🚀 Hideout Exotics
If you have ever looked at a cruiser blueprint and wondered where on earth you were going to find that much exotic ore, this one is for you. Here is the problem we had. Both exotic ores in the game, Cryzen and Kelvolrite, come out of a single system. Two belts, sitting right at the bottom of the law scale, which makes them about the two most dangerous places in the galaxy.
A Vigilance needs the better part of twenty-seven thousand units of the pair between them. So you needed a cruiser to survive the belts that produce the ore that builds the cruiser. That is not a challenge, it is a wall, and no amount of skill or patience was ever going to get anybody over it.
Word has come in that the pirate crews have been solving it for us, though certainly not on purpose. They have started tractoring exotic asteroids out of the deep belts and parking them at their own hideouts, in close, just inside the turret line, where they can work them in private and nobody has to answer awkward questions about where the ore came from.
So every pirate hideout at law level 4 or below has a chance of sitting on a cache. Both exotics, every time, in rocks considerably bigger than anything you will cut out of an ordinary field. Open the Pirate Intelligence board in any lawless system and each base will now tell you whether it is holding a deposit.
If somebody has already been through and stripped one, it says that too, so you are never sent out on a wasted trip. You will have spotted the catch already. That ore is parked in the middle of a working pirate base, inside the reach of the guns, with the garrison on station and more held back in reserve.
Don’t expect a warm welcome when you arrive. The crews dragged those rocks home themselves, and they have opinions about visitors.
⚖️ Balance Change
We have changed our minds about the mining boosters, and this one is worth reading if you mine. Until today the rule was one of each. You could fit a Chaff Tractor and a Sluicerunner Array side by side, but never two of the same, and the info panel told you that a second would do nothing.
Several of you read that as one booster per ship full stop, which is fair enough, because that is more or less what it said. We have looked at it again and decided the restriction was not earning its keep. Mining boosters now stack, and they stack however you like. Two of the same, two different ones, whatever you can fit.
Every booster in your system slots adds its yield to the total, and the info panel now says so properly instead of warning you off. It is worth being honest about the scale of this. An Extractor carries two system slots, so two boosters is the ceiling, and filling both of them means no autopilot, no landing kit and nothing else in there. That trade is the real cost, and it is exactly why we were comfortable loosening the rule.
🔧 Bug Fix
Thanks to Elkhorn for this one, and for describing it precisely enough that the cause gave itself away. Leave an asteroid belt with your shields down and they start recovering, exactly as they should. Dump your load, fly back into the belt, and the recovery stops dead. It stays stopped until something happens to you. A pirate takes a shot, or you trigger a shield booster, or you put a drone out, and then it picks up again as though nothing had ever been wrong.
Elkhorn had all of that right, including the oddly specific list of things that unstick it, and that list is what pointed straight at the answer. Your shields recover in two different places. Out in open space the server tops them up every eight seconds. Inside a belt or a hideout the field itself does it, smoothly, so the bar creeps upward instead of jumping in lumps.
It now checks whether you arrived damaged and starts topping you up on the way in. You should not have to get shot to start healing. One thing worth saying plainly, since it has come up before. This only ever affected shields. Armour and hull have never repaired themselves out in the black and still need a repair drone or a repair laser.