Ostranauts news & patch notes

• ROSTER UI now includes a toggle for the auto helmet removal behavior.
• ROSTER UI now includes an indicator for the current hour.
• Player captain and crew will now stand still while AUTOTASK is off during free time.
• Tracking alarm will no longer sound when controlling crew on a station.

Hey Folks!

Update v0.15.1.16 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a feature update to our "Across the System" milestone, which fixes strange AI behaviors, erroneous docking fees, and other problems.

Saves from v0.15.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

Note: 📢 indicates changes inspired by community feedback!

• AIs will no longer be paralyzed with a desire to insult sworn enemies that are across the Solar System.

• Docking a ship with a crew pilot in a different region than the player's captain will no longer incur fees in the wrong station.

• All recurring docking fees on a ship now stop repeating once that ship undocks from anywhere.

• Selecting more than one object (e.g. via dragging a box selection) will no longer deselect current crew and silently select the captain.

• AIs will no longer teleport around in a game of interdimensional musical chairs.

• AIs will no longer interact with any item that has use coordinates in a forbidden zone.

• 📢Dragging/pinning the quick action bar (QAB) will now save that position with the save file.

• Derelicts will no longer chat like humans via COMMS while docking.

• Attempting to dock from too far away will produce a more suitable reply now.

• Warnings about viz block TF nulls and null COs on ship should stop spamming the log now.

• Rotated items should once again have correct lighting/shading directions and colors.

• 📢Bartenders will take a break from counter wiping to attend to needs more often now.

• NAV station should produce fewer null exceptions now when changing the line art for ships.

Another batch of AI and other fixes today!

One particularly subtle bug involved an error in AI range and line of sight checking. A player noticed their crew was standing on an asteroid, doing nothing but complaining of not being able to reach the fixer on K-Leg, halfway across the Solar System.

Looking into the situation more, it turns out that they really wanted to insult their sworn enemy, and were trying to use a special type of move that must be used without walking first. The target had to be within range, and within line of sight to trigger.

Both of those tests passed, technically. Except, the target was on a completely different map, and no longer loaded. So when the crew attempted to start, they immediately failed. And the process repeated.

Today's patch will make that test check for non-loaded targets before anything else, and should avoid this situation in the future. There aren't many interactions that fit that pattern, but there are a few.

Another, trickier to reproduce bug fixed in this patch involved docking fees from distant stations. We've long heard about this one, but have never been able to figure out the cause.

However, a player's save had a few clues which helped us find two causes that we could fix. Namely, if the player had their captain leave the ship, and then controlled crew to fly that ship to another region, docking/undocking in that new region could end up mixing the stations and their fees. We were able to shore-up the code around these fees to be more careful of captain/crew distinctions.

And for players with these recurring fees, any undocking event on a ship will now clear all recurring fees for that ship. So the first undock in any affected saves should stop more fees from piling-up.

A possibly related bug involved selecting more than one item at a time, typically with a mouse drag selection box. Doing this while crew was selected would deselect that crew and silently select the captain, which could also cause weirdness (e.g. strange docking fee locations, or controlling captain when they are not on-screen). This, too, is fixed now.

Recently, players have reported seeing AIs teleport around from chair-to-chair. And this one turns out to be an emergent AI behavior. AIs in Ostranauts will remember which actions they took corresponded to which emotional changes, to help them decide what to do in the future. Usually, this is limited to what we call "opener" moves, which are the beginning moves in a chain.

In this case, they were remembering one of the middle moves in the sit action. The one that teleports them from their using animation to their sitting one. They saw that this move corresponded to a mood boost they wanted, and decided to keep using that wherever they could. The fix for this was pretty easy, as we just fixed the erroneous "opener" flags on those moves, making them unavailable to AIs for free use.

Semi-related to this, AIs should now avoid using any item that would end up with them inside a forbidden zone, trapping them.

Some of our players have requested that the quick action bar could remember where they pin it across sessions, so we added this feature. Now, when the QAB is pinned somewhere, saving the game will remember that location, and loading a save will restore it's pinned status and position.

This patch also includes a range of other miscellaneous fixes, ranging from rendering to log spam, and even derelicts talking like humans.

From here until launch, our main goals are to address bugs and quality of life issues in existing features, and finish implementing the content planned for the 1.0 release. If there are major pain points or quality of life suggestions you want to be sure we're aware of, please let us know in the forums, on Discord, or on Reddit.

In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

• Game will no longer pause every time an NPC has trouble sleeping, loses a video game, or finishes studying.
• AIs will now more reliably swap out batteries when the destination charger is full.
• Cleaned up some debugging log spam.

Hey Folks!

Update v0.15.1.14 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a feature update to our "Across the System" milestone, which includes several AI and other quality of life changes.

Saves from v0.15.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

Note: 📢 indicates changes inspired by community feedback!

• 📢AI hauling bulk items into zones will now try to gather other nearby items before making trips back, if applicable.

• 📢AI fulfilling install or repair tasks requiring multiple items will attempt to gather other nearby items first, if applicable.

• AI hauling into zones will no longer stack infinitely near zone edges/wall.

• AI should produce fewer ghost items now when hauling to zones.

• 📢AIs are now able to attempt replacing and recharge dead batteries in tools and EVA suits.

• 📢Roster UI now includes permissions to recharge/replace batteries. (Default ON for new captains, OFF for all others.)

• 📢AI should now take care of their own hygiene, according to their personality traits and available supplies. (wipes/brushes only)

• 📢AI will now try to take their helmets off more often in good atmosphere areas.

• AI pilots have improved collision avoidance now.

• 📢Bartenders will now prioritize replying over wiping the counter.

• 📢AIs will attempt to carry any removed clothes when switching to EVA/suits now.

• AIs should more reliably refresh air in their helmets if they attempt a second time soon after the first.

• AI will no longer consider a broken helmet sufficient in survival situations.

• NPCs should be less likely to drop items due to starting with locked containers.

• Player's captain and crew will not auto-run for transit when seeking air now, only NPCs.

• 📢Micrometeoroids will no longer strike while in torch flight or atmospheres.

• 📢Awkward chit chat social moves are now in a collapsing group in the context menu, to make it less cluttered.

• 📢Tool battery charging stations now have more storage space.

• Ships docked to/towing other ships will no longer accelerate under a phantom force.

• Unconscious/sleeping characters that are extremely comfortable will no longer sleep forever.

• Fast-forward will no longer stop when the controlled character changes helmet with no adverse effects.

• Fast-forward will no longer stop when the player is on a ship without working NAVs and something targets it.

• 📢Maintenance NPCs will now repair faster.

• Exposed some more UI strings in strings.json.

The biggest chunk of this update is a series of improvements to how player, crew, and NPC AIs work.

One of the things players often cite as frustrating in their games is their crew being inefficient. AIs would often run from one ship to another, grabbing one ingredient at a time, per-task. And this could cause a lot of wasted walking time.

This patch aims to help streamline that a bit, by giving the AI some help in recognizing when it can grab other ingredients for the same task nearby. NPCs doing tasks like "repair," which can require a handful of different ingredients, will now grab all or most of those ingredients at the same time, before heading to the task. This goes for general hauling tasks to zones, as well. You can now watch crew hoover-up many items until they're full (or nothing else is nearby) before each trip to the destination haul zone.

Some tasks that have a single input, like "Install," are still tricky for the AI to multitask. They'll often still do these one item at a time. However, by using zones and the Haul command, players can take advantage of the aforementioned Haul optimization to get the items close to the desired work first, and then do installs after. 

Also, a reminder that there is a way to prioritize hauling over installs/repairs, and other fine-grained task control. E.g. if you wanted one crew to be hauling as top priority, feeding items closer to another working on repairs/installs. It's in the Duties UI, which you can get to via the "Switch To Crew Duties" bumper button on Roster UI:

And speaking of the Roster UI, you'll notice a new control in the Roster: Replace Batteries!

Another common player concern was that crew required too much babysitting to take care of themselves. Enabling this option will do a few things to help with battery maintenance.

• Crew will check if a tool on them is out of power, and will switch an empty battery with a good one if they are carrying one

• If crew have an empty battery on them, they will try and give it to a charger if the charger has space. This will prioritise chargers with batteries that are finished charging (and swap the empty with the full battery)

• Crew will try to fetch a new battery if a tool on the crew is empty, as long as they can carry it. (Crew will keep old battery in inventory.)

Hopefully, this cuts down on one of the major pain points with automating crew. Charges have also been changed to accommodate more than one battery each, to make this change more useful.

AIs will also now care for their own hygiene, using wipes and tooth brushes whenever they think they are getting dirty (determined by their own Slovenly/Tidy traits). And when in areas with good atmo, they will prefer to take their helmets off more often.

And while we were working on that, we improved the way AIs remove helmets and clothing so that they are less likely to drop it on the floor.

Another player frustration involved micrometeoroids. Specifically, they would happen too often during torch travel, which could really disrupt the already arduous task of interplanetary trips. We've changed the frequency to avoid such trips, as well as spawning them in atmospheres where it makes no sense.

We still get a lot of feedback that the social moves feel too numerous and meaningless, so this patch also includes an early change to address that. Now, when viewing social moves on a target, you'll no longer see the complete list of unskilled social moves. By default, it'll be hidden under an "Awkward Chit Chat" button, to better indicate that these are moves you wouldn't necessarily want to use, but are there when you lack the skill or mood to say anything else. That will leave a much shorter list, prioritizing the important "Advanced" social moves you have to choose from.

Plus several other fixes and improvements to player-reported issues.

From here until launch, our main goals are to address bugs and quality of life issues in existing features, and finish implementing the content planned for the 1.0 release. If there are major pain points or quality of life suggestions you want to be sure we're aware of, please let us know in the forums, on Discord, or on Reddit.

In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Folks!

Update v0.15.1.6 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our "Across the System" milestone, which includes several fixes to saving and loading, docking, and some initial AI improvements.

Saves from v0.15.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

Note: 📢 indicates changes inspired by community feedback!

• The game should no longer hang or CTD on quit after a save.

• Autosaves should once again honor the 10-saves-per-captain limit, instead of 10-per-manual-save.

• Saving should generally be more reliable now.

• Steam Cloud settings on both user level and game level are honored, instead of just the game.

• The load and save UIs will now alert the user when Steam Cloud is nearly full.

• The load UI will now alert the player if a given Cloud save file is still downloading.

• Loading a cloud save that is not finished downloading will now exit gracefully.

• Ships docked to multiple other ships and stations should now behave more reliably when docking/undocking.

• Docking large ships and multi-ships to stations should no longer collide with the station/asteroid.

• Cycling to crew while on multi-docked ships should no longer fail to load docked ships.

• Secondary airlocks that were previously docked will once again be uninstallable.

• Sending an SOS for a hauler should now correctly dispatch the hauler again.

• Ships spawning near Venus will no longer source pilots from OKLG.

• It should once again be possible to maneuver while docked to a wreck.

• Undocking should have better orientation and fewer collisions now.

• Docking UI throttle slider once again works, and shares settings with the NAV UI.

• 📢Throttle slider now uses an exponential scale instead of linear, so there is more low-end granularity.

• Undocking from derelicts with pirates aboard should be less likely to drift away unnecessarily.

• NPCs with more than 1 scar should no longer immediately pass-out from pain when arriving on the map, and then die with helmets on.

• NPCs with EVA suits should not run out of batteries and O2 as often now.

• 📢NPCs fleeing rooms without air will now attempt to use transit before the player's ship.

• Characters should be better able to pathfind to tasks in room corners now.

• It is now possible to resolve emotional clobber events.

• 📢Buffing weapons will now exclusively prefer using scrap cloth, instead of also allowing clothes.

• 📢Players can now mark clothes as scrap to also make those usable in weapon buffing.

• Freshening up with water at a sink will now complete reliably.

• Aging, scarring, arthritis, and smoking should no longer leave occasional permanent stat effects.

• Fusion canisters breaking down into scrap will no longer transfer their fuel to the scrap.

• Hitting Esc when a new game is loading will no longer result in an uncloseable black screen.

• 📢Furnishing kiosks will now restock with more lights, alarms, doors, and vents.

• Power overlay speed is now in real time, instead of fast-forwarded.

• Contaminant scrubber installation footprint has been fixed.

• 📢Ship editor now starts with Uniques panel closed.

• Several null/exception fixes.

This update contains a few major groups of fixes that have been in development and testing a while, so thanks for your patience!

The first was a batch of fixes for saving and cloud sync. A number of issues arose as a result of autosave threading and cloud sync problems, and could cascade into cases of lost or missing saves, and even crashes to desktop.

The fixes and improvements include better monitoring and warnings for cloud storage limits, honoring player cloud save settings in both global Steam and Ostranauts independently, better handling and tracking of threads when saving, and generally smoother save game experiences now.

We also fixed a bug that would reset the autosave limit every time the user manually saved. So it's worth checking your save game list to see if you have more there than you'd expect!

Another group of changes involves the way we dock ships. As we graduated from limited one-to-one docking into many-to-many, we unsurprisingly ran into a number of teething issues.

The last couple weeks have given us a chance to track down and fix most of the issues reported by players in this new system, and it should hopefully mean more stable and consistent behavior when docking, tethering, and towing now.

This patch also includes the first batch of AI QoL changes we are planning.

Specifically, this batch will finally fix the single largest cause of NPC knockouts and deaths on stations: concurrent flare-ups of chronic scar pains. Basically, any NPC with 2 or more chronic scar conditions were usually having both flare-up at the same time the moment they returned to the station (e.g. after hours of being away). These combined flare-ups would cause enough pain to send them into shock, knocking them out on the spot.

And from there, if they were in a pressure suit or EVA with dead batteries, it was only a short while before they suffocated. This patch rebalances some of these effects to be more reasonable and combination-friendly.

Speaking of EVAs, this patch also addresses NPCs in EVA suits running out of battery and O2, by helping them recharge periodically (when they travel between maps). And speaking of *that*, NPCs will now prefer running to transit in oxygen emergencies, instead of onto the player's ship.

There was also a bug which caused AIs to think they couldn't reach corner tiles from a diagonal when the cardinal directions were blocked, which should be fixed now. AIs should now walk to the closest corner instead of all the way outside the room/ship to the other side (or refusing altogether).

We also changed how weapon repairs work, making AI exclusively prefer using scraps, so it will avoid trashing your favorite pair of pants. If you still wish to use clothing as a rag, you can now mark clothes as scrap manually.

And thanks to an eagle-eyed player spotting a duration issue, emotional clobber events can now be resolved if they occur more than 6 minutes apart. (Sorry about that!)

We have a couple other AI changes in the works for next patch, as well, so there's more NPC/crew help coming.

The rest of the changes are more miscellaneous in nature, but should also hopefully mean smoother sailing.

From here until launch, our main goals are to address bugs and quality of life issues in existing features, and finish implementing the content planned for the 1.0 release. If there are major pain points or quality of life suggestions you want to be sure we're aware of, please let us know in the forums, on Discord, or on Reddit.

In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Folks!

Dan Fedor here. And I'm excited to announce that after years of Early Access, Ostranauts 1.0 is finally releasing August 3rd 2026. Check out the teaser trailer:

What's New for 1.0?

• New endgame content

• Bounty system

• Tutorial improvements

• Workshop support

• New station designs

• ...and lots more!

Since the final "Fire in the Hold" milestone earlier this year, our main focus has been fixing bugs, and improving stability, performance, and quality of life.

That said, there are a few things we wanted to add to make the 1.0 launch special.

Longtime spacers will be able to see the conclusion of the Ceres Affair plot. Why is there a war around Ceres? What is a VHS? Who is Ben Choong? And why does everyone (and thing) have an opinion on him? Players will finally have answers to these burning questions. And depending on their choices, determine which changes ripple across the System.

You'll also be able make it big by catching criminals (some dead, some alive), with the new bounty system. Players have long requested the ability to play as a bounty hunter, and it seems like the perfect fit for such a capitalistic dystopia. So in 1.0, players can finally say "howdy" to being a big shot.

We've also been working on improving the main tutorial. After hearing a number of new players were still struggling, we conducted some more user testing, watched hours of footage of new players learning the game, and fixed, adjusted, and/or expanded areas where they struggled most.

Another area we've been attending to is filling-in the rest of the placeholder station maps to have more variety. Players of "Fire in the Hold" will have already seen the new Atlantis map and stations around Ceres. And in 1.0, you can expect to find similarly new station maps in places like Mars's Tharsis Landing and Labyrinth, Deimos's Voltaire facility, the faltering Jade Rabbit mining outpost on Luna, and more.

Also, players can finally download and manage mods using Steam's built-in Workshop! The already active modding community gets a boost in exposure now that players can more easily try out mods. You can even browse and manage workshop subscriptions right inside the game! As of this post, there are 42 listed mods, and growing. We've setup an official workshop and modding guide to help users get started.

We'll have more info as we get closer to the launch, but for now, time to get back to work! Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Folks!

Update v0.15.1.2 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a feature update to our "Across the System" milestone, which includes a mix of performance improvements, Venus fixes, and other bug fixes.

Saves from v0.15.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

Note: 📢 indicates changes inspired by community feedback!

• Save files with an overly large OKLG_SEC.json (>15MB) should decrease in size significantly after a save/load with this patch.

• OKLG_SEC should no longer spawn a limbless pirate in the prison cell.

• Save sizes should generally be a bit smaller overall, as the game progresses.

• Ores (and other items) should once again be placeable on cargo webs.

• Restoring and extinguishing fires should now increase faction standings, instead of decreasing them.

• It should no longer be possible to ask every item in the universe about Benjamin Choong.

• Jettisoning a corpse will no longer delete whatever object the player is dragging now.

• 📢Accessing inventory of nearby objects is now near-instant.

• 📢A new unarmed Babak variant will now spawn in the boneyard and ship brokers at OKLG, BCRS, and BCER.

• Babak Refit and Royal Flush ships should no longer spawn with non-uninstallable racks.

• NPCs waking up from hibernation and entering the map will no longer slam performance with log spam.

• NewCal construction Robots should no longer have human faces.

• NewCal construction Robots should no longer spawn without law enforcement training and get attacked by other robots.

• 📢LEOs and robots chasing the player across map levels should now stop if they lose sight after transit.

• Venusian aerostats should once again have gravity.

• The PDA Notes app should no longer crash if it has too many notes.

• Every NPC in the universe will no longer contribute their notes to the player's PDA Notes app.

• 📢The default star system and starting station for new games is now defined by TXTDefaultStarSystem in loot.json.

• Performance should be improved when the game is attempting to load a special event and cannot.

• White wall lights and custom white wall lights should have correct relative brightnesses now.

• The game's log should now have fewer spam entries about missing Rex Korin.

• Loading screen will now show more information during LOADING SHIPS phase.

• Save game will now record which version it was started in vs. last saved in independently.

• Games saved in 0.15.1.1 that caused little present icons to appear everywhere should no longer see them.

• There should generally be fewer error messages when loading saves now.

• Message log should have better subject-verb-pronoun agreement in some more edge cases.

One of the more insidious bugs fixed in this patch involves OKLG_SEC. A prisoner there would spawn without any limbs or containers, and this caused items spawned on them (which would sometimes accumulate due to collisions with the station) to bloat save files. Some OKLG_SEC.json files were 200MB!

This save fixes the prisoner, as well as the redundant way it stored items that caused bloat. Saving and then loading any affected games should see significant drops in save file size. (Plus, more generally, save files should be slightly smaller now.)

We also made several changes which reduced the amount of log spam the game generated, which should also help improve performance and reduce crashing. In one case, a log file crashed the game when it hit 2 million repeated entries due to a "thawing" NPC that walked onto the map.

And speaking of spam, the player's PDA Notes app will no longer be the playground of bored NPCs across the universe.

Some players noted that restoring items and extinguishing fires on stations caused faction drops, instead of increases. This turned out to be a sign error in the data, (and not disgruntled maintenance union workers, as some surmised) and has been fixed.

We noticed some players wishing that inventory was a bit snappier, especially when sorting through many containers in their possession. So we've tweaked opening inventories to be near-instantaneous when the item is in range.

Venus also had some updates and improvements.

First of all, we discovered that several robots spawned in the construction zone there had messed-up careers, portraits, and other stats. This led to issues like human faces in the MTT, robots with citizenship or illegal status, some robots without LEO training being ganked by the other robots. It was pretty chaotic!

Those issues have been fixed, plus the AI tweaked so that LEOs and robots chasing the player across maps will no longer bee-line to the player after emerging from transit. Now, if they don't have line of sight, they'll switch to searching.

Lastly, the Venus aerostats had their gravity restored, plus a little sunlight tweaking for better visuals.

A new variant of the Babak ship will now spawn in some places, jettisoning corpses should no longer delete dragged items too, ores and other items should once again fit in cargo nets. Plus, modders can now specify which star system and starting station New Game defaults to via the TXTDefaultStarSystem in loot.json.

It's a pretty juicy patch!

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Folks!

Update v0.15.1.0 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a feature update to our "Across the System" milestone, which adds support for Steam Workshop, plus fixes for the gig system, station maps, and other issues.

Saves from v0.15.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

Note: 📢 indicates changes inspired by community feedback!

• 📢Steam Workshop support!

• Gigs should work better now, and be completed more reliably. Particularly when multiple are active. (Note: Currently active gigs may not be fixed.)

• Gig money transfers should now appear correctly in the message log.

• There are now "short hop" gigs available around Ceres and Europa.

• 📢NAV station will now allow engaging torch autopilot while docked, so players can carry shuttlecraft on long trips.

• Broken ship/zip block data within save files will now be skipped on loading, so the save file can still be loaded without them.

• Ships docked indirectly to your ship will no longer collide with stations/ships when docked.

• Flotilla station should stop letting characters spawn outside the hull now.

• Port Mojave's HVAC system has been upgraded with better cooling.

• The LEO spawned on VORB HAB should now be the correct jurisdiction.

• LEOs should no longer repeatedly arrest players outside their jurisdictions, taking their money, but never processing them.

• 📢Characters walking outside on ground stations now use the walking animation and speed, instead of floating.

• Wall light in the white setting now uses the correct sprite.

• The debug Respawn Ship button has been improved to avoid spawning duplicate characters and retain ship metadata better.

• Fixed an index out of range error that could happen when drawing ship lines in NAV.

By far the biggest change in this update is the addition of Steam Workshop support.

With the addition of Workshop support, it is now possible to browse and subscribe to mods on Steam, and get updates to them automatically. And with the new in-game MODS UI, you can do all this, plus control which mods are active.

And the new MODS UI still lets you control local mods as you did before, in case the mod you want is not yet on Workshop.

We're very excited to release this feature, as a number of players have been asking for an easier way to use mods. And we can't wait to see what other creations people make and share with it!

Apart from Workshop, we've also been working on a number of other issues.

One of the more significant updates in this patch is to the gig system. Previously, there were problems with gigs finishing if too many gigs were taken of a certain type. And in this patch, they've been expanded to better handle multiple open gigs.

This means it should be more reliable to take and finish gigs now. Though note that already-taken gigs may still have the old issues. If you are unable to complete an existing gig in your save, you may have to abandon it.

And speaking of gigs, Ceres stations now have their own short-range gigs so players stuck in port have a way to earn cash to get free again.

The NAV autopilot will now allow you to plot and engage trips with a shuttle attached. Since we added multi-docking, players have been taking advantage of larger ships with a smaller shuttle docked, and this was a limitation to them getting around.

Note that with this safety feature off, your ship could be damaged if you don't have a towing brace installed and secured before travel!

We found and fixed an issue discovered with loading saves, where a block of the zip file was unreadable, and it would cancel loading the rest of the save. If the game encounters this issue, it should now attempt to continue loading the rest of the save.

We reworked how the ship respawn code works in the debug UI, which lacked some handling of ship metadata. And this allowed us to reuse it to backwards-patch old saves with new station maps if we need to.

As a test of this, today's patch will attempt to respawn Flotilla and Port Mojave, fixing NPC spawn locations in the former, and runaway heat in the latter. Note that this will skip respawning the station if you load a save while on said station, but it should re-attempt it in a future load process.

Also, we finally found one of the main causes of officers arresting players repeatedly on VORB! It turns out that the officer spawned on VORB Hab was from OKLG instead of Venus. And the way we setup their arrest routines, the final step blocked attempts if they were out of their jurisdiction, but the opening step didn't care.

So they would start to arrest, take your money, say you're free to go, then immediately arrest you again.

Now, the arrest process has the same regional filter at both the beginning and end, so they should stop attempting arrests unless they are in the right region to finish.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Folks!

Update v0.15.0.37 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our "Fire in the Hold" update, which adds Kozakh's design contest 

ship, the Babak, plus several improvements to tutorials, docking, airlocks, and more.

Saves from v0.15.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

• Our ship design contest winner, Kozakh, now has their ship featured in game!

• Encounter UI should no longer get stuck on-screen when an NPC replies to the player while choosing an option.

• Repair sparks will no longer start fires in the first 3 hours of the game.

• Hallway conduit tutorial now triggers when approaching from the west, as well.

• Ostraka step for leaving the dorm is now clearer about being able to click walk through doors without manually opening them.

• Cargo kiosk now has a ship selector drop-down, for when multiple ships are docked.

• Airlocks can no longer be uninstalled/dismantled while in use, and they should be placeable on the ground normally again when loose.

• Encumbrance status updates are suppressed now while sitting/on NAV.

• Asteroids near Ceres that NPCs use will now use less save file space/memory when NPC finishes.

• Fixed a bug that would cause the entire asteroid field near Ceres to drift away from Ceres over years.

• Docking request process now consistent between single and multiple dock vessels.

• Undocking request dialogue now includes a BACK button in case something stalls it, so player cannot get stuck.

• Transit back from OKLG residences should be working now.

• The game will no longer crash if the player moors to an already-docked ship that lost significant mass since it was spawned.

• Nulls will no longer occur when using transit interrupts loading multiple docked ships in the background.

• The game will no longer hang on loading a save if the player debug-jumped across regions earlier.

• The Monocarrier ship had its spawn points moved and docking ports renamed to avoid docking errors.

• Several other null fixes.

The big news this patch is our latest ship: the Babak Multipurpose Corvette, by Kozakh!

As the winner of our ship design contest, this vessel will now appear as part of the pirate fleet players encounter around Ceres. And watch yourself out there, it's a heavy-hitter!

Another important change in this patch is to the Encounter UI. There was a situation that could happen where an NPC replies to the player as the player is choosing a reply in the Encounter UI, erasing all the options. And because there were no options to choose, the UI wouldn't ever close.

This patch fixes that bug, so options don't get deleted. Plus it changes the UI to always close in cases where no options appear (in case there are others we didn't catch).

A few more changes to the tutorial were also added. Most importantly, we've zeroed-out the chance of setting fires via repair sparks during the first 3 hours of the game. Despite the already very low chances, there was still a chance, and players who got unlucky were rightly frustrated. So now, there's a grace period from the beginning of the game for a few hours.

We also noticed some players walking a different route after leaving the starting dorm, so we added a trigger for the hallway conduit tutorial from other directions. Plus, a few new players didn't realize they could click to walk through doors automatically, so we adjusted the tutorial wording when leaving the dorm to help.

We also noticed in some player save files that asteroids near Ceres were accumulating, taking up precious file space and memory. We found one of the causes of this: NPCs mooring to asteroids would cause those asteroids to procedurally generate, and then remain "inflated" once the NPC leaves.

We adjusted the code here to "deflate" the asteroid again, so it wouldn't take up as much space in memory. Plus, while we were there, we also fixed some issues that could cause the asteroids near Ceres to drift off from Ceres over time.

A whole bunch of docking and mooring bugs were also fixed here. Thanks to several bug reports and player saves, we were able to find even more edge cases where ships (un)docking caused errors in the game.

One of the more interesting bugs involved a player who, after docking to a derelict, uninstalled the docking ring they were attached to. Which, on its own wouldn't be necessarily much of a problem. But they also took it back to their own ship, so when it came time to undock, the derelict went to look for the docking ring with the associated ship on it, and couldn't find it, and got sad.

Or another one, where a bad spawn point on the Monocarrier ship resulted in NPCs spawning at 0,0, which happened to be just outside the primary airlock, and causing the ship to think nothing could fit there to dock. Fun!

All these and more were fixed. And a handful of other issues such as OKLG transit, cargo kiosks when players had more than one ship, or even the encumbrance message spam we got while sitting at NAV and using thrusters.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Folks!

Update v0.15.0.36 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our "Fire in the Hold" update, which makes several improvements to the tutorial and general quality of life, plus other fixes.

Saves from v0.15.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

• Career history UI now emphasizes life event and end career options, to help new players understand the intended main choices.

• Plots no longer begin during the first 3h of the game, to avoid confusing players in the tutorial.

• Clicking the map in NAV, while in RCS mode, no longer causes the map to drag/pan suddenly or miss the clicked target.

• Clicking on the Ostraka in NAV no longer selects things on the map underneath.

• Firing guns will no longer always miss a person/object while it is highlighted.

• Doing repair/restore actions now has a 10x lower chance of igniting fires.

• Character mass stats are now correctly tracked when carried item stacks are manipulated. (And old saves should self-repair mass errors.)

• Ostraka window now responds correctly to scrolling, resizing, moving, and clicks if the user had returned to main menu one or more times.

• Ostraka prev/next buttons now work to switch chapters, as well as pages.

• Ostraka buttons now have tooltips.

• Several Ostraka illustrations have been updated to be more helpful.

• Tutorial steps that target kiosks, lockers, and lamps now show those items in the objectives, to make finding them easier.

• Corpses on chairs in corners can now be interacted with again.

• Roster tutorial now continues to work after the player returns to the main menu.

• Docking UI now prints warning text on screen when station keeping is actively maneuvering.

• Hovering mouse over an inventory item will now highlight the grid window it belongs to, and dim the rest.

• Using QAB to reopen an already open window now makes that window reanimate into place, for better feedback.

• The MegaTooltip (MTT) now has better use of space for item info, and puts some commonly-needed stats above the 'Show More' button.

• Active objectives that have been dismissed can now be restored to the HUD via the PDA list.

• Objectives listed in the PDA now have more room for text.

• Damage overlay once again shows shadows for easier item identification.

• Following the tutorial to undock will now slow the game speed back to 1x if it was fast-forwarding.

• QAB and inventory window pin/unpin button tooltips are now more descriptive.

• Encounter UI no longer has the Force Exit button (was confusing new players, and rarely used now).

• Docking with the tutorial derelict no longer alerts the player they may be committing a crime.

• PDA's Cart Compartment is now named PDA Carts for clarity.

• Message log at bottom of HUD now scrolls more smoothly.

• Refuel kiosk UI now pauses the game when it opens.

• Collecting pressure suit and helmet before the tutorial reaches that point no longer stalls the tutorial.

• Clicking Unpin on QAB and inventory windows no longer leaves tooltip stuck open.

• Fixed a text alignment issue in the refuel kiosk title.

• Several kiosks' short names have been expanded for clarity.

As you can see, a big portion of this update addresses the new game experience. We recently watched some new players navigate a new game and tutorial to watch where trouble spots appear, and it was very imformative!

One of the bigger issues turned out to only happen if the user returned to the main menu, and then played again. The Ostraka UI (and Roster objective) would largely stop working in this case, and fixing this will be a huge help. The Ostraka also needed some better pictures to replace old or placeholder images on certain pages.

We also updated that UI with more tooltips, and to make the forward/back arrows work across chapters, not just pages. And we were able to fix the issues where clicking the Ostraka would click through to the NAV map, confusing things.

Speaking of NAV, we also tweaked the way selection works on the map. Previously, clicking the map would sometimes cause it to move and snap back suddenly, causing the click to miss what the user was aiming for. This was because click-dragging the map in RCS mode allowed the player to temporarily pan the map, and it would return to the map's focus after.

However, most users simply got frustrated with this, as they could never click anything unless paused. And if they wanted to move the map around, they would just use map panning mode. So now, when the user clicks, the map stays put, and the clicked object gets selected more reliably.

We also noticed that many new users were unsure what to click in character creation, and would (logically) decide to focus on saving money and working on skills/traits. This bypassed the intended main way to advance a character, which was to "Seek Adventure," gaining skills, traits, contacts, and money all for the low cost of 1 year.

To better help steer new users here, we adjusted the button positions and sizes to emphasize primary and secondary actions.

The MTT had a bit of restructuring to make better use of space, and to place certain bits of info above "Show More," which was a complaint several users had when we changed the layout there.

The objectives list in the PDA now has more room for text, and new buttons to allow the user to un-dismiss objectives back into the HUD, if they wish. And the inventory UI now better highlights which grid goes to the item under the cursor, which helps in cases where the user has many of the same container type open.

Apart from tutorial and quality of life changes, a few important bugs were fixed.

First, all ranged weapons were missing targets very often. And it turns out this was due to the way we highlight objects. Recently, we changed selected objects to highlight better, but doing this made them invisible to ranged attacks. So with the help of some player feedback, we were able to find and fix this.

Second, some hardcore players were able to pinpoint a mass accounting error that only occurred when the characters used interactions to pickup or drop items (such as in hauling or install orders). This would add the mass of stacks they picked up, but only subtract the mass of the top item in the stack when dropped.

Some of the save files affected by this had characters with over 1000 kg of mass! Though in micro-g, it would often not appear much until the player visited a planet or accelerated.

This accounting error involved some changes to deep stacking code, but seems to be more reliable now. Plus, the game will attempt to repair any characters afflicted by this bug the next time you reload.

Finally, corpses sat in chairs in room corners were unreachable due to a range issue on the drag or strip actions, since they were over 1 tile from any approachable edge. This was fixed, and now both players and maintenance staff can deal with corpses that are in corner chairs.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Folks!

Update v0.15.0.32 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our "Fire in the Hold" update, which addresses NPC and pilot behaviors, docking issues, and emphysema, among other things.

Saves from v0.15.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

• Non-crew NPCs are no longer allowed to target items and people on the player's ships for recreation.

• NPCs now occasionally restore their physiological needs when they travel off-map.

• Characters blacking out from lack of sleep can no longer use chairs.

• Moving between port and residential maps with a ship docked will no longer cause that ship to be missing.

• Saving the game while police are performing a shakedown will no longer cause the police to get stuck undocking and redocking in a loop.

• Chronic Emphysema is no longer caused by smoke inhalation.

• Save files that had emphysema effects on characters will have this condition removed.

• AI pilots around Ceres should get stuck calculating targets less often now.

• Clicking ship names in the social PDA app should no longer cause null errors or strange NAV UIs to appear.

• Using rescue/debug docking to cross regions in space should no longer leave recurring docking fees.

• Leggings that lack pockets no longer allow accessing their inventory.

• Several typo fixes in game data.

Perhaps one of the more welcome changes in this patch is to NPC behavior. For a while now, we've been tracking down the various ways NPCs end up on the player ship.

In this patch, we've thwarted a case where NPCs with both airlock and disembarking permissions ended up wandering onto the player ship to talk and use the amenities. Typically, this was LEO and maintenance staff, though there could be other NPCs with such permissions set.

As of this patch, they can no longer target player ship items for recreation unless they are part of the crew.

Another issue players report is excessive sitting, and we are gradually chipping away at the behaviors that lead to this. Today's patch includes an additional blocker from sitting when the NPC is blacking out from sleep deprivation.

And while we're on that topic, NPCs now have a new trick: restoring their physiological needs when they're not on-screen! Previously, they could only do this when they were active on-screen, and would be stat-frozen when off-screen.

Now, we give them a bit of relief every time they travel around off-screen, to simulate their self-care. This should result in fewer NPCs walking around like zombies from hunger, thirst, sleep deprivation, and similar issues.

This patch also includes a batch of fixes for nulls, missing ships, and strange NAV UIs due to errors. Thank you to the players who submitted save games and repro steps to help us find and fix them!

Another issue in the game was chronic emphysema. This was meant to be much more rare, from breathing acidic atmosphere around Venus for long periods.

However, with smoke now more common, this disease was running rampant. So we dialed down the effects a bit, and applied a save patcher to remove it from anyone who got it in error.

Police ships had a save error that lost track of their shakedown progress, which could lead to looping undocks. And Ceres naval ships would get stuck in a loop when calculating their target coordinates, causing the area to be littered with stuck ships. Both of these AI bugs should be fixed now.

And while debug docking (using the drop-down in NAV to teleport) isn't technically a supported way to fly around, some players really prefer it. And using it to teleport across the map could cause the game to think you were still docked at the old station, charging more fees each shift. This should be fixed now.

Finally, some typos in leggings and posters were causing weirdness when using those items.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Folks!

Update v0.15.0.30 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our "Fire in the Hold" update, which fixes some reactor temperature issues, suddenly exploding ships, ship weapons, and other bugs.

Saves from v0.15.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

• Ships oriented almost-but-not-exactly 180 degrees away from the nearest celestial object will no longer instantly accelerate out of the universe and explode.

• Reactor laser arrays will no longer produce 100x the heat they were supposed to.

• Reactor laser arrays will now correctly power on/off when the reactor cycles.

• Ship weapon auto-fire should hit more often now when target has a high VCRS.

• Ship weapons destroyed on targets will now stop firing.

• Non-torchship AI pilots around Ceres should get stuck calculating targets less often now.

• Pressing unused buttons on the Weapons MFD will no longer show the COMMS main menu on-screen.

One of the more bizarre (and violent!) bugs we discovered recently involved ships suddenly exploding for no reason. In one player provided save file, setting the game speed to exactly 16x and hitting unpause would cause all ships on-screen to explode at 8:30 and 11 seconds. Reliably.

No ships were nearby to crash into. They were not moving more than a few m/s. Nothing on-board was volatile or in danger of exploding. And playing at any speed other than 16x was fine.

As it turns out, there was a precision error in some math we used to calculate the angle between two vectors. When their slowly-rotating ship was pointed almost (but not exactly!) 180 degrees away from the nearest celestial object, a calculated value we passed to an arccosine function \appeared\ to be -1, but arccosine saw it as < -1. Which is not allowed, and so it shrugged and returned "not a number."

This, in turn, caused the game to instantly accelerate the ship from 0 to infinity, ejecting it from the universe, and tearing apart every atom on the ship from G-forces.

And there you have it, folks. MATH KILLS.

In other hilarious(ly deadly) physics news, our recent fixes to the power system during fast-forward also fixed some reactor modules, so they now turn on and draw power like other appliances.

Unfortunately for any humans aboard, this also means their heating effects finally started working. And the laser arrays, in particular, began heating the reactor room faster than any reasonable number of coolers could counteract.

But only sometimes. As restarting the reactor often caused the lasers (and only lasers) to turn off again, permanently.

This patch adjusts those lasers to be more in-line with other reactor parts, and also to make them more consistently turn on and off with the reactor.

Combat pilots should hopefully appreciate this next fix. Players have long reported that their ship weapons failed to hit targets when the target had appreciable VCRS crossing the weapon's arc of fire.

As it turns out, the targeting code for these weapons had a units conversion error, incorrectly predicting future positions of the projectile and target.

And there you have it, folks. MATH KI- er, doesn't kill?

Also, when a target's weapons are destroyed, they should now honor their destroyed status and stop firing back at you.

Lastly, we fixed some AI pilot logic that was causing non-torch pilots around Ceres to treat every trip as an opportunity to achieve torch speeds with their puny RCS ships, and get stuck in a loop trying to find a destination they could reach with the little RCS fuel they had at those speeds.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Folks!

Update v0.15.0.29 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our "Fire in the Hold" update, which fixes several character status issues, NPC behaviors, and other issues.

Saves from v0.15.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

• Characters with stuck status and movement/work penalties should be back to normal again.

• Stat bars should show correct values when character is in extreme statuses.

• Hunger bar now shows both satiety and nutrition status.

• NPCs and officers should no longer use the player's apartment as a crash-pad when their ships run low on fuel.

• NPCs and officers currently in player's apartment should leave now.

• Laying or removing large swathes of conduit should perform better now.

• Super FFWD now drains and recharges batteries appropriately.

• Using Super Fast Fwd while a pirate is on board will no longer cause the ship to disappear from under the player.

• NPC ships attempting to dock with off-screen stations should no longer rip all limbs off of their crew.

• Eating prepared foods from carts should be more nourishing now.

• Docking with BCRS residences should work properly now.

• BCRS transit should reach all residences now.

• Officers should no longer fine the player for docking to their own ships.

• Officers should now recognize when a docked player has open docking ports available.

• Officers should no longer fine players if the player docks to a station before officer reaches them.

• Steam Cloud saves should now work if user's save directory has been changed.

• Gas puff visual effects and sounds should be visible/audible again.

• Index out of range error fixed when loading some save games.

• A null which prevented (un)docking with OKLG has been fixed.

• A null which prevented loading saves where a ship was docked to a secondary port has been fixed.

• Ceiling lights should now work correctly, and be installable normally.

• Ceiling lights and alternate door types are now available in Ceres furnishing kiosks.

• Opening inventory on items should happen faster now.

• Some new debug overlay features.

• Several improvements to noun/verb agreement in UI and logs.

One of the bigger changes in this build fixes a subtle, but insidious issue. Players and NPCs alike would sometimes gain double status effects, like simultaneously being sleep-deprived and well-rested. The stat bar would show well-rested, but the penalties for lack of sleep would still be there.

And in some cases, this could lead to surprise death, or movement/work penalties that never went away.

Thanks to players providing a save where we could watch this situation happen in real time, we were able to fix the cause! All characters should once again have a single status effect for each category, and loading old saves will attempt to repair stuck statuses and penalties.

Another major fix (or group of fixes) in this build involved NPC behaviors, and in particular, officers. We've long had reports of NPCs collecting on player residences, seemingly out of nowhere. And again, thanks to a player save right before it happens, we were able to find out why, and fix it. (AI pilot logic was using the nearest station dock when running low on fuel, and that often was the player's residence.)

NPCs will no longer come to the player residences, and those who are there now should leave shortly after loading your save.

Also, we were able to fix a number of officer behaviors in choosing when to target the player for questioning and fines.

Our unpowered conduit overlay feature was causing some slowdowns when placing large runs of conduit, and this should be fixed now.

Super Fast Forward (SFFWD) also now correctly charges and discharges batteries for the amount of time passed. And using SFFWD shouldn't rip the player's ship out from under them when a pirate is aboard.

Speaking of ripping, some poor NPCs were getting everything (including their limbs) ripped from them when an off-screen ship attempted to dock, resulting in limbless people roaming around, spilling their thoughts on the ground. This bug has mercifully been fixed (though any affected NPCs in saves may still be broken).

Players who tried relocating their save directory were having trouble with Steam Cloud seeing it, and thanks to a bug report, we were able to address this. Plus a number of other fixes for user reported issues.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Folks!

Update v0.15.0.24 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our "Fire in the Hold" update, which improves the tutorial and user experience, plus fixes several reported issues in the game.

Saves from v0.15.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

• Splitting a stack onto an item already on the floor should no longer delete the floor item.

• Rolling over objectives should once again highlight items on the map.

• Dismissing the last objective on-screen will no longer permanently shut all lights on the map off.

• It should no longer be possible to map select and cancel actions to the same input.

• Critical main menu and input binding reset buttons will now always respond to all inputs, regardless of mappings.

• Escaping out of the keybinding UI while setting a hotkey will no longer lock out all input.

• PowerViz mode now also shows dead conduit paths.

• New game tutorial polish and extra steps.

• Purchased residences at BCER should be available for docking now.

• Games saved in planetary atmospheres should once again have gases outside.

• NPCs stuck in a loop approaching, docking, and undocking from player should cut it out now.

• New debug console command: info

• Non-1080p resolutions should no longer have a mouse click dead zone near top left corner.

• Inventory tooltips should no longer be stuck on screen when closing inventory UI.

• It should no longer be possible to select and/or delete hidden objects (tiles, rooms) in ship editor.

• Eyedropper tool in ship editor should no longer duplicate hidden tile objects each click.

• Port authority clerk should no longer hover frustratingly just out of conversation range.

• Several null and other exception fixes.

A large chunk of this update adds polish and some rework to the starting tutorial, to fix issues and add some extra steps where needed.

It seems the item highlighting for objectives broke somewhere along the way to 0.15, so rolling over objectives should once again work. This includes some items referred to later in the tutorial derelict, but which did not get pointed out when rolled over.

The NAV portion of the tutorial also had some editing and extra images added, to make it clearer, and to add more useful reference info.

The PowerViz was also upgraded to aid in the tutorial steps requiring placing conduits. Now, the PowerViz overlay will show unpowered conduits in gray, along with the powered ones in yellow, making gaps easier to see.

A number of users were getting trapped in the main menu due to either impossible hotkey bindings (e.g. canceling and selecting on the same key), or due to the key binding UI trapping all input even after exiting. These were fixed, and as an added emergency measure, certain buttons on the main menu always register to a click, regardless of key bindings.

Some players noticed their rotor ships stopped working, and it appears we sucked all the air out of every planet in a recent patch. This was due to an error parsing large numbers (greater than 1e38), resulting in zero gas pressure for most large-volume spaces like planetary atmospheres. These planets should once again have atmo.

Finally, a range of other user-reported issues have been fixed. From nulls and index errors, all the way up to disappearing items and inaccessible residences.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

• Fires should no longer ignite on characters, carried items, or inside containers.
• Fires should no longer ignite on the tutorial derelict.
• Characters should no longer experience emotional clobber events in rapid succession.

Hey Folks!

Update v0.15.0.19 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our "Fire in the Hold" update, which addresses some repeated random values, disappearing items, and other issues.

Saves from v0.15.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

• Game universe will no longer have only ugly people. (Or in alternate universes, all beautiful.)

• Loose and carried items will no longer disappear suddenly for no reason, leaving only trash.

• LA Aerostat should no longer rotate and duplicate itself periodically.

• Player ship should no longer disappear when an NPC ship undocks from it.

• Several null reference fixes in the NAV station UI and tutorial.

The first issue turns out to be a pretty major bug, though insidiously tricky to notice. Kudos to our eagle-eyes players on Discord for noticing something odd about their game: everyone they met was marked as ugly! Or not. In some games, everyone was beautiful!

It turns out there was a bug in our random loot generator that was caching values. Any time there was a < 100% chance of something, the loot generator would work normally until that chance passed, then it would always pass. This meant that in cases where a random "this or that" list occurred, the first successful outcome would always be the outcome later, until the game shut down and restarted.

The implications here are pretty wide. Some save games are filled with ugly people. Some all beautiful. In some worlds, all people are smokers, or shy, or born leaders. What's more, this applies to all other random loot tables, as well. Items, ship types, random events... it's going to be interesting detangling the affected game world issues to know what is a bug caused by this vs. other issues!

A second, somewhat less insidious, bug involved disappearing items. Ostranauts has a random event generator that fires occasionally, and one of the outcomes is "random part failure."

It's designed to search your ship for a part near failing, and nudge it over the edge to spice things up.

Unfortunately, the filter it used was too wide, and it could include loose items, items carried (even worn!) by the player, and items that have no defined damaged state. It's that last case that helped us find this bug. Reactor canisters would just "poof" suddenly, leaving only trash behind. No sign of a cause.

We've patched this system to limit it to installed parts on the ship (barring reactor canisters), so it should only be things like lights, thrusters, walls, and other items. And even then, only those in dire need of repair.

Another bug involved a bad rotation calculation that resulted in the LA Aerostat duplicating its map, like a giant clone stamp tool. Another bug which undocked NPCs incorrectly from the player, taking their ship with them.

And a handful of other, less interesting null fixes.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

• Docking to a space station with another of your ships already docked there should no longer suffocate them instantly.
• NAV station orbits should no longer be invisible.
• Ceres plot should no longer end abruptly due to a missing encounter.
• Using the skills/traits part of character creation extensively, and then undoing it, should no longer cause a null.
• Several null reference fixes in the NAV and Docking/COMMS UIs.
• The hallway conduit tutorial should no longer break if you leave the map and return mid-tutorial.
• Particles spawned in gas exchanges should no longer cause null exceptions.

Hey Folks!

Just a quick hotfix (0.15.0.17) here for an issue some players ran into in the new build.

It appears that a null reference could happen if the player uses transit to leave and come back just before the undock step of the tutorial. And this patch fixes that.

We've got some more fixes on the way, but we wanted this one out fast since it can break the new game experience for some.

Best,

Dan

Hey Folks! Dan Fedor here, happy to announce that the Fire in the Hold Update is out NOW! Watch the "out now" trailer and see some of the new features in action:

There’s something for everyone in this update! Seasoned spacers can experience ship combat by ferrying or flying to Ceres to participate in the war, or jumping in directly by opting-into the Arena Mode. Those who want a more peaceful experience can still find it around OKLG, or they can stay in the safer edges of the Ceres asteroid belt and mine for riches.

You will need to start a new save file (v0.15.0.0 and later) to access the new features. Beta saves should transfer over to the main branch normally. Players wishing to continue their 0.14.x.x saves can do so by opting into the Steam legacy_14 branch.

This update includes a large number of changes and new features, too long to list here completely. But highlights include:

• Ship-to-ship Combat: Ship weapons and sensors can now be obtained near Ceres, where armed navies and pirates are fighting for control of the asteroids there.

• Asteroid Mining: Fly out to the asteroid belt near Ceres and mine for precious resources. Use the ores you find there to improve standings with arms dealers, or sell them for cash. Or set up asteroid claim beacons for improved standings.

• Fire and Smoke: Damage in ship combat? Want to light a trash can on fire? Indulge your inner pyromaniac.

• Performance: Several improvements to framerate, hitching, and memory use.

• New Items: Ship weapons and rifles, ammo, mining items, explosives, new hulls, decor

• Steamdeck and Gamepad Support: Play Ostranauts on your SteamDeck, or with a gamepad from the comfort of your couch!

• Steam Cloud Save Support: Saves are now synced wherever you login with Steam.

• Multiple Docking Ports: Always wanted a ship's boat? Wished you could dock your torch ship in orbit and take an aeroship down to Venus? Now you can! Ships and stations now support more than one docking port.

• Modular NAV Stations: Wish your NAV was more combat focused? Or want different station layouts for your pilot vs. gunner? Now you can customize your NAV with modules you find!

• New Plot Content: A strange artifact found on a derelict leads to some unexpected conspiracies.

• 3 New Major Stations: Port Mojave, Zhonghuamen Terminal, and Atlantis Landing Zone now have custom maps, each with their own transit systems.

• New Skill Effects: Piloting, Gunnery, Zero G, and Sensor skills now impart bonuses when flying a ship.

• New "Pristine" Items: Items that have never been Damaged before have a "Pristine" status, making them more valuable and resilient.

• Random Event Upgrades: Tired of your character being emotionally clobbered repeatedly by the memory of the dumbest thing they said? Now there is a wider variety, some with choices that can change your character traits!

Combat tutorial and beginner guides

Jump into ship-to-ship combat with a brand new video tutorial by Joshu! He shows how to engage in combat, navigating the console and how to use the different weapons and senors. Watch here:

There’s also a text version of this guide available here. If you’re completely new to the game, we also have a Starter Guide on Steam.

Ship Building Contest

In honor of today’s update, we’re challenging you to build us your finest, combat ready ship. Use the ship editor, test out the build in Arena Mode and we might just pick your ship to be a permanent addition to the game! Full rules and details are here.

Full Patch Notes

• Players can now engage in ship-to-ship combat.

• A proxy war is ongoing around Ceres, with two factions vying for control over the asteroids, and pirates in between.

• Attacking naval ships and beacons around Ceres will affect faction standings with Ceres factions.

• Ships now require passive and/or active sensors to see the area around them.

• Ship weapons have arcs of fire, and will auto-fire if target is locked and in range.

• Ship weapons can also manual fire outside of their auto-target range, using hotkeys.

• Weapons control module in NAV can change which firing group each weapon belongs to.

• Missile launchers can be installed to launch homing missiles at distant targets.

• Point defense cannons can be installed to shoot incoming missiles, nearby ships, and sometimes even micrometeoroids.

• Railguns and coilguns can be installed to punch holes in targets at medium range.

• Decoy launchers can be installed to divert incoming missiles.

• 3 decoy missile types: ranging in effectiveness, cost, and acceleration rates.

• Militarized hulls and armor cladding can be installed to protect ship systems and occupants.

• Players can now demand surrender or be offered surrender from other ships, and negotiate for money, boarding, or arrests with rival factions.

• Players can now offer surrender or agree to a demand for surrender, and the NPC can negotiate for payment to leave the player alone.

• Destroying the reactor on a ship may cause a massive debris explosion now.

• Some ship subsystems can now explode when hit (e.g. missiles, mining explosives)

• Missiles have a chance of exploding into debris when intercepted.

• Added a combat rifle, carbine, and shotgun to the game.

• Fire can ignite from sparks, explosions, and weapons fire.

• Fire can burn through equipment and injure nearby humans.

• Fire will foul atmosphere with smoke and other contaminants.

• Fire can be extinguished with fire extinguishers or old-school stomping.

• Contaminant scrubber now works on smoke and CO.

• Skill in piloting now uses less RCS and torch fuel.

• Skill in gunnery allows longer range auto-targeting of railguns.

• Crew with SkillOpsZeroG now have a 75% chance of avoiding knockdown in collisions and missile hits.

• NPCs with piloting skill will attempt to dodge railgun shots.

• NPCs with gunnery skill will shoot at player from further away.

• NPCs now have a chance of being skilled pilots and/or gunners.

• Navy NPCs will now attempt to board player ship if they dock in combat.

• NPC ships will stop maneuvering if player docks to them and nobody is piloting at NAV.

• New PDA order type: Reload Ship Weapons (uses Haul priority)

• Automatic crew cycling (e.g. on KO) should be less frustrating now, and more intuitive.

• Walking character footsteps now sound less harsh.

• NPC maintenance techs now put out fires, among their other tasks.

• Super FFWD now always gives full sleep benefits when characters are sleeping, regardless of shift.

• Character sleep deficit should now be capped at a more reasonable value, and easier to restore.

• Emotional clobber events now have more variety and interactivity, and some can lead to trait changes.

• Game engine has been upgraded from Unity 5.6 to Unity 6.

• Players should see fewer lag spikes and hitches now.

• Players should see better overall framerate now.

• Thread usage on CPUs should be spread out a bit more now.

• Several memory leaks fixed.

• Ship damage from maneuvering while docked is limited to fewer items per frame to prevent lag.

• Painting large batches of install and other work orders is now more performant.

• Using the highlight interactables toggle should now run faster.

• NAV station performance should now be better.

• Ships now have primary and auxiliary airlocks, and can support multi-docking.

• Many stations now have multiple docking ports, allowing players to dock more than one ship.

• Ships can now have more than one ship docked to them at a time. (E.g. landing craft, shuttles, etc.)

• Ships can now moor/tether (i.e. park nearby) to other ships, if there are no available open docking ports.

• Several new naval and pirate ship designs are now in-game.

• New smoke alarm item.

• New walls, floors, planters, and other construction/decor pieces.

• Pirate and LEO should no longer target player ship through planets or from extreme ranges, or when player is on a station.

• Having lots of cargo webbing should no longer cause a performance hit.

• Loose items floating without floor beneath them will now gradually strip away during spacecraft maneuvers.

• Asteroids now appear around Ceres, which can be mined for ores.

• OKLG has a new asteroid cluster for players to try their hand at mining.

• Ores can be sold for money, or for faction "scrip" and improved faction relations with Ceres factions.

• Ceres factions sell weapons and military equipment at their respective stations, and available tiers require better faction standings.

• New tools for mining include mining drills, and both small and large explosive charges.

• Players can purchase beacons from Ceres factions and deploy them near asteroids to gain faction standings.

• NAV stations now have modular layouts, which can be customized by players.

• NAV station modules can be purchased at vendors, or salvaged from other ships.

• It is now possible to cycle between multiple crew who are on NAV stations, without the UI closing.

• New NAV modules for tethering, analyzing asteroids, weapons control, sensors, and target info.

• NPCs can now reply in some new ways via COMMS.

• Rotate ship hotkey now works outside of debug mode, so players can change triangle orientation in NAV.

• NAV orbit lines no longer accumulate over time after rotational maneuvers.

• Player ship silhouette works again in NAV when zoomed-in.

• Ostranauts is now updated to work better with SteamDeck and gamepad!

• New default control scheme added for SteamDeck.

• SteamDeck and gamepad input now supports direct character movement.

• Several UI changes made to improve legibility on SteamDeck.

• Tooltips and input glyphs now correctly identify SteamDeck, gamepad, or mouse and keyboard.

• New faction standings app in PDA.

• Improvements to lighting, progress bars, and TV text.

• Several typo, grammar, and other copyediting fixes.

• Cycling between crew will now prefer crew on same ship vs. other ships, and awake crew vs. unconscious.

• Players can now switch the physiological stat bars to emotional ones to see their character's mood status.

• Damaged items now have a custom icon next to their name near the cursor.

• Steam Cloud saves are now supported.

• Save on Close now added to options menu.

• BCRS, BCER, JATL, and JPTN now have full station maps with transit levels.

• BCER and BCRS stations now offer visas and residence units for sale.

• There should be fewer limbless NPC spawns now, which were causing social moves littering the floor.

• Several nullref and index out-of-range errors fixed.

• The PASS ferry service now has long range routes to other planets.

• Loose 1x4 racks can now be placed like regular items.

• It should now be possible to install/uninstall Caylon walls like other walls.

• Wearing a space suit while standing over a superheated corpse should no longer intsta-kill you.

• Space stations should now restore breathable atmosphere when player is away.

• Planetary background scenes should no longer wrap at the edges.

• New Plot Content: A strange artifact found on a derelict will take the player across the System in search of answers.

• What is 79AU?

• NPCs are now more selective whom they talk to, and for how long.

• Items are now "pristine" if they've never been Damaged, which boosts their value and resistance to wear & tear over time.

• Ammo and other items in stacks within containers are now exhausted one stack at a time, instead of a little from each.

• Basic controls page updated to new controls and UI.

• In-game manual now includes full-screen zoom option for each page.

• Characters renamed during creation no longer have their faction changes ignored.

• New fireproof blast doors are now available.

• Left clicking a tile should no longer select the topmost item twice before drilling down.

Thank You!

Thank you to everyone who participated in the beta! As always, your feedback and testing helps make each release better.

And with that, dive in and have fun! Meet fellow spacers and chat about this update on the Blue Bottle Games Discord. If you have any bugs to report, feel free to do so on Discord or here on the Steam forums.

We hope you enjoy Fire in the Hold, and we’re looking forward to hearing the stories you create!

- Dan, the BBG team, and Kitfox

Some of the new features in Fire in the Hold:

Hey Folks!

We've updated the Arena Mode, and it is now available on Steam opt-in beta branch arena_mode. Update 0.14.99.31 adds some new features, fixes, and balance changes to the Arena Mode, where players are currently trying out the new ship combat in a special zone.

• Missiles now have a chance of exploding into debris when intercepted.

• PDC and railgun hits no longer knockdown crew.

• Crew with SkillOpsZeroG now have a 75% chance of avoiding knockdown in collisions and missile hits.

• NAV sensor VIZ circle changed to be more intuitive.

• Ammo and other items in stacks within containers are now exhausted one stack at a time, instead of a little from each.

• Added a combat rifle, carbine, and shotgun to the game.

• Small mining charges adjusted to be useful as breaching charges.

• Arena Mode scorecard now has a handy screenshot button, for sharing with others.

• NAV orbit lines no longer accumulate over time after rotational maneuvers.

• Player ship silhouette works again in NAV when zoomed-in.

• Weapon arcs flicker less now.

• Save on Close now added to options menu.

Several of the changes here are directly as a result of our first wave of feedback from players.

Players were asking if missiles could do splash damage when they were shot down, so we added a chance of that happening. Other players were frustrated with constant knockdowns from direct fire hits, especially the rapid-fire PDCs from enemies. So we nixed knockdowns from those, and also added the benefit of avoiding other knockdowns in collisions and missile hits if players had SkillOpsZeroG.

A number of players were confused by the sensor VIZ circle on enemy ships having a notch in it. That was there to help identify the circle's center, but many interpreted it as a blind spot. So we changed the VIZ to be a solid circle with rotating stalk, which should look more intuitively like a radar sweep.

Players using PDCs and railguns were also frustrated by the way those weapons drained one ammo from each stack, making it hard to reload. So we've adjusted the item removal code to focus on one stack at a time now.

This patch also adds the new combat firearms for personnel, plus adjusts the small mining charge to be usable as a breaching charge. Docking and boarding aren't very common in Arena Mode, but expect this to be more relevant when Fire in the Hold comes out!

For now, though, we put them in there in case you want to play with them.

The Arena Mode score card now has a screenshot button to help players share their builds and results. Plus some fixes to NAV rendering issues, and other UI issues.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know via the forums or our Discord (also linked on the game's main menu), if you're trying out the update. We're interested in seeing which ship designs can be the most effective!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey folks,

2026 is going to be a big year for Ostranauts! We talked a little bit about the future of the game in the 2025 Year in Review post, but we wanted to discuss our plans in more detail here.

Some notable things coming in the Fire in the Hold Update:

• New ship weapons, sensors, and hulls

• Fire and smoke

• 3 new stations around Ceres

• New Plot around Ceres

• New small arms: Combat Rifle, HG Rifle, Shotgun

• Asteroid mining around Ceres

• Unity 6 port/Better performance

• Add emotional statbars to main HUD

• Steam Workshop

• Steam Cloud Saves

• SteamDeck improvements

• Captain/Crew skills improve ship weapon ranges and fuel efficiency

• Emotional clobber events have more variety, and more interactive

Notable things coming in 1.0:

• Replace placeholder maps on other stations in the Solar System

• New EVA and Pressure suits

• Improved modding support

• Steam Achievements

• Bug Fixes

• Polish and quality of life changes

We are committing to Steamworks support for 1.0 launch. We want players to be able to take advantage of modding tools to tweak their experience to their liking. With just a text editor and pixel art tool, it should be possible to edit items, characters, plots, maps, recipes, and even the star system itself!

Plus, some clever players are figuring out even more sophisticated mods to such things as crew AI, character creation, and even UI changes.

Post 1.0

We plan to continue supporting Ostranauts after 1.0, with more bug fixes, polish, and potentially even new content. Over the course of development, we've collected a large list of ideas that were beyond the game's original scope, both from players and our own desires.

The success of Ostranauts will have an impact. If Ostranauts suddenly becomes a massive hit, it'll be a pretty strong case for us dedicating more resources towards making it bigger and better. Or if it isn't very popular, we may have to scale back.

Either way, though, we don't see 1.0 as the end of Ostranauts's development. Merely a signal to potential customers that Ostranauts has reached the end of what we promised in our original Roadmap.

Arena Mode Beta live now!

In preparation for Fire in the Hold, we’ve been working on a combat testing build, called Arena Mode, where you can pick out a preset ship and jump right into combat. Or you can edit a preset, or even make your own from scratch!

From there, you'll be attacked by endless waves of increasingly difficult ships. It's up to you and your ship design to last as long as possible.

When you're defeated, you'll receive an after action report, and score, depending on how many waves of enemies you survive, how much damage you caused, and how expensive your ship was. This should be a great way to get some low-risk practice with designing and piloting ships in combat, for those who want to engage with that system in the upcoming milestone.

You can check out Arena Mode by accessing the arena_mode branch, which can be done by following the instructions here.

We’ve also created a text guide which explains how to play Arena Mode and how to engage in ship combat: 

Arena Mode Guide

So strap-in to your flight seats! Power-on your NAV systems! (Maybe pack an extra fire extinguisher!) And go get 'em!

We can't wait to see what you come up with for ship designs, and how far they can get.

Happy new year, everyone!

After restful holidays, the team here at BBG is back at work, getting Ship Combat ready. And I wanted to take a few minutes to look back at what we've been up to, and what's next.

For the first half of 2025, our work primarily focused on hardening the game. Each build, we would reevaluate which issues players were having most, and worked on fixes and features to alleviate them. This could be bug fixes, UI changes, performance optimization, new features, or other quality of life enhancements.

During that time, we gradually ramped-up our focus on new work for our final milestone, Fire in the Hold (v0.15). And as the year came to a close, we were nearly full-time on that milestone, only pausing to fix issues when they particularly disrupted players of the live patch.

Here's what that looked like, as a timeline:

Red lines are major updates, with new features and content. Orange lines are smaller features and significant fixes. And yellow lines are hotfixes, primarily addressing bugs players found.

The infographic also has blue lines for each of the major devlog and preview posts we made, plus green sections for when Ostranauts was on discount.

As you can see, 2025 was a pretty busy year! So busy, in fact, that we ended up postponing our release of Fire in the Hold to 2026.

And that brings us to the second part of this post.

What's coming in 2026?

While we weren't able to release Fire in the Hold in 2025, we did manage to get it into closed beta. And if you follow my Bsky account at all, you've probably seen a few of the screenshots coming from testers over the past few weeks.

Here are a few highlights from testing so far:

Figure 1: a revised OKLG with 3 docking ports, and one is occupied by an Ibex modified to carry a small craft docked in its own central docking port.

Figure 2: Retrofitting a police Vector Mk III with sensors, PDC, and mass thrower.

Figure 3: Ship Combat Shot and Hit Indicators

Figure 4: Smoke and Contaminant Alarms

Figure 5: Debris from a ship scuttling in an asteroid field.

Figure 6: Sensor view of a derelict wreck embedded in some asteroids.

Figure 7: Stray fire from a nearby ship battle, with asteroids and a beacon nearby.

Figure 8: Sprites for some new ship weapon types.

As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts in 0.15! Aside from ship combat and fire, there are customizable NAV stations, asteroids and mining, and even new possible ship designs with multiple docking ports.

The plan from here is to continue the closed 0.15 beta as we fix bugs and adjust balance issues. And once that is in a state where it's stable and entertaining, we'll push the patch to public_test for the rest of Steam players to try out.

At that point, the game will be feature and content complete, and the primary focus will be on stability, quality of life, performance, and general polish as we approach 1.0. Our hope is that we can achieve this in early 2026. Though, as history has shown us, our predictions can be wrong!

As always, if you have any questions or other feedback, we're keen to hear it! The best place to post is as a reply to this Steam announcement, which we'll monitor for at least a few days. But we also keep an eye on our Discord and comments to our Reddit posts. Thanks for reading, and we hope you all have a prosperous 2026!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Folks!

Lately, we've been focusing a lot of attention on getting the Fire In the Hold (0.15) Milestone ready. It's getting closer, and we expect to be in closed beta testing as soon as this week.

If you want a sneak peek at some of the sensor and weapon features it'll include, check out this short video of a battle between ships:

Content Creator Sign-Up

And speaking of closed betas, are you a content creator interested in Ostranauts? If so, fill out this form to get updates on future opportunities and promo materials as we get closer to 1.0 launch.

QoL Patch

And last, but not least, what about this patch? We're still trying to reserve some dev time to keep fixing and improving the existing game. Update v0.14.5.20 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our "Inventory Overhaul" update, which includes fixes and improvements for undocking, the PDA Vizor, inventory, and others.

Saves from v0.14.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

Note: 📢 indicates changes inspired by community feedback!

• Undocking from ground stations no longer obliterates large ships.

• PDA Vizor presets and saving now works more reliably, and older saves with problems can be fixed via 'pda reset' console command.

• 📢Inventory Trash slot is now in the bottom left, instead of top left.

• Inventory Trash slot timer now ignores fast-forward, and correctly resets when new items placed in it.

• Click-swapping an item in a container's inventory grid no longer makes the new item invisible outside of that grid.

• 📢Painting item install jobs via PDA now maintains item rotation between installs.

• Box Sled ship type removed from starting ships.

• Damaged doors no longer have the Access Locks option.

• 📢Autovents now power-on into the closed state, instead of open, to avoid losing atmosphere during a power cycle.

• Bash action is now available on items after a save/load.

• Characters will no longer get trapped in an infinite teleport loop when standing up from chairs.

One of the more concerning problems we've heard reported involved large ships trying to undock from a ground station. They were frequently colliding with the ground on pushback, and sometimes causing total destruction.

This patch adjusts the pushback to avoid collisions better in those cases, and large ships should once again be cleared for departure!

We also heard reports that older saves had broken PDA Vizor after the last patch. So this patch improves how those settings are saved and loaded, and keeps settings between crew members. It also includes a new command users can use to factory reset their PDA if it's stuck in a bad setting. Simply open the debug console (default F3 key), and type "pda reset" to scrub the settings back to their defaults.

A number of users requested the inventory trash slot move away from the head to avoid mis-clicks and lost items, so we swapped that with the social items slot. We also fixed the timer on trash to make it easier to undo.

While testing this, we also found a bug that hid the cursor item when item swapping, and were able to fix that.

Users have also requested that the PDA install painting cursor remember item orientation between each click. It turns out we had that in Ship Editor, but not the main game, so we carried that over.

Two changes were the result of watching new players struggle with the game. First, we finally removed the Box Sled ship as a character creation option. Way too many users would suffocate trying to board that ship, not realizing it had an open floor between the airlock and cabin. We tried making this ship only appear after a few new games were started, but it wasn't enough.

Now, you can still get the ship, but it has to be more deliberate. The ship broker should basically always have one in stock.

Second, a lot of users would encounter damaged doors, right click on them, and see "Access Lock." And reasonably assume that was how to get them working again. So we removed that option from damaged doors.

Another long-time player request was to change the auto-vent behaviors to start "closed" instead of open. Losing power on a ship would often mean the vents briefly open after power was restored. And in some ships, this could mean certain death, as the limited air was lost.

They now start in closed state, to avoid this unexpected air loss.

Finally, we fixed a few other issues players encountered with missing Bash actions and chair dismounting.

We hope everyone's getting settled-in for some cozy holidays! The team here at Blue Bottle Games will gradually be heading out for holiday breaks over the next few days, likely until the new year.

I may poke my head in here and there to see if anyone needs anything, but other than that, I'm looking forward to a few days of food, a warm fire, some (arguably) friendly games of cards with the family, and maybe a homemade karaoke night or two.

From everyone at BBG, we hope you have a safe and happy winter break, we wish you a healthy and prosperous 2026!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Folks!

Update v0.14.5.18 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our "Inventory Overhaul" update, which includes some quality of life improvements for Vizor and the QAB, plus other fixes.

Saves from v0.14.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

Note: 📢 indicates changes inspired by community feedback!

• 📢Jettison menu option has been removed for all non-corpse objects.

• Corpses should no longer become hotter than the Sun and explode the ships/stations they are on.

• PDA Vizor presets should now remember their individual settings.

• F3 console now has a 'wipe' command to clear any stale signal box settings on the currently selected item.

• Signal boxes now run periodic audits of their settings to avoid stale links.

• Using PASS, transit, or other teleportation services while docked should no longer drain RCS on ships left behind.

• Docking/undocking from a ship should no longer cause damage that was leftover from previous docking encounters.

• 4L and 8L drink flasks should now use correct image in paperdoll UI.

• Haul tasks involving corpses should no longer throw null reference exceptions when PDA is opened.

• Using PASS should no longer throw null reference exceptions if one of the involved ships tried to spawn something.

Many players have mentioned accidentally jettisoning items when using the QAB (context menu), which was an unfortunate necessity before the inventory update added a Trash option. Now that Trash exists, however, we can finally remove Jettison from the QAB (except for corpses, that is).

Speaking of corpses, with the help of some player saves, we were finally able to figure out why some stations were becoming so hot they exploded from pressure. It turns out that our body head code had a blind spot, which if left unchecked, could cause temperatures to rise indefinitely.

In some cases, this happened to corpses inside EVA suits, causing them to heat up the air inside to temperatures hotter than a star. And when that helmet was removed, all air in the station would superheat, expand, and cause the station to explode.

The PDA Vizor app now remembers settings from preset-to-preset, which should hopefully make it less of a pain to use. And signal boxes now have some self-auditing code to help clean up stale or broken references blocking their use. (Users can also now manually reset the signal box using the F3 console's "wipe" command.)

PASS and other teleporting travel should no longer cause RCS fuel to go missing upon return to a vessel. And docking/undocking should no longer cause extra damage if the vessel was previously bumped by NPC ships.

Finally, there were a few smaller null fixes, and typos corrected to fix missing sprites.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Folks!

Update v0.14.5.17 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our "Inventory Overhaul" update, which adds a load of new sprites, quality of life improvements, and some fixes.

Saves from v0.14.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

Note: 📢 indicates changes inspired by community feedback!

General Changes

• New item sprite art for food and drinks.

• New item sprite art for medical injectors, EVA supplies, batteries, and O2 candles.

• 📢Main Menu and Quit buttons now have a confirm dialog.

• 📢Options Screen now has a Reset All Settings button, to restore all default game settings.

• 📢NAV station ship labels no longer overlap.

• NAV and other UIs no longer close after using super fast-forward and then unpausing.

• MegaTooltip no longer blocks clicks in the world where it is invisible.

• MegaTooltip item list now scrolls instead of overflowing down screen.

• Dropping an item on an incompatible slot no longer traps it behind the inventory UI.

• Training manuals now report/display correct skills.

Over the past few weeks, the team's priority has shifted more towards 0.15 development. But that doesn't mean we're done with 0.14!

Today's update includes a large batch of new item sprites, continuing our effort to get clearer artwork for smaller items in the game. This batch includes most of the foods and drinks available in-game, plus several of the other consumables and personal batteries.

We also added some player-requested features to the main UI. The game will now prompt you for confirmation when exiting to the main menu and exiting the game. And for cases where the game has stored settings that are hard to find or edit again later, we added a nuclear option to wipe all user settings data for Ostranauts on the machine.

In the NAV station, you'll now notice that ship labels will adjust to avoid overlapping, hopefully improving legibility in crowded spaces. The UI will also remain open if you've used super fast-forward and then unpause.

The Megatooltip has also received a few updates. First, we fixed the issue where it would block mouse clicks in areas where it was invisible. And we changed the way it lists multiple items in the same spot, so it uses a scrollbar instead of an endless list crossing the screen.

Finally, we fixed training manuals showing the wrong skill, plus a case where the item on the cursor got trapped behind the UI, getting stuck.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

PS: Also, Ostranauts is on sale this week. So if you (or a friend!) has been eyeing-up the game, now is a good time to pick it up. And if you know anyone who might dig what we're making, please spread the word!

Hey Folks!

Update v0.14.5.15 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our "Inventory Overhaul" update, which fixes some ship loading issues, panning while dragging selections, and the whodunnit plot.

Saves from v0.14.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

Note: 📢 indicates changes inspired by community feedback!

• Dragging a selection rectangle will now stay put in the world while camera pans/zooms.

• Ships with items falling on the floor should once again load correctly.

• Ships should once again be getting their full names, instead of missing the first word.

• Closing a whodunnit case file on a victim that was also an enemy should no longer crash the game.

• Station maintenance techs will be more gentle when refilling gas canisters now, to avoid detonating the station.

Some players noticed that the new selection dragging feature would follow the camera around, instead of staying fixed in world space. So we adjusted the code for that to behave more intuitively.

We also fixed a bug that could cause an out of sync error when loading ships that had dying NPCs or breaking items. The removing/adding of parts on the ship as it loaded caused errors, and this should now work more reliably.

Some ships were being spawned with part of their names blank, and this was due to an error loading ship names. All future ship spawns should have full names now.

The whodunnit plot could cause a stack overflow in cases where the victim was an enemy, which would often freeze then crash the game. This should once again work now.

Finally, we toned-down the maintenance tech refill actions, so they would be less likely to refill canisters beyond explosive pressures.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC