HDog Alpha 0.901 (Vis-Light) is here, focusing on jet build choices and loot management.

The loot system has been re-organized, with chests now having color-coded tiers, each tier with its own loot pool. You'll need to hunt down those sweet red chests if you want access to the more broken weapons and items (looking at you, shot displacer). Chest quality increases the further you'll get into the game and how well you play also features into it (as in how many times you consecutively flawlessed a wave).

But the loot revision isn't all about limiting you, rather the contrary. The new zone store and choice chests actually give your more control over how your jet evolves throughout the game. Choice chests give you a choice of three items after you opened them (you can only pick up one). The zone store comes in the form of a store vessel. You'll have to hack and defend it during its own new wave type in order for it to become available for the remainder of the zone. The store ship will then come alongside during each hyperspace jump and you can access it's store chests there. Until the end of the zone, which will now destroy all remaining chests and pickups, as well as the store ship. Overall the whole loot management aspect of the game got funneled more into the intermission scene. For now I cut the possibility of opening chests during wave combat, since that didn't mix well with choice chests and store offers. But the intermission scene now allows for better chest interaction in return, enabling button controls to interact with items. If you use button controls you no longer need to switch to mouse each time you'll go into the intermission and if you you have mouse aiming enabled the intermission will use mouse controls too.

When testing the new stuff I also came across a whole lot of problems with the recently added wave objectives. So yeah, lots of bug-fixes, again. I also nerved zone two a whole lot, so it should feel less  like a brick wall now. Zone three is where the game seriously tries to kill you, but you should be able to get to the second set of bosses more consistently now.
The final alpha content update (0.95, Full Spectrum) will give you multiple player jets to choose from and will start gating some content via an unlock system. After that its just bug fixing, testing and tuning till the release.

Cheers!
Stefan