Starfoundry — development log

Towns hold fewer people

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Changed A Township houses four rather than five, and a Metroplex nine rather than eleven. Housing was outrunning the work: worlds were filling with people who had nowhere to go, and the towns you put up to reach a far corner of a world were paying for themselves twice over.
Fixed The Shoal's own words match their own buildings again: a Coral Sprawl said it housed eight and a Pressure Bell seven, while both had been holding more than that for some time.
Fixed The six peoples are shown whole on the opening screen again. On a short window their portraits were being squared off and shrunk, which cropped the top and bottom off every one of them — they now come down a size with the picture intact.

Cities reach further than towns

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Fixed The tutorial finds the ship for you. It used to say “click the ship” on a screen you can drag around, with the ship on a card of its own that might be well off the edge of the window — so the guide now brings it into view, rings it, and mentions that the sector can be dragged and zoomed.
Fixed There is a way back from choosing a people to your list of games, which there was not once the load screen took the whole window.
Fixed The species paintings are shown whole rather than cropped to fit — the Varkesh was losing his head.
Fixed Finishing the tutorial left a black screen. It now hands you to the start screen, which is the choice it was preparing you for — and the guided game is saved like any other, so it is still there if you want it back.
New The tutorial covers the system view and actually moving a ship, which it never did. It also stopped calling a ship a “hull” at a player who has never been told what one is.
Changed Choosing a people, and choosing which saved empire to go back to, both show the painting of that people at work rather than a square portrait and a wall of figures.
Fixed Games kept on the server describe themselves too — species, worlds and population — without disturbing when they were last played.
Changed The tutorial is a third of its old length and asks you to do something on the second step instead of the seventh. It ran to 1,623 words across 29 steps — eight minutes of reading before you were really playing — and now runs to 296 across 14. Anything worth saying beyond that sits behind a “Tell me more” line, and there is a plainly labelled way out instead of a cross in the corner.
Changed Planning a world — districts, focus, where the towns go — is offered at the end of the tutorial rather than dropped into the middle of it. It is what a world is won with, and it matters around turn thirty rather than in your first five minutes.
Fixed Games saved before the menu recorded what they contained now describe themselves: open the load screen and every one of them fills in its people, its worlds and its population.
New Choosing a game to play gets the whole screen. A list of everything you could pick up — each one with the face of its people, how many worlds it holds, how many live in them and when you last played it — and a reading pane for whichever you choose. Games kept on the server and games kept in this browser are labelled as such, empty server slots are shown as empty rather than left out, and a new game can be started straight into one so it is kept there from its first turn.
Changed A browser game can be moved to the server from its own card, and a server game deleted to free its slot.
Fixed A world stops growing once a fifth of its people are standing about with nothing to do. Capacity had been a target rather than a ceiling — measured on an advanced start at turn 120, fifteen posts with all fifteen filled, thirty-five people housed and twenty-two of them idle. Now it settles at seven. Room to spare is headroom for the next thing you build, so Townships can be sited for the workforce they reach without setting off a population boom.
Changed A Metroplex draws its workforce from three regions out rather than two, and a Habitat Dome with it. Each kind of settlement now carries its own reach instead of there being one radius for all housing — a city has transit, and a world can be planned around one of them instead of a scatter of small towns.
Fixed Every building is drawn the same size on its tile. The art is framed raggedly — measured across the set, pictures fill anywhere from 56% to 100% of their canvas — so a Metroplex, a Hydroponic Belt and the Climate Engine were rendering visibly smaller than the foundries beside them.
Fixed The spare hands in the corner of a world stay on one line. Synthetic labour carries a “+ build” button under it, and that was pushing its figure up out of the rank whenever anybody else was standing there too.

Planning a world now matters

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The biggest change to how a colony is built since the game had colonies. Until today, laying out a world was a sorting problem: find the tile with the highest number, put the matching building on it, repeat. Where things sat in relation to each other made no difference at all. It does now.

New A tile is a region, not a building — a world is a world, so one hex of it is about half the size of Europe. Farmlands, Mineworks, Foundries, Institutes: named in the plural because that is what they are.
New Regions of the same kind beside each other work better — a tenth more for each neighbour doing the same work, up to five. Four adequate regions in a block beat one perfect region standing alone, so the richest tile is no longer the answer.
New The same rule runs on a citadel, where it means a reactor bank rather than a farming belt. A hull laid out well grows a stern full of power and a face of guns instead of being a heap of modules.
Changed Archives, Fertiliser Works, Purification Works and Automated Foundries now lift the regions they touch instead of the whole world — and are worth considerably more where they land. You can finally see what they do.
Changed Bare ground holds far fewer people. Townships, Metroplexes and Habitat Domes hold more. Growing a world now means siting towns, repeatedly — and a town ringed by smelters is a hard place to keep order, while one facing open water half governs itself.
New A region draws its workforce from any populated region within two tiles, which is worth fifteen per cent. Work wants to be concentrated; people want to be threaded through it.
New Some things must now be built near other things: Freight Yards near a Spaceport, refineries beside the ore, a University within reach of a township — and no fission complex next door to a city. The build panel says what is missing rather than silently hiding the option. (A Spaceport briefly wanted a foundry nearby as well, which was wrong and is gone: a launch site wants flat empty ground, and a farming colony must still be able to reach orbit.)
Fixed Synthetic labour no longer appears to take up living space. An Android or a Maketh citizen needs no life support — the simulation always knew that, but a world's card counted them anyway, so a colony with room to spare read as full.
Changed The build list folds away anything with a better version of itself already on it. A late empire was being offered Combustion Stations beside a Singularity Tap, and hunting the one you wanted out of a column of superseded kit was the whole of the annoyance. They sit under “Older designs” rather than being gone — the cheap old one is occasionally exactly what a poor colony wants.
Changed A tile now says what it takes and what it gives on one line of icons under its name, instead of a column of words and figures. Star names on the galaxy map are bigger, and the spare hands in the corner of a world are drawn larger.
Fixed Every population figure is drawn the same height. The art is framed raggedly — measured across the set, figures fill anywhere from 87% to 100% of their canvas — so synthetics and Nemora came out visibly larger than everybody else.
Fixed Synthetic labour walks into a finished building it can work, instead of standing in the yard. It was only ever looking for the trade that belongs at a post, or a Colonist, and an Android is neither.
Changed A tile with work on it shows what is coming rather than what is there, and carries a button to call the work off — which there was no way to do from the tile at all.
Fixed A building can be taken down with somebody still working in it. It keeps running right up until it comes down, and whoever is in it is turned out then — rather than the order being refused until you emptied it by hand, which also switched the thing off for the whole time the work took.
Fixed Corrected the upgrade ladder, which had four wrong rungs. The Zero-G Foundry and Fabrication Bay were the wrong way round, and three multiplier buildings that produce nothing themselves sat at the top of a production ladder — so “upgrading” into one would have deleted the output it was bought for.
Changed A tile with work on it draws the thing being built as a proper projection — its silhouette in light, with the scanlines the rest of the game uses. Upgrades sit directly under the worker and read like the build list: the picture, what it gives, and what it costs beside what it would have cost from nothing.
Fixed A sector no longer warns that it is over its life support because of synthetic labour standing in it. They need no air and no room — and to answer the question directly: they add nothing to unrest either, measured, however many of them are aboard.
Fixed A citadel is no longer charged unrest for having quarters beside the workshop. That is what a ship is; a hull has no open ground, so it could collect the penalty and never the relief.
Changed A rare seam says what works it — an Extraction Rig, not an ordinary mine — and the build panel now shows the refusals that are instructions rather than dead ends, so standing on a Tritanite seam tells you what to do instead of quietly leaving the mine off the list.
New Buildings and hull modules can be upgraded in place. A Combustion Station becomes a Fission Complex, an Engine becomes an Ion Drive, a Workshop becomes a Fabrication Bay — one order on a working tile, at the difference in price rather than the whole of it. The old one keeps running until the new one is finished and whoever is standing there stays standing there, so improving a reactor no longer means putting the lights out while you do it.
New Blight. A long unbroken belt of farmland can catch a crop disease, and it spreads only between farming regions that touch — so a gap in the belt is a firebreak, and Fertiliser Works beside your fields both resist it and cut it short. An unbroken belt of twelve loses about a fifth of its harvest over time; broken into blocks of four, or treated, it loses far less.
New Every tile now shows its own arithmetic under “Where it stands”: what its position is worth, who is helping from next door, and what to do when it is working against you. Districts are drawn and named on the map, so a world can be read at a glance.
New The tutorial has a chapter on all of it, and the world it hands you is laid out by the same rules it just explained.
Fixed One of the fifteen can no longer be lost to famine, crowding or failing life support. They were being deleted by capacity arithmetic and logged as “a population unit has died”; now the loss falls on somebody else, and a hero genuinely lost in battle is named in the log.
Fixed A hero of another people — a Shoal navigator joining a land empire — is no longer a quiet dead end. The game explains that they live in water, that a Flooded Caisson will give them ground to stand on, and that they can serve aboard a hull meanwhile. They also keep their own place in the crew list instead of vanishing into a stack of colonists.
Fixed Sectors no longer report “building stalled” while they are visibly building. A world waiting its turn for the shared shipyards was being described as stuck.
Fixed The website listed a contact address that did not exist. Everything that asked you to write in — the privacy policy, the terms, the contact page — now points at the feedback form, which reaches a person and takes an address to reply to.
Changed No advertising at all for the first five turns of a game. What a new player meets when they end their first turn should be about the turn they just played.
Fixed Heroes stopped arriving out of nowhere. The chance that brings you your first one climbs until it is guaranteed, and it was still climbing afterwards — up to eight per cent a turn, forever, so a long game collected legends. Exactly one of the fifteen now walks in of their own accord, once per game — a floor, so that an empire which never investigates an anomaly still meets somebody. Every hero after that has to be found.
Fixed A hero standing idle no longer disappears into a stack of ordinary workers of the same trade. They keep their own figure, their own portrait and their own name wherever people are listed.
Changed The tile panel is rebuilt in the order you actually read it: what this place gives you, then who is working it, then what its position is worth, then what you can do about it — and the ground it stands on and the description last, where reference belongs.
Fixed A Colonist works at the ordinary rate, not sixty per cent. That figure changed a long time ago and six places in the game were still quoting the old one.
Fixed A Solar Panel Array can no longer be fitted into a hull berth that happens to sit on the rim. It bolts onto the outside and needs no frame under it — which is why it is cheap — so it goes on the empty space beside the ship and nowhere else.
Fixed A built Hull Frame no longer explains what a hull frame is, and Dismantle is greyed with the reason when it cannot be done rather than refusing after the click.
Fixed Building work no longer spends the minerals your reactors were going to burn. It leaves a turn of fuel in the silos, so a world can never put its own lights out by laying down a hull — and when the work is held up for that reason it says so, rather than claiming there are no minerals.
Fixed One to a body, now, for every building whose whole effect is a multiplier — Archives, Automated Foundries, Fertiliser Works, Purification Works and Simulator Halls on the ground, and the Automation Bay, Data Vault, Simulator Deck and Grid Optimiser aboard a hull. Each takes the best of what it reaches rather than the sum, so a second was always minerals spent on nothing.

Accounts, cloud saves and a website

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Starfoundry has a home of its own. Along with it: optional accounts via Google, and save slots kept on the server so a game started on one machine can be picked up on another.

Signing in is optional and always will be. Playing as a guest keeps your saves in your browser and works exactly as before — an account adds slots that survive a cleared cache, and settings that follow you.

The game you are playing is now written to its own slot at the end of every turn, rather than to a single shared autosave. Loading a game and continuing it are the same action.

Synthetic labour

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

A worker built rather than born. An Android runs a farm or a works at 130% and will do nothing else: it eats nothing, draws a point of the grid, needs no habitation however hostile the ground, and neither feels unrest nor causes any. Moons and asteroids stop being places you have to keep people alive on.