I've finally taken some time to work on the graphics of the game. I pulled in a couple of people in the studio I work at to help out so now things should be looking better. 

Lighting Changes

The new cloud layer is more detailed and responds to lighting as does everything. I've also made various things glow more. You'll also now encounter some thunder and lightning in the debris encounters to amplify their hostility.

Species-XI

You'll notice the above ship in the lighting example is looking a bit "tentacally". If you're one of our testers with access to the full game you'll find some new Species-XI parts to use in ship designs to play about with. They'll officially start invading in 0.6.5 where they'll hopefully be infecting some other ships and seeking to destroy you.

If you're not a tester join our Discord and DM me!

https://discord.gg/BMwM8zB9yw

Stats

You'll now find a 5th tab on the core panel, this is where achievements will go (in version 0.8) but for now it tracks various stats from the game. I've got this in early so people can tell me useful things like how many enemies they've defeated when it comes to balancing the game over longer time periods of play.

Better music is now in for Sector 1 and 2 and there are a lot more changes below. Thanks for the continued support and feedback.

Patch Notes

New Features / Content

• New lighting effects added, objects will now be lit by their surrounding light sources.
• New cloud renderer with slight layered animation and more detail.
• Added thunder and lightning to encounters that contain debris.
• Species-XI parts and templates added to ship design (full version only).
• New stats panel added with some basic stat tracking, achievements will be added later. 
• Battleship now unlocks at level 30 and no longer requires an upgrade to unlock.
• Music now assigned for all encounters in Sector 1 and Sector 2.

Balance Changes

• Enemies 5 or more levels below now give 25% experience instead of 0%.
• Enemies 5 or more levels below now do 25% damage instead of 20%.
• Different rarity equipment now drops with a minimum of 2 modifiers.
• Increased base damage of laser weapons by 5%.
• Reduced number of enemies in Warzone encounters.
• Reduced number of enemies in Rescue encounters.
• Behemoth and Citadel now correctly use radiation shields.

Quality of Life / Accessibility

• Number of light rays emitted from a dropped weapon is now equal to it's modifier count.
• Hyperdrive jump can now be used to travel to any linked encounter, not just complete.
• Favorite toggle button on equipment is now easier to see.
• Reduced default bloom in graphics settings from 25 down to 15.
• Gateway destination text now scales with camera distance.
• Container name text now scales with camera distance.
• Cleaned up gradient images used by a few of the laser weapons.

Bug Fixes

• Spread debuffs will no longer jump from hostile to friendly targets.
• Turrets will no longer get modifiers to Drone Speed.
• Drone bays and turret launchers no longer start encounters on cooldown.
• Fixed class selection in ship design not using translation.
• Fixed null pointer in warzone encounters with wave spawning.
• Fixed arrival delays on some elite encounter waves.
• Fixed issues where equip / swap buttons would not work on unique passive equipment.