Subspace: Redux — The First Flight Update

Everything a new pilot meets in their first hour, rebuilt — and one very old bug swatted that everybody has been flying with.

Your Weapons Are Visible Again

This is the big one, and it has been wrong for a long time.

Gun rounds, bombs and mines now actually appear. They were firing, travelling and dealing damage the whole time — you just couldn't see any of it. You heard the shot, you saw the damage on the target, and nothing in between.

Engine thrust and afterburner flames are back. Your ship has been running silent-and-dark this whole time.

Impact bursts and explosions show when a round lands.

Loot pickups sparkle again.

If the game has felt strangely flat in a fight, this is why. It should feel very different now.

A Tutorial You Actually Fly

The old tutorial was a wall of text with a button at the end. The new one puts you in a ship.

29 guided steps, flown not read. Each one finishes when you do the thing — thrust, turn, stop, fire, drop, lay, open. You cannot page past a lesson without learning it.

You keep the controls the whole way. Nothing takes your ship off you.

It shows YOUR keys. If you've rebound a control, the tutorial names the key you actually use.

Nothing can hurt you , nothing costs anything, and ESC leaves at any time . Stuck on a step? It moves you along after a while rather than leaving you stranded.

You fly it as Trainee in a Trainer — a deliberately slow, forgiving hull — so your real pilot and your real ship are never involved.

It assumes you have never flown a space game before, and it starts with the thing that catches everyone out: space doesn't slow you down.

It covers flight, stopping, the safe zone and the full stop, energy, your gun, bombs, mines, heat, power settings, your hull's utility, the actionbar and its drawers, your player frame, the radar, the galaxy map, cargo, missions, the story journal, your pilot sheet, targeting, and what happens when you die.

Everywhere Has a Name Now

The galaxy used to be coordinates. Now it's places.

Every sector has a formal designation — "Alpha Quadrant, Sector Gamma Two" . The quadrant tells you whose space you're in; the letter and number climb as you head out toward the rim, so you can hear a location and know roughly where it is without opening a map.

26 landmarks have real names , written for the faction that holds them: Ironhold Gate , Corwin's Anvil and The Rampart in Iron Reach; The Counting House , Escrow and The Grey Market in the Ledger Expanse; Dead Relay Nine , Hollow Run and The Lost Fleet out in the Quiet Gaps; The Spearpoint , Voss Yards and The Slag Fields in the Shattered Crown.

Each faction has a capital : Bastion Prime , Concord Vault , Nowhere , and Throneless — where the Void Ascendancy's chair has stood empty since Vael died.

Sanctum Reach sits at the centre, where the Guild ended.

Your radar names where you are , above the scope. The radar is also a little larger.

The galaxy map answers "what is that?" Hover anywhere and it names the sector, whose space it is, what happens there, and calls out anything worth knowing — a black hole's pull, or a safe zone .

Every New Pilot Gets the Story

A cinematic intro now plays for every new pilot , with full narration and score: the Guild's end at Sanctum Reach, then your own flag's handler meeting you at your home station.

It plays in the live world — real stations, real traffic, real pilots — and the camera pulls out, travels over your ship and settles into flight exactly as the last line lands.

You're held safe while it runs : nothing can shoot you, you can't shoot anyone, and you're off the player list. Any key skips it.

Ships Fly Better

Every hull's thrust is up 50% , and the afterburner is 25% stronger on top of that. Same top speed — you just get there a great deal faster. Everything feels more responsive.

Turning now honours your ship's real turn rate and any upgrades affecting it. Lining up a shot is noticeably easier.

The Trainer is deliberately half as quick in both — it's a school ship.

Controls

Nothing ships unbound. Your gun, bomb and mine now have 1 , 2 and 3 on them by default, and every actionbar slot has a key. No more blank rows in the bindings screen.

Anything you've rebound yourself is left exactly as you set it.

Pilot Fixes

Fixed: a new pilot could arrive wearing a deleted pilot's ship, bounty and level. Every pilot on an account was accidentally sharing one record. Each pilot now keeps their own progress, properly separated.

Deleting a pilot now really deletes them — their quests, their flags, their talents and their friend and ignore lists all go with them. Your account's credits, bank, cargo, hangar and callsign are untouched, as they always were.

Bans, mutes and support tickets deliberately survive a deleted pilot.

Battlegrounds & Arenas

The queue list now reads as cards , not a cramped row: mode, size, level and status where you can actually see them, sorted from lowest level up.

Arenas never get bots. They're rated and pilot-against-pilot by definition — bots were being put in arenas and never in battlegrounds, which was exactly backwards.

Bots only ever top up a battleground that popped short , so a thin queue still gives you a game.

Quests

Four new objective types to build contracts from: Intercept , Disable , Hold and Smuggle .

Quest encounters are public. When a quest spawns hostiles near you, other pilots can see them and pitch in — no more fighting something invisible to everyone else.

Chat

The chat font size setting actually changes the chat now. All of it — the messages, the tabs, and the box you type in.

The window opens at a sensible width and can be dragged out to 60% of your screen. Whatever size you leave it at comes back next time.

Sound

That low hum in the safe zone is quieter. It's the station's own room tone, and it was sitting far too loud under everything else. It's at half volume now, silent during the intro, and — the actual bug — it stops when you leave the safe zone , instead of following you out into open space.

Performance & Polish

Crowded space costs much less. Big fights and busy stations now stream distant ships as light contacts instead of full updates, so a packed sector no longer drags everyone's frame rate down.

Anti-aliasing is off by default for a cleaner baseline frame rate. Turn it back on in Settings if you prefer it.

Tooltips draw above everything else.

Fixed: the world reacting to a mouse you can't see. Hovering over stations no longer triggers while the cursor is hidden.

New title-screen art.