Stationeers News

Everyone is back on the ground after the holidays, and work continues on the major pieces of work we mentioned toward the end of last year - with a couple of additions. As always, we've included a smaller fixes and changes.


Peer-to-peer Multiplayer
We're in the process of refactoring some of the multiplayer code to support peer-to-peer networking, which should prevent many of the issues people were seeing with port forwarding and make the multiplayer system easier for us to work with. This should be available on the beta branch tomorrow.

Pipe & Cable Placement Improvements
We're also adding a quality-of-life feature based on a very old suggestion from Discord - you'll no longer need to remove cables or pipes to add additional connections. eg. A straight cable can be turned into a T junction with the addition of a corner piece, instead of having to remove it and replace it with the variant you want.

Scenario and Incident Expansion
It's not noted in the patch notes below, but there has been a lot of new functionality added to the XML-authored scenario tool-set, allowing scenario authors to create objectives based on the state of an interactable (open a door, close a chest, turn on a machine), pipe pressure, death of an entity, mine a certain number of voxel chunks and many more. We've also introduced EventActions which occur at the beginning and end of a mission stage, this allows mission authors to directly affect the world by spawning in objects, changing object states etc. While these will be available to everyone who wants to author scenarios, we're primarily adding them for use in an expanded tutorial system in the works.

All of this functionality has also been added to the incident system, which is used to script random events that will be added to the game once we've authored some and figured out a nice way to notify the player that they're taking place!

Patch note title image credit goes to UhOhPolio and their creative use of the various cosmetic cladding options available to create this stylish workshop.

• Added a LogicType ForceWrite that, if set to a value above 0, will trigger any LogicWriter to resend its current value.
  
• Added Opacity Toggle Button to the IC Code input window to toggle the transparent background. You'll find it at the top to the left of the help buttons.
  
• Fixed Error message spam when trying to complete a mission with an atmosphere-related objective (such as the hydroponics one in the Mars mission) due to no support for playing UI audio outside the main thread.
  
• Added LogicType and LogicSlotType descriptions to localization system.
  
• Added descriptions for PrefabHash.
  
• Added ability to retrieve object's (and slot object's) PrefabHash.
  
• Added sounds to warn you of appearance of new critical and warning states.
  
• Improved home/end/delete/backspace key behaviour in IC IDE.
  
• Improved voxel generating logics. Generating voxel close to object first.
  
• Changed LogicWriterSwitch saving so that it successfully loads the older version of saves.
  
• Changed side of Sleeper player gets out of from base to side with on/off button.
  
• Optimized terrain generation to reduce stuttering when generating a large number of chunks.
  
• Optimized camera filter effects so that it uses less memory and CPU.
  
• Reduced volume of menu music file to bring it back to the level it's supposed to be at (a recent prior update had removed a volume reduction at some other stage in the chain).
  
• Changed Lists in the Stationpedia from paragraphs to one entry per line for clarity.
  
• Moved the Randomize button in Appearance menu so it doesn't jump around when turning on and off Facial Hair options
  
  
• Fixed tooltip comment on LogicWriterSwitch switch.
  
• Fixed Issue causing the Escape From Mars mission to skip the plant growth task, due to a missing check to ensure a plant had actually grown before seeing if it had grown enough.
  
• Fixed setting ForceWrite on LogicWriters caused a write even if they were turned off.
  
• Fixed setting ForceWrite multiple times within a single tick would cause the value to be written multiple times within a single tick.
  
• Fixed bug preventing ChuteBin from locking.
  
• Fixed Logic Writer devices now no longer resend values on load.
  
• Fixed Jetpack on/off state not persisting through save/load.
  
• Fixed the moving item slot sound from playing to everyone, is now playing locally.
  
• Fixed Bug where when loading settings, if the settings.xml file was present, but empty, it would still attempt to load utilize the contents causing errors. Now if the settings file cannot be loaded completely without errors the game will not attempt to use it.
  
• Fixed issue where jetpack is invisible after dropping it from your InventorySlot.
  
• Fixed player being able to pass through glass top of Sleeper.
  
• Fixed player sometimes colliding with Sleeper when exiting.
  
• Fixed bug that allowed frames to be built over dynamic crates.
  
• Fixed issue where status' sometimes failed to redisplay upon opening a new world.
  
• Fixed notification sounds spamming on game start.
  
• Fixed corpses and unconscious players no longer blink.
  
• Fixed memory leak when initializing game.
  
• Fixed Music Volume slider not setting the volume correctly.
  
• Fixed an issue with UI button hovering sound conflicting with itself.
  
• Fixed Issue with the models for some paint cans not being correctly colored.
  
• Fixed the sound channel displayed in the Audio settings.
  
• Fixed broken button animation for Appearance in Settings
  
• Updated Localization Files (Current 21st Jan)
  

This time last year we were just coming off the back of Early Access release, so where the last post took a look at where we were going, in this one I'd like to take a look at where we've come from.

Here's a summary of the major additions to the game while we've been in early access in the last 12 months. It's hard to even imagine the game without world atmospheres or the logic chip system now, so I can't wait to see what this list looks like at the end of 2019!

• Logic System (followed 6 months later by the programmable IC's)
  
• World Atmospheres
  
• Mars, Europa and systems for planet Variation (day/night temperature curve, solar strength etc)
  
• Hunger Mechanics
  
• Third-person camera
  
• Workshop support for mods and IC code.
  
• Stationpedia
  
• Scenario System
  
• UI Refresh accross the board (menus, server browser, mouse UI, recipe selection, text entry for labeller etc)
  
• Content (Plants, cosmetic cladding, wall types, weapons, planets, clothing/gear, structures)
  
• Massive performance optimizations for terrain, and stuttering in general (with more to come)
  
• And much more...
  

While many of these were things we had already envisioned, one thing we didn't count on was the massive level of support we've received from the community over the year. Stationeers is a challenging game, and teaching people how to interact with all the various systems will be an ongoing battle. The tutorial is on its 4th major iteration and certainly not the last, with a more fleshed-out tutorial campaign being planned for the new year. Personally, the thing I've found most endearing about the community is their willingness to answer questions on Discord, Reddit or the Steam Community board - but this is supplemented by a massive library of tutorials on Youtube. Add to this the team of dedicated individuals providing translations for the game in 14 different languages and thanks to everyones combined efforts the game is accessible to audiences it otherwise wouldn't be.


We would like to take a moment to acknowledge the outstanding work of one particular individual - Discord user Dragon, who took it upon themselves to configure a tool for localization tracking and support. This has provided a useful interface to track localization efforts of the game, giving volunteers a one-stop-shop for translating various pieces of Text from Stationeers into one of the 14 languages currently supported. This work would of course be all for naught if it weren't for the assistance of our dedicated translators. This is not a complete list, just those currently signed up to the tool and those responsible for some of the more recent submissions through the old Discord-based system. Apologies to anyone we've missed!

• Dragon
• EmreAdv
  
• AstralWalker
  
• DemonCZ
  
• Croco
  
• Mekko
  
• socramazibi
  
• semTex.
  
• ShiaNox
  
• Dax
  
• STD
  
• Harpi
  
• lill
  
• Spiike
  
• vikjITA
  
• Mustard
  
• Daedalusxxx
  
• comel11
  
• -Ulitka-
  
• organiq
  
• Bonbon_kocher
  
• Von Meister
  
• samuelcseto
  
• TFlippy
  
• YuanYu
  
• DinhoBRJ
  
• Pip
  

And while on the subject of foreign-language support - A special shout-out is in order for the community of the Unofficial Stationeers French-Language Discord Server and to Tioris (Psi) who sent us this save showing his base ready for the holiday season.



On that note, the studio will be closed for the next few weeks, so we'll see you back in mid-January re-energized and ready to kick off another year of Stationeers development!

• Added logic type support for Pressure, Quantity, Temperature, RatioCarbonDioxide, RatioNitrogen, RationOxygen, RationPollutant, RatioVolatiles, RationWater, and RationNitrousOxide to TankLarge and TankSmall (reporter's credit to SunRazor)
  
• Added a field to display your current system speaker mode found in the settings menu, under Audio.
  
• Added UI audio feedback when moving an item to a hand slot.
  
• Added Voice notifications now play once when enabled in the Audio Settings menu.
  
• Updated Localized Text Dictionaries. (Current 10th December)
  
• Fixed the MainMenu music still playing quietly even when the volume was set to 0.
  
• Fixed command descriptions for the
• al commands on the programmable chip.
  
• Fixed a bug that prevented clients from selecting backwards on logic chips
  
• Fixed Autosave running even on multiplayer clients if autosave settings were changed after you connected.
  
• Fixed bug of players getting stuck on LadderEnd when trying to descend
  
• Fixed un-localized text field in tutorial on powering your spacesuit stage.
  
• Fixed bug that prevented players passing through the gap in the Ladder Platform
  
• Fixed plants yielding between 2 and HarvestYield+1 depending on how they were harvested
  
• Fixed a bug that allowed the player to have a fully grown plant in their hand
  
• Fixed bug in which player getting out of chair would be instantly killed.
  
• Fixed bug which allowed players getting off the top of ladders to clip through objects
  
• Fixed bug that was causing setting input on logic batch writer to freeze game.
  
• Fixed NullReferenceException error on Dedicated servers when trying to play some of the new slot interaction UI audio elements.
  
• Fixed some of the IC chip instruction descriptions (reporters credit to EinBerliner)
  
• Fixed added Plastic Sheets to first locker you find in the Escape From Mars scenario, as the recent addition of manufacturing machine build states had made it unintentionally challenging to progress without them.
  
• Fixed issue with Tutorial caused by a change in how chairs are placed resulting in required suit filter being impossible to pick up.
  
• Tweaked the look of the Tutorial panel to match the new look of the IC Editor help windows
  

Trying something a bit new this week. Normally we structure patches around one-or-two significant new features that have been added to the game. Unfortunately nothing is quite ready to release, but we do have a large number of small improvements, bug fixes and quality of life additions that I think everyone playing on the stable branch will appreciate. So here they are!



We're going through adding functionality to what you can already do with the Communications Motherboard. This is mostly based around finding storage devices on the same data network and collating their contents. This will determine which items are available to trade. The means to transfer goods between yourself and the trade vessel will be pretty 'magical' to start with, but the shuttle landing process will be added after that.



At this point of development it becomes clear what big packages of existing work needs to be reconsidered, because you get a better idea of what is fun in the game, where your performance problems are, and what is actually realistic to achieve. We've identified four key areas that we need to redevelop and are starting work to finish these off. Once these are done, we will have the broad platform in place for the complete game - and then just need to focus on the stuff around it.

Remember these are only intended plans and we go into them considering if they are possible. Where they're not, we will have to change and adapt, dropping what we can't do or what isn't fun. Don't consider these absolutes!

Zero-point Shifting

Our game engine (Unity), like nearly all others, uses "float" precision for "vectors" - vectors are used to position things in the game world. This means that each "number" in the position (x,y,z) has a fixed number of bits in which it can be stored. For a float that number of bits is 32. Each number in the position is effectively stored as two values: the "significand" and the "exponent". The significand store the significant digits of the number up to a fixed amount, and the exponent stores the order of magnitude of the number, also up to a fixed amount. In a float these fixed amounts are 23 and 8 bits respectively. Because a high value of the exponent results in the gap between numbers that the computer can represent becoming larger, the further the number is from zero the less absolute precision it has. The practical result of this is the as you get further from the origin (0,0,0) the physics objects start "shaking" because you don't have enough precision for smooth movement.

The solution to this is to abstract the "meta" position of the object (i.e. the position of it in the game universe) from the "rendered" position of the object (i.e. the position of the object in the game scene). This means when the player gets a certain distance from the origin we move the character back to the origin and adjust the position of everything else so those things keep the same position relative to the player.

In essence, it's a pretty simply thing to do. In practice, because position is handled nearly everywhere, it's quite laborious and fraught with bugs to implement.

What does this allow us to do? This allows us to offer much, much bigger worlds to the players. Allowing them to explore beyond the current limit before things break, which is 5km³. We need this for vehicles such as rovers, drones, air vessels, etc...

Multiplayer Netcode / Object Virtualization

The game sends a lot of data to clients. We're using the early unity version of UNET for networking, with a mix of high level and low level network messaging. Sometimes we have our own serialization of network messages and sometimes we use Unity's helpers to have it do the heavy lifting. This means we have a lot of memory turnover (garbage) and cleaning this up is what causes game stutter every few seconds. Network messages aren't the only source of this, but they're a major contributor. Even when playing alone the game runs as a server and sends messages to itself, so it still contributes to the problem when playing alone.

Unity is releasing a new network package soon, and we'll be evaluating whether to use that, or to abstract out objects completely. This means that, like the zero point shifting above, we might have game objects existing "virtually" in a universe sense as pure data constructs, and only turn them into "game" objects when we need to render them. This means we can have a "pool" of such objects and when we need to draw one, we simply apply the "virtual" objects details to it and plop it in world. This would give tremendous performance improvements, both in memory and in CPU. The result would be quite remarkable. But it's worth considering this is, in fact, a huge amount of work and quite risky.

We can't 100% commit to which option we choose, but at the very least some level of multiplayer refactoring will occur.

What does this allow us to to? Potentially tremendous performance improvement, not just for multiplayer but also for single player if game objects are virtualized. This means better frame rate and order of magnitude amounts of game objects that could be supported.

Session Abstraction

Big words! What does this mean? Simply put, this means cleaning up our quite messy initialization procedures when you start a game. We need to abstract out elements of this and clean it up. By doing this we really open up the door for what "types" of games we can support. Want to replay the same save again and again as a round like SS13? Can do! Want to make a MP deathmatch arena? Sure can! Want to create a coop-mission challenge? Yep that too!

What does this allow us to do? In addition to cleaning up the game setup and removing many pesky connection bugs, this allows us to restart the game while clients are connected, as well as support advanced gameplay modes such as round-based play.

Game-world Migrations

Off the back of the previous work, we want to be able to migrate one game world to another. We actually already have this work mostly done, and we were actually going to support it via migrating to new sessions. This meant four players could migrate to a new session when they wanted to take a mothership somewhere, but the other players in the world could continue. It "mostly" works. But it's really, really complicated. Complicated is bad. If this wasn't a niche game, we'd probably go down this route. But it's a niche game and we have to embrace that. This means we need to go for safe options, ones that we know we can do without over committing and not delivering.

So we're going to dial back that system a bit. You'll be able to take everyone currently playing, get on a vessel, and go to a new world. Using the session abstraction this means:

• Save out what is going to the new world (players on ship, stuff on ship)
  
• Delete everything except player "brains"
  
• Make the new world
  
• Create the stuff we saved out
  
• Start the game
  

Sounds pretty simple right? Once we've done session abstraction, yeah!

What does this allow us to do? Away missions, basically. It allows you to continue game sessions over many worlds. Build a ship, fly it somewhere new, fly back to your old place. The main caveat we're likely to make is requiring everyone in the play session to migrate at once, rather than splitting the session into instances.

So while not a complete road-map, this will hopefully give players a good idea of what we're looking at working towards over the next few months. If you have any questions, hop into Discord!

• Fixed bug that prevented second input on chips being set.
  

• Added new uniform models for when they're un-equipped to replace the original flat box models that they've had since release.
  
• Added 'Appearance' button to the settings screen. This functions the same as the character creation screen that has always been accessible in-game, but sets a preset character that will be used when you create a new world. This will be extended later to work with joining multiplayer games.
  
• Added Localized text (translation) support to the New World screen.
  
• Added Atmospherics Tablet Cartridge can now be used to read the internal atmosphere of another Stationeer's suit. Good for diagnosing unconscious players! Thanks to Sim and Neouni for the suggestion.
  
• Added dimmed backgrounds to all windows and dialog boxes to better prompt the user on what's currently interactable.
  
• Added a define command to the IC that allows programmers to create constant values without using a register.
  
• Added more sounds to UI including the character creation menu.
  
• Added moustache facial hair variants for November.
  
• Added in-game sounds for task, mission and stage completion, adding an object to your hand slot and opening and closing inventory windows.
  
• Added some more missing interface sounds in the menus.
  
• Added Holding the smart-rotate key as a modifier (default: C) now lets you loop through logic device pin options backwards.
  
• Added Green as a new available hair colour.
  
• Adjusted Prompt, Alert and Confirm dialog boxes to be more consistent with each other and adjust their size to the content inside better.
  
• Adjusted IC Script Editor window layout to be more consistent with other windows in the game.
  
• Adjusted Text Input window layout to be more consistent.
  
• Adjusted max radius an many looping sounds to reduce sonic clutter. WIP.
  
• Adjusted IC help windows to be longer, showing more items.
  
• Changed Debug Log file entries to exclude some unnecessary data and replace it with some metrics that are more useful for troubleshooting, like server type and loaded mods. The game log file can be found in %userprofile%\AppData\LocalLow\Rocketwerkz\Stationeers\output_log.txt and is immensely useful if you're reporting a bug - particularly ones where an error was displayed in the lower-left corner of your screen.
  
• Improvement IC better supports coding with enum values.
  
• Improvement Devices on device pins are now sorted unibetically (= alphabetically, give or take).
  
• Updated Localization Files (Current 29th November)
  
  
• Fixed text jumping around when resizing the Stationpedia.
  
• Fixed a pretty major issue with a 'default active' sound that was causing it to use up all available sound voices, preventing any other sounds from playing. Complex stations should now sound much better, but there is still WIP on this.
  
• Fixed a bug where combining pipe networks wasn't calculating new combined total atmosphere properly.
  
• Fixed a bug where removing a pipe from the end of a network would clear the atmosphere contents.
  
• Fixed a bug where removal of a pipe from a network wouldn't divide up atmosphere properly.
  
• Fixed the documentation for lr on the IC.
  
• Fixed Dynamic Hydroponics attached to a Tank Connector not being removable, due to not having an animation controller.
  
• Fixed Prompt dialog boxes jumping in size occasionally.
  
• Fixed bug in which battery wall light would drain power even when off.
  
• Fixed bug in which battery wall light would remain on even after battery discharged.
  
• Fixed Digital Valves are no longer forced into an error state by being fully enclosed in a frame.
  
• Fixed Issue starting new worlds due to previous WorldSettings change and dependency on worlds names not being changed.
  
• Fixed sound clashes in the main menu.
  
• Fixed inventory sounds playing at once when you start a new game.
  
• Fixed issue with new moustache variant for third face style.
  
• Fixed error whenever destroying the Portable Solar, as it was trying to start generating power, despite it being in the process of being destroyed.
  
• Fixed the majority of misaligned and overflowing text within menus and on buttons. Text should now autosize and stay within their bounds. Especially noticeable when using a localized language.
  
• Fixed Error when trying to recycle the Portable Solar, as it was trying to run solar-charging code like whenever you drop it, despite it being in the process of being destroyed.
  
• Fixed instances where duplicate sounds were playing when navigating menus.
  
• Fixed Issue with the full beard on one of the face variants not displaying properly.
  
• Fixed issue on loading characters where organ creation could fail, resulting in immediate death.
  
• Fixed NullReferenceException error that could occur if the UI Audio Manager attempted to play audio before it had properly initialized.
  
• Fixed a bug in which the GasDisplay could show incorrect units if cycled through temperature (finders credit to EinBerliner).
  
• Fixed incorrect close tag in ChangeSettingToFor value.
  
• Fixed bug on IC where defines weren't storing hashes correctly.
  

Mostly odds-and-ends this week, with a few new quality-of-life features and fixes but mostly just building on the foundation of the game. Things like the military gear may not obviously fit into most of the game as it stands, but the less obvious things like the new character rig will greatly improve our workflow for working with characters down the line. Audio work continues, with the newest member of our team taking the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the basics of the UI and Audio system in game before moving onto some of the more challenging development areas.

Additionally, we're rapidly approaching the end of our first year in Early Access. We'll be putting together a brief video looking at what has been achieved throughout the year and what the future will bring for Stationeers. You can expect to see this in the next few weeks.


Later in development we're going to want to add more variance to characters with gear options and role-based outfits. In order to prepare for that, we've fixed a long-standing issue with the character rig, which should resolve several outstanding animation/appearance bugs, mostly affecting female characters.


We're continuing to fill the void that some players may have noticed, with the addition of interface audio to the settings screen. This work will continue over the following weeks with the mission/task UI and inventory receving some long overdue audio feedback. After that's out of the way we'll move onto some of the more technically challenging sound implementations to round out this so-far neglected aspect of Stationeers.

• Fixed Null Errors that could be encountered on load due to issues getting an invalid game install path from Steam.
  

• Added Wall Light Battery variant. This has only a data port, but takes a battery as a power source so is useful as an emergency or temporary source of power.
  
• Added Suit Storage will now recharge batteries that are put in it, including batteries inside head torches and marine helmets.
  
• Added new character rig and models. This is a visual improvement to provide a better and more consistent visual result for characters, while still using the same rig for both male and female.
  
• Added Marine Helmet, Armor, and Uniform. Constructed on the Tool Manufactory. Helmet has a battery slot, and a lamp. Armor has four internal slots for storage. Currently does nothing special this is the first pass and will be extended later.
  
• Added first pass of controller support. Currently no defaults, so you have to set your own axis definitions. Added button images for Xbox One Controller (other controller image support to come later).
  
• Added Major refresh of Localized text files. Untranslated keys are no longer included in every XML file, as missing keys now default back to english. See the #localization channel in Discord for more details.
  
• Added branches and ternary operators to the IC to complete the missing ones.
  
• Added interface audio to the settings menu.
  
  
• Improvement JumpTags can now be used as variables on the IC. The value of the variable is equal to the line number the tag is defined on.
  
• Changed Plants no longer take damage from being in an atmosphere that doesn't contain what they need to breathe. They'll still take damage incorrect temperatures, presence of toxins or lack of water, however.
  
• Updated Localization Files (Current to 10th November)
  
  
• Fixed Disk Slot on Air Conditioner and Wall Cooler allowing any item to be inserted.
  
• Fixed Re-scaled audio settings sliders to a max of 100, this being identical to what was previously the default setting of 80. If you had volumes below the previous default value they will have been scaled accordingly, so no volumes should be any different unless you were using settings above 80.
  
• Fixed issue where IC housing dropdown list entries were not cleared when removing a ProgrammableChipMotherboard from a computer, leaving them visible in the world and attached to the motherboard.
  
• Fixed slightly less shadow from helmet when looking at player shadow. Was caused by incorrect layer assignment on one of the scene directional lights.
  
• Fixed skin color not changing to correct body when wearing uniform. Now skin correct color on hands and arms while wearing uniforms.
  
• Fixed Headlamp not counted as a "light" for the purposes of the Light key and status indicator. Now all helmets with lights, and headlamp, will be togglable with this.
  
• Fixed bug where powered item status indicator would stay on when dropping an item while it was turned to on.
  
• Fixed Randomize button in Character Creation screen did not randomize all attributes. Also did some slight optimization on character creation screen. More to come with this.
  
• Fixed StationContact buttons now more clearly display whether or not they're within contactable range.
  
• Fixed issue dropping objects since yesterdays beta update introducing controller support due to it still using an old input system.
  
• Fixed DynamicCrate missing Lock interactable, causing Debug.Log spam and lowering FPS when looking at crate.
  
• Fixed a bug in which a graph with a line y=0 would prevent interaction with consoles on either side of it.
  
• Fixed Jetpack animations for directional movement not working properly due to controls refactor.
  
• Fixed Playing of interface audio, game sounds and voice notifications are now gated behind checks that your master volume and volume for that particular channel is above 0.
  
• Fixed Tooltip Opacity slider values not rounding correctly.
  
• Fixed a big frame counter running in duplicate and reduced more memory allocation.
  
• Fixed Volume scale readjusted to now bottom out at -40db instead of -80db, making more of the slider range useful.
  
• Fixed a item kit composite floor grating bug where the kit claimed there were five options rather than the actual four.
  
• Fixed Game now more gracefully handles instances where Steam isn't running, displaying a prompt rather than just a wall of log error text.
  
• Fixed invalid construction option entries on ItemKitBasket and ItemKitWallIron (Thanks supakadai & Sli in Discord).
  

It's been a quiet week or so and with some of the team taking extended breaks we were fairly light on the ground - but we made some good progress on the trading mechanic and have a few other surprises.


One thing we've been working towards through early access is a way to give the end-game further meaning. You've mined everything valuable around your starting area. You've built an impressive base with all the requirements for survival comfortably taken care of. You've built redundancy and automation using all the tools at your disposal - what is there to do next? We've got several ideas for expanding on late game life, and Interstellar Communication touches on several of them.

As described several updates ago, we're working towards what we've dubbed the 'Trader Mechanic', but the final implementation will actually support far more than that.

In creative mode you can now spawn in construction kits for Satellite Dishes and a Communications Motherboard. A Communications Computer will display all of the contacts that could be reached by all Satellite Dishes on its network, and the signal strength to each. You can adjust the angle of your Satellite Dish in order to improve the signal to available contacts or find new ones. In time, you'll be able to use logic to streamline this process like on all the other devices in the game.

The next steps we'll be implementing will allow you to, given a sufficiently strong signal, initiate contact. This may just be for information (ie. reports from weather satellites) or to accept trade offers or visitors assuming you have a powered, connected and accessible landing pad (also currently available in Creative Mode).

As with all our new features, portions of the complete feature may be accessible while it is still a work in progress. We encourage you to try it out, report bugs and let us know what you think on Discord!





To demonstrate some of the flexibility of how some of the systems in Stationeers interact, we'd like to introduce the newest member of the botanist/atmospherics engineer toolkit - the Alien Mushroom. This functions in much the same way as existing plants, however instead of breathing in Carbon Dioxide and exhaling Oxygen, these will inhale Nitrous Oxide and exhale Nitrogen and Oxygen. This serves as a proof of concept for allowing us to easily change the gas mixtures inhaled and exhaled by plants, for which the next step will be to expose these values to mods.



As promised, Rocket has continued to expand the Stationpedia to now include information on Alloys, and applied a few usability improvements as well. The color scheme has been changed again to improve the readibility of some elements, but may still be subject to change based on peoples feedback. It will also now automatically appear when beginning the tutorial or your first game. For those who have been asking about how to translate this, once more of the guide is complete we'll be making it available through the localization system so you'll be able to help translate it into your preferred language.

• Added Alien Mushrooms. Alien Mushrooms breathes in Nitrous Oxide and breathes out Nitrogen and Oxygen. This is a first pass for plants breathing custom gas mixes.
  
• Added Alloy information and list to Stationpedia.
  
• Added Tutorial and new game Stationpedia will now popup with opacity set to none by default, to make it easiest to read it.
  
• Added second pass on Satellite Dish. Vertical and Horizontal can be set, in a similar way to the Solar Panel.
  
• Added first components of the systems supporting Interstellar Communication to creative mode.
  
• Added RatioNitrousOxide LogicType to logic-enabled atmospheric devices.
  
• Added Door Setting variable can now be set by Logic.
  
  
• Changed approximate checks on programmable chip from using |a - b| < e*max(|a|,|b|) to |a - b| < max(e*max(|a|,|b|), float.epsilon
• 8) to avoid it wigging out when a or b are near 0.
  
• Changed GraphDisplay so that graph runs from left to right, and reduced wasted space on the plot by removing above/below the x-axis if no line is plotted there
  
• Tweaked and adjusted the layouts of the Settings screens so they're easier to read.
  
• Updated text input fields to now animate while hovering over them.
  
• Improved server messages. Server messages (shutdown notifications, server notices etc) now show up in the chat window as well.
  
  
• Fixed Doors not reset Setting to new Open state, so it assumed actions must be taken (Credit: Risu)
  
• Fixed Player State Window (top right) now displays temperature as "not a number"(NaN) when in a vacuum.
  
• Fixed Player State Window color values not being initialized, and only updating correctly on first change.
  
• Fixed Aliases being cleared on reset for IC Chips (Credit: Risu)
  
• Fixed Beta bug where NaN was displayed when below 0 celcius, not invalid temperature. Now displays Nil (localizable) correctly for invalid temperature, instead of 0 which it displayed previously.
  
• Fixed syntax highlighting bug in programmable chip editor that would cause things like `# O=k` to display tags, and `# 0=kelvin` to not be coloured correctly.
  
• Fixed a bug where players could use RTF markup to highlight their own code.
  
• Fixed the incorrect display on the computer monitor of IC source code.
  
• Fixed Rotated filter slots on the large gas filter so their label is visible.
  
• Fixed NullReference on generating terrain while flying faster than it could generate.
  
• Fixed a couple of null reference exceptions caused by the interim commit of the trading mechanics.
  
• Fixed Stationpedia window was not correctly initializing centered.
  
• Fixed an animation delay when hovering certain buttons in menus.
  
• Fixed occasional error for some players when populating Stationpedia data resulting in none of the text being loaded for any language. Will now display an error and continue loading normally.
  
• Fixed reagent coloring in help system was a dark purple that was nearly always hard to read. Has been replaced with magenta to help with reading.
  
• Fixed two matching filters show up as a warning (Credit: Risu).
  
• Fixed visual blueprint missing for Portable Solar.
  
• Fixed NitrousOxide filters were removing Nitrous Oxide from the input pipe correctly, but would add Water to the output instead of Nitrous Oxide.
  
• Fixed tutorial required player to keep Stationpedia window open at all times during microwave task. Now player only needs to open it, and if they want to have it closed during the rest of the task they can.
  
• Fixed WallCooler being an amazing heater in Europa. WallCooler efficiency drops as the temperature difference becomes too large. If the waste network becomes 100 degrees warmer than input, efficiency begins to drop until zero at 200 degrees.