"Distance Star" was recently updated on Steam and the devs posted the full changelog on Steam.

As was posted on the Steam page of the game:

With this update we roll out an overhaul to the mission system which makes substantial changes to how missions work and improves the flow and pace of the game.

There were a number of issues we wanted to resolve with these changes and we'd like to go through them here and talk about how we addressed them.

Missions are too long. Feedback from a lot of players noted that some missions went on for too long - perhaps there were too many waves or encounters which meant some missions could go on for 30 minutes or so. This was longer than intended and with today's changes missions should take between 5 and 15 minutes.

Enemy spawns are predictable. Another common point raised and again, something we wanted to improve upon. Knowing that an enemy fleet will spawn at a certain point or at certain intervals stops being fun after a while, so we've changed this. We've done two things to resolve this - reduce the number of triggered enemies in each map and also changed the behaviour of triggered fleets. They are less likely to spawn near your fleet than they were but they can now spawn elsewhere on the map (and either move to attack you or wait for you to come to them).

Multi-spawns are a problem. Many players would trigger a second (or even a third, fourth and fifth!) fleet of enemies when attempting to avoid or flee from the first spawn. This would create way too many enemy ships to handle at once, which can be an inconvenience if you're trying to save the galaxy. As of today, most trigger points won't spawn additional fleets if you are in combat which should resolve most situations where multi-spawns occur and will also allow you to explore the maps a bit more. In missions where there are multiple objectives, these changes should greatly improve the odds that players will be able to achieve those objectives as there will be less trigger spawns en-route.

Mission rewards don't reflect difficulty. We've improved the rewards system which will scale both credit rewards and experience gained based on the difficulty of the mission.

Many thanks to everyone who tested out the changes and gave us feedback via the Beta branch - it's greatly appreciated!

If you were playing the Beta branch and want to go back to the live build, then you can do so by opting out of the Beta branch via the same steps as you took to opt-in.