This update introduces gas. This is another layer of "debris" that damaged/destroyed ships leave behind.
The initial motivation for adding this was to provide motivation for player to not harvest one group of asteroids only, and instead spread their harvesters to multiple locations, which would create motivation to fight in multiple locations. As such, the first effect of gas is that any resource asteroid inside a gas gets reduced mining rate. This will go up to 95%, but that only really happens if multiple resourcers mine the same asteroid. I've also changed harvester AI to spread out between nearby asteroids, so you don't have to micromanage them.
There are also other gas effects, such as slightly lowered armor efficiency, repair beam rate reduction, so ship getting pummeled cannot be kept alive by repair beams indefinitely. Ships inside gas also get reduced damage they take from using abilities, so you can use gas cloud to get more juice out of that reactor overload or weapon overcharge.
Gas is created when some object takes damage, and then spread to nearby area, and eventually completely disappears (this can take several minutes). Damage to asteroids caused by mining creates more gas than by regular damage. Gas is additionally created whenever resources are "lost", such as when destroyed cargo hold is losing resources, ship is destroyed with not enough storage left in jettisoned containers, cargo transport (fighter type) is destroyed, or when resource asteroid is damaged and mineable resources are lowered.
The performance of rendering of gas is right now not very good. You might want to lower the details on it, and if you're using high resolution monitor, perhaps lowering gas resolution to quarter will still look acceptable.
This update also brings a slight visual improvement to UI. This includes changed UI textures and colors (still not final), basic animations, and UI sounds. There is still a problem that UI is updated in a thread that runs at 20 FPS, so animations won't look very smooth (this also makes their speed dependent on game speed, which is less than ideal). I'll hopefully fix this in next update.
Lastly, you can now financially support development of Soil on Ko-fi (https://ko-fi.com/soilrts) if you wish so, and have nothing better to waste your money on. You can of course still download and play the game for free, and you will get nothing in return for your money, except for a big thank you and a "supporter" role on discord if you wish so, which also won't give you any benefit. (you can probably guess I don't work in sales or marketing)
