Update 0.2.0 - Flight Systems
Greetings, Commanders!
Today, we're deploying our first major Early Access update: Flight Systems! As outlined in our Early Access Roadmap, this update brings sweeping improvements and refinements to core gameplay systems, including the highly requested ability to save and resume runs, enhanced gamepad support, clearer rewards and mission feedback, updated enemy behaviors and early-game balancing, and much more!
We have a lot of ground to cover before you're cleared for launch, pilot. Given the sheer magnitude of this update, this broadcast will focus on the most important additions and changes. We highly recommend viewing the full Patch Notes for our extensive balance changes regarding Augments and late-game enemy scaling, available here:
View game page
Let's get to the details.
Featured Content
Save & Resume Last Run
We lost a few good researchers to temporal anomalies in order to make this technology possible, but while we figure out where and when they ended up, let's focus on the here and now:
Run progress is now saved whenever you leave a system and enter the Sector Select map, allowing you to return to a run the next time you play!
Note: After winning a run, you must first choose Endless to return to the Sector Select map before quitting or returning to the Main Menu if you want to save and resume that run later.
Reward Clarity and UI Improvements
ALI, your ship's artificial intelligence companion, has received significant firmware upgrades (including some features our engineers don't recall adding... nothing to be concerned about, surely).
Ship Upgrade cards now display the percentage change for each stat, making it clear how much an upgrade improves a stat. Stats that have reached their cap or floor now show a MAX label, so you can tell when further upgrades won't help.
Detailed tooltips have been added to the Reroll, Banish, and Lock buttons on reward screens, as well as to Ship Info stat displays. Hover over or focus a stat to see its description, current value, and caps.
Note: Banishing an augment upgrade now suppresses all subsequent upgrade tiers for that augment for the rest of your run!
ALI now provides clearer mission alerts and reward feedback, including a brief on-screen notification when collecting a power-up, active Challenge and Reward HUD markers, Modifiers (Armory, Industrial, Anomalous, etc.) for the current sector, and improved boss and mission notifications.
Gameplay Balance Changes & Difficulty Tuning
Tactical Abilities
Afterburner, Burst Drive, Phase Drive, and Micro-Warp Drive have been retuned to have a stronger baseline impact:
Augments can still modify and specialize tactical abilities, but Upgrades no longer increase tactical ability 'Strength' directly (i.e., the speed Afterburners provide, the range of Micro-Warp Drive, the distance Burst Drive moves the player, etc.).
Thruster upgrades now primarily affect Tactical Ability cooldown, as well as ship acceleration and speed.
Many reports said enemies were too fast or impossible to avoid. Sometimes, this was intentional. But at greater difficulties, the enemy's speed increased excessively, causing an imbalance between the player's and the enemy's movement. These changes to Tactical Abilities will offer players a more reliable, consistently scaling movement option.
Additional notable changes to movement systems include:
Added a short activation lockout to Phase Drive and Afterburner to prevent repeated input from immediately canceling the ability.
Capped tactical cooldown-reduction upgrades at roughly 50% cooldown reduction.
Increased baseline Battleship acceleration.
Tactical Mastery survival skill changed from increasing Tactical Ability power to reducing Tactical Ability cooldown.
Enemy Behavior
Enemy movement speeds have been retuned across all tiers, reducing extreme late-run speed spikes and making combat roles much easier to read. Enemy behavior has also been significantly improved:
Melee enemies are now much harder to kite. Instead of trailing directly behind you, they anticipate where you're heading and attempt to cut you off.
Large coordinated attacks now arrive as a few impactful fleet bursts. These formations now field a much stronger mix of specialist enemies (Exploders, Shielders, Chargers, Ranged) rather than mostly basic fighters.
Cruisers now appear as deliberate, telegraphed threats. ALI sounds a new "Heavy Contact" alert when one is inbound, and they no longer randomly mix into the normal enemy stream, so each one lands as a real event.
Starmap & Progression Changes
To smooth out early-run pacing and give pilots a fighting chance to prepare before facing major threats, the Starmap has been heavily rebalanced:
Armory sectors are now guaranteed to appear within the first three sectors of every run. These sectors grant a choose-1-of-3 Weapon Reward, giving you the necessary firepower to confront the mid-run intermediary boss, which now appears in sector 6.
Enemy composition and intensity scales have been distinctively tuned across all threat levels. Normal, Hard, and Brutal now offer unique enemy weights, and Cruiser-class enemies will no longer deploy on Normal difficulty until Sector 8.
Challenge map modifiers are now dynamically rolled per difficulty level. Normal mode features a starting pool of Radiation Fields, Meteor Storms, Ancient Battlegrounds, and Ion Storms, while Hard and Brutal unlock the full, unrestricted pool.
Controller Support & Menu Navigation
For pilots navigating with a gamepad, we've implemented full right-stick manual-aim support, complete with a visible targeting cursor for precision firing.
Gamepad focus and menu navigation have also been significantly improved across the Main Menu, Shop, Run Summary, and Narrative screens.
The Codex is now fully controller-navigable. Move between entries in any direction with the stick or d-pad, including the new 'Group by Type' view, and use the shoulder buttons (LB/RB) to reliably cycle through all categories: Augments, Weapons, Components, Ships, and Loadouts.
Quality of Life & Accessibility
Along with this update's additions and changes, a host of new QoL features and options are available to help pilots customize their experience:
Leaderboards have been separated and now feature Standard (one-loop) and Endless.
ALI seems to have paired with your ship's tractor beam, enabling the automatic collection of nearby Caches during combat!
Added a Gameplay Setting to disable gamepad vibration.
Added an Audio Setting to toggle game audio when the application is not in focus (thanks for the suggestion, @RonEmpire).
'Interact' can now be rebound in the input settings.
Performance & Stability
We've also delivered several changes to improve performance and stability during longer, late-game runs and combat-intensive scenarios:
Fixed a memory leak that could degrade performance during extended sessions.
Fixed a hard freeze that could occur when reinforcement waves overlapped with status-field augment effects.
Improved reinforcement-wave handling during intense combat.
Reduced the cost and intensity of several heavy effects and audio moments, including Nuclear Tick VFX, smoke, and shield-hit audio.
Giving Feedback
Not to sound like a broken data disc, but your feedback is crucial to the development of Starforged Legacy!
We've created several channels for your feedback, suggestions, questions, and bug reports:
We've created a Flight Systems Update Feedback Thread right here on Steam to track feedback for this update.
Complete our short feedback survey available here and from the in-game main menu.
Join our official Discord server to speak with the development team directly.
We'll be closely monitoring the reception to this update and any bug reports over the next week before we set our sights on our next "Hangar & Arsenal" update(s), where our focus will shift towards adding new content.
Starforged Legacy x NIMRODS
Before we sign off for the day, we'd also like to share a brand-new bundle: Starforged Legacy X NIMRODS! If you have a penchant for creating weapons of mass destruction (and you likely do if you've read this far into this transmission), be sure to check it out!
It's incredible that we're now bundling some of the very games we've played ourselves, which influenced Starforged Legacy and served as inspiration during its development. We couldn't have done it without you, pilots.
Communication Systems Online
Receive incoming transmissions: news, announcements, devlogs, and deep-space disturbances, by following Second Shift Games on X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky, YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok, or by visiting our website: SecondShiftGames.com.
Join our community Discord to chat with the developers and fellow pilots, and give your feedback on the game!
Wishing you clear skies, Commander.
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