Titanium now arrives much sooner. The Wide Sonar that finds it and the Industrial Drill that mines it both unlock far earlier, right in your early steam progression. I have been listening to all the forum and Discord and feedback posts that you have made about it and hopefully this is going to feel like a more refined and smooth progression.
The Code Lab gains a Concepts half: 49 short lessons that explain the language step by step and how it works inside the game, from how get_component hands you a machine to scripts that run for as long as your colony does. Every lesson comes with examples you can run on the spot, and the first eight practice lessons now start you off with the shape of the solution, so you fill in the key detail.
Big colonies autosave smoothly, the Harvesting field runs about six times smoother, the game stays fluid with the Planet Map open, and the editor keeps up with long scripts. There is plenty new to build with too: the editor, console and DOCS can each open in their own window, PyCharm and Zed join VS Code as fully supported editors, and your scripts gain enums, custom exceptions, new modules and far richer Control Room cards.
New in this version
Progression
- Titanium arrives much earlier: the Wide Sonar now unlocks at 1.8 kPa pressure instead of 6, and the Industrial Drill at 30 ppt oxygen instead of 100.
Code Lab
- The Code Lab has a Concepts half: 49 short reading modules with runnable examples.
- The first eight lessons now start from a worked shape, not a blank page.
- Two new Code Lab achievements mark your first lesson and the halfway point.
Scripting
- Scripts can now use the enum module, with Enum, IntEnum, StrEnum, Flag, IntFlag and auto, so a state machine can name its states and the editor catches a misspelled one before the script runs.
- Your scripts can define custom exception classes, and catch them like any built-in.
- New built-in modules: json, heapq and traceback, plus more of functools and dataclasses.
- Scripts can deploy, undeploy, decommission and rename hardware through the Ship Computer.
- Custom Panels gain text fields, dropdowns, lists, radio groups, and mouse and keyboard input.
- Hover, signature help, completion, DOCS and the external editor stubs now show the Python type of every parameter and return value.
Windows, DOCS and settings
- The editor, console and DOCS open as separate windows, with a Return to game control.
- Separate windows remember their size and position across sessions, and Reset Window Layout, under Window Recovery in Settings, brings them all back.
- Added an editable Data Archive for custom notes, formulas, and references.
- DOCS tabs can now be reordered to match your preferred workflow.
- Ctrl+click (Cmd+click on Mac) and middle click on any DOCS link, including links in a script's Info tab, now open a new DOCS tab instead of replacing the page.
- The DOCS manual has a new FAQ section answering common questions and troubleshooting.
- The DOCS manual export offers a light or dark appearance and an optional build stamp.
- Export Save and the DOCS exports now open a real Save As dialog.
- Water Pumps now display current salt storage and venting rate on their machine cards, hover inspect, and the Info tab.
- Added keybinding settings for the code editor autocomplete popup so you can customize navigation, accept, and dismiss keys.
- Notification duration is now a setting.
- Background saves can now be set to every 30 seconds, 1, 2 or 5 minutes.
- Unsaved editor text rescued after a crash is announced once when the save loads, and Recovered edits on the Pause menu can apply, export or discard it.
- A failed save now names its cause: a full disk, another program holding the file, a second copy.
- Failed saves and failed loads can be reported in one click from the pause menu.
External editors
- PyCharm now has a proper Code: Terraform plugin, installed from Settings, with autocomplete, error checking, Run, Stop and Debug in the gutter and the editor menu, a Machines tool window, and game output.
- Zed is now supported: the game writes the extension for you and Settings tells you how to install it, with Run, Stop and debugging.
- VS Code, Zed and PyCharm now format your scripts with your own Ruff, colour game symbols the way Python is coloured, and answer rename, find references and the outline view.
- External editors gained a Machines view listing every machine, with run, stop, debug, open and reveal.
- Import File as Game Library now works from every external editor, not just VS Code.
- Each scripts folder now gets its editor settings and a .gitignore written once, then left to you to edit.
- Settings now shows, for each external editor, whether it is installed, missing, or older than this game build, with the action that updates it.
- Added a rerun-on-save toggle for external editors.
- External script editing can be switched off, and the Settings section says whether it is on.
Windows and Linux
- Windows: the game recovers from a renderer crash and returns you to your save.
- Windows: repeated renderer crashes switch to software drawing, with a setting to choose.
- Linux: a Frame pacing setting for high refresh rate displays, where dragging stepped.
- Linux: an Audio device wake-up setting for USB headsets that stayed silent from launch.
Fixes and improvements
Saves
- Fixed a bug that could block every save route at once, including exit.
- Quitting from the title screen can no longer hang on a save that never finishes writing.
- Saving no longer stops when the editor's crash recovery store cannot be read.
- Fixed a save with a large external scripts folder never finishing its load.
- Autosaving no longer stalls the simulation on a large colony.
- Faster loading and smoother browsing of save history snapshots, especially on colonies with many backups.
- Improved save export reliability and resolved errors where export files could remain locked.
Editor and scripts
- Fixed an outside edit replacing work you were still typing in the in-game editor.
- Fixed an in-game edit being discarded when the scripts folder had not been read yet.
- Saving a file in an external editor no longer freezes the game for seconds.
- Faster editor analysis, including the freeze after several renames of one name.
- The editor now warns only about argument types the game actually rejects, including a fraction passed where the game needs a whole number.
- Fixed external editors marking every attribute of self missing behind an unresolved base.
- The editor and external editors no longer mark inherited attributes and methods, a walrus inside a comprehension, or a generator-based __iter__ as errors.
- Hover no longer repeats one class name several times, and a write to one object no longer changes what the editor thinks another object holds.
- Game type annotations in scripts no longer report false undefined name warnings and provide exact import guidance.
- Fixed a lint error where increasing a number read out of a tuple made an unrelated list appear to lose its methods.
- The editor now knows get_component("computer") and offers its methods and return types.
- Completion now works after an attribute that holds a get_component(...) result, such as self.console_2.
- Autocomplete no longer offers the old id of a starter Biology building after it was redeployed under a new one.
- When an editor command is refused, the message now names the actual reason instead of a generic failure.
- Error messages now name types the same way Python's type() does.
- Fixed small differences from Python: string searches accept None as a start or end, Zone set operations raise TypeError for anything that is not a Zone, and lru_cache(True) works.
- An imported library now sees its own name in __name__, as in Python, so an if __name__ == "__main__": block in a library no longer runs when another script imports it.
- Closed script editors immediately clear outdated error underlines and diagnostics.
- Code execution line highlights now stay in sync across detached and docked editor windows.
- Returning a detached script editor back to the main window preserves your unsaved edits.
- Ctrl+click on a symbol now opens the docked DOCS pane instead of floating a second copy over it.
- With separate windows on and the editor docked, the DOCS button no longer opens DOCS twice.
- DOCS opened in a separate window renders its references as clickable links.
- A floating script editor's Dock button no longer reads Undock, and no longer stays highlighted when it is not doing anything.
- A pop-out window now appears immediately instead of after ten seconds.
- Fixed script console lines jumping or disappearing when filtering log history.
- The game no longer creates a scripts folder for players who never asked for external editing.
- The scripts folder no longer collects recovery files that nothing ever removed.
- Windows: fixed the scripts folder rescanning itself for the rest of the session.
Game and interface
- The Harvesting field is about six times smoother and no longer stutters while it animates.
- The Planet Map does far less work while it sits idle, so the game stays smoother with it open.
- Fixed the wildlife reading dropping to zero when a Habitat was undeployed.
- Fixed a plot keeping a machine's dimming after the machine was replaced by a plant or cleared.
- Cancelling machine deconstruction jobs now works reliably from both the map and machine cards.
- Stopping or detaching a script on Biology machines no longer resets your manual settings.
- Control Room cards now render from loops written any way, not only from a plain forever loop.
- A tall 1x2 Control Room card now reaches the full height of the two cards beside it, and + New Card no longer stays disabled after your first card.
- Control Room widgets drawn inside clip_rect can only be clicked where they are visible, and clear() inside a clip no longer disables clickable widgets outside it.
- Escape now cancels a map marker placement even with a script editor open over the map, instead of opening the pause menu.
- All 28 visual themes now correctly tint the full window background instead of leaving dark gaps between dashboard cards.
- Fixed tooltips, such as the Terraform Index breakdown, getting pushed off the edge of the screen.
- Dashboard card outlines and frames no longer flicker or distort when resizing the window.
- Switching focus back to the game window now immediately refreshes canvas animations without hesitation.
- The scanner now documents that a sweep can succeed while leaving a contact unidentified.
- The drill and sonar descriptions now state that each tier cuts everything below its hardness limit, and name the minerals each one adds.
Windows and Linux
- Windows: fixed the game getting slower the longer a session ran, with input and scrolling falling behind.
- Windows: fixed the game freezing after Alt+Tab, both when the picture stopped while sound and clicks kept working and when the game showed "Not responding", including right after typing with an input method (IME).
- Windows: starting a new game with separate windows on no longer makes two windows flicker in a loop with the keyboard dead, and clicking the pop-out control and then Manage quickly no longer freezes the game.
- Anything you copy in the game now lands in the Windows clipboard history (Win+V).
- Linux: the Steam overlay and screenshot keys now work.
- Linux: fixed DOCS PDF export, which failed outright or tried to print to paper.
- Linux: the game now checks which graphics driver it actually gets before choosing hardware acceleration, so a machine that would silently fall back to software rendering keeps the faster configuration.
