Subspace: Redux — The Clarity Update

A reviewer told us they often could not make out what they were looking at, and you told us the damage numbers were boring. Both were right. The text was small, the fonts changed from screen to screen, the panels were busy, and the numbers only showed your gun, showed what you fired rather than what landed, and never showed what hit you. So we rebuilt the interface and the combat text from one design, and fixed the parts of combat they made obvious.

A reviewer also told us they never understood what the goal was. Nothing said what to do, why, or how the world worked. So every new pilot now meets someone whose job is to tell them.

And every MMO with an economy grows a second one in the dark. We would rather run that market ourselves, in the open, where nobody gets robbed: say hello to the Supporter Token.

🤝 Your Sponsor

The Guild that licensed every pilot is gone. Now you fly on someone's name: a person in your faction who vouched for you. Every new pilot meets theirs first.

• The opening is now the start of your story. Every new pilot sees it, and it cannot be skipped. It still ends within a minute and a half.
• Your Sponsor speaks first, before you can fly. They tell you who they are, what happened to the Guild and the Admiral, what your faction stands for, and what you are flying for: levels, rank, better ships and a name people know.
• They explain how the game works: - story quests are marked in yellow, and missions are in your Flight Log; - bounty and the bank; - safe zones and your faction's guards; - the open Lanes, where you will need other pilots.
• Then they walk you through your instruments. Open the galaxy map, your Flight Log and your pilot sheet. The steps name your own keys, even if you have rebound them.
• Finally they send you to your faction's flight handler, who starts First Flight and the starter chain, and points you at the main story.
• Each faction has its own Sponsor: Ansel Hart for the Vanguard Concordat, Corvina Rask for the Void Ascendancy, Odile Kestrane for the Balanced Path and Lisbet Qaro for the Shroud Collective.
• Pilots who are already into the starter chain carry on where they were. Nobody is sent back.

🎛️ Your faction's console

Your action bars now sit in a console built in your faction's style: riveted navy steel for the Vanguard Concordat, blood-red iron with ember cracks for the Void Ascendancy, jade and bronze scales for the Balanced Path, and smoked violet glass for the Shroud Collective.

• Every slot sits in a frame from that console, whatever is in it, so the bars, the frames and the console are one piece.
• Your class sits in the hexagon on the left and your faction's emblem in the ring on the right.
• Heat runs along the top of the console and your experience along the bottom, each in its own channel.
• Your utility has its own station to the left of the upper bar: its picture, its key and its name. It glows when it is ready, counts down while it is active and dims under a sweep while it recharges. It used to be a line of text floating above the bars.
• Energy and speed sit to the right of the upper bar: an arc that empties as you spend energy and turns red when you are running low, with your speed beside it.
• The upper action bar is seven slots, centred, one for each window it opens, and no empty slots. Anything you had placed there is kept.

🖥️ One look, everywhere

The main menu, Pilot Select, the hangar, every window and every HUD panel now share one style.

• Quiet surfaces. Dark, flat panels with a thin cyan edge. No textures and no ornament competing with what the panel says.
• Controls that answer you. Buttons, tabs, fields and rows sit in a soft slate and light up in cyan when you point at them, so it is always clear what you are about to press.
• Clean window headers. A title in capitals and a thin rule under it, with a close button in the same corner of every window.

🔤 One font you can read

• One clean, open typeface replaces the four we had. Menus, HUD, chat, nameplates, quest dialogue, tooltips, the diagnostics overlay and the combat text all use it.
• Readable at small sizes. It keeps its shape at HUD sizes where the old condensed faces blurred into the background.

🔎 Bigger where it was too small

• The HUD draws about a third larger by default: the player and target frames, chat, the trackers and the radar. The HUD Scale slider in Settings still goes both ways.
• Larger text where it was smallest: keybinds on the action bars, the XP bar, zone messages, nameplates, the heat bar, item slots, store filters and the Controls help, which is also a larger window now.

🎯 One icon set

• Every icon in the game now shares one style. Guns, bombs and mines, every class field (Aegis Dome included), every station on the action bar, and every buff and debuff.
• A small badge marks the variant: a bolt for EMP, a flame for napalm, a heart for life, a crosshair for homing, target rings for proximity.
• Buffs are light, debuffs are red, so you can tell them apart before you read a word.
• Icons for the little buttons. Chat's Send and Scrapbook, previous and next, zoom in and out, mail and close are icons now instead of symbols typed as letters.

📐 Nothing on top of anything

• The class and faction art sit in the console's end pieces, not over the end slots.
• The chat stops short of the action bars, however wide you made it.
• The quest tracker hangs below the radar instead of under its readouts.
• The galaxy map's controls moved above the map, clear of the action bars.
• The slot drawer opens on top of the action bars, not behind them.
• Windows fit what is in them. The game menu is tall enough for all its buttons, the Cargo Hold's help line sits under the slots, and Hangar Bays has one close button instead of two.

💥 Floating combat text, rebuilt

• Every hit you land shows a number: guns, bombs, mines, Burst, Thor's Hammer, napalm, class fields and your sentry turret. The number is the damage that actually landed.
• The colour tells you what you hit. Red is hull, blue is shield, yellow is energy (an EMP). A shot that breaks through a shield shows both, blue then red, so you can see the moment your shots start hurting.
• Heals are green with a +. Repair pylons, life-steal and repair pickups all show what they restored.
• Crits pop. A critical hit swells to twice its size and settles back in a fifth of a second, almost straight up the screen. It keeps its colour; size is the crit.
• Damage you take rises from just above your own ship, in the same colours, wherever your camera is pointing.
• Words, not zeros. A hit that does nothing says why: IMMUNE, ABSORB, RESIST. Your killing blow says KILL.
• It reads the same in every camera. Each number grows as it flies off on its own angle and arc, then fades out, over the shoulder or top-down, so a burst of hits spreads into a spray you can read. Swap cameras mid-fight and they stay with the ship. Far targets draw smaller, but never shrink to a dot.
• New options in Settings → HUD → Combat Text: show the damage you take, show damage over time, and show other pilots' combat near you (off by default).

🏎️ Smoother fights

• Shots arrive in volleys. The server now sends the shots near you in small timed packets instead of one message per bullet, and your game plays them back on the same timeline as the ships. A burst of fire flies as one clean stream instead of stuttering, and it uses far less bandwidth.
• Fewer hitches. We tracked down where the game was making garbage every frame and stopped it, so the short pauses you could feel in long fights are gone.
• Combat text lands where the hit lands: it waits for the shot to arrive on your screen instead of appearing before it.
• The radar shows your heading, labelled, instead of your speed.

🐣 A safer first flight

A new pilot was jumped by a patrol drone four minutes into their first session, right outside their home. That should never happen, so:

• A cushion around every faction's home. Patrol drones now stay well outside the starter area and turn back long before reaching it.
• New pilots are left alone. Patrol drones no longer pick a fight with pilots of level 3 or below. Shoot one first and it will shoot back.
• Drones show their level. Every drone's nameplate now shows "Lv N" in the colour that tells you how dangerous it is to you. The number in brackets is still bounty, not level.
• Drones match where they fly. Near the starter area a drone carries a few basic upgrades, not dozens. Tougher ones live further out.
• Every AI ship is worth something. Bounty now scales with a ship's size and level, so no drone, raider or boss is ever worth zero.
• Learn offline first. The first time you launch, the game offers the offline tutorial: flying and fighting with nothing shooting back.

🛡️ Guards answer for their own

Your home space is no longer a place nobody can touch you. Pilots of other factions can now attack you anywhere outside a safe zone, your own domain included, and every attack there has a price.

• Attack a pilot in their own space and their faction's guards come for you. A wing arrives within seconds and goes straight for the attacker, with no warning first.
• Guards near a homeworld are level 100. Each band further out, they are ten levels lower. The patrols that warn trespassers carry the same ranks.
• Hurt guards still call for help, and the reinforcements still grow the longer you stay.
• Safe zones are unchanged. Inside one, nothing can hurt you.

⚡ Thor's Hammer lands

• It hits every ship in its line, each one once, and keeps flying through asteroids and walls. It could pass straight through a ship before.
• It hits hard: ten times your gun's damage, where it used to be a single gun round that any shield soaked up.
• It is fast: at least twice the speed of a gun round, even from a standing start.
• Every ship it strikes lights up with a lightning impact.

🛰️ Class specials, finished

• All nine specials have their real models: Sentry Turret, Repair Pylon, Sensor Buoy, and the device at the heart of every class field.
• The Sentry Turret turns to its target and fires from alternating barrels, with a muzzle flash.
• Repair Pylons and Sensor Buoys show their real range as a ring on the field: the pylon's crystal glows and the buoy's dish pings.
• Every class field's device grows in at its centre, bursts and glows from its core while the field holds, and shrinks away as it closes. Bastion Field, Slipstream, Aegis Dome and Suppression Grid draw properly again: they showed a lone column of light, or only their sparks.
• Your utility's station shows your deployable's picture.

🎟️ The Supporter Token

An item worth 30 days of Supporter, bought from the Supporter window for the price of a 30-day pass.

• It arrives by mail. Claim it at any Trade Depot and it goes into your vault. Token mail never expires, so a full vault only means it waits for you.
• Redeem it by right-clicking it in the Galactic Bank vault: 30 days of Supporter for your account, exactly as if you had bought a pass.
• Or sell it for credits. List it from the Auction House's Post tab, buyout only, on your own faction's house. Another pilot pays credits they earned, redeems it, and becomes a Supporter.
• It never leaves the vault by any other road. No hold will carry one, so it is never dropped on death, never looted, never traded hand to hand and never on the Black Market.
• A new token waits seven days before it can be listed. Long enough that a stolen card is found out before it turns into somebody's credits.
• Hardcore pilots cannot buy, list or receive one. Hardcore is self-found. Your account can still redeem a token your Normal pilot bought.

No credits are created anywhere in this. They only change hands, and the Auction House takes its cut.

🚀 Your pilot's ships are your pilot's

Pilots can fly for different factions, so they no longer share a hangar.

• Everything is per pilot now: wallet, bank and vault, every hull with its hold and its fit, and the hangar bays. Supporter time and anything you bought for the account stay with the account.
• Your existing credits, bank and ships went to your oldest pilot, once, so nothing was lost in the move.
• Deleting a pilot deletes what it owns. The warning says so now. A pilot with a live auction cannot be deleted until the auction ends.
• Free accounts keep one pilot and one bay.

🔩 Only death costs progress

Fly any ship in your hangar. Swap between them as often as you like. Nothing you built into a hull is lost unless that hull is destroyed.

• Taking damage no longer strips your systems. A ship used to lose a tier for every quarter of its armour gone, mid-fight. Not any more.
• The hangar shows what you built. Select a hull you have flown and a small card above it lists the tier in each system, your specials and modifiers, how full the hold is, and the hull's own flight numbers.

🌌 A sky above the horizon

Since the camera moved behind your ship, the stars stopped at the horizon and everything above it was black. The starfield is now mirrored up across the horizon line, so the stars run from below you to the top of the screen, stream past above and below as you fly, and swing round with you as you turn. Blitz keeps its own starfield.

🕷️ Also new: Skitter

Skitter, a lane tower defence game set in Subspace space, now lives inside Redux. Pick it from the mode list on the main menu.

• Ships run an orbital corridor at your station core. Buy turrets on the pads with the credits the run gives you, and hold. Every level is generated, and level 100 is for a very good player.
• Completely offline. No account, no pilot, no ship and no server.
• Retry Run replays your last run's layout from the main menu or the pause menu.
• Your settings are shared with every other mode, and Skitter only loads when you pick it.

🔧 Fixes

• Story quests work as written again. Since 2.3.0 many quest steps lost their details, so some "talk to" steps, courier deliveries and steps you can do in any order did not behave as intended.
• F hails a story pilot while your mouse cursor is hidden. It only worked after you moved the mouse.
• The Auction House names its market. It read "Auction House · Black Market" in every faction's own House.
• "Claim your reward in the Mission Center" shows your real key. It said J, which opens the quest journal; it now shows whatever Missions is bound to.
• "That wreck belongs to whoever made the kill" says it once. Flying back and forth through someone else's wreck repeated it on every pass.
• Distant objects no longer blink in and out as you turn. Asteroids about 1,000u away vanished in the middle of the screen but showed at its edges, so turning swept them in and out. They are now drawn by distance, not by where they sit on screen.
• HUD Scale resizes the action bars and their console. They stayed one size while the rest of the HUD scaled.
• EXIT BATTLEGROUND only shows in a battleground. It showed in the open world, where it dropped you to the main menu and left the game menu open there.
• The Sell Items prompt shows its colours. Its rare-items and Supporter-bonus lines showed raw colour tags.
• Holding the key for a weapon on your action bar keeps it firing. A gun placed on a bar slot fired once per press.
• New: key bindings per mode. The MMO, Blitz and Skitter each keep their own keys. Settings → Input shows and saves the set for the mode selected on the main menu, says which one it is, and lists only the keys that mode uses. Blitz starts from the keys you already had.
• Skitter's controls can be rebound. Move, build, overclock, the gates, sortie, rotate, frame board and fire, each with a second key: arrows move, Tab frames the board and Ctrl fires by default.
• New: Subspace keys. Settings → Input has a SUBSPACE KEYS button that loads the original Subspace Continuum layout: arrows to fly, Shift for afterburner, Ctrl for guns, Tab for bombs. Press APPLY to keep it. The default keys are unchanged, and every key can still be rebound.

• The tutorial is fully offline, and plays as often as you like. It used to open Pilot Select when no pilot was chosen, and flying into the world after it could fail with a lost connection.
• Deployables appear in the tutorial and in practice, where they could be invisible.
• The mission tracker shows mission names again.
• Squad frames clear when you leave a squad. Your old squadmates stayed on screen until something else changed.
• J opens your quest journal. It could open and close it again on the same press.
• "Select an faction" now reads "Select a faction".

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