The v0.5 update is here! I've been looking forward to this one for a really long time. A fully detailed changelog is contained in the text itself, but I wanted to share a condensed and highlighted version here. Also, please know that I'll be uploading the prior changelogs in a separate devlog post, so look forward to those if you're interested in tracking the game's changes from the jump.

Chapter 1: The Basics

Community development has been greatly simplified. This is the main change for v0.5, and its practical effects are distributed across this intro chapter, the crew and character creation mechanics, and a couple of our new downtime actions. Some of the changes: the currencies got named (shells, for liquid resources, and caches, for materials to expand your community), Rep and Tier mechanics were cut, and hold is now simpler. There's also been some tweaks to the way quirks function and some other small changes.

Chapter 2: The Crew and the Community

The crew creation process has been updated to include more material related to the community which your crew is a part of. As a result of these changes, crew and community creation now comes before character creation, since they’re such an important piece of stage-setting. Chapters have been re-numbered to account for this. The ultimate idea here is that the community itself should be a pretty central part of the story you're telling, so players should get to build the place themselves.

• Community creation is now a distinct part of crew creation; the two processes work alongside each other. You’ll fill out your community’s info on its own community sheet.
• Foundation maps no longer exist. Instead, you can now build any foundation that you have the caches and prosperity for, drawing from a global list. This list will be expanded in future versions.
• Crew upgrades have been rolled into foundations. Crews now start with two foundations, one of which is based on the crew’s specialty. Players choose their second foundation during crew creation.
• During crew creation, there’s a new step in which you’ll create NPC community members to fill out the cast of your game. Community members will help represent the various foundations of your community.
• Crews now gain xp in two ways; by iterating on community ideals (which have replaced goals and drives) and by investing character xp into the crew.
• Several of the game's foundations and crew abilities were updated, either to account for these changes or for their own reasons, or both.

Chapter 3: Characters

Character creation has been dramatically simplified. This involved a number of changes (renaming substrate form, drawing up new form choices, simplifying the heat mechanic for Imperial refugees, etc.) Other changes include:

• Reliefs have been removed from character creation. Reducing stress is now a community activity; see chapter 5 for more on this topic.
• Friends and rivals have been cut; during crew creation, you’ll generate members of the community that will fill out your cast of NPCs instead.
• “Beliefs and drives” have been replaced with anchors, the things in a strider’s life that tie them to their community and the work they do. During character creation, you’ll fill out a community belief clocks which track your character’s attitude about their role in the community. You gain xp when the clock’s belief is challenged and whenever you fill the clock.
  
• Action ratings: Renamed “Read” Decipher: ancient lore, a coded message, a set of blueprints, a person’s emotions, etc. Hopefully this makes the action’s scope a little clearer, and in combination with Trace it should cover most kinds of analytical activity in Songs.
• The strider playbooks have seen significant changes to their gearsets and several ability patches. I'm fairly certain that we hit every gearset with at least one change, but even if we didn't we came damn close.

Chapter 5: Downtime

• Introduced threads, focusing questions that help provide themes for a given downtime session.
• Infamy has been renamed notoriety. Heat and notoriety now function on a single tracker for your community, rather than by region.
• Entanglements have been restructured. The higher your notoriety level, the more dramatic your entanglements become—but even at the highest levels, there are still opportunities to turn an entanglement in your favor. To this end, a few entanglements have been merged, cut, or rearranged, and several new ones have been added. Consult the tables in chapter 5 for details.
• There are now two downtime actions which reduce stress: Cut Loose (for reducing stress as a crew) and Unwind (for reducing stress with NPCs.) Each has its own set of consequences for overindulging.
• The “Outreach” action has been renamed Lose Heat for clarity’s sake.

Chapter 6 - 10

The patches were much sparser in this half of the book, and intentionally so -- v0.6 will focus much more on lore and setting updates, plus a revamping of the crafting rules (which still feel kind of inelegant) and some more fleshed out writing on topics like player advice and principles. Some of this is already drafted (you can see examples here), and I'm excited about getting the rest out there!