University Update

[h3]Skill Trees[/h3][p]Hugely enlarged the skill trees to show the shape of things to come. Many of these are works in progress (“WIP”) and unattainable at this time, but we wanted players to be able to look at what’s coming and know where the game was going, beyond the relatively modest offering that’s available at the moment.[/p][p][/p][p]There’s a lot of new stuff in there, including:[/p]

• [p]Botany now includes Herbalism, Forestry, Farming, and Foraging[/p]
• [p]Combat now includes the Combat Tactics tree, which shows how that tree will progress as we develop and includes Ranged, Melee, Drones and Combat Engineer combat options.[/p]
• [p]Cooking now has Preservation and Foods. (The Medicines and Cures have moved to Medical.)[/p]
• [p]Crafting contains Tailoring, Armorer, Machinist, Weaponsmith, Toolmaker, Civil Engineering and Architect. The Refining tree has been moved to Mineralogy to make it easier for mining folks to unlock those functions.[/p]
• [p]Medical now includes Pharmacology (which holds the Medicine and Cure recipe unlocks), the Healix specials, and Genetics.[/p]
• [p]Mineralogy has Refining, Prospecting, Mining, Gemology, Industrial Mining, Gas Harvesting, Depositing, and Chronophasing.[/p]
• [p]Ranger has the Trailblazer utilities, Survivalist, Surveying, Stealth (and Stealth Attacks), Navigation and Camping.[/p]
• [p]Vehicles include room for Ground and Air Vehicles, as well as Starships.[/p]
• [p]Xenobiology accesses Xenolinguistics, Xenoarchaeology, Pets, Animal Training, Husbandry, and Hunting and Fishing.[/p]

[p][/p][p]New skill trees include:[/p]

• [p]Business: Including Management, Logistics, and Advertising[/p]
• [p]Humanities: Including Writing, Journalism, Music, Dance, and Acting[/p]
• [p]Leadership: Including Inspiration, Group Tactics, and Coordination[/p]

[p][/p][h3]New Weapons (and weapon changes)[/h3][p]The trusty OmniBlaster has been renamed to OmniShock. Why? Because there is now an OmniForce also that uses Kinetic damage (compared to OmniShock’s shock damage type). [/p][p]There are two other new weapons also: The Freeze Ray and the Corrosion Drones.[/p][p][/p][p]OmniForce: Uses Kinetic damage. The primary fire is very similar to the OmniShock, but fires slightly slower but delivers a more powerful punch. The specials for the OmniForce are:[/p]

• [p]Artillery: Hold down the “E” button to see an indirect fire arc and ground decal. Release “E” to fire the shot that will impact in that location. Causes significant knockback.[/p]
• [p]Hunter Seekers: Use the “Q” button. Three shots fire out in a fan (like the OmniShock’s Tri-Shot ability), but they each then burst into a vertical line of shots (nine projectiles in total) that start homing in on nearby targets. These also cause knockback.[/p]

[p]
[/p][p]Corrosion Drones: The primary fire on this weapon is much like the Companion Orbs, except that it uses Corrosion damage. Because it doesn’t cause terrain to heat up, it does slightly more damage instead. The specials for the Corrosion Drones are:[/p]

• [p]Acid Bath: Trigger this with “E” and projectiles arc out in all directions, creating AOE detonations where they impact. Causes targets to be Poisoned.[/p]
• [p]Bug Bombs: A fan of shots goes out in front of you, detonating at short range and saturating an area with corrosion damage. Causes targets to be Poisoned.[/p]

[p][/p][p]Freeze Ray: The primary fire on this is cold-based and much like the Gravity Gun’s primary beam. However, it doesn’t do knockback, so it does slightly more damage instead. Specials for this weapon are:[/p]

• [p]Snow Globe: Projectiles streak out in a hemisphere pattern all around you, detonating at short range and potentially impacting a great number of targets. Can Freeze impacted targets.[/p]
• [p]Deep Freeze: An indirect projectile that does light damage, but causes everything…including the terrain…to freeze solid. Hold “Q” to see the targeting arc and decal and release “Q” to fire.[/p]

[p]The new weapons have skills (to unlock the specials in Combat and to unlock making the weapons in Weaponsmith) and have new recipes, as well. The new recipes are “component” recipes, similar in nature to the recipes for the Terraformer and Harvester and are a good way to increase your Crafting XP.[/p][p][/p][p]Other weapon changes:[/p]

• [p]The OmniShock Tri-Shot and Doom Blossom specials now do Electrified effects when they impact targets, adding crowd control to their abilities. (Electrified can knock flying targets down to the ground.)[/p]
• [p]The Companion Orbs Ring Nodes will catch opponents on fire, doing damage over time to them.[/p]
• [p]The Gravity Gun knockback effects have been increased slightly.[/p]

[p][/p][h3]Mining Improvement[/h3][p]When you mine through rock and soil now, you’ll see additional drops of resources occurring that weren’t there previously. [/p][p]Depending on the material you dig through, you’ll start to find bits of Ores (like Carnotite or Pitchblende) or Found Materials (like Obsidian Shards or Quicklime). You can also occasionally find gasses or gems this way.[/p][p] [/p][h3]Ecology Kiosk[/h3][p]The Starbase and every planet now has an Ecology Kiosk on it. You can access that Kiosk to find out the Ecology status of that area.[/p][p]The first screen you see when you access the Kiosk is the Overall Health of that planet or region of space. It’s broken into three stats: Flora, Fauna, and Mineral. Overall Health is affected by quantity (how much of the original indigenous stuff is still present) and diversity (how many species or types of mineral are still present).[/p][p]If you want to drill down into it more, you can click detail tabs for each of those categories and you can find out how much of individual species or minerals are still present.[/p][p][/p][p]Servitor Violations[/p][p]If you hunt a species to near extinction or get close to eradicating it through mining or harvesting, there are repercussions.[/p][p]The Servitors will launch edicts telling you (essentially) “don’t do that anymore”. If you continue to pursue that (and we know you will!) then they will respond. They can do this through meteor strike…or they can appear and take care of you personally! [/p][p]Every time you do a negative thing, you will rack up Servitor Violation rating. This rating only dissipates over time, and the worse the overall planet health is when you do something forbidden, modified by how bad your Servitor Violation rating is, the more severe their response will be to your actions. [/p][p]Later (soon-ish) we’ll also add carrot to go with this stick and you’ll receive rewards for taking care of a planet and keeping it healthy. But for now, it’s all stick. Enjoy! [/p][p][/p][p]NOTE: If an item has an edict on it, and you mine/harvest/kill that thing, the doober you receive will be highlighted in red. If you see that, stop unless you strongly desire the attention of the Servitors.[/p][p][/p][h3]First-Time User Experience[/h3][p]A large number of edits were made to the First-Time User Experience (“the FTUE Hallway”):[/p]

• [p]During character creation, you have the choices of “Show me the way” or “I know what I’m doing”. If you choose the latter, then when you appear in the world, you will have the skills and equipment for the Explorer profession. If you want other skill sets, you’ll need to navigate the Hallway instead.[/p]
• [p]The lava/Fire Suppressor room has been revamped to make it much easier to navigate and so the Fire Suppressor freezes the lava more effectively.[/p]
• [p]The Debris Tool area has been changed slightly to make it easier to navigate after the debris is cleared.[/p]
• [p]Revamped Soldier and Explorer because both professions were granting waypoint skills...and we don't have any way to use those in-game currently.[/p]
• [p]Soldier now gets the Artillery special unlocked. (Also gets the OmniForce pistol instead of the Companion Orbs.)[/p]
• [p]Explorer gets longer lasting camps and the second stage of camp unlock.[/p]
• [p]All profession kiosks had the text edited and reformatted to make it easier to comprehend[/p]
• [p]Edited text to direct the player to the Mission Kiosk more effectively (hopefully) once they reach the starbase.[/p]
• [p]Restructured some of the FTUE Hallway logic to avoid repetitive dialogs.[/p]
• [p]Told the player directly to jump into the electrical room and die on purpose (instead of making it seem like an accident, which was frustrating players and making them feel like they were left with a hopeless non-choice).[/p]
• [p]Edited the angle of meteors in space so they feel less like they're just falling straight down[/p]
• [p]Removed some servitor dialogs to avoid constant click-closing of dialogs.[/p]

[p][/p][h3]Misc Updates[/h3][p]We’ve also made a bunch of fixes that don’t really fit into discrete categories. Here’s a list of them:[/p]

• [p]Portal objects (in space) have been replaced so you only have to fly through them instead of land and run through them.[/p]
• [p]Added wormhole opening and closing VFX and Audio[/p]
• [p]The Healix VFXnow properly updates the VFX on its specials when PQRV enhances the radius of those effects. So when you make it bigger, you see the change now.[/p]
• [p]If you release LMB on an ability and then click-and-hold LMB, the ability will trigger again after the cooldown timer expires.[/p]
• [p]Players can now (properly) burn flora that are on their Homestead. Other players that have edit privileges on that Homestead can do that also.[/p]
• [p]Kiosks in the starbase now are different colors to make them easier to differentiate.[/p]
• [p]Paver tool no longer alters the landscape that you pave other than to change its materials.[/p]
• [p]“Stripped” tools are now called “Starter” tools and have their own first-time help dialogs.[/p]
• [p]Flying creatures now properly fly above ground when patrolling.[/p]
• [p]Tree spreading rate was decreased to make it possible for players to depopulate flora again. Also, if a species goes extinct, it will no longer naturally propagate through spreading and reappear on the world.[/p]
• [p]Multishot damage is capped again. This broke a while back and we didn’t notice. What that means is that if you get point blank on a target and fire many projectiles from a single weapon click, you can only do so much damage to a target, regardless of how many projectiles hit them. Conversely, this also applies to creatures, so you should get nuked less when you’re close to creatures that have multishot capabilities (unless they are powerful enough that one projectile does the job anyway).[/p]
• [p]You can now see a Homestead owner’s name from a greater range (above the Homesteader object).[/p]
• [p]All Farming and Forestry skills now grant Botany XP so that you can unlock nodes in those trees in the new setup.[/p]
• [p]Healix beam is fixed now and heals characters again.[/p]
• [p]Issues with the Xyloslicer and certain kinds of seeds causing the Xylo to malfunction have been resolved.[/p]
• [p]Saguaro cacti no longer spread logs.[/p]
• [p]Food consumables should now work correctly.[/p]
• [p]Chat has been overhauled. New back-end functionality is not yet implemented, but the UI is new and somewhat more useful. Pressing ESC will minimize the chat pane.[/p]
• [p]Skills menu can now be closed by hitting “K” again.[/p]
• [p]If you open a full-screen menu and the game changes you from fixed-reticle to free-reticle while you’re on that menu, you will return to fixed-reticle when you close that menu.[/p]
• [p]Lights have been optimized. Greatly. Homestead light limits have not yet increased, but will likely go up on the next update after we assess during playtests how the optimizations are performing.[/p]
• [p]Some volumetric fog has been added to the game, but we are using it lightly until further optimizations occur.[/p]

[p][/p][p]Known Issue[/p][p]When you return to the Mission Kiosk with completed missions, then after you turn them in and go to select a new mission, the list will be blank.[/p][p]To fix this, just move the scroll bar (or use your mouse wheel) and it will populate normally again.[/p][p]This issue will be resolved soon in a new update.[/p][p][/p]