Our systems will be offline for a few hours from late Wednesday night (21st June) UTC to Thursday morning.

Players will be unable to connect during this time.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Our game servers have had some issues contacting people with gmail email addresses. This is now resolved - you should no longer have any problems with email.

We apologise for the inconvenience.

We're working on a new client update which will include:

• A new engine version, the latest stable available to us meaning performance, visual and stability enhancements
  
• The new "Procedural City" system for displaying colonies.

The Procedural City renders each of your buildings uniquely, so that, for example, no two residential buildings or two office buildings look identical anymore. As you can see from the screenshots, this is well underway and already looking like a huge improvement for colonies.

As part of the update, "transport grid" tiles will be expanded into a combined road and rail tile, with upgradeable utilities (power/water/sewage) in the future.

How will your colony look after the update?

Due to power infrastructure maintenance, Ascent servers may be offline for periods between 02:30-03:30 10-March-2023 UTC.

Your NPCs can now develop an exploit for an operating system. This is a difficult task requiring InfoSec theoretical and practical knowledge. The task gets harder for higher level operating systems, however it's easier for operating systems you have a copy of, and even easier if you have the source.

Exploits will later be used for hacking. Developing exploits against your own operating systems will make upgrading your OSes to higher levels easier - making them harder to hack for other players.

New NPC Missions have been added:

• InfoSys education job at universities (used to install software etc)
  
• Install Operating System job

In addition, NPC Missions can now be unique (i.e. can only be run once or one at a time).

Some minor bugs have also been fixed.

There is a new NPC mission type: Develop New Operating System

You can (so far) only have one OS per player account, but with upgrades will come many versions.

Exploits and upgrades are next!

In the first of a number of updates, there are new NPC missions available for training:

1. Software Development
   
2. Information Security

These skills will be used in offensive and defensive Information Security missions within Signals Intelligence. Intel missions build (or defend against) Intelligence Networks which are used in other missions.

Up until now only HumInt missions were available. SigInt will comprise all aspects of Intelligence from intercepting EM (radio) signals through Information Security and hacking.

Update: This situation has been resolved. We have restored the service without needing any rollbacks and everything is operational again. Once again we apologise for the unexpected unavailability period.

Our game servers are temporarily inaccessible right now. This outage is unplanned, but we hope to restore service soon. We expect resolution today so don't panic.

Update #1: ETA to resolution is about 12 hours from now. (It's 10:34 UTC now)

The problem is a faulty storage controller, and those are always lots of fun. The good news is we're able to recover the live data, which means no rollbacks, the bad news is that this is a slower process than reverting to yesterday's backups. So nobody loses anything except playing time, but we're going to be offline a bit longer than expected.

Apologies for the inconvenience!