Hello players! For my first blog post on the new site, I’m going to share some exciting new changes we have coming up soon.

I’m very excited to announce that we will be splitting Freighters into 2 new ship types! Currently, classes outside of support focus have a very difficult time being involved in base building and other non-combat activities that require large amounts of hull space.  We would like to fix that so that all players can participate in base building, without the need to level up a new Engineer or Shield Monkey alt. Both ship types will be able to equip all of the current “Freighter only” gear.

Industrial Freighters are ships designed to store and transport large amounts of items most often for the purpose of creating user bases. They have extremely high hull space, but relatively low defensive abilities. The Thatch, Dark Freighter, and Singularity Sphere are great examples of this new class.  They will no longer be affected by any class  hull bonus, and will have their hull increased to balance that out. They will also have an inbuilt effect to lower weight to match the support focus bonus that they will lose out on.  They will still get bonuses from classes that affect all ship types though, so we hope that will provide some interesting diversity.

Support Freighters are the ships that are currently flown in combat roles by the support focus. They have tend to have decent defensive abilities as well as much higher hull space than other combat oriented ships.  Ships such as the Pax Astronomica and Apprentice Ward are classic examples of this new ship type. All skills currently effecting freighters will be changed to effect support freighters, so the transition should be seamless for everyone currently flying one.

The following freighters have been changed to Industrial Freighters. If you feel there are any other ships that should be moved to the new hull type, we’ll be watching the discussion topic so please let us know. Additionally, MFM will provide 5% to Industrial Freighters rather than the standard 10%.

In other news, we’re also making some changes to how team slots work. After some recent discussion resulting from us fixing a bug with perma drones and owning galaxies, we’ve decided to make team slots based off of accounts instead of characters!  This should alleviate the issues caused by our previous changes by allowing all those off team Merchant Fleet Master alts to join their main teams. Based off of the number of accounts on teams out there in the universe, we’ve decided to set the base number of account slots on a team to 50 and the Roster team skill will give 5 slots per level. This means that teams grandfathered into the team skill system with 10 in Roster will have 100 account slots, which is just above what the largest teams current have. We’ve checked all the teams out there, and everyone will have plenty of account slots to fit all their current characters.

Both changes are currently on test.starsonata.com:3032, and will be in for the reset.  I hope everyone enjoys these changes, and has a great reset!

This week’s update will mainly focus on class rebalance changes and bugfixes, but will also contain a new ship announcement! Keep reading to find out more!

With the Class Rebalance testing phase in full swing, you guys have been doing a really good job of bringing issues to my attention. I’ve been trying to do just as good a job at getting fixes rolled out for every bug you guys find! There have been some pretty big bugs that have been squashed and I figured I’d go over a few of them here.

• Slaves not getting class skills.
• Slave Ph.D. not properly giving extra slave slots.
• Issues with Psionic Shrouding ability proccing too often.
• Lots of implementation changes for Deathblossom.
• Fleet Admiral not being applied at all.

These are only a few of the issues that have been fixed in the last week and I applaud you guys for finding all these bugs. Because of your testing the eventual roll out to live is going to be considerably smoother!

Along with bug fixing, I also worked on a lot more missile changes. One of the biggest projects this past week was reworking missile production. Right now missiles that no one even uses, some missiles that don’t even work and almost all the specialty missiles are a pain to make. That doesn’t even cover the confusion of factories. This has all been simplified and given a minor rework.

Firstly, we are eliminating a few missiles and factories. Disruption, Gatling Platform, Decoy, Interference and Burst are all being depreciated and having their factory blueprint removed from Hyperion. Most of these missiles have seen very little use and a few of them don’t even work properly (I am looking at you Decoy). We are also eliminating Mark I and Mark II factories for Kinetic and Armor Piercing Missiles. Having three different crates per missile just is item bloat. The crates will still exist, and the factories will still work (if you have them), but you won’t be able to get blueprint for them from Hyperion anymore. All missile factories that used MKI and MKII crates have been changed to use MKIII crates. MKIII factory blueprints are also now sold directly in Hyperion and you don’t have to do the annoying mission to kill UrQa to obtain them anymore.

Secondly, we are making some missiles more easily available. Cheetah Missile factories are having their cost significantly reduced and the missiles crates will no longer require Vis or Copper. Red Photon missile crates will no longer require Plasma Crystals, but Promethium instead. Vortex Missile factories are having their Vortex Pellet requirements drastically reduced, Medium Lancer Factories will only take 2 Reach of Prometheus, down from 5, and finally Large Disinegrator Missile factories will no longer require Amoetroidizodal’s Acid Blood, just Acidic Remains like the previous two tiers. Missile factories have also had their production time cut in half, down to five minutes. All of these changes should increase the availability of missiles to all players.

Finally,  a new ship announcement. Next universe we will be introducing a tech 5 capital ship, the Pax Lyrae, as part of the class rebalance. This is a hole in content that sorely needed filled, as players who selected a Fleet Focus class couldn’t use a ship that would give them full bonuses until tech 10. Players will be able to find this new, 2 augmenter capital ship in Paxius or the Fleet Focus base in Lyceum.

That’s it for this week’s update. As always, feel free to post questions, comments or suggestions in the automatically generated forum post! I’ll be back next week with another update!

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

The universe as we know it is going kaput on February 22nd at 1:00pm EST.

We expect the server to be back online around 1:30pm EST, but that is an estimate. It can occur before or after that time.

If you don’t know what a universe reset is, check out this handy guide for more info.

- Fix for a crash during jump (there is still at least one alt-tab related crash with jumps, maybe more).
- Fix for a crash with weapon switch.
- Fix for a crash in inventory tab.
- Fix for a crash in certain stations if you docked just after jumping.
- Fix for a crash when transfering items
- Fix for a crash when transfering credits.
- Fix for a crash when setting descriptions on userbase.

In a nutshell… this is a crash fix patch !

So i’m being told i need to make a blog post to answer those questions, here we are.

My questions this week are from starwyrm:
1. hours of SS played weekly?
2. what recently released content have you worked with?
and just for you:
3. so you’re Canadian, Eh? east or west? either way, shoutout from New Brunswick!

The number of hours I spend playing SS vary greatly from week to week. Depending mostly on how many major problems I have to fix. But on average i would say I spend about 20hours playing ss (Not counting afk time)
I do spend quite a good share of this time on secret unteamed alts that i just enjoy leveling and meeting random people.

I very rarely work directly on content or content code, my role is more of a code management thing. Bug and crash fixing, performance improvements, security implementation, backup systems, server configuration and such.
I am especially the one stuck with being awake for days when the server experience major problems… extreme lags, hardware failure / replacement, external attacks, patch going wrong, memory corruption errors and the likes. Mostly because well… if i dont do it, who will ?
It takes a special kind of mental illness to have the instinct needed to figure those weird issues that make very little sense up to the point where you do track it down, and apparently, I am affected !

As for the last question, I am east Canadian, more specifically from Quebec. I live in Saguenay but thats about as precise as you’ll get .

This week’s update is going to cover a few different things including; new Tech 22 missiles and factories, some changes to Tech 22 Alien Ships and an update on the new zone launching next universe, the Temple Grounds. Keep reading to find out more.

As promised, with the class rebalance we are going to be making a new set of tech 22 missiles available. We would have done this earlier, but it didn’t make sense to make a set of new missiles only to rework them a few months later. These new missiles will come from factories available from Mitchell Sparks in LACS S2637 once you have done the introduction mission available in the Blue Photon Subspace Facility.

There are three new missiles that will be available.

• The Ksaravis’ayu is a physical damage missile similar to the rotten eggs launched by Raurava in Equipment 22 or Janayitri Sahistha in Piloting 22. While flying they will damage nearby enemies and on impact they will impart a caustic parasite. These launch in salvos of three.
• The Matra Markata Prahetiayu is a standard missile, the twist being that is is a radiation damage missile. These launch in salvos of 5.
• The Visphotakapad Ksaravis’ayu is a small, fast missile that does a low-damage but sizable area-of-effect on detonation. All ships caught in the blast zone are infected with a caustic parasite. These launch in salvos of 10.

In addition to adding the new missiles, you will not be able to use the Basic DNA Extraction Beam on on a variety of missiles launched by the Aveksaka in Subspace. Extracting from a missile is going to be challenging, and as such, you will get a high return from each DNA extracted. Currently, each factory will produce 5 crates of the new missiles per DNA used.

Tech 22 ships will be seeing a few changes as well. Firstly, all tech 22 player ships are getting nameplates. Currently they don’t have them and it can get a little confusing when you can’t tell the aliens and the players apart! Secondly, there are goign to be a few changes coming to both the Vacohar’ayu and the Rajanicar’ayu.

It’s important that these ships are viable alternatives to the high end Olympus ships and at the moment they are a little lacking.  As such, both are getting new in-built superitems. The Vacohar’ayu will be getting “Alien Evasive Maneuvers.” This device will give a short duration 75% evasion buff on a fairly lengthy cooldown. This will add some much needed survival utility on the ship. The Rajanicar’ayu will be getting the “Alien Translocator”. This is a super item that uses a translocator, effectively allowing the ship to have two. Finally, both ships are also having their resistances reevaluated. Energy and physical resistances are lacking and will see some buffs.

Finally, I’ve been doing some serious work on making sure the new tech 22 boss, The High Prophet, is ready for launch with next universe. The boss fight has seen quite a few changes from it’s previous iteration and will be available for testing in the next week. This boss fight is unlike anything currently in game and I’m very excited to see how players handle him.

That’s it for this week’s update. As always feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums. I’ll be back again next week with another update!

For years we’ve gotten so many requests to accept various currencies from across the world and haven’t been able to accommodate all players that wanted to play. We’ve been following the bitcoin trend closely for the past year and we’re proud to announce that we’re accepting bitcoins for payments for subscriptions and services like augmenter resets, and item forms! You can find out more information about bitcoin here.

And while we’re on the subject of news I’m officially beginning the class rebalance testing phase WITH PRIZES! The top five contributors to testing will get CUSTOM SHIP SKINS for the ship of their choice (much like the beta contest). All the juicy details are available over at the newly created testing forum.

And here’s a preview of the trophy ship! It is much win. wow.

Thanks to Jey he has found and isolated the cause of the crash. It was something related to Micron, and until a fix gets in it will be locked. We are expecting the fix to go in today (Monday, January 27th). The Event weekend will be extended through the end of next weekend (Monday, February 2^nd), subs will be extended by three days, and the class rebalance contest that was going to launch Friday will now launch Tuesday. Thank you guys for your patience and understanding!

This week’s update will focus primarily on the newly announced advanced class skills. It will give a few more details about the skills and detail how we are handling training them. Keep reading to find out more!

First, I’d like to give a few more updates about the new advanced subskill system, as it’s been my primary project for the last few weeks. In all, we are adding 42 new skills to the game. There are six general skills, four focus locked skills (one per focus) and 32 class locked skills (four per class). All of these skills will reset with a Skill Reset.

If you remember last week’s post; in it I detailed transference resistance and evasion augmenter stats. From what I have seen in the forums, there has been a fair bit of speculation on how they are going to be used. Since we have finally announced the new advanced subskills, I think it’s safe to give a few more details on these new stats. Both of those will see use in the new subskills. Specially, the following three;

• Lucky Devil (Speed Demon) – +10% evasion, +5% critical hit chance
• Advanced Flight Controller (Fleet Commander) – +75% evasion for fighters, +2 fighter slots.
• Civil Engineer (Engineer) - +20% transference resistance, -15% tractor beam energy cost.

The design for advanced subskills calls for leveling up your focus to unlock the ability to train a new skill. For example, training focus 21 unlocks the ability to train one new skill, training focus 22 unlocks the ability to train another, etc. Using the current skill training and mission systems we have in place there was no easy way to accomplish this. We considered a token system, where your focus training mission would grant you a token to train the skill, but unfortunately there is no way to remove tokens on a skill reset (which would allow players to get extra tokens). So, we hit on the idea of ‘Advanced Skill Points’.

Advanced Skill Points can be received as mission rewards, and are used as mission goals and mission requirements. Each time you complete a focus training mission for a tech 21+ focus skill you will get one of these points to spend on an advanced subskill. You can then go to your focus base to find a set of new missions unlocked that offer advanced subskills. These skill training missions only appear if you have a token to spend.

For players who already have their focus skill trained to level 21, they will be able to find a set of missions to grandfather them into the new system so they don’t have to skill reset to get their first advanced skill point. Players will also be able to train tech 22 focus and class skills. Much like with tech 21, each focus will require the player to have already obtained two different tech 22 skills.

So that’s it for this week’s update. We’ll be starting a series of blog posts detailing the new skills this week, so be prepared for that. And as always, if you have an questions, comments or suggestions on the material covered here, feel free to post in the forums!

For this month’s event we’ve got +30% Mod chance on dropped items, +30% Aug drop chance, and +50% experience gained!

The event will start roughly around 12:30pm EST on Friday, January 24th and end Monday, January 27th at 12:30pm EST!