Despite Holidays, LGM made some great progress with Starpoint Gemini 3, and are only one step away from reaching half of planned Early Access Updates.

So, what is the cornerstone of this update? Devs claim they are the three pillars - first infusion of extra life into the Universe, the new Starchart to give players a much better tool when understanding where the heck they're going and how this Universe looks like, and finally pretty extensive batch of improvements and fixes to existing features based on what players reported and suggested in forum discussions.

Once you boot up the game, how will these changes spice up your life? It's simple really – open a Starchart and notice you have a proper map that shows much more details and area objects. Each object has a pop-up window describing in short what a specific location is, where it's exactly located and what's its purpose. The Starchart also has 2 layers – local sectors and overall Universe map. Second layer allows players to cycle through all distant Star systems and see what local maps are available. Best thing is – you can access and browse sector maps within a specific system map even if you're not physically located in that system at all. Ladies and gentleman, you can now snoop around and determine your next target for pirating even if you're sitting half a galaxy away!

When your spying of global maps is over, and you finally hit the road in any given direction, be careful of traffic – it's gotten a helluva more dense. Trade convoys, individual ships going about their business, everybody using T-gates, Starpoints and Nav Buoys... you'll see much more stuff happening around. All these events are to be considered as a welcome opportunity or simply as greater variety of targets to plunder. But beware of unintended consequences – AI got first batch of updates, so trade ships and convoys will have armed escorts that won't sit idly by while you plunder the hell out of them.

Check here for the official announcement and the latest patch-notes.