Hey Folks!
Update v0.14.3.8 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.
This is a hotfix update to our "Across the System" update, including some improvements to AI food and water use, ship orbit plotting, and other fixes.
Saves from v0.14.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.
- Ships now orbit more accurately when in freefall (i.e. while not maneuvering).
- NAV station now plots current orbit (if applicable) when not maneuvering.
- Moon orbital tracks are visible once again.
- Minor performance optimization to the NAV station by ignoring hidden, helper celestial objects.
- Improved AI eating and drinking to behave more appropriately to their needs and personalities.
- Added the ability to drink blood and chunky blood.
- The Load button on the in-game Escape menu now works.
- Changed AI to prioritize family and meaning needs lower, so they are more in line with other social needs.
- Changed clothing to use higher-resolution artwork in the MegaTooltip.
- PASS shuttles will now attempt to ferry people from overpopulated stations to underpopulated stations.
- Several causes of excessive NPC spawns have been fixed, including NPC haulers that had impossible destinations.
- NPC ships will no longer prevent the player from using super FFWD after being ordered to 'come here.'
- Trying to use the trade UI with no ship docked no longer causes errors.
- Trade UI no longer allows delivery to barter zones if no valid zones exist.
- Torch ships no longer drift apart while towing and both torch drives active.
- Plots no longer begin with the player's crew as a protagonist.
- Crew no longer spawn outside the unmarked gas tanker ship.
- LA Residential map now has a working down transit station.
- Fixed several typos game text.
One of the main areas of improvement in this patch is to the way ships orbit celestial bodies. The path the ship follows now more closely matches that of satellites and moons, so it should be easier to hold position relative to those now.
The NAV station now also plots this orbital track as a gray ellipse, to show more long-term projection info. And we fixed the missing orbital tracks for moons, as well.
AI eating and drinking also got a lot of attention in this build. Their consumption should now be more appropriate to their needs and personalities, and should prioritize use of drinks like water for survival, vs. alcohol for more social or pain needs. (We also noticed that blood was the only liquid one couldn't drink, so we "fixed" that.)
We also looked into some player-provided saves that were experiencing performance issues, and discovered a number of them had overpopulation issues. This turned out to be partially due to NPCs choosing impossible destinations, resulting in some stations gaining NPCs but never losing them.
We've added a few more population shaping rules to the game, enforcing max pops where applicable. PASS ships will now ferry excess population to underpopulated stations. And extreme cases of overpopulation will run the "prune" operation on NPCs that can be safely removed.
The escape menu's Load button is now working! So it is now possible to load a save directly from in-game, instead of quitting to the main menu first.
Several bugs were fixed involving the trade UI and barter zones, as well as ships towing other ships, and plots initiating on NPCs instead of the player.
Plus, a few other fixes and new sprite art.
As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!
Best,
Daniel Fedor
Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC