever happens to be available right now.
Prerequisites are visible before you commit. Locked nodes show what they're waiting on, so planning three techs ahead doesn't require memorizing the tree.

Dev Update · 2026-07-20

Raiders Now Fight Smart, and Colonization Has a Real Registry

Raider groups react instead of just patrolling. Enemy raiders now size up nearby threats, group up for safety in numbers, fall back toward allies when outmatched, and commit to a fight only once cornered or grouped — instead of marching a fixed patrol loop regardless of what's nearby.
World biomes are a real colonization registry now, with the first tier of buildings and matching art to go with it.

Tech Note · 2026-07-22

Planet Surfaces Stop Wasting CPU on What You Can't See

Off-camera units and colonists now simulate cheaply instead of freezing or costing full price. Anything outside the camera's view banks its elapsed time and catches up in one larger step every ~1.2 seconds — no per-frame DOM work for entities nobody's looking at — while construction and movement still resolve correctly by the time you scroll back. The last missing piece of the chunked-world renderer needed for very large planet surfaces.

Deep Dive · 2026-07-16

The Galaxy View Is Live — Seven Real Stars, One Probe Away

The minimap now has a Galaxy tab. Research First Interstellar Probe and a second view opens up alongside the Sol system map: the seven real nearest stars to Sol, laid out at their actual relative distances.
Every system is real astronomy first, procedural second. Alpha Centauri's survey report leads with the actual confirmed exoplanet Proxima Centauri b, then fills out the rest of the system procedurally. Sirius carries its real white-dwarf companion's radiation. Wolf 359 is a real flare star. Epsilon Eridani has a real dense debris disk. Nothing here is made up wholesale — it's grounded, then extended.
A probe, not a fleet. Surveying a system spends Research and clears its fog of war — it does not send a ship, and there's nothing to click to "go" there. Gatewake has no lightspeed drive; until a stabilized gate exists, the galaxy is something you learn about, not somewhere you visit.

Dev Update · 2026-07-16

Building Placement Now Shows You Exactly What You're Getting

A real holographic preview. Pick a structure and a translucent copy of the actual building follows your cursor across the grid, snapping to the tile you're over — not a guess, the real building art.
Red means red for a reason. The preview turns red the moment placement won't work — overlapping another structure, bad terrain, no adjacent road, or simply not enough resources banked. That last one used to only show up as an error after you'd already clicked.
Placement still means placement. Click and it goes exactly where the preview showed you, then a work crew is dispatched and construction runs its course — nothing pops into existence instantly.

Deep Dive · 2026-07-16

The Galaxy Beyond Sol Is About to Get a Lot Less Foggy

A new Galaxy View is coming. Zoom out past the Sol system map and you'll see the seven real nearby stars — Alpha Centauri, Barnard's Star, Wolf 359, Lalande 21185, Sirius, Epsilon Eridani, Tau Ceti — sitting under fog of war. Gatewake has no lightspeed drive; nothing crewed leaves Sol without a stabilized gate, and that stays locked for the whole demo. But slow, unmanned probes don't need a gate, just time — and sending them out is how the fog clears.
Exploring is how you get to late-game tech. Surveying a system remotely doesn't colonize it, but it does bank real research progress — first contact, capital-ship doctrine, and more all require having looked outward first. This isn't flavor text; it's a real prerequisite.
Your first survey target matters. Which of the seven gets surveyed first is a real decision — Alpha Centauri for a safe, balanced start; Wolf 359 for a risky push with a salvage payoff (its old wreckage seeds Capital Ship Doctrine directly); Epsilon Eridani if you want to rush the economy. Whichever comes first locks in a permanent bonus for that playthrough.
Every system has its own personality. Barnard's Star is quiet and stable — great for research, nothing will surprise you there. Sirius is gorgeous and lethal, gated behind real radiation-hardened hull tech, but its stellar remnant material can't be found anywhere else. Tau Ceti is the one system whose survey data suggests it might not even need terraforming.
The capstone is a decision, not a conquest. Once you've surveyed a few systems, you designate a priority target for the first real expedition once gate travel is finally stabilized — a full-game milestone. Which system you pick sets a standing empire-wide research bonus right now. Different target, different playthrough.

Deep Dive · 2026-07-16

Mapping the Terran Research Tree

Early Game — Solar System Expansion. Survey, colonize, and industrialize Sol: near-Earth spaceflight through advanced Sol civilization, six eras of Colonization, Stations, Sensors, Ship Engineering, Logistics, Defense, and AI-assisted Automation branches, each gating real ships, stations, and colony buildings — not just stat bumps.
Mid Game — Reaching for the Nearest Stars. Once a commander clears the pre-interstellar threshold, the tree opens onto seven real neighboring systems — Alpha Centauri, Barnard's Star, Wolf 359, Lalande 21185, Sirius, Epsilon Eridani, and Tau Ceti — with dedicated interstellar logistics and colonization tech to reach them.
Late Game — Contact, Diplomacy, and War. The endgame branches into Xenodiplomacy (first contact, translation, treaties, and alliances with Gatewake's nine major powers) and Fleet Warfare (capital ships, planetary siege, boarding actions, and multi-system defense).
Every ship gets real upgrade tiers — weapons, hull and shields, environmental resistance, sensors and targeting, propulsion and power, all on Mk.1/2/3 tracks that match the same tier progression you already see in unit art.
Also mapped: habitation and population growth, modular stations, satellite types, farming, deep mining, ocean and subterranean colony technology, and planet-type survivability for icy, scorched, and gas-giant worlds.

Dev Update · 2026-07-16

What We're Building Next for Demo Alpha

Matches with a real beginning and end. We're designing survival and elimination conditions so a session in Demo Alpha resolves into an actual win or loss, with an end-of-match summary — instead of running indefinitely.
Custom match setup. Difficulty, hostile activity, and match pace are being wired into a real pre-game settings flow so hosts can actually shape the match they're starting.
A commander worth remembering. Account-linked identity and persistent progress are in active design, so your colony's history follows you between sessions.
Performance groundwork for bigger worlds. We've moved surface terrain generation onto a background thread, verified at a full 1,000×700-cell world with zero impact on responsiveness — the foundation for much larger surfaces ahead.
As always: Demo Alpha stays Terran Coalition, Sol system, desktop-first while we get these foundations right.