This post is a Community Spotlight (CS), where we're bringing attention to cool community-driven projects for StarMade. We'll be posting some more of these in the near future. Check out the "Discuss with the Devs" that happened in our official Discord last month here: https://starmadedock.net/threads/discuss-with-the-devs-july-18-2019-sis-shortform.31343/ --- Quickfire Team: Quickfire is a community-run project to modify the games configuration files for a more balanced, fun, and interesting game experience. The QF team consists of members from every part of the StarMade community, including several veteran PvP specialists, creative builders with technical knowledge, and a long-time administrator of one of the most historically popular StarMade servers, as well as several other veteran StarMade players. While the mechanical changes that can be made within configs are somewhat limited, we have done our best to correct the issues the community has been having with the current game and enhance combat gameplay. The Quickfire Initiative has also worked with Schine on refining certain game mechanics (e.g. armor stacking). We have, at the same time, made an effort to avoid undermining key design elements of the power and weapons updates (e.g. the chamber system and arrangement) when not absolutely necessary. We have also played a key role in testing, tracking down, and confirming several critical bugs with weapons and systems, which were fixed in the most recent patches. Quickfire has created a config package that includes everything from fine-tuned missile guidance to rebalanced chamber costs. Every system in the game has been looked over and re-tuned to address various balance issues brought up by the community and/or our team members. We have also adjusted or modified all of the weapon combos, with the goal of creating greater diversity, viability, and utility for each where possible. Weapon changes include eliminating the troublesome cursor recoil mechanic from cannons, significantly improving acid damage application from beams (reducing the need for output spam), adjusting missile guidance, flight speed, and turn rate, and eliminating the extremely exploitable Death Beam. Currently, we have addressed most of the issues and features that we intend to (aside from some minor tweaks), and have a configuration set available for testing. We are now in the phase of refinement and testing, and for this, we need the community! Feedback, suggestions, and thoughts on our settings for weapons, systems, and chambers are welcome, and will help us improve and refine the Quickfire Initiatives configs and make StarMade a better experience for everyone. Our in-progress configuration set is available on a public Github (updated often), and we also have a public creative/test server running our configs, at QuickfireSM.com:4242. You can find an overview of Quickfires changes in this document. A longer, more complete list of changes and the explanations behind them is available here. If you have feedback, suggestions, questions, issues, or other comments about our config set, please post them in the project thread. You can also join the Quickfire Initiative Discord server. --- Schine: We'll be adopting the Quickfire config changes in the next week or so. At the same time, we'll also begin to start making efforts to lower the barrier for modding. We've been working with modders from our own community as well as others to come up with a plan to make modding StarMade much easier, without taking a big chunk of dev time from the universe update. If you're interested in modding StarMade, head over to our official Discord (Join the StarMade Discord Server!) in the #modders-dev channel. If you don't get a chance to test QF configs out before then, we'll be taking feedback with the Quickfire project when we officially adopt their changes and continue to address balance concerns. Thanks for playing StarMade, - The Schine Team