(original challenge description below)

This last month you all have shown your Indie stripes and refused to play any games for “the man.” You and your crew did just fine on the fringes! Who needs trade permits when you’ve got smugglers? Who needs high-level shipyards when you’ve got- okay, well, maybe that would’ve been nice. But still!

It’s been a lot of fun reading your stories and hearing about your adventures. If you want to catch up on the fun, you can check out the challenge discussion thread and head to our Discord and go to #hunna_snakes_rule_challenge.

A few highlights:

MasterShake, for engaging Captain’s Logs with stories of combat gone wrong (crew member ☠) and gone surprisingly right (3 non-combat crew and a medic holding their ground against enemy boarders).



Lord Duluth for keeping Indie crew members on board who normally wouldn’t make the cut. When you live on the edges, you work with who (or what) is available.

Innocent and aware17, along with MasterShake, for coming in with crews that were nearly all Indie at the end of the challenge. 👏👏👏



Swuul for entertaining narratives on the challenges of helping the Hunna. Who knew it would be nearly impossible to find Advanced Electronics?

Steven of the Seven Sails, who along with Swuul was practically writing full fan-fiction stories for us all and getting lots of nice spice reactions in the Discord.



Great work, Captains! There are so many more of you who participated in the challenge, shared great screenshots and stories; thank you all! Of course, even though May is over, we would love to hear about your try at this challenge (or any of the previous community challenges) any time you’re looking for a fun twist to your playthrough.




It’s been a while, but we are back with a new challenge for the month of May 2022!

Star Traders are independent and don’t need the establishment to be successful. In this challenge, we want to see you reject those faction phonies. You play by your own rules, and if they don't like it: tough. Who will acquire success without ever being part of "the system" -- and who isn’t afraid to make some enemies along the way?



To qualify for this challenge, your Captain must never acquire a military rank, edict, or even a trade permit with any faction. Your Captain must also never accept missions from any Contact representing "the man" -- Princes, Warrant Officers, Military Officers -- Only those who flaunt those rules are worth are consideration. No missions from ANY Contact unless:

• they also offer Black Market access
  
• are Hunna / Independents
  
• are Calagan Faen or Valencia, up to the point Valencia joins the Hunna

All other Contact services, such as selling Intel, recruiting and purchasing equipment are allowed with any Contact, regardless of their affliation.

Show and tell us about your fiercely independent captain and crew with screenshots and stories, stats, let’s plays, interpretive dance videos, etc. You can share them here or in our Discord. At the end of the month, we’ll highlight several with the Trese Brothers flashlight.

• Your favorite Indie Planet, your ship, your Indie crew with screenshots
  
• How you built your Indie crew, stories of missions from your favorite Indie/Hunna contact, and the challenges of working on the fringes
  
• Your strategies to survive outside the system: making money, finding supplies, trading partners, upgrading/buying ships
  
• Stats of your reputation with various factions, number of missions you complete
  
• Your own creative edits / showcases / celebrations of your adventures

No matter what you share, we ask that you include at least one screenshot of your “Indie crew roster.” Show off your coolest officers and crew and their Indie flag!

If you post in the Discord, please post in the #hunna_snakes_rule_challenge channel in the STF category.

We've opened up a discussion on the general forum for all posts, questions and shares for this challenge!

Can’t wait to see ‘em Captains. Stick it to “the man!”

With Update #294, Star Traders: Frontiers joins the celebration of everything rogue-y on Steam with a 35% discount, improved carrier meta, better ship dry dock UI and improvements to the recently added auto battle option in crew combat. Thanks to everyone in the community for posting feedback and suggestions! Check out the full details below --

We're recently back from Cyber Knights: Flashpoint’s demo stint on the floor at PAX East where we joined the PAX Rising showcase, a group of 12 indie dev's hand picked by the Penny Arcade team. With that exciting show behind us, we're back to the private alpha test for our 1,000+ Kickstarter backers and back on the long march to release on Steam. So, cyberpunk heist RPG lovers -- make sure you’ve wishlisted (and followed!), or join us for behind-the-scenes discussion and development snapshots in our Discord.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1021210/Cyber_Knights_Flashpoint/

With Update #294, we have removed the original (and confusing) rule that Skill points from Wing Jobs that involved getting into a craft -- such as Wing Leader, Bomber, Commado and Saboteur -- did not count toward the Skill pools to operate and run your capital ship. While this had some merit in the game's meta and balance, it is overly complicated especially in the case for Officers or Wing Bomber's Tactics Skill. With Update #294, we've removed the rule which is a net positive for carrier crew and craft -- the Skills of your craft pilots contribute to Ship pools like everyone else.


When previewing a ship in Dry Dock or looking to install a new component within the ship starport, a ship now correctly displays its bonuses stack like +Accuracy %, +Escape Dice, etc. This is especially helpful when shopping for ships to get a clear idea of what types of bonuses are coming out of the gate with the hull and its default components.

We also fixed one reported crash while selling ships. Thanks to everyone reporting bugs!


A big thanks to everyone sharing feedback and posting bugs on the new Auto-Battle feature. We've now resolved the one class of bug that was reported -- that various movement Talents could feasibly move your own squad into the enemy ranks and just .... mess *everything* up! With this fix in #294, everything is looking clean for Auto-Battle to ride into the sunset and slay endless enemy combat crews!

We've provided a much needed clarification to the Smuggler's "Hideout" Talent with this update -- specifically that this Talent only protects mission packages, prisoners and passengers and not regular cargo from search and seizure. Based on the discussion around this clarification, we've started looking into how we could add some of the other possibility -- hidden smuggler compartments -- that would actually hide illegal *cargo* from search and seizure. We'd love to hear you thoughts on this one!

- Boost for Carrier-meta: all Wing Jobs (Leader, Bomber, Commando, Saboteur, Tech) now contribute their skill pools normally to ship
- Ship Upgrade and Ship Dry Dock now correctly lists bonuses like +Accuracy and +Escape
- Fixed Auto-Battle issue with Talents moving your team forward or backward would push them into enemy lines
- Clarified description of Smuggler's "Hideout" Talent to be clear -- only protects mission items
- Fixed bugs with some modal dialogs crashing on double click
- Fixes issues with crash reporting

Hey Captains, we're back at PAX this year!

Our upcoming game Cyber Knights: Flashpoint was selected for the PAX Rising Showcase, a group of 12 indie games hand-picked by the PAX team for a spot in the Expo Hall.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1021210/Cyber_Knights_Flashpoint/

Even if you're not going to PAX, this means more in store for you, including a new studio chat in Discord next week (Star Traders questions always welcome!), and a giveaway of one of these awesome Cyber Knights posters:



Follow @TreseBrothers on twitter for sights from the show! (You know Star Traders is on twitter and Facebook too, right?)

You'll find us 10am-6pm in the PAX Rising section of the Expo Hall, booth #13091.



We'll have:

• a playable Cyber Knights demo level, with three different versions of the Vanguard for you to choose from
  
• at least two more chances to win a Cyber Knights poster
  
• a unique photo opportunity
  
• a ton of excitement to chat with anyone who's already a Trese Brothers fan!

Hope to see you there! Have a great weekend!

Update #293 follows on after Update #300 (what madness is this, it's April Fools!) with a major quality of life upgrade for combat captains, a powerful balance improvement for mission runners, new content for the crew barks system and fixes for Blade Dancer and the Templar storyline. We're hard at work again, knocking off the major quality of life and rebalance requests from the community. If you are enjoying the improvements, please take a moment to leave a review, post some feedback or share our game with a friend.

Earlier this year, Cyber Knights: Flashpoint’s private alpha test went live for our Kickstarter backers, following the same tried-and-true process we used for Star Traders: Frontiers. With a thousand players in the game now, development pace has picked up and we’re on the long march to release on Steam, so make sure you’ve wishlisted (and followed!), or join us for behind-the-scenes discussion and development snapshots in our Discord.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1021210/Cyber_Knights_Flashpoint/


When it comes time for the rapid takedown, we've made a lot of improvements over the last year to help combat captains play faster. An upgraded suite of keyboard shortcuts and the high speed combat option to skip animation and SFX have both helped. But compared to the newest Auto Battle option, these previous improvements are tepid spice beer compared to a heaping spice plate.

Auto Battle --

• Uses the same AI controlling the enemy to control your team
  
• Uses all your Talents, healing and attacks automatically
  
• Resolves combats very quickly, especially when combined with Fast Combat option
  
• Can win easily if you are in a commanding position -- if you outclass the enemy or you've already cleared half the enemy team, Auto Battle will help you mop up. If the enemy is a lineup of E-Techs and Navigators, Auto Battle can give you that rapid takedown experience.
  
• Should be used carefully in evenly matched combats where every decision counts. In closely balanced battles, Auto Battle will duke it out but will not be able to use your team's combat builds as optimally as you could.
  
• Can be quickly turned off - click the toggle to get control again
  
• Will never Surrender and always fight to the death
  
• Is not responsible for deaths to your team members -- Use at your own risk!
  
• Starts disabled with each new combat. To a void mistakes where Auto Battle runs the first few (woops!) turns of a xeno combat, it always starts disabled

Auto Battle always starts disabled and as soon as you engage it your team will take care of the rest. We recommend trying out Auto Battle option in a few safe situations -- when the enemy is down to 2 crew, when the enemy is far lower level than you, when your fighting mostly enemy ship crew boarding -- to see how it feels with your combat crew. The Auto Battle AI uses basically the same AI as the enemy, so it may not be able to use your combat crews optimally, may not buff in the order you like or may heal less than you'd chose to -- etc.

We're excited to hear your feedback -- especially from boarding-heavy captains -- to see how this helps and what we could do to further tune the Auto Battle AI.



With Update #293, Reputation mitigation Talents like the Diplomat's "Adept Mediation" or Spy's "Stealth Op" will activate before the Bounty Hunter's more generalist "Red Badge". This is a boon to captains who specialize in these skill-focused Talents, enabling you to save your Red Badge for a later mission step that might not have Stealth or Negotiation options.

The Bounty Hunter bearing an Edict has always been able to use Red Badge to reduce Reputation loss on any type of mission step in urban zones (not Exploring). Historically, it always went first. Many captains found this to be a disadvantage to the newer Rep mitigation Talents and we've finally caught up with the change that activates Red Badge always as a last resort.


We have fixed the description of the Blade Dancer's "Ritualized Retreat" Talent to be much clearer about what Black Market cards it can protect against -- that is, only cards that include "Cargo Lost" in their title specifically. It does not protect against encountering hostile security squads.

In a recent Twitch stream on our Twitch channel, Cory hung out and chatted and gathered awesome suggestions from the community to improve and add to the already huge set of barks in the game. Another 20 entries were added for specific Traits.

- Enabled hotkey and button to toggle auto-combat in Crew Combat (AI will resolve for you)
- Added button to toggle fast combat in crew combat
- Added 20 new barks for crew Traits
- Adjusted order of Mission Rep Loss mitigation Talents -- Blood Badge will run AFTER other specific Skill (Stealth, etc) Talents
- Corrected description of Blade Dancer's "Ritualized Retreat" Talent to only cover Cargo Lost cards
- Fixed bug allowing reclaiming (and then using) Templar gear

One of the things we’ve always been quietly proud of in Star Traders is the wide variety of faces available within the game.

But even before we added official modding support to the game, some of the first unofficial mods were graphics replacements players created to further customize the game’s character art or add in their own faces & clothes. Now with fully-supported Steam Workshop modding available, it’s even easier, more reliable, and we’ve seen some modders getting pretty creative with it.

So creative… we may have gotten a little jealous. Seeing modders getting a chance to put a whole new spin on the game, from tributes to other franchises to rebalances that create new playstyle opportunities… not to mention all the straight-up improvements some modders are claiming… “Improved Ship Combat Icons,” “Sound FX Overhaul,” “Larger Cargo Holds” …this is what comes from creating a Captain simulator, everyone thinks they can run the ship better. ;)

So, we dug deep into our graveyard of code fragments, searching for a half-finished time-travel wormhole we’d written off all the way back in Early Access as too dangerous to complete, and let our wounded pride throw caution to the solar winds. Why a time travel wormhole, you might ask? Because how else in the midst of Cyber Knights development, spring travel, and 😱 tax season were we going to find the time for this: a full faces revamp featuring entirely new*, 100% original** crew art now available to you within the game.



We asked Andrew to art better this time, and boy did he! While the original faces were a collaboration between Andrew as Creative Director and our professional art team partners, the revamped crew faces are a fully in-house effort only "lightly" inspired from their original work, and we think you’re going to love the results.



Each face features:

• 20-50% more pixels
  
• fine-tuned adjustments to key facial features
  
• bold new interpretations of classic sci-fi tropes
  
• exciting speculative guesses at alternate evolutionary possibilities
  
• increased immersion through stronger representation of the effects of centuries of drinking the water-fuel

Okay, so you’ve hopefully figured it out by now, but if not: April fool’s! This is not a real game update.

…

…

…

…

BUT IT IS A REAL GAME MOD! 😮😁😮😁😮😁

If you want to, you can actually play with these ludicrous, outlandish, unexplainable, sometimes unfortunate faces, by playing the mod version of the game and adding our new mod, Star Derps. All 100+ of the crew faces have been replaced with new versions. Try it out, you might even find a few you’d like to grab from the modded spritesheet and add into a less outrageous mod of your own.

For-real props to all our modders, who have created some truly fun stuff for the game. Check out the other mods now available for Star Traders and leave some comments to encourage them to make more, and dive into the Making Mods section of the wiki to learn how to make your own.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2787587653&searchtext=

Update #292 was born directly from a lively and productive conversation here on the Steam boards about the System Atlas and its display of accurate or inaccurate trading conditions. While we were in there, we added some clarifications to the in-game text about the thresholds at which trading into certain rumors -- Trade Blockade and Embargo -- can yield Reputation bonuses. And to make it look good, we also dressed Update #292 in a new helmet and awesome translucent visor to boot.


My brother Cory and I have worked closely with amazing partners in Ukraine to dream, design and create the art for our next game Cyber Knights: Flashpoint over the past 3 years. Over the years, our partnership has grown to friendship as we spent countless hours working with these wonderful and talented people.

The entire Trese Brothers team is worried for our friends, their children, their families and their country. They need our prayers, our monetary support and our voices raised in solidarity. Their country and millions of refugees are in desperate need of food, water, shelter and medical supplies. We hope you will join us in giving to some organizations trying to ease the suffering in Ukraine.

Here are a few options:
Ukrainian Red Cross
Project HOPE
Docotrs without Borders

Speaking of new, new new -- if word hasn't trickled down from the tippity top of the New Boston spires, leaked below the streets and drip-drip-dripped into your safehouse, we're here to tell you about our upcoming turn-based cyberpunk heist RPG. Cyber Knights: Flashpoint will be coming to Steam in 2022 and mixes stealth, hacking and tactical combat with deep RPG elements and a unique heist system for missions. The wishlist button is calling your name, Knight. The private alpha is in full swing with over a 1,000 players, so get your cyber ready.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1021210?snr=1_2108_9__2107


This update brings a major upgrade to the way the Star Atlas displays buy and sell information for places you've visited. It's something we've been tinkering with ideas for for a while, and recent discussions in the community helped us prioritize pushing this through to completion. Thanks all for the feedback!

Previously, the Star Atlas would display supply and demand information based on the system type, zone type and economic rating. This gave players a good "usual conditions" benchmark for what they could expect to buy & sell in different zones, but was frequently mistaken for a live display of current prices. Without additional tracking on your own, it could be difficult to remember as you made numerous trades along a route where your last trades had left demand for certain goods, or where there was still an affordable supply of another.



Now we've made it so that the Star Atlas remembers and displays supply & demand information unique to each zone, based on your last visit to that zone. Your crew logs the local pricing to the ship's data cores each time you depart, where it will remain "fresh" for up to half a year (21 weeks). After 21 weeks, the Star Atlas will revert back to showing an estimate for that zone, with a helpful reminder displayed that the information may be inaccurate as you haven't visited that location in a long time.



This is a big boon for traders executing shorter trading trips and triangles and greatly reduces the need to check and double-check economic conditions before leaving port. May your trades glitter!


Update #292 adds a new translucent visor, interjecting display over reality to help combatants and ship crew alike do their daily tasks. Looking cool, looking blue. We've also added a new helmet, hitting the milestone of 15 total hat/helmet options. Perfect for some of the combat armors, this helmet is for battle-hardened combat crew or your wing pilots.



With this update we have improved the data displayed in the Exchange if you are making a sale and the Trade Blockade or Embargo Rumors are active. The messages there now include the specific threshold of sale value (for example, $1,500 for Embargo) before any Reputation bonuses can be gained. Small sales will not move the Rep needle, which is now nicely messaged in game.

- Added new helmet and new pair of translucent eyewear for characters
- If zone has been visited within 1/2 a year, Star Atlas supply / demand data is accurate
- Star Atlas supply / demand data will include cargo types that are not being bought or sold due to lack of supply / demand
- Clarified rules for Rep bonuses when trading under Rumors "Trade Blockade" and "Embargo" in game

Update #291 brings some important upgrades to the power levels achievable through Contact recruiting, fixes screen display and resolution for smaller resolution monitors, adds an important option for anyone playing on the Steam Deck and drops one more Talent into the oh-so-useful Talent Manifest.


My brother Cory and I have worked closely with amazing partners in Ukraine to dream, design and create the art for our next game Cyber Knights: Flashpoint over the past 3 years. Over the years, our partnership has grown to friendship as we spent countless hours working with these wonderful and talented people.

The entire Trese Brothers team is worried for our friends, their children, their families and their country. They need our prayers, our monetary support and our voices raised in solidarity. Their country and millions of refugees are in desperate need of food, water, shelter and medical supplies. We hope you will join us in giving to some organizations trying to ease the suffering in Ukraine.

Here are a few options:
Ukrainian Red Cross
Project HOPE
Kyiv Independent

Speaking of new, new new -- if word hasn't trickled down from the tippity top of the New Boston spires, leaked below the streets and drip-drip-dripped into your safehouse, we're here to tell you about our upcoming turn-based cyberpunk heist RPG. Cyber Knights: Flashpoint will be coming to Steam in 2022 and mixes stealth, hacking and tactical combat with deep RPG elements and a unique heist system for missions. The wishlist button is calling your name, Knight. The private alpha is in full swing with over a 1,000 players, so get your cyber ready.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1021210?snr=1_2108_9__2107


In the last update, we made some changes to the screen resolution detection to better cater to the Steam Deck hardware. It had some unexpected consequences for players on lower resolution monitors. We've addressed that in Update #291, by rolling back to the old resolution detection and adding an option in the Options menu for "small screen display". If you're playing on a Steam Deck (lucky you!), toggling this option on and you may find the game's interface better caters to the smaller screen. May you like it the big screen way too -- you get to pick!


With Update #291, we've made some significant upgrades to the Contact Recruiting service. All the numbers got bigger! To help Contacts provide better recruits into the late and mid game, we've upgraded their service to recruit character levels at 2X the Contact Service level which ranges from 1-8. So, instead of base levels for your characters from 1-8, you can now range from 1-16 (level 1 still recruits level 1).

In addition, we've bumped the bonuses of passing Eras from +10 over all of the Eras in the game to +12. Therefore, late game Contacts in the final Era will be offering level 28 Officers and Crew recruits, not counting any Edicts, Military Ranks, Permits, Traits or Rumors that may further increase those values.

To even out the big new improvement to Contact recruiting, the minimum thresholds for Effective Rep and Influence have been significantly raised as well as the Personal Rep and Credit cost of recruiting. Truly high-end recruits are costly, especially if you are considering cycling through a few to look for the best Traits and Attributes, but as always -- compared to Spice Hall or Conscription -- they do have the best Traits and Attributes!


If you see a Talent missing from the manifest, please report. Thanks to a report, we've now added Sample Analysis to the on-landing Talent stack in the manifest for those adventurous spirits seeking Scientific Intel.

Thanks to reports from the community, we have also fixed a number of issues with different missions. Some missions that failed to mention the name of the destination zone in their text have been corrected and other places were Prisoners were being transported and there were missing nouns in the mission options have also been fixed. Big thanks to everyone reporting issues!

- Improved Contact Recruit services across the board to recruit higher level characters (service level x 2)
- Increased Credit, Personal Rep Cost and thresholds for Effective Rep and Influence on all Contact Recruit service levels
- Added Scientist "Sample Analysis" to Talent Manifest
- Fixed multiple missions that failed to list destination zone names in text
- Fixed issues with Prisoner missions where there was missing nouns in mission options
- Fixed issue with lower resolution screens converting UI to Steam Deck UI, added option to play in small screen mode

Greetings, captains. We have Update #290 coming out tonight but first we wanted to focus on something much more important…


My brother Cory and I have worked closely with amazing partners in Ukraine to dream, design and create the art of Cyber Knights: Flashpoint over the past 3 years. Over that time, our partnership has grown to friendship as we spent countless hours working with these wonderful and talented people.

The entire Trese Brothers team is heartsick and worried to see the invasion and wanton destruction of their country – missile strikes hitting hospitals, apartment buildings, even kindergarten schools. We are scared for our friends, their families and their children. They need our prayers, our monetary support and our voices raised in solidarity.

Their country and thousands of refugees already need food, water, shelter and medical supplies. We hope you will join us in giving to some organizations trying to ease the suffering in Ukraine.

Here are a few options:
Ukraine Direct Relief
Project HOPE
Kyiv Independent


Our 290th update adds 2 new customizable outfits which are matching uniforms for the masculine and feminine characters. You can also mix and match these with any other outfits and for some matches, it is looking awesome!

In preparation to apply for verification with the Steam Deck, we've assigned 3 default controller configs for the game. The Steam Deck one was put together on our testing hardware and the Steam Controller and XBox Controller configs come out of the community -- so thanks for posting up awesome configs, team.

Occasionally, we get a little confusion from some players when the Skip Intro checkbox missing on a new install or after wiping all their saved games. For most players, this is never noticed but we've adjusted the code to ensure that the Skip Intro option is always available, even to a completely new captain who has never before played or a player who has no saves on the local machine.

- Added default controller configs (Steack Deck, Steam Controller, XBox)
- Added 2 new outfits
- Skip Intro option is always shown in New Game regardless of save counts
- Improved modding support for modders

Update #289 takes a turn and swings back through the Rumor section of the simulation to see the completion of some long needed tweaks and the addition of a Rumor affinities system that helps better match Rumors to applicable systems and zones to deliver more compelling and impactful results. We've also fixed and improved a number of other things with Update #289, working from community requests -- blocking more early game Rumors, repricing the Explorer extraction components and fixing odd bugs with the new ship comparison display. Plus, from our on-going work with the modding community, we've improved some of the visual modding support and are looking forward to the upcoming release of some new exciting character design mods.

Earlier this month, we launched Cyber Knights: Flashpoint’s private alpha test for Kickstarter backers, following the same tried-and-true process we used for Star Traders: Frontiers. With a thousand players in the game now, development pace has picked up and we’re on the long march to release on Steam, so make sure you’ve wishlisted (and followed!), or join us for behind-the-scenes discussion and development snapshots in our Discord.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1021210/Cyber_Knights_Flashpoint/


With Update #289, we've added a new system of Rumor affinities that improves the matching between the system and zone type and the Rumors that can be generated along with it. This system both helps to avoid certain silly situations -- such a Surplus on a Lux Population world that produces nothing -- but also strengthens the thematic appearance of Rumors in the right places -- Mining zones are more prone to civil unrest, oceanic systems are more prone to Ion Storms, Farm zones are more likely to have Surpluses, Orbital zones are often running into Shortages. We've loaded in about the first 30 affinity matches and are excited to keep extending and improving this system.

The new Rumor affinities system also gave us a chance to review and improve some of the Contact events taken in response to Contact actions taken when a positive economic Rumor was on their zone. We have increased the strength of these actions -- helping an ally, creating an additional positive Rumor, gaining Influence by 20% -- making the impact of positive economic news felt more strongly.

We have also improved the text on many of the event logs for Rumors (bottom right) as well as the entries going into the captain's log to ensure they are more helpful and clear.

To avoid unfair and messy situations in the first 2 years of the game, we've extended the block on certain Rumor types in the early game. Previously, this type of blocking was reserved for Xeno related Rumors, but now you will no longer encounter the following Rumors in the first 900 Turns of the game: Starport Closed, Civil Unrest, Ion Storm or Meteor Storm. Have more fun flying in your first years :D

We've done some work with #289 to improve support of Templar Contacts. Templar and all Zendu Contacts have received an even longer age limit before they may die of old age. We've also fixed a number of places where the game could report -- through filters, search or services list -- that Templar and Zendu Contacts could offer services, such as Recruiting, that they really do not. Thanks to everyone for reporting these issues.


With Update #287, we've adjusted the purchase and repair cost for some of the most powerful Exploration components -- Extraction Drill, Harvester Bay, Resource Processor and Javat Mechi-Reaper. For their value in the field, and ability to greatly increase profits from exploring, their costs had dipped too low. Constantly damaged by their use in exploring, finding the right value for their repairs is key.

Update #289 fixed a couple of key issues that came out of the last few updates. First, zones with 0 Starport rating -- which rare -- could crash the game if your ship had certain levels of damage to it when you tried to land. Second, if you debuffed an enemy ship hard enough, its ship comparison could go "all the way around" and start reporting that it was superior to you!


We've got some exciting work brewing in the modding community and to support that we've made some improvements to the game's handling of hair, hats and beards to help the modders keep making progress toward some awesome releases. If you haven't checked out the Workshop recently, don't miss all the different options to tweak gameplay, character visuals, add story, jobs and more --
https://steamcommunity.com/app/335620/workshop/

- Removed "Stardock Closed", "Starport Closed" and "Civil Unrest" Rumors from early game
- Removed "Ion Storm" and "Meteor Storm" Rumors from early game
- Increased Influence Economy via Rumors by 20%, making all Contacts more powerful
- Created New Zone and Planet Rumor affinities to tie Zone/Planet Types to thematically consistent Rumor Types
- Revised & Improved Rumor Lifecycle Logging
- Fixed issue where heavy debuffing could cause ship comparison to go "all the way around" and flip comparison
- Clarified in-game Wisdom hover
- Fixed issue where Recruiting or Rank services could show up for Templar Contact incorrectly
- Increased the maximum Contact age of Zendu and Templar Contacts
- Repriced & Rebalanced "Extraction Drill, Harvester Bay, Resource Processor, Javat Mechi-Reaper" Components
- Fixed crash landing on Starport: 0 Zones with a damaged ship
- Improved support for modders adding new head / hair / beard / hat combos

Star Traders, gather round the spice hall -- its Update #288.

Earlier this month, we launched Cyber Knights: Flashpoint’s private alpha test for Kickstarter backers, following the same tried-and-true process we used for Star Traders: Frontiers. With a thousand players in the game now, development pace has picked up and we’re on the long march to release on Steam, so make sure you’ve wishlisted (and followed!), or join us for behind-the-scenes discussion and development snapshots in our Discord.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1021210/Cyber_Knights_Flashpoint/

Over the last few updates, we've been updating the data schema for ship components to give us more fine-grained control over the cost and time consumed by repair. As this backend work has wrapped up, we've now made some wholesale adjustments to these values and rebalanced the time required to repair all ship components in the game. In general, repairs times should feel shorter, more predictable and less "spikey". As components increase in size (small, medium, large) and level (1-8 currently) and complexity (engines, bridges, salvage bays, launch bays, etc) the repair times increase but more within an expected curve than previously where some components simply came with astronomically high repair hours.

We've love to hear your feedback about it and will be returning to look at the credit cost ($$) of repair in a future update but this alone has gone a long way to help make repair a more predictable experience.

Finally, we have also put in a rule that -- regardless of any Talents or faction bonuses -- Repairs must always take at least 1 Turn.

For anyone who was counting Turns and worrying about the pace of story, this should be a boon as well!


I don't want to spoil anything, but we fixed a story timing bug where Valencia might leave before "the Hunter" arrives. If you had this bug, you know what I mean. If you don't, good luck!


After the fuel cost display adjustment in Update #287, the HUD could display the wrong AU Fuel Range. This has now been resolved and you'll now see a 100% sync between the displayed fuel range and fuel cost per AU throughout the game, engine displays and HUDs. Thanks to everyone pushing on this!


There was one case -- in which one of the two ships had no weapons installed -- that could cause the new ship comparison screen to crash. We've fixed this bug with #288 and apologies for the delay on that.

- Rebalanced repair time for all components, especially improving some Weapon Lockers, Railtraks and other peaks
- All repairs must always take at least 1 Turn
- Fixed issue where AU Fuel Range was misreported in the HUD
- Fixed story bug where in some cases, Valencia left before the Hunter arrived
- Fixed some ship designs could cause crashes with new ship comparison