It's that time of year where the nights are short and the days are cold. Astro-Santa is busy checking his list and his elves are working hard. But alas, Astro-Santa needs your help once again, the evil Astro-Grinch, destroying all those with a festive spirit, is roaming the depths of space once again!

This year Astro-Santa is located in his retreat in Lapland, which can be found off of the Handle's Cove system. The winners of the letters to Astro-Santa competition will have their letters and mission added after they've been chosen.


Once again we wish you a Happy Holiday and More....

As the New Year approaches, there is a change in the air with Star Sonata. I’m very excited to be given the chance to be part of that change. In September I was given the opportunity to become a member of the Development Team. Through my experiences as developer I have learned so much about the game and all the work that goes in behind the scenes that I never fully realized before when I was just a player.

Through the past few months we’ve listened to the requests of you, our players, and thought best about how to proceed. More....

Rules:

Screenshots should be 800x600, or else something that will look good when cropped to 800x600. I would probably prefer to get some that show the UI at this resolution and some that don't.

Multiple submissions encouraged, within reason. 10-20 good quality, different screens are welcome, but please not a whole bunch that look nearly identical.

The categories for screenshots are:
Solo action shot (with or without slaves)
Squad Action shot
Exploration shot (just a cool looking screen with no combat)
Team galaxy shot (show off your bases and trade slaves)
Base action shot (BvB, PvB, or BvE)

Rewards:

There will be one winner in each of the above 5 More....

Patch will be released at 11pm US-East on January 27th

This patch is pretty big so we're expecting downtime of roughly 3 hours.

* Changed the on-board item dropping code for when an enemy is destroyed. The chance for an item to drop used to be mainly based on either surgical or how exactly you could kill and enemy, with overkill preventing drops. We want to start eliminating self-destructors on mid-high level ships to make the game more interesting, but not flood the market, so the chance for items to drop off of destroyed ships will now be inversely proportional to More....

Patch will be released at 11pm US-East on December 22nd.

Discuss these patch notes here: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=49465

* New ship: Patrol Cadet
* New ship: Ares Dog Sled
* Cleaned up the Ares War Chariot texture map
* Added glow to Ares War Chariot
* Added glowmap for Hephaestus Machine
* Added new look for James Watt
* Added Interdiction Frigate texture and glow map
* Added new ships: Hephaestus Crystal Machine, Demonic Wattage
* Added in Global Christmas drops
* Added some explore goals to some of the first missions in Nexus to better guide the new player to the next galaxy
* Adjusted More....

* New high quality fonts for better readability
* New option to set font size to normal, larger, and largest
* Chat area now scales horizontally to take 50% of your screen space
* Fixed a memory leak
* Made it so the blueprint list is ordered alphabetically
* Fixed a bug with the background rendering disabled and laglevel.
* Made it so closing the chat input box by clicking/changing tab wont reset its content.
* Fixed a possible client lag source while the map was being loaded.
* Added Inferno glow
* Fixed engine mount on missiles
* Fixed a bug that caused showpain and More....

* added a scrollbar in the construction tab blueprint description.
* Fixed the pause/cancel buttons in construction tab.
* Fixed the Shrimp+ (hopefully)
* made it so slaves obtained by abuses will be forced into stasis and set to expire on next server restart
* Fixed the controlbot bug allowing for any tech/qty of ship to be slaved.
* made it so any slaves obtained using bugs/exploit will be forced into stasis and set to expire next server restart.
* Fixed a bug where AI ships would only use super items when they got out of weapon range and then got back More....

* made it so link in the galaxy map are colored/thicker when linking 2 owned galaxy. (your own team is green, other teams are blue)

* fixed a bug with the construction tab not cleaning correctly on undock.


This is an optional patch, you must run your patchbot manually if you patched before it was More....