Starmap Cloaking:

Players have been having problems with getting overwhelmed with attack bounties on their mothership. This is usually a result of making some enemies early on and that tends to snowball, so we wanted to give you all a way to get out of a sticky spot, but without undermining the consequences for making enemies. To solve this, Carl has invented something new, the Starmap Cloak. Starmap Cloaking automatically unlocks at level 6. Normally you will get a perk at this level, but we also made it so that old saves with a level six or higher will also be able to cloak. When you cloak, anyone chasing you will lose targeting on you and will re-evaluate their goals and move on to some other target. Cloaking costs quite a bit of extra rez to use, about twice the cost of normal flight (on top of your current flight mode.) You can stay cloaked as long as you want if you have enough rez to maintain the cloak. If you start combat or any action that takes time on the starmap, like Collecting goons at a resource node, or repairing, or joining a fight, you will become visible. Once your cloak is down, it takes time to regenerate (currently 60 starmap seconds) and you will not be able to recloak while the field is regenerating, so use cloak wisely.

Cheat Mode:

Cheat Engine has been pretty popular for people to modify their game, and we wanted to make that a little easier and less error prone than twiddling random memory :) So we have added a cheat menu to the game just like we had in SPAZ 1. If you use cheats, your achievements will be disabled for that game moving forward, but if you load any save game without cheats active, then achievements will be back online. Current Cheats: Level Up Add 100 Goons Add 1000 Rez Add 10000 Scrap Cheats can be used over and over so if you hammer the buttons, you will get pretty rich pretty fast. The Cheat button is Alt-F7 as in SPAZ 1 for old time's sake :)

Moving Forward:

So this marks the end of our first task list here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/252470/discussions/0/364042262889515926/ We will be posting shorter tasks list moving forward so that we are better able to jump on good ideas as they come in vs. completing a long list before being able to act. We already know what the next two items will be as well and here they are.

Current Design/Implementation Goals #2

Core Synergies: One big request has been to move ship designs away from the ideal L or T shapes that have emerged, and we couldn't agree more. We want to add a lot more thought to balancing ship systems power vs. raw firepower, and to that end, we are adding Core Synergies. A Core Synergy is a stats bonus for connecting multiple cores together. So now not only will the shape of your spine matter, but also which core you put where in the spine, because you want the biggest bonuses on the best cores with the most active connections. The better ship construction update v0.3.0 will help a lot to keep this process streamlined. The more cores connected to a core, the higher the bonus. It will require some tuning, but we are thinking along the lines of 3 connections is about equal to the current cores' output as of today. This means a ship that is a lone line or an L is going to have diminished systems power vs lots and lots of firepower as it has now, so it will be a balance. We also don't want the most viable ship to become a solid 3x3 brick, the downside of the brick of course will be the lack of weapons available. We are really excited to see what the core synergies bring, and they will be the next task we work on. Bigger Better Bandits: Another huge request has been to make the bandits viable into mid to late game. In their current incarnation, their purpose is to be feeder fish that bridge the early gap into fighting other captains, but as we have learned, some people don't want to be the pirate and we hear you. All too often we have read stories of players battling bandits well into the double digit levels and that is just not fun, so we want to fix that! Keep in mind, this is Space PIRATES and Zombies and fighting the 200 Captains needs to remain the most lucrative experience because it plugs into the whole faction reputation system that is the backbone of the living universe, but we do want to provide extra options. The new bandits design is still in its infancy but there are some things that we do know. Bandits are going to level up. Bandits are going to be able to equip some of the parts they steal for nastier designs. There will be medium and large scrap parts added for the bigger bandit ships (player can use too) The word Bandit Chief has been uttered. Thanks to everyone for their great suggestions and sticking with us! Andrew (Blorf) and Richard(Narlak)