Early Access Update 8.4.0

Greetings Wayfarers!
The update that carried Stars Reach from playtesting into Early Access was packed with changes – and you’ve already been playing the results.
And we’re not slowing down. Our next hotfix is coming soon, so keep your eyes peeled for more updates!

 

Gameplay & World Updates

The Corruption

WE CROSSED EMPTINESS. WE ARRIVE. WE ROOT. WE MULTIPLY.

Created long ago as the accidental outcome of the genetic experiments conducted by the Old Ones, the Corruption are a deadly biological hive mind that believes itself destined to absorb the entire Garden into its collective. The Servitors hunt down and exterminate what they call the Corruption whenever they see it.

In the game, Corruption spores float through space, crash into planets, and start new tentacle-and-spore colonies to expand across the biome.

YOUR PAIN WILL BE COMPOST. YOUR JOY WILL BE NECTAR.

They can take several forms: floating spores, which often grow, split, and explode in deadly gas clouds; anchored types, like plantlike turret tentaclevines or puffball stalks; and of course, the dreaded Motherplants. These act much like Makers, building rings of defenses around themselves and gradually spreading more of their children across the landscape.

Beating back the Corruption on a planet can be a major task requiring serious cooperation, lest you too end up absorbed.

YOU WILL NOT VANISH. YOU WILL ECHO PERFECTLY.

New Haven Map

• A whole new map for the starter area, Haven, has rolled out. This new map is much more explorable, and may even have a few fun Easter Eggs on it, waiting to be discovered!

 

Added Alien Puzzles to Game

• As players explore planets, they will have the opportunity to discover alien artifacts. Some of these artifacts may be hidden behind mysterious puzzles that have to be solved… By design, these intentionally lack instructions, and are a puzzle for players to solve.

Corruption Attack on Haven

• We replaced the old kill mission with one to defend Haven from the Corruption that so recently attacked it. Don’t worry, they are cute baby ones, not the big mama ones.

 

Optional Haven Missions

We added optional Haven missions and NPCs that teach you about

• camps and saving your state
• dodge rolls and combat
• the grapple and how to use it
• the harvester and collections

 

Creatures avoid human construction

• Creatures will now tend to avoid player structures and NPC buildings.

 

Klaatus in loot caches

• Loot caches will start to include Klaatus.

 

Homestead and lot price changes

• We doubled the cost of homesteads and zoning lots, now that there’s no skill gate.

 

Remove skill requirement for owning homesteads

• Homesteads have gotten quite a bit more expensive, but will no longer require any skills to place.

 

Skills & Progression Updates

Xenobiology updates

• Scanning creatures with the bioscanner now gives Xenobiology XP, not Ranger XP.
• Maker Scanning has been moved to the Xenobiology skill.
• We have re-added food preferences for creatures so they can now be tamed.
• You now need the Pets skill active in order to tame creatures

 

Business Skill Tree updates

• You now earn Business XP by engaging in trades with other players.
• The Business skill is now required in order to place vendors

 

Tailoring is now its own profession

• We moved this out of base Crafting tree into its own advanced Profession.

 

Remove stat mods from starter clothing

• Starter clothing was granting stat mods. You don’t get to skip ahead that way, sorry!

 

Removing skill chits

• As we continued to flesh out progression and game loops, we removed skill chits from the game.

 

Crafting Updates

Crafting Recipe revisions

• We moved a lot of recipes around to address balance and softlock issues in the new crafting system.
• Many recipes required components or ingredients that were only available in loot. We removed these critical path ingredients from loot and ensured they are available as skill unlocks.

 

More information when inspecting Crafting Stations

Inspection now shows:

• Crafting Station type and tier
• Whether it crafts instantly or processes jobs over time (and what the processing capacity is)
• Examples of the sorts of things you can craft with this station

Recipe book management

Recipes found as loot will no longer go straight into your recipe book. Instead, they will go to inventory, and you will right-click them to add them to the recipe book. You can also right-click items in the recipe book to remove them. There will be a cooldown on re-adding them once removed.

 

Better crafting data guidance

• We added recipe tree views when you right-click on a recipe. It shows you all the steps and ingredients needed for that recipe.
• We also added “what can I use this for?” to the Item Details pane when you select an item in inventory. It lists every recipe it can be used in.

New recipe book limits

• We lowered the base recipe book size and made it so that you increase its capacity as you acquire skills that grant recipes. As part of this, we also no longer automatically re-grant recipes or put them in your recipe book. Recipe book management is all on the player now.

 

User Interface, Controls & Social Updates

More Galactopedia entries

We added a bunch of entries and updated some obsolete ones:

• Makers and dens
• the recipe book
• loot caches
• right-click context menus
• the new chat box buttons
• Q and E and tab and loadouts
• combining stacks

 

Roadmap and legal links on the splash screen

During Early Access, we want to make sure everyone can easily see this page here, the one you are reading now! We also, alas, have to make sure you can read boring legal documents. So the splash screen will have links for both.

 

GUI for friends

We’ve had command-line support for adding friends, but now we added

• the ability to add a friend from the context menu
• the ability to add a friend from right-clicking on their name in chat
• whether they’re online will be visible on the Profile page
• when you invite a friend they get a pop-up asking for consent

Because of this last one, friends can only be added while they are online to agree to it.

 

GUI for managing block/ignore

• We added functionality for managing block and ignore, including a block list on the Profile tab, context menu entries, and the foundation for right-click context menus on lines of chat, which can later be used by the friends system too.

 

Nameplates over all interactable objects

• Not sure how we missed this, but we made sure that when you hover over something you can interact with, it shows the object’s name.

 

Wounds more visible on health bars

• We showed the wounds as a reddened area on the gray background bar.

 

Adjust default keymap

• There were a few elements in the keymapping we had used for ages that were non-standard and not all that comfortable, so we adjusted the location of several of the defaults. In particular, Interact and Use Consumable swapped places so that Interact is on F like in most games.

 

Controller remapping

• Basic controller support is live, and we added remapping capabilities and more polish to it.

 

Inventory manipulation screens visual fixes

• Vendors, banks, and storage screens all got a visual pass to clean them up and enhance the experience of using them.

 

Expanded space for names on inventory tiles

• Inventory tiles will now have more space for names, going to two lines if needed.

 

Better feedback during character creation

Character creation flow is more incremental so we can provide player feedback as it proceeds. Specifically, this fixed:

• character disappearing if the name chosen was in use by another character on the account
• feedback if the name is in use
• interrupted partial creation can resume at stat allocation
• better handling of the “skip” functionality

 

Map improvements

A handful more polish items:

• we replaced the nav-point style icon with an arrow so you can see which way you are facing.
• waypoints on the map have tooltips when you hover over them, giving the details and coordinates
• the waypoint list on the right has more detail on mission waypoints
• tutorial missions on Haven now appear on the map

 

Graphical & Audio Updates

Bringing spacesuits back

• With the switch to the new character customization system, we lost spacesuits. This brought them back!

 

New station art

• Added new art for the machine shop, lathe, and field fabricator.

 

Performance & Technology Updates

Physics performance improvements

• Integrate a newer version of the physics library with performance improvements for raycasts. This should have broad impact on physics performance.

 

GeForce Now support

• We worked with NVIDIA to get this supported for Stars Reach!

 

New option for framerate capping

• We added an option so that you can cap your max framerate to provide smoother rendering.

 

Entitlements system

• In order to deliver your cool Founders Pack items, we needed a system to track what a given account is entitled to. This includes the ability to redeem keys in game for these items. You can now find this system in the ESC menu. This will also allow us to deliver other sorts of things later on, like: Kickstarter rewards, shop items, the Property Pass, and other goodies!

 

Projectile networking updates

• These updates should be largely invisible to players, but will improve networking and CPU load.

 

More advanced planet generation

We have an exciting rewrite in progress on planet generation, with the goals of:

• more realistic distribution of rock based on geology and formations
• more realistic distribution of gems and metals into those rocks
• more dramatic landscapes with alien features
• cooler underground areas

Bug Fixes

• Fix errors caused by the hover prompt: Under certain circumstances, the hover prompt when you hovered over an interactable item could end up generating thousands of lines of logged errors, causing client performance issues. This was fixed.
• Using a consumable no longer holsters your tool
• Fix icon scaling on skills window: We’ve fixed a scaling bug with the icon in the skills window so that now the name will display properly regardless of length
• Remove recipes when players unlearn a skill: Fixed a bug where if you unlearned a crafting skill you still had access to the crafting recipes it granted.
• Skill Tree changes:
  • Fixed a bug that prevented you from hyperlinking back on the skill tree
  • Tweaked how skill nodes are colored
• Fix blank large inventories: Very large inventories were causing a network overflow resulting in empty backpacks, no backpack tabs, and white squares on the toolbelt. This is now fixed.
• Fix errors in keymapping displays in Galactopedia: Some entries in the Galactopedia were not displaying the correct keymapping, so we have corrected them.
• Cap creature difficulty on Haven: Say goodbye to giant purple deer stomping hapless newbies with their delicate hooves.
• Reduce durability loss on kiosks:
  • Several kiosks were doing excessive calls to the durability system.
  • Removed durability helper imports and durability-loss calls when changing ability loadouts via UI popups.
  • Removed durability-loss calls tied to mission turn-in at mission boards.
  • Removed durability-loss calls tied to finishing crafts at crafting/processing stations and adding skills.
• Invisible avatar (& parts): We tracked down the source of this issue.
• Fix the Rough Terrain hint & entry: Many of you noticed that the “Rough terrain” entry in the Galactopedia displayed the same text as the entry for “Reticle.” This fixes that, and ensures that you will see the warning about moving through thick grass or difficult terrain slowing you down.
• Memory optimizations and leak cleanups: We found an assortment of memory leaks. This should clean that up so that the client performs better!
• Fix vendor UI not updating when you add items for sale: Just a minor fix to this UI to get it to refresh properly when you put something up for sale.
• Fix assorted tool edge cases: Using a special while using a beam was causing movement slowdowns to get stuck; there were other edge cases which led to weapons stopping doing damage, etc. This adds hardening against a bunch of edge cases to prevent oddities like these.
• Fix misplaced numbers on Stat Allocation screen: They were just too far off to the right.
• Fix crafting window sync with backpack: There was a bug whereby if you open a crafting station while you have the recipe tab selected, it will not display ingredients correctly. This fixes that.
• Fix the missing bioprocessor:

Turns out it had gone out for pizza. It’s a bioprocessor, after all.

OK, fine, more seriously:

• We now grant Medical and the accessible Antiseptic Bandage recipe during onboarding
• Simplifies ingredients and the Bioprocessor I construction path.
• Replace medical [WIP] descriptions with their real gameplay effects and clearer status terminology.
• Renamed Neural Charge Ampoule to Tool Charge Cartridge (Neural didn’t make sense for what is doing)

• Fix inspecting in inventory: There was a bug where if you are in fixed reticle, and inspect something in your inventory, it puts you back in the fixed reticle while still in the popup. You could still use ESC to close it, but it shouldn’t have happened. This fixes that.
• Fix missing weapon audio: You may have noticed that going bang-bang with a gun was more like going “… …” — oops. We got that working again.
• Fix recipe permissions:
  • Recipes can be deleted from the inventory recipe book.
  • Recipes can be traded or sold.
  • Recipes can no longer be left in the bank.
  • Fixes to the recipe limits.
• Fix shiny white rendering issue: We made a fix for the shiny white rendering issue whereby distant things turned into glowy white areas.
• Prevent “+0xp” float text: Minor but annoying bug!
• Free the cursor when selecting resource to scan for: There was a bug in the game where if you were in fixed reticle, the cursor was not automatically freed when you opened the resource selection pop-up window when using the Harvester or Terraformer. This fixes that so that it automatically switches to the cursor when that pop-up is open, and reverts back to the fixed reticle afterwards.
• Fix trading Klaatus: This had been broken for a while, but we fixed it.
• Fix large trades causing blocking popup: Trades could be so large that the resulting popup exceeded the size of the screen and could not be dismissed. This fix caps the length of the popup by saying “…and more.” Full details still go to your chat box.
• Fix for items disappearing during backpack rearranging: Dragging items from the backpack to empty area within the backpack was making them turn invisible. They will now reliably go to the end of the inventory list.