A month of Driftbound: fifteen updates, and almost all of them came from you

I am Ed, the solo developer of Driftbound. I have just looked back over the last month and counted fifteen updates, which surprised me. Here is what actually changed, and why.

The honest summary is that I wrote very little of this month's roadmap myself. Nearly all of it came out of the subreddit, Play review replies, and one long DM.

Someone finished the game in three days

A player called Brandruid told me he had beaten the campaign in three days and had nothing left to do. He was right, and it was the most useful message I have had.

So the galaxy now goes deeper than the end of the story. There is an opt-in descent below the deepest sector, and a Deep Run counter that makes the entire universe harder and richer at once rather than just adding bigger numbers to the same content. Prestige got the same treatment: Renown now unlocks things to do, not only stat bumps, plus a Service Record, Honours, and a ladder that keeps going.

Two skills were quietly lying to you

Auditing the endgame turned up worse. Crafting had fifteen modules that no code ever read, so the whole skill was decorative past a point. Scanning had no content at all beyond level twelve, and its level-twelve action discovered things more slowly than its level-one action.

Crafting is now the route to the best gear in the game, on a proper tier ladder. Scanning pays past twelve. Refining and fabrication also stopped pretending to be one skill, because on the Operations screen they read as a single bar and nobody could tell what they were levelling.

The feedback batches

Several updates were straight lists of things players reported:

• Offline combat can no longer kill you while the app is closed.
• Market prices are honest: the total you are quoted on a bulk sale is the total you receive.
• "Earn N credits" objectives count what you earn, not your bank balance, which had been quietly confusing for months.
• Mining now attracts raiders, bounties follow you across systems, and Helios will hunt you to a gate.
• The Hold opens instantly. It used to take three seconds to draw a large cargo hold, and now it takes nine milliseconds.
• Scrolling has real flick momentum instead of the stiff drag it had before.
• The NPC pilots you meet online are now labelled as NPCs, and kept off the human leaderboards.

The polish pass

The last update was not content at all. I went back through the whole shipped game looking for things that were quietly wrong, and found more than I expected.

Back used to quit the app from anywhere, mid-fight included. Buttons fired the moment your finger touched them, so scrolling a list with your thumb over "Re-enlist" could start a new tour. The PROMOTED banner was destroyed in the same frame it appeared, which means no player had ever seen a promotion. Losing a friendly spar applied the full death penalty despite being sold as zero-stakes. And on Android, progress can finally move to a new phone.

There is also a text-size setting, a reduce-motion setting, and a keep-screen-awake setting, none of which existed a month ago.

Nine languages, properly

Driftbound hit 100% translation coverage across all nine languages for the first time. Previously new features shipped in English and quietly stayed that way in every other locale, which is a bad way to treat the people who picked a different language.

Still the same deal

£3.99 once. No ads, no in-app purchases, no subscriptions, no energy timers, no account needed. The whole game plays offline.

If you have played it: what is the first thing that annoyed you? That question is genuinely how most of the list above got written.