Your first fight comes about twice as fast: repair kits are now taught right after it.
Energy Doctrine asks for one Plasma Cutter, and a Tin Mine beat comes first. A second cutter is its own mission afterwards.
The first tours of Engineering and Combat are shorter and only explain what you can already use.
Combat
Your hull repairs itself between fights.
Losing a fight now tells you why on the combat screen: a boss trait, empty guns, under-tier guns, the wrong damage type, Common gear against a boss, or simply being out-damaged.
When every gun runs dry, combat pauses, and one click starts making that ammo in Engineering.
REPAIR ALL in the Ship Designer fixes every worn module your Spare Parts cover, fitted gear first.
Buy storage 10 slots at a time, or MAX. A full hold now keeps 5 overflow slots for new materials before anything is lost, and it names what was lost.
Economy
Hand crafting now tops out at ×4 speed. Past that, plants make the volume. An Engineering card shows "×4 hand cap" once it reaches it, and the Efficiency research says so too.
Parallel II+ gear, hull upgrades and fleet ship upgrades are now priced as a refit of Zone 10 gear: a tier II module costs its family's Zone 10 recipe (+25% per zone after Zone 1, ×1.5 per later Parallel) plus its sector's Parallax material. The old Zone 1 recipe ×1.4 made a tier II Mass Driver cost 42 Iron.
Other changes
Item cards no longer lock by themselves while you read them. Middle-click or press Ctrl to lock one in place; the same press or its ✕ closes it.
The one-time review request now comes after your first Zone 3 boss instead of after a Warp.