Happy new year everyone! Here’s the first blog post of 2017!

Pixel

Pixel has added new permanent drones that are made to mine astroids. You deploy them in the orbit of an astroid belt and the drone will shoot a mining pulse which will sit in place until an astroid collides into it. The astroid will then explode allowing your bots to scoop the debris. This will make mining bots more efficient at mining rock belts.

These drones can be found in the Capella galaxy. The permanent versions can be made from blueprints and the temporary drones can be directly purchased from Assayer’s Refinery.

Click here for more information (spoilers).

Dark Steel

After finishing his work with many augmenter rebalances DarkSteel has finally been able to balance the new Twisted light fighters.
The Bana light fighter also has 5% critical hit chance on its hull.

Micro Capacitor

I’ve changed the targetting code from bases and drones. Bases will now prioritize other bases in healing and damage and drones will now prioritize ships and other drones in healing in damage. You will no longer be able to be RTS bases.

Hober Mallow

Hober has been very busy these past few days! Here’s what hes done over the holidays:

• Mythos Scanner’s resistance to damage changed from 5% to 3%, electrical tempering has been changed from -5% to -3%.
• Addressed some issues with the Strontium Cannon, it had massive amounts of particle effects before and I’ve adjusted it to not be that way now.
• Unlocked the class overloaders, in some cases made them a bit more distinct in their intended function.
• Added a Mastodon Fighter Bay as an item, it’s ship bound and sticky (just needs to be added to the Mastadon hull). It has 10 Slots, and gives fighters 10k bonus shield bank for 5 seconds after being launched from it.
• Increased the rate of fire of the Talon line of weapons so that their up front damage isn’t as high.

Jey

Jey has been busy over the holidays but has gotten some sercurity updates done! Should be back tomorrow to get back to work.

Jeff

Jeff has fixed more unexpected issues with the skill tree content. As it turns out, it is very difficult to cap AI if your prismatic conversion suddenly gets bonuses to its DPS from your Weaponry skill! It is also very difficult to heal your friends if Shield Transferences suddenly do damage. The bonus DPS from the Weaponry skill no longer applies to weapons doing 0 or negative DPS.

Berserkers should now receive the correct amount of bonus hullspace from Arsenal Expertise on the test server. There was also an issue of everyone being able to MF, even new players in their trusty zebucarts. Except fighters, who had troubles firing more than two weapons at once, causing some of them to do less DPS than intended.

Urza

Urza has brought up an issue with the prospecting system: Nodes containing basic resources, like silicon, are a bother and serve no purpose. They will be removed for the next universe.

Hober

Hober has brought up the feedback he has collected for his upcoming Fighter rebalance. Expect an additional and more detailed blog post coming soon!

Jeff

Jeff’s been working on the new skill tree content ensuring nothing goes wrong, for example the hull space issues the beta testers have been reporting about how Capital ships have been recieving too much hull space from the skill changes. This is now fixed!

He has also been working on the e-mailing side of Star Sonata so now hopefully more filtering will occur between the legit e-mails to the spam and old issues with the previous e-mailing system will be a thing of the past.

Jey

Finally Jey has found the one of the large memory leaks and started fix it. While he was fixing he found another issue with visual grouping not removing themselves correctly resulting in a slow increase of undeleted visual groupings which would slow down some computers. A fix has been applied to this issue.

The main memory leak is thruster related as some aren’t removed correctly but hopfully have this fixed by the weekend.

Ryan

Ryan is working on the new skill tree system making sure the interface is working correctly and fixing any issues the beta users are discovering.

In other developments bases and drones overall have recieved a semi-fix awhile ago that addresses the in-built energy charge mechanic and has effected some drones and bases in a big way that wasn’t expected, now the energy charge will be consistant after this next patch.

Pixel

Pixel’s been looking at the warp 4 regarding how resistant they’re to mining and have recieved a decrease in resistance to mining from 98% to 75%. This should help lower levels to complete the Paxius Warp Navigation 4 mission chain. Another change related to this is now the item dropped from these AI will no longer be a blueprint but the decaying commod as now concourses no longer use the commod as a “Neural Keysyncs” to gain access to.

Pixel has also finally has a look at the “Chid Adiz Mardana Var” drones and removed their ability to have infinite energy charge. This has been related to the changes regarding to the in-built energy charge in drones and bases being fixed.

This has been reduced from 5,000/s to 45/s in-built energy charge, means that it’s about 30 seconds until the drone fully banks out using a high end Engineer setup.

Hober

Hober will be working on removing the class locks from class overloaders, turning them into powerful unstable versions. He will also be looking into Unstable Overloaders as a whole, adjusting their failure rate and other attributes so that they are more desireable to use.

Hober is also working on putting control bots into a balance sheet! This will mean some underused and underpowered combat control bots will be seeing buffs. Expect some exciting changes to existing combat control bots like the Olympus control bots, and some targeted nerfs to multifiring combat control bots sustainability.

As a team, we have decided that Fighters being added into the game with Wild Bots as they are right now would end up making Fleet Commanders unacceptably strong. Therefore we have decided to nerf the offensive capabilities of Wild Bots at a base level.

What will happen is that your Wild Bots will do less damage unless you pick the Advanced Class Subskill (which we will be adding as an option, it will most likely be Wild Man) that gives you their damage back. However, making this decision will prevent you from using Fighters. We may include an alternative for fighters, which would lock you out of Wild Bots in exchange for more powerful fighters.

Christmas is here, or near enough, with our Christmas event kicking off this Saturday. Astro-Ginch better watch out, as those pesky terrans will seek him out for his tweak generator and other goodies.

Christmas will run from the 10th December for a bit over three weeks, extended from what we said in the weekly blog to avoid ending on New Year’s Eve. The Christmas event will now end on the 2nd of January in the new year.

The event this year will feature the normal festivities, including the return of Astro-Santa, spreading his jolly cheer and giving all the (nice, and definitely not naughty) citizens of the universe their presents. Rumor has it that the Gingerbreads have formed an empire and are lurking in the depths of space.

Missions and related content can be found from the Lapland system, which’ll appear from a new wormhole in Sol when the event starts.

Astro-Santa Letter Competition

This years competition will take a bit of a change from previous years, it’ll run as normal but the letters submitted will appear in next year’s Christmas event. This year’s event will feature all the letters we’ve ever had, going back around the last 8 years. In addition, all the letters will use the egg carton system, grouped by year, to save you from some tedious clicking.

Standard rules for the competition apply:

• You are allowed to make multiple submissions.
• Deadline for submissions is Friday 23rd December, 00:00 EST (05:00 GMT). Submissions after this date will be ignored.
• Submissions to be posted in the topic for this post.
• If you want your letter to be counted as from your player name instead of your account name, include it.
  • Ideally, put your letter in a [quote][/quote] block and leave other comments outside to make it clear what you want in your letter.
• Submissions may be excluded for reasons we see fit (such as plagiarism).

Once the deadline has elapsed, a maximum of five winners will be chosen, which’ll have their letters created for the following year. They’ll also recieve a unique permanent holoprojector, Frozen Snowflakes, and various Christmas items.

Jeff

Jeff has been working on fighters and the new Augmenter Tweak adjustments.

Pixel

Has added the existing skins to the Hybridized Scutelogica Paxian ship and added a new Wraithful Egg skin to the Kalthi Warrior branch of ships, this skin was created by Curse!

He has also been fiddling with explosion effects! Here’s one of many examples that what could be possible in the near future:

Hober

Hober has been talking about trying to get a recruitment type system thats for squads instead. For example when a player wants to find a squad that needs a Monkey class they can look in a list that would accept them into their squad. We felt this was a great idea but will have to be set aside currently as the push for prioritised things are much more needed.

He has also been balancing the fighters a lot lately and is slowly chugging through them, expect some nice improvements to most fighters!

Here’s some new content Hober has been working on (subject to changes):

DarkSteel

Still hard at work balancing content for the latest Prawn changes and some adjustments to XYZ base gear requiring the new Industrial Commodity system.

MicroCapacitor

Went through most of the base gear and reduced the size of base gear and base augmenters!

Jey

Through the past 2 weeks been debugging the client to look for the client crash / memory leak that some players are experiencing. Jey thinks he’s narrowed it down to a certain section in the client but will still take a bit of time before this memory leak is fixed.

New Developer!

We have a new developer join the ranks! Not much can be said currently as this individual/machine is still fresh from the recruitment line. More information about this next weekly blog.

Its finally here! New content relating to tech 21 & 22! Past few days me (Pixel) and many other developers have been working to make a self contained mini new zone to add to Perilous Perilous Space. This new zone contains a whole slew of new ships, scoops, engines, weapons and much more.

Here’s some of what is coming next universe with this new zone regarding to new tech 21 & 22 build-able ships:

There will also be a whole series of missions allowing players to exchange unwanted gear for twisted tokens. These tokens will allow the ability to interchange them for other pieces of twisted gear of desire.

Some of the new items to give you a taste what will be included:

Do you want your fate decided? Well you can find out next universe!

Universe Reset Patch – May 7, 2016

The Universe is now reset, let the landgrab begin! We had a patch earlier today, but we still needed to get a few more things in.

Additions
*Added EF Warp Beacon to Glass Matrix.
*Added factories for the “Industrial Commodities” in Capella
*AI Bases in wild space are now themed around individual commodities, and will buy the “Industrial Commodities”
*Added subspace mined commodity compressor for extend mining sessions
*Added mobile nuclear waste, metals, silicon mobile furnaces
*Added Programming skill training to level 60
*Added tech 1-19 ship upgrades to Beta Antares

Changes
*Subspace AI no longer count towards ownership of Aveksaka owned galaxies (this excludes the Aveksaka Outposts themselves)
*Missile launch tweaks
*Lowered the cooldown on Heavy Capacitor Device from 7.5 min to 5 min
*Universe generation changes
*Suns are now significantly larger
*Planets now have random sizes (within their gravity class), and occasionally become gas giants, which have 5 station slots and 50% chance of having 6.
*Fixed the “concentric” galaxy type to no longer generate planets with overlapping orbits
*Added a small chance for T1 commodities to spawn in asteroid belts, and made each asteroid belt have varying levels of metals/silicon/nukes/fermium (these were previously fixed amounts for all belts).

Fixes
*Fixed a bug where moons could spawn too close to their planet (sometimes inside)
*Fixed a bug where ai bases were spawning inside of suns
*Fixed a bug with the new tractor rules

Jey

Tracked down and fixed weird crash issue relating to Control bots.
Preperation for Christmas to go live in a few days.

Ryan

I’ve been working on some brand new christmas content! I think everyone will like it a lot, there are 11 new gals and a boss that scales based on how many people are attacking it (and everyone will get personal loot).

Pixel

Worked on some lots more pretty artwork which you’ll be seeing in game soon, as well as some cool sounding items

Astro-Santa Letter Competition

The Astro-Santa letter competition is now drawing to a close with just a few hours left, so if you want to be in with a chance to win, you better send your letter to Astro-Santa!

You can find out more about this here.

Universe Reset

The Scientists have been at the eggnog, getting their party on early and in their drunkness have missed the prediction of the universe’s imposion. Fortunately, being the time of Christmas, Astro-Santa’s Astro-Elves have been hard at work making all the presents as well as conducting research for new ideas! Amongst their research findings the Astro-Elves have learnt that the universe is becoming unstable and have predicted that it’ll eventually suffer a total collapse at 540 on 9th of Aer, 153rd Grand Age of the Elves. However, due to also being drunk the Elves have made a mistake and actually the date of the collapse will be around 14 Earth days later, making the demise of our universe occur on January 16th, 2016 at 1PM EST.

We’re currently experiencing some unexpected downtime following the micro patch to address the source of the recent crashes.

It seems that the server is crashing on load and we’re currently looking into it.

Thank you for your patience.

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.