Version 3.5.0 marks the launch of the new universe. For those who do not have it currently bound, you will need to

/bind n nav

..to use the new navigation system. All 7,680 sectors are available, but will still continue to have their contents tweaked and improved over the coming months.. and probably for the entire life of the game (we'll always be adding things). You must be 3000m from the nearest object to jump to another sector.

Chat System - global chat has been removed and replaced with General Chat (up to 3000m distance), Sector Chat (entire sector), Group Chat (current group), Long Range Chat (only available in stations, covers the entire territory of the current faction, very rate limited), and also Help Chat and Guild Chat (Guild Chat is not fully implemented yet). Additionally, you can chat with the people onboard a given station by visiting the Station Bar.

Buddy System. "/buddy". You can add buddies, be notified when they log on or off, get the last time they were online, and leave notes for them to read next time they come online.

Player Voting. At present, players can "/vote" to mute an abrasive individual, 30 votes will result in a 24 hour muting for that user. All relevant information is logged and recorded by the server when this occurrs.

Player Mentors. Players can offer to mentor new users, with the "/mentor" command. When the newbie reaches a certain level, they are prompted to rate their mentor (good/bad). Mentoring points are recorded, and will eventually be used to open up new gameplay options (missions/equipment).

There are now 56 variations of ships, some of which are faction-specific and available only to those of particularly high faction standing. Several new weapons have also been added. Engines are no longer configurable between ships (or we will be removing that) and will come with the ship. This is necessary to permit ship balancing to work a little better. Making engines generically configurable between all ships required too many tradeoffs, which resulted in some of our past imbalances (the Centurion being.. less cool than it should have been, etc). If we can make the engines specific to the particular ship, that gives us a lot more room to tweak it to work better with the inertial matrix of the specific ship.

Lots of other stuff, this just covers the highlites and should answer some common questions. More data will be forthcoming on the messageboard or future newsposts. Thanks, please keep the bug reports and feedback coming!