Hey everyone! As some of you might have noticed, I’ve started doing more content development lately, and not so much bug support. Recently I’ve finished quite a lot of content additions, but one major content addition that was voted up on the player suggestions was to make a Perilous Perilous Space. So, let me give you guys a small taste of what it will be like.

Perilous Perilous Space will be an extension of the current Perilous Space, and all galaxies above Danger Factor 400, up to Danger Factor 500 will be considered Perilous Perilous Space. I must warn you however, the AI you will face in here will give you guys a serious fight – so prepare to spend some time in your escape pods!

There will be three new major factions, these make up the majority of all ships. However, there will be a nifty variety of different AI flying around, and I’ve also added in some roaming bosses. I’m not going to reveal too much about what is obtainable and not, but there will be a lot of rewards coming from roaming AI, and the roaming bosses will also be represented with their own dungeon versions and their own unique drops. Which brings me to the next part: dungeons.

Dungeons will now be a lot harder. However, most of the loot in these dungeons will be new additions, and will be high-end loot, like it was suggested by some players. We’re moving some pretty powerful items into these dungeons, and we will probably expand this mid-universe if needed. We want these dungeons to feel exclusive and unique, so we might just do some extra tweaking to them… You’ll see next universe I guess!

The most important part for us – management wise – is to make sure the universe generates the right danger factors and the dungeons, so they behave the way we want them to for the entire universe. There are some things we can add mid-universe, and since this project is based upon volunteer developer work, it has been short on time.

I hope you guys are looking forward to it, and you’re all welcome to come and play with my new lovely minions when the new universe has launched! Moahahahaha…

The universe is becoming unstable. It is expected to collapse into a big crunch January 31. All deployed bases and drones will be lost, but out of the crunchy ashes, a new big bang will erupt and a new universe will be born. All ships will somehow survive and be able to quickly colonize this new universe for the glory of … whoever happens to colonize it the greatest.

Expect to see some “Perilouser Perilous Space” amongst other additions.

Server Patch 1.13.2015

* Fixed most advanced class subskills effecting bases and other things they shouldn’t have.
* AI Drones will no longer count towards the temp drone limit
* Galaxies at risk of being cut off will now send a message to team chat.
* Drones that have no owner and are both destroyed and irradiated will be automatically deleted (this is normally impossible, and should delete the remaining bugged Electric Eel drones) Oops, looks like we were overly cautious here (automatic deletion is scary) and not all the bugged drones were deleted, we’ll get the rest in a future patch.
* Fixed a bug where you could not invite someone to the squad in instances with the default limit of 10
* BvB off outposts is now fixed.
* The bug where outpost drones would go unowned shortly after owning a gal is now fixed.

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.

I have been collecting various skins that have been posted on the forums at various places, as well as creating new skins myself. In this latest client and server patch, here is a list of new skins that players will be able to use. This list is in alphabetical order of skin name, with columns specifying the ship/s that the skin applies to (some skins will work on multiple ships), and what the account name of the creator of the skin is.

The skins  Earthforce Police Battlecruiser,  Earthforce Police Battleship, Earthforce Police Cruiser, Earthforce Police Destroyer,  Earthforce Police Dreadnought,  Earthforce Police Zebra, HM1080, Rainbow-imizer and Rainbow-imizer+ have animations on them, and the images below corresponding to those ships have a link to a GIF file where you can see the animation that is featured in the skin. All of the areformentioned skins’ animations play continuously through a loop, the animation for the HM1080 plays when a weapon is first used after undocking, and resets once docked again.

The skins except from Adamantiumized Samgrahak’ayu, Ember Vazi, Frozen Zeus, Hybridized Black Paxian Battle Frigate, and the Neon Machine + may have their engine mounts not appearing correctly where they should be; I do not know if the problem was fixed in the latest client and server patch, but I will tell you when it does get fixed if it has not been already. The Zebucart Mark 2 skin I believe appears approximately 3% smaller than it should be on the ships, due to the volcom model being scaled to the size of the ships the skin applies to; this is something that I will try to fix.

I plan to add more skins in the future, such as a skin for the Battle Sphere and Singularity sphere that changes their model to have a slightly cubic shape compared to what they are now, and a skin for the Wattage and Resistance each that replaces the glowing spheres on the back of the ships with a miniature version of a star that is seen in the galaxies in Star Sonata. Also, any players who have not received a free copy of the skin that they designed that is currently in the game please send me a forum pm.

Skin name	Image of skin	Ship/s that the skin can be used for	Account name of creator of skin
Adamantiumized Samgrahak’ayu		Samgrahak’ayu	xcrunner5
Earthforce Police Battlecruiser		Earthforce Battlecruiser	egrosphere
Earthforce Police Battleship		Earthforce Battleship	egrosphere
Earthforce Police Cruiser		Earthforce Cruiser	egrosphere
Earthforce Police Destroyer		Earthforce Destroyer	egrosphere
Earthforce Police Dreadnought		Earthforce Dreadnought	egrosphere
Earthforce Police Zebra		Zebra	egrosphere
Ember Vazi		Vaziayu	Sk1rm1sh
Frozen Zeus		Zeus Throne	grimer
Hephaestus Machine Frame		Hephaestus Machine	egrosphere
HM1080		Hephaestus Machine	thecrazygamemaster (combat mode animation made by egrosphere)
Hybridized Black Paxian Battle Frigate		Paxian Battle Frigate	joku1999
Neon Machine +		Hephaestus Machine+	Tomzta09
Rainbow-imizer		Equanimizer, Equaminizer	egrosphere
Rainbow-imizer+		Equanimizer+	egrosphere
Zebucart Mark 2		Zebucart, Zebucart+, Advanced Zebucart, Oversized Zebucart, Micro Zebu	egrosphere
Zebu Master Mark 2		Zebu Master, Zebu Master+	egrosphere

Server/client Patch 12.24.2014

+ Added Warp Beacons to Staff Quarters and Temple Grounds
+ Removed Common items from the base Friedman in Free Market
* Fixed the issue with DPE on Molten Chain
* Made 5 new T21-T22 tractors
* Added in another mission chain for tweaks to Junkyard
* Added Blueprints for new T21 and T22 tractors
* Added 18 new Neurotweaks
* Don’t automatically complete a mission if the user is in a pod
* Changed it so that you can always attack enemy bvb kits in gals your team owns, even if your HQ is dead.
* Removed Astral Travel from various space stations
* Field Generator items now have to “warm up” after you equip them for an amount of time equal to the length of the longest aura that they bestow. For most, this is about 1 second. This is to prevent people from rapidly cycling through a bunch of different field generators in order to get the effect of multiple ones at the same time.
* Changed rules for deploying drones so that they no longer get block
* Multiple crash fixes and performances improvements both server and client

And offcourse, this patch also include the new xmas letters and some other xmas related things

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>

Hey guys!

So, a while ago I asked you guys which AI ship you would fly, if you could. Now you can know the reason! I’m actually planning on making one of these player available! 

You can cast your vote over at the forum, at http://forum.starsonata.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=60171

I’m looking forward to the results. Of course, I’m not going to tell you guys how it’s going to happen. But you’ll see soon enough.

So, that’s it for my little update. Stay tuned, there’s some cool things coming your way soon!

Regards,

The classiest Dev alive.

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