SpaceCorps 2027 0.4.5

SpaceCorps 2027 0.4.5 lets you choose where to come back when your ship is destroyed, adds a kill feed with funny lines to the Global chat, Invite Friends with a starter pack for new pilots, ways to hide the Global chat, ignore a pilot and report one, and Italian as the twelfth language. The server's refusals and notices are now translated too. Dying works differently, so the "If you already play" list below is worth reading.

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

• Choose where to respawn: the death screen offers your base (always open), the nearest portal (locked for 3 minutes after you use it) and the spot where you died (locked for 5 minutes). Press 1, 2 or 3. A portal or spot respawn protects you for 5 seconds, until your first shot.
• A kill feed in the Global chat: a short, funny line in your language whenever a pilot is destroyed. Switch it off in the chat window's menu.
• Invite Friends (Community): every pilot has a personal code. A friend with a new account (level 4 or lower) who uses it gets 100,000 credits, 5,000 Thulium, a N.I.K.E., a Quantum Laser 2, an Engine II and 1,000 Advanced Plasma. You collect 2,500 Thulium for each friend who reaches level 5, and more at 3, 5, 10 and 25 friends.
• Chat safety: hide the Global chat, ignore a pilot, or report one to the admins (right-click a name in the chat).
• Italiano is the twelfth language. A native speaker has not read it yet.
• The server's refusals and notices are translated: Assembly, Hangar, Skylab, Shop, clan, wipe and bonus code messages now show in your language.
• Also: the empty Epic rocket slot sends you to the Shop, the help cards and some texts are corrected, Settings, About and the sign-in card link to the privacy policy, and Settings says plainly what happens to a crash report you send.

If you already play: what changes for you

• Your ship no longer respawns by itself. After the explosion you stay on the death screen until you pick a place (1 base, 2 portal, 3 spot) or dock with Return to Base, which is the base and spends nothing. No timer picks for you. A pilot who closes the game on the death screen meets "Your active ship is destroyed. Please revive it in the hangar first." at the next launch: revive the ship in the Hangar, which costs nothing and puts you at your base.
• The nearest portal and the spot are locked after you use them, for 3 and 5 minutes. The base never is. The locks stay through a logout and a server restart, and a new season clears them.
• After a portal or spot respawn nobody can hurt you for 5 seconds. Your first shot (a laser volley or a rocket) ends it, and aliens drop you as a target meanwhile.
• The Global tab has kill feed lines now, between the pilots' words. They never count as unread, and the switch is in the chat window's menu and in Settings › General › Chat.
• The chat's right-click menu has Ignore and Report… next to Invite to group. Ignoring a pilot hides its Global and Local lines and turns down its group invitations. It is not told, and it still hears you.
• Some texts promise less. The station's news line no longer promises a double-XP weekend, and the texts of the First Contact, Tech Surge and War Games phases no longer promise themed rewards or effects the game does not have. The welcome line in the chat no longer says "private Beta".
• The Master Drone and the Helios Beam have new item texts ("Advanced drone, upgraded from a Slave Drone." and "Ultimate laser weapon, upgraded from a Starfire-3."). Their stats are as before.
• Pilot avatars are a little brighter, so that the initials stay readable on every colour.

Choose where to respawn

• When your hull reaches 0 the ship is destroyed and the death screen, headed "Choose where to respawn", shows three rows: your base, the nearest portal and the spot where you died, in the order of the keys. Click one, or press its key. The keys work on the number row and the keypad, and only once the explosion is over (about 3 seconds), so a thumb on the hotbar's 1 does not pick a place.

  Choice	Key	Where you appear	Locked after use
  At base	1	your company's base, as before	never
  At the nearest portal	2	next to the portal of the map you died on that is nearest to where you died, 150 to 300 units from it	3 minutes
  On the spot	3	where you died, on the same map and in the same world	5 minutes

• The lock starts when you respawn that way, not when you die. A locked row is greyed out with a countdown and opens by itself. If the server says a choice is still locked, the game tells you and reads the choices again. A refusal never uses up a lock.

• A sector with no portal greys the portal row out ("No portal in this sector."), and it never falls back to another map or to the base. If the server was updated while you were destroyed, or an admin moved you to another world, the place you died at is not known any more and only the base is offered.

• Spawn protection: a chip with the seconds left shows while it runs. During it, lasers, rockets and blasts do nothing to you, nobody can lock on to you and aliens drop you. It ends when you fire a laser volley or a rocket (the game tells you), or after 5 seconds. The base has no protection of its own: the station's safe zone has it.

• The black hole: in Danger Sector 4, a place within 4,200 units of the black hole's middle is moved out to 4,500 units on the same bearing, for the spot and for the portal. You are told ("You were moved out of the black hole's radiation.") and the lock is spent as for any respawn.

• Everything else about dying is as it was: no items lost, no cost, the ship comes back with its base hull and empty shields, and every ability is ready.

• The Death help card explains the choices, and a test checks its numbers against the server's file.

The kill feed in the Global chat

• Whenever a pilot's ship is destroyed, the Global tab gets a line with a skull: who died, who or what did it, and a joke about it. For example "vega asked the black hole for directions", "rex sent cyd a Lancet. It was not a gift." or "kai tried to hug a Gorvane". The names have their company's colour.
• There are 62 lines in nine groups (lasers 8, rockets 8, the N.U.K.E. 6, the N.I.K.E. 6, aliens 8, the black hole's horizon 8, its radiation 6, a pilot pushing someone into the hole 6, anything else 6). The server picks one at random and never the one it used last for that group.
• The line is written in your language. The server sends who died, who killed, the cause and a number, never the text, so a Japanese pilot reads the joke in Japanese. The jokes were adapted for each language and not translated word for word.
• It tells nothing about where. The line carries no map, position or world, so a cloaked pilot's death does not give the pilot away.
• Only pilots' deaths are posted, not aliens' or company pilots'. A pilot who logs out in a fight is not destroyed and posts nothing.
• A mass death does not spam. The server lets at most 4 lines a second into the channel, and the game folds a burst (more than 4 lines in 3 seconds) into one line, "N more pilots died", that grows in place.
• Switch it off with Show kill feed in the chat window's menu (the ⋮ button in its title bar) or in Settings › General › Chat. Turning it off only hides the lines, which come back when you turn it on. The game keeps the last 100 lines, and earlier deaths are not kept: you see what happens while you are online.

Invite Friends

• Open Community › Invite Friends. Your personal code looks like XXXX-XXXX: eight letters and digits, with no vowels and no 0, 1 or L, so it cannot spell a word or be misread. It is yours alone and never changes. You can copy the code, or a ready message with the download link and the code. The page lists your friends, the pack, the milestones and what you can collect now.

• A friend who is new enters your code once on the same page ("Have a code from a friend?"). The rules are: the friend's level is 4 or lower, once per account, never your own code, and at most 3 codes per network address in 24 hours. The friend gets the pack, all at once:

  Starter pack
  100,000 credits
  5,000 Thulium
  1 N.I.K.E.
  1 Quantum Laser 2
  1 Engine II
  1,000 Advanced Plasma (the x2 damage ammo)

• You get 2,500 Thulium for each friend who reaches level 5. It waits on your page and you collect it yourself, once per friend. A badge on the Invite Friends row of the sidebar, and on Return to Base in flight, says that something is ready.

• The milestones count friends who reached level 5. Each step pays once, in any order:

  Friends at level 5	Thulium
  3	5,000
  5	10,000
  10	25,000
  25	75,000

• The numbers sit in a file on the server (Invites.json) and may change as we see how it goes. A reward you have collected stays collected.

• What we keep. Your page shows a friend's name and whether the friend has reached level 5, and the server sends nothing more about a friend (no level, email or address). It stores a code per pilot, who used which code and when, and a scrambled form of the network address, never the address itself. Deleting an account does not take back what the other pilot earned.

• A season wipe does not touch codes or rewards, and it does not reset levels either.

Chat safety: hide Global, ignore, report

• Hide Global chat is in the chat window's menu and in Settings › General › Chat. The Global tab then shows no lines (the kill feed's included) and counts no unread lines. The tab says "Global is hidden" with a button, Show Global. The lines you send there still go out, and the lines that arrived meanwhile are back when you show it.
• Ignore: right-click a pilot's name in the chat and choose Ignore. Its lines in Global and Local are hidden, and its group invitations are turned down at once, with no prompt. A pilot in your own group still shows in the Group tab. Nothing is mutual: the pilot is never told, and it still hears you.
• The list is in Settings › General › Chat, with a Remove button for each pilot. It holds up to 200 pilots, follows your account to your other computers, and a full list says so rather than dropping someone.
• Report: right-click a name and choose Report…. The sheet shows what is sent: your name, the pilot's, the channel, the last line of that pilot you could see (up to 200 characters) and the reason, which is Spam, Abuse or harassment, Cheating or Something else. You can send up to 5 reports an hour.
• Nobody is punished automatically. A report is a note for the admins, who read them on a new Chat reports card in the Admin page and decide what to do with the tools they already had. The pilot reported is not told who reported it. The server cannot check the quoted line, and the card says so.
• Needs the 0.4.5 server for reports: hiding and ignoring work on any server.

Italian

• Italiano is the twelfth language, after English, Deutsch, Español, Français, Magyar, 日本語, 한국어, Português (Brasil), Русский, Svenska and 简体中文. All 4,274 texts are in it, the kill feed's jokes and Invite Friends included. It is written with tu, the loan words Italian players use (slot, booster, respawn, clan) and the key names of an Italian keyboard (Invio, Canc, Maiusc).
• Pick it on the sign-in screen (the language button at the bottom right) or in Settings › General › Interface Language. Automatic picks it when your system is set to Italian.
• It has not been read by a native speaker yet. The same is true of the new texts in the ten other languages. Please tell us what reads wrong.

The server's texts, translated

• The refusals and notices the server sends now show in your language: the Assembly (a craft that cannot start, a piece that is fitted or missing), the Hangar, the Skylab, the Shop, the clan, the wipe and the bonus codes, plus the restart countdown. The messages that follow an action (the toasts after a click in those pages) are translated too. In 0.4.4 many of them came in English whatever you had picked.
• A test keeps it that way: the build fails if the server can send a text that has no translation in every language.

Smaller changes

• The empty Epic rocket message is right: when you run out of Harpoons, Piledrivers, Eclipses or Maelstroms and press their slot, the game tells you to buy more in the Shop (5 Thulium each), as a click on the slot does too. Only the N.U.K.E. and the N.I.K.E. say Assembly.
• Help cards: the Rockets card says groupmates are safe from your rockets as well as your company. The Ability slots card says new pilots start with a Repair Drone I and that a stack of Afterburners runs 15 to 20 seconds. The Death card describes the three choices. The chat's card has rows for the kill feed, hiding Global, ignoring a pilot and reporting one. Invite Friends has a card of its own.
• The wiki: a page for Invite Friends, sections on the kill feed, hiding, ignoring and reporting on the Groups page, a Wipe Timeline that says what a wipe really resets (items and ships, not level, credits, Thulium or ranking points), and the Rockets, Forge, Abilities and Black Hole pages corrected where they were out of date.
• Privacy: the sign-in card, Settings and About link to the privacy policy (https://spacecorps.github.io/play/privacy/). In Settings, the crash report switch says that a report you send becomes a public issue on GitHub (SpaceCorps/play) that anyone can read, without your name. Off, the reports stay on your computer.
• About: the build line wraps short of the Copy button in a narrow window.

Updating

• From 0.2.1 or later: the game downloads 0.4.5 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.
• Update the game. The server updates first, and a 0.4.4 client keeps working, but it is missing a lot of this release:
  • It respawns you at your base by itself 3 seconds after you are destroyed. There is no death screen with choices and no protection.
  • It shows no kill feed lines. The server sends them as a message it does not know, and it ignores it.
  • It has no Invite Friends page, so it can neither use a code nor collect a reward. Rewards that wait for you stay where they are.
  • It cannot hide Global, ignore a pilot or report one. Its Global chat has everything it had.
  • The chat's welcome line (which lost "private Beta") and the descriptions of the Master Drone and Helios Beam show in English, because the 0.4.4 client only translates the old text.
  • The new Italian texts and the translated server refusals are in the new client only.
• A 0.4.5 client on a 0.4.4 server (a private server, or while the update is on its way) still plays. It respawns at the base the old way, shows Invite Friends as "Not available on this server", has no kill feed lines to show, and answers a report with "This game server does not take reports 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 (8 GB recommended) and 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 issues

• The builds are unsigned, so macOS Gatekeeper and Windows SmartScreen warn on a first install (see above).
• Italian has not been read by a native speaker, and neither have the new texts of this release in the other ten languages (the death screen, the kill feed's jokes, Invite Friends, chat safety, the server's refusals). Some jokes may fall flat, and some words may be wrong. Please report anything that reads wrong.
• The death screen waits for you. There is no timer and no automatic respawn: a pilot who walks away stays destroyed. Closing the game on it gives "Your active ship is destroyed. Please revive it in the hangar first." at the next launch (revive it in the Hangar, free of charge). The locks are not shown anywhere but on the death screen.
• Dying on purpose is a free ride. Flying into the black hole to die gets you to your base, the nearest portal or the spot you died on, limited only by the 3 and 5 minute locks. We left it as it is and will watch it.
• Hide Global hides everything on that tab, the server's own lines too: a restart warning does not show on the hidden Global tab, while the Local and Group tabs still show it.
• Hiding and ignoring are on your side only. The server still sends everything, the pilot you ignore still hears you, and a pilot in your group still shows in the Group tab: leave the group to be rid of it. The ignore list is saved with your account's settings, the last computer to save wins, and the web client does not know the list and may drop it.
• Reports are only as good as the pilot's line. The server keeps no chat history and cannot check the quoted line. Nobody is punished automatically, and what an admin does is up to them.
• Invite rewards can be farmed with throwaway accounts. The guard is the level (4 or lower), once per account and 3 codes per network address in 24 hours, and a friend must play to level 5 for the Thulium. We watch it, and every number is a line in a file.
• Pilots on a shared network share the 3 codes a day. A household or a school may need to try again tomorrow or from another network.
• Windows fullscreen has not been tried on a real Windows PC. It is on by default for every Windows player. The kill switch (start the game with SPACECORPS_NO_FULLSCREEN set to 1, or add "fullscreen": false to .spacecorps2027\client.json in your user folder) and the log file (.spacecorps2027\spacecorps2027.log) are there for that. Please tell us how it goes, with your log.
• The stuck-key fix is a set of fail-safes, not a found cause. We could not reproduce the chat and ability keys going dead. Escape in a text field lets go of a Shift you are really holding, and coming back to the window lets go of a key you were really holding, so press it again.
• Rockets can destroy small ships in a few hits, and a N.I.K.E. in one. There is no cap, on purpose. Return to Base is still an instant exit, also from a Danger Sector fight.
• Groups put enemies together and live only in the server's memory, so a server update ends them. The same goes for Dark Matter crates and the one-minute cloak recharge. The Global chat has a rate limit and now the tools above, but no filter.
• A Solar upgrade switches off the whole Skylab for up to 6 days, and the production is not made up. A Master Drone is only a look. The Helios Beam is still a long project, and its times are an estimate.
• In flight, far from a map's centre, the stars can still shift slightly while the camera moves. On older or integrated graphics, High and Ultra can lower the frame rate: pick Auto or Medium if flying feels less smooth.
• There is one public game server with limited capacity. It may restart for updates, and your ship is saved when it does.

Report problems at https://github.com/SpaceCorps/play/issues or on Discord.

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	66551b40abcf098fccaa1321116af4658fefc09b50ff526115f3309ddaefb815
SpaceCorps2027-windows-x86_64.zip	8b8f7c5c08bd3f0f845039df665fca9a5362791a6258657d58a1f2a0c4096e08
SpaceCorps2027-linux-x86_64.AppImage	032ef6a955add2899b0340c9e6463b0c9345200d4b9b6ff0b3568e75878d8a89
SpaceCorps2027-linux-x86_64.tar.gz	bedc04124d498fba7f8b45b41ab7d09024e885911d539106a2a5f0c3effdccf5