We took some time off for the Holidays, but we’re back now.
We’re continuing to make small changes that should make Starmancer a bit more fun.
Shifts
A colonist’s day is now divided into 3 shifts: First, Second, Third. The player can assign a colonist to work some or all of the shifts. If a colonist isn’t assigned to a shift, they’ll perform free-time activities (like eating and sleeping).
The intention is that after 24 hours, the player can see if a colonist’s morale and needs are better than they were 24 hours ago (one shift cycle). This betters informs the player if they need to let a colonist work less, place better beds, serve tastier food, etc.
This also makes the Insomniac (requires less sleep) and Oversleeper (requires more sleep) perk more interesting. An Insomniac could definitely work 2 shifts, but an Oversleeper could only work 1.
If a colonist is working 3 shifts, they’ll eventually pass out. When a colonist passes out, it takes a long time for them to wake back up (we also adjusted the sleeping durations for beds, floors, toilets, chairs, and sofas)
By the way, colonist needs are structured in a way that they’ll always prioritize staying alive over working. A starving colonist will eat before working, but a slightly hungry colonist will only eat during a free-time shift.
Heads of Department
This is a change that we might not keep, but we’ve been playing around with it, and it doesn’t feel terrible.
For right now, colonists can only have 1 job. We didn’t like that the old design encouraged players to assign every job to every colonist, with different priorities. Ideally, the player should improve their colonists or upgrade their objects to solve problems.
It’s always best for a highly skilled Mechanic to repair your broken objects. If everyone is a Mechanic…good luck. It’s also difficult for 1 colonist to gain lots of job skill when everyone is randomly performing jobs around the station.
So we added a new concept, Head of Department (HoD). The HoDs are supposed to be the best colonists for each specific job. If your Head Mechanic is low skilled (or an alcoholic), your station will be in a constant state of disrepair. You’ll probably rarely have colonists that are well suited to every job. Hilarity ensues.
“Engineer” sounds cooler than “Mechanic”
Forcing the player to have only 1 colonist perform 1 job makes it much easier for us to balance how frequently and how quickly each colonist performs a job. If 1 Mechanic can’t handle your station, it’s because objects are breaking too frequently or because objects take too long to repair.
In the future, we want HoDs to perform special or unique activities related to their job. The Head Mechanic might be involved in upgrading objects, performing quests, or unlocking new objects. The less time that they have to spend doing mundane activities, like repairing life support, the more time they’ll have for interesting things.
Assistants
You can assign each HoD up to 3 assistants. Assistants do all the same basic roles as the HoD. So you could assign the Head Mechanic to first and second shift, and the Assistant mechanic to third shift. This would ensure that you always have a Mechanic awake, and ready to fix broken objects.
As HoDs level up, they’re allowed to have more Assistants.
We recognize that this new system requires much more micromanagement, so we added a new default job, Assistant. The Assistant performs the Laborer (moving resources), Farmer, and Mechanic jobs. A generic Assistant is different from a HoD Assistant. This also allows you to have a station with only 1 colonist.
Mining Drone Changes
The mining drone now requires a pilot and has to be manually sent on missions.
It wasn’t fun when the drone came back with random resources, you just had to hope that you would get whatever resource you wanted.
Brave volunteer (art hasn’t been adjusted yet)
With this change, you can target specific asteroids and send out a crew to acquire specific resources.
The Hauler ship flies faster and has a much larger inventory, so it’s still much better to use.
Mission Requirements
We added ship requirements to many star system bodies.
Large Asteroids: Improved Thrusters
Stations: Boarding Module
Planets: Heat Shield
The icons are placeholder
For now, the Hauler has all of these upgrades, and the mining drone has none of them. In the future, we want to allow the player to upgrade their ship with different modules.
We’ll possibly extend the system so that colonists acquire skills related to each specific body type. A colonist who routinely salvages stations might become better at it. Although we’re leaning more towards ship upgrades, like a “Mining Laser” that increases mining success chance.
So Long
That’s it. Goodbye. Thanks for reading.
p.s. Here are the Alpha patch notes
Alpha Patch Notes
[New Stuff]
- Added a placeholder area in the mission window for active missions.
- System bodies can now require certain things from ships in order for missions to be performed. Abstractly, the requirements are agents, so they can be whatever we want them to be.
- Added Heat Shield requirements to planets, Improved Thrusters to large objects, and Boarding Module to stations. The hauler ship has all requirements, the mining probe has none.
- The mining drone can now longer be used to passively return with items, instead, it has to be used on missions, and has a crew space of 1.
- Improved sink model
- Implemented a shift system for colonists where they'll perform certain AI states during certain shifts. If it's a work shift, they'll work. If it's not a work shift, they won't work. If there's no work to do, they'll perform a nourishment or free-time state.
- Implemented the new object unlock window.
- Objects no longer require extra power when they produce something. Instead, each object now has a higher baseline power requirement.
[Bug Fixes / Minor]
- Decreased mining probe fuel requirement from .005 to .00125
- Adjusted skybox camera so that planets can be placed on the border.
- Reduced duration of all missions.
- Previous hods will now lose relationship with new hods (because they get jealous).
- Adjusted max relationship reaction penalty from -25 to -45.
- Dead colonists can no longer be selected as crew in missions.
- Passive item requirements are now refreshed in the UI when objects are turned offline/online.
- In the crew selection, the real level of each skill is used to determine if the skill should be displayed. This fixed an issue where golden morale would cause every skill in the game to be displayed.
- Increase the conversation success chance when hearing a hated personality type from -25% to -35%
- Fixed a bug where the ship could be accessed while it was on missions.- Mission location danger levels are now displayed as Low, Medium, High, and Very High.
- Mission success chances are now displayed as Very Risky(<= 35%), Risky(<= 70%), Safe(<= 90%), and Very Safe(> 90%)
- UI adjectives can now contain color data.
- Sleeping and dead colonists will no longer perform sight checks.
- Fixed lighting issues with lots of objects.
- Adjusted AI state generation so that components can override which states are actually performed. This allows the build bots and the colonists to use different pathfinding states but the same generic AI state template.
- Gameobjects can now be automatically linked to multiple agents and it will persist through save-load.
- Adjusted sink access position.
- Fixed a bug where ships wouldn't correctly request the correct amount of required resource if the ship didn't have access to the correct amount when the mission was created.- Colonists will now regenerate their pathfinding route if you place something in their way (or if you turn a door offline). Previously, they would walk through the new object.
- Fixed a key population issue with one of the mission crew buttons.
- Fixed how duration is calculated in the mission creator window so that it's the same as the actual mission duration.
- Fixed a bug where quests didn't despawn.
- Colonists will no longer "return" from their access position if they're target access position is the access position that they're currently at. So a laborer will take items directly out of ship when they're a crew member instead of walking out, walking back in, and then taking them.
- Floor cosmetics are now lit.
- Implemented wire capacity display.
- Notifications are no longer displayed if a colonist is invisible. This fixed an issue where pop-ups would be shown for colonists that were acquired from missions.
- Tripled ship speed.
- Reduced the max number of system bodies discovered by the radar dish from 3 to 2.
- Increased the duration of the radar dish production from 60 seconds to 180 seconds.
- Increased the duration of the food brick factory from 20 seconds to 60 seconds.
- Eating nutrition bricks now gives -25 freedom morale.
- Added hud message when missions fail and succeed at locations.
- Fixed a bug where sometimes the tooltips wouldn't change parent transforms.
- Fixed a bug where ships would request offload of their fuel and biomass.
- Fixed a bug where the researching state would start before the research cooldown was finished.
- Added a hud message when a colonist passes out.
- Fixed a bug where the wrong number of items would be requested if a container was currently storing matching items.
- Fixed a bug where morale based perks weren't removed when morale was high.
- Fixed a bug where sometimes the tooltip wouldn't be resized correctly.
- Fixed a bug where the cafeteria chair wasn't mounted correctly.
- Colonists now queue going to sleep when the need is at 65%, previously they queued when it was at 50%
- Reduced the sabotage cooldown range from a max of 15 minutes to a max of 6 minutes.
- Input is now absorbed if you press escape to cancel building (previously, this would close the build menu, and on Mac it would activate the escape menu).
- Renamed Farmer to Botanist, because it sounds cooler.
- Renamed Mechanic to Engineer, because it is cooler.
- Added Assistanct Engineer and Assistant Botanist jobs.
- Colonists can now only have 1 job.
- Jobs now have a global count. There can only be 1 mechanic, chef, farmer, and doctor.
- Skill level of engineer and botanist affects the number of assistants that they can have, with a range from 1 to 3.
- Jobs are now sorted by their availability, so that an unassignable job is shown at the end of the job assigner menu.
- Added the time display back to the Hud, and added a placeholder shift display.
- Added a memory when a colonist passes out.
- Created the assistant job. The assistant is a Laborer, Mechanic, Farmer.
- The assistant is now the default job.
- Adjusted sleep need so that colonists will require less sleep.
- Adjust sleep restored by all objects so that colonists will sleep for, at most, 8 hours (on a floor, everything else is faster).
- Fixed a bug where colonists wouldn't restore any sleep need if they passed out.
- Removed the morale notification when colonist's social morale is modified, because there's already a notification when a colonist's relationship is modified (so it's sort of redundant).
- Implemented notifications when colonists take damage or are healed.
- Changed build cost of objects so that they use silicon instead of metal
- Added new speech and thought bubble for a colonist seeing a broken object
- Made some changes to the power grid so that it would more consistently overload (or not overload).
- Adjusted how item crates are selected so that matches are more explicitly prioritized (this fixed issues where {tomato, soup} would use the crate.
- Shifts can now be assigned/unassigned in the job tab.
- Fixed a bug where production wouldn't occur after save-load if the only issue was that a container lacked space.
- Fixed an issue with usable crafting objects where sometimes the success action was out of bounds.
- A bunch of different objects will now be unlocked together, like: all kitchen objects, cosmetic themes (wooden, sterile, etc), and life support.
- Airlocks are now unwalkable on the far right/left side. This fixed a bug where colonists would walk through an airlock if you turned it offline.
- Colonists now use Airlocks slightly faster. The cycle duration was reduced from 10 seconds to 5 seconds, and the cooldown between cycles was reduced from 5 to 2 seconds.
- Fixed a bug where a material modifier was incorrectly returned to the pool, and then that instance was stored by multiple objects.
- Adhoc material changes are now applied to body parts if they're added after a colonist is placed (like a helmet when walking through the airlock).
- Fixed some issues with access positions having invalid dimensions.
- Fixed a bug where sometimes a different grid position was used when adding and removing a colonist.
- Fixed a bug where the original material of an object wasn't always correctly stored.
- Fixed a bug where connecting multiple atmospheres with vents would cause issues.
