D-minus 5

Soon!™

That's the goal for finishing the next prerelease, which involves quite a lot of changes across the board for items, that's for sure! We're a week behind due to that content detour I mentioned earlier, otherwise it probably would've been ready for the weekend, but as is I'm hopeful it can be done within the next week. There's actually still a lot left to do, but it's a ton of little things that individually shouldn't take much time (for example applying all of the weapon changes discussed on stream, none of which have yet made it into the game itself :P).

This past week it took a while to get the full extent of the new Trap Extractor mechanics working, but that is complete and looking pretty promising for anyone interested in doing a more serious trapper build. Most of the concept can be seen in this demo gif:

The planned Core Analyzer revamp was also completed, which unexpectedly turned into also replacing the Puncture critical for piercing weapons with a very different Impale critical :)

I've even been adding some new common parts, including four new engines, most of which have a new Hyb. prefix, and I bet some of you could guess what that means/does with help from the art here:

I still have yet to decide how to handle the changelog this time around because I normally list item changes as line items, but there are way too many this time xD. I will be offering my charts to help pinpoint changes among certain item types, though I mean the text version of the changelog will still need to convey changes in a useful manner as well. Listing everything would have its advantages, but also get kinda crazy :P. I think once Beta 11 releases, everyone is going to have to simply throw out most of their accumulated assumptions about parts in general and rebuild your knowledge of them to reconsider options that did not seem enticing before!

If there's not enough time for it I may end up postponing the NEM update until the following prerelease (to make sure this gets out before too long), and after everyone's got this build in hand I'll probably be writing a blog post about the rebalancing efforts.

*If you don't know what "NEM" refers to, don't worry about it ;)