What's new in Calibrated.

Burn fixed

An urgent balance fix: burn no longer kills anything in seconds.

Deaths that land

Planet kills fall and stay down, and the loot lies beside them.

What's new

• Deaths that land. On the landing worlds a kill plays its death, and the body stays down for about half a minute.
• Loot by the body. Loot drops beside the body. Walk over it to pick it up; if you don't, it's paid to you anyway after a minute or when you leave.
• Walking off. When a job ends, the creatures and raiders still around leave on their own feet.

Five slots

A tighter ability bar, and every pilot can set up the combos.

What's new

• Five slots. The ability bar has five slots, on keys 2 to 6. Consumables stay on 0 and -.
• Burn and brittle for everyone. Killing Time, Survey Burn and Freight Burn now set an aimed target burning, and Read the Room makes nearby hostiles brittle, so every pilot can reach both the Wildfire and Shatter combos.

A straight run

A fix to running on the landing worlds.

Status combos

Statuses on hostiles react to what hits them next.

What's new

• Shatter. A nova or blast on a brittle hostile hits 60% harder (30% on a boss) and uses up the brittle.
• Pinned. Missiles on a snared hostile hit 35% harder (20% on a boss).
• Wildfire. A hostile that dies burning throws its fire onto the three nearest hostiles within 450 m.
• Combos together. Combos work across your own abilities and between pilots. When your hit sets off another pilot's status, you both see it, with a line naming them. Each combo has its own tell and word, and explains itself the first time.

Combat

Dodge, flank and break your way through fights, and every elite fights in its own way.

What's new

• The evasive burn. Left Shift in flight is a 240 m sideways dash, with a 6 second recharge shown on a dial by the skills row. It dodges telegraphed blows such as rams, locked artillery and shells, and those blows now hit 30% harder if you don't.
• The break. Damage an enemy enough while it winds up (12% of its hull and shield during the cast) and its blow is broken. It reels for 3 seconds (1.5 on a boss) and takes 30% more damage. Cast bars are bigger and easy to read from the chase camera.
• A target frame that tells you. A much larger enemy portrait, and a threat line from Harmless to Deadly that says how fast it hits you, how long you last and how long it lasts.
• Flanks. Your own shots into a hostile's rear arc do 35% more damage, 20% on a boss. The target shows its rear arc as a crescent, gold while you're inside it, and a flank hit throws a gold spray and says FLANK. Hostiles never flank you.
• Elite marks. Every elite carries one or two marks that change the fight. Mortars rain shells where you're heading and leave the ground burning. A tether drains you into its shield: burn or pull away to snap it, or dodge it as it lands. Warded elites take little damage while their escorts live, and reel when the ward falls. Volatile wrecks burst after a short fuse. Elites say ELITE on their nameplates, and their marks show on the target frame.

One continuous place

No more hard cuts on the way in.

What's new

• Screens that flow. Moving between screens crossfades from the last picture instead of cutting to black.
• The wait after boarding. While you board, the lift-off stays on screen, darkened, with a dial and where you are headed: "Docking at" your station or "Entering" your sector.
• Signing out. Signing out drops you out of warp at the login.

True dawn

The pilots screens stand at a real dawn.

What's new

• A real dawn. Each faction stands under its own dawn sky, with a small white-hot sun low over the hills, the home station hazed in the morning air, and dust drifting on the wind.
• Faction emblems. The faction cards carry their emblems.

The stage alive

Your pilot comes alive on the pilots and creation screens.

What's new

• A living stage. Pilots shift between idles and glance at you. They stand three-quarters on, and after you turn them they step back round on their own feet.
• Faction gestures. Picking a faction plays its gesture: a Concord salute, an Ascendancy fist to the chest, a Veil raised hand. An accepted name gets a nod.
• Walk-ons. Choosing another pilot walks the old one off and the new one on.
• Boarding. Boarding walks your pilot to their ship, which lifts off in a cloud of dust as the screen fades.

The front door

The game opens on its own screen, and pilots run with a steadier stride.

What's new

• An opening of its own. The game opens on its own screen, the home sector with the logo and its progress, and moves into the login with no blank screen.
• A livelier login. Sign-in panels slide in, buttons answer the pointer, and a wrong password shakes the card.

A sensor read

The scanner reads its target, and anyone can help a ship gone dark.

What's new

• A sensor read. Scanning draws a thin, steady beam to a point of light on the target's hull. Brackets close in on it while a line sweeps across.
• The lock. When a scan lands, it locks onto the target, instead of a flash of light round your own ship.
• Jump starts. A ship gone dark no longer needs a cell. Come alongside, slow right down and hold still for ten seconds to jump-start it; the card shows the jump filling. A cell still does it at once.

Struck and down

Pilots on foot take a hit and go down like people.

What's new

• Flinching. Shot on foot, a pilot flinches the way the round came: a shoulder twists back, or the chest doubles. The legs keep moving and the blaster stays on target.
• Going down. When your suit gives out, your pilot falls onto their back, and comes round in the shelter getting up off the floor.
• Downed surveyors. A downed surveyor falls and gets back up the same way.

Feet on the ground

Pilots stand on the ground they walk on.

What's new

• Planted feet. Pilots' feet meet the ground on hillsides, instead of floating above it or sinking into it.
• Turning on the spot. A pilot turning on the spot steps round instead of spinning in place.
• Other players. You see other players strafe, sprint, jump and land, where before they only walked and ran.

On your own feet

Pilots on foot move like people.

What's new

• Walk, jog and sprint. Pilots walk, jog and sprint on their own unarmed animations, and their feet no longer slide at a sprint.
• Jumps. A jump has a push-off, a pose in the air and a landing. Drop from a height and you land heavily.
• Aiming on the move. Aiming the wrist blaster, you step backward and sideways instead of sliding.
• Carrying. Carrying heavy salvage, your pilot holds the load out in front.

Planetfall polish

Landing worlds look right at night, and their scenery no longer fools you.

Mist and light

Mountains rise out of low mist, and sensor rings become light and gas in space.

What's new

• Low mist. On landing worlds a low mist lies over the plain and thins up the slopes, and the mountains rise out of it instead of fading into flat fog.
• Sensor fields. Scans, ability reach, enemy wind-ups, derelict pings and mine blasts are wavefronts that bend the light. Search areas, bounty hunts, hazard edges, mine arming, sieges, frontiers and a boss's pull reach are shells of haze with motes drifting in them. Your radar, map and hotbar rings are unchanged.

Planet air

Planets seen from space have real air.

What's new

• Air from space. Each world scatters light through its own air: a thin bright limb in the air's colour on the day side, a faint veil over the disc, and sunsets coloured by the air. The night side is dark, lit only by its limb and city lights.
• Bare moons. Airless worlds and moons are bare rock, with no air and no clouds.

Solid stone

Boulders on the landing worlds are solid.

Smaller cracks

A small fix to the storm visor.

Green stays green

Two fixes to the space look.

Dark nozzles

Engine nozzles show their own heat.

Engines and warp

Engines and warp look the way they would in vacuum.

What's new

• Engines in vacuum. Each nozzle has a small white-hot core, and the nozzle bells glow with real heat, from dull red to orange. They take seconds to heat up and keep glowing after you cut thrust. Plumes are faint and wide, and a heat shimmer trails the engines at cruise.
• Warp. In warp the stars bend toward your heading, bluer ahead and redder behind, and a single flash marks going in and coming out. The tunnel, streaks and ring are thinner.
• Arrivals and departures. Other ships warping in and out, and gate jumps, show as one flash and a thin streak.

The real sky

The sky in space looks like the real one.

What's new

• A real-looking sky. Stars and the Milky Way are drawn as the real sky has them: the right numbers at each brightness, coloured by temperature, with dark dust lanes along the galaxy. Every sector's sky is turned its own way.
• Nebulae. Nebulae have the colours of an astrophotograph, with dark dust lanes, and their clouds are made of fine wisps.
• A white-hot sun. The sun is a white-hot star you can hardly look at.

Sensor rings

What you need to read now shows on your HUD; space keeps only light and metal.

What's new

• Sensor rings. Hazard edges, a mine's arming, a boss's reach, scans, enemy wind-ups and area abilities show as thin sensor rings on your HUD instead of glowing shapes in space.

A death in vacuum

Ships die the way they would in vacuum.

What's new

• Deaths in vacuum. A ship's death is a flash and a fireball gone in half a second. Air vents out and freezes into glittering ice, and plates tumble away glowing where they tore.

Hard hits

A hit in vacuum looks like one.

What's new

• White-hot beams. Gun beams are thin white-hot lines, and plasma bolts are white-hot slugs.
• Molten spatter. Hits throw sparks of molten metal that cool from white to red.
• Scorched hulls. Hulls glow and scorch where shots get through.
• Bending shields. Shields show only as a ripple bending the light behind them, and flash their lattice as they fail.

Hard light

Space is graded and lit like a photograph.

What's new

• An eye that adjusts. The view in space dims when you face something blinding, and opens up again when you look away.
• A calmer look. Space is graded darker and calmer, with a harder light on ships and softer fill.
• A smaller sun. The sun is a small, fierce star instead of a large ball in the sky.

Storms that look real

Planet storms look real.

What's new

• Cracked visor. When a storm cracks your visor, the cracks look like real glass and bend the view behind them.
• Lightning. Lightning lights up the plain around you.
• Grit. Storms carry grit instead of streaks.

Face down

New animations for being knocked flat by a storm.

A new alarm

A small sound update.

Real snow

Nadir's pines wear real snow.

Snow on the pines

Four new kinds of tree, and snow settles on the pines.

What's new

• More trees. Snowy pines, junipers, dry trees and bare snags join the woods on landing worlds.
• Snow cover. Snow settles on Nadir's pines.

Storms that knock you down

Planet storms hit hard now, and the worlds look better while they do.

What's new

• Storm terror. On foot in a storm, gusts shove you, debris flies, and a hard gust can knock you flat. Crawl, and press jump again and again to get back up. Your visor cracks and the screen shakes. Visor cracks can be turned off in Settings.
• New trees. New broadleaf, pine and charred trees, with leaves that move in the wind.
• Warp trails. Jumping to warp leaves a plume, a shimmer in the air and a wake that fades behind you.

Fair fights

Arena bosses are rebalanced so a careful pilot can win.

What's new

• Aimed grapples. A grapple now locks its aim as it winds up. Watch for the amber line and sidestep out of it. If you are caught, thrust away: every ship can pull free.

Clean blasts

Missile kills no longer crackle.

Ring glow

A small art update for Accretion.

A clean break

Accretion's broken ring is re-cut.

Arena bosses

The twenty star-map bosses fight like themselves.

What's new

• Kits of their own. Each of the twenty star-map bosses has its own moves and two phases, in place of the moves of the elite it grew from.
• Prism field. The Prism Warden's prism field turns a share of your fire back on you while it shines. Hold your fire until it fades.
• Grapple. Some arena bosses grapple you and drag you in. Fly out of the ring or out of their arc before it lands.

Clear overhead

Two more landing skies are repaired.

Hazards

Space has hazards now, and you can see them coming.

What's new

• Radiation. Every sun is ringed by radiation. Keep your shields up near it.
• Ion storms. Storms drift through deep space and drain your shields.
• Minefields. Mines lie round debris and derelicts. Shoot one from range and it pops.
• Gravity wells. Near the Singularity, the Maw and the Choir, gravity pulls at your ship.
• Warnings. New status chips and rings on the map show where each hazard is.

Three skies

Three landing skies are repaired.

Bosses in phases

Bosses change how they fight as they weaken.

What's new

• Boss phases. At two-thirds and one-third of its health, every sector and raid boss changes how it fights. It may gain new moves, call a wave from behind, the flank or above, or raise Warding Pylons that shield it until you break them. Follow the lines of light to find the pylons.
• Raid phases. Raid bosses' phases are their own now, in place of a flat rise in damage.

Ten new bosses

Ten new bosses, each with a look of its own.

What's new

• Starter wardens. Each starter sector has a warden you can reach near the lanes: the Toll Warden in Sol, the Scrap Baron in Kharon and the Lantern Eel in Lyra.
• Bosses of their own. Pale, Stygian, Duskfall and the Singularity have new bosses: the Pale Mother, the Needle King, the Dusk Prophet and the Event Warden.
• More hunters. The Umbral Gulf has a second hunter, the Gulf Harrower, and the rift's doors are guarded by the Brood Gatekeeper and the Last Picket.

Bosses and danger

Every boss has a move of its own, and deep space has more to fight.

What's new

• Signature moves. Every boss has a move of its own. Some fire shells that land where you stood, some send waves you break by putting a rock between you and them, and some raise shields or repairs you must shoot through in time.
• The Raider Admiral. Cinder Expanse has its own boss, the Raider Admiral, at level 20. The Cinder hunt now targets the Admiral.
• A Titan to fit. The roaming Void Titan is sized to the sector it surfaces in.
• Fuller deep space. The rift and beyond sectors have more to fight.

Painted distance

Landing worlds read like a painting's far layer.

What's new

• Soft distance. On landing worlds the far ground goes soft while the sky stays sharp, the corners of the view darken, and the air glows toward the sun.
• Sunlit pilot. Your pilot catches a rim of sunlight on the surface.
• A new setting. "Soft focus on the distance (planets)" turns the soft far ground on or off. The volumetrics setting is now called "Volumetric gas, dust and sun shafts".

Your level counts

Your combat level now helps in a fight.

What's new

• Outgrown enemies. Each combat level you stand above an enemy makes it hit you 5% softer, down to a fifth of its damage, and makes your hits on it 3% harder, up to two and a half times.
• Sturdier with every level. Each combat level adds 1% to your hull and shields in space and to your suit on foot.

Landmarks

Two worlds get a landmark on the horizon, and the far skies lose their seam.

What's new

• Landmarks. Emberfall and Accretion each have a landmark on the horizon: a smouldering caldera with a column of smoke, and a broken ring of rock hanging in the sky.

Painted worlds

Each landing world now has its own colours and light.

What's new

• A palette per world. Every landing world has a colour grade of its own: light on Meridian, The Cleft and Veilmoon, and strong on the strange worlds.
• Lit air. The haze brightens toward the sun's side of the sky, with a soft glow on the horizon. Nights stay dark.
• Something in the air. Embers, snow, petals, ash, flakes, spores or motes drift past, depending on the world. Veilmoon and Mirror Moon stay clear.

New horizons

New music while exploring space.

What's new

• Exploring music. The eight tracks that play while you fly through space are new.

Smooth flying

Other ships fly smoothly, fights run lighter, and a round of fixes.

What's new

• Smoother flight. Other pilots' ships no longer stutter or jump between updates. Your own ship holds steady through a warp, and autopilot legs end exactly on their mark.
• Lighter fights. Hit flashes, scan rings and damage numbers are reused instead of made for every hit, and the HUD redraws less often.
• Hunter Swarm's own icon. The swarm has an icon of its own on the hotbar and in the skills window.

Flying alone

Companions are gone, and the Ascendancy's Kindling becomes Hunter Swarm.

What's new

• Hunter Swarm. The Ascendancy's Kindling is replaced by Hunter Swarm: five drones that hunt your target. If Kindling was on your hotbar, Hunter Swarm takes its place.

Pulse sounds

The instrument pulses have sounds of their own.

What's new

• Pulse sounds. The Sweep sends a sonar ping, the Survey a rising shimmer and the Appraise a tally chime. A groupmate's call-out chirps.

Pulses and twists

Each role gets a pulse, groups can call out marks, and each profession adds a twist of its own.

What's new

• A pulse per role. From level 20 in your role's own track, press P to fire your instrument's pulse, once every half minute. What it finds is marked for a minute: on the radar, on the map, and in words over the thing itself.
• Sweep, Survey, Appraise. A warrior's Sweep flushes lurking hostiles in reach and narrows any ace hunt under way. An explorer's Survey reads every ore rock within 3 km and marks the ones with ore. A trader's Appraise values every wreck and cache within 15 km and says how often customs would stop your ship as loaded.
• Call it out. Press L to share the mark on your target with every groupmate in the sector, with your name on it, for what is left of its minute.
• A readout. A small panel under the target panel shows your instrument's read, or the mark on your target and how to call it out.
• Nine twists. At level 30 in your role's track, your profession adds one twist. A Marshal keeps aces on the radar's rim from anywhere in the sector. A Vanguard's target line names the weapon the target resists least. A Warden finds lurkers within 3 km without a Sweep. A Surveyor names a hidden site's modifier on the first ping. A Pathfinder's Survey reaches twice as far. A Seeker hears hidden sites from 20 km. A Broker reads a station's prices from anywhere in its sector. A Quartermaster's Appraise lists what each wreck holds. An Envoy sees which stations keep a fence, and what customs would make of the ship.
• On the creation card. Each profession's card at pilot creation says what its instrument grows into.

A closer read

Your instrument now reads a target in depth.

What's new

• A deeper read. From level 10 in your role's own track, hold the scan key on a target and your instrument reads it. The read shows on the status line and is kept in chat, and only you see it.
• Warriors: the Threat Board. On a live hostile it reads the next special attack by name and when it may fire, and who the hostile is angriest at, as shares.
• Explorers: the Survey Array. On a rock it reads the ore and the units left, or when a stripped rock regrows. On a found site it reads the vault's terms and whether the seal holds. On a hidden site it names the modifier from the second ping on.
• Traders: the Ledger. On a wreck or cache it reads what is inside by kind, its credits and who holds the claim, without opening it. On a gate it reads the chance of interdiction and a customs stop in the sector beyond, for your ship as loaded. On a station it reads the three cheapest buys and the three best-paying sells.

Solid again

The Titanhaul is fixed, and emblems sit better on fifteen older hulls.

Shapes of their own

The middle and top ships of every line have new shapes, and tier marks.

What's new

• New silhouettes. The refined and flagship hulls of all nine lines, 18 ships in all, are re-made with shapes of their own.
• Stripes and crests. Second-tier hulls carry their line's stripes and fourth-tier hulls its crest, in eight of the nine lines. The Veil trader line flies without them.
• New portraits. The Yard's pictures of those ships are redrawn.

Instruments

Each role's radar now shows what its profession looks for.

What's new

• Warriors: the Threat Board. Elites and bosses carry rank dots on the radar, and a line runs from each hostile to what it is hunting. Unknown hostiles are picked up at 10 km, up from 6, and elites and bosses show on the map.
• Explorers: the Survey Array. A wedge on the radar points toward a hidden signal. The rich rocks of a charted field show as points, comets and anomalies stay on the rim, and charted fields on the map carry a count of their rich rocks.
• Traders: the Ledger. Wrecks and caches are ringed by the credits in them, a customs cutter's scan reach is drawn to scale, and convoy haulers carry a mark. A wreck's note on the map shows its credits.
• Yours to dim. The instrument's name sits in the radar's corner. Click it to dim the layer.

True colours

The ships past the ladder now fly in the colours they were given.

Lights on the right side

Hall furniture shows its lit side to the room.

Fleet colours

The ships past the ladder wear their faction's paint.

No more film

Your own ship is lit by a soft light of its own.

The Yard

Ships are now found and built: hulls are laid from plans, and each comes off the slip with its own roll.

What's new

• The Yard. The Hull Upgrades tab is now the Yard. Hulls of tiers 2 to 5 are laid there from a plan and materials. Each row walks you through what a hull needs: your level, its plan and its materials.
• Every ship rolls. A laid ship comes off the slip with a rarity and two to four stat bonuses, up to 25% in all, on hull, shield, speed, turning, cargo, reactor or mining. Laying the hull you already fly rolls it again.
• Take it or keep yours. A laid ship waits on a slip card beside the ship you fly, showing its rarity, its bonuses and every number that changes. Take it, or keep the ship you have. Both ask twice.
• Plans. Hull plans drop for your own faction and role from foes in the hull's level band: rarely from ordinary foes, more often from elites, and always from a boss until you have that plan. A workshop can also draw one up.
• Plans you have earned. If you already fly or have flown a hull, you know its plan and the plans below it on your line. Nothing you own changes.
• A portrait of every ship. Each of the 72 hulls has its own picture in the Yard.
• Credits still work, for now. You can still buy a standard hull with credits until 19 October, 00:00 UTC. After that, hulls are laid from plans only.

Steam and rings

Two landing-world effects are redrawn.

Clear skies

One fix to how planets look from space.

Facing the jump

One fix to the rescue's tow home.

Lamps out

The approach lamps outside stations are gone.

Planetfall

The tutorial lands you on a world, ten worlds have thick air, and five worlds grow trees of their own.

What's new

• Tutorial, chapter 3: planetfall. The guided start now takes you down to a world: land, jump and sidestep on foot, take a survey at the outpost terminal, land a hit with the wrist blaster, report the job and take off. Your handler speaks every step, and knows whether you are in a hangar, in space or on a world.
• The ring follows you in. The tutorial's ring now goes on into the window a step is done in: the Sell tab, the row and the button that sells; the gun and shield in the hold; the star and Learn in Skills; the recipe and Craft in the Workshop.
• Chapters from Settings. Settings has a Tutorial section with a button for each of the three chapters. Any of them can be played again, or for the first time if you skipped it. If your tutorial was already over, your handler tells you once that the new chapter is there. The gun and shield your handler sends are sent once for each pilot, so replaying a chapter does not send them again.
• First-time hints. Your handler says a line the first time you meet the bounty board, the crew window, a group, a fold on the scope, a frontier sector, a good that pays more elsewhere, and the map's Galaxy tab. A frame goes round what the line is about.
• Thick air. Ten landing worlds have air of their own: sight closes to a few hundred metres and a bank of mist lies on the ground, deep in the hollows and thin on the rises. The other ten are as clear as before.
• Five worlds' own trees. Meridian's dry-country tree, the Cleft's mesa juniper, Verdance's broadleaf, Prism's crystal tree and Emberfall's charred one stand where you get near them: at the edge of the ranges, at the rim and in groves on the plain.
• Hazards you can see. Every hazard on a landing world has an effect: a vent hisses and throws a jet of gas, tar bubbles, a heat seam burns, a spore patch bursts into a cloud, a blizzard blows snow past your boots.
• Change your suit on foot. Suit mods and the rifle can be changed while landed, and take hold at once, or as soon as the fight is over. On foot, F opens the hold on the suit.

A wooded ridge

The pilot creation stage has a forest on its ridge.

What's new

• A wooded ridge. The ridge behind the creation stage carries the same forest the landing worlds now have. The pad and the masts stay clear.

Forests on the mountains

The mountain ranges of the landing worlds are wooded.

What's new

• Forests on the mountains. The ranges of 17 landing worlds carry belts of trees: pines on Veilmoon, dry woods on Meridian, thick green on Verdance, and pods and crystal on the alien worlds. Salt, tar and obsidian worlds stay bare on purpose.

Light moons

You can jump on foot, three moons have low gravity, and there is a flag to capture on them.

What's new

• Jump. You can jump on foot on every landing world, with Space.
• Light moons. Veilmoon, Mirror Moon and Graveyard Moon have low gravity now. A jump there is a long, fast bound.
• Capture the flag. A new job at the outposts on those three moons, against raiders. Take their flag from their camp and plant it on your stand, while a raider runner comes for yours. Solo or in a group.

Towed home

The opening is longer, far more dangerous, and has a score of its own.

What's new

• A longer, harder rescue. The raider gets to you before help does, more raiders warp in, and a flagship's salvo leaves your ship dying.
• Towed home. The stranger tows you home through warp and lets go off your own station.
• Its own score. The opening has music of its own, from adrift in the wreck to the tow home.

Chosen in amber

In pilot creation, your choice now stands out.

A click chooses

One fix to pilot creation.

Remember the rescue

Pilots you already have can now play the opening.

What's new

• Remember the rescue. Existing pilots can live the opening: ask the dispatcher at your home station how you got here. It gives nothing and takes nothing, and you wake where you asked.

In the frame

One fix to pilot creation.

One face each

Two fixes to pilot creation, and one to docking.

Dawn on the pad

Pilot creation now stands on a world at dawn, under your faction's own sky.

What's new

• Dawn, under your own sky. The creation stage stood at night under one sky for every faction. It now stands at dawn, with the sun low over the ridge, and picking a faction swaps the sky for that faction's home.
• Home overhead. Your faction's home station hangs in the sky over the ridge, lit and slowly turning, with a world of its sector high beside it as a moon.
• A landing apron. The pilots and the hull stand on plating with markings in the faction's colour and lights round the rim.
• A world underfoot. The ground is the dust of a real world, with pebbles at the pilots' feet, masts and shuttles on the horizon, and mist and motes in the air.

The stranger's name

The stranger who pulled you out of the wreck is now part of the story.

What's new

• The stranger has a name. You will hear it on the frontier, hear from them once in the Deep, and meet them again at the very end of the story, where the unmarked ship holds the last stretch with you.
• Re-recorded chapters. Ten story chapters have new text, with their briefings and story lines recorded again to match.

Voices in the wreck

The opening is voiced, and it leads straight into your first fight.

What's new

• A voiced opening. In the rescue, your ship, the stranger and your handler now speak.
• Systems coming back. The displays on your wrecked ship start dark and light up as its systems return. You wake in the hangar out of white.
• Straight to the first raider. A pilot who played the rescue skips the flying and warp lessons. Their first raider comes to them, and the station's guardians leave it to them for two minutes.

Station traffic

The shuttles round a station belong to it now.

What's new

• Traffic that uses the hangar. Station shuttles come out of the station's hangar mouth and fly back into it. They used to appear 700 m off the hull and vanish.
• Busier capitals. A capital keeps seven shuttles out and an outpost three, as before. Lawless space has none.
• Protected. Station shuttles can no longer be attacked: there is no Attack offered, and a shot at one does not land. Lane haulers, convoys and miners are unchanged.

The rescue

A new pilot's game now begins in the middle of something.

What's new

• The rescue. New pilots begin in a wrecked transport with raiders closing. A stranger in an unmarked ship fights beside you, a flagship arrives, and you warp out to wake in your faction's hangar, where the tutorial starts as before. It takes about five minutes, cannot be lost and can be skipped. Pilots you already have are not affected.

A new first hour

Pilot creation is rebuilt, the hall's kiosks are live, and the server is hardened against lost and doubled writes.

What's new

• A new pilot creation. A rail across the top names the five steps and goes back to any finished one, and a summary card keeps your choices. The pilot step is a grid of faces with names. The role step is three hull cards with bars, hardpoints and silhouettes. The paint step is scheme tiles and colour swatches. The faction step stands the pair with the faction's three hulls behind them and says where each faction starts.
• Straight into the game. Arrows and Enter work on every creation step, and Create pilot boards straight into the game.
• The hull on its pad. The hull is drawn at its in-game size, lit by its own light, with thrusters at idle. It turns slowly. The character screens play the home theme, and each card on the pilots screen shows its hull's silhouette.
• Live kiosks. The trade consoles in station halls show the galaxy's price news, and the information kiosks show where you are: the sector, whose it is, its levels and its gates.

The arrival

Docking is a proper arrival, the halls have people in them, and the frontier outposts have a new hull.

What's new

• The arrival. The docking run and the launch go through each station's own hangar mouth. The hall opens on your ship and the camera glides to your pilot; any key ends it. Approach control speaks as you dock.
• Halls in use. People stand at the stalls, the bar and the boards, and the departures and mission boards show live game data.
• A new frontier hull. The frontier outposts at Halcyon, Cinder, Pale and Ashen have a new solid hull: an old hauler with the hangar in its bow.
• A round sun. The sun is round, and its plasma (the fringe, the loops and the glow) moves smoothly.
• Shields that show. A ship's shield shows for a moment when it stops a shot. It does not show when the shield is down.

Windows onto space

Station halls now look out onto the sector they stand in.

What's new

• Windows onto space. The glass panes in the hall walls were black. They now show the sky of the sector the station is in, with that sector's sun out through the back wall. The stars shift against the frames as you walk.

Who flies with you

The crew berth makes it plain who flies beside you, and the bounty board reads in columns.

What's new

• Flying or staying aboard. Every crew row has a Flying / Stays aboard switch, with Stand all down and All fly over the list. Flying beside you was already a choice, but the control was easy to miss.
• A clearer crew berth. Post, level and trait sit in columns, with a badge for each post, and the list has a search box. Let go, and a hire that replaces a post's holder, ask for a second press.
• Bounties in columns. The bounty board shows sector, rating and standing in columns, with the bounty last.
• Results you notice. The crew, bounty, cosmetics and direct trade windows show what an action did on the coloured bar, with its sound. Skills and fitting do so when an action is refused.

A shield you can see

A raid boss now wears its shield where you can see it.

What's new

• A visible shield. While its wave lives, the Void Titan and every other raid boss wears a rim of light round its whole body. A shot it refuses sends a ring across the shield from the side you fired from, and the shield bursts when the wave dies.

Fewer, heavier

A raid boss's wave is now a fight of its own.

What's new

• Fewer, heavier adds. The Void Titan and every other raid boss used to call a wave of small, weak adds. A wave is now one heavy add, with a second from three pilots and a third at five. Each is more than twice the size, with four times the hull and two and a half times the bite.

A closer look

The galaxy map zooms, and shows where you have not been.

What's new

• Zoom the galaxy. On the map's Galaxy tab, the mouse wheel or + and - zoom the chart up to three times, about the pointer. Drag or use the arrow keys to move it, and Whole galaxy takes you back.
• Uncharted space. A sector you have never entered reads "uncharted" under its name. The list beside the chart ticks the sectors you have been in.

Hauls in view

Haul contracts join the mission tracker, and upgrade costs show their materials.

What's new

• Hauls in view. Haul contracts you carry show on the flight HUD's mission tracker beside your missions, with where to deliver and the time left. Track on HUD pins them too.
• Pin from the board. A station's mission board offers Track on HUD for the missions and hauls you hold.
• Upgrade costs with faces. On the workshop's Upgrade tab, what tempering, retuning and ascending take is listed as rows: the material's icon, the count and what you have. Hover over one to see where to find it.

Easier to read

A pass over the station windows, the flight HUD and the galaxy map.

What's new

• Rows you can scan. The workshop's recipes, the mission board, the exchange's Equipment tab, the pilot market and the vault show their numbers in columns under headings. The line under a name runs to two lines instead of being cut.
• Finding things. Those lists have a search box and filter chips, and a click on a column heading sorts by it. Recipes you have not learned are listed, dimmed, with how to learn them.
• A second press. Actions that cannot be undone ask for a second press on a red Confirm button: Analyse, Break down, Abandon, Cancel listing, and selling rare gear or better.
• Results you notice. What an action did shows on a coloured bar at the foot of the window, with a sound. A refusal is red, and a greyed button says why it is greyed.
• Materials with faces. Recipe inputs in the workshop show the material's icon. Hover over one to see what it is and where to find it.
• Missions in flight. Up to three held missions stay in view in the flight HUD, with their progress and time left. The journal (J) has a Track on HUD button to choose which.
• A wider galaxy map. The chart lies on its side and fills the window, with home on the left and each band of space a column. Sector names carry their levels, and a list beside the chart gives every sector with its levels and jumps.

Worn but working

The outposts' hall is furnished too.

What's new

• Furnished outposts. Every outpost's hall is furnished in a worn set of its own: a market stall and cargo by the exchange, lockers by the vault, a workbench and fabricator, a mission board, and the bar out at the hangar's edge. The furniture is solid, and every counter can still be reached.

Music for worlds

Landing worlds have their own music, and their outposts their own sound.

What's new

• Music for worlds. Landing worlds have their own music now, scored by the kind of world: barren, living or hostile. Fights on foot have their own music too.
• A working camp. Planet outposts no longer play a station's PA and crowd. Near the pad you hear a small working camp instead.

Behind the window

Two fixes: the wing panel stays under your windows, and the game keeps running when you switch away.

Furnished halls

The capitals' halls look like working stations.

What's new

• Furnished halls. The halls of Concord Prime, the Ascendancy Bastion and the Veil Observatory are furnished. Market stalls and cargo stand by the exchange, a bar and booths by the crew berth, and mission boards by the missions counter. There is a workshop floor, a departures board over the bay and ground crew kit beside your ship.
• Walk around it. The furniture is solid, so you walk around it rather than through it. Every counter can still be reached.

Lit from inside

The new stations show you where to fly in.

What's new

• Lit hangars. Every new station's hangar mouth is lit from inside in its own colour, so you can see where you are flying to. The approach lamps lead to the real mouth.

Every station its own

Sixteen stations stop sharing one hull.

What's new

• Stations of their own. Concord Prime, the Ascendancy Bastion and the Veil Observatory each have their own exterior, and the outposts have one for each kind of space: frontier trade posts, deep rigs, abyss watch stations and the reclaimed wheels past the rift. Each carries its own lit windows and fits its own collision.

Take the salvage

The tutorial's salvage step now waits for the salvage.

Where to press

The tutorial now shows you where to press.

What's new

• Where to press. A breathing frame rings the button the current tutorial step is about. In space that is the button on your target's action bar (Warp, Attack, Salvage, Mine, Scan or Dock) or the hotbar slot (your weapons, mining laser, scanner, first consumable or first ability).
• The right counter. In a station, the counter the step is done at lights up: Launch Control, the exchange or the Workshop.
• Then out of the way. The frame goes once the button is on, and after the tutorial ends.

A hold you can see

Your cargo hold is now a grid of tiles with its own count, and what you have equipped has a tab of its own.

What's new

• The cargo hold as tiles. The hold window (I) shows your cargo as square tiles, as the fitting screen does: equipment with its Item Power and an upgrade arrow, stacks and goods with their count. The Cargo Hold tab shows how full it is, turning amber from 90% and red when full.
• Equipped on its own tab. What you have fitted sits on an Equipped tab, one tile for each hardpoint, named for its slot and faded when empty.

Know what you sell

Selling equipment now tells you how it measures up against what you fly with.

What's new

• Know what you sell. On the exchange's Sell side, every piece of equipment in your hold says whether it is an upgrade, a downgrade or would fill an empty hardpoint. Hover it to see what you have equipped beside it, and the detail pane lays the two side by side. Press Alt to step through your fitted slots.

A word from the handler

Your handler now speaks up if you stop on a tutorial step.

What's new

• A nudge when you are stuck. If you stop on a tutorial step, your handler says a second, plainer line, the tracker pulses, and in space the thing the step is about (a raider, the wreck, a rock, the station or a derelict node) is put on your target.
• Not while you are busy. The handler waits while you warp, mine, dock, fight or have a station window open, speaks at most twice per step, and then stays quiet.
• New lines. 51 new voiced handler lines, for 17 steps in each faction's voice.

Lit from within

Stations are lit from within.

What's new

• Lit from within. Every station hull has rows of lit windows, each station with its own pattern in its faction's colour, visible from far across a sector.

The sound of a station

Each kind of station hall now sounds like what it is.

What's new

• Station hall ambience. Each kind of station hall has its own background sound: a Concord hall is a clean working deck, an Ascendancy hall a foundry, a Veil hall a hushed observatory, and an outpost a worn frontier post.

Halls in their own light

Each station hall now has a light of its own.

What's new

• Halls in their own light. Concord halls are lit a cold white, Ascendancy halls amber, the Veil's violet and the outposts a worn green-grey. The deck and the hangar bay are lit, and each service has a pool of light in its own colour.

To the end

The Lost Fleet story now runs to its end.

What's new

• The Rifts and the Beyond. The story's last two acts: five rift chains and three Beyond chains, 24 chapters in all, finishing at Last Furrow.
• Your parent's voice, to the end. Your parent's recordings continue through both acts, in your mother's or your father's voice, and every new chapter is read aloud by whoever posts it.

Megastructures that glow

The vast structures on each sector's horizon are re-made, with lights of their own.

What's new

• Megastructures that glow. The ring habitat, the shipyard, the mining rig, the dreadnought wreck and the broken gate on each sector's horizon are new models with their own lights: lit windows, floodlights, a furnace, a dying reactor, glowing conduits, and points of light that waver.

A fairer tutorial

The tutorial counts what you did, and its lines keep off each other.

The Abyss

The story reaches the Abyss, and every chapter of it can now be heard.

What's new

• The Abyss chapter. The last three fleet buoys on this side of the Singularity are held by the Sentinels, one at each Abyss outpost: Gulf Watch, Crown Bastion and Event Horizon. Each has a three-chapter story and a recording in your parent's voice. At Event Horizon you learn what the Singularity is.
• Briefings read aloud. Every story chapter, from your first at home to the hunts on the far side, is read aloud by whoever posts it when you take it.

One party panel

Your companions and your groupmates now share one panel under your portrait.

What's new

• One party panel. Companions and groupmates are listed together under your portrait, with hull and shield bars in the same amber and blue as your own gauges.
• Act on a groupmate. Click a groupmate to target them, or right-click to warp to them, whisper, kick them or leave the group.
• Find a group. The group window (G) lists nearby pilots with an Invite button, and explains how groups work when you fly alone.

The story stays with you

The tutorial no longer leaves you on your own: when the guided chapters end, the tracker follows your story.

What's new

• A tracker that follows the story. After the guided chapters, the tracker stays. It shows the chapter you hold and how far along it is, tells you where to report when it is done, and names the next chapter and which mission board has it, with the sector and the number of jumps if it is elsewhere. Hide takes it away until the story moves on.
• Pointed the right way. The dispatcher is marked when the story is waiting at their board, your handler tells you once to come and see them, and a chapter that sends you somewhere targets it for you.

Giants in the fields

Asteroid fields are places now: colossal rocks you fly round, standing in a band of dust.

What's new

• Asteroid giants. Every main asteroid field has three or four colossal rocks standing round it, hundreds of metres across. They are solid, so fly round them.
• Belts of dust. Each field sits in a band of sunlit dust and can be seen from far across a sector.

A gentler sun

The suns, the twisters and the storm shelters sit better in their worlds.

Into the Deep

The story goes down into the Deep.

What's new

• The Deep chapter. On its way to the Singularity the fleet left a line of buoys. Each Deep outpost, Ashen Relay, Stygian Station and Duskfall Haven, has a three-chapter story to reach one, open to every faction in any order. Each buoy holds a recording in your parent's voice, which you hear when you take the last chapter. One of them is a warning that never reached Ashhold.

The frontier chapter

The story continues on the frontier.

What's new

• The frontier chapter. Raiders tore a fleet pilot's flight log in three and sold the pieces. Each frontier outpost, Halcyon Outpost, Cinder Yard and Pale Anchorage, has a three-chapter story to win its piece back, open to every faction in any order. Each ends with a page of the log read aloud in the briefing.
• The recording. At Pale Anchorage the last piece is a recorder, and when you take that chapter you hear it: your parent's voice, thirty years old.

The stars blaze

Every sector's sun now blazes.

What's new

• The stars blaze. Every sector's sun has a white-hot glare, plasma arcs curling off its edge, and a glow that lights the gas around it.

Rotors that turn

The scavenger drones' rotors turn as they should again.

Voices past the Singularity

The people at the far outposts finally have their own voices.

What's new

• The far outposts' own people. The 24 brokers, dispatchers and engineers at the eight stations past the Singularity used to be copies of Halcyon Outpost's staff. Each now has a personality of their own, talks about what lies outside their station, and greets you aloud. Some of them have heard about the fleet beacon.

One sun over Mirror Moon

Mirror Moon's daytime sky is painted again.

The Lost Fleet

The story begins. Thirty years ago the three factions sent one fleet together toward the Singularity, and it never came back. Now its beacon has switched back on, and the new pilot's name is on its list.

What's new

• The Lost Fleet. Your guided first sortie and every faction's six story chapters now tell the story of the fleet the Concord, the Ascendancy and the Veil sent to the Singularity thirty years ago, and of the beacon that has just switched back on with your name on it.
• A handler who wonders. Your handler's lines during the first sortie are re-recorded, with a few things on their mind about that beacon.

Scout and gunship rebuilt

The other two Scavenger drones are rebuilt to match the hunter.

The hunter rebuilt

The Scavenger hunter drone on the middle landing worlds is rebuilt.

Marsh, scrap and vents

Three kinds of landing world sound new.

A proper fireball

A gunship's shell now bursts in a proper fireball, and five kinds of landing world have new background sound.

Wet ground

The ground on the landing worlds shines where its own surface says it should.

Cleaner drone sounds

Drone fights on the landing worlds sound cleaner.

Ground with depth

Every landing world's ground now has depth and shine of its own, as Meridian's has had.

What's new

• Ground with depth. The ground on the other nineteen landing worlds looks the same from afar, but up close it is no longer flat. Salt plates stand up at their edges on Mirror Moon, the cracked clay of The Cleft and the floor plates of Bastion have real grooves, and Cairn's ash has ripples. The ice of Nadir, the tar of Stygian Minor and the resin of The Seat catch the light.

A stone for every world

Every landing world's rocks are now its own stone, after Meridian's sandstone.

What's new

• A stone for every world. The boulders, rocks and ridge formations on the other nineteen landing worlds now match their world: iron-red rock on The Cleft, bubbled grey basalt on Veilmoon, mossy teal rock on Glasswater, lava clinker on Emberfall, crusted white salt on Mirror Moon, black obsidian on Accretion, veined violet stone on Prism, frosted blue rock on Nadir, rusty slag on Graveyard Moon and more. Crystals and anything that glows keep their own look.

A steadier stride

Your pilot moves properly on the landing worlds: she runs upright with the wrist blaster, her arms swing as they should, and carrying salvage is faster and smooth.

Meridian's sandstone

Meridian's rocks are now its own sandstone.

What's new

• Meridian's sandstone. The boulders, the small rocks and the formations on Meridian's ridges now match its red sand, instead of the dark stone every world shared. Other worlds will follow.

Drones that fight their own way

The three drone classes on the landing worlds now fight differently, you can hear them, and they leave real wreckage. Every landing world also has its own background sound.

What's new

• Scouts. Scavenger scouts on the home worlds are fast and fragile. They circle close and spit light bolts quickly, and one more of them comes in each group.
• Hunters. Scavenger hunters on the middle worlds hold further out and fire two fast bolts, one right after the other.
• Gunships. Scavenger gunships in the rift and beyond are slow and armoured. They charge for a second, then lob a shell that bursts where you stood. A ring marks the ground it will hit while it flies, so move off it. One fewer of them comes in each group.
• Same challenge. Each world is meant to be about as hard as before. The name tags say which class you are fighting, and the gunship now spins all eight of its rotors.
• Drones you can hear. Each class has its own shot. Rotors hum, a scout whines and a gunship drones, and they wind down when a drone is shot out of the air. A gunship's shell whistles as it comes down and lands with its own blast.
• Real wreckage. A drone that crashes leaves its carcass and pieces of its own plating, thrown out glowing, bouncing and cooling on the ground.
• The sound of each world. Every landing world has its own background sound under the music: wind on the dry plains, a hush on the moons, drips and insects in the marshes, vents on the volcanic worlds, wind in the ruins, chimes on the crystal worlds, clicking in the hives, cracking ice, and creaking metal on the Graveyard Moon. It fades in when you land and gives way to a storm.

Meridian's ground

Meridian's ground has real relief now.

What's new

• Meridian's ground. Where Meridian's ground was flat sand, it now has wind ripples, pebbles and small craters that catch the light. The other worlds keep their ground as it was.

Drone classes

The landing worlds now send a drone that fits the world: a small Scout on the home worlds, an armoured Hunter on the middle worlds and a Heavy gunship in the rift and beyond.

What's new

• Three drone classes. A small twin-fan Scout patrols the home worlds (sector level under 20), an armoured Hunter the middle worlds (20 to 49), and a Heavy gunship the rift and beyond (50 and up). Each is bigger and hovers higher than the last. They fight just as before: only the look has changed.
• Living machines. Drone optics glow by day and by night, their rotors spin, and they bob as they hover.
• Going down in style. A drone shot down shorts out in red arcs, and its explosion is sized to the drone, with a crackling core and smoke rising off the wreck.

Painted skies

Every landing world now has its own sky, day and night: burnt orange under twin suns on The Cleft, a gas giant over Veilmoon, aurora over Glasswater, ash and eruption glow on Emberfall, a black hole over Accretion, and wreck fields over Graveyard Moon and Bastion.

What's new

• A sky for every world. All 20 landing worlds draw their own high-resolution painted sky, day and night, and the sunlight comes from where the sun is painted.

Wing header

Your crew's panel header fits again.

Room to breathe

The panels over the chat box no longer touch it, and the dust devils ahead of the storms are fuller.

Energy blasters

Wrist blasters now fire energy: fire or lightning, with their own sounds and impact bursts. Storms blend into the ground, the outpost signs hang over their counters, and the panels down the left of the screen have room to breathe.

What's new

• Energy blasters. Wrist blasters no longer fire bullets. The warm blasters shoot fire and the cool ones, the Warden and the Riftwalker, shoot electricity. Each has its own flash at the wrist, a bolt you can watch fly, a burst of flame or crackling current where it lands, and its own shot sounds. Other pilots' shots fly as bolts too.

Crisper lightning

Lightning in the storms on the landing worlds is crisper.

Dust devils

Dust devils now run ahead of the storms on the landing worlds.

What's new

• Dust devils. On the sand, ash and toxic worlds, dust devils spin ahead of an approaching storm front: columns of dust twisting up out of a swirling skirt, coloured by the world.

Sharper lightning

Storm lightning on the landing worlds is sharper and more natural.

Storm fronts

On the landing worlds you can now see a storm coming. A wall of dust rolls in toward the outpost, lightning strikes inside it, and once it arrives the storm drives past you.

What's new

• Storm fronts you can see. A storm used to be just thicker fog. Now a lit wall of dust rolls in from the side it comes from, coloured by the world: sand, a white blizzard on the ice worlds, ash on the burnt worlds, a toxic front on the sulfur, tar and living worlds, and a dark charged storm on the crystal worlds.
• Lightning and thunder. Bolts strike inside the front and light it from within, and the thunder arrives later the farther away they strike. Blizzards have no lightning; the crystal worlds have the most.
• Inside the storm. Smoke and grains of sand, snow or ash drive past you on the wind, and a blizzard howls.
• Venting rocks. The rock vents breathe lit steam, sulfur fume or dark smoke.

Steady wing

Your wing holds steady beside you now, and its escort craft are smaller.

Escort craft

Your companions fly their own ships now: each faction's crew has an escort craft no player flies, lit in the colour of its role, so you can tell your wing from yourself at a glance.

What's new

• Escort craft. Concord crews fly the Picket, the Ascendancy the Hound and the Veil the Moth: small ships of their own, in place of a smaller copy of yours.
• Role colours. A companion's running lights and name tag show its role: strikers red, decoys amber, tenders green, wranglers violet.
• Your wing and your group stand out. Your companions and your groupmates wear a teal rim that stays visible up close. A groupmate loses theirs when they leave the group.

Ranger in green

The Ranger wrist blaster is remade in its concept's military green, with new item icons to match.

Wing frame

The wing frame now shows your companions the way the group frame shows your group, with real hull and shield bars. And when you join a group, your companions stand down.

What's new

• A proper wing frame. Each companion gets a row with their portrait, name, role and level, a hull bar that turns amber then red as it drops, a shield bar, their hull and shield numbers, and their ability's timer, or how long until a downed one is back.
• Companions stand down in a group. When you join a group, your companions leave space, since your groupmates are your wing now. When you leave the group, they launch again.

Wings in formation

Your wing flies with you now: in formation while you travel, into warp at your side, and into a fight each by its own role once the shooting starts. This release also fixes the Skills window getting stuck on the Abilities tab.

What's new

• Formation flying. Your wing holds a diamond round your ship: the right and left wings off your beam and the third low behind. It stays close enough to see in the chase camera and turns with you.
• Warping together. When you spool up, your wing breaks off whatever it is doing, lines up with you, rides your warp on its slots and drops out beside you.
• Fighting by role. The wing holds formation until shots are fired, then each wingman fights its own way. Strikers make attack runs on your target. Decoys draw its fire to them. Tenders stay at your side, away from the threat. Wranglers circle the adds. Ten seconds after the last shot, they fall back into formation.
• The wing frame says whether your wing is in formation or fighting.

Deep space

The Skills and Abilities windows get a proper backdrop, and their cards and tooltips now lead with the numbers.

What's new

• A real nebula behind every constellation. Each track, and the Abilities tab, has its own high-resolution nebula behind the chart. It fills the view without stretching and drifts a little as you pan. A crisp star field sits over it and stays sharp at any zoom.
• Clearer skill and ability cards. A card now shows where the skill sits (its tree, tier, or which two trees a bridge joins), your rank, and what it does now and at the next rank, with the numbers picked out in colour. It also shows the level and points the next rank takes, an ability's cooldown, duration and reach, and a tick or cross for each requirement. Tooltips use the same layout.

Constellations

The Skills window is rebuilt. Each track is now three trees joined by bridge skills, laid out as a constellation you can pan and zoom, and there are more skills than points, so a build is a real choice. The windows are bigger too, and item cards say what an item is at a glance.

What's new

• Three trees per track. Combat is Gunnery, Bulwark and Tactics. Explore is Navigator, Surveyor and Prospector. Trade is Merchant, Hauler and Artisan. Each tree runs from a root to a capstone.
• Bridge skills. Between each pair of trees sits a bridge skill that needs points in both, so the trees braid together. There are 27 new skills in all.
• Choices that matter. A track now holds more than a level-50 pilot can buy, about two of its three trees, so your build is yours. The old Mastery skills are retired.
• Free respec. Your skills stay where they were, and everyone gets one free respec of their skill points to rebuild with the new trees. Use "Respec skills" on the Skills tab.
• Constellation view. Each track is a star chart around its emblem, over its own nebula. Drag to pan and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Zoomed out, you see the whole shape of your trees.
• Bigger nodes. Nodes are larger, in metal frames: capstones are hexagons and bridges are diamonds.
• Ability bridges. Your faction's trees and your role's trees each gain a bridge ability between every pair, 6 new abilities per pilot from overall level 30. The Abilities tab shows both groups as constellations beside your hotbar.
• Bigger windows. Windows are drawn larger, item cards and hold tiles are bigger, and windows shrink to fit ultrawide screens and larger HUD scales instead of running off the edge.
• Item type at a glance. Item cards and the hold's detail pane now start with what the item is, colour-coded by where it goes: "SHIELD", "SHIP WEAPON · BEAM", "WRIST BLASTER · ON FOOT".

True shapes

The wrist blasters and the mountain pines now show their real shapes, and the snow on the high pines is white.

Mountain pines

Pine forests now climb the mountains of the cold and temperate landing worlds, heavy with snow near the peaks.

What's new

• Pines on the mountains. Veilmoon, Cairn, the Citadel, Umbral Nadir and the heights of Verdance grow pine forests on their ranges. The pines are laden with snow as they near the snowline, and dead snags stand among them on Cairn's ash slopes.

Wrist blasters

On the landing worlds, your rifle is now a wrist blaster worn on the forearm. You aim with one arm out, and venting its heat lets off a burst of steam.

What's new

• Wrist blasters. Every tier and every unique has its own unit on the forearm. You aim with one arm out, and R vents the heat in a burst of steam.
• New names. The rifle tiers and the seven uniques are now blasters. Their effects talk about shots, the cell and venting instead of rounds, the magazine and reloading. Your gear keeps its stats: only the names and looks changed.

Wooded ranges

The mountains around the landing worlds are no longer bare: forests of each world's own alien trees now climb their slopes.

What's new

• Forests on the mountains. Stands of each world's own alien trees grow up the valleys and shoulders of its ranges, stopping short of the snow. Worlds without trees keep their bare peaks.

Storm warning

Storms on the landing worlds are now hard to miss, and the outpost outfitter finally opens.

What's new

• Storm warnings across the top. A storm's warning and its arrival now show in big red letters at the top of the screen. The warning says how many seconds you have to reach the shelter, and you're told when the storm has passed.

Lie of the land

Every landing world now has its own terrain. Each has its own plains and its own mountains on the skyline, with rock showing on the cliffs and snow on the high peaks.

What's new

• Every world has its own terrain. Plains range from dune seas and dead-flat salt pans to crater fields and rolling hills.
• Mountains on the skyline. Worn sandstone ranges, knife-edged peaks, stepped mesas, black volcanic ridges and crystal spires, each world with its own.
• Rock and snow. Steep faces show bare rock, and snow lies on the higher peaks of the colder worlds. Umbral Nadir is under snow from the pad to the peaks.

Every unique counts

All seven unique rifles are now worth chasing. Warden's Verdict finally drops, Prospector's Luck pays out properly on a kill, and Riftwalker hits harder.

What's new

• Prospector's Luck pays out. A kill now refills the magazine, and your next three rounds are sure crits. Gold spills off the rifle with a chime when it pays out, and flashes on each lucky hit.
• Riftwalker hits harder. On top of piercing, it now does 15% more damage.
• Warden's Verdict comes from the Accretion. The Accretion's Alpha now drops Warden's Verdict instead of Arc Ranger. Arc Ranger still drops from the other tech 3 worlds' Alphas.

The Alpha fights back

The Alpha is a real fight now: a few minutes long and tuned to each world and tier. Storms hold off while it's awake, and an Alpha that could get stuck in the air is fixed.

What's new

• A longer, harder Alpha. It has far more health and moves faster than you can run, so the sidestep is how you answer its tells. A fight takes about three minutes at Routine and four at Deadly.
• Hits tuned per world and tier. Its blows hit a little harder on the deeper worlds and at Risky and Deadly, but a blackout still takes several hits anywhere.
• Torn seals. Each of its blows stops your suit mending for a few seconds, so hits taken close together add up.
• Burning lanes. A strafe leaves its lane on fire for a few seconds. The fire you see on the ground is exactly where and for how long it hurts.
• No storms mid-fight. A storm that's due while an Alpha is awake waits until the fight is over.

The Alpha

Every world now has an Alpha: its dragon grown huge, waiting in a lair that opens once you've hunted three of its creatures. Hunt contracts send you tracking a marked beast by its spoor, the Alpha fights in three phases, and each world has a unique rifle to win from it. The game download is also a good deal smaller.

What's new

• Hunt contracts. One of the world's creatures has been marked. It gives off no signal, so you track it by its spoor: each read narrows the search, and the trail moves on. Then bring it down.
• The Alpha. Three hunts on a world open its Alpha's lair, and it stays open. The Alpha is that world's dragon grown huge, with a boss bar and its own music.
• A fight in three phases. The Alpha sweeps and charges, and both are marked on the ground first. At 60% it screams and its brood pours from the rocks; a suit pulse breaks the scream. At 30% it takes to the air and burns lanes across the lair, then crashes down and is open to punishment for a few seconds. Its vents are yours to use.
• The Alpha's rewards. A rare-or-better rifle of the world's tech, creature parts, and a chance at the world's unique rifle, guaranteed by your fifth kill without one.
• Seven unique rifles, one per tech. Old Faithful hits hard with its last round. Prospector's Luck puts rounds back in the magazine on a kill. Arc Ranger's lightning jumps to a second target. Warden's Verdict spreads staggers to nearby targets. Pathfinder's Mark marks a target to take extra damage. Riftwalker's rounds pierce through. Horizon Line spins up while you hold the trigger.

Raiders and cover

Scavenger raiders come to the landing worlds, and they fight like you do. Rocks become cover for both sides, two new jobs send you into a creature's nest and a raider camp, and the uplink hold now comes in waves.

What's new

• Scavenger raiders. They hold their distance, sight you down (watch for the red laser), fire in bursts, and duck behind rocks to reload. That's your window.
• Rocks are cover. Boulders stop rounds, theirs and yours.
• New job: Clear the nest. Fight your way to the burrow, plant the charge and hold until it blows. Don't stand on it.
• New job: Scavenger camp. Take the camp, then crack the raiders' cache.
• The uplink comes in waves. Holding the uplink now brings waves of attackers, with a pack leader in the last one. Stepping out of the ring pauses the upload.
• Revive your surveyor. An escorted surveyor who goes down can be revived.
• Salvage and harvest bite back. You can't fire while carrying salvage, and Deadly salvage runs draw raiders. On Risky harvests, something nests at the field's edge.

The wild fights back harder

The creatures and drones on the landing worlds now fight properly: they rear up before they strike, roar when they spot you and back off when badly hurt, while drones hang back and shoot. You can sidestep out of the way, your rifle looks and feels the part, and a blackout no longer throws away the whole job.

What's new

• Creatures that behave like creatures. They walk and run on their own animations, rear up before they strike, roar when they spot you, sleep by day and back off when badly hurt.
• Drones that shoot. Scavenger drones hang back and fire bolts you can outrun. On Risky and Deadly work some carry a shield that only drops to your suit pulse.
• Sidestep. Press Left Ctrl to dodge sideways out of a strike.
• A fairer blackout. Blacking out no longer loses the job straight away. It costs a quarter of the pay, and a second blackout loses it. On Deadly work, the first one still does.
• A rifle that looks the part. Muzzle flash, tracers, spent casings, and hits that spark, splatter or kick up dust.
• Better ground. Planet ground no longer repeats in an obvious grid, and hills look smooth from a distance.

Armed on the ground

You can fight back on the landing worlds now. Shoulder your rifle, pick off drones and creatures, and loot better rifles from what you bring down.

What's new

• Your rifle. On a landing world, hold the right mouse button to shoulder your rifle: the camera moves over your shoulder and you strafe as you aim. Left mouse fires and R reloads.
• Drones and creatures can be brought down. They now have health, and every hit is decided by the server: your magazine, rate of fire, range and aim all count.
• Rifles that drop like gear. Kills can drop rifles, rolled like the rest of your gear with rarity, quality and effects of their own. There are seven rifles, one per tech level.
• A rifle slot. Rifles fit their own slot, separate from your ship's gear. Without one, you carry the service carbine.
• The outfitter sells rifles of the world's own tech level.

Item Power and the wing

Every item now carries an Item Power, and its card tells you at a glance whether it's an upgrade. The fitting screen becomes a grid you can filter and hover to preview. And your crew can take the controls: mark them to fly with you, and they launch in escort craft beside your ship.

What's new

• Item Power. Every piece of gear has one number that sums up its tech, rarity, quality and how well its effects rolled, shown big on its card along with how it compares to what you have fitted.
• Item cards. Tooltips are laid out as cards: the item type, its power, a clear verdict, the numbers and its effects. Hold Shift to see each effect's possible range and how well yours rolled.
• A grid for your hold. The fitting screen shows your hold as a grid of tiles with rarity frames, quality, power and a green arrow on upgrades, with filters along the top. Click a socket to show only what fits it, and hover any tile to preview your ship's numbers with it fitted.
• Power on loot too. Loot cards and the item details show Item Power and the upgrade arrow.
• Your crew fly with you. In the crew window, mark a crew member "Fly with me" and they launch in an escort craft beside you a few seconds after you arrive in a sector. You get one seat, a second at overall level 25 and a third at 50.
• Each post flies its own role. Your gunner flies a Striker that focuses fire, your navigator a Decoy that lures enemies off you, your engineer a Tender that passes you shield, and your quartermaster a Wrangler that nets the adds.
• Command your wing. Press H, or click the wing panel, to switch between Engage, Guard and Hold.
• Enemies hold a grudge. Enemies now remember who's hurting them most and switch targets when someone else pulls ahead; a decoy's lure overrides it. A downed wingman returns after two minutes, and its kills count as yours. Raid bosses count each wingman as half a pilot.

A quieter search globe

A small follow-up to 0.2.96: the search globe's grid lines are quieter from outside.

Search areas you can fly into

Search areas in space are now translucent globes you can see into and past, instead of a flat circle stuck on the sky.

Crystal cores

The glowing core inside a derelict's relay nodes is now a cluster of crystal shards instead of a single one.

What's new

• Crystal relay cores. The glowing heart of each relay node at a derelict site is now a multi-point crystal cluster, seven shards growing from one base, instead of a single shard.

Kitted for the wild

Every landing outpost now has an outfitter, four new suit mods answer each world's particular danger, and veteran pilots get a third suit slot. The planets and space also get a visual pass: danger zones and search areas are drawn on the ground, fold mouths look like vortices, and contested holdings show who is winning.

What's new

• An outfitter at every outpost. Every landing outpost sells Mk I suit mods, suit patches and stims.
• Four new suit mods, Mk I to III. Traction boots keep you moving through tar and blizzards, a sealed liner shrugs off heat seams and spores, a signature dampener keeps hunters from spotting you so soon, and a resonance filter sees through crystal echoes.
• A third suit slot opens at overall level 40.
• Know your loadout. The job board says which of the world's dangers your fitted mods answer.
• Dangers you can see on the ground. Search circles, the uplink's progress ring, vent warnings as they calm, swell and burst, and the edges of spore patches are all drawn on the ground.
• A clearer picture in space. Scanned anomalies show their reach, fold mouths read as swirling vortices, contested holdings carry beacons showing who is winning, and lane buoys and relay cores are proper models.
• Easier-to-read threats. Threat name tags are bigger and sit on glass chips.

Close quarters

Beams and bolts now pay for getting close. They hit harder across the board, and trading fire from inside an enemy's reach toughens your ship for a moment. Missiles still let you kite from safety; beams and bolts reward standing in the fight.

What's new

• Beams and bolts hit harder. Every beam from tech 1 to 6 does 40% more damage, and every bolt 25% more. Missiles and tech 7 weapons are unchanged, and weapons you already own pick this up automatically. Enemies are exactly as tough as before, so beam and bolt pilots simply kill faster.
• Close quarters. For 3 seconds after your beam hits a target from inside that target's own weapon range, you take 25% less damage (15% after a bolt hit). It shows as a status on your ship, a shield with a crosshair, and as "close quarters" on the incoming-hits line. Sniping from beyond an enemy's reach doesn't earn it.

Engines with character

Engines now look and feel like engines. A white-hot core burns at every nozzle, shock diamonds march down the flame as you open the throttle, your stern glows in your engine's colour, and every kind of ship has an engine of its own.

What's new

• White-hot cores and shock diamonds. Every nozzle burns with a white-hot core. Shock diamonds appear down the flame as you push the throttle: none at idle, two at cruise, up to four in warp.
• Streaked, heat-coloured trails. Engine trails are streaked and cool as they go: white-hot at the nozzle, then the engine's colour, then a cool fade. They taper toward the end and burn wider and brighter under thrust.
• Your engines light your ship. Your own ship's stern glows in the colour of its flame.
• An engine for every role. Warriors burn a short, hot needle that flares hardest, traders a wide, lazy plume, and explorers a long, steady flame. Each refit look burns a little bigger, and NPCs flying those ships get the same engines.
• Engines answer the throttle. A flicker as they spool up, a puff when you cut hard, and a kick as you go into warp.
• Boost you can see. The Boost ability now fires your engines: a kick, then a flame burning past full for as long as it lasts.

A new fleet

Every ship you can fly has been remade. All nine faction lines, the Concord, Ascendancy and Veil warriors, explorers and traders, now have three looks each: frontier, refined and flagship. Your ship changes its look as you refit up the tiers, and the faction ships you meet in space fly them too.

What's new

• Every ship line remade. The warrior, explorer and trader lines of all three factions each have three new looks. Tiers 1 and 2 fly the frontier look, tiers 3 and 4 the refined one, and tier 5 the flagship. Each look is a little bigger than the one before, and your fitted modules stay fitted.
• See your refit. Every refit that changes your ship's look plays the reveal in the hangar: a scan over the old hull, a flash, and the new ship by name.
• Engine flames on every nozzle. Each new look burns its flames from its own engines.
• The factions' ships match yours. Haulers, wardens, guardians, customs cutters, siege lancers, pickets and the Reef Drone fly their faction's new looks, grander the higher their level. The ark derelict is now a Concord trader flagship.

Real engine flames

Every ship now burns a real flame: a shaped, flickering exhaust in its faction's colour that stretches out as you open the throttle. Concord warriors get a line of ships of their own, and a new look at each refit.

What's new

• Real engine flames. Soft blobs are gone from every ship's engines. Each nozzle now burns a shaped, flickering flame in its faction's colour, short at idle and stretched out as you open the throttle and go to warp. The trail behind takes the flame's colour.
• The Concord warrior line. Concord's warrior hulls fly three new ships: the Bulwark at tiers 1 and 2, the Aegis at tiers 3 and 4, and the Paragon at tier 5. Your fitted modules stay fitted across every look.
• A refit you can see. When a refit changes your ship's look, a scan sweeps the old hull in the hangar, flashes, reveals the new one and names it.

The wild fights back

Outpost jobs get their last big round. Trap creatures in vents and storms and craft their parts into suit patches and stims, throw lures to pull hunters off your trail, chase a gold extra for more pay, and walk a stranded surveyor home. You feel every hit now, a rescue drone comes for you when you black out, and every world's scenery fills in with glowing pod-trees, crystal spires and distant mesas under a low moon.

What's new

• Lure and trap. A creature caught by a vent as it bursts, or kept hunting in a storm for too long, drops dead and leaves a part: ichor, a gland or a core, depending on the world. The part goes straight into your hold.
• Suit patches and stims. Craft them from creature parts and surface materials. A patch restores your suit (key 0), and a stim refills your stamina (key -).
• Lures. Take three from the rack by the pad each landing, and press F to throw one up to 20 m. For eight seconds every creature and drone near it goes to investigate.
• Push your luck. After the first step of most jobs, a gold extra may appear farther out, guarded by a creature. It's optional and pays 30% more.
• Escort. Search for a stranded surveyor and walk them home. They can't keep up if you get too far ahead, hunters go for whichever of you is nearer, and if the surveyor goes down the job is lost. It pays 30% more.
• You feel every hit. The screen's edge flushes red with an arrow toward the blow, the camera jolts, and sparks fly off your suit.
• Blackout rescue. When your suit gives out you crumple, the screen bleeds red, and the outpost's rescue drone lifts you back to the shelter, where you come round.
• Scenery on every world. Stands of glowing pod-trees, clusters of crystal spires and tall mesas fill the middle distance, and a pale moon hangs low in the haze. The pods glow like lanterns at night. Each world has its own colours, and the outpost worlds are a little sparser.
• A kit line on the suit panel shows your patches, stims and lures, and their keys.

No more pink after takeoff

A quick fix for two things you'd see leaving a planet: the dust under your ship now billows instead of drawing as squares, and space no longer fills with pink blocks after you take off from some worlds.

Suits and standing

Every world now has something to take home. Its jobs pay in its own surface material, which you craft into mods for your suit. Standing on a world grows with every job there, until the outpost trusts you with Deadly work and, in the end, gives you a paint in its colours. Two new jobs join the board: hold an uplink against the waves, and haul heavy salvage home at a walk.

What's new

• Hold the uplink. Start the upload at a relay, then hold its ring for 60, 75 or 90 seconds by tier while hunters come in waves and a vent beats inside the ring. Stay out of the ring for five seconds and the link drops.
• Heavy salvage. Carry four heavy pieces from a wreck back to the pad at a walk, with no sprint. Press E to set a piece down. Drones spot a carrier from much farther away, and every delivery wakes another. Each piece pays its share, you can report the job after the first one, and a blackout drops the piece where you fell rather than losing the job.
• Surface materials, one per world. A finished job sometimes pays the world's own material at Routine, usually at Risky, and two or three at Deadly.
• Suit mods. Craft armour, stamina, scanner and pulse mods, Mk I to III, from two worlds' materials at the workshop, and fit any two of them into your suit's two slots from the hold. They work whatever ship you fly.
• World standing. Each job on a world earns standing there: 1 point at Routine, 2 at Risky, 3 at Deadly. You rise from Stranger through Known, Trusted and Respected to Honoured.
• Deadly work opens at Trusted standing on that world (8 points), replacing the five-jobs-in-one-landing rule.
• A world paint at Honoured. Reach Honoured on a world and you earn a ship paint in that world's colours, one of 20 new paints.
• First clears. The first time you finish each kind of job on each world, it pays half again.

Outpost games

Outpost jobs become small games. Choose how much danger you'll take, keep a streak going, hunt a dying beacon, harvest pods inside a ring of bursting vents, and race a storm for its caches. You can finally answer back: a suit pulse stuns whatever is on you, and a sprint gets you clear. Every world adds a twist of its own, and jump gates now open a glowing field as you come near.

What's new

• Choose your danger. Every job on the outpost board is posted as Routine, Risky or Deadly, paying ×1.0, ×1.6 or ×2.5. Riskier work brings more hunters, faster and harder-hitting, with less time on the clock, and a better chance of a star-map fragment. Deadly opens on a world once you've done five jobs there in one landing.
• Streaks. Each job you finish in one landing pays 10% more than the last, up to +40%. A blackout ends the streak.
• Dying beacon. Find a crashed probe before its battery dies. Every scanner ping drains it, and a ping can wake something that comes for you.
• Ripe harvest. Two pods sit inside a ring of vents that burst one after another. Take each sample while its pod swells, and time your way in and out.
• Storm run. Grab three caches, each farther out than the last, and get back to the shelter before the storm hits. Every cache you leave behind costs a quarter of the pay.
• Suit pulse (Q). Stuns every drone and creature within 5 m for a few seconds, then recharges for 20 seconds.
• Sprint (hold Space). A burst at 6 m/s while your stamina lasts. Nothing that hunts you is faster than a sprint.
• Every world has a twist. Blizzards slow you on ice worlds, tar and resin stick to your boots, heat seams cook the suit on ember and sulfur worlds, crystal worlds sometimes echo your pings back empty, and salt and bone glare shortens what both you and the hunters can see.
• Jump gates open as you arrive. A turning field of light fills a gate's ring as you approach, and it runs brighter and faster once you're close enough to jump.

A world in every sector

Sixteen new worlds open for landing, one in every sector: Emberfall, Mirror Moon, Cairn, Stygian Minor, Prism, the Crown, Nadir, Accretion, the Clutch, Molar, Bastion, the Seat, Graveyard Moon, Reliquary, Cantus and Verdance. Each has its own ground, growth, grass and skies, its own creature, and a boss of its own behind its star map. The deeper the sector, the harder the ground bites. Outpost jobs now pay like the station missions of their sector, their pay reaches your panel, and no job is a safe walk any more.

What's new

• Sixteen new landing worlds, one in every sector, joining Meridian, the Cleft, Veilmoon and Glasswater. Each has its own painted ground, recoloured growth, grass, and a day and night sky.
• A creature on every world, and a star-map boss with its own ship for every sector.
• Danger follows the sector. On deeper worlds there are more drones at a crash site, more creatures on the plain, and vents that burst harder.
• Every job has its dangers. Any job that takes you off the outpost's safe ground now has a creature bedded down near the work and a gas vent or two. Creatures roam the plain by day as well as by night, and they spot you from a little farther away.
• The storm shelter is a shield dome, dim in clear weather, pulsing when a storm is warned, and full while it blows.

Thicker grass

The grass on every landing world is fuller now: more and wider blades, grown in patches, so the fields read as ground cover rather than scattered stalks.

Search and danger on the surface

The landing zones come alive. A crash site or a crystal growth is no longer marked for you: you have to search for it with your scanner. The ground fights back, with scavenger drones, each world's own creatures and bursting gas vents. And every world now has its own grass, its own recoloured growth, and its own sky by day and by night.

What's new

• Search for it. The downed shuttle and the crystal growths are hidden somewhere inside a search circle. Press the scan key on foot to ping: each ping shrinks the circle around the real spot and tells you whether you're getting warmer or colder. The target shows itself once you're close.
• Scavenger drones circle a crash site and go for any pilot who comes near.
• Each world has its own creature: the dune crawler, cinder hound, pale stalker and fen lurker. They bed down by the growths, and at night three of them hunt the plain and see farther.
• Gas vents near your objectives swell as a warning, then burst.
• The outpost is safe ground. Nothing follows you onto it, and hunters give up if you run far enough. If your suit wears down to nothing you black out and lose the job, as in a storm.
• Grass on every world, each in its own style: gold stalks on Meridian, rust shoots in the Cleft, pale moss on Veilmoon, and violet fronds on Glasswater whose tips light up at night.
• Every world grows its own life, recoloured to match it, and Glasswater has groves of gas-pod and jellyfish trees out on the plain.
• A sky for every world, by day and by night: a warm, dusty sun on Meridian, a red two-sun sky over the Cleft, a near-black twilight on Veilmoon and a violet sky over Glasswater. Nightfall changes the sky.

Star maps

Outposts sometimes pay in torn pieces of old star maps. Put three together and the map opens a wormhole to the region's boss, for you alone. Taking off from a planet now lifts you off the pad and out of the atmosphere, and the flight HUD is tidier.

What's new

• Star-map fragments. Outpost jobs sometimes pay a fragment of the sector's star map, and the hard jobs (storms, the dark, spores) pay one more often. Three fragments of a sector make its map. Maps and fragments weigh nothing.
• Wormholes to the region's boss. Use a map in its own sector and a crimson wormhole opens a few kilometres away, for you alone. On the far side, the region's boss waits with its escorts, stronger than anything in the sector. It drops as a full boss with two extra rolls, and what you win is held until you reach the beacon, with a bonus when you get out.
• Four new bosses, each with its own ship: the Meridian Wraith (Sol), the Cinder Tyrant (Kharon), the Hollow Choir (Lyra) and the Glassfen Leviathan (Halcyon Reach).
• Dock, jump and land from the action bar. The "[E] Dock at…" prompt over the console is gone; the target's action bar shows the same thing. E still docks, jumps or lands whenever you're in range.

Glowfen

The first alien world is open. Glasswater, out in Halcyon Reach, is a fen that lights itself: glowing mushrooms, fields of anemones, floating jellyfish trees and crystal vents under a long teal night. Watch where you stand, because the spore patches swell and burst.

What's new

• Land on Glasswater. Glasswater Fen in Halcyon Reach is a new landing site, and it's the first alien world. Half its day is night.
• Spore patches. Eight patches across the fen lie calm, swell for a few seconds and then burst, hurting anyone standing inside. A burst on a badly worn suit knocks you down. The patch glows as it swells, and you're warned if you're standing in one.
• Spore samples. The fen's outpost has its own job: take three live samples. A sample is only ripe while its patch swells, so take it and get clear before it bursts.

Smooth engine trails

Engines draw a clean, continuous trail now, even through a hard turn, and your ship no longer steps sideways when the server corrects its position.

Planetfall

You can land now. Meridian, the Cleft and Veilmoon each take you down to a surface of your own, with an outpost to work, weather to outrun and a night that falls. Warp gets steadier too: quiet engines slip past the pickets, and the drive needs a moment to settle between jumps.

What's new

• Land on Meridian, the Cleft and Veilmoon. Landable planets are marked. Set down on a private surface, walk it in your suit, and launch when you're done.
• Outpost jobs. Each landing site has an outpost with six jobs on offer.
• Weather and night. Storms sweep across the surface, and night falls on a day cycle.
• Target action bar. Actions for your current target now sit on a bar, and the Warp button counts down while your drive settles.
• New music, for boss fights and exploration.
• Warp interception follows your engine. Pickets hear engine signature much more strongly now, and ambushes are rarer overall: a quiet ship running empty is rarely pulled out of warp, while a loud, laden one still draws attention.
• Warp cooldown. After any warp ends, whether you arrived, were interrupted or cancelled it, the drive needs 10 seconds before it will spool again. Re-targeting mid-warp isn't affected.
• Click empty space to deselect your target. A double-click there still turns your ship that way.

Loot worth the trip

What you find is now never worse than what the local stations sell, expeditions included, and you can upgrade gear without taking it off your ship.

What's new

• Loot matches the shelves. In each sector, dropped gear is now at least the tech its stations sell, up to the sector's own tier. In the level 30–44 sectors that means tech 5, where most drops used to be tech 4 or lower. The starting sectors are unchanged.
• Expeditions follow where you came from. Loot in an expedition or a fold is now at least as good as the sector you entered from. Take the Sunken Bastion from a 30–44 sector and its rewards are tech 5, not tech 3.
• Upgrade fitted gear. The workshop's Upgrade tab now lists the gear on your ship, and you can temper and retune it without unfitting it. Ascending or breaking down a piece still needs it in the hold.

Folds

Every so often a fold opens somewhere in a sector: a pocket of space for a single pilot. Fly in, crack the dark-matter fissures, face the guardian at the core, and make it back to the extraction beacon before the fold collapses. Anything you're still holding when it goes is lost.

What's new

• Folds, a solo run. An amber tear opens near a nav point for about five minutes. Fly into it and press the interact key to enter a pocket of your own, built at your combat level with two random mutators.
• What's inside. Dark-matter fissures to crack and packs of ships to fight, with a guardian waiting at the core.
• Keep what you carry out. Everything you pick up in a fold is held until you reach the extraction beacon. If the fold collapses (after about nine minutes) or your ship is destroyed, you lose the haul, but never what was already in your hold.
• No getting stuck inside. If you disconnect in a fold, you come back where the fold opened.

Lighter debris

Debris fields are lighter again, for smoother flying through them.

Megastructures

Every sector now has a vast man-made structure on its horizon.

What's new

• Megastructures. Over the home worlds you'll see a spinning ring habitat or a shipyard, on the frontier an ore rig, and further out a dead dreadnought or a broken gate arc. Each stands far out on the horizon, too distant to fly to, and the inhabited ones glow faintly with their own lights.

Planets, properly lit

A follow-up to 0.2.73's lit planets. The ring that stood off some planets is gone, and most worlds now show their real day and night sides.

Traffic and living worlds

Sectors have daily traffic now: shuttles come and go around stations, miners work the ore fields, and the wardens fly as a wing. Planets look very different too. They're no longer glassy marbles: each has a real day and night side, and the inhabited worlds show city lights.

What's new

• Station shuttles. Up to three shuttles loop around each station, undocking, flying a few kilometres out and back, and docking again. They're neutral: fire on one and the wardens will remember.
• Miners at work. Up to two neutral miners per sector fly out to an ore field, work a rock with a visible mining laser, then fly home to dock.
• Warden wings. Wardens patrol as one wing, a leader with wingmen holding formation. If the leader goes down, a wingman takes over.
• Lit planets. Each planet has an atmosphere and a night side, city lights glow on the inhabited worlds such as Terra, and the capitals have weather.

Quieter wrecks, lighter debris

A follow-up to 0.2.71. Wrecks no longer blink, and debris fields are much cheaper to draw while looking the same.

Stations at work

Stations look like working places: dishes turn, cranes swing, drones weld, and floodlights wash the hulls. Space around them is littered with the debris of old battles, damaged ships vent and spark, and big moments shake the camera. You can turn the shake off in Settings.

What's new

• Debris fields. Hull plates, girders, snapped sensor booms, burst cargo modules, torn-off engines and escape pods drift in junk fields, at ambush sites and around station outskirts.
• Stations at work. Each station has a turning comms dish, a sensor mast with blinking lamps, cargo cranes swinging near the bay, and construction drones welding on the plating.
• Floodlights and a beacon. Spotlights wash every station, a lighthouse beacon on the crown flares as it sweeps past you, and a row of lamps with a running pulse marks the undock lane.
• Station markings. Each station carries its faction's emblem and a hull number on its flanks.
• Damage that shows. Below half hull a ship vents gas and sparks from a breach, faster as the hull drops. Below a quarter it also burns and its running lights stutter.
• Hull wear. Ships, stations and props now show panel seams, rivets and grime up close.
• A camera that reacts. The camera shakes when something big dies nearby or you take a hard hit, and slows for a beat when a boss dies within 3 km. To turn all of it off, set Settings > Combat > Camera shake and slow beats to Off.

Battles leave a mark

Space keeps a record of what happened in it. Wrecks linger where ships died, asteroid belts read as belts from kilometres out, and lit buoys mark the shipping lanes between stations and gates. Lights on mining, derelicts and caches now actually light what they're meant to.

What's new

• Wrecks stay where ships died. A destroyed hull breaks into torn plates, and bigger ships also spill a cargo container. The break smoulders and cools to black over a couple of minutes, then the wreck lingers where it fell for a few minutes before drifting off.
• Asteroid fields read as fields. Each belt has a far layer of grit, visible as a band from kilometres out, and a haze of dust around it.
• Ore veins on charted rocks. In a field you've charted, every ore rock shows ridged veins in its ore's colour, brighter in a rich field.
• Lit shipping lanes. Amber nav buoys every 2.5 km mark the lanes between stations and gates, with a pulse running inbound along each lane.
• Space lights now reach what they light. Mining sparks light the rock, derelict nodes and reactors glow on their hulls, and cache beacons show up. Many of these lights had been too dim to see.

Lived-in space

Space looks lived in: hulls reflect the nebula they fly through, ships run navigation lights, and fights light up the ships around them. The flight HUD is reorganised around bigger weapon and skill slots.

What's new

• Hulls reflect the sector's own sky. Metal used to reflect a stock blue sky over brown ground. Ships now pick up the nebula around them, and station halls reflect properly too.
• Running lights. Every ship shows a red port light, a green starboard light and double-flashing strobes. You can spot a convoy by its lights from 2 km out, and a cloaked ship runs dark.
• Lit hulls. The generated hulls now have glowing panels in their faction's light colour.
• Fights light up the scene. Hits, beams, kills and warp arrivals cast light on nearby hulls.
• Kills read at range. Every kill throws a shockwave ring and leaves a cloud of fire-lit smoke that hangs for several seconds, so you can see a kill across the field.
• Bigger weapon and skill slots. Both rows are 50% bigger, with the shield, hull and speed readouts right on top of them. The status line has moved to the top centre, under the target panel, and the dock prompt now sits above the flight readouts.

Three expeditions, and bosses that fight back

Solo expeditions now come in three tiers, and you can ask about them at any station. Bosses heal up once a fight is over, stand their ground instead of drifting away, and send interceptors after pilots who try to kite them from out of range. Enemy health bars are much easier to read.

What's new

• Three solo expeditions: - The Scrapline Redoubt, a raider outpost for levels 14–18. - The Sunken Bastion, the Sentinel derelict, for levels 25–32. - The Infested Chrysalis, a hive bioship, for levels 40–48. Ask station contacts about deep-space derelict signals to claim your daily transponder or warp to an expedition.
• Enemies recover after a fight. Once a mob or boss has nobody left to fight, it repairs its hull and recharges its shields within about ten seconds. A boss back at full health also calms down and loses its escorts. You can no longer die, respawn and finish off a half-dead boss.
• Bosses that can't reach you launch interceptors. Keep a boss beyond its guns and it sends fast interceptors after you. Kiting a boss from out of range is no longer free.
• Thicker health bars on enemy markers, the lock-on bracket, the target panel and the boss bar.

The Sunken Bastion

The first solo instance. Claim a transponder from your faction's dispatcher, then warp to a private derelict to face the Custodian alone. You have one emergency reboot to fall back on. The Exchange and Workshop are also rebuilt around clear Buy/Sell and Upgrade flows.

What's new

• The Sunken Bastion, a private derelict for pilots around level 25–32. The Concord Dispatcher, Ascendancy Warmaster and Veil Archivist each hand out one Encrypted Derelict Transponder every 20 hours. Entering uses up a transponder and takes you straight to your own instance.
• The Custodian, a solo boss. Its hardlight shield turns away 80% of fire from the front, it calls in repair drones, and its casts can be interrupted. It has its own named-loot drop rate, with a pity counter so a long dry streak ends.
• One emergency reboot in an instance. The first killing blow instead leaves you at half hull and half shield, with a moment of Aegis. The second one is final.
• The Derelict Citadel Hulk, a walkable station inside the Bastion with an Archaeotech Vault terminal and an airlock back out.
• A redesigned Exchange and Workshop. Buy and Sell are now the top tabs, with category filters under them. Upgrades have their own flow, and a material you're short of tells you where to find it.
• Music follows you between sectors, and the HUD shows the area a sector belongs to.

Abilities with reach

Ten abilities now fire at the ship you have targeted, from three to four kilometres out, instead of going off around your own hull. Several trees swap their tools so each one plays differently, and the ability hotbar stays in step with what you mount, rank and respec.

What's new

• Long-range targeted abilities. Execution, Thermal Lance, Breaching Round, Shatter Round, Assay, Holdfast, Anchor Line, Suppression Net, Tithe and Leverage lock onto your current target at 3–4 km and hit that one ship. The target must be within the listed reach.
• Execution hits harder. It is now a single rail strike for 4.5× your volley, up from 2.2× spread across an area.
• Reworked abilities: - Hardpoint Lock now reflects 35% of incoming damage. - Stress Pattern now boosts your weapon damage by 35%. - False Signal now silences enemy guns around you. - Slip Lane now restores 35% of your shield. - Cargo Is Sacred now repairs 50% of your hull at once.
• Last Wall and Unbroken both absorb 75% of incoming damage.
• Ability cards tell you whether an ability hits one target or everything around you, and how far it reaches.

Bosses that look like bosses

Every boss in the game is bigger now — real colossus proportions, 50 to 130 metres across, instead of a ship with more health. Every boss and mob archetype gets its own painted icon, shown on the target panel and the boss bar, so you can tell what's coming for you before it's in range. Enemy visibility past two or three kilometres is sharper, and sensors now cut off at 10 km.

What's new

• Bosses are colossus-scale now, 50 to 130 metres across depending on the boss, up from ship-sized. Their engagement range grew to match, so a boss reads as the threat it is well before you're in its shadow.
• Every boss and mob has its own painted icon — 59 in total — shown on the target panel when you lock on and in a new frame on the boss bar.
• Enemies read better at range. Silhouettes and thruster plumes scale more clearly between 2 and 3 kilometres, and sensors now have a clean 10 km cutoff rather than trailing off.

The card that never showed

Selecting an ability to rank it up, and unspending your ability points, could do nothing at all — no card, no error. The pieces were always working; the card that shows an ability's details was tied to the wrong part of the screen and never actually appeared once you switched to the Abilities tab.

A face that matches, arms that rest

Two more from the pilot roster, both reported from the live build.

Whole hips, and the right gender

Two faults in yesterday's new pilot roster, both reported from the live build.

A new face for every faction

The pilot roster is rebuilt from the ground up: twenty-four concept pilots, one suit design per faction worn by a man and a woman of four looks, painted and built rather than assembled from parts. If your pilot was created before this, they now wear one of their faction's new looks — the old preset they were on no longer exists to wear.

What's new

• Twenty-four new pilots, four looks each, one suit per faction. Character creation offers one design per faction now, worn by either gender in four looks, replacing the old mixed roster.
• If you already have a pilot, they've changed. Every character made before this update pointed at a pilot that no longer exists; each one has been moved onto one of their faction's new looks, chosen by your character so it's consistent for you specifically. There's no way back to the old look — it isn't in the game any more.
• Skin, hair and outfit tints are gone. A generated pilot is one material over the whole body, and a tint would wash the face along with the suit. Ship paint is untouched — this is your pilot only.

The right key lights up

Pressing an ability key fired the right one, but the wrong slot lit up: the recharge sweep and the running flare were drawn from the catalogue's own order rather than from what's actually on your bar, so a loadout in any order but the catalogue's watched its neighbor flare instead — reported as "2 activates 3, 3 activates 4." It draws from your own loadout now.

The console, redone

Your keys just moved. Mining is Q now, not 2; Missions is J, not Q; your eight skill keys run a plain 2 through 9 instead of the old scattered 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 0, minus and equals; your two consumables sit on 0 and minus. Everything you fly with is one reachable cluster near WASD now, instead of spread across the whole number row.

What's new

• Your keys have moved to one reachable cluster. Mining is now Q (Missions moved to J to make room). Your eight skill slots run a plain 2 through 9. Your two consumables took the keys skills gave up: 0 and -. The on-screen hint line at the bottom of the flight HUD always shows your current bindings.
• The console under your ship is two rows now, not two side-by-side trays. Weapons, mining and the scanner sit in one row; skills and consumables sit in the row below. Both stay centred as you fit more mounts or learn more abilities.
• Each weapon mount wears its own colour, by what's fitted to it, so you can tell a rail gun from a launcher at a glance before you even check its ready state.

The right ability, every time

Clicking an ability on the flight console could fire whichever one sat next to it instead. It only showed up once you'd learned more abilities than the bar holds — routine past the early levels — and only after your first zone of a session: undocking, warping, taking a gate, or reconnecting all rebuilt the bar sized to how many abilities you know, not to your six-slot bar, and that shifted every slot after it by the difference.

A star that fails now says so

A click on an ability star could go wrong in complete silence: no card, no error, nothing — because that one path never had the safety net every other action in the game already has. It does now.

A sector says what is really in it

A sector's rating used to be judged by its easiest ground: if the bottom of the band was beneath you, it read EASY, however hard the deep end got. That was fine while every band was ten levels wide. The abyss shipped wider ones to fit its boss content, and the gap started to hide real danger — Hollow, banded 30-44, read EASY for a CL32 pilot standing in the same sector as a CL41 boss.

Actually capped, this time

Last patch's engine-trail fix helped, but your own ship at real cruising speed still trailed a long dotted tail. The cap was reading a slower, laggy estimate of how fast you were going instead of the exact number already sitting on the HUD.

Shields you can actually see

Shield and hull were thin arcs up near the ship. Against a bright nebula, or a lit station, they had no contrast to fall back on and simply vanished. They're bars now, thick and cell-cut like the reactor's, standing beside the speed reading where you're already looking.

What's new

• Shield and hull are thick bars now, beside the speed numeral rather than thin arcs by the ship. Cell-cut the way the reactor bar already is, so a lost tenth of your shield reads as a lost cell rather than a sliver you have to squint for.
• A hit flashes and sparks properly. The reactor's hairline bar was too thin for either to read, so it shipped with sparks off. The new bars are wide enough, and a bug that made an unset spark render as a checkerboard square — Unity's placeholder, not a glow — is fixed with it.

The cap that never capped

Last patch's engine trails were supposed to stop a quarter of a hull behind the ship. In flight they still strung out twice a hull long. The formula was right and the number fed into it was wrong: a near-1 multiplier was standing in for a real speed in metres per second, so the cap's own math always came out too loose to ever bind.

What you actually are

The fitting screen could always tell you where a number came from — every affix, every source feeding it, every point the stacking penalty took off. What it could never tell you is what you are. Twenty rows of rolled effects still left the arithmetic to you, and the numbers that matter most were on no row at all. Now there is a screen that just says them.

What's new

• A stats screen, on the fitting pane. Offence, Defence, Mobility and Utility, with the totals rather than the working. It toggles with the effects list where the old heading sat, and it leads: the ledger is the explanation, the totals are the answer.
• Your damage a second counts crits. A crit is a chance at double damage, so what you actually deal over a fight is more than the number on your guns. That is the figure on the line now, with the raw one under it.
• A resist reads as the health it buys you. Ten thousand health behind 20% bolt resist is twelve and a half thousand against bolts. The percentage never told you whether the slot was worth it; that does.
• Your shield line says how much of you it is. Which is where last patch's rebalance becomes something you can see rather than something you were told.

Shields first

Your hull was the bigger number. On most ships it was nearly twice the shield, which is a strange thing in a game where the shield is the bar you watch, the pool that comes back on its own, and the thing half your gear exists to feed. That is the wrong way round, and it is now the right way round: every ship in the game, yours and everything you shoot, carries between one and a half and nearly three times as much shield as hull.

What's new

• Shields are the main pool now. No ship got tougher — the totals are exactly what they were — but the split moved, so a fight is mostly fought on the bar that regenerates. Your factions still feel like themselves: an Ascendancy hull is still the armoured one, a Veil hull still the shield one, and Concord still sits between them.
• Creatures still have no shields at all. The things out there that are alive rather than built take it all on the flesh, which is what keeps an anti-shield gun a choice rather than simply the best gun.
• Shield pierce was retuned to match. Pierce goes straight past the shield onto the hull, and hull is the small pool now — a heavy piercing gun had quietly become the only gun worth carrying, taking over 40% off a ship's real health. The ladder was brought down so the top rail is a genuinely good anti-shield weapon instead of the answer to everything. The cheap piercing gun you start with is untouched.
• The workshop only shows what you can actually build. It used to list a hundred and forty-nine recipes and grey out the hundred and twenty-five you had not learned, so finding the one you could make meant reading past everything you could not. Locked plans are gone from the list.
• The workshop is in four tabs — Build, Bench, Jobs and Learn — with Refinery, Components and Items under Build. Each tab says how many things are behind it, and opening the window puts you on a tab that has something in it.
• You stand on a planet now. The pilot screens have real ground under them: a ridge on the horizon, boulders, and a ship landed beside you rather than turning on a spit. The character window's render fills its frame properly, with the home sky behind it.
• The tabs are real tabs. Character, Fitting and Cargo hold sit on the header rule with plates of their own, and the credits chip has stopped overlapping Fitting.

The nine fire now

The nine ships you take off a boss did nothing you could see. Their whole worth was a number in a tooltip, quietly true, and a pilot flying one got the same fight as anyone else. Now each of them fires: a chance, on something you do a hundred times an hour, to do something for a few seconds — and four of them reach everyone flying with you.

What's new

• The nine now do something you can watch. Take a hit in an Indemnity and there is a chance you and your whole group cannot be touched for four seconds. Land one in an Injunction and the thing you hit may stop firing altogether. Kill something in a Gravelight and your hull and capacitor may come back in full. The Harrow's hits can go off again for twice themselves; the Antiphon's abilities can cost nothing at all; the Codex, the Glutton and the Assize hand their luck to the whole wing.
• Four of them are worth bringing to a group. Until now nothing about these ships gave anyone a reason to want you along. An Indemnity that occasionally makes the whole fight harmless is a pilot people ask for.
• A screen for your pilot, on I. Your pilot and their ship, and beside them who you actually are: your calling, your three tracks, your crew, your hull and how long you have been out here. The cargo hold and the fitting screen are one click from it.
• The hangar says which hulls are the rare ones. A ship off a boss is written in gold, a ship anyone can lay in violet, a rung of the ladder as it always was — and every ship now says what it does on the row rather than only when you hover it.
• Flying works through six pieces of music rather than looping one. Fights have their own, and a boss draws from four of its own on top of that.

The world got harder, and your ship explains itself

Two things changed that you will feel within a minute of undocking, and both are deliberate. Everything past level 10 hits harder and takes longer to kill. And four copies of the same bonus are no longer worth four times one copy. The fitting screen will now show you exactly what your gear and your crew are doing, which is the first time it has ever told you.

What's new

• Music. The fleet has its own explore track in place of the pack's, and the home sectors have theirs. Boss fights draw from a pool now rather than repeating the same piece.
• The nine boss ships are worth the boss. They were the tech-6 ships plus 13%, carrying the identical built-in gun — less than a single tier step for a plan that drops one kill in eight. They are a full ladder rung clear now, with their own Mk VI gun, and each carries a mechanic no item can ever roll: the Injunction stops what it hits from rebuilding its shield, the Gravelight rolls every wreck twice, the Armillary cuts every rock within 400 m of the one you aimed at, the Antiphon sounds every ability a second time a beat later. Nine ships, nine mechanics, one to each.
• Your fit shows its working. Every effect on the fitting screen now names its sources — which gun, which set, which roll — and what each one actually contributed. Where a duplicate was reduced, it says by how much.
• Your crew are on that screen too. They have been changing your ship's numbers all along and the game never said so. Every member aboard now lists what they are worth to you.
• Engine flames sit on the nozzles on twenty-one more hulls, placed by hand rather than guessed at.
• A hull carries its own light in the dark. In sectors with almost no ambient light a ship was a shape you lost track of; it now lights itself enough to read, without lifting the dark around it.

Nine ships nobody can buy

The game is called Calibrated now. The sector is still the Singularity, and so are the gates, the lance, the drive and the core — the place keeps its name, the game gets its own. And there are nine hulls in it that no blueprint pool will ever hand you.

What's new

• Nine ships, nine bosses, one each. The Grand Admiral and the Worldmother from 57, the Devourer and the Hive Empress from 63, the Ascendant and the Null Dreadnought from 70, then the Sovereign Husk, the First Voice and the Worldseed. Each drops exactly one ship plan, one in eight kills, and it is the only place that plan exists — these never enter the shared tech-6 pool.
• Their traits go past what a rolled item can do. The best shield-piercing weapon in the game caps at 35%; the Injunction ignores 45% of a shield outright. The Armillary reads 80% more ore and scan range at once. Harrow hits everything within 260 m of whatever it hit. One per faction and profession, so every build has exactly one of these to want.
• A hull arrives dressed. Generated hulls bake as a single albedo with no emissive channel, so a ship whose concept art was covered in running lights converted to one with none of them lit — grey plastic with a name. Each hull now carries the paint and glow it was drawn with, applied only where you have chosen nothing. Anything you have equipped still wins.
• Traders and explorers gained in the numbers they are actually flown for. Before this the trader hulls gained no cargo at all over the rung below them.

Eighteen trees, and six slots to carry them in

A pilot had five abilities, got all five automatically, and ranked every one of them to the top with points to spare. Two Concord warriors were identical. There are eighty-one abilities now, you are offered twenty-five of them, and you can carry six.

What's new

• Eighteen ability trees. Three for your faction and three for your role, four deep, each ending in a capstone. Concord fly Bulwark, Interdiction and Wardency; Ascendancy Overload, Fracture and Ascent; Veil Misdirection, Predation and Absence. Every warrior shares Lance, Aegis and Warband; explorers Pathfinder, Prospector and Ghost; traders Convoy, Broker and Bulk.
• A capstone is worth building toward. Each one needs the ability above it at rank 3, and they are the only long cooldowns in the game — ninety seconds to two minutes, where nothing else waits more than forty-five. The Last Wall stops almost everything for eight seconds. Solar Verdict empties the reactor in every direction at once. Nobody Here takes you off the sector's books for nine seconds, and firing ends the arrangement.
• Six hotbar slots, and you choose what goes in them. Abilities used to own keys — the first you learned was key 3. Now you mount what you want where you want it, and an empty slot stays where you left it.
• The last two ranks of an ability cost more. One point each for the first three, then two, then three. Maxing an ability costs what three used to, which is the first time a build has meant giving something up.
• Unspending your ability points, from the Abilities tab. Free the first time and once a month after that; the button says the price before you press it.

Abilities that reach, and eighteen ships that are not one ship

Every ability in the game went off on top of you. Not by design — the engine only ever knew how to resolve one at the caster's own hull, so Confuse was something you set off under your own feet rather than aimed at the ship you wanted turned. Six abilities reach now, and the machinery under them means the next ones can too.

What's new

• Abilities can be aimed. An ability now says where it goes off: on you, on what you have targeted, where you are aiming, or on a wingman. Six new ones per that: Anchor Line holds a ship at 3 km and takes its warp; Aegis Relay sends your shield pulse to somebody else's hull; Kindling sets a target alight and lets the fire find what it is near; Fault Line lays a brittle shear where you choose; Whisper turns one pilot on their neighbour from across the fight; Siphon Lance pulls a shield's charge back to you. An aimed ability tells you what it reaches and how far away the thing is, rather than "out of range".
• Abilities have their own tab. They were a row squeezed under the star charts with room for exactly the five you had. They have the window now, and it grows as they do.
• Every ship laid after tier five is its own ship. They shipped as one ship eighteen times: identical hull, shield, gun and signature, so nine pairs were twins that differed only in silhouette — and all eighteen were tuned like warriors, so the traders gained no cargo at all. Each carries a trait now, one named thing it does, and gains in the number its role is flown for: traders haul 18% more, explorers cut faster and run quieter. The flat edge over the last rung drops from +26% to +10%, still pure upside.
• The yard says what a refit changes: "+1 gun · +18% cargo · +10% shield · +10% hull", instead of absolute numbers you had to hold your current hull's against.

A kill pays in the tier it was worth

Loot was reading the wrong number. A mob's level says what it is worth, but what it actually handed over came from a tech tier typed into its table by hand — and seventeen of those were written below the tier their level implied, four of them by four tiers. So the deep and the abyss paid out in tech 1 parts, and the band from level 31 to 40 had no boss of its own at all. All of that changes here.

What's new

• The abyss has a boss. Levels 31 to 40 were the only band of content without one: its sectors were watched by a level 41 Overseer and a level 44 Leviathan, both a tier above. The Hive Progenitor now stands in the Hollow and the Singularity — a wasp the size of a frigate that calls its own brood and stings harder than it shoots — and it carries the Progenitor's Clutch: stingers, carapace and a wingbeat drive, turning faster with two pieces and quicker on the trigger with all three. It closes the hive's own gap as well, which ran from level 29 to 63.
• Thirteen named pieces, and something to hunt in every slot. Every empty legendary cell from the frontier to the rift is filled: the Lurker Drive and the Corsair's Clock, the Girder Drive and the Chronarch Core, the Abyssheart, the Overseer's Core and the Abyssal Relay, the Elder Carapace, the Armada Runner and the Broodsense Crown. A relic can now be the greater version of one you already know — the Abyssheart gives back a third of your shield where the Voidheart gives a quarter.
• Mining joins the rarity ladder. It was the one slot outside it: a legendary laser was a common one with better numbers and a blank card. Lasers now roll cutting speed, ore yield, beam reach and a prospector's eye, and three named ones carry mechanics of their own — the Pearl Bore, the Surveyor's Lance and the Swarmcut Lance. Hot Cut heats the beam the longer you hold one rock, up to five seconds, and cools the moment you move; Rock Sense means a third of what you cut out never comes off the rock at all.
• Running lights. Glow was the one look the fleet could not wear, because a generated hull arrives with no emissive channel for it to colour. The lights are drawn on instead — patterned in the ship's own frame and scaled to its length, so every hull wears them at the same density whatever its size.

Eighteen ships, and a sun that is not a photograph

The hull ladder was the whole of what a pilot could fly: five tiers, refit by price and level, one rung at a time. Past the end of it there is now a ship — untiered, its own shape, bought with neither credits nor levels.

What's new

• Eighteen ships in the yard. Two for every faction and role, and none of them the same shape as another: a spinal cannon the ship is built around, a catamaran, a container spine, a flat wedge, a tug with its nacelles on outriggers, an asymmetric cargo drum, a ring hull, a vertical tower, a cluster of pods on a spine.
• A ship is laid, not bought. A rift boss drops the plans, a workshop teaches them, and a hangar lays the keel from forty null alloy, a hundred riftglass prism and eight of the faction's own core. It asks three things in the order you meet them, and the hull ladder is untouched — this comes after it.
• They are dark. Three passes on the first hull settled the register for the rest: painted faction livery read as a toy against a nebula, bare pale alloy read as a model on a stand, and near-black graphite with a cold cast, dense panelling and a few dim running lights reads as a ship that is actually out there.
• The sun stops being a photograph. Its corona breathes — scale and brightness on two clocks that never line up, each sector's on its own offset — and prominences stand off the limb, a few at a time, rising and falling rather than popping. The lens flare now fades as the sun leaves the middle of your view, the way a real one does.

A chart that points you somewhere

Reading a survey chart spent it, revealed the derelict, and then left you looking at the same empty sky you were looking at before. It now puts the thing it found under your cursor, which was always the point of reading one.

Loot that draws, and a derelict that explains itself

The markers over rare and better drops have been rendering as Unity's magenta error shader since 0.2.40. That is fixed, and so is the reason it could happen at all.

The gas hides you

Nebulae were scenery you flew through. They are cover now — and because everything that hunts you reads the same number, hiding in one works against all of it at once.

What's new

• Gas swallows your signature. Up to 40% of it at the heart of a cloud, tapering to nothing at the rim. That one number is what ambushes roll against, what sets a mob's aggro range, what decides whether a warp lane is interdicted, whether customs pulls you over, who a strike raid picks, and what the quiet hears — so a nebula is now the smuggler's road.
• The HUD tells you when you are in it. The signature readout drops as you enter gas and says in cover, so you can see the thing working rather than guess at it.
• Cover is not the same answer as running quiet. Nebula cover is deliberately kept out of the quiet's floor: a full hold that gets you caught in the open still gets you caught in the open, but the gas is a second way through. The abyss has two answers now instead of one.

Every drop says what it is

Four different things could be floating in front of you — a cargo pod, a kill's wreck, a cache, a vault drop — and all four drew the same sixteen-metre asteroid. The only way to know what you were about to open was to open it.

What's new

• A drop looks like what it is. A cargo pod is a hauler's containers. A kill leaves a torn hull section. A cache is one of seven rocks, picked from the drop itself so the same one always looks the same. A site vault drop is the vault drum.
• Rare and better wear a marker, hovering above the drop in its rarity colour, so something worth the detour reads from a distance. Below rare is unchanged.
• Grant faction standing from the admin panel. F10 → Grant will now move a pilot's standing with any faction, alongside credits, XP and items.

Contested territory

Influence used to be one number per sector per faction, and because the three numbers were independent, nothing you did for one faction ever cost another a thing — you could be Exalted with all three at once and the map would never notice. The frontier is ground now, and there is only so much of it.

What's new

• Eighteen places that belong to somebody. Six holdings in each contested sector, every one of them somewhere already on the map: the outpost, the two belts, the Wreck line, the Dead zone, and the gate home. Each frontier sector's gate leads to a different faction's space — Halcyon to Sol, Cinder to Kharon, Pale to Lyra — so every faction has one door it cares about more than the others do.
• The map is the scoreboard. The galaxy map leads with the war: one bar split into three runs, one per faction. Because every holding belongs to someone the runs always fill it exactly, and the bar can never grow. The only way up is to take ground off a rival. Every contested sector wears its six places as pips in their holders' colours.
• The outpost becomes theirs. Holding a sector used to be a flag on a map — the outpost never changed, whoever owned the ground outside. Dock at one now and you are in its holder's hall: their layout, their voice on the PA, their market stock. The name over the door stays, because that is the character of the place.
• The war pays, and the leader does not also collect. Access is a ladder against what a faction holds of the whole frontier: a quarter of the map and their counters pay 5% over the book, two fifths 8%, over half 12%. It is held, not earned — drop under a line and it is gone until the ground comes back. A faction holding one sector out of eighteen still gets the flat holder's bonus, because holding something should never be worth nothing.

Something to do out there, and a hall you can see across

The far side shipped with three sectors, a tier of gear and a set of bosses, and nothing to do with any of it but grind. Each of those sectors now has a hunt, ending in something you cannot buy.

What's new

• A hunt in every far-side sector. Cull what wanders, kill the elite leading them, then kill the boss. The Cradle's ends on the Sovereign Husk, the Choir's on the First Voice, the Bloom's on the Worldseed.
• A mission can pay in something other than money. A reward could be credits, XP and a hull, so a chain could only ever end in a bigger wage — and every mission in the game already pays a wage. A reward can now name an item, and each hunt ends in that sector's own blueprint: the ossuary plate off the Sovereign, the choral lattice off the First Voice, the bloomskin off the Worldseed.
• Looting looks like something. Both loot effects resolved to the stand-ins this project draws when a pack is missing, so nothing ever reported them absent and the one moment you are actually being paid looked like the fallback path. There are two effects now: a green flare as the cargo comes across, and the pack's own junk scattering when a wreck has nothing left in it.

The tide, and everything you were carrying that nothing tracked

Take a sealed case off a warden and the game told you what it was exactly once, on a card that died with the event. Jump out of the sector and it closed in silence, leaving you carrying contraband that customs will seize, that no ordinary market will touch, and that twelve stations would happily buy — with nothing on screen anywhere saying so.

What's new

• The far side has a tide, and it is the breach's opposite. Everything past the rift inherited the ambient events and lost the only escalating one, so the endgame got quieter the deeper you went. A tear pays for every wave you hold and banks it the moment you decide you have had enough, so the only way to lose it is to be greedy. A tide has a count and a finish: it pays when the last wave breaks and pays nothing at all if you walk away first, so the only way to lose it is to stop. Greed is the virtue on one side of the rift and the vice on the other. Ignoring it still costs nothing.
• The board tracks what you are carrying, not just what you signed up for. Six things used to go invisible the moment you left a sector or closed a window — a sealed case, a seal cipher, a lead chart pointing at a derelict two sectors away, a floating cache nobody looted, a half-hacked derelict, a convoy stake. They have a section now, and every row says what it is, why you have it and where it goes. Contraband names the fences that will buy it. A lead names its sector and carries a course. A cipher says it opens a vault at a derelict, which is the one thing it does and the one thing nothing in the game had ever mentioned. Docked at a fence, the contraband row stops listing eleven other places and says it sells here.
• An admin can hand out gear from the catalogue. The staff panel could already grant credits, XP and items, but naming the item meant typing its id. F10 now has a Grant tab that filters the catalogue by category, tech tier, rarity, drop family and name, with a toggle for named and set pieces.

Four halls instead of one room with four names

Every station in the game was the same room. The four interior layouts were byte-identical apart from a key and a name — the same 24×18 m hall, the same six counters at the same six coordinates, the same sixteen lamps at the same sixteen heights, down to the last of 233 pieces. Docking at a Concord capital and docking at a rift outpost were the same experience with different words on the signs, so arriving somewhere new felt like arriving nowhere.

What's new

• The four factions build differently. Concord keeps the hall the game shipped with, unchanged to the centimetre, and it is the shape the others are read against. The Ascendancy build a spine — half as wide, a third longer, lit the warm colour of their hulls. An outpost is the smallest room that still holds six counters, lit hard and white because nobody out there is paying for mood. The Veil do not build in straight lines at all: their hall is the widest of the four, and its counters stand in a crescent around where you arrive rather than in two files down two walls.
• A hall you can read at a glance. Every service was the same 0.6 m white disc with a floating name, and the name changes per faction — the counter that sells things is the Quartermaster here, the Trade Post there, the Exchange somewhere else. Six counters read as six copies of one thing, and the only way to learn which was which was to walk to each and press E. Each service now has one colour and one glyph used everywhere it appears: a ring of its colour painted on the deck, its glyph hanging over it, its name drawn in the same colour, and its entry in the hall index to match. The station's own name for the counter stays, because that is the character of the place; the colour carries the meaning.
• A deck that is lived in. Reactive floor rings, deck crew, and a lane to walk.

The workshop says it exists

The bench has the deepest rules in the game and almost nobody found it. It had no key, no name a pilot would recognise — the Repair Bay at seventeen stations and the Engineer's Bay at three — and nothing anywhere else in the interface mentioned it. The words craft, workshop and blueprint appeared nowhere a pilot would see.

What's new

• Every window points at the bench. A rare or better piece in your hold says what the workshop would do with it and how far it would carry it: "Bench: temper to Q78, retune an effect, ascend to tech 5". A loot card says the same the moment the piece drops, which is when you are actually looking at gear. A shelf piece in the exchange says "You can build this: 4 steel, 2 raider cores" when you know the plans and can reach the rank, and names the rank when you cannot.
• Blueprints stop being interchangeable. All 109 carried the same description, so a duplicate looked exactly like a discovery and the only way to tell was to open one and be told you already knew it. A blueprint now names what it makes and what it takes — in the hold, in the loot window, on a shelf and at the bench.
• The Workshop has a name and a key. It is called the Workshop at all twenty stations now, and it opens with C. It was the only window in the game with no key at all.
• The guided start finally mentions crafting. A seventeenth beat, which fires when you queue a craft rather than when you collect it, so it does not make you wait out a build.

The far side

The rift was the end of the map. It is now the way through. Three sectors lie past it at combat levels 70 to 85, entered from the three deepest rift sectors and joined to each other, so the deepest thing you have done becomes the door to the next thing.

What's new

• Three countries past the rift. The Cradle of Husks is hulls that rebuilt themselves out of the ships that came before them. The Choir is a crystal lattice that grew until it was one instrument. Bloomfall is one organism, spreading, with a sector's head start. They are lawless — no guardians anywhere — and each has its own sky, painted for the place it is.
• Three new families to fight. Husk, choir and bloom, two packs apiece with an elite and a raid boss, sized for levels nobody had reached. Your own level cap has not moved: it is still 50, and past it only gear and company close the gap. A level 85 boss carries about two and a third times the health the top of the rift did.
• Tech 7. Sixty-two pieces — the full roster of guns, shields, engines, reactors, devices and mining heads, three reforge cores, three materials, three survey charts, three boss sets and fifteen named legends. Twenty-nine of the bases are blueprint-only, built out of the far side's own voidglass set in the rift's prisms.
• Fifteen new uniques. Nine are numbers: a wall of shield that is slow to come back, a hull that turns like a smaller ship, seventy power bought with a fifth of your shield regeneration. Six change how a fight goes — the Standing Wave pays for keeping a rhythm on one hull, the Harmonic Ward learns the kind of the last hit and refuses it, Thornmail answers what reached the hull rather than what was fired, the Scrapfeeder takes its repairs off the thing it killed, and Sporeburst spends the kill instead of the shot, opening the target into a cloud that keeps working.
• One more rung on the ascension ladder. A tech 6 favourite can be carried onto the far side, for materials found only there.

A cockpit that says when

The loud parts of the HUD get quieter, and the abilities learn to tell you something they never could: whether pressing one right now would be worth it.

What's new

• An ability slot says what it would catch. Twelve actives have a radius, and the slot now counts the hostiles standing inside it. The frame warms with the count — quiet at none, thin below the threshold, ready at it, amber at twice it. The threshold comes off the effect itself, because a nova divided among one ship is wasted while a burn applied to one ship is worth spending. A slot you could not press anyway — recharging, drained, unlearned — goes grey instead, since telling you about a shot you cannot take is noise.
• The reactor is a gauge again. It decides whether your next ability fires at all and it was drawn three pixels tall under the speed. It is nine tall now with an edge, cut into twelve cells, so a glance answers how many more casts you have rather than roughly how full you are.

A counter with departments

The exchange was one long list with everything on it at once, and an item's card ran its stats and its rolled effects together in a single line. Both are sorted into parts you can read.

What's new

• The exchange has departments. Goods, Equipment, News and Wanted are tabs now, with Buy and Sell a toggle inside the two where a direction means anything. It opens on the first tab that actually has rows, so you are never looking at an empty counter.
• An item's card divides. The detail line is sentence-cased and no longer carries the rolled effects; STATS and EFFECTS are captioned blocks of their own, so what the piece is and what was rolled onto it are two separate readings.
• A vault that looks like one. Derelict sites get a purpose-built drum with a violet state band, mounted on the wreck, instead of borrowing another prop's shape.

The radar sweeps

0.2.30 rebuilt the tactical map. Two things about it were wrong the moment it shipped, and a wreck field could still fill it with a clump of squares nobody could read. This is the map as it was meant to arrive.

What's new

• A scanning sweep. A wedge turns about your ship once every four and a half seconds.
• Salvage is listed rather than plotted. A graveyard drops six or seven wrecks within a few hundred metres, which at any useful zoom piled into a clump that could be neither read nor clicked apart. The list already carries every one of them named, sorted by distance and coloured by what it holds — twenty-four wrecks in Sol Reach are two rows there and were two dozen overlapping squares on the plot. Selecting a row still places it on the map, so the map answers the moment you ask.

An instrument, not a sticker sheet

The tactical map was six saturated colours, a painted icon and a question badge on every one of sixty-six contacts, twenty names over the field, and a square grid behind it all. Everything shouted and nothing stood out. It is one instrument now.

What's new

• The sector map reads as a sensor return. Nine geometric marks where the shape tells you what a thing is, one hue throughout with amber kept for you and for whatever is shooting at you, range rings and bearing spokes drawn on your own hull instead of a grid behind everything, and two names on screen rather than twenty.
• The galaxy chart matches it. The seventeen red level lines are gone and the deep sectors fade into the dark, so the shape of where you have been is legible at a glance.
• A Crew Berth in every station. The crew window and the hiring board were already in the game, but the only way to either was the U key and nothing ever mentioned it, so most pilots never found out crew exist. Now there is a terminal to walk up to.
• An analysis announces itself, win or lose. Taking a piece apart in the workshop gives you a card naming either the recipe you learned or the piece you destroyed, and the odds you beat or lost to.

The gas you were promised

0.2.28 said you could fly into the nebulae. You could, technically — the gas was there, at a density that covered about one fortieth of an asteroid belt crossing, which is to say you could not see it. This release is the one where it is actually there.

What's new

• Gas you can see. Nebula clouds and belt dust are thick enough to fly through now, and a belt's dust reaches deep enough that you are inside it rather than looking out through the thin edge of a disc.

Gas you can fly into

Last release gave every sector its own palette and a landmark on its sky. Those landmarks were the same handful of spheres in different colours, the nebulae were a painted backdrop you flew past rather than through, and the asteroid belts were the same grey rocks everywhere. Now the gas is a place, and no two hubs look up at the same world.

What's new

• Nebula clouds are volumetric. You fly into them rather than past them: stars dim as the gas thickens ahead of you, and the sun scatters through it. Asteroid belts carry thin dust of their own. There's a new Settings toggle, Volumetric gas and dust, on by default.
• Every landmark is its own world. Sol's Meridian is a ringed, banded gas giant. Kharon's Cleft is a cracked crust. The Singularity's Accretion is a machine world. Hollow's Crown is a dark port world. No two hubs share a landmark any more.
• The rocks belong to their sector. Asteroid fields and rubble belts are drawn in each sector's own palette — grey and white in Sol, brown and orange over Kharon, electric violet in Duskfall, lava rock in the Rift.

Facing the right way

Last release gave every family its own hull. Most of them flew sideways. This one turns them round, and cleans up three things that were stepping, spilling or hiding.

What's new

• A cleaner sun. The corona was an 8-bit gradient stretched hundreds of pixels wide, so all 255 of its steps showed as rings around the star. It is now a half-float texture with 65,000 levels across the fall-off, and the camera dithers its last step — which also takes the banding out of nebula edges and the haze on a far hull.
• The flare reads as a lens. Its ghosts sit on the line from the sun to the centre of the screen, so with the sun dead centre they all landed on it and nothing said "lens". They are stronger now, with an anamorphic streak across the star that shows at any framing.

Space you can read at a distance

Seventeen sectors wore seven looks, so Kharon Drift and Halcyon Reach were the same place under a different name. Ninety-two mobs wore forty-two models, and ten of them wore the same Ascendancy warrior, so a family had no shape until its name resolved. Everything far away was a white speck. This release is about what you can tell from across a sector.

What's new

• Every sector has a face. All seventeen now have their own dust colour and thickness, gas, accent and grading — no two share a palette — and each has a landmark: one planet-class body 24–32 km out and 10–15 degrees across, placed on the emptiest bearing and held clear of every warp lane, field, spawn and gate. The Cleft over Kharon. Mirror Moon in the Pale Shallows. The Crown in Hollow Crown. Graveyard Moon over the Armada.
• A far hull is a shape, not a dot. Past 1.5 km a hull holds a minimum silhouette on screen, so a 22 m scout at 8 km reads as a scout instead of the same twinkle as a cruiser. The scaling lives on a wrapper the colliders and weapon ranges never see, so nothing you aim at moved.
• Distance you can see. A haze pass in each sector's own colour, clear at 1.5 km and 60% of the way in by 10 km, on hulls and rubble only — the star shell and the sun stay sharp behind it.
• The sun casts. Soft shadows on hulls, off in Settings → Graphics → Sun shadows if you'd rather have the frames.
• The sky in two layers. The six skies were re-rendered quadrant by quadrant and reassembled at 8192×4096, and sharp things now hang on the shell in front of the gas — a galaxy band, a nebula knot, a star cluster, the rift's tear, an ember — one to three per sector, sliding against the gas as you travel.
• Every family has a silhouette. Eleven new models: the raiders' own scout, marauder, warlord and admiral; the Armada's dreadcaptain and flagship; and creatures of their own for the void wraith and harrower, the leviathans, the hive praetorian and the reef broodmother. Tiers of a family wear one hull in different paint — the corsair is the scout in navy, the captain the marauder in crimson, the Armada's line black.
• Creatures breathe. A creature no longer wears the red stance rim. It glows in its family's bioluminescence — violet voidborn, teal reef, amber hive — breathing on a period taken from the creature itself, so no two are in step.
• Aces drop like the bosses they are. A named target on the Bounty Board with six times the hull of an ordinary ship was rolling an ordinary ship's loot table. Now: 12% named against 1%, 30% blueprint against 5%, the boss quality floor, and the bad-luck counter that guarantees a named piece after ten dry kills of a family — which aces were shut out of entirely.
• Event pay climbs with the sector. Escort pay was 90 credits a level, flat, while a kill's credits triple every ten levels — an escort was thirteen kills' worth at home and less than one in the Armada Graveyard. Escorts, distress rescues and the witness's cut are now all measured in kills at the sector's level, and the stakes you can put up scale the same way.

The sentinels stop wearing your ships

The rift's hardest line — the four Sentinels standing at the end of the game — flew hulls you can buy at a station. The Ascendant, the last thing in the line at level 70, was a starter Concord warrior scaled up seven times. The most dangerous enemies in the game looked like the ship you were handed in the tutorial.

What's new

• Four hulls that belong to nobody you've met. The Arbiter, Lancer, Executor and Ascendant are built as one family and deliberately against the house style: bone-white ceramic over an exposed dark instrument frame, gold-white seams, rows of small sensor apertures, severe symmetry. Everything else out there is dark metal and cyan, which is the point.
• The silhouette is the warning. The three lesser sentinels now fly the hull of the thing they teach — the Watcher wears the Arbiter's, the Prime the Executor's, the Overseer the Ascendant's. Learn to get behind cover from a Watcher at 32 and you'll recognise what's coming when the Arbiter does it to you at 64.

Attacks you can see coming

Until now nothing in this game was telegraphed and nothing was dodged — every hit landed the moment it was fired, so the only thing a level 70 fight could do that a level 7 fight couldn't was hurt more. This release gives the dangerous things a wind-up, and gives you something to do about it.

What's new

• A bar over the ship that is about to do something. Drawn in the world above the caster rather than on the edge of your screen, because the answer is almost always a manoeuvre relative to that specific hostile and a HUD bar can't tell you which of four it is. Red means shooting it will stop it. Amber means shooting it won't, and moving will.
• The siege shell. Everything else in the game resolves against a ship. This resolves against a place — the spot you were standing on when it was fired, marked for the whole of its flight, hitting whatever is there when it arrives. Stand still and it lands on you. Step out of the circle and it doesn't.
• Fifteen new things the late game does to you, and a teacher for each of them twenty or thirty levels earlier, so none of it arrives as a wall at 50.
• Things that lie in wait. A lurker isn't on your scope at all: no contact, no bracket, nothing to lock. It is deliberately not a cloak — there's no state on it to dispel — so the counter is a scanner sweep rather than an ability. Sweep and you find it without giving it the opener. Fly in blind and you don't. The Elder Reef Stalker waits at 1.2 km, the Abyssal Maw at 800 m.
• Afflictions that belong to a place instead of a duel. Everything inside the Devourer's event horizon has its warp held down, whoever it happens to be fighting — including whoever was just passing through.
• Drained now takes the reactor too. It only ever meant shields, which made it the mildest thing in the catalogue. An ion wash that leaves every button on your hotbar grey is a different proposition.
• The Executor passes a verdict instead of deleting you. Below 30% hull it opens a ten-second interruptible bar that heals a third of its hull and calls in two Lancers. Failing it makes the fight longer, not over. The Hunter Ace at 36 teaches the same interrupt on a six-second bar.

Eight things that ask you a question

Until now, almost everything that interrupted you in space wanted to be shot or scooped. These eight want an answer — and doing nothing is one of them.

What's new

• The witness. Raiders cutting into a live hauler offer you a cut to keep flying. Drive them off and the hauler's people pay in credits, XP and standing; take the cut and the raiders pay what they promised, and a faction loses a ship with a witness on the scope.
• The strike. A seam of rich ore opens in a deep sector with a finite pool in it, and NPC prospector crews are already draining it whether you're there or not. Fill your hold and run it home loud, or take a light load and stay quiet — raiders roll against the noise you're actually making.
• The quiet. The abyss stops talking and something very large moves through it, hunting the loudest thing it can hear. There's nothing to lock and nothing to shoot. Cut your engines and it can't hear you; stay loud and survive, and it sheds something from ten levels above the sector.
• The favour. A warden patrol with a sealed case and no paperwork. Coming alongside is the yes. The case is contraband, so a fence will buy it and a customs scan will find it.
• The stranded. A prospector drifting dark with a full hold and no reactor, who needs one shield cell. Use a cell while alongside them and it passes across instead. They pay out of the hold they were carrying.
• The wake. Something enormous came through recently and the trail is still warm — the first thing in the game with a bearing, drawn as a line of cold violet motes. It cools faster the further you get, and it always ends on something.
• The claim. A fresh wreck field with a salvage crew already cutting it, who would rather be paid than raced. They take a wreck every thirty seconds while you think about it.
• The breach. The Rift's own event, and the first one you end by choosing to stop. Pay compounds per wave held, everything is banked the moment you leave, and the only way to lose it is to be greedy.
• Four new kinds of mission. Every mission used to count something — kill 3, mine 6, scan 2. Now: escort a convoy to its dock, run a delivery without being scanned by customs, hold a nav point clear for a stretch, and assay a set of particular rocks in a field.
• A mark over anyone holding something of yours. An amber diamond hangs over the station's mission NPC when a job can be turned in there, and over the vendor when cargo in your hold can be delivered.

Never alone by accident

If the server is away or your game is out of date, the game now says so instead of quietly letting you into an empty world. And the interface gets the last round of its polish pass.

What's new

• A server that's away says so. Entering the game while the server is restarting now keeps you on the pilots screen with a clear message, instead of loading a station with nobody in it.
• An out-of-date game goes to the update screen. If the server needs a newer version when you try to enter, you're taken straight to the update message and the download.
• Patience right after an update. The game now keeps trying to connect for about fifteen seconds, which covers the moment just after a restart when the server is still starting up — so you simply get in.
• A lost connection is honest. If the connection drops while you're playing, you return to the pilots screen and are told your pilot is safe as of the last save, rather than carrying on alone with nothing being recorded.
• Columns that line up. List headings now sit exactly over their own numbers, and section headings across the exchange match the rest of the game.
• Motion that means something. A number that changes briefly highlights, the hotbar slot you fired gives a small kick, and status lines go quiet after six seconds.
• Tidier windows. Window heads show readouts rather than controls, with one clear close button; lists gain a hairline scroll bar; and every panel keeps a consistent margin from the screen edge.

Updates that say so

When the server restarts for a new version, the game now tells you an update is needed instead of quietly dropping you back at your pilots.

What's new

• The countdown names the update. When a restart brings a new version, the maintenance banner says which one and that you'll need to update before coming back.
• Straight to Get update. At the end of the countdown an outdated game goes to the update screen, with the download one click away, instead of trying to reconnect first.
• Found out while idle. Sitting on the sign-in or pilots screen, the game now checks once a minute whether a newer version is required, so the message appears on its own.

A lighter connection and the glass pass

The game now uses a fraction of the bandwidth it did, so busy sectors stay smooth and your connection isn't flooded — and every window in the game has been rebuilt to be easier to read.

What's new

• A much lighter connection. The server no longer sends every ship to every pilot ten times a second. In a sector of a hundred pilots the game now uses about a seventh of the data it did, and server ticks take a fifth of the time, so crowded space stays responsive. Your own ship, your target and anything attacking you always update at full rate.
• Windows you can read. Windows are opaque and the world dims behind them, so text no longer fights the hangar lights. Section heads are dividers instead of looking like another row, status lines sit in a footer strip, numbers line up in columns, and long lists fade at the edges instead of cutting a row in half.
• Windows that arrive. Windows fade up into place instead of popping in, and eleven lists now say what would be there when they're empty.
• Somewhere pays more. The exchange names a nearby station paying noticeably better for what you're selling — only when it's worth the trip.
• Readings on their arcs. Shield and hull numbers sit at the end of their own gauge arcs, in the arc's colour, instead of in a row along the bottom of the screen.
• A calmer screen. Event cards sit in a band near the top instead of across the middle of the view, contacts group into hostiles, loot, places and traffic, and the throttle is a proper gauge.
• A search area you can see past. A site ping's answer is drawn as its edge — a ring from outside, a horizon from inside — instead of a wall of violet haze across the screen. It also shows on the radar and the sector map.

The Hunt, and the panels that were missing

A chain of five aces to hunt each week, derelict courses that run three to five wrecks deep — and the Bounty Board and convoy trackers, which shipped builds turned out never to have had at all.

What's new

• The Hunt. Five linked aces a week, the same chain for every pilot, leading from the frontier out to the Rift. Only the next link is loose; killing it names the next one for the whole galaxy. Each is tougher, richer and deeper than the last, no contract is needed, the bounty pays whoever brings it down, and the final link leaves a named legendary for every pilot who fought it.
• Expeditions. A derelict's vault now sometimes yields a course instead of cargo: three to five wrecks, each a gate hop or two beyond the last, each guarded by a harder twist than the one before — sealed, then a live reactor, a decaying orbit, rivals — and the last vault hands over a blueprint at that sector's tech. A course goes cold after two days.

Moderators, reports and workshop orders

The galaxy gets a staff: moderators to keep it civil and a way for anyone to report a problem. Crafters get work orders to fill, and the flying tutorial becomes a proper drill.

What's new

• Report a pilot. Every pilot card has a Report button (or type /report). Your report reaches the moderators with the public chat from around that moment, so they can judge it fairly.
• Moderators and a [GM] tag. Staff are marked in chat with a tag players can't fake. They can mute, remove or ban an account, or require an offensive name to be changed — and you're always told the reason and for how long.
• Announcements. Staff notices appear in the banner at the top of the screen, separate from the restart countdown.
• Workshop work orders. Each workshop posts two orders a rotation: built arms when a siege is due, refined ore in a glut, otherwise gear of its tier. Deliveries pay a bonus over the piece, Trade XP and standing, and count as a frontier deed.
• A maker's mark. Crafted gear carries its maker's name in tooltips and listings, and keeps it through tempering and retuning. Gear orders take only marked pieces.
• A flight drill. The first flying lesson is a six-part drill — throttle, turn, look, zoom, stop, align — with live key prompts and voiced lines.
• Fittable consumables. The fitting screen shows the consumable racks, so shield cells and the rest can be fitted there.
• Nebulae are nav points. Every nebula can be warped to, and the tutorial's signal lesson points you at the cloud hiding a derelict.
• Customs you can watch arrive. Cutters warp in from ahead in a line and drop out alongside, with an on-screen marker and range while they're inbound.

The front door

The three screens before you fly — sign-in, your pilots, and character creation — are now part of the world instead of menus in front of it.

What's new

• A login in Sol Reach. The sign-in screen sits in the home sector: its sky and sun, the hub station down the lane, ships flying the docking lane with engines lit, and a slow approach through the stars. Signing in throws the view to warp.
• Your pilot by their ship. The pilots screen shows your pilot on a bay deck with their hull standing behind them, and Enter game walks them towards it before the scene changes.
• A stage in faction light. Character creation and the pilots screen share a plated deck under the same sky, lit in your faction's colour, with a scan of light on every change.
• Both looks at the faction step. Creation stands a second pilot of the other gender beside the one you're building, so you see both before you commit.
• Password rules you can follow. Register and reset now state the real rules — at least 10 characters with upper and lower case letters and a number — and name the one you missed.
• Interdictions that match the sector. A picket that drags you out of warp brings raiders from that sector's own roster, not the same starter scout everywhere.
• A calmer run. Pilots' arms swing smoothly through their range instead of snapping between the ends.

Updates without the drop

Server updates no longer throw you out: the game leaves on its own when the countdown ends, waits for the server to come back, and signs you straight back in. Under the hood, the client and server got a hardening pass so busy nights and restarts behave.

What's new

• Graceful updates. When a maintenance countdown reaches zero, the game leaves the zone cleanly, shows a "server updating" screen that counts the wait, and reconnects you to your pilots as soon as the server answers. If the new server needs a newer build, it says so right there.
• Rift skies of their own. Each Rift sector has its own painted sky, and the Singularity gets one too.
• A sky that moves. Gas drifts, stars twinkle, and the near stars slide past in warp.
• A way out of every screen. Exit game from the sign-in screen, the pilots screen, character creation and both Escape menus; Back from the first step of creation returns to your pilots.
• Station exteriors. Four epic station exteriors with lit windows.
• Cosmetics window. The Modules tab is out from under the preview, and the With / Without switch reads the way it works.
• Map clicks go where you mean. Ships no longer catch a click meant for the waypoint under them; a switch makes them clickable when you want that.

Faces, bounties and a sharper first hour

Your pilot has a face now, five named outlaws are loose to hunt, and the whole interface has been tightened — along with the first fifteen minutes of the game.

What's new

• Pilot portraits. Your pilot's own face appears on the HUD plate, on pilot cards, on group rows and on the character-select screen, rendered from the character you made.
• Twelve female pilots. Four per faction at character creation, each with their own look, and a clearer Male/Female choice.
• Bounty hunting. Five named outlaw aces are loose each six-hour rotation, one for every level range, each flying a tougher refit of a ship from its sector. Sightings narrow a search sphere until you find them; everyone who fought the kill is paid, and contract holders get half again. Press B for the Bounty Board.
• A sleeker interface. Every window is drawn at a calmer size, cards grow to fit their text, hairlines are finer, and the group frame makes room for the contacts list.
• The galaxy card. Selecting a sector on the galaxy map shows whose space it is, its security, level band, stations, gates, boss, and the intel: who holds the frontier, shortages and gluts, your leads, and any ace at large.
• Sound and alarm. Windows have their own open and close sounds, and a hull alarm warbles under a third hull, quickening as you near death.
• A first hour that teaches. The tracker now tells you how, not just what, with the actual keys ("W throttle up · A / D turn"). The warp beat points you at the raider picket, a first-sortie pilot always meets a raider, and customs no longer pull over a brand-new pilot mid-fight.

A crew, a convoy, and a frontier worth fighting for

Hire a crew who learn on the job, escort convoys through raider ambushes, and fight for the frontier sector by sector — plus real group invites and whispers between pilots.

What's new

• Hire a crew. Up to four hands — gunner, engineer, navigator and quartermaster — hired from a station's crew board. Each has a trait, a fee and perks that grow: damage and cooldowns, shields and hull, warp speed and scan range, cargo and trade margin. They earn half the XP you do in their line, so they level up as you fly.
• The Crew window (U) and the intercom. Portraits, roles and what each hand brings, and your crew speaking up at the moments that belong to them: guns hot, a buckling hull, a warp, a sale.
• Convoy escorts. Convoys of haulers run the lanes carrying what a station is short of, and raiders ambush them along the way. Fight off the ambushes and you're paid credits, XP and standing by how much of the convoy got through. Just turning up at the dock pays nothing.
• Back a convoy. Not a fighter? Stake 500 to 5,000 credits on a convoy early in its run and take 1.6x if it all arrives — even if you log off before it docks.
• The contested frontier. Kills, escorts, vaults, rescues, missions and trade all count as influence for your faction in a frontier sector. A clear lead takes the sector; the holder's wardens fly its lanes and its pilots are paid better at the outpost.
• Frontier sieges. When a sector is close to changing hands, both factions' battle groups warp in around a beacon. Hold the ring to drive the meter, and everyone who fought is paid.
• Flying together. Group invites now arrive instantly with Accept or Decline, targeting another pilot offers Invite, Whisper and Fly to, and /w, /tell and /r whisper across zones.
• The galaxy chart shows the money. Each star carries its biggest shortage or glut, and marks the sectors your leads point to.
• Running in stations. Running is now the default indoors, with Shift to walk.

Smugglers, the law, and a living market

The trader gets a game of their own: contraband to run, customs cutters to dodge, shortages that move prices, and a record with the law you can pay off. Explorers get charts worth selling and derelicts that fight back.

What's new

• Contraband and fences. Four illicit goods a fence sells cheap out in the deep and the core pays well for. They're bulky, so a run worth making needs a trader's hold, and honest stations refuse them outright.
• Customs cutters. The law pulls ships over as they drop out of warp in policed space, judged by how loud your ship looks rather than what's actually aboard. Hold still and they take the illegal cargo and fine you; burn away and it's a crime that gets worse the longer you run.
• A record with the law. One wanted ladder per faction — Clean, Suspicious, Flagged, Wanted, Hunted, Kill on sight — with a badge showing where you stand. Each rung brings someone new after you, and it follows you through gates and across sessions.
• Doors that close, and a way back. A bad record gets you refused docking and paid less at the counter. Wait it out, or pay a fine at a station to clear it.
• Shortages and market news. Destroy a hauler and its destination goes short of what it carried, which moves prices for hours. Sixteen stories — fires, outbreaks, booms, gluts — rotate through the galaxy, and the exchange shows the shock, the headline and how long it lasts.
• A news board at the counter. The Buy screen opens with this station's stories and the biggest elsewhere, each saying what to do about it: sell now, carry it somewhere, or buy cheap here.
• Survey charts. Find a hidden site and you're given a chart of that sector, signed by you. Sell it, trade it or hand it over — and when a vault it led to opens, you take a cut, online or not.
• Leads. An opened vault can point you at a wreck a jump or two away, one that always carries something extra.
• Derelicts that fight back. Most sites now carry a twist: a sealed vault needing an explorer or a cipher, a reactor that goes critical if you fight near it, an orbit decaying in five minutes, or a rival salvage crew racing you to the nodes.
• Hauls worth defending. A full hold makes you loud and slow, and outside high security a loud ship can be snared out of warp by a picket waiting on the lane.
• Engine Mounts tool. Engine flames are now placed by hand on each hull's real nozzles.

Faster explorers

Tier 5 explorer hulls get more firepower and speed, and the fitting screen is easier to use on the bigger hulls.

What's new

• Tier 5 explorers. Every faction's top explorer hull now carries five weapons and four devices and flies about 8% faster.

Chapter Two and a deadlier Rift

The guided story continues past the first sortie, the Rift's enemies finally hit like endgame enemies, and bosses, warps and derelicts all get the moments they deserve.

What's new

• Onboarding Chapter 2. Your handler picks up where the first sortie left off: fit shield cells, mine, use a consumable, track down and hack a derelict, and train your first ability. Pilots already past the first sortie are offered it once.
• Handler hints. A one-time word from your faction's handler the first time something new happens: a full hold, your first death, going wanted, meeting a boss, entering the Rift.
• A Rift that threatens. From level 30 up, enemies hit hard enough to destroy an unprepared pilot of their level and fly fast enough that kiting takes a good engine.
• Boss moments. Raid bosses hold a shield while their wave lives and shatter it when it falls, enraged bosses burn red, and world bosses warp in and out.
• Warps you can see. The warp tunnel opens where your ship stands and wraps around it for the whole jump.
• Warp stops short of open space. Warping to nav points, planets, fields and derelicts drops you about 3 km out; gates, stations and wrecks still bring you alongside.
• One damage number per target. A running total with the newest hit beside it, and hits on your own ship show what your defences blocked.
• Effects for everything. Consumables, set-item procs, site guardians bursting from hacked nodes, derelicts appearing and breaking up, and a search area that shrinks with each ping.
• Better crafting drops. Ingredients far below an enemy's tier now drop as a material of its own tier.
• No refitting down. The hull yard no longer lets you drop to a lower hull tier.
• New account emails. Signup and password-reset emails are clear, branded messages from no-reply@calibrated.info, and a reset email now says it's a reset.

Derelicts and ship cosmetics

Hunt hidden derelicts in the nebulae for vaults of loot, dress your ship the way you want, and watch every warp, dock and hit land with new effects.

What's new

• Exploration sites. Derelict warships, arks and crystal spires hide in each sector's nebula clouds. Follow the signal, ping to narrow the search, hack the nodes while creatures wake around you, and open the vault for gear, Explore XP and a chance at a cosmetic.
• Ship cosmetics. 36 to start: paint schemes, engine trails, hull finishes like chrome, carbon weave and void lacquer, and emblems and stripes. Buy them at stations, earn them from bosses and raid bosses, or find them in derelict vaults. Everyone else sees what you wear.
• The Cosmetics window. Open it from the fitting screen to preview each look on your ship, turning in its own light, before you wear or buy it.
• Warps and docking with presence. Warp jumps flash in and out (red when an ambush drops on you), and docking and launching play at the bay.
• Weapons that look like what they are. Rail guns fire an instant streak, arc weapons throw forked lightning, the mining laser is a green plasma beam, torpedoes hit with a big blast and seekers with their own.
• Ships that burn. Hull hits throw flames by damage type, and a ship under a quarter hull keeps burning until it dies or is repaired.
• Ability effects. Shields, repair, boost, overcharge and cloak each play their own effect on the hull.
• Endgame mobs drop endgame gear. Drops now come from the enemy's own tech tier or the one below, instead of evenly from every tier.

New creatures, new arsenal

Space creatures replace the dragons, sixty new items arrive, combat looks and sounds far better, and every skill point finally has somewhere to go.

What's new

• Space creatures. Fourteen new creatures replace every dragon and legged model: void eels, tendril horrors, reef polyps, crystal stalkers, swarm mites, and new raid-scale forms for the Worldmother, the Devourer, the Hive Empress and the Void Titan.
• Sixty new items. Gear filling every tech band in every slot, new consumables like hull patches, warp beacons and ore charges, ten legendaries with abilities no other piece has, and five mid-tier boss sets.
• Capstones and mastery. Each skill tree gains a capstone row, such as Deadeye, Slipstream or Freighter, and a Mastery that takes every point after the tree is maxed, without end.
• Combat that looks the part. New weapon, impact and explosion effects, tracers on slug guns, and ship deaths scaled by class with shockwaves for bosses.
• Abilities with their own look and sound. Shield bubbles, repair nanites, engine boosts, overcharge arcs, and a cloak that fades your ship to a faint outline.
• Wrecks that break. Destroyed ships split in two and drift apart with fire and sparks along the break; loot shows as a rarity beacon.
• Hit feedback. The screen edges flash blue when your shield takes a hit and red on the hull, and pulse while your hull is low.
• Bosses on the move. World bosses now roam their whole sector instead of sitting in one spot.
• Power matters for engines. Engines draw reactor power; an over-budget ship still flies, but slower.
• Vaults per station. What you store at a station stays at that station, and the vault window tells you what you've left elsewhere. Anything already in your vault can be collected once from any station.
• Professions are for life. The hull yard only offers hulls for your own profession.

Compare at a glance

Gear is easier to judge at a glance, and exploring dangerous space pays what it should.

What's new

• Side-by-side compare with Alt. Hover any item in the hold, fitting screen or exchange to see your equipped piece beside it; Alt steps through every fitted piece of that kind.
• Rarity and tech on every icon. Item icons wear rarity-coloured corner brackets (doubled for legendary) and their tech level.
• Clearer effects. Tooltips list effects in their own section, legendary uniques first.
• Exploring pays with danger. Discoveries, scans, anomalies and mining now grant XP by sector level, up to 45 times more in the Rift than at home, with a bonus for mining while a field's prowler is on watch.
• Cleaner loot cards. Rarity shows in the card's corners instead of a coloured band.

The Rift

Five new sectors past the Singularity for levels 50 to 70, built for groups, with raid bosses and the best gear in the game.

What's new

• The Rift. Brood Expanse, Armada Graveyard, The Maw, Hive Throne and Sentinel Citadel, reached from the abyss, each with its own sky, outpost and contracts.
• Raid bosses. Every Rift sector ends in a raid boss that scales to the pilots fighting it, with waves, phases, an enrage timer and a shared wreck.
• The Null Dreadnought. A second roaming world boss that surfaces only in the Rift.
• Tech 6 and boss sets. A full tier of gear that drops only in the Rift, and three-piece boss sets with 2- and 3-piece bonuses.
• A galaxy star chart. The galaxy map is now a spiral of stars with the Singularity at its core.
• Respawn nearby. When destroyed, you return at the nearest station you've discovered, not your faction's home.
• Destroy items. Clear junk from your hold, docked or in space.
• 69 new item icons and a fitting stats box that lists every effect one to a row.

Maintenance warnings and real suns

No more surprise disconnects: pilots now get a countdown before the server restarts, and their progress is saved first.

What's new

• Maintenance countdown. A banner warns every pilot before a server restart, counts down, and saves everyone before it happens. The message stays on screen after you're returned to login.
• Suns with a surface. Stars are now 3D, with boiling granulation, sunspots and a corona.
• Brighter faction space. Home and frontier sectors are brighter; the abyss stays dark.
• Fittings in space. Press I in flight to view your fitting and what a hold item would change.
• Enemies above you hit harder. Fighting above your level is more dangerous, matching the extra reward, while home sectors are gentler for new pilots.
• Freighter-sized haulers and a larger target portrait.

The arsenal update

New guns, gadgets and consumables, shots you can watch fly, and a loot and pay curve rebuilt around combat level.

What's new

• Shots that fly. Bolts and missiles travel to their target and hit when they arrive; incoming missiles are called out at launch.
• New weapon types. Scatterguns, Longlance rails, cryo, corrosive and siphon guns, and the Arc thrower.
• The miner's kit. Mining lasers are gear with their own speed, yield, reach and noise, plus quiet drives and signal masks for cutting unseen.
• Consumables. Flares, decoy beacons, chaff, nanite packs, shield cells and stim coils on keys 8 and 9.
• Five new legendaries. Event Horizon, Broodmother's Choir, Warlord's Ledger, Queen's Carapace and the Prism Lance, plus two toughness uniques.
• Hits you can read. Critical hits, pierce, leech and reflect each have their own look; every status effect has its own shape on the hull; enemies telegraph charges and artillery locks; big ships die in stages.
• Gear compare with verdicts. Tooltips show your fitted piece against the one you're looking at, with a verdict based on what matters for that kind of gear.
• Combat level and punching up. Sectors and enemies are rated against combat level. Fighting above your level pays more XP, credits, loot and named-item chance.
• A guaranteed named piece. Legendaries are rarer, but every tenth boss kill of a family without a named drop guarantees one.
• Pay that keeps up. Contract and mission rewards scale with what gear costs where you are; abyss contracts pay many times more.

Hull modules and new ores

Make your ship look like yours, mine five new ores, and dock at a rebuilt station hall.

What's new

• Hull modules. Fit turrets, missile racks, fins, sensors and armour plates that visibly change your ship. Other pilots see your fit too. Craft common ones from the new ores, or take rare ones from bosses.
• Five new ores. Ice, cobalt, voidglass, neutronium and gas ice, each with its own rock model, plus rare cores. Rich rocks glow, and most nav points now have a small field.
• Planets and rings. Every sector gains a planet with an orbit point; ringed planets carry a belt of rocks.
• A new station hall. Stations are one clear hall: quartermaster, vault, mission board and engineer in sight of the dock, and a tall ship bay at the end.
• Area effects on the ships they hit. Shrapnel, arcs, hull fire and light sweeps now play on each ship caught instead of a ring on the ground.
• Pick up where you left off. Logging back in while in space puts you where you logged out.
• Vaults take goods. Ore and trade goods can be stored by the unit.
• Field prowlers. Most asteroid fields have a local predator that comes and goes.
• Hull Upgrades tab. Standing and hull tiers get their own tab in the Skills window; refits climb one tier at a time.

Guardians and staying signed in

Safer home space, a login that remembers you, and a clear message when it's time to update.

What's new

• Station and gate guardians. Faction guardians patrol home stations and gates and shoot anything hostile that follows you in. Security thins out the further you fly: high security at home, lawless in the abyss.
• Live sector threat. Under the sector name: its security rating and what is happening right now, like a world boss up, recent losses or a distress call.
• Remembered login. The login screen remembers your email and password (protected by Windows), and you stay signed in across restarts.
• Update prompts. When the server needs a newer build, the game says so and takes you to the download instead of showing an error.
• Surveys you can finish. Surveys count places you scan even if they were already charted.

Enemies that fight differently

The dark fights back with real tactics now, space feels alive, and every station has a vault.

What's new

• Fighting styles. Brutes charge and ram, artillery holds back and retreats, swarms circle and hit harder together, and support ships heal, shield, snare and summon. Creatures breathe acid, darkness and shards.
• Fourteen new enemies and bounty hunters. New creatures and ship crews fill every family, and bounty hunters warp in on pilots who attack haulers or wardens.
• Area damage. Blast weapons, chain lightning, burning fields and nova abilities that hit everything caught in them.
• A vault at every station. Store what your hold can't carry and take it out when you need it.
• Know before you jump. Each sector shows its level band and how dangerous it is for you, with a warning when you arrive somewhere beyond you.
• Livelier space. Lit asteroids, rubble belts, drifting debris, micrometeors, a new warp tunnel and engine flames on the real nozzles.
• A sharper radar. Range rings, contacts by shape, scroll to zoom, click to target.
• Crafting with stakes. Analysing a piece to learn its recipe can now fail, with the odds shown before you try.

Hulls all the way up

Ships now keep growing with you across the whole map, and each faction's story finally feels like its own.

What's new

• Hull tiers 3 to 5. Every faction and profession now has a hull in every level band, each a clear step up in hull, shield, weapon racks and power, with 27 new blueprints.
• Three stories, three voices. Each faction's opening chain has its own order, its own chapter titles and its own mission giver, from Concord's by-the-book dispatcher to the Veil's archivist.
• A gravity well that bends space. Anomalies now warp the stars and stations behind them instead of drawing flat on top.
• A map you can read. The galaxy map dims the game behind it, and its markers are distinct silhouettes tinted by what they mark.

The first public alpha

The first build of Singularity anyone can download: three factions, a galaxy of sectors to fly, stations to walk, and a shared world to do it in.

What's new

• Three factions, nine professions. Sol Concord, the Ascendancy and the Veil, each with a fighter, an explorer and a trader, and a guided first sortie that teaches flying, fighting, selling and fitting.
• Stations you can walk. Dock and step out of the cockpit to the exchange, the mission board, the workshop and the hangar, with thirty-six station characters who each sound like themselves.
• Fitting on a reactor budget. Weapons, shields, engines and devices all draw from one reactor, with a spec-sheet view that compares a piece against what it would replace.
• Loot worth hunting. A rarity ladder from common to legendary, named pieces with their own effects, and a salvage window you pick from.
• Skills and abilities. Combat, exploration and trade skill constellations with real prerequisites, plus active abilities for your faction and profession on the hotbar.
• Bosses as events. Roaming bosses announced across the sector, a shared wreck for everyone who fought, and the Void Titan as a raid with phases, waves and an enrage clock.
• Faction standing and a player economy. Ranks earned through deeds and trade unlock better prices, docking rights and hulls; cargo from far away sells for more, and work orders let pilots craft for each other.