Thank you for all the engagement and feedback, I'm reading it all even though I can't respond to everyone right away. I've collected a bunch of fixes in this patch that addresses several of the big complaints. Please give the game another chance if you previously stopped, hopefully you'll have a positive experience this time!
Performance & Optimization
Skip sub-pixel stars and station variants at low zoom levels.
Skip refinery/cleanser beam details and cleanser shadows at low zoom levels.
Bug Fixes
Crashing when sacrificing ship fixed. This was happening if you sacrificed ships that killed the black hole but ships where already en route. They lost their target and looped infinitely trying to find something.
Traders now correctly apply their Cargo Size when selling product. Bringing their profits way up. Previously they for some reason skipped that in the calculations making them quite useless.
Expeditions reset correctly if prestige mid expedition.
Black Market Contacts trade boost to +10%.
Ship manifest now shows correct ship IDs on very large fleets
Auto-buyers no longer force-reactivate on level-up.
Gameplay & Balance
Pirate Rework, I've heard you loud and clear, pirates are a money sink and not good. This is a first step just to give them a more permanent purpose. Defeated pirate ships enter a 15-second repair state instead of dying permanently.
Halved Void Cleanser metal consumption rate (from 0.2 to 0.1 /s).
Expedition rebalanced overall risk.
Removed credit-based bounties from Signal Range 5 (SR5).
Prevented refinery placement in locked signal ranges.
UI & Quality of Life
Moved the Bounty Board inside the Fleet Command panel instead of being alone. Not final or the best solution but works for now. Instead of the bounty board disappearing off-screen and requiring the player to collapse the Fleet Command, player can now scroll down in the panel to see everything.
Improved clarity of Void Cleanser UI buttons.
Engine Overclock displays decimal values after level 40.
Reworded Void Cleanser descriptions for clarity.
Shortened large numbers for better screen readability. After a billion numbers will now be lettered, buttons will always be shortened.
Added bootup instruction message for on boarding new players. Goal of the game is to prestige multiple times.
More adjustments to triggering achievements.
Note: Achievements keep being stubborn and refuse to trigger for a small subset of players. I will keep trying, but one thing that has worked for people in discord is to manually delete their save file and starting over. Especially for "not a cookie" and Signal Range 2 achievements. Save file can be found in %APPDATA%\\Roaming\\desk-space
Issues I'm aware of:
UX is still not up to standard based on your feedback, this is a bigger task and a revamp will take time. I do hope we are close enough and the tweaks and changes make it easier to play
Console spam. I want to add message filter and the ability to turn off the console, this will come a bit later
More options for pirates. Today's patch fixes them being a money sink and they don't permanently disappear. Pirates have a 40% chance of losing their battle that's why people thought they "instantly" died before. Now they will go back to base for repairs. A bigger refactor takes time I want to do it properly.
Upgrade confusion. Some of it is on purpose, some of it is bad text. Will tweak this as we go on.
Metal bottleneck. I'm following this, and have to think about what the best choice is. Games need friction but this might be too much, we'll see which direction we'll go.
As always, thank you for playing and thank you for all the feedback!