Beta Branch Note: These changes are currently available on the beta branch. The beta branch is for testing experimental changes and for finding and fixing errors.
This is how you get access to the beta branch (USE AT YOUR OWN RISK):
Right-Click on Avorion in your Steam list, Properties -> Betas -> Select branch 'beta'.
Mining Rework
"We reworked mining to make it feel more like actual mining, and less like just shooting rocks until you're rich. So the most efficient mining lasers no longer refine ores and you'll have to ship them to a refinery yourself. In order to avoid massive complexity in the beginning, we left refining mining lasers in there, like for example for the drone."
- Resource Asteroids carry 33% more resources
- Added new weapon types: Raw mining lasers, Raw salvaging lasers
- Previous mining + salvaging lasers are now refining mining/salvaging lasers
- Raw mining lasers deal 200% damage compared to refining mining lasers
- Efficiency Changes (lowest to highest rarity & possible rate):
- Raw mining lasers have very high efficiencies of 57% - 99%
- Reduced efficiencies of refining mining lasers to 11% - 18% from 5% - 75%
- Raw salvaging lasers have efficiencies of 5% - 40%
- Reduced efficiencies of refining salvaging lasers to 7% - 14% from 8% - 36%
- Mining lasers of the drone remain unchanged
- Raw lasers drop Raw Ores or Scrap Metals
- Raw Ores and Scrap Metals ...
- - are trading goods that require a cargo bay
- - cannot be used as a currency yet
- - cannot be stored in the global bank
- - must be refined into resources before they can be used
- - can be sold to merchants
- Added a refinery option to all Resource Depots
- Refinery refines ores and scrap metals to resources 1:1
- Refinery takes a small tax of 1 to 5%, based on relations
- Added new asteroids with very high-value, hidden resource depots in their center block
- Can be detected with mining upgrade (Auto-mining-ships need this to find them, too)
- Added AI-ship commands for refining ores and metals on board
- Amount of resources in asteroids is now only visible with a mining system installed
Audio
"Per Kiilstofte remade the entire combat music for Avorions. He's the mind behind Avorion's previous combat music, but we worked together and he wrote a completely new soundtrack specifically for Avorion! On top of that, Hannes Kretzer made six new background tracks for Avorion, too! With this update, you can enjoy all those new tracks in-game!"
- Added 6 new background ambience tracks (Thanks Hannes!)
- Replaced old combat music with new combat music (Thanks Per Kiilstofte!)
- Ambient music is now mood-oriented based on which sector the player is in, and no longer completely random
- Increased length of silence between tracks to at least 90 seconds
Gameplay Changes
"There have been some other gameplay updates, which are not directly related to mining."
- Delivery missions no longer give players dangerous or illegal goods
- Dangerous goods are no longer a concern if player's relations are "Admired" (>80.000)
- Ships that are ordered to fly through gates now wait if the path is blocked
- Harvest AI now only uses armed turrets if no salvaging turrets are available
Balancing
"There have been some other balancing updates, which are not directly related to mining."
- Destroyed blocks and crafts now drop scrap metal & ores in addition to refined resources
- Smoothened out probabilities of resource types in asteroids
- Less low-tier materials are less likely to be spawned in high-tier material regions
- Only the latest 3 tiers of available materials are used for ships, turrets, etc. to avoid obsolete technology appearing where it doesn't belong (ie. Iron AI ships in Xanion territory)
- Increased production time by 300s for ships at shipyards when a crew is requested
- Increased costs of crews at shipyards by +50%
- Fast moving AI ships no longer damage player-owned ships if they're more than twice as fast
- Changed relation status ranges:
- Friendly: 15.000 - 30.000 (from 5.000 - 15.000)
- Good: 30.000 - 60.000 (from 30.000 - 40.000)
- Excellent: 60.000 - 80.000 (from 40.000 - 70.000)
- Admired: 80.000 - 100.000 (from 70.000 - 100.000)
- Captains now cost 15.000 Credits, up from 7.500
- Hiring Pilots, Boarders or Commanders now requires relations of at least 'Friendly'
- Hiring Generals or Captains now requires relations of at least 'Good'
Ship Founding
"Founding Ships now costs an initial fee, that starts out very low and increases with every new ship. We want to move large (!) fleets more into mid- or late game, while giving new players more incentive to push for higher-tier materials. As long as we don't have good sinks for large amounts of resources, we're still very careful with exponential fleet growth and the snowballing that comes with it. That's just a nightmare to balance. We've seen how much money players tend to have in late game stages and we think these costs are fair. They're also subject to change based on your feedback, so get playing!"
- Note: Ship fees are based on how many ships you HAVE right now, not how many ships you founded so far.
- When one of your ships gets destroyed, the founding fee also goes down again
- Ships 1 - 3 now cost 500 Iron and 0, 0, 1.000 Credits respectively
- Ships 4 - 6 now cost 500 Titanium and 5.000, 10.000, 20.000 Credits respectively
- Ships 7, 8 now cost 500 Naonite and 50.000 and 100.000 Credits respectively
- Ships 9, 10 now cost 500 Trinium and 200.000 and 500.000 Credits respectively
- Ships 11 - 15 now cost 500 Xanion and 750.000, 1m, 1.5m, 2m, 2.5m Credits respectively
- Ships 16 - 20 now cost 500 Ogonite and 3m, 3.5m, 4m, 4.5m, 5m Credits respectively
- Ships 21 and more now cost 500 Avorion and 1m more per ship, with costs increasing by 1m for every 10 new ships
UI
- Replaced all icons in-game that were only used as placeholders
- Added icons & tooltips for uncollectable loot that show why loot is uncollectable
- Added an alert when pirates attack a sector without players but with player ships
- Added an alert when xsotan attack a sector with an unmanned player ship
- Cargo amount in cargo tab is now displayed with dots for better readability
- Improved clarity of discard blocks button text and tooltip
- Added a warning window when a player is about to delete his ship in the build mode
- Implemented warning symbols at the top left of the screen when ping or server performance is bad
- Galaxy map is now updated correctly when a player ship jumps to an unknown sector
Misc
- Implemented a window that shows the latest important changes of the mining update
- Added a window that shows patchnotes when there has been an update
- Improved refreshing of positions of objects around the player ship and its targets
- This fixes several sync-issues, like loot following the player ship or objects not taking damage
- Renamed factories with ambiguous names, i.e. factories that use a production result in their name and have more than one result
Client
- Networking is now done asynchronically on client
- Pings are more frequent (10 per second) and server answers them immediately, not during update loop (avoids inaccurate pings)
- Improved performance and accuracy of pings (now shows network time only, no longer influenced by update frequency)
Server
- Fixed an issue where sometimes server started to hang for everybody when a single player caused large amounts of traffic
- Fixed an issue where server started to hang for everybody when a single player applied a very large craft plan
Scripting API
"With the mining rework, we also moved our turret, weapon and fighter generation code to scripts for more transparency and easier modification through modders."
- Moved turret, weapon and fighter generators to scripts
- Added a ProgressBar UI element
- Added getters for amount of different entities in Sector
- Bosses can now be associated with music tracks
- Added access to Music API
- Added function invokeFunction() to client-side Player
- Added a getter for the player's craft's faction on the client
- Added a getter for controlling faction in Galaxy
- Added getters for local & nearest faction in client-side Galaxy
- Added estimates to sector templates about number of generated stations and ships
- Fixed several issues where text would be wrongly aligned when set to Center
- Added a fitIntoRect() function to Picture
- sendChatMessage() function of Faction, Player and Alliance now allows entities and NamedFormat as sender
Bugfixes
"As always, bug reports marked with [UBR] are user bug reports. Thanks everybody for reporting and helping us, and keep it up!"
- Fixed a crash when multiple entities were being pushed away by stations
- Fixed a wrong callback being called when player changes group
- [UBR] Fixed shot size not scaling with weapon size
- [UBR] Fixed an issue where torpedoes could be entered by players, leading to a crash
- [UBR] Fixed an issue where loot would follow the player ship indefinitely without actually being picked up
- [UBR] Fixed an issue where objects (mostly asteroids, wrecks) would be in the wrong position
- [UBR] Fixed an issue where objects (mostly asteroids, wrecks) wouldn't take damage
- [UBR] Fixed an issue where loot drops for alliance ships were reserved for the players piloting it
- [UBR] Fixed custom turret design shot colors not being applied to missiles
- Fixed an issue where shield sounds were played in menus or loading screen
- [UBR] Fixed an issue where scrolling down in the building quick selection caused items to become hidden
- [UBR] Fixed an issue where turrets in the quick selection in building mode were reset when opening the building inventory
- Fixed flickering of faction areas on map when an update of the area comes in
- Fixed an issue where cargo loot would still "lock on" to ships and follow them even if their cargo bay is full
- Fixed an issue where station titles in chat messages weren't translated correctly
- Fixed an issue where crew costs were wrong at shipyards
- Fixed an issue where client would wait for a 30 second timeout when connecting to a local server in Steam Offline Mode
- [UBR] Fixed an issue where players with a space in their name could not be invited to trade
- Fixed an issue where the ship's order icon wasn't reset when entering a craft
- Fixed an issue where ai factions would get coaxial turrets