Single Player is receiving a huge overhaul.
Big design overhaul
The intent was always to make a sandbox game where you could collect cool ships and customize them with deep and interesting ship design features. To that end, we built a dynamic economy with shops and shipyards and venders and trade etc, however we seriously missed the mark because the game's story didn't encourage you to interact with that aspect of the world, and the ship design elements made your interactions with it shallow and in many cases unnecessary. Furthermore, the loop of unlocking hulls and modules so that you could dig deeper into the ship designer and make progressively better ships didn't work at all for the early game. That should have been more of a late game feature, while the early game should have tried to play more like a standard sandbox space RPG.
So we are changing all that.
So what I'm doing is reworking the early game by introducing more standard tropes from space RPG games, and de-emphasizing the [design your own ship] features in the early game where they never worked great anyways. You will still collect module blueprints and hulls, and you can still design and construct your own ships, however you will no longer be expected to do that in the early game because of new features being introduced. I'm adding shipyards that sell fully built ships custom mapped for various roles, and I am adding a significant amount of ship enhancement items and loot drops so that even store bought ships can be customized to your liking. I'm also adding mission boards to every economy station hosting procedural missions for cargo hauling, passenger transport, and combat missions. The idea behind all of this is that your early game experience need not require a masters degree in ship engineering to enjoy because it will play more similarly to other titles.
What follows is a detailed breakdown of the new features and gameplay changes.
Procedural missions
Every economic station, trade hub, and shipyard, has a mission board now. Enter the stellar cartography room to access it because the missions are displayed on the map. I've added passenger missions, cargo missions, and combat missions. All of these missions reward credits and exp. It also has a pretty fancy UI for selecting the missions based on their destinations and requirements.
Loot
I like loot. Everyone likes loot. So I'm adding lots of it. There are now 4 ways to upgrade an existing ship: tuning kits, module components, turrets, and crew. Some of this has already been in the game, but all of the systems are now going to be fleshed out and working. I have redone every single loot table in the game to include new items, I have fixed a ton of bugs and things that prevented tuning kits from working, and I have replaced all blueprints for crafting turrets in both shops and loot drops with instances of individual turrets, likely with affixes. Now you will be able to make a powerful ship simply by buying a generic one and upgrading it.
Turrets
Turrets are items now. They drop from ships in scoopable loot containers, they can be purchased from shops, and when you remove one from your ship in logistics it will go into your inventory. They also can have affixes. Turret affixes are named and each one provides changes to the statistics of your turret such as fire rate, range, damage, ammo capacity, etc. You can forge a turret with a new crafting item that drops as loot to add an affix to an existing turret, and turrets can have multiple affixes allowing you to potentially collect a set of turrets for your ship that are significantly better than the default. You can no longer unlock and print generic turrets to fill all of the slots on your design so you're going to want to go shopping. If an enemy ship is shooting a really cool gun at you, blow them up and it might drop.
Tuning kits
Tuning kits are an inventory item that is consumed to upgrade your ship hull with stacking passive attribute bonuses. They have been in the game forever, but it turns out they never worked correctly! My bad. They have been fixed so you can actually apply them now, and to boot i've added some new tuning kit types to the game. These tuning kits stack multiple times on the same ship and provide bonuses such as armor hardness, hull durability, acceleration, turning, shield strength, etc. You've got to find these as loot drops because they are some of the most powerful upgrades you can apply to a ship.
Module components
Tuning kits apply a bonus to your entire hull, but your ship's performance is really just the sum of its modules right? Good news, you can also upgrade your modules now. Module components are a new item type that you will find periodically. They can even be purchased in some shops. They are simple items with a few tiers of quality and if you have a Mechanics Kit you can open any compatible module in your ship and simply slot them in. Module performance can be drastically increased with high quality components, possibly even doubling the output of the affected module. It is up to you which of your modules you will enhance first. So if you want to upgrade your modules to perform better, stop by a crew equipment shop at your nearest trade hub and pick up a mechanics kit.
Procedural Crew
The original design for crew was that I made the crew system very modular and capable of supporting a large variety of special crew characters that were custom made with dialogues and storylines and special gear and special scenarios and interactions. I wanted to design a robust system that could handle whatever I chose to throw at it later.
Then I got bogged down debugging lots of quests and working on other aspects of the game and the crew diversity suffered as a result. There just aren't interesting crew in the game, and as a game about building the ultimate star ship I think customizing your crew should be a big part of making your ship stronger.
To rectify this, I have come up with a system for procedural crew to show up in bars all around the system. When you visit a station, you should check out the bars because there could be all sorts of procedural crew members offering to work for you. These are mercenaries and freelancer ship crew so you will have to hire them and pay them to join your roster. Each one will have a relatively powerful procedural talent tree that will show you all of the stat modifiers that crew member could add to your ship once they are levelled up. Because each crew member is capable of adding 20%+ to various ship statistics, building the perfect crew can now have a huge effect on the performance of any ship.
Hired crew will live in your home station bar forever, and can be swapped out depending on which ones are optimal for the ship you plan to fly at any given time. The crew that are currently in your party will gain experience when you gain experience.
Managing your ship collection
Ships are inventory items now, and you no longer lose them on death. Significant changes across the entire game have been made to support this with the goal of making the game less hardcore and allowing you to collect cool ships, customize them permanently, and swap between them with ease.
Hangars replacing airlocks
I've remapped every station interior to include a hangar module. You enter a hangar by targeting the station, flying over it, and pressing (default) [V]
Airlocks still exist, but will no longer be the primary means of entering and exiting a station. Why? because when you use a hangar your character is placed inside the station and the ship you were flying is placed inside your inventory. This allows you to buy and sell ships at a regular item shop, it allows you to store a collection of ships in a cargo bay, it allows you to swap between ships easily on the fly, and it allows you to transport ships around as cargo. I've even created a new consumable inventory item that will pack a ship that you find (or disable) out in space into an inventory item so that you can scoop it up and take it with you as loot. Ships are loot now, and you can collect them all! fill the stash tabs at your home base with them if you like.
Also, on a purely technical level, using a hangar allows the new mission framework to function. When you pick up missions from the procedural mission board, your mission cargo and passengers gotta go somewhere, and figuring out which docked ship to put them into via an airlock was a nasty technical issue that prevented me from making nice function procedural missions in the past. Now that stuff goes to the hangar where it can be automatically loaded into your ship when you depart.
Some players will decide to continue playing the game the old way using airlocks which of course is wrong and if you do that I hate you.
Not lost on death
This isn't realistic at all. I'm doing it because it makes the game more fun. When you undock from a hangar your ship is produced from the packed ship inventory item slotted into your character's ship slot. That item remains there when you die, which means you no longer lose your ship on death. I think this is reasonable and justified because ships are kinda expensive now, and you are going to put a lot of work into upgrading them with rare components and turrets. Losing all of that on death won't be fun. Instead, if you lose your active ship you will probably fail your current mission and lose your cargo, so you know...still try to avoid doing that.
If everyone really hates this change and absolutely insists on discord that I MUST bring back self-griefing and losing all of your cool turrets on death, well then maybe you can convince me to add a second difficulty option to the game. The idea here is this is no longer a game about producing a cool ship DESIGN and printing it over and over again...it is about making a cool SHIP and then doing cool stuff with it until you can find a better ship.
More type roles
With the inclusion of procedural missions actually mattering, I am hoping that players will actually care about ships that do things other than go pew pew. There are transport variants for sale that only have nice fancy bedrooms in them now, why? because passengers care about the quality of their cabin when commissioning your ship. That means to do the best passenger transport missions (the ones that pay the most credits) you will want to be transporting fancy rich people who will demand nice bedrooms and maybe even dining facilities. Likewise the best paying cargo missions will require lots of cargo space, and the best paying combat missions will put you against a big swarm of enemies. Having a specialized ship will help you make money faster in your preferred play style.
Shipyards will sell role-specialized ship designs.
- t: transport - lots of passenger space
- c: cargo - lots of cargo space
- m: mining - mix of cargo space, defense, and comes with mining turrets
- b: balanced - balanced mix of passenger comfort, decent cargo space, decent defense and weapons
- a: assault - focused on fighting other ships
New modules and tech
First of all the obvious headline should be: Tier 3 is finally in the game. So people who care about the ship design aspect of the game need not worry, there's stuff in this update for you as well. Not all new modules added are T3, and many modules have been rebalanced or retuned or debugged. Tier 3 tech drops in the gauntlet end-game zone. Here's a short list of some prominent additions:
- 7 tier 3 ship hulls that can be unlocked with fully T3 mapped interiors
- 5 unlockable tier 3 reactors with significantly better power output
- tier 3 versions of energy turret mounts covering the various turret sizes
- 3 new capacitors with better energy storage density
- a new tier 3 shield emitter that is small and convenient to add to your designs as well as being efficient. Event small ships can have shields!
- 5 new T3 turret types
- a new beam controller type for making even more powerful beam weapon designs
- 5 new tier 3 bridge modules with more active system slots than T2 bridges of similar size
- 3 new tier 3 engines with excellent thrust for their size
T3 hallway components serve the same purpose as normal hallway components, but these ones make your ship look spiffy and futuristic. They also provide structural support when placed making them a net increase to the sturdiness of your ship designs instead of a detriment. I love min-maxers and theory-crafters.
Both T3 hallways, and T3 conduits can be unlocked simply by advancing your research progress into any other T3 modules.
There are also some new modules that are going to show up in other areas of the game. I've implemented tier 2.5 shield emitters that we had shiny artwork for but which I never got around to making. They drop from existing ships and as tier 2.5 tech they have slightly improved average performance compared to the one existing shield emitter but with each one being specialized for either more storage, or faster regeneration.
Then on top of all that the update will include a bunch of new tier 2 modules:
- a point defense missile interdiction laser module. Small and easy to place, it will periodically take pot shots at incoming missiles. They aren't perfect, so having more of them will protect you a lot better from missiles if you are looking to make a defensible ship.
- a tier 1 shield emitter allowing lower tier ships to have regenerating shields.
- multiple computer core modules that will offer various statistical enhancements to all point defense lasers on your ship.
- multiple computer core modules that will offer various statistical enhancements to all missile systems on your ship.
- multiple computer core modules that will offer various statistical enhancements to all turrets on your ship.
- multiple computer core modules that will offer various statistical enhancements to the defensive attributes of your ship.
Expanded crew size
The current game just doesn't let you bring very many crew members with you onto your ship. Multiple loot related bugs, and the fact that we had always intended on dropping the last crew upgrades in end game activities meant that the low amount of slots went overlooked and remained unreasonable for way too long. Well now we've fixed the bugs meaning the crew slots you were supposed to already have are finally available, and the crew slots we were saving have been added to the endgame gauntlet. You should finally be able to bring your friends.
Crew slots are a reward for exploration and the items needed to gain them are all over the game world. You can now get up to 7 crew members if you find them all.
Quests and story
Not everything is changing. However I'm overhauling the early game introductory quests to hold your hand a bit less and encourage you to poke around in the sandbox more before moving on. I'm also doing lots of quest related debugging for this update. I know that's been an issue for a long time. I hate quest debugging, why couldn't I have decided to make an incremental game instead?
I will caution that the overly complex questing system was my biggest mistake when designing the original game, and there may still be bugs with quests especially later into the campaign. None of these bugs should prevent you from interacting with the game's sandbox elements or doing the endgame activities, however the possibility of bugs with storyline missions is part of the reason this patch is 0.9.4.00 and not 1.0.0.00.
Character bound to world
Your character is now part of the world save. That means make a new game, get a new character. That's probably how it always should have been, but when we were early in development and the game was chaotic and unfinished I decided to make your character persist outside the world because otherwise you might never be able to find certain unlocks. That all has hopefully changed now, so the system is moving to the way it ought to be.
This also means that the sandbox available from the main menu will now have access to all of the tech so you can play around with the ship editor without activating any debugging mode.
Live now
There's no warning for this event. I'm simply releasing it. Go play it now!
