published on November 03, 2025 in devlog

Development Log Summary October 2025

October was a busy and exciting month for Prosperous Universe! Between a new release, a few tricky bugs, and some long-overdue maintenance tasks, the team made good progress on both the technical and game design fronts.

The month kicked off with a short but productive in-person meeting at simulogics HQ. With a public holiday making for a short week, the team focused on marketing and organizational topics. In parallel, Michi took on a side quest to clean up and modernize parts of the client's build system. This meant diving into some old dependencies, including a decade-old orbital mechanics library used for ship trajectories. After a bit of digital archaeology, he ended up forking the project, modernizing its build process, and even publishing it as a new npm package. A fresh start for some of the oldest parts of the codebase.

Meanwhile, preparations ramped up for one of the year's most significant updates: the Colonization release. This update introduced colony ships, a major step toward expanding the universe, and player options. Michi spent a lot of time testing migrations, running automated checks, preparing the world data, and coordinating communications, including release notes, newsletters, Steam announcements, and translation updates. A stubborn bug in the faction contract system also got squashed just in time for release.

map showing the new sectors

When release day arrived, it came with its fair share of drama. During final testing, Michi discovered a navigation bug preventing colony ships from reaching certain detached sectors — a result of a subtle migration issue. Thankfully, the fix came quickly, and the release went ahead as planned. But the excitement wasn't over yet: a database hiccup during the deployment caused a bit of extra stress while the servers were offline. After some quick troubleshooting and switching providers, everything came back online smoothly. On the bright side, the new inventory system, rebuilt months earlier, went live without anyone noticing — always a good sign!

Following the release, the inevitable wave of bug reports came in, but thankfully, nothing too dramatic. Michi spent the following week patching graphical glitches on the universe map caused by recent rendering changes in three.js. Some colors and filters needed adjusting, and there were a few precision-related gremlins in inventory transfers that required careful fixing. Floating point math made another appearance, but the issues seem to be resolved for good this time.

Colonization release artwork

With the Colonization update now stable, focus shifted back to the upcoming Gateways feature. Michi's main goal is to get a test version ready for player feedback soon. This new feature will continue to expand the possibilities for interstellar logistics and cooperation.

On the community and business side, Martin shared some bittersweet news: after nearly ten years, simulogics is phasing out physical perks from supporter packs by the end of 2025. Between the logistics effort and the low demand for items like shirts and art prints, it made sense to focus on digital content instead. Players who still want to grab a pack of physical goodies can do so before December 31st.