Build 29 changed how you earn commander levels, and a few of you have asked what happened. Short version: nothing was taken away from you, and your level did not go down. But the way you earn levels is genuinely different now, and it is worth explaining properly.
What it used to be
Every ship you built gave you experience based on what it cost. That sounds reasonable, until you look at the numbers: across all 910 hulls in the game, the exchange rate was identical. Every single ship, from the cheapest cutter to the biggest dreadnought, gave exactly one experience point for every four minerals it cost.
That had two consequences we did not like.
Your level was really just a record of how much you had spent. Not what you had built, not what you had explored, not what you had survived — just minerals, converted at a fixed rate. And minerals come from mines. So your commander level was, in effect, measuring how many mining tiles you had zoned.
The fastest way to level up was the most boring thing in the game. Because every hull paid the same rate, there was no reason to build anything interesting. Building the same cheap fighter over and over, forever, was mathematically the best route. Anyone who figured that out would have left everyone else behind, and they would have had a miserable time doing it.
We checked this against the live game before changing anything. A mid-sized base was already producing enough to reach the old maximum level in a few months of pure ship-spam, and the biggest base in the alpha could have done it in under three weeks. That is not the pace we want for a game meant to last.
What it is now
You earn experience the first time you build each ship design. Build something you have never built before and you advance. Build your seventieth identical fighter and you do not. The ships still get built, they still fight, they still cost the same — they just are not a lever for levelling any more.
Modules and research now give experience too, the first time you reach each kind and tier. Previously they gave nothing at all, which was strange given how much of the game they are.
Resources still matter enormously. You need them for ships, modules, buildings, upgrades and repairs. What they are no longer is a shortcut. Minerals buy you things; they do not buy you rank.
The short way to say it: your level now follows what you have done, not how much you have spent.
Why your level seems to have stopped around 36
This is the part causing the most confusion, and it is expected behaviour rather than a bug.
The commander ladder runs to level 50. Roughly the first two thirds of it comes from the content you work through — the ships, modules, research and buildings available to your faction. The upper third is earned in combat.
Combat experience is not in the game yet. It arrives with fleet battles in the next update. So until then, the practical ceiling sits somewhere around level 35 or 36, depending on how much of your base you have built out.
Nothing you do now is wasted. Every ship design, module and research node you unlock still counts and still pays out. When battles arrive, the rest of the ladder opens up on top of what you already have. You are not stuck — you are early.
The rest of the rebalance
While we were in there, a few other things changed that are worth knowing.
Shipyards. There is a new building for your base, with its own design for all thirteen factions. It is the thing that controls how many ships your bay holds, how many fleets you can field, and how many ships you can build or research at once. Across its five marks it takes your bay from 5 ships up to 35. Before this build that limit never moved, which is why so many of you hit a wall at five ships and could not get past it.
Much bigger storage. Warehouses and vaults hold about four times what they did. A stockpile is now something worth building up — and worth defending, which will matter more than it does today.
Every level ladder rebuilt. Commander, base and fleet levels all run to 50 now. Fleet ranks in particular were completely stuck: every fleet in the game sat at rank 1 and never moved, no matter what you put in it. That is fixed, and there are five different insignia across the fifty ranks.
If something looks wrong
Your commander, base, ships and fleets were not touched, and nothing has been wiped. If your level, your experience bar, or anything that unlocks at a level looks wrong — and especially if anything went backwards — please tell us. Every threshold in the game changed in this build, so that is exactly the kind of mistake worth hunting down.
The current playtest round has a task for it, or drop a note in the tester channels. Thank you for the reports so far, and for asking the question that prompted this post.