In short: v0.89.0 closes that work, and the whole game is now in English. You pick your language on the sign-in screen or in Settings, and it follows your account. Before shipping, we went through the entire game in English, on the live server: two places were still in French. They are fixed, and a check keeps them from coming back.

What is translated

Everything on screen: the screens and their tooltips, the tutorial's explanations, the names and descriptions of buildings, resources, technologies, quests, ships and defenses. That is 4,721 strings in all, and not one is missing in English. At the start, our counter found 854 sentences written straight into the code, where no translation could reach them. It is at zero.

The trickiest part was the server's 281 messages: a building you cannot build yet, a sale that is refused, an action that went through. The server translates nothing: it attaches a code to its answer, and your game turns it into a sentence, in your language.

Picking your language

The first time, the game uses your browser's language if it offers it, and French otherwise. You can change it on the sign-in screen, where it applies right away, or in game from Settings: the game asks you to confirm, then reloads in the new language.

With an account, the language is saved with it and follows you from one device to another. In guest mode, it stays on the device.

What is already written keeps its language: a notification or a history line stays in the language it was written in.

What stays in French, on purpose

Proper names are not translated: star systems, planets and ship nicknames. In the screenshot, Chimère, Aigle and Écho-3 keep their names in English. Their class, type and description, on the other hand, are translated.

The oldest entries of the in-game version history stay in French as well.

What the review turned up

Before closing the work, we did what we did for the tutorial: play, rather than trust our tests. On a test account, with the game in English, we opened every screen, every tab and every window (11 screens, 45 tabs, 7 windows), noting any text that looked French.

Two leftovers. In the Hangar's Defense tab, the Posture line showed "Posture équilibrée" instead of "Balanced posture". Same thing on the posture buttons of the combat simulator. The Control Centre already showed them in English: those two places fetched the French name straight from the source instead of asking for its translation.

Both are fixed in v0.89.0. And since this kind of slip creeps back easily, our tests now fail if a screen shows a game name without going through its translation. That check found exactly those two places, and nothing else.

What about other languages?

This site comes in eleven languages, the game in two. The game is now built to take others: adding one is translation work, no longer a coding job. No other language is translated today.

Two notes. The game's English is surely not perfect: if a sentence sounds off, or a French word is still lying around somewhere, let us know. And the screenshots in this post come from a guest game, with the interface in English.

Feedback, or something wrong? Drop by the Discord.

In short: we got stuck in several places, and v0.88.0 fixes them. The steps come in a new order, where you learn to earn Scrip before spending it. The guide brings the place to act into view, helps you in the Workforce window and tells you when a build is already under way. A greyed-out button says what is missing. And as before, you can skip the tutorial at any time.

What we found by playing it

A step with no way out. "Build a second power source": the guide pointed at the Champ solaire, already built, whose only button was "Upgrade". Upgrading it ticked nothing. The only way forward was to build a coal plant, which then sat idle for lack of coal and an operator.

Scrip asked for too early. The tutorial had you hire a technician, paid in Scrip, long before explaining how to earn any. On our test account, at zero Scrip, the "Hire" buttons were greyed out without a word, and nothing said to go and sell.

Places off the screen. The guide sometimes pointed at a button hidden below the bottom of a column, or at a card with only its edge showing.

A new order

Still eight phases and twenty steps, arranged differently: first steps, factories, selling at the NPC Counter, then technicians and power, research, an expedition, scanning a system, and defense to finish.

So you learn to sell right after your two factories, before any second hire. The scan comes before defense, which is the longest step. And the step with no way out becomes "Upgrade your Champ solaire", which the button shown really lets you do.

A guide that points at what you can see

When the place to act is out of view, the guide brings it onto the screen, once. After that you scroll as you like: it does not drag you back.

In the Workforce window, it shows who to hire. To staff two factories, that is a technician able to run two sites, the cheapest one you can afford: one candidate in two can only run one, and nothing said so. Once the hire is done, it points at the button that closes the window.

During a build, the bubble no longer asks you to build next to a button that has turned into "Cancel": it says the build is in progress, and that it finishes even if you leave the screen. The same goes for a probe on its way.

Finally, a greyed-out "Hire" button says why: no room left, or not enough Scrip, with how much is missing and where to earn it.

The early deficit

Right after your first hire, the Advisor reports a Scrip deficit. It is true, and it is expected: you are paying a wage before you have anything to sell. The Compass now says so in one line: at zero Scrip, nothing is destroyed and nobody leaves.

Nothing mandatory

The tutorial blocks nothing. No timer, no reward you could miss, nothing to lose. "Skip the tutorial" stays in the Compass from start to finish. The "Phase complete" card goes away on its own, or with a click.

If your tutorial is in progress, it picks up where your colony stands. If it is finished or skipped, nothing changes for you.

Two notes. Not everything is perfect: in the Workforce window, the guide's bubble covers part of the card of the candidate it points at. And the screenshots in this post come from a guest game, in a narrow window where the game switches to a single column, with the interface in French.

Feedback, or something wrong? Drop by the Discord.

In short: you can found an alliance or join one. Its members can donate Scrip to it, which pays for posting an announcement, for changing its name or its tag, and for giving it a banner and a frame. An alliance brings no in-game bonus: no resources, no production, no protection. The whole game can be played solo, and nothing forces you to be part of one.

Found or join

Founding an alliance is free. It needs a name, a tag of a few letters, an emblem, an icon and a colour picked from the game's list, and a motto if you want one. It holds up to twenty members.

Joining an alliance takes both sides: your application accepted by the alliance, or its invitation accepted by you. An alliance can only invite a player who has declared themselves open to offers on their public profile. And you leave whenever you want.

Inside, three roles: the leader, the officers and the members. The member list says who has played recently, in broad strokes: online, today, this week. Never an exact time. An activity feed keeps the alliance's latest news: arrivals, departures, role changes.

A treasury of donations

Every alliance has a treasury in Scrip, the currency earned in game. It lives on the voluntary donations of its members only. Let us be clear: a donation cannot be taken back, not by leaving the alliance, not if it is disbanded, and it earns nothing for the one who gives. The treasury produces nothing and gives nothing back to anyone.

It pays for three things. Posting an announcement, a short message read by all members, which stays displayed until the next announcement. Changing the name or the tag of the alliance. And buying its cosmetics. A ledger, which only members can see, keeps track of every movement.

A banner and a frame

The leader can give the alliance a banner and a frame for its emblem, paid for by the treasury. The catalogue holds four of each. What the alliance wears shows wherever the alliance is displayed.

It is appearance, and nothing more: no effect on the game. The prices shown may still change.

Nothing is required

An alliance brings no in-game bonus. That is a choice, not an oversight: a solo player must lose nothing by staying solo. An absence costs nothing either, neither to the member nor to the alliance.

Two notes. An alliance requires an online account: in guest mode, nothing is sent online. And the alliance in the screenshots, Les Veilleurs de Prima, was founded for the occasion on a test account, then disbanded.

Feedback, a problem? Drop by the Discord.

In short: you have a profile other players can look at, settings saved to your account, a vacation mode that protects your colonies while you are away, and a showcase of appearance items.

A governor profile

The Profile tab is simple: a few words about yourself, your numbers (tier, colonies, completed expeditions, unlocked research, account age) and the choice to show your profile or keep it private. You do not type these numbers: they are read from your game.

In the leaderboard, click a player to open their profile, if they left it public.

You can also flag that you are open to alliance offers. To be clear: alliances are not in the game. This choice shows on your profile and does nothing else.

Settings that follow you

Settings are sorted by category: Interface, Audio, Notifications, Accessibility, Social, Gameplay, Account & security. Interface size, high contrast, reduced effects, notification duration: each one has a real effect.

They are saved to your account, so you find them again on your other devices. In guest mode, they stay on the device.

Leaving with peace of mind

Vacation mode protects your colonies while you are away: no new incursion, and no other player can launch a raid on you.

In exchange, everything runs at half speed: production, factory consumption, wages and Trading Post contracts. Your game becomes read-only. Whatever is already under way finishes, nothing new can be started.

Two limits, on purpose. A vacation lasts at least 48 hours. And whatever was already announced or launched against you when you left still arrives: vacation mode is for leaving with peace of mind, not for dodging a fight.

A showcase, not a shop

The Profile tab also shows the appearance items: the interface theme, free for everyone, and four slots, portrait frame, title, banner and profile background.

Each slot shows a price in Scrip, the currency earned by playing. Nothing is for sale: the slots are empty for everyone, the showcase is for looking only, and these prices may still change.

Feedback, a problem? Drop by the Discord.

In short: your colonies became real colonies, expeditions take their time, the Market was rebuilt from the ground up, and the game moved to our own server.

Screens built around the colony (v0.61 to v0.69)

After the Planet view, the Buildings and Factories screens got the same treatment. Your colony's landscape fills the whole screen, and the panels float on top, on a dark background that keeps the numbers readable.

Quests and Expeditions are now two screens. The first gathers the campaign, achievements and a colony leaderboard. The second gained a map of your planet's sectors.

Expeditions finally take their real time: a flight of 1 hour 30, then 1 to 8 hours on site, your choice. The longer you stay, the bigger the loot. The risk and the Fuel bill go up too.

The colony lives on your clock. Dawn, day, dusk and night tint the scenery, along with the weather of the day.

Less visible: the game copes better with small hiccups. If the server is busy while your save loads, it retries on its own instead of showing an error.

Colonies that truly exist (v0.70 to v0.79)

This is the biggest change of the period. Each colony now has its own stock, its buildings, its workers and its queues. Switching colony really means switching place. Scrip, on the other hand, becomes a single wallet shared by all your colonies.

The top bar slimmed down: four basic resources, Electricity and Scrip. The rest sits behind a button. Every panel can be collapsed, and the game remembers it from one session to the next.

A Control Centre gathers what used to be scattered: the threat radar, your defensive posture, announced incursions, the combat history and a simulator. A message box comes with it, for reports and alerts.

The Market was rebuilt. The Trading Post shows three offers of the day and a price table with a 24-hour trend. The Player Exchange shows the real order books. Nothing is simulated: an empty book shows up empty.

On the sign-in side: a "Stay signed in" box, a faster start, and a security fix for those who play with two tabs open.

A move, then work behind the scenes (v0.80 to v0.85)

At the end of September the game changed servers. It now runs on our own machine. Your save, your colonies and your Scrip were carried over as they were. You only need to sign in again once.

Along the way, you can change your password from the Profile, raid alerts arrive in under a minute, and signing out now only closes the session on the device you are using.

The versions after that change nothing in your save. They are tools for the team: finding out what happened on an account when you report a problem, or giving resources to every player after an outage.

If you are coming back after a break

Your colony is where you left it, and production kept going without you. Sign in once, then have a look at the Market and the Control Centre: that is where the game moved the most.

Feedback, or something wrong? Drop by the Discord.

Screen 01 is the first screen every new player sees, and the one veterans keep open the longest. Up through v0.59.2, it was a dashboard in the strictest sense: orange-boxed cards, a permanent red alert banner up top, buildings scattered at roughly random positions on the planet render, with no visual link to the hexagonal grid sitting underneath. It worked, but it read like a management form, not a colony.

The v0.60.0 to v0.60.3 rework changes no rule at all: production, costs, available slots are exactly the same. What changes is what the screen actually shows you.

Before / after

Before (v0.59.2): boxed dashboard, buildings scattered across the holographic table, a permanent red shortage banner, panels that stayed open whether you were reading them or not.

After (v0.60.3): a 24-slot honeycomb where every building actually fills its own hexagon, a radial spotlight centering your eye on the colony, separate Event and Advisor panels, a HUD with a rate for every resource.

The design choices, explained simply

The render's radial spotlight. A radial gradient centered on the colony pulls the eye toward the middle of the screen instead of letting it scatter across the four corners of an evenly lit rectangle. It's the same planet render as before; only the lighting changed, and the screen still reads far better immediately.

The 24-slot honeycomb. Before, a built structure showed up at a roughly arbitrary spot on the render. Now, the hex grid that already existed faintly underneath becomes the actual map of slots: 24 cells, occupied or empty, each at a fixed position. One glance tells you how much room is left.

Buildings that fill their own hexagon. Every built structure now takes up the full space of its cell, with a readable icon and name right there, instead of a small floating marker hovering above the terrain. The colony looks built, not pinned.

Collapsible panels, with the choice remembered. Constructions, Research, Expeditions: these three panels can now be closed with one click, and the game remembers each player's choice across sessions. If you never launch an expedition early on, that panel stays closed until you open it yourself.

A HUD with per-resource rate and a real date. The top bar used to show totals only; it now also shows the rate (+412/h, +17, and so on) so you can tell at a glance where the colony's economy is heading, plus an in-game date instead of a bare sector number.

A banner reserved for events, the advisor split out. Before, shortage alerts and advisor tips landed in the same red zone. Now, the top banner is reserved for actual events (a solar storm, a detected signal), and the advisor has its own panel, no more mixing up "this is happening right now" with "here's what I suggest."

What this changes for players

Nothing to relearn: same buildings, same costs, same slots. What changes is how long it takes to read the state of your colony when you open the screen and, simply, how much you enjoy looking at it.

What's next

v0.61.0, shipped right after, applies the same logic to the Buildings catalog: the same colony render in the background, the same radial spotlight, the same collapsible panels, this time applied to the screen where you choose what to build.

If you're testing v0.61.0, we want to hear from you: join the Discord to talk directly with the team, or sign up for the newsletter to catch every update. There's no Steam page yet; the wishlist link will follow once it exists.

The first diagnosis, which was wrong

My first thought was: it is too dense. Eight branches, eight technologies each, that is a wall. So I tried to declutter. I shrank the cards, added whitespace, moved the descriptions into a tooltip.

It changed nothing. It was prettier and still impossible to decide from.

The real problem

What was missing was not space, it was consequence. A card said "Advanced photovoltaics, cost 400 Data, 12 minutes". Nowhere did it say what that would do to my colony, right now, with my colony.

The difference between the two phrasings:

Advanced photovoltaics, +6% solar panel yield

Advanced photovoltaics, +18 power across your four solar fields, which is enough to run the Plate Press you are missing

The second one requires the engine to know the actual state of the save at the moment of display. That is more work: every technology effect has to be a function evaluable against the current state, not a line of hand-written text. I had to rewrite the effects table for it.

What the rebuild produced

• A sticky queue panel on the left, always visible, answering "what is running right now" without scrolling.
• Eight genuinely colour-coded branches, with the colour reused everywhere else in the game. Colour is not decoration here, it is identity.
• A vertical tree rather than a horizontal one, because a screen is taller than it is wide once the HUD is accounted for.
• The tier X doctrine behind a double confirmation, because three people picked it by accident during testing. A permanent choice deserves to be asked twice.

What I take from it

When a screen is unreadable, the temptation is to simplify it. Nine times out of ten in this project, the real problem was not the amount of information: the piece that lets you decide was missing. Removing is not enough. Often you have to add the right thing, and that costs more.

The screen today shows more text than before. It is far simpler to use.

It sounds minor. It is not. It is the constraint that shaped the engine more than any other, long before the art or the balance.

The problem with most management games

In a classic online management game the loop is simple: you start a production run, it takes eight hours, and you have to come back to collect it. Come back too late and the warehouse is full and the rest is lost. If a player passes by during the night, your resources leave with them.

That is not difficulty. It is a tax on your availability. A player who can log in six times a day beats a player who plays better but has a job. And above all: none of it is interesting. Nobody has ever told a friend about the thrilling decision they made at three in the morning to save a fleet.

What Astra Genesis does instead

The engine does not simulate time continuously. It stores a timestamp, and when you come back it works out what should have happened in between. That is what the catch-up function does:

// The server replays the hours you were away, boundary by boundary:
// each construction finishing, each research completing and each
// expedition returning is handled in order, with the production
// rates as they stood at that exact moment.
catchUp(state, elapsedSeconds);

The detail that matters is in that last sentence. A naive catch-up multiplies the current rate by the elapsed time, which is wrong the moment an event changes the rates halfway through. If your factory finishes two hours after you log off, the following six hours have to use the new throughput, not the old one. So the catch-up cuts the absence at event boundaries and recalculates rates at each one.

It takes longer to write. It is also the only honest version.

What else does not happen

• Warehouses do not overflow in the punishing sense. A saturated chain stops and waits; it destroys nothing.
• No event fires while you are away to take something from you. Incursions arrive with a warning you can see before you close the game.
• There is no button to speed things up for real money, because there is nothing to speed up: time passes the same whether you are there or not.

What this choice actually costs

To be honest about it: this rule makes balancing harder. With no time pressure, the only tension left is the trade-offs. Every tier has to pose a real factory question, or nothing is left at all. It is a game where I cannot hide behind a countdown and pretend something is happening.

Good. That was the idea.