In three days, Starcom: Unknown Space graduates from Early Access. It's been over four years since I started work on this game, and over a year and a half since it entered Early Access. Thanks to everyone who has come along on this journey! I also wanted to give a quick shout out to the players who have been helping out by answering new player questions in the discussion forums, providing large amounts of detailed feedback via F8, suggesting the game to their favorite streamers, etc. This has been a very busy week, here are the highlights: Last week Kepler 17318 was promoted to default and there have been no reports of unexpected new issues. I feel pretty confident at this point with the Release Candidate. Yesterday I uploaded a new build to the opt-in unstable branch. This fixes one minor anomaly bug and a dozen or so typos/grammatical issues. The bigger change is that it implements the image thumbnail load optimization I [url=https://steamcommunity.com/app/1750770/allnews/]talked about last week[/url]. The short of it is that the game no longer loads a full sized version of every anomaly/item/character image that it [i]might[/i] need. Instead it loads a small thumbnail until it knows it needs the full image. This speeds up initial loading time and reduces the baseline memory footprint substantially. It's [i]possible[/i] this memory reduction might help with the outstanding technical issue some players are reporting with older integrated Intel laptop GPUs, but that's just a hope. Since this change could introduce new bugs and the current build is very solid, I will not be promoting it to default before launch. In other news, the Youtuber/streamer Splattercat, who has helped Starcom's visibility enormously over the years (and indie games in general) [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mtqN7KHG2Q]uploaded a new video on Wednesday.[/url] He also mentioned likely streaming(?) the game on launch day. Anyone who enjoys learning about new and upcoming indie games should follow his channel. I've also started to investigate what I want to tackle in the next post-launch update, but I'll save that until next week when I hopefully will have a clearer picture and a bit more bandwidth. And I finally figured out why the workshop home page wasn't showing player designs by default: I had originally set it up as visible only to players who had the game, which apparently prevents the home page from displaying anything, even if you had the game. Until Monday! - Kevin