Orbit, round 1: jobs now have a place. There have been three jobs per zone since 0.27.0 — but in flight they showed up as one unreadable line of text under the timeline, with no direction and no reward. Quest goals without direction are just statistics, not quests.
- Job panel under the timeline: the zone, its three jobs with progress bars, the current one highlighted, and beneath it the goal with its distance. You still don’t accept anything — everything counts — only one is highlighted so there’s a sense of direction. N (controller: Y) cycles to the next one.
- Target arrow: a large, labeled arrow at the screen edge pointing to the next place where the job continues — the zone’s hatchery, a station to deliver to, a field to break through, an astronaut, a signal. Once you’re close, it turns into a ring around the target. Once a zone is secured, the chain moves on: the next unsecured zone (inward or outward), then the keys, then the Gate. The jamming nebula affects it too — the panel then reads “OUT OF RANGE”.
- Every completed job pays out immediately: 30/45/60 ions and 10/15/20 ore per zone, with a banner and rings. Before, you only got a banner and nothing else until the whole zone was done.
- Zone briefing when you enter and at the start: name, hazard, the three jobs — shown for a few seconds beneath the ship. The ring name banner is dropped in exchange.
- The target pulses on the system map.
Fixed — and this is the bigger find: Orbit had no visible edge arrows at all. The effects buffer was cleared inside the effects step, which ran after the arrows to locations, guardians and wreck parts, the halos under pickups, and the key aura — so everything got wiped again every single frame. The clearing now happens at the start of the frame instead. That finally made the old “arrow to every location” rule visible, and with detection unlocked it produced a picket fence of field and nebula arrows — so the small arrows now only show targets within 2,600 px: hatcheries, stations, signals — and the Gate, always.
Fixed: the timeline sat 20 px off-center, because a CSS rule meant for the HUD corner in the top left was also matching the timeline bar — both shared the same class name.