Patch Notes — 1.4.1

A wording-and-polish patch on top of 1.4.0: the over-cap abandon flow is clearer and far more forgiving, PvP attack fleets now dock with a retaliation window, and yards carry more tonnage.

Planet slots follow Astrophysics in the Research tree. Hangar rules are in Resource Protection and capacity rules in Tonnage. Or open Settings → Quick Guides in-game.

New Features

PvP Retaliation Window

Fleets returning from an attack on another player dock outside hangar protection for a short window, so a raid can be answered before the hull disappears into the hangar.
Window length scales with the surviving hull tonnage that comes home: 2 hours minimum, up to 24 hours at realm-max fleet tonnage.
Flagged ships are visible to scouts and can be attacked, and they do not consume hangar capacity. Sending a new fleet spends flagged ships first, so relaunching clears the window early.
The window is shown in the Fleet Hangar panel (with per-ship counts and clearance timers), on the fleet return mail, and in scout reports of your colony.
Attacks on pirate strongholds and Riftwake targets do not open a window. Attacks on alliance system centers do.

Hyper Dense asteroids

A rare jackpot density above Ultra Dense joins the asteroid spawn table, with a far larger ore pool and its own map marker.

Improvements

Over-cap abandon flow

While you are over your Astrophysics planet cap, any non-homeworld planet can be abandoned with full compensation. You no longer have to wait for a colony to become access-restricted on Day 7, and you are not limited to the specific colonies the system flagged as excess — pick whichever planet you want to give up. Compensation stops once you are back within the cap.
Defense investment is now refunded 100% as resources, alongside the existing building refund, warehouse resources, hangar ships, and Building Nano Boost items.
Abandoning a planet also grants 1 Colony Relocate boost (moons do not).
Colony Settings explains the state you are actually in: an over-cap banner for eligible colonies, the restricted banner only for locked ones, and a preview that lists the defense refund and relocate boost before you confirm. The refund mail lists the same lines.
Moons of flagged excess planets remain independently abandonable to the homeworld — order still does not matter.

Asteroid harvesting

The harvest limit is now one fleet per asteroid
Harvest cycles floor at 3 minutes for most classes (1 minute for Industrialist and Guardian), and research tick reduction caps at 30%.
Only the first 2 million Orbital Refineries contribute mining speed (extras still add cargo). One-click harvest sizes fleets against that cap.

Quality of life

Auto warp hop — one-click Harvest and Survey can take the nearest warp gate hop automatically, using the same rules as the fleet send screen. Toggle it under Settings → System missions (QoL required).
Astrophysics next planet slot progress now shows for every commander from level 1, without waiting on the cap rollout flag.
Riftwake Mandate fatigue wording is explicit: the penalty applies to Riftwake battle stats only (Siphon Spines / Wakeheart), not to regular combat.
The Rapid Fire combat announcement now names the exact rollout window: Sunday 6 September, 05:00–06:00 UTC.

Balance

Astrophysics planet slots round up — the limit is now 1 + ceil(level ÷ 3) instead of rounding down, matching the legacy rounding. Astrophysics 1–3 grants a second planet, 4–6 a third, and so on.
Yard tonnage capacity raised — Shipyard base capacity 45M → 65M and Defense Yard 30M → 45M per level scale, lifting empire tonnage capacity for the same yard levels to keep it overall tonnage at same level after planets cap applied.
Excess planets no longer add tonnage capacity — yards on over-cap colonies are skipped when your capacity is computed, while ships and defenses stationed there still count as used tonnage.
Ahead of the Sunday combat update, late-game defenses are tuned down: Prism Tower attack 40k → 12k, shield 20k → 10k, hull 25k → 20k, and rapid fire vs Battlecruiser / Titan / Carrier cut to ×3 / ×2 / ×3. Planetary Dome shield 40k → 25k, hull 150k → 100k. After hull change, it was unnecessarily OP and with this we now have 1:5 tonnage defense:attack power rate back.
The rapid-fire ceiling used in combat resolution rises from 10 to 20, so mid-tier anti-swarm rapid fire is no longer clipped.

Bug Fixes

Warp gate fleet hops refresh both the source and destination colony, so switching to the destination no longer shows a default planet with no building slots.
Fixed a service initialization issue in the building / yard pipeline that could break build queues.
Pirate and Riftwake system players are excluded from planet cap checks, excess snapshots, and colony abandon.
Planet cap rollout clears cached tonnage totals for affected players, so capacity updates immediately when excess colonies drop out.