Can you please explain how proximity assist works?

Yep. So proximity assist basically just looks around the ship in six different directions. It just does a very quick, simple, cheap raycast. And if there's something that it hits in that range, it then works out how much it needs to lower the acceleration of the ship, not to avoid it, but to give you a chance to correct yourself before you hit it. And then how much it drops off is just based on a design-driven curve. So it's not the same drop-off for every ship. We could make it not drop off at all for one ship if we wanted, or be insanely high for another.

So it's to help give you more time not to hit things, not to prevent you from hitting things.

Yeah. Nothing's going to stop you as a player just holding down that button and crashing into things. If you want to do that, sure, do that. This is just for those situations where you haven't quite realized how close you are to a surface, and without any assist at all, you would just smash into it. This gives you those extra valuable half seconds to make a correction.