Astrape is here! As well as adding in the new facility and a bit of new early-game content, this update brings a much better balanced and more flexible familarity system with a soft cap instead of the previous hard cap, groups which share familiarity across smiliar actions and time dilation which allows actions with familiarity above the soft cap to be completed faster in real time while taking the same amount of game time (and using the same amount of resources).

There are also new features like a basic world map to help you keep track of where you are, a "Reset consumption priority on loop" toggle in the options so you don't have to set them every loop if you don't want to and you can now set consumption priorities on items before you pick them up. I've also made a number of QoL improvements such as highlighting logs which you've not seen on previous loops, showing your current location on the resources panel and your rover resources always being visible (once it's repaired). And, finally, there have been some technical improvements under the hood to improve performance, better protect saves when things do go wrong and reduce the size of save files. You can check out the full change log over on the Discord Server.

Early on in the development of this version, Guri volunteered to help out with some of the more technical aspects, and I definitely couldn't have got as much done on this version without him. And of course, a big hand to all my beta testers who, as always, did a great job of finding bugs.

What's next? Well, back when I was first starting work on this version, my Ko-Fi donations hit the goal of paying for the game to be added to Steam (a lot faster than I'd expected them to). So, while I'm sure there will be a minor update or two over the next couple of weeks to properly round off this version, after that I'll be fully focusing on getting the game ready to go on Steam. That means lots of UI/UX, QoL and polish - making an actual main menu, proper save/load screens... Plus, of course, sorting out all of the assets which are needed for the Steam page itself. I'll talk more about this in my dev log on the Discord, as a lot of things relating to this won't be decided until I get further through the process.

So, for now, I hope you all enjoy exploring Astrape!