SpaceCorps 2027 0.4.17

SpaceCorps 2027 0.4.17 is the Danger Sector update: when a season reaches day 11 (the Tech Surge), the machines of a lost civilisation wake up. DS-1, DS-2 and DS-3 get a pulsar and a giant excavator that mines Thulium and rare ore when you fuel it with Dark Matter, DS-4 gets the Dormant Swamp and its guns, three new dormant aliens (the Slumbering Void, the Inert Mass and The Unwakened) defend them, and the Dormant Swarm comes back twice as fast and pays twice.

The game plays on the public server https://spacecorps-game.sliplane.app. Your pilot, ships, items, credits and world carry over. Nothing of this exists before season day 11.

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

What's new

Highlights

• A pulsar and a giant excavator on DS-1, DS-2 and DS-3 of every world. Put Dark Matter in its tank (3 at most; 1 burns for 10 minutes), choose Thulium, Cataclysite, Quorvium, Orvium or Velkonite at the control panel and start it: everyone in the world is told in chat. A box lands around it every 20 seconds for anyone to take. A full run of 30 minutes is worth about what 2 to 3 pilots hunting for Thulium the best way make in that time (4,821 Thulium in Alpha).
• Mining calls Slumbering Voids: 2 every 2 minutes, 8 at most, each 25,000 hull and 150,000 shield at speed 400. If no pilot is left to fight them they attack the excavator (200,000 hull in Alpha): destroyed, it rests for an hour and its fuel is lost.
• After 30 minutes of mining in all, the excavator overheats and rests for an hour, and it and its pulsar radiate: 10% of a ship's hull and shield every second, so a ship dies in 10 seconds. You are warned 60 and 15 seconds before.
• The Dormant Swamp, the top-left corner of DS-4: a N.I.K.E. every 2 seconds, a N.U.K.E. every 5 seconds and two laser turrets of about 50,000 a hit fire at every ship they see within 4,300 units, and none of them sees a cloaked ship. Five Inert Masses and two patrolling Voids live there, and The Unwakened (10 million hull and 10 million shield, 75,000 damage a second within 700 units) sleeps in the middle and cannot be hurt yet.
• The Dormant Swarm starts from the swamp, is back 30 minutes after its last ship dies (it was an hour) and pays twice the Credits, Thulium, experience and honor.
• Ranking: a Slumbering Void gives 10 PvE points, an Inert Mass 15 and The Unwakened 112.
• New look and sound: purple-black models with glowing violet seams, the excavator's control panel, a radiation gauge, 15 new quiet sounds and every new text in 12 languages.

If you already play: what changes for you

• Nothing changes before season day 11. From that day (event 2, the Tech Surge) to the next Wipe the Danger Sectors hold all of the above. A world that is past day 11 when you update gets it at once.
• Update the game. A 0.4.12, 0.4.13, 0.4.14, 0.4.15 or 0.4.16 game installs it as a patch (a Linux AppImage game from 0.4.14), and downloads the whole package if the patch cannot be used. A 0.4.11 or older game downloads the whole package.
• A game that has not updated cannot see the swamp, the pulsars or the radiation, and they still hurt it. A 0.4.16 game keeps working, but it draws no pulsar, excavator or swamp, has no control panel, and sees the new aliens as ordinary ones.
• The Dormant Swarm changes from day 11: it starts at the swamp, is back after 30 minutes and pays twice (the loot box is the same).
• Rocks near the new places are gone: there are none within 2,600 units of a pulsar, 2,200 of an excavator or 4,900 of the swamp.
• A login or an "on the spot" respawn never puts you inside the radiation or the swamp's zone: you are moved out of it and told so.
• Dark Matter has a new use (the excavator's fuel). An Inert Mass can drop it, and The Unwakened would drop a lot.
• No Credits, Thulium or items are paid, moved or removed by the update.

The pulsar and the giant excavator

• Where. One pulsar and one giant excavator on each of DS-1, DS-2 and DS-3 in every world (nine pairs). The excavator stands 900 units from its pulsar, in the open part of the map, far from the gates. DS-4 has the black hole instead. A label "Excavator" hangs over the machine within 1,400 units: click it to open the Giant excavator sheet.
• The control panel. The sheet works within 600 units of the excavator. It shows the fuel tank (three cells), the heat, the hull, the five resources with what each lays a minute in your world, Add Dark Matter and Start mining. Anyone can add fuel, choose and start; the choice can be changed until Start and is locked while it runs. A refusal ("You are too far from the control panel", "You have no Dark Matter", "The tank can hold no more Dark Matter") shows in red.
• Fuel. Add Dark Matter takes 1 Dark Matter from your cargo (not one that is fitted, not one in the Transport Cache). The tank holds 3, never more than the excavator can still burn before it overheats; 1 burns for 10 minutes. If the excavator is destroyed, the fuel in its tank is lost.
• Mining. Start tells the whole world in chat and the Game Log ("[pilot] started the giant excavator on DS-1: mining Thulium, 30 minutes of fuel. Slumbering Voids will come for it."). A box lies 450 to 900 units from the excavator every 20 seconds (90 in a full run) for 5 minutes. Anyone can pick one up, first come, with no daily limit on its Thulium. Normal PvP rules apply here: nothing protects a miner from a raider.
• Out of fuel before the heat limit, it is ready again with its heat kept: add Dark Matter and start again.

A full run lays (30 minutes, 3 Dark Matter)	Alpha	Beta	Gamma
Thulium	4,821	7,714	9,643
Cataclysite	1,157	1,851	2,314
Quorvium	514	823	1,029
Velkonite	320	320	320
Orvium	160	160	160

Velkonite and Orvium, the Skylab's two ores, are capped at 4 hours of a level 20 collector of that ore, so a run never speeds the Skylab up by more than that. Thulium, Cataclysite and Quorvium are laid at the same worth, in the model's figures about what 2.5 pilots make in half an hour hunting for Thulium the best way (3,857 Thulium an hour each, counted before the cost of their ammo); Beta and Gamma scale it by 1.6 and 2, and the Voids' pay and boxes come on top.

• Overheating. Mining adds heat, and the heat never cools while the excavator stands idle: after 30 minutes of mining in all, however many runs it takes, the excavator overheats and rests for an hour. The tank is emptied, the boxes already on the ground stay, and the map is warned 60 and 15 seconds before.
• Radiation. While it rests, overheated or destroyed, the excavator and its pulsar radiate. A ship within 1,100 units of the excavator or 1,300 of the pulsar loses 10% of its hull and shield every second, shield first, cloaked or not: a ship at full strength dies in 10 seconds, and the kill is credited to the last enemy who hit it. Aliens are not hurt. The circles are drawn on the flight view and the minimap (an amber ring in the last minute, red and dashed while they radiate) and a gauge shows the dose. The Ironclad (speed 92) cannot leave the circles in 10 seconds from the panel or the far boxes: leave in the 60-second warning.
• Slumbering Voids. The first wave comes 60 seconds after a start, then every 120 seconds: 2 Voids from the edge of the map, at most 8 alive, none in the last 60 seconds before the overheat. They hunt the pilots near the excavator; the ones left over start flying away 90 seconds after the run ends, unless they are fighting.
• The siege. When no pilot is left for them to hunt (dead, cloaked, in a safe ring or farther than 7,000 units) for 15 seconds, the Voids shoot the excavator for a quarter of their laser damage. At 0 hull it is destroyed: it rests for an hour, its hull is full again and its fuel is lost. Pilots cannot hurt it, and nothing but the Voids does. Its hull is 200,000 in Alpha, 300,000 in Beta and 400,000 in Gamma.
• A server restart pauses a run: fuel, heat, choice and cooldown are saved; the next wave comes 60 seconds after.

The Dormant Swamp

• Where. The top-left corner of DS-4: a zone of 4,300 units around its middle, more than 6,700 units from the nearest portal ring and clear of the black hole. A ship that crosses the notice ring at 4,800 units is told once ("Warning: the Dormant Swamp. Its turrets fire on every ship they see, and something sleeps in the middle.").
• The guns stand in the middle and cannot be hurt. Each aims at the nearest ship it sees, with the world's strength on its damage (1.5 times in Beta, 2 in Gamma):

Gun	Fires	Hits for	Reaches
N.I.K.E.	every 2 seconds	75,000, 35% penetration	3,640 units
N.U.K.E.	every 5 seconds	50,000, blast of 900 units	1,080 units
Two laser turrets	every second	45,000 to 55,000 each	2,500 units

• A cloak is the way in. No gun sees a cloaked ship, a ship in an EMP's window, a ship in a safe ring or one in its 3 seconds of respawn protection, so a cloaked ship can fly through the whole zone up to The Unwakened's aura. Nothing else can be done to the base yet. A Wraith with the best shields lasts 3 to 13 seconds inside the zone in Alpha.
• Five Inert Masses stay within 2,400 units of the middle. Each fires a Dormant Lance every 6 seconds at the nearest ship it sees: a homing rocket (speed 750) that hits for 5,000 to 8,000 with 40% penetration and follows you for 7 seconds. Only a cloak, an EMP, a safe ring or a jump breaks its hold. A dead Mass is back 60 minutes later. Nobody else can fire, craft or sell a Lance.
• Two Slumbering Voids patrol 4,600 to 6,500 units from the middle, outside the guns' reach, and are back 60 minutes after one dies.
• The Unwakened stands in the middle at speed 10 and burns every ship within 700 units for 75,000 a second (cloaked ships too; 1.5 and 2 times in Beta and Gamma). He is immune for now: shots and rockets land and do nothing, the Target window shows full bars and the hit says "Immune". Quests and events of a later update are meant to turn that off.
• Nothing in the swamp ever follows a cloaked pilot or enters the black hole's circle.

The three new dormant aliens (Alpha numbers; Beta and Gamma have 1.5 and 2 times the hull, shield and damage and pay 2 and 3 times as much)

	Slumbering Void	Inert Mass	The Unwakened
Hull / shield	25,000 / 150,000	250,000 / 100,000	10,000,000 / 10,000,000
Shield takes	80% of each hit	80% of each hit	80% of each hit
Speed	400	60	10
Weapon	lasers, 2,400 to 3,000 a volley	Dormant Lance, 5,000 to 8,000	aura, 75,000 a second
Where	in waves at a mining excavator; 2 patrol the swamp	5 in the swamp	1 in the middle of the swamp
Pays	23,000 Credits, 60 Thulium, 3,600 experience, 16 honor	125,000 Credits, 335 Thulium, 20,200 experience, 88 honor	7,500,000 Credits, 20,000 Thulium, 1,200,000 experience, 5,200 honor (nobody can earn it yet)
PvE points	10	15	112

• Pay and box. A kill pays every pilot who did at least 5% of the damage, by their share, and the loot box is first reserved for the pilot who did the most. A Void's box holds, 60% of the time, 30 to 60 of one laser ammo (Ultra Core or Experimental Fusion Core) and, 40% of the time, 1 to 3 of one Epic rocket; never Dark Matter and never a N.I.K.E. An Inert Mass's box: 400 to 800 of the two ammos, 20 to 40 of one Epic rocket, and by chance 1 to 2 N.I.K.E. (5%), 1 to 3 Dark Matter (5%), an Ancient Control Unit (10%) and 1 to 2 Power Cores (25%). The Unwakened's box is written down and out of reach: 10,000 to 15,000 of the two ammos, 500 to 800 Epic rockets, 20 to 30 N.I.K.E., 5 to 10 N.U.K.E., 40 to 60 Dark Matter, 10 to 20 Ancient Control Units and 100 to 200 Power Cores.
• How hard. A Void's shield takes 80% of every hit while it stands, so its hull goes after about 125,000 damage with no shield penetration, 55,556 with 25% and 35,714 with 50%. An Inert Mass takes about 350,000. In the model three level 8 Paragons with x2 ammo destroy a Void in 27 seconds and an Inert Mass in 76.
• The Voids are fast: speed 400 is a Storm on Afterburner III. Only a gate, a safe ring or a cloak gets away from one.
• They count. Every kill goes in your kill statistics under the alien's own name and gives the PvE points above, toward your rank and the gold crown, as the swarms' kills do (they have counters of their own); no quest or Challenge asks for them yet. A Void's death is told to nobody, an Inert Mass's to its map and the kill feed.

The Dormant Swarm from day 11

• It starts at the swamp (4,700 units from the middle, outside the zone) and flies out through the gates as before, keeping 450 units clear of the zone. It is back 30 minutes after the whole swarm is destroyed (it was 60), and pays twice: a Dormant Force now pays 400,000 Credits and 1,070 Thulium, a Dormant Pulse 190,000 and 510 (Alpha), and experience and honor double too. The loot box, its strength, speed and route are the same. Before day 11 nothing about it changes.

What you see and hear

• The pulsar is a violet core with two sweeping beams, the excavator a hexagonal frame with a spiral drill and three fuel cells, the swamp's zone, its notice ring and its turrets are drawn, and the aliens have their own purple-black models with violet trails. The minimap and the Star System map mark the pulsar, the excavator (with its state and time) and the swamp.
• The flight view warns you when a flight order leads into the radiation or the swamp's guns, and the death screen says "Moved out of a danger zone" when an on-the-spot respawn was moved.
• 15 new quiet sounds, each with its own rate limit on the effects volume: the sheet opening, a unit of fuel, one tick for each resource, the start, the overheat warning and the overheat, a wave, the radiation, the swamp's warning, each of the three guns, an immune hit, and two hums (a mining excavator and The Unwakened).

For administrators and the server

• At the first start: one new table (ExcavatorStates, one row for each of the nine excavators, written on every change and every 60 seconds; the Wipe empties it), and the seeder adds three alien rows (Inert Mass, The Unwakened, Slumbering Void) and one rocket row, the Dormant Lance, that nobody can fire, craft or list. No data step. The backup gate lists one line. Two data files are new (Excavator.json, DormantSwamp.json) and four change (Swarms.json, Rockets.json, Market.json, ranking-config.json). New routes: GET /api/admin/excavators, POST /api/admin/excavators/:tool (fuel, resource, start, stop, heat, cooldown, destroy, overheat, wave, reset), GET /api/admin/swamp, POST /api/admin/swamp/immunity and POST /api/admin/swamp/voids, every call recorded. One new client feature string, dormant-ds, thirteen new excavator_* counters. No new environment variable.

Updating

• From 0.4.16, 0.4.15, 0.4.14, 0.4.13 or 0.4.12: the game downloads a patch by itself. Click Restart to Update, or quit the game, and it installs. If a patch cannot be used the game downloads the whole package. A Linux AppImage game gets a patch from 0.4.14 or newer.
• From 0.2.1 to 0.4.11: the game downloads the whole package. 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: no Credits, Thulium or items are paid, moved or removed. Everything new waits for season day 11.
• A 0.4.17 game on a 0.4.16 server (a private server) plays, but shows no pulsar, excavator, swamp or panel.

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

• Nobody has played an excavator run, a Void wave or the swamp with real players. They were tested with scripts, a real server and a headless game, and the numbers come from a model, not from play: the value of a run, the Voids' strength and pay, the guns' damage and the kill times above.
• The Unwakened is immune on purpose, and his rewards are written down but cannot be earned: quests and events of a later update are meant to make him mortal, and the base itself stays out of reach until then.
• The swamp's guns hit hard. Inside the zone a Wraith with the best shields lasts 3 to 13 seconds in Alpha, and the damage is 1.5 and 2 times in Beta and Gamma. A cloak is the only way in. An updated game warns you when a flight order leads into the guns; a game that has not updated does not.
• One strong pilot can hold a run alone, and then takes all of it. In the model a lone level 8 pilot with 25% or 50% penetration holds a run in Alpha (his hull falls to 25% and 61% at the lowest) and makes about twice what the best hunting hour pays; a level 4 or 5 pilot cannot. With no penetration and x2 ammo, Alpha needs 2 level 8 pilots, Beta 5 and Gamma 8; with 50%, 1, 2 and 3. The reference hunt is counted before the hunters' ammo; counted after it, the same 2.5 pilots would make 3,389 Thulium in Alpha, so against that a run is worth more, not less.
• Anyone can fuel, choose and start, so a rival can change the resource before you press Start, and a raider can take your boxes. The Dark Matter in a destroyed excavator is lost.
• "Twice the kill rewards" is twice the pay, not twice the box: a doubled box would make Dark Matter free.
• The Danger Sector visit points of Centre Recon, Grand Tour, Centre Survey, Gauntlet of the Centre and Four Corners lie inside the swamp's zone on DS-4. The visit counts on any Danger Sector: do them on DS-1, DS-2 or DS-3.
• 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 was written by AI. Please tell us what reads wrong.
• The other limits of 0.4.16 still stand: the patches are still new (each kind has not been checked on a real machine one by one; the game falls back to the whole package when anything is wrong), the crew sizes of the Wardens come from a model, and designs cannot be undone. The builds are unsigned (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	24746dc02a308d53f18c30956a459716912a99398c937274b7dc127972fad99b
SpaceCorps2027-windows-x86_64.zip	804d0f850d84c473650ffce2f1bfd5dee0e1146eda8cb2e06888fc616c622d72
SpaceCorps2027-linux-x86_64.AppImage	41396c8cf739f9affa809f21bf26b210617a5ce9e1118feedb25fe91b52ff227
SpaceCorps2027-linux-x86_64.tar.gz	2776e0e91479652fce8b26d2afa9e4e665edbd7f3ba9f82cec125291071ab03d