Heathen is happy to announce Terran’s Sector K72 patch is scheduled to release to beta build in the last week of March. While we still have plenty of work to be done the massive undertaking that kicked off in November of 2016 is to a point where we need your feedback to insure the best possible results.
If your not sure how to ‘opt-in’ to the beta build check this link from Steam out, no password needed of course. Beta is available to everyone who owns the game. Sector K72 is a massive change from the current live build and includes a change of engine, serialization (how we read and write stuff to disk), asset loading (how we sort stuff in memory) as well as a slew of new gameplay features; its basically a whole new kit and with a lot more to offer.

Terran Tester

Early Access has always been about getting your feedback and growing the game to be more than it could be if done behind closed doors. The Roadmap, store notes and forums will all be updated along with the Sector K72 release. As always the Heathen team will be there to answer questions, hear your feedback and to make sure that has a meaningful impact of continued development effort. The Terran Roadmap hosted on Trello is your best view of what the developers are actively working on have their sights on. The roadmap is updated by developers directly and is a candid view, spelling/grammar errors and all. Steam Community is Terran’s official community source, where members of Heathen can be easily identified. This is the place to voice all your likes and dislikes, concerns and hopes. All of Heathen’s dev team has access to and can engage on the forums. Heathen is here to help, while the public forums are an ideal place to discuss yes even bugs, never the less sometimes you need some one on one and Heathen Support is here for you. Heathen Support is staffed by the same devs that build the game and chat on the forums so you get the same level of quality. You can reach out to us via e-mail or through the Heathen Support portal and track your query through our help centre.

So What’s New!

It’s all new, with Sector K72 the first thing you will notice is the new boot and load sequence. While not exactly ground breaking, it is new to Terran which previously used an in-game settings options approach. With the new loading screen, you can do everything you might expect, create a new ‘profile’ aka a new save file, load existing ones, adjust your basic system settings and of course exit out of the game.

Map

Prior builds keep you limited to the Ship Editor and Dashboard, the new build integrates the Dashboard into your view of the Galaxy its self. The new interface and the new features of the galaxy are key areas interest for the Sector K72 patch. You can now browse the galaxy zooming in and out of systems and managing your assets (aka planets) as well as viewing other known systems.
Once you have formed an organization you will be able to scan and claim planets enabling you to establish and cultivate a population. The map view when zoomed into the planet level provides the tools to manage your populations and ‘improve’ them via ‘Asset Improvements’ expanding your capability and increasing your output.

But wait there’s more!

Fleet

Fleet Manager is the new face of ‘Ship Editor’ as it appeared in previous builds and will be further extended providing you the tools to form and structure your fleet’s flotillas, divisions and wings as well as assign them to missions and tasks such as system or sector defence.

Exploration

Coming soon the exploration view will provide you the tools to probe and scan the galaxy for new points of interest providing another route to expand your knowledge of the galaxy and uncover its mysteries.

Contacts

The contacts view makes it easy to engage the people and organizations you have meet. Each contact has its own opinion of you and a network of contacts of its own. By accepting and completing tasks for a contact you can raise your reputation with them and their related contacts expanding your network and opening new opportunities.

Organization

With the launch of Sector K72 you will be able to form an organization right at the start though in the full game you will need to build toward that goal. The organization view is where you can browse known organizations, apply to join them or create your own. For the first cycle of Phase 2 you will not be able to join NPC organizations and will be able to create your own government or corporation right at the start, this is to help focus initial testing on the empire building aspects new to this phase of Early Access.

The Profile

Profile is a view of your character and is where you can ‘improve’ your character’s attributes by ‘installing’ Pilot Enhancements. Pilot Enhancements will modify your character’s basic stats and may also unlock new designs and parts for use in the ship editor as well as new asset improvements. As you grow, explore and expand you will uncover new and more powerful pilot enhancements. You can change your set of installed enhancements at any time though the number and complexity of enhancements you can have installed at any given time is limited. A new announcement will be posted when the patch hits the beta build later this month and will includ more details on the list of additions, fixes and changes.

[ 2017-03-02 22:35:01 CET ] [ Original post ]