Pioneer Day release of 2025

A  year of development brings with it many changes and improvements. Headlining this release is a new ship model, a complete rebalance of all ships in the game, the ability to install multiple weapons per ship, many improvements to user interface, and more.

Natrix Reworked

The overhaul of our ship models has now come to the OPLI-Barnard Inc. manufactured Natrix line, with a beautiful new model and vastly improved capability for this not-so-little ship. While not intended for a combat role in the same way as the Coronatrix, the Natrix still has plenty of defensive firepower to ensure your deliveries go where they are needed in a timely fashion.

User Interface

We have focused on improving a number of things about the user interface. First and most noticeable, we have implemented a new, much more consistent UI color theme. (This also brings better support for user mods that recolor the UI).

The Save/Load dialog has received a complete overhaul and now displays significantly more information about each save, including character and ship name, location, and (new this release!) when the game was last saved and total time played in the save.

(Yes, it's quite obvious this screenshot is from a developer...)

Other notable changes include:

• The radar interface in the flight view has been greatly improved with control over radar zoom and full keybinding support.
• Mission progress in the Scout mission gadget has been remade to better communicate mission state to the player.
• The commodity market now shows separate buy and sell prices.
• The economy display in the System View have been confusing to many, which is why we have added tooltip for clarity.

Other Visual Improvements

While playing around with some of the headlining features, you may find yourself witnessing improved planetary ring textures, and noticing that ships docked in orbital stations are now lit by the station!

Ship Equipment System Rewrite

Probably the most major feature this release contains is a complete redesign of how ships are equipped and how equipment is handled by the game.

Equipment now has fully independent mass and volume values, and ships are now equipped based on the amount of free equipment volume rather than a "capacity" metric shared between cargo and equipment. Cargo is now fully separate from installed equipment; you won't have to choose between carrying cargo or equipping that beam laser any longer.

We've decided to make ship equipment slots first-class citizens rather than just a simplistic numeric limit, which has allowed us to finally add support for multiple weapons per ship rather than the hard-coded singular forward and rear weapon mount (if you happened to be rich enough to even afford a ship with a rear weapon mount!)

This has also enabled us to implement a much-needed improvement to the game's hyperdrives, converting them to sip fuel from an internal reservoir rather than chugging an entire cargo container of fuel from the cargo hold. Hyperspace jumps in small ships should take quite a bit less cargo space to carry out now. For those curious, the hyperdrive design document outlines the thought that went into the new design.

A number of these changes had to be merged in very late in the development cycle, so we consider this release the "first iteration" of the new equipment system, focused only on converting existing equipment and game content to function under the new code architecture. Many aspects of the game have yet to receive a full balance pass, and we have a number of new systems and gameplay features planned to take advantage of this new architecture.

We are sure you, the players, will be quite happy to report back the full details on the effects this has had on the game's balance, and we intend to continue iterating on adding equipment and content as we enter the 2025 development cycle.

Complete Ship Rebalance

As part of the equipment redesign, we had to convert every ship in the game to use the new system. We took the chance to go through all of the ships in the game and set more realistic values for cargo, fuel, and equipment space based on the physical volume of the ship's hull, as well as giving each ship its own weapon layout.

We're certainly not finished with balance changes, and intend to update ships as they are redesigned and reworked with new models and new gameplay considerations in mind.

For detailed changelog see the release page