Finally got this thing working so thought I'd throw it out in a quick update. The game now has a built-in Glossary that lets you look up factions, ships, items, and legendary weapons.
In both the main menu and pause menu you'll now find a link to the Glossary. Inside, you can browse every item, legendary, ship, and faction you've discovered. It shouldn't spoil anything, and it will backfill data for your existing saves.
You can change the level when viewing ship and item stats, and see how legendary weapons scale with different base items at different levels. I plan to keep expanding this over time, adding more detail for theory crafting and build design.
Navigating through a sector and hitting a dead end sucks. I took the Diablo 2 approach of throwing a cache at the end to make it suck less... but the caches also sucked.
First fix, Sector 4 now has fewer dead ends. I've increased the number of links between encounters so navigation should feel less frustrating.
Second fix, caches now come in four varieties and contain guaranteed rarity rewards. Each sector rolls its own mix, and the rewards improving as you get toward Sector 4. Caches no longer drop common items at all, and the chance of pulling a legendary from a Sector 4 cache is now around 5x higher than before.
The first 15 levels were more of a grind than intended, so that should now be fixed. Kills below level 15 now grant up to +50% bonus XP, tapering off as you level up. The early game should move faster and get you to the fun parts sooner.
Plenty more changes below. Enjoy!
• Added a new Glossary of items / enemies you've encountered to the pause menu.
• Caches now come in four types: Credits, Different, Rare and Legendary.
• Sector 4 now has ~33% more radial links to reduce windy routes.
• Kills under level 15 now grant up to +50% XP to soften the early grind.
• Species-XI Transports now drop extra Infected Seeds at higher levels.
• Caches now drop significantly more rare and legendary items, never common.
• Menu and panel background fade now opens 4x faster with smoother easing.
• Startup Player.log now flag known buggy software that can cause issues.
• Analytics and Early Access popups wait for the scene transition to end.
• Menu ships now hold off spawning during transitions and open popups.
• Removed unused texture filtering on Beautiful/Fantastic quality presets.
• Steam achievement sync now runs at the main menu, fixing a startup error.
• Toggle Vents now defaults to V and Left Stick Button on existing saves.
• Some UI objects no longer appear duplicated in pause menu as it blurs.
• Enemy AI orbiting allies no longer get stuck boost-invulnerable.