Major Update

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