Some of us admins are tired of you guys killing everything so easily, so we’ve gotten together and built up a galaxy of bases in Porellis in Perilous Space. This galaxy has been set to allow placement of user bases. We challenge you to take us down!

There is no gear on any of these bases that normal players don’t have. And I only have, like, 30 Station Mastery skill, I swear. And just one pet helping to guard the galaxy.

5 Tarnished Imperial Chests will be awarded to anyone listed as the killer of any of these bases in their black box reports.

It’s finally here!

All things are a go in the universe for Christmas. Lapland has appeared, Astro-Santa is giving gifts in Earthforce Space and Sol has been donned it’s santa hat, unfortunately it brings with it that reject of a Grinch roaming Perilous Space in a pair once again.

A slight change of plan

Due to requiring a patch to add this years christmas letters from the competition and there’s no one to do it right now, I’ve pushed ahead with the main event, using last years letter’s. These will be replaced soon, and the missions will change when they do. To remind you, last year’s winners were:

• epicninja
• Tom Daedalus
• reaper pride
• Platinum
• AfriendlyCanadian

Once this year’s winners have been picked, things will be sorted for their letters to go live and I’ll update this post with the winners

That’s it, so from everyone at Star Sonata, Merry Christmas! Have fun!

King Midas is pissed off that you players keep farming him for Imperial Chests, so he has recruited a giant mob of various Big Greens and Green Battleships to warp into Perilous Space and exact revenge!

As part of our month-long celebration of the 10th anniversary of Star Sonata, tonight, the invasions of the Midas Goons is beginning. Approximately every half hour, somewhere in Perilous Space, up to 25 ships will spawn. If you can manage to fight them off, they will each have a small chance to drop an Imperial Chest, Dementium Fragment, or Bindomite.

But if you think that you’re so leet that fighting off hordes of Green Battleships is easy, well, this *is* Perilous Space, and you might have to PvP other players for the drops.

Just for fun, here is the XML code we used to add this event. You may notice that this is limited to 4000 spawns. Once this spawner has produced 4000 children, it deletes itself and the event will be over. This should take somewhere between 3-5 days, depending on how vigilant people are at killing Goons.

<WILDAI>
  <WILDSPAWN name="SuperGreenSpawner">
    <QUANT>1</QUANT>
    <WILDSTART>3.8</WILDSTART>
    <WILDEND>99.0</WILDEND>
    <LAYER>4</LAYER>
    <USETEAM>Midas Goons</USETEAM>
    <SPAWNOBJ typename="SpawnNasty">
      <SPAWNER>
        <SPAWNBASE>
          <NAME>SuperGreenSpawner</NAME>
          <INTERVAL>1800</INTERVAL>
          <NUM>25</NUM>
          <LIMITSPAWNS>4000</LIMITSPAWNS>
          <LEVEL>-1</LEVEL>
          <MINATTACKLEVEL>0</MINATTACKLEVEL>
          <ATTACKFRACMINAI>0.5</ATTACKFRACMINAI>
          <ATTACKFRACMAXAI>0.0</ATTACKFRACMAXAI>
          <ATTACKFRACMINPLAYER>0.0</ATTACKFRACMINPLAYER>
          <ATTACKFRACMAXPLAYER>999.0</ATTACKFRACMAXPLAYER>
          <SCAREDYCAT>0.0</SCAREDYCAT>
          <DROPITEM chance="0.01">Imperial Chest</DROPITEM>
          <DROPITEM chance="0.02">Dementium Fragments</DROPITEM>
          <DROPITEM chance="0.05">Bindomite</DROPITEM>
          <SPAWNATONCE>true</SPAWNATONCE>
          <RANDOMIZED>1</RANDOMIZED>
          <NAMELIST>BigGreens100.txt</NAMELIST>
          <NAMEPREFIXLIST>UberPrefixes.txt</NAMEPREFIXLIST>
          <NAMESUFFIXLIST>UberSuffixes.txt</NAMESUFFIXLIST> <!-- extra suffixes for identification -->
          <BOUNDTOLAYER>true</BOUNDTOLAYER>
          <HATEMODIFIER>3.0</HATEMODIFIER> <!-- hate on the haters -->
        </SPAWNBASE>
        <PERIPATETIC>25</PERIPATETIC> <!-- jump reasonably often -->
        <SWARM>1</SWARM> <!-- birds of a feather ... -->
        <ALLOWJUMP>1</ALLOWJUMP>
        <GROUPATTACK>1</GROUPATTACK>
        <GROUPATTACKDIST>3000</GROUPATTACKDIST>
        <RALLYFACTOR>10000</RALLYFACTOR> <!-- fight everyone -->
        <CANUPGRADE>0</CANUPGRADE>
        <DONTDOCK>1</DONTDOCK>
        <ADDITIONALBRAVERY>200</ADDITIONALBRAVERY>
        <SHIPCONFIG weight="1.0">Green Meanie</SHIPCONFIG>
        <SHIPCONFIG weight="1.0">Titan Green</SHIPCONFIG>
        <SHIPCONFIG weight="1.0">Green Battleship</SHIPCONFIG>
        <!-- pooling all the skills all versions of the Greens get for a particularly nasty combo, +50%-->
        <XTRASKILL lvl="30">SKILL_COMBAT_FOCUS</XTRASKILL>
        <XTRASKILL lvl="15">SKILL_SNIPER_EFFICIENCY</XTRASKILL>
        <XTRASKILL lvl="15">SKILL_FLEET_FOCUS</XTRASKILL>
      </SPAWNER>
    </SPAWNOBJ>
  </WILDSPAWN>
</WILDAI>

So this blog post has some awesome new; firstly about Christmas!!

Christmas is here

But as always, the rite of passage to Astro-Santa’s goodies is sending him your letters!

That’s right! It’s time for our annual Astro-Santa Christmas letter competition. Send Astro-Santa (or maybe the Astro-Elves) a heartfelt (or hateful) letter, for what things Astro-Santa should get people, or just to raise (or ruin) their Christmas spirits.

You have until Friday 19th of December, 00:00 server time to get your entries in.

Five winners will be chosen later that day and prizes will be handed out during the event.

Prizes:

• A unique item (permanent holoprojector or soundprojector).
• Their letter added to the game.
• 5 Kotonjatas
• 5 Candy Mints
• 5 Triple-Chocolate Candy Cane Kisses
• 5 White Chocolate Candy Pretzels
• 5 Gigantic Stockings
• 5 Good Deed Tokens
• A collection of holoprojectors and soundprojectors

Dates:

• Entry deadline: 19th December (midnight server time).
• Winner’s announcement: 19th December (or later that weekend).
• Event start: At Winner announcement time

Rules & Judging:

• Entries should be posted to the forum thread titled ‘Astro-Santa Letter Competition Entries’ (link is at the bottom) before the end date.
• The submissions will be judged on creativeness and relevance to the holiday and of course, bonus points for Star Sonata themes.
• Your letter must be original work belonging to you; if found otherwise you may be disqualified.

Competition Entry topic

And secondly, December!

We’re 10!

That’s right; Star Sonata is 10 years old! For those of you who’ve been with us since the start, you may know that this actually occurred a few months ago around the same time we were being plagued by memory corruption issues.

It was decided that we’d delay the celebration until December, to wrap it up with Christmas and New Year’s celebrations.

From now through till the 5th of January; we’ll have various bonuses for you in game and as time progresses, some special party items.

The bonuses will start small and stack up over the month, some bonuses will be temporary, check here for current details

The bonuses:

• +25% mod chances
• Green Goons
• +50% artifact mod chance
• +100% experience
• +100% worker speed
• A respawn of Astro-Santa

Once again, my apologies for forgetting to do it sooner. Novembers Monthly event will run until Tuesday, 5PM server time. The bonus is +150% experience and the wild outposts, that is, the Green Meanie and Iceprick bases, as well as the ruin outposts; giving access to specialist station gear in Sol.

Halloween is here!

The festivities started last night, with all the usual tricks and treats we have.

Unfortunately I have to apologize for the lack of daily missions; recent events have proved difficult in getting time to do them.
However, don’t forget about our competition, with only four days left! Now is the perfect time to buy your pumpkin for the pumpking carving competition!

Due to the rollback on Tuesday; this years halloween event will be extended by a day. The end date is Tuesday 11th November, 17:00 server time.

Enjoy!

Hey guys! We’re aware that the recent patch broke bases, and we’re working to get an administrator to resolve the issue as soon as possible. We’re going to prevent losses at best we can, but the final decision to what is being done, will be taken by an administrator Most likely it will be a server shutdown followed by a rollback to prevent losses. Further updates will either follow in the chats or on the forum, or through other announcements

UPDATE:
Jey has brought the server down and rolled the save back to 02:00AM (server time, 6:00 UK (UK clocks changed, US is next week)).
The extra time in the rollback is due to the TSL; the save got corrupted and we decided to rollback further to avoid item duplication/deletion issues.

The part of the patch which was causing the problem has been removed, so all should be good now.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience. Halloween will be extended by a day to make up for lost time.

** UPDATE 16.10.2014 **
Server is currently having some problem with the fixes (the fixe is actually revealing tons of other problems, proving to be very annoying to fix, but unfortunatly most of those problems depend on live architecture and cannot be reproduced on our test server…. Once all those issues are fixed, the server will undergo a catching up bonus period, during which you will gain 3times the normal xp, 3x team xp, workers will be 3x as fast and colony will grow/tick 3x as fast. The bonus will last for 48hours, this could be extended if the server keep on having problems.
– The bases will receive a static + 1bil hull in a way that we can turn it off live without server restart. This way, we can schedule the base “fix” once everything is working, since i know with all those downtime / crash most people wont be here as the server come back up. The bonus will be exactly 1bil hull (unless it would bring you above the 2bil limit), so you can easily see how much hull your base will have after its removed by doing -1b)

So as many noticed, this reset came with some pretty annoying server unstability And client unstability. We have been working pretty hard to rectify the issues but well, some of them (namely the server crash) are by no means simple to fixes. I personally been working essentially all day and night since reset on those and can finally say that its close to being resolved.

Now as for the real reason of this post, along the many bugs that came with the reset. One in particular is bound to have some large effect once fixed. Stm base hull bonus, they currently receive 55% hull bonus per level instead of 5.5% per level. This will be fixed in a patch alongside the server crashes.

Once a specific eta is available, server shutdown timer will be set (and reset on crash), in the meanwhile make sure your stations have enough extensions to not overhaul after the fix and keep a large enough reserve of fuel / rations to ensure your base can last even if it get overhulled by the patch.

Summer’s gone and Winter is coming, the leaves are turning brown, there are conkers to be found, the nights are drawing in and the kids have recently gone back to school. All of this can only mean one thing…

Halloween is soon! As such, it’s about time we got a competition going. This year’s competition is gunna be a bit different to any we’ve had before so listen (or read) carefully for the instructions; because you’ll be carving pumpkins!

You will (probably) need the following:

• A pumpkin (which unfortunately will have to be bought, unless you grow pumpkins).
• A sharp cutting implement, like a knife (youngsters should have adult supervision for this — We’re not responsible if you slice yourself open).
• A light producing device, such as a candle, to sit inside your pumpkin.
• A camera to take a picture of your creation.
• And anything else you feel like adding.

Prizes:
Five winners will be picked from the entrants the weekend of the 31st and will be given the following:

• A permament and neurobound holoprojector; unique to this competition.
• 5 of each Undead Miner.
• 5 of each Bite tweak.
• 5 Pumpkin Shards.
• A collection of temporary holoprojectors and sound projectors.

Dates:

• Competition start: 30th September (12 noon server time).
• Entry deadline: 31st October (12 noon server time).
• Winner’s announcement: 31st October (or later that weekend).

Rules & Judging:

• Entries should be posted to the forum thread (link is at the bottom) before the end date.
• The submissions will be judged on execution, creative design and of course, bonus points for Star Sonata themes.
• Your pumpkin must be original work belonging to you; if found otherwise you may be disqualified.
• Your photographs of your submission must have a sign with the account name (or main character) you are using to post as part of the photograph.

When you submit your entry, make sure you have good picture(s) of it. You can take multiple pictures of your submission; if your pumpkin is to be lit inside, pictures of it lit in the dark and a picture of it unlit in the light would probably be a good idea.

With Bageese no longer with the development team, Suit felt like something was missing. He went on a search on how he could stop this, but had no idea. He finally decided he could no longer bear this, and contacted the Lyceum scientists to try and go back in time.

Long story short, something went wrong with the black hole generator and the universe as we know is going to end.  They are unsure how long they can hold the black hole generator from spinning out of control, but they predict that it will swallow the entire universe saturday the 11th of October at 1PM Eastern Time. Hopefully the almighty adum will be generous and will be able to re-create everything, so the server should be back up shortly.

If this is your first universe reset, click here for a guide!