Missions on Big Bang Smugglers

Missions, Goals & Streaks

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Three separate systems, and it’s worth keeping them apart:

Events are dated missions — daily, season-long, or ad-hoc GM drops.
Goals are permanent Bronze/Silver/Gold ladders that run all season.
Epic goals are one-sided dedication ladders that pay out in ships.

Events

There is no accept step and no limit. You are enrolled lazily and your progress accrues from your ordinary play — including while you have never opened the Events screen. The 1.x “one mission at a time” rule is gone.

v2.2.1 — Bug Sweep

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 18:00:00 +0000

A bug sweep from captain field reports.

Combat & missions

Defeating an NPC that ambushed you — mid-move or mid-warp — now counts toward mission objectives and goal ladders (Scourge of Pirates, Terror of the Lanes). Previously only fights you initiated counted, even though the kill showed in your stats.
Made of Money now progresses: bank deposits were never counted toward the goal, for anyone.

Ship & inventory

Supply shop purchases (Sentry Drones, mines, turrets, buoys, cloak fields) appear on the Ship screen’s Ordnance card immediately.
Recalling your own nav beacon returns it to inventory, as the confirmation promised. Destroying someone else’s still grants nothing.

The Nav tab lists every ship in your sector, including offline captains (shown dimmed, still targetable) — it now agrees with sector scans and StarNav counts.

Stats & leaderboards

The Settings player stats card shows real season numbers — K/D, missions, goals, bounties, trades — instead of zeros.
Planets claimed, distance traveled, and streak milestones are now tracked, count toward lifetime career totals, and the planets season award is winnable for the first time.
Overall leaderboard scores are labeled with XP and credits.

Counting starts from this release — earlier kills and deposits show in your stats but predate the counters.

v2.0.4 — The Galaxy Comes Alive

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Day two of launch week, and the galaxy just got a lot louder.

The Feed Tells the Story

Until today, the galaxy feed only carried system notices — battles, land grabs, and arrivals were happening all around you, invisibly. No more:

Battle reports. Every PvP engagement now posts publicly — “X destroyed Y in sector N,” or drove them off, or watched them run. The ⚔️ combat lane from v1 is back.
Ship commissionings. When a captain commissions a tier-3+ hull, the galaxy hears about it.
Land and war. Planet claims, port captures, and ports shaking off their occupiers all post publicly now — several of these were being written with your name on them and delivered to no one.
New captains and season honors appear for everyone, and feed entries carry proper categories again.

Every Ship Is Now Its Own Ship

A sharp-eyed captain noticed two ship classes with identical stats. The audit found it ran deeper: the Federation line was a stat-for-stat clone of the neutral line. As of today:

v1.23.0 — Events, Roles, End-game, and New Player Onboarding

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

v1.23.0 is the biggest content release since the game launched. Daily events, role specialization, prestige tiers, a full season end-game, and new-player onboarding are all live. An extensive bug-fix and balance pass ships alongside them — over 80 issues closed.

Daily Events

A live events system now runs inside every galaxy. Daily events generate automatically from a rotating template slate and are visible from the Events board on your Ship screen.

v1.22.0 — Planet Parking, Active Defenses, and Mission Alerts

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

v1.22.0 makes your planets meaningfully harder to crack, adds a full in-app ship catalog, and pushes reminders before your missions expire.

This release also closes several mine-behavior bugs and tightens up combat rules that were leaving gaps in what sector defenses actually covered.

Planet Parking and Citadel Defense

Ships can now land on planets you own. While landed, the full citadel defense stack — shields, garrison fighters, deployed mines — applies before an attacker can reach your hull. Your planet has to fall before your ship does.

v1.5.2 — Player Profiles, Toasts & Contracts

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 19:00:00 +0000

v1.5.2 is a quality-of-life update with three notable improvements.

Player Profiles

Players now have public profile cards showing lifetime stats — kills, deaths, missions completed, trades, sectors explored, credits earned, and current streak. Tap a player name on the leaderboard to see their profile. Your own stats are visible in the Settings screen with additional detail only you can see.

Themed Notifications

The game’s system alerts have been replaced with a custom notification system that fits the space theme. Success messages appear in teal, errors in red, warnings in yellow, and event notifications in gold. Notifications stack at the top of the screen, animate in and out, and can be dismissed with a swipe. Confirmation dialogs are also styled to match the game rather than using the plain system modal.

v1.5.0 — Missions, Goals, Streaks & Faction Bounties

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000

v1.5.0 is the biggest feature update yet, adding four interconnected systems that give you more reasons to play every day and reward consistent engagement.

Mission Board Overhaul

Missions now come in three flavors. Standard missions are the contracts you already know — trade runs, combat bounties, and exploration tasks. Daily missions are a single shared mission available to all players each day; claim it once and complete it for a bonus reward on top of the normal payout. Event missions appear during special in-game events with a countdown timer showing how long they’re available.

Starport Services Launch

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Remember the Federation Starports redesign post? The one where most sections said “coming soon”?

Today we crossed them off.

12 GitHub issues closed. All six starport locations now fully operational. The redesign isn’t a concept anymore — it’s live.

What Shipped

TriStar Shipyard

Warp drive is now a real thing you can buy and install at the shipyard. The upgrade path works too — take your existing drive and push it to the next tier. Both the install and upgrade functions went through testing and shipped today.

Quality of Life Fixes

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Not every update is a major feature. Sometimes you just fix the things that quietly annoy players every session.

February 12th was one of those days — four fixes, all polish, all feel.

XP Display Was Lying

The warp drive purchase screen was showing “0/100 XP” for a player who had 1,227 XP. That’s a bad look. The field read was wrong — it was pulling from the wrong path in the player doc. Fixed. Now the XP requirement actually reflects your real progress.

Mission, Performance & Docs Audit

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000

February 6 was a long day. We split the work into three parallel audit tracks — missions, performance, and documentation. This is the first of three posts from that session.

Mission System: The Whole Thing Was Broken

We audited the mission system end-to-end and found that most mission types literally could not complete. Not “had edge cases.” Could not complete.

Here’s the breakdown:

Courier missions — dispatch/document system missing, first objective impossible
Survey missions — probe deployment system missing
Pirate heist — boarding mechanics missing
Sabotage missions — no way to plant explosives
Rescue missions — personnel rescue system doesn’t exist
Bounty/raid missions — target and convoy spawn system missing, nothing to hunt
Ship upgrade missions — upgrade categories (engines/weapons/sensors) don’t exist
Equipment missions — equipment parts inventory missing
Planet raid missions — planet raid mechanics not implemented
Corporate operation missions — no high-value mining targets exist
Escort missions — merchant rendezvous system missing, merchant can’t be found

That’s 11 issue tickets in one audit. A lot of mission templates were referencing systems that had never been built. We also found that 32 NPC-dependent mission templates had been removed at some point — those got flagged for restoration.