We’ll be adding a couple of new missions, both to show off some new ships and to even out the difficulty curve. The “medium” difficulty Hornet’s Nest will be re-labeled as hard, with a new, easier mission to take its place. The Onslaught, I’m sad to say, made a sorry showing in the missions that it’s in, due to how it was outfitted – so you can expect to see a mission where it unleashes its full power on you, the unsuspecting player.

In the 0.34a release, you’ll be able to easily share mods (download and unzip in a directory, then enable which mods you want to run with from the launcher). Mods can contain new missions, weapons, and ships. If you haven’t seen the player-created ships, you might want to check them out – they’re the motivating factor for modding functionality being in this release.

Thanks in large part to your reports and feedback, quite a few bugs have been squashed. We’re also making various usability improvements, ranging from the launcher remembering your settings to tweaking the AI and UI.

For a detailed list of the changes that’s already been made, take a look at the live patch notes.

Beyond 0.34a, there are two arcs – adding features to combat, and working on the campaign layer (that’s where you travel, build up your fleet/character, etc). It seems important to get a functioning campaign layer implemented soon, so combat improvements will take a back seat. They won’t be completely ignored, though – perhaps a 25%/75% split.  (Continued after the break)

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