Beyond the Map Edge: Living Factions, Ground Radio and Trader Journeys
OCTOBER 12-26, 2026 / DEVELOPMENT UPDATE
The world outside the colony has gained a longer memory and more activity. Living Factions tracks distant settlements, ground radio introduces discovery through contact, and visiting-trader journeys show where eligible trading groups are coming from and where surviving members return. These systems interact, but their settings and limits remain distinct.
Settlements with changing fortunes
Living Factions records population, food, materials, treasury, defenders, fortifications, stability, ruling houses and recent outcomes. Friendly and neutral settlements can fund food expeditions. Hostile factions can launch skirmishes, raids and invasions. Shortages, losses, outposts, abandonment, conquest and succession can change the political picture over time.
Technology advances through prosperity and paid investment. Royalty factions with climate devices can create temporary, attackable climate sites against hostile NPC settlements away from player homes. Existing saves receive a starting baseline; the system does not invent past battles, pregnancies or named people to fill its history.
A confirmed ruler death starts succession review. An available adult relative may inherit, another house may be appointed, or a pressured settlement may surrender. Accepting a player-directed offer creates an allied, self-governing NPC protectorate. A missing relative is not automatically treated as dead. The Faction chronicle preserves named-person histories alongside the broader settlement simulation.
Discover a faction before following its story
Hide undiscovered factions defaults ON. Contact can come through a visit to the colony, including a raid, nearby exploration, a settlement visit, trade or radio. A faction's simulation continues while it is unknown; hiding it does not stop its production or incoming incidents.
Turning the visibility option OFF shows all faction settlements and activity without permanently marking every faction discovered. Turning it ON restores the saved discovery view. This is a display choice. It does not grant research or activate features disabled by their own settings.
Build a ground radio
Radio costs 600 research after Microelectronics and appears on the Tool Progression research tab. The building costs 65 steel and three industrial components, requires Construction 4 and draws 100 W. Select a colonist and right-click the powered radio to scan channels.
A scan takes one game hour and can reveal one unknown faction that has radio technology. Completed scans have a 2.4-hour cooldown, including a scan that finds no new signal. Industrial and higher NPC factions begin with radio knowledge; developing factions can gain it on reaching industrial technology. A tribe without that technology is not a radio contact.
The radio contacts ground factions only. Orbital trading remains a normal comms-console service. Ground calls require Radio research and an eligible known faction. Remote request quests and ransom demands are gated until the research is complete, while physical arrivals, local discoveries and accepted quests retain their specified behavior. Unrelated mods with custom quest-generation paths may require compatibility work.
Watch a trader's itinerary
Eligible random trader incidents can schedule travel from a reachable home settlement to the colony, with route-based travel of 0.25-3 game days. Requested caravans already queued keep their original arrival time. A world marker shows origin, stage and estimated arrival; it disappears while the actual trading pawns visit the map.
Departure tracking builds a return marker from members who actually left. It does not fabricate survivors from a killed or captured group. These are itinerary markers, not interceptable player caravans, and they do not create extra goods or silver. The separate journey setting defaults ON.
Current repairs and test limits
The .135 fix corrects the ground-radio definition name and supports older saved radio references. The .145 correction restricts ground expedition and trader routes to valid surface tiles, addressing orbital settlements reaching the ground pathfinder. Native and focused checks support these changes. A live sequence of discovery, scanning, trader arrival, departure and save/reload remains necessary to verify the whole experience.