0.8: Stories & Supernovas

0.8 Stories & Supernovas is now live, and this is by far the biggest update Null Horizon has received yet.

This update adds a full main story campaign with multiple endings, completely overhauls faction reputation, introduces procedural faction questlines, reworks contracts into a faction-driven system, improves UI readability across the board, rewrites controller support, and tons of other great improvements and fixes!

In short, Null Horizon is now much more story-rich, faction-driven, and reactive than it was before. DISCLAIMER: I am unsure how the story changes affect old saves. For this reason, I highly recommend that you start a new save file. That being said, old saves may still work fine, with caveats. If you choose to disregard this and continue your old save, I can try to support you in the discord but I can't make any promises that anything broken can be fixed. This may not affect them at all, I just can't be certain.

Here is the full breakdown:

Story & Campaign

• Added a full in-engine intro cutscene between vessel registration and gameplay.

• Added a full faction-driven main story campaign with multiple endings.

• The main story is centered on the player’s destroyed homeworld, their missing family aboard an escape shuttle, and the last signal coming from the Null Horizon.

• Added faction-specific story contacts, rendezvous scenes, and beat-by-beat story progression.

• Added coalition-based final support and ending resolution tied to faction relationships and hidden story drift.

Reputation & Factions

• Added a Background Dossier panel to vessel registration.

• Wired backgrounds into starting faction standings and story contribution seeds.

• Replaced the old single good/evil-style reputation track with per-faction standing bars.

• Gated Solaris and Eclipse player ships behind EXALTED standing.

• Standardized faction hostility so factions become hostile and revoke access at the HOSTILE tier.

• Moved faction reputation bars out of the player profile and into their own dedicated Reputation screen.

Contracts & Side Quests

• Added a procedural faction questline system to NPC hails, with rare multi-step quest offers for Solaris, Eclipse, Zenith, Lucent, NULL, and Independents.

• Added faction-specific quest rewards including new modules, weapons, cargo, and item bundles.

• Reworked contracts to be faction-driven instead of generic.

• Restricted contract types by faction theme.

• Added faction reputation penalties for contract failure.

• Added contract tiers across contract types, gated by faction standing.

• Made bounty targets faction-specific, and bounty completions now reduce standing with the target faction.

• Added the ability to track a contract or quest, showing the active objective in the top-right of the UI while flying.

UI

• Reworked map icon language.

• Updated full-map NPC markers to use directional triangle icons like the minimap.

• Switched full-map NPC colors from generic type colors to faction colors.

• Updated the minimap to use faction colors as well, so both maps now match.

• Added a full-map legend explaining icon meanings.

• Moved faction reputation bars out of the player profile and into their own dedicated Reputation screen.

• Added a REPUTATION button to the bottom-right cockpit monitor.

• Merged Fleet Command and Fleet Missions into one tabbed Fleet Operations menu.

• Replaced the two bottom-right fleet buttons with a single FLEET OPS button.

• Added control explanation auto-swapping between mouse and keyboard and controller.

• Refreshed the tutorial to be simpler and easier to read.

• Made it so any entity between the player and an enemy becomes invisible during combat.

Controller Support

• Completely rewrote controller support to feel more natural, intuitive, and less bloated.

Kraken Overworld Behavior

• Reworked the random-spawn overworld Kraken so it no longer hunts the player immediately.

• Added separate behavior for the overworld Kraken and the Infinity Kraken.

• New overworld Kraken priority:

• Planets first.

• Then NPC ships.

• Finally the player.

• Added a 5-turn planetary siege state.

• The Kraken now fires its Maw at a planet every turn during the siege.

• Added attack logs such as X IS UNDER ATTACK BY THE KRAKEN.

• Planet destruction now uses the same stacked blast style as the intro cutscene and ignores distance fog.

• Left the Infinity boss encounter untouched so the final fight still behaves like the dedicated boss battle.

Miscellaneous

• Added various other fixes and adjustments.

Please restart Steam or Verify your files to download the update

If you are having fun, please consider leaving a review ^^ If you have any questions, bugs or feedback, please join us in discord.

Thank you so much for your support. I hope you enjoy the update, and look forward to the next. I'm glad we are on this journey together. ||| HopefullyHeroic