✨ Improvement – Item Database
The Item Database will now tell you how to get the thing you are looking at. It has always been good at telling you what a piece of equipment does. Damage, range, power draw, what it costs, all of that was there. What it was oddly quiet about was where any of it comes from, and that turned out to matter a great deal more than we realised.
If an item was printed from a blueprint, the panel named the store that sells the blueprint and told you the print cost. Fine. But a great many things in this game are not printed at all. Every combat drone, every mining defence drone, the salvage drones, all four repair drones, the courier drones, shield boosters, stim packs, exploration kits and defence kits are built in a Molecular Assembler from a plan.
For all of those, the panel simply said no blueprint available and left you to work the rest out for yourself. That is now filled in. Open any assembler built item and you will find an Assembler Plan section that names exactly how the pattern reaches your assembler, and there are three ways it can happen.
Most of them arrive on their own. The drones, the kits, the boosters and the stim packs unlock at a Captain level and nothing else, so the panel now tells you which level. A Combat Drone Mk2 says level twenty and says plainly that there is no plan to buy, because every assembler offers it the moment you qualify.
If a pattern is available from the very start, it says so. The refined goods are the research route. Those come from an R and D plan, so the panel names the plan you need to go looking for and the research level it asks of you.
The third way is over a counter, and that is the newest one. Missiles and defence turrets are sold as plans rather than blueprints, so those now show the shop and the price, which for the moment means the Vulcan Ordnance Works. While we were in there we found the launcher blueprints had been quietly pointing at the wrong shop.
🚀 Mail Box Rebuild
Your mail system has been rebuilt as a proper mailbox, with folders. FOLDERS Six of them, down the left hand side, each with its own unread count. Inbox now holds mail written by other captains and nothing else. Notifications holds everything the game files for you. Harvester reports, manufacturing runs, contract notices, berth fees. Sent, Drafts, Saved and Trash do what you would expect. The split between Inbox and Notifications happens on its own. You do not have to file anything. DELETING Deleted mail goes to Trash rather than vanishing. You can restore it from there, or empty the Trash to destroy it for good.
Tidying your Sent items leaves their inbox exactly as it was. SAVED Star anything you want to hang on to and it moves to Saved, safe from a tidy up. READING AND FINDING The reading pane is considerably wider, which suits the longer station reports. Search works inside whichever folder you are looking at. Long folders are paged rather than loaded in one enormous list, so opening your mail is quick no matter how much has piled up. Notifications carry a small tag showing where they came from. Station, Trade or Industry.
HOUSEKEEPING Read notifications are cleared after thirty days, and unread ones after ninety. Captain to captain mail is never removed automatically, at any age, and neither is anything you have moved to Saved.
🔧 Bug Fix
Thanks to Drylok for spotting this one, and for describing it clearly enough to walk straight to the cause. Mine an asteroid until it runs dry and the rock goes, exactly as it should. What could happen next is that the laser which had been cutting it got left in an odd half state. It showed no asteroid, the little release button beside it disappeared, and it would not take a new rock either.
That was one laser off your ship for the rest of the trip, with nothing you could click to get it back. That is sorted. A laser that is not actually cutting anything is properly free again, so it picks up the next rock you click on. The release button now stays put whenever a weapon is holding a target or is switched on, so there is always a way to clear a slot by hand. And if a click on a rock is ever refused, it will now say why in the log instead of quietly doing nothing.