The Space Birthday Update: Quality of Life

This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details. The Space Birthday Update goes live for everyone in 8 hours from this post, which is today at: UK: 6pm US Pacific: 10am US East: 1pm Your time: check here Lastly, we have 10 more changes that just make the game nicer to play, better balanced, or provide more options for those who want or need them.

Gamepad controls

We have these now! They're designed for Xbox pads but others may work.

Much smoother ship collision

Oh my God, I didn't know how much this was bothering me until it was fixed. When you bump your pod into a big ship, there used to be a little hitch as you rebounded. Turns out this was a bug, John found it, and now it's fixed and ship collisions are so much smoother and nicer.

New item pricing

We've re-written the formulae for how items are priced, so you should see fewer weird outliers. And if you do, we can fix them much more easily.

New mission generation

The whole mission generator has been rewritten to more reliably provide a range of difficulties, and is a lot more intelligent in how it figures out how much pay is fair.

New shop interface and discounts

When you use a shop, you can now browse all shops without having to walk over to them. The one you accessed is at the top so it's still easy to get to what you want that way if you prefer. Shops now also have one type of item that's discounted, and one that's more expensive than usual. This changes every 10 minutes, and when a station is liberated.

You can now crash doors, forcefields, and regular guards

Crash a door to lock it shut or keep it open for a while. Crash a forcefield to turn it off for a moment, sucking anyone in the room into space. Crashing any guard now leaves them unable to sound the alarm.

The Offworld Angel now reduces blood loss instead of preventing it

Making you immortal was probably a bit much.

Guard heat sensors now trip the alarm

Previously the guard would just run to you to investigate, which made them actually easier to deal with than guards with no sensors at all. Now they're a thing you actually need to think about and plan around.

New options

You can now turn off heirlooms if you like, which may be useful for speedrunners to give themselves an even playing field. You can also now adjust sound volume, not just music.

Liberation missions

In the last big update we added well equipped Liberator characters, to help out if liberations were going slowly. They served their purpose but some people felt this was too much of a helping hand, so we've replaced them with occasional Liberation missions - just a new objective type, the reward for doing the mission is liberating that station rather than any pay. These only show up if liberations are going slowly, and if you preferred the Liberator characters you can turn those back on in the options menu.

Personal mission loot

If your personal mission is to steal something, the item itself will be a very good item that you can keep. You don't need to turn it in to complete the mission. If your personal mission is to take someone out, they'll have some good kit you can take and keep too. This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.