Ground Control Update 8.5.0

Good evening Wayfarers, 

Update 8.5.0 is coming tomorrow! We’ll announce the maintenance window via Discord and in-game broadcast You can also keep an eye on Server Status for the latest updates.

When the game comes back up, Ground Control will have landed.

What’s in store you ask? 

Performance and Stability

• Resolved several issues with how we are saving characters and the persistence around them making it much more difficult to have items vanish from your character.
• Solved an issue with Banks and Public vendors in the space sectors spawning extra versions of them. In addition we will combine the duplicates in each of the zones with the update so that if you hand stuff in multiple versions they should now be in one place.
• Fixed another server memory leak contributing to lag over time issues.
• Made improvements to loading of the zone map, which should make them load faster and require less data transfer.

User Interface Updates

• Space Map – We are providing a full visible map of our current space zones (since there is no surveying currently in space).
  • Provides icons and labels for each of the portals and wormholes, showing their destinations.
• We have also improved loading the map in general, so it should be more reliable.
• Marketplace Improvements:
  • Updated Marketplace to include details on your total Klaatus.
  • Updated the listing count to be more accurate. The current limit on private vendors are 100 and 25 for the public market. Due to some previous bugs, you may be over your limit and you can get yourself under the limit by removing items. You will be unable to add more listings if you are over the limit.
• Bank Improvements:
  • Added a Filter and Sort.
  • Tooltips on items will work much better than before.
  • Fixed issues with Take All that could cause you overstuff your inventory and possibly lose items.
  • When dragging items with quantities it will how show a background of the quantities selection UI.
  • You can now move items to any empty slot in your bank, and move items within the bank without having to withdraw them first. 
  • Several other under the hood fixes to make it perform better
• Portal Travel:
  • We have updated the look of the Portal Travel screen and moved it to the lower section of the screen. It will also provide some basic information about where you are traveling to, which we will be expanding on in the future. 
• Character Creation:
  • We have updated the lighting and background to provide a better visual of your character while customizing them.
  • Fixes to several of the hair choices that were distorting when used with some of the head and ear sliders.
  • Cleaned up the order for several of the category sliders.
  • We have begun to roll out some color variations for the Terran models. We are continuing to work on this system and plan to introduce variations for other species soon. In addition while this is currently only available in character creation, we plan to make customization for existing characters available in the future.
  • Removed the NONE as clothing options that were messing up with the shuffle.
  • Removed TBD Ears that were accidentally showing up. 
• Fixed keybinding icons not displaying correctly in popups and mission descriptions.
• Galactopiedia Updates:
  • Better view of Resource Tiers:
    • You’ve been relying on either the tiny image chart or charts you have made to be able to see what tier things are.
    • The Galactopedia will gain entries for every resource type so you can see exactly what goes in each.
    • Also, your collections for resources will now be organized by tier.
  • Updated the “ ! “ used to show new entries to be easier to see.

Climbing and Transition Fixes

Many players have run into situations where they were in a small tunnel and bumped their head or grappled into the ceiling to find themselves dead. We have made several updates to make this way less likely to happen.

• Prevent player clipping into terrain while climbing/mantling/dismounting/grappling and so on. No clipping should mean no accidental death from these! (unless terrain falls on you which is still intended).
• Crouch while climbing allows you to drop from the wall, Jump without moving while climbing will bounce you off per the current behavior.
• Fix thin walls allowing you to climb over the top back and forth (you’ll just cling to the edge if there’s no room at the top to stand, you can then use jump to get over).
• Reduce the clearance needed for dismantling so it’s closer to the player capsule size.
• Fix floating in jump animation while mantling.
• Fix getting stuck in hit react animation while climbing.
• Fix missing Haven Arrivals Building glass collision.
• Make Haven arrivals building climbing tutorial shelf ladder a little wider and flush with the top to make mantling smoother there.

Homestead Updates

We’ve heard the ask from players to get to homesteading more quickly, so we decided to just make availability very easy for now. This may well change in the future, but what the heck, it’s early days! So now you will receive a Homesteader as soon as you get to a Space zone. To support your building endeavors, we are also giving you access to the main tool you need to place and rotate things: the Fabricator. You can claim Fabricators for free through your Homestead Console and Tool Shop.

• One-time Homesteader Grant: ALL players (new and old) will now receive a homesteader next time they enter a Space Zone. The Homesteader is granted even if their inventory is full.
• Claim Free Fabricator from Homestead Console: Players can now claim as many Fabricators as they would like through their Homestead console
• Everyone can also buy free Fabricators from the Tool Shop.
• Because they are free, however, we will no longer allow players to sell them at the marketplace.
• Fabricators no longer have durability and decay mechanic.
• Removed Fabricator recipe from skill grant and loot drop.
• Added a pop-up to explain Homesteader after granting it and updated Homesteading hint.
• Instaformer and Paver are T2 recipes on Circuit Bench II now. Players can also buy them at the Item Shop.
• Added a galactopedia hint on Customizing your Home that explains Instaformer and Paver.
• Fixed construction tools description.
• Added Xylo and Chorno to Item Shop.

Redesign of Recipe Handling

When you are granted a recipe:

• Recipes automatically go into your collection.
• The Collections will have tabs for each of the crafting professions showing your recipes there.
• Being granted a recipe automatically increments your recipe cap.
• It is automatically activated.

When you move a skill out of practice:

• We also deactivate any recipes associated with that skill.

When you get a recipe as loot:

• It goes into your inventory.
• These objects can be sold, traded, banked, etc. They act like ordinary objects.
• You can “learn recipe” with a right-click, which adds it to your collection.
• If you have it already, it tells you so and suggests you sell or discard it.
• If you don’t have it, it checks if you can use it. If you do not qualify, it pops a UI prompt saying so, and asks if you are sure; if you can use it, it just learns it.
• Learning consumes the recipe.
• If you are below the recipe cap, learning also activates it.
• If not, you are told you are at the cap and to manage things in collections.
• There is also a right-click “learn all” which just sweeps your inventory and learns them all. It also has a confirm popup : “Are you sure you want to learn all the recipes in your inventory? Recipes you already have collected will be left in inventory. You may be learning recipes you cannot craft. Yes | No”.
• Learn All consumes the ones that can be added, and skips the ones that cannot be added. It does not activate any.

When you look at collections:

• Recipes are added when learned, but never removed.
• Recipes are sorted by type and by tier in the display.
• They are highlighted differently based on whether they are active or not.
• There is a button to make a recipe active/inactive, like skills, in the right pane.
• And a button to see the component details. You can also right-click a recipe in the collections pane to get the same thing.
• The cooldown works as it does now.

When you look in inventory on the recipe tab:

• It is a list of only the ones you have active at the moment.
• This exists for convenience since the collection view is large.
• You don’t have a right-click option for deactivating here (people have been misclicking).
• The descriptions tell you what it is used for and what crafting categories it belongs to, like now.
• It still has the right-click that shows you the graph.

When you go to craft:

• Crafting references the active list, which should be the same as the recipe book.

Migration path:

• We will go through every skill players have and automatically add the relevant recipes to their collection.
• This process happens every time you log in, and that way it catches all future cases of this issue as well.
• We do not remove recipes from collections with this process, so you never lose something out of there.
• We do deactivate any that you no longer qualify for, but this does not cost you the recipe.
• We make sure that the cap quantity matches the already present math based on granted recipes + spare slots.
• We will ensure that granted recipes are never dropped in loot

Crafting updates

• We have collapsed a few resource types in order to streamline inventory.
• We fixed coffee-related recipes, which had a bad ingredient mapping.
• We fixed the Power Chamber recipe. It can be crafted with a Circuit Bench..
• Currently, a lot of crafting stations are within the individual crafting professions, but require a high level Machine Shop to build. This meant that you had to basically do both professions in order to craft these. We are moving them entirely to the Machinist tree. If you already have the recipe, you won’t lose it.

Other Bug Fixes or Updates

• Added Sprint to the Key Mappings
• Fixes for Fabricator Building UI not going away. This guy has been pretty stubborn, but we have resolved many of the issues around it.
• We’re adding smarter logic to the system for loot caches, and are turning down the frequency at which recipes in particular drop.
  • In general, the distribution of what kinds of stuff you get will change somewhat. The odds of a loot cache dropping something immediately useful are going up (usually food/meds at lower tiers and tools/clothing at higher tiers). You will be less likely to just get a pile of recipes and raw resources.
  • We will also make the high end puzzle caches feel more worthwhile.
  • Lastly, we are reducing the frequency of loot caches in general.
• Controller improvements:
  • Invert Y works on controllers now.
  • Add a toggle sprint option for both keyboard and controllers.
• Some flora are now more willing to grow on particularly cold worlds, and Harvest Missions assigned to cold worlds are less likely to be cancelled by the TPL.
• Creatures will try to be smarter about checking line of sight and circle around walls instead of shooting through them.
• Fixed Corruption being visible from very far away (as well as their HUD damage numbers).
• The Terraformer’s Empty Hopper ability no longer fires a beam of dirt when it’s empty.
• Using 2 Grapple utility tools no longer leaves stuck VFX.
• The Departures holopedestal near Sky Skiffs on Haven and Crucible shows a timer for the next Skiff departure.
• Additional Tuning of Haven Missions:
  • Reduced number of popups when talking with Mayor Bob
  • Added progress counter to the mining missions.
  • Made Harvesting and Hunting missions less likely to require you to be a mountain goat to reach the target.
  • Simplified the Survey mission to be easier to finish.
• There is now a Friends button by the chat box. Clicking it will open a context menu of your friends, and picking one of them will open a direct message chat tab with them.
• You can now see your friends’ location on the Profile screen – planet and coordinate.
• New animations have been added to space flight 
• Creatures have better detection of line of sight and will try to only target you if you can be seen.