Friends, we're approaching the end of the year again. 2015 where have you gone! It's been quite a year, as every year is. We kicked the year off with a brand new GUI followed by several optimizations, performance updates, and balancing updates. We saw our team here at Schine expand, added in the new rails and docking system, the start of boarding mechanics, and overhauled how explosions work. Soon after on-ship spawning, flash lights, jump inhibitors, shipyards, transports, and more. The center-of-mass for ships changed, so did the HP and Armor systems, new chat controls, magnetic docking, not to mention more recently slabs, thrust mechanics and cargo. This year we also attended and exhibited at a convention with Schine showcasing StarMade at TwitchCon. The council had its first term that went for most of the year as we ironed out the procedures and methods of discussion. We had Q&As, Live streams and more.

Overall a grand year. Behind the scenes, stuff got a lot more organised. We documented the rest of the plans for the game, organised all our planned features and determined the best direction forward to get them in as quick and practical as possible. Across a dozen or so documents, over 32,000 words described the plans for StarMade, detailing features, some of which have since made it into the game, many others you'll see in the new year. Already we have planned out the next six months worth of work, continuing a direction towards a StarMade we all want to see and enjoy.

It's an exciting time for StarMade.


The council Term 1 has wrapped up, and applications are open for Term 2. You can find all the details in this news post here. Applications will close at the conclusion of 2015.


Criss' Thread has a lot of updates on recent builds that have been happening as part of our in-game assets updates. Here's a couple of images otherwise head on over and check out the thread.







Like anyone, we here at Schine have families, and jobs. During this time, most businesses have a bit of a break over the festive season. At Schine, we think it's important to keep our team refreshed and ready for a crazy year ahead. So, in our development schedule, the next two weeks are an optional holiday break for our dev team.

For the community, that means that there won't be a release happening between the 27th of December 2015 and the 10th of January 2016.


You might have recalled earlier I mentioned we had the next 6-months of development already planned. No doubt some of you were already planning on jumping to the comments section to demand to know what happens next. Needless to say, I'll save you the trouble, and give our reply here.

The plans haven't really changed. The past few months we've been in our RP season. Our main goal at the moment is one some players keep assuming isn't our main goal: to add in stuff for you to actually do in the universe of StarMade. We've thought out of the box and have plans that will help make it all dynamic and organic. They might sound like buzz words, but for us it means making a game that's gameplay can adapt as your universe changes. Missions will become available as the context for them occurs. Decisions could alter anything from the prices at the nearby shop to the balance of a war between two factions. Overall, the direction we're going will make for a better gameplay experience. It will allow us to add more in as we go without it being jarring, and will allow your choices to influence the universe around you.

It all sounds great, but there are a lot of pieces to implement. So like giving birth to a baby, there's going to be some labor pains. There's a lot of new mechanics to go in to support plans, some of which you would have heard in our development direction news post. We have a number of awesome teams that are working on different aspects of upcoming updates, and we've structured it all in a way to deliver an enriching gameplay experience as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

Speaking of immersion, a big thing players have continually asked for is an audio overhaul. Thanks to all those who submitted folios for consideration earlier in the year, we've been able to put together a well-equipped team that we believe will produce an incredible audio experience for StarMade. So stay tuned and you'll hear more from them as we head into the new year.

That's it from our end. Thanks for sticking with us throughout the year and welcome again to those who only joined our community this year. We look forward to what 2016 has in store for StarMade. I can guarantee that writing this dev blog next year I'll be amazed at what StarMade will have become.

See you then.

- The Schine Team

Friends, we're approaching the end of the year again. 2015 where have you gone! It's been quite a year, as every year is. We kicked the year off with a brand new GUI followed by several optimizations, performance updates, and balancing updates. We saw our team here at Schine expand, added in the new rails and docking system, the start of boarding mechanics, and overhauled how explosions work. Soon after on-ship spawning, flash lights, jump inhibitors, shipyards, transports, and more. The center-of-mass for ships changed, so did the HP and Armor systems, new chat controls, magnetic docking, not to mention more recently slabs, thrust mechanics and cargo. This year we also attended and exhibited at a convention with Schine showcasing StarMade at TwitchCon. The council had its first term that went for most of the year as we ironed out the procedures and methods of discussion. We had Q&As, Live streams and more.

Overall a grand year. Behind the scenes, stuff got a lot more organised. We documented the rest of the plans for the game, organised all our planned features and determined the best direction forward to get them in as quick and practical as possible. Across a dozen or so documents, over 32,000 words described the plans for StarMade, detailing features, some of which have since made it into the game, many others you'll see in the new year. Already we have planned out the next six months worth of work, continuing a direction towards a StarMade we all want to see and enjoy.

It's an exciting time for StarMade.


The council Term 1 has wrapped up, and applications are open for Term 2. You can find all the details in this news post here. Applications will close at the conclusion of 2015.


Criss' Thread has a lot of updates on recent builds that have been happening as part of our in-game assets updates. Here's a couple of images otherwise head on over and check out the thread.







Like anyone, we here at Schine have families, and jobs. During this time, most businesses have a bit of a break over the festive season. At Schine, we think it's important to keep our team refreshed and ready for a crazy year ahead. So, in our development schedule, the next two weeks are an optional holiday break for our dev team.

For the community, that means that there won't be a release happening between the 27th of December 2015 and the 10th of January 2016.


You might have recalled earlier I mentioned we had the next 6-months of development already planned. No doubt some of you were already planning on jumping to the comments section to demand to know what happens next. Needless to say, I'll save you the trouble, and give our reply here.

The plans haven't really changed. The past few months we've been in our RP season. Our main goal at the moment is one some players keep assuming isn't our main goal: to add in stuff for you to actually do in the universe of StarMade. We've thought out of the box and have plans that will help make it all dynamic and organic. They might sound like buzz words, but for us it means making a game that's gameplay can adapt as your universe changes. Missions will become available as the context for them occurs. Decisions could alter anything from the prices at the nearby shop to the balance of a war between two factions. Overall, the direction we're going will make for a better gameplay experience. It will allow us to add more in as we go without it being jarring, and will allow your choices to influence the universe around you.

It all sounds great, but there are a lot of pieces to implement. So like giving birth to a baby, there's going to be some labor pains. There's a lot of new mechanics to go in to support plans, some of which you would have heard in our development direction news post. We have a number of awesome teams that are working on different aspects of upcoming updates, and we've structured it all in a way to deliver an enriching gameplay experience as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

Speaking of immersion, a big thing players have continually asked for is an audio overhaul. Thanks to all those who submitted folios for consideration earlier in the year, we've been able to put together a well-equipped team that we believe will produce an incredible audio experience for StarMade. So stay tuned and you'll hear more from them as we head into the new year.

That's it from our end. Thanks for sticking with us throughout the year and welcome again to those who only joined our community this year. We look forward to what 2016 has in store for StarMade. I can guarantee that writing this dev blog next year I'll be amazed at what StarMade will have become.

See you then.

- The Schine Team

Hello players,

With this update the thrust system will finally be addressed to make gameplay, especially fighting, a lot more interesting.



Inertia is now physically correct to mass distribution. This means, that if you bump a stick by either end it will rotate slower that if you would cause any rotation on the axis along the stick.

This also applies to your ship’s thrusted rotation. However, you can now influence the effect with thrusters. More on that later.


Max speed is now thrust dependent. Your thrust to mass ratio determines how fast you can go. This should make smaller fighters a lot more interesting as scouts and agile fighters.

The minimum you will go is 0.5 server speed. The max is up to 3 times (with overdrive even 4.5 times) the set server speed at a 2.5:1 Thrust:Mass ratio. Going beyond this ratio will not increase your max speed. You can see your current values in the build mode stats.

Also, note that taking Structural HP damage will decrease your max speed.

Please make sure your server speed isn’t set to more than 100 m/s (to start with at least) after updating.


This often requested features gives players the ability to customize thrust.

We don’t think having to balance out directional thrusters by themselves is all that fun, especially on bigger ships, so we tried to make a simple solution that will in later stages also be usable in a crewed ship.

To change your thrust balance go to the “Ship”->”Thrust” tab in your top task bar when you are piloting a ship.

You can change what axis you want to put your thrust in: forwards/backwards, right/left, and up/down. You can also put thrust into your rotational thrust to make your ship turn faster. Changing thruster settings does take a little time though, 15 seconds to be exact. All these values are adjustable in the blockBehaviorConfig.xml, which is since the last hotfix also available as a mergeable custom config (check the customBlockBehaviorConfig directory in your StarMade installation folder).

You can now also inherit all the thrust of docked ships. Simply press the “Inherit Thrusters from docks” to enable this on your ship.


We have now included a newtonian flight mode to all ships. The old, dampening mode is still there of course although you’ll most likely not use it a lot anymore. The newtonian mode comes equipped with an option to enable dampening if you leave the ship, like a parking brake, so your parked ships aren’t floating away into deep space.


Personal stash will now have its limit switched on (you can still switch it off in the server config is needed).

To lessen the blow to people that didn’t follow the last update, all personal inventories that are overcapacity will automatically create a “block storage” meta item with all your blocks in it. You can take out as many blocks as you need at a time but you can’t put any blocks back into that item (except as admin, who can use this item to create rewards). You can move the item around and empty it in a high volume chest.

Next update we’ll enable chest bleeding when over-capacity. If a chest/factory/shipyard goes over capacity, it will drop blocks over time till it’s under capacity again!



The give_metaitem admin command has been updated to automatically adapt to current and all new meta items. Its description will also automatically be updated.

Also we forgot to mention in the last news, but as most of you probably already saw, you can now tether any storage from a friendly ship in the same sector. Just go to the storage you want to use and toggle the “Use as personal Cargo” button. Then a new tab will appear in your personal inventory to access it at any point, as long as you are in the same sector.


The asteroid spawn system is based on temperature. Some asteroid types spawn near a star, in high temperature zones and others spawn near system edges where it is cold.

Some asteroids, such as blue Larimar would only spawn in very cold zones. Unfortunately this meant it only spawned consistently in system corners, the place where asteroid belts almost never cross.



We’ve adjusted all asteroid spawns now and you should be able to find the ones you need without a problem. \

Because there’s not a lot of known information about what asteroid spawns where, Kupu has made some nice infographics to illustrate it, you can find them here: http://starmadedock.net/threads/asteroid-belts.22386/


Pink hull sets have been added to the game, including Crystal Armor variants, slabs and lighting options.


By request, a mining factor for unowned system is now available. Server owners and others that use a custom faction config must insert this new value into their config, else the game will not start (ParseException)! A better solution (by xml merging) will follow in the future...

We implemented some changes to accommodate for the new thrust system

• Total Thrust has been reduced by 25%. This is just to compensate for the new system, most ships should still be capable of moving as fast as they could before.
• Cannon projectile speed is now 12.5 times the server speed, used to be 10.
• Missile projectile speed is now 2.48 times the server speed, used to be 1.98.
• Overdrive has been reduced to a maximum of 50% efficiency. However you do need 4 times less blocks to reach maximum effectiveness now. It also consumes a little bit more power now, 10 per block per second, used to be 6.66.

We’ve adjusted the complex crafting recipes for coloured hull.

• Standard armor: 1 basic hull with 1 standard hardener.
• Advanced armor: 1 standard hull with 1 advanced hardener.

Both hardeners use 1 asteroid ore which wasn’t used for much else before + some alloyed metal meshes.

• Standard hardener: 5 fertikeen capsules + 10 alloyed metal meshes
• Advanced hardener: 4 fertikeen ingots + 20 alloyed metal meshes

Asteroid spawn chances are more or less equal so we can finally tweak other crafting recipes. There are several resources not being used at all and some get used too much. We don’t want the same resource costs for everything though but decreasing the gap between them seems to be a good idea.


Other changes include a new config option to increase mining yield in un-owned systems. That’s set to 3x now, with other territory still sitting on 6x and faction owned territory on 12x.


Starting players now receive a lot more essential blocks:

• 350 basic grey hull + 100 wedges + 50 corners + 50 heptas + 50 tetras
• 100 power reactor blocks
• 100 thruster blocks
• 2 salvage computers + 50 salvage modules
• 2 faction modules
• 5 ship cores

They still get their meta items of course, but you don’t get any weapon computer or cannon barrels. If you want to arm yourself you’ll have to buy it from a shop.


We’ve also adjusted the volumes of all basic resources:

• Raw ores/shards and mineral blocks are 0.01 volume
• Refined resources like capsules are only 0.001 volume, to allow easy storage.

There were more volume and cargo changes planned but those got reverted, we need more cargo feedback to get a feeling of what you want, and what you definitely not want.


Feel free to post feedback: http://starmadedock.net/threads/game-balance-suggestions.22101/


Thanks for playing StarMade,

- The Schine Team

Hello players,

With this update the thrust system will finally be addressed to make gameplay, especially fighting, a lot more interesting.



Inertia is now physically correct to mass distribution. This means, that if you bump a stick by either end it will rotate slower that if you would cause any rotation on the axis along the stick.

This also applies to your ship’s thrusted rotation. However, you can now influence the effect with thrusters. More on that later.


Max speed is now thrust dependent. Your thrust to mass ratio determines how fast you can go. This should make smaller fighters a lot more interesting as scouts and agile fighters.

The minimum you will go is 0.5 server speed. The max is up to 3 times (with overdrive even 4.5 times) the set server speed at a 2.5:1 Thrust:Mass ratio. Going beyond this ratio will not increase your max speed. You can see your current values in the build mode stats.

Also, note that taking Structural HP damage will decrease your max speed.

Please make sure your server speed isn’t set to more than 100 m/s (to start with at least) after updating.


This often requested features gives players the ability to customize thrust.

We don’t think having to balance out directional thrusters by themselves is all that fun, especially on bigger ships, so we tried to make a simple solution that will in later stages also be usable in a crewed ship.

To change your thrust balance go to the “Ship”->”Thrust” tab in your top task bar when you are piloting a ship.

You can change what axis you want to put your thrust in: forwards/backwards, right/left, and up/down. You can also put thrust into your rotational thrust to make your ship turn faster. Changing thruster settings does take a little time though, 15 seconds to be exact. All these values are adjustable in the blockBehaviorConfig.xml, which is since the last hotfix also available as a mergeable custom config (check the customBlockBehaviorConfig directory in your StarMade installation folder).

You can now also inherit all the thrust of docked ships. Simply press the “Inherit Thrusters from docks” to enable this on your ship.


We have now included a newtonian flight mode to all ships. The old, dampening mode is still there of course although you’ll most likely not use it a lot anymore. The newtonian mode comes equipped with an option to enable dampening if you leave the ship, like a parking brake, so your parked ships aren’t floating away into deep space.


Personal stash will now have its limit switched on (you can still switch it off in the server config is needed).

To lessen the blow to people that didn’t follow the last update, all personal inventories that are overcapacity will automatically create a “block storage” meta item with all your blocks in it. You can take out as many blocks as you need at a time but you can’t put any blocks back into that item (except as admin, who can use this item to create rewards). You can move the item around and empty it in a high volume chest.

Next update we’ll enable chest bleeding when over-capacity. If a chest/factory/shipyard goes over capacity, it will drop blocks over time till it’s under capacity again!



The give_metaitem admin command has been updated to automatically adapt to current and all new meta items. Its description will also automatically be updated.

Also we forgot to mention in the last news, but as most of you probably already saw, you can now tether any storage from a friendly ship in the same sector. Just go to the storage you want to use and toggle the “Use as personal Cargo” button. Then a new tab will appear in your personal inventory to access it at any point, as long as you are in the same sector.


The asteroid spawn system is based on temperature. Some asteroid types spawn near a star, in high temperature zones and others spawn near system edges where it is cold.

Some asteroids, such as blue Larimar would only spawn in very cold zones. Unfortunately this meant it only spawned consistently in system corners, the place where asteroid belts almost never cross.



We’ve adjusted all asteroid spawns now and you should be able to find the ones you need without a problem. \

Because there’s not a lot of known information about what asteroid spawns where, Kupu has made some nice infographics to illustrate it, you can find them here: http://starmadedock.net/threads/asteroid-belts.22386/


Pink hull sets have been added to the game, including Crystal Armor variants, slabs and lighting options.


By request, a mining factor for unowned system is now available. Server owners and others that use a custom faction config must insert this new value into their config, else the game will not start (ParseException)! A better solution (by xml merging) will follow in the future...

We implemented some changes to accommodate for the new thrust system

• Total Thrust has been reduced by 25%. This is just to compensate for the new system, most ships should still be capable of moving as fast as they could before.
• Cannon projectile speed is now 12.5 times the server speed, used to be 10.
• Missile projectile speed is now 2.48 times the server speed, used to be 1.98.
• Overdrive has been reduced to a maximum of 50% efficiency. However you do need 4 times less blocks to reach maximum effectiveness now. It also consumes a little bit more power now, 10 per block per second, used to be 6.66.

We’ve adjusted the complex crafting recipes for coloured hull.

• Standard armor: 1 basic hull with 1 standard hardener.
• Advanced armor: 1 standard hull with 1 advanced hardener.

Both hardeners use 1 asteroid ore which wasn’t used for much else before + some alloyed metal meshes.

• Standard hardener: 5 fertikeen capsules + 10 alloyed metal meshes
• Advanced hardener: 4 fertikeen ingots + 20 alloyed metal meshes

Asteroid spawn chances are more or less equal so we can finally tweak other crafting recipes. There are several resources not being used at all and some get used too much. We don’t want the same resource costs for everything though but decreasing the gap between them seems to be a good idea.


Other changes include a new config option to increase mining yield in un-owned systems. That’s set to 3x now, with other territory still sitting on 6x and faction owned territory on 12x.


Starting players now receive a lot more essential blocks:

• 350 basic grey hull + 100 wedges + 50 corners + 50 heptas + 50 tetras
• 100 power reactor blocks
• 100 thruster blocks
• 2 salvage computers + 50 salvage modules
• 2 faction modules
• 5 ship cores

They still get their meta items of course, but you don’t get any weapon computer or cannon barrels. If you want to arm yourself you’ll have to buy it from a shop.


We’ve also adjusted the volumes of all basic resources:

• Raw ores/shards and mineral blocks are 0.01 volume
• Refined resources like capsules are only 0.001 volume, to allow easy storage.

There were more volume and cargo changes planned but those got reverted, we need more cargo feedback to get a feeling of what you want, and what you definitely not want.


Feel free to post feedback: http://starmadedock.net/threads/game-balance-suggestions.22101/


Thanks for playing StarMade,

- The Schine Team

Hello players,

Cargo has finally arrived. It is meant to improve gameplay mechanics by having a physical representation of loaded goods on a ship, while still being easy to use.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8wZuu8UzJE


Cargo is a physical representation of things loaded in your ship, station or planet. The more you have loaded, the more boxes you will see appear in your cargo area.

There were some main concerns for it in terms of scalability, organization, usability and migration which I hope we solved sufficiently.

Since it’s impossible to organize your things into different little boxes with limited capacity, your storage block will still be the main piece to use. Because having a limit on both slots and stack capacity would be tedious, we decided to just have an overall capacity for a storage with unlimited slots. Each item’s needed space in the inventory is represented by its volume (which defaults to mass, but can be adapted in the block config if needed).

So basically, you can fill up your storage with as many slots as you like, as long as the total volume of all items is within capacity.

Because of this sudden change, penalties for being over-capacity are turned off by default in the server config. These penalties will be switched ON by default in future updates. A player whose inventory is over-capacity will move more slowly, and a ship which is over-capacity will leak items out of storage over time.


So how do you increase the base capacity each storage block gets?


It’s simple: just get a few Cargo Area blocks and connect them to your storage. Each block adds capacity to your storage block. They are non-physical and not visible as long as they are empty, but they will fill up with inventory when reaching capacity.

Keep in mind that items in storage now also add mass to your ship. It’s a lot less mass than it would add if you built the blocks on your ship by using the patented “warp storage technology”, which stores most of the mass in the void.

Also, please note that this balance is by no means final. We put it at the lower end, because buffing it in a future version is a lot easier than nerfing (and also causes less anger amongst players ;) ).


This same cargo capacity concept also now goes for factories and shipyards. Factories only pull the necessary items required for one crafting tick/cycle. This prevents them from filling up. Also, instead of sending a signal to adjacent Activation (full <-> not full) and ‘OR’ blocks (empty <-> nonempty), they will send it to connected ones.


Cargo can now be transferred from or to docked entities. Just connect your docker and rail to the storage you want to pull from or off, then deactivate pulling on the one you want to be pulled from, and it will pull in the other just like it would on the same entity.


You can now also dock to rails by physically touching them with your docker block. After undocking you will not be able to re-dock to that rail for 5 seconds. In the future this time interval will likely be switched to a distance limit, where if you move a certain distance from the rail you will be able to re-dock.


There has been a nice optimization done for planets which should add some FPS (after a planet is loaded in)


Thanks to player feedback and the help of the council, we’ve changed several values that should improve your gameplay experience.

• Power soft cap has been increased from 1 000 000 to 2 000 000
• Max shield regen under fire has been increased from 10% to 25%
• Shield sharing is disabled when you go under 25% shield capacity instead of 50%
• The system penalties you receive when you suffer damage are now more moderate.
• Starting cash is now 50,000 credits instead of 20,000 credits for new clients and station cost price has been decreased from 1,000,000 credits to 50,000 credits
• We’ve introduced multi-slots for lights and their respective light rods, the delay-signal is now also sitting in a logic multi-slot. We’re planning to add controllers + modules in the next release.
• Missile + cannon, missile speed has been buffed from 0.5 to 2.0, now it can go 6 times the max server speed.

T917 Emissive mapping makes rod lights appear on when they're off

T839 Certain weapons mounted directly to an asteroid and then fired will crash the game at the next autosave

T786 Players that are attached to a ship via alignment share the ship's shield when shot.

T680 Ships not checking for collision before docking

T655 Shipyards give free cores

T258 All blocks are rotatable

Power Supply and Power Drain textures are now correctly labeled.



Thanks for playing StarMade,

- The Schine Team

Hello players,

Cargo has finally arrived. It is meant to improve gameplay mechanics by having a physical representation of loaded goods on a ship, while still being easy to use.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8wZuu8UzJE


Cargo is a physical representation of things loaded in your ship, station or planet. The more you have loaded, the more boxes you will see appear in your cargo area.

There were some main concerns for it in terms of scalability, organization, usability and migration which I hope we solved sufficiently.

Since it’s impossible to organize your things into different little boxes with limited capacity, your storage block will still be the main piece to use. Because having a limit on both slots and stack capacity would be tedious, we decided to just have an overall capacity for a storage with unlimited slots. Each item’s needed space in the inventory is represented by its volume (which defaults to mass, but can be adapted in the block config if needed).

So basically, you can fill up your storage with as many slots as you like, as long as the total volume of all items is within capacity.

Because of this sudden change, penalties for being over-capacity are turned off by default in the server config. These penalties will be switched ON by default in future updates. A player whose inventory is over-capacity will move more slowly, and a ship which is over-capacity will leak items out of storage over time.


So how do you increase the base capacity each storage block gets?


It’s simple: just get a few Cargo Area blocks and connect them to your storage. Each block adds capacity to your storage block. They are non-physical and not visible as long as they are empty, but they will fill up with inventory when reaching capacity.

Keep in mind that items in storage now also add mass to your ship. It’s a lot less mass than it would add if you built the blocks on your ship by using the patented “warp storage technology”, which stores most of the mass in the void.

Also, please note that this balance is by no means final. We put it at the lower end, because buffing it in a future version is a lot easier than nerfing (and also causes less anger amongst players ;) ).


This same cargo capacity concept also now goes for factories and shipyards. Factories only pull the necessary items required for one crafting tick/cycle. This prevents them from filling up. Also, instead of sending a signal to adjacent Activation (full <-> not full) and ‘OR’ blocks (empty <-> nonempty), they will send it to connected ones.


Cargo can now be transferred from or to docked entities. Just connect your docker and rail to the storage you want to pull from or off, then deactivate pulling on the one you want to be pulled from, and it will pull in the other just like it would on the same entity.


You can now also dock to rails by physically touching them with your docker block. After undocking you will not be able to re-dock to that rail for 5 seconds. In the future this time interval will likely be switched to a distance limit, where if you move a certain distance from the rail you will be able to re-dock.


There has been a nice optimization done for planets which should add some FPS (after a planet is loaded in)


Thanks to player feedback and the help of the council, we’ve changed several values that should improve your gameplay experience.

• Power soft cap has been increased from 1 000 000 to 2 000 000
• Max shield regen under fire has been increased from 10% to 25%
• Shield sharing is disabled when you go under 25% shield capacity instead of 50%
• The system penalties you receive when you suffer damage are now more moderate.
• Starting cash is now 50,000 credits instead of 20,000 credits for new clients and station cost price has been decreased from 1,000,000 credits to 50,000 credits
• We’ve introduced multi-slots for lights and their respective light rods, the delay-signal is now also sitting in a logic multi-slot. We’re planning to add controllers + modules in the next release.
• Missile + cannon, missile speed has been buffed from 0.5 to 2.0, now it can go 6 times the max server speed.

T917 Emissive mapping makes rod lights appear on when they're off

T839 Certain weapons mounted directly to an asteroid and then fired will crash the game at the next autosave

T786 Players that are attached to a ship via alignment share the ship's shield when shot.

T680 Ships not checking for collision before docking

T655 Shipyards give free cores

T258 All blocks are rotatable

Power Supply and Power Drain textures are now correctly labeled.



Thanks for playing StarMade,

- The Schine Team

​
Welcome again citizens to another Dev Blog. As we head towards the holiday period we’ll be letting you know a bit more about our plans as they continue through to January and beyond. For now, some exciting things are happening that we want you all to know about.


With the recent addition of language packs a couple weeks ago, we can now support multiple language options for StarMade. We have an incredibly passionate community from all across the globe, and so this was another way we could make StarMade available to more people.

But let’s be honest, while Schine is made up of a number of people from all over the world, we need you, the community to help with translating the game as we go on.

To help us to that end, we’ve started a Translation Project on Crowdin. You can find the translation project at http://translate.star-made.org/. The website is an online translation tool, allowing users to collaborate in real time on language pack translations. Anyone can suggest translations for the game, however we will have language pack project managers who oversee all translations. Those who speak the language can also vote on a suggestion translated in the site. If anyone wishes to translate a language that is not on the site currently, or has an XML file for a new language, they need to send an email to Tai Coromandel (DukeofRealms), his email is duke@star-made.org. You can also PM him on the StarMade Forums.

Already we have translation projects for Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Swedish. So check it out and get involved.


The council has been doing a great job. One of the recent things they’ve been working on is all the balancing in the game, coordinating with some of the dev team to discuss and make suggestions. However balance can be such a subjective thing. So to facilitate the community’s input on a larger scale, a Game Balance Suggestions thread has been started to feed through suggestions specific to game balance, you can find the link here.

Make sure to read all the rules and flick through the suggestion lists up the top before posting.


Speaking of the council, the current term will be concluding on the 20th December. Applications for Term 2 are already open so if you think you would be a good councilor, hit up the application page here. Applications for Term 2 will close December 31st at Midnight (New Years Eve) UTC. With the voting for Term 2 commencing shortly thereafter. If all is well, Term 2 of the council will commence on January 20th and will be 4-months (actually 4-months this time) as each consecutive council will also be.

You’ll hear more in the lead-up to then, but for now those are the dates you need to be aware of.


We announced in the Game Direction thread a number of things, one was about the change in default factions for the game. There’s a number of factions that will be default in every game, and then a number of procedurally generated ones as well, making each server experience unique in that regard. There’s massive plans for that entire system, it’s slightly intimidating but I know the end product will be incredible.

As part of our move towards this though, more refinement is happening with the existing faction’s in-game assets, and adding new ones. That means an overhaul of stations, which ones they’re assigned to, new ships etc.

But what about the station competition that happened? I hear you ask. Some of those will be re-assigned to a different faction, some will remain with the one they are, some will go into the pool of stations and ships that the procedural factions will choose from.

So does that mean no more competitions? For the Trading Guild, Scavengers, and Outcasts that is correct, for now. Maybe in the future once their styles are well established in the game and community, then we may run another competition for them, but it won’t be for a while.

Does that mean no more competitions? No it doesn’t. Remember I mentioned the procedurally-generated factions, if we do run ship or station (or both) building competitions, it will most likely be for these procedurally-generated factions. The competition might have certain restrictions, but this setup allows for more freedom to build, allows us to run competitions more regularly, and makes encountering new factions more interesting as it’s less predictable.

Of course none of this is set in stone, but that’s the explanation of why things are changing.

Schine has an in-game assets team taking care of the construction of the ships and stations for the Trading Guild, Scavengers, and Outcasts, along with the other default factions you have yet to hear about (yes they’re out there….. somewhere).

You can check out Criss' thread here to keep up with what’s being constructed etc. but for a bit of a tease, here we have the small freighter. You may recognize it from the spawn station.







That’s it for this dev blog. I don’t know about you but I’m looking forward to end of next week when the next release comes out.

Until next time,

- The Schine Team

​
Welcome again citizens to another Dev Blog. As we head towards the holiday period we’ll be letting you know a bit more about our plans as they continue through to January and beyond. For now, some exciting things are happening that we want you all to know about.


With the recent addition of language packs a couple weeks ago, we can now support multiple language options for StarMade. We have an incredibly passionate community from all across the globe, and so this was another way we could make StarMade available to more people.

But let’s be honest, while Schine is made up of a number of people from all over the world, we need you, the community to help with translating the game as we go on.

To help us to that end, we’ve started a Translation Project on Crowdin. You can find the translation project at http://translate.star-made.org/. The website is an online translation tool, allowing users to collaborate in real time on language pack translations. Anyone can suggest translations for the game, however we will have language pack project managers who oversee all translations. Those who speak the language can also vote on a suggestion translated in the site. If anyone wishes to translate a language that is not on the site currently, or has an XML file for a new language, they need to send an email to Tai Coromandel (DukeofRealms), his email is duke@star-made.org. You can also PM him on the StarMade Forums.

Already we have translation projects for Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Swedish. So check it out and get involved.


The council has been doing a great job. One of the recent things they’ve been working on is all the balancing in the game, coordinating with some of the dev team to discuss and make suggestions. However balance can be such a subjective thing. So to facilitate the community’s input on a larger scale, a Game Balance Suggestions thread has been started to feed through suggestions specific to game balance, you can find the link here.

Make sure to read all the rules and flick through the suggestion lists up the top before posting.


Speaking of the council, the current term will be concluding on the 20th December. Applications for Term 2 are already open so if you think you would be a good councilor, hit up the application page here. Applications for Term 2 will close December 31st at Midnight (New Years Eve) UTC. With the voting for Term 2 commencing shortly thereafter. If all is well, Term 2 of the council will commence on January 20th and will be 4-months (actually 4-months this time) as each consecutive council will also be.

You’ll hear more in the lead-up to then, but for now those are the dates you need to be aware of.


We announced in the Game Direction thread a number of things, one was about the change in default factions for the game. There’s a number of factions that will be default in every game, and then a number of procedurally generated ones as well, making each server experience unique in that regard. There’s massive plans for that entire system, it’s slightly intimidating but I know the end product will be incredible.

As part of our move towards this though, more refinement is happening with the existing faction’s in-game assets, and adding new ones. That means an overhaul of stations, which ones they’re assigned to, new ships etc.

But what about the station competition that happened? I hear you ask. Some of those will be re-assigned to a different faction, some will remain with the one they are, some will go into the pool of stations and ships that the procedural factions will choose from.

So does that mean no more competitions? For the Trading Guild, Scavengers, and Outcasts that is correct, for now. Maybe in the future once their styles are well established in the game and community, then we may run another competition for them, but it won’t be for a while.

Does that mean no more competitions? No it doesn’t. Remember I mentioned the procedurally-generated factions, if we do run ship or station (or both) building competitions, it will most likely be for these procedurally-generated factions. The competition might have certain restrictions, but this setup allows for more freedom to build, allows us to run competitions more regularly, and makes encountering new factions more interesting as it’s less predictable.

Of course none of this is set in stone, but that’s the explanation of why things are changing.

Schine has an in-game assets team taking care of the construction of the ships and stations for the Trading Guild, Scavengers, and Outcasts, along with the other default factions you have yet to hear about (yes they’re out there….. somewhere).

You can check out Criss' thread here to keep up with what’s being constructed etc. but for a bit of a tease, here we have the small freighter. You may recognize it from the spawn station.







That’s it for this dev blog. I don’t know about you but I’m looking forward to end of next week when the next release comes out.

Until next time,

- The Schine Team

Hello players,

Here is a small but impactful update before the cargo update.


While implementing cargo, we looked at different options to display different states of a cargo area filling up, and a long planned feature came back into discussion: slabs.

With having finished a lot of ground work in the past year, they finally became possible, and here they are. As always, of course, scalability is our main concern, so we made sure that slabs wouldn’t impact performance any worse than any other block. This is possible because of the grid system in use.

There are 3 different sizes of slabs available: Quarter, Half, and Three-Quarter Slabs

The slabs are taking a block id, but a system was built to make creating and maintaining them as easy as right clicking on a category in the block editor.

Since we knew that with another 3 sub-types of blocks, the inventory would become incredibly cluttered, the slabs aren’t items in the inventory, so only the full block version is needed. They can be placed down by selecting any full block that has slabs, and then conveniently selecting the slab size in the advanced build mode. Any slab can of course also be rotated in all 6 directions.

Slab versions of special blocks like wedges and corners will follow. If necessary the internal size of blocks can be expanded from 3 to 4 bytes, effectively doubling block ids a few times, so don’t worry about block ids running out.

Currently we have added slab variants for all Hull types, Hazard Stripe blocks, Doors and Force Fields.


Good news everybody, we are expanding your range of building materials! We have monitored feedback over the past year and have begun to implement a few of the most popular requests. In this release, we have added Dark Grey Hulls. You can expect a few more in the run up to the winter holidays.

You may (or may not) have noticed some slight UI changes. We have begun to look into some legibility and scale issues. Our plan is to further streamline the UI, provide support for players using high resolutions and a wider range of characters for translation packs.


List of fixes:
We are working to fix the problem of spawning inside a block for good. For now, you can hit the 'up arrow' key after spawn to warp out of any stuck situation.


T839 Certain weapons mounted directly to an asteroid and then fired will crash the game at the next autosave
T789 Deleting shipyard core anchor when design is loaded, removes it from the database
T786 Players that are attached to a ship via alignment share the ship's shield when shot.
T748 Tutorial Immediately Bugged
T722 Recursive use of create dock feature in shipyards breaks out of creative mode
T680 Ships not checking for collision before docking
T640 game config: computer limitation does not work and acts like group limitation
T490 Planet part entities does not vanish even without any blocks
T450 Fix for entity-flag exploit does not affect already created entities.
T400 Warpgate faction permission issue
T258 All blocks are rotatable
T233 Chat kick and ban options
T64 /Destroy_Entity and overheating making rail entities invulnerable/untouchable
T52 ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException in storage UI


Black Hull textures are now darker.

Shield Drain & Shield Supply are now correctly labeled on their CPU texture.


Next update, the cargo system should be ready,



Thanks for playing StarMade,
- The Schine Team

Hello players,

Here is a small but impactful update before the cargo update.


While implementing cargo, we looked at different options to display different states of a cargo area filling up, and a long planned feature came back into discussion: slabs.

With having finished a lot of ground work in the past year, they finally became possible, and here they are. As always, of course, scalability is our main concern, so we made sure that slabs wouldn’t impact performance any worse than any other block. This is possible because of the grid system in use.

There are 3 different sizes of slabs available: Quarter, Half, and Three-Quarter Slabs

The slabs are taking a block id, but a system was built to make creating and maintaining them as easy as right clicking on a category in the block editor.

Since we knew that with another 3 sub-types of blocks, the inventory would become incredibly cluttered, the slabs aren’t items in the inventory, so only the full block version is needed. They can be placed down by selecting any full block that has slabs, and then conveniently selecting the slab size in the advanced build mode. Any slab can of course also be rotated in all 6 directions.

Slab versions of special blocks like wedges and corners will follow. If necessary the internal size of blocks can be expanded from 3 to 4 bytes, effectively doubling block ids a few times, so don’t worry about block ids running out.

Currently we have added slab variants for all Hull types, Hazard Stripe blocks, Doors and Force Fields.


Good news everybody, we are expanding your range of building materials! We have monitored feedback over the past year and have begun to implement a few of the most popular requests. In this release, we have added Dark Grey Hulls. You can expect a few more in the run up to the winter holidays.

You may (or may not) have noticed some slight UI changes. We have begun to look into some legibility and scale issues. Our plan is to further streamline the UI, provide support for players using high resolutions and a wider range of characters for translation packs.


List of fixes:
We are working to fix the problem of spawning inside a block for good. For now, you can hit the 'up arrow' key after spawn to warp out of any stuck situation.


T839 Certain weapons mounted directly to an asteroid and then fired will crash the game at the next autosave
T789 Deleting shipyard core anchor when design is loaded, removes it from the database
T786 Players that are attached to a ship via alignment share the ship's shield when shot.
T748 Tutorial Immediately Bugged
T722 Recursive use of create dock feature in shipyards breaks out of creative mode
T680 Ships not checking for collision before docking
T640 game config: computer limitation does not work and acts like group limitation
T490 Planet part entities does not vanish even without any blocks
T450 Fix for entity-flag exploit does not affect already created entities.
T400 Warpgate faction permission issue
T258 All blocks are rotatable
T233 Chat kick and ban options
T64 /Destroy_Entity and overheating making rail entities invulnerable/untouchable
T52 ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException in storage UI


Black Hull textures are now darker.

Shield Drain & Shield Supply are now correctly labeled on their CPU texture.


Next update, the cargo system should be ready,



Thanks for playing StarMade,
- The Schine Team