Galactic Arena Update & Spring Sale
This update brings a brand-new game mode: the Galactic Arena. In the Arena, you can find new challenges for both your ship design and your piloting skills. Even better, you can build your own arena and share it on the Steam Workshop with the press of a button!
If you haven't got it yet: eXoSpace will be 20% off during Steam Spring Sale, so grab it while it's hot!
Galactic Arena
The new Arena challenges you to design a ship that can beat all others in 1v1 combat. Each arena has its own rules, such as a module or resource limit, specific weapons that can be used, whether you or the AI controls the ship, and more. Become the champion and earn a gold medal!
Some challenges are relatively standard, such as drones or fighters battling it out, but some are pretty insane, like the 50-module arena or the parkour-like Gauntlet. The current selection of arenas is just a start, and players can easily create and share their own arenas as well!
Key features of the arena:
Challenge your ship design skills in one of the 13 built-in arenas (more to come!) or download one of the community-made ones.
AI and Manual Control: AI arenas are a pure design challenge, see if you can abuse the systems better than everyone else. Manual control arenas also put your piloting skills to the test.
Balanced and Unbalanced Arenas: In balanced arenas, the opponent ship designs follow the same rules as you, but in unbalanced arenas, things can get crazy.
Arena Options: Lots of customization, from weapon whitelists to world-changing modifiers.
Auto Ranking: Pits all designs against each other, tournament-style, to determine which is best in your own arenas.
Fast Forward: Skip the boring bits in AI battles.
Steam Workshop Integration: Upload arenas with all opponents included to the Steam Workshop with a single click. You can also easily update them and attach update notes.
There's a lot more to cover, so go try it out, or read the full update notes below.
Ship Editor
Designs can now be uploaded to the Steam Workshop and updated from the sandbox screen, with an attached update note.
Added undo and redo for the current selection (now supports CTRL+Z and CTRL+Y).
The firing arc of weapons shows when placing or hovering over them.
All connected connectors near the cursor are shown, allowing you to quickly check whether placed parts are connected correctly.
Added warnings for low battery, generator capacity, and low steering/forward thrust.
Added a search function for ship modules by name.
Added forward, steering, and strafe thrust stats.
Improved Boss AI editing UI for clarity.
Added CTRL+A and CTRL+D keyboard shortcuts for (de)selecting all parts.
Added energy generation and storage help items to the editor's help menu.
Added a "Control Enemy" option to the ship test menu. The enemy can now also be spawned in the center of the test area.
The thrusters tab is now grayed out instead of hidden when building a starbase to avoid confusion.
Ship designs can now only be saved when they have a name.
Adjusted the initial zoom based on ship size.
Designs now autosave every minute in the editor (when changed).
New Features and QoL Improvements
A history of your bounty hunts now allows you to gloat over your past victories.
Joints are now configurable! Although using moving parts can still be quite yanky, you now have some more control over e.g. speed, rotation limits and more.
Player made factions. Create your own faction in the sandbox and assign ships to it. Factions (along with all its ships) can be uploaded to Steam Workshop as well!
A new factions overview now shows all factions in the game, and marks designs that are not yet discovered with a ?.
Updated invasions in the sandbox. They are now based on factions. Select up to four factions and waves of ships will start spawning and fighting, resulting in some pretty apocalyptic battles. You can use your own factions here!
Shields now only have an effect on their outside border, and not inside the covered area (this stops ships from exploding when firing explosive weapons from within an enemy shield).
The GUI got a restyling for more clarity and many smaller improvements.
The Sandbox, ship library, import and test selection pop-ups now all have the same filtering options.
The ship AI had many fixes and tweaks, including an built-in reaction time and inaccuracy.
Auto AI now uses broadside movement if all weapons are turrets.
Update spawn compositions: factions can now assign weights to spawn "doctrines", determining how often capital ships, swarms of tiny ships or average sized wolf packs will be spawned.
Ships are automatically classified based on their mass and AI, from drone to dreadnought, along with civilians and bases.
Classification and mass is visible in sandbox ship overview.
Designs can be sorted by classification in the sandbox.
Lots of new ship designs added and existing designs updated.
Asteroid storms now last a bit shorter, allow normal jump speed, but offer a chance of finding resources if you sit them out.
Added the smallest part: a decorative light.
Reduced max modules per side in combat to 1500. However, in settings you can now increase this, if your computer can handle it.
Limited maximum length for design names, designer and descriptions and arena names and descriptions.
Boss phases with conditions can now set an "activate immediately" flag. If its conditions are met, this phase will activate immediately, unless the current phase has a minimum duration.
Added download / built-in icon to design buttons.
Significantly boosted chance of power-ups dropping.
Power-ups now have a minimum time interval between drops.
Shields now have a short "bump" animation when going up or down.
Shield brightness now scales correctly with visual intensity.
Tracking on larger missiles was reduced to make them less effective against smaller targets.
Improved visual accuracy of projectile impacts.
Added Streamer Mode that filters out potentially content-ID checked music.
Hex energy generator changed from common to rare.
Light and heavy beam weapons got a boost.
Added some new music.
Changed "double click" confirmation buttons to a proper confirmation dialog.
Deleted designs are autosaved.
Bugfixes
Projectile penetration was still possible if a projectile hit multiple parts in a single frame.
Regeneration of joint (moving) parts recreated bodies in wrong positions, causing physics mayhem.
Specific orders in which joint (moving) parts were added could cause physics glitches.
Joint arm connected to joint arm caused weirdness.
Shield position was incorrect when attached to moving part.
Shield collider would come up even when shield was destroyed.
Part count was incorrect when selecting moving parts.
Moving part arm was not rendered in part preview.
Part configuration (e.g. control mapping) were not copied along with the part itself.
Importing designs now also copies all part configuration.
Searching in capital letters did not work in design import and test selection.
Closing ship editor popups with escape key opened settings.
Warnings were given for active mods in missions that only contained visual changes or added ships.
Missiles would aim at cursor position when player ship was AI controlled.
Exiting test mode in editor could cause overlapping UI elements.
Copying and editing autosaved designs left them in autosaved state.
Deleting ships in sandbox would not always cleanup muzzle flash effects.
Crew effect would be reset after visiting sandbox.
Boss invulnerable shield would cause parts to become invulnerable as well.
Boss shield radius change would not affect shield collider.
Parts would be marked as "dead" for bosses during first frame.
Boss check for whether a module group was alive took into account negative health values.
Selection of all parts of type would not take current selection into account.
Boss auto repair did not work correctly.
Boss first phase would not initialize.
Boss bar would steal clicks.
Boss phases and module group settings would persist when boss core was replaced with normal core, allowing module groups on normal ships to become invulnerable. These are now reset on save.
Could use boss weapons on normal designs by replacing boss core with normal core.
Exiting editor by closing window during tutorial could leave player with ship with only its core.