SpaceCorps 2027 0.4.11

SpaceCorps 2027 0.4.11 makes ranks per company, draws the drone formations as shapes round your ship, gives the Group window a new layout, makes Unequip all take the equipment off your drones too, and sets the PvE points of the swarm aliens and Clan Wardens by their toughness like the older aliens (their kills already counted; only the figures change). Your rank is now your place among the pilots of your company: the best pilot is its only Senior Admiral (20,000 PvE points at least), the others follow by place, and each rank needs a minimum of PvE points. Each of the 16 formations places your drones in a pattern of its own, other pilots see it, and the Auger is a cone with its tip ahead of your ship. Your rank can go down now, and many ranks will at the first start: read "If you already play".

The game plays on the public server https://spacecorps-game.sliplane.app. Your pilot, ships, items, credits, clan and world carry over.

Download page: https://spacecorps.github.io/play/
On Hangar: https://hangar.sliplane.app/p/spacecorps/spacecorps-2027

What's new

Highlights

• Ranks per company. Your rank is your place among the pilots of your company, all three worlds together. The best pilot is the only Senior Admiral and needs 20,000 PvE points; the others follow down 23 ranks by place, a fifth of them Junior Pilots and the best tenth Captains or better, and each rank also has a minimum of PvE points. Only pilots who flew in the last 30 days are on the ladder. A rank can fall when pilots pass you (never announced); a rise is. The Company page shows your place, percentile, the pilot to pass and the whole pyramid.
• Drone formations are shapes you can see. Each of the 16 formations places your drones in a pattern round your ship, turning with it, and other pilots see yours: Testudo a roof of shields, Sanctum a heart, Stiletto a sword, Gyre a wheel and Auger a cone round the ship with its tip ahead. With no formation (Standard) they fly the escort you know.
• The Group window puts the shield bar (blue) under the hull bar (green), and a groupmate's target to the right of the bars.
• Unequip all in the Hangar's Spaceship view also takes the lasers and shields off your drones, with the amps and cells in them. Your drones and the formation you wear stay.
• Swarm aliens and Clan Wardens count by their toughness. Their kills counted before; their PvE points now follow the same rule as the Seeker, Phantasm, Bulwark, Goombah and Crystalys, and the PvE card (the (i) on the PvE tiles) lists them.

If you already play: what changes for you

• Many ranks fall at the update, once. The ladder is relative, so the rank your PvE points gave in 0.4.10 is not the rank your place gives now (the Senior Admiral needed 750,000 points; it needs 20,000 and first place). Nobody sees a "rank down" message; if your place now gives a rank above the best one you were told, you see Promoted once at your next launch.
• A rank is no longer for life. The season wipe keeps your points and so your place, but your rank follows the company: it falls when others pass you, and rises when you pass them or pilots leave the ladder.
• 30 days away takes you off the ladder: you count as a Junior Pilot until you launch again or open the Company page, and then you take your place back with the points you left. The 30 days start at the update, so nobody is off the ladder on the first day.
• Your PvE points can go up at the first start if you killed swarm aliens or Clan Wardens (Pirate Boss 15, Pirate Scout 4, Wardens 13 to 35): the server counts every pilot's kills again at its start. No figure went down, so the new figures take no point away.
• Unequip all in the Spaceship view now also empties your drones' slots; the items go to your inventory.
• Small changes: your drones appear in place when you launch instead of flying out from the ship, and each Group window row is 4 points taller (44, it was 40).
• A 0.4.10 client keeps working against the 0.4.11 server, but the new Company page, the shapes, the Group window and the drones in Unequip all need the 0.4.11 client.

Company ranks: the ladder

• The order: the pilots of a company, all worlds together, are ordered by their stored PvE points (a tie goes to the higher level, then to the older pilot). Nothing else counts: not PvP points, honor, credits, the clan or Wipe Points.

• The shares: place 1 is the Senior Admiral, alone. Of the pilots behind him 20.1% are Junior Pilots, and each rank above holds fewer: the best 10.2% are Captains or better, the best 4.9% Majors or better, the best 0.86% Generals or better, and 0.15% are Admirals.

• The minimum: a rank also needs PvE points, and your rank is the lower of what your place gives and what your points allow. A company that has only just begun cannot hand out the top ranks for nothing.

• Small companies: the cuts round down, so a company has a pilot at a rank by place only when it is big enough to fill it with a whole pilot: 11 pilots for a Captain, 46 for a Colonel, 118 for a General, 301 for a Junior Admiral, 675 for an Admiral. In a company of 30 the second pilot is a Senior Major at best. The last column of the table is the smallest company that has a pilot at the rank by place; at a slightly larger size the band can be empty again when a cut moves.

• Who is on the ladder: pilots of a company with PvE points above zero who flew in the last 30 days. Everybody else is a Junior Pilot wherever a rank shows (ship tags, chat, the Hall of Fame, profiles) and has no place. A pilot who comes back is placed with the points he left, when he launches or opens the Company page.

• How a rank moves: a kill moves you up the order at once and every symbol on the screen follows in the next update. Promoted shows when you reach a rank above the best you were told since you last launched, so a pilot who is passed and passes back is not told twice. A fall is silent. From Junior Major up your company, flying in your world, hears about a promotion your own points earned.

• The Company page (Company ranking) shows your rank and your place ("Place 16 of 31") with your percentile ("Top 52%"); under the bar to your next rank either "301 PvE points to pass nova and reach Sergeant" (the place holds you) or "600 PvE points to Junior Colonel" (the minimum holds you); the best pilot of your company; All ranks, the pyramid of the 24 ranks with the share of the company each holds, how many pilots hold it now and its minimum points; and the best 50 pilots of your company across all three worlds.

  #	Rank	PvE points needed in 0.4.10	Minimum in 0.4.11	Share of the pilots behind the leader	Held by place from a company of
  1	Junior Pilot	0	0	20.1%	2
  2	Pilot	150	150	16.1%	4
  3	Senior Pilot	350	350	12.9%	6
  4	Junior Sergeant	700	610	10.3%	3
  5	Sergeant	1,200	800	8.24%	4
  6	Senior Sergeant	2,000	1,000	6.59%	8
  7	Junior Lieutenant	3,000	1,300	5.27%	5
  8	Lieutenant	4,500	1,500	4.22%	6
  9	Senior Lieutenant	6,500	1,900	3.38%	8
  10	Junior Captain	9,000	2,200	2.70%	9
  11	Captain	12,500	2,600	2.16%	11
  12	Senior Captain	17,000	3,000	1.73%	14
  13	Junior Major	23,000	3,500	1.38%	17
  14	Major	31,000	4,100	1.11%	22
  15	Senior Major	42,000	4,700	0.88%	28
  16	Junior Colonel	58,000	5,600	0.71%	35
  17	Colonel	80,000	6,500	0.57%	46
  18	Senior Colonel	110,000	7,700	0.45%	61
  19	Junior General	150,000	8,900	0.36%	84
  20	General	200,000	10,000	0.29%	118
  21	Senior General	280,000	12,000	0.23%	178
  22	Junior Admiral	380,000	14,000	0.19%	301
  23	Admiral	520,000	17,000	0.15%	675
  24	Senior Admiral	750,000	20,000	the best pilot, alone	1

Drone formations you can see

• One pattern for each formation, drawn for your ship and for every other pilot's, turning with the ship's heading: the pattern is built for exactly the number of drones you own (1 to 8), not cut from a bigger one, so with one more drone the pattern is made again and the others move a little to make room. Which formation a ship wears is told to everybody who sees the ship; a ship that comes into view has its drones in place from the first frame.

  Formation	The shape round the ship	Moves
  Testudo	a roof of shield tiles in two columns over the wings, the ship's spine left open	hovers
  Adamant	a diamond: a corner ahead, behind and to each side	hovers
  Sanctum	a heart ahead of the nose, its point towards the ship	hovers
  Redoubt	a dome: a ring hugging the hull, a pair over the flanks and a crown on top	hovers
  Cordon	a wide oval ring round the ship	turns once in 24 seconds
  Rampart	a wall across the nose, its ends reaching forward like claws	hovers
  Asterism	a four-pointed star round the ship	twinkles every 1.5 seconds
  Bodkin	an arrow with your ship as its head: a tip ahead, barbs on the flanks, a shaft behind	hovers
  Ballista	a V ahead of the ship, its arms sweeping back along the sides	hovers
  Centurion	a block: a rectangle of guards round the ship	hovers
  Shrike	a trident: a row of three across the nose and three tines ahead, the middle one longest	hovers
  Culler	wings: a fan of four drones on each side	flap every 2.4 seconds
  Gemini	twin spears: a column of four along each flank, the tips ahead of the nose	hovers
  Stiletto	a sword with your ship as its hilt: a blade of drones ahead of the nose and a pair at the nose as the crossguard	hovers
  Gyre	a wheel round the ship, a rim and a hub	spins once in 6 seconds
  Auger	the drill: a cone round the ship, its tip ahead of the nose and opening backward at 25 degrees to the line you look along	spirals about that line once in 3 seconds

• The Auger is the owner's drill: its axis is the line your ship looks along, so it points where you point and turns with you. With eight drones they sit on the tip and three rings behind it (1, 2, 2 and 3). From the usual camera, looking down at 70 degrees, eight drones read as a sparse spiral; tilt the camera with a right-drag to see the cone.

• Changing formation glides each drone to its new place in 0.8 seconds, round your hull and never through it, never a jump. A swap during a glide starts from where the drones are.

• Standard (no formation worn) is the escort of 0.4.10, the 2-2-4 layout, unchanged. Your drones now appear in it in place at launch instead of flying out from the ship.

• Other pilots see your shape (the server told them which formation you wear since 0.4.10; 0.4.11 also says it in the join, so a ship that is already there is not drawn in the wrong shape for a moment).

• A picture of each pattern turns in the tooltip of a formation slot, of an entry of the Formations menu and on the formation's item card (the Hangar's Drones view, Assembly and the Shop). It shows the pattern round a Paragon with eight drones.

• Settings: Show My Drones and Show Enemy Drones turn the drones off as before. Reduce Motion holds the turning, flapping and twinkling patterns still and shortens the glide to 0.2 seconds. Ships more than 3,500 units from the camera draw no drones, and at most the nearest 64 ships do.

• What did not change: every formation's bonuses and prices, the 2-second limit, the sound of a change (the one 0.4.10 added) and which drones you own. The shapes are the client's drawing; the server does not know where a drone flies.

The Group window

• Hull above shield: each member's green hull bar has the blue shield bar beneath it, both as wide as the row's text column while the member has no target beside them. A ship with no shield fitted shows the hull bar alone, in the same place.
• The target to the right: a member who is shooting has the mark, name and two thin bars of what he shoots at to the right of his bars, in the lines of the two bars; beside a target the member's bars are shorter (at the default width 105 points long, 195 without a target). The distance and the arrow stay at the top right of the row. In the new form a row is 44 points tall (it was 40) with or without a target, so nothing jumps when a mate starts or stops shooting.
• Narrow windows keep the old form: below about 240 points of window width there is no room beside the bars, and the target goes beneath them as in 0.4.10, making that row 21 points taller. The default width of 250 points is wide enough; a width you saved is kept.
• Long names: the name keeps at least 90 points; when it would be cut shorter the level text leaves the line (it stays in the hover card), and the place text is cut with an ellipsis before it could lie over the name. At the default width a long target name such as "Pirate Boss Xerxes" is cut with an ellipsis (the hover card has it whole).
• Hover shows one card at a time: the hull bar's, the shield bar's, the target's or the member's.

Unequip all

• What it does now: in the Hangar's Spaceship view the button takes off every item of the configuration on show, including the lasers and shields in your drones' slots and the amps and cells fitted in them. They return to your inventory. Its tip reads "Unequip every ship and drone item in this configuration". The Drones view's button, which took only the drones' items, is unchanged.
• What stays: your drones. A drone is owned, never fitted, so there is nothing to take off a ship; what you fit "on a drone" are the lasers and shields in its slots. The formation you wear stays too: it is a choice, not equipment.
• All or nothing: the server now does the whole list in one step, so a failure half way leaves everything as it was. No item is lost or duplicated. The other configuration is not touched. The same rules as before apply: docked, or in flight from a safe zone and out of combat, and an item in the Transport Cache refuses the whole list.
• In flight your ship follows at once: no laser, no shield. Your hull does not change (nothing in a drone slot adds to it), and your shield is only cut to the new maximum.

PvE points: the swarm aliens and the Clan Wardens

• The rule is the old aliens' rule: a kill pays the square root of the alien's hull plus shield over 1,600 (a Seeker's), rounded: Seeker 1, Phantasm 2, Bulwark 4, Goombah 7, Crystalys 16. The swarm aliens and the Clan Wardens' crews are held to it now. A kill of one counted before (since 0.4.8, and the Wardens since 0.4.10); their figures were set by hand and some paid less than an old alien of about the same toughness (a Pirate Scout paid 1 where a Bulwark pays 4).

• 19 of the 29 figures changed, none went down:

  Alien	Before	Now
  Pirate Boss	10	15
  Pirate Scout	1	4
  Dormant Pulse	10	11
  Brood Warden I, II, III	10, 15, 25	14, 18, 35
  Siege Warden I, II, III	10, 15, 25	13, 17, 32
  Wrath Warden I, II, III	10, 15, 25	14, 18, 34
  Brood Drone III	1	2
  Siege Escort I, II, III	1	2, 3, 6
  Wrath Guard I, II, III	1	2, 3, 6

• What stays: Seeker 1, Phantasm 2, Bulwark 4, Goombah 7, Crystalys 16, Seeker Slave 1, Brood Drone I and II 1, and two kinds that pay more than the rule: the Boss Seeker 5 (the rule says 2) and the Dormant Force 25 (the rule says 16), so nobody loses points at the recount.

• The PvE card (the (i) on the PvE tiles) lists the five old aliens and now a row for each swarm (Seeker Swarm 1 to 5, Pirate Swarm 4 to 15, Dormant Swarm 11 to 25) and one for the Clan Wardens (1 to 35), each from the member's figure to the boss's. The Ranking calculation's line "Points per alien kill" lists every alien with its figure.

• Who is paid: as for any alien, the pilot whose hit claimed it, or, for a swarm's leader and a Dormant Pulse, every party with at least 5% of the damage; a group's kill pays the weight to its payee and the others their share of the experience.

• Not changed: the Wipe Point kill milestones count the five old aliens only and pay nothing for a swarm alien; a group mate gets experience but not the weight.

The wiki

• Ranks is rewritten for the company ladder (place and minimum, who is on the ladder, how a rank moves, the Company page, how long it takes) with a new picture of the pyramid, and the Company page picture is retaken. The Clans, Company Pilots, Getting Started and Wipe Timeline articles carry the matching sentences, and the PvE tables have the new figures. All in the game's 12 languages.

For administrators and the server

• One new table, PilotSeen (PlayerId primary key, Day: the Unix day a pilot last flew), made when the server starts, only while dormantDays is above 0, with one row for each pilot; at the first start every pilot gets today's date. A 0.4.10 server ignores it. No data step, no rename, no startup repair, no new file under Resources/, no new environment variable. The release job's backup check finds exactly one line: schema CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS PILOTSEEN.
• Changed files: Resources/Ranks.json (version 2: scale, dormantDays 30, rebuildSeconds 600 and the share of each rank; points is the minimum now) and Values/ranking-config.json (the 19 figures). Deploy the image, never a 0.4.11 binary on 0.4.10's files: the old Ranks.json stops the start with "Refusing to start: Resources/Ranks.json: ...".
• The ladders are lists in memory, read at the start and again every 10 minutes; a kill moves one entry. The start logs Company ladders: N pilots in M companies, K left off for not having been seen in 30 days and one line for each company with its best pilot's points and rank. An admin's edit of a pilot's level, experience or company and a deleted account move the ladder too.
• One new key on the wire: the join (MapDetails) says which formation each ship wears; older clients ignore it.
• Rolling back to 0.4.10 (code only) starts cleanly. A pilot whose stored rank is lower than his 0.4.10 rank sees Promoted once at his next join.

Updating

• From 0.2.1 or later: the game downloads 0.4.11 by itself. Click Restart to Update, or quit the game, and it installs. If you installed the game with Hangar, Hangar updates it.
• From 0.2.0: download it once from the download page and replace the old app or folder.
• What the update does to your account: nothing is converted, paid or removed. At its first start the server places every pilot with PvE points on his company's ladder and counts the kills again at the new PvE figures; no data step runs.
• Update the game. The server updates first, and a 0.4.10 client keeps working, but it shows some things the old way, and the new Company page, the shapes of the formations, the Group window and the drones in Unequip all need the 0.4.11 client:
  • Ranks: the server's ladder applies to every client at once. A 0.4.10 client shows your new rank and its symbol, your place ("Place 16 of 31"), the bar to your next rank, the table of 24 ranks with today's prices and the list of 50, but no percentile, no "pass" line, no best-pilot line and no pyramid.
  • Formations: a 0.4.10 client draws the escort whatever formation a ship wears.
  • Unequip all: a 0.4.10 client sends only the ship's own items, so the drones' lasers and shields stay fitted, as in 0.4.10. (The server does the list in one step for every client.)
  • The Group window and the PvE card are the client's: a 0.4.10 client keeps the old layout and lists five aliens.
  • The PvE figures apply to every client at once, and so does the Ranking calculation's list, which the server sends.
• A 0.4.11 client on a 0.4.10 server (a private server, or while the update is on its way) draws the shapes, because the 0.4.10 server already tells every client which formation a ship wears; a ship that is already there when you join glides from the escort to its shape once. The Company page keeps the 0.4.10 form, Unequip all works but not in one step, and the PvE card lists figures that server does not pay yet.

Platforms

Package	For
SpaceCorps2027-macos-universal.dmg	macOS 12 Monterey or later, Apple silicon and Intel
SpaceCorps2027-windows-x86_64.zip	Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit
SpaceCorps2027-linux-x86_64.AppImage	Linux x86_64, glibc 2.35 or newer (Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 36 and later), Vulkan
SpaceCorps2027-linux-x86_64.tar.gz	the same Linux build, as a folder to unpack

Graphics need Metal (macOS), DirectX 12 or Vulkan (Windows), or Vulkan (Linux, Mesa 22 or a vendor driver). The game needs 4 GB of RAM at the least and 8 GB is recommended: measured on a Mac for 0.4.6, the game's footprint in flight peaked near 3 GB at Low and near 4 GB at High. It needs 400 MB of free disk space. On computers with 8 GB, Medium or Low uses noticeably less memory than High.

First launch

The builds are not signed by Apple or Microsoft yet, so on a first install your system asks once before it opens the game. Updates the game installs itself don't ask again.

• macOS: open the dmg and drag SpaceCorps 2027 onto Applications.
  • macOS 15 and newer: open the app once and click Done. Then go to System Settings › Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway next to "SpaceCorps 2027 was blocked".
  • macOS 12 to 14: right-click (Control-click) the app, choose Open, then Open again.
• Windows: right-click the zip, choose Extract All, and start spacecorps2027.exe from the SpaceCorps 2027 folder: the whole game is in that one file. If SmartScreen says it "protected your PC", click More info, then Run anyway.
• Linux: run chmod +x SpaceCorps2027-linux-x86_64.AppImage, then start it. Or unpack the tar.gz and start SpaceCorps2027/spacecorps2027.

Known limits

• The new texts in the other languages have not been read by native speakers. Every new or changed sentence of this release in German, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Swedish and Simplified Chinese (the Company page, the Unequip all tip, the PvE card and the Ranks and other wiki pages) was written by AI and has had no native-speaker review. Please tell us what reads wrong.
• The ranks come from a model, not from play. The shares, the minimums, the 20,000 of the Senior Admiral and the 30 days are the design's numbers; nothing has been measured on the live companies. In a company whose best pilot has fewer than 20,000 PvE points there is no Senior Admiral yet, and in a company of a few hundred the ranks above Colonel belong to its leader and a handful of pilots. They are data files, and the first season will retune them.
• The first 30 days after the update, pilots who have long left are still on the ladder (the clock starts at the update), so your place counts them.
• A lone pilot reads "Top 100%" next to "Place 1 of 1". The percentile is the place over the ladder rounded up; the last place of any company reads it too.
• The five readings of the formations that are ours: the Rampart as a wall with claws, the Stiletto as a sword, the Shrike as a trident, the Centurion as a block and the Sanctum as a heart ahead of the nose, and the widths (a pattern reaches up to two hull lengths from the ship; the Auger's tip is the farthest). They are plain numbers in one place each.
• A cloaked ship's drones do not fade with its hull: they stay opaque while the ship is a ghost (the same since 0.4.10).
• In a crowd of 40 ships, each with 8 level-8 drones in a formation with height (the roof, the dome, the Auger), the game's memory footprint on a Mac (what macOS counts as its physical footprint) in one test stepped up and down by about 280 MB while its resident memory stayed flat; it did not with the old escort, a flat shape (the Cordon, the Gyre) or the drones off, and it did not with 12 ships. The cause was not found; it is reversible and not a trend.
• A drone bought in the Shop while you fly (possible only from another device or window) is not drawn until your next loadout change, formation swap or kill that pays experience. And each formation swap recalculates the whole ship: in a test with 40 pilots swapping every two seconds the server spent 36 to 46% of one core (a debug build). Both are 0.4.10 behaviour; the shapes may make pilots swap more.
• A Boss Seeker and a Dormant Force pay more PvE points than the toughness rule (5 and 25 instead of 2 and 16). A boss's whole figure goes to every party with at least 5% of the damage, so a crowd that shares a kill is each paid in full.
• The Wipe Point kill milestones count only the five old aliens; a swarm kill pays no Wipe Points.
• The tick cost of the ladders on the live server and the first drawing of the shapes and the new Company page on Windows and Linux have not been measured at the time of writing. The numbers above come from one Mac and a development build.
• The builds are unsigned, so macOS Gatekeeper and Windows SmartScreen warn on a first install (see above). There is one public game server with limited capacity; it may restart for updates, and your ship is saved when it does.

Verify your download

SHA256SUMS lists every package's SHA-256 and is signed with the SpaceCorps release key
(SHA256SUMS.minisig, minisign). With both files next to
the package:

minisign -Vm SHA256SUMS -P RWRhY8TTCr07i1iOS7MT45OHD3LFJJnWXWCF19fy7hjV1RD8cwWlVKF1
shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing   # Linux: sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing

Checksums

Package	SHA-256
SpaceCorps2027-macos-universal.dmg	edb976b5c6e6692accb4b6c7997befeaf4013cc25d187d07877284eb379ab3e3
SpaceCorps2027-windows-x86_64.zip	da074f723dbfd5ebc16d44d68ea5f39bf3c7be0c333b54a4849705c4fc04871e
SpaceCorps2027-linux-x86_64.AppImage	feeded82801029d9137f5ab0d180632572442e129f1fdafb9979801e42fda1f0
SpaceCorps2027-linux-x86_64.tar.gz	df3d8d5bd32ed0cf9309f19a1e320226d0d449340e1b8f9ab6b6bb117f65c29a