Foundation Update book cover

Introducing Update 1.1

Today we’re excited to bring you the Foundation Update. It’s the first of many free updates to come, and we’re looking forward to you getting hands on with it. Here’s an outline of the updates – but we encourage you to dive in and discover for yourselves!

Game Modes

Screenshot of different game mode icons
  • Explorers can now decide to play with new rulesets in three game modes
  • Normal mode is the original experience
  • Creative mode allows free exploration and creative freedom
  • Survival mode will test players with more extreme conditions
Screenshot of death screen

Death quotes: prepare to see these a lot in survival mode.

Base Building

Base building screenshot
Screenshot of teleporter
  • Find and claim uninhabited bases, and settle down on your chosen home planet.
  • Construct modular structures and decoration in exchange for resources gathered while exploring
  • Teleport to and from your base from Space Stations with a terminus teleporter
  • Add storage containers to bases
  • Build shelters and take refuge from storms and atmospheric damage
  • Claiming a new base will destroy the old one, refunding all of the resources

Farming

Toxic plant
Farming screenshot

Grow and harvest crops using the new Farming system

Research and grow ten new plant types

Plants grow over time meaning biome dependant crops can be cultivated outdoors, or inside hydroponic labs

Screenshot of plants

Making Camp

Explorers can now deploy equipment in the field

Automated harvesters gather resources continuously

Communication terminals allow explorers to leave sub space messages for others to find

Nearby mineral deposits, uninhabited bases or drop pods can be discovered with a Signal Scanner

Place save points anywhere

Base building items

Freighters

Freighter screenshot

Screenshot of orange freight
  • Interstellar Freighters can be purchased and summoned from anywhere in the Galaxy
  • Freighters expand traveller’s reserves
  • Teleport resources to your Freighter while on-planet
Screenshot of pink freight
  • Stockpile goods within freighters and transport them in bulk to trade in other systems
  • Customise the base building section of your freighter & build hydroponics labs to grow crops
Screenshot of purple freight
  • Use the new recruitment system to recruit NPCs for your Freighter
  • Create extended cargo holds to increase freighter capacity

New Resources & Technology

  • Discover new resources as you explore
  • Biome specific resources only grow in specific climates

Screenshot of new resources

  • Discover new technologies
  • Craft new items via base building: Advanced mining laser and Hazmat gauntlets
  • Use these items to gather resources in specific biomes

Screenshot of new technology

User Interface

New quick menu added

Screenshot of new UI

Stack up to 5 items per inventory slot

Screenshot of new UI

New arrow indicators show shield and life support damage more clearly

Screenshot of new UI

Resource symbols improved to allow for easier differentiation

Screenshot of new UI

Press left on D-Pad to view current objective

Screenshot of new UI

UI is no longer colour tinted and removed artifacts

Screenshot of new UI
Screenshot of new UI

Early warning of pirates on cockpit

Screenshot of new UI

Red screen indicates you’re unable to use Pulse Drive

Screenshot of new UI

TAA & Motion blur

Introduced motion blur (to turn off, visit Options > display)

Screenshot of new Motion Blur
Screenshot of original Motion Blur

Introduced TAA (temporal anti aliasing) as an option

Screenshot of new TAA
Screenshot of original TAA

Added texture streaming, which will allow minimum spec PCs to run the game more smoothly and should help players who are experiencing frame rate drops due to memory loss

Patch notes

General Gameplay

  • Fixed technology becoming instantly fully charged when repaired
  • Fixed ship appearing on incorrect pad in space station after loading
  • Added interactable objects that required certain tech to collect
  • Added shootable objects that require certain tech to mine
  • Rebalanced resource availability and technology charge requirements
  • Fixed initial game flow – where travelling to space too quickly after visiting the monolith could prevent the first atlas station notification appearing
  • Prevented player being prompted to scan for buildings before leaving the system after visiting the monolith
  • Prevented laser and melee attacks while in space from attempting to edit terrain
  • Improved calculation of resources received when mining terrain
  • Renamed Signal Scanners to Signal Boosters
  • Signal booster objects updated to search for playable bases, suit upgrade pods, and mineable resources
  • Removed signal booster from being distributed on terrain, as player can now build them
  • Improved accuracy of environment detection, fixing cases where it rained inside caves
  • Fixed galactic waypoints not loading correctly across saves
  • Removed atlas pass v1 requirement from doors in stations
  • Suit upgrade pods are no longer spawned in stations
  • Suit upgrade pods can now only be used once
  • Fixed collision in anomaly that was causing issues when exiting larger ships
  • Increased the number of different NPC character models generated per system
  • Fixed the game always remaining in day time for players who began their save prior to patch 1.03
  • Fixed a potential crash in foliage instance renderer

Localisation

  • Fixed stats page in asian languages
  • Fixed multiple issues with asian language formatting
  • Multiple improvements and fixes to localisation text in all languages

UI

  • Added new icons for specific types of primary resources
  • Fixed health bars not appearing on some targets
  • Added hazard and life support drain indicators
  • Fixed mission messages not appearing in a timely fashion
  • Beacons now notify the player that they will save the game
  • Fixed crash when creature IK animations were updated under certain conditions on the discovery screen
  • Improved navigation in discovery UI
  • Massive speed improvements to browsing huge discovery lists
  • Increased size of discovery storage
  • Added option to load “Earliest” previous save in Options menu
  • Fixed weapon naming
  • Added icon to remind players of the reload button when weapon is empty
  • Multiple fixes for viewing discoveries

PS4

  • Added photo mode
  • Large optimisations to the engine to accommodate base building

PC

  • Added support for up to 8 mouse buttons
  • Fixed better order position history for mouse smoothing
  • Fixed bug where setting gamma to zero gave a fully bright rather than fully dark image
  • Fixed hard-limiting on save sizes, with appropriate warning about free space on boot
  • Player is now notified when shaders are being loaded
  • Fixed occasional crash on exit
  • Fixed performance of trail renderer for some AMD cards
  • Large optimisations to the engine to accommodate base building

Generation

  • Added biome specific plants
  • Adopted new method of distributing resource plants on terrain, for more lifelike clumps of plants
  • Improved distribution of plant life across all terrain types
  • Introduced visual differentiation of red, green and blue star systems
  • Introduced new mineable terrain resources found only in red, green and blue star systems
  • Reduced average building frequency
  • Introduced planets with elevated building density
  • Introduced planets with no buildings or sentient life
  • Increased the proportion of lush and tropical planets
  • Decreased the proportion of lifeless planets
  • Fixed bug where multiple ships could appear, overlapping, at the player’s start scene
  • Prevented certain building types being incorrectly placed underwater
  • Prevented multiple buildings occasionally being placed in overlapping positions
  • Prevented buildings occasionally being placed intersecting with the terrain
  • Improved and altered per-planet terrain resource generation, improving gameplay and visuals

Creatures

  • Fixed elevation cache mismatches, causing errors in creature knowledge and pathing
  • Fixed slow memory leak in creature role allocation
  • Improved creature animation speeds
  • Fixed issues where some creatures turns had the incorrect frame count
  • Fixed occasional crash when interacting with creatures

Atmospherics

  • Increased proportion of vibrant blue skies
  • Corrected cloud levels for clear skies
  • Improved average cloud level settings
  • Fixed cloud rendering while flying in your ship
  • Improved atmosphere depth when transitioning to space
  • Increased fidelity of atmosphere rendering on nearest planet
  • Improved atmospheric fog as you fly to a planet
  • Improved fog method for planets seen on the horizon

Terrain

  • Improved terrain generation algorithms
  • Improved and extended blend areas between different terrain noise types
  • Terrains now generate more open spaces
  • Smaller features now appear at nearer lods to improve visuals in the distance
  • Fixed objects being placed on incorrect terrain material types
  • Improved resolution of distant planet terrain
  • Decreased differences between planet as seen from space and actual planet terrain
  • Fixed seams on planets when seen from space
  • Improvements to terrain material selection and terrain material blending
  • Terrain generation priority and cost calculation improvements
  • Fixed terrain generation angle calculations, which would previously prevent nearest region being generated first
  • We now generate caves on lower terrain lods to decrease visual differences in lower detail terrain
  • Introduced more varied and vibrant colouring to terrain for each biome
  • Decreased frequency of brown terrain colour selections
  • Changed texture scales to improve transition between terrain lods
  • Improved terrain colour combinations to add variety and better match terrain contouring
  • Improved terrain texture blending method to better retain vibrant colours
  • Improved settings for hue, saturation and value noise variation on terrain
  • Fixed a number of issues causing holes to be seen in the planet terrain
  • Fixed occasional crash when mining terrain

Visuals

  • Fixed colour of muzzle flashes on player weapons
  • Added muzzle flashes to ship weapons
  • Added cockpit lighting for damage and weapon firing
  • Added debris to freighter explosion effect
  • Improved freighter cargo explosions
  • Improved photon cannon hit and space explosion effects
  • Improved turret explosion effect
  • Improved grass colour selection
  • Improved grass colouring method to match underlying terrain colour
  • Improved grass placement to match gradient of terrain, and rocky terrain slope patches
  • Improved lighting on grass
  • Improved alpha cutoffs and blending for grass in the distance
  • Improved colouring method for on-planet buildings
  • Fixed “pop” in lighting when flying between planets
  • Fixed incorrect lighting seen in shadow areas
  • Improved lighting method when rendering tree leaves
  • Fixed procedural texturing on objects with multiple overlapping textures
  • Fixed size of certain texture atlas normal maps
  • Fixed texture scaling on asteroids
  • Zinc plant is now more obvious when it has been gathered
  • Fixed occasional rendering errors due to precision on cockpit during warp
  • Fixed pulse lines not appearing when pulse driving out from planet atmosphere
  • Fixed shadowing artefacts on imposters

Space

  • Improved asteroids to allow much denser fields
  • Improved explosion effects
  • Fixed scale of moons on the space map
  • Added freighter groups to the space map
  • Changed distribution of resources in asteroids
  • AI ships will now clear asteroids in their path
  • Planets are now scannable from space to see their resources

Space Combat

  • Fixed bounty targets warping out too soon
  • Improved HUD indicators in space combat
  • Added damaged ship effect on AI starships
  • Added formation flying
  • Improved locking on passive starships
  • Improved AI combat flight patterns
  • Added new ship weapon technology
  • Holding brake whilst turning now activates drift for fast turns
  • Improved AI ship freighter attacking
  • Improved freighter targeting code when under attack by enemy ships

Freighters

  • Fixed pulse drive to prevent travel through freighters
  • Improved docking code
  • Added hangar to the lead freighter
  • Added docking in freighters
  • Added icon to accessible freighter hangars
  • Added colouring to cargo drops to identify what is in them
  • You can now only pick up cargo drops that will fit in your inventory
  • Added auxiliary freight ships to freighter groups
  • Added alert lights and alarm audio for when freighters are in combat
  • Improved turret lights and explosions
  • Improved muzzle flashes on freighter turrets
  • Added indicator of cargo contents
  • Freighter Commanders now give rewards for rescuing them from pirate attack
  • Fixed collision on freighter cargo containers

Audio

  • Updated the lush ambience to make the wind sounds less noisy
  • Ambient background fauna now checks for the presence of creatures
  • Added rain on foliage
  • Added rain on ship
  • Added freighter specific footsteps
  • When on a dead planet, no music will play
  • Round table prop now plays an appropriate sound
  • Added more music to the loading sequence and game start
  • Added audio to new base building props
  • Created sounds for new base building props
  • Added audio to freighter doors and internal freighter ambiences
  • Added freighter explosions
  • Added freighter alarm
  • Added ambient radio comms when approaching a freighter
  • Fixed missing sounds when in a space station due to the mix settings
  • Multi-tool upgrades now affect audio
  • Lots of minor mix changes
  • Changed some compression settings for PS4 audio to make the sub-channel audio play more reliably