Ahoy Cosmoteers!
Cosmoteer update 0.27.0 is now available for all! The headline feature of this update is "Clouds & Storms": three new types of outer-space environments that will change and challenge how you design and command your ships. The three new types are:
Gaseous Clouds
Gaseous Clouds are a thick fog that will open up new kinds of tactics for ships that choose to take advantage of them. Flying into a Gaseous Cloud will hide the ship from enemies outside but also reduce its sight and radar range while inside. Using Gaseous Clouds, you can lay traps for enemies or sneak up undetected to ambush them. But of course, there is the risk that they will do the same to you!
Electron Clouds
For ships that operate within them, Electron Clouds will change how they must be designed and commanded in ways both harmful and beneficial. They are full of electrically-charged particles that will short-circuit your ship's reactors, reducing their power output by 80%, but they will also boost energy weapon damage by 75% as well as ship speed. When designing ships to fight inside Electron Clouds, you'll need to think about possibly building extra capacitor storage and whether it's better to rely on low-power projectile weapons or risk taking advantage of the damage boost that power-hungry energy weapons receive.
Ion Storms
Ion Storms contain massive amounts of pent-up ion energy, striking any ships that dare to enter with powerful bolts of ion lightning. Unlike Gaseous Clouds and Electron Clouds, you'll rarely want to venture inside unless you have no other choice; it's usually much better to go around. While some ships may be able to survive, those that do are likely to take extreme damage unless they are specifically designed to withstand the ion lightning, which itself is a difficult and expensive proposition.
These three new types of outer-space environments are supported in all game modes including Career, Creative, and as a host option in all PvP modes. For existing Career Mode saved games, you should encounter some clouds and storms in any unvisited star systems, though if you start a new saved game you will encounter two new types of star systems with very different amounts and shapes of clouds and storms. And looking into the future, these new types of space environments will serve as a foundation upon which new kinds of missions, encounters, and content for Career 2.0 can be built.
Lastly, as with nearly every major Cosmoteer update, this 0.27.0 update also has a ton of other bug fixes, quality-of-life improvements, balance changes, modding features, and new built-in ships, which you can read about in the full patch notes below.
Have fun!
- Walt
Full Patch Notes:
- Major Feature: Clouds & Storms
- Added Gaseous Clouds, which reduces ship sight range and sensor range, but also hides ships so that they can't be seen by other ships outside the cloud (except when firing weapons).
- Added Electron Clouds, which reduces reactor production by 80% but buffs energy weapon damage by +75% and increases ship speed. They also prevent hyper-jumps in or out.
- Added Ion Storms, which rain powerful ion lightning strikes upon any ships brave or foolish enough to enter.
- Built-In Ships:
- Added 2 new Monolith combat ships: Macerator and Throne
- Added 1 new Monolith station: Med Monolith Trade Station II
- Added 1 new Cabal station: Small Cabal Trade Station II
- Added 3 new Imperium combat ships: Ceyx, Kanishka, and Tytonidae
- Added 7 new Fringe combat ships: Black and Bruised, Glisterling, Liability, Nettlesome, Opponent of Commerce, Ossipon, and Pogoo
- Updated many of the existing trade stations to have Manipulator Beams.
- Tweaked Model-L starter ship to be a bit better defensively.
- Miscellaneous updates to other existing combat ships.
- Career Mode:
- All star systems in Career mode will have at least a few clouds or storms. Some star systems may have much more. (In existing saved games, star systems that have already been visited will not have any clouds or storms.)
- New star system type: High Cloud Density, which has a high density of Gaseous and/or Electron clouds. (Only available in new Career games.)
- New star system type: Supernova Aftermath, which has no sun but has a high density of Ion Storms. (Only available in new Career games.)
- Each trade station now has a defensive ship patrolling around it to help protect it.
- Station guards will now patrol the perimeter around the station and generally shouldn't cut through too close to the station.
- Increased starting funds in Career by 150 to account for the Model-L's changes.
- Creative Mode:
- Clouds and storms can be added from the doodads box.
- When starting a new Creative Mode game, there is now an option to automatically generate clouds and storms.
- The "Clear Objects" command can now clear all clouds and storms.
- Multiplayer:
- All PvP multiplayer modes have clouds and storms by default. This can be customized by the host in the pre-game settings.
- In Domination mode, some control points will have large asteroids inside them.
- Balance:
- Increased Small and Heavy Laser Blaster turrets' penetration resistance from 3 to 5, but reduced their main penetration resistance from 3 to 1. (This should be a buff in most situations.)
- Increased the range at which ships with Small and Heavy lasers will default to attacking small enemies from 60 to 90.
- Ships will now fire at neutral/junk mines and projectiles when friendly-fire is enabled.
- User Interface:
- When a ship is inside a cloud or storm, an icon indicating the type of cloud or storm will now be displayed underneath the ship's name near the bottom-left.
- Ships that are hidden because they are inside a Gaseous Cloud will now have an 8-segment selection ring instead of the normal 4-segment ring.
- The crew EVA icon no longer replaces the speedometer when displayed. It now appears to the right of the speedometer and command distance icons.
- When a ship part has multiple valid warning states (such as no-crew, no-power, and no-ammo), the icon will now cycle through all current warning states.
- When the "There are uncommitted modifications to this ship's blueprints" dialog is displayed, there is now an option to save the blueprints before discarding them.
- The ship editor will now display whether new parts have door access or not similar to how it already displays whether the part has access to crew and power/munitions. However, this works for all parts in which crew can enter, not just those that directly use crew or power/munitions.
- While dragging a box to collect floating resources, the quantity of each resource to be collected will now be shown underneath the mouse cursor. If the ship is out of storage for that type, that will also be indicated.
- The icon on the pause button now changes to a "play" icon while the game is paused.
- Renaming an existing custom marker will now start with the existing name already entered.
- Tweaked the Engine Room's description to clarify that it also increases power consumption.
- Updates to all language translations.
- Ship A.I.:
- Ships will now automatically pathfind around the new Electron Clouds and Ion Storms. (They will not pathfind around Gaseous Clouds.) This can be disabled in the settings or suppressed by holding the X key.
- A.I. ships will generally be unwilling to enter Ion Storms at all.
- Ships will now fly normally when exiting sun damage zones.
- Graphics:
- The vision circles around ships now smoothly change their size when the sight distance changes.
- Tweaked the Mine Launcher tube doors to open and close more logically.
- Bug Fixes:
- Crash if the game is saved while the "all hands lost" message is shown.
- Multiplayer desyncs caused by ship formations.
- Ships could sometimes fail to pathfind around suns.
- Ships could have difficulty navigating around binary suns and could sometimes get stuck in the "armpits" created by the overlapping damage zones.
- The path and distance to the nearest power source wasn't being shown for any thrusters.
- Possible door locations weren't being displayed in blueprint mode if there were any destroyed parts adjacent to the door location.
- Mirror mode for crew assignments wasn't working properly for the new Crew Barracks.
- Right-clicking near but not directly on another ship while parts are selected would issue a command to attack or follow that other ship.
- Right-clicking-and-dragging to issue a rotated move command would be ignored if the mouse button was released while the cursor was over another ship that was already being followed by the selected ship.
- Clicking-and-dragging with the repair tool to queue multiple parts for repairs could unintentionally cause already-existing repair orders to be canceled.
- The stats for the Standard and Large Cannons now properly show their actual rate of fire.
- In Arena mode, if the "point tick" sounds were playing at the same time as the game ends and returns to the setup screen, the tick sounds would keep playing indefinitely.
- Using right-click to start any ship movement command and then dragging the mouse cursor over an asteroid could display the asteroid's name twice.
- Crew Barracks weren't available in Build & Battle. (They are now always available without needing to unlock.)
- In Build & Battle during the build phase, the player's money would temporarily increase while firing a chaingun.
- The title screen tips mentioned the incorrect default number of quick-save and auto-save files.
- Modding:
- FYI: In rules files, clouds and storms are called "nebulas".
- Clouds and storms (nebulas) can cause various effects to ships inside, such as make ships hidden, give ship-wide buffs, change sight/sensor range, change damping, and cause lightning strikes. See the rules files for the current nebula types for examples.
- Clouds and storms can have multiple render layers above and below ships that each use their own shader and textures.
- Clouds and storms support an "active effects" system. The currently supported active effect types are LightningStrikes, DamageShips, and DamageCrew.
- Star system generators now support spawning nebulas.
- Most star system spawners now support requiring minimum and maximum distances from specific nebula types.
- BulletEmitter and BeamEmitter components now support an optional 'RevealsShip' parameter (defaults to true) that, if set to false, will prevent the emitter from revealing its ship in a nebula when firing.
- Added a WholeShipBuffProvider which provides a buff to the part's entire ship.
- BuffToggle components will now properly start in the "on" state when spawned and have 'Invert = true'.
- A.I. ships now support a 'MinPatrolRadius' parameter.
- The IndicatorSprites component will now cycle through all valid indicator icons simultaneously. To make one icon suppress and hide another, use the new 'HidesIndicators' parameter.
- Removed the "indicators" ship render layer because it is no longer used by vanilla. (And is unlikely to be used by mods either since IndicatorSprites no longer uses the layers system.)
- If 'IncludeInBlueprints = true' is specified for a ToggledComponents, then its sub-components will now *always* be rendered in its blueprints regardless of the toggle state. Use 'IncludeInBlueprints = dynamic' to restore the old behavior (check the toggle state).
- In developer mode, you can now click on a star system to jump the view to it even if the player has no ships there.
- Mod actions that use 'CreateIfNotExisting = true' will now give a more informative error if the path trying to be created is a file root.