BETA 3 has arrived, with a focus on improving the star system. We have added a number of new features as well as some polish to existing ones.
You can discuss BETA 3 on Discord or as usual on the Steam Discussion Topic

Patch Notes

Warp is no longer safe

Fleets can and will now react to your presence. If you get too close to a hostile one, they may chase you down and force you into combat. If you do enough things to their faction in a small frame of time, a pursuit fleet may be spawned just to track you and try to kill you. Regions may now react to players visiting. Distress calls will reveal their true nature when entered. Maybe they are an ambush, or its a ship wreck--the twisted salvage strewn amongst some asteroids--or it could be a genuine ship in distress.

Discover all the things

Region information and discovery has been improved. You can buy information about a system from a trader (if you can find one), and you will see labels for regions known to have Assemblers (for ship building and repairs), Labs (for manufacturing), Traders or where combat is taking place. Discovery has been tweaked overall to make things a bit more interesting, and now visually distinguishes between regions you've scanned, and regions you've visited.

Space is now a little less empty

Finally, the spawning algorithm responsible for spawning dynamic regions (like fleets and traders) has been overhauled. The focus is now on making interesting things for the players, as opposed to just filling up the star system. The end result is actually a more engaging flying time, with the additional benefit of less wasted and extraneous regions the player never visits.

Details

Additions

• ADDED: Regions (fleets and such) can now force players out of warp
• ADDED: Aggressive regions
• ADDED: Factions will now keep track of players actions against them (for the short term). This allows factions to react with different levels of intensity depending on what the player has done, and how pissed off they are.
• ADDED: Several new parameters to universesetup.json
• ADDED: 3 new region templates to support the multi faction capabilities.
• ADDED: Regions will only be marked as "in battle" if they are battling something other than you, the player. Other things include other players and two or more AI factions going at it.
• ADDED: Indepedent Traders will now offer trade options upon initial hail.
• ADDED: Inline tooltips to mission descriptions and other text elements for additional mouseover information. Will be used more in the future.
• ADDED: Traders now offer the option to buy star system discovery information
• ADDED: Ambush regions will now spawn fleets that can chase a fleeing player
• ADDED: Regions known about (via visiting or trader purchasing) will show region faction icon

Fixes/Updates

• CHANGE: Changed how dynamic regions are spawned. They are now focused more on the players active in the star system. This should produce better gameplay while keeping the number of active dynamics limited to a fixed number regardless of star system size.
• CHANGE: Certain hostile regions can and will now be immediately engaging in combat upon player enter instead of the previous multi second delay.
• CHANGE: Suits will now be destroyed if they receive an extra amount of damage after death.
• CHANGE: Enhanced the system used for picking and assigned factions to regions, this now allows for much easier multi faction regions (ex: two fleets in mid battle)
• CHANGE: Systems in conflict will slowly convert regions into battle regions. These regions will have multiple factions spawned.
• CHANGE: After a star system conflict has resolved, regions now have the chance to regenerate into completely different types of regions. Ex: A planet outpost region could become a planet trader region
• CHANGE: Projectiles, like mines, spawned via region templates can now vary their level based on the region's level
• CHANGE: Behind-the-scenes, restructured space suits to be more desirable. This should fix a number of edge cases where space suits were being ignored or overlooked for gameplay elements.
• CHANGE: Improved AI responses to combat elements. Previously AI vessels would only react on tile death, but now they can and will react on tile damage, tile death and shield damage.
• CHANGE: Tweaked how reinforcements are generated. Instead of a pure tile % check, it now uses a more sophisticated agro check.
• CHANGE: AI now are aware of "Transfer all/single" actions when calculating their opinion of cargo theft.
• CHANGE: Taking inventory from factioned cargo may now be seen as an aggressive action and not only lose faction standing, but may result in combat. Also, the closest appropriate vessel will hail you now to let you know what you've done instead of the first valid vessel.
• CHANGE: Changed the data structure for discovery. This goes in hand with changes to the discovery system where elements are displayed at the star system level once the elements have been identified. This includes things like labeling regions that have battles occuring, where traders are known to be present, where Assemblers are present.
• CHANGE: Discovery now lets you know whether you have merely scanned (to scan something you just have to be within range) or also visited (having exited warp into) a region. Scanned regions have a different color boundary than visited, and unknown regions have a dashed boundary.
• CHANGE: Updated how trader items are generated. This should provide more variety yet better accuracy depending on the region and star system characteristics.
• CHANGE: Herman has signed an exclusive deal with the Independent Traders. He is now a member of their faction.
• CHANGE: Adjusted fleet region naming to be a bit more descriptive.
• CHANGE: Distress beacons will now change to a more appropriate type once they have been visited. This means that distress beacons can now be revealed and labeled as shipwrecks, ambushes and distress calls.
• CHANGE: Changed "ping point" to "map marker" for hopefully better clarification
• CHANGE: Certain dialogue will now automatically pop up
• CHANGE: Destroying all alive ships in a distress beacon region should now cause the region to disappear or change into a debris region (depends on what else is left behind) after the last player leaves.
• CHANGE: Removed bulky reactors from the "light" loot pool. This should lessen the issue of small, light ships spawning with these massive reactors in their cargo.
• CHANGE: Wrecks will now retain their faction by default but allow access to inventory etc similar to factioned cargo crates. Be careful no one is around when you loot them!
• FIX: A general issue with connecting via hostname
• FIX: Connecting using hostnames that include a dash "-"
• FIX: Connecting to a hostname with multiple subdomains (e.g. server1.cool.game.server.examplehost.com) should now work
• FIX: Extraneously garbage generation from the weapons system
• FIX: An issue with wreck generation where mounts had phantom tiles present.
• FIX: An issue where commands that required no parameters were given parameters and causing errors
• FIX: Dedicated server console command input now uses the whole input string. This mainly effects things that have information like /kick
• FIX: Some issues with UI culling of star system elements when at warp have been identified and fixed
• FIX: Missing language entries for mission 259 - Conflict: Ticeroy Base Located
• FIX: Regions generated for missions not being seeded correctly resulting in "samey" names, in addition to other things.
• FIX: A rare issue where missions generated via /command for star systems in conflict were being generated with the wrong factions.
• FIX: /clearallmissions not fully clearing missions
• FIX: Fixed Charkles dialogue... again
• FIX: Fixed an issue with ship wreck generation where ownership was incorrectly assigned
• FIX: Fixed region label text wrapping that occured when zooming in and out
• FIX: Fixed an issue with buying bribes when you had the exact amount of spacebucks
• FIX: Corrected a number of misplaced engine recipes
• FIX: Sometimes suits would not be removed when they were supposed to.

COMING IN BETA 4

For BETA 4 we will be looking at general content and polish. This means a larger picture look at what is going on and focusing on lots of little things that we find could be done better.