Patch day - a few updates and fixes this week.
You can now unlock Smuggling. Speak with Forley Coresh on the Achmedius Trade Station to start your career. Smuggling is a fairly dangerous career and you will be harassed by Raiders and Scavvers if you have active contraband contracts. I recommend a starship with decent weapons, shields and balanced power systems. This is a great career for those of you who want to make money from trading smuggled goods and of course from all that loot you are going to find by eliminating the enemy ships that attack you. For now, you do not need to worry about The Authority (not in the game yet). I have a few interesting plans for the smuggling system including a few ship enhancements, timed smuggling missions and extended story content related to The Syndicate. If you read the dialog carefully, you might notice an intro to future story content and a long-standing mystery surrounding the loss of your crew, depending on the options you choose. Smuggling requires a large Trade-Net to be effective - so place beacons in every system you find with orbiting stations. Contraband goods are traded all over the universe, but not as often as normal commodities. Ships may attack each other now. You can join in and help or ignore these skirmishes. In some cases, if you do decide to help, you have a good chance of finding loot from dropped cargo containers. Rarely, regardless of whether you engage or not, cargo containers are dropped from these ships and you may find them floating in space. This is the start of the faction warfare system (just the start) and these engagements are generally between the various factions and Scavvers and Raiders entering and leaving systems. I've added a mission and contract tracker to the HUD when traveling in space. You can now see active missions or trade contracts on this list. While in FTL space, you can select any destination and the Star System the mission or contract is located in will automatically be selected in the info panel so you can click the approach icon and fly to that system. If you are in Star System that has a mission or contract, selecting an item in the tracker will select the planet or station where the mission or contract is located so you can easily approach that location without needing to open the log to reference mission information. The tracker is also useful for translocating as it displays contract destinations and commodities in the list. And one last thing - a surprise for those of you playing the game...no spoilers. I'm sure you will notice immediately. If you find any problems with this build, please post on the bug forums and I'll address the issues promptly. Patch notes: ADDED: A short mission that unlocks Smuggling. Speak with Forley Coresh on the Achmedius Trade Station. He will help you start your new career. ADDED: The Objective Tracker. All missions and Trade-Net contracts (buy/sell) are now displayed in the objective tracker while in space. The tracker can be opened/closed using an icon on the right center of the space exploration UI. Selecting a tracker mission or contract entry will display the targeted star system, planet or station in the info panels so you can easily navigate to the destination. Selecting an item in the tracker will: 1) Target the destination planet or station if you are in the same Star System where the mission/contract is located 2) Target the destination Star System if you are in FTL space UPDATED: Increased the min/max base margin values for the Trade-Net across the board. This means there will be lower sale prices and higher buy prices available depending on the size of your network. These adjustments will become available over time as trade contracts are refreshed. UPDATED: When translocating using Jump Points, ship fusion cells are now used instead of ground weapon fusion cells. The cost is still the same - 5 fusion cells per jump. UPDATED: Incursions now only provide a positive faction bonus for the faction that initiated the incursion. UPDATED: Faction rewards in space combat adjusted: --Incursions generate higher individual faction bonuses for the faction that assigned the incursion. Additional factions (factions other than the assigning faction ) no longer generate faction bonuses. It was too easy to gain alignment with other main powers in the Universe while doing work for a specific faction. --Destroyed ships from non-incursion attacks in hostile systems will only generate negative faction based on that system. --Destroying ships that are not part of an incursion and not direct attacks in hostile systems will generate single digit faction bonuses for all non-aligned factions and normal negative faction based on the ship destroyed UPDATED: Trade in values when buying a new ship increased. Note that CHA applies to all ship purchases decreasing the price of buying a ship and increasing the value of your trade-in. This has always been the case. UPDATED: You now have a much lower chance of being attacked when you have an active delivery contract if that contract is not contraband. A higher chance of being attacked by Raiders and Scavvers if you have an active contraband delivery contract. FIXED: A lockup when docking at stations, planets and translocating if under enemy ship fire. FIXED: A rare crash related to enemy ship beam weapons. FIXED: Incursions will now reward faction for the system where the incursion is taking place, regardless of whether the system is a main or sub-faction. FIXED: A very rare persistent yellow particle effect left in the scene after space combat. FIXED: Old auto-saves - that is auto-saves created before the new auto-save system (rotating between 4 dedicated save files) are no longer displayed in the load/save menu. This will clean up save lists for players with games that were created all the way back to the start of Early Access. Thank you all for supporting the development of Stellar Tactics. Have a great weekend!