🚀 New Feature
With the announcement of the Upcoming Combat / Mining update I figured it might be fair to release the new drones that will go with that update (timing to be announced) this will give you time to build some of the new drone types prior to the new Combat update. Sixteen new drones have gone into production, and every one of them is built in a Molecular Assembler.
Combat Drones lead the line, in four marks. These are the hunters, the only drones that chase a target down and take fire in return, so do expect to lose a few when a fight turns properly ugly.
Repair Drones come in three families, one for each layer of your ship, and the pricing tells you everything about the job. Shield menders are cheap and quick. Armour sits in the middle. Hull drones are slow and expensive, because a breached hull is the one layer that will never quietly come back on its own.
Courier Drones round the set out with three marks of their own, and they do something no other drone does. Launch one out in the field and it carries your cargo hold straight to Commercial Storage, and then it is gone. Every launch costs you the drone, so think of them as consumable drones rather than equipment, and load accordingly.
Getting hold of the patterns is a matter of rank rather than research. Every drone carries a Captain Level, and the moment you reach it the pattern turns up in your assembler ready to run. There is nothing to unlock in R&D and nothing to buy from a trader.
The upper marks ask for something you cannot dig out of a rock. Combat Drone Mk3 and Mk4, Shield Repair Mk3 and the two larger Couriers all call for Solar Gases, the hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen that only a Solar Cultivator can draw down out of a star. If you have been wondering what the Industrial wing of your outpost was ultimately building toward, this is a good part of the answer.
A few goods that have spent a long time gathering dust in warehouses have found honest work too. Purified Water goes into the coolant loops on combat drones, Textiles into the ablative wrap that armour menders carry, and Synthetic Diamonds into the cutting heads on the hull repair line. If you have been sitting on any of it wondering who on earth would ever want the stuff, it turns out the answer is the manufacturers, and they want it now.
One thing to weigh before you fill a bay. Every deployed drone takes up bandwidth, and your hull only has so much of it to give, so a locker full of Mk4s will not all fly at once. Bandwidth is now listed against every drone in the Item Database, so you can plan a bay that actually fits before you spend the materials building it. These have all been made with the new combat system in mind, the one we wrote to you about recently. We are still not putting a date on that. When it does arrive, though, you will want a full bay and the skills to fly it.
Two things to remember about drones (Excluding Courier drones) They can be recalled in the new combat Sim, and they Self heal over time when NOT in combat.
✨ Improvement
The Item Database has caught up with the drones. Combat Drones, Repair Drones and Courier Drones each have a section of their own now, sitting alongside Mining Defence and Salvage under Consumables, so the whole drone catalogue finally reads in one place. Every family brings its own columns. Combat Drones show hull points against damage, their damage per second and their reach.
Repair Drones show how much they mend per pulse, how quickly they cycle and what that works out to per second, which turns comparing a shield mender against a hull one into arithmetic rather than guesswork. Couriers show the size of the hold they will carry off for you. Bandwidth now appears against every drone in the game, including the Mining Defence and Salvage units that have been with us for years and never showed it anywhere at all. You will find it in the table rows and in the detail panel, so whichever way you go looking for it, it is there.
🔧 Bug Fix
Outposts – Industry. A correction on outposts, and an apology to anyone who ran headlong into it. Solar Cultivation and Miner Contracts could both be researched before Industrial Expansion, which was never how it was meant to work. Industrial Expansion is the piece that opens the Industrial wing in the first place, so buying either of the other two ahead of it meant paying good Research Points for a production line that had nowhere to appear. Both are now properly locked until Industrial Expansion is in place, and they say so plainly on the Upgrades tab instead of quietly taking your points. If you did buy one early, nothing has been lost. Your research is still sitting there on the outpost, and it will come to life the moment Industrial Expansion is purchased.
Exploration XP / Credit Fix. A small but persistently annoying one, now put right. When you came back up from a planet surface, or climbed out of a derelict and undocked, the credits in your header and the experience bar along the bottom would both still be showing the numbers you set off with. Everything you had earned down there was safely banked, it simply was not being drawn on screen, and the moment you did anything else at all the figures would snap up to date on their own. Both now refresh the instant you return to your ship, so what you came back with is what you see. On the planet side there was a second wrinkle worth mentioning, because the end of expedition survival bonus is awarded at the exact moment you take off. The display was being redrawn a fraction too early and reading your totals just before that bonus landed, which is why it could look like a long expedition had paid you nothing extra at all. It now waits for the award to land before it updates. Nothing was ever lost in either case. The totals were simply turning up late to the party.
⚖️ Balance Change
⚠ READ THIS BEFORE YOU NEXT SET FOOT ON A PLANET OR BOARD A WRECK. If you have grown used to exploring without kits, that era has just ended.
Captain TheDoki reported something that turned out to be entirely correct. Past the early levels, Exploration Kits, Defence Kits and Stim Packs had quietly become optional. He cleared a medium wreck in Kelsey with no oxygen, no hydration, no suit and radiation sitting at maximum, and strolled out with most of his health intact. He was right to call it out, and no, it was not a feature.
The cause was simple enough. Running a survival stat dry cost you a flat two Health per room, and that figure never moved no matter how many stats were empty or how experienced your captain had become. Your maximum Health, meanwhile, climbs steadily with every level you gain. The kits never stopped working. Captains simply outgrew them. Three things are different now. Damage scales with your maximum Health instead of being a fixed number, so it presses just as hard on a veteran as it does on a newcomer.
There is no growing out of it any more. Empty stats stack. Each one now adds its own share rather than all four counting as a single problem, and oxygen and radiation are by far the two that hurt most. Suffocating while irradiated is a real emergency rather than a rounding error. And then the big one. With oxygen at exactly zero, your Health drains in real time. Not per room. Per second. Whether you are walking, standing perfectly still, or sitting there reading the room description. Roughly a minute of that and your captain is on the floor being evacuated.
Here is the warning that will save you a lot of grief. A Stim Pack will restore Health, but it will not stop you suffocating, so all it buys you is a slightly longer wait for the same ending. The only thing that stops the drain is oxygen, and that means an Exploration Kit. Carry them. Watch that oxygen bar like a hawk. The moment it touches zero you have about a minute, and the clock does not care what you were in the middle of.
Your surface and boarding logs will now tell you exactly what each room is costing you in Health, and will say plainly when you have stopped breathing, so you are never left guessing which stat is killing you. Thanks to TheDoki for the report, and for testing it thoroughly enough to prove the point beyond argument.