Greetings, Spacefarers! We've got another update for Alpha 8, newest version is now 0.8.21. For this update we've focused on finalizing the new changes for Alpha 8 and also added another new facility, the Composter. We worked on a new view mode, the water vapor view mode, allowing you to see where water vapor is distributed on your ship. We also added a way to eject stuff from a storage and tweaked some things, read all about it below.
Introducing the Composter facility and fertilizer as a resource. Grow Beds will now need fertilizer to enable crops to grow. The composter will allow you to decompose many type of resources to fertilizer, carbon and water. While the Composter supports the food production loop the Chemical refinery is capable of producing fertilizer more efficiently. Use these two facilities to keep your food production up and running.
We added the much wanted water vapor view mode, which will allow you to be more strategic with where you place your water collectors on your ship. Use this view mode to see where water vapor is accumulating, and place a water collector to get the vapor turned back to liquid water again.
We modified the mining station to have two shuttles, and increased the default crew member amount at start to 6. This will help with the logistics work in the beginning, allowing things to run a little bit smoother as you build your ship to take to the stars. A couple of other worthwhile mentions: We tweaked the random derelict ship generator a bit to increase the chance of finding hypersleep chambers aboard derelict ships. It seemed it was very rare to find one, the chance should be higher now.
We also added a way to eject items from a storage on a ship. This will become handy when stuff just keeps accumulating and you need some space for more important resources.
With every update our graphic artist uses some of his time to polish assets in the game. This time the power generator has gotten a tune up to its animation as well as the solar panel. Probably a lot of other stuff, he doesn't always tell us =) Thoughts on Alpha 9 The updates seen to Alpha 8 so far have been smaller updates, still taking time but allowing for a near weekly new patch. A bigger update and a new Alpha version will require many weeks of development time, and we're ready to start working on it once we know these final versions of Alpha 8 are stable enough. We will be able to state our ideas for Alpha 9 in a broad manner once we have started working on Alpha 9, but we will be able to show the final details of the update closer to the release of the update. We also plan to keep you updated weekly or bi-weekly depending on how progress is coming along. =) Full Patch Notes: [version] 0.8.21

• New Facility: Composter.
• New view mode: Water Vapor.
• New resource: Fertilizer.
• You can create fertilizer in the Chemical Refinery.
• Fertilizer resource units added to old saves to allow for a smoother transition to this new version.
• Plants in grow beds now need fertilizer.
• Toilet now produces water and biomatter. Grow beds also produce biomatter.
• Increased the chance to find a crew member in a hypersleep chamber aboard derelict ships.
• Added oxygen indicators to airlocks.
• Combined Hazardous gas and smoke to one view mode named Hazardous/Smoke.
• Added a new welcome text as the first information when starting a new game.
• Prisoners can now eat from nearby storages and items on floor if they have access and permission to those tiles.
• Modified mining base start scenario to have two shuttles.
• Modified mining base start scenario to have 6 crew as default instead of 5.
• Modified building job not possible notification to not come as often.
• Added a mechanism to eject items to space from a storage.
• Fixed shat pants negative comfort remaining after condition was removed by going to the toilet.
• Fixed a problem with trading.
• Fixed problem with produce if < xx in grow beds.
• Fixed many bugs.