• - killing budd's stations now spawns budd via the station death tracking quest instead of the gary quest script
  
• - pirate station killing quest tooltip should apply properly now
  
• - budd quest tooltip fixed
  
• - fixed a crash in the budd quest
  
• - gary quest tooltip fixed
  
• - removed code from the gary quest that could cause budd to spawn infinitely
  
• - fixed an issue where gary quest wasn't triggering initial dialogue because the trigger was referring to the old depricated version of the quest
  
• - fixed a visual bug with ship maximum integrity overflowing the tooltip bar
  
• - removed references to capacity from some screens that no longer use capacity
  
• - some visual improvements to ship damage effect
  
• - added exp rewards to all of the quests I debugged in this patch
  
• - disabled 2 rare event types in the end-game gauntlet which are under suspicion of causing the gauntlet to freeze

• improved sliding value selectors to guarantee they can't overflow their value selection based on mouse position
  
• fixed a bug that would allow you to sell items to a station beyond its capacity to hold those items
  
• fixed a bug with the hacking screen where it was going back to the previous screen instead of to the exterior in some cases which would lock you out of the console until you reloaded the game
  
• upgraded the screen transition logic to prevent overlays and screens from lingering on the screen stack when switching screens in a way that should clear the stack
  
• fixed a bug with saving power routes from the engineering screen that could cause a crash
  
• the game will now create a crash log if the game crashes while attempting to load initial content

As always with a release there were immediately things we had to fix. I had a massive coffee ready to go and have made some quick changes. Here's what we have done so far:


Fixed ships spawning without crew.


Fixed some missing biome definitions which caused black backdrops, and fixed a bug with crystal growth that could cause a crash if you used a branch gene.


We are still searching for a bug that is causing some people's save files to crash while loading. Hopefully will have another hotfix before the end of the day.

There is nothing broken in 0.9 which isn't worse in 0.8 so it no longer makes any sense to keep 0.9 on the unstable branch. I'm sure the added exposure of being on a live branch will reveal some things that nobody noticed before, but overall 0.9 is now much more stable than the previous version.

...as such, 0.9 is going to the live branch tomorrow morning. (Friday Sep 24)


The entire world runs on an asynchronous database now. That means the game is smoother and more stable and less likely to lose your data when it crashes.



Ships will now require resources for construction. Repairing now requires resources. Get resources from mining, piracy, or trade.

You can now properly explore the mastery trees because your character gets exp from all sorts of activities.

The gauntlet is the final challenge in Zero Falls. You may enter with your ship and try to defeat the final boss.

Reworked structure and damage to make ships more survivable and to remove the irritation of having to reach structure requirements in a design

Trade npcs have receive a number of tweaks and there are now mining npcs which will be defended if you choose to mess with them


It has been streamlined and we have added some new ways to get around it. There are now different areas which can help you accomplish different tasks. Consider checking out the new mining ring subway station, or marvel at our magnificent cloning facilities

There are new recruitable crew members, and they have interesting auras which do different things!


You can now hide from enemy ships in a cloud, and having better sensors will make a difference in combat.


You can see NPC ships chatting with each other now, and if you like you can hail them and talk to them yourself. You will now need to hail repair stations in order to repair at them

We've made some big improvements to allow for better mods. The way the game loads assets has been rewritten to support replacing any art inside the existing client, and the engine was enhanced to load dlls from the steam workshop which modify the game's code directly. We also release a very primitive modding library on github which we want to expand on in the future. In theory, anything is now possible for mod makers and it should work with the steam workshop.

Are cloud saves working now? Probably! We're certainly going to be configuring steam to use them starting with patch 0.9 and we don't anticipate any problems. With characters and worlds being inside database files now it should be a straightforward change to make, but tell us if you have any issues.

One of the hardest problems for us to solve in this update was just fixing the existing quests. They aren't all 100% working guaranteed at this point, but they were downright unplayable before and we think 0.9 should be a big improvement in this area. We addressed a number of large underlying issues with quest-npc continuity that could cause ships and crew required for quest completion to slip through the gaps of our save system and stop working after a save and a reload. This update post is being posted right now because just last night I was actually able to complete the blockade quest after saving and loading. Individual quests and edge cases may still need to be addressed, but the core underlying framework is now in place.

Okay first of all, we recently added to the test branch the ability to hail other ships by targeting them and pressing h. Think of all the neat interactions we could build with this system!



You can hail NPC ships and stations now. It is required for using repair stations now. This concludes our introduction of the hailing feature, press 'h' to find out more!


We think shipbuilders like theorycrafting every module that they put into their ships, and we want structure to be no different. That is why we are completely reworking structure modules.

Currently, every ship has an amount of inertia determined by how far all of its pixels are from its center of mass. A big, a long, or a wide ship will have lots of inertia, and in order to keep it running you need to have enough structure to support its size. The penalty for not having enough is that you sometimes hear a spooky sound in the interior and when you take damage from any source your ship will degrade with random damage taken to random pixels across your ship.

That system isn't very good for a number of reasons. For one, it isn't at all obvious to players what is happening to their ships. They often report strange unexplained sounds, and random damage is often reported as a bug by people who don't know why it is happening. More importantly, structure is a boring space-wasting module that is mandatory in every ship, but which doesn't have any fun benefits for the designer to theorycraft around. We can do better.

So introducing the new system:

There are now 2 different types of damage in the game: Explosive and kinetic. Explosive damage shakes a ship apart from the inside, breaking its structure and shattering its hull, while kinetic directly destroys the pixels that are hit. Every existing weapon will be upgraded to use some ratio of these two damage types.

Ships will have the same inertia as they had before, however structure modules will now provide significantly more structure points thus making it easier for you to meet the minimum requirement for your ship. Additionally, the penalty for having enough is completely removed, and is instead replaced with a benefit for being over the minimum. Ships with no structure, or ships with structure that is less than their inertia will take damage exactly the same as they did before from all sources, and with no random pixel damage across their ship. However, ships with structure beyond what is needed for their inertia will absorb a certain percentage of damage dealt to them and instead distribute that damage randomly across their structure modules until their ship's hull breaks, at which point they will take normal damage again.

This will have a number of effects on game balance, but here are the effects we are intending for it to have (as opposed to the unintended which we do not intend)

• increased diversity of weapon types
  
• adding extra structure to your ship is no longer wasted space
  
• skill cap for ship design is reduced since no structure ships are now viable
  
• theorycrafting around structure is now much more interesting
  
  • low structure ships can now be viable glass-cannon ships
    
  • high structure ships can armor tank for much longer
    
  • structure can be added to make repairing easier and to protect modules
• damage dealt in combat will more often be on the interior of ships
  
  • this makes the job of repairing combat damage more interesting
    
  • this reduces the appearance of ships being "cut" by damage and flying around with big holes in them while being mostly healthy
• structure has a visible effect on the exterior simulation
  
  • better visual feedback for the damage you are dealing and receiving
    
  • more obvious to the player how damaged enemy ships are
    
  • interior repair progress can be seen by the pilot
• modules near the exterior of a ship are no longer overly penalized by excess vulnerability
  
  • armor tanks will not lose exterior module functionality as fast
• your valuable ship is now slightly less mortal
  
  • ships will sustain more damage before breaking into pieces and losing their components
    
  • ships can be made to feel very durable without simply being invincible

Overall this feels like a best of both worlds solution to the debate between health bars vs damaging tiles. You are still damaging tiles, but you also get the satisfaction of watching the length of a bar go down as your enemy absorbs bullets and missiles.

Everyone I talk to says this is the best new feature, and if you don't agree then you are a structure overhaul denier.

I hope you have a nice weekend, or week, whatever. We'll probably release this 0.9.0.00 update soon. Unless we don't!

Greetings comrades. I'm currently on the road with my face mask searching for a bread line with wifi that isn't actively burning to the ground or experiencing rolling blackouts. I found a nice place that allowed me to stay for a while even though my presence increases their risk of death from the common cold by as much as 0.004% and I thought, why not lets talk some more about development progress and hopefully I don't get cancelled before I can finish this patch.

We're spending most of our time debugging all the horrible changes we made to improve the game at the cost of our quality of life. Can you imagine? We replaced the entire world format! Who would ever think that was a good idea? The truth is that the game runs a lot better now, and after many days of debugging I can even save and load games reliably again. Generating a new game takes a little longer now, but saving and loading is nearly instant by comparison and the actual gameplay performance impact is significant with all ship assets generating off the main thread which means frame rates are up while hitching is down.

This debugging would go a lot faster but in order to procrastinate I've distracted myself with a number of other improvements to the game, lets list some of them:


I made a ton of new crew members. They all have faces and names and personalities and best of all they have combat stats on the computer chip that's inserted into the part of their brain which otherwise might have warned them against joining your crew. I tried to make a nice variety of them in order to fulfill my original design of allowing you to pick and choose your crew based on their auras in order to min-max ship performance. I'm even making multiple tiers for each aura because crew are going to level up as you collect exp!

At long last there will finally be more crew than there are crew slots.

These crew will also have dialogue interactions and special event triggers which interact with the new gauntlet end-game activities. Each new crew, and also all existing crew, have been given unique specializations that either allow you to avoid something horrible or give you a chance to trigger something beneficial based on the context of the procedural generation.



We've had a very fancy respawning animation sitting and waiting for a while now, so I thought that it was time to finally remap the home station interior. We're utilizing a lot more of the space available in the station and we've got some new game play improvements along with the remap:

• Cloning bay. You no longer magically appear in a random hallway but instead are 3d printed like a rational adult
  
• Docking ring. You now have lots more airlocks to work with at the home station so you can manage more than 2 ships docked at a time. The airlocks are located in a new section of the station dedicated to ship logistics.
  
• It's now much harder to accidentally walk into space at the start of a game.
  
• Safe storage. Storing items at your station now keeps them in the character database so they transfer between saves instead of physically existing in the map also there's more storage space.
  
• Construction animations. In addition to costing resources, ships will now actually construct over time. It looks real neat.
  
• Ship provisioning. Transfer items to and from your ship via the logistics screen
  
• Expanded effective area for right clicking ships and requesting they be tractored to docks
  
• Your station now has mining capabilities, since mining exists now and it was always that type of station

This is one of Jan's current pet projects.

Do you just love shooting at rocks endlessly? Well our AI sure does! We're filling the galaxy's ore belts with mindless wage slaves just trying to make a living so that you will have even more opportunities for rapid personal wealth gains. NPC mining parties will now periodically show up at ore nodes and begin mining ore, which will be conveniently left in their cargo holds for you to pillage and plunder if you find yourself lacking for ore and compassion. Their families may never find out what happened to them, but be careful, because their corporate overlords will be looking out for the bottom line. Attack mining operations at your own risk because you may trigger an armed response.

Mining operations will also introduce an entirely new line of ships from another new manufacturer: Goliath Industries. These ships are fantastic for harvesting resources and all of them will come with interior designs well suited for collecting and transporting ore. Expect to see some new mining themed modules and equipment in the game and also built into these new ships.



I've been tweaking controls to try and make them less cumbersome. Slowing your rotation is a lot easier now, and I made thrusters more complex giving them a limited energy reserve for lateral thrust so that you can make ships quite maneuverable in strafing side to side in short bursts without making thrusters better than main engines for forward top speeds. I also added a minor visual indication for engine and thruster energy levels ship wide so you can tell if you can't maneuver because your thrusters are broken or unpowered.


Ships are a lot more expensive now, and they feel a bit too fragile, so I've spent some time tweaking the damage model.

I made shields a lot more effective by allowing them to fully prevent hull damage from any shots that directly impact shield pixels. This effectively prevents bleed-through damage from shield pixels that are too close to your hull, and overall makes shields into a much more effective way of keeping your ship alive. I also tweaked values for shield emitters to allow more reserve energy so shields can hold for longer before forming gaps and holes.

Armor was also buffed. If a bullet strikes an armored tile its damage will now be reduced for every pixel touched by the explosion instead of only armor pixels. This prevents bleed-through damage allowing for modules behind your armor to benefit from the protection that the armor provides and makes heavily armored ships feel much more durable under fire while weakly armored ships have a more visible transition in the amount of damage taken when their armor is penetrated.


AI will now sometimes broadcast their feelings about their current lot in life. We've got a fancy new system for animating the things they wish to exclaim and we are filling it with clever and silly little chat events. They might complain about their jobs or taunt you when attacking and we are hoping it will provide some nice atmosphere to the otherwise emotionally empty vacuum of space.


I've added some new tuning kit types, and reworked the system a little so it's easier to add tuning kit types in the future.

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.