As most of you already know we have been really busy working on SimplePlanes 2 but we managed to find some time to bring you a small-ish update to fix some concerning bugs we had been seeing affecting career, and while we were at it, spice things up a bit with a visual refresh, new celestial bodies and big performance improvements.

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It's no secret some of the contracts added in 1.3 have been technically challenging, we released multiple patches to try to address various issues making it hard to complete the Space Station and Rover contracts.

Even with all those efforts there were still various game breaking bugs we struggled to reproduce, but thanks to all your bug reports we think we have finally fixed them for good 🤞.

Sadly if you got a contract really stuck it may need to be canceled and restarted, if you find yourself in a hard to solve situation let us know.

On the topic of Career Mode, if you like to play in the Solar System there's been a lot of progress by @SatelliteTorifune[simplerockets.com] on a mod free Custom Career for RSS. If you are interested you can check out a preview and share your feedback here[simplerockets.com].

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We didn't want to leave you with just a couple bug fixes, so to spice things up we have done a pass through the whole Image Effects to enhance the visuals of the game. You can expect a brighter and more colorful experience now, especially in Map View, as well as better looking lens flares when looking at the sun.

Disclaimer: Droods can sungaze safely thanks to their helmets, staring at the Sun can cause irreversible damage.

Additionally we have finally caught one of the most reported bugs ever, that caused the player orbit line to look black in some devices. No more squinting to see your orbits!

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The keen eyes may have noticed something odd in that Map View screenshot... you are right! We have made from scratch our Skybox, in an effort kickstarted by @Brixxter[simplerockets.com] with a Blender project set up to render cubemaps.

From that point I got a bit carried and overhauled the whole project, leading to what now is not just a new, better looking and more realistic skybox for the game, but also a setting to bump up its resolution to 2x and 4x on PC, for all the low FoV enjoyers.

We have decided to share this project with everyone so you can make your own skyboxes, as far as I know it's the most advanced skybox generator available for free, you need some knowledge of blender to use it (both shaders and geometry nodes) but it is surprisingly easy to get into it. The skybox in the game has a secret that has been removed from the blender project, can you find it?

Download the project here[jundroo.blob.core.windows.net]

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As the Droods cleared their telescope lenses to capture the skybox in such high resolutions they noticed a strange object near Sergeaa. Upon further inspection it seems to be a Proto-Earth which they have decided to call Oord.

Strangely it has water in its equator, the best theory so far is that its strange orbit, causing it to have a permanent partial eclipse by Sergeaa, has lowered its temperatures enough to sustain liquid water, probably brought by recent comet impacts.

Huge thanks to @HyperPatch[simplerockets.com] for letting us use his Young Earth Exoplanet[simplerockets.com] as a template, when I saw it I fell in love with it and knew it was the perfect fit for the style of Oord.

There is also a new outer body in the system with a really dark and interesting story, including the first song added to the game in half a decade! Can you unveil the mysteries behind Cladh? No gifs for this one, you will have to visit it for yourself to see it.

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As per usual there's more to this update, you can find all the changes in the Release Notes[simplerockets.com], like the new Vizzy blocks for the Texture Widget in the MFDs or fixes to some memory leaks that have been affecting RAM usage for years.