What changed in Star Traders: Frontiers this year?
We celebrated the 3-year anniversary of Star Trader’s launch this year; what a ride it’s been! Although we’ve been deep in dev work on our upcoming heist RPG, Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, we’ve still produced 38 (so far) updates to Star Traders: Frontiers this year, including one of the largest post-launch additions to a game we’ve ever made: mod support!
To help you make sure you haven’t missed anything, we’ve rounded up all the most notable changes & improvements into the summary below. We did the same last year, so if you’re coming back to Star Traders after a long break, we hope these will be helpful as you get ready for a new journey through the stars.
[h2]1) New expansions & improvements to game systems.[/h2]
New default map! Since we added the new v2 map generator last year (allowing the creation of better-balanced, more unique, and much larger custom galaxy maps), we were on the hunt for a new default map to take advantage of the same benefits. Thanks to everyone who pitched in to help us find the perfect map seed!
The new default has 10 more quadrants than the original. We’ve also since made it so all "local" starting Contacts are always placed in your starting quadrant, even if there are 2 to a zone. And if you’ve starred a zone with a color, that now appears on the quadrant map.
New story vignette! Fractured Factions has a chance to begin after the Coalition, when landing on any Cadar world, from contact Felix Slayer Na’Zee. Through the multiple endings you stand to make powerful enemies, allies, and gain access to multiple powerful ship components and/or a unique crew weapon. Even with the factions supposedly united, the balance of power is in constant shift...
Economic & recruitment rumors are now for sale from many contact types. And now, all rumors that are purchased from a contact—most notably, salvage rumors—get a bonus to their duration to prevent any from ever expiring right after you purchased it.
We rebalanced many trade systems—increased rare trade goods demand in many zone types, made $5,000+ trades during economic faction conflicts now impact the conflict score, altered the smuggler talent “slippery trader” to entirely avoid Rep loss in trade conflicts, and rebalanced the supply/demand/prices of multiple goods.
Plus:
- 2 new mission types: "Nomadic Defender" & "Mercantile Negotiation"
- More profitable ship salvage 💥 & ransom 💰 options.
- Legendary Bounty Hunters are far more likely to appear and chase you down once you make enemies
- New operations card art
- 30 new crew barks with lore about factions, jobs, and planets
[h2]2) Even more options for your crew.[/h2]
New crew jobs: Shock Trooper & Saboteur. The Saboteur provides many useful boarding talents, plus a mix of stealth talents and pistol abilities. The Shock Trooper brings a wealth of new combat talents to the table with a strong emphasis on frontline snubber-wielding. Also available as a starting profession for your captain, with traits that grant ship & crew combat bonuses.
All factions now provide an affinity bonus for at least one crew job: We started this last year with the Blade Dancer, renowned for their long tradition among the Steel Song. Now, every faction has at least one crew job in which its members have exceptional training or suitability. Crew members recruited from that faction, with that job, have special attribute bonuses—Cadar Shock Troopers, Zenrin Bodyguards, Alta Mesa Wing Leaders and more!
Rebalanced bleeding rules & snubbers. Any bleeding damage you’ve dealt an enemy is now applied every time they act. All bleeding effects and things that grant bleed resist were rebalanced. Meanwhile, snubbers have all been rebalanced to trade some of their Accuracy for Parry, making them superior “up-front” weapons.
Better auto-training for the early game. For new playthroughs, auto-training your crew members now prioritizes skill-save talents to ensure you reach a safe baseline of ship operation before expanding into more combat abilities / bonus-providing talents.
And more!:
- More customization options! 2 outfits, 16 new faces, 3 new beards, new flight helmet hat.
- New "Traits + Gear" section on crew member detail screens, summarizing all effects
- 7 new ultra rare level 10 Relic Weapons
- 4 new level 5 Gear for sale (2 Mil, 2 Specialist)—defensive, offensive, Attribute boosters
- New Diplomat Talent "Vindication Pact," reduces price of Pardons
- Improved Merchant's Talent "Garner Favor" to give even better Rep bonuses
[h2]3) New starship combat rules, components, and rebalances.[/h2]
Many tweaks to small craft (and their counters), plus new plasma bombers. The ability to build or encounter ships that launch starfighters becomes a big deal in ST:F’s late game, and we’ve continued to make additions and improvements to that experience. This year we’ve:
- added 3 new PlasBombers with massive radiation-damage weapons to help cripple enemy ships instead of cracking hulls
- increased the damage of all craft bomb & rocket weapons
- boosted the chance-to-hit-craft for all Autocannons for better close-in defenses
- added a new ship: Dreadnought Battlecarrier
- reduced Maintenance Cost for Class 1 and Class 2 Small Craft
- increased Hull Points for Boarding Shuttle Small Craft at Level 5 and above
- buffed the Battle Prow component with a minor craft defense bonus and added a Tacticians Annex component that grants accuracy/defense against capital ships and craft
Many new components & weapons:
- New type of medium component, Annex to hold one officer and provide specialized bonus related to their class - Warden’s Annex, Tactician’s Annex, Engineer Annex
- Faction-specific components—Rychart Peak Velocity Matrix 4
- Fuel Helix components to increase Engine Safety, reduce Jump cost and add fuel boosts
- New level 8 heavy Railguns for 4 and 3 RP
- New level 8 Autocannon for 1 RP, great at taking down craft
- New level 8 Missile for 3 RP
- 6 new powerful weapon types for high level craft
[h2]4) Quadrantfuls of Quality of Life Improvements[/h2]
Your feedback is always helpful; we hear and respond to almost all of it within the forums and our Discord, and just finished up a player survey to help with next year’s roadmap.
This year Cory & I have been on a streak of finding ways to improve convenience & clarity, within the scope of what we can do post-release. Some notable areas and overall trends we’ve put work into include:
Easier mission planning & map integration - icons for offered missions and accepted missions now appear on the galactic & quadrant maps; you can also now go directly to the galactic map from a contact mission offer. In that mission offer, you’ll now see icons next to each mission segment, indicating if it requires a ship battle, crew battle, exploring, spying, picking up for dropping off a passenger etc. And within your mission list, you can now use filters to show offered missions, and show only narrative missions or local missions.
Better logs - Lots of little tweaks to make it easier to find out more about what’s going on “under the hood” in combat (e.g. radiation & void damage from ship weapons), keep track of events as you sail the void (e.g. how your medical rating is impacting saves), and understand how much impact your talents are having (e.g. repaired components during ship combat).
Clarifications in other key areas—in addition to all the log improvements, we’ve also made Trade Ban warnings much more visible, clarified many components of ship encounters (we’re looking at more ways to improve this still), and reworked mutinies. While mutinies may be a rare event for most captains, we want to make sure if it happens your options and their cost are crystal clear (we also improved the value of anti-mutiny talents while we’re at it).
Save Slot hotkeys - check your hotkey options, as we now offer configurable hotkeys for the 4 save slots available.
[h2]5) We added (and kept adding to) mod support![/h2]
The moddable version will show up as an option whenever you launch the game from within Steam. It gives you access to any mods you’ve “subscribed” to from the Steam Workshop, and automatically grants all of the game’s unlocks.
We’re excited about modding’s potential to add even more content to the game (modders can create their own stories, gear, crew jobs, and more), enable very different gameplay experiences (from near god-mode cheats to small, intimate crews), and give everyone even more customization options (art, maps, and more). We’ve expanded modders’ options in all of those areas since launching mod support in August.
We’ve written more about what modding will and won’t do as we continue to add to its capabilities (depending on the mods you start)! Check out Creating Mods on the Star Traders Wiki, and join the Discord for help, modding requests & discussions, and a great community of Star Traders players.
[h2]2022, here we come![/h2]
Sometime in the new year we’ll give the roadmap an update to share more for the road ahead. In the meantime we do have one major change we’re thinking about that we’d love active players’ input on.
Going on 4 years of Frontiers now, and we still love adding to this game and are glad so many of you still enjoy it (and so many new sci-fi RPG fans are still discovering it!). Special thanks to all who support the continued development of the game through our Patreon, by gifting Steam keys to their friends, by shouting us out on in reddit recommendation threads and YouTube comments, by drinking from your Star Traders mug during Zoom meetings, etc. 😉
Even just leaving / updating your review (and giving a 👍 to others’) is one of the best gifts we can receive as the Steam Winter Sale approaches. Happy holidays, Captains!
