Pioneer 2026-09-07

What began life as a simple bugfix release to fix the occasional surface-to-orbit terrain spike has grown with each passing month until it became the autumnal harvest bounty we set before you today. In this veritable cornucopia of new features you'll find major improvements to the flight HUD, new and improved Rayleigh-Mie terrain lighting for atmospheric planets, visible thruster exhaust trails and dust kicked up on planetary surfaces, smuggler's holds to hide your ill-gotten cargo, and more!

Visual Improvements

Rayleigh-Mie Atmospheric Terrain Lighting

Thruster Plumes & Shield Heating

User Interface

Flight Reticle and Radar Landing Aids

We've completely revamped the flight UI, implementing a new local gravity display, current thrust-to-weight ratio display, and a thruster activity indicator. The radar has received the ability to display the docking pad you need to land on, and the central reticle now shows a line-and-tick helper to assist you in orienting your ship to the landing pad correctly.

Orbit Apoapsis / Periapsis Altitude Display

All text elements of the flight display got upgraded to use our new shadowed text rendering tech, improving visibility while maintaining readability over bright surfaces. We also finally added a readout displaying your current Apoapsis / Periapsis height while you're in orbit.

Other Features

OpenAL

Pioneer has received a more modern audio backend using the OpenAL Soft library. Aside from nice technical improvements, the major features of this backend are support for Binaural Rendering (HRTF) for headphone users and a simulation of the Doppler effect that Pioneer was completely lacking.

Smuggler's Hold

A feature long-discussed among the development team has finally been added to the game - now you can install shielded cargo spaces in your empty passenger cabins, disguised as simple blank walls to fool any cops who come knocking on your airlock. These cargo spaces provide a certain amount of shielded cargo capacity which cannot be detected by a police scan. Beware though - if you have more illegal cargo than shielded hold space, you will still be caught and fined for all of the goods you are carrying.

Load Mission Cargo

If you dock at a station with no room in your cargo hold, you no longer have to undock and re-dock to pick up the mission cargo for someone who wants you to bring their belongings back to them. Simply open the mission details in your Info Screen and click the "Load Cargo" button once you have room in your cargo hold.

And More!

See the changelog below for all of the lovely features and fixes that were merged during this "bugfix" development cycle.

Thanks to all of the Pioneer Contributors for their hard work, and thank you to our users for your continued interest in Pioneer Space Sim!

Full Changelog

Major changes and new features

• Add thrust-to-weight ratio display to flight UI and station screen (#6382)
• Shield heating effect when flying at high speed in atmosphere (#6408)
• Terrain lighting now uses the Rayleigh-Mie atmospheric model (#6285)
• System view frames the entire system at default zoom level (#6422)
• Improve flight reticle display, add orbit apoapsis/periapsis information (#6397)
• Thruster exhaust plumes (#6346)
• Add docking aid to flight reticle (#6373)
• Improved missile exhaust plumes and trails (#6411)
• Autopilot can now fly to the vicinity of a landed ship (#6379)
• OpenAL audio backend, allowing 3D audio (#6188)
• Findperson - New scenarios and greater linguistic variation in flavor strings (#6251)
• Make probability of lava depend on volcanicity (#6390)
• Implement Circular Thrust Indicator (#6387)
• Show percent translation complete for language options (#6370)
• Add URL to translation wiki from language option menu (#6399)
• Avast! Be ye knowin' of the Smuggler's Hold? (#6353)
• Save and recover Comms log (#6361)
• Clarifying fuel pump directions (#6339)
• Add custom "Load cargo" button to cargo pickup missions (#6340)
• Render instanced models using per-frame scratch buffer (#6348)
• UI / HUD tweak: Shorten Hyercloud text (#6333)
• UI: Info box in sector map auto-opens (#6333)
• Pause sound when game is paused (#6333)
• Approximate ring shadow penumbra (#6309)
• Add ObjectViewer button to perfinfo debug view (#6316)
• Show the status of the wanted person (#6298)

Bugfixes / Tweaks

• Donation advertisements display amount of gained reputation and have a more even curve. (#6197)
• Revert "Improve calculations in AIMatchVel (AIChangeVelBy)" (#6296)
• Fix ImGui nag messages related to extending parent boundaries (#6422)
• Automatically open the System View body info window when switching to it (#6422)
• Fix debug-mode invulnerable ships playing damage sounds (#6422)
• Fix system view showing explored systems as unexplored (#6422)
• Decreasing radar minimum range to 50m (#6419)
• Adding missing DSMiner engines, adjusting plume sizes (#6403)
• Crew Contracts: Do not show the $1 button twice (#6416)
• Fix nil lastStockUpdate value, crash when exiting hyperspace (#6417)
• Fix for HUD trails not displaying in rotating frames (#6384)
• Fix ImGui error message of extending parent boundaries with SetCursorPos (#6380)
• BulkShips fix for running out of parking slots (#6385)
• Fix for HudTrail and missile targetting crashes (#6394)
• Search & Rescue mission checks cargo hold for additional fuel (#6377)
• Fix skybox background glitch - Scale down the skybox in SystemMap (#6398)
• Fix bug that made persistent NPC names (lobby, police, etc.) non-persistent (#6401)
• Advice module rewording (#6351)
• Font padding for umlaut in (#6358)
• Fix Kanara translation tokens (#6355)
• Make Cargo names upper case (#6357)
• Limit the number of messages on the saved Comms log (#6364)
• Round off new commodity stock on news event (#6365)
• Fix placeAdvert error in Scoop.lua (#6335)
• Make thruster visual more consistent (#6342)
• Fix typo in MISSILE_NAVAL_FLAVOURTEXT: personel -> personnel (#6337)
• Make giant stars circular in system overview (#6341)
• Add string for missing hypercloud analyzer message (#6328)
• Balance number of combat and scout missions (#6310)
• Fixing missing material transparencies (#6347)
• Fix no frame of reference in binary star systems (#6329)
• Fix buildings rendered incorrectly / in the sky, and/or crash to desktop (#6348)
• Scoop mission fix: Game.player.frameBody being nil (#6313)
• Don't mess with velocity if the ship just docked (#6327)
• Fix stale docking clearance timeout & position (centre of planet) (#6325)
• Fix refuel mission crash: TraceRay using stale static geometry (#6321)
• Fix quitting showing death animation: Clear the next lifecycle variable after using it (#6323)
• Reduce the occurrence of random crashes (#6319)
• Make scanning missions survive hyperspace jumps (#6331)
• Fix for Barnard's Star display issues (#6318)
• Fix for station names disappearing (#6332)
• Fix enemies target velocity vector. Draw HUD trails relative to the player (#6315)
• Fix flight log recovery (#6301)
• Start-At fix and log conditional (#6299)
• Fix overlapping craters, and early out of GetHeights (#6292)
• Fix News debug window supporting multiple 'delete' advert buttons (#6308)
• Fix error shown in the Language selection list (#6290)

Internal Changes

• Null audio backend for running headless unit tests (#6413)
• Fix return-value warning in PiGuiRenderer.cpp (#6374)
• Add text shadow capability (#6388)
• OpenAL Soft contribution added in Authors and About dialog (#6396)
• Remove redundant japanese languages ja-Hira and ja_JP (#6405)
• Upgrade Dear Imgui to 1.92.8 (#6356)
• Update CMake and CI build files (#6359)
• Remove unused "set as target" strings (#6363)
• clang-format: Add SpaceBeforeCpp11BracedList: true (#6362)
• Remove debian/ directory - maintained outside source tree (#6367)
• Remove obsolete navtunnel code (#6297)
• .desktop: Prefer Wayland over X11 (#6287)