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A new Star System

New Worlds to Conquer

A completely new Star System is being added to the galaxy later today, with 256 additional sectors. This is the first time we've expanded the game universe since 2004, so it's probably worthy of note.

The Wormhole to the new system is Hidden, players will have to find it for themselves. Hints will be provided through game context. Down the road, the wormhole may even dynamically move around.

The new System may contain new dangers, but also new rewards. People should understand that this system may change much more frequently than the rest of the galaxy, as we try different concepts and experiment with gameplay, and even the process by which we generate star-systems.

The game is still completely FREE until June 1st (Sunday night at midnight CDT), so it's a great time to log on.

Next Generation Economy

The next-gen Economy has been expanded from Latos N-2, to now encompass the entire Latos system. Development is on-going around this.

Trade Convoys now will only be launched from stations that Locally Manufacture a given item, which also changes where Escort Missions will appear.

Escort Missions now immediately re-appear (in quantity) after our occasional server restarts, as the economic state is now saved with greater detail on server shutdown.

Other economic changes have also occurred. We have a lot more insight onto tuning the economy, with our improved Analytics, so more of this is likely to take place.

Hive Sector Conquest

Players may now Conquer hive sectors, if they successfully attack and destroy enough Hive vessels in a given sector, before the local NPC military gets involved.

There is a Badge progression for driving the Hive from sectors, and this will be an area of future gameplay expansion.

Related to this, you can now see the state of Hive conquest in any system with a Hive presence, via the Nav map.

Corporate Sector Run

The cross-galaxy race, known as the Corporate Sector Run, has been revived to run on Saturdays on a fully automated basis.

The event awards millions of credits in prizes, for both the top-placing racers, as well as those pirates who destroy racers closest to the finish line.

There is also a unique, permanent trophy item for first place finish, in-game News announcements of the winners, as well as potential for specialty leaderboards and badges in the future.

For more information, see the Facebook Event listing.

New Badges and Awards

A variety of new badges have been released, including the following:

• NPC Unaligned Pirate kills
• NPC Pirate Trident kills
• Hive Sector Conquest
• "Watch My Six" - Score 50,000 damage in a non-capship turret (Atlas, Behemoth, etc).
• "Explosive Personality" - Destroy an enemy ship, after dying, with your explosion.
• "Galactic Traveller" - Visit every system.
• "Badge King" - Earn 50 badges.

Some badges are retro-active, some are not. Not all of these stats were previously being tracked in the game, so we cannot retroactively award them all.

Other Notable Changes

Storage rental fees are now capped at 26 weeks. As a result, returning long-time players won't have their account balances impacted too heavily by unpaid storage fees.

Destination sectors are now preloaded when a player first begins a jump/warp/death animation, for a smoother transition. This further improves complex sector loading-times.

User Keys can now be used as a proxy for the Owner Key, when keying conquerable stations; this makes management of complex keychains much simpler.

Improved performance relating to instanced rendering on DX11, GL4, Vulkan and ES3. Most apparent with very dense sectors, using shadows. This also should help on GearVR and Oculus Go. (This update ships later today).

List of Upcoming Events:

• May 30th, 4pm Central (05/30 @21:00 UTC) - Corporate Sector Run
• June 6th, 9pm Central (06/07 @02:00 UTC) - Open TeamDX Season 2020

Update History

Here's a recap of other updates, since the last Newsletter. As usual, this doesn't really represent "everything we've been doing", but it shows some of the player-visible changes that have been made:

• Fixed rare issue with player getting stuck leaving a turret just as the capship leaves the sector.
• Fixed rare issue with player attempting to launch from a ship with no launch bays, or in a ship that is not in the local inventory.
• Fixed rare issue with player taking control of their capship and launching at the same time.
• NPCs convoys are less likely to be stalled for lengthy periods, while docking (although they can still take awhile on certain stations with limited docking bays).
• Furies will not become aggressive if a player repairs them.
• Updated targeted Character Info menu to display more badges. The region can also be scrollable, although no scroll bar will appear.
• If an item that would otherwise disappear is sold to a dynamic economy station like Latos N-2, the item will be put into your station storage instead of disappearing and you will receive a message that it happened.
• Player-owned capships being attacked in NFZ now enable the Self Defense mechanism for the owner to defend against the attacker.
• Strike-force squads no longer accumulate (pointlessly) under certain conditions.
• AI sector navigation and long-term learning algorithms have been changed. This may take time to impact the game visibly.
• Server-side analytics have been improved and expanded for various AI, NPC and economic functionality. We can now simulate the economy at 100x speed, for testing.
• Trident livery textures are now preloaded to minimize stalls when it is seen for the first time.
• The cost of buying back your ship and addons when in a Deneb skirmish mission now displays the correct value of 0.
• Fixed issue with player-capships not appearing correctly when in different sectors from their owners.
• Added weekly Unaligned Pirate report to in-game newsposts.
• Free ship buy-back during Deneb border missions now include addons.
• Added Corporate Sector Run Advertising mission that includes the rules.
• Players muted from a "/report" are now notified of the offending chat text.
• Some administrative mutes have been changed to in-game time instead of wall-clock time.
• Fixed issue with strike force attacking when docking to a group member's capship when both are in a Deneb Border Skirmish mission but the capship's owner is not in the sector.
• Fixed issue with losing radar target when targeting a player-owned capship and they launch from it.
• Changed virtual keyboard tab icon to the word "Tab".

Download the Game

You can install the game client for Android, iPhone and iPad, Samsung GearVR and Oculus Go, Google Daydream VR, as well as find the game on the Mac Store. Or, you can directly download the game installation for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

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