Lodestar update for 16 March 2023

Explore and discover the secrets of the Lost Planet of Z with new puzzles, resources, monsters, and upgrades for you to discover. We're continuing to fulfill our early access promise of 6 planets with the addition of our 5th planet. We've take you to exploration, wonder, despair, and danger. The Lost Planet of Z will now take you to terror. Part of that is the unknown so we will avoid spoiling too much. Good luck out there captain!

Sight Beyond Sight

Unveil the hidden secrets and areas utilizing a new ability that will change the way your play and have you reevaluate the journey so far.

Major Features:

• Planet 5 Launched (boss, monster, resources, upgrades)
• New S.B.S. "Truesight" ability
• Dozens of new Puzzles, some involving S.B.S., have been added to planets 1-5 with additional upgrades to unlock.
• French and Turkish have been added to the games. Thanks to @Sokoul
• The building system has been reworked to make it more intuitive and easier to align
• New cosmetics are now available to build on the ship. Many are interactable to configure or use. Find one in each planet!

Minor Feature:

• Upgrade UI has been significantly improved
• HUD UI has been made more slick and sci-fi
• Improved progression tracking on analytics
• Monsters on planet 4 now have an appropriate cooldown on their fireballs and navigate better
• New beacon puzzle type has been added
• New invisible wall puzzle type has been added.
• Dozens of new Salli lines and additional lore have been added to the game
• Lava will no longer be as dark, so you will have more opportunity to survive inside it
• Salli will now warn that you don't have the correct equipment to solve certain puzzles.
• Lore rewritten to add a new demolitions expert, Zehra.
• Planet 3 and 4 have significantly improved visuals.
• Water is now more watery.
• Environment Shield Visuals improved along with new upgrades.
• Improved Subtitle UI significantly.
• Performance generally improved in many problematic areas of the game

Hotfixes:

Patch 5.0.3

• Fixed an issue where titanium recipes would not appear in foundries/refineries.
• Fixed an issue where one mining upgrade required Tungsten
• Fixed an issue where environment shield would constantly active when not on cooldown even when you were not in lava until the game was restarted.

Bugfixes:

• Placing buildings should no longer hitch as badly on low-end CPUs
• Planet 4 should have increased performance.
• It should be much more difficult to accidentally double-trigger a sound crystal
• Sound puzzles should no longer repeat the same crystal
• Upgrades and Unlocks in multiplayer should no longer disappear on load
• Firespitter sounds will not have attenuation
• Rock-timed closing puzzles have been adjusted to avoid getting stuck as often
• Building should materialize and de-materialize more reliably and correctly in multiplayer
• Many strange collision bugs have been fixed. Please keep reporting any you run into via the in-game report feature
• Let's get growing quest should now properly complete at each step.
• Shiny pop VFX will now play even on last mine.
• Planet 1 Boss Lore area should no longer create weird texture stretching on the player
• Fixing many areas where localization was not working
• Darkened caves will no longer permanently darken a player's game until reloading.
• Crabs no longer float in the air and have collision on death
• SMG no longer has an infinite firing rate when rapidly clicking
• Fixed a bug that would cause Salli to say some of her lines twice
• Picking up the mushroom unlock will correctly progress the mission immediately now instead of waiting for a player to harvest one mushroom
• Unlocking plants via the cheat menu should no longer cause the player to be unable to complete the relevant missions
• Fixed a bug where some planets would occasionally be at half their intended FPS.
• Introduction can now be localized. Additionally filled in a lot of missing localization.

What's next?

We have two more big goals we want to hit before leaving early access with patch 7.0.0. First, we need to create the 6th "planet" which will primarily just be an epic boss fight and potentially a handful of extremely challenging puzzles that may require you to have nearly every unlock to complete. We don't want to focus as much on a large level here so we can put all our effort into final boss fight.

The second goal is to fill the world with more lore and story. This will include a lot more Salli lines and lore files. Additionally you'll see more "flavor" added to the planets that will allow players to infer details about the story that are not explicitly stated. We'd love to hear your thoughts on these additions and theories about the truth of the Lodestar story.

Finally we want to polish all existing systems to reflect the higher quality we are now able to deliver on after multiple years of development. Some of been a little left behind and we want to raise the minimum bar across the board before the full release. We think that the final boss will be released in a couple months with full launch following shortly after we have resolved all bugs. Thanks again for coming on this early access journey with us and as always please let us know your thoughts via reviews and discord!