Building Knowledge
Today we’ll give you some info on the new progression system! We want the journey towards the center of the galaxy to be more challenging. From now on, you’ll have to unlock Building Knowledge about each new material (starting with Naonite, you’ll start out with knowledge about Iron and Titanium) before you’ll be able to use it for ship building. Unlocking the next material will also unlock the ability to build bigger ships with higher subsystem socket numbers.
There will be different ways to get your hands on above Building Knowledge. In any case, we want players to prove themselves in a new area before they can unlock the next building tier. You can get the knowledge for the next material by either beating a boss in the area or a difficult pirate encounter. In case you’re not the fighting type you can also buy the building knowledge at a shipyard from an allied faction in the specific region.
Processing Power Revisited
Building Knowledge will not only allow you to use the materials, but the higher-material knowledge you acquire, the more functional blocks you will be able to add to your ships. Adding functional blocks will not only increase the processing power but also the number of subsystem sockets of your crafts. This has always been part of the game, but now we’re visualizing it better. While taking a hard look at the processing power requirements for subsystem sockets we realized that some number tweaking might be necessary, so from now on you’ll unlock new upgrade sockets earlier (less processing power required)!
Existing Saves & Avorion Classic Scenario
Finally, the new progression will only be active for newly created galaxies. All your old savegames will remain the way they are. In case you’re not a fan of the new progression and prefer the more sandboxy approach, we are also going to introduce a new “Classic Avorion” scenario which allows you to play without the new progression. Whenever you create a new galaxy you will be able to select the option in the main menu.