The main changes are the addition of extra officer
actions, more sophisticated adventures, new
or changed types of location, improvised modules,
more varied trading, richer medical
rules, crew alert status, crystal
mining, revised shops and minor tweaks.
This means that initially everyone's an Ensign because no-one can fill any of the higher positions. When some officers reach skill 4 they move up to Lieutenant: there will be enough positions for 60% of officers to be lieutenants until some reach level 8 and take some Lt. Commander positions. Note that demotions are quite possible, if an officer doesn't advance quickly enough they may find their position taken by another player.
Promotions and demotions are reported in the Times each turn.
| Rank | Actions per Turn | Minimum Skill Level | Positions Available |
| Ensign | 2 | 0 | 40% |
| Lieutenant | 3 | 4 | 30% |
| Lt. Commander | 4 | 8 | 20% |
| Commander | 5 | 12 | 10% |
The exploration menu is widened into an adventure menu, and repeated to allow multiple adventures/explores per turn. For locations without a known adventure, the menu just shows the location and choosing it finds any adventure there (locations can only contain one adventure each now). Locations with known adventures show as a range of options for how to tackle the adventure.
Finding previously invisible criminals, which used to be part of the exploration menu is now separated out into "Police" actions for the weaponry officer, allowing them to search one location per action and identify any Heavies there.
Adventures consist of obstacles and rewards. Obstacles are as in the playtest for weaponry and medical officers/crew, needing victory in combat or luck in surviving accidents. For engineering and science officers/crew the obstacles need to be overcome by use of crystals (engineering) or a puzzle solving spell (science). An adventure has a random combination of obstacles, and they are tackled in random order at each attempt, so it's generally not clear that an obstacle has been removed until they're all gone. No attempt can be made to collect rewards while any obstacles remain.
Each strategy seeks a specific kind of reward (information about the adventure, skill, crew, a module, favour or information about other adventures). Rewards are collected if the adventure has some of the right type for the specific officers in the landing party. Some rewards (eg information) can be taken more than once, others (eg modules) are removed as soon as they're taken. When all of an adventure's major rewards are removed the adventure disappears (and another appears randomly in the cluster, with the same difficulty level but a new assortment of obstacles and rewards.
The key idea of this system is the value of collecting clues about adventures.
Knowing which strategies and officer combinations to try produces rewards
much more quickly than guessing. Players collect these clues from other
adventures, from rumours in pubs, from general gossip (using many types
of location now has a small chance of yielding adventure clues as general
gossip) and by trading data with other players.
Pubs - specialised to each officer type, they're a source of rumours: clues to adventures related to the appropriate officer/skill type.
Hospital/Laboratory/Workshop - allow medical, science and engineering officers to do some short-term contract work for cash related to their skill level. There is a limited amount of cash available per turn for these things in each star system, each action can earn no more than half the remaining cash.
Arena - allows weaponry officer to engage in recreational (but still dangerous to the crew) combat for cash prizes if successful.
Wormhole - similar to stargate but doesn't need a key and sends the user one way to a star randomly chosen each turn (not known in advance of entering the wormhole).
Temples - provide favour with the appropriate Great One.
Jungles - source of medicine (replaces oceans in that role).
These locations have different properties:
Comets no longer simply supply chocolate, each comet location contains a specific type of trade good (not reported which), in a ratio that matches the good's price. Harvesting comets requires warp drives for bouncing around the Oort cloud, and gives a chance of finding something depending on warp drive percentage and the trade good's price. I.e. it's easy to find cheap goods and hard to find expensive ones, but both are helped by good warp drives.
Colonies no longer buy from players who are the enemy of their race,
i.e. there's more of a choice between combat and trade (though judicious
use of the Make Peace spell may allow profits from both sides).
Modules can no longer have reliabilities up to 99%, each tech level has its own upper limit, from 80% for Improvised to 98% for Magic. These lower limits prevent players using the TBG-2 extra officer actions to sustain enormous ships by multiple repair and maintenance actions.
Improvised modules can be made by players from nothing, as long as they
don't already have a module of the same type (and the special option to
buy a primitive warp drive for $500 is removed). Each officer can improvise
only the two types of module associated with their skill, except that Engineers
can also improvise pods, and Weaponry officers can improvise only shields,
not weapons.
| Improvised | Primitive | Basic | Mediocre | Advanced | Exotic | Magic |
| 80 | 85 | 90 | 93 | 95 | 97 | 98 |
The mechanism is that each colony is given a notional stockpile of cash
when it moves, and moves again when this is exhausted by buying goods.
Not all races have plague all the time now, it breaks out at about 2 homeworlds per turn, less if there's already a lot in play. Plague can still be cured in the same way as before, but only down to 1% - it cannot be eliminated without a specific medicine. Homeworlds which have plague also have a "Reward", the amount of energy they'll pay for the first delivery of specific medicine that removes that plague entirely. The reward offered increases each turn by $1 per 1% of plague.
Getting medicine becomes a two-stage process and now involves jungles rather than oceans. The medical officer's new action "Collect Plants" can be done in a jungle location and produces a variable number of promising plants for the doctor's collection (up to one per alien race). Once a player has some plants, their medical officer has an option for each plant to spend an action trying to make it into a medicine, with more chance of success according to their sickbay factor.
A player can maintain plants and medicines for any combination of races up to all of them, but medicines are removed (i.e. rendered useless for sale) when their target race is sold some medicine by any player. You have to be first to get any money.
Various information about plagues starting and stopping is reported
in the Times.
| Alert Status | Health Effect | Crew Skill Effect |
| Resting | +2.5% | Crew contribute nothing |
| Ready | None | Normal |
| Yellow Alert! | -5% | Crew skill doubled |
| Red Alert!!! | -10% | Crew skill and number doubled |
Interrogating prisoners is made more productive by eliminating the risk of them not revealing anything when they could.
Restarting players resume at the same star they were at before, i.e. the strategy of exploration by restarting is prevented, while allowing local knowledge to carry over to the ship in a more reasonable way.
Trade prices are adjusted to multiples of $20 so the 5% changes don't suffer gradual drift through rounding effects.
Skill bonuses to module percentages are limited to no more than the
raw module percentage (used to be limited to double this).