Galactic Prospectors: Update 1.003.009

Getting out of your ship has some more meaning

Big one today. For as long as this game has existed, a station was a menu. You flew up, pressed a button, and did your trading from the pilot seat. That's over. You park, you climb out, you walk in.

Outposts are real places

Every trading outpost has an interior now. A few floors, a corridor, rooms with actual purposes: a market, a cantina, storage, a medbay, somewhere to look out the window. Each outpost gets its own layout and keeps it, so the place you were at last week looks the same when you come back, and the same people are still working there.

And there are people. Astronauts, robots, and a handful of alien species wander between rooms, stop and turn to look at you when you talk to them, and have things to say about life in the much talked about Ethereon Sector. They all sound different, they all walk different, and the rooms themselves have their own background noise.

There's a lift between floors. Stand on it, press F, pick a floor.

Derelicts and monuments are worth exploring

The hostile sites got the same rooms-and-corridors treatment, minus the friendly faces. Spiders actually use the doors now instead of walking through walls, and they'll chase you through the whole site if you let them. Some rooms are locked, and the keycards to open them are somewhere else in the building. Find one, drop it on your toolbar, swipe it at the door. Rooms you haven't opened stay dark until you do.

Every site gives you a few things to do on the way in, like getting the power back on or finding whoever's still alive in there, so there's a reason to go deeper than the first room. Friendly sites turn up all over the map now, not just near where you start.

Airlocks

Going in or out of anywhere now means an airlock. On the way in, the chamber pressurizes and the base fades in around you as the inner door opens. On the way out, everything fades out as you step in, and you get a short countdown before the outer door lets you go. Fair warning: once you've stepped out of the chamber into the base, whatever's in there can follow you back in.

Cryopods and beds

Every outpost has somewhere to sleep. Press F to lie down, F to get up (similar concept for cryopods). Log out from the menu while you're in a pod or bed and that's where you wake up next time. If someone's already in a pod you'll see them in it, with their name, and you can't climb in on top of them. Medbay beds patch you up while you rest, and keep working slowly even after you've logged off.

Beacons

The name and avatar floating over every ship (if you had this enabled) are gone. Instead, every ship has a beacon. Give it a name, set how far it broadcasts, anywhere from a meter to fifty kilometers. Anyone inside that range sees it on their HUD: blue for your own, green for friends, red for people who'd rather you weren't there. It also tells you how far away your ship is while you're on foot, which turns out to be very useful. It's not a map marker. It doesn't go on the map.

While you're walking around inside, your name floats over your head so people know who they're looking at.

Nobody's taking your ship....maybe

If PvP is off in your world, your parked ship is yours and nobody else can get in. If PvP is on, however, someone can hack it, but they need a hacking module and it takes a while, and how long is up to whoever set up the world or the server. You also have to actually get out of your ship to walk into a station now. Docking parks it for you.

A tutorial that teaches the whole game

The old tutorial covered the basics and left you to figure out the rest. The new one walks you through everything, from your first flight to docking, prospecting, trading, getting out on foot, keycards, cryopods, beacons, all of it. There's a Guide page in the terminal with the same material if you'd rather read, for you bookworms.

Chat and controls

Chat was clunky and we knew it. It's been rebuilt: long messages wrap, Enter now always sends and doesn't glitch out anymore, it fades out when nobody's talking, and it works inside stations and sites whereas before it didn't. You can also bind anything to anything now, including Enter and mouse buttons, and it saves the moment you change it.

You can't fire or use tools while you're in your inventory or the terminal anymore. And in single player, the game pauses while you're in the terminal, so take your time.

Smaller things

• Trading posts weren't showing up in some parts of the map.
• Map markers are per world now. What you marked on one server stays on that server.

Multiplayer

Everything in this update works in co-op and on dedicated servers. Doors, keys, objectives, who's in which pod, beacons, hacks, airlocks, all of it is shared between everyone in the world.

For server owners

You can now sign into a new RCON tool with your Steam account, and hand out different command permissions to different people. The remote console tool ships in the game and server folders, for Windows and Linux. If it crashes, it'll tell you what went wrong instead of just disappearing. For any crashes, please do submit those logs to us!