One of the things we’ve always been quietly proud of in Star Traders is the wide variety of faces available within the game.

But even before we added official modding support to the game, some of the first unofficial mods were graphics replacements players created to further customize the game’s character art or add in their own faces & clothes. Now with fully-supported Steam Workshop modding available, it’s even easier, more reliable, and we’ve seen some modders getting pretty creative with it.

So creative… we may have gotten a little jealous. Seeing modders getting a chance to put a whole new spin on the game, from tributes to other franchises to rebalances that create new playstyle opportunities… not to mention all the straight-up improvements some modders are claiming… “Improved Ship Combat Icons,” “Sound FX Overhaul,” “Larger Cargo Holds” …this is what comes from creating a Captain simulator, everyone thinks they can run the ship better. ;)

So, we dug deep into our graveyard of code fragments, searching for a half-finished time-travel wormhole we’d written off all the way back in Early Access as too dangerous to complete, and let our wounded pride throw caution to the solar winds. Why a time travel wormhole, you might ask? Because how else in the midst of Cyber Knights development, spring travel, and 😱 tax season were we going to find the time for this: a full faces revamp featuring entirely new*, 100% original** crew art now available to you within the game.



We asked Andrew to art better this time, and boy did he! While the original faces were a collaboration between Andrew as Creative Director and our professional art team partners, the revamped crew faces are a fully in-house effort only "lightly" inspired from their original work, and we think you’re going to love the results.



Each face features:

• 20-50% more pixels
• fine-tuned adjustments to key facial features
• bold new interpretations of classic sci-fi tropes
• exciting speculative guesses at alternate evolutionary possibilities
• increased immersion through stronger representation of the effects of centuries of drinking the water-fuel

Okay, so you’ve hopefully figured it out by now, but if not: April fool’s! This is not a real game update.

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BUT IT IS A REAL GAME MOD! 😮😁😮😁😮😁

If you want to, you can actually play with these ludicrous, outlandish, unexplainable, sometimes unfortunate faces, by playing the mod version of the game and adding our new mod, Star Derps. All 100+ of the crew faces have been replaced with new versions. Try it out, you might even find a few you’d like to grab from the modded spritesheet and add into a less outrageous mod of your own.

For-real props to all our modders, who have created some truly fun stuff for the game. Check out the other mods now available for Star Traders and leave some comments to encourage them to make more, and dive into the Making Mods section of the wiki to learn how to make your own.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2787587653&searchtext=