This update is mostly about making the systems already in Deepfield easier to understand and use, with a few fairly significant additions to logistics and mining along the way.
Personnel are no longer just names in a list.
Crew, civilians and raiders now have persistent identities and portraits, with a much larger pool of faces and names. The personnel screens have been rebuilt around this, with clearer displays for skills, suitability, ratings and where everyone currently is.
Moving people between reserve and ship positions should also be much easier to follow.
The refit workbench has had a fairly substantial redesign.
Module and weapon slots are now connected visually to their actual position on the ship, and the UI more clearly distinguishes between what is currently fitted, what you're trying to install, and what is still waiting on parts.
Work orders now show which fixture they belong to, along with whether the required equipment is actually available.
In short: refitting a ship should now require considerably less staring at the screen wondering what the hell it's doing.
The world map now shows the actual jump capabilities of your fleet.
Ships display their individual jump ranges, fuel state and current position, while groups show the area the entire selected fleet can reach together. Destinations are clearly marked as valid or blocked before you commit.
Mouse-wheel zoom on the map now also stays anchored beneath the cursor instead of dragging you away from whatever you were trying to inspect.
Supply targets now have three modes:
Stockpile keeps the requested amount aboard that ship.
Distribute tries to maintain the requested amount, but allows excess cargo to be used elsewhere in the fleet.
Released temporarily disables the target.
This makes it possible to build actual fleet logistics rather than having every ship jealously hoard whatever happened to arrive first.
Supply targets are now available on the ships that can meaningfully use them, rather than being automatically attached to every capital ship.
The campaign instructions have also been updated to better explain how supply reservations work.
A new steel mining shuttle can now be built.
Mining shuttles can automatically locate surveyed deposits near ships requesting resources, fly out to the asteroid, extract material and deliver it back into your logistics network.
They'll stop when a deposit is depleted or inaccessible and move on as necessary.
Mining now also has proper contact effects at the asteroid surface rather than firing vaguely into the general vicinity of geology.
Manually controlled shuttles can now be returned to automatic operation.
You can also right-click a friendly capital ship while shuttles are selected to tell them to resume automation while prioritising that ship's requests.
The sidebar now makes it clearer whether a shuttle is under manual or automatic control, what it's doing, whether it has a pilot, and how much ammunition it has remaining.
A lot of the interface has been resized and retuned around larger, cleaner typography.
This affects the sidebar, menus, quests, personnel management, refitting, dialogs and other common screens.
There are also clearer icons, meters and tooltips throughout the logistics and personnel interfaces.
The underlying visual-effects system has been rebuilt and a number of existing effects have been migrated to it.
You'll see improvements across weapons fire, projectile impacts, mining, scanning, point defence, ship destruction, construction, repairs and jump effects.
Several placement bugs were also fixed. Mining and scanner effects now terminate on the actual surface of their target, projectile impacts no longer follow moving ships after impact, and beams and trails behave more consistently.
Fleet defeat is now tracked as part of the game itself rather than being tied to a particular campaign quest.
Once your starting fleet has entered the game, losing every capital ship will end the run and display the defeat screen correctly, including after loading a saved game.
Deepfield has improved how it selects a graphics card on systems with multiple GPUs.
Previously, some multi-GPU systems could end up using the wrong adapter, potentially causing unexpectedly poor performance.
GPU detection and selection have been reworked to better identify compatible devices and choose an appropriate GPU at startup.
There have also been a number of networking, UI, build and engine fixes behind the scenes, particularly around distributed sectors, stale connections and entity positions.