Patch will be released at 11pm US-East on December 22nd.

Discuss these patch notes here: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=49465

* New ship: Patrol Cadet
* New ship: Ares Dog Sled
* Cleaned up the Ares War Chariot texture map
* Added glow to Ares War Chariot
* Added glowmap for Hephaestus Machine
* Added new look for James Watt
* Added Interdiction Frigate texture and glow map
* Added new ships: Hephaestus Crystal Machine, Demonic Wattage
* Added in Global Christmas drops
* Added some explore goals to some of the first missions in Nexus to better guide the new player to the next galaxy
* Adjusted stats on Cadet's Firstline shield

* Many client performance optimizations were added.
* Improved the turning precision especially on low fps client.
* Asynchronized the logic fps and render fps. (your CPU will keep doing logic frame while waiting after the GPU to finish drawing).
* Removed frameskip from the lagkiller, since it was made pretty much deprecated by the async rendering.
* Limited the number of floaties rendered per frame so that they spread more efficiently.
* Tweaked medium quality so that its smaller increment from low quality performance wise.
* Enabled the culling on just about everything
* Some performance improvements in the client logic code.
* Threaded some parts of the rendering
* Items will not take any damage in arena galaxy anymore.
* Removed Gear Glue from global drop lists
* Replaced Ancient Pax Medal mission rewards/requirements with Paxian Medallions
* Replaced gremlins with forced turn on Big Greenie bases

* Made all common very low tech (0-4) pulse guns track better to help newer players hit stuff
* Made all the very low level AI's (< lvl 20) have worse tracking on their weapons to compensate and make them easier to dodge
* Made it so the message "Report back to [base name]" when you complete a mission will simply say "Report to [base name]" if the start and end bases are not the same for the mission to reduce some confusion
* Made it so pinned chat tabs are now saved and loaded. (so if you disable them all, they won’t come back on client restart).
* Made the target window use the same kind of rendering as the floaty, so that it can be rendered less often at lower quality settings.


* Fixed a crash related to particles (mausoleum).
* Fixed a bunch of warp effect bugs.
* Fixed some scrollbar issue covering part of the tables. (inventory/tradebase).
* Fixed the culling algorithm so that it work better for our needs
* Fixed a bug that caused team flags to always be redownloaded.
* Fixed the timer display error for the Imperial Coronation
* Fixed a Paxian exploration mission
* Fixed a bug causing error messages to not show on login.
* Fixed a bug that caused mission indicator to not update when exploring a galaxy.
* Fixed lots of server crashes.
* Fixed an error with the overloaders sheet, only change is size, most are the same size though
* Hopefully fixed the bug when undocking and ending up ultra far.
* Attempted a fix on the multithread texture load (create a threadload.txt empty file in your ss2 folder to enable it for testing, be warned that it could crash your pc if there is still issues in it)
* finally fixed (at least, i hope so !, wasnt able to reproduce it anymore) the ai issues that caused them to stop thinking (dg ai drifting/out of sync, mining slaves not working, fighters not returning and many more).