This week’s update has a few new goodies and quality of life improvements. Starting with the first addition of the Interstellar Rift Original Soundtrack. For 3 years now we’ve had menu music which was composed for us by a friend. However this was originally intended as music for a video blog. We put it in the main menu for the simple reason that we needed some music. But we have recently partnered up with the Otherworld Agency to create an entirely original soundtrack for Interstellar Rift. Composed by Curtis Schweitzer who also composed the soundtrack for Starbound, Airship, and Cartoon Survivor. The first of these new music tracks to be added to the game is the new menu music which also doubles as the Interstellar Rift theme. So if you’ve turned menu music off in the options in the past you now have a reason to turn it back on. We will continue to add more original music to the game in the coming weeks and months so stay tuned!

Curtis was kind enough to make the theme available on his soundcloud here:

But wait, it’s not all music and medleys we’ve also overhauled the ingame chat window to be a bit more user friendly. You can now scroll up to see previous messages, switch between different chat channels such as the newly added fleet and crew channels. And also quickly send private messages by clicking on the player’s name in the chat windows.

We’ve also heard your cries for more static defenses and have thus made a new deployable turret which players can build and eject from the disposal airlock and have them defend specific points in space. Such as your station or your ship while you’re mining in a particularly dangerous star system.

In addition we have started the implementation of faction influences inside star systems. This means that when you complete missions for a certain faction. That faction’s influence in that system grows so more stations of that faction will spawn. This is a bare bones implementation of this system which we hope to continue to expand in the future to include npc’s and more.

Killing aliens will also reduce that systems alien influence.

As always we hope that you enjoy this weeks update and if you would like to know more and see sneak peeks at upcoming patches please follow us on Facebook, Twitter, our own forums or our Steam forums.