Welcome to another Star Sonata Dev Diary!

Today we’re going to talk about the Merchant Navy! Most players are going to associate this group to either the Merchant Navy Contriver or Merchant Navy Seal Commander. We hope to expand this association to be a presence within Terran space and a notable player contact for various missions and storylines.

The Merchant Navy, the future administrators of Strontium-90, pay most of their bills by hunting pirates and defending trade routes in the Terran heart worlds. Visually identified by their Paxian-like but not quite boomerang ships, the Merchant Navy maintains peace while Earthforce itself deals with more universal threats. This means that the Merchant Navy will take over from Earthforce as the primary player contact for missions in the lower levels while Earthforce interactions pick up later in progression. Orca and Porpoise will now be retextured to be Merchant Navy variants and will visually move away from the Paxian look but we will keep original look as a free skin for those that prefer that style.

Outside of Strontium-90, this will be slow transition as we move through the early game and readjust our protagonist allies in various missions, zones and content. Earthforce will still have player interactions but Merchant Navy will provide another key mission vendor.

Welcome to another Star Sonata Dev Diary!

Today we’re going to talk about an upcoming backend expansion, Base Logs and Market Check! One of the most sought after and longest asked for things in the history of Star Sonata!

Base Logs

Currently on the live server, base logs are divided into 4 categories that store 15 logs each – Trade, Construction, Management, and Important (trades over 100 million credits). None of which saves when the server crashes or is restarted currently. Most important gets washed away by docking, bot purchases or various odd-ball tasks.

We’ve taken that and expanded it to 9 categories and 15 logs per category. Some categories retain memory while the server is up but on restart or crash are not retained due to being lower priority.

List of Items that display and save with server crash/restart:

Trade: Buying and Selling under 100 million credits.

Important Trades: Trades greater than 100 million credit but lower than 10 billion credits.

Very Important Trades: Trades greater than 10 billion credits.

Management: Equip/Unequip, Use Item, Toss Item, Set Trade Bay

Ledger: Construction Started/Finished, Transfer Item, Install Blueprint, Cancel Construction, Add/Remove Credits.

Status: Set Name, Changed Rank Access, Set Team, Transfer Base, Hostile Takeover, Abandoned.

List of items that are retained in memory but don’t save:

Construction Misc: Pausing/Resuming/Setting Description.

Bots: Docking and Buying/Selling of Bots.

Docking: Docking by players.

While not a radical departure from the current state and the interface remains the same – we hope to add additional features that are able to build off this first iteration to help players better manage their shops, production hubs and have greater insight into past events.

Market Check

Next up is the market check search, which can now perform “fuzzy” searches. When an exact match can’t be found the client will present a selection dialog with a list of up to 50 similarly spelt items, ordered by how similar they are to the search term. The algorithm is fairly simple, looking at the number of matching words and letters.

We also optimized the interface to ignore capitalization as some items (Artifact) were picky about exact matches in the past. These changes should help players spend less time focusing on exact spelling.

Hello Sonatians! There have been whispers amongst the player base that Fighters and Deathblossoms would see some sort of adjustment sooner or later. I am here to confirm that we are definitely making some targeted changes to both of them, and we plan to patch them in soon. We’re doing this because, in our conversations with you during the Healing Revamp, we committed to taking decisive action to fix pain points and problems sooner rather than later. We’ve also found that the way that Fighters and the Deathblossom works causes the game to become almost unplayable in crowded situations.

With that being said, let’s dive into some of the problems we’re going to address.

Note: Things may be subject to change before release.

Problems

Deathblossom

When enough SOBs (Space Objects) are present on the field, the user’s game experience deteriorates rapidly. Not only do excessive SOBs cause significant graphical lag, they also lead to severe network latency between players and the server. The more Deathblossoms looking for targets to fire at, the bigger the lag and latency for all players involved.

We decided to target two separate things in order to fix this problem:

• Bots firing Deathblossoms.
  • Bots will no longer use a Deathblossom.
• Deathblossoms firing at fighters.
  • Deathblossoms will no longer fire at fighters.

When a Deathblossom is fired, it creates lots of space objects that need to be tracked. When those projectiles fly towards fighters, and the fighters evade them, those projectiles still exist and will keep trying to track towards the fighters. This causes a significant amount of latency and graphical lag.

Also, when a critical mass of fighters are on the battlefield it becomes almost impossible to actually use a Deathblossom or splash weapons to kill them fast enough due to the cap on the number of targets splash is allowed to hit (20 at present).

This creates a weird situation where Deathblossoms almost completely counter fighters, until you bring enough fighters to a battlefield and suddenly the Deathblossom is nearly useless against them. UPDATE: Several players pointed out that splash, on live, does not have a limit. This limit was considered in the past, but was not implemented in favor of another change. Unfortunately, I had bad information. However, this does not change the point of the project.

We’ve decided to remove this from the equation. These changes will result in Fighters being much more durable against players and AI that use Deathblossoms. They will also result in Gunner bots doing less total damage than they used to. We’re aware that this will result in lower damage output from high-end bots, but we believe that Gunner is overtuned in DPS in the first place. Any niche situations where the drop in Gunner bot DPS unreasonably affects squad play will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Fighters

When enough fighters are present on the field, the user’s game experience deteriorates rapidly. There are too many objects with their own particle effects from weapons and engines in play, and when a critical mass of fighters are on the battlefield it becomes almost impossible to actually figure out which ones you should prioritize shooting down. This means that area-of-effect weaponry are the best way to deal with them, but even this is unreliable because of Evasion and the random nature of target selection.

However, the biggest reason to adjust fighters is the sheer number of fighters players have fielded at once. The presence of this many fighters in play at once creates an enormous amount of client and network lag, and has made it clear that Star Sonata is not able to handle massive swarms of player assets. All of these factors combine to create a situation that warrants a change to fighters.

We decided to target a few things in order to address these issues:

• All fighters will require 1 slot to launch.
• Bots will be disallowed from launching fighters.
• Fighter bays will have a maximum of 2 slots (+2 on Fleet Commanders).
  • The total damage that Fighters do is increased to compensate for the reduction in the total number of fighters launched.
  • Fighter shield bank will be increased, and they’ll be made a little bit bigger visually.
  • Stat bonuses on Capital class Fighter Bays are doubled.
• Evasion will be removed from fighters.
  • Fighters will have a 90% chance of avoiding non-targeted damage. This includes area-of-effect, splash, non-targeted collisions, and so on.
• Fighters with aura generators will no longer have them, and fighters that take very high amounts of energy for extra damage will no longer do so.
  • Death of First Born, Jovian, and Panther Kitten fighters are examples of fighters that have been changed.
• Radiation Expert will no longer apply to Fighters.
  • Flight Controller will give 20% damage per level to Fighters (from 15%, on live).
  • Advanced Flight Controller will give Fighters +15% Damage.
• Pulse Guns on fighters now act like Magcannons, and do not inherit the velocity of the fighter.

The most controversial change is the removal of fighters from combat bots. It’s important that we do this because Bots represent an automatic way of engaging targets, and they can be used to immediately launch dozens or even hundreds of fighters in seconds. As long as Bots are allowed to launch fighters, we will continue to see players trying to figure out how to reach critical mass with regards to the number of fighters on the field at once.

To address this, we are going to make fighters more powerful on the main ship.

In addition, there have been long standing requests from the players themselves for changes to be made to fighters.

• Players have routinely asked for fighters with projectiles to be changed so that they continue to fire at targets when in range, so we’re doing that.
• Players have also asked for AoE and Collision code mitigation, and although we’re not giving them resistances or immunity to it they will be highly resilient against it.
  • They also will no longer be targeted by Deathblossoms!
• Players have also asked for fighters other than Radiation to be useful, and we’ve done this as well by removing the Radiation Expert Bonus from fighters but buffing all fighters Damage values through Flight Controller and Advanced Flight Controller.
  • This will result in a reduction to Radiation damage bonuses on Fighters, but an increase to non Radiation damage bonuses.
  • UPDATE 2: We have also changed Radiation Expert so that Radiation Damage is increased by 15% per level, while Damage is is increased by 25% per level. (NOTE: This means Radiation weapons will have ~154% bonus damage.) This will allow Fleet Commanders to consider a wider array of damage types when outfitting their combat bots.
• Players have also routinely asked for something to be done about holiday fighters, specifically Death of First Borns, being powerful and impactful relative to other fighters. By normalizing them, we’re making them no longer feel mandatory.

“What does this mean for me?”

Summary

• Fighters will no longer be launched from bots, at all.
• Fighters launched from your main ship will be stronger and tougher to kill, won’t be shot at by Deathblossoms, they will no longer have Evasion when targeted but will evade the vast majority of non-targeted damage.
• Higher tech fighters will be visually bigger.
• Fighters with projectiles will shoot them more consistently.
• There will be much fewer fighters launched at once.
• Gunner bots will no longer use Deathblossoms.
• Gunners will not quickly kill groups of fighters.
• The DPS you do with fighters should be equivalent to what you are able to do on live. This will be higher in some cases, and lower in other cases.
  • If you are a low level player just starting out as an FC and only have a few fighters, you will probably do more damage.
  • If you are a mid level player who has a bunch of bots that launch fighters only, you will probably do less damage.
  • If you are a high level player who has good fighters on yourself and your bots, you will probably do more damage.
  • If you are an end game player with powerful bots, and powerful fighters, you will do more damage in most situations.
    • The one area you will certainly be less powerful is with Radiation fighters.
• UPDATE 2: Radiation Expert now grants 15% Radiation Damage per level, while Damage is increased by 25% per level.

UPDATE: To further clarify, if a player used Death of First Born, Cerberus, or any fighter that used a very large amount of energy to do more damage (High Energy), your personally launched fighters under this change will not do the same amount of damage as your bots and your own fighters combined. This is because High Energy fighters do not exist in the new system, and the damage bonus they received for using large amounts of energy will not be carried over.

While we are doing our best to vet this project from many angles and solicit feedback from the players, it’s always possible that we may overlook something important. If this happens, we will quickly move to address the issue.

What do the items look like now?

Will you be adding more fighters?

Yes, we will be adding more fighters in future updates. We have about ~40 fighters that have been created and will eventually be added to the game.

Can I test these changes to see how they affect me?

These changes are now available on Test.

(You can select “Test Server” from the drop down menu within your client’s login screen.)

~

All of these changes should be coming in with an upcoming patch, keep your eyes peeled!

Christmas is here and Astro-Santa is out to deliver presents to all the good peasants and workers in the universe again! However, Earthforce and the other Terran factions report that Astro-Grinch has been sighted roaming Perilous Space again! Many speculate he is looking to stop Astro-Santa from delivering his presents!

Lyceum Scientists report that the wormhole to Lapland will stabilize in Sol on December 10th, 2021 for the beginning of the Christmas event! The event will continue until January 3rd, 2022.
For the duration of the universe, Lapland will remain in Sol for any turn-in’s you may have forgotten to do.

Welcome to another Star Sonata Dev Diary!

Today, we’re covering a range of topics from the new Base Upgrade system, new Bot chat commands and some fixes to pesky bugs that we’ve been chasing for years!

Base Upgrade system

So here’s the problem: You’d laid bases on a planet. They’re just plain vanilla Ai station kits deployed on the planet and yet, several weeks later you have some upgraded Laconia kits you’d prefer to lay down.

You’d have to transfer gear, demolish the original bases, lose any augmenters that were already equipped and lay the new station then move everything over and re-equip.

With the new Base Upgrade system, you simply select the currently deployed base, you double click/use the new kit from your inventory, and the base upgrades into the new version without any of the previous hassle.

Notable Mentions

• The upgrade process causes the construction timer and vulnerability to reappear.
• Bases cannot be upgraded into with a station kit that will result in over hull capacity, lower tech level or fewer augmenter slots.
• The same conditions that prevent deploying normal bases apply to upgrading bases with bases.
• Destroyed bases cannot be upgraded — they must first be repaired.

Bot Commands

We are always looking to improve players’ ability to directly control their bots. We’re expanding the level of control players have with 9 new commands players can use.

/botsAttack: All combat and wild bots will be set to attack your target.
/botsNoAttack: All combat and wild bots will be set to not attack your target.
/botsFight: All combat and wild bots will be set to fight enemies.
/botsNoFight: All combat and wild bots will be set to not fight enemies.
/botsClose: All bots will stay close.
/botsNoClose: “Stay close” will be disabled for all bots.
/botsDock: All non-wild bots will dock and deactivate.
/botsCombatDock
/botsTradeDock

We are also adding an option in the bot menu to disable weapons that can’t be unequipped in the “More bot settings” menu.

Everything Nice

As a point of pride, we’ve finally found and tackled the issue with Deathblossom not firing the correct number of projectiles when having Multifire 3.

The deathblossom fix will be part of the next patch the others will be in a later patch.

The June 2021 universe introduced some changes to how DG loot works.
The patch notes at the time did not go into particular detail on what the changes were or how they would affect the loot quality from DGs.
Now that the dust has settled from the reset, we put together this Dev Diary to clear up any confusion about the new system.

First, we’ll look at how DGs used to work.

Previously

DG bosses would get one guaranteed item drop and two rolls (at 30% and 15%) at an extra item from our dungeon items list.
This was a global dungeon item drop list that featured every single item you could get from a boss in a DG.
We also often reuse this list for generic loot from non-DG bosses across the game.

Now

The global dungeon drop list itself has remained unchanged, however, a lot of DG bosses no longer roll on this list (just seven do). Instead, we now have multiple lists split into categories;

• Commodities & Neurotweak crates

• Weapons

• Shields

• Engines

• Energies

• Equipment (anything you could find in the “Item” tab of the trade bay) and Scoops

• Tractors

• Station

• Radars

• Drones

• Augmenters

There is also an additional list of generic gear, similar to the old global list, but with fewer items in it.
Blueprints for gear are included in the category for the type of item they build (e.g., the Fine Tuned engine blueprints come from the engines list, not the station one).
The augmenters list consist of Class, Ship Mastery, Spacey, and Speedy augmenters.

Each DG boss has been assigned one of these lists to drop 100% of the time. They then have a second list with a 50% drop rate on which may be the same, or another list, and finally typically a 40% chance at the commodity list.

For example, a Vulture boss will always drop from the engine list, has a 50% chance to drop from the radar list, and a 40% chance to drop from the commodity list.
A Big Green will always drop from the weapon list, with 50% chance at another item from the weapon list and 40% chance from the commodity list.

Not all bosses completely follow this new pattern, and some bosses will always grant a commodity drop in addition to their gear drop.
Bosses which were special before and granted unique or extra loot, such as Red Wattages, Stellations, the named bosses, still give their extra loot.

The result of these changes will be that you’ll get loot of certain types at a more consistent rate than before, and if you need something in particular you’ll be able to target that item better by fighting bosses which are known to drop that type of gear.

While we’re not going to just give away which bosses drop from which lists, the assignment is on the boss type and will be consistent from universe to universe.

Welcome to another installment of our Dev Diary series! Today we’re diving into the refreshed Kalthi Depths zone that will accompany the upcoming Moonfighter Rebellion movement on June 26th’s reset.

One of two new Kalthi, special Armored Deployers lay an impressive array of drones in combat.

The original concept of Kalthi Depths offered an exciting but chaotic experience that conveyed the militant nature of the Kalthi faction but ultimately frustrated players with its over-the-top design. With the help of some powerful new development tools, we have been able to push the boundaries of AI teamwork and tactics and we’re debuting these advances with a refreshed Kalthi Depths zone that hues more closely to the original militant theme.

The other of the two new Kalthi, a few unique Wrathful Stingers will haunt their foes with a revealing laser.

Along with the new and improved Kalthi AI, you can expect to see changes to the notorious Selenite and Lunarian swarms that had a tendency to crush everyone in sight. Each Moonfighter faction has been split into 3 teams and some of them have been made not to roam. We expect these adjustments will still allow for some swarming while dialing down the “death ball” effect.

The domineering Fleet Commander of the Kalthi, engaging with a new pulse gun formation and fighters.

Another big change to Kalthi Depths is that fewer AI will roam between galaxies. We made this change to reward players for actively seeking out enemies in new areas.

Lastly, this new design direction synchronizes and is expanded upon by the Tech 23 Update. Intrepid explorers will find the Empyreal Concord roaming the deepest depths. Think twice before engaging on sight!

Welcome to a new Dev Diary on the upcoming Tech 23 update that’s hitting the live server in time for the Universe Reset on June 26th! We have an ambitious plan to be released in several phases or “movements.” In this post, we’re proud to announce the opening movement of our next Sonata: The Moonfighter Rebellion.

A massive station powered by an artificial sun within the Empyrean zone.

Players will explore a whole new zone and join up with a mysterious order known as the Celestial Hand. Players will help suppress the Empyreal Concord, a rebellion of Lunarians and Selenites that have stolen precious relics and holy items. The bulk of their forces have been trapped by the CHS Primordial Light flagship behind the Celestial Encampment deep within Kalthi Depths, and so this is where you must venture.

An Empyreal Celeste flanked by Equinoxes.

Players will bring their squads and face off against the rebellious Empyreal fleets and six new instanced bosses within Empyrean space.

An Empyreal Ascension using a powerful beam.

As a bonus, we will also release new Delquadrakimdan teaser content from the upcoming second movement: three solo instance bosses hidden within another new zone within Kalthi Depths.

A Fallen in wait..

Welcome Sonatians. The upcoming patch contains a considerable adjustment to shield-stealing. Here’s what you need to know.

Stealing vs. Healing

Something we’ve struggled with since we released the new Shield Monkey class is the balance between stealing shields and healing. We envisioned shield-stealing as something that healers would do to supplement their regeneration, but this hasn’t proven to be very popular. On the flip side, “draintank” Shield Monkeys who use stealing as an all-in-one tank-healer-DPS mode proved to be much more powerful than we had envisioned. Eventually, we realized that it all comes down to resource use. Healing an ally or stealing shields with the main focus of healing yourself are just not as valuable as “draintanking,” which allows the player to deal substantial damage while tanking and healing themselves all at once. This realization led us to the following two concrete positions:

1. Shield-stealing should cost more energy than healing with the same weapon.

2. Shield-stealing should heal the user considerably, even if they aren’t specialized for DPS.

After playtesting with a few helpful Paxian Disciples, we arrived at the following implementation. Shield Monkeys now receive 3 units of healing for every 1 unit of shield-stealing damage they deal. Shield stealing now costs 2.75x the firing energy of healing.

This change may end up buffing or nerfing your Shield Monkey setup, depending on how you play. Here’s the breakdown on that:

• If you play a Shield Monkey who focuses on shield regeneration, this change won’t affect your setup at all. You may even find it useful to steal shields now and then.

• If you play a Shield Monkey who sometimes steals shields to stay alive, this change is a buff to your setup. You may be able to re-gear toward more HPS since you’ll receive more healing whenever you steal shields.

• If you play a Shield Monkey who focuses on dealing damage with shield-stealing, this change is a nerf to your setup. You will probably experience lower uptime on stealing since it costs a lot more energy to do so. Moreover, you will receive more healing when you do steal, making it harder to keep some empty space in your shield bank.

If you’re anything like me, you are probably curious to know a few more details behind this change to mechanics. Here’s how we’ve implemented the increased firing energy.

• Transference weapons now operate at around 36% DPE when used for stealing shields.

• The extra energy cost is extracted in a single chunk whenever you steal shields.

• If your shield bank is near full or if your target is near death, the server automatically adjusts the amount of stealing damage and extracted energy to keep DPE constant, giving you a smooth gameplay experience.

• If your energy bank is near empty, the server automatically reduces your stealing damage and extracted energy to keep DPE constant. Your rate of fire on an empty energy bank will be the same as it always was.

Weapon Stat Tweaks

There’s one other adjustment we want to make to healing, but it didn’t make the cutoff for this patch. Here’s what you can expect with the next patch (which will still hit before Universe Reset on June 26).

When it comes to transference weapons, we have tried our best to create a sandbox scenario with lots of interesting options. However, players have helped us realize that some of the options we’ve offered are a bit too wild and niche to provide competitive alternatives to the current meta. We believe the following stat tweaks should address the majority of these issues.

• Low-tracking transference weapons have had their tracking increased (20º to 30º) and firing energy reduced in exchange for some weapon range.

• Transference weapons with 45º tracking have also received reduced firing energy in exchange for weapon range.

• All transference weapons have gained a little range (100-150) and reduced recoil time (3 seconds per shot at most).

• Many Tech 22 transference weapons have been adjusted to offer more competitive alternatives to the Vaidaya Bhisajamzu.

We thank the players who have offered feedback on the balance of transference weapons and hope to hear your opinions on these changes!

Welcome to a new developer diary series that will be running over the next several weeks in anticipation for the next major release of Star Sonata!

Today, however, we wanted to share some updates to a mundane yet striking visual element that will be part of the next universe reset – celestial rings!

The previous ring system for celestial bodies was originally designed for Saturn during the conversion from C1 to C2, and was later expanded to be added to random celestial bodies during universe generation. They were essentially a textured plane bisecting the planet, with the texture depicting the full ring. It worked well for smaller objects, but any larger bodies stretched the limits of the system, as seen in the image below. Additionally, they looked pixelated and objectively horrible on lower graphics settings because of the severely reduced texture resolution (more than any other game object.)

The old style of rings scaled up to mega rings poorly, even on high settings.

Ryan and Zynoa have devised a new way to render these rings, with a focus on making them both more consistent across graphics settings as well as scaling better to larger sizes. Instead of a full ring texture slapped on a plane with a ton of dead space used for transparent bits (like the hole for the planet), the new method utilizes some special made models for the rings and the entire texture is dedicated to just the ring itself. Because this increases the effective resolution of the rings (without increasing the technical resolution), the new rings maintain their appearance well across graphics settings and sizes.

Additionally, we’ve departed from some of the more organic and earthly palettes and went for a more vibrant color pattern that we feel strikes a balance between grounded and cartoony visuals for the Star Sonata world.

We hope this and other upcoming graphical changes will make for a more vibrant and engaging universe.

*Note: rings are shown on every celestial body in images for demonstration purposes. In the actual universe, rings will still appear at the same rates they currently do.