Greetings Gaters!
We’re pleased to announce that as of right now, patch 0.8.5 is live on Steam! Update your game and check out the following new content:
- Alien gaters: Meet 3 new alien races, and recruit their members to work in the base and go on missions.
- New Operations room: A new room to unlock, which allows scientific expeditions to return to previously-visited worlds, so you can fully explore them and bring back more resources.
- More new features!: Exonium Generators, Builder Bot Upgrades, improved mission UI and star map navigation.
To celebrate, we’ve put the game on sale for 25% discount! That’s our biggest sale yet. So if you’re still itching to explore the universe, now is a great time to step through the Exogate.
See the end of this post for the full change log details.
Reporting for Duty From Across the Universe
Three new alien races can now be encountered on the star map, and recruited to work for the Initiative. Each race has their own unique appearances, personal names, backstory, events, and gameplay traits!
You’ll recruit them into the existing gater classes, meaning they can work in the base and go on missions, just like human gaters! Unlock them by exploring the star map and making first contact, just as you would with other intelligent races - except during one of the events, you’ll have the chance to recruit a member of their race into the Initiative. They will return through the Exogate with the team, and begin their new life in the base!
It doesn’t stop there, however. Once you’ve established relations with their race and claimed a presence on their world, you can recruit even more of them!
Revisiting Planets
We’ve heard your call about returning to previously-visited worlds, and now you can with the new Operations room! After first exploring a planet, you’ll be notified of its scientific potential. Claim the world, build an Expedition Mapper in the Operations room, then lock it onto the planet you’d like to revisit - now you can send a scientific expedition to collect valuable resources!
Return to planets to collect science resources, and broadcast job offers to alien gaters - all in a day’s work in the new Operations room
Operations is where you can also recruit more alien gaters: build an Alien Gater Recruitment Console, which lets you broadcast job offers to alien worlds you’ve claimed a presence on. This ensures members of that race will apply during your next recruitment campaign!
And There’s More!
Other significant new additions in this update are:
Exonium Generators
New to the Power Plant tech tree, these are by far the most powerful generators in the game! They run on Exonium, so if you’re short on power, and you’ve an abundance of this refined material sitting in storage, this could be for you.
Builder Bot Upgrades
New upgrade paths in the Builders tech tree allow you to upgrade builder bot movement and repair speeds, and increase the total number you can have in the base. This is in addition to the previously introduced Bedrock Laser Drill, giving you more options to customize your builders.
Improved Mission UI
An improved missions-in-progress HUD, notifying you not only of which teams are on which planets, but also the type of mission they are on and its current status, as well as providing shortcuts to quickly control each mission, and view its destination on the star map.
Got an excess of Exonium? Then get ready to fuel up the most powerful generators in the base!
What’s Next
In case you missed it, we recently shared our Early Access roadmap progress. With the Alien Gaters patch now out, we’ve updated the roadmap so you know what to expect and when, as we continue towards our 1.0 launch:
We hope you enjoy the new content in the game! We’d love to hear your thoughts, whether that’s through a Steam review, a thread on the Steam forums, or getting in touch directly via the in-game feedback tool and bug reporter.
We’ll see you again soon through the Exogate!
Safe travels,
Maxime MILLET
Creative Director, Xeno Bits
Changelog 0.8.5
Please note that previous saves are still fully compatible, but due to a lot of balancing changes you will have a better experience by starting a new game.
New
- Alien gaters! Meet 3 new alien races with their own narrated events, which allow you to recruit one of their race to work for the Initiative.
- Operations room! Contains the new Expedition Mapper, which lets science teams return to visited worlds to explore them further and gather more resources. Also houses the Alien Gater Recruitment Console, which lets you recruit more alien gaters from a specific race, once you’ve claimed a presence on their world.
- Science expeditions! Each destination now has a “scientific potential,” which is only revealed after your first visit, and shows the quantity of science resources that can be gathered there. Use the new Expedition Mapper to send scientific teams back to visited worlds, to gather bio samples, specimens, and other items of interest.
- Builder bot upgrades! New to the tech tree, unlock multi-stage upgrades for builder bot movement speed, repair speed, and maximum number in the base.
- Exonium generator! The most powerful generator in the game by some margin, and powered by your exonium reserves, which dutiful engineers will automatically replenish.
- New mission tracking interface, which makes it much easier to see the current status of all your missions, with seamless integration with the star map for ease of navigation and control. For example, missions can now be held and resumed with a few clicks on the UI, without having to cancel and restart from the star map.
- You can now use spaces in team names!
- Keyboard shortcuts 1-5 for the main UI bar
- Builders do not consume base energy anymore but there number is now limited
- You can’t have more than 50 gaters in the base
- You can now see gater attributes as a tooltip during mission events
- New VFX when Sqarb bodies disappear
- New checkbox to auto-assign appropriate equipment to gaters when setting up a mission
Changes
- Gaters will no longer interrupt a mission launch if they are hungry or sleepy
- You can’t select an invalid team for a mission anymore
- Improved balancing for power generation and power requirements
- Bio samples and specimens looted during mission events will now grant higher quality patent theories
- Legendary patent theories can now only be developed from bio samples and specimens looted during mission events
- Money gained from selling materials is now displayed on the monthly budget summary
- Star map procedural generation was entirely reworked for better balance on new save games
- Improved notification visibility on main UI bar when a recruitment campaign is over
- Improved Sqarbs targeting systems
- Notification log during mission events will reset back to the top when a new entry is added
- New notifications when a team assigned to a destination is not valid anymore
- Improved team and gaters sorting based on context in pickers
- You can now use the arrow keys to scroll in the event editor
- Improved influence gain balancing - you will now gain more from missions and claimed intelligent beings worlds, and less from the number of claimed sectors
- Increased influence cost of sectors far from Earth
- Recruitment campaign sorting order has been inverted so it’s easier to view; expired campaigns are now also automatically removed after some time
- Exploration reward icon for unusual destinations is now an XP icon, to be more self-explanatory Monthly trending and slumping classes are now also shown on the class selection for new recruitment campaigns
- Reworked threats and equipment section of the star map destination detail panel
- Reworked vacant/engaged lights on specimen containment to be consistent with bio sample containment
- Improved the visibility of the Sqarbs’ homeworld on the star map
- Improved balancing of wear and tear for power generators
Fixes
- Lots of improvements for sound management - there should be no more stutter, and sound spatialization should also be improved
- Fixed a bug when building a room inside another room - the object/furniture selection was sometimes incorrect for the selected room
- Loading a game where a gater had been injured during a mission was not displaying the injury on the mission results screen
- Foundry and material storage objects are no longer still animated while the game is paused
- Fixed a bug where gaters sometimes got stuck in the ICU
- Fixed some bugs where builders were not doing maintenance properly
- Using the delete key to remove objects was not properly refunding money
- Builders would sometimes freeze while refilling meal dispensers
- Fixed a bug where gaters could sometimes claim multiple lockers
- Fixed a bug where food stock was sometimes not delivered to meal dispensers
- Gaters were sleeping in the wrong direction on canopy beds
- Fixed a bug where you could not purchase an object if you had exactly the cost amount of money left