• Exploration - more than 270 billion star systems generated with unique planets, mineral concenrations, agriculturual values and climate
• Farming and mining on planet surfaces - players can build their own planetary bases for resource harvesting. City simulation style play.
• Personal starbase construction - players can construct their own starbase to their own design. This becomes your home in space, and your centre for heavy zero-g manufacturing and research
• Trading - dynamic local NPC markets, player to player global market
• Dynamic NPC mission system - combat, trade (supply/demand), passenger transport, courier and salvage missions
• Asteroid mining - manual control of ship and axial mining beam. Player and character skill based.
• Research - blueprint fragments attainable from salvage missions allow the player to research forgotten and new ships and components, as well as enhancements to their buildings
• Manufacturing - every ship, weapon and utility module in the game can be manufactured by players and sold or used to customise their ships (which can also be given a custom paint scheme)
• Gas giant harvesting - because sometimes you need things like hydrogen and oxygen!
• Space combat - manual control fighter to fighter dogfighting, scales up to big ship broadside duels between cruisers
• Colonization of outer systems - the largest so far has over 50,000 structures and hundreds of thousands of colonists
• Outer Star Bases - these can also grow to vast size, open ended in 3D space just as colonies are on the surface
• Governments - Players who own colonies in a given system can vote for a colony mayor, planetary governor, system Senator and a colonial President. Governors can rename their planets, Senators can rename their systems and approve Jump Gate construction to their systems, and the President can approve jump gate construction to the inner systems.
• Player constructed jump gates - when approved by the relevant government authorities, players can band together for a community mega-project of constructing new jump gates, extending the reach of new players into the colonized outer systems

As an MMO, our intention is to never stop developing Ascent. However, before we call it "ready for full release" we would like to re-examine every interface in the game from the ground up, add a great deal of new graphics (our successful KickStarter campaign has allowed us to hire our artist full time) and we plan to develop several key new features:

• Full disembark (without an EVA suit), being able to walk around in certain structures on colonies, starbases and space stations
• NPC AI - we are implementing Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs with our NPCs, giving them motivation to act within the game world. We are also developing a system which will enable them to engage in actual text chat with players (like old adventure games only we now have access to incredible new parser technology) in order to achieve their aims.
• Hiring NPCs as pilots - they will not be able to warp or jump unaided but that leaves a lot of capability
• Colonial Laws - these will enable you to outlaw or allow certain goods (e.g. alcohol) at your colonies, and lead to...
• Smuggling - setting up smuggler networks and sneaking banned goods into colonies for fun and profit
• Crime and punishment - setting up police and prisons in your colonies, and adventuring as a freelance investigator
• Bounty hunting - tracking down fugitive NPCs, whether they are running from the law, or just their enemies
• Assassination - whether blowing up the ship they're in, or tracking them to their home and pulling the trigger, you're a stone cold killer for hire