GRAKKON Patch Notes

MARQUEE

▶ Pick up exactly where you left off.

Refresh the browser. Close the tab. Come back tomorrow. When you sign back in, your pilot is in the same galaxy, at the same position, with the same loadout, and your chat history is still scrolling above your HUD. Sessions used to evaporate at the slightest disturbance — a stray F5, a closed tab, a bad WiFi handoff would dump you back on the main menu staring at an empty cockpit.

Now they don't. Galaxy, position, and the last twenty-or-so chat cards all survive the trip. Chat cards even get their remaining lifetimes adjusted down by the elapsed disconnect time — a card with 30s left when you closed the tab has 20s left when you come back ten seconds later. The design intent was literally "I never noticed the refresh." That's the spec.

REF · #69 · #78

FIXES

Radio rework. Pressing T no longer types a T into your chat input on the way to opening the radio. The radio panel now starts empty instead of preloaded with mock pilot chatter on first load. The interaction model is cleaner end-to-end — quick-tap T, type, ENTER, send.
· #57 #58 #66
Contrails match your thrust. Engine trails were sometimes still drawing behind a coasting ship and sometimes failing to draw behind a thrusting one. They now track your actual thrust state — no more ghost trails.
· #48
Ironlogic executor stops misfiring. DOCKMASTER's close-approach trigger now fires the way his brief intends. The executor also stops triggering multiple loop iterations from a single fired-upon event within one tick — NPCs no longer reply three times to one stimulus.
· #63 #68
HUD survives a window resize. Browser-resize used to shrink the HUD instead of expanding the viewport. The TopHud and chat-input panel widths now rebuild correctly on resize. The placeholder pilot data no longer flashes on real-mode startup. Default font sizes are sensible again.
· #40 #71 #72
Safety-critical UI reads at any zoom. Low-hull alarm, kill feed, GAME OVER, and incoming NPC hails are now pixel-floored — they don't blur or shift at fractional zoom levels. The stuff you need to see, you can see.
· #70

IMPROVEMENTS

Radar legibility. The radar finally has a legend — you know what the dots mean. NPCs and players now have visually distinct dot shapes, so a glance tells you who's who.
· #59 #67
You don't disappear at rest. A subtle high-contrast outline now keeps your ship findable in a dense starfield when you're sitting still — the moment you needed to look at it least is when you needed to find it most.
· #60

Production hardening

Server-side hardening for scale. The boring, invisible work that keeps the cabinet up as more pilots show up.
· #25 #26 #27 #28

PILOT'S NOTE

This is a polish patch — nineteen tickets compressed into eight player-facing beats. The marquee was the felt-quality fix everyone asked for the moment they first hit F5 by accident. Sessions stop evaporating. “I never noticed the refresh” is now literally true.

A pile of HUD and radar work landed underneath: the radar tells you what its dots mean (#59), your ship doesn’t get swallowed by the starfield when you stop (#60), NPCs and players are distinguishable at a glance on radar (#67), the HUD doesn’t fight your browser window (#40, #71, #72), and the safety-critical UI elements stay sharp at any zoom (#70).

The radio is no longer the rough edge it was. Big thanks to pilot ROBOTCENTRAL — #58 came in through the in-game [ESC] feedback flow, framed exactly the right way: “It pulls me out of my flying zone. I should be able to T type ENTER super quick.” That feedback shaped the whole rework. ROBOTCENTRAL joins MADMEX in the patch-note hall of fame — keep them coming.

Under the hood, four production-hardening tickets shipped together (#25, #26, #27, #28). Not flashy, but the kind of work that matters more the more pilots show up.

— Ray