It was brought to my attention by reddit user u/BlueSabere and Nobody_the_2nd here on itch that my game was unplayable past character creation.

+ Fixed a critical issue that prevented characters from being created.

+ Fixed a critical issue that allowed characters to be created without a ship

+ Fixed a critical issue that prevented the game from loading the correct save file.

Should be working now, sorry about that. I typically don't check character creation when I modify things, I considered it a "complete feature". Turns out adding story data in prevented the save files from working correctly.