Work continues on what looks to be our biggest update yet. This is part 2 of our development blog about 0.9.0.00 which means the features listed here are being added in addition to the feature discussed in the previous blog post. Lets talk about more upcoming features:


Mastery points for completing quests was a great idea! It gave the power to our quest designers to directly control the speed at which the player's power and sense of agency ramps up as they move through the story. There was only one problem...we don't have any quest designers on our team. So mastery points have been feeling like an incomplete feature for a long time.

You know what? EXP is a perfectly good system that doesn't need to be reinvented. Who doesn't love filling bars and receiving rewards? So that's what we are doing now, we are giving the player exp for things and filling a bar. When the bar fills, you get a mastery point, just like in every other game, including all the ones which can afford to keep a quest designer on staff all the time. There's more than one reason why this system is nice.

So one feature you can look forward to in 0.9.0.00 is finally being able to use all of the mastery points we designed so long ago. Who knows, maybe we will even add more of them some day.


This is a long one...which is why I made an hour long video explaining it.



The short version is this: While working on mining and resources I decided my life was miserable because our world save format was terrible. It was some of my earliest code and I made a lot of mistakes that became systemic problems impeding my daily development. So I burned it to the ground and started over and I think the new system is much better.

One immediately obvious result of the new world format is that gameplay is much smoother on average and free from the hitching caused by asset initialization and disk operations.


Well all of that is neat, you say, but what are we to do with our ship once we've harvested the resources and researched the technology and filled it with crew and stocked it with supplies?

Why blow it up in the new end-game activity of course!

This is supposed to be a game about getting to a planet, so I suppose it's about time we actually added that planet right? Well we added it. So now winning the game is an activity that you will be able to do...finally.

Inconveniently, it seems that the planet is guarded by all the meanest enemy ships in the star system. Also some sort of energy field will force you to progress through a series of procedurally generated zones one at a time, periodically defeating a boss in order to reach the next area until eventually you reach some sort of final challenge.

I'm calling it a gauntlet. It's the end of our story. It will be available to attempt pretty much immediately after starting the campaign, but it will be pretty difficult so you won't want to try it in your starter ship. It will also only be partially complete as of the release of 0.9.0.00 because ultimately we want all of the T3 stuff to be in the gauntlet and T3 assets are probably going to take us until 1.0 to make.

I'll be paying closer attention to gauntlet feedback because I kinda eyeballed the neutrino bombs on this one. If people absolutely hate it big changes can be made.


Probably the most important question to answer. Here's the current status breakdown:

* Clouds are in
* Sensors and vision is done
* World overhaul is done and mostly debugged
* A whole lot of new items were made
* Mining modules and nodes and animations are done
* New tooltips are done
* Core framework for resources is designed but not fully implemented
* Mining nodes spawning across the entire universe is nearing completion
* Space dungeon core framework is working and the details are now being fleshed out
* World layout and economy rework is looming ominously over us
* I started a side project of trying to optimize big ship interiors but it is low priority
* We're doing some changes to our website

We're trying desperately to get this all finished before the world formally ends but we may need an additional month or two after it has in order to wrap things up. In other words, I'll try to keep you appraised of the progress.

We've been working for on a big update for a while now. This is going to be the 0.9 update which means we are getting close to feature complete. As you can imagine it will be a big one. Here's what we are doing.


We are upgrading our sessions to contain a THIRD type of thing! While before they supported two types of things (terrain and stations) now they will support three types of things! (terrain, stations, clouds) Now you might argue that ore is a fourth type of thing, and we are indeed adding ore as well, but we consider ore to be ships so we didn't count ore. If you think we are wrong to classify ore as ships, then good news: we are upgrading our session to support FOUR types of things! Will talk about ore later.

Clouds aren't just aesthetic, they will have meaningful gameplay impacts. Depending on what type of cloud you encounter a simple dust cloud might obstruct vision, making ships inside harder to detect, while a plasma cloud might disabled sensors entirely and zap you periodically. We have a lot of potential cloud types on our drawing board such as radiation clouds which will cause your crew to take constant radiation damage. These hazards are meant to add another layer of interaction to the world map beyond simply avoiding collision with rocks and make the world feel more alive and interesting.

Clouds do come with a bit of an overhaul of our rendering, and if you have been following Jan's twitter you have probably already seen that the results look pretty nice. This will be a visual update which may force us to reconsider some of our system requirements so if this update absolutely melts your video card, well then we may need to have a serious conversation about honestly trying to support your grandfather's laptop from 1998. We already have pretty modest system requirements, and it is 2019, so we are really hoping it won't be an issue, but if it does we are willing to consider adding more things for you to disable in the settings.

Ships and asteroids cast shadows on clouds, and light sources inside the clouds will cause them to glow.






Now we can't talk about hiding inside clouds without talking about the new visibility framework, so I will mention it briefly. In the past, a ship was visible if it was within your "vision" radius set by your bridge. This was the same rule as terrain and clouds, and it needed an upgrade for hiding in clouds to work. So we changed how ship visibility worked, but we left terrain and clouds the same.

Ship visibility now works based on a system that attempts to simulate how hard a ship is to see as well as taking into account sensor strength to give ships with real strong sensors a real bonus towards seeing their enemies. Every ship now has a dynamic detection radius, and it will be seen when it is closer than that radius. Also, having lots of sensor strength increases the effective detection radius of all nearby ships.

We designed the system so that anything can be programmed to increase radius, so we might in the future design some modules with interesting trade-offs there. However the main contributing factor to ship visibility that will matter for every ship design is heat radiated. Note that it isn't size, which means big ships can still be stealthy if designed correctly. When your radiators remove energy from a reactor they increase your visibility, and by refraining from producing heat you can reduce it. With capacitors, a variety of reactor types, a variety of radiator types, and some new heat-related modules recently developed, we hope that stealthiness can be a serious factor in future ship designs.


We sort of already have mining, but we don't like it!

In the beginning, when considering mining, it seemed obvious to us that if the entire gimmick of our game is simulated interiors for everything then clearly mining should take place on the inside of asteroids. Unfortunately, our game is forced to exist in real life where obvious answers are often wrong. By our revised assessment, interior mining is boring and ugly, and it needs to burn in a fire.

It turns out the best part about Wayward Terran Frontier is the ship design and the ship combat NEITHER of which are possible if you are inside an asteroid punching rocks. Also realism is hardly important to us, but we do recognize that real space mining probably wouldn't be done by crew leaving their ships to go inside the asteroid being mined.

So we are reenvisioning mining, and it will look like ore-rich asteroids that you can shoot at with your ship weapons. The best part about mining this way is that we can add mining related turrets and module types which will allow for all sorts of new mining-focused ship designs that we hope will drastically expand the variety of possible ship designs. While regular ore can probably be extracted with a good old fashioned machine gun, there will be new types of specialty ore which will require specialized mining equipment to extract.

We hope that adding ore nodes will make wandering aimlessly more interesting by punctuating your wander with loot pinyatas in the form of periodic low quality ore nodes. We also hope we can accomplish a compelling gameplay loop where people make custom mining ships and go exploring for rare high quality ore.




This is the big one, and it is the reason that we are pushing back the release of this patch for longer than we wanted. The idea of the resource system is that ship construction should not be limited by such a simple stat as "capacity" but instead each module should be given a cost in terms of resources needed to construct it, and the ship construction should be the sum total of all those module costs. The idea behind this system is to give the player more reason to interact with the dynamic economy instead of simply towering over it with their ability to print infinite resources, this is meant to be one part of a step towards fixing issues with our core game loop.

Right now, the player is dropped into a sandbox that feels small and empty because of their mechanical removal from that sandbox. While all of the architecture exists for the player to go around manipulating a dynamic economy, mining, fighting, collecting, trading, etc.... the truth is you don't have to do any of that in order to advance your goals. The culprit is that evil "spawn ship" button and its unreasonable ability to violate every conservation law in the universe. What need have you for an asteroid belt, when you can create finished products at home for free? We hope that through the nerfing of that button your character will be reduced down to a creature of the verse. We hope that the tools, the dangers, and the treasures that already exist within our world will be transformed from a monotone backdrop into a world of treasure and adventure.

Or at least we hope you waste more of your precious life playing the game before you get bored.

Either way, we have been discussing doing this for a while and when we made the new mining system we quickly realized that adding a whole lot of new resources via mining kinda forced us to also consider resources. So now both systems have to be completed before the patch can go out. This resource system is big and complex, so we might need a 2nd blog post to fully explain the implications once it is closer to being ready for release. This is also why this patch will be bringing us to version 0.9.0.0


Finally, I should say that we are working on multiple projects simultaneously, and I'm digging into at least one which will warrant its own blog post, so whats listed above isn't comprehensive. Here are some other items that for sure will be added (also fulfilling mandatory bullet points requirement)

• 17 new weapons
  
• three new hulls
  
• new mining modules
  
• implementation of stealth related modules
  
• new weapon impulse system
  
• a new faction

Oh, and we redid tooltips!



Now go enjoy Christmas and leave us alone already!

Just some bug fixing this time.

• the dialogues that open when you kill Greg or when talking to gary will now wait patiently if you already have a dialogue open so that the quest can't break. This might have been allowing 2 dialogues to happen at once causing one to disappear and leaving that quest stuck forever
  
• Budd now spawns every time you kill a station after you have killed 8 stations so long as he has not spawned. This should not be necessary since before he spawned on the 9th kill which is logically equivalent, but since logic doesn't seem sufficient in this case we are making it even MORE guaranteed
  
• Budd's ship will now be tracked by the new mini-map quest objective tracker
  
• fixed a bug when entering a station where the station map icons could break all animations inside the station (most obviously the doors)
  
• drones now must kick the proverbial dog or their controller will consider them lost. This means drones abandoned in far away sessions or otherwise non-responsive will eventually be replaced by the module
  
• drones will now attempt to move into the session their source ship is currently in so they can follow you across session boundaries
  
• drones that are beyond sensor range will eventually be abandoned as if they were unresponsive, so keep your sensors working

Features and QoL
• added the Ion beam controller to the game. Blueprint drops in green zone from T2.5 ships as temporal source before dedicated ship is introduced.
  
  
• added a new Pike variant with Energy turrets and ECM
  
• energy turrets should now be obtainable outside of green zone
  
• new modules were integrated into the design screen
  
• activating debug mode from the ingame menu via Konami code will now also activate design screen debugging options

Bug Fixes
• your targeting computer will no longer draw target brackets for ships that are still targeted but outside of your view and in another sector since they draw at the wrong spot and look like a bug
  
• added more null reference checks to some EVA boarding code that should never have crashed in the first place because none of these things can ever be null but apparently one of them was anyhow
  
• fixed a crash in the debug spawn menu caused by trying to teleport yourself into a new design which has no airlocks
  
• fixed a bug where drone launchers were not synchronizing their ready state if they were created on a ship which already has ready drones
  
• fixed some code that might have been causing visual artifacts when switching between ship interiors on occasion. We suspect a thread timing issue so we weren't able to reproduce the problem reliably but we fixed some code that looked really suspicious and we're hoping to never talk about it again

These patch notes belong to patch deployed few days ago, they are just slightly delayed. Patch 0.8.4.02 is already in work. In meantime, before trying to summon Budd, please make sure you have both "kill Greg" and "kill Budd" missions. We suspect, that having only one may lead to quest bugging out.

Main features

• ship combat is now possible across sector borders making sector transitions feel much more seamless
  
• you can now see ships in nearby sectors
  
• ships can now be targeted from other sectors
  
• bullets can hit ships in nearby sectors
  
• missiles can track across sector boundaries
  
• added a new module: artifact activator tier 2
  
• added a new gameplay mechanic: Artifacts. They are a new procedural form of loot with random attribute enhancements for your ship. They must be placed into an artifact activator and powered in order to function
  
• added a new dialogue as part of the process for unlocking the artifact activator module research
  
  
• we overhauled ship active systems with a new back-end framework which allows more data to be synchronized between the interior and exterior of your ship and allows control schemes for active ship systems to be more complex. This means the GUI for all active systems now allows individual systems to render their status in unique ways instead of requiring every system type to use a single progress bar for status
  
• added large set of new active modules:
  
• added a new active module which can create a remote temporary mine field
  
  
• added a pair of new active modules which will remove heat from reactors exactly the way radiators do, but which must be manually activated in order to dump the heat into space. These can help with active cooling of you ship and will be important in the future when we add stealth mechancis
  
• added a new active module which creates a delayed detonation at a location in front of your ship
  
• added two new active modules that entangle target in graviton web, slowing it down and preventing it from entering travel drive
  
  
• rewrote drone system logic to make use of the benefits of the new framework. Drones can now defend ships and the status display tracks individual drones.
  
• added a new active module which produces an inhibitor pulse disabling travel drive of nearby ships
  
• we trained the AI to use many of our newly added active modules against the player
  
• added a new active module which can be used to disrupt ship sensors for a limited duration
  
• added a new active module which fires a volley of slow but devastating torpedos that will deal massive damage if not dodged
  
• three new charged railgun turrets with delayed fire but small penetration effect

QoL, balance and other features

• added a new optional control scheme to make the game less difficult for keyboard turning players. It seems shaming them was not sufficient.
  
• added ability to allow extra interior zoom (can be turned on in settings)
  
• completely redid the loading screen
  
• beams now scale with beam damage rate modifier again
  
• overhauled ship system save data so that changes to ship system binary data can't damage save file formats
  
• changed ship system binary data for drone launchers, this will probably break any workshop items that include drone bays
  
• added new framework for highlighting quest ships on sensor overlay, this is currently mainly used for quest requiring to obtain shards for Pirate cove, we will implement it for more quests in the future
  
• new icons
  
• new framework for rendering fancy shockwaves, used for some of new modules
  
• more new icons
  
• turret code base was extended to allow dynamic behavior such as changing firerate or projectile spread over time. Game now also support turrets required to charge before firing.
  
• extended debuff system to allow automatic follow up states and improved several buffs/debuffs, for instance after ECM debuff expires, sensor fortification buff is applied to prevent infinite jamming.
  
• we modified loot tables in addition to blueprints related to new active modules
  
• all T3 reactors were assigned values to reflect their intended power level
  
• two sets of high end T3 turrets were added, they are accessible to modders, but will go through balance pass once they are integrated into campaign
  
• added animations for T3 engines
  
• decreased Interdict pulse distortion effect
  
• we messed with the procedural worldgen some but it shouldn't make any difference for Zero Falls story

Major bug fix

• fixed multi-threaded random number generation to actually support being multi-threaded. This was a source of some random freezing.

Note: for long time we had problem reproducing this freeze on our systems, however we know that this is 100% related to freeze occurring when switching from Interior to Exterior and when Visiting Tavern, also causing crash during saving. We further believe that this might be related to several quest bugs causing target ships to spawn on incorrect coordinates (0,0). We will appreciate feedback if you encounter any of these issue again.

Bug fixes

• fixed a bug where the game could crash if you delete the world saves folder
  
• fixed a bug where shady dealers had a loitering duration of 0 and would be gone as soon as you left the bar
  
• fixed display of credits in shops
  
• fixed display of credits in red floaty text
  
• warp gates are now saved in the database with the character profile instead of being part of world data
  
• the trigger that offers you research to increase your station capacity for credits will no longer repeat if you already have the research items in your queue
  
• fixed a bug with powered modules which could in rare cases allow them to try and take power from themselves
  
• fixed a bug with large shield boosters which prevented them for repairing any shields in cases where there were not enough damaged shield tiles to use all of the available energy
  
• fixed windowed mode screen centering on some systems

We also give you new opportunity to play again by killing your world saves, sorry, it couldn't be avoided. However your profiles will be fine and you will keep all your shiny stuff. Also worth noting: Artifacts won't exist in your old worldsave so you will want to make a new one either way.

Furthermore we are almost done with new Ion Beam controller, it will be very likely included in obligatory hotfix. We will also try to roll out some new ships using new modules as soon as possible into the world to provide new challenge.

There are few more things that had been added aren't going to be visible yet, for instance rendering was extended to allow cloaking buffs which will be used for T3 stealth modules later on.

Multiplayer will be free for existing Zero Falls owners.

That's the plan at least.

We don't know exactly how we are going to accomplish that, there is more than one way we can. Right now we are more concerned with making sure it works.

From our perspective right now the plan looks like this:

1. Get the core elements working
   
2. Get some testers playing it
   
3. Release a single player content patch for Zero Falls
   
4. ....
   
5. Figure out how to release multiplayer

It's hard to formulate a release strategy for a multiplayer game when you have never even stress tested a server to know how many people it supports.

Please be patient with us. We're like 2 guys and a cat doing this and neither of us likes social media (the cat isn't allowed to post because he's racist)

We did indeed tease multiplayer on april 1 as a prank. The plan was to tell you it was real in a way that nobody would ever believe, and then show you it was real in a way that nobody could deny in order to get people to talk about it. Unfortunately it seems my writing was too convincing, and many people were even more convinced multiplayer was fake when they saw the videos, so lets make things real clear.

April Fools prank: (These were not true)

• Adding multiplayer to Zero Falls would be as easy as changing one variable. - False. That's not how programming works and I hope you didn't believe that.
  
• We intend to make Zero Falls early gameplay more difficult for new players - False, it's difficult because the game has strong simulation elements which makes it hard to simply increase the power of the player relative to enemies
  
• We are releasing some new product soon named Vagabonds - Mostly False, we don't have a product to release nor do we have finalized release plans
  
• Zero Falls development is being cancelled - False, we absolutely intend to finish Zero Falls and we don't consider it finished.
  
• We are setting up an online cash shop full of loot boxes and micro-transactions. - False, we hate those things and said that as a joke

Actually Real: (these may have lead to some confusion)

• Multiplayer is real.
  
• People really did decompile our code and tell us we are programming wrong
  
• The variable openMP really does exist, it has since the game was multiplayer many many years ago, however that variable did nothing for years while we developed Zero Falls
  
• Multiplayer likely won't be coming to Zero Falls but will have to be an independent release since we spent years programming things into Zero Falls which we always knew would only work in single player
  
• The name...is kind of real. We use Vagabonds internally when discussing the project. We haven't decided if we will release under that name exactly

We always wanted a multiplayer game, which is why our original kickstarter was multiplayer. However, people didn't back that kickstarter. Also many people told us multiplayer was too ambitious and that we should refine our scope to single-player only and do another kickstarter. Well we did, and that's why Zero Falls was sold as a single player only game.

However I think at this point we have sufficiently proven that even a single player game can go way beyond scope and take forever to finish. It's made especially difficult by the fact that our plan was to fund continued development of the project by selling on early access, and our customers are all waiting for multiplayer to be added apparently because we'd be making more money flipping burgers.

Using a single player game to fund the development of a multiplayer game is backwards and dumb. We realize that now, and we aim to correct it.

To be clear though, multiplayer didn't start out of some greater realization of the error in our overall strategy...multiplayer started because I was in a really really crummy mood and decided I didn't want to work on NOT multiplayer anymore. I literally turned off social media for a week and hid in my developer cave working on it in secret. For many months, the rest of our team didn't even know I was doing this. I was working on both projects at once and I didn't show it to anyone until I was sure it would actually work. My only regret is that I eventually told them over Discord so I never got to see the look on their faces.


Lets be very clear here. It may be possible for me, as a single developer, to hide in my man-cave and make the Wayward Terran Frontier (engine) multiplayer compatible. After all, it did start with the concept of multiplayer functionality built into its spine. However it is not reasonable for me to magically apply multiplayer to years worth of single player only code that was built on top of that engine in the form of the (game) Zero Falls. As such, it was obvious to me from the beginning of my code-tantrum that if I wanted multiplayer, it had to be an entirely new game and NOT an attempt to change Zero Falls.

Aside from the engine and the combat, I decided I would do EVERYTHING different in this new project. Here are some examples.

The Economy:

• Zero Falls supports a dynamic living NPC economy based on supply and demand that can be completely broken by the player's actions. It is an attempt at simulating a real economy.
  
• Multiplayer will make no attempt at simulating real economics. Players will trade items

Factions

• Zero Falls has factions which are simulated government entities with motivations and goals that are custom designed to advanced a specific narrative that makes exactly 1 player feel important and meaningful.
  
• In multiplayer we will only have factions if we allow groups of players to form their own.

Story

• In Zero Falls you are a unique and special snowflake. Everyone is shocked by your uncanny ability to respawn after death and enact infinite vengeance against your enemies. You may even change the fate of the universe, who knows.
  
• In Multiplayer you are a generic Vagabond. (hence the name) Nobody cares what you do unless you find a way to do something extraordinary within the framework of the multiplayer sandbox.

Game world

• Zero Falls is a hand-crafted star system that aims to tell a story and challenge the player with deeper content than what can be made using procedural generation
  
• Multiplayer is an infinite procedural expanse where the depth will need to come from player interactions

Enemies

• In Zero Falls every enemy has a simulated life. Their faction allegiance, the cargo they are carrying, any damage on their ship, it all relates to things that have happened to them in the simulation itself.
  
• In Multiplayer endless hoards of procedural enemies will spawn for you and your friends to tear through looking for loot

So the short version is that we really are making a new game, and that game is multiplayer, and we don't know when or how or in what form we will release it, but we wanted to tease it because it's getting close to ready. The real release announcement is yet to come.

Zero Falls will remain a single player adventure with lots of narrative and characters and a sandbox that offers the type of depth that doesn't work in multiplayer so easily.

Multiplayer will be more of an action RPG loot grinding sandbox in an open world where you make your own narrative with friends.

We're releasing a multiplayer version of Zero Falls as a stand-alone game. Check out our blog post for more information!

For years now we have been developing a single player game because we were mistakenly lead to believe that a multiplayer game in an infinite persistent universe where the interior of every ship and station are simulated would be a challenging task. Indeed, we remained stuck in our beliefs even when the community pointed out that it should be totally easy, and perhaps there was just a way to "activate" the old netcode that existed in our (less than half working) multiplayer demo that we made before our multiplayer kickstarter failed 6 years ago. Some players were even kind enough to decompile our exe and tell us that multiplayer code was in there, but we were just too stubborn and blind to see it!

We should have listened.

Well today I have to apologize to all of you, because while stumbling drunkenly through the code at 2AM looking for a way to make the early game more punishing for new players I stumbled on a variable that I had never seen before:



Changing this variable leads to this...



I am going to have to re-learn everything I thought I knew about programming now because after setting this variable to true, the game is suddenly fully multiplayer, and I don't even understand how that's possible. Me and the team have been testing it extensively, and no matter how many times we enjoy an afternoon of totally sick co-op space battles against NPC battleships or other players in a pvp deathmatch, we just can't wrap our head around how the game could have been multiplayer all along without our knowledge. Sure the code was always there to send and receive messages, but that code wasn't working even when we wrote it, and we've added years of changes with no consideration to maintaining a stable network state. The chance that the bits in our codebase could simply align themselves to form working network code without our knowledge...well it seems absolutely impossible and has lead us to question our own sanity.

But boy do we feel stupid for telling you it would be impossible.



One must wonder, where do we go from here? How do we fix bugs in code that doesn't even exist? If we change anything will it stop working? There's even a fully functional chat and party system using UI elements that we've never seen before! Decisions like these require heavy drinking...

So it's official! Today on April 1st we are officially announcing Wayward Terran Frontier: Vagabonds, our new multiplayer action RPG sandbox game. It's got all the ship combat and world-gen features and items from Zero Falls, because it's just Zero Falls with a single bit changed from 0 to 1, but this time it's multiplayer, so we're selling it as an entirely new game!

Once again we are totally blown away by this new development, it's as shocking to you as it is to us. We don't even know the exact release date yet since we didn't expect to be revealing a second game any time soon. Obviously we will need to prepare the online cash shop and loot boxes before anything can go to customers for testing, but as of today we are reaching out to influencers on twitch and youtube who will hopefully try to convince you to buy it!



As you might expect, this means all single-player development for Zero Falls is simply canceled and that project is fully abandoned. Why would anyone ever want to play through a story when you could play battle-royal space ships arena? It's for the best.



So check out our stream, and tell your friends, because we finally have the game you have all been asking for and it's coming soon to an online retailer near you!

-George

Hi again everyone,

There's something I'm curious about. What is your favored playstyle?

Zero Falls is optimized for two different playstyles: trading and piracy. You can either optimize ships for capacity and storage and go the Han Solo space trader/smuggler route, or else you can outfit your ships with every Kill-O-Zap death beam at your disposal and blast weaker ships into oblivion.

I started a new save recently, and currently, I'm favoring piracy. Looting abandoned asteroids and space stations and selling your cargo for spare cash is all well and good, but for me the excitement in Zero Falls comes from piracy and the high-impact space battles. I'm still not far enough through the early-game to really be an effective pilot in a death match and I often pick battles that I don't end up winning, but it's still satisfying to see the other sucker explode into a thousand different particles which go flying off into the infinite black in every direction.

I'm also currently in the process of outfitting the Vulture and Eagle blueprints with extra rockets and autocannons. I'm not very good at it.

So what do you favor? Piracy or trading? Or a combination of the two?