ECON Galaxy v0.13.0: Frames, Crew & an Economy That Holds (Alpha)
Ships have people aboard now, and the galaxy works again
Version 0.13.0 is live. Three things at once.
A ship is no longer a line in a catalogue but a hull with slots, a
registration and a log book. The people aboard are a real system for the
first time instead of a personnel file nobody ever read. And the economy
produces again, population grows again, and your first job is waiting
right after registration instead of behind three forms.
Less glamorous but honest: a large part of this version was fixing
things that worked on paper and not in practice. More on that below.
What's new?
Frames: the name on the hull decides nothing any more
It used to work like this: a Prospector mined, an Aurora hauled, and
the ship type decided what the thing could do. That's over.
There are now 11 frames in four classes, named by type number instead
of by marketing. A frame is a chassis with slots, a power and CPU
budget and a base statline. What it can do is decided by your fitting.
The interesting name belongs to the player who buys the hull.
Every hull carries a registration that survives rename, refit and
sale, plus a log book: voyages, distance covered, hours flown,
cargo hauled. A ship has a history, and the history goes with it when
it's sold.
Refitting doesn't destroy fitted modules. They move into an equivalent
slot, else into the owner's storage, else into the ship's own hold. And
every frame got its own render. The one hull that came back lying
sideways was redrawn.
Crew: the system that is actually new
Honest framing first: a crew page already existed. You could hire
people, they had roles and attributes, and then nothing happened with
them. The captain sheet carried four figures that exactly two places in
the entire codebase ever read: the panel that printed them, and the
backup script that copied them along.
From now on, crew is a system you cannot route around.
Nothing flies undermanned. Every frame states a minimum crew and a
bunk count. Below the minimum it does not leave the dock, and one
undermanned hull holds its whole fleet.
Roles decide what a fleet can do on its own. This is the heart of
it:
- Buying and selling wants a trader aboard
- Mining wants an engineer
- A jump between stars wants pilot and engineer, the one thing in
this game that asks for two trades at once
- Travel from low-sec onwards wants a security watching the cargo
The hull flies itself to a station on its minimum crew. But negotiating
a purchase, working a rock or lining up a jump wants somebody who knows
how. Your own hands at a market are unaffected: this is about what a
fleet does while nobody is watching. The qualification belongs to the
formation rather than the single hull. You fly together, so one trader
serves the fleet.
A better trader raises a real ceiling. How much can move in a single
order depends on the person: 200 units at the bottom, then 800, then
2,000, and no limit at all at the top. That is the difference between a
bonus you can ignore and a route that will not run without the right
person aboard.
Percentages only exist where they do something. The pilot makes the
fleet faster, the engineer shortens the mining cycle. Trader, security,
tactician and scientist carried bonuses that were never applied. Those
are gone. A number nobody reads is a promise the game does not keep.
Wages run hourly and go to the population where the crew is
stationed. The money doesn't vanish, it stays in the economy. An
employer who can't pay keeps their crew and loses their goodwill.
Hiring is a journey, not a click. Somebody signed on at Earth has to
reach Mars before they can stand a watch, and even at the same station
they have to pack and board. Minimum 45 seconds, plus distance, plus a
surcharge for leaving the system, capped at 30 minutes so a badly
planned hire doesn't tie somebody up for a whole session. A fleet waits
for anybody still inbound.
Your first ship comes with somebody who can fly it. A pilot,
deliberately ordinary and deliberately cheap: 250 credits an hour
against a first delivery worth around 1,600. Somebody who was already on
the payroll when the keys changed hands.
Everybody on the payroll gets a face. Portraits were only generated
for crew that came out of the seeder. Everybody else was excluded for
good rather than merely waiting their turn: 3 of 155 crew had a picture.
On top of that, a crew roster that leads with the hulls that can't fly
and says why. Crew members can be dragged onto a docked ship to send
them over.
You're somebody aboard
The four dead captain figures are gone with nothing put in their place.
What replaces them is something that actually counts: you are a person
on the roster.
At character creation you spend 12 points across reflexes, intelligence,
charisma and stress resistance, each starting at 3 and capped at 8. A
specialist is possible, a prodigy is not. Then you pick a role: pilot,
engineer, trader or security. Tactician and scientist are deliberately
left out while they do nothing, because the choice can't be taken back.
After that you're crew in every way the game already understands: the
same attributes, the same bunk, counted by the frame like anybody else.
Your role qualifies your fleet exactly like an employee's does. Two
differences: you earn no wage, because nobody pays themselves. And you
can't be dismissed, because there'd be nobody left to dismiss you.
Used ships change hands as objects
The ship market doesn't trade catalogue entries any more. What's sold
is that specific hull: registration, service record, fitting and crew
all travel with the sale. Your own listings are marked and can't be
bought back by accident. A standing listing can be repriced or
withdrawn.
There's also one ship dossier used wherever a ship is selected, showing
exactly what the viewer is entitled to: the owner sees everything, a
buyer sees what the seller put on the table, a stranger sees the frame
and the name.
Onboarding happens inside the game
Before: registration, then portrait selection, then five intro steps,
then a company form. Three full-screen windows before a new player saw
anything of the game.
Now: registration, and you're on the mission board with a ship, a
loaded hold and a personal run. You found the company afterwards, after
the first paid delivery, in a dialog instead of a form. The job comes
before the paperwork.
Starting capital is paid at company founding. It used to hang on the
first habitat, which was simply too late.
Jobs you can actually fly
A run belongs to a player now instead of a ship. A run used to be a
contract with exactly one hull: it named the pickup point, it named the
ship, and nothing else in your company could touch it. The hauler that
happened to be free, the stock already sitting at the destination, the
second fleet halfway there, all of it useless.
A run is a standing order: somewhere wants a quantity of something. Who
brings it and where it comes from is your business.
An active mission can also be flown from the card it lives on. Before
that, the only buttons were View Details and a red Abandon, and "Travel
to X" was a label. Docking happens on the way in. Runs nobody can
finish come off the board.
The economy works again
This is the unglamorous part, and also the most important one.
Stations produce. Every location had a production rate that no
service ever wrote to. The galaxy was a pure sink: everything was
consumed, nothing was made. Stations now have specialities and publish
their surplus on the open market. Food stock across the galaxy before: 17. After: nearly 3,000. Food satisfaction from 0.0001 to 0.17.
Manufactured goods, luxuries and medical supplies deliberately stay at
zero output. That's your opening.
Population grows again. Growth was rounded to whole people per tick
and the remainder thrown away. A place needed 500 residents to gain
one, but only 100 to lose one. Measured across every populated
location: delta zero, in both directions. That's why so many colonies
sat at exactly 99.
Capacities were brought back to a readable scale, too. 83 asteroids,
gas clouds and ice fields each carried 100,000 capacity, Earth alone
carried 12 billion. And population was sized against what the
locations' own consumption profiles already describe.
Demand appears where it exists. NPC buy orders were partly posted
at the cheapest seller instead of the place that needed the goods. Now
they stand where the goods are wanted.
Bids nobody stands behind are withdrawn. A station buys with its
owner's money, and an unbacked bid disappears instead of luring a
hauler across the system to find out on arrival that nobody is paying.
The money is metered, not printed
The economy's faucet was rebuilt. Over the whole lifetime of the game,
8.7 million credits had entered through the faction allocation, the
faction AI had burned 3.5 million of that on ships nobody built, and
1.2 million had ever reached a player.
Now money appears where work is done: a delivery that fills a station's
bid is paid in new credits, capped by what that faction's stations
actually get through. Mission rewards are minted into escrow and burned
again if nobody flies them. The faction AI no longer burns its budget.
Trade fees are territorial now. Instead of a flat 2 to 3 percent
they range from 1 to 6 percent depending on whose space you trade in.
You'll notice this.
Permits and construction pay the landlord: habitat licence 100 percent
to the faction, HQ build 15 percent, research 10 percent.
Warp needs a warp module
Jumps between stars want a drive. The problem: warp drives only existed
in large, and only 4 of the 11 frames have a large slot at all. They
now come in three sizes, priced accordingly, with recipes so somebody
can actually build them.
Along with that, a one-off opening stock of modules was put on the
market so the fittings a ship needs can be bought in the first place.
Mail, navigation and the rest
- In-game mail client with faction guidance after the tutorial.
Conversations instead of loose messages, and you can finally tell who
wrote what.
- Email notification for unread in-game mail, so messages don't sit
there for months.
- Command Center regrouped. Navigation follows activities now
instead of the shape of the database.
- Market filterable by star system, and from a docked hold you can
sell straight into a bid you can see. If nobody here is buying, the
button tells you where it looks better.
- Trading partners are named and linked on the transactions page.
You can see who you traded with.
- Fleets hold station and dock on arrival instead of waiting in
orbit.
- Rank tells the truth now. The chip printed "Top N percent", and N
was the share of the field you were ahead of. A company sitting 24th
of 27 was told it was top 11 percent, the one in first place top 96.
- HUD split into separate panels for credits, fleet, crew,
habitats, research, revenue and rank.
- Public pages are server-rendered, with a sitemap and traffic
attribution. Crawlers used to get an empty shell with no title.
- 5,147 "Production Complete" notifications reached a single player
in three days. None of them were ever opened. Fixed.
Why this matters
v0.12.0 delivered bases, combat and ship depth. What was missing was a
world for all of it to happen in: production stood still, population
could neither grow nor shrink, and a new player faced four forms before
being allowed to move a ship.
v0.13.0 repairs the foundation and at the same time builds the layer on
top that makes ships interesting: a hull is an object with a history,
the people aboard cost money and decide what you can operate at all,
and you are one of them.
Next up (v0.14.0): Corporations with a shared wallet, hangar and
roles. Finally playing together.
Alpha note
This is still alpha. Features aren't final, balance is a work in
progress, bugs exist. The new crew economy in particular wants
watching: wages are a running cost, and whether the numbers hold up
only shows in operation. Feedback is welcome, ideally on
Discord.
Get going
Log in, create your character, look at who's sitting on your ship and
what they cost. Fly the first run, found the company afterwards. And
take a look at the used ship market: everything on it has a past.
ECON Galaxy. A solo developer project. No lootboxes. No drama.
Version 0.13.0 is live. The full roadmap shows where
this is going.