- 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)

It’s that time again.  The fabric of space-time is becoming unstable and the universe is expected to completely unravel on September 15 at 1:00 PM Eastern / server time.  A new universe will be born shortly afterwards.

Expect to see drastic changes to the Kalthi Depths, bases buying and selling items using the new alternative currency system, and new and improved combat bot AI.  There is also reported to be some interesting changes in the Anaconda instance.

All Deployed user bases and permanent drones will be destroyed but your ships and TSL items will transition over to the new universe.  Whatever ship you were last flying will be the ship you fly in the next universe, so make sure to log out while in your storage thatch to give everyone else a good laugh as you try to find a good galaxy to colonize in that thing!

Existing terraforming blueprints are getting an update. The exact list of blueprints will be available below this blog post with almost all terraforming blueprints no longer building into their respective planetary project. Instead, they will build into a new “Pre-Fabricated” blueprint that can then be added to any planet or moon’s base to be built into the respective planetary project without the use of materials or credits. The existing cost of projects will remain on the original blueprints, allowing players to bulk build terraforming projects at a single centralized production base to remove the hassle of managing resources such as metals on all of your planet’s bases.

Once you’ve built the pre-fabricated project blueprints, you can add one to a planet or base by equipping and beginning the build. The blueprint will require no resources or credits to function, only time. The first project in a chain will take one day to build, while the second in a chain takes two days and third takes three days. Building all the way to the last project will, as a result, take seven days total.

- Content Changes -
* Dark Fighter Defender nolonger drops from DG Dark Transports
+ Added a 1% drop chance of Gargantuan Goblets to DG Green Battleships
* Paxian Rescue Order (broken daily in Subspace) has been removed.
* Kraken spawn time reduced by approximately 1/3rd.
* Termites will now be hostile to almost everything
* Updated engineer class description to correctly show the aug tweak bonus.
* Added Fuchsia Panther skin.
* Fixed a typo in one of the emp notification messages
* Base Amplification Blueprint description now properly states the 3 day time requirement to activate from 7.
* New generic DG consumable drops; more extracted commodity crystals/crates, pirate crest crates, and tokens that count for Honorary Mention/Diploma exchange.

- Server Changes -
* Added options for enabling/disabling fighter and missile launching for bots.
* Added an option for equipping/unequipping all diffusers on a bot at once.
* Fixed a bug where DGs would sometimes set inappropriate lockouts on their boss spawners
* Made Astral Travel and Glory skills auto-remove themselves from players that had them and return skill points to them as they no longer have any use.
* Added support for stacking certain types of construction speed boosts
* Implemented async galaxy idle which should allow a galaxy to lag without lagging the whole universe. As a nice side effect, some functions become more responsive even in a lagging galaxy (docking, jumping, inventory management and instant use items).
* Fix for a bug that prevented the “free bvb slot” from working if your team had any drones in the system (drones were counted as a teamed base and took the place of the free slot).
* Bot would not launch fighters if it would leave them with less than 1k total energy. This was problematic on lower level bot or high regen energy with no bank. Changed to prevent launch if it would drop them lower than 10% energy up to at most 1k.
* Fix to support multiple beacons in a single galaxy. When jumping into a galaxy with multiple beacons, pick a beacon in the following priority order. In same squad and team > in same squad > in same team > any other drone. Drones whose owner or team hates you cannot be used.
* Comets drop re-enabled.

- Client Changes -
* Improved the client Preload to show a better estimation of the whole progress and added shader compilation to the preload (instead of moving fast then freezing for a long time at the end)
* Added ships meshes to preload data to reduce lag when entering sol for the first time.
* Improved memory limit management a bit more, this should make the client more resilient to out of memory errors.
* The client can now allocate up to 3.4gb memory up from the previous 1.6gb, on low settings it should not make any difference, but will allow the highest setting to keep everything in memory and also allow non dds textures to be used (It is strongly recommended you use DDS for normal play, only disable it if you are editing textures and want to test the changes quickly)
* DDS textures quality has been improved quite a bit by properly handling the alpha channel on our textures.
* Improved normal map quality which should result in less visible artefact on ships
* Improved glowmap rendering. They are now much sharper than before.
* New background client state detection and handling. It should be a lot harder to notice when the client become in background state and when it does its less intense than before.
* Background assets loading. Textures and mesh now load in low priority in background while you play, resulting in mostly the performance of full preload, with the game starting speed of not preloading. Multiple clients are aware of each other and sync their load to reduce the strain on the system.
* Fixed a case where having an intel and another gpu while using the other gpu (nvidia/amd) still caused the intel to be detected and some restrictions added to the render. This resulted in the few users having both gpu losing a bit of performance.
* Fixed a crash in the optimized mesh generation.
* Improved data gathering for some crashes in the UI.

On July 28th we discovered a bug causing certain database writes to not go through for several hours starting on the 27th. This didn’t impact gameplay as a whole but the worst effect was that it allowed an item duplication and deletion bug when withdrawing/depositing items from the TSL. Making matters worse this issue also meant that our normal event log was not being written to, so we would be unable to see who had withdrawn items during this time period. We made a decision to shut down the server and rollback 19 hours to the start of the issue once we realized we would not be able to reverse any that had taken advantage of this or those who had lost items to it.

This is obviously a very unfortunate circumstance that we normally would like to avoid if at all possible, but the potential scale of the issue forced our hand in this case. The timing is especially bad as everyone’s Friday evening progress will be wiped. In understanding of this, we will be running a special bonus event for 48 hours with most of our normal event modifiers turned on at the same time. We will also be giving everyone a day’s subscription time as compensation for the lost game-play.

We are extremely sorry to have to do such an impactful rollback, but we hope you understand and that this event can help make up for it.

The compensation event will be as follows:
* Double XP from all sources
* Double aug drop chance for augs equipped on AI ships
* Double Bindomite drop chance
* Half item damage taken on death
* Double mod chances from dropped items
* Double construction speed
* Double prospecting rewards.
* We will turn on global holiday drops from one of the holiday events based on a poll that will be posted on our Discord server.

Update: The compensation event has been extended until Tuesday the 31st.

I spent a bit of time last week thinking about the role that fueled energies play in Star Sonata, and as a result, I decided to make some changes to a lot of the fueled energies.  I think fueled energies don’t work as a resource sink, and they don’t particularly work as interesting game play, but they do provide interesting flavor for several energies, so I want to keep a lot of the fuels, but make the relative bonus smaller and make the consumption rates slower so they aren’t as annoying.

In the previous iteration of the energy balance sheet, energies with simple fuels like Nuclear Waste got a 15% power bonus, while more difficult fuels like Promethium gave a 25% power bonus and Enriched Nuclear Waste gave a power bonus of 30%.  I wanted to reduce the difference in the strength between fueled and non-fueled energies, so I increased the baseline power of all non-fueled energies by 15%, while increasing the power of simple fuels from 15% to 20%, leaving Prom and ENukes where they are.  So the power progression will now go 1.15 -> 1.20 -> 1.25 -> 1.30 instead of 1.00 -> 1.15 -> 1.25 -> 1.30.

A large number of energies that were using fuel will no longer use fuel.  In the case of energies that were using simple fuels like Nukes, nothing about them will change except the lack of fuel.  The energies with their fuel requirement removed are:

• Oversized, Gigantic, and Gargantuan Obsidian Ionizer.  Visibility now 0 for all.
• Vazaha Cluster energies
• Mzungu Clash, Clang, Burst, Whack, Slam, and Strike energies
• Rhino Endurance, Primal Rhino Endurance
• Zebra Life, Primal Zebra Life
• Lion Heart, Primal Lion heart
• Berserker Core, Prototype Berserker Core, Advanced Berserker Core
• Multi Mythos Energizer
• Oversized Yallow, Gargantuan Yallow
• Kidd’s Energy Grid
• Paxian Bloodstained Reserve and Bloodstone
• Emerald’s Energy
• Bear Strength, Primal Bear Strength
• Sivar’s Purpose
• Hermes and Mercury energies
• Speed Demon Bank energies
• Tiger Blood, Primal Tiger Blood
• Lunarian Bank, Selenite Bank
• Venusian Vitality, Mercurian Zeal, Solarian Vigor

In addition, I noticed that there were several fuel types giving large bonuses that weren’t really deserved.  The power bonus of energies generating Face Hugger’s Acid, Jelly’s Blood, Pyritic Radiation, and Eridium Fragments were reduced.  The power of the energy using Vis was slightly reduced.

Those energies that still use fuel have had their consumption rate drastically reduced to between 1 per 300 and 1 per 600 seconds depending on the fuel and energy tech level.

Dhatri Jivikadeva and Antu Vrkkasamvita will now consume 1 Aveksaka Plasma per 5 min instead of producing Nila Rakta.  Cara Hrday’ara and Ayudhin Balakrura will now consume 1 Alien Husk Fragments per 3 min instead of producing Nila Rakta.  Nila Rakta parasite health will be increased for those energies still generating it.

Several energies, including the Paxian Bloodstone energies, that were mistakenly categorized and thus overpowered have been brought closer to where they should be.

Lastly, I’ve added 8 new rare DG drop energies from tech 19 to 22 that use various new and weird things as fuel.

- 324.443 -
* Fix for a crash introduced in 324.435
- 324.435 –
* Assets preloading is no longer done upfront and instead is handled in background. The total loading time is similar but you can now log in right away instead of having to wait for the loading to complete. (this mean the game start as fast as it used to without texture preloading, but after a minute or two has the same performance has a preloaded client).
* Improved the background detection and rendering. It should be a lot less intrusive now, it no longer reduce the graphic quality and only impact the fps. Disabling background rendering will leave the last frame rendered as the image until the window is brought back to foreground.
* Modified the dds texture generation to reduce the size and improve the quality.
* Made glowmap rendering much sharper.
* Improved normal map rendering to get rid of weird graphic artifact on some ships when seen from specific angles.
* Client crash fix in the target ring rendering code.
* Support for locked “LOCKED” mission mechanic on test server.

Those changes are available in the beta client which can be downloaded here https://www.starsonata.com/beta-client-download/

* Improved the client Preload to show a better estimation of the whole progress and added shader compilation to the preload (instead of moving fast then freezing for a long time at the end)
* Added ships meshes to preload data to reduce lag when entering sol for the first time.
* Improved memory limit management a bit more, this should make the client more resilient to out of memory errors.
* The client can now allocate up to 3.4gb memory up from the previous 1.6gb, on low settings it should not make any difference, but will allow the highest setting to keep everything in memory and also allow non dds textures to be used (It is strongly recommended you use DDS for normal play, only disable it if you are editing textures and want to test the changes quickly)
* Fixed a case where having an intel and another gpu while using the other gpu (nvidia/amd) still caused the intel to be detected and some restrictions added to the render. This resulted in the few users having both gpu losing a bit of performance.
* Fixed a crash in the optimized mesh generation.
* Improved data gathering for some crashes in the UI.

Those changes are available in the beta client which can be downloaded here

Weekly Dev Blog – 19th June