VO 1.8.573 includes:

- Reduced PCB shot-lifespan from 3s to 2s (range from 645m to 430m).
- Reduced TU mine energy requirement from 500 to 100.
- Android has new experimental asynchronous background loading of game assets from disk, to shorten sector-jump load times, and reduce the need for pre-loading assets.
- Improved and fixed a variety of internal analytics, to help debug game loading times and other issues.
- Android: Updated Google Play Games Services library.
- Android: Google Play Games Services are no longer initialized on the first game runtime.

The new experimental "asynchronous background loading" should be very helpful to a lot of people and use cases, and seems to be considerably faster to load data during sector-jumps. It is in testing on Android, and will later be rolled out to other platforms. It's particularly beneficial in combination with the load-time improvements that were rolled out on Android last-week.

The system uses background threads, configured based on the number of CPU-cores offered by your device or system. Because the loading is a bit different to predict, the old "progress bar" for jumps has been replaced, at least for the moment, by "progress dots" that mainly indicate that something is happening. Given that the new system is still faster to load sectors *overall*, this was considered a worthwhile trade-off.

More substantial changes to gameplay are coming, but we needed to get through some of this technical development to make other types of gameplay possible in the future.

Have a great weekend, everyone!