- The Spaceport now feels alive with a health-responsive planet-side glow that shifts from red-orange to blue-white as Zoveka heals, complementary far-side shading, a slowly rotating glass-dome interior, restrained navigation beacons and sign shimmer, and orbiting intake-capture energy.
- Homeworld-to-Spaceport traffic now begins immediately with a single active shuttle before minute 25, expands to full activity afterward, uses a broader range of ship sizes, and keeps docked craft to a gentle sway instead of aggressive pitching.
- The Area 2 SuperDust Processing Plant now receives a soft masked yellow-orange glow from the Sun's direction across its base, tractor tower, and fabrication tower without spilling light onto nearby objects; the glow's prefab-authored distance, scale, colour, and opacity remain directly tunable.
- The Area 2 and title-screen Sun now emits dense additive plasma motes for its ambient flares and periodically launches a larger, slower solar prominence with hundreds of lingering hot particles, velocity-stretched ember streaks, multiple curved filaments, 30% greater outward reach, and rim-biased origins that can begin up to roughly one-third inward across the Sun's face; individual eruptions vary between complete loops, partial returns, and short arcs that evaporate near the apex.
- The shared Plasma Comet red-hot ember particle now has a complete soft alpha falloff and generous transparent padding, removing the visibly clipped left and right glow edges everywhere the sprite is used.
- Colourful Dust Munchers now crawl in from the map edges alone or in increasingly likely groups, vacuum up loose tier-1 dust, feed from the mining station, softly route around equipment, and can be fought with the ship force field or configurable Dust Cannons; their expressive movement, feeding and audio culminate in tier-scaled dust blasts, smoke and lingering slime, while surviving Munchers persist with the game save.
- Dust Dronies can now be fitted fleet-wide with a 1,200-credit neon-purple laser upgrade from the Spaceport; upgraded Dronies share and kite nearby targets, defend the ship or their assigned work area against asteroids, comets, Dust Munchers and eligible Pirate Ships, and provide simple per-target toggles in their menu across both normal play and Dust Rush. The permanent Rare DustRock is no longer damageable or available as a weapon target.
- Fixed an early-game lower-left screen dead zone where an invisible off-canvas UI panel could suppress world hover information, selection and placement even when the placement ghost was green.
- Dronie laser target options now highlight enabled targets in green for clearer at-a-glance configuration.
- A full Dust Processor queue now produces a tight stream of short-lived green smoke directly at the intake corkscrew instead of scattering broad puffs around the ship.
- Dust Dronie laser beams now remain attached to their moving Dronie for the full beam flash while retaining the original impact point on the target.