Hi guys,

Happy 2015! We’re back in the office now and we’re hard at work on moving the unstable update to stable and fixing a few issues.

In the mean time I wanted to address some of the current problems we’re aware of and explain how we’re going to deal with those problems for 1.0

Guns do too little damage

Currently guns do too little damage, particularly guns with a high rate of fire. This is a known problem and it’s largely down to the way protection works currently. Guns that shoot a small amount of damage rapidly for an overall high DPS are unfairly mitigated due to how protection functions. We’re looking at fixing the way protection handles small damage values for the stable release.

Mining is a little dull

Mining at the moment is a little uneventful and a bit of a grind. We plan to remedy this by vastly increasing the number of underground encounters, dungeons and microdungeons you’ll encounter whilst mining. Many of these dungeons will contain some of the loot you’re looking for whilst mining and save you from simply tinking away at blocks for hours on end. We’re also going to increase the range of monsters underground to mix up the experience and look into benefits for sustaining existing mines.

There’s no reason to build on a planet

Currently there’s very little reason to settle on a planet, given the utility of the ship and the amount of space it has available to it on upgrading. We plan to remedy this in a number of different ways. Firstly, we’re going to add a planet bookmark/teleportation system. This will allow you to get directly from your ship to a base you’ve set up on a planet instantly and without travelling to that planet first. Next there will be utilities and crafting resources that won’t function on your ship and will require an on planet base. Finally there will be alternative progression paths that directly require buildings of various kinds. The nomadic nature of settling in your ship is directly in support of the combat/adventure progression path.

Monster path finding is bad

We’ve made so many changes to monsters and their abilities that their path finding has suffered a lot. We’re going to be working on it and retooling it for the next stable release. Hopefully by then the monsters should be substantially smarter.

Hunger and/or temperature is gone

We made the decision to remove hunger and temperature as stats because we weren’t happy with their current implementation. They’ll be back in some form for harder difficulty levels

There’s only one path through the game

Right now adventuring and combat is more or less a requirement if you want to progress. We intend to change that with farming and building progression paths. We’d like you to be able to progress through the game with barely any combat or questing required. These paths will likely be distinct from one another so you’re able to progress through all of them individually over time.

Quests are too fetchy/there aren’t enough quests

The current quests are fetchy because we needed to create a quest line with the engine features we currently have available to us. We’re going to be expanding quests in a big way and many of the quests currently available are placeholder. With more quest triggers we can massively expand the kind of quests available to us and we’re going to be adding some form of procedurally generated quests too.