What has changed, newest first. The game is in active development and this page is the honest record of it.
A pass over the whole campaign: briefings tightened, radio beats retimed so a well-flown mission hears less of the script, and the pay ramp rebalanced against the new wallet.
New hazards out on the surface, and a terrain and lighting pass that changes how the shelf reads at dawn and dusk.
The campaign is no longer the end of the game. Finish the sixteenth mission and a job board opens, generating contracts in batches of three — mine backlogs, supply runs, crew rotations, medevacs, surveys flown low and slow, and Cassidy wanting a rematch.
Contracts carry the same constraint tags the campaign does: deadline, fragile, race, survey and night rate. The tagged ones pay more for the same distance, which is the whole trade.
The workshop and the casino are now places you walk into rather than menus you open. Shut the ship down on the paint, step outside in a suit, and go in.
Being outside is not free: storms and cold drain the suit, and the hardened suit upgrade exists because of it.
Upgrade points are gone. Everything now runs on credits: mission pay, ore sales, fuel, hull repairs, the workshop and the tables all draw on the same balance.
The campaign pays about three-fifths of a full fit-out, so the last third of the ship is contract money. Which ship you want is now a real question.
Missions are flown once each, in order. You can refly a finished one for the scenery, and it pays nothing — a mission cannot be brute-forced past by flying it badly sixteen times.
The world generator was rebuilt: terrain, craters, erosion, classification and the siting of every mine. The chart shows the whole shelf.
You can also get out of the spacecraft now and walk around on the rock.
The station, the mines and the ship are modelled rather than assembled from primitives. There is a casino two hours out on the shelf, with blackjack and roulette that are actually played.
Sixteen authored missions replace the old dispatch queue, written as legs and data. Autosave, dust, procedural terrain subdivision, HUD markers and a new sky.
Section numbers in the source comments (§14, §73, …) refer to the design log that the game is built to. Most of these releases exist because the obvious alternative turned out to be subtly wrong, and the log says which.