Why the research queue arrived
A player in the alpha wrote us one sentence last week that hurt because it was true: he was still fairly early on, and all he was really doing was waiting for buildings and research. It was spoiling the fun.
We could have replied that waiting is part of the genre. Instead, we measured.
What the measurement showed
The first hour is fine. Sixteen actions, the lab after a good half hour, the shipyard and the first ship after about four hours. The wall comes after that.
From collector level 8 onwards the bottleneck is no longer the stockpile but build time — two thirds of the time you were waiting for the clock, not for resources. A committed player on day two was looking at upgrades of one and a half to nine hours, with two build slots that together carry barely more than an hour and a half.
Research was worse, and not because of the numbers: all first-era technologies at level 1 take under an hour combined. But there was one research slot per world and no way to queue anything. If you did not check every twenty minutes, your lab sat empty.
And the tutorial itself sent players off to wait: the step "save up 2,500 Iridyne" — about thirty hours by our own reckoning — stood before every active step. The two levers against waiting that the game already had were never mentioned once.
Three changes
The research queue. Every world now has two research entries for free. They run one after another, not at the same time — nobody researches faster because of it. But if you go to sleep, you no longer leave an empty lab behind. Further entries are in the shop, like the Second Shift for build slots: they replace presence, not strength.
The tutorial. The saving step now runs alongside lab, shipyard and the first rift instead of before them. A new step teaches research methodology — the technology that speeds up the lab and that nobody had mentioned so far. And steps that ask for a state ("build the lab to level 4") now recognise what is already there: if you already had lab 6, you previously had to build again before the task would tick.
Build times. The build-time ramp is 17 to 20 percent shorter on levels 8 to 16. From level 20 onwards nothing changes — the endgame stays as it was. Measured: level 8 to 9 takes 33 instead of 40 minutes, level 14 to 15 a little over seven instead of over nine hours.
What we deliberately left alone
The daily tasks — after the shipyard nine of fourteen are available, that is enough. The anomalies and the echo worlds, which are mid-game content. The third build slot, which remains a decision of the shop. And the growth of research costs: levels 1 to 5 take minutes to an hour, and that is intended.
If you want to find out whether the wall on day two is lower now: the alpha is taking applications, and we invite every day.