This update is here a little earlier than planned. Once the performance gains started stacking up and the visual upgrades came together, it felt wrong to delay it though.

They’ve been on the roadmap for a long time and you'll now occasionally encounter them while exploring. They’re not common, but when you do find one, visibility drops hard hopefully giving a very different feel to combat. It may be tweaked in future updates but I want to see what you guys think first.

I’ve upgraded the bloom system with proper tonemapping. Glows now keep their colour instead of blowing out into flat white. At the same time, Gateways have been reworked with proper portal shaders and new entry animations.

This ended up being a much bigger visual improvement than expected. In hindsight, I should have done it sooner but it's here now!

The overall game brightness has been increased slightly. If you dislike this there's now a Brightness slider in the settings. Background Darkness is still adjustable separately under Accessibility.

To keep ships readable against brighter environments, they now have a subtle black shadow.

Fox-2 Ship Design by Yo (https://star-vortex.com/ships.php?view=152)

This update includes a major performance pass across the entire game.

Large fights with heavy projectile and drone counts should feel noticeably smoother. Drone weapon pools are now preloaded before combat, so you won’t get that initial stutter when a swarm fires for the first time.

A lot of invisible per-frame allocations have been removed from targeting, clean-up, and patrol systems. That means fewer garbage collection spikes and fewer random hitches.

Steam Deck performance in particular should now feel much more stable.

Work on Sector 4 continues behind the scenes. You'll start seeing new Species-XI enemies appearing in the next update, and boss development for this phase is about to begin.

Full details are listed below. Enjoy!

• Some encounters are now shrouded in thick nebula fog, limiting visibility.

• Smaller factions in sectors now have a minimum number of spawns.

• Increased cooldown on Phantom Demon's invulnerability from 5s to 10s.

• New animated effects for gateway and sector portals.

• Added brightness slider to graphics category in settings.

• Improved bloom with smoother, more saturated highlights using Neutral tone mapping.

• Added Split Toning option under Graphics for a subtle cinematic color grade.

• Added Film Grain setting under Graphics for a subtle cinematic texture overlay.

• Increased the default brightness of background artwork by 15%.

• Ships now have a small shadow around them to improve visibility.

• Added button to ship design that re-opens the tutorial if you missed it.

• Removed normal maps for improved performance, as visual impact was minor.

• Improved drone targeting performance, especially with multiple drone bays.

• Reduced drone CPU overhead per frame.

• Eliminated FPS drop when drones first enter combat.

• Reduced per-shot overhead for all projectile weapons.

• Improved performance for multi-shot weapons (e.g. Scatter Gun).

• Faster projectile clean-up when projectiles expire or hit targets.

• Reduced memory allocations from frequently running clean-up checks.

• Improved generation speed for sectors.

• Multiple improvements to player list loading when there are multiple saves.

• Fixed excessive garbage collection in AI controller during battles.

• Updated pop-up tutorial about linking slots with correct UI artwork.

• Fixed bindings not correctly displaying in ship design for keyboards.

• Fixed bug where Gunner upgrades were not correctly applied to missile weapons.

• Fixed an error when a black hole dealt damage after its parent ship was destroyed.

• Fixed key bindings not displaying when the ship designer first opens.

• Fixed bug where some templates would display as level 999.

• Fixed an error when using older beacons to summon friendly ships.

• Fixed bug where enemy cooldowns were being incorrectly reduced.

Nothing massive this time, but this build includes some visual upgrades, meaningful performance improvements, and a handful of quality of life features.

A new spinal weapon has entered the loot tables: the Thermal Lance.

It functions similarly to the Cryo Lance, but deals Thermal damage instead. Like all spinal weapons, it can be equipped with a fixed firing direction.

The navigation panel now features a proper territory shader. Factions are clearly highlighted, and debris types are displayed separately around encounters that include them. This should make the map easier to read and help you understand what you’re flying into.

Faction territories are visible even before you reveal specific areas, so you can still plan your route.

Shield visuals have been completely reworked. The new shaders better reflect hit locations, animate in more dynamic ways, and gradually turn red as shield power drops, giving you an earlier visual warning in combat. Overall, shield feedback should now feel clearer and more responsive.

Arriving friendly ships now receive a temporary blue outline on arrival, making them much easier to identify during busy encounters.

Ships now physically show where they’ve been hit. Hull damage appears directly on the surface and glows based on the damage type that caused it, layering on top of parts already breaking away long before the ship is fully torn apart. Combat should now feel more destructive.

Several long requested features have been added to the ship designer. You can now repeatedly click the same area to cycle down through overlapping parts, press Ctrl + A to quickly select everything, and use the new copy and paste functions.

Alongside these changes are significant performance improvements and a large number of bug fixes. Full details are listed below. Enjoy!

• Added new spinal weapon, Thermal Lance.

• Ion thruster dodge factor increased from 140 to 180m/s.

• Encounter rewards from invasions are now higher rarity.

• Phase shift, Shield Ward and Disabled status effects now block hull regeneration.

• Species-XI ships no longer Phase Shift for longer than 5s with a 12s cooldown.

• Friendly ships now get a blue outline on arrival, which can be disabled in settings.

• Debris and faction territory are now rendered more nicely in navigation.

• New shield artwork and shaders for all external shields.

• Shield color now slowly shifts to red as it gets weaker.

• Ships now get 33% transparency when dodging and are immune to damage.

• Ship now shows damage temporarily as a visual effect when taking hull damage.

• Clouds now appear volumetric under lighting instead of flat.

• Clicking an already selected part in the ship designer now selects the part under it.

• Ctrl + A now selects all parts in the ship designer when using a keyboard.

• Added copy and paste buttons to the ship designer.

• Ctrl + C and V can now be used to copy and paste in the ship designer.

• Tweaked settings on bloom slightly for cleaner glows.

• Reduced the size of ship explosions slightly.

• Piercing projectiles now cut ships in half like lasers.

• Vastly improved the performance of dodging and temporal drive after images.

• Object pool returns are now instant instead of scanning the entire pool.

• Death surge effects use a shared lookup table instead of rebuilding one per kill.

• Projectile hits resolve with one component lookup instead of three.

• Seeking missiles reuse already-found targets instead of re-searching each candidate.

• Explosions reuse cached physics data instead of re-fetching per object in blast radius.

• Spawned ships notify the spawner on death instead of checking every frame.

• Fixed snake enemies moving far more rigidly than intended.

• Dragging UI sliders in ship design no longer deselects parts.

• Renamed Caustic Laser to Corrosion Beam.

• Fixed a crash that could occur when rapidly clicking in the ship select dialog.

• Fixed RenderTexture errors on Linux multi-monitor setups.

• Fixed tiny Inferno Cannon item image.

• Fixed two bugs that allowed Sector Keystones to be placed in storage.