Your weekly update on Stars Reach
More changes to the Twilight Update! – We found a netcode issue and it was a biggie. Fixing it allowed us to improve your framerate. You should see some significant improvements to your frames-per-second. Tools and Weapons Refactor We overhauled the PQRV (potential, quality, resilience, and versatility) stats on all tools. In general, the things you'll notice most will be big improvements in the behaviors of tool and weapon batteries. In short, you can use them a lot more now before the batteries give out. But additionally:
The Chronophaser works again to melt stuff…however…Quality controls the max heat of the beam. So you'll need a high-quality Chronophaser to melt really tough stuff like diamonds. However, even a low-grade Chrono will melt dirt.
Higher Quality Healix tools will heal better.
Higher Quality Companion Orbs will do more damage.
Higher Quality Omniblaster will also do more damage.
Gravity Gun doesn't get increased damage because it already had increased knockback (via Potential).
Inventory Changes
You can now merge your inventory stacks (as long as each stack has two units or more in it)! If you have stacks of smaller than two units, then you can either wait until they have more in them and can be merged, or just delete them. To merge stacks:
Drag and drop a stack onto another stack.
The process is lossy. You will end up with fewer units of material than the sum of both stacks.
The stats of the end-product stack will be an average of the two stacks. We add up the stats of all resources involved and then divide by the number of resources. So if you only have two units in one stack and you have 57 in the other, the end result stacks are going to be very similar to the stack of 57.
You'll get a dialog giving you a preview of the final stack and you can decide whether to do it or not thereafter.
Tuning ChangesCreatures that use cold projectiles no longer generate heat when those projectiles hit the terrain.
The Fire Suppressor in the first-time user experience hallway is now more effective and it's easier to freeze the molten floor.
We've increased the batch sizes of many recipes (blocks, building tiles, alloys, ores, and more) so that you don't have to sit there and hit the Craft! button so many times in a row.
Many meteor storms have been modified so they deposit different types of metal into the world to supplement the fact that you've mostly mined the worlds out right now. This may not be a permanent change.
The announcement text at the top, center of the screen now refreshes much more rapidly so it doesn't get caught in such long update queues.
Pulse mining is dead. Oh…and did you know that you can just hold down "Q" when emptying your Hopper? Because you can! (You don't need to pound the "Q" key.)
Known Issues
When other players have their weapons equipped, you will see an animation twitching/vibrating issue that is new, but we're going ahead with the test and we'll fix it in the next update. It is a visual oddity only and shouldn't affect your gameplay (other than aesthetically).
We temporarily removed the low-health (red screen edge) overlay while we convert it to a new system. It shall return! (But is not here now.)
The Control key image is currently missing from the F1 Help Screen. Here's the image for reference while we get this fixed in an upcoming update.
Saturday, August 16, Dave Georgeson and Rick Reynolds hosted Fireside Chat #46 to introduce the new update. You can join catch the video here:
Hooby posted a new blog entry about the Twilight Update: https://hooby.blog/posts/PAT20-twilight
Controlled Chaos interviewed Stars Reach Moderator Signus about his gaming and Stars Reach journey:
The Transplanetary League (TPL) logo merchandise has been a big hit. Check out our licensed merch in our Web Store! https://starsreach.com/store
We also have late pledges available on payment plans at our store
Backer Invites + Discord Backer Badge. Almost all of the backers have submitted their survey, but if you haven't then search your email box.
New testers received an invite from FirstLook with a playtest schedule and instructions. (Check your spam folder if you don't see it!)
Existing testers will not get a new invite, your Discord role should now show a Backer badge. Not yet? Log into FirstLook.gg and sync.
Can't find it? Email [email protected]
Kickstarter late pledges are still available but this may wind down soon: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starsreach/stars-reach
Screenshots of the Week:
PoisonGirl's favorite tamed creature so far:
Dr. Vellaut's Farmer-Gone-Wild ammonia farm:
