This one is a *biggie*

It's been incredibly hot here (well over 40c most days)  and this has made development especially challenging.

The big request prioritized by the Patreon was planet landings - and that has now been accomplished! While still in a very primitive form, the first landable celestial body now exists - Alpha 1 Minor, the moon of Alpha 1, can now be landed on. There's even the stub of a mission that will be coming along soon.

For now, you can fly around a little, hop out and run around a little, then get back in your spaceship and fly.

On this patch I converted the map to levels streaming and implemented texture streaming (in hopes of improving performance - we shall see) and the patch notes demonstrate how exhausting it was to produce this patch. The number of bugs was out of control, it required weeks of fixes just to get the streaming to work mostly right, and I'm sure there's still a lot of bugs.

ALPHA 0 Patch 9:

I don't even know. This was an enormous amount of work. The weather was incredibly hot.

* You can land on the moon Alpha 1 Minor.

* There's a first preview of a rescue mission there - but it doesn't work yet.

* You can walk around on Alpha 1 Minor.

* The entire map system migrated to streaming maps to help set up for big things later. It was a massive headache.

* As always feedback on the forum is appreciated, you can go here: https://forum.longplay.games/t/alpha-0-feedback-thread/224 or you can join the chat server and tell us directly! https://matrix.to/#/#longplay_games:matrix.org

This build has some pretty mammoth bugs, it's the first sighting of at least 4 major tech pieces - texture streaming, level streaming, walking around on planets, streaming in a planet map to run around. Holy cow, I'm so tired.