Heya everyone this is just a short post showing what has happened this week. Expect a larger than usual blog post next week.

Been busy this week with help from Vaporize improving the Behemoth model. Here’s some imagery, enjoy!

This also means the Divine Behemoth got a update!

Additionally a skin has been added to the Resistance and Wattage.

The Isvas’ayu engine mount has been fixed!

Expect all this to come in the next upcoming patch and much more!

Other News

In other news the ban topic has now been published: click here.

Bobbo

Bobbo is working on a simple new T20 DG uber, piloting a Vulture. It is not meant to be a huge new addition, but simply meant to make access to the Vulture/Aug Blueprint and Commodity a bit easier.

Jey

Jey is still trying to figure out Client crashes, but they are elusive, to say the least. (Or in jey’s words: “They make little to no sense which is **** annoying”)

He can however explain, and has fixed, the ocasional lag affecting the website. It seems to have been caused by the code that handles updating the test server.

Keep on sending crash dumps when you crash (simply click “yes”), the data has been extremely helpful! The client crash is a very weird one and jey is still not fully sure what is causing it, but he is making steady process. All my focus is on that (when the server isn’t crashing / lagging to death) and I am hoping to pinpoint it really soon. Quite a few things are being delayed while the crash hunt continues.

Hober Mallow

Demolishing and Neutralizing weapons are getting their splash damage removed, they are not the right weapons for a splash effect (High DPS, High DPE pulse guns). I’ll be saving the effect for a more appropriate weapon, preferably one that doesn’t have the highest Mining/Radiation DPS in the game. The other stats on the weapons will not change.

In working on invasions, I’ve found that the lower tier invasions don’t seem to serve the purpose they were originally intended for. Originally, they would provide something interesting for low level players to do. However, the fact that they are in a Premium zone meant that those players were not interacting with them very much. Going forward, there will be no invasions in the lower arms. The invasions and outposts will be locked to the Sas Arm, and the rewards from the other arms will be moved into other places.

Pixel

Scruples, Nightfuries and all their kin used textures that were, quite frankly, absolutely terrible. Pixel has been busy making them glorious once again!

He has also been working on a new boss, the Queen Hive, which is still in the early development stages but will enter the universe eventually.

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s_m_w

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few weeks getting myself acquainted with the client code, which is starting to bear fruit! Here’s a short video of my results from fiddling with lasers.

Server Changes

* Another server lag from bvb (or other heavy spaceobjects scenario) fixed, hopefully is the last one.

Content Changes

* Reduced Twisted Nikola shield caps from 17mil to 15mil.
* Improved “Outpost 2 Reporting In” mission intro and summary to better convey the objective to the player.
* Made Lasting Reserves Berserker only
* Adjusted the cost of station-bought Thoraxes and Torpedoes
* Adjusted Stygian Fist
* Reduced weight on Primal Zebra Hooves Torpedoe
* Reduced size on (Primal) Lion V2 Rocket. This had a severe impact on their stats.

Bug Fixes

* Fixed bots getting full bonuses to fighter bay slots, they now get half the fighter slots bonus from the master

Recent Patches

Recently we’ve been pushing out a lot of patches and we appreciate you all for your help with constant feedback, reporting bugs, and fixes. Expect a couple more patches.

Bobbo

Bobbo been fixing some Easter bugs with some missions not giving rewards correctly, next patch. This includes a number of other bugs related around the Sniper but is still within the primalary stages of being fixed.

s_m_w

Some more background fixes related to gear balance issues.

Pixel

Has remade the Unt Faranji Wingship visual. He has also been poking about with HTML5/Javascript related scripts to apply to the player guide improvements.

Termites have also been looked at with the current result of the huge termite losing ¾ths its damage potential and lowered resistance from 98% to 90%.

This is a pretty small patch, mostly due to how recent the previous patch was.

On another notes, a slowdown on the webserver was fixed recently, hopefully website should be back to fullspeed.

Thanks again to everyone sending the crash dumps from the client, I have a lot of data to go through and fixe as many of the crashes as i can, client patch fixing most crashes should be here this week.

Changes

* Slaves now correctly receive bonuses from Zen of Capital Ships and Zen of Fleet Commander
* Reduced the min and difficulty levels of the UZ kill missions by 400. Missions now open at level 600 like the wormhole itself
* Fixed another ancient scoutship mission description
* Weakened huge termite.
* Server crash fix

Server Changes

* Multiple less frequent crashes, fixes
* Added more detail to /showsquaddamage. The output can get very bloated, more improvements will come later
* Diffusers with a chance of failure on ships in stasis should no longer have a possibility of being destroyed if the ship is attacked while in stasis.
* Fixed bad description on Super Intelligent crit hit bonus

Content Tweaks

* Doubled extraction power of panning beam.
* Made the Aveksaka Xenobiology Platform deploy 5 fighters instead of 1. Will require to re deploy the drone..
* Fixed an issue with Honey Strikers doing less damage than intended.
* Reduced the weight on Subshield Reactors by 90% (since it doesnt include the previous tier anymore)
* Beefed the Bule Hyperdrive Device (Bule Eradicator inbuilt): Jump distance 1500, Failrate 15%, Energy needed 15000, Charge time 25s
* Added Thorn Augmenter within the Cleft Thorn family internal inventory list so that surgical weapons will increase chances to obtain it.
* Adjusted junkyard extractors from sticky to base bound.
* Any base kits missing station upgrade blueprints and defender/platform/assault drone blueprints have had them added. Existing kits will not receive these blueprints if they are missing them.
* Paxian Figurines are now made from 250 Baobabs (up from 150)
* Paxian Figurines now get consumed by their respective AI base type at the same rate Fine Space Whisky gets consumed
* Base price of Paxian Figurines increased to 37.500 from 22.500
* Merchant Fleet Master now once again gives +10% max shields, rather than +2%
* The “Market place? Trading Federation?” Paxian Exploration mission no longer rewards players with an Ion Peashooter+, as the item requirement was removed already.
* Engineers tweakings changes (+5.5% to augs, +11% to tweaks)
* EDVAC Prospecting Scanners have had their tech levels updated.
+ Added Combined Augmenter blueprint packs to Augmenter Labs in The Acropolis. These blueprints will no longer drop from AI. (These will need to be manually added to The Acropolis for this universe.)
* Dementium Lockers should now drop from Kalthi Depths, previously they did not.
* Assault Dropships no longer require Colonial Marines to make, the Assault Behemoth now has an inbuilt generator that makes Assault Dropships. The Assault Dropships themselves have been buffed quite significantly.
* Wrathful and Armored Kalthi ships now require 5 Reinforced Kalthi Essence’s instead of 10.
* The Zeus Throne now generates 24 Jovian Guards instead of 12.
* The player progress missions in Sol are much more helpful as to where and how you obtain Tech 21 and Tech 22 skills.
* Vaidya (In Vihara Vaidya, also known as the Shielding 22 boss) now has significantly less regeneration, but is healed for 100% of the damage done to it when the wrong damage type is used against it. The spawn also have more shield regeneration and shield bank.
* Super Intelligent mod is once again additive
* Kalthi Wrathful and Armored Blueprint requirements lowered: Kalthi Ship Plating 10 > 2, Reinforced Kalthi Essence 10 > 4.
* Mythic Defenders now have a Subnavigator’s Augmenter builtin instead of a Grand Navigator’s Augmenter. This will result in a reduction to their Damage, Rate of Fire, Resistances, Shield Bank and Shield Regeneration. Their inbuilt Mythos Stream healing beam now Chains for 1 jump instead of 2 jumps.
* Hermes Fire Starter, Fire Maker and Faulty Fire Starter energy cost increased.
* Rajanicaragupta Amzuchid now imparts a +2500 Visibility tweak for 5 seconds.
* Many torpedoes have received significant overhauls, especially in the lower techs
* Added tech 0 Weak Mining Laser to be added to the Volcom side of Nexus
* Neutralizing and Demolishing weapons now have 300 splash range and 75% splash damage universally.
* Kalthi Wrathful and Armored Blueprint requirements lowered: Kalthi Ship Plating 10 > 2, Reinforced Kalthi Essence 10 > 4.
* Mythic Defenders now have a Subnavigator’s Augmenter builtin instead of a Grand Navigator’s Augmenter. This will result in a reduction to their Damage, Rate of Fire, Resistances, Shield Bank and Shield Regeneration. Their inbuilt Mythos Stream healing beam now Chains for 1 jump instead of 2 jumps.

Bug Fixes

* Zarkar’ayu Cloning Vats now take the 3.75billion to generate the aforementioned Fighter Generators, as they should have been taking originally.
* Fixed the visbility bonus on the Angelic mod
* Twisted Death Augmenter Blueprint now takes 30b total (was 3b due to a typo)
* Berserker Mode no longer drops from DGs (item renamer), replaced with Berserker Method
* Minor description fixes: No such thing as “statis” and duplicate description on Flying Monkey
* Changed how quality tiers are calculated for scoops (drone capable scoops should no longer be auto-marked as exotic)

Easter is Here!

Easter event has started. Be sure to pay a visit to the Easter Warren Sector off Sol!

Jeff

Jeff added some equipment that new players can purchase in Mutara Gardens as well as an asteroid belt with an AI miner flying about. The miner is not just there to liven up the place: The Volcom side of the Nexus is meant to be a bit of a puzzler, with the miner acting as a hint on how to get rid of that pesky asteroid blocking the wormhole to the next galaxy. In general, Jeff is not very happy with how the Volcom starting zone currently is. Rather than fighting random cadets everywhere, there should be more puzzles and challenges.

AI can now have multiple engagement sounds. Even the most diehard of Volcom pirates needs some variety in their vocabulary other than “Yarrrr!”.

Bobbo

Bobbo found bugs and presumably fixed many.

He has also added some important details to item descriptions, such as the amount of space the items in a crate will take up, or whether a laser is ethereal or not.

s_m_w

I’ve expanded the damage meter to show individual sources. Not quite perfect, as parasites injected by missiles and such count as the player’s damage, but it’s still far more detailed than what we had before!

And it also works for healing!

On an unrelated note: Samgrahaka Bhisajvars are REALLY good. This was a test with 7 of them in a 3 gen ops setup.

I’ve also finished the next, and hopefully final, pass on Torpedoes and Thoraxes. Most importantly: Torpedo I, II and III are no longer the worst weapons in the entire game. In fact, torpedoes in general got changed: Their niche is now high DPS, low DPE weaponry. There are very few torpedoes to experiment with at the higher techs currently (mostly due to how bad torpedoes were in general), but that’ll change over time.

Since it’s going to come up: The Zebra Hooves Torpedoe got changed quite a bit. The reasoning is simple: The hallmark of the physical damage type is high DPE. For non-physical torpedoes to be in line with the ZHT (DPE of 0.4), they’d have to have far lower DPE (in the range of 0.25 and less! Torpedoes of large size classes would be approaching 0.1!), which simply didn’t work.

While the ZHT itself did lose some of its burstiness, it did inspire the general idea of what torpedoes should look like.

Jey

Last week has seen a pretty large server performance improvement, much larger than what was expected from this change! It came with a few new item related problems but all those should be fixed now. This is the reason why there hasn’t been any real update since last week, I did not want to add new things on the server when it was in an unstable state. Now that the server is a bit more stable, patching will resume later this week.

Thank you to everyone who’s been clicking yes when they crash, all those dumps are providing me with a lot of data to fix the crashes. A client patch for those I found should be available on beta in the coming days and hopefully will become the live client with the patch coming up.

Hober Mallow

Fixed Shielding 22, I kept the boss at a 30 second cycle timer because anything more made it far less exciting. The timer wasn’t the issue, it was the insane healing the boss got from seemingly out of nowhere. The boss is now less of a spank fest, and you’re less likely to kill it inside of a single damage type rotation. Killing the spawns is much more important than it previously was.

There are now Combined Augmenter blueprint packs for sale in Augmenter Labs inside of The Acropolis, this should make building the Lyceum Combined Augmenters a much more reasonable and feasible task. This means that the blueprints will no longer drop from AI.

Assault Dropships, from the Assault Behemoth, have been reworked and are now close range and tanky fighters. A non Fleet Commander user can only deploy 2. They should be really interesting.

Updated the player progress missions for Tech 21 and Tech 22 skills, they are now much more specific and no longer mislead the player about what they need to do in order to level their skills up.

In regards to Subspace Invasion, I am working on a system where you won’t have to kill Outposts for monthly missions rewards, you will instead be killing invading Motherships instead. These will spawn at the beginning of the Invasion, and I’ll move a big chunk of the rewards away from Outposts into Motherships. It will still be worthwhile to kill Outposts, I don’t intend to take that away from players.

Ryan & Pixel

Pixel has been hard at work updating the various guides on the SS website.

• Guide Sector Menu: http://www.starsonata.com/players-guide/
• Quick Start Guide: http://www.starsonata.com/quick-start-guide/
• Summary & Key Bindings: http://www.starsonata.com/summary-and-key-bindings/

And last but not least: A far more convenient way to check your lockouts!

SunDog60

Added Zen Reset missions, available in Sai’s Retreat (once they are added). They will instantly reset one of seven Zen skills of your choice.

This is a bug fix patch, mostly aimed at items bugs introduced in the recent patch, alongside a few crash fixes.

* Auragenerator should now be working properly
* Fix for Galscanner
* Base amplification device no longer reset its timer with the server
* Tractor should now update properly
* One bug with scoop was fixed (pretty sure theres still more)

Server Changes

* Adjusted Ai Base 3 visuals
+ Adding Combat Focus Defensive Device to the bases in The Nexus
* Fixed ult drone controller bps having an incorrect max uses
* Made it so that extractors that extract the same resource share slots with other extractors of that resource.
* Fixed lockouts for coloured empires
* Updated The Nexus to visage2 AI bases.
* Tweaked Earthforce choice visuals.
* Gunner Analysis fixes
* Controlbots now say what type of bot they are (Trade/Combat) in their description.
* Scans of solarbodies will now include the name of the object they orbit, if they have one
* Fixed a bug that prevented Diamond Extractors to be equipable on a ‘Gem Caverns’ terraform
* Beefed the Arcadian to Argonaut Barrier Booster effects.
* Adjusted base pulse pluses lower recoil and lower damage but same dps.
* Adjusted Deep Space Fuel Stations visuals.
+ Adjusted Deep Space Background.
+ Removed negetive 5% shield charge aura from Paradise.
* Made it so that automatic super items that do damage will not be triggered by healing weapons
* Buffed the missiles the Aveksaka Munitions Device’s use.
* Adjusted the Stormcloud fighter so it will always be able to launch fighters, lower the damage on the Stormcloud fighter, lowered the damage on the Zarkarayu fighter, lowered the damage on the Wasp fighter.
* Fixed issue in pax stratos turret position
* Beefed Mythic Defenders range from 100% to 125% and enabled the Light of War weapon.
* Junkyard extractor can now be equipped alongside normal version of the extractor
* Reduced size of andaman and achilles crest bps to 100
* Server performance improvement with splash weapons and deathblossom.
* Fixed Ambrosia Drone (attached), Andaman Drone (attached), Qafir Drone(+), Ancient Defense shield banks. Will require redeploying.
* Qokujiii Qa’ik no longer has way more regeneration and shield bank than intended.
* Items sold alongside a ship when said ship is sold can now be recovered with the undo button.
* Guard AI in Kalthi Depths dungeons will no longer drop augmenters from their drop tables, they’ll only have a chance to drop augmenters that are equipped to their ship hull. They, instead, have a chance to drop a wider array of commodity crates.

Client Changes

* More crash fixes, it should be pretty stable now.
* Client crash now attempt to upload the dumpfile automatically if you click yes (instead of opening the folder and asking you to send it to us).
* Small tweaks to the laser shaders
* Renamed dds texture option to compressed texture to reduce confusion.
* New lockout tab display in the character window.

** Beta client updates **
a new beta client is now available, beta client will automatically download the update if you are using it.
If you are not using the beta client but wish to install it, the installer can be found here http://www.starsonata.com/dl/StarSonata_2_beta.exe
- 308.110 -
* Fix for multiple client crashes
* New attempted fix on the freeze when in background issue.
- 308.195 -
* save dumps now include the character name to avoid overwriting by accident.
* new system to automatically upload dumps in the event of a crash (if you click yes). It’s minimalist but should work.
- 308.221 -
* improved the save dump upload to compress and include starsonata.log + config files to help with tracking crashes.
* fixed another client crash
* temporary disabled gameview related texts (floating messages and nametags). Some crashes came from here and a fix is currently being written.
- 308.223 -
* gameview related texts fix is done and they were enabled back on.

Client patch still has to wait a little, lots of new crash found that need to be fixed but its progressing at a great pace.

* Nerfed shield bank on jelly carapace from 4k to 1k
* Increased Apollo Energybank X from 25k to 28k to allow tech 3 kits to fire a Apollo MagCannon.
* Gear from the Jungle is now properly Tech 12, with Primal gear being Tech 14.
** Many of these items have seen their power levels increased, while also increasing their sizes. This is most true for Bear/Tiger/Elephant gear.
* New items have also been added, namely the Tiger Claw/Primal Tiger Claw and Primal Bear Fighter and Missile Bays.
* Removed the maximum piloting level restriction from Super Phunka mission (p21+ player could not start it).
* OS / Gigantic / Gargantuan conversion effiency changed to 0.55 / 0.60 / 0.65. Credits per ration reduced to 5 (from 6 – 10)
* Fixed a bug that prevented Diamond Extractors to be equipable on a ‘Gem Caverns’ terraform
+ Removed any scoops from the AI in the Rumble galaxies.
* Stormcloud Fighters now launch 3 mini fighters instead of 6 mini fighters. Pax Cosmologica fighters now do their intended damage. St. Bernard, Cerberus and Zarkar’ayu fighters no longer do more radiation damage than they should. The generators that make Greenish Fighters, Mini Vulcanite Fighters, Honey Strikers, Slumber Mc Chrome Face Fighters, Twisted Strikers now make 24 of them like other fighters.
* Reduced the damage output of Arctia AI.
* Kalthi Depths no longer drops random items and gear that are inappropriate for the zone.
* Small server performance improvement with death blossom (more to come)