Starcom: Unknown Space
Playing now
60+6 vs. yesterday
1.7%of peak
All-time peak
3,469Jan 2025
Playing now
60+6 vs. yesterday
All-time peak
3,469Jan 2025
| Published | Kind | Announcement | Build |
|---|---|---|---|
| Game update | Kepler 21550 Minor Patch Minor patch to fix: · Localization bug preventing some text fields from being shown if user's system language was set to Turkish · Fixed potential issue with user content · Fixed typo | 19669271 | |
| Community | Dev Update: August 8, 2025 Since Starcom: Unknown Space entered Early Access in 2022, I've posted weekly updates on the game's development, with only a few scheduled interruptions. While I am still doing work on the game and releasing patches as necessary, I've started turning my eye toward what's next. I've tentatively begun research on a possible follow-up game, imaginatively code named "Starcom 4" (Why not Starcom 3?… | — | |
| Community | Player Survey Responses Two weeks ago I put up a player survey to gauge interest in a possible future Starcom game. So far, I've received over 600 responses. Most of the players who left comments expressed enthusiastic interest in either another game or DLC. The general vibe I got was similar to the responses after Nexus: more of the same, don't change too much. One of the specific questions I asked was about the miss… | — | |
| In-game event | Update 21548 The default branch has been updated to Kepler 21548. This updates/addresses the following: · Fixes an issue where anomaly roll modifiers would not be reset between encounters, potentially leading to scenarios with very large bonuses or penalties until the game was reloaded. · Fixed an issue where it was possible to load a design in the shipyard in planning mode without the tech prerequisites ·… |
Announcements are the developer’s own posts to the game’s Steam news feed: updates and their patch notes, in-game events, releases and sales. The important ones are marked on the players chart.
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| Community | Weekly Update: July 18, 2025 Last week I made a long post about ideas for a potential sequel, as well as a survey to gauge player interest in different possible changes. If you haven't already, please take a moment to fill it out and let me know your thoughts . On Tuesday, I posted a small patch to the opt-in Beta branch that fixes an issue a player reported allowing players to leave the shipyard after loading a ship with… | — |
| Community | Game Updates, Creator Tool, Player Survey & Future Plans First, as previously mentioned, the game is now officially Steam Deck Verified! Through the help of players, I've been gradually improving controller and Deck support since 1.0 launch. The last mile from "Deck Playable" to "Deck Verified" took some time, mostly because the game has a number of screens with a fair amount of text. The Deck has a resolution of 1280 x 800 and Steam has a minimum fo… | — |
| Community | Weekly Update: July 4, 2025 Quick update this week: I'm currently working on a longer news/update post and player survey, but they're not quite ready yet. Last week I talked about making the Creator Tool available to all players, but was blocked due to an issue in the Steamworks backend that prevented it from being visible. With Valve's help, that's been resolved and now any interested player should be able to see it with… | — |
| Community | Weekly Update: June 27, 2025 There's a new Opt-in Beta available. This is a minor update: · First, it hopefully addresses a long standing bug that caused skill check modifiers after certain anomalies not to be reset, leading to weird modifiers, like +1530%. · Two, it implements necessary changes for future Workshop story content. That is, once the Creator Tool is ready, Creators will be able to share their content with oth… | — |
| Community | Weekly Update: June 20, 2025 Two weeks ago I talked about posting a player survey in the next couple weeks. I still plan on doing that, but decided to prioritize a few other tasks. One of those, as I posted about last week , was getting the game Steam Deck Verified. The other is working on a patch for the game. As I've mentioned in the past, I've made the "Creator Tool" (the tool I build to author the game's anomalies, mis… | — |
| Community | Starcom: Unknown Space is Steam Deck Verified! Since the game's official 1.0 launch in September of last year, I've been making continuous updates to the game with new content, bug fixes and QoL improvements. Among these have been enhancements to controller and Steam Deck™ support. The game has been officially marked "playable" for a while, but the last mile to go from "playable" to "verified" was a bit of challenge. There are a few screens… | — |
| Community | Weekly Update: June 6, 2025 In the my last news update I announced my wife and I were taking a trip to Scandinavia at the end of May. Now we're back. Nordic Game In the first half of the trip we were in Malmö, Sweden for the Nordic Games conference. This was the first time I've gone to a game developer conference and didn't have a concrete agenda: my main reasons for selecting this one specifically were: a) it happened to… | — |
| Game update | Minor Deck Patch Kepler 21540 is a very minor patch to address some text scaling issues for Steam Deck verification. | 18718100 |
| Community | Weekly Update: May 16, 2025 Next week I'll be traveling with my wife to attend the Nordic Game conference in Malmö, Sweden. This is actually the first time I've ever attended a game developer conference: when I first started out doing indie game development, it was not at all clear that this would be a profitable endeavor, so I resisted any expense that wasn't absolutely essential for making the game I was working on. At… | — |
| Community | Weekly Update: May 8, 2025 (Posting a day earlier than usual because I'm out of town this weekend.) On Sunday I posted build 21533 which addressed a few QoL type issues and aimed to fix several of the remaining "stuck" issues. These are spots where the main storyline appears to stall out. Most of these cases arise from the player doing something different from how I expected and therefore missing or not triggering the ne… | — |
| Game update | Kepler 21533 Update Various fixes to areas where players have reported being stuck with no clear way to advance the main storyline, plus some QoL improvements: · Visited trade planets are considered "explored" for purposes of dimming explored stars (existing saves may need to revisit system) · "Highlight investigate" will also cause unexplored star systems to pulse · Add First Officer tip about star dimming · If C… | 18334083 |
| Community | Weekly Update: May 2, 2025 Very quick update this week: On Monday I posted a small patch that adds the ability to load a blueprint even if you don't have the requirements while in planning mode (plus a few minor other fixes). I've also started work on another minor update that will attempt to address some of the remaining cases where the main storyline has appeared "stuck" for some players. Until next week! - Kevin | — |
| Game update | Kepler Patch 21531 Minor updates: · If the player is in Planning Mode in the shipyard they will be able to load blueprints that they do not have the tech/resources for · "Exit station" and "Delete saves" alert/confirmation dialogues now allow selection of a button when using the controller · Several more minor typos | 18229974 |
| Community | Weekly Update: Apr 25, 2025 If you missed the announcement from earlier this week, the default build has been updated to Kepler 21530, mostly with changes for improved Deck / Controller support, with a few other patches. Deck/Controller Improvements: · Improved Save & Load menus to enable all functionality via controller inputs, including toggling selections for delete, deleting old autosaves, etc. · When text scaling is… | — |
| In-game event | Kepler 21530 Controller / Deck Update The default branch has now been updated to the Kepler 21530 build. The main goal of this build was to prepare the game for Steam Deck verification, although there are a few minor gameplay improvements as well: Deck/Controller Improvements: · Improved Save & Load menus to enable all functionality via controller inputs, including toggling selections for delete, deleting old autosaves, etc. · When… | 17855597 |
| Community | Technical Design of a Quest System (Part 3) This is the third and last post in a series on the technical details of the Mission System. But first a bit of regular news: As I've mentioned previously there's a build on the beta branch with a number of improvements to Deck / Controller support, plus some minor fixes. Barring any reports of issues, I plan to promote it to default early next Week. In the first post in this series I explained… | — |
| Community | Technical Design of a Quest System (Part 2) This is the second part in a series where I discuss the technical implementation of Starcom's mission system. You can read the first part here. Last week I explained how the mission system works overall. As a quick recap, several times a second the MissionManager iterates over all active missions. Each mission has one or more "lanes" that define a sequence of nodes, where each node is a set of… | — |
| Community | Technical Design of a Quest System (Part 1) This week I'm going to start a multi-part deep dive to talk about how I implemented mission logic, with code examples. But first I wanted to remind new players that there's an updated build on the beta branch . It's mostly changes to improve Steam Deck support, but also includes a few minor fixes. I've been doing some kind of software development for about 25 years and game development for mayb… | — |
| Community | Weekly Update: Mar 28, 2025 Over the past three weeks I've been working on improving Deck / controller support and the updated build is now deployed (along with a few other unrelated fixes) on the beta test branch . In the process I had to make a number of small changes to how UI / and input were handled, so there's the potential that this has introduced new bugs. For that reason I'm going to leave this build on the opt-i… | — |
| Community | Weekly Update: Mar 21, 2025 As discussed last week, I'm continuing to work on changes necessary for Steam Deck Verification. Overall, almost all of the game is playable on the Deck, but there are still some parts of the UI that cannot be controlled using only standard Deck inputs (i.e., without using the touchscreen). And some of these have been tricky to get a decent implementation. To give a specific example: Ship color… | — |
| Community | Weekly Update: Mar 14, 2025 Happy Pi Day! Since the 1.0 graduation update of Starcom: Unknown Space back in September, I've made a lot of updates to the game in terms of both content, bug fixes and QoL improvements. In the last category are a number of incremental changes to controller/Steam Deck support. During Early Access, Steam had evaluated the game as "playable" on the Deck but not "verified". After the most recent… | — |
| Community | Weekly Update: Mar 7, 2025 Last week I mentioned I was getting over an illness. It doesn't seem to have been Covid or the Flu, just a really bad head cold. Maybe due to not having had one in over five years, my immune system was out of practice? Still not 100%, but definitely feeling much better-- thanks for all the well-wishes. On Tuesday I updated the default build with a series of patches that had been deployed to the… | — |
| Game update | Kepler 21519 Patch Hot patch to fix issue with music not playing in latest update. | 17597191 |