Hello players,
Cargo has finally arrived. It is meant to improve gameplay mechanics by having a physical representation of loaded goods on a ship, while still being easy to use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8wZuu8UzJE
Cargo
Cargo is a physical representation of things loaded in your ship, station or planet. The more you have loaded, the more boxes you will see appear in your cargo area.
There were some main concerns for it in terms of scalability, organization, usability and migration which I hope we solved sufficiently.
Since it’s impossible to organize your things into different little boxes with limited capacity, your storage block will still be the main piece to use. Because having a limit on both slots and stack capacity would be tedious, we decided to just have an overall capacity for a storage with unlimited slots. Each item’s needed space in the inventory is represented by its volume (which defaults to mass, but can be adapted in the block config if needed).
So basically, you can fill up your storage with as many slots as you like, as long as the total volume of all items is within capacity.
Because of this sudden change, penalties for being over-capacity are turned off by default in the server config. These penalties will be switched ON by default in future updates. A player whose inventory is over-capacity will move more slowly, and a ship which is over-capacity will leak items out of storage over time.
So how do you increase the base capacity each storage block gets?
It’s simple: just get a few Cargo Area blocks and connect them to your storage. Each block adds capacity to your storage block. They are non-physical and not visible as long as they are empty, but they will fill up with inventory when reaching capacity.
Keep in mind that items in storage now also add mass to your ship. It’s a lot less mass than it would add if you built the blocks on your ship by using the patented “warp storage technology”, which stores most of the mass in the void.
Also, please note that this balance is by no means final. We put it at the lower end, because buffing it in a future version is a lot easier than nerfing (and also causes less anger amongst players ;) ).
Factory changes
This same cargo capacity concept also now goes for factories and shipyards. Factories only pull the necessary items required for one crafting tick/cycle. This prevents them from filling up. Also, instead of sending a signal to adjacent Activation (full <-> not full) and ‘OR’ blocks (empty <-> nonempty), they will send it to connected ones.
Docked Cargo pulling
Cargo can now be transferred from or to docked entities. Just connect your docker and rail to the storage you want to pull from or off, then deactivate pulling on the one you want to be pulled from, and it will pull in the other just like it would on the same entity.
Docking on contact
You can now also dock to rails by physically touching them with your docker block. After undocking you will not be able to re-dock to that rail for 5 seconds. In the future this time interval will likely be switched to a distance limit, where if you move a certain distance from the rail you will be able to re-dock.
Optimizations
There has been a nice optimization done for planets which should add some FPS (after a planet is loaded in)
Balance changes
Thanks to player feedback and the help of the council, we’ve changed several values that should improve your gameplay experience.
- Power soft cap has been increased from 1 000 000 to 2 000 000
- Max shield regen under fire has been increased from 10% to 25%
- Shield sharing is disabled when you go under 25% shield capacity instead of 50%
- The system penalties you receive when you suffer damage are now more moderate.
- Starting cash is now 50,000 credits instead of 20,000 credits for new clients and station cost price has been decreased from 1,000,000 credits to 50,000 credits
- We’ve introduced multi-slots for lights and their respective light rods, the delay-signal is now also sitting in a logic multi-slot. We’re planning to add controllers + modules in the next release.
- Missile + cannon, missile speed has been buffed from 0.5 to 2.0, now it can go 6 times the max server speed.
Bug fixes
T917 Emissive mapping makes rod lights appear on when they're off
T839 Certain weapons mounted directly to an asteroid and then fired will crash the game at the next autosave
T786 Players that are attached to a ship via alignment share the ship's shield when shot.
T680 Ships not checking for collision before docking
T655 Shipyards give free cores
T258 All blocks are rotatable
Power Supply and Power Drain textures are now correctly labeled.
Thanks for playing StarMade,
- The Schine Team