Modular ship loadout — your ship is now a hull grid you fit parts into. Cutting heads mount in the nose; tanks, radiators and modules fill the body. Every part costs cells you could have carried ore in.
Service depot rig screen — pull up to the fuel pad and rebuild the ship: drag parts from stores onto the hull, rotate them, pull them back off. Mouse or controller.
The hold is the space you didn't fill — cargo capacity is whatever hull is left over, so a greedy build carries less.
Abilities come from parts — the vent, shield, afterburner and sonar are bolted on, not bought off a list.
The shop splits in two — the tech tree researches a line with minerals; the depot manufactures units of it for credits, as many as you can fit.
Armor plating — bolt-on hull that lies along the ship's outer skin. It stacks, so armouring up trades directly against everything else you could carry.
Skip the tutorial — a new game can drop straight onto the planet.
Controller support — cross-platform input with controller-specific button prompts.
Freeze is its own vent mode — a second mode on the vent button.
Improvements
Heat is a real cost: a greedy rig idles hot, radiators only cool what they touch, and the depot readout shows the whole ship — hull, fuel, speed, heat capacity, and whether the rig settles or climbs.
Lava is a heat source, not a damage source. Cooling is the defence, and holding station in it is now an Engine build.
Radiators cool 1.5/s per tier (down from 5) — cooling should cost a build, not a cell.
The depot lists one row per part, shelved by kind, ranked by tier, collapsible, with buy and sell on the same row.
Picking up a part with a mount restriction lights the region it can go in.
Adjustable HUD pixelation.
Ghost chunks draw across the world's wrap seam.
Bug Fixes
Overheating never dealt damage. Heat could sit pegged at maximum with the hull untouched — lava included, since overheating is the only thing lava does.
Saves can no longer be written hollow — quitting at the wrong moment could replace a run with $0 and an empty research tree.
Loading no longer hands out a free unit of every researched part you own none of.
The ship keeps its parts across a reload; a save can't erase the loadout.
The dragged part now lines up with where it will actually land.
Ore stays visible through the surface breakup and no longer blocks the player on the surface; AOE blasts clear ore with the terrain.
Engine smoke is hidden behind fog of war; cloud parallax and surface noise stay stable far from spawn; square tiling removed from the caldera background.
The shop tree zooms while hovering a node; menus close with the pad Back button; the Freeze upgrade branch works again.
Debug mode no longer reports OFF while it's running.
Technical
Unity test gate moved to the steam-release branch.