Happy Hunting, eXoSpace's First Large Update!

2025-12-04

It took much longer than expected, but "Happy Hunting", the first large update for eXoSpace Combat Engineer, is finally done. The good news is that it brings a generous pile of new features, content, and polish.

Happy Hunting brings major improvements to the Bounty Hunt game mode:

• rewarding victories: bring unlocked modules home, a crew perk system, and more
• balancing: difficulty scaling is now more gradual and consistent, and permadeath is optional for all difficulties
• a new mission and boss: with new factions and a new boss, the Cultist offers an entirely new challenge
• several new mechanics: new weapon types, pursuit fleets, power ups, and ranks that let you increase your starting resources
• quality of life improvements: autosaving of designs, importing other designs into your current one (for reusing parts), and more
• new modules: lots of new weapons and other modules to discover and use
• a whole load of bug fixes and small improvements

In this blog post, I will go through the largest changes one by one.

Rewarding Victories

A major goal of this update is to make completing a mission feel much more rewarding. You now take home more after victory, and there is more to do with your bounty.

• Ranking up increases starting resources and unlocks new starting ships.
• Your resources and ship are added to your bounty. Your design is saved and can be reused in the sandbox or subsequent missions if you have the resources and unlocks.
• Take module blueprints home. You can now choose modules you discovered during your run and bring them home. These can be used in your next mission for a small fee.

Bring Your Own Modules

The starting ship you choose comes with a set of modules you begin your mission with:

However, you can now also bring additional module blueprints from earlier missions, for a small fee. This means you never need to go without your favorite module.

Crew

Another new form of progression is the introduction of Crew. When you hear “Crew,” you may picture little aliens running around inside your ship that you need to manage, but in eXoSpace it is really a glorified perk system:

You can spend your bounty on training your crew and permanently improve the functioning of your ship. For example, your armorer can increase armor hit points or specialize in some sort of shields. Every training choice matters.

The crew can be retrained for free, so you can experiment freely, but not during a mission.

Any previously purchased modifiers and starting equipment sets are refunded.

Modifiers (previously Perks)

You can now buy modifiers in the Armory and use up to three of them in your next mission. Modifiers now apply to all ships, not just yours, and can change the game dramatically, introducing all kinds of new and questionable challenges.

Previously purchased perks are refunded, so you can jump right into experimenting with the new modifiers or crew.

Ranking Up

By completing increasingly difficult missions, you now rank up. Ranking up unlocks new missions, grants more starting resources, and unlocks new starting ships.

The rank icon now replaces the otherwise unused bounty hunter icon you could pick when starting the game for the first time.

Better Bosses

All bosses in the game have received a major overhaul, and an entirely new boss system was introduced. You can now even design your own boss by placing a boss core in the sandbox. A boss gets its own boss bar, configurable AI, special boss weapons, and a phase system.

Several mini bosses and a new mission end boss were added as well: the Cultist.

Pursuit

Your target has a new surprise for you. Near the start of the sector, you will find a pursuit HQ. This HQ will periodically launch pursuit fleets that try to intercept you before you reach your target.

Improved Difficulty Scaling

Many encounters and enemy spawns have been tuned to be more consistent and easier at the start of the game. Some additional changes were made to the difficulties as well:

• The chosen difficulty now ramps up as you travel toward your target. The difference between difficulties is smaller at the start but grows gradually.
• Insanity is now a separate difficulty instead of a modifier, available once the mission is completed on hard.
• Permadeath is now a toggle, selectable for each difficulty. Activating permadeath gives 50 percent extra bounty.

AI Remade

The ship AI system has been replaced and now works better and faster. It can be configured directly from the ship editor and also has broadside movement support:

The old and slower scripted AI has been removed.

The autofire AI has also been improved:

• Modules can be set to autofire on projectiles, ships, or both.
• Autofire mode can be toggled on and off.

New Game Mechanics

Several mechanics were tweaked and added:

• Explosions are handled differently. Damage is now dealt from a damage pool from the nearest to the furthest part, meaning armor parts can protect the parts behind them.
• Spin up time for weapons such as beam weapons and miniguns.
• Charging weapons: beams can fire in pulses, cannons can charge up to fire.
• Salvo weapons now charge faster when they have more charges, making it more attractive to fire them when full.
• Power ups are now manually activated. The last picked up power up is stored and can be activated with a key press (T by default). A thruster super boost power up was added.

New Modules

A bunch of new weapons and other modules have been added for you to discover and then use to disassemble your enemies:

Quality of Life Improvements

• A new weapon status display at the cursor shows whether your weapons are ready to fire and if they are within range:

• You can now load designs from the library even when they cannot be built while on a mission, so you can remove that one module you have not unlocked yet.
• A new option for painting the entire ship in one go is now available in the ship editor.
• Improved ship info energy display in the editor. It now shows an easier to read bar indicating energy generation surplus or shortage.

• Designs can now be sorted by cost, name, last change, and faction.
• Ship design files are compressed to about ten percent of their original size and are faster to share on the workshop.
• Designs are now autosaved when discarding, dying in hardcore, and loading a new design.
• Added Delete and Explode buttons in sandbox to clean up unwanted ships.
• Added Import button in the ship editor that lets you import another design for copying or comparison.
• Your bounty hunter name and ship trail color can now be edited by clicking on the player name in the bounty hunt screen.
• Added overview of selected part types and counts in the ship editor. Click a part type to select all parts of that type.

Performance Fixes

The higher difficulty levels were having performance issues caused by many ships spawning on top of each other, which is not great for the physics engine or for your framerate. Several fixes were made to lessen this problem significantly:

• Fixed many issues with too many ships spawning on insane mode. In many cases, ships are brought in as reinforcements instead.
• Ships on the same side are now pushed away from each other to prevent stacking, which was a major source of physics performance issues.

And More

• The in game feedback button has been removed. It has been extremely useful (thank you for all the feedback) but for now I receive more than enough feedback through Discord. Got ideas or feedback? Join our Discord!
• Loads of smaller fixes and improvements.

A Word of Thanks

Last but not least, a huge shout out of thanks to all the playtesters and fleet designers. This update would not have been possible without you.