Breaking News: Lyceum scientists have intercepted a trans-dimensional transmission!

Robert: “He did it again!”

Boyle: “What”

Robert: “Kyle spilt baobab milk on Universe 667′s server hamster. The entire universe has stalled!”

Boyle: “Well…the boss isn’t going to be happy. This requires a complete overhaul!”

Robert: “We talkin 30 days or 3 years?”

Boyle: “I should have it done before the planned universe collapse…maybe”

Robert: “Great. Just great!”

Lyceum scientists predict massive changes to life as we know it on a universal scale. They are working on pinpointing the origin of the communication to uncover more details

EMERGENCY NOTICE

BREAKING NEWS:

Reports are coming in from multiple expedition teams that an unknown organism is rampaging through known space!

According to an unnamed Earthforce official and an eyewitness report, an unidentified interplanetary fishing trawler managed to catch a rare species of Cosmic Space Lobster in the midst of Earthforce Space. According to the eyewitness, instead of properly reporting the rarity to the authorities, they decided to store the creature — improperly — in the officer’s mini fridge.

By the time the workers returned to their shift the next day, the fridge was missing along with half of the desks! The organism was last seen engaging in numerous battles with civilians and militant groups in Perilous Space.

Earthforce has officially posted a warning to avoid the entity as a battle with it could result in a destabilization of the universe as we know it if it absorbs any more space fairing travelers.

The Kalthi have ignored the warning, and the scientists at Lyceum have reported rupturing of the space-time continuum that will reach its peak on February 13th 2021.

At that time, the universe will implode, creating another in its place — credits on active bots will be lost at the end of the universe alongside any bases and permanent drones. Player ships will not be affected.

The universe reset will be held on Saturday, February 13th.
BST: 18:00
EST: 13:00
CST: 12:00
MST: 11:00
PST: 10:00
UTC: 18:00

Tentative Future Reset Dates
June 12, 2021
October 9, 2021

The long-awaited healing/support revamp is in preparation for patch. Over the next few days, I’ll release a series of blog posts detailing what you can expect with this release. To start, here is a basic FAQ about the project and its release schedule.

When will the project be released?

The release date isn’t scheduled yet as our server programmer Jey is still in the process of setting up the patch. We can expect a patch date around November 13 (yes, Friday the 13th). This has been revised a week later than our original estimate due to the patch preparation process taking longer than expected.

What’s included in the project?

The project includes major changes to the combat classes of Engineer and Shield Monkey. I’ll give more details on each of these classes in a dedicated blog post over the next few days. The project also involves major changes to three other aspects of the game: hulls (aka “ships”), certain skills, and modded weapon bonuses.

What’s happening to my ships?

Hulls (aka “ships”) have had their resistance profiles reduced with boss zone DPS reduced to match. The upshot is that you should be able to survive longer when taking fire from most enemies (although certain bosses may still kill you pretty fast). Resistance no longer scales up with tech level, making it easier for us to balance hulls going forward. Resistances are also more consistent with most hulls having only one or two damage type vulnerabilities.

Hulls with more augmenter slots than typical for their type have lost those slots in exchange for better stats in other areas. Hulls that lost augmenter slots will automatically have their augmenters unequipped on release of the project so that you can re-gear them appropriately. All other hulls will be entitled to one free reset of their augmenters using the command /freeAugReset while the hull is active. This will unequip all the equipped augmenters on the hull, allowing you to re-gear it appropriately. Lastly, every character will have access to three extra augmenter reset missions that can each be used to unequip the augmenters from any one of your ships (just like the reset missions in Shadow). These missions will eventually expire (no earlier than February 2021–exact date TBD), so make sure to take advantage of them as you experiment with new augmenter setups. The test server with the Community Testing Event galaxy will also be kept available at least until February 2021 for experimentation with setups.

What’s up with skills?

The most impactful skills are Zen of Shield and Zen of Energy, each of which provides a 2% boost to your shield and energy stats (up to 100% at level 50). The Zens of Acceleration and Spin have also been changed to percent-wise bonuses: 2% each to thrust and turning for 50 levels. Lastly, the control and resistance skills in Lagrange have been converted to percent-wise bonuses (up to 10% damage or resistance for a single damage type at level 25).

A few skills affecting bots and drones have also been changed. Bot PhD grants 8 extra combat bot slots and also passes 30% of your skill bonuses to your bots. This includes special skills like Might of Atlas. You can get another 30% of your skill bonuses to your bots by maxing out Bot Tweaking, which still has its speed and mobility bonuses from before as well. Similarly, the Droney advanced subskill now confers 50% of your skill bonuses to your deployed temporary drones in addition to the +1 drone slot bonus.

What’s up with weapon modifications?

Weapons with modifications and/or augmenter stat bonuses will now only grants those bonuses when they are the active weapon. This means equipping a sleek Hermes Caduceus will not increase your speed unless you select it as your active weapon, for example. The classes most affected by this change are Berserker and Gunner, both of which had been using many extra equipped weapons to garner a passive bonus to damage (and hostility, in the case of Berserker). However, several other classes had also been using a few extra equipped weapons for a more modest bonus to damage. We are compensating the following classes with extra damage to help make up for the expected loss in damage from this change:

• Berserker: +55% damage
• Gunner: +33% damage
• Sniper: +18.75% damage
• Speed Demon, Seer, Shield Monkey: +7.5% damage

Note that this change has no effect on item modifications on non-weapon gear.

What other things will change?

A lot gear stats have been adjusted as a part of this project. Partly, this is due to us performing some much needed maintenance on our internal balance formulas. This maintenance will help us produce new content faster and ensure that things remain balanced. Generally, you can expect shields to have more bank and a LOT more regeneration, to help compensate for the lower resistances on hulls. Shield chargers now only work out of combat, so you can expect much higher stats on those items. You can expect energies to have a fair bit more regeneration to help compensate for the fact that solar panels now only work out of combat.

Weapons with damage-over-time (especially fires) have been analyzed with much greater scrutiny before. Our new depth of understanding of these weapons has helped us to tune them to be very good on the longer time scale (30+ seconds) but less useful for very short engagements. As part of that analysis, we realized that fire extinguishers and pest exterminators were an unnecessary complication to balancing the weapons, so we’ve converted these item types to work only out of combat (but at much higher effectiveness).

The cost to repair your equipment has been standardized to scale with tech and rarity. This means that you will no longer encounter powerful items with an unreasonably high or bizarrely low cost to repair. We have balanced things so that an endgame player can expect to pay around 500 million credits to repair from a single death (actually, most setups we tested came in around 350 million). Furthermore, towing now only incurs one death’s worth of repair costs instead of the three deaths’ worth that it cost before. Drone repairs are extra, since drones don’t take durability damage when the player dies and only require repairs if they’re destroyed in the field. We’ve balanced drone repair costs to come to around 500 million at the highest rarity tier of tech 22. This means that it’s somewhat costly to lose all your drones, but only as much as another death or two in your player ship.

You can get a full list of changes to items here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ji0EVBL3t0J0qD1_PmBAdihetThdvpFi/view?usp=sharing

Status of the revamp

Over the past few months, the dev team has been working hard on a revamp that focuses on the Shield Monkey and Engineer classes. While the project’s main goal is to give these classes more interesting and active combat roles, it has also led to broader changes to ship stats as we attempt to produce a more balanced damage mitigation experience in the game.

We held three community testing events over the summer to solicit player feedback on the project. While we did receive a lot of feedback that helped us improve the project, the testing events were plagued by glitches and the overall lack of polish, resulting in much frustration and wasted time for the players who signed on to help us. While our goal was to make our development process more transparent, we lacked the capacity to receive and process the massive amount of community feedback that you all provided. We had aimed to close testing on August 31 and move the project into patch preparation, but we didn’t hit this goal and are currently reassessing to develop a new timeline.

To the players who participated in the testing events or otherwise spent time discussing and theorycrafting this project, we are sorry for the frustration we have caused you. The dev team has lost a few members over the past year and this project is just too big for the current team to finish as quickly as we had hoped. However, it was still my responsibility to make an accurate assessment of the team’s capacity, and I apologize for falling short in this respect.

Player concerns and our reponses

To help show that we’re listening and attempt to repair some of the damage, Jeff and I held an emergency meeting a few days ago to address the concerns brought up by the playerbase. The meeting focused on responding to a list of five concerns that had been circulated by the player Jiraque. We’ve listed those concerns below, along with a summary of the responses we gave during the meeting.

1. Never again use the player base as an ad-hoc QA team. If there is insufficient testing manpower in the development QA team to test changes, extend the duration of your testing events and/or decrease the scope of your projects.

The last few community testing events were too early and disrespectful of your time as players. We won’t open up testing events in the future until they are much more polished and ready for community testing.

2. Be fair to your players. If you are changing augmenters or ships, compensate the player base accordingly with augmenter resets and/or opportunities to ship form (once per affected ship).

We had assumed that five augmenter resets would be enough for players to adjust to the changes in this project. We didn’t realize how large of an impact these changes would have on heavily invested players. Now that we have a better understanding, Jeff has authorized me to grant a free augmenter reset to every ship that logs in before February 6, 2021, plus three additional augmenter reset missions that will also expire on February 6, 2021. We will give more details on how to use your free reset when we are closer to launch. Note that the Community Testing Event galaxy on the Test Server will also stay open until February 6, 2021 to facilitate player theorycrafting and setup testing.

3. Respond to our concerns about the feel of the classes we play. The feel of playing the game is just as important as the numbers are. If there’s a general sentiment that something feels bad, prioritize fixing it.

We’ve taken this to heart and we will be asking focus groups of the classes that are changing for their opinions on the reworks to make sure any changes are considered fun or helpful.

4. If there is an extremely overpowered object of any kind in the game (item, ship, augmenter, equipment, etc.), make it your top priority to correct it. Do not let it linger in game and become the meta, then punish the player base for adopting that meta by nerfing it.

Distorting ships or strategies like the PBF, Battle Sphere, passive mod-stacking, and solar panel stacking all fall into this category. We’re working to address these and others in a way that satisfies the player base in order to open up design space in Tech 23 onwards.

5. If you increase the cost of things in-game (repair costs, AI base items, blueprints, etc.), add or tune active/passive income sources to compensate. Inform people of scrap price changes before patching.

We are dialing back repair costs in the project (see below). More broadly, we are making better communication and documentation a priority as we continue working on this project. This includes a changelog (of which we have started doing on test) and better patch notes.
All Test Changes
Outline of Healing Revamp (but see below for possible changes to Engineer)

Specific changes and initiatives

Here are a few noteworthy changes that we have made to address some major concerns before the next version of testing:

Lastly, we’re currently evaluating an experimental change to Engineer. In the spirit of Concern #3, we acknowledge that our earlier concept for the class wasn’t quite doing what we wanted, resulting in imbalances and lack of enjoyment. Early testing suggests that the following change would move the class in a promising direction:

EMERGENCY NOTICE

Paxian scouts have alerted us of a possible eradication event. Scanners have picked up an SOS by a Selenite Avenger ship. Reports say that their engine was disabled by the janitor tripping over an apparently vital power line that had been taped to the floor. Nobody is quite sure why the ship had their main engine powerline on the ground — or how one crewman could so utterly destroy it…

Further scans and a followup investigation report that the Avenger is opening fire immediately on all rescue attempts and that it contains a large shipment of anti-matter. This is especially disastrous as the ship is currently on a collision course with the event horizon of a black hole. The collision will be catastrophic for the space-time fabric of the current universe, and we urge everyone to prepare for transportation to another dimension. The resulting distortion will cause all credits on trade bots to be wiped, and all existing stations to be destroyed. We urge everyone to pack their stations and remove all credits from their trade bots before the end of the universe.

The universe reset will be held on Saturday, October 3rd.
BST: 18:00
EDT: 13:00
CDT: 12:00
MDT: 11:00
PDT: 10:00

Future Reset Dates
Dates have been updated to properly show the new times
February 13, 2021
June 12, 2021

What’s this about a revamp?

As many of you know, the dev team has been working hard on a revamp centering on the two support classes: Shield Monkey and Engineer. The main goal is to give these classes more interesting and pronounced combat roles. For Engineer, this comes through a redesigned Drone Ops stat that lets the class directly customize their drones, and new energy distribution systems such as the Tesla Coil. For Shield Monkey, we’ve removed the “free shields” granted by Transference Efficiency but replaced it with a new system that allows healers to steal shields from enemies to replenish themselves in a zero-sum way.

As part of the changes to healing, we have made additional changes to ships and shields that make constant healing less necessary. All players receive a substantial bonus to shield bank and regeneration to help them survive longer without heals when they come under fire. Also, higher tech hulls no longer receive higher resistance levels, and resistances are mostly standardized with a few thematic strengths and weaknesses at most. Of course, the shielding and damage output of bosses and adds have also been reviewed to align with these changes (but if you encounter anything that seems off, just let us know!)

When can I test this revamp?

You can test the revamp right now! We’ve just begun Community Testing Event 3, which can be accessed by pointing your client to the Test server (make sure to select Test, not Test 2).

A special galaxy is avialable off of Sol during the testing event. This system, Community Testing Event, will contain a large selection of gear Tech 15 and above along with Hogg’s Map Revealer! All of these items will be obtainable for 1 credit and available only during community testing events.

What exactly is changing?

A full list of the current changes to items can be found here. If you want more of an outline, check here instead.

Tips on testing

This is a big project and it may be hard to know where to start when you first log in. Here are some suggestions.

• Shield Monkey: Don’t forget to equip a second shield! Also check out the Shield Monkey Laboratories in Lyceum for some new class-locked items, and consider picking up a new Advanced Subskill. You may find it helpful to replace one of your augmenters with a damage-oriented augmenter.
• Engineer: Don’t forget to equip a second energy AND an extra augmenter. You may also find it helpful to replace one of your existing augmenters with something the grants Transference Power or Shield Regeneration. Also check out Engineer’s Workshop in Lyceum for some new class-locked items, and consider picking up a new Advanced Subskill.
• Everyone: Diffusers are now limited to one per ship and can’t be swapped during flight. Think about what damage type you’d like extra resistance toward, or try out one of the new omni-resistance options.

We want your feedback!

Any and all feedback you have can be posted to the feedback channels in Discord under the Healing Feedback category. We are committed to collecting and acting on community feedback until the project is fully polished for release on the live server.

Support Revamp Testing

Testing of the Shield and Healing Revamp will begin on July 1st! Starting on that day, players can experiment with the upcoming release on test.starsonata.com which can be easily accessed by clicking the dropdown on your client and going to Test.

A full list of the current changes for this revamp can be found here.

During the event a new galaxy will be available off of Sol. This system, Community Testing Event, will contain a large selection of gear Tech 15 and above along with Hogg’s Map Revealer! All of these items will be obtainable for 1 credit and available only during community testing events.

Any and all feedback you have can be posted to the feedback channels in Discord under the Healing Feedback category. We are committed to collecting and acting on community feedback until the project is fully polished for release on the live server.

Today is the day we’ve all been waiting for! Star Sonata 2 is available on Steam!

As we’ve already highlighted in previous posts, it is super crucial for us to get as many of our existing players to play with the Steam version of the game during the Launch Event (June 12-July 12). By playing the game through Steam, and buying any Space Points through Steam, you are directly helping the game increase in visibility and standings which allow us to grow the game and share it with more people!

Don’t forget to check out the details of our Launch Event and the Starter Pack.

If you are a new player to Star Sonata, welcome! We are so excited to have you here. Check out our Quick Start Guide, or pop on over to our Discord server for more information to help you get started in the universe.

If you are an existing player to Star Sonata, you probably have a ton of questions about this Steam launch. Here are some questions we’ve heard that we’d like to answer.

• Will I still be able to download the client through the website?
  Yes! If you don’t want to use Steam at all, you don’t have to!

• Can I use my existing account on Steam?
  Yes! When you launch Star Sonata 2 through Steam and you come to the login screen, there is a button to switch to a non-Steam login, then you can log in with your existing account. Currently, there is no way to actually link your account with Steam, but you can still use your pre-existing account.

• How do I get the bonus of the Launch Event? 
  Launch the game through Steam and log in either with a Steam Account or a pre-existing account. When you log in you will get the bonus Raging Steam holoprojector, and the EXP bonus will activate. You will only get the EXP bonus while you are on the Steam version of the client.

Kilando has put together a video for existing players that shows how to access the game launch the game through Steam. Check it out below!

As part of our launch on Steam, we are excited to announce the contents of our brand new Starter Pack that is exclusive to Steam! Whether you’re new to the universe, launching into your first Zebucart, or an experienced pilot traversing the stars, the Starter Pack has something for you!

Included in the Starter Pack are 5 unique ship skins, a unique Steam exclusive holoprojector named the Cosmic Shimmer, and 3 months of premium subscription time. This starter pack is a one-time purchase option for all players for $19.99! Normally a three-month subscription is $24.95, so that’s a 20% savings on a premium subscription.

Now if that isn’t enticing enough for you, during our Launch Event Window, the Starter Pack is going to be discounted even MORE. From June 12 through June 19 the Starter Pack will be 25% off the base price. So that’s 5 skins, a holoprojector, 3 months of sub time for $14.99! This deal won’t be coming back anytime soon so jump on it while you have the chance!

Here’s a preview of the Cosmic Shimmer and skins in the Starter Pack!

Don’t forget that the more you play on Steam during our Launch Event, the more it helps us to grow and gain visibility. Even better, if you purchase the Starter Pack, or any Space Points through Steam, it also really improves our rankings and visibility! If you want to support us so we can keep on making Star Sonata an epic game, here is your chance. We definitely wouldn’t be where we are today without your support, so join us on Steam!

It has been a long time coming, but we’ll be going live on Steam at roughly at 10:00am PT this Friday. We’ve already made a huge post about how you can help make our Steam Launch a success, so if you haven’t checked that out yet give it a read. In a post coming later today, we will be outlining what is included in our Starter Pack.

Today, we wanted to take a moment to highlight what our launch event is going to look like and why you should definitely play on Steam during the event! Playing through Steam helps us, so here’s what we’re offering you in return:

• Just by logging into Star Sonata through Steam, you will get a Steam exclusive holoprojector named Raging Steam. This is the only way to get this holoprojector, and it’ll be unobtainable in the future.

• Additionally, we’ll be offering 50% extra experience for characters logged in through Steam for the entire duration of the launch event.
• Finally, we’ll be offering a bonus 10 space points on top of every space point purchase through Steam. We’ve never offered a special on space points ever before and I’m not sure if we’ll ever do it again, so its a good time to stock up!

These bonuses will only apply if you are logged into the game through Steam during the launch event window, which runs from June 12th to July 12th. Make sure to log on through Steam at least once to grab the exclusive holoprojector, but we hope you’ll keep using it through July 12th to get the 50% bonus experience.  As we mentioned in our previous posts, every purchase and play through Steam during the launch event really helps us to grow our visibility and rankings within Steam, so we really hope that you participate to help make this a success! Thank you for your support, and stay tuned for the next blog post coming later today outlining the Steam Starter Pack. It’s a really good deal, so keep an eye out!

Note: Just to correct a common misconception, linking your existing account through Steam is not currently possible and not required for any of the above bonuses. You can login via your normal username and password through the Steam downloaded game client.