Hello and welcome back!

This month i focussed on crafting and early game progression, and did some quality of life improvements. I aimed to flesh out the crafting content by adding recipes for more types of gear, and providing more opportunities for the player to loot materials. 

For example, players can now butcher space crabs for their shells, and either use the shells to build improvised armor or pad their existing armor. These suits are clunky, and less useful than an expensive suit from the supply ship, but they can be acquired rather easily, thus being an entry-level option.

Besides content, all menus and mechanics related to crafting received some love, and should be much smoother to use.

Release Schedule and Roadmap

The next development goal is to get rid of the supply ship. This means to transition the gear progression to finding / fixing / crafting equipment, supported by what has already happened with this version's changes.

The player stat progression will tie to an achievement-like system where generally doing a lot of a certain thing improves the player character, in addition to some secret lore-related unlocks.

In tandem with this, the game world generation pool will be expanded, adding more ship shapes and environments, as well as enemies and items.

Ideally, i would like to deliver content in larger packages, not tiny bites, so my ideal release schedule is one release every three months, at the current rate of progress. The current release is a bit of an exception, since the crafting changes were easy to wrap up, and provide a lot of value in my eyes.

Major Changes

Enemy loot

Most enemies now carry either damaged gear the player is able to fix, or can be looted for crafting materials.

Wrecks

Befitting the name of junk ring, there are now a lot of destroyed ships for the player to explore, which yield materials and damaged gear, but are also much less dangerous than the mission ships.

Crafting recipes

The player is not able to craft a lot of base to mid-tier equipment and items, and can fix and modify most equipment in the game

Menu Quality of life

Ironed out a lot of issues with the input scheme and improved menu navigation

Help functionality

Keybindings for all menus can be checked at any time via '?', and the extended game manual is also always available via 'M'