Underspace News

Hello again starchasers! I hope you've been enjoying space. What's that? You fell in love with a microbe? Well don't do that. She views you more as a friend. She just won't love you the way Lady Mimosa here loves plastic bottles.



Anyway, a bit of news: The demo will be coming back to Steam! We were waiting for a few hotfixes and were patching stuff up, but expect it to be back up this week. The 10% off sale will also end this week, so if you want to save a whole TWO (2) dollars, get it while you can.

Anyway, onto the patch. This is a big one with a lot of bugfixes, plus some small requested features. As a reminder, we do NOT do wipes on saves and make a point to try and make previous save versions always compatible with the latest version of the game.



[h2]NEW FEATURES[/h2]

• The abyssdrive, when unusable, now gives more accurate information as to why you cannot use them (comms, storms, etc).
  
• Completing Baton, Broken will allow you to mention it to Hat when it becomes relevant.
  
• Pard-130 now has a connecting jumphole to Shipstar.
  
• Canceling a mission that involves unique cargo will now remove that cargo from your inventory.
  
• Added new options to the options menu to control text scrolls speed and a multiplier for how long text stays on the screen. This can be found under the audio tab in the options menu.
  
• Cloud saves are now enabled and working!
  

[h2]CHANGES AND REBALANCES[/h2]

• Radios can now play on stations. The radio will use the ambient folder for this, if you’re using specific folders in that way.
  
• The escaped ship in Great Rescape is now recovered after you find it out in the minefield.
  
• Adjusted the distances of several hazards so that they can’t catch you quite as much by surprise.
  
• Adjusted the spawning areas of storm rifts inside several nebulas such as Thoroughfare.
  
• Added higher tiers of radiation hazards as storm hazards.
  
• Added many many more stupid names to the Ballden’s name generation.
  
• You can now craft higher tier repair items from lower tier repair items (Such as shrunken battleships from unstable refabricators), provided you can find them!.
  
• Crafting recipes now show the stats and description of the crafted item.
  
• Ammo now displays in ship descriptions.
  
• Turn rate now displays in ship descriptions.
  
• Forgiveness isn’t considered a virtue in the Union, but they’re still willing to forget. Attacking a neutral or friendly station, jumpgate, or laneline will gradually cause it to stop being hostile, provided you’re far enough away. By default, if you’re more than 35k away from a base for around a minute, it will stop being so damn angry at you.
  
• Extreme collision damage now only occurs while using the abyssdrive.
  
• Gone Adrift will no longer show scannables for the ships you’ve already found.
  
• The Gate and the Code has more hints on how to figure out the Code for the Gate.
  
• Shooting missiles at a station doesn’t instantly incur a hostile wrath. They know you didn’t mean it. Right? RIGHT??
  
• Taking a further look at Us Missions, we’ve decided to make them award a VERY meager amount of reputation, to prevent softlocks. The Us are slow to trust unless you like, blow up an ancient jumpgate to stop a racist guy from attacking them or something. That gets them a bit happier.
  
• We’ve adjusted how the leading pip works with projectiles. Should be more accurate.
  
• Increased the target framerate option to go up to 300.
  

[h2]FIXES:[/h2]

• Mod support has been restored to the game.
  
• Fixed some typos in dialogue.
  
• Fixed some quests that were displayed as being available when the requirements for them were not met.
  
• Many quests have had their objective text adjusted to make the actions that need to be taken more obvious.
  
• Hardpoints on Ballden ships now have proper rotational values.
  
• Hypercharged webbing now works and the Curshian Death Cube can be overcome. Have fun in Curshia Prime!
  
• Unpausing from the save menu no longer locks the controls.
  
• Abyssdrive colors now save.
  
• You can now set waypoints to locations outside of your star system (though you’ll need to know the path) and set waypoints while on stations.
  
• Fixed issue where chapters wouldn't acknowledge storms being killed.
  
• Fixed issue in Box of Memories that could cause softlocks.
  
• Fixed issues in the Lords of Croft and campaign mission 14 that could cause softlocks.
  
• Saves made in space during a random mission will now acknowledge that you’ve launched to space with that random mission and update accordingly.
  
• Bugfixes for the following random missions: Runaway Train, Corpse Collection, Carcass Sorting, Starchaser Teamup, Military Assistance, Washer Sacrifice.
  

And that's it for today! Have fun with the Death Cube. Who knows what waits beyond it?


We're aiming for another patch at the end of the week. This one will start bringing in some of the aforementioned features in our previous patch, along with new things like radial menus and unstable jumpholes getting a bit more crazy. Keep an eye out!

One more cat pic for the road? Fine.

Hello starchasers! We've still got a patch coming on Monday but I had some time today so I figured "Why not". Is it some special occasion? Some holiday? Homestuck day you say? Well Homestuck's terrible now so no. It's just a nice present for you all.



[h2]CHANGES AND REBALANCES[/h2]

• The best price tab now shows the star system of the station you can sell things at.
  
• Off-Track now has some more crazy nonsense to help you figure out the puzzles within.
  

[h2]FIXES[/h2]

• Fixed issue with options resetting on a restart.
  
• Storms received some optimization with some effects, which should help with GPU load.
  
• Starchaser ships now properly color both highengine effects.
  
• Fixed saving issue that would cause unstable jumpholes to reset the game.
  
• Fixed some possible softlocks that happen during campaign mission 10.
  
• Storms now properly save in save files.
  
• Us ships can now be customized.
  
• Fixed cargo duplication bugs when transferring a ship.
  
• Fixed some small UI errors when transferring a ship.
  

Cat picture.

Welcome starchasers! This is our first hotfix since launch, mainly meant to address a lot of priority reported issues. Not all of the issues people have come to me with were able to be fixed in the current timeframe, but rest assured you can expect another patch on Monday that should be pretty comprehensive. This will include a lot of keybind issues, primarily.



But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's get into our current patch notes.



[h2]KNOWN ISSUES:[/h2]

• Some keybinds are missing in the controls menu and binding certain keys (such as escape) can cause issues.
  
• Abyssdrive coloring won't save sometimes.
  
• Several random missions may not complete properly.
  
• Saves loaded in-space won't properly update random missions.
  
• Out of system waypoints for specific objects aren't functional. Waypointing to a system directly IS functional.
  
• Some scannable items in quests persist.
  
• Killing certain storms won't count as progress towards specific storm-chased-based chapters.
  

[h2]NEW FEATURES:[/h2]

• You can now delete saves in the saving menu.
  
• Mouse buttons other than mouse buttons 1 and 2 can now be mapped to actions.
  
• Missiles now take into account your current velocity when firing.
  
• New positioning for the Transfer All button when trading in a ship. It can all transfer all your cargo BACK to your original ship.
  

[h2]CHANGES AND REBALANCES:[/h2]

• Hardpoints have gotten some major upgrades. In addition to them having higher health, repairing your hull will also repair your hardpoints and reactivate them.
  
• NPC missiles were far too fast. As a result, most missiles fired by NPCs have been slowed significantly, allowing you time to shoot them down or asking your Autoturret to shoot them down.
  
• We've rebalanced energy mechanics a bit to slow down your energy charge rate. This makes the skill for that much more useful while still allowing you to fire for a decent time.
  

[h2]FIXES[/h2]

• Fixed a major issue where manual docking wasn't enabled by default and automatic docking wouldn't let you go through gates. By default now, automatic docking must always be turned on due to its vast inferiority over manual docking.
  
• While cleaning up the... stuff they found inside the Littlefish, Hat and the Idolsmashers accidentally flipped the "Hardpoints have no health" switch in the cockpit of said ship. I went back and switched it back on. Now the Littlefish's gun ports aren't made out of kitten whispers and butter dreams.
  
• Fixed issues where respeccing your character would give you extra skill points. For those who received them, have fun you overpowered bastards, you cards you.
  
• You can now reset your reputation with Vauldwin law enforcement aboard Kaisus Circle.
  
• Several unintended audio files that remained have been stripped out.
  
• You can now partially loot cargoboxes that have commodities inside them.
  
• Fixed (hopefully) cargo duplication issues when trading in ships.
  
• Fixed several stations in Ballden Space where you'd fall through the floor.
  
• Baton, Broken, now properly awards Amesten's freighter at the end.
  
• Made the instructions in "To Catch A Smuggler" clearer.
  
• Removed some additional placeholder audio.
  
• Expanded the area you need to enter before the Yeahtier will begin moving in "The Battle that Always Will Be".
  
• Taking a train to a station other than UHC-46 will now make "Off-Track" properly complete.
  
• Comprehensive fixes for the in-game radio. Unfortunately, MP3 support isn't on the table (thanks Unity!) but we fixed a bunch of loading errors related to it and updated the guide as to what formats and rates are valid to get Underspace to acknowledge your tunes.
  
• Loading a save that was saved in cockpit mode now doesn't disappearate your ship.
  
• Lowered the sound of scanning pings and fixed issue where sound settings wouldn't change their volume level.
  
• NPCs squadmates on lanelines can no longer ram you up. At least, not lethally.
  
• Rewrote some of the in-game manuals to contain more comprehensive information.
  
• Basic functionality for the search menu has been restored on the navmap and typing names into the searchbar won't cause menus to open.
  
• Fixed issues where cargo construction missions gave you too little loot to complete them.
  
• Texture quality option has been removed. A deep dive revealed it did Croft-all for performance while also making the game look significantly worse. We'll give you something neater in return, don't worry.
  
• Fixed issues where fighter spawns in some missions wouldn't progress the mission.
  

While you're here, I'll share a few smaller things being worked on that'll be upcoming with some of the later patches this month. This doesn't cover the BIG update roadmaps, just some neat features in the pipeline. This includes:

• Greatly expanded tutorials for aspects of the game, including covering equipment, menus, etc.
  
• Improved feedback on items when they become available to be crafted.
  
• New UI elements such as dialogue history and being able to read scanned data entries from your main UI.
  
• New menu options for things such as text speed, allowing alternate inputs to control the throttle, and more.
  
• New graphical options to help with optimization.
  
• New ways to sell, acquire and utilize both your scanned data and learn about in-game locations.
  
• Quickmenu support for additional equipment types.
  
• More cat photos.
  

Welcome starchasers! Normally I'd put out something right around the 24 hour mark talking about everything but that's 4AM my time and adrenaline only gets you so far in life, so I'm doing it while I'm not asleep!
This was day 1 of our early access launch, which happily met with a lot of our expectations for sales and attention. Sadly much like me, my cats are currently at a hotel and unable to appreciate this properly. Not that they ever appreciate anything if it doesn't relate to wet food.



So, with all the new people here and so many eyes on something that isn't a Thomas the Tank Engine mod for once, let's talk about the future.

Right now I'm out of town and away from my precious actual computer, spending most of my time galavanting around at the launch party. There's a cake. It bleeds for some reason.



Anyway, onto stuff that isn't cake. Our first month of Early Access is mostly going to be focused on bugfixes and some features that didn't quite make it into launch. Some of this will include content, but by and large it'll be a focus on the aforementioned bugfixes, features, etc. As expected, it's an early access release so a lot of things go off the wall crazy.



Anyway these hotfixes will include additional work on keybinds, and that also includes controller and HOTAS support (you can see a lot of the framework for these in the game's options menu). We do have basic functionality for this already (though it currently only autodetects Xbox gamepads), but further support has always been planned. Nevertheless, given the speed of the game's combat mouse and keyboard is heavily recommended.

Our testers are familiar with this, but we are VERY quick to push hotfixes and bugfixes. I'll be back home Friday where I can properly start work on that, but the aim is to push out patches once a week at minimum starting this Friday. Don't worry, almost always these hotfixes are only a couple megabytes at most.



Now that's the roadmap for THIS month. Early May we'll be sharing with you the ENTIRE early access roadmap, including large upcoming content and feature patches that you can expect over the next year. This will include things like the remaining quests, expanded customization options, and of course multiplayer.

We're thrilled to announce the long awaited Early Access release! Lots of updates coming on the roadmap. Stay tuned!