The clearest thing people told us about the demo was that there was too much on
screen too early. A station console, a tape deck, a puzzle shelf and a panel of
systems, all at once, before you had lit anything. So the demo has been rebuilt
around the first hour.
All of this is playable right now, free.
A new save no longer opens with every system out. Each one arrives the first
time it means something.
The radio turns up when you take Venus, so it appears once there is a reason for one.
Station Systems appear the first time something is falling toward a world you own.
The tone strip appears when you have tones worth trying.
The desk toys, the piano and the rest, wait until your first star has died.
You still end up with the whole console. You just are not handed it in the first
minute. A save with real progress on it skips all of this and shows everything
at once, as before.
Sharp rendering on high resolution displays. On a Retina or 4K screen the star, the worlds and every label are properly crisp instead of softly upscaled.
An all new title screen. Every piece of it is the game rendering itself: that is the real star, its real beam array and the real star field behind it, not a painting of them.
Shooting stars have real trails now, tapering and fading behind the head, instead of white lines drawn on the glass.
Captions and small text raised to a genuine contrast ratio throughout, so the quiet text is still readable.
The tone strip along the bottom recolors the entire console, and the Settings panel finally matches the rest of the interface.
The recovered photographs in PORTIA's notebook were redrawn.
On the Windows laptop we test on, the demo went from 30 frames per second to 60. Not a tweak, a doubling, and you do not have to turn anything on to get it.
A reduced effects mode on top of that, for anyone on integrated graphics who wants more headroom still.
Reduce motion follows your system setting on its own, without you going to look for it.
Both builds, Windows and macOS, were played through on real hardware before this went out.
Reigniting zeroed your planet income until you touched something. It does not.
Saves dropped permanent bonuses when they loaded. They keep them.
Quitting could lose the last few seconds of a run. It saves cleanly now.
New Game did not clear everything it said it would.
Click any world to open it. You could only reach them through the console list before.
The Watch Buoy on Earth: a tethered sensor with one flare in it, and the first thing you own that guards a world.
PORTIA talks less. Her repeated lines moved to the Log tab, and the ones that stay keep their distance from each other.
The demo ends after your first Reignite.
Your star can die four other ways. The demo's collapse is the gentle one. The others are not gentle, and which one you get depends on the star you built.
The system keeps going outward. Past Mars there are worlds the demo never names, and reaching them takes real minutes of flight.
Fifty eight cosmetics for your planets. The demo grants five. And that's not all you can customize.
The story about what happened.
Push all the way to the collapse and a fourth section of the Array opens, with four more things to build.
Something is waiting at the tenth star. And past that, for anyone who keeps going, so is something else.
And much more!
Thank you to everyone who has played, and to the people who told us it was a lot to take in. It was. Steam Next Fest is October 19 to 26, and the game will be there. Please Wishlist today!