Subspace: Redux — The Derelicts Update

Something was wrong with the old galaxy, and it was not the size of it. You could fly for twenty minutes in a straight line and arrive somewhere indistinguishable from where you left. Space was large and completely uniform, which is the one combination that makes a world feel smaller than it is.

This update puts things in it, and then puts borders around the things.

🛰️ Derelicts

Three hundred and sixty-six dead stations, drifting across the galaxy with their lights out.

Fly into one and it closes around you. Corridors that double back, rooms that go nowhere, one way in and no map. Somewhere at the far end is the chamber everything else was built to keep you away from, and whatever is still living in it.

• They come in sizes. The small ones you can read at a glance. The largest will lose you, and a wrong turn at speed means scraping your hull along a wall you cannot see past.
• Twenty-four of them are part of the story. Eleven stand on the Succession line and thirteen more belong to the four faction chains, so sooner or later the story sends you into one on purpose.
• The rest are simply out there, as dangerous as the space they drifted into. Nobody will tell you about those. You find them, or you do not.
• You can see them coming. Derelicts now show on the galaxy map, so a dark shape out on the edge of what you know is something you can decide to go and look at.

🗺️ A galaxy with borders

The galaxy is bigger, and for the first time it is divided.

• Danger rises as you leave home. Space near your capital is survivable. The further out you push, toward the Neutral Zone, the less it forgives.
• Every faction has its own road. Four territories, four ladders, four sets of neighbours. Two pilots from different flags come up through genuinely different space and meet as strangers.
• The map starts dark. It fills in as you fly, and it is yours — not your alliance's, not shared. What you have seen is what you know.
• Not everywhere is a homeworld. Smaller bases and colonies sit between the capitals, with a modest safe zone and a Trade Depot instead of a full station.

Patrols now keep to their own faction's space rather than wandering, and the pirates have moved to where pirates belong: the Nomad Lands, and the contested lanes between flags.

📜 Eighty-eight new jobs

Fetch something. Deliver something. Escort someone who cannot look after themselves.

They are scattered through every band of every faction's territory, so there is nearly always something worth doing on the way to the thing you were already doing. Older missions have been moved out to match the new distances — they were laid out for a much smaller galaxy and would all have been sitting on the capital's doorstep.

🎭 Squad roles

Tank, DPS and Support — and the game works out which one you are from what you actually fly.

• Your ship counts as much as your pilot. Reactor power now splits five ways instead of four, with guns taking their own share alongside armour, shields, thrusters and engines. There is only so much power. Every point you put into armour is a point not coming out of your guns.
• You cannot be all three. Not because it is forbidden — because there is not enough power or enough talent points to go round. Decide what you are for.
• Tanks finally have a job. Enemies pay attention to who has been hurting them and who has been patching their target up, instead of shooting whoever happens to be closest. A Vanguard who drops a Bastion Field makes everything hostile inside it deal with the Vanguard first.
• Healers get noticed. Keep a squadmate alive and whatever is attacking them starts taking an interest in you. Less interest than shooting it would earn — but enough that somebody needs to be standing in front of you.
• It shows where it matters. On nameplates, on your squad frames, in the Social window, and in the hangar as you move the power sliders and watch what you are turning into.

🎯 Knowing what you are looking at

Enemy levels are coloured now, the way you would expect: grey for something beneath you, green for easy, yellow for a fair fight, orange for a hard one, red for something that will probably kill you.

What they pay follows the same scale — nothing at all for grey, half for green, full for yellow, more for orange, most for red. The fight that frightens you is the one worth having.

⚡ You are flying in seconds

Launching into the world used to take the better part of a minute. It now takes a few seconds.

Same galaxy, same everything in it — it simply stops making you wait for the parts of it you are nowhere near.

🧭 Smaller things

• Heading and speed on the radar, so you can call a bearing instead of describing it.
• Ships fly heavier. Top speed is down by half and acceleration by a quarter across every hull. Fights last longer, turns cost you something, and the galaxy feels as big as it is. Trade runs are unaffected.
• Cargo expansions belong to you, not to one pilot. Buy one once and move it between your pilots and your ships as you like. It only works in one place at a time, and it arrives without making you log out and back in.
• Fourteen more Protocol cards for the Scrapbook, including two torn scraps — 'd and 's — that change the word in front of them. They are very hard to come by, and that is deliberate.
• A language filter, on by default, in Settings → HUD. It masks out the middle of a cuss word and leaves the ends. Cards you have collected are never touched: you found them, you may show them.
• Your own hull, shield and energy numbers now appear when you point at your frame, instead of sitting across the bars the whole time.