• fixed a bug with abandoning quests from the map screen that wasn't fully removing the quest
  
• fixed a bug where the gauntlet could recover from lost data by recreating the gauntlet but it wouldn't re-add all of its locations so it would be inaccessible
  
• the gauntlet will now generate a crash log if it fails to load correctly so I can hunt down the source of data corruption making gauntlets recover themselves
  
• world saving was made more robust with each individual stage being capable of logging exceptions and attempting to move on to the next stage, hopefully allowing me to catch sources of save game data corruption in the future
  
• added an extra safety check to world database finalization to make sure any async data items received after a shutdown was called can be collected and written before the database declares itself final and ready to close.
  
• fixed a bug with procedural quests that caused their description details to disappear after you accept the mission
  
• fixed a bug that could cause procedural quests to generate pirate's cove as their destination
  
• found and fixed a memory leak that was caused by switching back and forth from ship exterior view
  
• found and fixed a memory leak that was caused by switching back and forth from the universe map
  
• fixed a memory leak in the ship designer caused by resizing the screen
  
• fixed a possible memory leak in ship designer that might not have been happening at all but the code looked suspicious so I rewrote it
  
• the sinidal cascade active module can no longer be activated while in travel drive
  
• fixed a bug with procedural quests using duplicate quest id that could cause a crash depending on the order that you attempted to complete multiple procedural quests
  
• fixed a bug where procedural taxi quests were changing their destination after being saved and reloaded
  
• passenger mission bed requirements now correctly recognize when a bedroom has multiple beds

• fixed a bug when loading quests that could cause a crash when loading the game
  
• fixed a bug with the crew team that would allow any crew member to join the team widget and accept orders from the player
  
• friendly crew will no longer attempt to join the player's team if they are passengers
  
• passengers added by the manifest are added with the isPassive flag set to true so they behave like passengers and not crew
  
• upgraded procedural quests to include a "pick up" stage as the first stage so if you depart the source station with insufficient cargo/beds you can still return to the station later and complete the quest
  
• fixed a bug that was preventing failed procedural missions from being removed from the mission list potentially causing them to lag the game by constantly trying to complete
  
• fixed a bug that was causing economic nodes that consume resources over time to load their saved data wrong causing data corruption for the loaded consumption rate values. In most cases this was causing those stations to consume all of their supply instantly
  
• when hailing a repair station the repair station dialogue options will now remain available even if the station's crew are missing and only monsters are inside
  
• updated the crew inventory UI to ensure that you can not change your equipped ship while you are in a ship as it was always intended that you could only change equipped ships in a station.
  
• docking via hangar in a ship that is not your currently equipped ship now clears the cargo of your equipped ship
  
• revised the design of the start ship. It is meant to be a single person shuttle with minimal capabilities and it had too much cargo space and bedrooms at the cost of not having enough power for its thrusters
  
• fixed multiple instances where a quest completing could remove the waypoint marker for a different quest with the same name
  
• you can no longer use shipyard logistics rooms to build free ships using that shipyard's resources
  
• if you scrap a ship at an NPC shipyard, your resources will now be magically teleported to your home base instead of donated to the NPC shipyard for free
  
• updated the design of the junebug c to have the life support modules connected to the power grid
  
• when crew data is saved, any packed ships in their inventory now have all of their crew removed. Packed ships aren't supposed to be holding crew, and this fixes a very rare and strange bug where a player managed to get a packed ship with himself inside that caused an infinite save loop

• fixed many instances of the word yield being misspelled
  
• fixed a bug where picking up the item most recently placed into the trash slot would duplicate the item
  
• sped up world generation by skipping many noise samples in black empty space
  
• fixed rotation groups for tier 3 hallways
  
• tier 3 hallways are now structure adding modules. They add more structure than the default tile replaced when you place them, so they make your ship stronger when added
  
• removed duplicate entries for shield emitters in the design screen
  
• added a tier 3 shield emitter
  
• fixed turret offsets for T3 energy turrets
  
• fixed an extra pixel that was sticking out of the side of a T3 engine module
  
• tweaked the stats on some pulse beam weapons
  
• added many tier 3 bridge modules
  
• added missing visual power connection points to the largest size T3 energy turret
  
• fixed a bug that would cause AI ships to send repair drones to repair their current hostile target
  
• added a decorative conference room module what can be used to make space stations look more professional and business-like
  
• fixed a rare bug that could cause a crash when adding a crew member into a ship at an invalid position
  
• turret reload duration set to a default value other than zero to avoid divide by zero if somehow the value avoids being set
  
• added tier 3 ships to the list of all spawnable ships so the game will now spawn them when it wants to spawn a really scary ship
  
• tier 3 ships can now spawn as bosses and as escorts in the gauntlet
  
• boss battles in the gauntlet can now reward a data core with tier 3 research
  
• active system slot icons now have tooltips
  
• added tooltip info for many active systems, but maybe not all of them. Any we missed will say "An active system with an undefined tooltip."
  
• fixed an issue with active systems that made some of them stop working depending on the type of session you were in
  
• fixed an issue where a crafting station would never close after it was opened
  
• fixed single player crafting so that it would actually fail if you don't have the materials instead of removing what it can and giving you the output
  
• crafting will also fail now if you don't have sufficient inventory space for the output
  
• stat status that slows enemy forward movement on bullet hits changed into a debuff to acceleration similar to rotation accell debuff
  
• improved the layout of the crafting UI
  
• removed the old style UI button to open your character inventory
  
• fixed an inventory UI crash when attempting to sell items to a shop via right click from ship inventory
  
• fixed a bug that caused a quest to fail to load and delete itself
  
• tuning kits, this entire time, have required a resource that wasn't even in the game and nobody bothered to mention it in feedback. Their application cost has been heavily reworked so that you can actually use tuning kits now.
  
• significantly expanded the number of stats that status effects can modify
  
• added 14 new computer room modules, each of which provides a passive statistical increase to your ship which doesn't stack if you have multiple of the same module. They provide bonuses such as turret range, missile tracking, shield regeneration, point defense, etc
  
• added a new module type: point defense. It will passively shoot down incoming missiles using energy. They aren't perfect as their shots can miss so having many of them improves your odds of surviving large missile volleys
  
• fixed a very rare crash that could happen if a hellbore bullet despawns before establishing part of its animation
  
• fixed the same bug with 2 end game quests that prevented them from triggering
  
• corrupt quest rewards will now fail to load more gracefully
  
• if you somehow manage to type characters into the ship profile selection name entry field that can not be rendered by our sprite font, it will now remove the entered character and warn you instead of crashing at the screen's render pass
  
• fixed a UI bug with research tier progress bars that could fill beyond their max value
  
• module tooltips now indicate what installing upgraded components will do
  
• scrapping a packed ship in logistics will now remove the ship instead of allowing you to keep it
  
• tooltips can now dynamically scale their text to fit longer item names
  
• fixed a misplaced turret track slot for a large energy turret mount T3
  
• the trade screen now shows current credits without formatting to shorten the value so you can see all of your credits
  
• the trade screen now shows the exact price of the item under your mouse
  
• quests now save their progress a bit more frequently to prevent them getting broken if your game is abruptly quit without saving
  
• fixed a bug with initial loading of the game which was capable of breaking the loading sequence on some computers in a very rare thread timing issue
  
• added a timeout to randomized loot operations to make sure they don't run forever when testing an empty loot table
  
• fixed trade npc ships saying they lost their target when they undock from a station
  
• trade npc ships now say reasonable things when undocking from a station after conducting a trade
  
• fixed a bug that could sometimes cause the character to be placed wrong when entering a ship
  
• expanded the storage size for the trade screen because there were many shops that had more than 24 item types for sale
  
• exotic matter was removed from trade storage as it is meant to immediately convert to credits and there is no reason to buy it
  
• fixed a bug with tooltip image previews for large modules with square profiles that caused them not to render
  
• made a fundamental change to how crew are removed from ships to combat a common bug where you get kicked into EVA when transitioning between ships
  
• ship scrapping now rolls a dice to determine if you receive partial resource values instead of rounding. Before if scrapping would return 0.2 of a valuable resource you would always get the rounded integer value of 0, but now in the same scenario you will have a 20% chance of receiving 1 of that resource instead
  
• fixed one instance of dormitory being spelled wrong
  
• fixed a bug with a script that explains broken airlocks that could corrupt save files
  
• fixed: the labels "required" vs "stored" was reversed on the logistics screen
  
• fixed a crash in the research screen caused by an uninitialized string value
  
• removed a legacy UI element that was rendering in the bar screen
  
• fixed a bug where tuning kits would consume their component resources even if they could not be applied to the ship
  
• added mining laser to home station tool shop
  
• fixed an issue that caused some advanced turrets to lose their special properties when loaded from save data
  
• tuning kit tooltips now display how many kits are already applied as well as the maximum stack count
  
• fixed a rare crash when attempting to animate crew during a save/exit operation
  
• fixed a bug with artifact activator modules that could make certain artifact types cause the game to crash
  
• added a new craftable item: packey ball. It can be used to capture a ship into an inventory item
  
• added code to support station shops that sell ships as inventory items
  
• added a module for a new shop type that sells ships
  
• the cash bonus for destroying communications relays has been balanced to better reflect the new credits economy relative to procedural missions
  
• scrapping ships in logistics screen now only works on packed ships in your inventory
  
• added a mission board UI to the map screen when visiting the map via a cartography room in economic stations
  
• added a back-end for generating procedural missions to be listed at economic stations
  
• wrote a new quest type to handle procedural missions from mission boards
  
• added procedural pirate hunting bounty missions
  
• added procedural cargo delivery missions
  
• added procedural passenger delivery missions
  
• added a cargo manifest framework to handle mission cargo and passengers for ships departing and arriving via hangars
  
• created a new introductory tutorial quest sequence to introduce shipyards as a method of getting new ships
  
• cleaned up some events from existing introduction quests that no longer make sense with the new shipyard economy
  
• fire extinguishers removed from character creation as it is intended that the player should get one as part of the introduction quest sequence
  
• added a tiny variance to the reload timers of turrets so they don't all play their reload sounds at the same exact time
  
• doubled the energy capacity of all beam emitters
  
• added a hangar module for entry/egree into/out of stations without using airlocks
  
• added logic for crew placement into ships/stations when using a hangar module
  
• remapped nearly all stations to include hangar modules
  
• ships created from an owned packed ship in your inventory should no longer force hacking
  
• added a crafting station module for unlocking T3 items via the crafting menu
  
• added a number of T3 ship designs that can be unlocked
  
• added all T3 modules to loot tables so they can be unlocked via the new crafting room
  
• replaced the "journal" slot on character paper doll with a "ship" slot that holds your currently equipped packed ship
  
• lowered the hitpoints of many hostile monsters inside abandoned stations
  
• created detailed tooltips for packed ships with statistics about the ships capabilities
  
• fixed some critical bugs with the existing intro sequence that could cause your game to get stuck if you use the respawn function during the event
  
• added an inventory item type that holds a ship turret and displays its affixes in the tooltip
  
• upgraded the logistics screen to pull turret items from inventory and safe storage instead of creating turrets from a turret type
  
• added code to prevent the player using travel drive during the initial flight training tutorial
  
• added a new item type and associated crafting recipe that can "forge" a turret item adding a new turret affix
  
• added turret forge items to loot tables
  
• tuning kits can now randomly drop from killed NPC crew
  
• module components can now randomly drop from killed NPC crew
  
• turrets with affixes can now randomly drop from killed NPC crew
  
• removed module components tier 1 and 2 from research blueprint stores
  
• removed all turret type research from data cores dropped by ships
  
• removed all turret research that spawns in blueprint shops
  
• turret blueprints are effectively removed from the game now as their functionality has been replaced by turrets as inventory items
  
• basic turrets are now sold in blueprint shops
  
• significantly increased the number of items that appear in blueprint shops
  
• turret items added to ship cargo loot tables
  
• turrets can now sometimes fall off of NPC ships and gain an affix when you shoot them. These can be collected as loot.
  
• added random loot containers that sometimes appear in belts that can drop loot items
  
• integrated procedrual missions with the quest journal
  
• logistics screen now displays your equipped ship in a special location away from the packed ships in your regular inventory to indicate its importance
  
• revised the character database to create and load a unique character for each world save so that it is independent from the character used by the main menu
  
• the character build for use in main menu activities such as ship editor and testing arena now has more stuff unlocked so that you can do what you like in the sandbox
  
• added civilian shipyards to the list of stations that can spawn as economic stations
  
• added icons to civilian shipyards
  
• fixed an issue with the quest journal displaying quest distances
  
• fixed an issue with the "show on map" button in the quest journal
  
• removed a UI element (incoming notification button) that did nothing because it wasn't supposed to be there
  
• added code to prevent research shops from listing the same blueprint item multiple times
  
• shops that save their contents between visits now clear those contents when the player advances to the game stage where new loot needs to be added to shops
  
• added a new inventory item type: ammo box which turrets can use to reload. Unlike grey goo, turrets reloading from ammo boxes can pull ammo boxes directly from player inventory
  
• ammo boxes added to NPC shops
  
• player starting inventory now contains ammo boxes
  
• fixed a bug where player credits count would display as zero until the value changed
  
• fixed a number of inventory bugs relating to buying items from shops that allowed buying/selling to modify the contents of the shop
  
• tuning kit and module component application now updates the ship in your equipped ship slot to prevent tuning kits being lost if you lose the ship
  
• removed the tuning kit for travel drive speed from showing up in crew item shops
  
• fixed a bug with logistics screen which was causing the interior contents of a packed ship to be lost after that ship was modified
  
• fixed a bug with packed ships caused by the re-use of an important data structure that could cause damage to be saved in the packed ship item unexpectedly
  
• revised gauntlet boss spawning to use T3 ships for the higher tier bosses
  
• fixed a bug with scroll canvas UI elements that could cause them to scroll forever
  
• because it is no longer intended for you to construct your first ship, new characters will no longer spawn with blueprints or ship building resources
  
• rebalanced the cost of grey goo to more accurately reflect the economic price of creating it
  
• ships constructed in logistics from a player design are now placed into inventory as a packed ship instead of docking to your home station
  
• trading with station shops now allows you to move items to/from your equipped packed ship's storage
  
• the player's home base was upgraded with economic station logic so that items from packed ships and player inventory could be transferred to the home station using the same interface as trading with other economic stations
  
• a trade depot room was added to the home station
  
• ship building was upgraded to use the new resource storage system
  
• fixed a bug that caused the home station to sometimes spawn with hostile crew
  
• fixed a bug that caused stations in general to sometimes spawn hostile crew
  
• you can no longer use a packed ship from your inventory
  
• you can no longer pack ships from the logistics screen
  
• added logic to make your crew members follow you through hangar transitions into and out of stations
  
• legacy procedural taxi missions were disabled as they are replaced by the improved procedural passenger missions
  
• launching from a hangar reloads all ship weapons
  
• balanced the repair rates of some repair drones that were repairing way too fast
  
• docking at the home base with a stolen ship via a hangar should now pack that ship into an inventory item
  
• fixed a bug with ship shard breaking that was causing ship shards to use a ton of extra memory copying turrets too many times from the source ship
  
• added point defense module blueprints to blueprint shops
  
• added a large number of fully mapped ships for sale in all shipyard shops
  
• added flavor description text to ship hulls sold in shipyard shops
  
• created a new type of crew member that can join the player's team and appear at their home station bar: procedural crew members
  
• implemented a procedurally random talent tree generator for generating random talent trees for procedural crew
  
• added a new screen to display procedural talent trees
  
• wrote a dialogue for interacting with procedural crew members
  
• added a better UI element to the bar screen to make it more clear how you are supposed to inspect a crew member's talents
  
• upgraded the framework for displaying waypoints to fix issues caused by quest names being similar that could cause waypoints to not be displayed or to potentially become memory leaks
  
• all economy nodes had their storage capacity and initial trade good quantities drastically increased because they were running out leading to unexpected trade ship behaviors
  
• fixed a series of bugs that could cause ships to spawn with the incorrect number of crew
  
• fixed a bug that could cause empty ships to come back to life with added crew after a save/reload
  
• fixed some incorrectly placed text in the resources UI
  
• fixed a bug with a turret that was crashing the game
  
• upgraded the crew team UI widget to dynamically expand with crew slot unlocks
  
• upgraded the crew team UI widget to support more max crew slots
  
• fixed a bug with how tooltips display ship image previews
  
• added awareness of Ithacit Ore to economic stations and the home station
  
• fixed the text description in the tooltip for Ithacit Ore
  
• added new ore use ratios to T3 modules so that ships with T3 tech will require fancier ore to manufacture
  
• the bar screen panels can now be scrolled with the mouse wheel if there are more crew in your bar than can be displayed
  
• added a new score screen that displays after doing the gauntlet
  
• added a scoring system to the gauntlet which grants tokens for crafting T3 blueprints
  
• buying a blueprint and learning it should now update other instances of that same blueprint with "already known"
  
• fixed a bug that was preventing the ore node tracking world component from updating which caused a number of ore related bugs
  
• added all modules and all weapon types to the main menu ship editor sandbox environment
  
• fixed a bug with artifact activators that was crashing the game
  
• placed grey goo into player inventory when they enter survival mode from the main menu
  
• enclosed battle arenas in the gauntlet now block movement of all ships, not just the player's ship
  
• fixed a number of bugs with the binary save data format for ore nodes that was preventing them from saving correctly
  
• the quest to deliver food to the pirate's cove can now complete if you enter the station via its hangar
  
• fixed a bug with the SSC shipyard raid quest that was causing SSC ships to not turn hostile if you had saved and loaded the game at a certain stage of the quest

Single Player is receiving a huge overhaul.
The intent was always to make a sandbox game where you could collect cool ships and customize them with deep and interesting ship design features. To that end, we built a dynamic economy with shops and shipyards and venders and trade etc, however we seriously missed the mark because the game's story didn't encourage you to interact with that aspect of the world, and the ship design elements made your interactions with it shallow and in many cases unnecessary. Furthermore, the loop of unlocking hulls and modules so that you could dig deeper into the ship designer and make progressively better ships didn't work at all for the early game. That should have been more of a late game feature, while the early game should have tried to play more like a standard sandbox space RPG.

So we are changing all that.

So what I'm doing is reworking the early game by introducing more standard tropes from space RPG games, and de-emphasizing the [design your own ship] features in the early game where they never worked great anyways. You will still collect module blueprints and hulls, and you can still design and construct your own ships, however you will no longer be expected to do that in the early game because of new features being introduced. I'm adding shipyards that sell fully built ships custom mapped for various roles, and I am adding a significant amount of ship enhancement items and loot drops so that even store bought ships can be customized to your liking. I'm also adding mission boards to every economy station hosting procedural missions for cargo hauling, passenger transport, and combat missions. The idea behind all of this is that your early game experience need not require a masters degree in ship engineering to enjoy because it will play more similarly to other titles.

What follows is a detailed breakdown of the new features and gameplay changes.
Every economic station, trade hub, and shipyard, has a mission board now. Enter the stellar cartography room to access it because the missions are displayed on the map. I've added passenger missions, cargo missions, and combat missions. All of these missions reward credits and exp. It also has a pretty fancy UI for selecting the missions based on their destinations and requirements.
I like loot. Everyone likes loot. So I'm adding lots of it. There are now 4 ways to upgrade an existing ship: tuning kits, module components, turrets, and crew. Some of this has already been in the game, but all of the systems are now going to be fleshed out and working. I have redone every single loot table in the game to include new items, I have fixed a ton of bugs and things that prevented tuning kits from working, and I have replaced all blueprints for crafting turrets in both shops and loot drops with instances of individual turrets, likely with affixes. Now you will be able to make a powerful ship simply by buying a generic one and upgrading it.
Turrets are items now. They drop from ships in scoopable loot containers, they can be purchased from shops, and when you remove one from your ship in logistics it will go into your inventory. They also can have affixes. Turret affixes are named and each one provides changes to the statistics of your turret such as fire rate, range, damage, ammo capacity, etc. You can forge a turret with a new crafting item that drops as loot to add an affix to an existing turret, and turrets can have multiple affixes allowing you to potentially collect a set of turrets for your ship that are significantly better than the default. You can no longer unlock and print generic turrets to fill all of the slots on your design so you're going to want to go shopping. If an enemy ship is shooting a really cool gun at you, blow them up and it might drop.
Tuning kits are an inventory item that is consumed to upgrade your ship hull with stacking passive attribute bonuses. They have been in the game forever, but it turns out they never worked correctly! My bad. They have been fixed so you can actually apply them now, and to boot i've added some new tuning kit types to the game. These tuning kits stack multiple times on the same ship and provide bonuses such as armor hardness, hull durability, acceleration, turning, shield strength, etc. You've got to find these as loot drops because they are some of the most powerful upgrades you can apply to a ship.
Tuning kits apply a bonus to your entire hull, but your ship's performance is really just the sum of its modules right? Good news, you can also upgrade your modules now. Module components are a new item type that you will find periodically. They can even be purchased in some shops. They are simple items with a few tiers of quality and if you have a Mechanics Kit you can open any compatible module in your ship and simply slot them in. Module performance can be drastically increased with high quality components, possibly even doubling the output of the affected module. It is up to you which of your modules you will enhance first. So if you want to upgrade your modules to perform better, stop by a crew equipment shop at your nearest trade hub and pick up a mechanics kit.
The original design for crew was that I made the crew system very modular and capable of supporting a large variety of special crew characters that were custom made with dialogues and storylines and special gear and special scenarios and interactions. I wanted to design a robust system that could handle whatever I chose to throw at it later.

Then I got bogged down debugging lots of quests and working on other aspects of the game and the crew diversity suffered as a result. There just aren't interesting crew in the game, and as a game about building the ultimate star ship I think customizing your crew should be a big part of making your ship stronger.

To rectify this, I have come up with a system for procedural crew to show up in bars all around the system. When you visit a station, you should check out the bars because there could be all sorts of procedural crew members offering to work for you. These are mercenaries and freelancer ship crew so you will have to hire them and pay them to join your roster. Each one will have a relatively powerful procedural talent tree that will show you all of the stat modifiers that crew member could add to your ship once they are levelled up. Because each crew member is capable of adding 20%+ to various ship statistics, building the perfect crew can now have a huge effect on the performance of any ship.

Hired crew will live in your home station bar forever, and can be swapped out depending on which ones are optimal for the ship you plan to fly at any given time. The crew that are currently in your party will gain experience when you gain experience.
Ships are inventory items now, and you no longer lose them on death. Significant changes across the entire game have been made to support this with the goal of making the game less hardcore and allowing you to collect cool ships, customize them permanently, and swap between them with ease.
I've remapped every station interior to include a hangar module. You enter a hangar by targeting the station, flying over it, and pressing (default) [V]

Airlocks still exist, but will no longer be the primary means of entering and exiting a station. Why? because when you use a hangar your character is placed inside the station and the ship you were flying is placed inside your inventory. This allows you to buy and sell ships at a regular item shop, it allows you to store a collection of ships in a cargo bay, it allows you to swap between ships easily on the fly, and it allows you to transport ships around as cargo. I've even created a new consumable inventory item that will pack a ship that you find (or disable) out in space into an inventory item so that you can scoop it up and take it with you as loot. Ships are loot now, and you can collect them all! fill the stash tabs at your home base with them if you like.

Also, on a purely technical level, using a hangar allows the new mission framework to function. When you pick up missions from the procedural mission board, your mission cargo and passengers gotta go somewhere, and figuring out which docked ship to put them into via an airlock was a nasty technical issue that prevented me from making nice function procedural missions in the past. Now that stuff goes to the hangar where it can be automatically loaded into your ship when you depart.

Some players will decide to continue playing the game the old way using airlocks which of course is wrong and if you do that I hate you.
This isn't realistic at all. I'm doing it because it makes the game more fun. When you undock from a hangar your ship is produced from the packed ship inventory item slotted into your character's ship slot. That item remains there when you die, which means you no longer lose your ship on death. I think this is reasonable and justified because ships are kinda expensive now, and you are going to put a lot of work into upgrading them with rare components and turrets. Losing all of that on death won't be fun. Instead, if you lose your active ship you will probably fail your current mission and lose your cargo, so you know...still try to avoid doing that.

If everyone really hates this change and absolutely insists on discord that I MUST bring back self-griefing and losing all of your cool turrets on death, well then maybe you can convince me to add a second difficulty option to the game. The idea here is this is no longer a game about producing a cool ship DESIGN and printing it over and over again...it is about making a cool SHIP and then doing cool stuff with it until you can find a better ship.
With the inclusion of procedural missions actually mattering, I am hoping that players will actually care about ships that do things other than go pew pew. There are transport variants for sale that only have nice fancy bedrooms in them now, why? because passengers care about the quality of their cabin when commissioning your ship. That means to do the best passenger transport missions (the ones that pay the most credits) you will want to be transporting fancy rich people who will demand nice bedrooms and maybe even dining facilities. Likewise the best paying cargo missions will require lots of cargo space, and the best paying combat missions will put you against a big swarm of enemies. Having a specialized ship will help you make money faster in your preferred play style.

Shipyards will sell role-specialized ship designs.

• t: transport - lots of passenger space
• c: cargo - lots of cargo space
• m: mining - mix of cargo space, defense, and comes with mining turrets
• b: balanced - balanced mix of passenger comfort, decent cargo space, decent defense and weapons
• a: assault - focused on fighting other ships

First of all the obvious headline should be: Tier 3 is finally in the game. So people who care about the ship design aspect of the game need not worry, there's stuff in this update for you as well. Not all new modules added are T3, and many modules have been rebalanced or retuned or debugged. Tier 3 tech drops in the gauntlet end-game zone. Here's a short list of some prominent additions:

• 7 tier 3 ship hulls that can be unlocked with fully T3 mapped interiors
• 5 unlockable tier 3 reactors with significantly better power output
• tier 3 versions of energy turret mounts covering the various turret sizes
• 3 new capacitors with better energy storage density
• a new tier 3 shield emitter that is small and convenient to add to your designs as well as being efficient. Event small ships can have shields!
• 5 new T3 turret types
• a new beam controller type for making even more powerful beam weapon designs
• 5 new tier 3 bridge modules with more active system slots than T2 bridges of similar size
• 3 new tier 3 engines with excellent thrust for their size

T3 hallway components serve the same purpose as normal hallway components, but these ones make your ship look spiffy and futuristic. They also provide structural support when placed making them a net increase to the sturdiness of your ship designs instead of a detriment. I love min-maxers and theory-crafters.

Both T3 hallways, and T3 conduits can be unlocked simply by advancing your research progress into any other T3 modules.

There are also some new modules that are going to show up in other areas of the game. I've implemented tier 2.5 shield emitters that we had shiny artwork for but which I never got around to making. They drop from existing ships and as tier 2.5 tech they have slightly improved average performance compared to the one existing shield emitter but with each one being specialized for either more storage, or faster regeneration.

Then on top of all that the update will include a bunch of new tier 2 modules:

• a point defense missile interdiction laser module. Small and easy to place, it will periodically take pot shots at incoming missiles. They aren't perfect, so having more of them will protect you a lot better from missiles if you are looking to make a defensible ship.
• a tier 1 shield emitter allowing lower tier ships to have regenerating shields.
• multiple computer core modules that will offer various statistical enhancements to all point defense lasers on your ship.
• multiple computer core modules that will offer various statistical enhancements to all missile systems on your ship.
• multiple computer core modules that will offer various statistical enhancements to all turrets on your ship.
• multiple computer core modules that will offer various statistical enhancements to the defensive attributes of your ship.

The current game just doesn't let you bring very many crew members with you onto your ship. Multiple loot related bugs, and the fact that we had always intended on dropping the last crew upgrades in end game activities meant that the low amount of slots went overlooked and remained unreasonable for way too long. Well now we've fixed the bugs meaning the crew slots you were supposed to already have are finally available, and the crew slots we were saving have been added to the endgame gauntlet. You should finally be able to bring your friends.

Crew slots are a reward for exploration and the items needed to gain them are all over the game world. You can now get up to 7 crew members if you find them all.
Not everything is changing. However I'm overhauling the early game introductory quests to hold your hand a bit less and encourage you to poke around in the sandbox more before moving on. I'm also doing lots of quest related debugging for this update. I know that's been an issue for a long time. I hate quest debugging, why couldn't I have decided to make an incremental game instead?

I will caution that the overly complex questing system was my biggest mistake when designing the original game, and there may still be bugs with quests especially later into the campaign. None of these bugs should prevent you from interacting with the game's sandbox elements or doing the endgame activities, however the possibility of bugs with storyline missions is part of the reason this patch is 0.9.4.00 and not 1.0.0.00.
Your character is now part of the world save. That means make a new game, get a new character. That's probably how it always should have been, but when we were early in development and the game was chaotic and unfinished I decided to make your character persist outside the world because otherwise you might never be able to find certain unlocks. That all has hopefully changed now, so the system is moving to the way it ought to be.

This also means that the sandbox available from the main menu will now have access to all of the tech so you can play around with the ship editor without activating any debugging mode.

There's no warning for this event. I'm simply releasing it. Go play it now!

• fixed a couple of screens that were responding to mouse wheel scrolling that had happened on other screens
  
• increased the number of system slots on many bridge modules so you can activate more things
  
• refactored a context variable in all ship active abilities to make it easier to debug in the future and so that I can make new stuff more easily
  
• fixed a bug with calculating the cursor position on the universe map where the outcome of the calculation depended on which quadrant of the map you were in
  
• fixed a possible crash related to the chat widget opening
  
• fixed a possible crash related to hitting the craft button when no crafting recipe is selected
  
• the respawn script has been rewritten to handle the situation where something triggers a screen transition after it sends you to the respawn screen
  
• [OEMAUTO] and [ZOOM] keys have been excluded from the list of valid keys that can be used in keybinds because some windows IME (Input method editors) declare these keys to always be pressed. If you happen to have something important bound to the [ZOOM] key then we'd like you to know that we hate you.

Working on some big things behind the scenes. Hopefully announcement soon. In the meantime here is a bugfix patch that includes a lot of small changes accumulated over a long period.

• your crew will no longer follow you on the in-station fast transport network if they are set to hold position
  
• fixed a bug where logistics rooms would not rotate their animation to match the module animation
  
• you can no longer collide with asteroids while in travel drive. Realism be damned, I've never seen a new player pick up the game without immediately killing themselves in travel drive somehow.
  
• you can now use the scroll wheel to change mini-map scale in ship exterior view
  
• added tooltip description for tractor field modules
  
• tooltip base elements made to scale properly with UI scale
  
• tooltip resource mode made to scale properly with UI scale
  
• tooltip small stats made to scale properly with UI scale
  
• tooltip resource element made to scale properly with UI scale
  
• tooltip screen placement made to scale properly with UI scale so that tooltips do not render off of the screen
  
• AI crew will only search for tiles to repair if they have a repair gun
  
• AI crew will only search for fires to extinguish if they have a fire extinguisher
  
• all projectile turret magazine sizes increased by 300%
  
• all turret attack speeds reduced
  
• buffed the max energy use rate of shield emitters which means they can produce shields faster
  
• buffed the efficiency of shield emitter energy use so that they produce more shields for the energy that they consume
  
• doubled the lifespan of shards produced by flak shells
  
• significantly buffed the damage dealt by mining charges of all sizes
  
• fixed a bugged ore type that had a negative yield
  
• reduced the bullet velocity of all mining charges to make sure they still suck for damaging ships
  
• added a tier 1 shield emitter
  
• fixed a bug with mouse pointer location calculation on the universe map
  
• universe map biome tooltip no longer overlaps mouse coordinate output
  
• fixed a bug with a quest that could crash while loading the game
  
• fixed: quests were crashing the game because quest debugging was left on because last time I uploaded a patch I didn't give a fuck
  
• fixed a crash with conduit pathing on the ship design caused (most likely) by a ship with insufficient padding around the outside of the design
  
• the ships that kill you in the first tutorial now spawn faster
  
• changed how mouse scrolling and selection works in the station overview UI
  
• renamed the header for the station overview UI so people know they can teleport from it

Sorry for the rapid series of bug filled updates. Here's what happened:

I for the life of me could not figure out why the monsters would sometimes go invisible. So I wrote code that would try really hard to render them even if their animation was in a corrupted state. The new code immediately produced crashes without crash logs in version 0.9.3.01 and so in 0.9.3.02 I updated the code to catch those crashes with a proper crash log and also improved my rendering without art code....which immediately crashed again. Turns out I was looking in the wrong place because the issue wasn't with the artwork or the animations of monsters at all, but with their pathfinding. A very well hidden bug with monster pathfinding was attempting to normalize a zero vector (an impossible mathematical operation) and the result was that monster position data was becoming corrupted with a NaN value (not a number) and since we do math on that position for the sake of rendering the NaN was spreading to other variables making the monsters invisible.

This same pathfinding was used in other places and so this fix should probably result in other fixes such as fixes to bugs having to do with your crew members doing strange things while following you.

had a few rendering based crashes, so i've fixed the crashes that came up and also added crash logging for those exceptions so it will be easier to find them in the future

• turrets now remember how much ammo was in them when they are saved and loaded from a save or stored in a packed ship
  
• fixed the tooltip for ammo boxes which nobody even uses so who cares? Well they are fixed now, so that's nice.
  
• made mod loading more durable so as to prevent the client crashing when attempting to load a mod that is missing files
  
• on loading a save game, missing factions which failed to save due to a crash will attempt to re-add themselves to the world
  
• identified and fixed a threading issue that could allow the database thread to try and access faction info (for saving) while that data was being modified potentially resulting in data corruption.
  
• fixed storage nook rotation mirroring
  
• not sure the exact situation that is causing monsters to sometimes be invisible, but I cleaned up their artwork code a lot to get rid of a lot of unknown edge cases that MIGHT be causing that and hopefully they will stop being invisible
  
• fixed a bug that was preventing killing monsters from granting experience
  
• fixed a bug that was preventing crew members from getting experience from things in most cases

Added a new feature as well as some bug fixes with this one. Module components are an item that you can find and with the new tool you can use them to upgrade existing modules inside of a ship to have better performance.

• fixed a bug with some new modules in the design screen where their tooltip would display resource costs multiple times. The resource cost was correct only the tooltips were broken
  
• fixed a bug where anti-missile lightning charges from tuning kits in the gauntlet would target your own repair drones because repair drones are technically missiles which target your ship while repairing
  
• fixed a bug with scrapping ships at your home base where any item inside the ship was placed into storage inside your home station instead of the tabbed storage that you can access by going into the storage inside your home station. This made those items inaccessable to you. The items will now go into the correct (tabbed) storage and I have upgraded the function of "stash resources" on the home station to get those items out of where they were placed in station cargo bays and move them to the correct place.
  
• A new feature: Component salvaging. There is a new tool for you to use called a mechanic's kit. It opens ship modules and allows you access to their components. If you find high quality components you can swap them into your favorite modules to get a stat boost. The output increase can be fairly substantial for high tier components.
  
• you can no longer fire missiles while in travel drive
  
• automated undocking of abandoned ships from stations now takes a full minute to happen instead of happening as soon as they are considered abandoned
  
• fixed a bug with the ship editor power overlay where tiles that connected in multiple directions were only able to animate power connections in the mostly recently connected direction. This had no bearing on the actual power simulation it was only a visual bug with our power overlay
  
• fixed a bug with the first cloning vat exploration quest where the quest could fail to complete if you find multiple copies of the blueprint and transfer them all to your inventory at once
  
• fixed a crash when right clicking packed ships from your inventory in the logistics screen
  
• fixed changes to packed ships made via the logistics screen will now actually apply to those ships after leaving the screen
  
• fixed a bug with grey goo reloading of modules which could in some cases prevent the module from collecting enough goo from the inventories of npc crew
  
• fixed a bug that only matters to mod makers where an unavailable module that you can't unlock shared the same research id as another similar module preventing mod makers from messing with both of them
  
• fixed solid and liquid waste processors not blocking crew movement
  
• targeting space stations is now significantly faster
  
• fixed a mispelled word "palce" that should be "place"
  
• added the ability for a storage container to specify allowed item types that can be stored in there
  
• modules such as artifact activators which include a storage interface but are intended only for specific item types will now prevent you from placing other item types into them
  
• the create profile button now says "click here" so that it is extra extra obvious that this is a button
  
• unified tooltips for trade goods to indicate their base value which I think is more descriptive given that actual value scales with supply and demand
  
• fixed a bug where reactors were always behaving as if they had the High Q fields talent enabled