Starmancer’s biggest update, The Wilderness is out now!
This update adds explorable space stations and asteroids around your base. We also added many new enemies and items, like C4 and a Purple Slime Monster. Colonists are now draftable (you can order them to do anything). We rebalanced many of Starmancer’s core mechanics: Morale, Tech Tree, Item Prices, Object Prices, Combat, etc. The game is very stable, crashes are very infrequent and most of the bugs have been fixed.
Try it out!
How to Play
If Starmancer is already installed, your game should update automatically.
If you don’t own Starmancer, you can buy it on Steam
Asteroids
Asteroids now appear around your base. Resource nodes for ice, ore, silicon, biomass, and crystals spawn on asteroids. Worms, zombies, and other wildlife are often present too.
Sometimes these asteroids directly touch your base, meaning worms and other critters will sneak onto your base and start eating your food (or colonists) if you’re not careful.
Hello, Zombie, have you heard about paintings?
Abandoned colonists can sometimes be found wandering on asteroids. These colonists can join your base and be regrown just like the rest of your crew. Sometimes they spawn with diseases and the maniac perk, but mostly they’re good little fellas just looking for a home.
Unexplored areas are hidden in fog-of-war. You can disable fog-of-war in the options menu.
Note: Previously you used a spaceship to “mine” at asteroids. This was a rabbit-hole type activity. This spaceship has been removed for now.
Explorable Space Stations
Every star system spawns with an explorable space station.
The layout and rooms used are randomized, so no two stations are ever the same.
Be careful, monsters wander the halls–protecting the relics, treasures, and recipe caches found inside. Bring your best food to keep your colonists healed while they neutralize the monsters.
Your colonists can even live in these stations! They’ll use the toilets, beds, crafting stations, etc. You can purchase almost every object in a space station and keep it forever.
After looting everything in a star system (or whenever you want to) activate your warp drive and travel to a new destination.
The Stations
This section contains some spoilers about the new stations. If you’d prefer to keep the mystery and discover them on your own please skip this section.
Waste Station
A long abandoned Waste Processing Station that was taken over by the slimes.
This is the first explorable station, with the weakest monsters. Goolerium nests provide the base ingredient for Chemistry and Medical. Fuel can be scavenged to run your generators.
Ore refineries and waste recyclers are found here.
Medilab
The original purpose of this medical research lab was lost forever when its inhabitants were overrun by zombies.
This is the second station you’ll encounter. Undead monsters here are a bit tougher than slimes. You’ll encounter creatures that can infect your colonists, requiring medical treatment before they turn into zombies or go crazy from a cuddler infection.
Medical crafting stations, Therapy Booth (for curing various madnesses), and Healing Booth (for repairing organ damage) are found here.
You can also find anti-virals to cure colonists from zombie and cuddler infections.
The Lucky Kernel
A defunct casino ship operated by the Robot Mafia.
This is the third station. Bots roam the halls and attack your colonists on sight.
Once the station is cleared, your colonists gain full access to the fun arcade machines and casino tables. They provide a big morale boost.
Chemistry tables, silicon, and free-time machines (Arcade, Casino Table, Jukebox) are found here.
Draft Mode
Colonists can now be drafted and manually ordered around. You can order your colonists to do just about everything in the game. Some actions, like dragging another colonist, are only possible by drafting.
Drafted colonists do nothing unless ordered to by you. If you accidentally leave a colonist in draft mode they will pass out eventually (from lack of sleep). An on-screen notification is created for every drafted colonist, as a reminder to set your colonists free once you’re done ordering them around!
It’s a good idea to draft a “soldier” colonist (with high strength and health) to explore all asteroids and neutralize all threats before you send miners outside. If you close your borders, your colonists will automatically remain on your base.
Colonists require positive morale to be drafted, but don’t worry, you can always feed Mental Stabilizers to a sleeping colonist.
Relics
Relics are rare items with special properties that are found in derelict stations.
Ordinary Pen: Erases target colonist memories
Cosmic Bread: Colonist never gets hungry
Matter Refabricator: Colonist poos out whatever they last ate
Spiked Collar: Colonist is immune to zombie and cuddler infections
O2 Cannister: Colonist’s helmet never runs out of oxygen
Remote Uplink: Colonist is teleported back to base instead of dying (the remote uplink is destroyed in the process)
And more
We also added C4. It’s not technically a relic, but it’s awesome. C4 blows up all nearby floors and walls. It also deals 50 damage to any enemies (or colonists) caught in the blast radius. It’s amazing for defeating high level enemies and for creating emergency exits in derelict stations (because sometimes your dudes get trapped in bathrooms by purple slime monsters).
Your Base
Your base is now surrounded by a boundary floor. You can build on this and your colonists can walk on this. Anything outside this boundary is lost to space forever when you warp.
You can delete boundary floors at any time (for aesthetics and also for building a Magneto style prison)
Expansion permits are looted in space stations and increase the size of your base, allowing you to build bigger bases.
You can now “lockdown” your base so that colonists will not go outside your borders. This is very handy when arriving at a new system, because it prevents your colonists from wandering into a cuddler nest.
Internal Organs
Colonists do have brains! (and other organs)
Organs take damage when a colonist is hurt and under 50% health.
Lungs: If destroyed: unable to breathe (this is bad)
Stomach: Without this, colonists are unable to eat food. Damage to the stomach can lead to incontinence.
Liver: Used to process alcohol and drugs. Without this, the colonist cannot get inebriated
Brain: Without this, colonists are powerless. If damaged: incompetence, cannibal, or maniac.
Heart: If destroyed, instant death
Organs are repaired at the Healing Booth. This is found in the Medilab and must be stocked with Medkits. You can also research the Healing Booth and build one on your own base.
Shamblers are radioactive and damage organs directly.
Diseases
In Starmancer, things like Biowaste and rotten food generate germs. Germs are removed when a colonist cleans a floor. You can also use a sterilizer and some cleaning solution (found in the Waste Recycling Station) to remove germs from nearby floors.
Germs spread to food and cause it to rot, (which leads to more germs). Your entire food supply could be lost if you neglect to keep your station clean.
Colonists also get sad when they see a gross floor. A tidy station is a happy station!
When enough germs accumulate, your colonists will start to get sick with a virus. Viruses have randomized symptoms and various transmission types. When viruses spread to a colonist, their symptoms can mutate.
Scan an infected colonist or slime to unlock unknown virus symptoms. Once unlocked, you can create your own virus with that symptom at the virus maker.
New Skills
Colonists now have skills for speed, research, strength, health, construction, and cleaning.
Treadmills increase movement speed, but so does walking. Faster colonists generate more power at the treadmill. Fast colonists can run away from slow enemies without much risk.
Strength increases melee damage and increases colonist inventory cap (strong colonists can carry more stuff). Improve this by hauling resources or punching bad guys.
The skill cap was increased to 99. The more skill levels a colonist has, the more expensive they are to regrow.
Combat Rebalance
All food now heals colonists, and it can be eaten directly from their inventory. We also added a toggle to make your colonist automatically heal from their inventory
Before exploring a derelict space station, you should equip your explorer with the highest tier food you have, so that they’ll heal any damage they take.
Enemies now attack locked doors
Colonists now have a chance to passout if they take damage when under 33% health and monsters no longer fight unconscious colonists. This provides opportunities for rescuing explorers if they get into too much trouble.
Monsters award small amounts of DNA Fragments when killed–the currency used to unlock and grow colonists.
New Enemies
Every star system has unique “wildlife”. For example, undead monsters only spawn in the Medilab’s star system.
Slinker: It’s a worm, but you can eat it
Toxic Slime: It’s big. It’s purple. It’s mean
Mang0: An ordinary service bot whose targeting protocols have gone haywire
Drink Bot: Attacks colonists by throwing alcohol at them, inebriating them in the process
Bouncer Bot: Bigger than a purple slime, but with great power comes great movement speed reduction (it’s slow)
Alien Prism: Randomly found on asteroids. Very dangerous. Only attacks if provoked (this thing is awesome for clearing out enemies. But you have to attack it first to make it mad)
There are now 3 classes of enemies: Slimes, Undead, and Bots. Each type will attack the other on site. It’s mildly funny to trap a purple slime in your base and then release it into a Medilab (with the help of a fast colonist as bait).
Quality of Life Improvements
We made many Quality of Life (QoL) improvements.
Colonists now spawn with 2 perks instead of 3. Most “bad” perks now have trade-offs. Incompetent, for example, increases inventory capacity by 1. Aggressive increases strength exp by 10%.
Colonists automatically equip helmets if they start to suffocate
Any item can now be tracked in the HUD. Allowing you to easily keep track of your supplies.
Thermal Exchanger automatically shuts off if a room gets too cold.
A loading screen when you warp (with tips!)
Colonists display an icon in the HUD when they’re infected or have organ damage
Colonists are now automatically harvested when grown
Tech Tree Restructured
Save Wipe
Saves prior to 0.2.0 (the wilderness update) will no longer work. This is unfortunate, but there were too many underlying changes to the game to keep saves working.
The good news is that the game now has way more cheats and settings for customizing your gameplay experience. You can spawn items, unlock everything, build instantly, give yourself money, remove fog of war, and more. So you can easily rebuild anything you’ve lost.
However, The Wilderness experience is much much more fun and it’s totally worth starting over from scratch
Stream
We stream Starmancer every Friday at 11:00 am (gmt-5). This is the same timezone as New York City.
Come hang out and watch! Your good ideas might be added to the game!
Watch me speedrun to The Lerky Kernel
That’s It
The Wilderness is our biggest update. It sets the foundation for adding gear, NPC’s, quests, and all the new updates we’re planning.
What’s next? We’ll spend time fixing whatever problems crop up (bugs, balancing, etc) and then we’re going to start working on The Gear Update. The gear update will add weapons, tools, combat levels, and fun outfits for your colonists to wear
Don’t forget to check out the update on Steam!
Thanks for reading! Thanks for playing!
-Tyler
