0.553.1 just hit the Experimental branch, featuring:
- New astrogation protocol. Now, instead of having to stay still during the astrogation sequence, you need to match velocity to the trajectory that will get you out of the rings. On one hand, it makes astrogation more challenging in dense regions; but on the other, you retain the control of your ship during the sequence and if you are using astrogation to escape a tricky situation, you will not be sitting duck. You will also be able to control now which thrusters use for astrogation and rotation of your ship when arriving at your destination.
- Your ship computer will now display the proximity alert area around your ship and which objects prevent your astrogation.
- The shape of the proximity area was altered. It is tighter around the ship but extends further in the direction of your astrogation.

Feedback Focus: The new astrogation protocol.

0.553.3 just hit the Experimental branch, featuring:
- Updated Cothon-213 description to reflect the missing EMP shielding.
- Multi-layered improvement of performance at Enceladus: menu rendering is faster now, simulations are stopped when not needed, having a lot of cradled equipment won't slow down the menu anymore, several controls were re-written to use fewer resources, docking arms on inactive ships won't try to adjust their equally immovable cargo wasting CPU time.
- Decreased menu shadows on Enceladus.
- Improved performance of hull damage rendering, which should improve framerate both on the station and in the rings, especially if multiple ships are present.
- Turning off post-processing will now disable more effects, improving performance on low-end machines.
- Angular velocity of your ship was not accounted for in collision with objects. It could result in both damages being too low when your ship was spinning, and items that spun with your ship (ie. rocks wedged behind cradled equipment) to inflict more damage than they should when you rotated your ship.
- Fixed leaks that could cause a crash of the Enceladus menus if you toggled the Hardware and Tuning menu quickly.

Feedback Focus: Performance, especially on low-end machines and kinetic damage - both the one your ship gets and the one it inflicts.

0.553.4 just hit the Experimental branch, featuring:
- Fixed a bug that caused the insurance counter to not be updated when the amount of the insurance changed, which made repairs look free.

Feedback Focus: Still looking for feedback on kinetic damage.

0.553.5 just hit the Experimental branch, featuring:
- Transponders would only show up on the first LIDAR screen that detected them. This would usually make transponders not visible on Pilot and Geologist tabs, but could also remove them from the main LIDAR display if they were spotted first in OMS, which would be confusing.

Feedback Focus: Still looking for feedback on kinetic damage. This is the most significant change in recent patches.

0.554.2 just hit the Experimental branch, featuring:
- Physics performance improvements. The game can now handle more asteroids using the same resources.
- New asteroid distribution function makes the rocks you encounter in-game match more closely to what you see on the visual feed.
- You are now able to completely exhaust asteroids in a region, making clear patches in the rings. Currently, the effect wears off after you finish the dive. This both gives you the incentive to move around more and makes it possible to clear an astrogation runway path in advance.
- Kinetic weapons with a high rate of fire did not shoot at all if the physics tick rate was low enough.
- Fixed dialogue with repeated names.
- Adjusted logo visibility on the title screen and in credits.

Feedback Focus: Performance and appearance of the Rings.

0.554.4 just hit the Experimental branch, featuring:
- When a station in a dialogue checks if you are docked, it checks not only if you are docked at all, but specifically docked to it. This prevents weird dialogues when multiple stations are nearby.
- Fusion will now ignite in low framerates. A bug prevented the fusion reactor from igniting when the physics tick rate was low, which both made your EIME not launch from the Enceladus station, and could leave you completely stranded in the rings.
- The game now properly traces multiple cave locations and will track how many resources you acquired from each one.

Feedback Focus: Still looking for feedback on the performance and appearance of the Rings.

0.554.5 just hit the Experimental branch, featuring:
- Some of the ships and drones used much more resources for their AI than they should, making them both slow down the game and be too smart. This included mining companions and cargo containers (using as many resources as 4 ships), and certain non-symmetrical encounters that could use up to as many resources as 10 ships at once.
- Switching in and out of the Tuning menu quickly could lock it into a state where tuning options didn't show up.
- There are fewer asteroids on the title screen now. The title density exploded with our new density implementation.
- Fixed lighting glitches on ultra-wide monitors.
- You could discover events that should not move in different locations if you gathered a bunch of lidar contacts, but did not explore them immediately.
- Race drone AI will not have a face in dialogues anymore.
- Updated translations.

Feedback Focus: Performance, especially if you got mining companions on your build.

0.555.0 just hit the Experimental branch, featuring:
- Astrogation protocol enhancements: you can now pick the velocity of your astrogation jump, sacrificing travel time to make the jump easier to perform.
- Astrogating to Enceladus will now always use indirect burn, requiring you to hold still rather than speeding up through the rings.
- As part of balancing the astrogation, your jumps are now in general slower.
- Fixed more graphics glitches on ultra-wide monitors.

Feedback Focus: New astrogation features.

0.556.2 just hit the Experimental branch, featuring:
- Race drones and lifepods will now communicate with you as soon as they enter your cargo pod. This makes the stories tied to them trigger more reliably.
- New visuals for certain rare objects you can encounter in the rings.

Feedback Focus: Release candidate. I want to push out new astrogation changes and ring density improvements to the stable branch. Since 0.555.0 the new astrogation protocols were adjusted to be more similar to what you have in the stable branch; this removes some of the challenges presented in 0.554.0 and later, but on the other hand, does not exclude cargo-heavy builds from working. The overarching aim of these changes is to remove the gameplay-story separation that was present in astrogation, justifying why it works the way it works in the presented universe - and at the same time, making it feel like an actual maneuverer, not just a fast travel button. Please focus your feedback on that.

0.556.5 just hit the Experimental branch, featuring:
- Big Bad Wolf will now accept prisoners again.
- Fixed the boot screen on ultra-wide monitors.
- Quickly toggling the Tuning setting for nanodrone systems could cause crashes.

Feedback Focus: Release candidate. It fixes a couple of things that snuck up in the recent stable release.

0.556.7 just hit the Experimental branch, featuring:
- Fixes a bug that caused some events that should not be discovered multiple times to appear multiple times, seemingly astrogating from one place to another.
- Tuning maximum autopilot velocity now will also set maximum astrogation velocity.

Feedback Focus: Event encounters. Some events that make no sense to be discovered in another place (immobile, unique things) should not move anymore. This only applies to new discoveries - if you have radar anomalies or big lidar contacts you didn't visit yet, they can still contain duplicate events.

0.556.9 just hit the Experimental branch, featuring:
- Improved performance of the asteroid spawner/despawner. It runs in the physics thread, so this should improve performance on machines that were physics-bound, especially when traversing long distances in dense areas.
- Increased the ship awareness area of the racing drone, so it will conclude the race correctly even if you manage to go up to 60km away from the racing team.
- DTSS will not lower the physics FPS to the level that causes numerical instability and cargo phasing through the ship hulls.

Feedback Focus: Performance.

0.556.14 just hit the Experimental branch, featuring:
- Moved parts of ship initializations to a separate thread. This prevents a lag spike when a new ship spawns into the detailed simulation.

Feedback Focus: Performance.

0.557.6 just hit the Experimental branch, featuring:
- In-game profiler. This is a development tool useful mostly to me when adjusting the game for specific hardware, but might be also useful when reporting performance problems. Hit ctrl + ~ (the key next to 1, below ESC) at any time to display profiling information. A screenshot of what you see there will complement logs when reporting performance issues. The graphs displayed cover roughly 30 to 60 seconds (2048 subsequent frames), are gathered even if you are not displaying the profiler and have much higher resolution than what the logs report, so if you are in a particularly lagging event, turning the profiler on and grabbing a screenshot immediately would be an excellent addition to your feedback.
- AI will not forget about ships they get near to, and then back away from. This enhances the range you can get away from the racing crew in the ringrace event and still get the reward.
- AI will not be smarter now if your framerate exceeds 60 fps.
- Dialogue initialization now runs in a separate thread, preventing a lag spike when a new ship approached you.

Feedback Focus: Performance.

0.558.0 just hit the Experimental branch, featuring:
- Engine upgrade. The game now runs Godot Engine 3.5.1, with all the latest fixes.

Feedback Focus: Any quirks you encounter.