1.37.2 - Stable Orbit

EPAA discovers new moonlets
In a groundbreaking development, during a routine mineral survey, the Enceladian Polar Astronomical Array (EPAA) detected new, previously undiscovered moonlets located in the plane of Saturn's Rings. What sets these celestial bodies apart is their unique characteristic: unlike their predecessors, these moonlets do not form the typical propeller formations observed in planetary rings. This discovery defies the current understanding and theories of moonlet formation and its behavior within the dense and dynamic environment of planetary rings. EPAA has announced plans for an on-site examination slated for later this month.

New autopilot software regulations
A critical announcement issued today by the Enceladian Space Regulatory Commission unveiled comprehensive new regulations, mandating that all spacecraft autopilot systems must be enhanced to include precise tracking of surfaces of larger asteroids and moonlets. This regulatory overhaul has ignited controversy, as there are growing concerns that Elon Interstellar, a frontrunner in autopilot technology with pre-existing surface tracking capabilities, may have influenced the push for these updated standards. Critics contend that this move unfairly benefits the Martian-based conglomerate, triggering a heated debate over the equity of the new regulations.

The mineral discharge terminal upgraded
In response to the unprecedented boom in mining activities within the Rings, the Enceladus Prime ore unloading facility has recently completed a series of significant upgrades to enhance its operational capacity. Having reached their operational thresholds, the previously utilized Armstrong-TX7500 unloading arms contributed to considerable delays, resulting in lengthy queues of mining ships awaiting their turn to offload their valuable yields. The facility has integrated the cutting-edge Tetsuo-series electromagnetic delivery system into its unloading infrastructure to address this bottleneck. This state-of-the-art upgrade is set to revolutionize the station's processing capabilities, promising an astounding increase in throughput efficiency by over 9000%.

Maintenance logs
- Added a new moonlet story event to encounter.
- Enhanced autopilot targeting. You can now target a specific spot on the surface of a large object, like a moonlet, and autopilot will align to that spot. This prevents accidents where you click on a wall of a cave you were traversing to have the autopilot spin your ship toward the center of mass of the moonlet, wrecking your thrusters in the process. Now, it will instead point your ship towards the part of the wall you clicked on, wrecking your thrusters in the process.
- When you are scrapping your ship paint along a rocky surface, it will not sound like multiple impacts anymore.
- Improved performance of ship-mounted spotlights. This will be most noticeable on integrated GPUs.
- Improved adrenaline collision detection performance. This lowers the CPU requirement all around.
- Improved pathfinding for entities that rarely move, such as space stations. This lowers CPU requirements near such objects.
- Entities that cannot move at all will not imagine the paths they could take if they suddenly gain the ability to move. Such electric dreams wasted CPU cycles. They will now dream about android sheep instead.
- You can't salvage traveling phage stations anymore. They have their jobs, and they intend to fulfill them.
- A quirk in the spawning routines could cause many more rocks to spawn near entities that should not contain rocks inside. This artificially increased the density of asteroids around stations and moonlets and caused waves of asteroids to decrease game performance.
- Updated radiation shaders to work with ships that are hidden in caves.
- Your astrogator will need to have a way to detect a ship before he can trace it with the tactical marker. This means that they will not mark ships hiding inside caves anymore and can slow down ship identification in dense areas, like propeller formations or around moonlets.
- Improved the layout of the dive summary screen. Ores will now be spaced out equally, with unusual finds closer to the center of the screen.
- Optimized dive summary screen so that it won't be bogged down - or crash - if you bring hundreds of chunks of raw ore back.
- Added extra lights and adjusted a number of shadow settings for the brand-new moonlet event.
- Fixed two of the POI events not linking correctly, which caused you to rediscover a plain "moonlet" while you already knew about the secret inside.
- Pulse thrusters and torches that ran out of reaction mass during operation continued to burn as long as the control was held, draining the negative mass out of the universe and upsetting the dark matter/energy balance.
- The dealership was raising the price of the ships with kinetic and nanodrone systems by more than the system was worth, upsetting the economy somewhat.
- Ship plumes from RCS discharge inside moonlets will not be visible on the visual feed.
- You cannot astrogate from inside of a moonlet anymore.
- If your autopilot velocity limit was set to a number that was not a multiple of ten, the velocity slider on the in-dive Astrogation tab could not be set all the way to the top.
- Changed the way docking arms forcefully undock your ship. They are now aware of the ship's orientation or station you are docked to and will eject you away from that ship instead of just moving you the closest way outside the designated docking spot.
- Big Bad Wolf will now always stop completely after docking with you.
- Changed the physics settings of the External Impact Absorbers. They are now softer, dealing less damage in kinetic collisions, and their collision resolution uses a continuous collision detection algorithm - which should prevent physics glitches when impacting megaton asteroids at high speeds but does decrease the physics performance a bit.
- Updated translations.

1.37.4 - Light Lag

- If your ship was burning torch or thruster discharge at the very last second of the "return to Enceladus" cutscene, it could make thruster flares disappear completely from subsequent dives.
- Adjusted physical cargo bay actuator settings on OCP-209. Previous settings sometimes caused the cargo bay to get stuck if your framerate dropped to 15 or less.
- The ship spotlight on OCP-209 will not rotate with your habitat anymore.

1.42.7 - Signal to Noise

Runasimi releases quantum communications
Runasimi Inc. has introduced an advanced communication system tailored to meet the demands of real-time interlunar communications. This groundbreaking system employs a sophisticated quantum data transmission method in conjunction with Runasimi’s proprietary digital signal processing algorithms. This innovative approach ensures seamless and nearly instantaneous communication over interlunar distances, setting a new standard in space communication technology.

New flexible astrogation regulatory
Responding to the dynamic and challenging conditions of Saturn's Rings, the Enceladian Astrogation Authority has significantly relaxed its astrogation regulations. This adjustment grants astrogators the liberty to traverse the debris-strewn expanses of the Rings without the encumbrance of filing detailed flight plans. Now, spacecraft within the Rings are merely required to maintain a record of potential destination coordinates, substantially minimising administrative tasks and bolstering operational agility. This regulatory update is designed to stimulate exploration and mining activities by streamlining procedural requirements, all while upholding the essential principles of space traffic safety and accountability.

Comprehensive astrogation console update
Minding LF's latest update to its astrogation consoles, aimed at revolutionising the way astrogators sort and select navigation targets, has been released amidst a swirl of controversy. By introducing new algorithms for easier sorting and recovery of previously lost tracking data, the update offers astrogators unparalleled flexibility and precision in mission planning. However, its launch closely following the Enceladian Astrogation Authority's new, more lenient navigation regulations has led to accusations of unfair competition, with critics suggesting Minding LF might have had prior knowledge of the regulatory changes.

Maintenance Logs
* You can now call ships you talked with previously; most of the time, they will answer.
* New simulation range controls in the settings menu allow you to limit the physics simulation area and improve performance on low-end systems.
* New astrogation protocol. POI which you lost track of will still be selectable on your astrogation console - they are still contained in the ship logs, after all, it's just your current astrogator that has trouble finding them. You may attempt an astrogation jump to such a location, but you will arrive at the location that is the best guess of your current astrogator.
* Additional icons on the Astrogator console allow you to see different classes of astrogation destinations more easily.
* You can now label your astrogation destinations with different colours, making it easier to distinguish one moonlet from another.
* You can now zoom in on the Astrogation console visual map.
* General astrogation re-balance. Since you can now travel to expired astrogation targets, the base tracking time of your crew was lowered by 25% to account for that.
* Claim beacons will now return to the Enceladus Prime station automatically when your claim period expires. Previously, if you did not equip it again and travelled to exactly the same spot, you could find a defunct beacon waiting for you, just as if you just released it.
* Map labels on the dive target selection screen and the Astrogator panel will now keep their original size when you zoom in and out.
* Enhanced graphics on Enceladus stations. The station now has multiple-resolution images for all distances, so it will look more consistent when viewed at different zoom levels. Most notably, this removes subtle shimmering of the edges when the camera is zoomed away.
* OCP-209 HUD now has Bearing and Orientation readouts.
* Having your NDCI collision alert set to 10 seconds triggered a zero division, which could gradually degrade the performance of your game during dives.
* The settings menu will no longer overflow the Steam Deck screen when you increase the HUD size.
* Adjusted the layout of the Settings menu to fit additional controls.
* Updated translations.

1.42.9 - Arms Race

-Triskellion-Armstrong suffered a station-wide beacon coordination tightbeam service outage, rendering all the B8 Claim Beacons inoperative for over 48 hours. Lacking tightbeam connections, most beacons deployed in the rings initiated emergency return protocol and returned to the station. The company deployed many drone carriers to place all the beacons back in their registered claim locations free of charge.

1.44.4 - Ludocognitive Dissonanse
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* A new cognitive enhancer is available at drugstores across Enceladus. It allows ship captains to retain memories of previous encounters with other ships, factions and players, making subsequent encounters with the same ships more consistent.
* The Enceladian Tuning crew was found to often leave the ship computer running after the initial examination of the ship. This wasted quite a lot of power and caused the performance on the Enceladus station to degrade after entering the Tuning menu until you left the station. The crew was instructed to power down any hardware they used after they finished working on it.
* Improved performance of the Fleet and Dealer menus.
* When you acquired an encounter location via dialogue near the inner or outer edge of the rings, you could find that location much closer than it was supposed to be, up to spawning just next to you as soon as you finished up the dialogue. A proper distance will be maintained now.
* Crew leaving damaged derelicts will turn off their autopilot.
* The time of travel display on the Astrogation console will now be consistent with the distance display, both showing zero when you are near a spot where you lost track of a destination.
* The Ganymedean base now has access to cognitive enhancers, so it will remember your personal reputation when you return to it. This shifts the balance of gaining the favour of the base itself with trade, smuggling, and other personal favours and prevents the base from only vaguely remembering both good deals they had with you, as well as your attacks on them.
* When you deal with the Ganymedean station, the deal will be marked as accepted once you actually accept it, not when it's first mentioned.
* Fixed a vertical splice visible sometimes on a prototype K44 ship's hull.
* Fixed a potential crash to desktop if you exited the Tuning menu with the sensor simulation running.
* The banding-like wave formations in the rings should now be limited to places where they are actually placed on the map.
* You can't extort pirates over and over again by shooting them just after you finish talking.
* If you deploy a B8 claim beacon and then pick it up again immediately, you will now be able to re-deploy it in another spot.

1.45.0 - Virtual Achievement

- Improved graphical performance of the OMS menu. The zoomed-in background of the OMS could be very GPU-intensive if you entered the OMS while your thrusters were firing. This release introduces simplified rendering, which should not be noticeable but dramatically (2500%) improves its performance.
- Pressing B on the gamepad in the Virtual Flight Service will not close the simulation anymore but fire the simulated thrusters as expected.

1.49.2 - Birds of Foraging

Latent Behavioural Imperatives Found
Once deemed a failed project due to unexpected social behaviours among the drones, the Nakamura-Titan Mining Companions are making a comeback. These refurbished autonomous mining drones were originally sidelined when they exhibited complex social interactions that hampered operational efficiency. Recent breakthroughs in adversarial neural network manipulation now permit a small-scale reassertion of their original behavioural imperatives, potentially restoring their intended capabilities.

Mitsudaya-Starbus Grinder Recall
Mitsudaya-Starbus has launched a recall on grinder tips of their Prospector-series ships, including the widely-used Eagle Prospector. Now coated with industrial-grade diamond, the new grinder tips are designed to endure the most extreme mining conditions. Mitsudaya promises to double the lifespan of previous models, effectively addressing the durability issues highlighted in a recent class-action lawsuit.

H.475 available for Recon Craft
The H.475 codec, recently introduced to reconnaissance crafts, now incorporates AI-driven algorithms to enhance the compression and clarity of high-dynamic range video. This development is pivotal for missions near high-glare asteroids and moonlets, ensuring detailed and artefact-free imagery that greatly aids astrogational accuracy.

Maintenance Logs
* Improved lighting shaders. This release features a new way to process lighting on objects in the game. It should have the same performance as before, but now it will remove some noise and shimmering artefacts when you view big, detailed entities (like moonlets) with your camera zoomed out.
* You can issue more orders to mining companions.
* You can now restock the propellant on a Nakamura-Titan Mining Companion that is in your cradle arm.
* A new tuning setting was added to control propellant transfer to the mining companions.
* When your mining companion is out of propellant in an autonomous mining mode, it will ask you for instructions instead of returning to the station immediately. You'll have an option to order it to return to your cradle for resupply instead.
* Increased velocity of the mining companion docking protocol.
* You can now order your Nakamura-Titan Mining Companions to perform a cargo transfer protocol.
* Your Nakamura-Titan Mining Companions will now reverse the polarity of their grinder when executing the ore transfer protocol.
* NT Mining Companions that you ordered to return to Enceladus will not call you immediately back, inventing an excuse for why they are leaving.
* When you order a drone to dock to your ship, its tactical marker will disappear immediately after the docking is complete.
* You cannot hail mining companions that docked with you and powered down anymore.
* You can attempt to hail a ship or drone again that did not reply to you. Earlier, a lack of reply would lock you out from subsequent tries, even if that specific NPC had something to say later.
* Attempting to hail a Mining Companion just as you release it should not cause it to ignore you for 10 seconds anymore.
* Asteroid grinders are now better at grabbing (smaller) rocks and doing more damage. Success in grinding larger rocks still largely depends on their shape and your ability to get a good grip on them.
* Picking up an entity with active transponder into your cargo bay will now immediately remove it from your pilots contact list.
* Racing team now has a separate conversation option when their drone is not operational, and will not schedule a race nobody can win.
* Additional Racing Team encounter.
* The bearing and distance to identified contacts will now be exposed in your Pilot tab.
* Fixed Virtual Flight Service access in the Tuning menu when using a gamepad or keyboard. Moving downwards with MVFS selected will now put you on the first tuning item, as expected.
* Fixed POI descriptions overflowing the Astrogation window if you scrolled them by dragging the scrollbar with your mouse.
* Fixed line-of-sight in the Space Bar being rendered wrong in one of the corners if you got close enough.
* Fixed a bug that caused ore to vanish if your Nakamura-Titan Mining Companion left the detailed simulation range with cargo inside and then came back near your ship. In such cases, that cargo would vanish immediately after it left its cargo bay during the Cargo Transfer Protocol.
* The interior of the space bar now properly blocks you from astrogating away and hides your exhaust and laser flares from the visual feed.
* Updated translations & credits.

1.49.4 - Stay Shiny

- Made ore shiny again. A layer of dust covered most of the ore nuggets on your recon craft feed, making them quite dull, but our dedicated team of drones painstakingly cleaned them up to make them shiny again.
- Updated translations.

1.49.7 - Timelike Curves

- OLED saving was applied to non-static HUD elements, such as autopilot targeting receptacles and ore identification markers. OLED-saving protocol introduces a slight shift of all the static elements of your HUD to prevent OLED (and CRT) displays from being damaged with burn-in from having a prolonged display of a static image. This makes sense for static elements of your HUD. This will cause all the autopilot target markers and ore identification markers to be exactly centered on the target.
- The Autopilot HUD overlay displaying relative velocity and distance was not placed correctly if you targeted the surface of a big entity, such as a moonlet. While the triangle marker was correctly placed on the surface of the object, the velocity overlay was placed over its centre of mass.
- The custom paint job, if present, will now be applied to OCP-209's habitat.
- LIS-Kitsune HUD will now respect brightness tuning for the microseismic scanner floating window.
- The Virtual Flight service in the Tuning menu required you to use the shortcut key to activate it. You will now be able to activate it using your mouse.
- You could take a very specific path through the spacetime that caused some of the points of interest to appear more than once.
- Fixed a bug that caused faction disposition for unique entities, such as certain space stations or station-like structures, not saving individual disposition towards you correctly. This could cause some entities to become hostile on your first interaction. This change is retroactive and will reset all the mistakenly set dispositions automatically.
- Updated translations.

1.50.4 - Autonomous Cargo

* You can now refuel your THI Cargo Containers. This includes the ability to tune the propellant buffer.
* You can give more detailed commands to your THICCs. This allows for new playstyles, including releasing the containers to follow you in a formation while you mine and only re-docking them for processed ore transfer.
* The presence of some drones prevented the correct fracture of asteroids near them, resulting in worse yields with some playstyles. This affected mostly excavating asteroids with grinders and built-in excavators while having NT Mining Companions or THI Cargo Containers attached near such an excavator, but also lowered they yields from mining companions using their own grinders.
* Adjusted spawning routines for ore in close proximity to other entities, such as ships, cargo holds, grinders and more. This should greatly improve the odds of having good yields when mining with an excavator or grinder directly.
* Some drones did not power up their autopilots when released. Machines have a hard time flying when they are powered off. They will be turned on again.
* The ship HUD boot sequence was missing from the Enceladus launch sequence cutscene.
* Updated translations.

1.51.3 - Rare-Space Elements

* New ore graphics. Ores are now more visually distinct and look closer to their real-life counterparts.
* Ships you encounter in the rings, both flying and derelict, will now have more variety in the equipment installed.
* Improved LIDAR performance, AI collision avoidance performance and pilot adrenaline performance.
* Decreased memory fragmentation of Doppler LIDAR. While no memory was leaking, during longer dives your memory could get fragmented over time and exceed your CPU cache sizes, which could slowly degrade performance in multi-hour dives.
* On some occasions, the Enceladus background could zoom out far further than it should.
* Ore carried with a mining companion docked to your ship will not trigger NDCI collision warning anymore, or make your pilot freak out with adrenaline surge.
* You can now scroll the Pilot's tab in OMS with gamepad analogue stick, if it doesn't have focus.
* You can access and scroll the Pilot's tab with the gamepad even if the first contact you have has a "Hail Error" connection status.
* The pilot's tab will scroll automatically when you move through the contacts with your gamepad.
* Fixed some events trying to despwn over and over again when flagged as "essential, not despawning", which could hinder the game performance if you flew away from such an event.
* Updated translations.

1.51.5 - Repeat Offender

* If you try to get weregild for the same offence twice, people will now call you out on that.
* Fixed HUD previews not showing up in the Equipment menu.
* Updated translations.

1.52.11 - Rapid Delivery

Tetsuo HMX-2000I low-stress approval
Tetsuo Engineering has announced the approval of their HMX-2000I iron delivery mass driver for installation on low-stress hardpoints. This approval allows the HMX-2000I to be integrated into a wider variety of spacecraft, significantly enhancing the versatility and efficiency of iron ore transport and delivery in mining operations. While this powerful mass driver boosts throughput and streamlines the iron delivery process, it is important to note that the high rate of iron delivery could cause flight instability on non-spinal mountings.

Coherent Light releases new lens
Coherent Light, a titan in the laser technology industry, is expanding its horizons with the launch of their premium L-50F high-fidelity lens, designed specifically for high-end photography and reconnaissance applications. While the company has built its reputation on pioneering laser systems, this latest innovation showcases expertise in optics. Reconnaissance craft equipped with the L-50F lens will now be able to deliver both better resolution and a wider field of view. This advancement is crucial for detailed surveillance and mapping, enabling more comprehensive and accurate identification of ore deposits and spotting of asteroids.

Armstrong loses planned obsolescence lawsuit
Triskelion-Armstrong has been found guilty of deliberately using software to simulate damage in their AR1500-M salvage manipulators. This practice misled operators into believing their equipment required costly repairs or replacements when no real damage was present. The court's ruling mandates Triskelion-Armstrong to compensate affected users and revise their software to eliminate fraudulent damage indications. This verdict represents a significant win for miners and salvage operators, who can now expect more transparent and reliable performance from their equipment.

Maintenance logs
* Reversed the polarity of debris spawning. It's now much more likely for a big rock to shatter into multiple smaller fragments when force is applied, but it should preserve the desired tight spawning radius when mining with the excavator or grinder.
* Tetsuo Engineering managed to obtain approval for the installation of Tetsuo HMX-2000I on low-stress hardpoints.
* Adjusted dynamic physics simulation range settings to be less aggressive. Previously, the game could attempt to limit the simulation space in response to new objects being introduced too quickly, which, while it preserved good performance, could make the ice only appear in a narrow band around your ship. This could also lead to some weird ice formations as the simulation range was adjusted back and forth to find the optimal spot. The new settings are much more gentle and make the spawning seem much more natural while preserving the performance benefits.
* Updated ore graphics.
* Improved performance of encounter detection. Previously, when you made a lot of deals with shady entities, the performance of your game could degrade as it attempted to trace each deal you made. The shady activity ledger is much faster now.
* If you went straight from one established deal to a location of another deal of the same type, without visiting any other location between them, you could find nothing.
* Fixed refuelling speed for crafts you attach to your ship. Previously, it used ore transfer pump capacities, which are slower for most crafts.
* Saved games will not contain events that can not happen anymore. This improves loading speed. Old saves will be cleaned up automatically.
* Fixed the title menu being misaligned if you had a save with a long ship name.
* Fixed some of the big, complex moonlets experiencing runaway kinematic reactions, leading them to spin uncontrollably and break game physics.
* New asteroids will not spawn in close proximity to your ship anymore.
* You can now ask BBW to join their cause multiple times in one encounter. Beware that they might get annoyed by this.
* While you can still bind multiple keys for an action in the game, the HUD will only show the first key bound. This prevents the interface overflowing if you manage to bind keys that have long representations, like keypad keys.
* Improved physics performance for certain big, complex moonlets by over 1000%.
* General physics engine collision detection optimisation. Due to how our physics throttling system works, the most immediate effect for you will be the ability for the game to simulate objects further away from your ship. If you desire a better performance instead, make sure to lower the "physics simulation range" slider in the game settings.
* Certain ship and stations that denied you docking for some reason will allow you to dock again when you manage to convince them that they should. That makes certain illegal cargo exchanges, and bounty hunting, flow more naturally when you are performing the operations in close proximity of recipients.
* Having a rogue cargo container attached to your ship prevented other such containers from appearing.
* THI Cargo Containers will now follow you through an astrogation jump when executing the "keep formation" command.
* Fixed tooltips for some buttons on OMS that were not showing when using a gamepad and flickering when showing up.
* Fixed a tooltip on the astrogator tab.
* Sometimes, cargo containers and similar craft attached to your ship would boot up and attempt to escape on Enceladus. This included both the main menu as well as the "examine ship" sections of the Dealer and Fleet menus.
* Added AI inhibitors to racing drones and their illegal modifications. The drone will now shut down in direct proximity to any ship, just like any other autonomous craft. This can make certain events and encounters easier and will prevent such drones from attempting to escape when already caught with docking equipment. Previously, such a drone would only shut down after entering a cargo bay.
* Fixed phantom manipulator damage. If you had a damaged ship in a save at the time when the damage model of the manipulator changed in an upgrade, the manipulator misalignment damage could been transferred past the upgrade, but you were not able to fix it without replacing the whole ship.
* Jury-rigging misaligned Salvage Manipulator will now apply the fixes immediately and you won't need to bash the arm on another rock in order for the fixes to kick in.
* Updated translations.

1.52.17 - Finite State

- Improved dialogue decorators. When a dialogue option results in a member of your crew going away, you will now see a clearer indication that they are leaving, including the time they will be away.
- The exact mineral composition of all the ore chunks you collect and process is now stored in your save file. Previously, the game relied on procedural seed to recreate the same composition after interlunar transit, but this approach proved to be inaccurate - especially if you had partially-processed chunks in your cargo hold.
- Fixed a memory leak that caused the game to use more memory when you encountered entities you could talk to.
- Fixed scale of the locust swarm, in which participants were twice as big as they should be.
- Enhanced performance logs. Additional information contained in long-term performance logs will make it easier to pinpoint any performance issues that build over long periods of time, like any memory leaks.
- If you collected a weregild and the captain you were processing felt like explaining themselves, they got distracted and did not remember that they paid you, allowing you to ask for money a second time.
- Updated translations.

1.52.19 - Dysregulation Syndrome

* Triskelion-Armstrong issued a recall on the most recent B8 claim beacon series. A faulty ship detection module inhibited most of the drone functions permanently, which both rendered the claim beacon inoperational shortly after deployment and hindered third-party modifications of the beacons.
* Made the cargo hold walls of OCP-209 a bit thicker. This should prevent carbon-based anomalies from slipping through the cracks.
* You can't pump ore into racing drones, mines and claim beacons anymore.