Ascent: The Space Game
Small patch to resolve network issues some players were experiencing
NPC Crew Missions Are Live
At one of your colonies or any other player's colony, new missions can now appear under your "ship and crew management" tab.
Crew sent on missions can develop their skills and attributes. Some missions are designed specifically to develop NPC skills and attributes, while others can have a lasting impact on the colony.
- Education missions train skills and attributes.
- Ground Combat Patrols can increase the political stability of a colony that has lapsed
- Intelligence missions can establish or expand your Intelligence Networks, which can aid in other missions
More of these missions are being unlocked every few days as we expand this feature, so keep an eye out for them. New missions will be in these categories, and new categories will be added soon:
- Propaganda missions (can influence voting)
- Destabilisation missions (can reduce stability which is desired for criminal enterprise missions)
- Criminal enterprise missions. These both increase criminal activity and will return crime-based rewards
- Policing missions (can reduce criminal activity)
Quick Patch
- Biocomputers now increase ship traits 5% faster than regular computers
- Window opacity has been increased for most UI windows for readability’s sake
- The physics response to collisions has been toned down in some circumstances to make landing easier and reduce issues people were having with Customs Patrols colliding with them on warp-in
- Some in-progress work to the Crew Away Missions system (not usable by players yet)
Ship Traits!
So far players have discovered three:
- Miner - gives a small bonus to yield and a significant one to mining beam range per level
- Fast Turner - gives a bonus to turning speed for large ships
- Tough - gives different bonuses to combat resilience at each of the first three levels
All ship traits are open ended, with the difficulty of upgrading to the next level getting harder with each level attained.
We will add more traits in the future; the system was designed with lots of open-ended expansion in mind.
Make your ship truly unique today with the new trait system!
Scheduled Power Maintenance 20:30 27th June UTC to 01:30 28th June UTC
The window starts at 4:30pm 27th June for East Coast USA or 1:30pm west coast. (see UTC timezone conversions for your time zone)
During the window we expect some disruption to Ascent's server infrastructure during which time your game client will not be able to connect to the servers.
Otherwise, playing during this maintenance window should be considered safe as the game servers persist all important information without delay. So if you can connect, you can play.
Small Patch
- Re-enabled terrain detail effects with a workaround for the issue they were having
- A small, intermittent bug with combat explosions was fixed. Probably.
Skills Expanded
- Piloting - This skill is an aggregate of all other skills in the game and will soon determine the maximum class ship you can fly. This means it will not be possible to work your way up to large ships solely by trading. Established players will start with a fair bit of piloting skill and it will go up quickly as their new skills kick in.
- Reactor Engineering - Increases the rate your reactors will charge up your capacitor
- Thruster Engineering - Increases acceleration from thrusters
- Warp Drive Engineering - Decreases the energy cost per second of warping
- Jump Gate Engineering - Rapidly decreases the alignment time required to use a jump gate. This time is about one second per ship class level, minus the skill level, with a further skill based reduction when this alignment time drops to two seconds.. Established players will find they have a number of points in this skill as soon as they log in.
- Weapon Heat Engineering - Reduces heat build up during weapon usage
- Gunnery - Increases the chance of hitting with axial beams
Further skills will be added soon, including more combat skills.
Asteroid Mining and Visuals Update
- The Game engine has been updated to the latest stable compatible version. It's likely this fixes bugs, crashes, and performance problems, including ones we don't know about...
- Shaders have been updated throughout the game to add detail to models where possible. This will make new and old ships, in particular, look a little more detailed
- New nebula visuals have been installed in Vulcan Space, Ceres Space, Apollo Space, and the main menu backgrounds. The stars in these areas have also been adjusted.
- Asteroid Mining has received a large look-and-feel overhaul. Asteroids now shatter into more than two thousand pieces with a satisfying kaboom, with a shockwave that shakes your whole ship, debris and dust flying everywhere. This is a big improvement to the look and feel of our most popular feature.
- Some other minor visual improvements and bug fixes are included in this update.
Silicon Filter DLC Released
This is aimed at experienced, established players who do a lot of mining.
We decided to release this mini-feature as a DLC for the following reasons:
- Would not have been worth developing for free as this feature alone is unlikely to bring in new players.
- It's very much optional, people have mining for seven years without this :)
- Funds further development
Tiny update to fix EULA issue
- A quick fix for an issue some players were having accepting the EULA.