Hi there, space travellers!
We are back with a medium-sized update, preparing the release of Chapter 3 and some further QoL enhancements. We listened to a lot of your feedback over the past months and improved areas like trading and mining and added some new areas and NPCs to the world. ElZanco also created a tool for easier weapon/equpiment and item balancing, which will make it easier for us to keep an overview of the endless amount of stuff already in the game and change things in the future more quickly.
Experimental Mining Re-Balancing
Mining has always been one oft most attractive moneymakers in the game, but the differences between the various mining lasers still didn't feel right. Also, mining lasers still felt pretty powerful in combat situations, so most of the time switching between mining and combat equipment wasn't even necessary. Some things we did to make mining more interesting and challenging, but also more rewarding over time:
Rebalancing asteroid HP
The difference between various sizes of asteroids and their HP is now more extreme. While tiny and small asteroids can still be tackled with conventional weapons, bigger ones might now pose a greater challenge. Even a low-level mining laser might be too weak for the biggest asteroids – so upgrades and better lasers are needed. The result we aim for: At the start of the game you won't be able to mine down all the big asteroids, you'll need to find smaller ones or buy better equipment first. This makes it a bit tougher in the beginning and prevents too much quick money by mining.
Rebalancing mining lasers
Weaker mining lasers won't be able to harvest bigger asteroids in a proper manner anymore. BUT the stronger ones will, and they'll be much better now. Power leveling should feel more rewarding - tiny and small asteroids will melt on sight with the right equipment, and even the giant ones won't stand a chance, but it will take a bit of time to get there. Also mining lasers are now way weaker in fights. They still do a good amount of damage against any ship hull, but they won't be as effective as in earlier versions of the game. This may require a switch from mining to combat equipment in certain situations or think about other compromises regarding your ship configuration (instead of just sticking with one OP-config from mid-game on).
More possible trading routes
We want to keep improving the trade system and make it an equally good income option in the game, comparable to mining. Some players had difficulties to find many trading opportunities, so we've increased the producers and consumers, added a lot more items to the network (stuff like luxury items, fruits, iron, gold, silver, helium-3, and other raw materials should now have better trading opportunities) and fixed/changed some of the old stuff. We also increased the credit amounts of some bigger traders have and some producers offer way higher amounts of the produced item than before.
Independent Science Academy Lectures
We've finally added our first lectures for the ISA: At certain days in-game you can visit the Auditorium on Phobos and maybe a professor will teach something about something. You might get some interesting information there - or even more...
The Aethercorder
Added a new device with a chance to get during one of the ISA lectures: It will enable you to "hear" electro-magnetic waves. The professor can tell you more about it... There are already some "secret" sounds in the game, ready to be discovered, but we will add more stuff later on. ;)
🇮🇹 Italian translation
Huge thanks to our community member Cosmicpixels for this brand-new translation!
New achievements
These ones are not so easy to get – play the alternative route of the Sphere Arc to get a better chance.
World
Added a new J-12 station, SMD Abbott
Many dialogues have been improved (including some changes, cuts and expansions) and numerous text errors have been corrected.
Several new characters have been added, with interesting information to share
Added some more details (like "look-at-target / player" functions for certain NPCs in space etc.)
Added a few more pirate bounty side quests
Added 2 more side quests
Added the Mr. Shiro diary entries and Xentron transmission logs
UI
A couple of layout tweaks to make room for the Italian translation and make it bulletproof for other localizations (we didn't think that many languages would be even more screen-hungry than German ;))
Balancing
More indirectly: We've developed a fancy internal tool that gives us real-time access to all of the game's databases and lays the groundwork for making future balancing processes a lot more efficient and seamless!
Portraits
Player "constructor" portrait polishing
"Jeez, I feel like a new person today!"
Analysis HUD: Population text is misleading
Dialog HUD: Text flickers shortly when tags are used
Trade Missions: The reward amount is shown as far too low in the dialog list
SOS Signal icon is not scaled to the screen resolution
Vex's note is now removed from the player's inventory after solving the riddle
Chondros dialog can no longer reduce the mission progress during 'The Siege of Pluto'
Some respawn timers and pirate positions
Imperial Garden should now be locked at game start
Belana's stew can be repeated endlessly
CTRL x2 doesn't toggle tooltips back on
Let's have a chat on Discord:
Learn more & stay tuned!
