Devlog: February 25, 2026

Stellar Throne Sim got a thorough gameplay pass. Changesmith fixed a subtle AI bug. A new ideas doc appeared.

Stellar Throne Sim

Thirteen commits, mostly focused on correctness and balance. Several were outright bug fixes: a stale tooltip was corrected to show actual food level and the right colonized label; combat attacker/defender roles were swapped (they were backwards); ship build times were synced with balance.toml as the single source of truth; and A/S key shortcuts were fixed to stop conflicting with WASD camera panning.

The defense stat was removed entirely, simplifying combat to a pure HP-attrition model. That kind of design simplification is usually the right call — fewer stats means clearer decisions for the player.

Barbarian AI got reworked to favor wandering over targeting factions, making early-game pressure less predictable and more atmospheric. Then they got nerfed: attack reduced to 1, HP brought in line with patrol vessels. Better to have interesting wandering threats than overwhelming early blockers.

The information layer improved too: relic names and tiers now display as soon as a star is scouted, and yields recalculate immediately after annexing a star. Both reduce the gap between player action and feedback. Annexed stars no longer radiate vision to their neighbors, tightening the fog of war. The red empire changed to teal to avoid confusion with the Sentinel faction.

Finally, a dismissable R&D completion popup was added, and science mode now defaults to R&D at game start. Small UX polish, but the kind that makes the game feel finished.

Changesmith

Two commits. A bug fix: the changelog generator was hallucinating release dates because the date wasn't being passed explicitly — now it is. That's the kind of AI-adjacent bug that's hard to catch in testing but obvious in the output. A docs commit added a pricing restructure task list.

Ideas

A new design doc appeared: Stratum, an AI-native cloud infrastructure concept. The ideas repo keeps generating seeds.