🔧 Bug Fixes
Drylok raised a good one while working an Asteroid field. He had three mining lasers running, one cutting a Ravenrock and two on a Niobenium, yet the nearby contacts list showed lock markers on the Ravenrock only. The Niobenium row sat there looking completely idle while two lasers were plainly chewing away at it. The lasers were working perfectly, and so were the markers.
The problem was the list itself. It only ever showed the five closest rocks to your ship, and the Niobenium he was actually mining sat further out than that, so it was not on the list at all. The Niobenium row he was staring at was a different rock entirely, one that happened to be nearer and happened to hold the same ore. Asteroid fields are full of repeats like this, and until now there was nothing on the row to tell two rocks of the same ore apart. Drylok’s own screenshot had two separate Nylonite rows in it, which is perfectly normal and exactly how the confusion starts.
From now on, any rock you have a laser locked onto keeps its place in that list, however far out it drifts. The list still shows the closest rocks around it, your working rocks simply take priority over them. So the green lock markers can no longer quietly vanish from something you are actively mining. Thanks Drylok. That one had been hiding in plain sight since the new combat screen went live.
Mission Ores
Some of the longer contract chains ask you to bring back an ore you will never find on a market anywhere. These are the odd seams that only surface for the captain actually carrying the contract, and they have always had to be mined rather than bought. When the new combat screen took over from the old mining interface, those seams stopped appearing.
The fields were fine, and the contracts were fine, but the ore a contract asked for simply was not out there any more. If you accepted one of those stages, flew out to the field you were pointed at and found nothing but ordinary rock, you were not going mad and you had not somehow missed it. It genuinely was not there. That one is on us.
It sat unnoticed for a few days while a handful of captains were left holding contracts they had no way of finishing, and our apologies go to every one of you. Those contracts work again now, and nothing you had already earned was lost. It has come back rather better than it left. Your contract ore is laid out for you personally when you reach the right field, so nobody else working that belt is competing with you for it, and two captains chasing the same contract each get their own.
It appears in the ore search with a marker beside it, and it lights up on the field map the moment you arrive, so you are no longer flying the length of a belt squinting at rock names. There is enough out there to cover the contract with a little in hand, so a rock left half cut or a hold you lost count of will not send you back out for one more run. Anything spare still pays when you hand the job in.
One thing worth knowing if you have not run one of these before. Contract ore stays with your ship. It cannot be sold, stored or passed to anybody else, because it is worth precisely nothing to anyone except the person who asked you to fetch it. And if you change your mind and drop the contract, the ore now leaves with it rather than sitting in your hold forever with nowhere to go.
Salvage Drones -AI Tweak
Salvage drones have stopped wandering off. Several captains reported the same odd habit: launch a drone, watch it sensibly strip the wreck right beside you, then watch it set off clear across the field for its next one while perfectly good wrecks drifted untouched a few hundred metres away. It happened in hideout assaults too, where there is usually plenty to pick over close at hand.
They were not being fussy about what they salvaged. The first wreck a drone visited was always chosen properly, the nearest one to your ship, but once that wreck was empty the drone picked its next target off an internal list in the order things had appeared in the fight, which had nothing to do with where anything was. Sometimes that landed on the wreck next door and sometimes on one at the far end of the map, which is why the drones looked sensible half the time and daft the other half. There was a second half to it, and it was the more annoying one.
A drone only ever reconsidered its target when a wreck ran completely dry, so a half stripped one kept its claim no matter what else happened. Clear one end of a field, fly to the other end and clear that too, and your drone would come home, unload beside a pile of fresh wrecks, and then set off all the way back across the map to the one it had started on. Both are sorted. When a wreck runs out, a drone now looks for the closest one to itself with anything left in it. And every time it comes home to unload it forgets where it was working and picks again from where you actually are, so drones follow the fight instead of commuting to it.
Nothing is lost from a wreck left half stripped, whatever is in it stays there and it simply becomes the obvious choice again next time you are in that part of the field. Nothing else has changed about how much they carry or how fast they cut.
✨ Improvement
The Release All Guns button has moved, and we have Drylok to thank for it. He pointed out that it sat over on the right at the top of your target boxes, a fair reach from the contacts list you actually pick your targets from, so releasing your locks meant leaving the panel you were working in. It now sits directly above the Nearby panel, where the choosing happens. Same spot whether your weapons bay is open or minimised, and it stays put while the contacts list scrolls underneath it. Worth knowing if you have never noticed it, and plenty of people had not: the X key does exactly the same job from anywhere on the screen, and always has.
X-Y Coordinates or Movement Reminder
A small choice has appeared for the combat screen. The bottom left corner has always carried the flight controls reminder, WASD to fly and Esc to leave, which is exactly what you want on your first few trips out and quietly redundant by your hundredth.
You can now swap it for your coordinates instead. Look under Account, then Preferences, then Display, for Combat Flight Controls Hint. Leave it switched on and nothing changes. Switch it off and that corner shows your position in the field along with the system and location, in the same style as the readout you already know from the star map. It is deliberately its own setting rather than being tied to the coordinates toggle you use for navigation.
Wanting coordinates on the star map says nothing about whether you still want the controls reminder in the middle of a fight, so you can have either, both, or neither, whichever suits how you fly.