🚀 Monitor Ship Builds
You kicked off a ship build, wandered off to do three other things, and now you have not the faintest idea when the thing is due to finish. We have all been there. You hand your blueprint over at a Ship Yard, the countdown begins, and then real life or a promising asteroid field pulls you away. An hour later you are two systems over, wondering whether your shiny new hull is ready to collect or whether you have got another day to wait. Until now the only way to find out was to fly all the way back to the Yard and look, or sit tight and hope you caught the notification.
Not any more. Open the Information Center and you will find a new Ship Builds tab sitting right next to Manufacturing. Everything you have cooking is now in one place, wherever you happen to be in the galaxy. The top half of the tab is yours. Every ship you are building shows a progress bar that fills as the work goes on, the exact time left before it is done, and the Ship Yard it is waiting at so you know where to go and claim it.
When a build finishes, its bar turns green and simply says Ready to collect. No more guessing, and no more round trips just to check. The bottom half belongs to your corporation. If you fly under a Corp banner, every hull your crewmates have on the go shows up here too, along with who started each one, so the whole outfit can see what is being built and where.
Not in a corporation yet? The tab will gently nudge you to join or form one, because building ships together is a good deal more fun. This one goes out to Droffy, who asked for exactly this, in very nearly these words. Fine idea, that. Consider it built. And while we were poking around the shipyards, we tidied something up for the miners among you. Ship blueprints now show the same full set of statistics you would see anywhere else, including the Ore Hold on extractor and mining hulls, so you can properly size up a build before you commit a single unit of ore to it.
⚖️ Exploration Balance Change
Fitz did some sums, and we could not argue with them. Fitz has been out among the Derelicts of late, prising loose salvage while the previous owners take noisy exception to the intrusion. Good honest work, right up until you tot up what it costs to keep yourself kitted out for it. He wrote in wondering whether the survival gear for this line of work was asking rather a lot in materials for what are, when all is said and done, entry level buffs.
Stim Packs to patch yourself up mid fight, Defence Kits for when the locals turn nasty, and Exploration Kits to keep you breathing on a hostile surface. He was gracious enough to add that he would not mind in the slightest if we disagreed. We did the sums, and we did not disagree. So from today, every Molecular Assembler set to produce any of that survival gear turns out twice as many for the very same materials you were feeding it before. Stim Packs, Defence Kits and Exploration Kits, every tier of all three, double the output across the board. Nothing about the recipes has changed.
You simply get twice as much at the end of the run, which is really just another way of saying each one now costs you half of what it used to. And if you already have an assembler quietly churning this gear out somewhere in the galaxy, you do not need to lift a finger. It picks up the new rate all on its own. Thanks, Fitz. Nicely spotted, and no complaint from us either.
🔧 Bug Fix
Pirate hideouts had a bad habit of freezing up on you. Not any more. If you have been tackling the pirate hideouts, especially alongside a friend or two, you may have hit a frustrating snag. Part way through clearing one, the pirates would simply stop turning up, leaving you stuck in a hideout you could never quite finish. Here is what was going on. When you switch to another browser tab or minimise the game, your browser quietly puts the tab to sleep to save power. The game lost its steady heartbeat with our servers, and the hideout took that to mean you had wandered off, so it stopped sending in fresh pirates.
In a group, that could freeze the fight for everyone. We have sorted it. Now, the moment you genuinely tab away from the game, we safely pull your captain out of the hideout and set you back in open space, with your ship exactly as healthy as you left it. No more sitting there quietly getting shot at while you are not even looking. And if you were fighting alongside others, they carry on without missing a beat while the pirates simply turn their attention to whoever is still in the thick of it.
When you come back, a tidy little panel is waiting with a Re-enter Hideout button. One click drops you straight back into the action, and the hideout remembers exactly how many pirates you had left to clear, so none of your hard work is lost. One reassurance. Clicking between windows on the same screen is perfectly fine and will not pull you out. This only steps in when you truly leave the game to go and look at something else. So the next time a message needs answering, tab away with a clear conscience. Your ship is safe, and the hideout will be right where you left it.
✨ Improvement
A friendly second question before you open a Corp Office, because a few of you were opening them in rather surprising places. If you run a corporation, opening an office is how your members reach your stores, bank and facilities at a given location. It is also a paid commitment, an upfront cost now and a monthly upkeep after that, so it rather matters that the office lands where you actually meant it to.
A handful of Founders have discovered, usually a moment too late, just how easy it is to click Open Office at the wrong dock and quietly sign the corporation up for a base nobody wanted. So we have added a simple safety net. When you press Open Office, a confirmation now pops up first, spelling out exactly where the office will be opened and what it will cost you, both right now and each month. A quick glance, a yes or a no, and you are on your way. Nothing is charged until you say the word. A small change, but it should spare a few red faces and a few wasted credits.