Dear Stellar Citizens,
This is the Public Relations Office of the Cosmic Development Committee. We thank each and every one of you who joined us during Stellar Trader's playtest and given us invaluable support.
Whether you’re a seasoned trader who’s already swimming in money or an adventurer upgrading your ship and dreaming of the next unknown frontier— we’ve truly felt your passion for Stellar Trader.
▶ The Playtest Has Ended
We'd like to officially announce that the playtest period has come to an end.
Every suggestion, discussion, and even every complaint has been exceedingly valuable and detailed. Many players provided in-depth feedback within just a few days by pointing out issues while also offering encouragement. This has been incredibly helpful for the team.
Although the playtest is no longer live, the game development has certainly not stopped. We now move into the next phase of refinement and adjustments. Future development plans will be optimized according to your feedback, so that we can return with a more stable, polished, and complete version of the game.
During the downtime, we’ll continue sharing development progress on social media and revealing more of Stellar Trader's worldbuilding. So be sure to follow us on our social media platforms if you haven't yet! We are on Discord, Twitter and TikTok.
▶ FAQ and Our Responses
Over the past few days, we’ve received a huge amount of feedback from all of you.
First, we want to sincerely thank everyone for your kind words and support. Many players praised the visuals of our warp jumps and FTL acceleration effects, as well as our space station and ship designs, which really warmed our hearts.
We also received almost no negative feedback regarding performance optimization, which means the team’s late nights tuning performance were worthwhile.
Lastly, the core trading gameplay earned a lot of positive comments with many players saying they genuinely enjoyed the “intergalactic trader” experience, which is exactly the feeling we want to deliver.
Of course, because we’re too familiar with our own systems, we overlooked some very obvious issues in early-game experience. Your feedback was eye-opening and reminded us that the new player experience still needs significant improvement.
Below are our responses to the most frequently mentioned issues:
Q: Early-game navigation and travel feels too difficult and new players often get destroyed by pirates or storms and feel frustrated.
A: We plan to reduce early-game difficulty by lowering the frequency of pirates and storm-related negative events. We’ll also add more optional side tasks during navigation so players can choose whether they wish to engage, enriching the travel experience rather than encumbering it.
Q: There are too many resources to manage—fuel, heat, deep-space anxiety—causing the trip to get interrupted constantly.
A: We plan to reduce negative events and adjust values related to navigation so that players don’t constantly get interrupted. Overall navigation flow will become smoother.
Q: Information on the demands of each space station isn’t transparent enough, making trade decisions difficult.
A: We plan to make demand information clearer so players can understand supply gaps before setting out. However, we still want to emulate a dynamic trade ecosystem so actual values may still shift slightly by the time you arrive.
Q: There are too few ship purchase and upgrade options, and combat upgrades feel limited.
A: We plan to adjust weapons such as missiles and lasers to make their differences clearer, such as higher burst or sustained damage. Other ship modules will also receive numerical adjustments so upgrades feel more impactful.
Q: The UI is difficult to read and navigate, the information layout is unclear, and the early tutorial is confusing.
A: We plan to improve the game's UI, enhance clarity of information display, and strengthen the in-game tutorials so players won’t feel lost.
Q: Will there be more hotkeys? Mouse-only interaction feels inconvenient.
A: Yes—hotkey options will be added to improve overall control fluidity.
We’ve also noted other feedback frequently mentioned—such as:
Certain minigames feeling disconnected or unfun
Map information display issues
All of your feedback have been recorded and we will continue to work to improve our game and address the issues raised. Thank you once again to everyone for the detailed feedback!
▶ Future Plans — What's Next?
In the coming months, we’ll continue refining the core gameplay, improving the early-game experience, and expanding the systems and scale of the entire universe.
The world of Stellar Trader will become more buildable, more manageable, and more exciting to explore. In the full game of Stellar Trader, you can expect these features:
Running mining operations or build planet-side stations, influencing the development of entire planets.
Constructing multiple space stations, forming industrial chains and trade networks.
And of course, more massive starships, deeper modular customization, richer mechanical animations, and more varied space station designs
Our hope is that the next time we meet, Stellar Trader will present itself as a more complete, smoother, and even more exciting game experience. Till then, we hope you'll stick around!
If you’d like to follow the game development progress, we welcome you to join us on our social media pages: