StarMade News

Greetings citizens, ~

Development

Weapons Update
The first prototype is about 1-2 weeks away. We will going to do a full news blog for all the changes and additions when it hits to give players something to explore and test for themselves, since trying it out is always better than just reading about it. The goal in the weapon update is to make ship battles more interesting and give armor, weapons, effects, as well as all combinations a valid purpose. For that, all weapon types, as well as armor and effects have undergone some major changes while still keeping their basic principles. As an example, we increased the destructive power of cannons immensely by adding an effect that would emulate explosive damage. In other words: cannon now make big holes. Also, the new minelayer support weapon will be introduced.

Stay tuned.


HUD Improvements

Now that the base functionality of Power 2.0 is in, we're actively working on improving the flight HUD to represent all ship vitals better and integrate newly required information (consumptions/efficiencies). The changes may not be mechanically or thematically drastic, but a concerted effort is being made to improve the legibility above all.


Bi-weekly Development Q&A

We answer a lot of questions in our weekly Twitch stream as well as in other locations such as the forum, tester slack and private conversations with some of our members. Feedback from this has been invaluable, however, one concern has been that these conversations are not easily accessible. To address this, we’ll be creating a thread on SMD every two weeks to gather questions for a bi-weekly development Q&A. Our answers will be posted in a news thread on SMD, Steam and potentially other locations. Hopefully this will provide a central location for further information, without having to go through stream recordings or spread out conversations.

We’ll still be interacting over the board in all different locations, as well as this development Q&A

Our first Bi-weekly Q&A can be found here: Schine Bi-weekly Q&A - 15th of March


Community Translations

With the release of Power 2.0, over 3K translations strings have been modified and 1K new strings added into the game. With only 5.4K strings in pre Power 2.0 StarMade (now sitting at 8.4K), over half of all strings have been changed in some way. Our community translation project has been hard at work since the release of Power 2.0. We’d like to mention a couple of our standout translators in these last few weeks.

@oasisdog (Japanese) has been translating StarMade into Japanese since November of 2015, during his translation time he’s translated a total 7659 strings (64,439 words), almost solely translating all of StarMade’s text into Japanese. He’s been diligently keeping Japanese up to date with all our updates. Since the release of Power 2.0 he’s brought Japanese back up to 100% translated (42 percentage point increase).

@ua2hk (Chinese Simplified & Traditional) has been translating StarMade into Chinese Simplified & Traditional since November of 2017. In total he’s translated 6889 strings (64,439 words) and made significant contributions to both language projects. He’s brought Chinese Traditional and Chinese Simplified up 40 and 20 percentage points respectively since the release of Power 2.0.

Both have made amazing contributions to StarMade, allowing many more people to experience our game in their own language. We’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to our translation project, it’s sometimes tough work translating schema’s English ;)

Thanks for playing StarMade,


~ The Schine Team

Hello players,

This update contains some fixes for problems with the last update, as well as a new advanced system for reactor design.



Our goal with this system is to make every entity shape equally viable. Stabilizer care about the distance between themselves and their reactor, which encourages you to build in one dimension. We worked on a method to allow this distance to be influenced indirectly by the size and placement of additional stabilizer groups. This mechanic does not change your existing ships but it allows you to now put the reactor in different positions with multiple stabilizers closer to it.

How it works

A reactor has 6 relative sides (Front, Back, Right Left, Top, Bottom) and we simply provide a bonus to your overall stabilization for every additional side that contains a stabilization group.

The maximum bonus provided by a side, is set in the config so we can balance it if needed. You don’t immediately get the maximum bonus though, as that would be exploitable.

To calculate the bonus of 1 of the 6 sides, we take the stabilizer group with the most efficient of that side and compare it with the most efficient group on the entire ship. If they’re equal sized, then you get the full bonus, else only a fraction.

The bonuses add up where the maximum one would be used if you use all sides with equal stabilizer groups.


Max bonuses:

1 stabilizer side used: -> normal efficiency at 100% of regular distance

2 stabilizer sides used: -> normal efficiency at 50% of regular distance

3 stabilizer sides used: -> normal efficiency at 33% of regular distance

4 stabilizer sides used: -> normal efficiency at 26% of regular distance

5 stabilizer sides used: -> normal efficiency at 22% of regular distance

6 stabilizer sides used: -> normal efficiency at 20% of regular distance

This will not mean that a cube ship will be able to place stabilizers at 1/6th of the distance when using all 6 sides for bonus, but you will be able to place them a lot closer to make that shape comparable with a long ship in terms of efficiency, and therefore viable. The same goes for any other basic shape.


The examples below normally require 100 meters distance between the reactor and the stabilizers. All 3 examples have the same stabilization and regeneration.


1 group of 200 stabilizers at 100 meters.




2 groups of 100 stabilizers at 50 meters.




4 groups of 50 stabilizers at ~25 meters.






The bonus system works on fixed axis for simplicity. However, it is possible to modify this axis freely. There is a new tab “Reactor” in the advanced build mode, which lets you do that. These are also applied and saved by individual reactor.

You are only required to modify it if your stabilizer groups are in the “corners”, as then the game can’t really decide to which dimension it belongs to.

• Fixed a bug that would fill up VRAM slowly (causing fps drops)
  
• Added a system to search an entity by block type. Select a block in the dropdown in “Selection” in advanced build mode and hit the “highlight” button. All blocks of that type will be highlighted, which will help a lot when refitting ships
  
• Turret aiming left click will now focus fire (like beams) if your cursor is on a structure. Right click will be unfocused fire.
  
• AI now prefers to aim on reactors, chambers and stabilizers (will use the scanning system in the future)
  
• Fixed several crashes
  
• Fixed some chunks not being editable anymore
  
• Fixed some ships not loading due to memory optimization using compressed chunks
  
• Fixed warp-gates not loading due to data discrepancy
  
• Fixed sector import failing with certain entities
  
• Fixed reactor HP removal on block destruction issue
  
• Fixed reactor overcapacity issue
  
• Fixed energy stream not always disappearing
  
• Fixed old blocks still appearing in factories (set deprecated to false to bring those back)
  
• Fixed RHP not deducting correctly on integrity explosions
  
• Overdrive, Ion, Piercing and EMP Effects are disabled now as they don’t work fully and will be replaced in the weapons update.
  

Work is continuing on the weapon update. There will be some news soon amongst other things on new mechanics making armor a lot more viable.


Thanks for playing StarMade,

~ The Schine Team

Greeting, Citizens ~

The power update has been finally released.




If you kept track with our last few dev blogs, you will already know how the majority of it works. We did change some features along the way to resolve the issues that were brought up and it might not be a bad idea to go through it once again.

There is an all new power system in this build. Old ships are still loadable and fully usable but the old power and its related blocks are disabled in shops, creative mode and factories. They can be re-enabled in the block editor if needed (set inShop to true) or you can still access them through the admin command /give “player_name” “block_name” if you’re an admin or in single player.

There is an option in the ServerConfig to completely disable the old power system should a server admin want that. It’s advised to not switch from allowed to disallowed and back again constantly though.

If old power is allowed, the system will detect which version to use based on the structure’s root entity (mothership, station or planet) and check if that has any old power blocks. All structures will be counted as “new” power until you place down an old power block at which point they will convert to the old system.

Anything that still uses the old power blocks, will stay like that till the very last old power block is removed. Make sure to clean out your old power before adding the new power components to your ship.


The main motivation to update the power system comes from a few basic issues that the old power system has.

• 
  Scaling of power versus the surface area of ships
  
• Filling ships with power and systems is almost impossible to change afterwards without tearing it down completely
  
• 
  Additions of bigger features was hard on existing system
  
• Consumption model was not consistent and didn’t scale well in terms of balance.
  
• Implementation based on partly outdated code
  
• Exploits to abuse power system mechanics
  

There is a lot more in this update than just the power system itself. Additionally, a change of this system allowed for a massive code overhaul of some very fundamental systems. Not only will that reduce bugs, it will also speed up the process of finding any remaining issues, as well as adding new features a lot faster, easier and streamlined.

Consider this update as a way to prepare the game to enter a phase of rapid development. A lot of foundation had to be made so that adding new stuff wouldn’t cause a problem in the end. While we could have skipped this step, it would have probably cost more time after just adding new features, so we went for the option to fix the foundations first, and then add new stuff, as well as finish other incomplete features.



The new power system is relatively simple but has a lot of depth if you are going for optimal building. However, it can be difficult if you build ships with the old power system in mind and expect similar results. Ships will perform similar as before, yet power regeneration and consumption values were changed drastically and simply can’t be compared easily with the old power system.

Our main goal was to make the power reactor components smaller, making sure that anything that uses power is also kept at a relatively small size.

The only way that this is possible, is if there isn’t a reason to fill up a ship with it. We went through a lot of iterations like restrictions compared to dimensions as well as mass, but all of these had major problems that would enable players to just circumvent the restrictions and fill a ship with systems regardless. Our system should be working with as few special cases as possible.


The system we went for is a combination of two blocks:

• The Main reactor block
  
• The Stabilizer block
  

The idea is that a reactor needs to be stabilized beyond a certain value to function properly and that the stabilizer blocks have to be a sufficient enough distance away of the main reactor to be effective. That distance is measured from the stabilizer block to the approximate shape of the main reactor.

The bigger the reactor, the more stabilizers you need and the further away from the reactor they need to be. This puts a minimum span on each reactor size, ensuring that a ship cannot be filled up with reactors entirely.

You get 10 blocks worth of free stabilization for any reactor, so that really small reactors don’t need any stabilization blocks to function. Small ships can be a little bit more compact, as you also need to protect 1 less vital component on your ship.

A reactor is fully operational with a stabilization of 25%, however there is a risk to that. A stabilization below 100% will cause the reactor to suffer from damage penalties. From very little at around 99% up to three times damage taken from all weapons at 0%. The concept of building with low stability is very risky but can of course have high rewards.


Additionally, there is a non-physical connection between your stabilizers and your reactor. A stream can be hit by any weapon projectile, and apply a temporary power regeneration nerf to the reactor. The duration of this nerf depends on the amount of damage that passes through the stream. Protecting these streams is just as important as protecting your reactor and stabilizer components, not only from enemy ship fire, but also from boarding parties.

A stream’s path can be bent and redirected with one or more Stream Node blocks. These blocks can be connected to each other to build a custom path by linking with C + V. Any stabilizer group will connect to the closest Stream Node and follow its path back to the active reactor.




Another important goal was to update and make power consumption more consistent. All power consumers now consume power over time and not instantly on use. This means that there is no instant power drop, and significantly reduces the need to have large amounts of power in storage.

All weapons now consume power when reloading. They also require a lower amount of power per second to keep themselves loaded, as they lose charge over time. If you can’t provide enough power to reload, the weapon will just reload a bit slower. It will only appear discharging if you cannot provide the lower “resting charge”. This means that you can now build weapons far bigger than your reactor technically supports, which will make for some interesting gameplay decisions.

Usable modules like thrusters will, like the old system, only consume power when in use. Some modules that are only active for a certain duration, only require power to charge it up and none when it’s active.


Additionally to this new consumption system, you can now also customize the priority in which power is consumed. You prefer being able to fly and having shields over your weapons recharging? You can set that now by just dragging your preferred priorities in the new power reactor panel.


One major problem of the old system was the way it handled rails and system inheritance. This is now streamlined and pretty straight forward: Only the mother ship’s reactor can be active. Its docks and turrets are also part of the priority list so you can make sure that your turrets always get power if you want, or you can prevent them to consume so much power that you cannot maneuver anymore. A docked ship’s reactor will go back online once it undocks.


Chambers are an all new feature that will help specialize your ship for certain tasks. All stand-alone effects, all “one-block” functionality and some “one-group” systems have been incorporated into this system. Effect blocks can still be used as-is in combination with weapons, however it would be advisable to not use them too much as they will change within the weapons update. (more information will follow shortly)

The chamber system can be understood as a physical skill tree that is on your ship or station. As an example, while a weak version of the jump drive is now available by default, you can use the chamber system to make it possibly stronger and suit your needs. You can reduce its power consumption, increase its recharge speed, change functionality such as allowing it to hold multiple charges at the same time, etc. Each change, represents a node in the tree and which parts you want is up to you.

Other chambers now include cloaking and jamming. There is also now a way to set artificial gravity, as well as set warp gates to an arbitrary position in reach, that doesn’t even have to have a warp gate on the other end.

To build chambers, you have to place down the basic chamber type and connect it to your main reactor through a chain of touching Reactor Conduit blocks. After that you can select a specification in the Reactor panel or simply press ‘R’ on any reactor component to bring you to that menu. In there you can see how your chambers are currently connected with each other. You can specify what each chamber does.

Adding additional blocks to an already specified chamber will automatically increase that chamber’s size. The minimum size requirement for chambers to function, depends on the size of the reactor.

All of this system is based on a new feature we call the “Effect Config System”. The ECS was implemented to allow for any effect on an entity from any source. At the moment, the only source used is a ship’s own chamber tree, but in the future this system will be used for several other things, including changing sector/system/region conditions depending on where you are in the galaxy (for example nebulae disabling all sensors, etc).

We also implemented an easy to use GUI to mod it, as well as insured that it is very scalable as it syncs between client and server with only a few parameters.




Multiple reactors are possible and encouraged as not only do they provide a fail safe system, they also enable ships to carry multiple sets of chamber trees and of different sizes. Stabilizers can be reused for multiple reactors, but keep in mind that the stabilization distance is calculated based on the biggest reactor.

Switching reactors can be done in the reactor panel. A switch is instantaneous but there is a cooldown to switch again afterwards.

One major advantage of multiple reactors is also, that only an active reactor can be scanned.


A ship’s HP is now determined by the active reactor and its chambers. Reactor HP is tracked for each reactor separately, but only the active one applies for your ship’s health. The reactor tree is consistent and keeps tracks of which blocks have been damaged. If your Reactor HP ends up too low (
You can chose the reset the HP to their new maximum to stop overheating, but you only do that out of battle as any damage will reset the timer. This consistency will also eventually lead to a repair mechanism that can replace destroyed reactor blocks.


Shields were always a big pain to balance out especially when rails came out, as they always covered the whole ship, no matter where the shields were placed or where the ship parts were located. This, paired with no extra power cost with capacity increases, not only encouraged players to excessively use shield capacity blocks, but it also enabled far away “islands” to be fully shielded, something that has much more of an impact with the new power system. Shield sharing within rails also was the cause of major exploits and confusion when building ships.

Shields no longer apply on your entire ship through inheriting. Now each shield recharger group has its own radius that it will shield blocks from damage. Any shield capacity group within this shield bubble, will auto link to that recharger group and provide it shield HP.

The radius of a shield recharger group, depends on its size.

You’re able to have more than one of these shield groups on your ship as each one has its own recharge and shield HP, allowing you distribute its strength to different parts of your ship and in different proportions. These spheres can overlap partially, but as soon as the recharge group (the center of a sphere) is placed within the influence of another sphere, it will disable itself. If a block that is within the radius of multiple shields is taking damage, each shield will receive the damage.



Stealth vs Recon System

This new system is incorporated in the chamber system. You can setup your chambers to gain stealth/recon strength. When your scanner or stealth drive is active, this strength is applied to your ship or structure.

The system compares your current scan strength with all nearby entities (and vice versa for stealth strength -> scan strength). Depending on the difference between you and a target, you’ll get different results. If your scan strength vastly outweighs the target’s stealth strength, you see every bit of information possible and also counter all of the target’s active stealth drive effects. Cloaker and jammer are now addons for the stealth drive, so these can be countered by scanners still provided your scan strength is high enough.

• To counter Jamming, your ship needs an equal amount of recon strength than the other ship’s stealth strength
  
• To counter Cloak, your ship needs 1 recon strength less than the other ship’s stealth strength.
  
• For scanning weapons, your ship needs 1 recon strength more than the other ship’s stealth strength
  
• For scanning chambers, your ship needs 1 recon strength more than the other ship’s stealth strength
  
• For scanning reactors, your ship needs 2 recon strength more than the other ship’s stealth strength
  

Unrelated to power, to combat general exploitation of shapes of systems, a new mechanic has been introduced: integrity.

Essentially, if a group of modules is below a certain density, it will receive additional damage when being hit. Generally this will not affect most builds, as long as there are no overly long lines or giant plates of systems being built.

For each group of systems, there’s a starting value of 200 integrity which will go up or down depending on how many blocks each block touches within that group. The penalty only applies if your integrity goes below 0, so small ships generally don’t have to worry about it at all.

• Touches 0 blocks: - 10 integrity
  
• Touches 1 blocks: - 8.5 integrity
  
• Touches 2 blocks: - 7 integrity
  
• Touches 3 blocks: - 4 integrity
  
• Touches 4 blocks: - 2 integrity
  
• Touches 5 blocks: + 0.5 integrity
  
• Touches 6 blocks: + 2 integrity
  

The integrity mechanic applies to all usable systems, but not hull.

There are a few special groups worth mentioning:

• Thrusters will be considered as the same group, they all share the same integrity value.
  
• Stabilizers group if close enough, get combined into a single group. This can easily be seen when looking at their outline in build mode with a stabilizer block selected in the hotbar.
  
• Shield integrity will take the lowest integrity of both rechargers and capacitors within a shield radius. A shield with low integrity will also receive damage on a shield hit, which means that this is the only module where integrity is an absolute necessity.
  

There was a large amount of GUI items to add for the new power system, along the way we’ve changed other ones too:

• 
  All new build information panel
  
• New power reactor panel
  
• Font sizes have been adapted to be more readable at higher resolutions
  
• GUI drawing optimizations
  
• Effect Config System GUI
  
• Several help and information bits based on context
  
• Updates to chat (more to come in weapons update)
  
• Several message popup fixes
  
• Right click on brush size scrollbar resets it
  
• A faction member’s position can now be set as waypoint in the faction member list
  
• C+V on remote logic (was already in but we missed mentioning it)
  
• The infographics you see in this post are available in the game as a quick reference in the top left corner when building a ship.
  

The information panel you see in build mode has been updated to be more dynamic, and to be less in your way. Each section gives you information of a specific system and can be minimized, allowing you to customize the amount of info you see on screen. The entire panel can be minimized too if needed.

Any large value that doesn’t fit will display as a tooltip if you hover over it.

This panel also has more functionality tied to it, such as faction module options and AI options.


Even if set to “none”, you will still a few power related ones in build mode as they are need to know information and doesn’t get in the way either as it depends on the block you’re looking at, and the one you have selected on your hotbar.


Turrets have now the option to be manually controlled. To do that, just set the checkbox in the bobby AI panel. Then you can assign the control for all manually controlled turrets on the hotbar of your mothership. As long as the icon isn’t selected on the hotbar, the turret will be using normal AI targeting. If it is selected it will switch to manual aiming. Additionally, using right shift to look around when manual turret aiming is selected will enable you to aim in all directions (right shift will be the old normal behavior if manual turret aiming isn’t selected).


A new block has been added that enables you to build hovercrafts and other contraptions. This block essentially works like a directional magnet that always pushes yourself away. This block is based on the physics system, so you will have to find the right balance for your ship. There are some options in the Thruster configuration for it, too.



You can now put individual limits on how much a storage can pull of each item and how much a factory can produce. This should make managing factories and inventories a lot easier. Keep in mind that factories will also pull enough resources for one extra production step.



Since StarMade’s graphics config in its development state is a bit hard to manage, we added simple config presets for all kind of systems. All old options have been moved into an advanced config tab and can be accessed and set as they could before.



A large amount of config values were added to the blockBehaviorConfg and effectConfig, giving you the ability to modify and change system values completely. This is not only to enable basic modding, but also for us to explore and experiment with different setups in the game.


Several optimization have been made to different parts of the game.

• Sped up general chunk loading by streamlining client requests
  
• Sped up module group calculations by avoiding unnecessary runs
  
• Reduced general RAM usage of ships, stations and asteroids by using dynamic chunk compression.
  
• Fixed several memory leaks
  
• Optimized RAM usage in several other places
  
• General drawing optimizations
  
• Several bottlenecks removed
  
• Reduced VRAM being used considerably by overhauling frame buffers.
  
• Fixed and reduced VRAM usage for antialiasing.
  
• Fixes for 4k resolutions
  
• Beam drawing optimizations
  
• Several block editing optimizations
  
• Networking optimization
  
• Use of advanced graphics card functions for cards that support it
  
• Faster debris handling
  

Planets have been made smaller by default to not have them impact performance until they are replaced completely.

• Fixed building while flying at high speed
  
• Fixed normal mapping tangent space
  
• Fixed many small fixes for textures
  
• Fixed several crashes (without issue attached)
  
• : Weapon output added to HUD context
  
• : Added safety checks for removal of an in-use inventory, warpgate with set destination, faction module and shop module
  
• : Fixed sounds not playing after 5 plays.
  

• Tutorial videos are not up to date yet. Update video will follow shortly.
  
• NPC Assets are not using power 2.0 yet, will be converted along the way.
  
• Lighting bug on some sprites and girder
  
• Long range scanner not functional yet (placeholder for universe update, will be temporarily serving as the scanning module of the old version)
  
• Sensor block currently doesn’t function with the reactor. To fix it will probably be sensing the current consumption versus recharge percentage.
  

Exploits or any other method of abusing mechanics can also be reported here, as bug tasks are private on creation.



Now that everyone is able to use Power 2.0 in a state that it’s supposed to be, we’ll continue to tweak it when balance or mechanical issues arise.

While the QA team keeps a watchful eye, the rest of us will work on the next update to revamp Weapons and possibly some support tools.

Thanks for playing StarMade,
~ The Schine Team

Information on our weapons update can be found near the bottom of our news post here: http://www.star-made.org/news/starmade-v0-200-311-power-2-0

This is not a full release, this is a release we believe to be ready, but still needs public exposure for testing. Pre-builds are after development builds, but before a release build. You can learn more about our release cycles here: https://starmadedock.net/threads/starmade-release-cycle-news-posts.28895/

Greetings citizens, ~

Finally, we’ve reached the point where we enter a pre-release state. This means that all the needed features are in, and preliminary bug fixing is done. There will still be issues, and while it should run fine, we strongly advise to backup your universe or try it out on a separate installation. It can be downloaded and installed from the Pre branch.

With more exposure, it will be easier to find those less critical issues and ensure stability before we can release it to everyone to use.

If you come across anything new that doesn’t work or you believe you’ve located a new bug, report that here to help us out: Report a Bug (Release Candidate)

If you’re not too sure about it, feel free to contact @Lancake in a private conversation, or leave a comment on this thread.

While we wait for people to try it out and report issues, we’ll continue building on features for the update after this.

---

What follows, is a quick overview of what’s new compared to release. We’ll make a more in-depth version for the actual release.


A quick overview of major features and changes:

• adapted font size to be readable
  
• new structure build info panel
  
• more context based information
  
• HUD context filters: all, most, some, crucial only, none. Crucial only is advised for experienced players.
  
• right click reset brush size
  
• removal prompt for storage/faction/shops/shipyards/warp gates in use
  
• setting waypoint to faction members from within members list
  
• shift click hotbar remove for creative mode + keybinding creative mode (if allowed)
  
• catalog blocks menu has a toggle to show resource cost
  
• chat GUI update (more coming in next update)
  
• reactor GUI, graphics and block textures
  

• new module use system (faster and a lot less error prone)
  
• new power consumption model (faster and less error prone)
  
• fixed major memory leak for servers
  
• fixed framebuffer VRAM usage
  
• reduced general VRAM usage (by more than half depending on Anti-Aliasing)
  
• network optimizations
  
• gui drawing optimization
  
• beam optimizations (more than double performance)
  
• several memory allocation optimizations
  
• normal mapping tangent space fix
  
• general chunk loading and validation optimizations (vastly reduced amount of calls)
  
• several block editing optimizations
  
• several group speed calculation optimizations
  
• optimization for chunk request queuing
  
• grouping calculation cancelling to increase performance and responsiveness during battle
  
• combined-module power consumption processing optimization
  
• usage of some more advanced shader functions for graphics cards that support it
  
• faster debris handling
  

• new power system
  
• new power balance
  
• chamber system
  
• effect system
  
• effect functionality (~130 effects for entities)
  
• structural integrity
  
• new shield system
  
• recon vs stealth system
  
• factory production cap
  
• storage pull limits
  
• manual turret aiming
  
• graphic presets for simpler option management
  
• repulsors
  
• new HP system
  
• reworked overheating conditions
  

• several menu fixes
  
• server message fixes
  
• fixed placing blocks when the ship is moving
  
• several other bugfixes
  

As you can see, a lot of optimization was done so make sure keep your eye out for graphical glitches, block grouping bugs and block destruction issues. In case you’re interested to see which issues occurred in the past, this task https://phab.starma.de/T2720 holds a link to many of them. It can give you clues about any other issues that were missed.

Also, keep in mind that we’re working on the weapon update too, the current offensive effects are not fully supported as some will be changed or removed only a few weeks after. The combination system will stay, but the combinations themselves can change drastically.

We’ll make sure to post a dev blog about weapons specifically after the next public release.



Please keep in mind that all config values are not 100% final yet. In case you encounter any oddities where specific mechanics are too strong or weak, please mention those and make sure to include a blueprint of the ship or structure where that is clearly the case.

There is an all new power system in this build. Old ships are still loadable and fully usable, but the old power and its related blocks are disabled in shops, creative mode and factories. They can be re-enabled in the block editor if needed (set inShop to true) or you can still access them through the admin command /give “player_name” “block_name” if you’re an admin, or in single player.

There is an option in the ServerConfig to completely disable the old power system should a server admin want that. However, once a universe is started with the old power disabled, this option cannot be reverted, as that would lead to incompatibilities with the Structure and Reactor HP system and can lead to overheating of many structures.

If old power is allowed, the system will detect which version to use based on the structure’s root entity (mothership, station or planet) and check if that has any old power blocks. All structures will be counted as “new” power until you place down an old power block at which point they will convert to the old system.

This is mainly for game worlds to be fully functional and for players to get accustomed to the new system without rendering all their creations suddenly completely non-functional.



This system makes ships work a lot differently. All ships made in the old power system, will not translate well into the new system. Simply swapping out the old power blocks with new ones does not make that ship functional again. Instead, we advise you to remove all power blocks, shields, thrusters and usables to start from a clean slate.

The best way to keep track of your power is to check the detailed power consumption in your reactor panel frequently (‘insert key’ by default, or use the radial menu with tab, or press ‘activate’ key when looking at a reactor block)

On the surface, the new system is really simple. You have your main reactor blocks which add power recharge to your ship; only a single reactor group is active at any given time. Power capacity itself is fixed and low, as all weapons and systems use power over time.

Weapons need a minimal amount of power to function, and require a lot more while they’re reloading. If you don’t have enough recharge, it will simply charge it slower.

Other systems such as thrusters and jump drives, only use power when they’re in use.

If your reactor group is small enough ( < 10 blocks), they work just fine on their own. You don’t need any additional blocks to make them function.
However, larger reactors have deteriorating stability. They will not gain power recharge unless you fix their stability. For that, you need to place down stabilizer blocks. These blocks will work at most ranges, but to be efficient, they need to be placed a certain distance or further from your reactor. This distance increases with your reactor size, so make sure to keep an eye out for your stabilization when adjusting its size. The hud context in build mode will tell you exactly what that distance is and indicate the efficiency of your stabilizers; it also shows additional information based on what you’re using.
While reactors have to be built grouped, stabilizers can be built distributed anywhere on your ship. If you have other inactive reactor groups, then all stabilizers look to the biggest reactor, and their resulting stabilization will be used.

You can also build multiple reactors and switch between them. A reactor switch is instantaneous, but there is a cooldown to switch again, and it also takes time for chambers to become active.



As said, all modules now consume power over time. Additionally. You now have full control over what is going to be consumed first. Open the reactor panel (‘insert key’ default, or use the radial menu with tab), and you can prioritize certain systems. This means that they will get power first in case your total power consumption is above 100%. So if you prefer your shields and thrusters to work over your giant cannon, you can do that now. It also regulates power that goes into your docks or turrets, giving you more control over their power consumption.

Most systems have a linear power consumption increase that depends on the group size. The few systems that have no group size, instead of scale with the mass of your ship.



Docked reactors will switch off on docking and all power needed is drawn from the mothership. This means that turrets cannot have any power reactors on their own when docked. We will change the behavior a bit more in the weapon update to increase performance in battle and to add more versatility to docks and turrets.

Ships now use reactor HP, which is based on the active reactor and the chambers connected to it. If you use multiple reactors, you can switch to a backup before your current reactor ends up overheating. As for the overheat mechanics, they’re similar to what you’ve known with structure HP, but each reactor tracks its own HP.
Reactors can only be scanned when they are active, so having a backup in another part of the ship can greatly increase survivability.



Chambers are an all new feature to customize your ship with. We added over 100 different effects that you can activate with chambers. For this, an all new effect system was implemented to enable fast and save management over network.

Chambers can be imagined as a skill tree. Each reactor only has a limited chamber capacity which chambers consume based on their type and level.

The difference to other skill trees is that here, you are physically building the tree yourself. You need to connect groups of chamber blocks with reactor conduits to the main reactor or each other. Then you can open the reactor panel (‘insert key’ default, or use the radial menu with tab) and specify what exactly you want in your tree. The possible options will adapt based on what you build.

There are eight general chambers currently:

• Defense
  
• FTL
  
• Logistics
  
• Mass
  
• Mobility
  
• Power
  
• Recon
  
• Stealth
  

Some functionality is now available by default, like the jump drive and the scanner. Chambers can be used to make these a lot more powerful.



Each ship now has a recon strength and stealth strength only if the respective scan/stealth drives are active. The more recon you have over an enemy ship’s stealth strength, the more information you get about that ship. This ranges from simply seeing a cloaked ship to being able to see a ship’s reactor and weapons fully outlined. For the weapon update we plan to add more to it and tweak it were needed.

Respectively, to cloak or radar jam you need a higher stealth strength than the other ship’s recon strength.



Shields have been reworked into local shields. They now have a radius and only cover the blocks within. This includes docks. Only shields on the mothership will work to prevent abuse and maximize performance. The radius and recharge is based on the main recharger group, and so is its power consumption. The origin of the radius is the center of mass of that group and its capacity is determined from all shield capacity groups that are within the radius (up to 20 groups max). If a local shield radius falls into another recharger group, only the bigger recharger group will stay active. Shield damage that falls into blocks covered by multiple local shields will do damage to all of them.

While adding an interesting mechanic, this system is mainly to avoid building ships in ‘islands’ that are very far apart as you would need multiple groups to cover them, making it more expensive and power intensive to maintain the same shield HP for each of them than you would get if it was a single more concentrated shield group.



This is a measure to prevent exploiting certain system shapes without constricting free building too much.

This mechanic will likely not be relevant for most builders. It is to prevent building ships that are too spaced out, mainly abusing line patterns. Most systems will now have an integrity value. This values starts fairly high and is modified based on how the group is built. If any block does not touch enough other blocks of that group, it will lose integrity. If it touches enough (up to 6 max), it will gain integrity. It can be set to scale differently in the config, allowing us to make sure normal builds do not get affected. This means while single lines are now impossible to build while maintaining a positive integrity rating, anything “dense” enough is still ok.

Thrusters count their integrity all in one, meaning that a checkerboard pattern will be the fastest way to lose it.

Shield integrity is based on the lowest integrity of the rechargers and capacity groups within that local shield.

For weapons and other computer + modules, it’s a separate integrity value for each group although this will be tweaked in the weapons update.

If integrity of a system is below zero, hitting that system will cause additional explosions across all groups of that same system. If a shielded ship with negative shield integrity is hit within its shield radius, the same will apply to the shield recharge groups and its capacity banks.



This new block enables you to hover a certain distance away from anything physical. They act as an output for your onboard thrust, and require you to distribute an amount of thrust to them in the thrust configuration menu. They work well in any gravity field and when balanced right, allows you to hover any entity.



Turrets can now be set to manual aiming. They will then automatically try to align themselves with where the pilot of the mothership is looking at. This includes looking around while using right shift (or double tapping right shift to make it sticky). You can of course also fire your turrets in this mode with the new usable in your .



Factories can now be set to limit production. The factory will also stop pulling resources when that happens, only keeping enough in storage for one extra production step.

Additionally, storage blocks can now be set to limit the amount of blocks to store per type, to stop pulling once that is reached.

We will continue work on refining the GUI and fix issues/exploits that come up that need fixing for an actual release. Some content such as the tutorial videos and block descriptions are still being worked on, but will be available on the actual release.

The weapon update is next and is going to bring more balance and exciting additions to the system. We’ll be making a dev blog about most of its content


Thanks to everyone helping us and thanks for playing StarMade,

- The Schine Team

Greetings citizens, ~


As a lot of you probably know, we are in the process of refining and testing the power update. Dev builds are released almost daily and things are coming together nicely.


We have no intention to rush the release as a large amount of existing systems need to be tested multiple times. While waiting on test results, development can already continue on parts of the future weapon update. Most of its mechanics will already be done by the time the power update is out and should make it likely to release both updates within this year. We definitely want to start to work on the universe update in 2017 still, and we are excited to share the details with you right after the weapon update release.


Within all of those updates, we will also continue working on stability and performance, especially further work to remove lag spikes or loading issues, including improvements to planet sectors. For now, we’ve reduced the default planet size further to decrease their impact on servers as an interim solution till they get replaced.



The new power system will be able to run alongside the old power. This means that ships spawned from blueprints will still be usable. However, the old power blocks cannot be crafted or bought in shops unless the server owner reactivates them, building new ships with old power is therefore discouraged, but of course not disabled. As both old and new power can co-exist, we’ve altered the config system to support multiple styles of the same value for system balancing. This should help to make the transition as smooth as possible.


A ship will be considered new power by default until an old power block is placed, in which case it would revert to the old power system, including structure hp and shields.

Having the old system run alongside the new one of course added a bit of workload, but we think it is worth it to be able to compare both types in-game, showcasing the differences for any player.


In addition to a new power system, several other features and changes were made along the way, which will, along with all the nuances of the new power system, be described in more detail in the coming pre-release news.


A quick outline of those features besides the power system, and the chambers is:


~ Config manager system: Can be used to attach properties to any entities (e.g. sector with more damage)

~ Repulse Block: can be used to construct hover structures

~ Reactor GUI with graph view

~ Normal map tangent space fix

~ Updated HP system

~ Block ID cleanup

~ Some updates and fixes for the Block Editor UI

~ Multiple values per blockbehavior config value

~ Turret aim mode: manually aim turrets from your mothership

~ Rewritten structure information in build mode with quick access to a lot of functions (faction, renaming, docking, AI)

~ Local shields: rewritten shield system to cover a radius rather than global to balance shield coverage between multiple docked entities

~ Stealth/Recon: New system for players to hide or gain information about their opponent

~ New warp interdiction system

~ New ship jumping system

~ Highlighting feature of any system (for recon)

~ Stability update: completely rewritten design for usable systems in entities

~ New undocking behavior

~ New dock sharing behavior

~ General GUI improvements and fixes

~ GUI updates in preparation of a scaling system

~ Refined debris creation to not be laggy in hotspots

~ Extra safety checks for block removal (storage block, shipyard, faction module,...)

~ Updated context help, ability to filter (all, most, crucial only, none)

~ Beam shader change and fix for beam sprite rotation.

~ Ability to save and load inventory hotbar layouts

~ Several fixes for bugs and bottlenecks



If you want to check out our latest dev build. Make sure to do so on a fresh installation, or make sure you’ve got a backup of your worlds to fall back on.



Thanks for playing StarMade,

- The Schine Team