Aetherdrifter

Heartbeat Patch 3 — five of your reports, fixed Every line in this patch traces back to something one of you told me. Keep it up. 💎 Your Influence and Aether finally have somewhere to go "Nothing to spend them on late-game" — heard, twice over. Emergency Session (Factions → Senate): convene one to grease every lane — +10% to speed, yield, XP and credits for 4 hours. Repeatable forever; the cost scales with your account level so it stays a real decision. Weave Infusion (Overview → Temporal Reservoir): weave surplus Aether Cells straight into banked Chronitons — 60 seconds of reservoir time per cell tier, cheapest cells first so combat keeps the good ones. Bounded by the reservoir cap. 🏺 Relic hunting no longer takes a geological age One of you was stuck at a third of one relic with the Standing Orders chapter blocked. The math agreed: completing your first set averaged ~28 successful expeditions. Three changes: fragment chance is now 2-in-5 per successful expedition (was ~1-in-3), a dry streak never lasts past two (the third success in a row always digs one up), and finds now favor sets you've already started — each piece you hold makes its set's remaining pieces far more likely. First restored set now lands in roughly 8–10 successful runs, and a partly-collected set finishes fast. 🐧 Linux & Steam Deck: dropdowns work now Native dropdown menus are broken at the Proton/Wine layer (arrow keys only — as reported). Every dropdown in the game is now a custom, in-game menu instead: mouse, touch, keyboard and controller all work, everywhere, and honestly they look better too. 🧭 The game now shows you WHERE things live "Go ›" used to teleport you into the Bounty Board or Expeditions without ever showing how to get back there. Now, whenever a shortcut opens a panel, the button that owns it pulses in the top bar (or the ☰ Menu tab on small screens) — while the panel is open and again when you close it — plus a one-time note naming the spot. 🔧 Also in this patch The Big Drift n...

Heartbeat Patch 2 — there's a new skill in this one Patch 1 was four small fixes. This one got away from me a bit. ⛽ New skill: Skimming (and the Flow) The Drift's twelfth discipline. Trawl the nebula gas-bands for volatiles — eight tiers of them, Drift Vapor up to Singular Condensate — then route them into the Flow: pick one lane (Process, Bay, or Combat) and your volatiles burn, highest tier first, to run that whole lane faster. +6% at tier 1 up to +20% at tier 8, for as long as you keep the tank lit. It's a gather skill whose entire point is making your late game quicker — an economy, not a stat stick. All nine new items have bespoke art and full wiki pages. One honest note: Skimming's achievements are built but can't go live yet — the game is at Steam's 100-achievement cap. They'll light up when Valve grants more slots; anything you earn meanwhile counts retroactively the moment they do. 🚀 Auto-Charter (¤60,000 automation upgrade) Away-team expeditions run themselves: returns get collected the moment they're back (every reward lands exactly as if you'd clicked), and the next mission launches automatically — the highest tier whose odds clear your floor (Safe ≥75% / Bold ≥55% / Any), crewed by your strongest idle hands. It never spends your credits on rerolls; that stays your call. ⚖️ Warfare levels slower now — here are the numbers Warfare's XP grew ×1.62 per tier while everything else grows ~×1.2, so by tier 8 combat paid about 7× more XP per hour than any other skill — a fitted ship could hit level 100 in ~13 hours. That's a balance bug, not a reward. Per-tier growth is now ×1.28: tier 1 is unchanged, an under-gunned ship earns slightly under gather rates, and a well-fitted one still earns a healthy premium (~1.3–1.7×). Level 100 now takes roughly 66–199 hours depending on your ship. XP you've already banked is untouched. 📐 Account Level, explained and improved "Acct Lv" now shows on your Overview card (hover it for the full explanation — it's your average skil...

Patch 1 — your first reports, fixed All four of this week's changes came straight from player reports: Esc now opens Settings when no panel is open (and still closes whatever is). New UI scale setting (80–140%) — zooms the whole interface, not just text. The Text size setting now actually reaches all the fine print (the Drift Echo tree was the worst offender), and the smallest text got a bump regardless. Tall panels (Factions, especially) no longer hide their header behind the top bar on 1080p displays. Keep the reports coming — this is the pace. — Jeff