Jan 16

Starship Simulator - Fleetyard Studios

We're a couple of weeks late, but I'd like to say a belated Happy New Year to everyone! It's that time again where we take stock of what we've achieved over the past year, and then look ahead to what we have planned for 2025.

In terms of progress, in 2024 we released a total of 57 development builds for our backer community to check out, with a release cadence of 1-2 new builds per week during the latter half of the year.

We also launched a new series of regular live development streams, with a total of 96 live streams in 2024. That's over 128 hours worth of live development action, with most streams averaging 3-4 hours long. If you haven't been watching, then why not join the fun every Wednesday and Sunday on YouTube:

Of course, the biggest news of the year by far was our unbelievably successful Kickstarter campaign in April, where 5,761 backers pledged a mind-blowing £402,085. After the usual fees and tax deductions, that was a £290,000 cash injection into the studio, which we're using to bring additional talent onto the project.

In other news, thanks to our other fantastic backers on Patreon and Ko-Fi, we were able to construct our brand new "Dev Shed", a dedicated studio space for development and streaming.

As for the game itself, during 2024 we focused on several core features;

GALAXY GEN

We completely overhauled the Galaxy Gen system, adding refinement and optimisation across the board. The coordinate system was re-based to place Sag A* at 0,0,0, and thanks to a new seed system with 2^256 unique vector-based seeds (a truly massive number), every cubic lightyear of space now has its own unique seed.

We also significantly increased the number of real-world stars in the game, with 18.2 million Gaia Catalogue Objects now extending out to a radius of 2,000 LY around Sol. Without wanting to blow our own trumpet too much, this makes our simulated Milky Way galaxy the largest and most accurate ever made for the consumer market, and we're only just getting started!

To help render all of that new data, we also added L, T and Y class brown dwarf stars to the game, along with over 70 new stellar sub-classes.

SYSTEM GEN

Just as with the Galaxy Gen, we completely overhauled the code for generating Star Systems within the game. In addition to numerous optimisations, we also added significantly more detail to the generation process. Here are a few highlights:

Our planet formation model now uses Core Mass Accretion when forming initial planetary cores, with iron content properly decreasing with distance from the central star.

Gas Giants are now formed using Runaway Gas Accretion, whereby the gas envelope grows exponentially when the escape velocity of the planetary core is greater than that of molecular hydrogen.

A star's Roche Limit is now properly taken into account when generating the innermost planets in a system, along with that star's Dust Sublimation Line. This ensures the orbits of the innermost planets are scientifically accurate.

Once a star's proto-planetary disk has been largely exhausted of mass, a Scattered Disk of small icy bodies is generated with increasingly eccentric and inclined orbits. This is similar to our own Kuiper Belt, which includes the likes of Pluto, Eris, Haumea and Makemake. All of which are also now in the game.

LIFE GEN

We started work on our Life Gen system, which now applies a high-level Political States to galactic sectors when they are generated. This determines if a sector consists of independent worlds, multiple factions, or even a single all-powerful empire.

Alien civilisations are now also being generated throughout the entire galaxy, with the initial groundwork complete for generating data points such as:

• Name
• Physiology
• Government
• Religion
• Tech Level
• Aggressiveness
• Xenophobia

These data points are now available on the sensors console, with long range scans identifying Tech Signatures on inhabited worlds. A short range scan of that world will then reveal all of the current data in text form.

This is of course just the starting point for the Life Gen system. Over time the amount and detail of the generated data will increase significantly, culminating in those races eventually being given physical form.

SENSORS GAMEPLAY

With greatly improved galaxy generation and alien civilisations popping up all over the place, it was important that we also overhauled the Sensors UI to manage all of this new data.

The Sensors UI now has four distinct modes, with each serving a specific purpose when uncovering more information about a target system:

• The GPS mode tracks your location in the galaxy, provides a scientific overview of your current sector of space, and lists the number of each star class located within that sector.

• The Long Range mode lists all of the star systems in range, and allows you to perform a Long Range Survey of any system within 2,000 LY to uncover basic details about its orbital bodies. Any tech signatures will also be highlighted, should they exist.

• The Medium Range mode has a maximum range of 0.5 LY. A Medium Range Survey will uncover more details about each planet in a system, such as a gas giant's specific type or whether or not a planet is an Earth Analogue. This mode will also reveal moons and other smaller objects.

• The Short Range mode has a maximum range of 3,000,000 km, and conducting a short range scan of a planet will reveal its full details, such as its surface composition and whether or not life exists there. You can even view a map of the planet's surface now.

All objects in a star system now have 3 knowledge levels, with the Short, Medium and Long range sensors being worth knowledge level 3, 2 and 1 respectively. This of course means that in order to fully explore a star system, all bodies must be scanned to knowledge level 3.

This exploration data is naturally saved as part of the save system within the game, so players can now begin the process of surveying the galaxy across multiple play sessions to seek out all of those new alien civilisations.

MAGELLAN CLASS REFIT

Our Magellan Class prototype exploration vessel underwent her most significant refit to date, with the addition of an Alcubierre Ring and a greatly expanded interior layout.

The ship received an Updated Framework Structure to support a new segmented design, which is an important change because it paves the way for modeling things like Air Pressure, Air Quality, Fire Spread, and other dynamic environmental effects.

The new framework structure also required new wall and floor panels, so we took advantage of that opportunity to increase their level of detail, in addition to adding new features such as Nanite Tesselation for per-pixel levels of surface detail.

We also added a Working Crew Lift to the main stairwell, as well as Dynamic Carpet Grime with an accompanying cleaning robot to test out our NPC task priority system.

Claire also set about doing some gardening on the ship, with our previously empty planters now filled with colourful foliage.

ACCESSIBILITY IMPROVEMENTS

We've been listening closely to your feedback, and with that in mind we've made some improvements to accessibility in the game.

The default camera mode having Headbob enabled was a point of contention for quite a few players, so we've removed it from the camera cycle entirely. Instead, Headbob is now an optional feature that you have to specifically enable in the gameplay options.

Players with significant visual impairment raised concerns about UI text being too small, or other details being difficult to see, so we've added a "Camera Zoom" slider to the accessibility options. This gives you control over how much right-click zooms the camera.

Also related to visual impairment, we've added 23 different crosshairs of various shapes and sizes to the control options.

LOOKING AHEAD INTO 2025

We're painfully overdue a public demo update, so that's very much the first thing on the agenda. We're dotting the T's and crossing the I's on that at the moment, so hopefully we'll have that released imminently.

Once Tech Demo #3 is released, we're going to focus heavily on recruitment. With Early Access planned for December this year, we've got a tremendous uphill struggle ahead of us. We know exactly who we need, we just need to find those talented individuals.

With our recruitment drive out of the way, we'll then work on a dedicated VR test build. We're keen to see how well the game plays in VR, and if all goes to plan it's going to be an extremely immersive experience.

The next patch cycle, 226, will focus on the Bridge gameplay. Specifically, the ability to issue commands to NPC or Player crewmembers. This will be achieved by either interacting with the Holo Display, or by looking over at the crewmember and bringing up a command interface.

We'll also flesh out more of the Bridge interior, with a view to getting that finished and polished if time permits. On the galaxy side of things, we'll finally be adding moons to the game!

And speaking of timescales, our new year's resolution is to keep patches small and focused. We really dropped the ball with that in 2024, so that's our biggest priority for 2025.

Ok, that's it from me. I'd like to say a huge thankyou once again to everyone that has supported us thus far, and we'll continue to work hard to make this project the best it can possibly be!

Jan 16

Marauder Expansion Hotfix 2 and Known Issues

Root - Dire Wolf CS

We’ve got another Hotfix headed your way to address bugs reported since The Marauder Expansion Release! A big thank you to all of the players who took the time to report and for playing Root Digital!

Bugs

UI
- Mob Icon should now have a vertical line to the left of the token in the Hundreds Tutorial.
- Placeholder accounts no longer appear at the bottom of the leaderboard
- The Devout Knights ability banner will now be positioned correctly during combat when using the Quick Battle setting.
- During the Marquise tutorial, Rule Flag tip should now be easier to read.
- In Quick Battle, the Corvid Embedded Agents banner should now appear entirely on-screen.
- Multiple icons should no longer display for each faction.
- Players should now be able to minimize the sway prompt and simultaneously open the supply and discard pile.
- “Hundreds is choosing a Homeland Clearing” text should now display to prompt opponents.
Gameplay
- Controller Support prompt should now appear immediately upon launching the game.
- Hundreds can no longer recruit to a Warlord in a Keep or Snare clearing.
- Eyrie AI set to easy and normal difficulty should now be less likely to make decree choices that send it into turmoil.
- AI should now choose to remove warriors in combat before their own warlord in almost all cases.
- Bitter Mood should now be selected when a Hundreds player has no warriors in supply.
- Eyrie Players can no longer select a clearing with a warlord.
- A Vagabond aiding the Hundreds should no longer be able to get items the Hundreds removed from the game with their Contempt for Trade.
- Players should now be able to ban a second vagabond in Advanced Setup.

[UPDATED 1/16/2025]

Please also see our list of known issues since the release. We’re working on these for an upcoming release. Again, a big thank you to all of the players who took the time to report!

Known Issues

Localization
- German, Czech, Russian, and Japanese translations for expansion content are incomplete. (We are waiting on source files from localization partners, so we are unsure of the ETA on these for the moment.)
UI
The prompt to enable controller support displays before it should, leading to it displaying improperly
- When many relics are in the same clearing, their values overlap.
- Relic tokens have inconsistent shapes.
- Placed Waystations don't display the Card Draw symbol on expanded player info.
- Ambush blocked by the Scouting Party needs its own label.
Gameplay
- Cancelling a move with Prowess forces the player to battle or not be able to take the action.
- Additional Relics are currently placed too far from Keeper's starting point.
- During gameplay, the Keepers in Iron AI will sometimes leave 4 or more Warriors in a single clearing, leaving them vulnerable to Live off the Land at the end of the turn.
- Players can enable Disable Faction Draft and Random Factions with Advanced Setup not enabled.
- Players cannot ban factions with Disable Faction Draft enabled.