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!

Hi everyone, here’s an update on the base rebalance.  As hoped, it is on track to go in for next universe (which should be announced soon).  The purpose of this post is to elaborate on some of the details of the rebalance, especially those that I left vague in my first post.

• Station Mastery skill will only provide 2% combat bonuses per level, but this change will be completely balanced out by increasing the corresponding base gear stats.
• Base gear will also be improved by a factor of 2 in addition to the Station Mastery change.  This will change the balance in PvB but BvB will be unaffected by it.  The changes will only affect things like DPS and Shield Recharge, not Range.
• Class skills will no longer affect bases.  There will be new base-only super items that the bases can use during combat to give themselves extra range or other bonuses.  The super items will have a 10 minute charging time to prevent you from rapidly swapping between bonuses.

I mentioned disposable base gear in my previous post.  Here’s how it’s going to work.  When you deploy a base kit, it will come with three new blueprints pre-installed.  If it’s a tech 20 kit, the blueprints will be Annihilator Upgrade X, Y, and Z.  Lower tech kits will come with the corresponding lower tech blueprints.  Each upgrade project builds a whole set of gear that can’t be removed, tossed, or sold from the base.  That includes a shield, energy, shield charger, laser, and omni-dampener (all seven damage types).  These projects cost little or no credits, but require a substantial supply of raw materials (Metals, Silicon, Nuclear Waste) over an extended period of time.  For example, the Upgrade Z version will take 6 weeks to complete.

The objective here is to give players the chance to build a strong galaxy defense even if they don’t have any base gear stored up.  Of course, having some Adamantiumized or Armada gear in storage will still be quite handy to make sure your bases are strong from Day 1.  Not only that, that kind of gear will be necessary for competitive BvB since the XYZ Upgrades take far too long for that.

Since we are repurposing XYZ gear as disposable, we need to do something about currently-existing XYZ gear.  When universe reset is taking place, we will go through and replace existing XYZ gear by the plain versions.  But before you cry “nerf!” let me share with you some new stats.

• Achilles Protector Z (old): 550,000 bank, 530/sec regen
• Achilles Protector (new): 1,822,875 bank, 2,462/sec regen

As you can see, the new plain versions of base gear will be miles better than the current Z versions.  The only XYZ gear that won’t be replaced by the plain versions are Andaman and Achilles Laser Z.  We are aware that these are popular endgame base weapons and so those two items will be left as they are (except of course they will receive the same stat buffs as the rest of the gear, as well).

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to hearing your impressions on this.

As some of you probably noticed. There was an issue with the webserver (and the game server due to dependency) being down.

There has been an hardware failure and it took a bit over 12hours before we could get it replaced. It is now fully functional again.

As compensation for the 14hours downtime that entailed from it, there will be a 100% experience bonus, 100% teamxp bonus and 60% faster worker until 11h59pm 2014-09-15 server time (EDT).

Due to the recent down time on Sunday and today, we’ve giving a bit extra this month.

Until Monday noon (server time, that’s EDT) you’ll get be getting +100% XP, +100% Team XP, double mod chances, Bindomite Crystal AI and 20% faster workers!

Time to have some fun before going back to school! Boo!