Hey Folks!

Ostranauts v0.14.2.5 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix to our recently released "Across the System" update, adding improved autopilot, ship logs, flashing screen accessibility options, and more.

Saves from v0.14.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

• Options menu now has ability to adjust/disable sparks, flickering lights, and spinning parallax backgrounds.
  
• Autopilot shouldn't cause reactor explosions/flame-outs as often anymore with certain reactor designs.
  
• Autopilot will now show an alert objective on-screen when it disengages.
  
• Ship logs have been overhauled to show more useful info.
  
• PowerViz now shows animated lines where power is flowing, instead of yellow sprites in each tile.
  
• New paperdoll sprites for laser torch, welder, screwdriver, and hacksaw.
  
• Undocking from a ship no longer triggers the proximity alarm for that ship.
  
• The docking ring of the other ship is visible for longer after undocking now.
  
• The REDACTED #1 and REDACTED #2 plots are now possible to complete if both have been started simultaneously.
  
• Quests to retrieve special parts from LA aerostat now have better payouts and more reasonable requirements.

Some players have requested relief for the excessive flashing of damaged lights, sparks, and the dizzying parallax background on spinning ships. So we added new preferences in the Options menu for controlling these effects.

Autopilot got a bit more love this update, too. We fixed a few more situations where the autopilot would incorrectly balance FLOW/CYCLE, which should hopefully reduce the cases where it flames-out (or worse, explodes). Furthermore, when autopilot *does* disengage, we've added an objective alert, similar to proximity alarms, to let the user know.

While doing that, we also decided it was finally time to start logging these events on the ship's NAV. So the NAV logs got an overhaul that will now track significant ship events. You can view these logs on the NAV's "Ship Logs" button.

PowerViz also got a bit of attention, and we finally switched it over to use the same pulsing line animation that alarm signal connections use.

Undocking will no longer immediately create proximity alarms and show "NO DOCKING CLEARANCE." Instead, it will now show the receding other ship's docking ring for a little while. We felt this was probably nicer, especially for new users who might think they did something wrong right after undocking.

Finally, several quests have had fixes and balancing done.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,
Daniel Fedor
Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Spacers,

We'd like to introduce the first of many devlogs from the Ostranauts team! There's been several major quality of life updates that have recently been implemented and this video will outline what's been done. You can watch the video here or on Youtube:

In the video, Dan explains several hardening phases the team is going through; bugfixes and quality of life updates to address a lot of the community feedback before moving on to the next major content update. We hope to do many more of these devlogs in the future to help show off all the work the team is putting into the game. What kind of topics would you like to see in future devlogs?


The team has been working on a beginners guide for Ostranauts on Steam. It takes you through about the first 30 minutes of gameplay as is a great place to start if you're new to the game!

As a reminder, you can subscribe to receive these updates via email by subscribing to the Kitfox Games newsletter[www.kitfoxgames.com]. You can also join the Blue Bottle Games Discord[discord.gg] or the Kitfox Games Discord[discord.gg] to chat with fellow Spacers about Ostranauts!

-Alexandra from Kitfox Games