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Although we've had the beta running on Steam for some time -- first to select streamers and YouTubers and then to our itch.io beta participants -- we've been keeping our public-facing store page under wraps until we could truly finalize it.  Please drop by the Community Hub and join the conversation!

We've also made a new build available on Steam and itch.io for those in the beta (0.1.18359).  We'll also update the Alienware Indie Game Challenge demo on Steam within the next few hours (the build number will be slightly higher than 18359 but the update notes below still apply).

As part of this, and as part of the work we're doing to bring Aven Colony to Playstation 4 and Xbox One with our partners at Team17, we've also been doing tons of optimization work.  We're happy to report that large colonies should now be significantly faster for most of you, due to tons of optimizations to both graphics and gameplay.  On my own 3-year-old development PC, a large colony in Tenari Glacier with 400 colonists is a full 10-12 fps faster than a version of the game from early March.

Here are the full update notes:

New features:

• New tunnel variations!  All tunnel types now have several variants and we pick randomly between them
• The Hospital now shows the Colonists overlay when being dragged -- this makes it much easier to see which areas are actually having problems when responding to a plague infection
• Resupply pods now have a green particle system to show when a drop pod has been summoned
• The Drone Auto-Repair policy now attempts to automatically replace any tunnels destroyed by lightning
• Pressing 'X' now also closes the expedition UI in addition to opening it (or whatever key you've mapped it to)
• The Expedition Center's radar, welder repair arm, and flaps now animate depending on the Expedition Center's state
• Winter visor frost sounds now have more variety and generally sound much nicer

Art improvements and fixes:

• Greatly improved the building implosion / destruction effect; this now as a much nicer particle effect and makes the building fall while being destroyed
• Improved colony icon in the expedition UI; made it smaller and gave it a drop shadow
• Improved Energy Battery textures

Tuning / balancing / minor changes:

• Fixed a bug where you could build a tier-2 or tier-3 building in the same time as a tier 1; building a T2 or T3 building directly now takes almost as much time as building a Tier 1 and then immediately upgrading it
• Drone construction speed is now roughly 5% faster to compensate
• Sandy Gulch: added a distant Gold mine
• Farms/Greenhouses now have GREEN power lights when using Potash
• Zorium plants now have ORANGE power lights when in Low Burn Mode
• Wind Turbines now have YELLOW power lights when in Fan Mode
• Geothermals now have YELLOW power lights when in Steam Recovery Mode
• Increased the battery power usage rate of Colony Boosts
• Reduced the research time for expedition tech and Colony Boosts by ~15% each
• Fixed issues where resupply pod beacons could be outside the range of the starting Construction Drone Station in the sandbox versions of Vanaar, Valley of Death, and Arido Mesa
• The Filtration Boost technology is now 44% more effective at improving air quality
• All building repairs have a Nanite cost roughly 1/3 cheaper
• The drone auto-repair policy now ONLY repairs buildings when the cost of repairs would be at least 1 nanite - i.e. below 90% integrity. This significantly cuts down on the amount of drones flying around like crazy repairing stuff constantly in a large colony
• Greatly improved winter visor frost sounds, with much more variety. We now play a 'slow' visor frost sound along with the fast one, both with more randomness in their timing. Also, both are a bit quieter

Performance Improvements:

• Fixed issues where lots of small meshes were accidentally being set to shadow casting when they shouldn't have been; this alone improves Draw and GPU time 2-15% on different PCs
• Storage buildings, drone stations, and Park buildings now eat less CPU time
• Trade, Immigration, and Expedition Centers: fixed their flashing lights to eat less CPU, the vessels to do less physics and not interact with the UE4 navigation system, and improved them to call Blueprint less often
• Birds, shard storms, resource tiles (iron, copper, etc), and air quality updates eat less CPU time
• Tweaks to call UE4 Blueprint functions less often and pre-cache timeline curves instead of calling UE4 Blueprint for them every time
• Tons of collision optimizations; wwitched collision detection to use simplified meshes around buildings for better performance
• Updating colonist health, happiness, commute morale, etc now eats less CPU time
• Tons of other little performance improvements

Bug fixes:

• Fixed a bug where construction drones could occasionally fly off into the wild blue yonder and you'd be left with only 1 or 2 drones at a Drone Hub that should hold 1 or 2 more
• Fixed a very rare stability issue
• Dead colonists now save & load properly
• You can now select an Expedition Center by clicking on its associated expedition vessel, just as you can with an Immigration Center or Trade Hub
• Plague & creep spores can no longer glide downward until they get close enough to the target building (8 tiles)
• You can now once again select a vessel in the expedition UI by clicking on the ship icon itself
• Lots of fixes to cases where clicking on a building in the wrong spot sometimes wouldn't select it properly
• Fixed problems with SHIPE audio ducking and changing audio settings in the gameplay menu
• Fixed issues with the player camera interpenetrating the Prometheus Lander
• Fixed a bug where air quality could get too low in the Holo-Sim tutorials
• Improved camera movement when you double-click on the terrain outside the colony
• In Tenari Glacier, the trade contract for "Export Starglow" actually traded 700; changed it to match the mission text, which says 600
• Improvements to C-drone movement to make it fly through buildings less often, particularly the Lander at the start of Vanaar
• Fixed a bug where the Drone Auto-Repair policy did not charge Nanites as it should have; we now charge between 2 and 3 nanites per season, for a cost of 8-12 nanites per sol -- we do this immediately when repairs begin up to the limit, and then charge the rest at the end of the season as appropriate
• The camera now rotates while auto-panning to a point if the ending look-at position OR the final camera position will be outside the world bounds (i.e., if you click on a notification about incoming plague spores which are coming at you from outside the map bounds)
• The Drone Auto-Repair policy should now remove the correct amount of Nanites at the end of each season IF they have not already been removed by this policy while repairing buildings during this season.
• Buildings now count other buildings toward their prerequisites even if they're out of power (or creep-infected, or non-functional for any other reason). 
• Parks and residential structures now properly lose structural integrity just like all other buildings.
• Fixed issues with boost sound effects being too loud when too many were activated all at once.
• Tenari Glacier: Fixed a bug where it wasn't possible to place a Geothermal on top of a distant steam vent
• The glowy construction material no longer animates while the game is paused
• The camera should now properly pan toward the correct position when you double-click on a point on the terrain way outside the game bounds
• Fixed various camera collision issues in Azara Falls, Vanaar, Tenari Glacier, Arido Mesa, and Hyla's Crescent
• Fixed bug where it was possible to immobilize the player camera by building a Skyscraper on top of it
• Police drones no longer spawn simultaneously on top of each other when you build a Tier 2 or Tier 3 Police Drone Hub
• Fixed bug with being able to build on top of alien ruins in Azara Falls

Paul Tozour & the Mothership Entertainment team