It's our first major update of Early Access! First things first, let's say hello to our new Custodian: Annie!
Blessed with a very strong sense of self, Annie lacks many of the obsessive hang-ups that Robbie has, and gains much less stress when the ship is not just-so. The ship doesn't need to be just-so, because SHE is just-so. Always, and forever. Of course, this self-confidence quickly turns into introspection as stress builds up...which isn't good for a Custodian trapped in an iron shell in deep space. Annie represents an implosive response to stress, and retreats inside her rich fantasies as things get bad. She starts with a permanent insanity, and can choose to make any insanities she acquires permanent as well. Even better - don't like an insanity you got? You can change it! Annie can choose to shuffle non-permanent insanities at the Observation window. What weaker minds call insanities, though, Annie simply calls the burden of perfection. She loses Stress at the end of every turn for every insanity she has active - and loses still more the more Psychosis she has. However, any Stress left over will cause Annie to retreat further into her inner universe, gaining Psychosis at the beginning of the next turn. Annie has a doubled chance to gain an insanity per turn, and cannot install the ECC module. Not that she needs it - why would there be any errors to correct in such a clearly perfect specimen?
Annie is far from the only thing in this update, though, so without further ado, onto the juicy patch notes!

Content

• Two new Narrative Arcs - Phasma Ex Machina and Turing Complete.
• The second act of the game, which includes the new Narrative Arcs and the yet-to-be-released Underworks arc, are less linear than the first three. On turn 6, you will receive a popup to choose which arc you wish to attempt.
• You are responsible for all that occurs hereafter.
• Added 1 new Crisis Arc to Endless Mode (Defragged Memoirs)
• Annie is strong against an existing Crisis Arc (Cold Coffins)
• Added 20 new random events.
• Added 10 Annie-specific choices for random events.
• Added Annie-specific choices on all current narrative arcs.
• Added scenes for Annie on all current narrative arcs.
• Added 10 new various insanities.
• Added 5 new insanities exclusive to Annie.
• Updated some minor semantics about existing insanities (ex: Illusory doors from the insanity may now appear on top of you sometimes.)
• Added 5 new Inspirations.
• New interactions with certain ship doodads - lockers, for example, now have a 10% chance to have a part in them when you search them the first time.
• First part of the new Interactive Tutorial
• At current, the tutorial is not being triggered by the menu item; we are evaluating with playtesters where it makes the most sense to fire. You may manually fire the new tutorial experience by hitting the tilde (~) key and typing "run tutorial_begin", without the quotes.
• The Interactive Tutorial is not fully done yet and we welcome feedback on topics to cover in it - post in the Discussions, or join our Discord! (https://discord.gg/GzNMeCtf8T)
• Added Ship Disasters
• Spills and leaks will now self-propagate if not cleaned. Ignoring them for too long will turn into a larger scale disaster, such as a structural collapse or an oil slick. Not all disasters are wholly negative, though...

Visuals and Audio

• Many new decorations, both in new areas of the ship and revamped old ones.
• Updated Cryo with new pod designs and light styles.
• Major sound revamp; lots of new environmental sounds, both directional and regional to your position on the ship.

Fixes

• Fixed a major issue with Contingency that caused the reactor power to not be fully restored at the end of the arc.
• Fixed Cooldown events that say they are repairing and overclocking a system; they will now always do exactly that, regardless of the state of the system or the ship.
• Fixed a dozen random events pushing LUA code into the savegame.
• Added a warning in the game about corrupt saves if LUA code is detected in the save.
• In the future, Endless Dark will refuse to load such corrupted saves, but for now it will only warn.
• Added a function to test ongoing random effects, and to check all events in the game for potential crashing bugs.
• Fixed dozens of potential crashes in the logic of random and narrative events thanks to this new infrastructure.
• Increased dead zones for controller inputs to make them less wonky.
• Fixed a very nasty encoding bug that was causing some UTF-8 characters to crash the game.
• Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash if it ran out of random events to show the player.
• Fixed a nasty bug that made it FAR more likely than intended for the player to contract an insanity per turn due to their psychosis level. Please be aware that Annie innately doubles your chance to contract an insanity per turn, so her insanity incidence is still quite high. Robbie will now be far more stable than he was, however.

Changes and Balancing

• Robbie's Emergency Repair now gets a success bonus the more systems are damaged or broken; at 3 systems on the fritz, it's about as reliable as a plain repair, which can save him a lot of Parts.
• Robbie can also use Emergency Repair through a system lock.
• Adjusted Tension gain from having dead passengers, and corrected Tension growth. The game will hit a little harder in the early turns, but overall will grow substantially slower as the game goes on. This should remove some of the pressure to rush all the time.
• Removed the Director's ability to launch an extra random event to add Tension to the game. It will now tend to spawn more minor issues (like stuck doors or spills) instead.
• The game will now put your last save into a save.bak to make it easier to send in your save games for analysis by the Little Light team.