Version 0.18.0 is live on orbit2d.co and in the
Android build. The ladder now runs to rank fifty instead of
thirty. That is the headline, and it is also the smallest part of the work.
Twenty ranks is not twenty numbers
Raising a cap is one line. The reason it took a day is that the old curve compounded at thirty
per cent a rank, which is fine while the numbers are small and absurd once they are not. Carried
straight through to fifty it asked for tens of millions of experience for the last few ranks —
technically a ladder, in practice a wall with a rung painted on it.
So the curve now bends. It compounds as before up to rank twenty-nine, then goes arithmetic:
every rank after it costs the rank-twenty-nine step plus two per cent of it. Rank thirty still
costs exactly what it always did, so nobody’s existing save moved, and the whole tail from
thirty-one to fifty comes to about 3.4 million experience rather than an unreachable number. The
per-rank price drifts from roughly 139,000 at the bend to 195,000 at the top: it keeps rising,
but you can feel it arriving.
The real question: what are you climbing for?
A cap raise with nothing behind it is the worst kind of update, because twenty ranks of
“+1 salvage cache” is a longer game, not a bigger one. So each stretch of the new range had to
hand something over.
Three new talent tiers, at thirty-five, forty and forty-five, two choices each — nine tiers and
eighteen options in total, and still a real choice, because you cannot have both. A timberwright
who works a wider span or a machine tender who slows every bit of wear. A camp cook or a longer
shift away from the game. A field scholar who learns faster or a prospector who pulls more out of
the ground. Each of those needed a new lever wired through the simulation rather than a number
nudged: build span, wear rate, cook speed, the offline window and the experience rate are now
things a talent can genuinely move.
Then six second-tier bench upgrades, spaced from thirty-one to forty-six, so the workshop keeps
opening up: better insulation, a third drill, a second servo, a second cell, a better governor, a
second crop line. Two more colony projects — a Thermal Loop at thirty-eight that permanently
warms the base, and The Long Vigil at fifty that doubles the unattended window from four hours to
eight, which is the only reward in the game for reaching the cap. A fifth and sixth standing-order slot, at
thirty-six and forty-six. And a thirteenth-through-sixty-second order: a new tier of thirteen
contracts scaled for the range, from digging two thousand tiles to eighty cooked meals to fifteen
postings.
Testing a ladder you have no time to climb
Nobody can play to rank fifty in an afternoon, so the ladder is verified the way the rest of the
game is: a headless browser drives the real build and interrogates it. A new suite asks the
questions I would otherwise have to guess about — is the curve monotonic, does rank thirty still
cost what it used to, does the tail total stay in the range I intended, does every new upgrade have
a requirement that actually gates it, does every talent option grant the lever it claims, do the
new order tiers unlock at the ranks the panel says, is the unattended window really eight hours
with the project and four without. Seventy-six checks, all green, on top of the existing suites.
One thing that suite taught me the hard way: each section now clears the browser’s saved state
before it starts. Five checks failed the first time for no reason other than a talent chosen in an
earlier section still being spent in a later one — a test that had quietly become a test of the
previous test.
Your save carries over untouched. The browser build is at
orbit2d.co, and the Android APK, with its checksum, is at
orbit2d.co/app.
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