🔧 Bug Fix – Weapon Fire
Snorrsen found a way to make his guns fire far faster than they should, and then reported it rather than quietly enjoying it, which is the good sort of captain to have around. He was clearing pirate gangs off the edge of a belt in Kelsey when he noticed that releasing his weapon locks, either with the Release All Guns button or the X key, and then locking straight back on, made every gun fire again immediately.
Do that over and over and the reload between shots stops mattering at all. A seven ship gang went down in about thirty seconds. The cause was straightforward once he pointed at it. A gun’s reload timer was being cleared the moment it was handed a target, so a weapon you had just locked on would open fire without a wait. That is the right feel for a gun that has been sitting idle and exactly the wrong thing for one that fired half a second ago.
Releasing and relocking simply wiped the wait every time. Mining lasers and repair gear never had the problem, because they were built the other way round. Reload now runs on the clock and nothing else is allowed to reset it. A gun that has been idle still fires the instant it locks on, so nothing changes about how a fight opens. A gun that has just fired owes its full reload however many times you release it, relock it, or switch it off and on again.
There is a small gain in it too. A gun left without a target, or one sitting out of range, now recovers its reload while it waits instead of freezing it, so swinging your guns onto a fresh target no longer costs you time you had already served. Thanks Snorrsen. Reporting something that was working firmly in your favour, while you were in the middle of using it, is a genuinely decent thing to do.
🔧 Server Wide Counters
The counters on the front page had quietly stopped counting, and one of them had been stuck for rather longer than we would like to admit. Ore Mined froze on the evening of the nineteenth, at the exact moment mining moved into the new combat screen. Every rock cut since then was banked properly and paid you properly, it just was not being added to the running total.
These counters are wired up again and counting the right things at the right moments. A pirate base now registers the moment its hull gives out, which is when you would call it destroyed, rather than a day later when the wreck finally clears.
🔧 Pirate Hideout
The next wave readout on a pirate hideout has been put right, thanks to Drylok spotting it. On the objective panel in the top left corner, Next wave in tells you how much more punishment the base has to take before it scrambles its next lot of defenders. It counted down correctly up to the first wave, then stuck on zero for the rest of the fight, so from that point on you had no way of knowing whether the next wave was one good volley away or most of a base away. The row of markers beside it was wrong in the same way, still reporting that nothing had been sent while defenders were plainly launching out of the base at you. Both read properly now, the whole way down to the last wave. Thanks Drylok.
✨ Server Patches & You
Every so often we take the server down for a few seconds to put an update out. If you happened to be in the middle of a fight when that happened, the field around you went strange in a very particular way and nothing told you why. Your ship still flew. Rocks still cut. Your drones still flew their patterns. But the pirates stopped moving, your shots stopped landing, repairs stopped healing, and anyone else in the field could no longer see you.
It looks less like a disconnection and more like the game quietly breaking, which is exactly why it was worth fixing. You now get told. If contact with the field is lost you will see a clear message saying so, explaining what still works and what does not, with a button to take you back out. Leave and come back in and everything reconnects. Your ship, your cargo and anything you had already banked were never at risk, and that has not changed. The only thing that was ever lost was your time, spent shooting at pirates that were never going to fall over.
✨ Lexicon update
The Drones section of the Lexicon has been rebuilt, because it was describing a version of the game we left behind some time ago. It covered mining drones and salvage drones and stopped there, which left out combat drones, mining defence drones, the three kinds of repair drone, courier drones, planetary harvesters and the whole corporation fleet. It also sent you to a Blueprint Store for drones that have never had a blueprint, and told you nobody sells a ready made drone when the FSP Support Store quite plainly does.
There are twelve entries now instead of five. The one worth reading first is Drone Bandwidth, because it is the number that decides how many drones you can have in space at once and it was not mentioned anywhere at all. There is also a page explaining the two tier ladders, since bay drones run Mk1 to Mk4 while the ones you leave working a field run Basic, Superior and Advanced, and having the two confused with each other is easily done. Exact damage and repair figures have been left out on purpose. Those get adjusted as we balance things, and a number written into a help page has a habit of being wrong six months later. The Item Database always has the live figures.
✨ Research – Global Projects
Research has somewhere new to go. Until now an R&D Complex could only work on your own research plans, and the captains who had worked their way through the list found themselves with nothing left to point one at. There is now a second option sitting alongside the first. The Research and Development Office has a Global Research tab.
It holds a handful of shared projects that the whole galaxy works on together. Point a R&D Complex at one and it contributes every hour, spending your research materials exactly as your own research does, and earning you Research Experience for every one percent you put in. Rather more of it, in fact, than a personal plan pays, so your Research skill keeps climbing the whole time.
What makes them different is what happens when one fills. The reward is not just yours. It switches on for every captain in the game, for a stated number of days, and then it lapses. The first five are all worth having. More out of every assembler, more ore out of every asteroid, cheaper repairs, cheaper jumps, and room for another drone in every bay. You are not choosing a path forever. Your own research progress is kept exactly where you left it, so lending a Complex to the galaxy for a few weeks and taking it back afterwards costs you nothing at all.
There is also a new icon on the bar at the bottom of your screen, a green globe. That opens a new overview of the Global Research Projects, and it is there for everybody whether you own an R&D Complex or not. It shows what is being worked on, how far along each project has come, who has been doing the work, and which rewards are running right now. Worth saying plainly. These projects are big. They are meant to take a while and they are meant to need more than one captain, so do not be discouraged by a bar that moves slowly. And if you have been quietly stockpiling Tech Shards with nothing left to spend them on, this is what they are for.