I've really blown up the achievements this update! That and much more in this update. I'm really excited to hear what you think!

In Game Achievements & Unlock System

For a while now people have noted a lack of "meta progression" in the game and while there is some it's rather opaque and very light. I wanted to solve a couple of issues with this update:

• Give players mid range goals while playing each run (besides just completing it)
• Make the progression leveling system more transparent

So I built the achievement system directly into the game and gave it an interface where players can clearly see what they can unlock and how far along they are in the progression leveling. I'm also hoping dying in the game feels a little less bad because you have a much better chance of unlocking a new upgrade or item for your next run!

New Mechanic: Virus

I've added a sneaky new mechanic to incentivize high risk/high reward gameplay. The basic idea is if you contract this virus you'll die in any one hit but you can remove it by powering up 3 shield structures. There's a handful of ways to get this right now but I don't want to spoil them for you and some ways to flip it into a positive!

Core Content

Added a few dozen upgrades and weapons in this update, one for nearly every single achievement in the game. There's quite a few other updates:

• About a dozen more ship theme unlockables (exp points needed to level up has been squished a bit to compensate)
• Doubled the number of ship trails unlockables
• Rescue mission has been reworked entirely
• New type of rescue mission will be more regularly found in star systems.
• Gear containers now have a new tier but I'm not gonna say how you get them...
• Asteroids have a very small chance of breaking off a very valuable (and fast) chunk
• Completely reworked a few "Starter" (Yellow) upgrades. I felt these were a little bland for my initial idea of them being the key upgrade you "build around". Most of the boring ones have been reworked into something that feels a bit more active or has impact on your decisions throughout the game.

Note about new upgrades: I really tried to focus upgrades around building synergies between things that are typically not all that good. Frost effects are pretty ineffective alone but nice to have attached to other things so introduced upgrades that play off of this aspect.  

Quality of Life Updates

• 
  If upgrades have an effect after a certain number of actions they will show the current count on the icon.

Balance

•  Swtcbade's starting weapon was strong all the way until the end game. I don't think that's very fun design so I've replaced it with something considerably weaker though still arguably more powerful than a lot of other ship's starting weapons.
• Tac T Ion's ability is really easy to snowball and at full power you could get an insane amount of drones out with the cooldown reduction. Picking up salvage will reduce the cooldown by half as much and the base cooldown of the ability has been increased 1 second.

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue where the UI would disappear in the tutorial
• Fixed some issues with save files saving items that shouldn't be
• Fixed some issues with sprite display in text
• Fixed a crash with circular ruin puzzle

What's next?

I'm winding down what I'll call "active development" on the game. With this update I feel pretty good about the amount of content and replayability the game has. I have a new project that I'm spinning up and you may hear about that soon. I'll also be listening and always trying to fix any bugs that come up. I can't say for certain if I'll do any more sizable updates but I may return every once in a while to introduce some new elements to shake things up or maybe I'll decide to do some DLC content down the road.

I'm also happy to announce I've signed an agreement to port the games to Switch, Playstation and Xbox! I'm really excited I'll get to see the game on consoles, it's like a dream come true for me!