This update contains a few quality of life changes, as well as many audiovisual improvements, and sweeping balance and scoring changes.
First up, mouse and keyboard users can navigate menus with the scroll wheel on the mouse mapped to menu up and down, left click to menu accept, and right click to menu back. Shift + scroll wheel is mapped to menu nav left and right which is useful for adjusting settings with a slider.
Next, Ship upgrades will show in the salvage screen how many of that upgrade type are currently installed and how many resources it will cost to install after after repairing it.
The main update is a change to the way energy regeneration works. Passive regen has been reduced on all ships, but now there is a small bar next to the energy bar that shows additional bonus regeneration up to 5% of your ship's max energy per second. Anything that uses energy resets this to zero (shooting, boosting, afterburners, countermeasures) but it will immediately start increasing towards 5%/sec any time energy is not being used. This means if you're running out of energy, if you can not use any energy whatsoever for a time then you can rapidly regenerate much more than previously possible.
Enemy ships that are chasing the player but fall far behind will now teleport some distance in front of them to discourage kiting in a straight line. This will be refined in the future but for now I am curious what people think about it.
Multipliers are no longer lost when your ship takes damage but shields are active. They are still lost upon taking hull damage, but with the other balance changes you really don't want to be taking hull damage.
The grace time before the multiplier starts decreasing has been halved across the board, so you will have less time to land a shot before it starts ticking down.
Ships have much less Hull HP, and hull upgrades give a much higher percentage bonus.
Photon is slower now but has 2 boosts by default.
Significant buff to shields on Hunchback and Hydra, with Hull HP reductions and some flight nerfs to compensate.
New curves for music filters for shield and energy values. Hopefully it will sound better and be more informative at the same time!
Added "Reloading" notifications at the start of reloading.
Lots of updated particles and sounds.