Summer’s gone and Winter is coming, the leaves are turning brown, there are conkers to be found, the nights are drawing in and the kids have recently gone back to school. All of this can only mean one thing…

Halloween is soon! As such, it’s about time we got a competition going. This year’s competition is gunna be a bit different to any we’ve had before so listen (or read) carefully for the instructions; because you’ll be carving pumpkins!

You will (probably) need the following:

• A pumpkin (which unfortunately will have to be bought, unless you grow pumpkins).
• A sharp cutting implement, like a knife (youngsters should have adult supervision for this — We’re not responsible if you slice yourself open).
• A light producing device, such as a candle, to sit inside your pumpkin.
• A camera to take a picture of your creation.
• And anything else you feel like adding.

Prizes:
Five winners will be picked from the entrants the weekend of the 31st and will be given the following:

• A permament and neurobound holoprojector; unique to this competition.
• 5 of each Undead Miner.
• 5 of each Bite tweak.
• 5 Pumpkin Shards.
• A collection of temporary holoprojectors and sound projectors.

Dates:

• Competition start: 30th September (12 noon server time).
• Entry deadline: 31st October (12 noon server time).
• Winner’s announcement: 31st October (or later that weekend).

Rules & Judging:

• Entries should be posted to the forum thread (link is at the bottom) before the end date.
• The submissions will be judged on execution, creative design and of course, bonus points for Star Sonata themes.
• Your pumpkin must be original work belonging to you; if found otherwise you may be disqualified.
• Your photographs of your submission must have a sign with the account name (or main character) you are using to post as part of the photograph.

When you submit your entry, make sure you have good picture(s) of it. You can take multiple pictures of your submission; if your pumpkin is to be lit inside, pictures of it lit in the dark and a picture of it unlit in the light would probably be a good idea.

With Bageese no longer with the development team, Suit felt like something was missing. He went on a search on how he could stop this, but had no idea. He finally decided he could no longer bear this, and contacted the Lyceum scientists to try and go back in time.

Long story short, something went wrong with the black hole generator and the universe as we know is going to end.  They are unsure how long they can hold the black hole generator from spinning out of control, but they predict that it will swallow the entire universe saturday the 11th of October at 1PM Eastern Time. Hopefully the almighty adum will be generous and will be able to re-create everything, so the server should be back up shortly.

If this is your first universe reset, click here for a guide!

Hi everyone, here’s an update on the base rebalance.  As hoped, it is on track to go in for next universe (which should be announced soon).  The purpose of this post is to elaborate on some of the details of the rebalance, especially those that I left vague in my first post.

• Station Mastery skill will only provide 2% combat bonuses per level, but this change will be completely balanced out by increasing the corresponding base gear stats.
• Base gear will also be improved by a factor of 2 in addition to the Station Mastery change.  This will change the balance in PvB but BvB will be unaffected by it.  The changes will only affect things like DPS and Shield Recharge, not Range.
• Class skills will no longer affect bases.  There will be new base-only super items that the bases can use during combat to give themselves extra range or other bonuses.  The super items will have a 10 minute charging time to prevent you from rapidly swapping between bonuses.

I mentioned disposable base gear in my previous post.  Here’s how it’s going to work.  When you deploy a base kit, it will come with three new blueprints pre-installed.  If it’s a tech 20 kit, the blueprints will be Annihilator Upgrade X, Y, and Z.  Lower tech kits will come with the corresponding lower tech blueprints.  Each upgrade project builds a whole set of gear that can’t be removed, tossed, or sold from the base.  That includes a shield, energy, shield charger, laser, and omni-dampener (all seven damage types).  These projects cost little or no credits, but require a substantial supply of raw materials (Metals, Silicon, Nuclear Waste) over an extended period of time.  For example, the Upgrade Z version will take 6 weeks to complete.

The objective here is to give players the chance to build a strong galaxy defense even if they don’t have any base gear stored up.  Of course, having some Adamantiumized or Armada gear in storage will still be quite handy to make sure your bases are strong from Day 1.  Not only that, that kind of gear will be necessary for competitive BvB since the XYZ Upgrades take far too long for that.

Since we are repurposing XYZ gear as disposable, we need to do something about currently-existing XYZ gear.  When universe reset is taking place, we will go through and replace existing XYZ gear by the plain versions.  But before you cry “nerf!” let me share with you some new stats.

• Achilles Protector Z (old): 550,000 bank, 530/sec regen
• Achilles Protector (new): 1,822,875 bank, 2,462/sec regen

As you can see, the new plain versions of base gear will be miles better than the current Z versions.  The only XYZ gear that won’t be replaced by the plain versions are Andaman and Achilles Laser Z.  We are aware that these are popular endgame base weapons and so those two items will be left as they are (except of course they will receive the same stat buffs as the rest of the gear, as well).

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to hearing your impressions on this.

As some of you probably noticed. There was an issue with the webserver (and the game server due to dependency) being down.

There has been an hardware failure and it took a bit over 12hours before we could get it replaced. It is now fully functional again.

As compensation for the 14hours downtime that entailed from it, there will be a 100% experience bonus, 100% teamxp bonus and 60% faster worker until 11h59pm 2014-09-15 server time (EDT).

Due to the recent down time on Sunday and today, we’ve giving a bit extra this month.

Until Monday noon (server time, that’s EDT) you’ll get be getting +100% XP, +100% Team XP, double mod chances, Bindomite Crystal AI and 20% faster workers!

Time to have some fun before going back to school! Boo!

Heyoo! It’s time for our Monthly Event!

This time we’re hitting you up for 25% Bindomite drop chance from Dungeon Bosses and 50% extra Experience!

In addition to this, Midday Sunday (server time) will see some strangely appearing outposts across the universe.

The event will last until the 1st. Happy hunting!

- 07/08/2014 276.352 -
* The optimizations mentioned in my recent blog post are now in the beta client.
* Added glowmap for Shrimp
* Some more skins related data for livetest and soon live.
* new ship stat window (broken on live since it lack the proper message, but should work on livetest)
* Fixed the band at the top of the screen not being clickable
* Fixed an issue with the rightclick -> activate control bot not working sometimes when the ship had never been opened.
* the client now know if a ship has skins or not (non functional on live for obvious reasons)
* hopefully fixed the issue causing docked ships to appear when docking.
* fixed a problem with drones initliasation, causing them to sometime go out of sync.

- New micropatch 276.237 (This client contain the client side of the quickfixing session and is needed to connect to livetest).
* lower the autopilot message a bit and fix the message when traveling to unknown galaxy.
* Add an x button to the radar window
* Add a /command (/HideHuiMethod) to change the function of h from deadman switch to a toggle for the session.

* Added tooltip lightly explaining the benefit of DDS textures
* support for the first iteration (still wip) for the ship skins system. (SKIN_FEATURE_1_0)
* Added support for the server/client feature system, allowing for better retrocompatibility between different versions
* Multiple crash fixes
* Fixed the commodity tab in stations to be consistant
* Fixed an overflow causing the “owned” column in tradebay to go into the negative with more than 32k of an item.
* Fixed a flag related handle leak
* Fixed the issue that caused flags to randomly not show next to the ship nametag.

livetest will be updated soon with the first iteration of the skin system, this client will be required to connect to it (trying to connect with live client will give you an unsuported feature error and wont connect).

If you do not have the beta client and wish to install it. It can be downloaded from http://www.starsonata.com/dl/StarSonata_2_beta.exe. The installation is separated from the live client, and it is recommended you keep the live client at hand reach, in case beta client update break it for you.

So it’s about 11:26am right now and the server’s been down for roughly 30 minutes. Jey is working as fast as he can to fix some last minute issues that creeped up in our final testing before reset. He is approximating that the server will be back up in 30 minutes from now (So roughly 12:00pm MST, 2:00pm EST).

One issue that will not be fixed prior to the universe start is the AI Outposts will not spawn. This means that neither the Faranji, Mzungu, Bule or Vazaha Bases will spawn, and neither will the Green Meanie or Iceprick bases.

We are however planning to manually load them in later and do an event on this. This would require much less work and we will announce this event in good time before it goes live!

Thanks for your patience and you’ll be exploring the universe soon!

EDIT: Live will be open at 2:20pm EST (so in roughly 15 minutes)!

Hey guys, as of now the server has been down for roughly 45 minutes. The server was locking up on restart due to some issue with a specific persona. We’re fixing the issue as we speak and should have more information for you shortly. We hope the server will be back up within the hour, but as with all server crashes that last longer than 10 minutes, giving an eta is a very rough estimate. Thanks for your patience!

EDIT: And we’re back! Thanks for holding on while we zapped the server hamster back to life!

So first off I want to give an update as to why the scoreboard on the website isn’t working. We are waiting on Jey to fix it, but unfortunately he’s been completely cut off from internet access due to extreme weather conditions for three weeks. Luckily he just got home today (like as I was writing this post). Yay! We’ll have an update later on this week with the status of that fix.

And yes, the monthly event didn’t get turned on and that was totally my fault. I’ve been moving since Thursday and doing way too many things outside of the house (appointments, meetings, blargh). I didn’t get computer and internet access until yesterday. But I’m back now as is Jey so things should start to return to normal. The monthly event will actually occur this Friday instead.

Thanks for your patience!