Greetings Scavengers,
Today I’m super excited to announce that Space Trash Scavenger is launching into full release! It’s been a fun time working on this in Early Access for the past year during which Sarah and I have been updating and adding to the game, very often based on your feedback.
So thanks to everyone who took the time to submit ideas and file bugs, chat in Discord, it’s been a huge help.
Quick recap: Space Trash Scavenger is a fully featured Factory and Automation game set in a semi open world with Survival mechanics, Building and Crafting. Pilot and build your Space Rig to scavenge and repurpose Space Trash to sell at a stock market with dynamic prices.
The unique twist is that you do all this in a fully 3D microgravity environment, in a series of toybox-sized, procedurally generated asteroid fields. You can also explore the procedurally generated interiors of derelict space ships, abandoned mines, terraformed farms and mysterious science vessels.
All of this is done while allowing seamless travel between space, space ships and gravity wells like asteroids.
Early Access Recap
Some of the highlights through Early Access include the Automation Update, where a major rehaul of automation meant you could finely tune and automate all aspects of your space rig operation.
In the Combat Update we added 30 new levelled Entity alongside new attack behaviours. We’ve added grenades, flashlights, new weapons, new drones, and updated the Rig flight model too. In that time I also acted on numerous bugs and glitches that you submitted, making the game as stable as possible.
We also added a complete set of difficulty sliders including hunger rate and fuel use, so that you can customize your own experience.
But we’re not done! Because with 1.0 we wanted to send Space Trash Scavenger into the Outer Reach with more. With the full release I’m proud of where we’ve taken the game, so let’s get into what we have added for the full release.
New Biome
First up is a new biome. We’ve added a new and final quadrant for you to jump to and explore. Here you’ll find the mysterious Science Vessels to explore - and Scavenge. What could these long abandoned research vessels have been used for..?
Creative Mode
It’s been a popular request for a while and now it’s here: Creative Mode. Like any of the survival modifiers and enemy difficulty settings, you can toggle this on or off at any time in options. Creative mode unlocks all blueprints and grants your Fabricator resource free instant for all items and structures in the game. Let your imagination go wild!
Story and NPCs
The 1.0 update features an overhaul of the existing NPC and quest system, expanding their scope, offering more background detail and more story. We’ve also added some cheery new characters you’ll meet along the way, like this little guy:
The game is technically open ended, generating an infinite variety of Salvage Sectors and outposts with procedural layouts to explore. But should you choose to, you can opt to pass a (clearly signposted) point of no return and bring the Scavenger’s story to an end.
Steam achievements
We’ve added Steam achievements to the full build. Collect them all!
New products to manufacture
The factory side of the game has also been expanded, with multiple new items to manufacturer and sell. Factory complexity has been markedly increased with higher ingredient products to create.
Holomap
The 1.0 comes with tonnes of new features and quality of life improvements. One of them is the indoor holomap. You can already use this out in space, but now you can track where you are while you explore the sometimes vast derelict space wrecks and outposts you will encounter while you scavenge.
And much more…
There are too many new features to write out here, so do check the 1.0 changelog below for more details. Many are based on popular requests such as renaming containers, the x5 craft button, more enemies and more scenery indoors.
Alongside the new features, there are also a slew of new bug fixes, balancing changes and pacing tweaks.
Final thoughts
It’s been a wild ride from when we started this project back in the dying days of the pandemic in 2021, to where we are now.
Two people making a game like this isn’t always so easy, and I want to thank everyone who helped me and Sarah make this project a reality, from all the beta testers and early access adopters, anyone who took the time to file a bug, and everyone else who helped along the way.
Al and Sarah
V1.0 Changelog:
New Biome
- Added a new quadrant with new Research Vessel sector type, with unique interiors to explore.
- New trash for final quadrant.
- Three new cubit elements specific to quadrant.
- Added several new stock items specific to quadrant.
- Updated sell stock questline for final quadrant.
Creative mode
- Let your imagination go wild and build the Rig of your dreams! Due to popular demand, you can now toggle Creative Mode at any time in Options > Game. This will give you all the blueprints and unlock free unlimited crafting from your Fabricator without needing any ingredients. Remember you can toggle many other difficulty sliders at any time there too, including hunger rate, fuel efficiency and max Entity difficulty level.
NPCs/Quests/Ending
- Added (optional) ending to game with save prompt before proceeding. Follow the questlines and complete your goals to finish the game and conclude the story.
- Significant restructure of NPCs. Some collection quests persist between jumps and reward with unique blueprints. Must complete certain NPC questlines before advancing quadrant.
- Addition of narrative elements to quests and rewrite of dialog across many areas.
- Added new NPC.
- New monolith types.
- New disks and runestones for updated fetch quests.
- Update actor sfx on NPCs.
New Features
- Steam achievements.
- Added holomap for when inside ships or mines, with three levels of zoom. This only shows the rooms you have been in. No more getting lost in the mines!
- Added lots of interior decoration and props to all interior locations.
- Added dynamic and pulsing lighting for atmosphere in interiors.
- Added new Entity types indoors to make combat more varied inside.
- Improved procedural generation for ship interiors, removes rare overlapping areas.
- Added new room types to Mining Outpost.
- Show item amounts when receiving NPC rewards.
- New ultra rare trash.
- Improved icons and forward arrow on quadrant map.
QoL
- Added “Fabricate x5” button to fabricate five items with one click. Due to popular demand.
- Can RENAME all Lockers, Autostorage and Machines. Due to popular demand. Got a locker just for Gold? A machine just for Steel? No problem, just click on the name in the inventory panel and edit the name. This shows on the pop up when you are near it too, so it’s easy to find them again. Will also save load.
- Added rig thruster Fuel Burn Rate difficulty slider to Game > Options. Another popular request.
Balance
- Balanced many ingredients, recipes and costs across Product line and other items for better progression and to better stratify across quadrants, requiring more engagement with NPCs, stock and factory.
- Increased grenade throw distance, reduced player damage from own grenades.
- Increase Thruster Fuel stack to 50.
- Adjust permit costs.
- Shotguns will only sometimes gib mining rocks if low health.
- Rig thruster fuel uses 2 oxygen.
- Revert Grapple 2 ingredients to Steel not magnet.
- Balance Laser Rifle and Shotgun.
- Rebalanced occurance of Freighters across the different quadrants so you will always encounter the larger ones later.
- Interior Entity balancing
System
- Removed GameAnalytics and related options and text.
- Fixed option menu labels to show correct Max Entity Cap and Base Attack intervals.
- Reduced debug output to player.log
- Remove pop up on starting game.
- Added difficulty and creative mode notice on New Run.
- Hide goals when inventory is open.
- Corrected Discord link.
Optimisation
- Reduced vram footprint by over 2gb.
- Better Steam Deck support - this means the main build will now run on Steam Deck. I will leave the low texture build option for lower spec systems.
Bug fixes
- Fix freighter in sector one to ensure disks for quest.
- Fix large freight ship interior sometimes clipping into rooms
- Fix skip tutorial to give algae recipe.
- Tools now don’t shrink too small fully on conveyors.
- Tweak interior spacewreck algorithm to prevent overlapping dead ends.
- Disabled hologram on terminal.
- Interior enemies scale level properly
- Fix telescanner sfx to handle double-clicking or very quick target on/off.
- Fixed crate contents to have more items and not just 1 item mostly.
- Corrected various recipe errors.
- Update blueprint shop to not include recipes you are given.
- Address issue in atomizer autofiller.
- Update farm asteroid enemies to include Orb and Rusher sometimes.
- Adding missing stock from blueprint menu.
- Can only toggle flashlight in movement or placement mode.
- Conveyors and factory machines do not pick up drones.
- Drones will activate on save/load
- Added dynamic queue title visibility in fabricator menu.
- Fixed jump drive labeling.
- Correctly updated hunger and fuel burn rates on menu close in game.
- Fix issue save loaded dead scav and scientist NPCs. Previously erroneously reset the NPC until next jump.
- Delivery shuttle hatch status now saves and loads correctly.
- Fixed bug where the delivery guy would load at scale zero on save/load cycle.
- Added check for incorrect array save to allow legacy saves on industrial quadrant drop zone to load However I strongly recommend restarting your playthrough with this build.
- Fixed entity that died from barrels not despawning correctly.
- FIxed missing colliders on some interior props.
- Improved ship interior detection.
- Improved interior enemy colliders.
- Many more various bug fixes and tweaks.
- Fix atomiser bug losing input item if input while full
- Fix laser rifle and pistol colliding with player at very high speeds
- Fix door locks on space wrecks and balanced rates
- Fixed erroneous colliders on indoor enemies
- Fixed erroneous spawn of enemies in some rooms
- Landing on an asteroid removes a tag
- Updated Factory to receive 3 ingredients
- Cannot accidentally close inventory when you are editing a machine name
