You can find these patch notes on the launcher screen, but I thought I’d paste ’em here for easy access. We’re aware there may be issues with a Steam update crashing the Mac build at the moment! It’s an issue with Steam– disable the Steam overlay to fix it in the meantime. Also hot-fixing an issue that causes stutter for people on lower-end computers and making the unpacker safer to use. Patch really soon (like today, not a month from now).

Changelog for v. Furious Koala  26/01/2014

Hey there Stargazers and Sports Racers, it’s been quite some time since the last patch, and we have some very large changes dropping this release.

Code Changes:

•  Absolutely massive changes to disk serialization (sorry reversers), which will allow us to never need to wipe players or ships again, and hopefully never need to wipe worlds again.
• Related, we now have a proper versioning system for save files.
• Added difficulty levels and permadeath characters to the game.
• Packed assets into databases (speeds up startup significantly), and included asset packing and unpacking utilities with the distribution.
• This should also allow for easier distribution of mods, and easier construction and management of slimmed down distributions for dedicated servers (official server paks coming soon.)
• Fix some graphical glitches with the wire nodes.
• Fixed some pretty nasty deadlocking bugs with networking.
• Fixed some very strange memory leak bugs stemming from a gcc lambda capture bug.
• Fixed various crash bugs related to a number of different issues (more specifics listed in “Info About the Upcoming Patch“– thanks for the bug reports, keep em coming)
• Speed up improvements with falling sand and other projectiles.
• More efficient databases storage layout.
• Documentation for lua functions have been written, and we’re going to release them soonish.
• Removed NaN floats from the code for performance reasons (reenabled -ffinite-math-only), we had been using them to signal that the float is disabled or in an invalid state, but we have a system for that now.
• Some internal changes that make maintaining code much happier for us, including better enum to string handling and much faster compiles.
• Other minor things, too numerous to list here (see “Info About the Upcoming Patch“).

Fun Changes:

• It’s no longer the holiday, so we’ve removed the holiday stuff for now, we’ll put them back when we have a better way of enabling it for holiday time.
• PVP is now forced enabled within Sector X.  If you’re in a party there’s no team damage though.
• All player drops are persistent now.  So if you accidentally throw your diamond drill down a mineshaft, you don’t have to suicide trying to get it back before it disappears.
• New Monster attacks (gravity slam! gust attacks! other stuff!)
• Fixed Legendary Weapons damage (adjusted up to be more… well… Legendary.)
• We’ve put in new Techs (such as a Glitch Mech).
• New biome type enabled.  Savannah.
• Boss Lore!
• No more eating bandages and stims, they have their own thing now.
• Better, more featureful .abc file support, and we have Wanderlust music in the game now.  (Thanks Leth and D2!)
• Made NPC chatter more configurable and slightly more varied.
• Added new objects (such as lava biome treasure chests).
• Added new items (like nightsticks and bonesaws).
• Sword swooshes are only active for 0.6 seconds instead of 0.9 seconds.
• Making cooldown times actually matter without slowing down combat.  Also fine tuned their hitboxes.
• Viking helmet?  Viking helmet.
• Watch out for landmines.
• Various changes to treasure drop pools (like Avian Guards actually dropping their guns…)
• Minor tweaks to existing armors to make them look better.
• Medieval Furnace now actually acts like a Furnace. (Rejoice).
• Graphical upgrades to some existing plants, and new plants.
• Lots more secret stuff! :OOO

We look forward to hearing what you think about the patch.  It was a very big one this time around.