Hey Folks!
Update v1.0.0.11 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.
This is a hotfix to 1.0, which addresses issues with the game not closing, plot and tutorial advancement, gig tracking, and others.
Saves from v1.0.0.0 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.
Note: 📢 indicates changes inspired by community feedback!
Quitting Ostranauts with Save on Exit enabled should no longer hang indefinitely.
The Tutorial Derelict will no longer spawn across the Solar System if the user exits and re-enters NAV UI while calibrating thrusters.
The calibrating thrusters section of the tutorial will no longer advance prematurely if the user exits and re-enters NAV UI.
📢Gigs now automatically add the client and target as contacts in the player's PDA Socials app, for easier tracking.
Courier gigs delivering direct-to-people now display ship name and range in PDA app, just like other gigs.
Gigs should no longer involve an unnecessary 3rd party, reducing the chances that NPC death cancels the gig prematurely.
Canceled gigs now report the cancellation reason in the message log when the PDA app is opened.
Gigs whose client or target dies while browsing the gig Nexus no longer throw null exceptions when the description is displayed.
Characters blacking-out from pain will now have work and movement penalties if forced awake.
Characters blacking-out from pain will now periodically black-out again if the player forces them awake.
Characters will now have their pain reduced slowly over time, even if no wounds are healing.
Characters knocked out by pain will now more reliably wake up when forced by the player.
Players stuck on the 'prove your loyalty' stage of the Ceres plot should have their saves patched to make this proceed now.
📢The 'border crossing' objective of the Ceres plot should have clearer instructions now.
The Personal Munitions Supply Depot should now restock with munitions instead of scrap parts.
📢The 'research VHS' step of the Ceres plot now has clearer objective text.
The REDACTED plot has a REDACTED choice removed, which led to the player being stranded with nowhere to go.
Possibly the biggest news here is the fix for the game not shutting down for some players, resulting in them having to force quit the app.
This turned out to be a thread management issue, triggered when the game had Save on Exit enabled, was fullscreen, and the user alt-tabbed away from the game immediately after confirming quit. Today's patch includes a change to the app clean-up process, and so far, all users who have tested it report success!
The next batch of fixes involves the tutorial, which no doubt frustrated new players hoping to learn the ropes. First, some players reported the Tutorial Derelict never spawning, and thanks to some eagle-eyed players, we discovered that it *did* spawn. Just... halfway across the Solar System.
This turned out to be a simple timestamp mismatch when calculating the derelict's position relative to the player ship, resulting in an orbit that was valid for another date.
However, causing this to happen was even trickier. It was only one lone bug report that led us to the cause, which was the tutorial skipping forward if the player exits NAV while doing the calibrate thrusters steps. This would give the tutorial one frame to ask NAV what VREL the player had, and not having finished initializing yet, NAV would report zero, passing the tutorial's advancement test.
We've fixed that case, and now new players should additionally have fewer confusing moments where the tutorial leaves them behind.
Gigs also got a bit of love in this update. Some players reported that gigs were disappearing suddenly, and we were able to track this down to one of the gig's required parties dying. A number of our gig types were unnecessarily naming a 3rd party (besides the client and target) that could die, canceling the gig. Removing this 3rd party from future gigs should reduce canceled gigs by 33%.
For those that get canceled due to dying target or client (and which seems a valid outcome in a hypercapitalistic dystopia), we have added a log message when you open the PDA gig app to explain why the gig was canceled.
While fixing this, we noted some players saying they couldn't find their courier targets, and this turned out to be that particular gig type lacking ship/range info in the readout. So we patched that. And since many players seemed to expect gig contacts to be in their PDA socials app (which is logical, and we do for plots), we added that, as well!
Another player noted that they could become a veritable superman by deliberately knocking their character out with pain (usually by crashing gently into OKLG over and over), and then force themselves awake, ignoring many of the penalties for pain.
The "blacking-out from pain" condition lacked movement and work penalties, since characters were usually stuck KOed for a while in that state. But there are some tricky ways to get out of that state and walk around, which is honestly more fun than waiting for them to wake up on fast-forward.
So we adjusted KO to allow waking up immediately, but to be debilitated and periodically black-out again while in that state. And one other issue we noted while testing this, that pain never went away if healing wounds were not present, has been addressed by a gradual pain reduction over time applied to all characters now.
The last batch of fixes in this patch involve progression through various plots.
The Ceres plot could get softlocked if the player courted loyalty for both sides of the war and waited on Ring Station instead of Port Mojave. And we fixed the lock here, as well as back-patched saves to resume from here as close to normal as possible.
There were also a few steps of the VHS and Ceres plot segments that had unclear objectives, so we reworded those to be a little more explicit. One plot reward came stocked with junk instead of munitions, and there was a conversation choice that exited a big encounter abruptly, which has been removed.
We still have plenty more to do, of course! And we'll be continuing with fixing bugs and pain points as our priority for now.
As always, thank you for playing, and for your help in making Ostranauts more fun for all!
Best,
Daniel Fedor
Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC