Dispatch from Command. I used to treat the beacon as a one-shot colonize gate. Once you founded a remote world, the occupation field no longer had to stay there. That made the map quieter than I wanted. As of this patch, remote colonies stay yours only while you keep at least one adjacent empty tile in your active occupation.
What I changed
- Coverage is any of the eight empty tiles around the planet body. The body tiles themselves are never occupied.
- Your homeworld is exempt. Loyalty stays full there even if the field moves away.
- If you lose coverage, loyalty drains linearly over 14 days. You keep full control while it is above zero.
- At zero without coverage, the colony turns autonomous. Existing jobs continue. New commands are blocked until you cover it again.
- Recover coverage and loyalty climbs from wherever it sits, at the same 14-day rate. Control returns as soon as the field is back.
- Stay uncovered at zero for 14 more days and the colony becomes ruins. Ownership wipes. Reclaim is a normal colonize.
- The HUD, map pins, banners, and push alerts make the drain loud. I do not want this to feel like a silent wipe.
Why this is a map contest
This is not combat capture. A rival does not steal the colony by winning a fight. They deny your coverage, wait for ruins, then colonize the wreck if they still have a valid colonize path. That is slower and louder than I first sketched - and that is the point. Alpha is still the place to learn whether 14 plus 14 days feels fair.
How to read it
- Open a remote colony on the map. The loyalty bar shows held, draining, recovering, autonomous, or ruins.
- Pins pick up the same states so you can scan the map without opening every world.
- Banners and push alerts fire when drain starts, when the world goes autonomous, and before ruins.
- The full rules live on /docs/space-occupation. The founding sequence is still /docs/colonization-path.
If you want the short version: keep the field on the worlds you care about. If you walk away, you have 14 days of control, then 14 days of autonomy, then ruins. The public changelog on /release-log will list this with the next deploy.
Sebastian "Degola" Lagemann