Christmas is here, or near enough, with our Christmas event kicking off this Saturday. Astro-Ginch better watch out, as those pesky terrans will seek him out for his tweak generator and other goodies.

Christmas will run from the 10th December for a bit over three weeks, extended from what we said in the weekly blog to avoid ending on New Year’s Eve. The Christmas event will now end on the 2nd of January in the new year.

The event this year will feature the normal festivities, including the return of Astro-Santa, spreading his jolly cheer and giving all the (nice, and definitely not naughty) citizens of the universe their presents. Rumor has it that the Gingerbreads have formed an empire and are lurking in the depths of space.

Missions and related content can be found from the Lapland system, which’ll appear from a new wormhole in Sol when the event starts.

Astro-Santa Letter Competition

This years competition will take a bit of a change from previous years, it’ll run as normal but the letters submitted will appear in next year’s Christmas event. This year’s event will feature all the letters we’ve ever had, going back around the last 8 years. In addition, all the letters will use the egg carton system, grouped by year, to save you from some tedious clicking.

Standard rules for the competition apply:

• You are allowed to make multiple submissions.
• Deadline for submissions is Friday 23rd December, 00:00 EST (05:00 GMT). Submissions after this date will be ignored.
• Submissions to be posted in the topic for this post.
• If you want your letter to be counted as from your player name instead of your account name, include it.
  • Ideally, put your letter in a [quote][/quote] block and leave other comments outside to make it clear what you want in your letter.
• Submissions may be excluded for reasons we see fit (such as plagiarism).

Once the deadline has elapsed, a maximum of five winners will be chosen, which’ll have their letters created for the following year. They’ll also recieve a unique permanent holoprojector, Frozen Snowflakes, and various Christmas items.

Christmas Event

Starting on the 10th of December and ending on the 31st of December, the Christmas event will begin! Lapland will be available in Sol featuring the Christmas-themed missions, as well as special Christmas loot found off of just about any AI, including DG AI!

Ryan

Ryan’s been working on the skill tree and finally fixed a UI bug that was driving him crazy, in other news he’s also fixed a exploit regarding to transwarps and most of all fixed the vacuum scoops… hopefully!

JeffL

Jeff has been working with the marketing side of Star Sonata to get a better understanding of what Star Sonata statistics are within the marketing realm.

Bobbo

Christmas has come early for Hober! Bobbo has finished work on the new Shield Remodulation Scanner, an item that will be available soon for Gunners!

Pixel

Pixel has been getting content ready for the big changes coming next full patch, adjusting and tweaking existing content so the big changes the skill tree bring and augmenter tweaking won’t have as much of an impact on existing content.

Hober Mallow

Hober has been working even more on fighters! Doing some final adjustments and communicating with the rest of the development team and players to ensure what’s happening to fighters and the way it’s being done is to a good quality.

Jey

Still working on the memory leak, getting closer to the heart of the issue and will victoriously defeat it with the Jey Debug Peashooter. Expect a micropatch sometime soon to fix some bugs that are currently lingering about, for example the hate system bug with some bosses.

Dark Steel

Dark Steel has been working on a lot of the Twisted Blueprints making them less annoying to build; Along with making some temporary drones more realistic in repair costs instead of almost free to repair.

Pixel

Pixel has changed one of the in-built items of the Bule Eradicator from a squad transwarp device to the new Bule Wormhole Generator that will essentially allow the owner to deploy small warp beacons for squad or team members to transwarp to!

MicroCapacitor

-Ruin Base Gear: Shields will have +Damage% = to tech; Energies will have +Shield Regen% = to tech; Radars will have +Range% = tech/2;

-Beefing Ruin Base Weapons and a few other Base Weapons.

-Possible change to Escape Pods to make them have super-items and different visuals!

DarkSteel

Dark’s finished his work on YZ upgrades and platform/defender drones having the IC-cost options, as well as a new feature for these that I’m sure many players will be happy to see:

Hober Mallow

I have finally finished my work on the new ships I plan on adding, which go from Tech 16 to Tech 21. We have, in increasing order, the Pax Latis Recta/Hybridized Latis Recta/Operative/Lyceum Exploration Cruiser/Blue Photon Corvette/Mastadon/Unt Faranji Wingship X/Kikale Mzungu Frigate X/Golagoay Vazaha Archetype X/Bule Abadi Spectre X/Hybridized Mastadon. These ships will be available from a variety of sources, mostly Subspace. The Mastadon will be available from The Serengeti and the ruin ships will be available from ruins.

I’ve finished the Fighter rework, I’ll push them through for the next patch. Fighters are buffed, take a ton of electricity, and come from Generators. The old blueprints and missions that gave Fighters and Fighter Packs now give Generators. I’ve also added a Tech 20 Starter Capital Fighter Bay to Beta Antares, and a blueprint for the upgraded version of it to the DG loot table. In addition, I will not be changing the fighter bay slots. This means you will be able to have swarms of these fighters now.

I am not able to get the code support to make fighters stay out their entire duration and follow you through warps just yet, but rest assured I plan on getting this in very soon.

The Shiv’s, Tusks, Cestus and Talons have all been completed. After they are patched in, you will find them dropping in DG loot.

Bobbo is putting the finishing touches on the Gunner Analyzer, I’ve been feeding him a steady diet of crackers and celery until he gets it finished. It seems to be working.

My next major projects are: working with DarkSteel on Kalthi Depths balance, working with Enkelin on Station Management 21 and 22, working with SunDog60 on Subspace, working with Red on using the Balance Sheets for good and not evil (Tweaks will be our first victim), and working with JeffL on a single cool super item for every class and focus (12 in total).

That’s all from me!

Jeff

Jeff has been working on fighters and the new Augmenter Tweak adjustments.

Pixel

Has added the existing skins to the Hybridized Scutelogica Paxian ship and added a new Wraithful Egg skin to the Kalthi Warrior branch of ships, this skin was created by Curse!

He has also been fiddling with explosion effects! Here’s one of many examples that what could be possible in the near future:

Hober

Hober has been talking about trying to get a recruitment type system thats for squads instead. For example when a player wants to find a squad that needs a Monkey class they can look in a list that would accept them into their squad. We felt this was a great idea but will have to be set aside currently as the push for prioritised things are much more needed.

He has also been balancing the fighters a lot lately and is slowly chugging through them, expect some nice improvements to most fighters!

Here’s some new content Hober has been working on (subject to changes):

DarkSteel

Still hard at work balancing content for the latest Prawn changes and some adjustments to XYZ base gear requiring the new Industrial Commodity system.

MicroCapacitor

Went through most of the base gear and reduced the size of base gear and base augmenters!

Jey

Through the past 2 weeks been debugging the client to look for the client crash / memory leak that some players are experiencing. Jey thinks he’s narrowed it down to a certain section in the client but will still take a bit of time before this memory leak is fixed.

New Developer!

We have a new developer join the ranks! Not much can be said currently as this individual/machine is still fresh from the recruitment line. More information about this next weekly blog.

Currently

Augmenter Tweaking (AT) gives the player 4% increased effectiveness on his augs. This means that, at the max level of 25, augs are doubled in their stats. So if an aug gives +50% shield you’ll get +100% shield from this aug with AT 25.

Okay, so what is being changed?

What we will be doing is giving all the augmenters the values that they would have if they player had AT 25. What this means is that all stats on all augs will be doubled.

The new AT will increase the effectiveness of augmenters on your ship by 0.5% per level up to maximum of level 10. Players will be able to obtain the new AT skill just like the old one: through a chain of missions in The Acropolis.

Why are we making these changes?

We’ve come to realise that lower tech players are at an incredible disadvantage until they get their AT skill up to a reasonable level (often players would have far lower AT level than they would be able to acquire), especially because the AI in the early – mid levels do have AT. Missiles and Bots have been very popular in the early game and we feel that AT is partially responsible for this. Low tech augs already have low stat values, and the lack of AT makes it even worse. With this change, players will really feel an increase in their effectiveness after equipping an augmenter when they start playing the game.

What is happening to my current Augmenter Tweaking?

• Players with Augmenter Tweaking 0 – 4 will have their skill reset back to level 0.

• Players with Augmenter Tweaking 5 – 9 will have their skill lowered to level 1.

• Players with Augmenter Tweaking 10 – 14 will have their skill lowered to level 2.

• Players with Augmenter Tweaking 15 – 19 will have their skill lowered to level 3.

• Players with Augmenter Tweaking 20 – 24 will have their skill lowered to level 4.

• Players with Augmenter Tweaking 25 will have their skill lowered to level 5.

This will help players get through the missions without having to do content that is far lower than their current tech level (preventing largescale grinds).

Enkelin

Headed the first weekly content meeting. These meetings will be held once a week and serve to make sure that all new content is being officially brought to the attention of the team and analyzed for balance issues. This should help improve the game’s quality assurance workflow.

Pixel

Pixel added some new unique ship graphics for the Corrupted Cyborg faction found in Kalthi Depths! This includes two new corrupted capital ships, as well as a corrupted support freighter. These ships will not be player obtainable, if you would like more info on them check them out on our official Discord server!

To go alongside this, Pixel’s also created 3 player-obtainable ships! The Rosbulk and Roscap are additions to the well known Roswell family of ships, as well as the Golden Man ship being a tech 19 addition to the Goldenboy ship family. Please keep in mind, all stats shown here are subject to change at any time before release!

Ryan

Ryan’s fixed the random prices on ruins, all should have their normal amounts now and will not change after the server goes down. He’s also fixed drones being affected by the 0.5s fire rate cap, fixed bosses not resetting due to destroyed drones being present, and fixed the abandon button in the possessions menu for drones, meaning you will no longer have to be in the same galaxy to abandon a drone.

Pixel

Pixel’s added a set of micro-sized support focus ship dampeners, half as effective but only 80 size compared to regular dampener’s 250 size.

Jey

As players have noticed, although Jey reported that he had fixed the hate rollover issue, it still occurred constantly. Jey looked further into the issue and found that AI needed the same fix for their target prioritization, which will mean that the hate rollover fix only needs a patch now and will be properly fixed.

Jey’s also worked on fixing server stability problems, mainly the recent 500ms+ frames issue.

DarkSteel

Changed the Basegear Y and Z upgrades, galaxy bound drones and base thruster blueprints from raw materials to Industrial Commodities.

Hober Mallow

Lyceum Combined Augmenters now require Infinite Knowledge, have increased credit costs on the blueprints, and do not require credits to acquire the blueprints from the missions. We’ve got a change coming in soon to Augmenters and various Tweaking skills, look out for a blog post explaining these changes in the coming days. I’m still working on Fighters, gathering data and figuring out scaling.

This is a small client update to fix some issues that have showed up recently.
* Fix a multitude of slowdown related to object loading and particles, resulting in a pretty good performance improvement
* Fix for a render thread using cpu when it did not need to (should mean that with background rendering disabled, client in the background will use very little cpu)
* Fix for 3 different client crashes.

Halloween Event

I hope everyone had a great Halloween! If you’re still looking for more Halloween goodies, the Halloween event has not yet ended! Until the 5th of November you can still find time-exclusive Halloween items and special missions in Graveyard, as well as encounter the Undead Narwhal in Perilous Space!

Jey

Jey wasn’t able to make it to the meeting, though he did give us a quick report on his work! He was able to track down and fix a slowdown issue some players have had with particles, though is still attempting to find a memory leak issue and the engine graphic displacement bug. On the server side of things, he’s preparing some changes to reduce server lag in the future.

MicroCapacitor

Nerfing Amplified Field Amplification Device. At the moment with both Bravado and Enlightenment amped, it gives ~13x dps modifier. Changing the Field Amplification Device to be 100% and the Amplified Field Amplification Device to be 300%. This would make with both Bravado and Enlight. amped you’d get ~5x dps modifier. Worry not! Hober and I will be changing fighters to help with the lack of FC dps!

DarkSteel

DarkSteel’s been fine tuning the Twisted Zone content with Pixel recently.

Pixel

Pixel’s been tinkering with the sensor factories and could possibly make the system much more easier but keep the existing system intact to provide optionality.

– Content changes –
* Increased Alien Healing Burst, in-built Superitem Bhisajayu.
* Increased mobility movement of the Mobile Transfer Station.
* Increased the Solarian Drone’s damage and energy bank but reduced the electrical charge to give more differentiation between the Solarian Drone and Mercurian Drone.
* Removed drone deployment ability from Bhisaj’a roaming subspace alien in perilous space. This will stop the event chat spamming of this wild bot from trying to deploy its drones.
* Made Pumpkin Drone a mobile drone again.
* Decreased the spawn delay on the roaming t20 ubers to 1 day
* Increased the distance at which you have to fly to spawn a Giant Space Alien from the southern spawner in Ngorongoro Crater
* Increased lifespans on Engineer Transfer Station and Mobile Transfer Station to 10 and 12 minutes respectively
* East Vindia NCC-Bulk spawner count increased from 4 to 5, excluding Ismail and the two roaming NCC-Bulk spawners.
* Barbe Rouge respawn timer decreased from 20 minutes (give or take 50% of that), to 5 minutes (give or take 50% of that).
* Added “Only follows the ship used to deploy.” to all assault perm drones descriptions and reduced size to 10.
* Weakened Wild Warp Beacon resis and shield bank.
* Removed the synergy between Bot Ph.D. and Wild Man, Wild bot slots are now the same as trade slots, *2 for Wild Man
* Beefed Iceprickler and Unforgone AI slightly so they’d be more competitive as Wild Bots
* Zebu Masuta is now available for RadEx
* Added sunglasses holoprojector.
* Removed Twisted Token requirements from DESPICABLE and SUBTLETY skills from the Ai Base in Twisted Zone.
* Reduced the droprate of the Bana King DG version from 100% to 33% with a weekly lockout
* Increased the droprate of Ancalagon the Black from 25% to 33% with a weekly lockout
* Increased the amount of time it takes for the Bana King roamer to respawn
* Decreased the amount of time it takes for Timothy the Red to respawn.
* Reduced Ambrosia Base Gear Pack cost
* Added Industrial Commodity and Industrial Commodity Factory tags to their respective items. This will make it easier to search for them.
* Beefed Twisted CnC drones.
* Changed Blanco Uber Station’s Monochrome Tint specialized trade goods to drop Monochrome Hue specialized trade goods.
* Beefed the Twisted Death Augmenter
* Slightly nerfed the Ult. Vanguard Augmenter
* Slightly nerfed the Grand Moff Augmenter
* Reworked the Nightfury’s Patience
* Reworked the Pax Stratos and Heliosoleta.
* Adjusted the Grand Navigator’s Offensive and Defensive augmenters.
* Adjusted the Grand Moff Augmenter.
* Removed Tractor Power from the Nightfury Patience Augmenter. Nerfed the Ult. Vanguard augmenter, and tweaked the stats of Sup. and Exc. Vanguard of augmenters.
* Added a 33% range reduction to the Samgrahaka Akramavar, Indrakoza Akramavar and Indrakoza Amzuchidvar. Also adjusted resistances to give them clear strengths and weaknesses.
* Adjusted the drop table for the Urqa Capship DG and roamer boss in Kalthi Depths. *Adjusted the requirements for the Grand Moff Augmenter Blueprint.
* Reduced range of Twisted Extensive Charge Drone from 300% range to 260%.
* Improved Twisted Earth sub boss area.
* Improved Nikola main boss area.
* Removed key requirements from Twisted Zone.
* Adjusted the drop rates of the Graveyard Souls and Spirits.
* Decreased the size of Fighter crates, and increased the weight.
* Lowered the maximum amount of Allied Commendations obtainable from the Paxian Supply Crates, removed Bindomite from the Paxian Supply Crates.
* Edited the mission text for the Graveyard missions, letting players know they should capture the Restless Souls.
* Reduced the costs on the lower level Lyceum Combined Augmenters.
* Lowered the weight of all Industrial Commodities
* Adjusted the stats of the Pax Stratos and Heliosoleta.
* Reduced the Red Photon Warship Transference Vulnerability to -10%.
* Rebalanced the Art of ___ Augmenters and Ultimate Art of ___ Augmenters
* Added skins to the Twisted Fate of Death ship.
* Added skins to the Twisted Honey ship.
* Changed ruin base gear to be on par with X Gear and +1 their tech level.
* Reworked the requirements on the Art of ___ Augmenters, as some of them required items that nolonger existed
* Removed the level requirement on the Honorary Mention for Jungle Armada Crests mission in The Jungle.
* Gurujana Ekam’s Zarkara, Hantr and Raurava minibosses will no longer drop their respective augmenters.
* Beefed Mythic Defender.
* Reduced Annihilator Thruster Blueprint from 100 size to 10.
* Changed the nerf capacitors to be tech 0. This was preventing people from capturing the Zobitan’s Hareem since it had a t22 nerf capacitor equipped when captured.
* Increased Massif III roamers.
* Changed the price of copper and tin to 750k.
* Adjusted Subspace Invasions so that they last for 24 hours instead of 4 hours.
* Hantr, Raurava and Zarkara minibosses spawned by Gurujana Ekam no longer drop their respective augmenters.
* Nexus AI no longer have -50% shield bank.
* Lowered the cost of Doomed gear from Infernal Tempest.
* Changed the Seer virus weapons to superitems.
* Changed the Seer virus blueprints to require/accept the new seer superitems.
* Adjusted numerous spawners in Blue Outpost, Bonnet, Absolution, Arctia, Tortuga and a few other places. The AI should now give experience no matter how many times you kill them.
* Adjusted Subspace Invasions so that they last for 24 hours instead of 4 hours.
* Removed Tech 19 ruin ships from their respective ruins, those ships will still continue to exist in game.
* Added Tech 20 versions of those ruin ships to their respective ruins, these ships have different stats.
* Increased wormhole opening time from 10 minutes to 1 hour in Twisted Zone.
* Adjusted the repair costs of various Tech 20 through 22 drones (Armada Drones, Chidz, Twisted Drones and Armada Inferno and Charge Drones in particular).
* Tweaked the Nightfury’s Patience augmenter
* Converted the Inferno Drone requirement to Armada Inferno Drone on the Twisted Condemnation Drone Blueprint.
* Tweaked some Twisted missions to take more Twisted Tokens.
* Added exterminators to the twisted AI.
* Added Self Destructor to Mini Vulcanite Fighters.
* Added 3 Nikola skins.
* Improved Termite Rat Speed.
* Improved Mobile Transfer Station speed by 10%.
* Made all exchange scrap item missions reward raw scrap notes.
* Scrap notes are now 0 size.
* Beefed the Fuzz’s aura.
* Given Twisted Rage Resonance 5% rate of fire.
* The Nexus Urqa are no longer on the same team as the higher level roaming Urqa.
* Anaconda has better turning.
* Decreased the Jungle Armada Crests required for an Honorary Mention, from the “Jungle Armada Crests” mission, from 5 to 2.
* Increased the number of Honorary Mentions obtained from turning in 5 Lyceum Mention Blueprints from 1 to 3.
* Tweaked Twisted Solar Panels.
* Tweaked Perilous Solar Panels.
* Added new different looks to the Slumberchrome, Rosie and Basils.
* Adjusted Twisted Main boss drop rates.
* Leopard Missile Launcher is now Light Fighter locked.
* Bule Abadi Sidhe has had its resistances adjusted some more.
* The Mzungu Frigate’s shield and energy bank bonuses have been increased to 650% each.
* The Monkey and Leopard’s resistances have been swapped, the Leopard has 4 augmenter slots as well. The Primal versions carry those changes as well.
* Oversized Wingship’s hullspace has been increased, and it’s resistances have been tweaked as well.
* Equaminizer’s inbuilt Juice Gen has been increased to 150, it’s build cost now includes an item form Equanimizer.
* Added upgrade item methods for Silent Night and Twisted Nikola.
* Beefed the splash range and nerfed the splash damage on the Amplificative Oscillation Ion Emitter
* Added Candy Corn visual for Neurotweak debris.
* Glacial Freeze has been altered from 90% resis to mining to 60%.
* Super Shield Soother now has no charge timer but does negative 8% to energy charge.
* Power Doughnut has no charge time but does 15% negative recoil instead of 50%.
* Aptitude Doughnut has no charge time.
* The rate of fire cap for userbases is now 500ms, rather than the standard 100ms for everything else
* Multiplied all base wep damage, energy, and recoil values by 5. DPS, DPE and EPS will be the same, but this should reduce the lag caused by high rof bases significantly.
* Reduced the restriction in distance between attached bases by 40%

– Misc Changes –
* Renamed Slave Master Pod to Bot Master Pod
* Renamed Perilous Expanse to Kalthi Depths
* Added two new names to the Monkey name list for The Jungle
* Removed basebound tag on base thruster manual.
* Added decay on universe reset tag to base thruster crates, Zaphragi Communique I to III, Jungle Communique I to III.
* Update skill descriptions for bot slot changes
* Wild bots will name be named “WB” instead of “CB”
* Reworked bot slots so that bots take their tech in slots:
** Trade slots: (Remote Control + Bot Research) * 2
** Combat slots: Trade + 8 (if you have Bot Ph.D.)
** Wild slots: Combat * 2 (if you have Wild Man)
* Reworked (slightly) the maximum number of bots you can have
** Trade bots: Remote Control + Bot Research – Minimum of two.
** Combat bots: Half trade (rounded up) + 2 (if you have Bot Ph.D.)
* Bots require their hull’s tech level in slots, at a minimum of 1 slot.
* Improved the Twisted Harbour bp and aura.
* Added extraction per day to extractor tooltips
* Wild Man nerf: Wild bot slots are now `Remote Control * 2` and Wild Man adds 50% slots
* Speed Demon Overdrive Device’s electric regeneration bonus has been lowered (Due to it being neurotweakable, players were receiving more electricity than they should have.)

– Misc Fixes –
* Fixed a typo in the Big Banker mission summary text
* Fixed a typo for Interial Dampening in the ship info window
* Changed it so that scoops will report errors if the message is different to the previous error, instead of if the error was greater than two seconds ago.
* Fixed a typo in the crowning notification message
* Coordinate info from Treasure Holochart corrected from 5000/1000 to 5000/1850.
* Fixed Kalthi Depths strontium missions.
* Fixed hate rollover (causing hate to reset to 0 if you did too much)
* The size and tech for the “Hesediel’s Augmenter Blueprint” was backwards. Changed to size:5 tech:11.
* Changed the ai in the crucible to not be able to jump to different galaxies.
* Fixed the sorting of the Level column in the character skill menu to sort as a number instead of a string

– Changes requiring a new universe –
+ Increased Rhino and Lion Aspect Augmenter drops.
+ Added a new tag to spawners to disable AI from scooping items and applied it automatically to dungeon AI
+ Reduced termite amounts.
+ Reduced drop rates in Kalthi Depths on generic drop items.
+ Fixed problem with L, T and Y class suns having planets and asteroids orbiting too close to them.
+ Fixed Twisted Fate of Death Roamer.
+ Added MagCannon Base Weapon Blueprint Pack to Free Market and The Acropolis.
+ Added mission auto start to Twisted roamer.
+ Added Mad Kidd Drones.
+ Added Hybrid Kidd Drone.
+ Added Honey Badger Drone.
+ Added Heavy Kidd Drone.
+ Added Armada Kidd Drone.
+ Added Captain Bling Drone.
+ Redone termites and unlocked all features to highest tier mounds.
+ Improved Twisted Zone entrance galaxy layout.
+ Changed the Seer Lyceum base to sell the correct blueprint/changed the missions to give the correct item.
+ Fixed UrQa’qa Qu’ishi boss scripting.
+ Added more Strontium 90 Kalthi hunting missions.
+ Added UrQa’qa Qu’ishi (UrQa King) Strontium priority target mission.
+ Added Twisted Fate of Death Strontium priority target mission.
+ Moved Bonnet and the Enigmatic Sector to the Earthforce layer.
+ Nerfed the offensive strength of the Subspace Outposts, but increased the buffs they give to the surrounding Aveksaka.
+ Added Twisted background music for Twisted Zone.
+ Changed the Kalthi Deployers to not bunch up early on in Peril Depth Dgs.

– Client changes –
* Fix for a corruption that occured at the gpu memory level (some drivers were unaffected but to others the impact was pretty varied).
* Small performance improvement in galaxies with lots of objects.
* Fix for 17 different crashes.
* Support for planet glowmap added.