
Damage Types & Enemy Variations
We added a few new ways how hulls and shields react to different damage types. Some of these "changes" are things that were already in the game, but not explicitly highlighted. Weapons now officially deal different types of damage: Basic Physical and Energy, and then Antimatter, Electric, Plasma and Fragment damage, which are specializations of Physical and Energy damage.
- Physical and Energy are the 'vanilla' damage types
- Antimatter deals increased damage to hull
- Plasma deals increased damage to shields
- Fragment deals increased damage to Torpedoes and Fighters
- Lightning deals zero damage to Stone
Some weapons have those fixed, ie. Bolters: Antimatter, Plasma Cannons: Plasma (duh). Other weapons, like Chain Guns, have a chance of getting a specialized damage type. These damage mechanics
were already in the game, but now we are explicitly highlighting them for better clarity. It also makes the code less obnoxious to work with. Ahem.
What's new now, is that enemies can have special
additional resistances and weaknesses against nearly all damage types. On top of that, we added some special,
tougher enemies that have increased HP and damage. These new, tougher enemies will appear alongside normal enemies and can have 3 levels of toughness:
Tough,
Savage and
Hardcore, each having more HP and dealing more damage than the previous.

Hyperspace Changes
To improve the flow of the exploration part of the game, we made some changes to the hyperspace jumping system. Waiting for your hyperspace engine to recharge while in an empty sector isn't really a lot of fun and slows players down unnecessarily. So, to speed up travelling through
empty sectors, hyperspace recharge time is now increased by 200% while travelling through clear space (a sector with alliance/group/your own ships and nothing else counts as clear space).
Next up, doing a hyperspace jump will only drain your hyperspace engine for the
percentage distance you jumped, in relation to its reach, but always for at least 50%. This means that, with a 40 sector reach, jumping 30 sectors will drain 75% power (instead of 100%), but doing a jump for 10 sectors will still drain it for 50%. Your hyperspace engine still has to fully recharge in order to do your next jump.
On the flip side, we didn't want to make it too easy to escape a fight, so we supplied enemy ships with hyperspace distorters.
While you're being attacked by enemies (not just enemies present, they have to want you dead), they will distort your hyperspace engine, reducing its recharge rate to 25% (as well as its energy consumption, btw). Keep in mind that while exploring, most enemies will not attack you immediately on sight any more (see below). This basically makes it so that once you've committed to a fight, you can't weasel out as easily.
New Enemy Spawn Behavior
Don't you love it when you're exploring a yellow-blip sector and once the loading screen disappears there are 25 pirate ships fully loaded with torpedoes waiting for you? No? Then we have some good news for you!
In order to make those encounters fairer and less frustrating, most enemy encounters in yellow-blip sectors
no longer attack on sight, but only after you get too close or provoke them. They also no longer spawn all at the same time, but in a handful of waves, with each wave stronger than the one before it. Defeat all waves to have a special strong enemy spawn at the end with some shiny loot!

Special Offers
We spiced up Equipment Docks a little: They now have regularly changing
special offers waiting for you. These special offers have an overall better rarity than the rest of the supply and are always -30% off.
Speaking of Equipment Docks, all Equipment Docks now always have a supply of basic upgrades to get new captains started a little quicker:
- A Turret Slot Upgrade
- A Radar Upgrade
- An Energy Upgrade
- A Hyperspace Upgrade
More Patchnotes - 0.31.1
Gameplay
- Improved pirate dialogues
- Reduced time between entering a yellow-blip sector and being talked to by waiting pirates
- A selection of basic upgrades is now always available at Equipment Docks
- Boss Fidget is now only stunned by Electric damage (from before all weapons with Energy damage)
Hyperspace Rework
- Added coloring of Hyperspace Engine UI depending on which kind of buff or debuff is currently active
- Added icons telling players which (de)buffs are currently active
Hyperspace Rework Rework
"These changes are in relation to the Hyperspace Rework as it was active on the beta branch. Some of them won't be relevant for you if you didn't play on the beta branch. We listened to your feedback and adjusted some things."
- Hyperspace cooldown is no longer static
- Hyperspace cooldown over 3x as quickly when jumping into an empty sector
- While enemies are attacking, Hyperspace Engine is being distorted and can only recharge with 25% speed
- Hyperspace Engine must only recharge based on the jump distance relative to the max distance, but always for at least 50%
- Doing a jump of 15 sectors with a 20 sector range will only drain your engine for 75% instead of 100%
- Doing a jump of 2 sectors with a 20 sector range will still drain your engine for 50%
Balancing
"Several of these changes are in relation to the last beta patch and might not be relevant for you if you didn't play on the beta branch."
- Reduced amount of waves in enemy encounters for outer sectors
- Reduced ratios of high fire rate and high damage specialty bonuses
- Reduced bonus damage for plasma weapons against shields
Client
- Added an option to enable adaptive VSync, can be set while the game is running
- Added blinking to energy bars for when energy is low or energy usage is high
- Added tooltips for Hyperspace and Energy UI bars
- Added info about resistances and weaknesses of enemies to bottom-right HUD display
- Improved tooltips of enemy variation damage types
- Improved Singleplayer Window and added more information about saved galaxies
Bugfixes
- Fixed a very prominent server hang
- Fixed an issue where hyperspace cooldown could become very large
- Fixed several issues with wave encounters
- Fixed several issues in missions
- Fixed an issue where "Immune" would be shown too often
- Fixed a crash in shop UI
- Fixed an issue where some bulletin missions weren't working
- Fixed a crash if player loses torpedo launcher during torpedo tutorial
- Fixed a bug where electric weapons could damage stone
[ 2020-02-05 08:55:37 CET ] [ Original post ]