Enhanced fire

Fires are now more dangerous, do more damage and can expand faster. Additional smoke effects are now spawned alongside, and there's more conditions that can spawn a fire. Some bomb-like effects have been refactored to offer more variety and, you guessed it, more FIRE. The xenomorphs from the last update also love it:

New small events

Two new malfunction mini-events have been added. Showers now have an obvious failure mode:
And since this is space and the year is 5781, things can explode sometimes for no reason. Anything:

New event: meteor shower

A devastating new event, whose effects are too horrible to picture (they involve plenty of fire too). You'll have one minute to try to lock doors and move your officers away from the area.

New event: miasma cloud

Accidents happen even in the best kept stations. Rush to repair the malfunctioning factory, or trigger its self destruct mechanism (for a chance of starting a fire, of course).

New event: medical emergency

Your hospital area will struggle to treat this many patients, but if you manage to expect a nice reward. This is the first goal-like, rewarded event and more will come.

New event: somebody set up us the bomb

(I'm old enough to remember that meme).
Another possibility for your enemies to annoy you: a random, hidden hostile can now spawn in your station and it will also spawn a bomb nearby. The bomb is not directly focused by clicking on the alert but it will always be near the hostile. After you find it it's possible to disable it by destroying it (it's a neutral object, so your officers and defenses won't auto attack, you have to find it and give attack orders). If your run out of time, well, more FIRE.

Small enhancements

A counter is now displayed in the staff listing in the staff screen, including both your total officer count and the current filtered count.
In the same vein the filter menu now has counters for all categories, to quickly get an idea of how your work force is distributed.
A very often requested feature is now in: the staff picker for ships now includes a basic overview of the officer vitals, to make a more informed decision about your crew picks.
The orange warning icons on top of objects were often confusing, so they are now smaller and inside the standard object icon bubble.

Proper autosave system

Autosaving in previous versions was poorly conceived, requiring manually saving often the game. The game only autosaved when landing or taking off from a planet. In 3.7 autosaves are now much better implemented. First, there's now 5 autosave slots per galaxy, which automatically rotate based on the save age. Second, autosaves are now on a timer, and do not depend on visiting planets or any other gameplay action. Since our save system is UI-blocking, the timer is flexible and tries to sync the saving with major UI transitions, like changing the game screen. This starts after 15m of the latest save (manual or automatic). If 30m or more pass without any screen change, the autosave system will block the game for a few seconds and save it anyway.

Save picker remake

The save picker has nearly been unchanged since our first pre-1.0 prototypes back in 2014, receiving only minor improvements since then. It was time to bring it up to a better quality standard:
Saves are now grouped by galaxy for a much more tidier interface. And it's also finally possible to name your manual saves, the game will prompt you for a name when manually saving a game.

Staff screen enhancements

A picture is worth a thousand words:
The goal is to finally make the staff screen an useful information resource rather than a place to put UI that it's too big for the station inspector. It should offer the same level of information plus any other specific features. The spec tabs will also be re-done and a new one will also be added to have a better look at XP and jobs. Stay tuned for the next update!

[ 2017-07-06 15:08:57 CET ] [ Original post ]