I waited until a few patches had been released before I downloaded the latest update - 1.34.

Installed it last night and was somewhat surprised to see what has happened to my home base planet. What was an icy world covered with trees and loads of animals has suddenly become a desert world with few plants and no animals I've seen so far. See the attached image. Not only that, it has ruined my base. The square building with the round windows was full of plants I was growing. The plants on the ground level are still there but all the other plants are gone although the planter boxes remain - floating on air because all the floor/ceilings are missing! On top of that all the internal ladders are gone. The only amusing part is that I still have some frostwort that I planted growing alongside my building. I like what I've seen of the new gameplay but why did it trash my home?

Guess I'm saying goodbye to this planet and looking for a new one or maybe I'll finally get myself a freighter...

As I understand it, if you want to play with your old saves from the last update, you gotta redo all quests involved in base building, also all the Atlas part is reset. Probably because otherwise the 'new story' woudn't jibe anymore.
That's also because I have started a fresh new game, I mean what's the difference? If you must redo everything to get things right, then you can also restart :)

That explains my next question "how come I'm back out at the edge of the galaxy again?" I feel like the game has ripped the rug out from under my space boots. The frame rate is rubbish - I'm walking around on worlds and small rocks etc are constantly popping into existence in front of me as I move. I tweaked the graphics settings down and this has improved a bit but it still isn't as solid as vers 1.24 was. And what is it with cleaning rust and slime off of things? Not even sure how you are supposed to do that - collect a new tool or cleaning agent of some kind?

I can see the sense in starting a new game but the idea of doing that depresses me after all the hours I've already put into the game. I'll persevere for a while with the current game. Probably dismantle my base and try and find a new more amenable world to set up shop on or like I mentioned in my first post maybe I'll get a freighter.

There is a lot that doesn't make sense in 1.3. I certainly do notice the massive performance drop compared to 1.2 even though all of the planets I have seen actually look worse now. There are tons of bugs in the 1.3 releases too, which is evident by how many minor version patches have been rapidly pushed out. It's always unnerving when you see a developer put out so many patches in such a brief period, almost as if they had no direction or quality control at all.

Cleaning the rust or slime off of things is done by holding down middle mouse, just like discarding inventory items. I have no idea why they implemented this "mini game" obstacle as it's not fun and doesn't add anything to the game.

Resetting the base missions and original Atlas missions was also done for no reason. There is nothing different about the missions that I could see, so I can only guess it was done as a way to artificially pad out the new and underwhelming story line.

Many resources have been renamed for no reason and some have been marked "obsolete" even though they have equivalent resources that they could have been converted into (bye bye hundreds of voltaic cells).

There is no way I was going to restart from the beginning and lose all of my progress, discoveries, exosuit, multitool, ship, freighter, base, resources and units. What I have done is installed v1.3 alongside my existing v1.2 (both using my existing save, which I rotate in and out per version) so I could play the new story but continue my real game in 1.24. Doing this made my progress through the 1.3 story much faster since I already had most of the resources needed to complete various tasks on hand.

You can run them side by side on the same machine? I did back up my games folder before I did the upgrade but I ran an uninstall of 1.24 before installing 1.34. I still have the 1.24 install files and my 1.24 game data back up though....

I think space looks better but being on planets doesn't. Things look smoother but somehow less detailed. Seems like there are far less plants on the planets than there use to be.

Middle mouse button? - Doh! Must have missed the memo on that one.

Hadn't yet confirmed that some resources were no longer relevant but suspected as much.

Took ages to finally get the 48 slot ship so I really don't want to give that up!

The patch 1.35 is imminent now. Atlas problems have been resolved and a ton of other things. Read the changes from 'Experimental' here:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/275850/discussions/0/1474221865183233621/

The transition 1.2 - 1.3 should work better now, but still you must redo base quests and Atlas is reset AFAIK.