🚀 New Unified Combat
Today is the biggest change Forged Space has had, and it touches almost everything you do outside a station. Combat and mining have moved into a new unified system. Instead of operating in a small combat area, you now fly your ship in real time in a large ongoing combat zone. You pick a target, close the distance, watch your shields, launch drones and read a live mini map of everything around you.
Mining works the same way. You fly to a rock, tap it, and your laser locks on and cuts by itself while you keep an eye out for trouble. The old combat and mining panels have been retired, and everything that used to open them now opens the new flight deck instead.
Ambushes, pirate hunts, bounty marks, raids while you are docking, encounters on the way somewhere, and asteroid fields. Every asteroid field in the galaxy now carries the same two buttons regardless of how lawless it is: an orange one to fly in, and a green one to put drones out.
Pirate hideouts have changed the most, and this is the part worth reading properly. A hideout used to be a pool of pirates you chipped away at. Every kill took one off the count, and when the count reached zero the base was finished. That mechanic has been retired. A hideout is now a place rather than a number. It has a garrison sized by how lawless the system is, gun turret emplacements holding station around it that open up as you close in, and reserve squadrons it scrambles while you are inside, up to four of them.
Bring the base itself down, and it becomes a hulk you can salvage, and it stays where it is until the salvage runs dry, or a day passes, whichever comes first. Then it is gone and another gang sites a new one somewhere else. We want to be straight with you about one consequence. All the Hideouts have been regenerated, and you will see they now display different status info when in normal space.
The Pirate Intelligence panel has been rebuilt to match. The invented leader names are gone, and so is the pirate count. In their place you get the gang that actually holds the base, drawn from the forty pirate affiliations already operating across the galaxy, and its current state: at full strength, contested, under assault, or ready for salvage.
If a base has already scrambled some of its reserves, you will see how many. Drones matter now in a way they never have. Combat drones fight alongside you, repair drones keep your shields and armour up while you are taking fire, and salvage drones strip wrecks while you are still shooting. They all draw on your ship’s bandwidth, so what you launch is a real decision rather than a formality, and higher marks cost more of it than the Mk1s do.
Because none of this was worth owning before today, every captain who has flown in the last month will find a starter pack waiting:
25 Salvage, 20 Combat, 20 Shield Repair, 20 Armour Repair, 20 Mining Defence and 15 Hull Repair, all Mk1.
Consider it a thank you for flying with us through the alpha. One warning that comes with them. A drone you leave in the field is a drone lost!. All drones can be recalled (when at full health) – Drones heal over time when out of Combat saving on a huge churn of Assembling 1000’s of drones 🙂 But recall is manual, it will not happen for you, and a damaged drone has to repair itself before it can come home.
There is now a prompt when you try to leave with drones still out, so you will not lose a bay full by accident, but the rule itself has not softened. Two captains who fly into the same asteroid field or the same hideout now land in the same fight, see each other, and share the rocks and the wrecks. Help each other or race each other, that part is up to you.
Finally, there is a walkthrough built into the flight deck. New captains get it automatically, one section at a time, as they meet each thing for the first time. Everyone else can open it whenever they like from the graduation cap in the toolbar and pick whichever section they want. It covers the screen itself, mining, pirates, drones and hideout assaults. Fly safe out there. It is a rougher galaxy than it was this morning.
✨ Improvement
A handful of smaller changes have gone in alongside the combat work, and a couple of them you will notice straight away. The green button at every station and planet now reads Dock and Access Location Services rather than just Access Location Services. That sounds like a trivial thing to mention, but the whole game has always talked about docking. Missions tell you to dock somewhere, NPCs tell you to dock, and yet no control anywhere carried the word.
New captains were following instructions that named an action they could not find on screen. One rename made every one of those lines correct without rewriting a single one of them.
Pirate aggression has been turned down, and this one affects everybody. Killing a pirate in a lawless system used to raise that system’s threat by three points, and at ninety an ambush is guaranteed. A hideout run is twenty to thirty kills by design, so the meter was pinned to the ceiling by the end of a single ordinary session, and the ambush on the way home stopped being an event and became a toll.
A kill now raises threat by one. Work a system hard and repeatedly, and you will still draw attention, which is the whole point of the mechanic, but simply showing up once will no longer cost you a fight on the way out. Threat also stops climbing on its own while you are inside a field or a base. Only your kills move it now.
Serial numbers on the three items every captain starts with were being built the wrong way. Instead of the usual three letters, eight characters and two, they carried a thirteen digit timestamp and a six character tail. Completely harmless, but they were the only items in the game that looked wrong, and they happened to be the first three items anyone ever owns.
Every one has been rewritten into the proper format, so your Civilian Pulse Laser, Basic Mining Laser and Civilian Reactor will read correctly from now on. New captains get a better start as well. The opening panel welcomes them and says where they are instead of presenting a bare checklist.
The mining instructions now explain what a spotlit rock actually looks like, amber on your mini map, rather than assuming you will work it out. And the objective guide no longer swallows most of the screen on a large monitor. Small things, but they are the ones people trip over.