Ostranauts News

Hey Folks!

Ostranauts v0.13.0.17 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Lucky Number 13" update, which adds a new maintenance tech to OKLG, fixes a few UI bugs, and updates the splash screens.

Most of these changes should be compatible with older 0.13 saves. Though if that save has already had errors, some of those errors may continue until a new game is started.

• Added a maintenance tech person to OKLG that will occasionally appear to patch, repair, and restore items on the station (in that order).
  
• Added the ability for maintenance tech to remove corpses.
  
• Added the ability for maintenance tech to refill canisters.
  
• Changed AI pilots to cause fewer collisions with players that are trying to dock to another ship.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause the game to get stuck when using the ship broker.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause the station refueling kiosk to have errors if the player had no ship docked.
  
• Fixed a bug that showed expand/collapse arrow in trade rows for empty containers.
  
• Changed the content warnings screen to include other potentially sensitive topics.
  
• Changed the logo splash screen to reflect Ostranaut's new self-publishing status.
  
• Changed the game credits screen to auto-scroll, since it was getting too big to fit.
  

One of the more exciting changes in this patch is the new maintenance tech! OKLG station now has a maintenance tech that will occasionally spawn, and walk around fixing things.

They will patch holes first, then repair broken things, then restore things, in that order. They can also dispose of corpses, and refill canisters. They might not be able to reach all their jobs, and they cannot rebuild missing things. But it should hopefully be a good step forward towards a longer-lived station!

The tech can also move around to other stations, and if they are OKLG-owned, they will be fixed, too.

We also made some changes to the way AI pilots work so that they would avoid clobbering players who are in the middle of docking with another ship. There are likely still other cases we'll have to guard against, but this should be a solid step towards fewer accidents.

We fixed an issue that caused the ship broker UI to clog the game and make it unplayable. Usually this happened when the player sold the ship before the UI finished loading, or other similar case where the ship no longer existed.

The station refuel and trade UIs also had some edge cases fixed.

Finally, we made a few changes to our splash screens.

First, our time working with Modern Wolf on Ostranauts has come to an end, and BBG is now self-publishing Ostranauts. It's been incredible working with their team, and we truly couldn't have gotten this far without Modern Wolf. We wish them the best in their future endeavors!

We also decided to update our photosensitivity warning page to include a few other content warnings that are relevant to a procedurally-generated game with mature content.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,
Daniel Fedor
Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Folks!

Ostranauts v0.13.0.15 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Lucky Number 13" update, which addresses inventory issues, docking fees, and meat spawn rates.

Most of these changes should be compatible with older 0.13 saves. Though if that save has already had the goatman encounter, some of those effects won't be seen until a new game is started. (See below for some tricks to edit your save.)

• Fixed a bug that could cause inventory windows to close intermittently when controlling crew and the captain was moving.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused audio to cut out intermittently while controlling crew and captain was doing EVA.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause inventory container stack to be drawn incorrectly when picked up from the ground via quick action button.
  
• Fixed bug that prevented quick action buttons from updating when item moved between inventory containers and slots via mouse.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused ships to deny docking permission when they are a gig delivery target.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused docking fees to continue forever after undocking with a stolen ship.
  
• Fixed a bug that prevented NPCs from Fleeing in some situations.
  
• Fixed several typos in game data.
  
• Fixed a bug that failed to close the trade UI when a trader is closing for restocking.
  
• Changed the trader code to force them to restock if an NPC becomes a new trader later in the game.
  

Plus some potential spoiler changes and fixes:

• Changed goatman final encounter to stop new meat derelicts from appearing.
• Changed meat derelicts to be less common before the final encounter.
• Added Pray action to altar, so cultists that meet the Goatman can use altars to pray for more meat after.
• Changed default meat infestation spawn size to be smaller.
• Added new conditions to let player configure meat spawning rules via F3 console.

One of the more annoying bugs players have reported involved inventory windows closing intermittently. And thanks to some players reporting hints on reproducing the bugs, we think we've fixed it!

Basically, the inventory UI was assuming the character that first opened it was still the one using it. So if the player had multiple crew and was using the inventory, it could detect the wrong character's range and close containers without warning.

Related to this issue, audio effects for the captain could take over what the player hears when controlling other crew. The sound would appear to cut out for crew randomly, but it turned out to be caused by the captain going in and out of EVA.

There were also a few bugs related to item stacks and Quick Action Buttons available on items not updated when the item was picked up using a QAB.

We found the cause of perpetual docking fees after undocking, as well. This appeared to be due to ships not being owned by the player, and the station was using that to detect when to release the recurring docking fee cycle.

We also fixed a number of plot-related things, which we've surrounded in spoiler tags in case people don't want to ruin the surprise. For those that don't mind reading spoilers, we have some more information about patching your save to take advantage of them.

If you wish to edit your save to take advantage of the new plot variables, you can use the F3 console to query and/or add conditions to your character. For reference, the new conditions affecting meat spawn rates are:

• StatNoMeat = For every point of this condition on the player, a normally-occurring meat derelict will be meat-free. E.g. 10 of this stat will stop the next 10 occurrences.
• StatMeatRate = When the player does encounter a meat derelict, this many StatNoMeat points are added to the player.
• StatMeatBlobMax = The largest starting meat blob size on a new meat derelict.

Adding a cond to a character works like this:

addcond Firstname_Lastname CondName 1

Where Firstname_Lastname is your character's name separated by underscores instead of spaces, and CondName is the stat you want to add (both are case sensitive). And the "1" is however many you want to add.

Note that if you are simply editing the current selected character, you can omit the name entirely, and the game will assume you meant the controlled character. Also, negative numbers remove.

You can also query the conds on your character in the same way:

getcond Firstname_Lastname CondName

This will report how many of CondName is on your character (if any). As above, you can skip the name if you just want the current selected character. And you can do a partial search this way to get, for example, all conditions starting with "Stat".

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,
Daniel Fedor
Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Folks!

Ostranauts v0.13.0.14 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Lucky Number 13" update, which addresses item stacking bugs, NPCs with airless helmets, and gigs/plots targeting the player.

Saves from v0.13.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

• Fixed bug that caused lost/inaccessible stacked items when picked-up from an inventory grid and right-clicked in the world.
  
• Fixed several other issues related to moving stacked items around in the inventory UI.
  
• Changed plots and gigs to prevent making the player the client or target.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused NPCs to have empty helmets if they were spawned for the first time in an off-screen ship.
  
• Added code to prefill pirate and other EVA-wearers' suits if spawned in an airless environment.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause NPCs to lose all survival behaviors if they were wounded or otherwise interrupted before they could finish spawning. (E.g. collision damage or derelict spawn damage)
  

The stacking bug was introduced in an earlier patch where we fixed buying stacked items from a trader and moving them to an off-screen barter zone. Because the fix involved removing stacks from their homes completely before moving them, some of the other inventory stacking situations that relied upon them still being in their home started to break.

As a result, a number of places in the inventory code needed updating to handle situations where a stack was fully or partially moved from either a slot or a grid location to either another slot, another grid location, or an invalid screen location (like the game world or other UI). There are at least a dozen permutations of how items can be moved around in stacks, so please let us know if we missed a particular case.

We also found and fixed several bugs that led to NPCs with airless helmets.

NPCs in pressure suits are supposed to "carve" out some of the ambient atmosphere to match the atmo mixture wherever they spawn, but a timing issue meant that they carved it out of a room that no longer existed, leaving their helmets empty.

Related, but different, was a bug where EVA-wearing NPCs would spawn in airless environments. In these cases, we had to artificially give them some O2 to mimic their suit providing the O2. But a previous fix to prevent them getting O2 each time they donned a helmet meant this broke down, and NPCs like pirates and police would come running aboard the player's ship for a breath of air before returning to their normal business.

This should be restored to normal again.

In the process of fixing these, we also discovered that many NPCs would lose all their survival programming if they were interrupted before they finished spawning. Normally, NPCs get their survival training the moment they spawn, since it differs from NPC to NPC.

But this requires that they finish several actions in their queue. And if they spawned on a ship that later collided, or lacked air, they would immediately clear that queue when panicking. The result is that many clueless NPCs would later dock with OKLG and die with helmets on, or forget to eat/drink.

Finally, we added some guard rails to the gig and plot generation code to avoid cases where jobs were targeting the player, since many players felt that was an error.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,
Daniel Fedor
Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Folks!

Ostranauts v0.13.0.11 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Lucky Number 13" update, which addresses the constant hauler and derelict collisions with OKLG.

Saves from v0.13.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

• Fixed a bug that caused haulers to continuously hover outside OKLG, banging into it, and dropping derelicts just outside the station.
  
• Added code to cleanup ships that were bumping OKLG constantly when an affected save game was loaded.
  

The bugs addressed in this patch took a lot longer to find than they did to fix!

For a while now, we've been hearing players complain about haulers constantly banging into OKLG. The reports say that soon after starting a new game, they'd start hearing constant collisions with the station, and looking at the NAV station, they'd see one or more haulers clinging to OKLG with derelicts in tow.

We tried all sorts of test cases and scenarios to try and repro this. Starting new games over and over and watching the first couple haulers go out and do their thing without issue. Creating custom scenarios where haulers came at the station from various angles and distances. Trying all of the above at different game speeds...

As it turns out, this was a bug which only happens when a hauler is out on its second or later mission, and that mission happens to be a deployment mission to drop a derelict into the boneyard.

A bug in the code that docks haulers with OKLG failed to clear their target coordinates, so when they launched again with a new derelict in tow, they thought their target deployment coordinates were inside OKLG!

This patch fixes that bug, so future haulers should no longer be doing that.

We also wanted to add some code to this patch to try and clean up any messes left by this bug, and that turned out to be its own kind of tricky.

Right now, when you load a save created before 0.13.0.11, the game will attempt to find all ships within about 15km of OKLG that have a VREL close to OKLG's. Basically, ships hovering just outside OKLG.

Then, we ignore any ship the player is on, or owns, or has claimed (i.e. used the NAV on or installed items on), since we don't want to kill any players' hard work. Plus, of course, any ships that are considered stations. (So we don't delete OKLG_MES, etc.)

In practice, this should stop the constant banging when you first load your save. Note, however, that if haulers/derelicts got stuck near Ganymed 1036 (the asteroid OKLG is on) and OKLG has rotated far enough away from those, they'll still be there. And there could be some ships/derelicts missed by our filter. So some manual clean-up might still be needed, depending on your save.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,
Daniel Fedor
Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Hey Folks!

Ostranauts v0.13.0.10 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Lucky Number 13" update, which primarily fixes issues with stuck crew members and glitched stats on them.

Saves from v0.13.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

• Fixed a bug that could cause crew stats to double-process a change, resulting in more than one stat threshold existing at once.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause food to have no eat option, even when character was hungry.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused characters to get stuck and ignore commands in AI Manual mode when they had an emergency, such as hypercapnia.
  
• Added code to fix saves from 0.13.0.8 and earlier which might have these duplicate stat thresholds.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused inanimate objects and wounds to start thinking for themselves and planning their next move.
  

While there are only a few main fixes in this patch, they address some issues that were pretty annoying to those who ran into them.

The first fix involves the way we calculate survival stats on people (and some things). As a particular stat goes up and down, it crosses thresholds that signify better or worse conditions. E.g. Satiety has a range from Hungry through Sated, Stuffed, and Sick Stomach, as its relevant stat goes up.

The bug would happen when the character received or lost a negative condition, such as nausea, that alters these thresholds. In some cases, adding or removing one of these conditions caused the threshold to change, and that threshold change would cascade into another threshold change before the first one finished. This could sometimes result in the "outer" threshold change to add an extra stat to the crew when it shouldn't.

One such example was satiety threshold of Hungry and Stuffed at the same time. To the player, it would appear that they have Hungry in the UI, but the game would deny them the ability to eat things because they also had Stuffed in the background.

This patch fixes the code to prevent this situation from happening. Furthermore, it attempts to repair any save file created before 0.13.0.8 where this has happened. In our testing (and testing by brave players with the bug), this patch seems to fix things.

The second fix is to a bug we introduced in the last patch. 0.13.0.7. In that patch, we gave survival "pledges" to the captain so that it could survive without player input when it was placed in Behavior AUTO mode. E.g. it would eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, and seek fresh atmo/don helmets when needed.

In order to ensure this didn't hijack the captain while the player was moving them around, we disabled these pledges when the AI was in MANUAL mode.

However, we forgot to add that same guard to those pledges' "emergency" modes. All AIs do a series of emergency checks before continuing whatever their current action is, so they can interrupt a long action if they are in danger, and deal with it.

But in this case, the emergency mode was triggering, and the pledge to address it was not, because the AI was in MANUAL mode. As a result, some players ran into situations where their captain or crew suddenly stopped responding to orders and would stand in place, paralyzed or repeating an animation. Usually when an emergency arose, such as hypercapnia.

This patch matches the emergency mode tests with the regular tests so they can act in concert again.

Lastly, this fixes a weird bug where inanimate objects and wounds would start to plan their next move after being in the game a while. It appears the code we added to make AIs plan their next move was not correctly guarded against inanimate objects and wounds, and in some cases, those objects would finish a turn the same way AI does, putting them into the queue for planning their next moves.

In practice, they couldn't really do much without other things the AIs have (like pathfinding). But still, they were probably eating up CPU cycles better spent elsewhere. So some users may experience better performance in this build, particularly in later game saves.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,
Daniel Fedor
Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC