2025-07-17
A development update before I head off on a trip to Scotland, where I'll be mostly offline for three weeks. There's been a lot of progress: updates to the meta-game, new encounters, publishing ship designs on the Steam Workshop, and more.
While doing a single assignment (repeatedly) was already becoming quite fun, I needed a better way to tie multiple assignments together.
One major change is that you now earn Galactic Guilders (GG) as a reward for completing bounty hunts. This was sorely missing. After all, what’s a bounty hunt without a proper bounty?
You now have a treasury of GGs, and every completed bounty hunt adds more Guilders to your stash.
You can now spend Galactic Guilders in the Armory. One of the things you can buy is starting module sets. You choose a starting module set whenever you accept a new assignment. These determine which module blueprints you begin with, along with your starting ship design.
This also means that module blueprint unlocks no longer carry over to new assignments. Each assignment now feels distinct, and in-mission progress is decoupled from meta-game progression.
To keep things balanced, module blueprints now drop more frequently from enemy ships and as mission rewards, giving you plenty to experiment with during assignments.
Another thing you can purchase in the Armory using your Galactic Guilders is Perks. Perks are modifiers that change gameplay during your assignment. When starting a new bounty assignment, you can choose up to three perks.
There are already some interesting perks, such as one that disables inertial damping, a universal guidance system that makes all your weapons guided (with slower firing as a trade-off), and an "Insanity" perk that increases enemy spawn rate to 1000%—just for chaos and fun.
The reputation system has been overhauled. You can now earn up to three reputation points per assignment:
Gaining reputation lets you access more challenging assignments.
All modules are now classified by rarity:
This system makes it easier to understand a module’s strength at a glance and makes discovering new modules more interesting.
Enemy ships can now drop module blueprint chips, which unlock new modules when collected. These chips also follow the rarity system, with more dangerous enemies having a higher chance of dropping rare or better-quality chips.
Module blueprint chips can also drop in sets, e.g. a whole set of triangular light armor is dropped instead of just one part.
To keep things interesting, each assignment now features its own boss and unique encounters. For example, the Dread Reaver assignment includes a boss equipped with a Doom Beam weapon (and some surprises) you’ll definitely want to avoid.
There’s quite a bit more in the works, but that’s it for now. See you in the next update!
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