Greetings Adoring Fans,

With the announcement of the winners of the Big Mode Game Jam 2025 - several weeks ago - we were struck with inspiration that it would be a good idea to share the bounty of progress we made over the preceding months. After the Big Mode Game Jam stream, we were overwhelmed with sympathy for our players. There just weren't enough features to communicate the information they so desperately desired. As such, we dove in and worked tirelessly to bring about the improvements that you gamers craved. Here are some of them *gesturing below*:

Mission Ranks

Astral Avarice is no longer a pass/fail game. We now score each mission based on how much time it took to complete. If you try really hard, you might be able to acquire the elusive "X" rank (in which you make it mathematically impossible for you to complete a mission with a victory).

Improved UI

We've reorganized the in-game UI to better communicate the statistics about our beautifully hand-crafted buildings. The UI also takes up less space, so you can now see 20% more of the game you're playing!

Visualizations

This is where the info dump begins. On release, Astral Avarice showed the gravity fields of various planets; but they were perpetually there, constantly judging you. Now you can disable it along with two other visualizations: solar fields and ...

Grid Groups

Not sure if two buildings across the system are connected? Wonder no longer! The grid group visualization colors each independent power grid differently. In the future, we'll also show statistics about each group.

Minimap

Hey look! The grid groups are also in the minimap! Also there's a minimap!

Planet Resources

We decided hovering over planets, looking at the inspector, and reading text is troublesome. Now when you hover over a planet, you can see the resources that planet contains with shiny new icons.

Celestial Movement Detection

In playtests, sometimes players would increase the gravitational fields of their planets, start attracting other planets, and not notice until a collision occurred. After seeing this, we had a decision to make: not do anything to address the issue and laugh at players as they unintentionally caused the demolition of entire celestial bodies; or warn them. We chose the latter.

That's a small taste of the extensive work we've completed over these past weeks. We're nearing a point we're very excited about. We're working on improved tutorials and level progression. Soon, we'll have a second version with all these features and more!

I know we'll see you there.

Love, 

Archibald Faugno and William Erignac