The Mobile Shipyard is the single most important thing you own. It builds your ships. It defines what your fleet can do. It's a capital ship that moves with you across the map, jumps between Gravity Wells, and if the enemy destroys it, you're in serious trouble.
It's also the closest thing this game has to a tech tree, except it's not a tree at all.
No tech tree
I tried a traditional tech tree early on. Research building, branches, unlocks. It felt disconnected from the rest of the game. You'd click a button, wait, and your ships would get better. There was no spatial cost, no physical risk, nothing to protect or position.
The Mobile Shipyard replaced all of that. Instead of a research building, you install modules directly onto the Shipyard itself. Each module takes up physical slots, costs Supply to install, and the bonuses apply to your fleet as long as the Shipyard is alive. Lose the Shipyard, and you lose the production capacity and the bonuses it was providing. Your progression is a ship on the battlefield, not a menu hidden behind a building.
The slot budget
The Shipyard has three tiers, and you upgrade between them during a match. Each tier gives you more module slots and unlocks heavier ship classes for production. At the starting tier you can build light ships. Upgrade and you get access to medium ships, then heavy ones at the top tier.
Here's where it gets interesting. There are way more modules available than you can fit. Even at the highest tier, you can only install about a third of what exists. That's not a bug, it's the whole point.
You have to specialize. Every match, you're making decisions about what kind of fleet you want to field and what you're willing to give up. Go all in on laser damage and your lasers hit hard, but your shields are stock and your ships aren't any faster. Stack engine modules and your fleet is fast enough to pick engagements on your terms, but you're hitting with baseline firepower. Invest in economy modules to build ships faster and earn more Supply, but that's slots not spent on combat upgrades.
Module chains
Most modules come in chains of three tiers. The first tier of a chain is cheap on slots and gives a small bonus. The second tier costs more slots, gives a bigger bonus, but requires the first tier already installed. The third tier is expensive but powerful, and needs the second.
You can stop at any point in a chain. Maybe you grab the first tier of laser calibration for a small damage bump, then spend the rest of your slots on shields and sensors. Or maybe you go deep into lasers, all three tiers, committing a big chunk of your slot budget to raw firepower.
The math works out so that going deep in one area means you're shallow everywhere else. A Shipyard maxed on weapon modules is producing a fleet that hits like a truck but melts under sustained fire. One built around shields and hull reinforcement fields a fleet that's hard to kill but takes forever to win a fight.
I don't know yet if every combination is viable. That's honest. Some module paths feel clearly stronger than others right now, and I keep reshuffling the numbers trying to get the balance right. The goal is that any focused build should have a counter, but I'm not there yet.
What the modules actually do
The categories break down roughly like this.
Weapon modules boost your fleet's damage output. Laser calibration for energy weapons, ion amplifiers for the anti-shield specialists. There are also range extenders and targeting uplinks for accuracy. Shield and hull modules make your ships tougher. Shield harmonics boost regeneration, hull reinforcement gives raw health, armor plating reduces incoming damage. Engine tuning makes everything faster. Sensor modules extend detection range, which matters a lot once Fog of War is in the game.
Then there are the less obvious ones. Command Center modules raise your fleet cap, letting you field more ships. The Reactor Core chain boosts every ship's energy pool and regeneration, which means more ability activations in a fight. The Production Optimizer cuts build times. The Supply Amplifier boosts your income.
And one of my favorites: the Emergency Repair Grid, an aura module that slowly heals ships near the Shipyard. It turns the Shipyard into a forward repair station if you're brave enough to bring it close to the fighting.
Multiple Shipyards
Late in a match, you can build a second Mobile Shipyard from a Capital Shipyard structure. This is a big deal. Two Shipyards means double the fleet cap, since Command Points stack between them. Double the production capacity. You can specialize each one differently: one built for combat bonuses, the other for economy and production.
The catch is that your Shipyards are your lifeline. Lose all of them and you lose the game. So that second Shipyard isn't free power. It's another thing you need to protect, another thing the enemy can hunt. I've had test games where building a second Shipyard won the match by flooding the map with ships, and others where it lost the match because I couldn't defend both.
The gamble of moving it
The Shipyard can jump between Gravity Wells. It's slow to charge up the Jump Drive, slower than regular ships, and it's vulnerable during the process. Moving your Shipyard is always a gamble. You do it to reposition your production closer to the front, or to retreat from a Gravity Well you're about to lose. But if the enemy catches you mid-jump or right after arrival, with your weapons still offline from stabilization, that can be the game.
I keep going back and forth on whether the jump charge time feels right. Too fast and there's no risk. Too slow and nobody moves the thing, which defeats the purpose of making it mobile in the first place. Still tuning.
What comes next
This wraps up the first batch of devlogs. The six posts so far cover the features that are built and working: small fleets, hardpoint targeting, tactical pause, energy management, ship abilities, and the Mobile Shipyard. Starting next time, I'll be talking about features that are in active development. First up: Gravity Wells and the move to a unified map, which was one of the biggest design pivots of the project.