🔧 Bug Fix
Unified Combat went live today, and with a change this size there will be rough edges. This is where we will keep track of them, along with the smaller improvements that come out of what you tell us. Anything you report that turns out to be real will end up here, with what we did about it.
Mining XP
Mining was paying no experience at all This one is on us and it is the big one. From the moment the new flight deck replaced the old mining panel, cutting a rock awarded no experience whatsoever. Not captain experience, not the Mining skill. It was not being saved up and paid on your way out either, which several of you reasonably assumed. It simply was not happening.
It is fixed, and the numbers are the ones mining has always used rather than anything new: captain experience is your yield multiplied by the ore’s rarity, and the Mining skill goes up by one for every cycle you complete. It pays on what actually made it into your hold, so a cycle that overflows a full hold pays for what fit. This applies to every rock in the game, including the ones scattered around pirate hideouts.
Solo Combat – Salvage Drones
Salvage drones were failing to drop the good a salvaged run, If you scanned a contact, chased it down and killed it, your salvage drones would strip the wreck and come home with an empty hold. The same went for bounty marks and for ambushes that jumped you in open space. Salvaging in an asteroid field or at a hideout was unaffected, which is why it took a player to spot it.
The cause was a fair one. Salvage is only paid out for cuts the server has actually seen land, which is what stops two captains stripping the same wreck and both being paid in full for it. But the server only tracks that where there is a shared place to track it in, an asteroid field or a base. A hunt happens wherever you caught the target, so there was nothing to record the cuts against and the game paid out nothing at all rather than paying you twice. Fixed. A fight with no shared location has nobody to race you for the wreck, so your drones are now paid for what they cut.
Players In-System Panel
The Players in System panel now tells you where everyone is It used to give you a name, a level and a ship, which told you somebody was in the system but nothing about what they were doing with themselves. Each captain now carries a line saying where they are: docked at a station, mining a particular belt, raiding a named hideout, or out in open space.
Better still, that line is a link. Click where somebody is and you set course for it, the same as choosing a destination from your Navigation panel. See that a captain is working Asteroid Field Delta, click it, and you are on your way. Open space is not a place, so there is nothing to click there. We think this is the most useful thing in this whole update for anyone who mostly plays alone. Fields and hideouts are now shared, so two captains in the same place genuinely fight and mine alongside each other, but none of that is much use if you never know anyone else is out there. Now you can look, and go.
The panel refreshes itself every ten seconds while it is open, so you can leave it up and watch the system go about its business. One honest limitation. The game learns where your ship is when you stop moving, not continuously, so what you are reading is where somebody last came to rest rather than a live trace. Somebody crossing the system will show at their last stop until they arrive. We would like to make that properly live one day, and the groundwork is already there in the ship blips you see on your own screen.
Drone Info – BW ?
Your own drones were telling you less than the catalogue was Bandwidth decides how many drones you can have in space at once, so it is the number you want in front of you when you are choosing what to launch. It was added to the Item Database, and then it was nowhere to be seen in your own drone bay, which is the one place the decision actually gets made. There is now a BW column in the Consumables tab of your ship inventory. Anything that is not a bay drone shows a dash rather than a zero, because a courier does not spend bay bandwidth at all and we would rather not have you adding it into a total it was never part of.
The bigger half of this was worse. Opening Full Item Info on something in your own hold showed a cut down version of what the Item Database showed for the very same item. That is now fixed properly rather than patched: your inventory hands the panel the whole item, so bandwidth, drone hull, leash range, damage and the rest all appear exactly as they do in the catalogue.
Ship Size Matters right ? 🙂
Your own ship was drawn smaller than everybody else Ships in the field are sized by their hull class, so a Cruiser draws bigger than a Frigate. Except that your own ship was measured from a different baseline to everyone else’s, and came out at around 87 percent of the size. A captain flying an identical hull to yours was drawn bigger than you, simply because they were not you. Nobody could have spotted this until now. For as long as a field held one captain and a screen of pirates there was nothing of your own class beside you to compare against.
Your ship now measures from exactly the same baseline as everything else on the field. While we were in there, the Stripminer has been given a size of its own. All three mining hulls shared one silhouette, so the largest mining ship in the game looked identical to the smallest. It now draws a full class larger than a Gravel Rat or a Prospector, above every pirate escort you will meet. It takes level 60 and a serious investment to put one in space and it ought to look like it. To be clear, that is appearance only. It does not change which hideouts a Stripminer may enter, and the mining barge door rule is exactly where it was.