What's New Since Next Fest — Early Access Is Coming
Next Fest wrapped, and development didn't slow down for a second. This past week rebuilt some of the biggest systems in the game as the final push toward Early Access begins. Here's everything new since the fest. And thank you to everyone who checked out the game. The Fest brought in 5,000 visits to the store page, 400 unique demo playthroughs, and 500 new wishlists (and about one thousand bots 'purchased' the demo, lol)! For a solo passion project in a niche genre, that's pretty freaking cool.
The economy, rebuilt
The whole economy got torn down and rebuilt. Empire upkeep now scales with your income instead of slamming into a hard ceiling, so the old wall that punished you for holding more than a couple dozen systems is gone. Newly captured territory doesn't pay out instantly: new "Supply Lines" model the time it takes to digest a conquest, so blitzing the map carries a real cost and consolidating your gains finally matters. The Territory tab is honest now too, with your true Net per tick, a node-by-node income breakdown, and your Supply Lines status laid out plainly. Star systems come in five value tiers, the delegated advisor runs three clear stances behind a solvency gate so it stops bankrupting you, and a master payback lever lets you spend your warchest to integrate new territory faster.
A galaxy with teeth
Notoriety carries real military weight now. Holding territory, racking up kills, and hoarding a warchest all raise the galaxy's hostility toward you, and the AI factions escalate as you climb the notoriety bands.
The First Purge can re-arm. Push the galaxy hard enough and the whole hunt comes for you a second time.
Weak, wounded empires get preyed upon, so the late game has a real doom arc instead of stalling into a stalemate.
Raids are no longer faceless. They arrive as fleets of named captains, and taking their territory wears those fleets down.
The galaxy map, overhauled
An updated look lets every faction's territory, economy, and defenses read at a glance through faction-tinted color and improvement glyphs, with trade lanes and contested fronts drawn right onto the map. Fleet movement is finally legible: every moving force is a bold filled arrowhead pointing where it's headed, parked forces are solid pips, and travel animates along dashed paths so you can follow exactly who's going where.
Combat and VFX
Module damage reads clearly: a hurt-but-living module throws sparks, a destroyed one smokes and cracks. The old "everything darkens to red" look is gone.
Weapons recoil when they fire, so your guns kick and the ship feels like it's actually shooting.
A tuning pass on shield VFX tweaked rim refraction, harmonics, and a chromatic shimmer to make a raised shield feel more liquidy. Sheildy.
An anti-speckle shader pass keeps hulls and effects clean when you zoom way out, plus a fix for the bug that rendered some mounts and dead modules mysteriously black.
Enemy ships
Procedural enemy ships are built from hand-authored faction silhouettes now, 16 ship classes across the factions, so a Necro cruiser reads as Necro and an Industrial dreadnought reads as Industrial. Generation fills hulls to their intended module count, reclaims wasted space, never overlaps modules, and biases toward bilateral symmetry (Bio stays deliberately asymmetric).
Fixes and polish
Two-row save slots so long ship names fit. Test Flight with a power deficit returns you to the Builder instead of stranding you on the map. Named captains keep their battle damage when they survive and leave, and their emergency warp now needs working engines and a safe distance. The targeting reticle and intel panel track your real fire target. The advisor stops cramming a garrison into every territory slot. Retreating ships warp out cleanly instead of spinning a full circle first. And the player-facing "Sliver energy" is now "Supplies / Development" (the lore still calls it Sliver Energy).
Early Access is coming
This is the start of the final run-up to Early Access. The demo on this page is the latest build. If you want to be there when EA opens, a wishlist is genuinely the single most helpful thing you can do, and I'm on Discord responding to feedback whenever I'm working on the game, so stop by if something makes you mad, sad, or happy and lemme know! More soon.