Up to now the rock in Orbit2D was an obstacle, not a threat. It was hard, it was dark, it was
cold — but it never did anything to you. You could dig a room forty metres down, twenty tiles wide,
leave it open to the sky and nothing would happen. This release changes that, and it is the first
one where the answer to should I dig here? is sometimes no.
Gas seams
Deep pockets now hold gas. Cut into a seam and it hisses out, spreads through the chamber you
just opened and pools upward, because it is lighter than the air your crew are breathing. Left
alone it thins out slowly. Near an open flame it does not: it catches, and the flash hurts anyone
standing in it.
Two answers, both things you build. A vent fan — powered, so it needs your
generator running — pulls vented gas out of a chamber before it finds anything to ignite. And the
old advice about a second way out stops being flavour text: gas follows the shape of the space you
dug, so a chamber with one narrow shaft holds it and a chamber with a through-route does not. Your
crew will retreat out of a bad room on their own rather than stand in it, and they will tell you why.
Roofs come down
An unsupported span of roof wider than eight tiles now collapses. Not instantly, and not silently
— it groans first, and that sound is your only warning. A pit prop
holds a span up, costs almost nothing, and is unlocked early on purpose, because the lesson is meant
to be cheap the first time you learn it.
This one quietly changed how the game reads. Wide open halls used to be free; now the shape of a
big base is a decision, and the props running down the middle of a long gallery are there because
you put them there.
Machines wear out
Generators, heaters, planters, galleys and fans now accumulate wear as they run. A worn machine
gets less efficient before it stops, and the condition is visible so you are never surprised by a
dead generator in the dark. Servicing is a normal job in the queue — a crew member walks over, pays
a small material cost and puts it right. It means a colony you have stopped paying attention to
gradually degrades, which is exactly what a colony does.
Three things worth a long game
The other half of this release is the opposite of a hazard: something to aim at once your base is
comfortable. Three colony projects unlock at ranks 18, 22 and 26, each built from
your hold in three shipments, each giving a permanent boon that follows you to every world you fly
to afterwards.
- Deep Foundry — a smelter big enough to work the deep ore properly. Every dug
tile has a one-in-five chance to give up a second unit, on top of any talent. - Atmosphere Plant — standing extraction run off the colony’s own power. Vented
gas thins out three times as fast everywhere, fans or no fans. - Survey Array — a mast on the ridge that finally looks at the rock instead of the
sky. Gas seams and unheld roof spans are marked on the survey map before they bite.
They are free, they are permanent, and the third one turns the two new hazards from surprises
into information. That progression — punished, then equipped, then informed — is the whole shape of
the release.
And the bug that mattered more than any of it
A player reported that the task queue could lock up: point the crew at something they cannot
reach and the whole task manager would stop doing anything at all, for every job, until you
reloaded. That was the real problem in this build, and it is fixed. A crew member who cannot get to
a target now says so in plain words — can’t reach that spot, ladder up to it first, or
Suit-01 can’t reach that, dig a way in — drops the job and carries on with the next one.
Where a route is merely long rather than impossible, they cut an access shaft and get on with it.
Reserved materials are released properly, so nothing sits locked in a job that will never run.
It is now covered by an automated probe that sets up five deliberately impossible orders across
two worlds and fails the build if any of them stalls the queue or leaks a reservation.
Where to get it
Version 0.15.0 is live in the browser at orbit2d.co — free, no
sign-in, about a megabyte, and it saves as you play. The Android build is the same version and is on
the download page. Existing saves load straight into it; the
new hazards apply to rock you have not dug yet, so a base you already sealed stays sealed.
If something drags, or something in here feels unfair rather than difficult, the feedback form on
the title screen reaches me directly.
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