It's now been half a year since Nienix reached 1.0! To celebrate, today's patch (1.050) includes a completely new game mode called Fleet Commander. Apart from this game mode, a whole bunch of other content has been added during the past three months (the time since the last major news update). This post highlights significant changes. As always, follow the patch notes for the complete list.

Fleet Commander

This game mode was inspired by Gratuitous Space Battles and allows you to orchestrate large-scale fleet battles. Play against an AI in the offline mode or a friend through the online modes. You can only summon foes that you have defeated during the campaign. I hope this feature makes exploring random events more rewarding, as these include enemies that you would not face by solely following the main quest line.

Updates to the Continuum Transmuter

I know that many of you have a love/hate relationship with the Continuum Transmuter. It is useful to roll and alter gear, but the process takes a long time - especially during the end-game. Thats why the Continuum Transmuter has been revised. In particular, it now includes the storage. The auto-match-recipes takes the items in the storage into consideration. Recipe auto-matching also better considers item grades when evaluating what to upgrade. Mythic- and Uber-grade items are no longer automatically selected. The latter was done to ensure that no important end-game items could be transmuted through the auto-matching feature by mistake.

Items can now unlock different skills

Legendary+ tier engines and ships can now roll with unlockable skills (up to tier 5)! Some skills only roll for certain kinds of ships/engines.

The core game engine has been updated

The core game code has been updated to .NET 6.0. This brings many improvements. In particular, newer Linux platforms such as Ubuntu 22 are now supported "out of the box" (there is no longer a need to add older libraries required by the previous game version on such platforms).

Updates for controller players

A new (gamepad-only) radial menu has been added that enables more easily enabling/disabling game screens that previously required two hotkeys pressed in combination (e.g., the inventory or map). The previous keybindings remain as-was; the radial menu is only enabled if the start-button is clicked (rather than pressed). Radial menus now also behave more closely to the variant used in Diablo 3.

New items

[New ship] A new Dreadnought-class ship has been added to the loot table. The default variant of this ship is narrow and 1100m long. [Continuum Entity] Ext-S Fragment: Extracts all skill bonuses from an item and stores them in a Continuum Entity. The item is destroyed in the process. [Continuum Entity] In-S Fragment: Inserts the skill bonuses in the In-S Fragment to a desired ship or engine. Any existing skill bonuses in that item are replaced.

Catalan

The entire game now officially supports Catalan (albeit some polish still remain - the final version is expected to be completed within a few weeks)! This work was made by the Ce Trencada Project, that translates video games into Catalan completely free of charge, altruistically, and with a purely cultural purpose, with the sole objective of promoting the culture of video games in Catalan. I deeply appreciate your contribution!

Japanese, German, Portugese, French, Spanish and Swedish

Based on player requests, I've decided to include the machine-made translations for Japanese, German, Portugese, Spanish, French and Swedish in the main branch. These localizations are bound to contain many errors. Please report incorrect texts on Steam or Discord! Or download the localization spreadsheet and correct it yourself. Translation instructions can be found here. I've decided not to tag the Steam store page with these machine-made translations - only localizations made manually (or at least thoroughly proof-read) are visible on Steam. Additionally, the machine-made translations are highlighted with a red color in the language selection drop-down menu and have a warning text popup.

Quality of life

[Misc] Engine auto-boost and active auxiliary auto-use are now coupled to the two ship hull configs. [Misc] Fixed-point weapon auto-fire is now coupled to the two weapon configs. [Keybindings] You can now bind all toggles in the radial menu (toggle the active skill, auto-fire weapons, auto-use auxiliary items and auto-boost engine) to keyboard/mouse keys. These options are available under Options -> Auto-use controls. [Balance] There has been a plethora of balance changes. In particular, many skills have been buffed and various enemies have been rebalanced. Summoned drones also have lower penalties to resistances during end-game Continuum Events. [UI] There is now information regarding the connection status to the master server in the public server listing. [UI] The local player map icon is now presented in the transparent map.

So, what's next?

I am currently working on some really cool stuff that have been suggested by many of you. Please keep giving me your awesome suggestions! I promise, I read them all (even if it sometimes takes me a long time to answer). It really makes the dev process a whole lot more fun. /Hannes