Update 24: The Economy
Everything in the game now has a price, and that price is set against a working day of forty credits. Merchants buy, stock runs out, food rots, corpses carry what their faction carries. At the far end of it there is a rocket you can build and a launch pad you can put it on, which is the first time Mars Exodus has had a way to end.
Economy and Trade
Prices rebuilt from scratch. Every item is tiered against a forty credit working day, so you can read a price tag and know whether it is a night of work or a month of it.
Merchants buy your loot. Every trader has stock, runs out of it, and puts in requisitions for goods they cannot source.
Faction corpse loot. Bodies carry what their faction carries: a patch on every member, weapons appropriate to the area, trade goods on the people who deal in them.
Seeded loot areas. Containers and world spawns are populated per area instead of drawing from one global pool.
Spoilage. Food degrades over time.
Recycling pays by value. The recycler returns materials based on what you fed it, not on weight.
Hand recipes. A set of recipes that need no workbench, for when you are out in the rings with nothing.
Item pass. 49 unused item types removed, the magnesium and tungsten chains reinstated with real sinks. 299 item types in total.
New item icons, rendered from the models themselves.
Leaving Mars
Win condition implemented. Build a rocket and get off the planet. It takes four hull parts, three tanks of ammonium perchlorate fuel and one uranium core, behind the Rockets technology.
Hull parts cost 200 electrical steel, 100 titanium and a component each. Titanium and tungsten come from the outer rings, uranium from research sites, steel from faction trade. The endgame drains the whole economy.
The Launch Pad, a sealed site in the Outskirts that accepts the rocket and stages it. In Early Access the launch window is "pending administrative review" and staging the ship is the finish line. The launch and the ending ship with 1.0.
Automation, capped. Mining drills, furnace, crusher, solar panel, generator, storage chest and workbench. A drill feeds any factory input next to it, so drill into furnace into chest works without belts or logistics. The large drill now produces four ore per second.
The ship costs roughly 5,200 ore: twelve nights by hand, or two days with two drills and two furnaces running. Automation is the fast path, never the required one.
Oxygen
Oxygen now drains by ring depth instead of world altitude. Climbing a building no longer suffocates you.
Oxygen tank equipment slot added to the inventory, with ghost silhouettes marking empty slots.
Three tank tiers at five, ten and twenty minutes, plus a canister consumable that refills a little over three.
Segmented oxygen bar in the medical panel, replacing the old radial timer.
Oxygen level is now saved with the rest of your character.
Survival Systems
Butchering. Corpses can be cut up with a blade for limbs, eyes, the brain and the heart. Meat no longer drops automatically on death.
Field surgery. A limb item will replace the worst matching body part once it falls below half health.
Hacking. Locked doors are opened through a keypad on the access panel, gated by your Hacking skill. Failure makes noise. Fourteen hackable doors are placed across the Qubic buildings, with locked door and hidden room pieces added to the modular kit.
Skills reworked. Every skill now has two working effects instead of stubs, level ups list what each level gives you, and Fitness adds two kilograms of carry weight per level.
Traits now save correctly, roll randomly, and have incompatible pairs.
Movement is restricted while carrying items: no clambering, climbing or double jumping, and sprinting is slowed.
World and Content
Three new modular buildings: water treatment plant, warehouse yard and nuclear power plant.
63 quests given unique titles and descriptions across nine languages, and the prison tutorial chain relinked with proper rewards.
New characters and dialogue, plus merchant configurations for all twenty unique NPCs.
The yurt village is retired. The Crimson Church now begins at the Graveyard, where Olivia spawns.
Roughly 200 floating props snapped down onto the terrain, and thirteen models re-exported to fix their orientation.
The jail yard has a continuous fence, with localised BetterLife notices posted on it.
Character fixes: all twenty unique NPCs got a correct avatar recipe, and the outfit randomiser no longer produces topless military characters.
Two new wearables, the Beanie and the Cybermask, with one assigned per faction.
Visuals
The art target is now circa 2005, between Half-Life 2 and early S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Warm, dirty, concrete and rust.
New procedural Mars sky: warm horizon, dusty blue grey zenith, harder sun, thinner cloud cover.
Volumetric fog restored and soft shadows enabled with a tuned profile.
Moon brightness cut by a factor of thirty. It was lighting the ground like a floodlight.
Trilinear filtering and anisotropic filtering across the project, textures capped at 1024 with 2048 reserved for terrain and buildings.
Render scale back to 1.0 with 4x MSAA.
Pink materials fixed, including the Noir glass set and the Qubic demo buildings.
Cut Content
Three factions removed to focus the faction war: Favela, Anime Alliance and Exodus Vanguard. Nine remain.
Firefighting cut.
Multiplayer removed.
Rope simulation dropped. Cables stay as logical connections.
The Obi physics package deleted, taking 2,300 files with it.
Fixes and Technical
Upgraded from Unity 6.3 to 6.6, with around forty packages updated, replaced or removed.
Tier one data modding through JSON.
Enemy health no longer scales with the altitude they spawned at.
Radiation raycasts are faster and radiation blockers now work.
Fixed leaking subscriptions when a character is destroyed.
Fixed mouse handling left over from the old input system, including splitting inventory stacks.
Fixed the cursor going invisible in builds after character creation.
Fixed two crashes caused by unimplemented methods.
Fixed area prefabs in the Outskirts and Anime District that were using the wrong area identity.