Happy 2019, Star Sonata!

2018 brought with it a lot of new things. Enkelin was named as lead content developer and he created the Press Corps to give more transparency to the player base. NCCIntrepid took the lead of Quality Assurance and has been adding more rigor to our testing and bug tracking processes. The dev team as a whole is probably more vibrant and active than ever before.

We had a galaxy assault / BvB revamp to make BvB more interesting and balanced. We added Electrified Georg Ohm. We added several new specialized base kits. AI’s and combat bots gained many improvements to their AI, and combat bots gained the new “V Formation” where they form up on your wing to fight, rather than fly all over the place. There was a major change to the shape of Kalthi Depths, with lots of roaming mini-bosses dropping KD dg loot. We revamped the way that planet terraforming blueprints work. Energies and shields were both buffed and rebalanced, making fuel much less necessary on energies and regen much stronger and less costly on shields. We revamped Junkyard and the junkyard tweaks, and added a new “alternate currency” system, where items can be bought and sold at AI bases for commodities in addition to credits. Gunner class received some tweaks and was made more offensive. We had a “Mega Moe” world boss event for Halloween, pitting the player base against the toughest boss ever for special Halloween prizes. Hull extensions and cloaks have had improvements and rebalances that are on the test server and will be patched soon. Jey has done a lot of improvements on the back end, and the server is running faster than ever, and aside from a few days of crash bugs, has been very stable.

Some of the most exciting things that the dev team worked on in 2018 haven’t been seen yet. We have been doing a ton of design work on an upcoming expansion for 2019 that will bring both a tech 23 expansion with a bunch of new bosses and areas as well as some sweeping gameplay improvements. We have scores of pages of finalized design docs on the upcoming expansion and spent hours and hours in meetings finalizing much of what we have planned. I’m going to leave some of the details about the theme and content of the tech 23 part of the expansion for another blog post, but for now, I want to write about a few of the big gameplay changes we have in mind.

Healing

We have designs to reduce the strength and the efficiency of healing while simultaneously increasing player shield regen, increasing shield banks by a factor of 10x, and greatly increasing out of combat healing. Instead of gaining massive shields from healing efficiency and cross healing, Shield Monkeys will have to steal shields from enemies to redistribute to their team and engineers will actively use a much stronger +100% transference vulnerability beam to buff the healing from their drones and allies on a single target. We hope that these changes to healing will make healing much more balanced and a more active component in playing the game.

Resistances

The current state of resistances in Star Sonata is more like a weird Pokemon rock-paper-scissors thing than anything else. The planned change with resistances is two-fold. First to bring almost all existing resistances into a new “Armor” stat on ships, where each ship will have an armor that represents the average resists to all damage types, and then have at most one vulnerability or resistance to a specific damage type. Capital ships, heavy fighters, and bases will get the most armor and other classes will have much less. We will also make it so that the game remembers what ships you’ve scanned with a ship scanner, and for those ships already scanned, present the armor and resistance information in the target box.

Second, we will be revamping the damage types to make them more about the utility that each damage type brings and less about rock-paper-scissors.

• “Laser” damage will be removed.
• Energy damage will be the default damage type for both pulse guns and non-ethereal lasers.
• Surgical damage will cause onboard item damage as you damage the target, potentially disabling them over time, and cause an increase in credit, augmenter, and item drops (including from drop lists) when an AI is killed based on how much surgical damage he took in the battle.
• Heat damage will remain the damage-over-time damage type of choice and the amount of DoT will be increased and standardized across all heat weapons.
• Mining damage will still be used on asteroids, but gain the additional property of being armor piercing, and ignore the armor stat on the target.
• Physical damage will continue to knock things back and have a high DPE. It will gain even more DPS than it currently has, but also become subject to double armor mitigation.
• Radiation will be the ethereal damage type, with ethereal lasers being radiation, and possibly radiation bullets being ethereal. Hitting an enemy who is below some fraction of shields with radiation will irradiate them and no longer require the killing blow to irradiate.

Mod Rework

The mod rework that has been talked about in the past is almost completed, and will be released along with the big 2019 update. The two most exciting things about the mod rework are the addition of “primary” mods, which are much stronger and have a strength associated with them, and “re-modding” an item, where a modded item can go back to the neurodoc, and a player can pay increasing amounts of credits to have a chance to increase the strength of the primary mod, add another secondary mod, change a secondary mod, or even change the primary mod. This brings a very fun mini-game of continually crafting and refining your best equipment, but the increased cost each time you do it means that you want to pick carefully from the options presented in re-modding. Existing mods will remain as secondary mods, and existing modded items that are eligible for primary mods will be able to be remodded and gain a primary mod, though if already neurobound, they will lose their current secondary mods. Un-neurobound items with mods can be modded and retain their existing mods.

New Cargo System

We’ve developed a more straightforward design of a cargo system than previously talked about which will be released with everything else. The new cargo design is where items will drop with a “cargo” tag, similar to a mod, such that any item with the cargo tag will always take exactly 10 space. Equipping, using, or transferring an item will remove the cargo tag, but tossing will retain it. Items with the cargo tag will have square brackets around the item name in your inventory. This should hopefully free up a lot of hull space for some people, and let others feel like they can DG in whatever ship they want without sacrificing too much for holding loot.

Improved Visibility/Cloaking System

Enkelin has a complicated but elegant design on revamping the visibility and cloaking system that will make things much easier to balance for stealthy ships.

Giving the Skill Trees more Impact

We want to make the skill trees have more impact and each skill change the way you play the game, rather than just give some stats. Focus skills will give different damage mitigations and add extra slots for different equipment types. Advanced sub-skills will all have large effects and make your choices even more meaningful.

More and stronger super items

We are planning to add a lot more, powerful, super items. This will give those extra slots in capital ships a lot more meaning. Keep an eye out for “broadside” super items built from dg drops and doing massive damage to the left or the right.

Overloaders

Overloaders will no longer self-destruct, but instead cause item damage to your weapons as you use them.

Rebalance of Fighters

Another rebalance of the fighters, giving more fighters useful side-effects, giving more power to fighters launched from a players ship, and making more noticable difference between fighters that take different amounts of slots.

Rebalance of Drones

Drones have a new balance sheet with rarity, range, mobility, and other factors that give a desired DPS for each drone. We’ve already done a quick balance pass on drones that is on test, but there will be a more in-depth look at drones for the big update.

And Much More

And lots of other little things are planned, as well as a light rebalance to the power of classes, with an overall balance between offense, defense, and utility for each class and trying to hit those targets for a fully kitted out player of each class. A lot of the work done in 2018 was actually preparing for a big branch in our source code so that we can work on this upcoming release while maintaining a main branch for small changes and bug fixes. Look for a post about the tech 23 stuff in the near future!

Universe Reset

The Paxians have been busy this Christmas keeping many of the strongest Aveksaka forces at bay around the Subspace dimension. In a show of poor holiday spirit, the Aveksaka have activated the device in Kumari to destroy the universe in return! Lyceum scientists calculate the destruction of our universe to occur on the 12th of January, 13:00 EST (server time). With the destruction of our old universe, a new one will be created! All characters, their skills, ships, and bots will be transferred over, but deployed drones and userbases will be lost, as well as anything on the userbases! You’ll have to re-explore the universe to map everything out once again.

Tonight at 10h30pm server time, the servers will be taken down for maintenance, during that time the website will become unreachable.

This maintenance is to allow the technicians at the datacenter to change one of the drive thats beginning to show signs of failure and at the same time to do some of the server maintenance i cannot do while the servers are running.

The estimated downtime will be 2 hours, discord will be used to provide updates if anything happens.

We, the Star Sonata II Development Team are proud to present Santa’s Mystical Porpoise, a complex fusion of the classic Porpoise and Elven technology. This sleek and wonderful one off will be only available to all players of level 350+ who log in during the Christmas 2018 event. From all of us on the Development Team: Merry Christmas! To claim your Santa’s Mystical Porpoise, log on during the 2018 Christmas Event and pick up the mission at Earth Central in Sol!

- Content Changes -
* Fixed the Zen of Fleet Commander description
* Added in 3 different types of selenite radiation and a possible parasite for oly fighters
+ Fixed an issue with Hauling and Rejuvenating Augmenters not showing up for sale in The Acropolis
+ Kalthi (Armored/Wrathful) Commanders, Destroyers and Terminators will no longer have their -range aura active if a player they hate is within range.
+ Lower end Kalthi Depths AI show up, and roam, outside of the danger factor that their non roaming counterparts spawn in. This means you will find the lower “tier” of AI in abundance in the higher tier zones.
+ Buffed some Kalthi Depths AI
++ Selenite Avengers have been given 2m Shields and 5k regen.
++ Lunarian Avengers have been given 5mil Shields and 5k regen.
++ Harriers have been given 300k Shields and 3k regen.
++ Caracara’s have been given 500k Shields and 5k regen.
++ Corrupted Cyborg Battleship’s have been given 7.5mil Shields and 7.5k regen.
++ Corrupted Cyborg Cruiser’s have been given 10mil Shields and 10k regen.
+ Reduced the speed of Harrier and Caracara spawns.
+ DG versions of Kalthi Destroyer’s and Terminator’s did not have the right amount of shield bank and regeneration, so their regeneration and bank have been increased. Roaming versions of the same AI were far too resilient and time consuming to kill, so their regeneration and bank have been reduced.
* Kikale Mzungu Transdim Blueprint no longer requires Mzungu Lore to equip.
* Twisted Fate of Death Upgrade Blueprint no longer requires Recon Focus skill to equip.
* Corrected Blue Photon Corvette superitem tooltip to correctly display +100% damage instead of +1000 damage
* Fixed Selenite / Lunarian Avenger BP drop chance
* Added a free skin to Twisted Fate of Death
* Fixed Carcass Launcher inbuilt to be 0 size to conform with all other inbuilt items being 0 size
* New version of Rumble Colosseum with the Arsonist, more AI, way better drops, but 1 day lockout.
* Piloting 20 mission now takes 25 Rumble Pirate Crests instead of 20
* Slight improvement to Powerful Pillbox
* Fixed Haunted House having no T12 Argonaut BPs once deployed, restored access to 2 other station holoprojectors for the Haunted House
* Fixed Argeiphontes Hermes Adrenaline Syringe superitem, now properly injects nanite into friendly targets
* Adjusted the Torch line (Radish, Nectar, Massif, Twisted). Buffed Radish, Twisted and Massif Torches. Radish Torch is now T20 (down from T21) and the weakest, followed is Nectar Torch at T21 (untouched). The Massif Torch (inbuilt) T21 and Twisted Torch T22 are stronger then Nectar Torch at the current end of the line progression.
* Added blacklight skin to death striker and death striker+
* Renamed Gunner’s Mass Destruction skill to “Shield Remodulation” and gave the skill +25% resist all, and +10% electric tempering
* Non-sticky items will now be removed with ship upgrades
* Ship Mastery Augmenters gain +1 weapon slot attribute
* Standardized the sizes and weights of all augmenters to bring them all in line with the common augs
* Changed ArgH’s superitem nanite to be an offensive nanite attack to slow your targets speed by 90% and give them +1 thrust for 1 second.
* Updated bps that produced t21 or t22 items to be t21 or t22, in light of bps now requiring equipment rather then station management.
* Slightly adjusted the costs of some base OL’s to conform to formulas in new balance sheet
* The scientists of Red Photon somehow figured out how to soup up the Red Photon Warship Prototype’s weapon systems. Luckily the modifications proved to be too unstable, so they were removed. As such, Red Photon Warship Prototype will no longer do twice the damage it was supposed to do.
* Updated rarity of twisted kits.
* Changed space blue alpha scout to need blue whispers in periodic resources instead of blue aether.
* Added +10 MF to Ship Mastery Augs
* Converted Multifiring Augmenter, Isvasa Sattva, and Cerberus Aug to use the new constant MF aug stat rather than the % multifiring aug stat.
* Removed Shield and Shield Charge aug stat from shields. Those few shields that had those gained other stats to compensate.
* Rebalanced all shields. Most high tech shields gained a little bit of bank. Many regen shields got up to 5x the previous regen. Elec cost per regen reduced by 10x so that having a regen shield doesn’t gimp your offense. Fixed elec cost for high bank shields increased slightly. Most sizes slightly reduced. Ares Olympus shields gained some additional damage stat. Hephaestus shields gained some resistance. Zeus shields gained additional elec. “Stealth” shields made more stealthy, while other shields made less stealthy.
* Gunner skill level 2 gains +20% resist all when in a capital ship (needs new client to see stat)
* Reduced offensive stats on some shields slightly.
* Fixed bad descriptions on all but emx verv bps
* Fixed spelling/grammar errors
* Removed nb from Qokuji’qii fighters
* Added rarities to all player obtainable diffusers. This will not have change their stats.
* Removed pre-req missions from t22 skills

- Server Changes -
* Fixed a bug where a trade bot following you would be way far back if you have other trade bots elsewhere in the universe
* Bots will now drop 5%-15% of their credits upon entering stasis
* Players, Bots, and AI will drop 5%, 15%, and 20% more of their credits when last hit by surgical damage.
* Removed neurotweaks from the basic Kalthi Depths drop table, they instead now drop the same items that occasionally spawn in the Colosseum (These items decay on warp) and have a chance of dropping Spacey/Speedy augmenters.
* Greatly improved the AI/bot weapon selection regarding weapons that inflict damaging parasites.
* Better descriptions of times in Neurotweak descriptions (e.g. “1 hr” instead of “3600 sec”)
* Warheads will no longer impart their side effects or inject parasites onto the firer of the missile (will still do damage and knockback if he’s too close)

While converting the old cloak balance sheet to the new-style balance sheet, it occurred to me that for a lot of players in the game, cloaks are just used as stat sticks and are pretty boring.  Upgrading to the new balance formulas doesn’t really work with cloaks, especially since they are so often used as stat sticks, because the old method was to take power budget out of their cloaking ability based on any secondary augmenter stats that a cloak has.  Taken to an extreme, a cloak under the old formulas could give +50% damage, but be really bad at cloaking, which would obviously be a broken item.

So cloaks are getting reworked in a few ways.  First, any aug stats on cloaks will increase the energy that it takes to run the cloak, rather than make it worse at cloaking.  Second, aug stats on cloaks will only apply when the cloak is turned on.  And third, most aug stats on existing cloaks were doubled to make them more impactful.  Note that mods on the cloak will still always affect your ship whether the cloak is on or off.

In addition, AI and bots have received an upgrade to their cloaking AI, so they will intelligently activate and deactivate their cloak based on their current energy and visibility.  They will turn it on if they aren’t short of energy and the cloak would actually make them reasonably stealthy.  They will turn it off if they don’t have full energy and are not stealthy even with it on.  Bots with cloaks in the same galaxy as their master who has a cloak will turn on their cloak if the master turns on his cloak, and turn off their cloak if they are less than 100% energy and their master turns off his cloak.

These changes should make using cloaks a lot more interesting and pave the way for us to create a lot more interesting new cloaks.  I envision a lot of cloaks that are good for running away, sneaking around, or surviving opening salvos, with shield, resistance, and speed stats on them, so the player will have an incentive to intelligently use his cloak.  Hopefully the energy costs are enough that just leaving the cloak on all the time without thought will not be the optimal play style, and hopefully the bonuses on some of the cloaks are worthwhile enough that most people will have a cloak to use in certain situations, not just Seers, Snipers, or Speed Demons.

Hello Sonatians! There have been many rumors and whispers amongst the playerbase that Drones, and by extension Engineers, would see some sort of adjustment sooner or later. I am here to confirm that Drones and Engineers are definitely being rethought and redesigned in a variety of ways. The first step towards these changes are now available on the Test Server. (You can select the Test Server from the drop down menu within the Beta Client.) It is apparent that there are many drones that are powerful and sought after by the playerbase. This is good, and we don’t want to make these drones useless. Even so, we have to acknowledge that it isn’t good for the overall health of the game to have certain drones far and away outperform other drones. As such, these changes will affect both under performing drones and over performing drones. The overarching plan is to make drones that are not very useful, even more useful. We spent many hours trying to get the math just right so that there is still a strong sense of progression and differentiation between Engineers, but we need your feedback to make sure we make the best decisions possible. As such, here are the changes you can expect to see on the test server:

• Drones now have a DPS tag at the top of their tooltip. This shows the DPS you can expect the drone to do with the first weapon in the drone list, prior to any external bonuses (Such as Drone Operations, Engineer class skills, auras, drone controllers, Imperial Seal skills, etc.) This damage is scaled up or down for each weapon, depending on the difference in DPS between each subsequent weapon and the first weapon. Generally, this means that the first weapon will be doing the most damage.
• Drones have had all Overloaders, Shield Chargers, and Augmenters removed from their inventory. These items helped to give drones a lot of their power previously, but as a result it made figuring out just how powerful a particular drone was an incredibly mystifying experience. We want to remove this confusion going forward, so most drones will simply have a Shield, Energy, Weapon and Radar while a few exceptions may have things like Super Items, Capacitors, and Diffusers.
• As a result of the previous change, many drones have had a variety of stats such as Electricity, Shield Bank, Energy Bank, Range, Tracking, Resistances, etc reduced. Things like Electricity and Energy bank are mitigated by the fact that many of the weapons on drones will not consume vast amounts of electricity from multiple Rate of Fire augmenters. The reduction in other stats such as Range and Tracking was intentional, as going forward Drones will have relatively smaller ranges. We intend to spend a good deal of time finding the most optimal final numbers, so please share your thoughts on this.
• The above points are no longer true as of December 2nd, 2018. Those changes have been pulled back as a result of player Feedback. There will still be some drones that will not have the same level of Defensive and Utility stats due to us fixing a bug that effected specific drones.
• The highest end of healing drones had their healing output reduced (Twisted Drones/Samgrahaka Bhisajvar’s). Samgrahaka Bhisajvar’s also had their percentage healing aura removed. We understand that, at the moment, people heavily rely on Engineers to provide squad healing. We do not want to make the game unplayable for those who do this, however we do realize that it is neccessary to cut back on the level of healing power Engineers have access to in relation to a Shield Monkey. Expect more changes to Healing and Healing Drones over time. Something to keep in mind is that the adjustment to Shield Regeneration on all shields will increase the amount of self regeneration that drones have. This should help to reduce the negative of drones doing less healing. It will also make Defense Drone Operations a bit more of an interesting choice!
• Transference Facilitator Tractors (as of December 6th, 2018) have massively increased Transference Vulnerability values (from 66% to 100%). This means that any target an Engineer locks onto with this beam will receive substantially more healing. This should minimize the nerf to Engineer’s single target healing while reducing their ability to heal everything around them automatically. This also, interestingly, has the benefit of making a Shield Monkey/Engineer composition more effective than Engineer/Engineer or Shield Monkey/Shield Monkey.
• Last but not least, the Mad Kidd/Mad Kidd+/Hybrid Kidd Drone have had the tracking on their thorax’s reduced, the delay within which their thorax’s are able to do damage increased, and are now immobile (as of December 6th, 2018). These drones had Thorax weapons, which are supposed to be hard to use to justify their high DPE and DPS, that were not hard to use. They may see further changes going forward. 

If you have any questions please post in this topic on the forums, and I will do my best to respond to them.

We decided that we want to generally increase the power of hull extensions to make them more impactful on ship set ups, while at the same time, simplifying some of the current baked in complexity and generally balancing them relative to each other.

The current balance of hull extensions is really all over the place.  The difference in power between the tech 20 Alien Hull Expander that just gives 26 hull space and the Divine Cargobay that gives 50 space and +10% capacity is huge.  26 hull space is certainly nothing to get excited about, and since most extensions are so weak, they tend to be used more as stat sticks than for their space.  The goal of the new numbers is to give some of the very best extensions modest increases in values, but much larger increases to others, according to standard balancing formulas.

Zeus Expander

A lot of the space, weights, and even built in aug stats of extensions have all been amplified, hopefully giving more interesting choices when deciding on what hull extension to use.  Since the baseline hull space that extensions give has been increased so much, I feel better about allowing extensions that give much less hull space, but give other benefits instead, like an extra weapon slot or some extra resistance.  If you have to choose between an extra weapon slot and 150 space, it might be an interesting decision.  Half a dozen new interesting end-game extensions have been added for next universe.

The other change, aside from general increases in power and balancing of stats, is making the extensions more straightforward.  Currently, one extension might take 5 space but give 10, while another takes 10 space but gives 15, and it’s hard to know which one is better by glancing at it, especially since the hull space granted gets multiplied by capacity augmenters and skills.  To simplify everything, the size of extensions have been homogenized, and the code has been altered so that extensions will always take 0 space while equipped, similar to sticky items.  In addition, all the bonus space from extensions have been converted to constant bonus space, meaning that they don’t get multiplied by augmenters or skills.  So instead of giving 26 space that gets modified, almost by mysterious amounts, by augs and skills, the new Alien Hull Expander gives 170 flat space, while taking zero space when equipped.  What you see is what you get.

I’ve been careful with the numbers so that even the very best extensions on set ups with lots of trans mods and even some capacity aug stat will still come out more powerful than currently.  Set ups in off-focus hull types will come out way ahead, while storage ships with all capacity augs may come out a little behind, but not by too much.  I feel like aside from making extensions more interesting and straightforward, this will also open up some more unique ship set ups that were too limited by hull space before.

This isn’t set to come out in the next patch, but is on the test server and should be out in the patch after next.

Recently the development team have been in talks about the potentiality of a new zone designed to give rewards to players and squads tough enough to take it on. We have considered the idea that this could be a scaling scenario, where the game gets tougher and tougher as a battle rages on, meaning that there will be something for players of all strengths, even at lower levels. For anyone able to complete this new zone, there would be a great reward, and for people who try but fail there would potentially be consolation prizes depending on how close you come. Whilst we have laid out some ideas for the zone, we’re keeping things pretty secret for now!

There is also a rumour that a new boss might be entered into Kalthi Depths, and that it might not be as fluffy and cute as it looks! (Be careful out there!)

Our Paxian allies have been doing some research into several pieces of equipment, and are looking to improve some classic that have been forgotten to time, upgrading them to Tech 22 level, allowing for more adaptive and interesting endgame builds!

It is important to take note that a lot of those changes have already been on the server since the universe reset. Due to how hectic that reset had been on the content side of thing, it was pretty messy to build a list of what was in and what was not. This patch was made to rectify this and properly apply all changes that should have been there on reset and more importantly cleanup the server state to allow for faster future patches.

- Content Changes -
* Reduced cost of most of the uz ships/gear(not mastodon)
* Minor changes to a few lasers to bring them into compliance with the balance formulas (most notably RoP)
* Made Pax Felicitas item 20 size.
* Stats of some lasers slightly adjusted to conform to balance sheet formulas, notably Vazaha Kiss line, Heavy, Heavy Bloodstained, and Nanite Ares Sappers, and Hybridized Reach of Prometheus
* Fixed Automated Hydroponics
* Added another shot to the Battle Spheres Superitem.
* Added visual for Zeus’s antu siege mode
* Changed Zeus’s Antu Siege mode (part 2)
* Dark Maelstrom’s room no longer saps your shields, instead Dark Maelstrom himself projects a nasty aura that drains your shields.
* The Kraken miniboss in Medium Whirlpool no longer gives a negative weight aura in certain phases, it now properly pulls its unwitting victims deeper into the planck skein layer, causing their mobility to be greatly reduced.
* Changed the energy usage of PWI from 20k to 18k
* Changed the description of items that charge to list the charge rate and the total time to normally charge, rather than the charge rate and the total charge needed
* Adjusted the Twisted Dragon Eye’s Blood from 7% to 10% chance.
* Electrified Georg Ohm now drops Kalthi Depths loot, and is guaranteed to drop a piece of his unique loot as well.
* Sniper Blind Super Items now have proper descriptions.
* Increased the strength of all non-fueled energies by 15%
* Increased the strength of simple fueled energies (e.g. Nuclear Waste) by about 4%
* Removed fuel from a lot of energies
* Greatly decreased the rate of consumption of fuel on most fueled energies
* Dhatri Jivikadeva and Antu Vrkkasamvita now consume 1 Aveksaka Plasma per 5 min instead of producing Nila Rakta
* Cara Hrday’ara and Ayudhin Balakrura now consume 1 Alien Husk Fragments per 3 min instead of producing Nila Rakta
* Fixed Paxian Bloodstone and Sahvika Vrkka energies which were way too powerful
* Added 8 new rare DG drop energies from tech 19-22 that use various new types of fuel.
* Every energy except those that use prom and enukes had their stats slighly altered in some way.
* Nectar Torch now has +110% knockback compared to Radish Torch, down from +2100%
* Reworked Samgrahaka Bhava toward defensive and everlasting ops
* The Olympus Charger exchange missions no longer mention their neurobound tag (which was removed a while ago).
* Twisted Torch now properly fires backwards
* Fixed a bug where only 1 engine got used on ships with multiple engine slots
* Increased the total amount of Indium, Rhenium, and Osmium that can spawn per day from 5 to 10.
* Arctia and Vulcan AI now take 100% more damage when using Heat and Mining against them, respectively.
* The link from 3rd-4th stations in the paxius exploration chain, and first mission on hidden station now require you to have a premium in order to start.
* Increased docking speed of Pax Felicitas.
* Added Eridium to DG drop list
* Fixed typo in Ordinance Supremecy (Ordinance -> Ordnance)
* Added small amounts of visibility to capacitors with extra aug stats.
* Added 4 new tech 21 capacitors
* Reworked the drop chances of lower tech capacitors so that the ones that were supposed to be “rare” are actually a bit more rare.
* Added Fighter Speed Booster to most fighters to make them go +100% speed out of combat.
* Changed the “Expensiveness” categorization on Dark Doom and Dark Infernal batteries
* Demon’s Tracking Device now properly informs the player that it reduces their range by 50% against the target they have marked.
* Drones deployed by super items no longer inherit any skills or class bonuses. Rebalanced all drones deployed by super items to have appropriate strengths
* Increased credit value of Blueprints if you want to sell them to an AI base
* Pax Latis Recta Hybridization now properly hybridizes the Latis Recta.
* Removed asteroid belt from Free Market
* Serpica Missile is no longer neurobound, its tag has been replaced with can’t remove.
* Increased tracking to full on Twisted Dragon Eye’s leech beam superitem.
* Dragon Eye’s Blood can now be moved into a TSL.
* Twisted Death Remains, Twisted Honey Remains, and Twisted Nikola Remains are no longer part of the Twisted Tech item group.
* Renamed old misspelt Advanced Resource Detectors
* Rejigger Repair drones now to 10% tweaks instead of 20% tweaks
* Heavy Rejigger Repair Drone gains 4000 DPS and 300000 shields, charge time increased to 120s.
* Made Super Adhara Pajca for the Hybrid Scutelogica that is laser only and does 500,000 total damage, but with a self-damaging laser and immunity to transference. Aveksaka Defender Device V charging elec increased from 400 to 10,000 and charge time reduced from 115s to 100s.
* Changed the Pest Drones to physical, increased their resists, and gave them a firing aug
* Improved the Titan Drone
* Increased resists on Blue Scout Drone
* Reduced resists on Field Hospital drone, increased shield and recovery. Large Group Blocker resists reduced from 75% for 5 seconds to 50% for 4 seconds.
* Reduced Resists on Large Field Hospital Drone, gave it +500 DPS and 100k shields. Large Group Blocker resists reduced from 75% for 5 seconds to 50% for 4 seconds. Energy and shield costs reduced.
* Super Thunder Drone charge time increased to 60s.
* Gave Heavy Thunder Drone 10x DPS and increased charge time from 30s to 60s.
* Hephaestus Hospital Drone lost Std. Shield aug and gained 20,000 shields and 4000 DPS. Charge time reduced from 110s to 40s.
* Support Drone and Combat Focus Drone (from tech 1 super items in Nexus) gain 5000 shields
* Support Drone Device and Combat Focus Defensive Device charge times increased to 60s.
* Forward Operating Base charge time increased to 45s. Fighter given a Fighter Speed Booster.
* Flamberge Charging Drone lost two augs but gains 2380 DPS and 300,000 shields
* Voulge Charging Drone lost two augs but gains 5340 DPS and 400,000 shields
* Cloakpedo Platform gains Stealthy Targeting Laser, has lifetime reduced to 15s, has reflectivity reduced from 0.1 to 0.001. Cloakpedo missiles will do 3000 damage each. Deploys a Smoke Screen on use. Charging time reduced from 20s to 20s. Charging elec reduced from 6000 to 1200.
* Hidden Cloakpedo Platform gains Stealthy Targeting Laser, does a Seer Smoke Bomb, has lifespan reduced from 30s to 15s, reflectivity reduced from 0.1 to 0.001, and the 3 missiles will do 10k damage each. Charging time reduced from 25s to 15s. Charging elec reduced from 10,000 to 900.
* Roswell Drone device charging elec increased to 200 and charging time increased to 120s.
* Rosburst Drone Device charging elec increased to 1700 and charge time increased to 85s.
* Rosfire Drone Device charging elec decreased to 600.
* Pest Drone Factory charging elec increased from 100 to 900. Charge time increased from 30s to 90s.
* Blue Scout Drone Factory charging elec increased to 2500 and time increased to 200s.
* Added quality tiers to capacitors
* Changed charge time on Aveksaka Regenerative Device V from 180s to 50s
* Reduced the electric tempering on Infernal Battery from 30% to 20%
* Gave Bhisaj Varpratinu a big boost to DPS and increased mobility, but reduced lifetime to 15s. Reduced charge time of Hull Regeneration superitem to 30s from 120s.
* Gave Aveksaka Regenerative Pod 60k extra shields
* Gave Twisted Mobile Bubble Drone 200,000 extra shields
* Gave Forward Operating Base and Alien Nest Drone targeting lasers
* Added attack patterns to Anaconda and his minions
* Added a super item and attack patterns to Icepicks, Replaced their Police Lasers with Really Big Lasers.
* Made some of the Icepicks a little bit swarmy for next uni
* Added more energy bank to dark transport AIs for next uni to make sure they can launch their fighters
* Increased the range, damage, and projectile speed of Super Duper Ice Sludger

- Server Changes -
* Fixed some cases of rubberbanding when max speed was changed and made the speed cheat detection more flexible
* AI’s and combat bots that have less than 10% energy will now only use whatever weapon has the best DPE against their target instead of the weapon with the best DPE of those that can currently hit. If the best DPE weapon can’t currently hit when it’s time to fire again, he will wait until either it can hit, or energy goes back above 10%
* Industrial Commodities will always drop from player and bot ships when they enter stasis
* Implemented “LOCKED” mission mechanic
* Fixed the bug where firing aura in DG boss level can give infinite RoF to said boss
* Cleaned up the /mc dialog a little bit
* Fixed a bug where all the newer suns were doing absurd amounts of damage. Sun damage now 1/10 what it was, but the effective maximum shields for calculating damage has been increased from 10k to 50k. This means it will be roughly half what it was for shields 50k and above, and much less the farther the shield gets below 50k.
* Can now sell any non-commodity item to AI bases. Prices for built items reduced by drastically reducing the value from common commodities. “Scrap” value from AI bases reduced on expensive things with a 1 bil cap. Station Extension Y’s can be sold again, but only for 20k instead of 100k.
* Added the ability for field generators to optionally work only out of combat.
* Changed “Stay Close” slave order to “V Formation”. Bots will fly in V formation with you. If they are set to fight, they will fight from your side, shooting whatever they can shoot, unless you have “attack my target”, in which case they will still stay there but always try to attack your target above all else. Bots who are correctly in their place in the V formation gain the ability to slowly increase their speed to double maximum, so once you assemble your formation, you can go faster and they will keep up.
* Changed the guard behavior of bots who get a right-click order to guard empty space. They will now sit in that spot and not move as long as they have that order, shooting stuff in place if they are set to fight.
* Fixed a bug in weapon descriptions which incorrectly listed parasite damage as being half what really it is over half the time that it really is.
* AI and bots will now take into consideration parasite damage when choosing which weapon to use
* Fixed the bug with vacuum scoops not vacuuming aug debris
* Fixed the bug with tractor beams not tractoring aug debris when nothing selected
* Trade slaves in V Formation will follow behind master in a line
* Ships in V Formation when their master docks will now circle the base, combat slaves in an outer circle, trade slaves in an inner circle
* V formation AI will now always face and shoot their target if their target is within weapons range and they are within “close distance” (500) of their master rather than trying so hard to stay exactly in formation
* “Attack My Target” combat bots will now not attack things that the master hits with incidental cc damage if master has a different enemy already targeted.
* Const DPS bonuses from either the newish aug stat or the Weaponry skill, will now make healing better by that amount rather than being ignored for healing
* Userbases and drones will now take into account the transference resistances of themselves and their target (if their target is a drone) when making decisions about healing. This fixes two bugs, 1) drones/bases will no longer heal drones/bases with 100% trans resist, and 2) there was a situation where a drone/base with very high trans resist would not heal stuff when it should have because it thought the healing would cost way more shields than it really will.
* Fixed a bug preventing drones from firing missiles
* Gunner slaves will now MF properly
* Added confirmation for abandoning a base.
* Fixed a bug where super items with multifire tag would mistakenly label non-weapon items as happening multiple times
* Made AI using super items where a weapon is the first item actually check if they will hit with it in order to use it, rather than just checking range

- Client Changes -
* Various crash fixes especially centered around intel gpu.
* Added Paramezvara’pATala skin for Subhatt’ayu.
* Added Umravar Paramezvara skin for Subhatt’ayu.
* Added HellAbha CakravyUha skin for Subhatt’ayu.
* Added Nebula Armored Deployer skin.
* Added Nebula Wrathful Deployer skin.
* Added two new wattage skins
* Added Police skin to hybrid zebra
* Added Dark Capital skin to Earthforce Overloaded Prototype, Interdiction Frigate and Recon Frigate
* Added Earthforce Teal edition skin to Earthforce Overloaded Prototype, Interdiction Frigate and Recon Frigate
* Added increase in warp navigation to description of Seer class skill
* Improved display of constant aug stats (e.g. shields and energy on capacitors)