The ships already looked right from a distance. Up close it was another matter: there were parts that were only hinted at — a turret that was a bump, an antenna that was a line, a panel you had to guess at. That is over.
What has been rebuilt
All twenty flyable ships — the five classes on each side, plus the Vanguard and Shadow designs the shop sells — both stations and both motherships. Twenty-four pieces in all, with the hull detail complete: turrets that read as turrets, hatches, masts, walkways.
Where it shows most is docking. The station is the only thing in a sector you see from a few metres away, and it now holds up at that range. In the hangar, with your ship in front of you, the same applies.
And it weighs less, not more
You would expect more detail to mean a bigger download. It has come out the other way round: 1.0.4 is smaller than 1.0.3, with the whole new fleet inside it. Going through what the installer was carrying turned up material that was no longer needed — hulls the shop stopped selling back in August, and texture versions of models that no longer exist — and it has been left out.
The Umbral hulls have also been corrected, the ones you can only earn by winning an Anomaly: they were asking far more of your graphics card than their share. Not any more. If you play on a modest machine, that is a difference you will feel.
And there is one fix you will see on every ship: they stop shimmering when you look at them from a distance. A hull at combat range used to flicker as it moved; now it holds steady. It is the change most noticeable to anyone fighting at middle distance, which is nearly everyone.
The three texture levels are still there
Settings › Graphics still offers all three, and they still work the same way: high, medium and low are separate texture sets that already ship inside the game, so switching level downloads nothing. If your machine is struggling, dropping to medium hands your graphics card just under a third of the work; on low, about a ninth.
The new hulls are in all three levels. There is no ship left without its lighter version.
