Overall, we’re pretty happy with the Industrial Commodities system that was added to the game at universe reset. We have some tweaks that we will be making though, both to increase the ease with which newer players can enter the system as well as to bring profits closer to where we wanted them to be.

Industrial Commodities in Earthforce Space

This won’t go live until next universe, but we’ll be seeding Earthforce Space with bases that consume Industrial Commodities. These bases won’t consume as many commodities as the Wild Space ones do, but they’ll consume enough to provide some income to players who aren’t yet strong enough to build in Wild Space.

Consumption Changes

We’re changing how bases consume commodities. Because the consumption rate is constant in the current system, the optimal strategy is to sell just under that rate in order to keep the supply close to zero and the price maxed. This runs into the counterintuitive scenario where selling more commodities will make you less money. If you sell just over the consumption rate instead of just under, you’ll eventually fill up the base and end up making 4 times less (50% price instead of 200%).

Instead, we are going to make it so that bases consume less when they’re almost empty (and the price is high) and consume more when they’re well stocked (and the price is low). We’ve optimized the curve so that you never lose money by selling more.  Even though the price will drop as you supply more commodities, your overall profits will still go up. The current consumption rate will be in effect at 50% stock and it will scale significantly higher on the way to 100% stock, as well as very low when close to 0% stock.

Changes to higher tier commodities

We’ve been getting some feedback that the consumption rates on the higher tiered commodities would require too many T1-T3 commodities to reach. We’ll be re-evaluating these numbers and ratios so that we are prepared to make changes to these commodities for next universe. Unfortunately, this change can’t be made mid-universe, but we will make sure to have it in for next time.

Weight tweaks

While we’re happy with the weight of these commodities when moved using bots, we aren’t too happy with how it seems to be inhibiting manual trading. This if very obvious in-game if you do a market check on Steel Girders: there are billions of easy credits to be made trading between the bases but trading in any reasonable volume results in weight that simply cannot be carried.  We will be going through the weight stats in an attempt to encourage more manual trading.

These changes to consumption are now up on the test server (test.starsonata.com port 3030) for you to test before they are patched in.

Ryan

Has finished up the server side code for the cargo slot system detailed here. There is still work that needs to be done in the client-side UI, but it shouldn’t be long until it is ingame. He has worked on some tweaks to the Industrial Commodities such as how the ai bases consume the commodities as well as some other changes discussed in the feedback thread. Expect a blog post that details the changes before the end of the week. He also did a minor code tweak for Pixel so that he could fix the issue where the Singularity Brake would warp you outside the docking radius of the base that you warped to.

MaxWhynd

MaxWhynd has been making /loads/ of cool sounds!

Pixel

Pixel’s been busy working on permanent drones. Now they work with astral injection like they did before! Additionally the Armada permanent drone series has received some neat visual improvements and some special assortments of weapons and fighters. Here’s the list of the improvements:

• Armada Ambro drone has 2 mini rhino fighters it can launch.
• Armada Ambush has holoprojector of duplicates.
• Armada Bastion now has a superitem weapon.
• Armada Defender now has a point defence superitem and Armada spitter superitem.

Forum topic to give any feedback about the changes: http://forum.starsonata.com/viewtopic.php?f=107&t=61674

Pixel has also been improving our suns!

Lastly, just a friendly word of warning; base holoprojectors may not be obtainable from Junkyard in the future, but some more have been added!

Jey

Patch is being prepared. Should be in a few weeks. There’s no rush for it so a proper announcement with livetesting will be done on blog in a few days.

I am currently working/testing on a system to get rid of the server wide lag when there is a single galaxy under heavy load (large bvb for instance). The galaxy where the action occur will still lag, but the rest of the server will not be impacted nearly as much.

Jeff

Jeff has been working on making Wormholes do fancy graphical things when they lock and unlock and cleaning up some of our old code.

Blue Dwarf

I’ve done my last exam of the year! o/
I’ve removed the restriction that players can only have one Outpost per character, fixed an issue causing low mod rates with ruin items, I’ll also be setting the parameter on live to allow squads larger than 10 players (for now it’s at 15).

Pixel

Pixel been adding new holoprojectors and ships! Here’s a Sneak peek!

He has also been working with Blue Dwarf to finally get those holoprojector super items back into holoprojector form, so when the next update rolls out expect your super item holoprojectors to be converted into holoprojectors!

MaxWhynd

MaxWhynd has joined us to provide us with some very cool sounds. He’s being working on getting us lots of cool new combat engagement sounds, as well as a few other new sound effects for us.

Auxilium

Auxilium has mostly been working on tweaking the missiles. He’s given the Lancer missiles their old launch ranges back, gave Flare missiles 10 second flares up from 5 seconds as well as the new launch mechanic, and he has improved the way missiles launch to begin with, so there shouldn’t be anywhere near as many cases of missiles missing their target.

He’s also given Junkyard Hydroponics and Extensors a sticky tag, which means you can move them out of a base but you cannot unequip them once you equip them. Hopefully this will prevent anyone from accidentally throwing their entire stack of Hydros or Extensors into one base and crying themselves to sleep.

MicroCapacitor

Through Earthforce’s analysis, statistics show that pirate activity has not been going down at all! Earthforce has lost many units fighting this ongoing battle with many different pirate factions. The scientists at Earthforce Headquarters have been working on a new type of Enforcer that will help put this outlaw scum where it belongs! The Marshal Blueprint will be available in the base on Mars in Sol, Earthforce Headquarters!

Blue photon has been building Capital ships for a long time. The Earthforce Capital ship line for Earthforce has proven to be very popular. Little did people know there was another ship that Blue Photon wanted Earthforce to produce which has an intimidating inbuilt mining laser! The Earthforce Overload Prototype Blueprint will be available in Beta Antares!

Absolution has been a place of exile for many years. A lot of ideas that Bellarmine had were cluttered about after he was sent to hell. A prototype Light Fighter ship was found, which is normally not used by the Absolution. This ship will allow them to pursuit to harm those who injure their space religion more effectively! The Cherub Blueprint will be available in Absolution!

Col Legno

Col Legno is back with us for a bit and will be poking a few bugs out of existance!

Morat

Morat fixed bugs, and is working on other bugs & quality of life improvements adding extraction rates to extractor descriptions.

Jeff

Jeff has posted his design idea for a new battleground-arena area in the Development Notes forum, you can read that here

Ryan

Ryan has been working on a new interface for Space Point purchases, so that they will be available from anywhere instead of specific ai bases. He has also changed account slots to be a flat amount of 150 per account instead of the current scaling system. He also had a lot of progress communicating with Valve for Steam, and a lot of progress was made towards that.

Jeff

Jeff’s fixing the issues with our wormhole placement code and even added a little thing so that we could ‘suggest’ where a wormhole should go in a galaxy, for DGs this means that the exit from one stage corresponds to the entrance in the next stage.

Jey

More lag and crash fixes! Additionally, early stages of patch preparation are going, so expect a patch Soon™?

Pixel

Pixel’s been adding more content in the form of user base skins! He will soon be getting back to work on permanent drones and get those astral injected augmenters working! This may take some time to complete though.

Also, this new fancy station visage.

MicroCapacitor

MicroCapacitor has been working on allowing attached stations to become detatched when they’re destroyed for places like Labyrinth.

Morat

Morat fixed minor bugs and is thinking about tweaks to the industrial commodity system.

A lot of us have been busy with the uni reset, either trying to take our piece of universe pie or fixing the custard for the rest of us.

Jeff

Jeff’s been working on changes to the Volcom pirate side of Nexus to make it more open-world / puzzle like. He’s also added a new sound for when wormholes using the automatic locking system unlock.

Jey

Jey’s been working hard on our universe reset and recent micropatches. He’s also had an idea on how to reduce server lag for everyone else during BvB, which he’ll be feasbility testing at some point.

Pixel

Pixel has buffed his new base field generators that many of you seem to be enjoying, and as I understand it he has some more cool stuff in store!

Morat

Morat is working on tweaking the new industrial commodities now that the playerbase is messing around with them, and still working on fighter tweaks.

Blue Dwarf

I’ve been fixing stuff such as the wormholes in dungeon galaxies being excessively far apart and been providing some functionality for various things for other devs.

We also have a new dev, whose decided to keep his player name as his dev name, so please welcome SunDog to the team. And for his first update, he’s made a new galaxy.

SunDog

Red Photon Fuel Depot will be a new star system found in Perilous Space. Red Photon has set up a mining outpost to supply fuel to its warships. The depot can also serve to fuel players in it’s region of Perilous Space, whether bought from the depot or mined directly from the belt.

Following on from this blog post by yclepticon, the new industrial commodities system has been added to the game with the recent universe reset.

28 new commodities have been added to act as sinks for commodities from t0 to t3, and are able to be sold to AI bases across wild space. These commodities are produced using factories purchased in Capella and can be equipped to your bases to convert the basic extracted commodities into more profitable forms.

This system is intended to replace selling items such as Extensor Ys as a sink for your metals and other resources (blueprint constructed items will no longer be possible to sell to AI bases this universe), and compliment future colony changes.

These AI bases will be recognizable by new base graphics.

The commodities exist in seven themed sets of four, with each commodity requiring some of the one before it.

Industrial Commodities in AI bases

Each AI base will trade in one complete theme set of commodities, and most of the Tier 0 commodities, randomly spread throughout wild space. Commodities sold to these AI bases will be consumed at a constant rate, allowing players and trade slaves who can keep up a steady supply to generate significant income. The Industrial Commodities that are not part of an AI base’s assigned set will not be consumed. (e.g. If an AI base trades in the four Girder commods but not all four Cell commods, it will not consume Fusion Cells).

Rates are designed based on the extraction rates of player bases, and may be subject to tweaking over the coming universes as necessary. Currently they are around 100-200k per AI base at the t0 level, down to 1-5k per day at the t3 level. Prices scale from a 200% to a 50% of the midpoint value depending on the amount in each AI base.

Industrial Commodities will be wiped from storages over universe resets.

New Commodities and Construction Requirements
Commodities by Theme

Tier 0 Commodities

Tier 1 Commodities

Tier 2 Commodities

Tier 3 Commodities

Jeff

Jeff made Crate of Stolen Parts items that you get from a Nexus mission disintegrate if you cancel the mission before delivering them.

He’s been working on a design to make the pirate half of Nexus be more open-world style and less hand-holdy so we can compare and see how that does versus the cadet side and working on another design doc for potentially adding a battleground type to Star Sonata.

Jey

Jey’s been preparing for our universe reset patch and, of course, the universe reset itself!

Theodore

Theodore has continued to be very busy making even more one time missions to be repeatable.

Auxilium

Auxilium removed the mechanic where the alien AI in subspace count towards the galaxy ownership. As of next uninverse only the alien Outposts will hold the ownership of a Subspace galaxy.

He also finished the missile rebalance and gave nearly all missiles special launch mechanics to make them feel more like actually launching a missile or torpedo:

Pixel

Pixel’s has been continuing to work on visual effects now covering vapor clouds and the olympus drone has been totally altered visually! No more the olympus drone can hide on top the sun avoiding projectiles!

Also, this badass mining weapon superitem.

Morat

Morat is working on making fighters a more viable choice across all tech levels.

Universe reset is this Saturday

The end is nigh, very nigh, this Saturday at 1PM EDT (UTC-04:00, 6PM BST) is when, good luck!

Ryan

Ryan has been fixing a few bugs some players revealed when using the Ship Upgrades on bots. He’s also been working on the new cargo slot system, it’s definitely taking shape but still requires a lot of work.

Jeff

Jeff’s has been going through his childhood days of playing Star Sonata and has improved quite a few issues within the Nexus, whilst tidying some of the code making it easier for everyone else to work with.

Jey

Jey’s been making progress with his bug fix spree. Here is some of the fixes:

• Player bases not updating their electrical drain if you unequipped a weapon while it’s charging.
• PWI type items when failing was sending unnecessary information.
• Fixed holoprojectors remaining after a transwarp.
• Fixing the issue with ships being at an angle of 0.0 causing them to face the wrong direction.
• Finally fixed the TSL not updating when the first time you dock.

Theodore

Theodore has continued to be very busy juggling missions to become repeatable, expect these to appear within the next universe. Enjoy!

Pixel

Pixel’s been very busy again! He’s added a variety of new tech 21-22 to the existing ruins! Here’s some appetizers: Mzungu Ethereal Transwarp, Bule Outbreak, Vazaha ENIAC Planet Scanner Sigma, Paxian Bloodstone and many more! This should make finding ruins in wildspace have more potential to be valuable instead of the existing few ruin types that are currently about. As a side note some people from the community helped with deciding and creating some of these items!

Other areas Pixel’s been busy with is the graphical department regarding to improving existing textures. Here’s an example of the serengeti blockade wormhole

Steppes and Ruby Steppes will have their own individual galaxies as you progress through them from next universe, resulting in no more issues with bots! Did attempt to do this to Labyrinth but couldn’t get it to work properly (may have a solution in the future).

Just in-case this was missed in the patch notes, a series of base field generation blueprints will become available next universe within the Free Market and Sol towing stations. These are focused around improving the performance of trading bots.

Last addition is new purchasable station holoprojectors available via The Junkyard next universe. These are experimental to see what you think of them!

Blue Dwarf

I’ve not had much going on, coursework and exams! Yay. Our next bonus weekend is this weekend and I’ll be looking to setup the first version automatic event system to run the events from then on. More news will come closer to the time.

Also, Pixel has put together some very cool looking skins and holoprojectors for me to hand to people with outstanding competition prizes

Just a reminder on universe reset

Don’t forget the universe reset is the 7th May.

Ryan

Ryan has fixed a few bugs with his new ship upgrade items where you could only use one on a ship and some items (like drones) didn’t treat upgraded ships correctly. He’s also fixed a bug where docking bonuses would get repeatedly multiplied with themselves, effectively giving the player infinite docking.

Jeff

Jeff’s been going through our server code fixing some of the warnings emitted by the compiler during compliation (funnily enough) and fixed a few bugs.

Jey

Jey’s been doing some back stage stuff making sure software is up to date with security fixes and is going to focus on bug fixing. He has a blog post requesting for players to tell him about their most annoying bugs to get fixed.

Theodore

Theodore has been working on changing a bunch of missions which give one time only, or specialist gear repeatable, at an increased price. Missions such as the Stable Overloader missions, if you know any of any items/missions that this’d apply to, he’s asked that you post about it in forum topic here.

Pixel

Pixel has been working making some awesome new AI bases for us.

Auxilium

Auxilium has been making good progress on his missile changes, he’s also nerfed the Burst weapons, removing their practically infinite tracking.

Blue Dwarf

Auxilium mentioned issues to me about the Volatile Projectile Overcharger device, in turn I fixed two issues, firstly bases didn’t take any range tweaks into account when calculating what they can shoot and secondly that the projectile speed bonus didn’t work (or rather, it did, but it was only +1 speed).

Just a reminder on universe reset

Don’t forget the universe reset is the 7th May.

It’s been too long since I did one so here we are.

Post in this blog discussion whatever game bug has been annoying you and you’d like to see fixed first. I’ll commit to fix all those i can over the course of the week

This can include any actual bug, please provide as much information on the bug as possible. As a rule of thumb, if I can make the bug happen on my side, I can fix it rather easily. Bugs that can’t be reproduced can sometime be fixed but its a lot less likely to be fixed until I stumble on a way to make it happen or can figure out the cause of the bug by guesswork.

Content issue can also be brought up, although keep in mind, while I can fix typos, broken missions and the likes. I will not address stats or balance issues.