Third Dev Patch post today – busy times!
✨ Improvement
Two small ones for corporations, the first from paco1600-1. The Members roster in the Corp Office can now be sorted by Role, Name or Captain level with three buttons above the list. Role is the order it always had; the other two keep founders and officers in their standing within the sort.
The Browse Corporations list on the promenade was one flat colour. Each corporation now carries a coloured level badge, from slate at level one through blue and violet to gold at five, with its member count in green and its home office in cyan, and your own corporation’s row is picked out in amber next to its star. Same list, easier to read at a glance.
🚀 New Feature
Drylok mentioned that his first stop each day on the old Buyers Market was to sort by newest and see what he could fill. The Galactic Exchange now has that page back, and a better one. Wanted sits in the Exchange’s left column above My Trades. It lists every open buy contract in the game, newest first, for resources and equipment alike: what is wanted, how many are still needed, what the buyer pays each, the total on offer, who posted it and when.
Beside each is a You Hold column showing what you have in Commercial Storage, or in full condition spare gear for equipment, so the contracts you could fill right now stand out in green, and a tick box narrows the board to just those. Click any row and the item opens on the Sell side with that contract ready to fill. Your own contracts show dimmed, since those are managed under My Trades.
Gates in on the Act!
The Galactic Engineering Authority has been watching the Galactic Exchange with interest, and has decided it is a great way to gather what the next gates need than waiting on donations alone. From today a new captain sits on the Wanted board: the Gate Authority. Every few hours it posts a buy contract for something the current gate project is short of, a few thousand units at a time, at the Exchange’s going rate.
Fill one and you are paid like any other contract, and what you delivered goes straight into the project’s totals, so the gate’s progress bar moves with every fill. The Authority keeps a handful of contracts open at any time and rotates them as they fill, so there is always Authority work on the board alongside what other captains are asking for. The donation office is unchanged; this is another route to the same gate, one that pays. You will find the Authority’s contracts on the Wanted page of the Exchange, and on any resource it is buying.
Trade Channel
Thedoki asked for somewhere to talk trade, and chat now has a Trade tab. It is open to every captain and it is for one thing: buying, selling and swapping. Ask for what you need, say what you have, haggle. Unlike the other channels, which clear after a week, Trade keeps a month of history, so a request posted on a Tuesday is still there to find the following weekend. The Exchange talks into it as well. When you list something for sale or post a buy contract, the form has a tick box, on by default, that announces it in Trade chat as you: “WANTED: 1,200 Amaranthine at 400 CR each, see the Exchange’s Wanted board”, or “FOR SALE: 500 Blissar at 199 CR each on the Exchange”. Untick it if you would rather list quietly.
NPC Outposts
Outposts have grown up enough to keep company. Word has spread among the freelance quartermasters, marshals, surveyors and recruiters who drift between stations that a player outpost is a decent place to set up a desk, and from today they will take one if asked. Every outpost now has a Contacts tab in its management panel with two seats. Choose what you want a contact to handle: ore contracts, materials contracts, supply runs, prisoner transfers, planet surveys, derelict surveys or bounties. The outpost finds the right person, gives them an office, and from then on any captain who docks at your outpost will find them on the promenade handing out missions, exactly as the NPCs at the big stations do. Hiring is free, and you can dismiss a contact and hire another whenever you like. A contact’s standing follows the outpost’s. A small outpost gets a contact who deals in safe ore and modest bounties; a level seven outpost gets one who wants the dangerous stuff and pays for it. Grow the outpost and its people grow with it. And of course everyone who docks to take the work pays your docking fee and your tax. A good contact is traffic.