Spacecraft upgrades are finally here!

They come with a tutorial, but it’s at the end and you might not be looking forward to redoing the whole tutorial just to see it. I really have to modularize that damn tutorial one of these days…

In any case, here’s the short of it: Go to the upgrade screen (the UI has been rearranged a bit to accommodate more menu buttons, you can now also access the codex directly from the game!). Learn about potential upgrades by clicking on the sticky note in the upper left. Put the new sticky note in a convenient location on the screen, and spend your remaining research points on uncovering its various still hidden aspects by clicking on them, or use them to make some more notes about other possible upgrades.

Once you want to actually install an upgrade in your spacecraft, seek out a spacecraft outfitter on a station with spacecraft services higher than 4, order your upgrade, and wait until they should be done. As in real life, there might be unforeseen complications with the installation. The more dilligent you are in your research and the higher the stations spacecraft service rating, the better the chances everything will go smoothly.

Earn new upgrade research points by chatting with outfitters, keeping your ears open while hitting the bars, doing maintenance and repairs yourself or even taking some time to just take a couple things appart and figure out how they work - a risky but quite effective option, especially suited for characters with high wits!

Go get your zero-g toilet now and get out of your diapers!

Some good, some not quite there yet

There’s a couple of other things to be said about upgrades. For one, they are not yet balanced. At all. This update adds properties to your spacecraft that affect various things. One of the most important right now is comfort. Resting aboard your spacecraft doesn’t restore drive anymore, instead it comes with a chance to lose some as a result of the cramped conditions and lack of amenities. Installing upgrades that increase that comfort significantly affect that chance of losing drive while you’re out there, and might in time even give you back the chance to restore some. So comfort updates are a very important investment to guard against burnout.

On the other hand, the craft also has endurance now. That is, whenever you leave a station, you’re on a clock. Your oxygen, your batteries, your water supply… something is going to run out eventually, which is all abstracted into that one stat. Unfortunately, the job generation does not really consider this, so you might now be getting jobs that’ll just have you die out there. Due to the periodic nature of space travel, there isn’t even much you can do about it. As a result, the endurance stat is currently set high enough to not make this too much of a problem. And as a result of that, endurance upgrades, though there’s quite a few of them, are kind of useless right now. Upgrades that extend your maintenance intervals are convenient, but not exactly game changing, and the same can be said about maneuverability.

Going for the extra lap

I did quite a bit of playtesting during September, during which the above issues became aparent. What also became apparent is that it is rather difficult to estimate whether a job will really be worth it, as well as if it can even be completed in time. With the provided navigational tools it’s not impossible, mind you, but it’s tedious and you need to understand quite a bit of what you’re doing. I have complained about job generation being too unpredictable, convoluted and unrewarding before. But the added complexity that results from multi-leg trips and limited endurance push it just a bit too close to “unplayable” for my comfort. I can still play it, but I have to wonder how many other people will manage.

So I decided that before moving on to the next, and for the steam demo last, big feature, which is going to be an actual character system, I am going to insert a month for an extra lap and bring the whole job generation up to speed. This won’t increase job variety yet. I think the current jobs are… fine for an early demo. Not great, but fine. Enough to get the point across. But the way they are presented, and the kind of information they convey is so disconnected from gameplay it’s useless at best, confusing and misleading at worst. I’ve come to consider fixing this to be absolutely critical for the demo. I could imagine throwing a demo out there without the character system, or with incomplete graphics… but since last month, I cannot imagine throwing it out there with the way jobs currently work. That’s how critical I think this is. And it shouldn’t take more than a month to fix, which is a mercyfully short time to address an issue that you’ve come to see as game breaking.

Other new stuff

This release delivers a couple of other new, or at least changed, things besides the upgrades, though. The patch notes are pretty extensive this time around. I’ve mentioned the small UI rework, which frees up some space for additional buttons, making things all in all more convenient. It has also enabled me to finally build the push mechanic directly into the UI via a button, a thing that has been dumping around in my backlog for a while now.

And we have some new Codex entries as well, though I’ll freely admit to cheating a bit on those. There’s a new spacecraft section, and it contains some articles about the space stations, which were in the orbitography section before, and about the Alex and its variants, which diligent readers of this blog (if such exist, though the readership numbers would suggest they do) will recognise from the state vector back in May. But there’s also a short article about earth launch systems, which is new. Still, that’s the only thing new in the codex for this month. But there’s also a new background graphic, this one of Lofty Docklands, the scavenger station of high orbit. That’s the fourth station done. Almost half through now! At least if I count prometheus as only one station, though in all honesty it’s probably going to require 2 or 3 times the effort of this one. We’ll see.

The character system I talked about is mostly finished on the drawing board by now. As mentioned I’ll take another month before actually throwing myself into its implementation, but at least it looks interesting on paper. I had to take some care to not let a character become too powerful and make the game too easy, but should still bring some relief in areas the player might struggle with. I think I’ve found a system that allows that, but I won’t really know until I play it. I might write a couple words about it in the next state vector, depending on what else might prove necessary to talk about.