🚀 New Feature
The Item Database has a new section, and it is one the manufacturers among you have been asking for. Assembler Plans lists every Molecular Assembler pattern in the game, and you can read the lot of it without renting a single assembler slot. Until now, the only way to find out what a pattern actually consumed was to pay for a slot, deploy an assembler and go and look.
That is an expensive way to fetch a shopping list. Now you can sit in the Item Database, work out exactly what a production line will cost you in resources, and only then decide whether to commit the credits. Every plan shows what it produces, how quickly it runs, and what it eats per batch. More usefully, it shows you how to get hold of it in the first place.
Some patterns simply arrive as your captain gains levels, and those carry the level you need to reach. The rest are unlocked through Research and Development, and those carry a green tick alongside the Research level required, so you can see at a glance what is sitting further up the R&D ladder and plan your research toward the things you actually want to build. You can browse the whole catalogue at once, or split it into the patterns that come with captain levels and the patterns that need researching. The list is ordered by how you unlock things, so reading it from top to bottom lays out a straight path through the entire assembler tree. Search picks up the goods as well as the plans, so typing in the name of a component will find whatever pattern produces it. Thanks to Hand Solo for the suggestion.
🚀 Corp Update
Corporations can now see what their people are actually good at. The Members tab in the Corp Office lists every member alongside their Captain level and ten skill readings covering the whole spread of corporate work. Manufacturing, Engineering and Recycling for the industrial side, Mining and Salvage for the gatherers, Research and Exploration for those who go looking, and Weapons, Shields and Drone for anyone you might need to call on when things get loud.
It sounds like a small thing, but it solves a real headache for anyone running a corporation of any size. Until now, working out who could assemble a particular component, or who could actually fit that piece of equipment sitting in the Corp Hangar, meant asking in chat and hoping the right person was awake to answer. Now the whole roster is laid out in front of you and you can plan builds and allocate equipment on the spot. Hover any reading to see the full skill name and level. Skills a member has never trained show as a quiet zero, which also makes it easy to spot the newer recruits who could do with a hand getting started. Thanks again to Hand Solo, whose suggestion this was.
🚀 New Feature
Outposts have gone industrial. The locked Industrial tab you have all been eyeing is now open for business, and behind it sit two entirely new ways to put your station to work while you are off doing something else. It starts with a piece of research called Industrial Expansion. Buy that from your outpost’s Upgrades tab and the Industrial wing opens up, along with two production lines you can then research separately.
Nothing arrives for free, and every part of this is paid for out of the Research Points your outpost generates, so the station has to earn its own way up. There is also a new Outpost Store, and this one is worth understanding properly. It is a single-shared stockpile across every outpost you own, not one per station. Anything your industrial operations produce lands there, and you can move goods between it and your Commercial Storage from any outpost you happen to be standing on. Deposit at one end of the galaxy, withdraw at the other.
Solar Cultivation is the first production line, and it does something nothing else in the game can. Research it, and you can deploy Solar Cultivators, drone-borne collection arrays that work the star at the heart of your outpost’s system around the clock. They draw hydrogen and helium in quantity along with traces of oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, five new resources that exist nowhere else and cannot be mined, looted, or bought from any trader.
If you want them, you can build them or purchase FSP versions. Each level of research fields two more cultivators up to ten, and the crafted units wear down with use while the Support models from the FSP Store never do.
Miner Contracts is the second, and it works quite differently. You hire an independent (NPC) captain for seven days to work ‘ore’ from your outpost’s own system, and they deliver into your Outpost Store hour by hour. The NPC Captains are paid in Research Points rather than credits, deliberately, because a fat bank balance should not buy you an industrial empire.
What limits you here is what your outpost actually produces, not what you happen to be sitting on. Three sizes of charter are on offer, and every contract splits its haul across five different ores of your choosing rather than one, so nobody is pointing a captain at the single most valuable rock within reach. Exotics are off the table entirely. If your system has no asteroid belts of its own, your captain will range out to the nearest fields and bring back whatever suits the local law level, so where you built long ago will never lock you out of this.
You can also pay a premium for a salvage escort. Cover the crew for the trouble and they will strip whatever they can off any wrecks they run into, coming home with a mixed haul of components alongside the ore. Sometimes it more than covers the fee and sometimes it does not, which is rather the point of paying a crew to go looking.
A Completed Contracts log keeps the record of every run so you can see exactly what came back and judge whether the gamble was worth it. Finally, there is Miner Relations, a research line that improves your standing on the docks. Each level has hired captains bringing back more ore for exactly the same fee, so the crews you build a reputation with work that bit harder for you.
None of this replaces getting out there and doing the work yourself, and it is not meant to. It is a reward for the captains who have poured serious credits and research into a station of their own, quietly ticking away while they get on with everything else.
✨ Improvement
Anyone running planetary harvesters can now see the condition of every unit before committing it to a slot. The Deploy Planetary Harvester screen shows a durability bar beside each harvester in your inventory, with the exact figure and percentage underneath, so a well worn unit is obvious at a glance. This matters more than it might sound. Harvesters wear down steadily as they extract, and until now the deploy list gave you nothing at all to go on.
It was entirely possible to rent a slot, pick a harvester off the list and unknowingly send out one with almost nothing left in it. Units that have run themselves right into the ground now read as depleted in red, and the deploy screen will not let you select one at all. A depleted harvester extracts nothing, so being able to deploy one only ever cost you a slot for no return. If you have one sitting in your hold, a repair bay will bring it back into service. Founder Planetary Harvesters are marked as Indestructible instead of carrying a bar, since they never wear down at all.
The deploy screen itself has had a tidy up while we were in there. Those of you with a serious collection of harvesters will have noticed the window stretching further and further down the page as the list grew, pushing the buttons out of easy reach. It now sits at a sensible fixed height with the lists scrolling inside it, so everything stays where you expect it however many harvesters you are sitting on. Thanks to Elkhorn for the suggestion, and for the annotated screenshot that made it very clear where the information needed to sit.
Porrima asked whether it is possible to run more than one outpost. After a proper look under the bonnet and a full round of testing, we can confirm that it is, and that everything behaves exactly as intended. There is no limit on how many you deploy. Each one costs the same as your first, an Outpost Deployment License plus all eight Hub Sections, consumed at the moment of deployment. That is the only thing standing between you and a small empire, so the real constraint is your production line rather than any rule we have written down. The Outpost Management screen takes a fleet of them in its stride. Your outposts are listed down the left hand side, you click between them freely, and each one keeps its own buildings, stores, contracts, upgrades, research and revenue completely separate. Levelling and research tick along independently for every outpost you own, so a second station is a genuine second operation rather than an extension of the first. While we were in there the management panel was widened a little, because the header statistics had begun wrapping onto two lines once the numbers grew large enough.
Thanks to Porrima for asking. It is a good reminder that if you are ever unsure whether something is possible out there, ask the question, because now and then the answer turns out to be yes and nobody had tried it yet.