After a whole month of beta testing and furious bug fixing, following the tradition, we are once again doing our yearly release. This release includes many engine improvements, such as 3D ships, an in-game wiki, reworked weapon sets, notable performance increases, etc., but also a significant amount of new content including a whole new area, more and reworked missions, and ship variants among others things. We also have not forgotten significant quality of life improvements; folding messages, more visual indications for things such as important characters at the spaceport bar, filtering for the mission computer, and more! We would like to thank all the contributors who participated and helped in the making of this release that we hope will both surprise new players and veterans alike!

Most notable changes:

• Nearly all the ships are now modeled in 3D with fancy lighting and tilting effects!
• You can now capture ships!
• New ships and ship variants!
• Faction reputation is no longer a single global value, but more nuanced and local.
• Simplified and more powerful weapon sets
• New challenging area to access many secrets.
• In-game Wiki full of mechanics and lore explanations!

• Gameplay
  • Ability to capture disabled ships
  • Faction reputation is no longer universal, but varies on systems
    • Direct faction hit changes are shown as messages
    • Your actions will more directly affect ships in the system
  • Significantly increase maximum potential fleet capacity
  • Excess energy to battery recharge efficiency is now flat instead of varying based on charge level
  • Gave the Zalek Sting a slight detection buff
  • Can only have a single patrol mission active at a given time
  • Pirates are less numerous during Chapter 0
  • Dvaered Arsenal has no fighter bays and fewer slots
  • Lowered CPU cost of some fighter bays
  • Decreased CPU and energy provided by large core slots
  • Pillaging ships affects reputation
  • Significantly increased the amount of fuel provided by outfits
  • Camouflage burster gives a speed bonus while active and disables when out of stealth
  • Can scan ships with u key
  • Gave the Quicksilver another medium structural slot
  • Beam weapons have minimum delays instead of minimum durations
  • Can stealth when missiles are locked on
  • Deployed fighters take stress and damage over time when their mother ship is destroyed
  • Electron Burst Cannons and Zalek Heavy Drones have had their damage per second lowered
  • Improved point defense
    • Spittle Tubuloid Cluster is now a utility and does more damage
    • Guardian Interception System does double damage
    • Missiles explode when intercepted
  • Bounties have explicit time limits
  • Derelicts should appear in remote systems
• Quality of Life
  • Added colourblind correction mode
  • Exposed more colourblind options to the user
  • Can modify game speed directly instead of using a slow mode difficulty for accessibility
  • Messages get folded instead of repeating
  • Asteroids no longer fade out if close to or targeted by the player
  • Display fuel consumption for ships in the equipment overlay
  • Added option to match speed with the slowest ship in the fleet (on by default)
  • Made it so ships in the equipment screen do not change order based on value
  • Mark spaceport bar tab when there is an important NPC
  • Weapon set keybindings change window tabs
  • Use short outfit names when displaying groups of outfits
  • Shown more useful things you have when buying outfits with things other than credits
  • Can sort and filter the mission computer
  • Added small optional bounce to NPCs when they start talking
  • Inform the player when they dont meet mission requirements for some important missions
  • Can add new plugins directly from the options menu
  • Can toggle whether autonav stops when missile lock-ons are detected
  • Added colour coded factional backgrounds in the shipyard
  • Can rotate shipyard image for ships with 3D graphics
  • Prompt when deleting notes
  • Added accessibility option that allows skipping story minigames
  • Can view and change all your ships in the equipment tab when there is refuelling
  • Reduced space dust size by 50%
  • Changed mouse click selection priority, it prefers spobs/jumps and will ignore clicks reselecting the same object
• Content
  • New in-game wiki with explanation on gameplay mechanics and lots of lore
  • 8 new missions
    • The Onions call
  • 4 new ships
  • 13 new ship variants
    • Give a new twist to existing ships
  • 6 new outfits
  • New area with unique challenges
  • New events
    • Get more Sirius abilities
    • Find the dark side of the Nebula
  • New NPC portraits
  • New generic NPC and News messages
  • Reworked trails to make ships feel more speedy
• Engine
  • Support for 3D models
    • Lighting is based on system stars
    • Fancy effects for special systems
    • Ships tilt slightly when rotating
    • Simple animations are supported and used when applicable
  • Support for an in-game wiki
    • Can process YAML, Lua, and markdown
    • Cross-link support
    • Support for custom widgets
  • Stats (except inverted stats) are now additive instead of multiplicative
  • Try to merge saves if multiple directories correspond to the same player
  • More robust weapon set support that can handle multiple overlapping weapon sets
  • Faster handling of asteroids with large exclusion areas
  • Added fuel_usage_mod ship stat
  • Fixed player losing navigation targets when unidiff is applied
  • Fixed ai.idir giving wrong answer by M_PI_2 in some cases
  • Threaded more loading components
  • Lua require now caches chunks
  • Dropped SDL_image fallback
  • Use higher internal timer for all platforms
  • Support for Tracy
  • Spobs that are not landable yet generate presence will be shown on the map
  • Warn the player if they try to use a name with all space characters
  • Decoupled the collision system from the rendering system
  • Added a low memory mode to use fewer and smaller textures with 3D
  • Lazy load ship and outfit graphics to reduce memory usage and decrease load time
  • Use clang-format to format all the C code
  • Use enums internally to represent keybindings instead of strings
  • Always use replaygain information when available when loading vorbis files
  • Stop repeating the same warning after a fixed amount of times
  • Support for outfits that dont break stealth
  • Editor has partial support for universe diffs
  • Editor has separate configuration and file dialogues
  • New ship stats
    • Global weapon range, damage, fire-rate and energy usage
    • Range ship stat for all specific weapon types
    • Turn, speed, and accel for launchers
    • Shield downtime modifier
  • Deprecated old faction API in favour of the new one for local / global standings
  • Added support for temporarily overriding faction standings
• Fixes
  • PSO and Mizar nebulas have trails again
  • Removed fancy background mode
  • Can remove fighter bays with deployed fighters
  • Sol is less friendly
  • Fixed rare cases where fighters would not be able to dock
  • Fixed hypergate and wormhole effects getting stuck
  • Obelisks tell if you have completed them already
  • Fixed space dust disappearing with certain jump abilities
  • Boarded pilots become permanently disabled if they lose space-worthiness
  • Double tap will activate feather drive like blink engines
  • Fixed camouflage burster not activating stealth
  • Fixed bug where beams were counted as giving energy in the equipment optimizer
  • shadowvigil: claim entire route
  • sh01_corvette: should be completable on easy difficulties now
  • patrol: fixed escorts and fighters becoming hostile if hostile to the mission giving faction
  • Fixed debugging paranoid builds under Windows
  • Fixed autonav not respecting shield thresholds
  • zbh10: Godheart and friends get at most 1 fighter bay per ship now
  • Fixed ESS Trinity being bribeable
  • Cargo on fleets with be displayed to make room for mission cargo when necessary
  • Made it so Shadow Vigil doesnt try to go through Surano system for reasons
  • blackhole/zbh09: fixed softlock during a cutscene under certain conditions
  • Dont play wormhole sound on main menu
  • Dont allow the player to sell unique ships
  • Fixed corner cases where destroyed player ships would not properly be updated
  • Fixed Sirius Providence flow absorption bonus
  • Fixed positioning of a certain blockade
  • Fixed some visual aberrations when forcing the player to land or jump
  • Prioritize pilots and other objects over uninhabited planets when clicking
  • Can always bribe your way to pirates clansworlds
  • Consistently colour the ShipAI messages in the tutorial
  • Made max_fps actually get respected
  • Fixed map decorators not shown in editor
  • Update the overlay scaling given the players position
  • Fixed population not being updated by universe diffs
  • Fixed date acquired being wrong on some platforms
  • Improved pilot facing corrections when jumping
  • Pirate ambush derelict events break stealth
  • Mining minigame result affects yield more
  • Absorption is no longer limited to the 0% to 100% range
  • derelict_rescue: only allow generic target space objects
  • Restored portable installs with the Windows installer
  • Show intrinsic outfits in the Other tab
  • Fixed plural form of 0 items in many cases
  • Ships significantly past the mass limit are no longer space worthy
  • Dont allow ship shield/energy to go negative
  • Jumping through a one-way normal / hidden jump reveals the hidden side
  • Increased nebula visibility by 400 km
  • Fixed map thresholds for interference
  • Editor now shows dialogues on errors and allows user to choose directory to save data to
  • Escorts will try to respect players autonav rules by default
  • Dont show stealth circles during cinematics
  • Made pilots in formation less prone to spinning
  • Workaround MESA driver bug that causes dark or invisible ships on AMD hardware
  • Can no longer abort missions during landing animation