Overall, we’re pretty happy with the Industrial Commodities system that was added to the game at universe reset. We have some tweaks that we will be making though, both to increase the ease with which newer players can enter the system as well as to bring profits closer to where we wanted them to be.

Industrial Commodities in Earthforce Space

This won’t go live until next universe, but we’ll be seeding Earthforce Space with bases that consume Industrial Commodities. These bases won’t consume as many commodities as the Wild Space ones do, but they’ll consume enough to provide some income to players who aren’t yet strong enough to build in Wild Space.

Consumption Changes

We’re changing how bases consume commodities. Because the consumption rate is constant in the current system, the optimal strategy is to sell just under that rate in order to keep the supply close to zero and the price maxed. This runs into the counterintuitive scenario where selling more commodities will make you less money. If you sell just over the consumption rate instead of just under, you’ll eventually fill up the base and end up making 4 times less (50% price instead of 200%).

Instead, we are going to make it so that bases consume less when they’re almost empty (and the price is high) and consume more when they’re well stocked (and the price is low). We’ve optimized the curve so that you never lose money by selling more.  Even though the price will drop as you supply more commodities, your overall profits will still go up. The current consumption rate will be in effect at 50% stock and it will scale significantly higher on the way to 100% stock, as well as very low when close to 0% stock.

Changes to higher tier commodities

We’ve been getting some feedback that the consumption rates on the higher tiered commodities would require too many T1-T3 commodities to reach. We’ll be re-evaluating these numbers and ratios so that we are prepared to make changes to these commodities for next universe. Unfortunately, this change can’t be made mid-universe, but we will make sure to have it in for next time.

Weight tweaks

While we’re happy with the weight of these commodities when moved using bots, we aren’t too happy with how it seems to be inhibiting manual trading. This if very obvious in-game if you do a market check on Steel Girders: there are billions of easy credits to be made trading between the bases but trading in any reasonable volume results in weight that simply cannot be carried.  We will be going through the weight stats in an attempt to encourage more manual trading.

These changes to consumption are now up on the test server (test.starsonata.com port 3030) for you to test before they are patched in.

As you all should be aware, we recently change how item modifications were given to items; some of you have also noticed things aren’t quite right.

I’ve spoken with ylcepticon and we’ve (well, mainly him) done some number crunching and we’ve written the part of the process which decides how many mods you get.

Under the old system, mods were handed out “in order” they were declared in the code, the order is below:

Miniaturized, Composite, Shielded, Extended, Scoped, Dynamic, Amorphous, Radioactive, Sleek, Resonating, Docktastic, Intelligent, Amplified, Rewired, Workhorse, Evil, Superconducting, Transcendental, Overclocked, Forceful, Gyroscopic, Buffered, Superintelligent, Reinforced, Angelic.

Because of this, mods towards the end (such as Superintelligent) were less likely to be chosen.

In the old system, for a T20 ruin item, the probabilities for mods were 0.00275853 for no mods, 0.119395 for one mod, 0.31415 for two mods, 0.347688 of three mods and 0.077762 for four. To simplify and even things out, ruins have 20% chance at 0, 1, 2 3 and 4 mods. In other words, you’ll get a modded ruin item four out of five times, two and three modded ruins will be less common, but four modded ruins will be three times more likely now.
For the other mod sources (drops, droplists, bindomite and spawning (like on AI)) we’ve adapted a similar pattern with different numbers.

The changes are coming with this next micropatch, around 17:30 BST (12:30 EDT) today.

Ryan

Has finished up the server side code for the cargo slot system detailed here. There is still work that needs to be done in the client-side UI, but it shouldn’t be long until it is ingame. He has worked on some tweaks to the Industrial Commodities such as how the ai bases consume the commodities as well as some other changes discussed in the feedback thread. Expect a blog post that details the changes before the end of the week. He also did a minor code tweak for Pixel so that he could fix the issue where the Singularity Brake would warp you outside the docking radius of the base that you warped to.

MaxWhynd

MaxWhynd has been making /loads/ of cool sounds!

Pixel

Pixel’s been busy working on permanent drones. Now they work with astral injection like they did before! Additionally the Armada permanent drone series has received some neat visual improvements and some special assortments of weapons and fighters. Here’s the list of the improvements:

• Armada Ambro drone has 2 mini rhino fighters it can launch.
• Armada Ambush has holoprojector of duplicates.
• Armada Bastion now has a superitem weapon.
• Armada Defender now has a point defence superitem and Armada spitter superitem.

Forum topic to give any feedback about the changes: http://forum.starsonata.com/viewtopic.php?f=107&t=61674

Pixel has also been improving our suns!

Lastly, just a friendly word of warning; base holoprojectors may not be obtainable from Junkyard in the future, but some more have been added!

Jey

Patch is being prepared. Should be in a few weeks. There’s no rush for it so a proper announcement with livetesting will be done on blog in a few days.

I am currently working/testing on a system to get rid of the server wide lag when there is a single galaxy under heavy load (large bvb for instance). The galaxy where the action occur will still lag, but the rest of the server will not be impacted nearly as much.

Jeff

Jeff has been working on making Wormholes do fancy graphical things when they lock and unlock and cleaning up some of our old code.

Blue Dwarf

I’ve done my last exam of the year! o/
I’ve removed the restriction that players can only have one Outpost per character, fixed an issue causing low mod rates with ruin items, I’ll also be setting the parameter on live to allow squads larger than 10 players (for now it’s at 15).

Pixel

Pixel been adding new holoprojectors and ships! Here’s a Sneak peek!

He has also been working with Blue Dwarf to finally get those holoprojector super items back into holoprojector form, so when the next update rolls out expect your super item holoprojectors to be converted into holoprojectors!

MaxWhynd

MaxWhynd has joined us to provide us with some very cool sounds. He’s being working on getting us lots of cool new combat engagement sounds, as well as a few other new sound effects for us.

Auxilium

Auxilium has mostly been working on tweaking the missiles. He’s given the Lancer missiles their old launch ranges back, gave Flare missiles 10 second flares up from 5 seconds as well as the new launch mechanic, and he has improved the way missiles launch to begin with, so there shouldn’t be anywhere near as many cases of missiles missing their target.

He’s also given Junkyard Hydroponics and Extensors a sticky tag, which means you can move them out of a base but you cannot unequip them once you equip them. Hopefully this will prevent anyone from accidentally throwing their entire stack of Hydros or Extensors into one base and crying themselves to sleep.

MicroCapacitor

Through Earthforce’s analysis, statistics show that pirate activity has not been going down at all! Earthforce has lost many units fighting this ongoing battle with many different pirate factions. The scientists at Earthforce Headquarters have been working on a new type of Enforcer that will help put this outlaw scum where it belongs! The Marshal Blueprint will be available in the base on Mars in Sol, Earthforce Headquarters!

Blue photon has been building Capital ships for a long time. The Earthforce Capital ship line for Earthforce has proven to be very popular. Little did people know there was another ship that Blue Photon wanted Earthforce to produce which has an intimidating inbuilt mining laser! The Earthforce Overload Prototype Blueprint will be available in Beta Antares!

Absolution has been a place of exile for many years. A lot of ideas that Bellarmine had were cluttered about after he was sent to hell. A prototype Light Fighter ship was found, which is normally not used by the Absolution. This ship will allow them to pursuit to harm those who injure their space religion more effectively! The Cherub Blueprint will be available in Absolution!

Col Legno

Col Legno is back with us for a bit and will be poking a few bugs out of existance!

Morat

Morat fixed bugs, and is working on other bugs & quality of life improvements adding extraction rates to extractor descriptions.

Jeff

Jeff has posted his design idea for a new battleground-arena area in the Development Notes forum, you can read that here

Ryan

Ryan has been working on a new interface for Space Point purchases, so that they will be available from anywhere instead of specific ai bases. He has also changed account slots to be a flat amount of 150 per account instead of the current scaling system. He also had a lot of progress communicating with Valve for Steam, and a lot of progress was made towards that.

Jeff

Jeff’s fixing the issues with our wormhole placement code and even added a little thing so that we could ‘suggest’ where a wormhole should go in a galaxy, for DGs this means that the exit from one stage corresponds to the entrance in the next stage.

Jey

More lag and crash fixes! Additionally, early stages of patch preparation are going, so expect a patch Soon™?

Pixel

Pixel’s been adding more content in the form of user base skins! He will soon be getting back to work on permanent drones and get those astral injected augmenters working! This may take some time to complete though.

Also, this new fancy station visage.

MicroCapacitor

MicroCapacitor has been working on allowing attached stations to become detatched when they’re destroyed for places like Labyrinth.

Morat

Morat fixed minor bugs and is thinking about tweaks to the industrial commodity system.

A lot of us have been busy with the uni reset, either trying to take our piece of universe pie or fixing the custard for the rest of us.

Jeff

Jeff’s been working on changes to the Volcom pirate side of Nexus to make it more open-world / puzzle like. He’s also added a new sound for when wormholes using the automatic locking system unlock.

Jey

Jey’s been working hard on our universe reset and recent micropatches. He’s also had an idea on how to reduce server lag for everyone else during BvB, which he’ll be feasbility testing at some point.

Pixel

Pixel has buffed his new base field generators that many of you seem to be enjoying, and as I understand it he has some more cool stuff in store!

Morat

Morat is working on tweaking the new industrial commodities now that the playerbase is messing around with them, and still working on fighter tweaks.

Blue Dwarf

I’ve been fixing stuff such as the wormholes in dungeon galaxies being excessively far apart and been providing some functionality for various things for other devs.

We also have a new dev, whose decided to keep his player name as his dev name, so please welcome SunDog to the team. And for his first update, he’s made a new galaxy.

SunDog

Red Photon Fuel Depot will be a new star system found in Perilous Space. Red Photon has set up a mining outpost to supply fuel to its warships. The depot can also serve to fuel players in it’s region of Perilous Space, whether bought from the depot or mined directly from the belt.

Today’s micropatch:

* Made it so you can sell cantpawn (unsellable) items to user bases
* Fixed the new mobile furnaces which were claiming to only work on space stations
* Fixed factory descriptions on factories with more than 3 ingredients
* Fixed some server crash bugs
* Added base slot numbers to scan results

Also, here are some extra notes which we’ve compiled due to recent comments about patch notes.

New this universe (everything done since last uni reset that wouldn’t take effect until a new uni):

+ New base field generator blueprints in Free Market and Sol
+ Added T18 and T20 kits to Iq’ Bana and the End of the Universe.
+ Added Hybridized Demon Expansion and Ultimate Demon Expansion in Lyceum
+ Improved the spawn rate of Gabriels Neurolichs in Penance
+ Olympus Shard missions automatically start in Fiery Lemnian Plains, in case you forget.
+ Moved the specialised trade goods mission from randomly scattered around the universe to tortuga main station. Still daily missions
+ Removed the anti farm tags on roaming olympus ai spawners
+ Removed Paxian Holocubes from Paxian ruins (they’re obtainable from the asteroids in Enigmatic Sector).
+ Doubled drop rate on Solar Prisms in Prism+ New tech 21 and 22 ruin items
+ Separated Steppes and Ruby Steppes to be multiple galaxies, instead of one large galaxy. Fixing annoyances with wild slaves.
+ Improved various visuals in various custom galaxies:
  * Strontium-90
  * The Mausoleum
  * Nihilite
  * Hyper
  * The Serengeti:
    * Manyara Mire
    * Manyara Dam
    * Lake Manyara
    * Serengeti Blockade
    * The Searing Rift
    * Serengeti Nebula
    * Serengeti’s Eye
    * Crater Highland
    * Emperor’s Peak
  * Olympus Entrance
  * Graveyard
  * Temple Grounds
+ Gave Nihilite an outer ring of drones.
+ Reduce all chat spam from Timotheus the Red.
+ Moved Giant Space Still to Capella (from Serpica). Due to Fine Space Whisky now being part of the Industrial Commodity set.
+ Added Industrial commodity factories to Capella.
+ Added repeatable missions for various items:
  * PWIs in Serpica.
  * Seer items in Lyceum.
  * Ancient Scoutship in Enigmatic Sector.
  * Strontium-90 reward items.
  * Xenobiology Research for Alien Incubation and DNA Beam
  * Stable Overloaders in Copper.
  * Combined Augmenters in Copper.
  * Crystalline Reserve variants in Prism.
  * War on Earthforce missions in Brigand’s Stronghold.
+ Allowed Programming to be trained up to level 60 in Kalthi Stronghold for Kalthi Manufacturing Parts
+ Universe generation changes:
  * Suns are now significantly larger
  * Planets now have random sizes, within their gravity class, and occasionally become gas giants, which have 5 station slots and 50% chance of having 6.
  * Fixed the concentric galaxy type to no longer generate planets with overlapping orbits
  * Added a small change for T1 commodities to spawn in asteroid belts, made asteroid belts have varying levels of Metals, Silicon, Nuclear Waste and Fermium.
  * Fixed a bug where moons would orbit too close to their planet (sometimes inside)
+ Fixed the Aveksaka echoes drop table, the table for Zailaguru Ksatra Cara, the level 6k Aveksaka Perilous Space roaming uber.
+ Fixed issues with Strontium-90 stations rotating
+ Added the tweak superitem blueprints to Shadow
+ Added tech 1 to 19 ship upgrades to the station in Beta Antares
+ Fixed various odd things in custom galaxies, like wormhole positions and visages for uni reset
+ Lowered the galaxy count for Wild Space (700 -> 600), changed seeds for the universe
+ Added a neutral Warp Beacon for Transwarps to Glass Matrix.
+ Added Mobile Nuclear Waste, Metal and Silicon Furnaces, like the Junkyard versions for space stations. Available from The Junkyard
+ Added a mobile item cook book which can compress Quartz Crystals, Nanosilicon and Phased Metals into crate items (for unpacking later). Available from Ring.

Everything from last patch (which was mostly covered on the day):

* Fixed bugs in missileshotgun (mag and pulse gun) and laser balance sheets.
* Reworked rarity on scoops
* Adjusted Kalthi skill commodity build costs:
  * http://forum.starsonata.com/viewtopic.php?p=754866#p754866
* Blue Photon fighter squadrons now launch fighters
* Missile rebalance:
  * Missile range is now scaled to tech (roughly, tech*100)
  * Some missiles received damage buffs for shorter range, others received nerfs for longer range.
  * Buffed Napalm fires (Incendiary Missiles).
  * Made Bunkerbuster Missiles do mining damage (instead of physical).
* Various improvements for sun graphics
* Added Argonaut MagCannon Blueprint to the MagCannon blueprint pack
* Various improvements to background textures
* Fixed one of our tiled cloud textures
* Fixed clipping on some sun textures
* Improved the Expanding Ring Texture (used in Ngorongoro Crater).
* Added some stat tracking for superitem use.
* Increased the speed of the Very Slow Missile Hull used by the Volcom base in the Nexus from 30 to 45.
* Added some stat tracking for when players hit specific levels and which side of the Nexus they done.
* Fixed a bug where slaves could equip ship tech upgrades while undocked (thus bypassing tech and slot restrictions).
* Renamed TSL to Storage in dialogs.
* Made it so certain tutorial events will not occur if you’ve fired recently, so as to be less annoying.
* Added a visage for Target Dummy Drone Mk II
* Changed the visage of Warptastic Drones to look like a Ruby.
* Made Nihilite and Warpastic Drones easier to cap.
* Changed “Source” to “Author” in the bulletin board.
* Improved some of our vapor cloud textures
* Gave Emperor Shaddam Kilrathi IV 70% extra thrust so he drifts around a little less.
* Added Shippy McShipFace to the list of AI names.
* Fixed a server crash.
* Added superitems to a large number of missiles which give them high turning and low thrust/speed on launch, to be swapped out for high thrust and speed and low turning.
* Lowered the cooldown on the Heavy Capacitor Device to 5 minutes (was 7 minutes 30 seconds).
* Buffed Space Blue Beta hull space from 325 to 340.
* Fixed a bug with new tractors rules
* Slight increase of tracking for Burst weapons
* Updated mission descriptions to accept shard dusts, unstables, and shard tokens
* Reduced Whiskey Outpost respawn times.
* Changed Earthforce Outpost mission to just require a kill of the outpost instead of kill and loot.
* Buffed Unt Faranji Diffuser
* Fixed Zobitan’s Hareem and changed weapons so they’re viable wild slaves again.
* AI will no longer sell commodities at less than a third of the item value (AI base buy at half). This should prevent AI from selling their stuff to playerbase buying it at 1 credit.

From the micropatches in April (iirc, this was never posted):

* Phunky Coaxer has been restored to its previous stats
* BFD 9000 damage and elec regen has been increased
* Added the “prevent warp” tag to platform and defender drones.
* Fixed Long Scope and Quick Scope (Sniper Adv. class skills) from being exclusive to one another
* Fixed issues with Sniper Analysis not resetting correctly when unequipping your Sniper Analyzer
* Changed microbes warp and amoureses to preventwarp rather then dieonjump
* Fixed the extreme ruin prices. More tweaks will come to these soon.
* Fixed the automatic event system from activating when it shouldn’t on live.

Following on from this blog post by yclepticon, the new industrial commodities system has been added to the game with the recent universe reset.

28 new commodities have been added to act as sinks for commodities from t0 to t3, and are able to be sold to AI bases across wild space. These commodities are produced using factories purchased in Capella and can be equipped to your bases to convert the basic extracted commodities into more profitable forms.

This system is intended to replace selling items such as Extensor Ys as a sink for your metals and other resources (blueprint constructed items will no longer be possible to sell to AI bases this universe), and compliment future colony changes.

These AI bases will be recognizable by new base graphics.

The commodities exist in seven themed sets of four, with each commodity requiring some of the one before it.

Industrial Commodities in AI bases

Each AI base will trade in one complete theme set of commodities, and most of the Tier 0 commodities, randomly spread throughout wild space. Commodities sold to these AI bases will be consumed at a constant rate, allowing players and trade slaves who can keep up a steady supply to generate significant income. The Industrial Commodities that are not part of an AI base’s assigned set will not be consumed. (e.g. If an AI base trades in the four Girder commods but not all four Cell commods, it will not consume Fusion Cells).

Rates are designed based on the extraction rates of player bases, and may be subject to tweaking over the coming universes as necessary. Currently they are around 100-200k per AI base at the t0 level, down to 1-5k per day at the t3 level. Prices scale from a 200% to a 50% of the midpoint value depending on the amount in each AI base.

Industrial Commodities will be wiped from storages over universe resets.

New Commodities and Construction Requirements
Commodities by Theme

Tier 0 Commodities

Tier 1 Commodities

Tier 2 Commodities

Tier 3 Commodities

Universe Reset Patch – May 7, 2016

The Universe is now reset, let the landgrab begin! We had a patch earlier today, but we still needed to get a few more things in.

Additions
*Added EF Warp Beacon to Glass Matrix.
*Added factories for the “Industrial Commodities” in Capella
*AI Bases in wild space are now themed around individual commodities, and will buy the “Industrial Commodities”
*Added subspace mined commodity compressor for extend mining sessions
*Added mobile nuclear waste, metals, silicon mobile furnaces
*Added Programming skill training to level 60
*Added tech 1-19 ship upgrades to Beta Antares

Changes
*Subspace AI no longer count towards ownership of Aveksaka owned galaxies (this excludes the Aveksaka Outposts themselves)
*Missile launch tweaks
*Lowered the cooldown on Heavy Capacitor Device from 7.5 min to 5 min
*Universe generation changes
*Suns are now significantly larger
*Planets now have random sizes (within their gravity class), and occasionally become gas giants, which have 5 station slots and 50% chance of having 6.
*Fixed the “concentric” galaxy type to no longer generate planets with overlapping orbits
*Added a small chance for T1 commodities to spawn in asteroid belts, and made each asteroid belt have varying levels of metals/silicon/nukes/fermium (these were previously fixed amounts for all belts).

Fixes
*Fixed a bug where moons could spawn too close to their planet (sometimes inside)
*Fixed a bug where ai bases were spawning inside of suns
*Fixed a bug with the new tractor rules

Additions:
* Many previously unrepeatable missions are now repeatable.
+ New look for the dummy drone mk II in nexus.
+ Updated Serengeti Blockade wormhole and fixed some rotational background effects.
+ Visual improvements to Searing Rift, Serengeti Nebula and Serengeti’s Eye.

Changes:
* Made item set text searchable in the inventory search field.
* Lowered Nihilite range from 200% aug mod bonus to 100%.
* Increased the speed of the Very Slow Missile Hull used by the Volcom base in Nexus from 30 to 45.
* Made it so that certain tutorial events will not pop up if the player has fired recently so as to be less annoying.
* Made Crate of Stolen Parts items that you get from a mission in nexus disintegrate if you cancel the mission before delivering them.
* Changed the drop rate of the Aveksaka Echoes holocubes from the Zailaguru Ksatracara.
* The roaming Timotheus the Red will no longer spam All chat. Instead he will yell in all chat only once per phase.
+ Updated Ruby Steppes and Steppes to be separate galaxies with some fun changes.
+ Sun graphics improved.
+ Added Argonaut MagCannon Blueprint to MagCannon blueprint pack.
+ Improved background cloud effect textures.
+ Improved Expanding Ring Texture.
+ Renamed from “TSL” to “storage” in dialogue related.
+ Altered all ruby steppes drones to look ruby.
+ Tweaked Super Phunki Aura.
+ Altered Olympus entrance galaxy.
* Changed range on “Station Point Defense Array” from 300 to 750.
* The Imperial Protector (Emperor’s Palace) now has 15.000.000 Shield bank as well as 5000 Shield Regen
* Fix for the weapon range circle in radar.
* Caracara now uses the Flaming Harrier Skin.
* Removed t18, t20 kits from all drop tables. Added t18, t20 kits to Iq’ Bana and The End of the Universe.
* Fixed Kalthi Wrathful Commander superitem. Now correctly does +heat vul. rather than -heat vul.
* Tweaked Kalthi Wrathful Warrior superitem ‘Kalthi Paralysation’ to have a Nightfury’s Vacuum Effect.
* Changed the Kalthi Wrathful Warrior’s base speed to 100.

Fixes:
* Made stations consider range tweaks when calculating what they can hit
* Fixed Volatile Projectile Overloader not giving projectile speed properly
* Fixed certain item types not becoming usable with ship tech upgrades
* Fixed a bug where ships could only upgrade their tech once.
* Fixed a bug where docking tweaks were multiplying with themselves to give crazy high values.
* Fixed a bug where slaves could equip ship tech upgrades while undocked (and bypass ship slot restrictions)
* Fixed the total slave slot display in the character window
+ Sun texture clipping fixes.
+ Fixed Tiled Cloud Texture.

Most fixes from the bug fix pass did not make this patch but will be patched in the first patch after the uni reset.
Those are already sure to be fixed in the next patch. More will probably be fixed at the same time
- user bases not updating their elect drain if you unequip capacitance gear (like wep) while it’s charging.
- pwi / sing brake fail if the client is sending position update at the same time (usually occur while aping)
- small target are no longer considered hotkeyable item on drag / drop client side
- fixed holoprojector remaining after transwarp / forced galaxy jump and fixed holoprojector not coming back on after a disconnection / reconnection.
- fixed issue with ships being at angle 0.0 causing them to invert due to a rounding issue.
- fixed TSL not updating the first time you dock.
- /show*damages not listing damage anymore and the damage popup not always working properly.