After months of hard work and hundreds of sizeable code commits, the most-requested feature for eXoSpace Combat Engineer is finally here: continuous progression! This major overhaul to the Bounty Hunt mode lets you evolve your ship over multiple missions, from a basic fighter to a massive dreadnaught.
Keep Your Ship
At the end of a mission, you now jump home with your ship, resources, and unlocked parts. To balance the advantage of starting with a more powerful ship, I’ve reworked the meta-progression:
Increased Difficulty: Missions start harder and gradually build up to an extremely dangerous new final mission.
Rank-Based Ship Caps: Your maximum ship size cap (determined by metal, antimatter, and exotics costs) now increases with your rank, which is earned via mission XP.
No More Galactic Guilders: The unlock system has been streamlined:
Unlock parts using new "tech" drops found during missions. Unlocks carry over between runs.
Level up your crew members, permanently boosting specific part type effectiveness.
Mutators (formerly modifiers) are now unlocked via achievements.
Playable Factions
When starting a new game, you can now select a playable faction as your "origin." This determines your tech tree unlocks and permanent crew bonuses. While you can salvage off-tree parts from destroyed enemies, each faction retains powerful unique modules exclusive to them.
I’ve also added multiple save slots, making it easy to test out different factions without losing your existing progress!
Achievements
There are 32 New Achievements: Unlock these to earn game-changing mutators and unlock new playable factions.
New Missions
Two New Missions: Discover new factions, fresh encounters, and challenging player-made bosses. (The Emperor is no longer the final boss!)
Existing missions and bosses have been heavily updated and tuned.
Full Patch Notes
Progression & Factions
Danger Levels: Now visible on the star map, scaling roughly from 1 (relaxed) to 500 (insane).
Global Progress: Discovered ships/factions, mission access, and unlocked modifiers are now shared across all save slots.
Tech Drops: Earning "tech" from disassembling enemy designs yields diminishing returns for repeat kills.
Crew Updates: Crew members are now faction-specific, specialize in specific part types, and can be managed directly in the Bounty Hunt screen.
Independent Faction and Space Pirates: Added a neutral faction to populate neutral mission areas, as well as Space Pirates to terrorize them.
Reputation: Faction reputation now carries over between missions. Rewards scale based on your standing, and faction behavior is a bit smarter (e.g., destroying a tiny ship in a massive crossfire no longer triggers a war).
Random Doctrines: Added completely random faction fleet doctrines.
Encounters: Spawns now use ship classifications (e.g., civilian) to determine appropriate faction ships. This also allows modded faction ships to appear in missions.
Missions & Encounters
New Missions: Exoleaf Collective and Deepspace Ferroforms. Huge thanks to Kepler, Etzu, Dalheriant, making funny spips, Hiddo, SUSTreason, and others for their contributions!
Boss Tuning: Difficulty adjusted for Master Thief, Dread Reaver, B.I.T.E. M.E., and Agamemnon. The Emperor boss now goes "Insane" on insane difficulty.
Conflicts & Quests: Added multi-area "Quests" and "Conflict" encounters (e.g., active warzones) with map markers.
Minor Factions: Missions can now feature minor factions drawn from a random pool.
Drifting: Running out of fuel and "drifting off" now returns you to your original encounter after getting fuel.
UI Additions: Faction overviews now show kill counts per ship, and hovering over a ship during flight displays its info in the bottom right.
Ship Editor & Modules
New Modules: Added partial shields (limited arc protection) and powerful uniques like the Bastion Shield, Nuke Torpedo Launcher, and Super Pulse Cannon.
Resource Costs: Unique parts and Cores are no longer free; they now cost resources to place.
Editor QoL: Part selection now features search, better categorization, and auto-scrolling. Added ship width/length info.
Painting: Paint all selected parts with a single click.
Classifications: Override ship classifications in the editor. Split "Station" and "Defense" classifications.
AI Broadside: Added broadside facing options ("least damaged", "smallest angle", "clockwise", and "counter-clockwise").
Bosses & Arenas
Arenas Upgrade: Added Checkpoint Mode (continue from your highest rank), enabled auto-repair, boss bars, improved preview images, and set manual control to most arenas.
New Arena: "Defeat the Empire."
Boss Editor: Assign module groups to multiple selected parts at once. Added "StraightAhead" movement.
Phase Spawning: Boss parts marked as "destroyed" in the first phase now remain hidden instead of spawning and exploding, allowing parts to "grow" in later phases.
General QoL, UI & Modding
Overhauled Bounty Hunt UI and improved the Steam Workshop upload UI.
Workshop uploads now feature preview images of all included ships.
Downloaded Workshop faction ships can now spawn in existing missions.
Duplicate built-in or modded player designs are automatically renamed on load.
Hyperjump charge duration has been halved.
Explosion graphics have been improved and now scale dynamically.
Screen shake intensity is configurable (and can be toggled off).
Breaking Modding Change: Explosion ranges in parts and projectiles now use standard coordinate units. Multiply your existing ranges by 32 to adapt.
And a lot of bugfixes!