Added a new ship to the game called the “The Commissioner”. This has been co-opted with Hober Mallow to add the final touches to the ship for in-game release.

Special thanks to James5 for producing the ship. The topic related can be found here.

Been expanding Kalthi Depths loot table, making additions to the following areas (in-progress):

• Corrupted Conversion Ray
• Fuel Compressors
• Transwarps
• Envelopes
• Prospecting
• Engines
• Tractors

• Drone Controllers
• Electron Clouds
• Scanners
• Sludges
• Torpedos
• Shields

In the shadows of the development, something is making a scratching noise.

Industrial Commodities

DarkSteel and enkelin have been keeping an eye on the Industrial Commodities market and have some proposed tweaks for next universe.

SunDog

Some players have been experiencing issues with the Psychic Mastery mission for seers. Specifically, the repeatable version of the mission after you first complete it. Last night’s hotfix was to address this mission, the Psionic Flares will now appear in Bipolar. If this is the case, send in a support ticket (or contact me on the Star Sonata Discord) to have it removed from your character so you can repeat it.

Kraken, Poseidon’s miniboss, takes a while to spawn in. I’m looking into reducing the time it requires as dragging out the spawn time for so long doesn’t accomplish anything besides increasing the time to complete a Poseidon run.

For anyone interested in lore, I’ve written up the lore of the Blue Pirates. You can read it all on the wiki, on this page: http://wiki2.starsonata.com/index.php/Blue_Pirates

Pixel

There has been some adjustments to the Voulge, Flamberge, and Flamlite where they were too similar so now they’ve received different arm amounts.

• Flamlite has 3 arms.
• Flamberge has 5 arms.
• Voulge has 6 arms.

Pixel’s been adding even more skins, enjoy!

Additionally, changes to Lunarium Dusts and Selenite Dusts will become Shards, this will skip the process into just one step from shard to final commod. The existing dust commodities and blueprints related to dusts will automatically convert over to the shard versions. Existing dust blueprints installed on stations won’t be converted.

This patch is to address an unforeseen issue with base thrusters in bvb. It seems that they can currently be used by the defenders to indefinitely “outrun” a bvb attack and prevent loss of ownership and cause a loss of all attacking kits. This patch will be making the following changes:

*Base thrusters cannot be equipped (and will turn off if already on) on a kit that has been attacked in the last 5 minutes (sharing a timer with the base transfer rule).

*Bases outside of the userbase placement limits (over 30k from the nearest solarbody e.g. suns, planets, wormholes, etc) will not count for galaxy ownership. If the only kits in the galaxy are outside of this limit, the galaxy will go un-owned. If a galaxy is owned with kits outside of their team beyond the limits, they will be converted to bvb kits.

s_m_w

Has been hard at work adding new visual effects with the following new lightning bolt effect as shown below, enjoy!

Each shot is dyamically generated giving that shocking experience each time. Additionally while still in the works lasers has received a slight adjustment with a rounded tip. To be warned this is all subject to change due to future developments.

Jeff

Jeff has fixed the bug with class skills giving skill debt. Additionally he’s made a new tutorial event that triggers if you try to warp through a blocked wormhole.

Pixel

Pixel added a new skin for the Behemoth, Divine Behemoth, and Leviathan.

Heya everyone this is just a short post showing what has happened this week. Expect a larger than usual blog post next week.

Been busy this week with help from Vaporize improving the Behemoth model. Here’s some imagery, enjoy!

This also means the Divine Behemoth got a update!

Additionally a skin has been added to the Resistance and Wattage.

The Isvas’ayu engine mount has been fixed!

Expect all this to come in the next upcoming patch and much more!

Other News

In other news the ban topic has now been published: click here.

Bobbo

Bobbo is working on a simple new T20 DG uber, piloting a Vulture. It is not meant to be a huge new addition, but simply meant to make access to the Vulture/Aug Blueprint and Commodity a bit easier.

Jey

Jey is still trying to figure out Client crashes, but they are elusive, to say the least. (Or in jey’s words: “They make little to no sense which is **** annoying”)

He can however explain, and has fixed, the ocasional lag affecting the website. It seems to have been caused by the code that handles updating the test server.

Keep on sending crash dumps when you crash (simply click “yes”), the data has been extremely helpful! The client crash is a very weird one and jey is still not fully sure what is causing it, but he is making steady process. All my focus is on that (when the server isn’t crashing / lagging to death) and I am hoping to pinpoint it really soon. Quite a few things are being delayed while the crash hunt continues.

Hober Mallow

Demolishing and Neutralizing weapons are getting their splash damage removed, they are not the right weapons for a splash effect (High DPS, High DPE pulse guns). I’ll be saving the effect for a more appropriate weapon, preferably one that doesn’t have the highest Mining/Radiation DPS in the game. The other stats on the weapons will not change.

In working on invasions, I’ve found that the lower tier invasions don’t seem to serve the purpose they were originally intended for. Originally, they would provide something interesting for low level players to do. However, the fact that they are in a Premium zone meant that those players were not interacting with them very much. Going forward, there will be no invasions in the lower arms. The invasions and outposts will be locked to the Sas Arm, and the rewards from the other arms will be moved into other places.

Pixel

Scruples, Nightfuries and all their kin used textures that were, quite frankly, absolutely terrible. Pixel has been busy making them glorious once again!

He has also been working on a new boss, the Queen Hive, which is still in the early development stages but will enter the universe eventually.

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s_m_w

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few weeks getting myself acquainted with the client code, which is starting to bear fruit! Here’s a short video of my results from fiddling with lasers.

Server Changes

* Another server lag from bvb (or other heavy spaceobjects scenario) fixed, hopefully is the last one.

Content Changes

* Reduced Twisted Nikola shield caps from 17mil to 15mil.
* Improved “Outpost 2 Reporting In” mission intro and summary to better convey the objective to the player.
* Made Lasting Reserves Berserker only
* Adjusted the cost of station-bought Thoraxes and Torpedoes
* Adjusted Stygian Fist
* Reduced weight on Primal Zebra Hooves Torpedoe
* Reduced size on (Primal) Lion V2 Rocket. This had a severe impact on their stats.

Bug Fixes

* Fixed bots getting full bonuses to fighter bay slots, they now get half the fighter slots bonus from the master

Recent Patches

Recently we’ve been pushing out a lot of patches and we appreciate you all for your help with constant feedback, reporting bugs, and fixes. Expect a couple more patches.

Bobbo

Bobbo been fixing some Easter bugs with some missions not giving rewards correctly, next patch. This includes a number of other bugs related around the Sniper but is still within the primalary stages of being fixed.

s_m_w

Some more background fixes related to gear balance issues.

Pixel

Has remade the Unt Faranji Wingship visual. He has also been poking about with HTML5/Javascript related scripts to apply to the player guide improvements.

Termites have also been looked at with the current result of the huge termite losing ¾ths its damage potential and lowered resistance from 98% to 90%.

This is a pretty small patch, mostly due to how recent the previous patch was.

On another notes, a slowdown on the webserver was fixed recently, hopefully website should be back to fullspeed.

Thanks again to everyone sending the crash dumps from the client, I have a lot of data to go through and fixe as many of the crashes as i can, client patch fixing most crashes should be here this week.

Changes

* Slaves now correctly receive bonuses from Zen of Capital Ships and Zen of Fleet Commander
* Reduced the min and difficulty levels of the UZ kill missions by 400. Missions now open at level 600 like the wormhole itself
* Fixed another ancient scoutship mission description
* Weakened huge termite.
* Server crash fix

Server Changes

* Multiple less frequent crashes, fixes
* Added more detail to /showsquaddamage. The output can get very bloated, more improvements will come later
* Diffusers with a chance of failure on ships in stasis should no longer have a possibility of being destroyed if the ship is attacked while in stasis.
* Fixed bad description on Super Intelligent crit hit bonus

Content Tweaks

* Doubled extraction power of panning beam.
* Made the Aveksaka Xenobiology Platform deploy 5 fighters instead of 1. Will require to re deploy the drone..
* Fixed an issue with Honey Strikers doing less damage than intended.
* Reduced the weight on Subshield Reactors by 90% (since it doesnt include the previous tier anymore)
* Beefed the Bule Hyperdrive Device (Bule Eradicator inbuilt): Jump distance 1500, Failrate 15%, Energy needed 15000, Charge time 25s
* Added Thorn Augmenter within the Cleft Thorn family internal inventory list so that surgical weapons will increase chances to obtain it.
* Adjusted junkyard extractors from sticky to base bound.
* Any base kits missing station upgrade blueprints and defender/platform/assault drone blueprints have had them added. Existing kits will not receive these blueprints if they are missing them.
* Paxian Figurines are now made from 250 Baobabs (up from 150)
* Paxian Figurines now get consumed by their respective AI base type at the same rate Fine Space Whisky gets consumed
* Base price of Paxian Figurines increased to 37.500 from 22.500
* Merchant Fleet Master now once again gives +10% max shields, rather than +2%
* The “Market place? Trading Federation?” Paxian Exploration mission no longer rewards players with an Ion Peashooter+, as the item requirement was removed already.
* Engineers tweakings changes (+5.5% to augs, +11% to tweaks)
* EDVAC Prospecting Scanners have had their tech levels updated.
+ Added Combined Augmenter blueprint packs to Augmenter Labs in The Acropolis. These blueprints will no longer drop from AI. (These will need to be manually added to The Acropolis for this universe.)
* Dementium Lockers should now drop from Kalthi Depths, previously they did not.
* Assault Dropships no longer require Colonial Marines to make, the Assault Behemoth now has an inbuilt generator that makes Assault Dropships. The Assault Dropships themselves have been buffed quite significantly.
* Wrathful and Armored Kalthi ships now require 5 Reinforced Kalthi Essence’s instead of 10.
* The Zeus Throne now generates 24 Jovian Guards instead of 12.
* The player progress missions in Sol are much more helpful as to where and how you obtain Tech 21 and Tech 22 skills.
* Vaidya (In Vihara Vaidya, also known as the Shielding 22 boss) now has significantly less regeneration, but is healed for 100% of the damage done to it when the wrong damage type is used against it. The spawn also have more shield regeneration and shield bank.
* Super Intelligent mod is once again additive
* Kalthi Wrathful and Armored Blueprint requirements lowered: Kalthi Ship Plating 10 > 2, Reinforced Kalthi Essence 10 > 4.
* Mythic Defenders now have a Subnavigator’s Augmenter builtin instead of a Grand Navigator’s Augmenter. This will result in a reduction to their Damage, Rate of Fire, Resistances, Shield Bank and Shield Regeneration. Their inbuilt Mythos Stream healing beam now Chains for 1 jump instead of 2 jumps.
* Hermes Fire Starter, Fire Maker and Faulty Fire Starter energy cost increased.
* Rajanicaragupta Amzuchid now imparts a +2500 Visibility tweak for 5 seconds.
* Many torpedoes have received significant overhauls, especially in the lower techs
* Added tech 0 Weak Mining Laser to be added to the Volcom side of Nexus
* Neutralizing and Demolishing weapons now have 300 splash range and 75% splash damage universally.
* Kalthi Wrathful and Armored Blueprint requirements lowered: Kalthi Ship Plating 10 > 2, Reinforced Kalthi Essence 10 > 4.
* Mythic Defenders now have a Subnavigator’s Augmenter builtin instead of a Grand Navigator’s Augmenter. This will result in a reduction to their Damage, Rate of Fire, Resistances, Shield Bank and Shield Regeneration. Their inbuilt Mythos Stream healing beam now Chains for 1 jump instead of 2 jumps.

Bug Fixes

* Zarkar’ayu Cloning Vats now take the 3.75billion to generate the aforementioned Fighter Generators, as they should have been taking originally.
* Fixed the visbility bonus on the Angelic mod
* Twisted Death Augmenter Blueprint now takes 30b total (was 3b due to a typo)
* Berserker Mode no longer drops from DGs (item renamer), replaced with Berserker Method
* Minor description fixes: No such thing as “statis” and duplicate description on Flying Monkey
* Changed how quality tiers are calculated for scoops (drone capable scoops should no longer be auto-marked as exotic)