DarkSteel and enkelin have been keeping an eye on the Industrial Commodities market and have some proposed tweaks for next universe.
SunDog
Some players have been experiencing issues with the Psychic Mastery mission for seers. Specifically, the repeatable version of it after you first complete it. Last night’s hotfix was to address this mission, the Psionic Flares will now appear in Bipolar. If this is the case, send in a support ticket (or contact me on the Star Sonata Discord) to have it removed from your character so you can repeat it.
Kraken, Poseidon’s miniboss, takes a while to spawn in. I’m looking into reducing the time it requires as dragging out the spawn time for so long doesn’t accomplish anything besides increasing the time to complete a Poseidon run.
There has been some adjustments to the Voulge, Flamberge, and Flamlite where they were too similar so now they’ve received different arm amounts.
Pixel’s been adding even more skins, enjoy!
Additionally, changes to Lunarium Dusts and Selenite Dusts will become Shards, this will skip the process into just one step from shard to final commod. The existing dust commodities and blueprints related to dusts will automatically convert over to the shard versions. Existing dust blueprints installed on stations won’t be converted.
Has been hard at work adding new visual effects with the following new lightning bolt effect as shown below, enjoy!
Each shot is dyamically generated giving that shocking experience each time. Additionally while still in the works lasers has received a slight adjustment with a rounded tip. To be warned this is all subject to change due to future developments.
Jeff
Jeff has fixed the bug with class skills giving skill debt. Additionally he’s made a new tutorial event that triggers if you try to warp through a blocked wormhole.
Pixel
Pixel added a new skin for the Behemoth, Divine Behemoth, and Leviathan.
Bobbo is working on a simple new T20 DG uber, piloting a Vulture. It is not meant to be a huge new addition, but simply meant to make access to the Vulture/Aug Blueprint and Commodity a bit easier.
Jey
Jey is still trying to figure out Client crashes, but they are elusive, to say the least. (Or in jey’s words: “They make little to no sense which is annoying”)
He can however explain, and has fixed, the ocasional lag affecting the website. It seems to have been caused by the code that handles updating the test server.
Keep on sending crash dumps when you crash (simply click “yes”), the data has been extremely helpful! The client crash is a very weird one and jey is still not fully sure what is causing it, but he is making steady process. All my focus is on that (when the server isn’t crashing / lagging to death) and I am hoping to pinpoint it really soon. Quite a few things are being delayed while the crash hunt continues.
Hober Mallow
Demolishing and Neutralizing weapons are getting their splash damage removed, they are not the right weapons for a splash effect (High DPS, High DPE pulse guns). I’ll be saving the effect for a more appropriate weapon, preferably one that doesn’t have the highest Mining/Radiation DPS in the game. The other stats on the weapons will not change.
In working on invasions, I’ve found that the lower tier invasions don’t seem to serve the purpose they were originally intended for. Originally, they would provide something interesting for low level players to do. However, the fact that they are in a Premium zone meant that those players were not interacting with them very much. Going forward, there will be no invasions in the lower arms. The invasions and outposts will be locked to the Sas Arm, and the rewards from the other arms will be moved into other places.
Pixel
Scruples, Nightfuries and all their kin used textures that were, quite frankly, absolutely terrible. Pixel has been busy making them glorious once again!
He has also been working on a new boss, the Queen Hive, which is still in the early development stages but will enter the universe eventually.
s_m_w
I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few weeks getting myself acquainted with the client code, which is starting to bear fruit! Here’s a short video of my results from fiddling with lasers.
Recently we’ve been pushing out alot of patches and we appricate you all for your help with constant feedback, reporting bugs and fixes. Expect a couple more patches.
Bobbo
Bobbo been fixing some Easter bugs with some missions not giving rewards correctly, next patch. This includes a number of other bugs related around the Sniper but is still within the primalary stages of being fixed.
s_m_w
Some more background fixes related to gear balance issues.
Pixel
Has remade the Unt Faranji Wingship visual. He has also been poking about with HTML5/Javascript related scripts to apply to the player guide improvements.
Termites have also been looked at with the current result of the huge termite losing 3/4 its damage potential and lowered resistance from 98% to 90%.
Easter event has started. Be sure to pay a visit to the Easter Warren Sector off Sol!
Jeff
Jeff added some equipment that new players can purchase in Mutara Gardens as well as an asteroid belt with an AI miner flying about. The miner is not just there to liven up the place: The Volcom side of the Nexus is meant to be a bit of a puzzler, with the miner acting as a hint on how to get rid of that pesky asteroid blocking the wormhole to the next galaxy. In general, Jeff is not very happy with how the Volcom starting zone currently is. Rather than fighting random cadets everywhere, there should be more puzzles and challenges.
AI can now have multiple engagement sounds. Even the most diehard of Volcom pirates needs some variety in their vocabulary other than “Yarrrr!”.
Bobbo
Bobbo found bugs and presumably fixed many.
He has also added some important details to item descriptions, such as the amount of space the items in a crate will take up, or whether a laser is ethereal or not.
s_m_w
I’ve expanded the damage meter to show individual sources. Not quite perfect, as parasites injected by missiles and such count as the player’s damage, but it’s still far more detailed than what we had before!
And it also works for healing!
On an unrelated note: Samgrahaka Bhisajvars are REALLY good. This was a test with 7 of them in a 3 gen ops setup.
I’ve also finished the next, and hopefully final, pass on Torpedoes and Thoraxes. Most importantly: Torpedo I, II and III are no longer the worst weapons in the entire game. In fact, torpedoes in general got changed: Their niche is now high DPS, low DPE weaponry. There are very few torpedoes to experiment with at the higher techs currently (mostly due to how bad torpedoes were in general), but that’ll change over time.
Since it’s going to come up: The Zebra Hooves Torpedoe got changed quite a bit. The reasoning is simple: The hallmark of the physical damage type is high DPE. For non-physical torpedoes to be in line with the ZHT (DPE of 0.4), they’d have to have far lower DPE (in the range of 0.25 and less! Torpedoes of large size classes would be approaching 0.1!), which simply didn’t work.
While the ZHT itself did lose some of its burstiness, it did inspire the general idea of what torpedoes should look like.
Jey
Last week has seen a pretty large server performance improvement, much larger than what was expected from this change! It came with a few new item related problems but all those should be fixed now. This is the reason why there hasn’t been any real update since last week, I did not want to add new things on the server when it was in an unstable state. Now that the server is a bit more stable, patching will resume later this week.
Thank you to everyone who’s been clicking yes when they crash, all those dumps are providing me with a lot of data to fix the crashes. A client patch for those I found should be available on beta in the coming days and hopefully will become the live client with the patch coming up.
Hober Mallow
Fixed Shielding 22, I kept the boss at a 30 second cycle timer because anything more made it far less exciting. The timer wasn’t the issue, it was the insane healing the boss got from seemingly out of nowhere. The boss is now less of a spank fest, and you’re less likely to kill it inside of a single damage type rotation. Killing the spawns is much more important than it previously was.
There are now Combined Augmenter blueprint packs for sale in Augmenter Labs inside of The Acropolis, this should make building the Lyceum Combined Augmenters a much more reasonable and feasible task. This means that the blueprints will no longer drop from AI.
Assault Dropships, from the Assault Behemoth, have been reworked and are now close range and tanky fighters. A non Fleet Commander user can only deploy 2. They should be really interesting.
Updated the player progress missions for Tech 21 and Tech 22 skills, they are now much more specific and no longer mislead the player about what they need to do in order to level their skills up.
In regards to Subspace Invasion, I am working on a system where you won’t have to kill Outposts for monthly missions rewards, you will instead be killing invading Motherships instead. These will spawn at the beginning of the Invasion, and I’ll move a big chunk of the rewards away from Outposts into Motherships. It will still be worthwhile to kill Outposts, I don’t intend to take that away from players.
Ryan & Pixel
Pixel has been hard at work updating the various guides on the SS website.
And last but not least: A far more convenient way to check your lockouts!
SunDog60
Added Zen Reset missions, available in Sai’s Retreat (once they are added). They will instantly reset one of seven Zen skills of your choice.
Death to instances, lets ban all players so the issues aren’t a problem anymore.
On a more serious note, beta client is currently available on http://www.starsonata.com/dl/StarSonata_2_beta.exe and include multiple crash fixes currently in testing.
If you crash a lot, grab it and keep me updated. Another server patch is coming by the end of the week, specific time still to be determined.
Bobbo
He has been finding and fixing a few bugs with the new class skills and “investigating” the Seer player experience.
Pixel
Has been looking at the Dark Wave weapon and adjusting it dramatically to become useful and thanks all those owners of this weapon for your patience on the matter. The image below is subject to changes but this is the current development on the weapon.
Been fixing Nexus issues, for example adjusting the spawners in the first Volcom galaxy and adjusting commodities in the Janitor’s Outpost AI base for next universe.
The universe reset is at the usual time of 1PM server time. However North America has entered their summer time, making this 1PM EDT, for the UK players (who enter summer time next weekend) this is 5PM (GMT), not the usual 6PM.
Hober Mallow
Arctia, Vulcan, Mira and The Jungle are being tweaked to be more difficult for their appropriate level. This means that players who are at that level should seek out other people to do the content with. This was done by increasing the strength of the bosses, and by adding a very small Aggro radius to the minions within these Dungeons.
Kalthi Depths is currently a little too easy, and a little too hard at the same time. AI like Corrupted Battleships and Corrupted Cruisers are far too difficult to take down, and lower danger factor AI like regular Kalthi ships are too easy. Expect outliers to be buffed or nerfed accordingly.
Pixel
Pixel has been updating the skill tree section with these wounderful images!
Here are the patchnotes for the patch coming with the universe reset.
* Represents a change that will happen after a patch.
+ Represents a change that will happen next universe reset.
Beta Client Changes
* Hundreds of different crash fixes.
* Fix for some engine particles
* Improvement to the projectile rendering
Top Patch Additions
+ Retuned every single Kalthi Depths AI so that they are balanced against how classes will be next universe. Reduced the concentration of both Roaming and Static AI, increased the number of galaxies in Kalthi Depths to 250, decreased the Danger Factor increase per jump to 10, and increased the number of dungeons in the layer.
+ Planets and moons can have multiple rings now.
+ Made sun types more varied with giant, supergiant, hypergiant, main sequence and brown dwarf suns being generated. Suns have luminosities, temperatures and logarithmically scaled diameters that are modelled on real life.
+ The Aveksaka Monthly Invasion missions now require you to kill Aveksaka Outposts in order to complete them. They also give a very large amount of credits and experience upon completion, as well as 50 levels in the form of arm specific Epiphanies. These arm specific epiphanies provide an accelerated form of leveling, and are neuro bound. You will, however, be able to transfer them to your alts through the TSL.
* All augmenter stats have been changed to accommodate for the removal of 100% Augmenter Tweaking. Your augmenters now have the stats they would have with 100% augmenter tweaking as baseline values.
* Added support for ctrl+A (select all) and ctrl+C (copy to clipboard) to all tables in the client (such as inventory, trade bay, ship stats, etc).
* Made all fighters able to retarget by default.
* Fighters now follow their launchers through wormholes.
* Fighters stay out for their full time lifetime, circling their launcher while waiting.
* Fighters that can return are now given 60s to return to their launcher when their lifetime has finished.
* Fighters now are able to be moved via transwarp.
New Universe
As the universe is coming to a close don’t forget to pack before Saturday March 11th at 1:00 PM Eastern / Server time.
Full list of the changes can be found here:
http://www.starsonata.com/patch_notes/serverclient-patch-02-11-2017/
Discuss in the Forum:
http://forum.starsonata.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=63008
