The Zenith Frontier alpha continues! In this weekly update we have continued filling the environment with interesting and varied cosmic bodies. A significant amount of work has been completed on the backend - not all of this is currently visible to the player, but upcoming world object and UI work will bring this to light.

Here’s a list of what shipped in today’s update:

Refactored environment objects and procedural generators. This is intended to future-proof the environment for upcoming roadmap items.

System name generation. System names are now being procedurally generated. They do not yet make use of the contextual descriptions based on their characteristics such as “Useva Trade System” or “Quellian Maw.” This is so that we can test how unique and distinctive names produced by the generator are currently - which makes it much easier for the player to navigate the galaxy and easily hold a mental geospatial model.

Star properties. Stars now have the following properties: mass; diameter; luminosity; surface temperature; lifetime; habitable zone orbital radii; stable orbital radii limits; and frost line orbital radius. These are not just for flavour, but will greatly influence the planets that orbit them through the formation simulation - down to the scarcity of each natural resource, difficulty of colony founding; and the presence and composition of an atmosphere.

Other. We have also added a placeholder background visualisation to the main menu (waiting for procedural planet rendering) and transitioning to and from the (currently empty) strategic map.