Version 8.1 hath dropped, bringing fixes, improvements, and giant sawblades to chop apart your enemies.

Changes

• New melee weapon: sawblade. Does a lot of damage at very close range.
• Strategic mode now auto-saves every 5 minutes.
• Debris lasts a lot longer.
• Multiplayer setup now defaults to all mods disabled.
• Weapon barrels are now drawn at correct angles across the board.
• Improved ship tactical AI for close-range weapons.
• Mods with missing graphics now refuse to load.
• Grenades can no longer be thrown arbitrarily high up.
• Ships that can't be loaded are now greyed out in ships list.
• Fixed jitterMerge behaviour. Flamethrower and gatling shots now tend to hit the same target repeatedly, which makes them more powerful!
• Support for weapons that don't require ammo.
• New modding options for animated barrels.
• New modding option for separate weapon clip reload.
• Weapons now explicitly specify the recoil they produce when firing.
• Graphics are now updated correctly when mods re-generate graphics.
• Fixed crash when landscaping.
• Fixed boarding pathing crash.
• Fixed ship display crash caused by names containing invalid letters.

Important notes for modders

• Mods with SpriteSheetBundles pointing at nonexistent images now refuse to load. If your mod stops working in v8.1, check if your SSBs are set up right.
• Previously, the ship recoil force (the amount of force by which the ship gets pushed back) was calculated automatically. It's now explicitly specified in the ModuleType as "recoilForce". If you have a cannon-type module in your mod, you should probably set this value. The standard formula is penDmg * 0.03.
• Weapon barrels can now be animated. See the new SAWBLADE module for an example. You can have both looping animations that run for a certain amount of time when the weapon fires, or per-shot animations that go through the whole animation cycle when the weapon fires.