This weeks experimental patch brings some much needed goodies, such as the new ship death state, escape pods, player inventory drop on death, and Discord rich presence integration.
First up the new ship death state. When a ships hull reaches 0% health, the ship will no longer blow up instantly. The ship will enter a brief period in which it ceases to function, and random explosions will rock the ship. This is called the death state, during this period players will have the opportunity to gather what resources they want to save from their cargo hold, and use the escape pod to make a run for it.
Once the deathstate is over the ship will explode. And anyone onboard will be killed. Which now means that the inventories of those players will be destroyed along with them. Hence why players will now need to use escape pods or other means of escape, if they wish to keep their inventories.
In addition if a player kills another player, a small device with the contents of their inventories will drop above their corpse allowing other players to loot their inventories, inventories will last for 5 minutes, after which they will despawn.
Escape pods will allow players to save themselves and their items from being lost when their ship gets destroyed. If a ship is equipped with an escape pod, players players will have a reliable way to escape a destroyed ship. Players can launch them by simply walking into them getting behind the controls and clicking the launch button. This will close the doors and teleport the pod away from the ship. Once launched players will have power to fly around for a brief period at maximum warp. The pod is not equipped with weapons and it is lightly armored so running away is your best option. Once you have reached safety, you will be able to salvage the escape pod for roughly 130k U-Nits worth of resources. The pod cannot be refueled once depleted. In addition pods can also be launched when the ship is in a death state, (a ship cannot move while in death state), and they can be replenished by purchasing them from HydroPEX service stations or Store-O-Tron kiosks.
For full patch notes, and to leave feedback, see here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/363360/discussions/4/1700541698690075993/
Instructions on how to join the experimental branch can be found here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/363360/discussions/4/350542145693906320/
Thank you all for playing and see you starside!
-The Split Polygon Team