Hey Folks!
Ostranauts v0.12.1.5 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.
This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Rate My Ship" update, which fixes issues with corrupted saves, loitering scavenger ships, NPC populations on stations, and more.
Saves from v0.12.0.0 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.
- Fixed a bug that could cause save games to be missing people or items on some ships.
- Fixed a bug that caused NPCs to remain docked longer than they should, longer for each other scavenger ship out there.
- Fixed a bug that caused all NPCs to gather over time on whichever OKLG stations player is not on.
- Added code to make NPC ship colors darker if nobody is on board.
- Fixed a bug that allowed AI to work on a task without tools if their hands were full and that tool existed somewhere on the map.
The biggest fix here addresses a source of possible save corruption. It was possible for the game to exit to the main menu before the save finished, clobbering some data for ships in the System. Typically, this would happen when using Save & Exit before Autosave or Save was used in a game, and would impact recently visited stations and ships.
This patch now correctly waits for save to finish before switching to the main menu.
We also found one cause of NPC scavenger ships remaining docked for too long. This turned out to be an issue with their AI timers being updated too infrequently. Now, NPCs should undock more often, and especially so if your save file had a lot of NPC ships.
We still haven't found the source of the bug that spawns too many NPC ships. However, to help us find the cause, you'll now notice some NPC ships are a darker amber color on the nav station map. These ships are missing a pilot, and hopefully that will help us figure out if the extra NPC ships are due to missing pilots, or something else.
Another bug fix involves the NPC transit system. Due to a missing cleanup step, any NPC that used transit to exit the currently loaded station would always immediately leave that station any time they reappeared.
This would often result in all NPCs gathering on the other two OKLG districts where the player wasn't. This fix should now balance that traffic better.
Finally, there was a bug that caused AIs with no inventory room to be able to perform work tasks without holding the required tool, as long as that tool was somewhere on the map. Those AIs will now correctly fail to start the task, and their logs will contain a reason why (for players examining crew).
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