v0.1.29c (Early Access)

Three networking fixes. A switch port no longer claims a live link into a machine with no power, a cable between two switches at the same level in your fabric stops reading zero, and attack traffic now splits between your routers by how much each one actually carries instead of evenly. Racks can also be navigated with a controller, which on a Steam Deck they could not be at all.

Fixed

Controls

• Moving around inside a rack works on a controller now. Stepping to the rack left or right of you, and panning up and down the one you are in, both only ever answered a keyboard. On a Steam Deck the stick did nothing at all once you were in a rack. Both now take the stick and the d-pad as well as the keys.
• Panning up and down a rack had never worked on any controller, on any platform, not only the Deck. It read the keyboard directly instead of going through your control bindings, so even a plugged-in gamepad with everything bound correctly could not move it.
• Holding the stick walks along the aisle instead of stepping once and stopping, and a stick that rests slightly off centre no longer creeps sideways through your racks on its own.

Cabling

• The cable tidy-up from v0.1.29b is more careful about what it touches. That release straightened direct runs a bug had sent down the rack's cable manager, including ones already saved in your world, and that worked. Telling those apart from a run the game had legitimately rerouted for you relies on a piece of supporting evidence, and there is a narrow case where that evidence is not available. It used to guess in favour of straightening; it now leaves the cable alone unless it is certain. The practical effect is that a few direct patches may keep their detour rather than being tidied up, which is the safer way round.

Networking

• A switch port no longer shows a live link into a machine with no power. Pull a machine's power and its own network port went dark correctly, but the switch port at the other end of the cable stayed lit, as though the link were fine. Real hardware loses the link at both ends. This also means the link-drop counter can finally record the one thing it was written for, a partner going away, which it could never do before.
• A cable between two switches at the same level in your fabric now carries traffic. If you cabled two switches together that both sit under the same switch above them, that cable read zero forever, on both ends, even though it was plugged in, powered and working. Traffic between machines on those two switches now crosses it and both ports report it.
• Machines with no network path between them stopped inventing traffic. In a datacentre split into parts with no route between them, the game credited machines in one part with traffic to machines in the other. It could not actually go anywhere, but it loaded the switches at both ends and could set off a fabric overload alert on a fabric that was doing nothing.

Attacks

• Attack traffic now splits between your routers by how much each one actually carries. Two routers fronting the same carrier device were handed an equal share of an incoming attack, no matter how much of it each one really terminated. A router carrying three quarters of the connection took the same battering as one carrying a quarter, so the small one drowned while the big one coasted. The split now follows what each router is genuinely exposed to.
• A router fronting no live line takes no attack, and the surviving router feels it. This part was already right and is unchanged; it is called out because the numbers move with the fix above. When a carrier line goes dark nothing arrives on it to filter, so the other router picks up the whole attack, absorbs what its firewall is rated for and lets the rest through. If your edge only just coped before, losing a line is when it will not.

Notes

Save compatible in both directions. A save from v0.1.29b opens here and a save from here opens on v0.1.29b, and nothing in this update changes what is stored in your world.

Attack outcomes will differ from v0.1.29b on any site where two routers front the same carrier device. Nothing else about attacks changed, no numbers were retuned, and the total attack a site receives is the same as before. Only the share each router carries is different, and it is now proportional rather than even.

Your network figures should not move otherwise. Traffic between your own machines still accounts for a bit over a third of what your datacentre carries, the same as v0.1.29b.

Multiplayer sessions need every player on the same version, as with v0.1.29b.