In-General

Everyone in general has been working towards the patch and universe reset, fixing any bugs and ironing out any potential issues that could arrise when the time comes. We’ve also updated the Steam trailer video for everyone to enjoy.

Jeff

Jeff has created a Support Drone Device that involves a Support Drone and a tech 3 weapon called “Push Back” which shoots a high velocity physical bullet with no recoil and short range. This is targeted towards ‘The Nexus’ for players to have the ability to play the support focus role by deploying this drone and healing your buddies while pushing the enemy back using the drones knockback weapon.

Darksteel

We’re changing some aspects of the commodity system of Kalthi Depths. Hazardium and Precarium are being phased out of the game as well as the Unstable / Stable / Enriched / Concentrated variants of the 2 as well as the stages of upgraded Perilium. We felt like this was unnecessary cluttering of drop tables as well as making KD builds more annoying than they really should be for no reason.

For instance, if a build currently takes 1 Precarium, 1 Concentrated Hazardium and 1 Enriched Perilium you will now have to supply 3 Perilium, 2 Rudimentary Admixium, 2 Middling Admixium, 2 Advanced Admixium and 1 Expert Admixium.

We will be making factories that will exist for one universe for the players to convert their built materials back to their raw materials EG Concentrated Hazardium –> 1 Perilium, 1 Rudimentary Admixium, 1 Middling Admixium, 1 Advanced Admixium and 1 Expert Admixium and 1 billion credits.

Pixel

Has been busy creating/splicing pixels together to create the almighty ‘Space Urchins!’, these little creatures will roam around Perilous space grappling onto their victims and exposing them to their spikey bodies. Some will inflict a lot of damage while others could provide benifical purposes… Lyceum scientists expect these to appear next universe due to the unstable nature of the fabric of space.

A new type of ship has also been created but its usage and reasoning remains a mystery!

Q/A

-13- : what is happening to Ruins at reset, specifically?
Not as far as I’m aware at this present time, apart from the current conversion of these ships which are more useful ships and will be tech 20 instead of tech 19:

• Unt Faranji Wingship X
• Bule Abadi Sidhe X
• Golagoay Vazaha Archetype X
• Kikale Mzungu Frigate X

-13- : is there going to be a patch before reset, and if so, when?
What will happen is the universe reset and patch will happen at the same time, this will result in a temporary universe for one week that will allow players to acquire the nessary class skill required for the proper universe reset. Gives everyone an equal start when the rush begins!

KangarooBlob: Could we get a comprehensive list of updates/balance changes coming in for reset please?
We will be providing a patchnote release and possibly other blog posts before this event takes place that we feel may need more context.

Chrono: Is XYZ gear being nerfed?
Only X gear has recieved a slight downgrade.

New Universe

Attention Star Sonata, on Saturday March 11 at 1:00 PM Eastern / Server time, there will be a universe reset to a 1 week temporary universe.  That means that all deployed bases and the entire universe itself will be destroyed, but after a short delay, a new universe will manifest into existence.  All of your ships and bots will transfer over into the new universe, but be aware of the last ship that you are in before the universe implodes, because that will be the ship you will be flying in the new universe, and you won’t want to dock all your ships in the wrong place just to switch out of your storage Thatch.

New Classes

At the same time as the universe reset, we will be patching in the new class system.  The new class system moves away from all class skills being regular skills that you have to train at special locations.  Instead, upon reaching certain level milestones (5, 10, 20, 40, 65, 100, 150, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 1000), you will be able to train a new skill from the class skill tree inside the character dialog. In addition to the new class skills which don’t cost any skill points, there are new Zen skills for each focus and class which do cost skill points and roughly equal the old skill point costs of all the previous class skills.  The overall power and stats of each class is designed to be very close to the previous classes at end-game, but much more powerful and impactful at early game.  We do plan to do a class rebalance later, after this new system is in place and everyone has had a good chance to try it and give feedback. When you first log in, all your old class skills will be automatically reset, and you can choose/re-choose your new class skills from the character dialog.

Another New Universe

Because of the way a lot of the AI use existing class skills, we needed to patch in the classes at the same time as a universe reset.  But we don’t want to force people to deal with re-classing and building on the same day, so we are doing a 1-week temporary universe to try out the classes and maybe some other random stuff.  There will be a new-new universe on March 18 at the regular time. If all goes well with the classes and the new universes, we will be announcing the official Steam launch date shortly thereafter.

Pixel

Pixel’s been busy working on a new Cleft Claw to roam around earthforce and wildspace layer. Bringing abit more hell fire to the universe.

He’s also going to start working on the base extractor changes, where only one type of each extractor can be equiped for next universe.

Hober Mallow

On test are also some changes to a variety of Pulse Guns, Magcannons and Laser Beams. Many of these weapons that had less than 1 second rate of fire now have between 1 and 1.5 second rate of fire (this is especially true of the Speed Demon locked weapons like the Hell Raiser, and other weapons that impart parasites/fires). The reasoning behind these changes was to preserve their DPS (they have the exact same DPS listed on the weapons) while enabling Speed Demons and other fast rate of firing characters to use the weapons without wasting DPS due to the rate of fire cap. It should be very hard, if not close to impossible, to hit the rate of fire cap with them now. Weapons that chain or splash, have been increased to 2-5 seconds as well. This was to make the Gunner weapons feel more thematic and heavy hitting. Let me know how these changes feel, or what effects they have on your setup.

Dark Steel

Dark Steel, mainly went over with the rest of the development team what Augmenters should be given a unequip due to changes.

This also applies to the following ships to recieve a free Augmenter reset:

• Prawn
• Resistance
• Hephaestus Machine
• Wattage
• Delquad

Q/A

Masterful: Reset? Still in the works sadly as we’re still sorting out issues. The current goal is sometime March but don’t take this as a solid deadline.

Chrono: Are termites being more buffed again ontop? Yes next universe they’ll be unleashed into the wild to test your resolve!

SunDog60

I’ve been working on collecting bug reports and getting them fixed with the help of Egrosphere. If you know of any obscure bugs that we may not know about, please feel free to contact me on Discord and let me know about them.

Red

Red’s been working on making various missions such as the tech 20 skill missions auto-start when you get to the boss zone.

Ingendum

Ingen’s been busy working on spawners and tracking down bugs in the new class system to get them all tested and fixed. More testing for this new system on the test server would be very helpful to getting this system complete and ready for universe reset.

Unfortunately for readers, much of what was discussed and done was for internal changes such as changes to spawners that won’t affect gameplay, as well as more tweaks and changes for the upcoming class system change.

Bobbo

Bobbo’s been working on fixing universe generation issues (issues arising from the addition of Kalthi Depths to the universe, mainly).

JeffL

When a new userbase is deployed by a player, instead of being an unnamed kit, it will now display the owner’s name initially.

Deathblossoms will no longer fire at every target within range (to the maximum target count they can achieve). If your deathblossom does not think it can hit an enemy within range, it will not target them. This will not affect ethereal weaponry (because if you are in range, an ethereal weapon will go through obstacles and other enemies to hit the target), this will affect non-ethereal weaponry and as a result mainly projectile weaponry.

Community Meeting

Hober will be having a conversation with the playerbase about Kalthi Depths loot on Friday February 3^rd 2017 at 3PM EST.

Click the flailing rat to join the conversation.

Hober Mallow

Hober has finished the first pass on all of the Kalthi Depths AI, the new AI should be put on test shortly for your testing pleasure.

Hober has convinced the rest of the development team that blueprints requiring Station Management by the player equipping them was unnecessary. Going forward, they will require the appropriate level of Equipment for a player to equip them to a base.

Finally, he will be adding one time missions for the majority of non Serengeti Tech 20 ships. These missions will have (roughly) the same requirements as the blueprints. This change is meant to allow players who do not have a Wild Space presence to continue progressing through content.

Pixel

enkelin

enkelin applied his renowned mathematical wizardry to the Gunner Analyzer. It should be up and running on the test server sooner rather than later. He has also come up with a brilliant plan that will solve all of our BvB woes… but he’s not ready to share it yet.

Bobbo

Working on Gunner Analyzer, courtesy of enkelin.

JeffL

Created a cool new Speed Demon super item that increases Shield Regeneration out of combat! Otherwise, he is working on things behind the scenes.

MicroCapacitor

Looking into potential issues with resistances and soaks.

Jey

He has been diligently hunting down bugs, and patching vulnerability issues. He was able to get the client to a point where it passed all of his stability tests. Out of the 183 dmps that were sent in the past 2 months, 164 of them are confirmed to be fixed by his changes. The rest were crashes without sufficient information, so they may or may not be fixed.

He has narrowed down the root of the graphical glitch that causes engine particle effects to display on things they shouldn’t, now he has to figure out the best way to fix it.

Oh, and we finally got him to move to Discord!

Community Meeting

DarkSteel, enkelin and Hober will be having a conversation with the playerbase about Perilous Perilous Space/Kalthi Depths on Friday January 27^th 2017 at 5PM EST. With the upcoming class changes, some of these AI are going to require reworking and rescaling. We wanted to take this opportunity to involve the player base in the process, since you are the ones who are engaging with the content on a daily basis.

Click the following rat to join the conversation.

Hober Mallow

He has also worked with egrosphere on some interesting super item code. They are: charging based on current speed, and charging based on each instance of an evasion. The evasion and speed based charging should be helpful for both Seer and Speed Demon going forward, with some of their super items charging up faster as a result of successfully evading damage or going past a certain speed. There’s also functionality for a “target tracker” that causes all of the damage you have done to a target to be done again when the “target tracker” effect expires. He hopes to use this functionality in service of Seer in the future.

Micro Capacitor

Hes been doing a lot of things lately, heres some of them:

• Been making Missiles 100% transference resistant so hps drones/bases don’t heal them (will work on code to prevent drones/bases healing them period).
• Looking into making a tag for parasites/fires/nanites to allow buff type not get killed by exterminators.
• Talked about new ways to allow players to alter the base’s targeting system. One of the thoughts were to have an item you may equip that allows the base to give targets with a specific property (example: further out) to have more priority than those not.

Pixel

PIXELS BEEN GOING CRAZY MAKING GALAXIES FOR WILDSPACE TO BUILD IN FOR NEXT UNIVERSE… enjoy!

He has also added a new superitem to the Hephaestus Machine! This superitem will allow the deployment of a Hephaestus Hospital Drone that can do a hit effect of +1.75k shield charge and 1k energy charge for 5 seconds for friendlies within 1k range.

Also a new skin for the Hephaestus Machine+

Hober Mallow

I will be adjusting the tech level for a variety of the lowest valued Olympus gear (Hephaestus’ Mallet’s/Brackish/Shorted/Damaged/etc), and I have also changed the blueprint requirements for the Hephaestus’ Striker and Maul so that they are the same cost as a Hephaestus’ Hammer.

I have been doing some work on the Subspace Monthly invasions, going forward they will provide very large and generous rewards upon completion. They will also require you to kill outposts themselves instead of droves of Aveksaka. Look forward to a blogpost from me about the changes.

Pixel

Pixel has been busy this week making skins for the players to enjoy, here’s some of them below:

Isvas’ayu – Bumble Stinger.

Kalthi Armored Deployer Skin.

Kalthi Wrathful Deployer Skin.

The skin names are subject to changes. Pixel also has been working on steam content. Here’s some examples:

Questions from players

• Chrono: Can fine tuned gear drop from dugeons?
  • We’ve decided that Fine Tuned gear shouldn’t drop from dungeons, but we’re aware none exists at tech 21+ and we’re now considering buff the current pieces.

• Reed: Is it possible to reward returning players like a mission would appear and they receive credits?
  • We plan to do this in the future but currently no.

• Everyone: Whens patch?
  • We’re still working the kinks out of the skill tree and fixing some issues.

Pixel

Pixel’s been adding new ships relating to the Interdiction frigate. There are now three ships where you can purchase the Recon Frigate from the Lyceum Recon base. Then you can upgrade this ship either into the Speed Demon or Seer variants. These will contain some interesting superitems that will make them quite useful!

He’s also currently working on some miscellaneous holoprojectors, such as Googly Eyes.

Ryan

Ryan has made a new tab in the character dialog to show active lockouts, as well as display a countdown to the next daily and weekly lockouts. He is also working on a system so that when major changes are made to a ship or augs, players will get a free aug reset on that ship. This system will be used for several of the upcoming ship changes.

Jey

More security and behind the scenes updating from Jey, this will also include some scheduled downtime while he performs some maintenance. Jey’s also been fixing crashes and memory leaks within the client.

Happy new year everyone! Here’s the first blog post of 2017!

Pixel

Pixel has added new permanent drones that are made to mine astroids. You deploy them in the orbit of an astroid belt and the drone will shoot a mining pulse which will sit in place until an astroid collides into it. The astroid will then explode allowing your bots to scoop the debris. This will make mining bots more efficient at mining rock belts.

These drones can be found in the Capella galaxy. The permanent versions can be made from blueprints and the temporary drones can be directly purchased from Assayer’s Refinery.

Click here for more information (spoilers).

Dark Steel

After finishing his work with many augmenter rebalances DarkSteel has finally been able to balance the new Twisted light fighters.
The Bana light fighter also has 5% critical hit chance on its hull.

Micro Capacitor

I’ve changed the targetting code from bases and drones. Bases will now prioritize other bases in healing and damage and drones will now prioritize ships and other drones in healing in damage. You will no longer be able to be RTS bases.

Hober Mallow

Hober has been very busy these past few days! Here’s what hes done over the holidays:

• Mythos Scanner’s resistance to damage changed from 5% to 3%, electrical tempering has been changed from -5% to -3%.
• Addressed some issues with the Strontium Cannon, it had massive amounts of particle effects before and I’ve adjusted it to not be that way now.
• Unlocked the class overloaders, in some cases made them a bit more distinct in their intended function.
• Added a Mastodon Fighter Bay as an item, it’s ship bound and sticky (just needs to be added to the Mastadon hull). It has 10 Slots, and gives fighters 10k bonus shield bank for 5 seconds after being launched from it.
• Increased the rate of fire of the Talon line of weapons so that their up front damage isn’t as high.

Jey

Jey has been busy over the holidays but has gotten some sercurity updates done! Should be back tomorrow to get back to work.