Hi all - lots of work being done. Some of my time has been spent adding a new mission that unlocks Smuggling. This mission gives you an option to unlock buying and selling contraband on the Trade-Net. Once you unlock contraband, these items will appear for trade as buy and sell contracts. Smuggling is a bit more dangerous than hauling trade goods between star systems and pays better overall in smaller ships as low volume high-value transactions.

I'll be expanding on this system quite a bit during Alpha with timed trade missions, branching delivery missions that include ground and space combat and special equipment for your ships. Initially, when this patch is released, you will be attacked more often if you have contraband items in your cargo hold, so make sure you are well equipped for space combat if you take these contracts.

Ive also been doing a bit of work on the faction system and when this next patch goes live, you should start to see small skirmishes in space between various factions. You can choose to join these skirmishes or fly in to pick up the loot when the shooting is over.

The next patch will also see an increase in the trade-in value of your current ship. CHA has always reduced the purchase price of ships and increased the trade in value of your ship. The next patch will boost this a bit more. Ill also be including a number of bug fixes and stability improvements.

Once the next patch is live, I'll start working on the crafting system, implementing the updated animations, adding the ground combat special attacks and moving on to some other work as I quickly approach full Alpha.

As I start implementing these new features I'll begin posting builds to the public test branch for a week or two before setting them live for everyone. Some of the changes that are coming are fairly complex so I think it will be a good idea to start separating the stable builds from some of these more experimental updates. I'll post on the forums when I start publishing test builds with instructions on how you can access these updates.

Thats it for now. I hope to have this patch live in a week or so. Meanwhile, here are all the latest patch notes. Have a great weekend and thanks as always for supporting Stellar Tactics!

5/20/19
FIXED: Another edge case with older saves that could display trade contracts from stations that are no longer in certain systems.
FIXED: Cargo volume displayed incorrectly when using sorting options. Could allow you to add more cargo than your cargo hold could carry.
FIXED: Cargo volume was displayed incorrectly in the vendor UI when sorting cargo.
UPDATED: You can now sell refined ore to vendors at or below average market value. This should help starting players who want to mine and sell refined ore.
UPDATED: Adjustments to vendor ore sale values - ore values are always below the market average and best market purchase price. Mostly applies to low-value ore.

5/17/19
FIXED: Planets were displaying completed mission landing locations after completing a mission. You could land at these sites but no enemies were present and the location was bugged. These locations are no longer shown on planet surfaces. If you are in one of these locations, just exit to space. The landing location should disappear.
FIXED: Panning and rotation using the keyboard no longer cancel each other out.
FIXED: When overriding a key bind, the override pop up now correctly displays the key you are overriding in the text field.
UPDATED: A few adjustments to enemy movement related to the physics engine. Will see if that fixes a rare bug with enemies losing their way when traversing the navigation mesh.

5/15/19
FIXED: A bug that was transferring cargo expansions between ships. If you have this bug, you can either keep the current cargo expansion or buy new cargo expansion and drag that to the cargo expansion slot in your ship.
FIXED: An error that was not properly applying drone perk bonuses. Perk bonuses for speed now correctly apply to mining and travel speed.
FIXED: If self stunned in combat (stun grenade etc.), you can now use the end turn hotkeys. Previously required that you manually click end turn options.
FIXED: Cargo values displayed below the center ship UI. Let me know if you see numbers that do not match your current cargo hold. This display updates every few seconds.
UPDATED: You can now cancel trade contracts from the Trade-Net menu. Select the contract you want to cancel in the list and then select the "CANCEL CONTRACT" button.
UPDATED: Refinery button moved to the bottom of the refinery menu.
UPDATED: The storage transfer menu now allows you to specify the number of items to be transferred with an updated VALUE entry field (bottom center of the transfer popup).
UPDATED: The drone manager now displays the quality level of the node being mined for each drone in the list as QL-1 through QL-10.

5/10/19
FIXED: Over time, Trade-Net contracts were being removed and not regenerating.
FIXED: In some cases, the color coding and arrow display in the contracts area of the trade net was being displayed incorrectly.
FIXED: The stacked item slider is now fixed in cargo storage.
FIXED: Phosphate can no longer be purchased for zero credits.
FIXED: Skills that are capped at 100 skill level now correctly display a full bar of skill experience in the character info hud.
FIXED: If you had a max skill of 100 in mining, you can now select mining perks
FIXED: If you have the current maximum friendly status with a faction, the faction bars in the upper left character hud and the log->map now correctly display as full. I expect that I will be adding additional tiers of faction in the future. Faction continues to be accrued even when at maximum with any faction and that is intended.