This summer, part of the Data Realms team got together in our annual "Summer Stugan" in Slovakia to collaborate for a few weeks and then playtest the game in our booths at Gamescom, PAX, and Tokyo Games Show. The result of these INTENSE months of work is distilled into today's huge update to Planetoid Pioneers! It is a big step toward its eventual release out of Early Access.

Here are the highlights:

• Polished Beginning section of Primoid a LOT based on all the feedback we have gotten from you and the players at Gamescom, PAX, and TGS. We also added some seeeecrets.
• Added still work-in-progress Defendoid, which is a new wave-defense style planetoid, which is already very tense and fun!
• Improved Carnageoid with new entirely new arenas and lots of polish.
• Reworked all weapons to actually aim where you point, have nice effects, juicy feedback and have ammo, explode and give you the blueprint when they are empty. We also added some new ones.
• Improved stability. The majority of the crashes have been caused by Lua scripts corrupting memory. Miro and Brian wrapped most of the classes used in Lua so Lua can not crash the game that way anymore.
• Scenes load faster by optimizing library load times and removing texture compression.
• The game saves in all relevant scenes and continues where you left off. Hopefully, most of the bugs with saving should be fixed too. Let us know if you find any, though!
• The coliseum uses all workshop blueprints tagged "Gladiator". This is the start of integrating workshop items into the game seamlessly. Stay tuned to the LIVE NEVERENDING CARNAGE and start tagging your published blueprints to see them automatically show up in the Coliseum :]
• The coliseum also uses the new Pioneer AI. Try it yourself by activating the AI connector on pioneers in the scene editor.
• We started using the loot system which will give you random loot including resources, weapons, blueprints and pioneers on Primoid through loot orbs.
• New control scheme for Xbox controllers. Making better use of the ABXY buttons and relying less on bumpers. To get closer to what you are used to.
• Added line from Pioneer to cursor for aiming shots and throws and also help identifying your cursor in coop.
• Better pioneer crawling controls.
• AFK players fall asleep after more than 20 seconds of no input
• Made all texts bigger so they read better on TV screens, videos and steams.
• As always lots of bug fixes and polish. There should be way fewer Lua errors now.