Easter is here! The bunnies have setup shop in Eastern Warren accessible from Sol, Flmer Eudd has returned to Handel’s Cove and is on the hunt for rabbits, and egg boxes litter the universe. The event will run until 15th April (Universe Reset).
Happy hunting!
In a distant corner of the universe, the space rats had developed a particularly pungent and powerful cheese. It was said that one bite of this cheese could make even the toughest of pilots swoon with pleasure.
But what the space rats didn’t realize was that their cheese was causing a cosmic disturbance. You see, the cheese was so potent that it had created a tear in the fabric of space-time. And as more and more space rats indulged in their beloved cheese, the tear grew bigger and bigger.
Before anyone knew it, the tear had become a black hole, sucking everything in its path into its vortex. And as the black hole grew, it began to pull the entire universe into its grasp.
Realizing the gravity of the situation, the space rats banded together to try and stop the black hole. They tried everything from sending in their best pilots to blow it up to offering sacrifices of their precious cheese, but nothing seemed to work.
In a last ditch effort, the space rats decided to do the unthinkable. They would use their cheese to create a new universe. They harnessed the power of the cheese and channeled it into a cosmic explosion. Now the universe is collapsing on itself and will reset in one month!
Dev Notes
PDT: 10:00
MDT: 11:00
CDT: 12:00
EDT: 13:00
UTC: 17:00
GMT: 18:00
It’s official, SPEX (the Space Point EXchange item) will be available to purchase after the universe reset! This has been in planning and talked about for years, but we’ll be breaking down exactly what they are, how they work, and our rollout plans in this blog.
For those who haven’t followed, SPEX are an in-game tradable item that are purchased for $9.95 and redeemable for 20 Space Points. Unlike Space Points, though, SPEX exists as an item within the game world and can be traded to other players in exchange for credits.
SPEX are an in-game tradable item that represent (and can be redeemed for) 20 Space Points. Space Points cannot be redeemed for SPEX.
The basic life-cycle of a SPEX item works as follows:
A player purchases a SPEX item for $9.95 and receives it as an item on their ship.
The purchasing player either transfers it to their own shop station to sell, or sells it to another player’s station somewhere in the universe.
The SPEX item circulates through the in-game economy until it is eventually in the hands of someone who wishes to redeem it for 20 Space Points.
That player redeems the SPEX item for 20 Space Points on their account, consuming the SPEX item. The newly awarded Space Points can be used in any of the usual ways (subscription time, name changes, aug resets, etc).
Due to the incredibly valuable nature of this item, it will have some unique special protections to ensure that it remains with the owner until the owner intentionally trades it away.
SPEX can only be traded via user stations. All other methods of transferring them to another player are disabled.
Only a station owner can interact with SPEX on their station. Their teammates cannot transfer off a SPEX or modify the price of SPEX items on that base. If the ownership of a base is lost, all SPEX items onboard will be automatically evacuated to the owner’s TSL.
Bots cannot carry SPEX items.
We’re rolling out SPEX purchases in phases. While SPEX can be freely traded once purchased, we are going to start out with a purchase limit of 10 SPEX every 30 minutes to help us catch any early issues that may arise.
If you haven’t checked out Part One: Click Here.
Here we go again! In our previous post, we shared with you some upcoming changes to mechanics and items that mainly affect ship-based combat. In this post, we will be focusing on enhancing the experience of claiming territory in Wild Space. We touched a variety of systems and mechanics in order to get things to a point where we felt confident it would be a net improvement for the game, and just like with the previous changes these are intended to promote a more dynamic and engaging game. We want players to have the opportunity to think critically and make strategic choices based on a consistent and intuitive game state.
We’re confident that these changes will bring about a more intriguing experience in Wild Space, so without further ado here’s what we’ve got for you in the next patch!
For quite a long time, Wild Space has been a place that wasn’t that much different from Earthforce Space. This generally meant that as soon as a player acquired Warp Navigation 2 they could go into Wild Space and explore, setting up a base and testing their ability to hold onto a galaxy. But it didn’t look or feel different at the galaxy level, and that’s because at its core Wild Space was not much different!
Over the years, we’ve made adjustments to Wild Space which made it stand further and further apart. As we looked to make changes to the layer, we realized we could do a better job at truly setting Wild Space up to be a special place. Here’s how we did it.
We’ve changed the minimum danger factor of all galaxies in Wild Space, raising it to 120. This makes all WS galaxies warp 3, setting a clear expectation on the part of players entering the area for the first time that it is supposed to be dangerous.
We are reintroducing Juxtapositions and Concourses into Wild Space (no Subspace shortcuts), with a new way to handle their placement more suitable for how we design and generate Wild Space.
We have completely overhauled our solar system generation tools. This allows us to easily define different types of solar systems that can be generated in Wild Space galaxies. While this will only be true for Wildspace in the upcoming patch, we have the ability to expand to the other layers in the future. We have set up three different solar system types; realistic (normal systems with planets), seismic (stars which produce asteroids, like fermium stars), and proto (a system with a star and gas clouds).
Using these solar systems we can ensure that each galaxy has multiple stars to allow for Command & Control stations to be safely deployed a good distance from each other, while still keeping the number of planets in the galaxy under our control.
This might not sound very exciting by itself, but we also now have new controls on how resources are distributed throughout the galaxy, primarily through the addition of a “colocation” modifier, which causes resources to have a very high chance of being placed on a solar body that already has resources. This will make it so that resource amounts should be much more concentrated than they were in past universes, particularly in the most highly desirable galaxies.
Now that we’ve outlined the more technical aspects of our changes, let’s get to the first thing you’re going to notice: The Wild Space layer map.
Every wild space galaxy will now be assigned a quality (common, uncommon, rare, or exotic, for now), and it will immediately be visible on the map, coloring the dot with the appropriate color, and in the tooltip for that galaxy. We want to make it clear to players (as soon as they warp into the galaxy) that there is something desirable about it, and making them immediately visible on the screen is the best way to do so.
This will not be the layout of Wild Space for next universe.
Quality is not purely a cosmetic feature, but rather the major driving factor for the value of the galaxy. There will still be quite a bit of variation, but in general quality will be able to tell you how good a galaxy is overall. Here’s why:
Quality is going to determine three things:
The number of planets and moons in the galaxy, with planet counts going up as quality goes up. In order to keep lower quality galaxies from having their resources too easily accessed, planets in these galaxies will always have more moons.
The quantity and distribution of Tier 0 resources (Nuclear Waste, Metals, Silicon, etc.) in higher quality galaxies will be very tightly packed. You will notice that the highest quality galaxies will have many planets with very little to no resources on them at all, and the planets with resources will have very high levels of resource density. In lower quality galaxies, resources will be spread amongst their planets and moons. This will make them less desirable to players looking to set up a massive colonial empire, who will want to look at higher quality galaxies in order to have the best colony profits possible.
Termite Strength. We’ll elaborate on this in the following section, but termites in higher quality galaxies will be much more difficult. Termites in lower quality galaxies will be significantly easier to handle.
We have assessed the resource requirements to hold a galaxy as well as the production value of existing high value galaxies to determine resource abundance by quality level. A Common galaxy will provide enough resources to hold ownership of that galaxy and have a small production value that is ideal for a small or new team starting out. Exotic galaxies provide serious industrial and production capability and would be the most suitable for production bases.
We are not completely getting rid of the effect Danger Factor has on galaxy resources. It will still affect the distribution of tier 1-3 resources (Petroleum, Diamonds, Adamantium, etc.), DGs, wild AI, and prospecting nodes. None of these things is affected by quality. Danger Factor also affects a few small details like the number of asteroids or resources in an asteroid belt.
We didn’t forget about AI Empires!
We’ve made sure that players cannot build in AI Empire galaxies while the galaxy is owned. In fact, AI Empires cannot be attacked at all while their galaxy is owned, so if you want to try to wrest control of their territory you will have to own the adjacent galaxy (causing the AI Empire’s ownership to lapse). All AI Empire HQs will be marked as Exotic, and XYZ will be Rare.
We want termites to be a constant pressure threat that galaxy owners must take into consideration when staking and fortifying a claim. In the past, it was possible to build in Wild Space for literally years without having a serious assault on your galaxy. We want players to understand from the very first time they own a galaxy onwards that Wild Space is Wild, and you will need to make sure your assets can protect themselves from the terrible termites.
At the same time, we know that the current distribution of termite power levels doesn’t work for everyone. We’ve been listening to your feedback for months now, and here’s what we’ve decided to do:
We’ve made termite strength and galaxy quality linked. Each quality level has a different termite strength, and this strength corresponds to the minimum value of the galaxy. Galaxies with a higher minimum value will have stronger termites and you will visually be able to tell what kind of termites are going to attack your bases by looking at this quality.
If you own a common galaxy, you will only get the weakest (common) termites. If you own an Uncommon one, you get the slightly stronger uncommon termites. Uncommon and Rare termites are the same as the Warp 2 and Warp 3 termites we have on the live server. You can expect Exotic termites to be 30% stronger then Rare ones, and Common termites are going to be dramatically weaker than the Warp 2 termites. This should give players looking to push into taking more lucrative territory a very clear idea of what they need to plan for before they set down a single base.
Finally, Termites will no longer despawn if all of the assets in a galaxy are killed. The mound will stay around for its entire lifespan of 7 days and 6 hours. They know what you’re trying to do, and they’re not happy about it. If you fail to defeat them, you’ll have to wait until they decide it’s over…
Before we move on, let’s talk about Termite Bait.
One of the most frustrating things about the current situation with Termites was that players didn’t have a way to figure out if their base configuration and galaxy defenses were powerful enough to repel termite invasions until the invasion was already upon them. Since the termite invasion was random, it could happen while you were offline and you would have no way of knowing why a base died. This made it very difficult for players to make the necessary upgrades to their bases, leading some to feel compelled to either greatly over invest in defense or else monitor their galaxies day and night.
To address this, we’ve added Termite Bait. When you use a Termite Bait, you will spawn a wave of nasty termites looking to tear your bases to shreds. You can use this opportunity to get a feel for how your galaxy will fare against a full blown assault.
WARNING: These are full blown, REAL termites that will kill your bases dead. Termite Bait must be used responsibly!
You can build Termite Bait from a cheap pre-equipped blueprint on the Command & Control Station in your owned galaxy. There is a different type of bait for each of the four quality levels of termite, and you can use any type of bait in any galaxy. When you equip the bait to your station, it will spawn a single wave of termites with quality level matching the type of bait you used. The termites will despawn after 30 minutes and will not respawn after being killed, and there is also a 30 minute cooldown between termite bait uses.
Since you can experiment with any quality of bait irrespective of the galaxy’s quality, you can work your way up from the weaker termites and tweak your defenses as you go.
Our goal with these changes is to give players the opportunity to prepare for the threat of termite infestations on their own time, no matter what quality galaxy they own.
We want player bases to be in a league of their own, powerful tools that players erect to leave their mark on the universe for fame, glory, and wealth. Bases are meant to be very important tools that can greatly further your aims when placed thoughtfully and strategically. It’s kind of hard to see them this way right now, so we’re going to make the following adjustments to ensure that bases are something everyone knows are a big deal.
First, we’re going to make sure that when bases die they don’t drop as much stuff. We know how frustrating it is to put really valuable equipment on your bases, only for them to drop after your base got a little unlucky in a fight with a termite. We know it happens sometimes, so we’ve decided to make that outcome less of a pain.
Next, bases will have their transference resistances increased to 75%. We don’t want players leveraging external shield regeneration in order to feed healing into bases because it creates a huge amount of effective shields due to how powerful base mitigation is. At the same time, we don’t want bases that have just been deployed to be brought down without some effort. To make sure that your enemies don’t pop your bases before they’ve got a fighting chance, we are adding a large amount of transference vulnerability during the construction phase. Your base will take 50% more healing while being constructed, making it easier to keep alive when first deployed.
Finally, we think that permanent assets can too easily be destroyed from outside of their engagement range. We are adding a new form of ranged-base damage mitigation to all player bases and permanent drones, making it significantly harder to kill them from distance. Specifically, any damage dealt to the base from beyond 1,000 distance is subject to extra mitigation, capping out at a whopping 90% bonus resistance for attacks originating from beyond 7,000 distance. Our idea here is that while bases can still die to a concerted attack from range, they are much more resilient to that type of threat and will likely shrug off a lot more punishment than before. We recognize that this is a relatively conservative improvement to the overall combat performance of player bases and are prepared to iterate further if indicated by the evolving metagame.
All of our work in this update is intended to set us on a path for more additions, content, and opportunities for interesting experiences and meaningful conflict in Wild Space. We will closely monitor the effects of our changes over the next universe cycle and will always be open to feedback based on experiences that players have in the system. We appreciate the continued support of our players and look forward to seeing you in Wild Space next universe! Thank you for playing!
We are thrilled to announce the upcoming Refined & Reforged patch. This update focuses on enhancing active play and promoting a more dynamic and engaging game, where players must think critically and make strategic choices to succeed. In addition to several new mechanics that are designed to promote active play, we’ve also made a couple changes that should greatly reduce the lag players have experienced in large-scale PvP battles. Our development team has been working hard to bring you new and exciting gameplay opportunities, and we’re confident that these changes will add a new level of depth and excitement to your time spent in the game.
The Deathblossom has been one of the most powerful effects that any class has access to in Star Sonata. It has allowed one class to deal high amounts of damage to many targets while only paying a modest electricity cost. The role of Gunner is inextricably linked to the feeling of the Deathblossom, so we knew that we needed to keep that feeling alive no matter what changes we made to the mechanic. The most major change we’ve made is that the Gunner will have to pay some amount of energy for each shot it fires. The exact amount of energy depends on the number of valid Deathblossom targets with efficiency rising greatly when several targets are being fired on. Based on our testing, we feel that this positively rewards using the Deathblossom tactically, as opposed to keeping it enabled at all times. Rest assured, Gunner still very much owns the role of indiscriminate destroyer, laying waste to a battlefield around them.
We’ve added a scaling electricity cost to the extra shots on the Deathblossom. This change makes Deathblossom mode much less energy efficient, particularly when firing against only 2 or 3 targets. Additionally, Deathblossom mode now disables your normal “selective firing” mode, meaning you cannot target a planet or moon to get an additional stream of shots on the target. This will encourage players to toggle the Deathblossom on and off based on what they are fighting. We have fixed a longstanding bug preventing Damage mods on Deathblossoms from working and have added these mods to various Deathblossom items for an added level of complexity. On-hit weapon effects (splash, area of effect, chain, etc.) no longer occur while the Deathblossom is equipped, greatly reducing visual lag and freeing us up to buff weapons with those effects for use by other classes as well. Finally, targets are no longer shot simultaneously, instead they are fired at a fixed rate, which will lead to a significant gain in server and player client performance, especially in larger engagements.
The Destruction effect has been decreased from 45% to 15%. This change was made as Gunners were adding substantial amounts of multiplicative DPS to a squad in spite of not being construed as a class with that role. However, the Automated Reloader advanced subskill now grants a 10% destruction bonus, bringing Destruction’s effect up to 25%. The Advanced Targeting Computers advanced subskill now grants +50% tracking and -15% range, instead of adding additional targets to the Deathblossom.
We’ve made some changes to the missiles and missile launchers as well. Missile launchers are no longer usable on bots and they no longer have a missile queue. The time between missile launches has increased but they now do much greater damage with longer-lasting effects. Missiles no longer fire in a volley in most cases and instead fire in a salvo of a single missile. Players are able to target and engage a singular missile much better than a volley of missiles. The Disintegrator missile effect has been changed to negative damage debuff.
Funky Monkey now has new functionality that allows you to put on a stacking healing parasite on whatever you are healing. The best part? This healing parasite doesn’t cost shields from your shield bank, making Shield Monkey considerably more efficient in healing. It does come at the cost of an overall HPS penalty so this should be an interesting choice for players to make.
Next, Monkey Mantle has undergone a few changes. It is no longer usable on capital ships and now requires an increased amount of constant electricity to be equipped. Additionally, we’ve decreased the size of the Monkey Mantles to encourage more tactical and situational use.
We’ve also made changes to Last Defense and Last Stand neurotweaks. Their bonuses have been adjusted to help you heal others and steal more shields, making them more effective in keeping you and your allies alive in the heat of battle.
We’ve made some changes to certain weapons. Super long-range weapons have been recategorized into the same category as long-range weapons. This reduces outliers of extreme range weapons that were obtaining such extreme ranges that it wasn’t very fun to fight against them (or even to fight with them as you were so far from visual range of your own target).
All projectile weapons other than Sebastopols now have at least a little bit of tracking. Transferences with low tracking had their tracking and HPE increased.
The ranges of on-hit weapon effects now scale with tech of the weapon. This causes the overall range of the effect on these weapons to be much farther at higher techs, a change that we believe will make these weapons viable for use by a variety of classes (and couldn’t have been done as long as AoE weapon effects were permitted in Deathblossom mode). However, the initial hit damage for on-hit effect weapons has been lowered, and the damage that the effects do has been raised. This means that the single target damage that these weapons do is overall lower but the damage done to additional targets is quite a bit higher. Overall, we view these changes to be a net buff to weapons with on-hit effects and anticipate that a variety of classes will find them situationally useful.
Energies are being buffed, mostly. Energies with high regeneration for their tech level will see a significant increase in bank size, while energies that had middling regeneration have had an even bigger increase in bank size. These changes should make Energy Bank bonuses much more useful across the board, and they should increase the amount of time players are able to fire their weapons at full power. Not all energies will retain the exact stats they had previously and could see weight, size, regen and potentially other changes but we attempted to prioritize regeneration numbers above all.
We have also added a fuel indicator to the user interface. When your energy is running low on fuel, the indicator will blink red to alert you to this fact and you can hover over the energy bar to know an estimation of how much fuel is left.
As we were analyzing the overall experience of large-scale PvP, we realized that the enormous range of tractor beams was distorting gameplay and encouraging people to engage their enemies from many screens away. We felt that tractor beams would be more engaging to use if they were restricted to somewhat shorter ranges than currently seen in game. The biggest change to know here is that the Tractor Power stat will no longer grant range along with strength. Also, we’ve shifted most of the power of the tractor subskills onto the baseline stats of tractor beams themselves. Lastly, since it will be a lot easier to avoid tractor beams than before, we’ve increased the cooldown of graviton disruptors so that you can’t use them to achieve near-immunity to tractor beams. As a whole, we hope that these changes lead to a more engaging experience when tractoring or being tractored.
Previously tractors in player conflict were used as long range harassment and to pull bots out of a squad’s position. While you will not be able to use the tractor from nearly as long ranges, those being tractored will not be able to maintain close to 100% uptime of their gravitation disruptors anymore. This creates a new paradigm where you have to actively work around tractors and use the gravitation disruptor when the time is right instead of repeatedly using it on cooldown to negate tractors entirely. As for the tractor beam range reduction, ships without a lot of tractoring bonuses can expect their tractor beams to continue functioning with similar range and strength.
Along with these changes, tractors stats will now scale up more aggressively with tech level. Be sure to check out the stats on any higher tech tractors in your arsenal to see whether they’ve become more competitive..
We’ve also made some changes to Drone behavior. Automatic cross healing of stationary healing drones has been disabled and temporary drones will no longer automatically heal other temporary drones with transferences. However, they will still automatically heal drones without transferences. You can still make healing drones heal other drones by using RTS. Additionally, we’ve fixed the Drone RTS to make sure that drones properly follow your RTS commands. With RTS fixed, Engineers have a new tool in their arsenal for actively contributing to their squad while inactive Engineers will no longer benefit from automatic cross-healing of drones.
Stasis has been adjusted so that you no longer benefit from your shield regeneration while in stasis. You will only heal from Death Stasis healing, making all classes be in stasis for the same amount of time regardless of their shield regeneration and shield bank.
Finally, the Speed Demon Overdrive Device has had its Energy regeneration amount reduced but now grants an extra Electric Tempering bonus. Berserker Class 3’s Damage bonus now requires piloting a heavy fighter to receive its benefits.
From the beginning, our work on this patch was focused on lifting up interesting tactical choices and rewarding active gameplay, particularly as informed by the various snags we’ve observed in squad-based PvP since the Anatolian Expanse update. Along the way, we have attempted to follow any nerfs with new opportunities, such as the removal of on-hit weapon effects in Deathblossom mode paired with the overall buff to weapons with such effects. We’re particularly glad to report that we’ve addressed several sources of lag that have unfortunately weighed down the game in recent months, particularly in large PvP engagements. Overall, it’s our hope that this update helps to inject some fresh and exciting gameplay into Star Sonata. We appreciate the continued support of our players and look forward to hearing your feedback as you explore the new and improved features. Thank you for playing!
Christmas is here, or near enough, with our Christmas event kicking off today. Astro-Ginch better watch out, as those pesky terrans will seek him out for his goodies.
Christmas will run from the December 16th for a bit over three weeks and end on January 5th 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.
Missions and related content can be found from the Lapland system, which will appear from a new wormhole in Sol.
[Bug Fixes]
Note: Some of these changes are already live.
