You are Jack Sharp, a daring adventurer, stranded on a dangerous, wild planet known as K’Tharsis. K’Tharsis is a former mining outpost, gradually becoming a ghost colony as the Antigravium Crystal Rush is over and the inhabitants struggle for survival.

There’s a constant struggle for existence on K’Tharsis as desert raiders, runaway slaves and the original natives are always thirsty for blood. They fight the normal people and aliens who live safely behind the walls of the settlements and the last corporate enclaves. There is only one guarantee, and it’s that not everyone is going to survive.

Within Exoplanet, there’s a good balance between classic “shoot-em-up” style gaming, and exploration. There’s a rich set of charismatic characters to meet, many of them based on cult personalities from Western movies with their own motives and hidden secrets. By talking to non-player-characters and listening to the dialogs you will be able to find new, more profitable ways to solve quests, but you will also be able to unearthen treasure as you will be able to influence them. The inhabitants of K'tharsis have their own background, motives, problems, quirks, and their own story to tell. Play your cards right, and they might even warn you on upcoming assassination attempts.

The team behind Exoplanet took their inspiration from classic games such as Fallout, TESIII Morrowind, Gothic, and the Firefly TV-series. Combining all of these, they defined Exoplanet as a space western universe, where the protagonist benefits from cybernetic augmentations and hoverbikes, but is still very reliant on his ever trusty revolver.

Exoplanet: First Contact is currently available on Steam Early Access for $19.99.

It is an important update for us, because in it we have reached not one, but two major milestones, which open big possibilities for the future updates.

The characters have received a makeover, with new faces, facial hair customization as well as skin tones. This should help a lot with making them more memorable as well as move away from the feeling that they are identical clones with different hats.

The second big change, while invisible to the naked eye, is no less important: the switch of all non-aggressive NPCs to the new AI system, which should finally allow scripting believable behavior in the future updates. We hope that you’ll enjoy playing this update!

PERFORMANCE

• Improved performance due to shadows calculation optimization
• Loading is 10-30% faster depending on your PC specs

WORLD

• Added Jack’s new voiced lines in certain places
• Added a small new area to the Windscream Canyon
• Added cut and broken variations of trees
• Added seedlings of palms and trees

VISUALS

• Overhauled most of the NPC’s appearances with new faces, skin tones, attire and accessories

GAMEPLAY

• Equipping weapons is now animated
• Using a scanner is now also animated
• You no longer have to stop to reload a shotgun
• Polished reloading animations to get rid of jerking
• Added more variety to the ‘getting damaged’ animations
• Added a variety of character impact sounds
• Added reloading sounds

QUESTS

• It is now possible to start the Lost Arphant quest by talking to Juggo first
• You can complete Getting Rid of Scalp Hunters quest if you killed the Scalp Hunters on your own
• Account for the player killing off the scalp hunters on his own
• A couple of adjustments to the starting scene
• Bribe is now a valid way to get into the fort
• Added dialogs to the fort’s gate guards

NPCs

• Non-aggressive NPCs play different animations when turning towards the player depending on how much they have to turn to face the player
• Added talking animations to the NPCs that missed them

QUESTS

• It is now possible to start the Lost Arphant quest by talking to Juggo first
• You can complete Getting Rid of Scalp Hunters quest if you killed the Scalp Hunters on your own
• Account for the player killing off the scalp hunters on his own
• A couple of adjustments to the starting scene
• Bribe is now a valid way to get into the fort
• Added dialogs to the fort’s gate guards

NPCs

• Non-aggressive NPCs play different animations when turning towards the player depending on how much they have to turn to face the player
• Added talking animations to the NPCs that missed them

KNOWN ISSUES

• Some players still can experience crashes on random areas
• Sometimes the game can crash if you click mouse keyboard buttons during loading
• Sometimes the game can crash during autosave

We are working hard to get rid of every single bug but some of them are really hard to fix because due to their strange behavior it is hard to reproduce them.If you experience any critical bugs, please let us know via our Discord channel[discord.gg]. We will try to fix everything as soon as possible.You can also report about bugs on technical support forum or send us your log to support@alersteam.com with description of the problem and your PC specs.You can find your .log file here: Documents\Alersteam\Exoplanet First Contact\system.log

Also, if you have any other questions or need help (game crashes / freezes / can't launch), feel free to add me (@bijou) and I will try to help you. As usual, we recommend to start a new game.

Exoplanet will also introduce innovative elements of survival to give the player a more immersive experience. If you choose to turn these options on, Jack will need sleep, food and water to be able to survive. Not having enough of either will affect his physical and mental condition! So make sure Jack roasts plenty of bitebugs and juicy hornhog steaks to keep it healthy, ready to take on the next bandits!

Exoplanet: First Contact will be the first Chapter, the major part of the Exoplanet’s Universe. Future Chapters will discover new adventures of Jack and his friends on this and other planets.