Welcome to Prerelease Update 4! My focus for this update has been improving build variety by buffing some previously underwhelming augments, along with some UI/QOL improvements

Balance

• Reworked Megashot! Megashot now causes your projectiles to increase in size as a function of distance traveled, rather than making them a fixed size bigger. Aim them far and they'll get REALLY big...
  
• Energy regeneration is now based on a fixed duration to go from empty to full, rather than a fixed rate. This means increasing the size of your energy bank with Generators won't cause it to take longer to recharge
  
• Reworked Frost Orbit! Frost Orbit now causes all enemies to become FROZEN for a short duration when you land on a planet. Frozen enemies can't use any abilities or move, and refund some time on the Contagion Timer when killed
  
• The first encounter will always be a shop and will always come after the 2nd combat encounter
  
• Made more interesting planet layouts appear earlier in the run
  
• Nerfed Hypershot values across the board
  

Bugfixes

• Fixed crash that could sometimes occur when player died
  
• Fixed bug that would cause some map icons to render incorrectly
  

Other

• Number of waves should be more consistent across runs
  
• Combat encounters now have labels to say how many waves are left
  
• Tweaked Augment/Loadout UI. New colors to indicate quality, better icons to distinguish augment types, and added icons to augment slots to better show which types of augments go where
  
• Update Ship Select screen to use new iconography
  

The game feels like it's in a pretty good spot. I think there's still some work to be done to make the rate at which the player is able to buy augments/upgrade a bit more predictable. This is mainly around tweaking map generation and enemy distributions.

As always, let me know what you think in the forums or on our Discord! T-minus 2.5 weeks til release!