Two builds in one update! Our normal cadence is one build a week, but kicking off Early Access was very special so we’re a little ahead of schedule.
Have an idea to make XO better? Head over to our Discord or post to our lively Steam forum!
Changelog
Warship armor was doubled for all ships except the battleship. We will be making additional changes to improve the feeling of combat, including adding more combat events.
This week’s big feature is the ‘waypoint’ command, aka Suggestion #65 on our Discord. You can now tell ships and formations exactly where to go, and they will go there and orbit until you tell them to do something else. This took most of the week to get right, and there’s still a few enhancements we’ll be adding.
"Waypoint" narrowly won out over "go to" in voting on our Discord. Most gamers think of a waypoint as a type of waypoint called a fly-through waypoint - something that you pass through on your way to an endpoint. This was verified after at least five minutes of extensive research. Turns out that a waypoint can be any navigational point. Maybe we will add multiple waypoints if such things are necessary to, say, avoid a minefield. Ahem.
Per Suggestion #33, it is now possible to delay the Harvesters appearing for a short while by jumping before the Harvesters arrive. Let us know if this scratches that itch.
A new event was added that hopefully does a better job explaining how low quality fuel locations can lead to badness if you get into a laser battle and need to jump quickly. Thanks for the feedback on that one!
Hovered ships now display “counterattacking” instead of “attack directly” when counterattacking. Disambiguation. It’s a thing.
Abandoned ship events are now more responsive to things like being disabled and being crewed with the wrong crew. That ended up taking much longer than expected.
The return to comms message was relocated to where it made more sense - right above the button you need to click.
Right clicking on a plan in your inventory moves it back to the trade dialog, preventing the accidental deletion rage quit syndrome. We believe that over the long term this will save many keyboards.
Mouse tooltips now wordwrap when on the edges, and should always display an opacity layer.
The UI for displaying resources in the minimap was slightly improved for readability.
It should no longer be possible to jump into a location and have zero events happen. This took a fair bit of tweaking to get right.
Combat, damaged and disabled events were adjusted to percentages to allow for easier ship armor level balancing should it be necessary.
List of Bugs Eradicated
An issue was fixed when trying to return a plan to a trade menu with zero items.
Ships should now properly display the fleet color (blue) when repaired, instead of reverting
Shieldships attacking a laser-equipped ship with a defend ROE now counterattack properly.
Losing a faction leader at the rendezvous no longer works the same way as when the fleet isn’t at the rendezvous.
The Elysian Hauler event now ends properly when you jump. Turns out spelling counts.
The formationAttack tag was acting in a cowardly and unbecoming manner and has since been disciplined.
An adjustment was made to our event spawning algorithm to ensure that missions, non-missions, timed events and fleet events all play nicely together. They should be doing that now.
Timers were appearing too soon on a few events, they should not do that any more.
I verified that all escort missions have decrew blocks.
An issue that led to [unknown ship] tags was fixed.
Known issues
If you’re having trouble clicking, try unplugging controllers, rudder pedals, joysticks and the like.
Some Linux users are experiencing strange graphic effects. Please help us diagnose this by posting your experience on the discussion thread here or on our Discord.
Feedback is not working from the native Linux version and we have no idea why. If you have an idea why, please hit us with a cluebat.