Cosmoteer update 0.28.2 is now available! This update has new ships, balance tweaks, user interface improvements, and bug fixes.

We're still working hard on more improvements as part of Career 2.0, as well as a very cool new weapon and major ship mechanic that is nearing completion, but we wanted to get these fixes and improvements out to everyone sooner rather than later.

Enjoy!

Full patch notes:

• Ships:
  
  • Added 3 new Monolith combat ships: Attractor, Bluescreen, and Reginleif.
    
  • Added 3 Monolith crew transports: Minor Connector, Bulk Connector, and Mass Connector.
    
  • Added 1 new Monolith trade station: Large Monolith Trade Station II.
    
  • Added 6 Cabal crew transports: Trailblazer, Pioneer, Wayfarer, Cicerone, Originator, and Pathfinder.
    
  • Added 6 Imperium crew transports: Ardeola, Bacchus, Agami, Botaurus, Ardea, and Butorides.
    
  • Added 1 new Imperium defense platform: Medium Nuke Platform.
    
  • Added 2 new Fringe combat ships: Bulkhead and Tenderizer.
    
  • Added 3 Fringe crew transports: Target Practice, Packed Like Sardines, and Khrushchevka.
    
  • Added 1 new Fringe trade station: Small Fringe Trade Station II
    
  • Miscellaneous updates to existing ships and stations.
• Balance:
  
  • The calculation that determines how many resources are needed to repair a damaged part now rounds up (again) to the nearest whole number of resources instead of down, because rounding down was causing repair costs to be far lower than intended.
    
  • Huge thrusters no longer have a ramp-down time.
    
  • Asteroids are now always visible inside gas clouds even to ships outside the cloud.
    
  • Increased the Electron Cloud's energy weapon buff from 75% to 90%.
    
  • Decreased the Electron Cloud's reactor debuff from 80% to 40%.
    
  • 2-way and 3-way Small Thrusters no longer have 5% lateral thrust. (This was supposed to have been removed back when lateral thrust was removed from other thrusters, but we forgot.)
• User Interface:
  
  • You can now save up to three different custom sets of "favorite" parts or decals. To do this, open the ship or paint editor, right click on the button for the part or decal, and then select which favorites set you want to add it to or remove it from. You can also middle-click on the part or decal to quickly favorite or unfavorite it. When a favorites set has any parts or decals in it, it will appear as a tab to the left of all the standard part/decal tabs.
    
  • Split the "shapes" decals group into "straights", "curves", and "fades".
    
  • When using the 'select' tool in paint mode, holding Shift will now suppress the 'grab hand' just like it does when using the 'select' tool in build mode.
    
  • Added a note to the Tractor Beam Emitter's tooltip to clarify that force and power usage varies based on the target's distance.
• Career:
  
  • Added a new "High Electron Cloud Density" type of star system that is covered predominantly by Electron Clouds. (These star systems will not appear in existing saved games.)
    
  • All four factions now have "crew transport" ships that are similar to trade ships but focus on crew capacity over resource capacity. Players can still trade and hire crew from these ships, and they will refill station crews faster than regular trade ships.
    
  • A.I. trade ships will no longer stop in ion storms or sun heat zones to repair themselves.
• Bug Fixes:
  
  • Crash if an under-construction part is selected in the supply-chain assignment mode as it finishes construction.
    
  • Crash in some rare circumstances when transferring crew while the game is paused.
    
  • Diagonal ships could sometimes have difficulty getting into and staying in formation.
    
  • Electron Clouds or Ion Storms that overlapped with sun damage zones could cause ship pathfinding issues.
    
  • Selecting a starter ship with a missile launcher would require all four missile/mine blueprints to be unlocked/purchased instead of only the one(s) required for the selected missile/mine type(s).
    
  • A.I. ships would sometimes demand that the player surrender if the player had any unarmed ships, even if those ships were being protected by other armed ships nearby.
    
  • In supply chain assignment mode, it was unintentionally possible to assign a reactor to a storage room (or vice-versa) by selecting both the reactor and a storage room and then right-clicking on a different storage (or reactor).
    
  • Randomly-generated crew names could sometimes have non-alphabetical characters.
    
  • The Flak Array's "Dmg vs Shots" stat was showing the incorrect value.
    
  • The description for the Launcher's 'Mines' mode was showing the text "Proximity Mines" instead of the full description.
• Modding:
  
  • Saved games containing ships that no longer exist due to disabled or updated mods should now be loadable. The missing ships will in most cases simply not exist after loading.
    
  • Mods can add (or remove) part and decal favorites sets.

Cosmoteer release candidate 0.28.2 is now available for testing! (To play this release candidate, you must opt in to test it. Please see this post for info on how to test release candidates.)

This release candidate has a lot of quality-of-life improvements, balance tweaks, new ships, and a handful of bug fixes.

We're still working hard at a bunch of upcoming improvements as part of Career 2.0, plus a big new weapon and related ship-design mechanic, but we wanted to get these improvements out to everyone sooner rather than later.

Thanks for testing!

RC1:

• Ships:
  
  • Added 3 new Monolith combat ships: Attractor, Bluescreen, and Reginleif.
    
  • Added 3 Monolith crew transports: Minor Connector, Bulk Connector, and Mass Connector.
    
  • Added 1 new Monolith trade station: Large Monolith Trade Station II.
    
  • Added 6 Cabal crew transports: Tourist, Pioneer, Wayfarer, Cicerone, Originator, and Pathfinder.
    
  • Added 6 Imperium crew transports: Ardeola, Bacchus, Agami, Botaurus, Ardea, and Butorides.
    
  • Added 1 new Imperium defense platform: Medium Nuke Platform.
    
  • Added 2 new Fringe combat ships: Bulkhead and Tenderizer.
    
  • Added 3 Fringe crew transports: Target Practice, Packed Like Sardines, and Khrushchevka.
    
  • Added 1 new Fringe trade station: Small Fringe Trade Station II
    
  • Miscellaneous updates to existing ships and stations.
• Balance:
  
  • The calculation that determines how many resources are needed to repair a damaged part now rounds up (again) to the nearest whole number of resources instead of down, because rounding down was causing repair costs to be far lower than intended.
    
  • Huge thrusters no longer have a ramp-down time.
    
  • Increased the Electron Cloud's energy weapon buff from 75% to 90%.
    
  • Decreased the Electron Cloud's reactor debuff from 80% to 40%.
    
  • 2-way and 3-way Small Thrusters no longer have 5% lateral thrust. (This was supposed to have been removed back when lateral thrust was removed from other thrusters, but we forgot.)
• User Interface:
  
  • You can now save up to three different custom sets of "favorite" parts or decals. To do this, open the ship or paint editor, right click on the button for the part or decal, and then select which favorites set you want to add it to or remove it from. You can also middle-click on the part or decal to quickly favorite or unfavorite it. When a favorites set has any parts or decals in it, it will appear as a tab to the left of all the standard part/decal tabs.
    
  • Split the "shapes" decals group into "straights", "curves", and "fades".
    
  • When using the 'select' tool in paint mode, holding Shift will now suppress the 'grab hand' just like it does when using the 'select' tool in build mode.
    
  • Added a note to the Tractor Beam Emitter's tooltip to clarify that force and power usage varies based on the target's distance.
    
  • Removed the "Dmg vs Shots" stat from the Flak Array because it was identical to the "Max Damage" stat and misleading.
• Career:
  
  • Added a new "High Electron Cloud Density" type of star system that is covered predominantly by Electron Clouds. (These star systems will not appear in existing saved games.)
    
  • All four factions now have "crew transport" ships that are similar to trade ships but focus on crew capacity over resource capacity. Players can still trade and hire crew from these ships, and they will refill station crews faster than regular trade ships.
    
  • A.I. trade ships will no longer stop in ion storms or sun heat zones to repair themselves.
• Bug Fixes:
  
  • Crash if an under-construction part is selected in the supply-chain assignment mode as it finishes construction.
    
  • Crash in some rare circumstances when transferring crew while the game is paused.
    
  • Diagonal ships could sometimes have difficulty getting into and staying in formation.
    
  • Electron Clouds or Ion Storms that overlapped with sun damage zones could cause ship pathfinding issues.
    
  • Selecting a starter ship with a missile launcher would require all four missile/mine blueprints to be unlocked/purchased instead of only the one(s) required for the selected missile/mine type(s).
    
  • A.I. ships would sometimes demand that the player surrender if the player had any unarmed ships, even if those ships were being protected by other armed ships nearby.
    
  • In supply chain assignment mode, it was unintentionally possible to assign a reactor to a storage room (or vice-versa) by selecting both the reactor and a storage room and then right-clicking on a different storage (or reactor).
    
  • Randomly-generated crew names could sometimes have non-alphabetical characters.
• Modding:
  
  • Saved games containing ships that no longer exist due to disabled or updated mods should now be loadable. The missing ships will in most cases simply not exist after loading.
    
  • Mods can add (or remove) part and decal favorites sets.

RC2:

• Asteroids are now always visible inside gas clouds even to ships outside the cloud.
  
• Restored Flak's "Dmg vs Shots" stat and fixed it to show the correct value of 1750.
  
• (Bugfix): The description for the Launcher's 'Mines' mode was showing the text "Proximity Mines" instead of the full description.
  
• (RC Bugfix): Crash when creating a new ship in multiplayer.
  
• (RC Bugfix): The order of part/decal favorites could sometimes change when switching between favorites tabs.
  
• Renamed a couple of ships.

• (Tech/Performance): Upgraded to .NET 9 (again) because we believe we have resolved the issue that was causing Cosmoteer to not boot for some players. Please let us know if you're still having issues. (And if you are, try updating your Windows.)
  
• (Balance): 1x3 armor/structure hybrid wedges had lower penetration resistance than was intended. They now match the regular 1x3 armor wedge.
  
• (Balance): All three reactors were generating power at very slightly different speeds than was intended. (This should have no noticeable effect on game balance.)
  
• (Bugfix): Multiplayer desyncs caused by ship formations avoiding collisions.
  
• (Bugfix): When attacking an enemy from a specific direction, sometimes the ship A.I. would appear to intentionally ram the enemy ship.
  
• (Bugfix): Ships could sometimes have difficulty getting in formation due to the recent collision avoidance changes.

• Downgraded from .NET 9 to .NET 8 because we suspect .NET 9 was preventing the game from booting for some players. If you were one of those players, please let us know if this solves the problem.

Cosmoteer update 0.28.1 is now available! This update has a lot of quality-of-life improvements, some balance changes, improvements to ship collision avoidance, and a handful of bug fixes.

We're still working hard on more improvements as part of Career 2.0, but we wanted to get these fixes and improvements out to everyone sooner rather than later.

Enjoy!

Full patch notes:

• Built-In Ships:
  
  • Added 4 new Monolith combat ships: Ambassador, Averter, Middleman, and Praefectus.
    
  • Added 7 new Cabal combat ships: Alcor, Atria, Chasing Wind, Decrux, Lazurite Tear, Menkalinan, and Zaurak.
    
  • Added 3 new Cabal trade stations: Small Cabal Trade Station III, Med Cabal Trade Station III, and Large Cabal Trade Station III.
    
  • Added 5 new Imperium combat ships: Ani, Dromiceius, Sulla, Swallowtail, and Tinamou.
    
  • Added 1 new Imperium trade ship: Penguin.
    
  • Added 3 new Imperium arms depots: Tiny Imperium Arms Depot II, Small Imperium Arms Depot II, and Med Imperium Arms Depot II.
    
  • Added 3 new Fringe combat ships: Clytemnestra, Kenesary, and Quicksilver Scout.
    
  • Miscellaneous updates to many other existing ships and stations.
• Balance:
  
  • Small Thrusters (all variants) now have a small dynamo that generates power very slowly. This allows Small Thrusters to operate while disconnected from crew/power sources, but the rate of power generation isn't enough to perpetually sustain the thruster.
    
  • Increased the 1x3 Armor Wedge's penetration resistance from 2 to 4.
    
  • Increased EMP Missile's launch cooldown from 2 to 4 seconds.
    
  • Mines are now much more visible and clearly show their detonation trigger range.
• Ship A.I.:
  
  • Improved collision avoidance when avoiding moving ships/objects.
    
  • Improved collision avoidance when avoiding multiple ships/objects simultaneously.
    
  • Improved collision avoidance when trying to move away from very close ships/objects.
    
  • Improved collision avoidance of ships in a formation.
    
  • Ship formations should now do a better job of navigating around suns and storms.
    
  • A.I. ships will no longer deliberately target roof lights or headlights.
• Career:
  
  • Repairing damaged parts was much more expensive than was intended. Repair cost (steel/coils only) has been reduced from 57.5% of base cost to the intended 7.5%.
    
  • It was unintentionally often cheaper to fully deconstruct and rebuild a part than it was to repair it. This has been fixed.
    
  • Defense platforms will no longer surrender to players.
    
  • Stations will no longer hail the player from outside the player's sensor range, because that was confusing.
    
  • Fires will no longer be regarded by the A.I. as breaking a surrender truce.
• User Interface:
  
  • Translation updates for all supported languages.
    
  • Enemies will no longer automatically slow or pause the game speed when spotted if they had previously been spotted within the past minute.
    
  • When a weapon's target goes out of sight range, it will now be automatically re-targeted when coming back into sight range. (Unless in the meantime the target is changed by the player.)
    
  • Small thrusters now display a yellow warning instead of red error when they don't have door, crew, or power access. (Because they no longer strictly require power.)
    
  • The U.I. Scaling setting will now be remembered per resolution or window size.
    
  • Except for Creative Mode, "lost ships" will now only be saved for ships that the player actually controls.
    
  • Added tooltips to the Resource Desired & Limits dialog that explain the functionality of the "Desired" and "Limit" numbers.
    
  • Updated the Large Shield Generator's description to make it clearer what it can and can't be projected through.
    
  • Crew distance warning icons can now be "clicked through".
    
  • Velocity arrows will no longer display for off-screen ships.
    
  • "Delivery" missions are now called "Procument" missions to clarify that the player is expected to gather the desired resources from wherever they can.
• Multiplayer:
  
  • Reduced the amount of clouds and storms that will appear when using "Varied (Sparse)", "Varied (Dense)", "Ion Storms (Sparse)", and "Ion Storms (Dense)".
    
  • If a player joins, leaves, or changes teams, the players in the game will no longer be automatically changed to "not ready".
• Performance:
  
  • Updated to Microsoft .NET 9.0. This may slightly improve overall performance. Please let us know if you have any compatibility issues running Cosmoteer.
    
  • Texture and shader caching can now be disabled with the --no-cache launch argument.
• Bug fixes:
  
  • Crash when loading a multiplayer save in single-player and then trying to transfer money to another player.
    
  • Very rare crash caused by crew being automatically unassigned from certain jobs.
    
  • Multiplayer desyncs caused by transferring resources to a ship with no crew.
    
  • Nuke explosions could occasionally "phase" into the ships that they hit.
    
  • In multiplayer, engaging an inter-system hyper-jump while another player is on the galaxy map would prevent the jump from happening and could ultimately lead to a crash.
    
  • In Creative Mode, it was unintentionally possible to tell a junk ship to salvage itself, which would then crash.
    
  • A.I. ships would sometimes spawn inside storms due to a pathfinding bug.
    
  • Ships could sometimes erroneously try to avoid collisions with objects that were farther away than their destination.
    
  • A.I. ships that had surrendered to the player were sometimes not exit the star system as intended.
    
  • When thrusters were attached to Engine Rooms, they were not correctly lighting up as possible power supply chain targets in the resource management screen.
    
  • The wrong ship name would be displayed when an ally was hailed by the A.I.
    
  • The names of ships and stations in the Comms list would sometimes appear smaller than intended.
    
  • Using the "Transfer Excess Resources" options would work but then make it impossible to reset or make any further changes to the amount of resources to transfer.
    
  • The chat/message log unintentionally had a non-function text-entry box and send button when playing in single-player.
    
  • Ship icons and crew warning icons were being unintentionally rendered on top of the mission list and chat/message log.
    
  • The ship velocity arrow for the selected ship could be extremely long when viewing the build, paint, crew, or resource screens.

Cosmoteer release candidate 0.28.1 is now available for testing! (To play this release candidate, you must opt in to test it. Please see this post for info on how to test release candidates.)

This release candidate has a lot of quality-of-life improvements, some balance changes, improvements to ship collision avoidance, and a handful of bug fixes.

We're still working hard at a bunch of upcoming improvements as part of Career 2.0, but we wanted to get these improvements out to everyone sooner rather than later.

Thanks for testing!

RC1:

• Built-In Ships:
  
  • Added 4 new Monolith combat ships: Ambassador, Averter, Middleman, and Praefectus.
    
  • Added 7 new Cabal combat ships: Alcor, Atria, Chasing Wind, Decrux, Lazurite Tear, Menkalinan, and Zaurak.
    
  • Added 3 new Cabal trade stations: Small Cabal Trade Station III, Med Cabal Trade Station III, and Large Cabal Trade Station III.
    
  • Added 5 new Imperium combat ships: Ani, Dromiceius, Sulla, Swallowtail, and Tinamou.
    
  • Added 1 new Imperium trade ship: Penguin.
    
  • Added 3 new Imperium arms depots: Tiny Imperium Arms Depot II, Small Imperium Arms Depot II, and Med Imperium Arms Depot II.
    
  • Added 3 new Fringe combat ships: Clytemnestra, Kenesary, and Quicksilver Scout.
    
  • Miscellaneous updates to many other existing ships and stations.
• Balance:
  
  • Small Thrusters (all variants) now have a small dynamo that generates power very slowly. This allows Small Thrusters to operate while disconnected from crew/power sources, but the rate of power generation isn't enough to perpetually sustain the thruster.
    
  • Increased the 1x3 Armor Wedge's penetration resistance from 2 to 4.
    
  • Increased EMP Missile's launch cooldown from 2 to 4 seconds.
    
  • Mines are now much more visible and clearly show their detonation trigger range.
• Ship A.I.:
  
  • Improved collision avoidance when avoiding moving ships/objects.
    
  • Improved collision avoidance when avoiding multiple ships/objects simultaneously.
    
  • Improved collision avoidance when trying to move away from very close ships/objects.
    
  • Improved collision avoidance of ships in a formation.
    
  • Ship formations should now do a better job of navigating around suns and storms.
    
  • A.I. ships will no longer deliberately target roof lights or headlights.
• Career:
  
  • Repairing damaged parts was much more expensive than was intended. Repair cost (steel/coils only) has been reduced from 57.5% of base cost to the intended 7.5%.
    
  • It was unintentionally often cheaper to fully deconstruct and rebuild a part than it was to repair it. This has been fixed.
    
  • Defense platforms will no longer surrender to players.
    
  • Stations will no longer hail the player from outside the player's sensor range, because that was confusing.
    
  • Fires will no longer be regarded by the A.I. as breaking a surrender truce.
• User Interface:
  
  • Enemies will no longer automatically slow or pause the game speed when spotted if they had previously been spotted within the past minute.
    
  • When a weapon's target goes out of sight range, it will now be automatically re-targeted when coming back into sight range. (Unless in the meantime the target is changed by the player.)
    
  • Small thrusters now display a yellow warning instead of red error when they don't have door, crew, or power access. (Because they no longer strictly require power.)
    
  • The U.I. Scaling setting will now be remembered per resolution or window size.
    
  • Except for Creative Mode, "lost ships" will now only be saved for ships that the player actually controls.
    
  • Added tooltips to the Resource Desired & Limits dialog that explain the functionality of the "Desired" and "Limit" numbers.
    
  • Updated the Large Shield Generator's description to make it clearer what it can and can't be projected through.
    
  • Crew distance warning icons can now be "clicked through".
• Multiplayer:
  
  • Reduced the amount of clouds and storms that will appear when using "Varied (Sparse)", "Varied (Dense)", "Ion Storms (Sparse)", and "Ion Storms (Dense)".
    
  • If a player joins, leaves, or changes teams, the players in the game will no longer be automatically changed to "not ready".
• Performance:
  
  • Updated to Microsoft .NET 9.0. This may slightly improve overall performance. Please let us know if you have any compatibility issues running Cosmoteer.
    
  • Texture and shader caching can now be disabled with the --no-cache launch argument.
• Bug fixes:
  
  • Crash when loading a multiplayer save in single-player and then trying to transfer money to another player.
    
  • Very rare crash caused by crew being automatically unassigned from certain jobs.
    
  • Multiplayer desyncs caused by transferring resources to a ship with no crew.
    
  • Nuke explosions could occasionally "phase" into the ships that they hit.
    
  • In multiplayer, engaging an inter-system hyper-jump while another player is on the galaxy map would prevent the jump from happening and could ultimately lead to a crash.
    
  • In Creative Mode, it was unintentionally possible to tell a junk ship to salvage itself, which would then crash.
    
  • A.I. ships would sometimes spawn inside storms due to a pathfinding bug.
    
  • Ships could sometimes erroneously try to avoid collisions with objects that were farther away than their destination.
    
  • A.I. ships that had surrendered to the player were sometimes not exit the star system as intended.
    
  • When thrusters were attached to Engine Rooms, they were not correctly lighting up as possible power supply chain targets in the resource management screen.
    
  • The wrong ship name would be displayed when an ally was hailed by the A.I.
    
  • The names of ships and stations in the Comms list would sometimes appear smaller than intended.
    
  • Using the "Transfer Excess Resources" options would work but then make it impossible to reset or make any further changes to the amount of resources to transfer.

RC2:

• Translation updates for all supported languages.
  
• Velocity arrows will no longer display for off-screen ships.
  
• Bugfix: The chat/message log unintentionally had a non-function text-entry box and send button when playing in single-player.
  
• Bugfix: Ship icons and crew warning icons were being unintentionally rendered on top of the mission list and chat/message log.
  
• Bugfix: The ship velocity arrow for the selected ship could be extremely long when viewing the build, paint, crew, or resource screens.
  
• RC Bugfix: Error when trying to load saved multiplayer games from previous versions.
  
• RC Bugfix: The chat box was causing off-screen ship icons to be farther from the edge of the screen than intended, even when the chat box wasn't being displayed.

• Bugfix: Memory usage could in some circumstances continuously increase almost indefinitely during gameplay.

• (Bugfix): When loading a saved game in multiplayer (or resuming after a desync), an auto-save could be triggered while loading/transferring the save file which would then cause a crash.
  
• (Bugfix): Dragging the game window between monitors could cause the window to become unusably and unfixably small.

• (Bugfix): Rare crash/freeze caused by ships trying to pathfind around clouds or storms.
  
• (Bugfix): Crash caused by changing missile launcher type while munitions are being transferred from it.
  
• (Bugfix): Error when saving the game after changing missile launcher type while munitions are being transferred from it.
  
• (Bugfix): Error loading some modded saves where rooms that both supplied and used crew were assigned to themselves. (No such rooms exist in vanilla Cosmoteer but do in some mods.)
  
• (Bugfix): When an ally was hailed by an A.I. ship, the wrong ship name was being displayed.

• (Bugfix): The message showing how much fame the player should have to hire more crew would show the incorrect fame amount if the player had already hired as many crew as possible for their current fame level.