Single Player is receiving a huge overhaul.
The intent was always to make a sandbox game where you could collect cool ships and customize them with deep and interesting ship design features. To that end, we built a dynamic economy with shops and shipyards and venders and trade etc, however we seriously missed the mark because the game's story didn't encourage you to interact with that aspect of the world, and the ship design elements made your interactions with it shallow and in many cases unnecessary. Furthermore, the loop of unlocking hulls and modules so that you could dig deeper into the ship designer and make progressively better ships didn't work at all for the early game. That should have been more of a late game feature, while the early game should have tried to play more like a standard sandbox space RPG.

So we are changing all that.

So what I'm doing is reworking the early game by introducing more standard tropes from space RPG games, and de-emphasizing the [design your own ship] features in the early game where they never worked great anyways. You will still collect module blueprints and hulls, and you can still design and construct your own ships, however you will no longer be expected to do that in the early game because of new features being introduced. I'm adding shipyards that sell fully built ships custom mapped for various roles, and I am adding a significant amount of ship enhancement items and loot drops so that even store bought ships can be customized to your liking. I'm also adding mission boards to every economy station hosting procedural missions for cargo hauling, passenger transport, and combat missions. The idea behind all of this is that your early game experience need not require a masters degree in ship engineering to enjoy because it will play more similarly to other titles.

What follows is a detailed breakdown of the new features and gameplay changes.
Every economic station, trade hub, and shipyard, has a mission board now. Enter the stellar cartography room to access it because the missions are displayed on the map. I've added passenger missions, cargo missions, and combat missions. All of these missions reward credits and exp. It also has a pretty fancy UI for selecting the missions based on their destinations and requirements.
I like loot. Everyone likes loot. So I'm adding lots of it. There are now 4 ways to upgrade an existing ship: tuning kits, module components, turrets, and crew. Some of this has already been in the game, but all of the systems are now going to be fleshed out and working. I have redone every single loot table in the game to include new items, I have fixed a ton of bugs and things that prevented tuning kits from working, and I have replaced all blueprints for crafting turrets in both shops and loot drops with instances of individual turrets, likely with affixes. Now you will be able to make a powerful ship simply by buying a generic one and upgrading it.
Turrets are items now. They drop from ships in scoopable loot containers, they can be purchased from shops, and when you remove one from your ship in logistics it will go into your inventory. They also can have affixes. Turret affixes are named and each one provides changes to the statistics of your turret such as fire rate, range, damage, ammo capacity, etc. You can forge a turret with a new crafting item that drops as loot to add an affix to an existing turret, and turrets can have multiple affixes allowing you to potentially collect a set of turrets for your ship that are significantly better than the default. You can no longer unlock and print generic turrets to fill all of the slots on your design so you're going to want to go shopping. If an enemy ship is shooting a really cool gun at you, blow them up and it might drop.
Tuning kits are an inventory item that is consumed to upgrade your ship hull with stacking passive attribute bonuses. They have been in the game forever, but it turns out they never worked correctly! My bad. They have been fixed so you can actually apply them now, and to boot i've added some new tuning kit types to the game. These tuning kits stack multiple times on the same ship and provide bonuses such as armor hardness, hull durability, acceleration, turning, shield strength, etc. You've got to find these as loot drops because they are some of the most powerful upgrades you can apply to a ship.
Tuning kits apply a bonus to your entire hull, but your ship's performance is really just the sum of its modules right? Good news, you can also upgrade your modules now. Module components are a new item type that you will find periodically. They can even be purchased in some shops. They are simple items with a few tiers of quality and if you have a Mechanics Kit you can open any compatible module in your ship and simply slot them in. Module performance can be drastically increased with high quality components, possibly even doubling the output of the affected module. It is up to you which of your modules you will enhance first. So if you want to upgrade your modules to perform better, stop by a crew equipment shop at your nearest trade hub and pick up a mechanics kit.
The original design for crew was that I made the crew system very modular and capable of supporting a large variety of special crew characters that were custom made with dialogues and storylines and special gear and special scenarios and interactions. I wanted to design a robust system that could handle whatever I chose to throw at it later.

Then I got bogged down debugging lots of quests and working on other aspects of the game and the crew diversity suffered as a result. There just aren't interesting crew in the game, and as a game about building the ultimate star ship I think customizing your crew should be a big part of making your ship stronger.

To rectify this, I have come up with a system for procedural crew to show up in bars all around the system. When you visit a station, you should check out the bars because there could be all sorts of procedural crew members offering to work for you. These are mercenaries and freelancer ship crew so you will have to hire them and pay them to join your roster. Each one will have a relatively powerful procedural talent tree that will show you all of the stat modifiers that crew member could add to your ship once they are levelled up. Because each crew member is capable of adding 20%+ to various ship statistics, building the perfect crew can now have a huge effect on the performance of any ship.

Hired crew will live in your home station bar forever, and can be swapped out depending on which ones are optimal for the ship you plan to fly at any given time. The crew that are currently in your party will gain experience when you gain experience.
Ships are inventory items now, and you no longer lose them on death. Significant changes across the entire game have been made to support this with the goal of making the game less hardcore and allowing you to collect cool ships, customize them permanently, and swap between them with ease.
I've remapped every station interior to include a hangar module. You enter a hangar by targeting the station, flying over it, and pressing (default) [V]

Airlocks still exist, but will no longer be the primary means of entering and exiting a station. Why? because when you use a hangar your character is placed inside the station and the ship you were flying is placed inside your inventory. This allows you to buy and sell ships at a regular item shop, it allows you to store a collection of ships in a cargo bay, it allows you to swap between ships easily on the fly, and it allows you to transport ships around as cargo. I've even created a new consumable inventory item that will pack a ship that you find (or disable) out in space into an inventory item so that you can scoop it up and take it with you as loot. Ships are loot now, and you can collect them all! fill the stash tabs at your home base with them if you like.

Also, on a purely technical level, using a hangar allows the new mission framework to function. When you pick up missions from the procedural mission board, your mission cargo and passengers gotta go somewhere, and figuring out which docked ship to put them into via an airlock was a nasty technical issue that prevented me from making nice function procedural missions in the past. Now that stuff goes to the hangar where it can be automatically loaded into your ship when you depart.

Some players will decide to continue playing the game the old way using airlocks which of course is wrong and if you do that I hate you.
This isn't realistic at all. I'm doing it because it makes the game more fun. When you undock from a hangar your ship is produced from the packed ship inventory item slotted into your character's ship slot. That item remains there when you die, which means you no longer lose your ship on death. I think this is reasonable and justified because ships are kinda expensive now, and you are going to put a lot of work into upgrading them with rare components and turrets. Losing all of that on death won't be fun. Instead, if you lose your active ship you will probably fail your current mission and lose your cargo, so you know...still try to avoid doing that.

If everyone really hates this change and absolutely insists on discord that I MUST bring back self-griefing and losing all of your cool turrets on death, well then maybe you can convince me to add a second difficulty option to the game. The idea here is this is no longer a game about producing a cool ship DESIGN and printing it over and over again...it is about making a cool SHIP and then doing cool stuff with it until you can find a better ship.
With the inclusion of procedural missions actually mattering, I am hoping that players will actually care about ships that do things other than go pew pew. There are transport variants for sale that only have nice fancy bedrooms in them now, why? because passengers care about the quality of their cabin when commissioning your ship. That means to do the best passenger transport missions (the ones that pay the most credits) you will want to be transporting fancy rich people who will demand nice bedrooms and maybe even dining facilities. Likewise the best paying cargo missions will require lots of cargo space, and the best paying combat missions will put you against a big swarm of enemies. Having a specialized ship will help you make money faster in your preferred play style.

Shipyards will sell role-specialized ship designs.

• t: transport - lots of passenger space
• c: cargo - lots of cargo space
• m: mining - mix of cargo space, defense, and comes with mining turrets
• b: balanced - balanced mix of passenger comfort, decent cargo space, decent defense and weapons
• a: assault - focused on fighting other ships

First of all the obvious headline should be: Tier 3 is finally in the game. So people who care about the ship design aspect of the game need not worry, there's stuff in this update for you as well. Not all new modules added are T3, and many modules have been rebalanced or retuned or debugged. Tier 3 tech drops in the gauntlet end-game zone. Here's a short list of some prominent additions:

• 7 tier 3 ship hulls that can be unlocked with fully T3 mapped interiors
• 5 unlockable tier 3 reactors with significantly better power output
• tier 3 versions of energy turret mounts covering the various turret sizes
• 3 new capacitors with better energy storage density
• a new tier 3 shield emitter that is small and convenient to add to your designs as well as being efficient. Event small ships can have shields!
• 5 new T3 turret types
• a new beam controller type for making even more powerful beam weapon designs
• 5 new tier 3 bridge modules with more active system slots than T2 bridges of similar size
• 3 new tier 3 engines with excellent thrust for their size

T3 hallway components serve the same purpose as normal hallway components, but these ones make your ship look spiffy and futuristic. They also provide structural support when placed making them a net increase to the sturdiness of your ship designs instead of a detriment. I love min-maxers and theory-crafters.

Both T3 hallways, and T3 conduits can be unlocked simply by advancing your research progress into any other T3 modules.

There are also some new modules that are going to show up in other areas of the game. I've implemented tier 2.5 shield emitters that we had shiny artwork for but which I never got around to making. They drop from existing ships and as tier 2.5 tech they have slightly improved average performance compared to the one existing shield emitter but with each one being specialized for either more storage, or faster regeneration.

Then on top of all that the update will include a bunch of new tier 2 modules:

• a point defense missile interdiction laser module. Small and easy to place, it will periodically take pot shots at incoming missiles. They aren't perfect, so having more of them will protect you a lot better from missiles if you are looking to make a defensible ship.
• a tier 1 shield emitter allowing lower tier ships to have regenerating shields.
• multiple computer core modules that will offer various statistical enhancements to all point defense lasers on your ship.
• multiple computer core modules that will offer various statistical enhancements to all missile systems on your ship.
• multiple computer core modules that will offer various statistical enhancements to all turrets on your ship.
• multiple computer core modules that will offer various statistical enhancements to the defensive attributes of your ship.

The current game just doesn't let you bring very many crew members with you onto your ship. Multiple loot related bugs, and the fact that we had always intended on dropping the last crew upgrades in end game activities meant that the low amount of slots went overlooked and remained unreasonable for way too long. Well now we've fixed the bugs meaning the crew slots you were supposed to already have are finally available, and the crew slots we were saving have been added to the endgame gauntlet. You should finally be able to bring your friends.

Crew slots are a reward for exploration and the items needed to gain them are all over the game world. You can now get up to 7 crew members if you find them all.
Not everything is changing. However I'm overhauling the early game introductory quests to hold your hand a bit less and encourage you to poke around in the sandbox more before moving on. I'm also doing lots of quest related debugging for this update. I know that's been an issue for a long time. I hate quest debugging, why couldn't I have decided to make an incremental game instead?

I will caution that the overly complex questing system was my biggest mistake when designing the original game, and there may still be bugs with quests especially later into the campaign. None of these bugs should prevent you from interacting with the game's sandbox elements or doing the endgame activities, however the possibility of bugs with storyline missions is part of the reason this patch is 0.9.4.00 and not 1.0.0.00.
Your character is now part of the world save. That means make a new game, get a new character. That's probably how it always should have been, but when we were early in development and the game was chaotic and unfinished I decided to make your character persist outside the world because otherwise you might never be able to find certain unlocks. That all has hopefully changed now, so the system is moving to the way it ought to be.

This also means that the sandbox available from the main menu will now have access to all of the tech so you can play around with the ship editor without activating any debugging mode.

There's no warning for this event. I'm simply releasing it. Go play it now!

Working on some big things behind the scenes. Hopefully announcement soon. In the meantime here is a bugfix patch that includes a lot of small changes accumulated over a long period.

• your crew will no longer follow you on the in-station fast transport network if they are set to hold position
  
• fixed a bug where logistics rooms would not rotate their animation to match the module animation
  
• you can no longer collide with asteroids while in travel drive. Realism be damned, I've never seen a new player pick up the game without immediately killing themselves in travel drive somehow.
  
• you can now use the scroll wheel to change mini-map scale in ship exterior view
  
• added tooltip description for tractor field modules
  
• tooltip base elements made to scale properly with UI scale
  
• tooltip resource mode made to scale properly with UI scale
  
• tooltip small stats made to scale properly with UI scale
  
• tooltip resource element made to scale properly with UI scale
  
• tooltip screen placement made to scale properly with UI scale so that tooltips do not render off of the screen
  
• AI crew will only search for tiles to repair if they have a repair gun
  
• AI crew will only search for fires to extinguish if they have a fire extinguisher
  
• all projectile turret magazine sizes increased by 300%
  
• all turret attack speeds reduced
  
• buffed the max energy use rate of shield emitters which means they can produce shields faster
  
• buffed the efficiency of shield emitter energy use so that they produce more shields for the energy that they consume
  
• doubled the lifespan of shards produced by flak shells
  
• significantly buffed the damage dealt by mining charges of all sizes
  
• fixed a bugged ore type that had a negative yield
  
• reduced the bullet velocity of all mining charges to make sure they still suck for damaging ships
  
• added a tier 1 shield emitter
  
• fixed a bug with mouse pointer location calculation on the universe map
  
• universe map biome tooltip no longer overlaps mouse coordinate output
  
• fixed a bug with a quest that could crash while loading the game
  
• fixed: quests were crashing the game because quest debugging was left on because last time I uploaded a patch I didn't give a fuck
  
• fixed a crash with conduit pathing on the ship design caused (most likely) by a ship with insufficient padding around the outside of the design
  
• the ships that kill you in the first tutorial now spawn faster
  
• changed how mouse scrolling and selection works in the station overview UI
  
• renamed the header for the station overview UI so people know they can teleport from it

Sorry for the rapid series of bug filled updates. Here's what happened:

I for the life of me could not figure out why the monsters would sometimes go invisible. So I wrote code that would try really hard to render them even if their animation was in a corrupted state. The new code immediately produced crashes without crash logs in version 0.9.3.01 and so in 0.9.3.02 I updated the code to catch those crashes with a proper crash log and also improved my rendering without art code....which immediately crashed again. Turns out I was looking in the wrong place because the issue wasn't with the artwork or the animations of monsters at all, but with their pathfinding. A very well hidden bug with monster pathfinding was attempting to normalize a zero vector (an impossible mathematical operation) and the result was that monster position data was becoming corrupted with a NaN value (not a number) and since we do math on that position for the sake of rendering the NaN was spreading to other variables making the monsters invisible.

This same pathfinding was used in other places and so this fix should probably result in other fixes such as fixes to bugs having to do with your crew members doing strange things while following you.

had a few rendering based crashes, so i've fixed the crashes that came up and also added crash logging for those exceptions so it will be easier to find them in the future

Added a new feature as well as some bug fixes with this one. Module components are an item that you can find and with the new tool you can use them to upgrade existing modules inside of a ship to have better performance.

• fixed a bug with some new modules in the design screen where their tooltip would display resource costs multiple times. The resource cost was correct only the tooltips were broken
  
• fixed a bug where anti-missile lightning charges from tuning kits in the gauntlet would target your own repair drones because repair drones are technically missiles which target your ship while repairing
  
• fixed a bug with scrapping ships at your home base where any item inside the ship was placed into storage inside your home station instead of the tabbed storage that you can access by going into the storage inside your home station. This made those items inaccessable to you. The items will now go into the correct (tabbed) storage and I have upgraded the function of "stash resources" on the home station to get those items out of where they were placed in station cargo bays and move them to the correct place.
  
• A new feature: Component salvaging. There is a new tool for you to use called a mechanic's kit. It opens ship modules and allows you access to their components. If you find high quality components you can swap them into your favorite modules to get a stat boost. The output increase can be fairly substantial for high tier components.
  
• you can no longer fire missiles while in travel drive
  
• automated undocking of abandoned ships from stations now takes a full minute to happen instead of happening as soon as they are considered abandoned
  
• fixed a bug with the ship editor power overlay where tiles that connected in multiple directions were only able to animate power connections in the mostly recently connected direction. This had no bearing on the actual power simulation it was only a visual bug with our power overlay
  
• fixed a bug with the first cloning vat exploration quest where the quest could fail to complete if you find multiple copies of the blueprint and transfer them all to your inventory at once
  
• fixed a crash when right clicking packed ships from your inventory in the logistics screen
  
• fixed changes to packed ships made via the logistics screen will now actually apply to those ships after leaving the screen
  
• fixed a bug with grey goo reloading of modules which could in some cases prevent the module from collecting enough goo from the inventories of npc crew
  
• fixed a bug that only matters to mod makers where an unavailable module that you can't unlock shared the same research id as another similar module preventing mod makers from messing with both of them
  
• fixed solid and liquid waste processors not blocking crew movement
  
• targeting space stations is now significantly faster
  
• fixed a mispelled word "palce" that should be "place"
  
• added the ability for a storage container to specify allowed item types that can be stored in there
  
• modules such as artifact activators which include a storage interface but are intended only for specific item types will now prevent you from placing other item types into them
  
• the create profile button now says "click here" so that it is extra extra obvious that this is a button
  
• unified tooltips for trade goods to indicate their base value which I think is more descriptive given that actual value scales with supply and demand
  
• fixed a bug where reactors were always behaving as if they had the High Q fields talent enabled