Update – Camp Attacks, Mining Ships & a Big Stability Pass
This one's a mix of new toys and a lot of long-overdue bug hunting.
New
New mission: your first camp attack. After the intro mission, the game now walks you through attacking an enemy camp — it points you to the map, lends you two fighters if you don't own a fleet yet, and keeps the first fight small so you can learn how fleet battles work without losing everything.
Enemy patrol alerts. While there are camps to attack, a flashing "Enemy patrol spotted!" alert pops up under the menu buttons every few minutes, and the Map button glows. There's always money to be made out there — now the game reminds you.
Mining beacons actually mine now. Drop a beacon inside an asteroid field and a mining ship flies out, works the field, and hauls the ore back to you. Beacons only work inside asteroid fields — the game will tell you when you're in one. The old "press use on an asteroid" minigame is gone.
The radar does something now. Click the Advanced Radar inside your ship to play a short scanning minigame. Win it and the radar picks up salvage somewhere in the system and marks it with a waypoint. Also trains your Surveying skill.
Loading screens. Starting the game and jumping between systems now shows a loading bar instead of the game freezing for a few seconds.
The Beacon and Repair quick-buttons light up when they matter — Beacon flashes gold inside asteroid fields, Repair pulses red when your hull drops below 30%.
Loot — the big one
A long-standing bug was quietly erasing loot tables from ships. Some enemies (including a few of the big ones) have been dropping nothing for a long time, and nobody noticed because... well, how would you. Loot storage has been rebuilt from the ground up:
9 ship types that had lost their drops completely got them back
Repair Bots now actually drop from ships that were supposed to drop them (they never did — a typo)
A few other items could never drop for the same reason — fixed
Short version: killing things pays better now, the way it was always meant to.
Fixed
A rare random crash that could hit at any moment, usually around saving or deleting profiles. This one took genuine detective work to track down and I'm very glad it's gone.
Crash when selling cargo at Omega station in the Red system (it also has a sell sound now)
Crash that could happen right after a ship you were fighting got destroyed
Capital ships crashing the game when they spotted an enemy while flying to help an ally
Getting permanently stuck in the ship interior if you came back to the Ice system before finishing the tutorial. The portal there now stays closed until you complete the missions — it'll tell you why.
Collector and mining ships endlessly circling their target instead of just stopping
Mining beacons spawning a duplicate mining ship every time you loaded your save
Mining ships forgetting which beacon was theirs after loading a save
"Can't delete profile — file in use" after quitting to the main menu
The scanning minigame breaking down (frozen rows) at high skill levels — and the skill's loot bonus was so small it did nothing; it's meaningful now
Ore deliveries you didn't pick up no longer fly back home with the mining ship
Ship formations breaking after loading a save