Progression on Big Bang Smugglers

Turns, Credits & Basics

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

The turn cycle

Turns are the whole pacing system. You get a fixed allowance, you spend it, and you wait.

Cap: 250 turns (season configuration).
Cycle: 4 hours (season configuration, valid range 1–24).
Boundaries: aligned to UTC — 00:00, 04:00, 08:00, 12:00, 16:00, 20:00.
Reset behavior: full reset to the cap, not an increment.
Carryover: none, ever. This is a design doctrine with no configuration knob behind it.

The reset is lazy: it lands the moment you next touch the game after a boundary passes, so you never lose turns by being offline. When you’re out, the game tells you how many minutes remain until the next reset.

Progression

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

The level curve

level = floor(sqrt(XP ÷ divisor)) + 1 capped at the season's max level
XP for level n = (n − 1)² × divisor

The ladder is pinned per season. The curve’s divisor and level cap are set when a season’s galaxy is created and never move mid-season. Seasons created before the ladder migration run a 50-level ladder; every newer season runs a 100-level ladder whose divisor is tuned to its length, so each unlock lands at the same fraction of the season whether it’s a 30-day sprint or a long grind. Same content spine, different pace.

v2.4.0 — Fixes From the Discord

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Every fix in this release started as a player report. Thanks to SauceLord Dulak and the plague for the clear write-ups.

Smuggling

Hidden compartments now protect your sales. Ships with hidden compartments used to hide cargo only from patrol scans; the risk of getting caught at a street sale was the same as any other hull. That risk is now cut by the compartment percentage. On The Phantom Manifest it drops 60%, so a Fed core sale goes from 22% to about 9%. The sell screen shows your real number.

Boosters

XP and Credit boosters now work. They only ever counted on mission rewards. XP boosters now apply to every source of experience. Credit boosters add 25% on top of your profit from trade and smuggling sales, and on loot, bounties, landmark caches, and mission, goal and streak rewards. They don’t apply to credits taken from other players.

Planets

Withdrawals use your real cargo capacity. Cargo compressors and hull cargo bonuses now count when pulling goods from planet storage, and the withdraw screen has a Max button.

Corporations

Accepting an invite actually joins you. Invites now work on every corporation, not just invite-only ones. Inviting a captain who has already asked to join approves them on the spot, and your membership shows immediately without signing out.
Declined requests say so. If a leader turns down your request, the corp list shows Declined instead of a permanent Pending, and Check Status no longer quietly files a new request.
Leaders now see new join requests as they arrive.

Interface

Long profiles can be closed again. Captain profiles opened from the leaderboard grew taller than the screen as honors piled up, and on web the Close button was unreachable. Every pop-up is now capped to the screen, scrolls inside, and keeps Close in view. Tapping outside or pressing back closes the ones that allow it.

Website

Live season standings. bigbangsmugglers.com now shows the current season’s status and standings, refreshed every four hours.

Under the hood

Cargo volume rules now come from the server in one place.
Housekeeping on the agent tooling in the repo.

v2.2.0 — The Premium Market Opens

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 18:00:00 +0000

The smuggling career gets its missing half, and a rare cosmic dead end gets repaired.

Smuggling — the premium market opens

Contraband can finally be sold the way the career was designed:

Hot Cargo — at any port outside a fence sector, sell contraband at street premium. The trade screen quotes the real price per unit and the region’s customs detection risk before you commit; get caught and the goods are seized plus a fine.
Fence it flat — Black Market ports now have sell cards with real quoted prices. Flat rate, no scan, no questions.
Fixed: contraband cargo volume was counted wrong outside the black market, so your holds could read “free” while buys said “full.” Hold math is now honest everywhere — ship screen, trading, loot, and planet transfers.

Combat

The battle result screen now shows the real numbers: both ships’ fighters, shields, and torpedoes, each side’s losses, and combat power — for PvP and NPC fights alike. No more rows of zeros.

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.

v1.10.0 — QoL and Bounty Follow-Up

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 07:30:00 -0400

v1.10.0 is a quality-of-life and progression update that builds on the recent corporation, bounty, and faction systems.

This release improves visibility, tracking, and pricing behavior across several major systems and closes out a few long-running follow-up items.

Tappable Corp Cards on Leaderboards

Corporation cards on the leaderboard are now interactive, making it easier to inspect corporation information from the leaderboard flow instead of treating it as static display data.

Player Platform Tracking and Version Gating

The game now tracks player platform details and supports stronger version-aware behavior.

v1.4.4 — Alignment, Level Progression, and Feed Pins

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:00:00 +0000

v1.4.4 fixes two progression display bugs and adds pinned feed announcements.

Alignment Was Always Showing as Neutral

Your faction standing in the Ship Stats screen was always displaying as True Neutral regardless of your actual alignment score. The reader was looking at the wrong field in the player record. It now reads correctly — if you’ve been doing good deeds or running contraband, your faction tier will reflect it.

Level Was Stuck at Recruit Level 1

XP was being awarded correctly by trading, exploring, combat, and missions — but your level was only recalculating when you completed a mission. Every other XP source left the level field untouched. Your level will now update immediately after any XP-granting action.

v1.4.0 — Combat Overhaul

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:00:00 +0000

v1.4.0 is a significant overhaul of the combat system and how you manage your ship’s weapons and defenses.

Attack vs Defense

Combat power is now split into separate attack and defense calculations.

Shields are pure defense. They have no effect on your attack power — only on how hard you are to damage or disable.

Fighters are pure attack. They deal damage but contribute nothing to your defense.

Torpedoes are pure attack with a heavier punch than fighters. One torpedo is worth roughly 2.5 fighters in attack power, but costs twice as much to purchase.

Bug Fix Sprint

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000

After the audit blitz on Feb 5-6, we had a clear list of what to fix first. February 8th was pure execution — 8 bugs closed, fast.

The Fixes

Credits in the wrong field (twice)

Two separate functions were reading bank.credits instead of the player’s wallet. The warp drive purchase showed 0 XP because it was reading playerData.xp instead of stats.xp. The repair function had the same pattern — reading a stale or wrong field. Both shipped same day.

Multiplayer Systems Audit

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

This is part 2 of the February 6th audit. While one track covered missions and performance, we ran a parallel deep dive into everything multiplayer: PvP, leaderboards, NPCs, and social systems.

The headline: a lot of it was scaffolding.

PvP: Disabled and Orphaned

The PvP combat system had been disabled — the Cloud Functions removed — but the UI was still there. Players could see combat controls. Nothing behind them worked. Combat notifications? Missing. Attacked players weren’t notified. The player detection system existed but its only consumer was the disabled combat code.