QoL & Scalability Update - Early Access 0.6.0 Patch Notes

My team took a nice rest, and we have been at work for the last month for our first Early Access update of "QoL & Scalability" Update. Which we aim to fix quality life life issues in game and improve the game performance for scalable and stable base builds.

Highlights

We made a lot of small changes in this update to a lot of things, so instead of giving you a patch notes this time, I prepared a highlight section to talk about different updates.

Performance:

With the performance upgrades we did, I'm very happy with the current state of the game, your base can be anything you imagine, and there is no technical barrier to stop you. No limits, the limit is your imagination.

Quality Of Life:

We appreciate you giving all the feedback about the usability of the UI and sticking with us. We have some nice features now like, search input in the research screen, filtering available pods in the bottom view, press space to stop the game, and more extended game controller support. We are still on the lookout for feedback to implement new QoL features, feel free to give us more ideas.

Planet Gameplay Variety:

We reworked the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th planets where they will require different approaches and gameplay styles for you to complete them. This was mostly requested and we decided to bundle this into the QoL update. Now every planet has its special quests, these quests are different on every planet. We believed on focusing on increasing the quality of the current content in the game instead of new content. And as promised new content is on the way.

New Settlers & Settler System Updates:

Now the settler arrival algorithm is changed and instead of fully random settlers coming in, it works as tiers of settlers, some settlers are more talented than the others, more talented ones now tend to come later in the game. Additionally, we added 20 new settlers from different tiers to make gameplay more replayable.

Experimental Full Controller Support

Happy to announce that Stellar Settlers now has full controller support. But it is still experimental. If you decide to play the game with a controller, let us know your ideas or bugs you faced in the Steam Community Forums.

Better Steam Cloud Save:

There were issues with our implementation where sometimes the game doesn't sync the player's progress. We reworked this system to make it very future-proof. You can play the game across your devices with one save and uninstall the game anytime and reinstall again later, and still keep your full progress, your EXP, current planet run, settlers etc.

More Achievements:

Not we have 20 achievements on Steam, players were asking for this, we had time for 20 in this version, but there is some nice ones you can grind for :) We will add more achievements in every major update during our Early Access and try to get to 100 on the full release.

New Planet Concepts:

We are already done with our additional 5 planets that we will release during Early Access, and decided to add these in the planet selection screen, tho they are locked and you will need to wait for other updates for us to implement and fine-tune their gameplay. We aim to release a new planet every month, with game modes and other updates in between. We will make sure you don't