Published: 3/16/2026
I realised I have not sent many updates so it’s time to do a quick round up of the project status and talk about one of the changes I introduced last year, player ranks.
Project status
Pace of development has been much slower for most of 2025 as my focused was on other games and projects. But work for player-owned companies is progressing well, hoping this will add a new layer of progression to Nebula FS. Will share more in this as soon as it gets ready for testing.
Player ranks
A change introduced last year was to move away from accumulating hours for a company and towards a system of player ranks. You can think about them as RPG levels.
Why the change?
My original plan was to allow players to unlock more complex and rewarding assignments as players worked for a particular company. For example, you flown 100 hours with company ABC, that means you have unlocked the ability to fly assignments you had to access to before. This would force players to stay loyal to a company, and could even present the opportunity to show rankings, allowing players to have some bragging rights on who’s on the top 10 for that company.
The downside was that it limits what a player has access to. Like in real life, an experienced pilot should be able to transfer that knowledge to a new company, instead of always having to start from the bottom. This may be a common pattern in games (think of a faction standing that you need to grind towards), but in this scenario I felt an experienced pilot should be able to be hired by other company to do the same quality of job, the same way that in real life having a certification to fly a particular type of plane should allow you to fly that plane for a different company.
Why ranks then?
We could simply track hours, and lock access to certain assignments behind gates (100 hours, 1000 hours, etc.), but I feel that encourages senseless grind. For example, it may feel better to make assignments with a slower plane in order to record more flight hours. That feels wrong. Now higher ranks are achieved by flying more, but it’s not only the time flown, there’s an amount of experience gained on each landing, which means doing a lot of short flights will give you more experience than a single long one. Now this may incentivise the opposite, fast flights with no preparation, but everything is a trade off.
This is not set in stone, we are still logging all your landings and flying hours, so it could be possible to re-calculate everything if needed.
What will ranks be used for?
Same as company hours, higher ranks will unlock access to certain types of assignments, whether that’s a general or company one.