🔧 Bug Fix
More fixes from the first days of Unified Combat, almost all of them found by you rather than by us. Keep them coming.
Salvage lasers
Salvage lasers were not training your Salvage skill cutting a wreck open with a salvage laser has always earned Salvage experience. Since the new combat went live it had stopped, so anyone who has been stripping hideouts and wrecks this week has been doing the work without the skill moving. It is back, and at the rate it always was: one point of Salvage experience for every cycle that actually brings something home.
One thing that is not a bug, before anyone asks. Salvage drones do not train the skill and never have. Working a wreck yourself is what teaches you the trade. Handing the job to a drone gets you the goods but not the experience, and that is the intended difference between the two.
Salvage drones
Salvage drones getting stuck on an emptied base reported by Porrima and TheDoki independently, and they had it worked out between them. Once you had felled a pirate base and stripped it with a salvage laser, your salvage drones would lock onto the empty base and stay there. They cut at it for ever, brought nothing home, and could not be persuaded to go and work the ship wrecks scattered around it, which still held loot.
The cause was a mismatch between two ways of stripping the same thing. Salvaging with drones correctly told the base how much it had left. Salvaging with a laser took from the pool but never updated the figure the base advertises, so a base emptied by laser still looked full to a drone.
The drones were doing exactly as they were told, they were just being told something untrue. Fixed, and both routes now keep that figure honest. Your drones will strip the base if it has anything in it, and move on to the wrecks when it does not. While we were in there, one thing worth clearing up because it looks like a bug and is not: a stripped base does not vanish the moment its salvage runs out. It stays until the last captain leaves the field. That is deliberate. It used to disappear immediately, which took every ship wreck in the field with it, so emptying the base first cost you everything from the fight you had just won.
Drones Looting
Drones were arriving faster (as loot) than anyone could spend them. This came in as a bug report, from a captain who watched his drone count climb and reasonably assumed something was duplicating them. Nothing was. Drones come out of combat as loot, and do so in Unified combat where drones are needed. Pirates give up combat and salvage units from their own bay, and turret emplacements give up repair units, because maintenance machinery is full of the mending kind.
Worth knowing if you have been wondering where yours keep coming from. He was right that something was off, though. The drop rate was set back when the new combat was still behind closed doors and almost nobody in the galaxy owned a drone, so it was deliberately generous to get them into people’s hands. Then we opened the doors, handed every active captain a starter pack, and the whole player base started running hideouts.
The reason for that generosity had gone and the setting had not moved with it. We have brought it down. Clearing a base will still pay back the drones a hard fight costs you, which is the point of it, but you will no longer finish an evening with more than you could sensibly use. Turret emplacements now hand over the same as anything else rather than being the richest thing on the field. Drones only mean something while deciding what to launch is a real choice, and that stops being true the moment you have more than you can ever spend.
Repair drones
Repair drones have stopped shouting over everything else If you fly with a few repair drones, your activity log had become almost unreadable. Every drone announced that your shields were fully restored, separately, every single time they topped off. In a real fight that is constantly, and with three drones out it was three lines at a time, burying the loot drops and the events you actually wanted to read. They now do the job quietly. Nothing is lost by it: your shield bar already shows the same thing, continuously, and rather better than a line of text ever could.