Retcons have technically happened to the game over its many years of development, with the caveat that Alex and David (the primary two-man team for the game who are the main coder/developer and main writer/artist, respectively) have always maintained that any part of the game's backstory, "lore", world setting and "main quest" story (the latter introduced in earnest in 0.95) are all up for changes at a moment's notice until 1.0 and the official release, and this option has been exercised with vigor multiple times. That said:
- The most significant is the broader backstory: after the third Starsector dev, Ivaylo, moved into more of a background role (later revealed
to be due in significant part to battling cancer), the "grimness" of the initial world setup post he made was, in certain ways, pared back and some details were changed in a later, more detailed pre-game timeline assembled by David. Prominent ones included the battlegroup that formed the Hegemony actually arriving about fifty years after the collapse (they were originally in-place almost immediately) and that the name "Task Force Pollux" was simply replaced with Domain Battlegroup XIV; the inclusion of the Persean League as the great counterweight to the Hegemony (the League having not existed in early drafts of the game, with a very early version of the Sindrian Diktat having been the game's original "midline" tech users); the Galatia Academy showing that intellectual advancement is still occurring (again, totally absent/unmentioned in earlier game drafts, where people couldn't even make tractors or rifles without nanoforges); and updates in-game that reflect that specifically Chicomoztoc and Kazeron still have wholly pristine nanoforges that can produce even battleships flawlessly, meaning technology is not completely lost and unable to be built (and also making Chico and Kazeron the 8-million-ton gorillas of the sector and the whole reason the Hegemony and League are as strong as they are). Many of the location names in Ivaylo's document went unused; the places that fulfill similar functions in the modern game have other names ("Verdaria II" likely became Eventide, "Hastaeus Prime" is Chicomoztoc, "Exar" and "Exar Secundus" became Mayasura and Mairaath, and "Itos II" may have become Nachiketa). - In a similar vein, early drafts didn't include the Luddic Church as a separate, quite large space-going organization at all, and didn't include the Luddic Path as a wholly separate "pirate"-style group; they were largely just background elements when they were mentioned at all. The "Cult of Lud" in the earliest drafts simply used the same hardware as standard pirates.
- Early drafts of the game and lore had hyperspace fuel (when it was even in the game) as being refined from "Infernium ore" and of unclear nature. The introduction of scannable planets and the expansion of the Luddic Church's place in the story saw this revised into the current form, wherein jump fuel is antimatter, refined from various kinds of volatile gases which constitute the "volatiles" commodity (and is why it can also be used in planetary bombardment). "Infernium" instead became the colloquialism used by more hard-core Luddic sects (like the Pathers) to describe AM fuel.
- Also, in the early drafts the "AI Wars", perhaps to the shock of newer fans, didn't exist; the Hegemony and Tri-Tachyon were just often in a state of low-level conflict. Indeed, the [REDACTED] weren't even added until version 0.8 in 2017! As a result, the early versions of the one-off missions didn't discuss the AI Wars at all; when the [REDACTED] were introduced into the game, a number of the missions were rewritten, both from a briefing and gameplay perspective, to take place during the Second AI War.
- All this being said, the main "grimness" now is that several incidents of full-bore planet destruction have been added to the lore courtesy of the Second AI War and the full details of the Askonia Crisis that created the Diktat, with other incidents implied to have happened during the First AI War (and are the in-universe reason for a lot of those dead colony worlds on the frontier); much of the tension in-lore now lies on the idea of various factions perhaps still having a stock of planet-killer weapons stashed away, and that a Third AI War could potentially put a period on humanity in the Persean Sector, full stop (rather than technological decay being the main potential threat causing that).
- Interestingly, the idea of the Persean Sector is also comparatively new. In the earliest drafts, the Sector was just a "distant sector", with no specific reason given for the Domain not potentially sending more ships to try and enforce a new order. 0.8, which fleshed out the game map alongside the AI War backstory, introduced the idea of the Sector being specifically the Persean Sector — that is, the first sector of the Domain of Man in the Perseus Arm of the galaxy, with the south-west of the map highlighting that the void space beyond is the "Persean-Orion Abyss". Organized Domain vessels aside from Battlegroup XIV haven't made the trip because making that journey without the Gates is unbelievably difficult, and is why the Sector is on its own.
- On the gameplay side, early versions of the combat engine had fighter wings able to deploy from off-map carriers, much like fightercraft in real life, and even the ability for fighter wings to simply fly around a system completely on their own as a "fleet". This was neat, but in the end felt a bit gimmicky; it was fairly easy for fighters to get annihilated in a stand-up fleet battle, and the side that committed more dedicated warships tended to win (since deploying fighters like this took deployment points), but on the other hand, if the fighters just wanted to run away, they could be incredibly frustrating to chase down. Later versions moved to a system that required a "home base" carrier to be deployed on the map to use fighters, required that a "Limited Production Chip" be installed on a carrier to launch a given flight of fighters, and removed the ability for fighters to operate autonomously, but gave fighters an engagement range (that is, how far they will travel from their carrier to engage an enemy) that was typically much longer than most weapon ranges (and also opened the design space to things like drones that have no outward engagement range but are designed to stick with the carrier as part of its defenses, and are much stronger as a result). The larger "retcon" of this comes from the fact that later versions of the game behave as if the newer-in-real-life model is the way fighter combat in Starsector's universe has always worked.
