Hey everyone! We've baked a new patch!
Coldwild Games is happy to bring you the next major patch in our early access series :) This time we're adding an item / crafting system and various optimizations. Let's start from the crafting.

We got a new building!

It's called "Space Oven." It's used for cooking awesome stuff. You can upgrade it to cook even faster, but it's quite costly (both in upgrade price and energy consumption). Finally, you can click on it or on your inventory button to start the crafting process. The Space Oven becomes available on third star system.

The cooking process itself

The cooking works in two ways: first, you can combine three similar items to get a stronger one OR you can try combining three different items to see. The recipes are left for you to discover, but we might make a wiki later on :) There are total 28 new items in this patch. Those items give you permanent boosts that affect your building production, ship damage and strength, offline production, species growth and battle rewards.
Inventory Screen

Balance

Thanks to your feedback, we know that increasing the amout of star systems to beat the galaxy made the game feel grindy. Now each galaxy has 5 systems that needs to be conquered, but the enemies encountered will be considerably tougher (base level grows). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuNcBq53H0U

User Experience

A lot of effort went into improving the user experience. Bullet / damage text were optimized to work much faster, so your average performance should improve greatly. The statistics window has also been added to show your progress / total numbers in the game. We've also received a lot of reports on occasional crashes. We're sorry that they were happening: we've analyzed them and those seem to be results of internal workings of unity engine (to which we don't have any access). We've updated the unity version and the crashes did not occur on our side anymore, but let us know if this continues to happen and we'll be monitoring the situation closely.

Full patch notes

• New Building: Space Oven, allows you to craft the items! Becomes available in third galaxy
• Crafting system: combine 3 same items to get improved item or experiment with combining the items together!
• 28 new items added
• Asteroid Map Points grant supply boxes upon completing; player can pick one item from them to boost his stats
• Sabre Weapon Damage Type changed to heat
• Made Trader offline bonus stack multiplicatively with the rest production bonuses
• Statistics Window
• Fixed Player Damage/HP multipliers: they no longer apply to enemy ships
• Galaxy Jumps now award candy too
• Fixed wrong discount that was applied to ship ugrades from blessings
• Candy amount gained from candy boxes in space battles is scaled with the current level of an encounter
• Candy is formatted like any other resouce
• Candy tooltip is updated every second when moused over
• Ship health bar dissappears, when ship gets destroyed or ship's health reaches 0
• Frame limiting option in background mode
• Performance impact of damage text in battles is reduced
• Bullet/projectile instantiation rework, should improve performance / memory handling

Thanks for your support!

We appreciate all the feedback that you send us in :) The next patch will work on mod support; If you encounter any errors - please let us know in discussion forums or join our discord channel!