Changes to Star Conquest

Changes to ship stores and COMPONENT POINT REQUIREMENTS this morning!

Component points and diplomacy:

* Pilots will require somewhat fewer points to buy components manufactured by their own alliance.

* A similar, lesser discount will be offered to allied pilots.

* Components belonging to an alliance with which relations are neutral will be very slightly harder to get.

* Components belonging to an alliance which you only have a treaty with, or that you are at war with, will be significantly harder to get.

* For a non-aggression pact, or for defunct manufacturers like the Coalition, point requirements are unchanged.

Ship stores:

* Components are now sorted by type and point requirement.

* The POINTS command is no more! Point requirement information will appear under INFO.

* Information about starships will now appear under INFO even when the ship does not have a market description.

As announced in-character during the earlier event with Corin Shea, our crafting system is going live.

Stores have just been placed on each capital planet/station and the help file is up. Type HELP CRAFTING for more information.

NOTE: If you really want to get started immediately, be aware that the Sonic Tech and Hand Weaponry licenses currently do not have the necessary supplies available anywhere. However, this should change within a couple of days, so go ahead and buy those licenses if you want to make stun weaponry eventually.

This system has an entry barrier of 20 points.

Introducing...

For the explorer with a plan....

In deep space, one can now find areas of unusual debris density. If that phrase is a bit wordy, you can just call them debris fields.

INTRODUCING ASTEROID BELT MANAGEMENT!

This is a new activity that will basically allow you to passively earn industry points on a daily basis. This will only be a fraction of your daily cap increase, but it's better than nothing!

We have two purposes here:

1) Allow players to progress without constant grinding (though, obviously, still much more slowly if they don't grind).

2) Make player age a greater component of their general level of advancement.

For more information, see Arty's post in General/General, as well as the Asteroid Belt Management help file.

As always, report any oddities or apparent imbalances!

The ground combat system has been partly redesigned, in particular where battlesuits are concerned.

The new system won't be going live for a little while, probably not till sometime after Christmas. This is being posted now because it has produced a few changes that could already be noticed. Also, you'll get time to prepare!

- Battlesuits no longer belong to the aerial fortress. Instead, each player buys their own individual battlesuit, which is customizable with weapons, abilities, and armor. The availability of these is determined by your ground combat points.

- Battlesuits will automatically transfer to the fortress, and back to the spaceport, as you enter or exit a mule.

- There is an all-new progression of weapons available. Which weapons are available depends upon the type and level of the battlesuit.

- Plasma abilities as well as repair drones are now replaced by a general system of special abilities, which include plasma and repair minidrones as well as two new branches. These abilities all expend a battlesuit's energy, which will recharge gradually on its own.

- Battlesuits can now customize their armor, or go without. Heavier armor tends to reduce evasion, but also drastically decreases the amount of damage taken.

- Battlesuit ammunition is no longer bought separately. Instead, your fortress will hold "synthesis supplies" from which it will build the ammunition it needs. Higher quality weapons require more supplies.

- Enemies will no longer fire randomly, but will instead focus on the target for which they have the most enmity. To manage this, the old flare ability is now under one of the special ability branches.

- Enemies in general will be hardier and will require more strategy and teamwork to take down.

- Full repair units are no longer available. Players will be expected to use ability- or item-based repairing to return to full strength, with the help of occasional full resupplies from the fortress.

- Battlesuits no longer have damage thresholds, and can be repaired completely from any damage level.

- Battlesuits can no longer be destroyed outright. If sufficiently damaged, a battlesuit will automatically be forced to return to the aerial fortress, and will require a refurbishment with a large supply cost before it can be deployed again.

- Aerial fortress supply centers on each capital have been altered for the new system. You can purchase and customize your battlesuit now, whether or not you have access to an aerial fortress.

- Obsolete equipment has been removed from player-owned fortresses, and the owners have been reimbursed for the full amount paid.

That sums up the changes, though more may be forthcoming. Keep paying attention for announcements about test runs and, eventually, the system going live.

Introducing TACTICAL COMMUNICATIONS.

Here's how it works!

General communications: suitable for transmissions like "Where can I find a shop that sells a single fingerless glove which is tight but not too tight?" and "I have reflected long on the fact that you believe me to be a moron and after painstaking self-reflection I have come to believe that YOU in fact are the moron."

Tactical communications: suitable for transmissions such as "OH MY GOD OUTSIDERS EVERYWHERE KILLING EVERYONE ALL DEAD WHO AM I EVEN TALKING TO" and... well that's about it really. Basically this channel is all business, so that ideally people could turn off the general channel and still be kept informed about exciting things happening.

These rules won't be staff-enforced but I suspect a lot of you players will tend to enforce it yourselves!

Probably everyone has forgotten this command, but you may type GEN COMM to toggle the general channel off and on. Similarly, TAC COMM has been added.

The new engine overhaul (as explained on OOC/MTTNS) is IN.

This system, in the next few days, will be subject to tweaks, but as always, report any bugs, oddities, or weirdness!

CHANGES TO THE WEB PORTAL!

First of all, the address again if anyone missed it: http://moo.squidsoft.net:7779/

This will be SC's main official website.

We've added new links to in-character information in what might be an easier interface: the alliance reports and the news aggregator headlines. The 'Who's Playing' link has been renamed to 'Active Pilots' and made IC, as well.

Also planned: letting you log in with your squidsoft.net account info and browse your ships, components, and other information about your character.

Anyone have any suggestions for things that would be cool/useful? Use the REPORT command!

We've put together a new website (although it still appears to be from the mid-90s) all served directly by the game through the web portal. This allows us to integrate the website closely with the game, and we'll be adding more features in this vein if our ambition is sustained!

http://squidsoft.net:7779/

If you're curious, you may want to check out the About page, which includes for perhaps the first time ever a clear statement of SC's theme, plus it includes a newly rewritten and expanded timeline that explains many elements of SC's theme. Enjoy!

And now, a little experiment.

STARSHIP INSURANCE 2.0

What was wrong with the old system? Well...

1) Not anything like how insurance actually works.

2) Makes the price of your largest warship essentially 150% of its actual cost.

3) Is built upon code a decade old.

So what's changed now? You now take out individual insurance policies on each of your ships. Or you can take out a cheap blanket policy, but it isn't as good as insurance was before.

Instead of holding back a single large sum of credits, you will pay the premiums on each of your policies each Conquest period.

A premium policy covering a single ship for 75% of its value is available!

This should already work properly with organizations, although that aspect will need more effort. For now, insurance payments are done using the organization's credits on hand.

Your old insurance account is no longer accessible. Its balance will be paid out to you the next time you use an ATM.

Be attentive and report any issues. As always, aspects of this system (premiums paid, degree of coverage) may be tweaked at any time.

Check HELP INSURANCE for more information.

We've launched the new Star Conquest space system!

Keep in mind that this is merely an initial release. While there's a few all-new places, our goal was really just to convert existing space to the new system. Mainly, this release is just paving the way for many more changes to follow. Just so that's clear.

Now, here's a tremendous list of specific changes.

SECTOR STRUCTURE

- Sectors are no longer numbered 1 through 30, 31 through 60, etc. Instead, sectors each have unique names that you will use to identify them.

- Sectors are no longer all equally accessible. Instead, sectors are arranged in clusters consisting of a main (or gateway) sector, usually at least one secondary sector, and sometimes more lower-tier sectors.

- The practical difference between main sectors and the lower tiers is beacon strength. Here's all you need to understand: main sectors have strong beacons and you can jump to them from pretty much anywhere, exactly like how all sectors worked before. But secondary sectors have weaker beacons, and you must be at their main sector before you can jump to them. This means that to get to Old Earth, you must first jump to the main sector Earthgate, and then you can jump to Old Earth Orbit.

- You can no longer refer to sectors by their numbers. Except for one deliberate callback, numbered sectors no longer exist. To jump to a sector, such as Old Earth Orbit, you would type JUMP OLD EARTH ORBIT. The command also accepts shortened names. For instance, JUMP OLD EARTH is also sufficient.

- You can see sectors within your current cluster, plus other immediately accessible sectors, by typing JUMP by itself and selecting YES at the prompt. This list DOES NOT include sectors in other clusters that you cannot immediately access. If it did, it would be overwhelming.

- You can use the JUMP command to travel to ANY accessible sector, even if it's not IMMEDIATELY accessible. For example, L5 Station will now be three jumps from any other cluster, but you can type JUMP LAGRANGE 5 from anywhere, and the system will automatically jump three times for you. Additionally, linking jumps like this is much faster than doing them one at a time, so that jumping between places doesn't take much more time than it did before.

- In summary:

* Use the JUMP command as you did before.

* Answer YES to the prompt that follows if you want to see a list of accessible sectors.

* Choose to jump to ANY sector you can access and your ship will take you right there, even if it requires multiple jumps.

* Sectors which are not in your current network, such as how Mutuality space is separate from the other alliances, still cannot be jumped to directly. These are accessible via the same methods you used previously; for instance, via acceleration gates.

SECTOR SECURITY AND PLAYER VS. PLAYER

- Sectors now have security ratings. These go from the Alpha tier, the safest, to Delta tier, the least safe.

* Alpha-1 security is completely safe, in that any hostile ships will be set upon by alliance navy or Accord peacekeepers within seconds, reinforced by space-based defenses.

* In the Beta tier, the next safest, the defending ships take longer to respond and the space-based defenses go away. Your safety isn't totally guaranteed, but anyone who attacks you must be prepared to face some opposition.

* In Gamma tier, spaceports become increasingly picky about who they serve. First they will serve only allies, and in very unsecure space, they will accept only their own pilots. Also at this level, spaceports can be influenced by conquest activities taking place in their region.

* In the lowest level of the Gamma tier and below, spaceports are outright capturable in battles.

* In the Delta tier, alliances have no recognized authority and your faction standings will take precedence in your relations with other ships and spaceports.

* At this time, only sectors in the Beta tier and above will be accessible.

- The high security responder ships will take the place of the old navy system, which has been disabled for some time anyway due to the strain it placed on the server. The new system has a much lower overhead, and we've also greatly upgraded our server hardware since then.

- The Accord Peacekeeper force will now respond to defend unclaimed and neutral sectors in Accord space. Miscellaneous Tandem Pact ships will respond similarly near Mutuality space.

- As mentioned above, very high security sectors will now have space-based defenses. These will probably guarantee the destruction of any hostile ship. Hostile ships are considered to be enemy alien factions, alliances at war, or any ship containing blacklisted pilots. Additionally, any ship that that sector's controller considers to be under its protection will be actively defended against hostiles.

- Player vs. player conflict is intended to be essentially impossible to pursue in high-security sectors, to the point where successfully carrying it out in Alpha-1 security will probably be considered a game exploit. In Gamma tier sectors, there is nothing to actively prevent player vs. player conflict, but it may still be considered an act of war in character, exactly as all sectors tended to work previously. In the Delta tier, you should expect and be prepared for active conflict regardless of war status. If you go to low-security space, you're accepting that risk.

- Some aspects of Gamma and Delta security may change before their release as we finalize the design.

RESOURCES

- Resources are now linked to particular sectors rather than scattered sort of everywhere.

- Debris can no longer be found just anywhere in uncharted space. Instead, certain sectors are known to contain clouds of debris, and you may go to these to salvage. Mostly, these are exactly the same sectors that contained debris before, now under new names. Additionally, uncharted space around these sectors also contains debris.

- Asteroids, similarly, can no longer be found just by exploring uncharted space from any point. Instead, you should look for asteroid belts or clusters and search from there.

- Local artifacts... can you guess? That's right, they're no longer found just anywhere. There is currently one source for them. Solve the mystery! Clue: Pivotal battle of the Outsider War.

UPCOMING CHANGES

- Firstly, the game will probably be full of bugs for the next couple of days as we find things that didn't handle the conversion so well. Enjoy!

- We plan to greatly expand the geography of Known Space, in particular adding in sectors at Gamma and Delta security.

- Certain objects in space are likely to be rearranged in the near future, such as space markets, asteroid belt management stations (which are currently nowhere near asteroid belts), stars, and other things.

- Mutuality space is largely untouched by the conversion and is not finalized. It'll probably undergo an overhaul of its own soon.

- Factions will become more important throughout the game and particularly in Delta security.

- The new stations all take the form of tiny placeholders at the moment. These will be built into proper destinations over time.

- Activities such as mail delivery, courier jobs, and running passengers will take security level into account in the near future, and will tend to keep you at the same security tier.

I feel like there should be some kind of Ultra Changelog.

I debated whether this should go under the major or minor changelog, but hell, nothing major at all has happened for quite a while!

A new quest has been added oriented around ground combat. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but the end of this quest will earn you a fun reward and reveal the direction in which this system will expand next.

Enjoy!

DIFFICULTY LEVELS ADDED TO BEACON DROPS

When you launch a beacon, you will first be prompted for a signal strength. This directly affects the level of enemy response.

Previous beacon drops were what is now "standard" strength.

The higher difficulties are indeed quite difficult. The last in particular is very much not recommended, unless your crew is very prepared or you would like to lose your ship in a new and interesting fashion. Seriously.

Transmitters have been altered!

TUNE TRANSMITTER now sets up frequencies similarly to before, with the addition of custom labels.

TRANSMIT now sends a message with your transmitter.

The USE command is no more.

We will soon be releasing craftable objects that expand transmitters to multiple frequencies.

Organizations have been implemented! Type HELP ORGANIZATIONS for more information.

Game time is now Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). Adjust your robes and wizard hats accordingly.

So, for the longest time, less secure space actually wasn't that much more dangerous. We have a solution to this startling problem.

Introducing a new mechanic, I like to call it 'heat' but that's not really anything official. It's an invisible statistic that fluctuates based on player presence and some other mysterious factors! As a sector 'heats up', the chance of an ATTACK on the sector becomes more and more likely!

It also might cool off. Sometimes. It depends on what players do.

Recent Additions and Changes

* The Teslaworld exploring activity is now available.

* Many changes to point balance and changes to the cap system.

Please check OOC/Announcements on your in-game message board reader for details on both of these.

Repairing your hull has had a bit of a makeover.

* You can now only repair your hull (with the REPAIR command) to the last failsafe broken.

* Starship weapon damage globally reduced by 25%.

Note: We want your feedback on this change! These mechanics are not set in stone!

Owners of carrier-type ships rejoice!

In specific carrier-type ships, you can type in STATUS in the docking bay to view a status report for the ships inside the docking bay.

Certain starship abilities now show up visibly in starship descriptions. Enjoy!

A few changes to beacon drops and combat points:

* Fixed an exploit where ships could get credited for beacon drops without fighting.

* Fixed an exploit where players could farm combat points by leaving beacon drops incomplete.

* Removed evasion points for any ship where the control room has weaponry (fighters and other one-person ships, plus corvettes) as the combined point gain proved excessive. Evasion points work as before in larger ships.

* Changed beacon drop cap interval from 24 hours to 22 hours, to account for battle time. This means you can drop a new beacon once one of your previous drops is 22 hours old. You can check this with the INFO command.

Rental starships! Now at FIND THEM IC. They have a generally modest set of upgrades (in the 200-400 points range) and a beacon launcher.

* Rented starships are rented for one hour.

* Rented starships are NOT subject to point or cadet restrictions. Cadets, rent whatever!

* Starships not returned within that hour are subject to late fees.

* The ship will get taken back when you next land if you're grossly overdue.

* If you get a rental ship destroyed, the next rental ship will be relatively more expensive.

* Rental ship loss affects conquest normally.

* Your reputation for being dangerous with handling a rental starship decays over time, to a certain extent.

Couriering makes a triumphant return! You can apply to be an employee at any courier company HR location, most of which that are currently open are on capital planets!

NEW FEATURES:

- Code modernized for the new generation. There may be bugs. REPORT them!

- 2 new starship classes added to the mix, bringing the number of starships for couriering up to 11. More may be on the way!

- Compared to the old couriering system, it should be much, much faster to get your first few upgrades in courier ship.

- You still only see your money at the end of every week.

- Point payout varies from on-par with mail to somewhat better!

This system is still being balanced, so point and cash payouts are, as always, subject to change. If the payout seems too low or too high, feel free to make a REPORT or post on OOC/Messages to the Staff!

Brand new players can now type CREATE at the game's login screen in order to create a new account, without having to visit the account maintenance website.

You can now also input the email verification code by logging into your account right here on SC.

This doesn't affect any of you in the least, but, uh, tell your friends?

Dear players,

During the forum last week, we polled you players about your desired event schedule. We included "24/7" as a comedy option, and as we should perhaps have predicted, most players chose it. Oh, how we laughed.

Then, afterwards, as we were driving back home in the hostmobile, our laughter faded away, and we began to think. Could there be, perhaps, a way that we could hold more frequent events? And we arrived at the conclusion that YES, there was something we could do. We have the technology.

And so we are proud to make an announcement!

OUR DAILY EVENT SCHEDULE BEGAN TONIGHT.

That is to say, we will aim for daily events, and we'll most likely hold them at least most days of the week. Most will be small and repeatable, and will not advance the plot, but they will be something different to do besides the usual grind. We'll call them minievents! The exact schedule will be unpredictable, but most events will occur during our normal peak hours (about 6pm to 11pm game time).

Rest assured that the addition of minievents will not interfere with our schedule for plot events, small or large. This will be an addition, not a replacement.

Enjoy!

With love,

The hosts

P.S. Write back soon!

BOARD READERS BOARD READERS BOARD READERS

This doesn't matter to any of you currently connected, but I did it and that means I am going to announce it. INTRODUCING HELPFUL HELPER NEWBIE DRONES! These will describe the intricacies of various important rooms to new players, as well as guide them step-by-step through their first salvaging trip. The purpose is to provide an alternative to wading through help files and going through the tutorial (which we find a lot of new players skip just prior to complaining about not knowing what to do) and let new players jump right into making progress without feeling lost. Enjoy! P.S. You can't actually enjoy these, they're for newbies.

Starship bounty rewards have been reworked!

1) First of all, bounty wasn't being awarded for ship kills at all a lot of the time. This has been fixed!

2) Now everyone who contributes to the destruction of an enemy ship gets a piece of the bounty, in proportion to how much they contributed.

3) The crew of the ship that lands the killing shot each get a bigger piece of the bounty, with the largest bonus going to the person who actually made the kill.

As always, bounty is actually awarded when you land at an alliance-controlled port.

Announcing organization command stations!

-----------

Org stations are the cool place to hang out. You can find most of the cool people there. In an org station you can just chill and do whatever and totally relax. "Take it easy" is the org station motto, for example, that's how laid back it is there. Show up if you want to have a good time. Another good reason to show up is if you want to hang out with friends.

-----------

Organization stations are available, for the moment, at 1000 industry and 500 starship combat points. That's org points, of course. Most of the current active orgs are at that point or pretty close to it, so it seems like a good place to start.

ICly, organization stations are prefabricated outposts already dotted somewhere in your alliance's space, in the new sector called "[something] Territories" which you may or may not already have noticed. When your organization qualifies for one and is willing to pay a small (very large) fee, one of these stations is powered, filled with air, and then belongs to your organization.

Not much is there to begin with (particularly since I haven't yet added anything that the control room actually does). However, you can add modular upgrades to your station for varying costs and at different point levels. Most of these are built off of your station's corridors, so if you're out of room, one of the upgrades is a corridor expansion.

As indicated in the first informative paragraph, most of the current upgrades are basically fluff and social areas, though still cool to have. Eventually, we'll be moving onto upgrades that create real mechanical advantages and new org-based activities. The purpose of today's changes are just to get the basis of the system completed and tested.

If you have ideas for more fluff areas or org-based activities, let us know! The REPORT command or a MTTS message (if you know we're around) is best for this.

A final note: this sort of thing is very difficult to test without creating a mess in the game world, so, well, I didn't test much of it beyond the initial station creation (which will probably find a way to break anyway). I will almost certainly be making some unfortunate pioneering player stand there trying the same thing over and over while I fix a dozen errors. Apologies in advance!

For greater ease in determining in which cases ships are transferrable, the INFO command now shows the highest point requirements of the hull and installed components.

It's important to note that this information was freely available previously, but it's easier to know now. These point requirements DO NOT include special enhancements to the ship, like the alliance specific upgrades, so being aware of those requirements is up to you.

As always, transferring ships to other players who do not meet the point requirements or belong to other alliances, or who otherwise could not get the same ship and components for themselves, is illegal by Policy 6.

Teslaworld 2.0 is released!

Teslaworld is now an actual planet deep in EAOS space. Tesla activities will take place here using your battlesuit.

The Tesla branches at each capital spaceport will no longer function. HOWEVER, there is a NPC in each one that will transport your battlesuit to Teslaworld for a nominal fee, in case you don't have access to a Gemini or mule.

The Teslaworld help file has been updated and should answer most of your questions, though some things are left to discover on your own.

Upcoming features:

- More content! Mission variety is low right now, so that will be a priority, particularly a new equivalent to Tesla exploring.

- More Tesla-specific abilities. Right now all you get are detection and resource extraction abilities, but there will be more to be gained from various quests!

This change is intended to create a highly scalable way to gain credits and industry points. Highly scalable means it should be a very good source of both at all point levels! However, we must take care that it isn't TOO good, so expect rebalancing and adjustments for a few days.

Also, I've only tested this in pieces, so bear with us if you run into problems and make liberal use of your REPORT command.

Adding new functionality to the helpfile system!

If you ask for help on a nonexistent help file, it'll ask you if you want to search the help system for it. If you say yes, then the MAGIC happens.

You can also access this new functionality with @SEARCHHELP.

Introducing Star Conquest's Recent Events web page!

http://moo.squidsoft.net:7779/recentevents

The page currently covers only the beta week and opening night event. It will be updated with additional recent happenings shortly!

Salvagers! Feeling a little insecure with pirates around and no one there to protect you? Hopefully there are people leaping to your aid, but you still have to abandon your salvaging. And, of course, there's nothing really in it for them. Or is there?

INTRODUCING SALVAGE OPS. The cool new way to salvage!

Salvage ops are a way to put salvagers and defenders together and make sure each are adequately compensated for their time. For much greater detail, check HELP SALVAGE OPS.

Doing a salvage op gets very, very slightly more points and credits than regular salvaging! And organization station salvage processing bonuses apply if you take your canister there!

The plan is for this to be slightly more worthwhile points-wise than regular salvaging, to make it worth the time, and to be fairly worthwhile in credits as well. But there are a lot of numbers to tweak, so it'll probably take a while to arrive at a good balance. Bear with us! Also, this system will branch into the next step in command points and organization construction.

Attention Cadets: Introducing PROMPTED PROFILES!

For those who are new to writing profiles or having trouble knowing what to write and what to avoid writing, we now have a series of prompts (for standard profiles only) that you may choose to use.

You should still try to choose a unique character concept on your own, but the prompts will help you keep track of your character's general circumstances and break things down into smaller, easier pieces.

As before, when you want to write your profile, just type the PROFILE command. You will be asked if you want to use the prompts.

Good luck!

Trade routes!

I've grown tired of complaints and seeing other players harassed about using EVERYONE'S FAVORITE ROUTE (which is kind of silly, by the way, unless you're RPing someone kind of irrational; nobody owns any trade route). To alleviate this, a second, somewhat equivalent route has been added. It will probably be hard to find. Enjoy!

Newsfeed aggregators are now available at any reputable comm store! These show headlines from minor news sources and is more related to mundane things, as opposed to the ship-based news system.

HI BILLY MAYS HERE. In an effort to make engineering a more valued occupation aboard a ship, not to mention more interesting to do, the following changes have occurred!

First of all, most of these changes apply only to large ships with dedicated engineering rooms.

- Upon entering the engineering room of any ship, you will begin familiarizing yourself with your surroundings. After a few moments, you are familiarized! But if you leave again for longer than moment, the process will have to repeat.

- Repairs of larger ships are slower! UNLESS they are started and maintained by a person who is familiarized with the engineering room, in which case they will proceed at their usual rate.

This boils down to the idea that someone who runs in to start a repair and immediately runs back out again is not as effective as someone who stands there and sees to repairs in a dedicated fashion.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

- Advanced engineering techniques are available! These allow a dedicated engineer to do things like rapidly repair a single component, or the entire ship.

- And now a bad thing! Combat energy grid on larger ships will be more of a limitation!

- But dedicated engineers can also shunt energy to a specific weapon room, or to all the rooms at once! To see how the weapon rooms are doing, there is a WEAPONS command in the engineering room!

- Advanced engineering techniques EARN POINTS which should be roughly on par with the points earned from lock evasions and gunnery!

- These techniques are done with particular crafted items. The license and toolset for these items ARE NOT available at the crafting store! So what should you do?! These things are available in a very special way! Perhaps there has been some hint of this already! Go explore!

Good luck! Report any issues!

Introducing the CONQUEST OF THE STARS system! Simply put, this is a new system designed to encourage competition among the alliances. Although its initial implementation is small and simple, our aim is for the core Star Conquest game to eventually revolve around this system (hence the lame name).

You can view Conquest results at any time by typing CONQUEST. Conquest results will also always show up in the welcome message when you first connect to the game.

The effects of certain activities and the nature of the benefits for winning will be prone to a lot of rebalancing for a while.

Star Conquest's unarmed combat system is now in effect. This is a way to grapple, disarm, and cause (usually) minor injuries to opponents.

The PUNCH, KICK, and TACKLE commands are now part of this combat system.

Announcing...

NEW FIRMWARE FOR YOUR FLIGHT CONTROL SCANNERS!

You can now TUNE flight control scanners TO either the 'public' scanner or your alliance's scanner. The public scanner is functionally identical to the old behaviour of flight control scanners.

The courier system has been fully integrated with the faction system. This shouldn't change anything on the player side, but it'll pave the way for new and exciting parts of NEWSPACE!

Minor changes (843)

NEWS in ship control rooms now displays the last 10 headlines instead of just 5.

Added some additional ship class characteristics; i.e., things that apply to all scouts, cruisers, etc.

New characteristics added are instantaneous speed (mostly mild penalties to larger ships -- it's an experiment) and maximum cruise speed (scouts have a large bonus here, for example).

These as well as the characteristics that were added before to boost small ships are now displayed in ship stores.

Apologies if your engine stats fluctuated for a few minutes. The speed bonus was being applied as the inverse for a little while!

Alliance blacklists have changed somewhat!

In the past, they were effectively permanent and could make the game effectively unplayable!

No more!

Now, while they have a similar short term effect, at the beginning of every liaison term after the base time for the blacklist has elapsed there will be an opportunity for players to vote for or against unblacklisting. Democracy!

Voices and Space Defense Captains can now view the blacklist for their alliance, as well as minimum time before blacklist renewal.

Org station locker rooms are now slightly more functional than before. Also, you can UNDRESS in them properly. Also, 'my locker' will always match your locker, just in case there's a lot and you can't find yours.

Certain org station rooms are now lockable and should work similarly to civilian liaison office locks.

Control rooms now show a more limited version of the damage display.

Repair & rearms owned by organizations now offer a slight discount when they are owned by pilots, and a slightly deeper discount to organization members.

A few new upgrades have been added.

Battle analysis scanners have been added to boost beacon drop activity in the area. Check the organization space station help file. No one yet qualifies for this! Enjoy!

Advanced pilot commands are now in the game!

These have a different focus than advanced engineering, and tend to require good tactical and situational awareness to use to your advantage. They are also higher level, starting at 500 combat points.

These new abilities are accessible via a quest. This is something you should look for on your own. An in-character hint has been dropped within the last 24 hours and it is accessible to all players, and this should be your first lead. Recall that while you might read the changelog, your character does not, so there is no in-character way to ask "Where are the new pilot abilities?" unless you've really seen someone else use them.

Additional engineering abilities are planned soon, as well as a new system related to gunnery, to complete the trifecta.

Excellent news! Despite absolutely no demand, blindfolds are now functional! Sort of!

Voting machines have been slightly altered to also work with organizations. They come with the conference room. Please report any issues with the new or old voting machines.

Fixed a serious exploit where pilots could allow their gunners to fire while avoiding a response from the enemy starship.

After having thought long and hard about a suitable activity to replace salvaging, I finally arrived at an answer: MORE SALVAGING!

But seriously. I'll keep prioritizing new industry activities, which are by far the most-wanted thing on the recent survey, but in the meantime, salvaging is less completely mind-breaking and less of a grind now.

Anyway, onto the actual changes.

- Debris chunks now appear in debris sectors.

- Your ship now has an array of crappy stock salvaging equipment, as will all new ships from now on.

- Salvage equipment stores added to all capital spaceports.

- Salvaging help file updated.

Have at it!

Added salvaging equipment to the engineering room STATUS display. Also made it a little prettier while I was in there.

Added value of installed salvage equipment to ship worth.

Took point requirements of installed salvage equipment into account under the INFO command.

Fixed a bug with the salvaging minigame's hints and improved some of the hinting.

Smart title/key placement:

- Now on by default. Type GENERAL-OPTIONS to toggle this.

- Fixed a case where keys would fail to be placed on keychains if no title container could be found.

- The ubiquitous cloth sack will now be automatically worn and used as a title container if no other container is found.

- The above changes basically serve to make the entire key-receiving process painless for brand new players.

Fixed a bug/exploit where players could over-nest ships.

Fixed a bug in felo genetic inheritance.

Fixed a bug with felo not getting nutrients from bari.

Felo chow now has more different effects with certain felo.

Changed felo asexual reproduction somewhat! Hooray!

Felo nests can now have 'litters' from a single reproduction. Note: Felo are still produced one-at-a-time.

Felo chow bags and bowls (renamed feeding troughs!) are now much larger for reduced micromanagement (and reduced felo death while you're asleep). The small sizes are available separately in the same shop if anyone is interested for whatever reason.

Fixed a couple issues with the cadet questgiver.

- Cadet buoys will no longer spawn EVERYWHERE and stick around forever.

- You should now properly get credit for killing RATS, allowing cadets to finish the combat portion of the quest.

You can now use @GIVE-PROPS to give props to someone for their exceptional roleplaying prowess on the popular starship game Star Conquest. Use it when you mean it, it means more when you do it like that!

Communicators should now garble properly inside RATS nests and similar ground mission sorta-thingydoos.

Debris in Mutuality space should be a little bit more exciting now.

Knocking on ships has been fixed. Hopefully.

You may have noticed a small change in your ship name! (Especially if you're Mutuality) DO NOT PANIC. THIS IS INTENTIONAL.

Made a few more things ready for the switch to the new space system: debris generation, asteroid generation, artifact generation, and detection of when ships enter or leave communications range. Please report any issues you notice.

Skimming might be slightly faster now.

Fixed a few more code issues with skims. In short, they should be less buggy, more easily debugged, and generally about as fast as they used to be.

Fixed a bug in the mileage display.

Disarming kicks should work again! YES

Some more ground combat balance changes...

* Gravitic weapon damage increased slightly.

* Gravitic weapon accuracy decreased.

* Chaingun weapon damage increased.

* Laser weapon accuracy increased.

Some more changes are possibly on the horizon.

Organizations will no longer list inactive members, but they will still be members if they begin playing again.

Organization founders can now see point contribution percentages as well as how many points have been contributed by each member.

Fixed up the Teslaworld minimodule shoppe menu so it is readable.

Fixed a bug where mines and barriers from defense missions could be preserved.

Voluntary renames for characters are temporarily disabled until we can create an approval process to ensure the new name makes sense in character.

I may have added SIEGE to every lounge everywhere. I didn't pay attention to what the room actually was, as long as it had "lounge" in the name. The game may or may not actually work. Enjoy!

There is also a Siege help file.

Trying some Siege changes, since I haven't examined this game in a good few years. It seems like the defender certainly wins more than half the time. So:

- Reduced the outpost defense bonus.

- Added a powerful named siege card.

- Displayed more information about the ongoing game in the room's description.

I might change a couple more things, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it!

I've finally thought of stuff to be in Voice reports. You can have the various liaison term stats that we've been quietly tracking in your very own weekly report. The first ones have just been delivered.

Added a new Tesla mission! It requires 200 Teslapoints and 250 ground combat, and everyone in your group must also have 250 ground combat. It's an entirely new type of mission, and while I've tested most of it, it will certainly break the moment anyone tries it, which is what always happens. You have been warned. We'll probably also have to make changes to its difficulty one way or the other. Enjoy!

Tesla salvaging monetary reward has been slightly increased. Point reward remains unchanged for now.

Beacon drops: Corin hinted at it ICly, but just to clarify, beacon drops (or at least credit for them) is capped at two in 24 hours, to keep combat point gain somewhat rate-limited.

For further clarity, the INFO command now includes: 1) Your last mining site completion times, 2) Your last beacon drop times, and while I was at it, 3) The worth of your starships.

The strength of attackers responding to heat will now be influenced by the grade of debris in the area. This should make salvage ops more exciting!

A form of encouragement toward population balance now exists during character generation. Characters potentially joining low population alliances will be offered a moderate point gain bonus up to 500 aggregate points. The actual bonus rate is determined dynamically by active population differences.

The 'op' command now works while experiencing roundtime.

Heat wave ships will now only be of the same type as any already present. No more IFS jumping in to fight the Outsiders!

Beard-B-Gone(tm) should begin actually working at its next application. If still not satisfied, return it for double your money back! (Offer does not apply in known universe.)

A change to the process for new players which doesn't affect anyone currently reading this!

New players will no longer have to have their email address verified before they can connect to the game. However, a player without a verified email address will be treated as a cadet regardless of their profile status.

The reason for this, like the cadet system itself, is to give new players an impression of the game before they have to start jumping through hoops to play it, and also to make it easier for new players to obtain help if they're having trouble with the process.

Added a @PASSWORD command to change your account password.

Liaison stuff!

Responded to all pending messages to liaisons.

Added staff nagging to ensure each message gets a response. Target response time is 6-12 hours, up to 24 if we're all busy or something.

Added extra furniture and things as several people had requested.

Added official stationery to be found on your desks.

Added non-graphical rundown to space defense captain terminal.

Added squad composition overview to ground squad leader terminal.

Made Teslaworld a moon like it's supposed to be.

New ground mission command: SQUAD to see the status of everyone on the ground. Also, you can SAY anywhere and everyone will still hear you regardless of where they are. This is called squad communication!

ATTENTION! Given the extreme inconvenience of the Hudson River Ferry, we've implemented a subway system in Manhattan. At the moment, it only transports you between the Spaceport and Battery Park, but it will be expanding soon. Enjoy the enhanced convenience! (*Remember to bring League credits.)

Civilian liaison room descriptions should now FULLY INFORM YOU of the current status of all relevant doors!

Added a 'fleet composition overview' option to the Space Defense Captain terminal.

The fleet composition overview should be slightly faster now!

Asteroids should now properly utilize INTRASECTOR ENGINE 2.0's new, exciting, and lemon-scented acceleration speeds.

As mentioned during the forum, some options have been added to make ground combat less overwhelming.

- Incoming ground combat text can be selectively filtered by typing FILTER while in your battlesuit. There are two presets, plus the ability to set everything manually. Screen reader users should probably start with the minimal preset and tweak it to their liking from there.

- Damage threshold warnings should now be appropriately colored depending on whether they're for you, an ally, or an enemy, as long as you've selected to color ground missions in your color options.

Had to dig through all kinds of things to add this, so some basic aspects of ground combat could be broken. Report any issues!

Our latest and quite possibly greatest innovation is complete!

A ship's head is now available for your last-minute needs and to ease your pain on those long exploration trips. You can find it in your storage room by typing GO HEAD. Go! Right now!

New object matching functionality!

In addition to other, third, etc., you can now type MY whatever. This will match only objects that are yours: things that you bought or last had possession of.

Tracking of who last had possession of an object has just been added, and may therefore be unreliable for older items until they've been held by you.

Added HELP MISCONCEPTIONS along with HELP ROLEPLAYING. These files are intended to help people roleplay better, or at least know exactly what sort of character they're playing!

You've probably already noticed it by now, but....

INTRODUCING COMMUNICATIONS SIGNAL STRENGTH!

As you go further out from beaconed space, your communications get progressively more garbled! Different beacons work flawlessly out to different ranges!

Added flight control scanners to the magical signal strength mothing.

now you can either mtts in RT or every command you enter will traceback. who knows.

Changed how damage works relating to launchers and turrets and such. Net result is that launcher-wielding ships should be a little bit better at not losing their damage output when they get shot when they're otherwise undamaged.

Load balancing in mining sites totally works now.

Asteroid mining sites are now linked to asteroid hauling place things.

Added playerbase statistics information to the player-accessible command @WHO/USERS.

Non-pilot roles can now be chosen from character generation. This marker designates anyone not a pilot. They can't fly a ship, but for whatever reason they've managed to land themselves in deep with pilots. They have a communicator, but it can't access encrypted channels.

It's mostly for experienced roleplayers who want a purely social role who aren't interested in the mechanics aspect of Star Conquest. We'll see how it works out!

Revamped some aspects of the profile system.

* Enhanced host profile management so we can pinpoint problems quickly and speed up the playing process!

* Revamped prompted profiles! They're a little vaguer but point you more in the direction that we want profiles to be.

* Changed some text in the profile system to make it less spammy AND point players in the direction of our handy dandy profile help files!

* Profiles cause hosts to go on code-enforced violent murder sprees 17% less often.

A slight math error has swapped the numbers 17 and -17. A fix will come into effect in a few days.

Since an organization command station actually exists now, it seems like a good idea to update some help files!

HELP ORGANIZATION contains a bit more information, in particular clarifying the situation with organization points.

HELP ORGANIZATION SPACE STATIONS is a new file. It's actually a bit more like an outline of a help file, but it will expand as the system is fleshed out.

r-tags no longer expire while the player is a cadet (however they expire normally afterwards).

You can now check a quantum entanglement communication device by looking at it!

Blown up ships are mildly unlikely now to end up on an escape pod to Mir.

Felo should now be smarter about finding food. In particular they will now note the location of food even when they're not hungry so that they can find it later.

Attention beardhavers: Be extra careful when grooming yourself. What is lost may not be so easily regained.

Dozing will now act more like not being connected at all in certain cases, such as when proteges choose you as a mentor. Also, if you unidle from a sufficiently long doze, you will now see the "Welcome back to Star Conquest!" message along with the "connect report" that follows which no one reads.

Felo genetic mutations are somewhat more rare now.

Fixed a bug in Ye Olde Custome Rolleraketery Shoppe.

And now, two completely unrelated changes!

- A certain breed of felo has been renamed to something else.

- The who list now displays tags for mentors.

Fixed an exploit that allowed asteroid haulers to haul while unpowered.

Added HELP SOCIALS.

Fixed the ability to use a social command on 'me' over the comms, which had been broken by one METEU GAMREY.

Server changes SQ-0.2.4 => SQ-0.3.1 - Oct 7 (f22c8e3)

* Idlers rejoice! The server now sends periodic keepalive packets. May not work in all cases, but it'll probably help out people who drop from the MOO periodically without text from the MOO.

* Sped up a few functions, including noise and isa() handling

* Rebased the server with Lambdamoo 1.8.4 (experimental) which...

- Fixed a ton of memory leaks.

- Fixed a code execution bug that would cause a for loop to be actually an infinite loop.

- Sped up ALL code execution through the magic of caching.

- Lots of other behind-the-scenes stuff that makes us run faster.

- Did some more changes of dubious utility! Yay!

The layout of The Cross has changed slightly! WOO YEAH. More changes are on the way.

Changed the layout of The Cross cluster of space somewhat, to make it actually somewhat interesting. More changes to Mutuality space are on the way.

Launching should now actually deliver you to the correct sector!

Certain sectors can now have space defenses despite not having Alpha-1 security. Actually, it's just one sector.

Space stations are back to having shapes and multiple docking bays.

Fixed courier request command bug.

Asteroid hauling has now survived the conversion.

Asteroid belt management stations have been moved out of alliance capital sectors to the nearest asteroid belt or cluster.

Stars as we knew them are gone, since they would not make any sense in the current system! Stars will still appear on your starmap but they are assumed to be in the distance. In fact, the same star will often appear in multiple sectors within a cluster. However, these stars do not actually occupy coordinates and you cannot interact with them.

Charge usage is now greatly reduced when linking jumps.

Region displays (the stuff in brackets up at the top when you starmap, like 'Human Interalliance Space') have returned.

Flight control should now broadcast onto the public tuner in "Beta-2" or more-secure space if the sector is owned by any of the four main-cluster alliances (I.E. Not the Mutuality).

Added pointless chatter to greet you when you jump into a sector.

You will now be alerted to the status of your alliance's sector defense via the Sector Status comm channel.

Updated the cadet orientation officer somewhat for newspace.

Added sector descriptions which will be shown to you upon jumping into a sector. Not all sectors are described yet.

Updated the DESTINATION command to show correct sectors.

Updated space taxi passengers to also show correct sectors.

Added some more sector descriptions. All clusters have at least one sector described now!

Aerial fortress REMOTE function updated for the new system.

Asteroid belt management stations will no longer launch hapless ships to distant places.

Service robots are now somewhat functional! They have been programmed to learn THREE menial tasks! But they must first observe you performing these tasks yourself! Which tasks? Do something tedious and see if your robot learns!

Books have been modified to save space. Also you're safe to write in them again! Please assist about any oddities or inconsistencies.

Added in TEXTMAP. It's pretty much equivalent to the automatic minimap, only it will be easier for visually impaired players to use!

Updated the 'Salvaging' text file for the NEW MILLENIUM.

Mail rooms, courier cargo centers, and passenger stations should now enjoy much greater success in choosing a destination that actually exists these days.

Added HELP SECURITY RATINGS, to give a breakdown to all of this crazy security rating nonsense.

Apparently in-game account creation has been broken forever. Now it is fixed!

Fixed a Teslatown bug where bulk extractors could sometimes extract one more mineral than was actually present, creating all sorts of oddities.

Certain salvagable objects shouldn't traceback as much as they did a few moments prior. Sorry about that.

RATS spawns will show some semi-random variety from now on!

The Star Catquest meow filter has been so much fun that we have decided to delay any plans for deactivating it for the forseeable future. We hope you all enjoy it!

Fixed an issue with the minimap spontaneously eating certain room descriptions.

Fixed a bug that made seeing the minimap a bit erratic in ground missions.

Fixed an issue where minimaps could potentially display multiple times in a starship room.

Added damage and energy displays to the minimap while you are in a battlesuit.

Slightly extended the damage/energy displays for both the minimap and the damage/energy commands.

Updated destination finder code slightly to improve performance.

SQ-0.1.10 changes (the reason for the reboot earlier):

* Ported some frequently used (~150 times a second) verbs to C-based builtin functions.

Fixed a couple of loopholes in sector security against enemy combatants.

Continuing to tweak debris chunk points as we see people do things!

Made some minor changes to several Electronics recipes in order for FUTURE RECIPES! STAY TUNED

A couple changes to make the navy less ornery:

- Sector defenses will not fire upon any human vessel while a threat to humanity (Outsiders, IFS, etc.) is present.

- Navy ships will be more forgiving of being fired at by other human ships, presuming it to be accidental, while a greater threat is present.

Flight control now reports class names for ships of PC alliances.

The EXPEL command now accepts words to match on; i.e., EXPEL GLOVE to get rid of the first spacesuit glove in your cargo hold.

Oh, and your previous frequencies are labeled 'Default.' You can change this by removing and re-adding them.

Mules left empty above the Experimental Structure will no longer be pulled into the depths of its Bari-filled docking bay by well-meaning tugboats.

Minor bug involving sushi has been resolved.

- Felo nutrigel dispensers now run out of nutrigel.

- Felo nutrigel dispensers now show how 'full' they are in their descriptions.

Modified the behaviour of a 'certain kind' of felo.

Made felo wander around more when starving, hopefully finding new sources of food faster.

Certain NPCs (primarily mid-size NPCs but some others have been affected) will act a bit more intelligent when they go about their piloting shenanigans.

There's now a very small chance that people in a room can overhear your whisperwhisperwhispering.

Backend updates! There should be no visible differences, but if anything goes wrong an ASSIST or REPORT about it would be greatly appreciated.

Revamped the daily maintenance task (which includes the weekly maintenance shutdown on Sundays) It now always executes at what is typically an off hour (10:00 UTC), and does a few more housekeeping things to clean up the database.

The Star Conquest Web Portal now should display the star conquest logo properly now. Rejoice!

One additional change from what was announced yesterday: loot from enemies will drop for a specific person, and only they can take it for 10 seconds. After that it's a free-for-all as before.

A lot has changed since the last run, so it could be a little rough. Please be patient!

Well, seeing some balance issues with the harder nests!

- Enemy HP reduced.

- Energy gain out of combat is faster.

- Fixed a bug causing some enemies to NEVER die!

Added the LAG command to attempt to reduce the 30 times a day that a random person asks other players if they have lag and is told "no." The usual result of this command will be to report no lag because 99.999% of the time there is none. Enjoy it!

Mutuality space is somewhat renamed, as per OOC/MTTNS

Mutuality now has a proper low-priority ground mission!

Rental ship losses on your piloting record now decay around 4 times faster. Happy Annual Festive Holiday-Related Gift-Transferring Celebratory Event, players!

Fixed an issue where some photographs would not copy properly.

Space market extensions: Added the DELETE command to remove items you have listed. Seemed like a good idea.

Added some blank lines to the market menu so it's easier to take in. Exciting changes abound!

Fixed an issue where a battlesuit sometimes retained equipped weapons for which it no longer had the proper module installed.

Added a thing for hosts that doesn't matter to you at all.

The concussion filter should no longer apply to OOC text.

Fixed text on the cadet orientation assistant description.

Added a new points category that will go unused for a while so that there are fewer things I have to change later.

Dropped, shattered items will now get shoved into the trash system that trash cans and sanitation drones use instead of being destroyed immediately.

Mutuality-types and those who love wearing Mutuality-type timepieces will find things to be somewhat different now! Enjoy.

Changed the display of TCT to use periods instead of pipes. If you don't know what this means, don't worry.

Added the following shortened aliases for starship commands: C for COORDINATES, SC for SCAN, RD for RUNDOWN.

Reduced OOC/MTTS's autoprune time to 30 days (from 60) in order to keep its size somewhat in check. If this is a problem, please direct any concerns to OOC/MTTS.

Made some adjustments to the AI ship spawner. Becaon drops will probably be slightly easier, as a result.

High security sectors now cool off faster than low security sectors.

Communicators now allow emoting, by prefacing your text with a colon or the EMOTE command.

Metafrequency transmitters now allow both emotes AND the social commands that communicators have had for a while.

Remember: Audible actions only!

A few more changes to how space works.

* A sector's security rating now falls off based on distance. Actually, it's done this for a while, but now players can see it!

* Decoy beacons can only be dropped in uncharted 'Gamma' or lower space.

* The navy will now come to your aid if someone attacks you in Beta-level uncharted space.

In light of previous changes, uncharted space with a security rating other than Delta-10 will now inherit the owner of the space closest to it.

Trustees can now view a breakdown of income to their organization. This has been quietly tracked for a few days, so you should have some information, but income from before it was tracked will of course not show up at all.

Listing workbenches inside stores should now work in most cases, hopefully!

Improperly placed furniture shall never trouble you again.

Added a password reset thing at http://moo.squidsoft.net:3333/forgotpassword

The issue with simulated ships constantly powering down their weapons should be solved. Also, they should no longer bother you with notices about how their power is depleted.

Today's changes:

* Deep space exploration is now an available activity. Check Corin Shea's post in General/General for details.

* Exploration points added.

* Starship augmentation stores now have a POINTS command.

Fixed a long-standing bug with battlesuits and looting restrictions and the reporting of when the timer goes away.

As you might've already just noticed, felo too young to mate will be referred to as kittens! Also, they should be a bit smarter about finding food, in that once they're hungry enough, they'll attempt to return to where they last ate rather than foraging randomly.

Fixed in issue in crafting higher grade metafrequency tuners. Whoops!

Added a note to the bari help file to explain our intentions to worried people!

Navies will no longer attack their own pilots for shooting a ship in their own sector, provided the victim ship is not of the same alliance.

A great blow has been struck against voyeurs everywhere! You can no longer look specifically at clothes that are obscured by other clothes on other people.

Made a few changes in the text filter to facilitate OOC filters and IC filters.

Fixed some typos. Cats have purr spelling skills.

Many reports of ground combat bugs and issues with extreme difficulty that seem to have merit!

- There was a LARGE jump in difficulty when a group had sufficient points to encounter tier three enemy suits. This has been smoothed out.

- Separated player armor from NPC armor and rebalanced the values. Armor should have quite a large effect now. Perhaps too large, but we'll see.

- Enemies interrupted by interrupt-effect abilities will no longer immediately retry the same ability.

- Enemy HP was being adjusted assuming that a group should consist of four people, whereas the current system is geared toward up to six. In other words, groups larger than four were being punished. This has been changed.

- Enemies should show a change in targets immediately instead of right as they attempt to fire.

- Just to make things fair, enemies will stop using cover since it pretty much only works against them. At some point they may begin to use cover intelligently.

- Once again attempted to fix the targeting for group-effect debuffs. I think it's right this time. One character makes all the difference.

- Fixed an issue where "accuracy down" debuffs increased accuracy. Isn't programming fun?

Vector locking's alternate controls have been fixed. Please assist if anything goes wrong with it.

Modified the account portal to reflect that account verification is currently disabled.

Also changed in-game account creation to reflect the fact that account verification is currently disabled.

We upped the antialiasing on ships so felo won't seemingly randomly commit seppuku using jaggies on a flight stick.

Mutuality outreach liaisons now get paperwork in proper TCT.

Characters holding civilian liaison positions can no longer be deleted.

Announcements on the website now list concrete dates as well as telling you how long ago it was since that announcement.

Marshals should show up more often again in beacon drops, and Ninlils should be a bit more common.

The newbie comm channel is now live!

Type TR NEW to speak on it.

Out-of-character speech IS ALLOWED on the newbie channel. However, it is not to be used for OOC chatter. The only thing on this channel will be newbie questions and answers.

!!! COMBAT CHANGE !!!

Extreme burst damage will now break only one failsafe instead of 3 or more. This is done in order to make fights more 'epic' and mitigate the disparity beweween large ships and small ships somewhat.

A few minor changes to how wormhole jumping works:

Added notification of the sector names to each step in the jump sequence, for greater education about space geography.

Fixed a long-standing display bug where the ship would not properly announce when it was performing rapid linking (which results in reduced cost to your ship's charge and a faster jump time).

Altered the timing of linked jumps so that the first jump, not the final one, takes the longest.

Jump sequences can now be aborted with the STOP command.

Some changes to the new player point multiplier incentive, which encourages new players to join underpopulated alliances:

The maximum point multiplier is increased, which increases the overall incentive across the board.

The multiplier for small alliances (i.e., Mutuality), which is greatly affected by even one new player joining, is now multiplied accordingly, drastically increasing the incentive above what normal-sized alliances would get.

Unsent letters are now written in your handwriting! Penmanship enthousiasts rejoice!

Explorers: The MILEAGE command has been added to ship control rooms. It will show you how many lightyears you have traveled, which will often (but not always) be your distance from charted space.

Type MILEAGE RESET to zero out the meter.

A new ship command has been added: RUNDOWN, available in all starmap-capable rooms, giving the full coordinate rundown normally available only as part of the starmap in weapon rooms. Intended to be an alternative to viewing the starmap.

Some minor cosmetic changes to @tops et al, to reflect the transition away from 'overall' points. Also, @tops itself is less overwhelming, but you can find the same information now under @tops-detailed (or just @tops-d).

The decision has been made to have each Conquest period end during our prime time, precisely at midnight game time!

In order to have this happen, this period has been extended by a few hours and will now end at 00:00 hours on Monday.

Added a few of the station upgrade requests that have come in lately.

Decorations and visible starship abilities should now look somewhat neater in starship descriptions.

Fixed a thing where battlesuits couldn't pick up some things. Those things should also drop more often.

For less confusion, we have decided that a pilot league shall henceforth be referred to as a PILOT CORPS.

Created terminals for each civilian liaison office to act as an interface for their job functions. Each one was done as a quick job and it's still taken me all day! So if it seems barebones when you first use it, give it some time.

Added new ground squad communication reporting and damage threshold reporting. Report any weirdness you notice with these.

Added new sector activity reporting. See above.

Added a CAPTAIN command for ships to send a message directly to their Space Defense Captain's terminal.

Implemented extra battlesuit slots for Ground Squad Leaders.

Electric fans will now turn themselves off out of loneliness when there's nobody to witness their turning. Be kind and appreciate your electric fans. Do not abandon them. They are your friends.

Hot tubs have caught the same death of lonliness affliction as electric fans.

After a thorough investigation, I've reactivated the enhanced n-dimensional distance calculator, which is much, much faster than the old failsafe method we were using.

I was terrifically bored and I have written a help file of in-character background knowledge about the parts of a starship. These things would be studied in the academy, but how well your character actually remembers it is up to you. You can find it under HELP PARTS. I may add more soon as things occur to me!

The payout for standard cargo for couriers wasn't really where we wanted it to be, considering the inherent annoyances of using courier work as a primary income method, so we increased the value again. Priority payouts have not been changed.

The QUIT alias has been removed from courier companies' RESIGN command to eliminate command conflict.

Had a go at fixing a few long-standing, rather tricky bugs in ground combat. I definitely fixed some issues; we just have to hope they addressed the actual problems.

- Looted items should cease fading into the aether and instead add up properly as they're taken.

- Group debuffs no longer need a target specified and should work on all enemies automatically.

- Nests which hang around saying they have ongoing missions and yet do not... well, I didn't get to the root of the problem, but from now on these nests should get a second chance to spawn a mission and then disappear normally.

Watched a nest run for the first time in a long time!

- Increased overall resilience of enemies at higher levels. You're welcome!

- Reduced the effect of laser guidance, which it turns out was completely incredible and I'm not sure that was ever intentional.

- Reduced the effect and increased the cooldown time of directed flare because it seemed like enmity management wasn't an issue with this ability.

- Damage mods (i.e., illuminate) will no longer stack. Sorry!

- Damage of RATS offensive nanites increased.

- RATS healing ability increased.

- Most important of all, fixed a typo in sonic wave.

The wormhole drive was having trouble finding unoccupied coordinates with the new larger planets. The system is now allowed more attempts to find open coordinates, which should make this issue quite rare.

Due to popular demand, the amount of time you're allowed to be idle before being booted has been SLIGHTLY EXTENDED. Enjoy doing nothing!

Organizations being transferred to a new alliance when the founder retires is an unintended effect and will not occur.

Ship titles are now more helpful.

Stars, being distant objects, will now appear on sector edges rather than floating in the middle of the sector which didn't make any sense.

Planets have been given a large volume in space... it's a bit exaggerated even with the newspace numbers, but you can say it actually represents the planet's gravity well if you prefer.

In any event, this results in a visual change on the starmap. This also effectively puts your starship closer to the planet when you jump into its orbit, resulting in shorter trips.

I've preemptively fixed a lot of structural issues, which involved nudging some planets and stations one way or the other, but watch out for other destinations you can't get to (because they're inside a planet) or other autopilot difficulties, and let us know if you encounter any issues. Also, it's intended that neither manual control nor autopilot should let you inside the radius of a planet, so send a report if you notice this happening.

Enjoy!

P.S. The ORBIT command has been disabled for now, because it requires updating that I don't feel like doing just yet, and it doesn't do anything at the moment anyway.

Fans of punching rejoice! Your punching has been enhanced.

A few changes related to asteroid mining:

* You may now only complete two sites within a 24 hour period.

* Asteroid mining site payouts increased significantly.

* Roid dogs now permakill your character.

In light of recent events, we have decided to lower the successful kill rate of a 'roid dog to 95%. However, they are still to be regarded ICly as nature's perfect killing machine.

Fixed an issue with RATS nest spawns and airforts.

Navies should now land properly on planets after being deployed.

Pathing for felo and robots has been improved.

Okay, now pathing really works. Or it should. Please assist if your robot or felo decide to go in imaginary directions, through walls, or begin smearing your ship in custard.

Fixed a bug where org key creation played no message when successful.

Artifact containers are now slightly more well behaved.

Added voting information to the connection report that you get a few seconds after you log in!

Fixed a bug in stun weapons, though it might need some balancing.

Retouched the help system a bit.

- Typing HELP by itself now lists a handful of help categories instead of a crapload of individual topics. (Unless you're a newbie, in which case the NEW TO THE GAME help file is shown.)

- HELP INDEX will also now list the categories instead of topics.

- Typing HELP followed by a category name will list specific topics within that category.

- HELP ALL will list all individual topics as before.

Updated the web portal help page to use the new categories.

Some changes to how some character information is displayed, just to make things more accessible.

- The POINTS command has been added. It will display your point totals whenever you are in communication range.

- Portable point units have been removed from stores and from your character. You've been reimbursed for its cost.

- Slightly tweaked the formatting of the CASH command.

- Added a SCORE command that displays points and credits together.

A couple ground combat changes:

- Missions are now balanced according to the point requirement of the battlesuit you're using, rather than your actual ground combat point level.

- Players with a ground combat point level above 250 may now maintain multiple battlesuits, gaining a new slot every 500 points. This can be managed with the SWITCH command in the battlesuit outfitter.

Both nice things, maybe, but put them together and what do you get?

- More experienced players now have the option of maintaining lower-tier suits and going on missions with less experienced players without getting them killed (as often).

Also about ground combat: For further encouragement, more experienced players taking low-level missions will earn bonus points depending on how far above the mission difficulty they are, to make it more worth their while.

For balance reasons, only group missions will be subject to the new method of balancing ground combat missions. Solo deployments and turtle assaults will work as before.

Engines changed to display speed in km/s based on new sector size.

The mileage meter will now display in kilometers, light-seconds, or light-minutes as appropriate, in an effort to avoid unreadably huge numbers.

Added the SPEED command to display current engine speed.

Changed how the standings engine works slightly on the backend, to allow for more robustnessosity. Should have no visible effect on how things work right now.

Fixed a bug with debris generation. Now sectors should ACTUALLY have varying amounts of debris depending on their security rating (and other factors)

Fixed a bug where battlesuits did not always transfer successfully off of a space station with multiple docking bays.

Changed the final prompt in the prompted profile system to make it more clear what we're after.

Rental ships got a slight upgrade in components. So they're a little bit more expensive now as a side effect.

Rental ship shops no longer erronously show a point requirement to rent a ship in the shop's INFO.

Rented ships now have pertinent rental info in their ER's STATUS screen.

Rental ships schedule their destruction more quickly now, because I figure nobody will really need a reimbursement on a rental ship.

Small rental ships (Fighters, Scouts) should now be slightly cheaper. Larger ships are now slightly more expensive as a consequence of this change.

The announcement and changelog commands now ALWAYS have some output. Previously, if you were trying to pull up recent announcements/changelogs and there weren't any, it'd just not tell you anything, while a 'changelog/announcements new' would, which was kind of inconsistent, and hey, EVERYBODY likes more output on their screen.

\ /\

) ( ')

( / )

\(__)|

I may have added TRADE CYCLES: THE GAME to the game. HELP TRADE CYCLES THE CARD GAME!

Fixed a scoring bug with TRADE CYCLES

TRADE CYCLES: THE GAME is now only at Mutuality ports. Thanks to ATHER JAMMOA for this request.

Courier ship requisition had a small bug. It is now fixed. Bug will now grow to the intended size in the waters of Old Earth before arising to destroy the nearest city.

A few cosmetic changes to point center reports.

* If you don't have any unauthorized starship combat points, it just reports as 'Combat Score'

* If you don't have any of a certain point category (aside from aggregate score), it won't show up.

Increased the value of standard cargo for couriers.

Courier radios are now automatically on when bolted down. You can still turn them off, they're just on by default.

Glyphs now transfer properly onto a newly purchased battlesuit.

Dropping things inside mining sites is now significantly more difficult.

Special battlesuits (that is, RATS suits) will now be treated as equals to other suits of the same tier in regards to ground mission balance, particularly enemy armament. This means that bringing a RATS suit along will not make the mission harder.

Changed how ship names are displayed in large portions of the code, in preparation for factions/deltaspace. For right now, there's little visible difference, however.

Asteroid mining site virtual rooms now tell you how many units of metal and ore are at a particular set of coordinates.

Mentors will now be notified when their proteges enter and exit the tutorial.

Created Groups help file.

Made the situations required for RATS spawning a bit more lenient in beaconed sectors.

After a few reports about starship caps, we reviewed the code involved and found that it was, indeed, counting ships that it should not as applying toward the cap. This has been fixed and certain ships that were capped will become available shortly.

In addition, ships held by excessively inactive characters (no activity for a month or more) will no longer count toward the cap.

Added hourly statistics to the player-accessible command @WHO/USERS.

Fixed an issue with photographs tracebacking.

Due to a bug, anyone with Teslapoints greater than 50 has had them reset back to 50. Some people accidentally gained huge amount of points all at once, which was not intended!

Boosted credit value of Teslabucks.

Scaled Tesla site value more appropriately for higher point levels (this is also good).

Also may have fixed a long-standing bug concerning ammunition cost at the battlesuit outfitter!

Fixed an issue which allowed players to undertake poacher camp missions too often.

Added support for maximum concurrent asteroid mining site operations at asteroid mining site operation rooms. No current asteroid mining site operation rooms have been affected by this change.

Some bugs in movefix and a bug regarding landing on stations owned by a non-existant org have been fixed.

The voting machines will now allow one to change their vote.

Adding new proposals and determining the results will both produce automatic posts to the Debates forum.

Fixed that bug in selling Teslatown modules.

Introducing the COMMANDS command. You can use this command on "me," on "here," or on any nearby object to see all usable commands on it and their approximate syntax. Hopefully this avoids showing you any commands that you shouldn't be able to see or use, but if you should see any command that has slipped through the cracks, please find it within yourself to report it immediately rather than using it to delete the server or whatever it does. Thanks!

Replaced starship repair functionality, much of which was a decade old, with entirely new code.

- Repair rate and command syntax should be unchanged.

- The command is, however, a little smarter about helping you pick valid components to repair, particularly launchers and turrets.

- Overall messaging is prettier; for instance, there is now an instant confirmation when you queue up an abort.

- You can now repair the same component that someone else started repairing, replacing their repair order. You want to do this if you are familiarized with the engineering room, but the person who began the repair is not.

- You no longer need to abort the repair in order to switch which component you're repairing. Just repair the new one.

- The system should now only inflict roundtime at appropriate moments instead of pretty much every time you try to use it.

- Overall the system creates less work for the server, which is always a good thing.

I've tested it and everything seems to work smoothly, but report any issues!

TOP LIST CLASSIC has been replaced with a more in-character assessment of pilots' relative skills, in the form of the KNOWLEDGE command. Enjoy!

Reduced the fine for claiming a ship as lost.

Requesting a ship from a courier company will now pay attention to the smart key placement general option.

Fixed an issue with certain ship keys not propertly recycling.

Fixed an issue where certain admins can't type well.

Smokers rejoice. Smoking in battlesuits now totally works.

Lighters too.

Excitement for advanced orgs! (CO 300+) Custom rooms are now available! These are rooms that station owners can design themselves with some limited staff intervention. These should be roleplay-centered rooms and will not provide any mechanical advantages. This is a way for each org to make their station unique and personalized! Enjoy!

This mainly affects RATS suits, but suits that don't start at 0 points for their tier-1 suits are now treated more normally with respect to their primary weapons modules. (like lasers, chainguns, and so on)

Removed the artifact submission points restriction, since it's quite possible these days for people to collect artifacts from day one.

Minor flight control change: Stations with multiple docking points will now just say the name of the station, instead of the name of the station and the dock of the station.

Oh, you might've already noticed but e-mail is back to its state of sorta-working.

Fixed the verify command. Verify away.

Nomination machines will now list how many nominees there are for each position.

- RATS nests may now spawn semi-randomly in uncharted space. For now, you can expect to find and get credit for one nest per day (meaning 22 hours). This will probably change later, or additional mission types will be added.

- Added a new type of loot and battlesuit customization that will be fun for the whole family.

- Added period of non-aggression to RATS AI when they spawn in uncharted space (but not in charted space). If they attack you immediately, this is broken. This is so fortresses have time to launch defender ships, and to prevent explorers from getting harassed.

- Certain items are more likely to drop from boss RATS.

- Fixed an issue preventing some multi-effect abilities from being targetable.

- Eased the difficulty curve on RATS nest scaling.

- Added new enemy type with boss variant.

- Enemy abilities are harder to interrupt.

Some balance changes!

* Tier two destroyers now need fewer points all around.

* Tier two gunships now need much more points.

* Tier one gunships have been looked at and brought into a similar power level.

* The same goes for tier two gunships!

* People who own tier two gunships who no longer qualify for them have 24ish hours to either qualify for them or clean them out. A full reimbursement for the ship's stated value will go into effect after this period.

Also, cruisers got their point level requirement upped. Similar deal!

Bounty hount tags are now sent by the correct issuer. Maybe.

After some additions to the properties of weapons, components should again be working properly. If you notice any strange output, please send a report. Odd things might include, for instance, the number 12 where something used to say 'laser.' Or errors!

For all of you chemistry nerds, we've added STARSHIP PLAQUES for you to craft! (as well as like twenty other things)

Starship plaques are starship decorations, but they can also be bolted inside if you wish. If you're feeling ambitious, you can ETCH the plaques to personalize them.

'Average damage' (in both the AVG command and in scans) should much more accurately reflect how damaged the ship really is now.

Some ships have had their max charge rating modified. DO NOT WORRY, FOR THIS IS INTENTIONAL!

Asteroid Mining feature addition:

* Carrier drones now have a new advanced task known as 'Load Balance,' which is on by default.

* When the load balance task is activated, a drone will attempt to balance the amount of ore at each processor based on the proecessing power of each ore processor, with a slight additional tolerance.

As always, report any bugs or oddness that may occur.

Low priority deployment centers have been added to battlesuit facilities. These include a live fire testing zone and, where it makes sense, simple solo missions against Outsider enforcers.

Pilot league liaison offices (or their equivalent) have been added to every capital spaceport. Their main purpose at the moment is to contain a CADET ORIENTATION OFFICER which is exactly what it sounds like. New players will now start in this office rather than on the landing pad, and they can talk to the orientation NPC for some early help and direction.

Miscellaneous changes I forgot to announce:

Voices now get regular reports if there is anything to report.

Teslatown defense missions now spawn fun toys for you to use.

Converted a thing that may have been responsible for preventing beacon drops from happening near new sectors.

Added seatbelts to the game, but keep in mind that they are still illegal and may be difficult to find!

Fixed some outdated sector references in flight control.

Updated old command references in the newbie drone's script.

Added the "VSM" command to starships, just in case you want the visual part of the starmap without the coordinate rundown.

Starship component upgrades rearranged!

As part of the change to the new space system, we've switched component distribution to a new semi-automated system that principally takes into account local sector security to determine which components are available.

In other words:

- Many components have moved, and they're probably much more spread out now.

- Generally, the less secure the sector is, the higher quality the components are. Although, since the geography hasn't been built up as much as it eventually will be, we've massaged the availability rules a little to make sure everything is out there somewhere.

- And the best part about this for you: since it's mostly automated now, the system has gone ahead and found places for all (well, most) components up to 1000 points, which includes several previously unreleased ones!

If you find any oddities, like components you can't find anywhere anymore, or duplicated menus, or anything else that just doesn't look right, please use the REPORT command and let us know.

Forgot to mention that this system has also resulted in a few brand new component-only starship stores scattered around.

You may find that you have much fewer combat points than expected. DON'T PANIC! This is normal. Ground combat points have been seperated out into a newer and creamer category!

Time to rein things in a bit! Salvage ops are about where they should be in terms of rewards when done normally, but they're a bit too easily gamed.

Heat buildup response is now not only increased by local debris grade, but also capped by it. Pirates won't go all-out for a canister of grade 20 debris just because it's guarded by an entire army.

Similarly, maximum bounty payout is capped at a level that should not affect reasonably balanced salvage ops.

Since salvage canisters are rented, they must be returned to the alliance from which you got them. For some reason I just assumed people would tend to do this anyway!

Upper-tier salvaging equipment will now enforce its point requirements when used.

Glowing test tubes of liquid are now, by popular demand, able to be consumed. Get one today! Available at your local Bari megapod.

Removing people of their worldly posessions now involves a criminal background check and a couple of other sanity checks. Okay, maybe not the criminal one but that's under consideration.

Made the minimap slightly more useful by increasing its size somewhat. Should still be okay on smaller screens. If this causes any problems, let us know.

The minimap should now work properly with peer.

@tesla now shows tesla explorers. And people opted out of the tops listings shouldn't be able to see it anymore.

Players with 1000 aggregate points or more will not be subject to being purged for not playing.

The STATUS screen now gives some insight into how fast your engine is making you go.

In light of recent changes, certain NPCs now do less damage, in order to keep the level of lethality in check. More changes may be coming (in either way) within the next few days.

Ships should now no longer deal damage shortly after their destruction.

Fixed a bug that allowed helpful sector matching to list lots of sectors whether they're supposed to be known or not!

Organizations: Due to popular demand, added trustee demotion and member removal!

Updated the NPCs help file!

Costs for repairing a ship's hull will now include a charge for repairing broken failsafes.

Changed ship component availability to be affected by alliance relations. This will not affect point levels, but does affect where you find the components. Some may have switched locations or disappeared altogether (but just for the moment). This change will become more important soon. Don't update your upgrade books yet!

Changed quantum entanglement communication devices to where they make a noise upon receiving or sending a message.

Fraction of a message, rather.

Fixed an issue where felo being held by a person would occasionally vanish suddenly and without a trace as though they had spoken out against the Premier in Soviet Russia.

Modified Bari Spreader behaviour. Again.

Fixed a few bugs in the starship damage algorithm with respect to starship component damage hit rates.

Added VOTING REMINDERS to general options! It will remind you to vote every 12 hours. In particular, getting into the top 20 on TopMudSites generally results in a large influx of players.

Added searchable portfolios and filing cabinets for letters. The filing cabinets are provided in civilian liaison offices, and the portfolios are available at mail rooms. They have BROWSE and SEARCH commands.

A long-standing bug has finally been fixed: edible panties will now function properly through the REMOVE command. You are welcome.

So, let's try something new!

The latest version of our MOO server uses a different memory allocation library, which, aside from being much faster, gives us a set of tools to measure resource usage in the server.

However, this may have unexpected behavior. Things seem to be going swimmingly at the moment, but who knows what the future may bring!

By popular demand, workbench LIST and USE commands are now subdivided by licenses.

An insurance thing! Two things happened:

1) We had a bunch of downtime.

2) The insurance company was still charging everyone after their coverage had expired.

For these reasons, everyone should now find that the only payment they owe is the latest one. Also, debt will cease to add up once the insurance company is no longer covering you, as intended.

- Added 'resign' as an alias for 'quit' at courier companies.

- Just for good measure, removed 'quit' as an alias for '@quit,' since I'm not sure when or why that was added.

Fixed an issue with security stations.

Naval strength will now be slightly affected by conquest standing, coming into effect as the navies rotate their patrols over the next hour or so.

Battlesuit minimod purge has been completed! Hopefully this won't be necessary again.

Minimod drop rate has been reduced by rather a lot.

The Electrostatic Exchange in Teslaworld now buys and sells minimods.

BY THESE THINGS COMBINED, we can hopefully make minimods something besides trash that everyone drops in the low priority deployment area.

Also I added a PA command to liaison offices a couple days ago and forgot to say anything.

Tesla sites should no longer lose minerals due to rounding errors.

Artifact extraction is somewhat faster.

Made resource detection prettier and had it communicate the results to other people nearby.

Made some changes serverside in the hopes of improving connectivity!

Small landing/mail report bug fixed.

Objects which dispense items can now be picked up by the player who last held them.

One-use repair drones are now available at battlesuit outfitters. You can equip up to five of them and you may want to!

The issue with buying repair drones is fixed! Nobody actually spent any money on it.

The ground combat help file has been updated for the new system, unless I've forgotten anything, which is likely.

Ather Jammoa may now be hurled into trash cans.

For some reason, we have seen fit to add a Miriani help file. The purpose of this is to clear up genuine points of confusion which, as we've all seen, tend to come up rather frequently here.

Added activity breakdown to Industrial Whip terminals.

Because the beginning description choices are rather extensive and may have been a newbie retention issue, going through the description choices is now OPTIONAL for cadets. However, they will be required to complete this process before submitting a profile.

The standings on the Industrial Whip terminal will now show the gap between their own alliance and first place.

RUNDOWN should now show the same sector title/area/security/etc. information that STARMAP does.

Civilian liaisons!

I feel a little crazy for doing this, but it actually came out sort of useful.

You now receive paperwork! An aide will drop a report on your desk every few hours, several times a day. This report will contain relevant stuff about your job. You may STAMP it to get rid of it and never see it again.

Alternatively, if it seems important, you may use the shiny new photocopier on your desk to keep a copy for yourself before you stamp it! This copy of the report will be a mailable letter.

(As an aside, mailable letters are now copyable too.)

Unfortunately, I still couldn't think of anything relevant that Voices could possibly receive in a report. If you have any ideas, post them in the liaison topic in OOC/MTTNS.

Updated the Coalition and Accord NPCs help file.

Fixed a bug where navy ships could become stuck for ever and ever, tending to result in large navies of small ships.

Added some enhancements to belt station shift orders. Also fixed a bug where a station left completely idle would not rest the employees.

@searchhelp will now show you which line matched your search at the end of the help file.

Changed a few things with how red alerts work, mostly to clean up 11 year code and make it strain the server less.

As always, report any weirdness.

Made a help file for BOOKS! This is something I've been meaning to do for a good year or so.

Airfort medical centers now use synthesis supplies based on the severity of the injury, as opposed to the flat rate previously used.

WOO ICY QUIZ

FIXED ICY QUIZ DATE PROBLEM WITH QUESTION 3 WOO

Something that was supposed to be implemented in ship conversion/hybridization stores but wasn't is now implemented.

A small change to garages: Garages now transport to more than just the 'Alpha' dock of a station.

Fixed a bug in the League Prime Defense Cruiser.

You can now no longer purchase a limited production ship shortly after losing one.

More nest changes.

- Allowed enemies to use some abilities previously only available to players.

- Added new enemy types for tougher nests.

- Increased difficulty of later bosses.

Assist reasons must now contain at least five words. This change has been done due to frequent abuse of the assist system by supplying invalid reasons. Happy assisting, everyone!

Attention miners: I grew tired of seeing people abusing the everliving fuck out of mining sites by starting and aborting 50 of them to get THE VERY BEST AMOUNT OF METALS. Doing this all the time without ever reporting it is basically classic policy 5, but rather than get all uptight about it, it will just no longer have the desired effect. Try it for yourself. Good luck!

Alliances with poor relations are now allowed to fulfill each other's special trade requests.

The sanctuary's patented Felo Mass Fredom Suction Device Mo-Thing now also extracts felo nests!

A proper error message is now given when using the talk command on players.

Purged the room o' unclaimed ships. There will be no more (or at least fewer) announced ship purges --- deleted player ships should now automatically get moved to the Room o' Unclaimed Ships.

Experiment time!

We're going to try something a bit different for "capped" activities, now that the Conquest period has been available as an interval of time for quite a while. That's right, instead of a daily cap, we'll have a Conquest period cap.

- Beacon drops had a daily limit of two. You can now do eight per Conquest period.

- Low priority ground missions were also two per day, now eight per period.

- RATS nests were one per day, now four per period.

I haven't done asteroid mining yet because it's different for some reason, but I probably will soon.

The reasoning for this:

- Greater flexibility. If you've got a good group for beacons or nests and everybody wants to just keep going, go for it, instead of trying to reassemble daily.

- A daily limit creates a sort of use-it-or-lose-it situation that can create frustration, which is relaxed with a longer period of time.

The downside of this is that it's no longer assured that people will be looking to do these activities daily; but then, it really wasn't anyway. But if it turns out that this makes finding a group even harder, then it'll be easy to change back.

The INFO command will now show how many activities you've done this Conquest period out of the total you're allowed.

Fixed that piercing gender thing that a thousand people reported!

Heavy lasers have been modified so as to hopefully make their usage more attractive.

Low-value trade goods are now worth more points than high-value trade goods.

Implemented the changelog system and ported some old announcements over to the new changelog system. A player command for viewing recent changes will be coming soon.

Fixed an issue in the changelog announcement system preventing it from actually working.

Changed a few things with respect to how Conquest results are tallied.

You can now use @conquest-latest to check the status for the current Conquest period.

@conquest-latest removed from general player usage.

A number of basic system upgrades have finally happened! There's no effective difference, but if you notice anything weird happening when flying around please report it.

You may now conceal all but one worn container (that is, bags and backpacks and such).

Your inventory is now spread out over multiple lines instead of just one. Furthermore, concealed items are now also listed. Also, looking may cause everything to explode. Nudity is suggested for your safety until the tracebacks subside.

Do you like shouting 'Are you there?' to the world? I'm sad to say that this practice is no longer necessary and you may need to broaden your horizons. You can now type '@who ' to see if someone you like is online and in communicator range.

Beverage dispensers and their kin now work when on a table.

Soldier felo genetics are now gradually lost through a docile lifestyle.

Renters of organization ships are no longer required to have the destruction fee on hand in order to rent a ship. However, the fee will be deducted regardless, even if it puts you into negative credits. This may be handled better in the future, but it will do for now!

Added a list of common cliches to be avoided to HELP BASIC PROFILE.

Yell should now be passed through the text filter.

Fixed an issue with enemy loot dropping!

By popular demand, because all games of a similar genre must apparently be exactly the same, I have added... not a course command, but an ETA command. This is actually an alias for the existing SPEED command.

Added the Mentor system, which is detailed under ANNOUNCEMENTS because ANNOUNCEMENTS ARE IMPORTANT and so is this.

Realized OUT OF NOWHERE that the cadet test buoy quest didn't survive the conversion. Now fixed!

Turns out I fixed the cadet test buoys a little TOO well. But now they are prevented from spawning, well, absolutely everywhere.

Fixed another outdated sector reference in the orientation officer's dialogue.

Fixed an issue where players were able to spend more credits than they had on battlesuit components.

Made sure that RATS would spawn for new players that have accepted the RATS core quest.

Fixed an issue where RATS weren't spawning in logical places due to the system relying on pre-conversion data.

So, it turns out that there was something terribly wrong with felo aging.

THE BAD:

* All super old felo died en masse.

THE GOOD:

* You'll have advance warning in the future.

The combat energy grid and battery changes have been implemented. Comments, suggestions, and so on should be posted to OOC/Messages to the Staff or REPORTed.

Everyone who participated in the event last week got a little point bump.

Added a status tag legend to @who/@users to explain all of those funky [c]s and [a]s beside people's names. You can turn it off with GEN-O.

Added ace and rogue perks and penalties, respectively.

Salvage ops are getting closer to finalized, including their full Conquest effect.

Several potential exploits have been fixed, mostly related to avoiding pirate attacks.

Salvage ops are now limited to six per Conquest, which should be roughly the same number of hours allotted for decoy beacon drops and RATS nests. Ops you've completed before now won't count against this limit.

We made a small change to how RATS core rewards are handled. You shouldn't see any visible change on your end, but report any oddities nonetheless.

The ship's computer is now more verbose about something not happening when you want it to.

Take its words to heart, ignoring its advice has terrible consequences.

Players should no longer be able to transmit on metafrequencies whilst out of communications range.

Fixed an issue that was probably preventing all limited production ships from becoming available since the conquest tally earlier today.

The bug with battlesuits not transferring to the spaceport under certain circumstances has been found and fixed. Everyone's battlesuits, if they were on an airfort, have been returned to their capital planet.

Going to try giving battlesuits a limited ability to slowly repair automatically out of combat. Report any issues!

Damage warnings should now properly notify you of the maximum threshold you've exceeded rather than the minimum. For instance, going from 8% to 25% damage will tell you you've exceeded 20%, rather than saying you've only exceeded 10%.

The pulse ability has been reworked to stun for the enemy for less time, but it now includes an interrupt effect.

Fixed a couple of issues in the RATS nest mapbuilder.

- It turns out an entire section 4-6 rooms in length was missing from the layout entirely!

- Enemies would occasionally double up when not intended in the final part of the nest.

Fixed an issue with conquest results not properly tallying (due to an error in clearing the datamine data)

Added an alias of GROUP to the HOLD command, with different messages, for those not secure with their sexuality.

Conquest gain and beacon drops: The conquest gain will no longer be even among all participants. The ship's owner (and his or her alliance) will achieve additional conquest gain based on the size of the crew.

Tagging for transporting contraband now checks both the ship's registered alliance and the control of the sector into account.

Getting caught for smuggling contraband now incurs an appropriate conquest loss.

Added some functionality to orgs that used to exist in SC Classic's company system, plus some other things!

- Added an ORG command to check org info and the status of pending actions from anywhere in communication range.

- Added notification of pending org actions to the login report.

- Orgs can now set an official stated purpose and a slogan.

- Orgs can toggle public status to determine whether non-members can list them and see (non-sensitive) information about them.

- Orgs can also toggle recruitment status. When activated, other players are able to apply to your organization.

- Added a SEARCH command to org rooms to allow players in an org to list other orgs. For orgless players, the MENU command also does this.

It's awkward to test org things as a host, so out of sheer laziness I did not do so. So have fun with that!

Functionality will be added to how orgs handle starship assets in the very near future as well.

As promised!

- Starships belonging to your org should now count as 'yours' for the most part, except that you must still be a trustee to upgrade its components.

- You can transfer an existing starship to your org. You must be a trustee, you must be holding the title, and both you and the org must fulfill the ship's point requirements.

- Trustees can generate a key for any org-owned ship through the org room menu at any time.

The DOCK/UNDOCK commands on landing pads should now grant permission to keyholders in addition to owners.

Removed the bonus to combat energy grid added to larger ships as a test run. We'd like feedback on this change on OOC/MTTS or the MTTS channel.

Combat score calculation has been changed slightly!

There's now 'Unauthorized' and 'Authorized' combat points. For upgrading, @tops, and so on, only authorized points will count. However, as your cap raises, the authorized points will gradually raise to your unauthorized point level.

In a similar vein to unauthorized combat points, there are now unauthorized overall points. In most cases, you'll never get them, but in a handful of cases, such as the point gain bug a few days ago, or if your cap somehow fluctuates and you find yourself above your cap, you'll only have the points counted up to your cap. They're not gone, but they won't count until your cap increases to that point.

Additionally, you can check your unauthorized points at any reputable point center near you.

After observing the state of the organization system since it was implemented, we've decided that the government shall match any point contribution made to an organization. In other words, whatever points you contribute will be doubled when added to the organization's totals. Also, all organization points have seen a one-time doubling this morning. Hopefully this will make it more practical to attain worthwhile ships for your organization.

It will require some testing, but I may possibly have made it so that you can use a battlesuit outfitter's SWITCH command as long as your active battlesuit is at ANY spaceport.

Added Manual Starship Control help file.

Made nutrigel dispensers boltable!

Server changes SQ-0.1.14b2 -> SQ-0.2.2

The technical:

* Optimized the parser slightly. The verdict's still out on how much this will help, but it can't hurt.

* Changed the random number engine to one that's about 5% more efficient while producing higher quality random numbers.

* Vastly improved suspend accuracy.

* New built-in functions for a variety of tasks.

The non-technical version of the above:

* Faster code! Always a good thing!

* More random random numbers. This means that a ship probably won't ding your hull five times in a row. However, it's still possible. The old RNG tended to have long strings of the same number and this one tends to be, well, ~~~random~~~!

* Ships will probably move significantly faster in general.

* Shinies for hosts (and by extension (through the magic of trickle-down economics), players!)!

Textmapping is now functional in battlesuits.

A possible source of the ftl lag has been fixed.

Tied salvage op payout to an internal value which is tracked for each character known as "target maximum credits per hour." For most of you, this probably means little or no change. However, it will prevent, for example, cadets who are one day old from collecting paychecks of 150 million.

Added organization station territories for the Mutuality and EAOS.

Organizations in alliances designed to be smaller will enjoy halved active member requirements for station upgrades.

A couple mining interface changes!

- Added a DISPLAY command to toggle whether or not the map is displayed in the BUILD interface.

- The ENTER command now accepts a set of coordinates to appear at within your site. For instance, 'ENTER 10 0' will place you at coordinates (10, 0) within your site.

Crafting stores: If you're holding your workbench, the menu will no longer display toolsets already installed.

Some assorted robot bugs are solved. Exciting service robot options will be coming soon!

The destruction (or forced launch) of a battlesuit will now inflict just a touch of conquest loss depending on the tier of the battlesuit.

Improved matching in certain instances to better detect when you're trying to use an object's exact name.

We've completed a change to how starship component information is stored. Please report any oddities.

The interalliance diplomatic status formerly known as "peace treaty" will now be known as "cease fire" for greater clarity, representing (as it tends to actually work) a suspended state of war. The hierarchy of diplomatic relations, then, is Alliance > Non-aggression Pact > No Relations > Cease Fire > War.

To clarify, grouping commands now work while in a battlesuit, and that's how you form Teslatown parties. However, group behavior will cease as usual once on a mission.

CASH and POINTS now show Tesla stuff!

WEAPONS should now properly show your equipped Tesla modules.

Increased the point value of Teslabucks.

The output of the Teslabuck exchange command is now clarified.

Mining operations will now be able to contact Teslatown from the surface.

Small mining operations should now be potentially more valuable, although not as valuable as mining in a group!

Fixed an issue with Tesla tunnels determining their depth, which should fix boss placement.

Small sites may now contain some weak enemies.

Added a new drill at 50 points!

Teslaworld site values now scale a bit more appropriately at lower levels.

Teslabucks converted into points now provide more ground combat credit. This is retroactive.

Slightly reduced the effect hull damage has on the 'average damage' rating in scan and the avg command.

Your point display will now indicate vaguely if you are at or near your cap for each category. If you have a command point indicator, don't pay much attention to it.

Added weekly maintenance shutdowns. Should happen around midnight pacific time on Sundays, which is fairly off-peak for everyone!

Fixed an issue with battlesuit refurbishment from the store.

Added a Mud List Voting help file to consolidate mud listing and voting information.

Added to the cadet orientation officer dialogue, allowing them to lead new players straight to the ship store or battlesuit outfitter. Correspondingly, added orientation assistants in these places to lead new players back to the office.

Also had the cadet orientation officer clarify that outfitting a battlesuit requires a crapload of money for a newbie.

Space markets expanded!

It's now much easier to sell copyable media, which includes books, film discs, and photos. New facilities have appeared on all space markets which allow you to sell these things indefinitely for as long as people wish to buy them.

- For the buyer, these work like any other store. Type MENU and then BUY #.

- For the seller, first hold the item you wish to sell in your hand, then type SELL. The item will be placed on the market, ready to distribute copies forever. If it's a new version of the same title, the listing will be updated automatically. After some items have sold, type COLLECT to have the profits transferred to you.

Fixed a bug with salvage op defender payout. Many apologies!

Fixed a reference to 'overall' points in ship stores to correctly read 'industry.'

Felo are now sensitive to overcrowding. More than your ship's limit is not a good idea!

Non-pilots have been given a credit cap.

NEW FEATURE FILLED WITH NEW: Now at any intersector fund center you can view the exchange rate between your alliance and other alliances in a handy table, including the inverse rate! Enjoy.

By suddenly extraordinarily popular demand, menus on organization stations have CLEAR and DELETE commands.

SDC terminals will no longer generate detailed reports about activity in uncharted sectors. This was an unintentional change that happened with a recent change to the claimed status of uncharted sectors.

Thanks for playing the 'OH GOD WHAT WILL THAT SHIP BE CALLED NEXT' game. Ship renamers should now work properly!

Just realized that the thing which updates the information that the KNOWLEDGE command spits out at you has not been running for a depressingly large length of time. This has been updated and should now continue to update itself daily as intended.

Tesla: Added a restriction against moving while extracting resources.

Policy!

- Rewrote Policy 1 to be an overview of key rules and things that new players seem to be most concerned about.

- Performed some minor edits to a few other policies; rewording and clarifications, no new rule changes.

- Made the policies viewable on the website at http://moo.squidsoft.net:7779/policy

The Teslatown equipment shop now allows for modules to be uninstalled and stored for later use via the DEPOSIT command.

Added two new Teslatown quests at 100 Teslapoints.

In the spirit of the "kitten" thing, we've added more conditional indicators in felo names. Also did a SECRET SURPRISE CHANGE.

Felo don't go in sacks. Fixed.

Sleeping felo will no longer sleep-munch on bari.

Felo now do cute things in their sleep. Yay!

Ships owned by cadets will magically no longer take damage from bari mold, nor will they grow bari warriors or queens.

To close a potential loophole, felo will no longer draw sustenance from attacking bari on cadet ships.

Felo nests will now show whether anything is growing in them when you look at them.

Good news! An industrious entrepeneur spotted a new market, and promptly began churning out all new LOW-GRADE DRY FELO CHOW! Lacking convenient nutrigel dispensers? Try all new LOW-GRADE DRY FELO CHOW today! (Warning: Not guaranteed to not reduce the lifespan of your pet.)

Changed how the damage meter in battlesuits looked, and additionally added a similar ENERGY meter!

Attention players!

The battlesuits you know and love have changed!

Namely...

* AEU suits can take a bit more of a beating on average now, but have less energy on average.

* EAOS suits can take a lot more of a beating.

* Mutuality suits have more energy.

* Advanced suits have a bit more energy.

We're still looking at the balance of battlesuits, so if anything seems weird or unbalanced, fire off a report or two.

Added a half-tier battlesuit for every alliance at 125 points. The suit at 125 points serves mainly as a gap-filler to allow suits to more naturally get into their 'niche,' as opposed to the larger upgrades later on.

Added the ability to view the changelog from the Star Conquest web portal at http://squidsoft.net:7779/changelog/recent

Added a count to the changelog page on the web portal, so you see something like "Minor Changes (38)".

Added CONQUEST OF THE STARS results to the Star Conquest Web Portal, at http://squidsoft.net:7779/conquest

Added the 'Most Pilots Awake' tidbit to the bottom of the Active Pilots listing on the Star Conquest Web Portal, at http://squidsoft.net:7779/who

Updated Alliance Information Assistants (and thus, the alliance report on the web portal) for the new space system.

Fixed an issue where certain sectors would have nonsense like (Unclaimed [originally Unclaimed]) on the starmap

Added some datamining stuff to battlesuits.

Reduced the evasiveness of AEU and EAOS suits, since they can now take more of a beating on average.

Organizations with a retired founder will now be taken over automatically by the trustee who has contributed the most.

Bolting should now work properly in all org station rooms.

* Fixed a few minor bugs in the NPC spawner.

* Added support for aftermarket combat roles to affect player ship combat rating, similar to how NPC ship combat ratings are affected by nonstandard combat roles.

Fixed an issue with the interdictor launcher recipe, because it made normal temp structure launchers. Whoops!

Interdictor launchers now go down with the ship. PLAYER ECONOMY.

Rolled back the previous 25% damage reduction. If combat is far too lethal now with the failsafe change in hand we can try to find a middle ground.

You may now use vector locking with alternate movement controls!

Our trained team of escape pod technicians have been soundly whipped.

The COMMANDS command now has a shitload of hyphens all up in its business. For the children. Or screenreaders, whatever.

Ground combat balance changes!

* Three abilities in "offensive nanites" buffed slightly.

* Everything in defensive nanites is now better! Everything!

Due to popular demand, org unity has changed!

Now, not only the number of different alliances count, but the number of people from the alliance counts. This means that one or two people from an oddball friendly alliance won't hurt QUITE as badly as having five or six, however it quickly reaches the old unity values as you add in more members. This affects all relations, but it has a much, much more minor effect on more hostile standings.

Fans of filling things with other things may find that it works better in probably imperceptible ways. Also, a similarly invisible bug with bari pod launches has been fixed.

Flightbags no longer accept things that aren't spacesuits, suit jets, or navaids.

A few little changes to ground combat, mostly to help ensure grouping up is a good thing to do.

- Abilities will no longer fire if your target has gone under cover since you began preparing.

- An interrupted ability now inflicts a token amount of roundtime.

- Length of cooldown of a full resupply from the airfort has been increased.

Fixed an issue wherein players could cheat various enemy-spawning quests. Probably.

NPC transport-class ships should now properly have a proper starmap symbol.

Felo chow has been fortified with paper for enhanced informative qualities.

Fixed an issue wherein battlesuits that were switched from would be sent on a magical journey to a faraway land from whence there was no return.

Naval elimination should now work properly.

Fixed a bug where navies would be eliminated even if there was no naval presence in a sector for that alliance normally. Mostly a clutter/performance fix than anything else.

Fixed a major exploit with xenology containers allowing players to gain exploration points at a rate far above and beyond intended.

Added Resistance Headquarters II to the locate command for keychains.

Fixed an issue with LRLs hitting hull very slightly more often than designed

Fixed an issue with Oblivion launchers, guided missile/rocket launchers, and accuratized minicannons not applying their hull lockon chance appropriately.

Modernized AutoVector Navigation Units. You no longer buy a boltable part, but rather you get a ship upgraded at a ship upgrade store. Uninstalled autovector units will still remain installable, but will install themselves similar to the new system. You will not get the autovector unit back if the ship is destroyed or sold, but it is now factored into the vessel's value for insurance, bragging, and other purposed.

Fixed a minor issue with the point level requirement of reactionless spacesuit jets and navaids.

Changed how ship key location works whilst out of comms. Ships in the Room o' Unclaimed Ships will still appear, but any other ship will not.

Reduced the life expectancy of starship FTL drive tracers somewhat.

Subscribing to a new newsfeed is no longer possible whilst out of comms.

Mule transports are now available! This is the ship required to transport an aerial fortress.

Tweaked the launch restrictions for certain vessels, in essence making the criteria for 'warship' a bit more widespread, in order to reduce abuse of starships against the spirit of policy 6.

Hit crediting in salvage ops and heat waves is now roughly eight hundred times faster. Or it may not work. We'll figure out which shortly.

Communicators have gotten a behind the scenes rework. If anything seems weird about them, please feel free to report it!

Kissing is now more exciting than ever! For fans of kissing, also try biting - it's just like kissing, but there is a winner.

Moved all non-Mutuality battlesuits away from Helios, due to the problem earlier.

Beacons now have sanitation drones of some sort wandering about. Because we sure do love being sanitary.

Beacon housings, rather.

Xenology containers have been altered. Pray I do not alter them again.

Men! Tired of daily tedious management of your beard when you don't even want one? Sick of someone suddenly reminding you that you even have a beard once it's down to your ankles? New Beard-B-Gone(tm) can help! Now sold at all personal care shops.

Fixed a bug where pirates might sometimes pursue salvage op participants to the very ends of the universe.

Salvage op payout has increased by a good order of magnitude or so since it was first implemented. It shouldn't be as good as mining or anything, but it should be worthwhile! It will continue to be tweaked.

You should now be able to communicate with your fellow salvage op participants via the OP command.

Allowed mentored newbies to leave the mentor channel at will. Don't worry, mentors; nobody's actually asked for this yet, but it seems like a good idea.

Edited the salvage and transfer code in preparation for a new thing. Please report any issues you might notice.

Added a housekeeping task to despawn RATS that should've despawned already but for some reason did not.

Belt management stations now have the option of automatically filling in their own shifts without ridiculous nested menus. Note that your employees will be owed a greater salary if they are managing themselves, and they will also not arrange their shifts quite as efficiently as you can yourself.

Added gamma security sectors to EXACTLY ONE SECTOR CLUSTER. This will see some fleshing out and further expansion in the next few days.

Upgrade shops (like the Secred Underground Resistance Supply shop) and normal stores (like most stores in the game) should now respond properly to the POINTS command.

Storebought items should no longer ever be locked and ending up stuck in your backpack forever or whatever.

Mail, courier, and passenger deliveries will no longer be assigned for locked-down spaceports.

The ISNN holovid channel will now always start by playing the most recent update, then the next most recent update, and so on in order up to two weeks back.

Added the Starship Basics help file to distill the most common ship commands into a simpler reference.

Asteroids no longer get stuck when attempting to haul them to certain places! Now get out there and ride those rocks. Yeee-haw!

Fixed an issue with the new Teslatown mission where enemies would remain inactive.

Empty ships in Alpha-1 sectors will now be rescued by friendly tugboats.

Rented ships now come with two complementary beacons.

Target tracking arrays with a longer range are now useful! They will report the position of the target to the pilot as long as it is anywhere within the tracking array's maximum range.

By popular demand, the 'hands' command now exists. It will tell you what is in your hands with no extra fuss. Use it wisely.

Charge boosters are now slightly more charge boosting than before.

The Ring Nebula no longer encompasses virtually all of uncharted space (newspace conversion issue).

Slightly changed the engineering quest. Shouldn't change much. It's mostly for FACTIONS FACTIONS FACTIONS FACTIONS FACTIONS FACTIONS FACTIONS. (Factions)

Updated current people with the completed engineering quest for FACTIONS FACTIONS FACTIONS FACTIONS FACTIONS FACTIONS.

For further landing pad-related convenience, a spaceport will now provide ships with a full recharge upon boarding, without the need to transport it back and forth.

After careful consideration, we've reduced the cost of AEU's Heavy Defense Vessel.

Three lines have become one. Rejoice and revel in the Blending!

State of the Corps reports will no longer comment on Conquest wins that never happened.

The end-of-Conquest announcement will now properly state when your alliance has achieved one performance goal but not both.

Owners of insurance accounts which start the Conquest period already paid in full will not receive a billing notice.

Changed a bit of silliness in the bounty code.

Made nysteel thread more sane in material cost, since after doing some number crunching, certain items would take thousands upon thousands of materials to make.

Also, released two new toolsets, around the 250-300 industry point range, as well as some new blueprints. Enjoy.

Pilot lounges should now have newsfeeds.

Felo lovers may now gaze towards the future with a mixture of joy and terror!

A rework of their innermost and most sacred logic has been completed. Their main logic now runs in one fourth to one fifth of the time it used to, hugely lightening their burden on the rest of the game and allowing for more complex behaviour. We're going to let them run like this for a couple of days to see if any weird bugs have been introduced while the old weird bugs were being ironed out. Please report any oddities!

Maps and minimaps can now be coloured with COLOUR-O.

Changes out of nowhere!

Idle-booting is now abolished. Idle the night away. Never disconnect at all. Who cares!

WHO output has been altered slightly. Most relevant is that it will not readily report names or numbers of idle players, although a total number of players will be available at the bottom. I basically recoded this completely, so report any oddities!

Fixed a few WHO display issues.

Delivered a new advancement in the art of idling: the DOZE command. Use it when you expect to idle for some time to disappear off the who list instantly. Usable only every so often to forestall abuse.

New general options:

Disable Peak Statistics: Will not show peak numbers in WHO output.

Single Line Per Player: Will display WHO as one player to a line instead of columnized and sometimes truncated.

Added a SCREENREADER command which does not do anything special except set several options which are useful. Don't use it unless you want to wipe out your custom options.

Slight change to exploration:

* Local artifacts can now be found for a short time out of comms, to help bridge the gap between alien artifacts out of comms and local artifacts much closer to home.

That one salvage op bug may be fixed. You know the one.

The salvage grapple has been altered. Pray I do not alter it again.

Some changes to ground combat!

- TRAP SPRUNG. Now that nobody has high tier suits belonging to other alliances, their point requirements have changed. Surprise! It's not too harsh, but it's no longer on a linear scale. Point requirements for suits of your own alliance are unchanged. (If anybody REALLY wants to be grandfathered in for the suits they had access to already, I suppose I can do that, although I'd rather not!) The idea, as with advanced suits, is for something to work toward at higher point levels.

- Speaking of advanced suits, I reevaluated the abilities of one certain advanced battlesuit, taking into account the point levels at which they are actually acquired, and adjusting accordingly. It's quite a versatile suit, particularly at higher levels.

- I have decided it fits better thematically if RATS nests are less overwhelmingly dense, particularly in deep space. This should not affect the time it takes to find a nest, but you're consistently having a hard time with it, report it.

Empty salvage containers will no longer be created.

Do you end up saying things on channels that were meant for frequencies? Try the new 'metaf' command! No more embarrassing moments when you misspell an alias.

Insurance for organization-owned ships should now work properly. All manual payments will be taken from the org's cash fund, but automatic payments will be taken each cycle from the insurance fund.

Organization members can now launch any org ship regardless of their alliance, as long as they meet the point requirements.

Organizations can now purchase an upgrade that allows them to rent ships to their members for a fee. Renting a ship provides a temporary key and halves the point requirements required to launch it for that member only.

Held felo are no longer immune to hostile environments.

Large ships get plenty of advantages, but small ships have few. This has now changed!

Small ship classes (fighters, flitters, scouts, corvettes, and destroyers) now enjoy varying levels of bonuses when fighting other small ships. Specifically, they will do increased damage to small ships and enjoy a reduced hull hit chance against small ships.

We are hoping that this will encourage a useful, specialized role for small ships in invasions and beacons, and encourage experienced pilots to use the right tool for the job.

Limited growth of felo within airforts and apartments, similar to how it is limited in ships. Reason: holy fucking shit people.

In order to close a potential loophole related to Policy 6, ships whose owners have not been active for over a month will no longer be granted launch clearance by alliance spaceports.

Fixed an issue with A CERTAIN KIND of felo's description.

Due to a recent rash of wrecks involving drunk pilots in battlesuits, Mothers Against Drunken Ground Missioning have pushed through legislation involving the testing of all pilots blood alcohol when beginning a mission.

We have ignored this, however, and encourage you to careen drunkenly to your doom.

Also a bug in that behavior has been fixed.

All right, we'll bring something back into Conquest: Performance goals!

This doesn't really change much. As before, you're not in competition with the other alliances, and as before, what other alliances do has no bearing on how successful your alliance is. But, should an alliance choose to, they can get back some of those point and insurance level bonuses they used to enjoy. There are two levels of performance goals, based on how alliances typically perform.

Again, this is not about competition. If everyone works, then everyone's a winner! Alliance A meeting their goals has nothing to do with whether or not Alliance B does.

Like the original change, this is something that can be changed back with a flip of a switch, so we'll keep an eye on it. The purpose is to create another motivator without turning the game into a chore. Also, the previous full benefit of Conquest will still only show up in wartime.

Fixed an issue preventing ships from ever leaving certain garages, which was deemed to have an "above average" level of effect on pilot activity.

Nonpilots can no longer have the pilot title.

Your hair and beard(s) will no longer grow while dozing.

THINK should now be available everywhere!

Server changes SQ-0.2.2 -> SQ-0.2.3

* Fixed two major crash bugs.

* Random number generation is about seven times more efficient.

The option to show only damaged components while starship engineering is now available under GENERAL-OPTIONS.

Airforts are now destroyed with the ship they are inside.

A long-standing bug allowing ships without food to generate infinite felo has been fixed. If you don't want to lose them, feed them! Also, landing pads now have an extra descriptor describing their infestation state if they are.

Battlesuit refurbishments (from battlesuit stores) now also fully repair your battlesuits. And you can get them if your battlesuit is merely damaged, instead of only when they're completely destroyed.

A few mining changes!

- Carrier drones will no longer attempt to load balance very small amounts of ore.

- You will be informed when all ore has been processed, similar to how you are informed when all ore has been mined.

- Poachers will no longer appear once the site has reached this "finished" state, since this was exploitable for greater profit. I'm afraid to look into how many people might've been doing this.

Adding in LANGUAGES! You can speak different languages now! Most people probably only speak Esperanto so this is kind of a moot addition! WOO

Speaking in battlesuits should use the language system properly now.

Gunning in multiple WRs should no longer be possible.

The COMMANDS command now handily divides commands into commands unique to that object and commands common to other objects of its type. Commands commands commands.

Added a new blueprint to the plastics license.

Until we get a new help file up for Teslaworld, you can read OLDHELP TESLA for mostly current information.

At long last, wrist and ankle restraints should be functional, with the RESTRAIN and UNRESTRAIN commands. They must be worn for this command to work. Accompanying this, you can now CLOTHE [person] IN [piece of clothing]. Being restrained limits your movements and allows people to freely do things to you that would usually require your permission. Use it with someone you're comfortable with! Thanks to everyone who flooded us with reports suggesting this!

Fixed a bug that would have conquest participants who hindered their alliance's conquest (through ship loss, et cetera) actually gain standing for the 'top performers' list at the end of the conquest period.

Fixed an issue that prevented the upgrade of expanded flitters

Changed how conquest calculations were done slightly. We'll continue looking at it over the next few days.

Registering a trade ship should once again be possible in ship registries. Additionally, renaming a ship has been added to the ship registry menus (though this was already possible through the RENAME command there)

Fixed a minor display bug in bounty tags.

Conquest: Fixed an issue that prevented ship loss from registering. Also changed the effect of ship size so that the loss of smaller ships has far less of an impact.

The systems panel in engineering is now coloured with the starship status meter color option. Additionally, cleaned up some 11 year old code.

Asteroid haulers can no longer dock in ships, and light carriers only fit inside significantly larger ships.

On further reflection, asteroid haulers now fit into a narrower spectrum of ship docking bays, as opposed to eliminating the ability completely.

You can now purchase battlesuits belonging to alliances with whom you have good relations, at a higher point level and greater cost. This doesn't apply to very many people currently, but it's something to keep in mind!

Mining upgrades have been spread out to 10 levels each and tweaked for better progression and balance.

A good first live run of the new ground combat system! We're going to do it again tomorrow evening. In the meantime, here are changes I've made after observing your runs tonight:

- Fixed (and occasionally caused) numerous issues while the system was live, which have probably been noticed already.

- Fixed a minor bug where suits not of your own alliance would be incorrectly named.

- Increased the points reward for the RATS nest mission.

- Fixed some issues with messages for abilities.

- Gave some weapons a slightly greater maximum ammunition.

- Balance change: Healing will now build more enmity. This will make flares and enmity management more important.

- Balance change: Enemy weapons beyond the first tier are more effective.

Also, a section about how to refurbish a 'destroyed' battlesuit is now in the ground combat help file.

INFO should now display battlesuit locations correctly with the new system.

Being ejected into space from the docks now ejects you into the right bit of vacuum. Rejoice!

Added a THEME help file, because new players keep looking for it to no effect.

Fixed a bug that cropped up with ground mission goal objects.

You can now use commas when giving credits to others. Hooray!

Fixed an issue with the POINTS command not entirely reflecting a character's special points. Woo.

Replaced the recent events webpage with a listing of ISNN broadcasts, since it's basically the same information, except only one of them was ever updated! http://squidsoft.net:7779/events/recent

Changed currency conversion via ATMs to use fewer menus and hopefully be more intuitive. Report any issues!

Exploding ships will now spew the contents of their storage holds around haphazardly.

Fixed an issue with limited production starships.

Organizations are now required to remain qualified to own their space stations and certain upgrades.

A small change to the space markets, possibly in a long string of changes to the space market: The item listing within categories is now sorted alphabetically, to help you find the best deals.

Space markets now respond to the use of @linelen

Certain ships were a bit wonky with cargo holds, so you may have gained EXACTLY ONE CARGO UNIT. Enjoy.

Chemistry's getting a bit more love as some more recipes have changed slightly, and some new recipes have been added. More recipes for the chemistry toolset are on the way in the near future.

Tepid news, everyone! The rift drive's gotten a bit of a behind the scenes rework. It's now much more efficient and the game should feel a lot smoother when there's more than a couple of people using it. This comes with the slight cost of maybe possibly making a mistake and making it possible for rift users to be lost in a neverending spiral of madness, unable to return to regular space. If you can distinguish this descent from your regular day-to-day life, good news! Assist and we'll sort you out.

Fixed a bug in the rift drive system that would make you and your ship to be lost in a neverending spiral of madness.

Battlesuit refurbishment devices now repair battlesuits instead of destroying them.

You may now use the commands TURN BOOK TO NEXT and TURN BOOK TO PREVIOUS for greater ease in achieving literacy. LEARN MORE ABOUT BOOKS AT YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY.

Did this a while back but forgot to mention it: Crafted temp drives (all of them) are now BETTER THAN BOUGHT TEMP DRIVES!

Crafted temp drives now show how many more jumps they can withstand!

Fixed an issue with NPC AI.

Added alternate manual control scheme for people without numpads!

The alternate keys are:

Q W E

A S D

Z X C

Q = northwest

W = north

E = northeast

A = west

S = no movement

D = east

Z = southwest

X = south

C = southeast

Like the numpad, the keys are laid out according to how your ship will move when you press them.

In addition:

R = up

F = down

You can toggle this on by typing OPTIONS, choosing the GENERAL category, and then picking the "Use Alternate Manual Control" option. Then, when you're in a ship on manual control, the above keys will work. If the ship isn't on manual control, any of the above keys which are also commands (like the compass directions) will work as before.

Sorted a few things in the miscellaneous help category that deserved real categories.

Pilots beware!

You can no longer dock or land right after getting into combat!

AI ships will now be smarter about when and what to repair.

There's now a new general option! Now if you're sure you know your pants go on your legs, you can turn that bit of text off for a more minimalist inventory.

Addressed a few ground combat issues.

- Added the ability to refurbish and reload battlesuits to the battlesuit outfitter menu.

- Low priority missions can now be resumed if you return to the deployment room within a few minutes of leaving it.

- Fixed an issue where newly bought battlesuits would not be placed into spaceport storage correctly.

- Fixed an issue where ammo capacity minimods did absolutely nothing.

- You should now never see yourself referred to in the third person while in a battlesuit.

- Battlesuits should now hear saytos.

Clothing in a player's description is now sorted from top to bottom.

For your enjoyment, pilot lounges (including Brian's) will now spam you with flavor text.

Containers (such as bags, backpacks, closets, dressers, etc.) and surfaces (tables and bars) can now categorize their contents and display them in lists that should be easier for humans to manage.

These lists will also display the proper aliases for referring to the objects inside.

You can access this functionality at any time by typing VIEW [container].

There is also a new general option to make this the default behavior when you look at a container.

Making some internal changes to the way ship destruction is handled. This is probably an excellent setup for another huge disaster, so please report any issues.

An IC explanation for the conquest system has been added to HELP CONQUEST, for those wondering how it applies in character.

Starship bounty fixes/changes: Hits against an enemy starship now count equally for everyone crewing aboard the attacking ship. Except for the killing shot, which is still special! Also bounty payouts have been increased across the board.

Debris changes: Debris is now worth a bit more. Hooray!

- Advanced engineering components will now reveal their effects and point requirements when you textually gaze upon them (that is, use the look command).

- Using advanced techniques in combat should now grant the engineer a fairer portion of the bounty, though this may need to be adjusted more.

Edited the pre-login screen to update the year and to better reflect the current plotline of the game.

Asteroid mining stations no longer keep their logs for longer than a week.

There is now a moderate reward just for exploring the new Glyphmaker stations! My best guess at retroactive compensation coming shortly!

I ballsed up the points and point categories a bit. It should be better now!

Fixed a small issue where colors would not show up if you chose the default setup prior to toggling color on.

All of the options menus can now be accessed through a main menu with the OPTIONS command.

As discussed in the forum, players can now set up automatic insurance deposits!

At any ATM, you can set a percentage of your income to go directly into your insurance fund, from none of it to all of it!

As always, report any oddities.

Asteroid Mining Upgrades

To further improve mining sites as players go up in points, a series of upgrades are now available. When purchased, these upgrades will apply to all future sites.

Upgrades include building and drone reclamation (as in, improving your return for these items at the end of the site), decreased research cost, and improved total site metals.

The UPGRADE command joins the LICENSE command in the room where you start your mining site.

Battlesuit tier, a concept which was originally entirely a construct of players, is now calculated and displayed in key locations, including the outfitter's SUITS command, the SWITCH command, and your character's INFO command.

The INFO command now displays information about and locations of stored battlesuits.

Detailed starship information has been shifted into the SHIPINFO or SHIPS command.

Tweaked a few numbers related to RATS spawning that haven't really been looked at since the space system changeover or the debris change. RATS should now spawn more like you would expect.

Logging in should be a bit faster now.

The AEU advanced gunship has been made a bit easier to find. Happy hunting!

For all you bounty hunters! A SLIGHT BALANCE CHANGE!

For repeat offenders, the rewards have been increased!

A condensed version of some recent changes:

* The value of repair points has been slightly increased, since the conditions for gaining them are so strict. This hasn't produced much change in anyone's combat points, but it'll add up for people who engineer a lot.

* A small change to the beacon drop algorithm has slightly (or significantly, depending on the situation) increased the difficulty of beacon drops.

* Certain ships that have no business (either for IC reasons or for game balance reasons) having a FTL drive no longer have FTL drives.

* Mutuality ships now have special internal descriptions, to represent their stylization more completely.

* Some changes were made to the alert system.

* Failsafes are now coloured similarly to the appropriate damage level.

* Failsafe algorithm changed slightly. Shouldn't affect player ships much, if at all.

* Simulator ships now have symbols and colours on the starmap.

As always, report any weirdness.

After some consideration, the following additional changes have been made to ground combat for balance purposes:

- Fringe suits have traded their laser modules for projectiles, and now carry more ammo. This is more fitting with their role as heavy damage dealers. Existing suits have been automatically updated.

- Fringe and Mutuality suits will not progress quite so high in HP as they did before, though the first tier suits are unaffected, so you'll never know the difference!

- Basic weapon modules (that is, not grenades and not missiles) have gained an additional weapon at 50 points, just to have some early progression.

- Similarly, a modest armor upgrade has been added at a low point level.

- AEU and EAOS suits have had their fragility emphasized... which probably means exactly what you think it does. This is to further make enmity management and balanced groups more important.

- AEU. EAOS, and Mutuality suits have had their energy capacity tweaked slightly.

Also, some minor fixes: getting hit now displays the exact damage to you, and looking at objects will reveal how damaged they are percentagewise. And finally, new lootable items, including a new battle item, have been added.

Also you can now deploy your battlesuit without a mission selected, should you ever choose to for whatever reason, to change its commands or admire it or have sex with it or whatever.

With rather more work, I have also added lower point abilities for each of the four ability branches. These involve three entirely new effects, so let's hope they actually work!

Added more weapons to close a bit of a point gap that few people are close to anyway. Perhaps one day I'll be satisfied.

Battlesuits now show their location in the INFO command. There was an issue earlier with the location not being right, so if it looks wrong, send a report!

Made the PEER command work without a given direction to show your immediate surroundings.

New Conquest benefit: Top alliances will enjoy accelerated ship construction.

The communications oddities should be fixed.

In light of exploration creating a lot of uncharted sectors, sector purging has had a thorough going through. You may notice sectors not holding their debris for long if you leave them, so if you intend to clean up the mess after a beacon be sure to get it quickly! In this grand purge we recycled about six thousand sectors and twenty seven thousand objects.

Fixed a bug in determining the seller's return in the copyable media stores.

Replaced the 'referrer' portion of character generation with a wider-ranging question about where the new player learned of Star Conquest.

Added our errant profile samples into the help system. They can be found under HELP ADEQUATE PROFILE SAMPLE and HELP GOOD PROFILE SAMPLE.

Some more changes were made to the crafting system. Enjoy.

Renaming ships should now be much, much cheaper in most cases.

Felo should now be far less effective at spreading through environments which are not enclosed. In other words, the "freerange" nests on planets and stuff should not produce nearly as many felo.

The one-person cargo hauler "Space Hauler" should no longer be read as the Starduster, John Bandicut's famous juggernaut.

Oh, I forgot to mention this until AFTER someone did a raid but the Megapod 'boss' dudes are now named like Mother (no Alpha, Beta, etc)

Mutating felo now do their thing with a little more randomness.

Altered the weapons-already-firing check to detect whether it's stuck. Please report any issues or unintended behavior.

Added a Tradesmen help file with guidelines on the sorts of items that should be requested.

Bounty hunting should be working again. Watch your backs and your neighbor's cargo holds!

Changed the conquest formula slightly; smaller alliances that are performing exceptionally poorly will not get penalized further.

Outsider Training Sectors no longer also spawn thralls. Whoops! Our bad, guys!

Gave some lovin' to craftin' for newspacey stuff

Garages made EASY! You may now freely attempt to board any ship present at a spaceport and if it's inside the garage, it will be MAGICALLY TRANSPORTED TO THE LANDING PAD and then you will seamlessly carry on with boarding it! This will only work with ships for which you have a key.

Probably a long time in coming, but now you can repair things without getting into a menu! Like 'REPAIR TURRET 10' or whatever!

Words are no longer sliced in half when you are using the automapper.

Added a way for players to see Tandem Cylical Time automatically converted into decimal format, just in case people can't handle the real way to view it.

New dialogue parsing engine! I call it Fancy Dialogue!

Its purpose is basically to take your dialogue and split it up intelligently into more varied and interesting constructions, like in a work of fiction, rather than having "Player says 'whatever'" for line after line.

Probably the most important thing to know is that if you don't like it, you can turn it off by typing GEN-O and choosing the appropriate option. Note that fancy dialogue is ON by default, which means that the option under GEN-O is whether you want to DISABLE it. If you like it, then keep that "disable" option toggled to OFF.

When fancy dialogue is active, your "ignore accents" option will, basically, do nothing. This is because reminders about accents should now be few and far between as part of the engine, rather than constant spam. If you have fancy dialogue off, your "ignore accents" option will work exactly as before.

You can also influence your dialogue by using emoticons! They will still be filtered out, but they will alter how you say things. Currently recognized emoticons are as follows: :) :( :D :P :O :|

I think there's still a few bugs to iron out and a few more tweaks to come, but this is mostly complete. Enjoy!

An edge condition traceback in starmaps has hopefully been fixed.

Added a condensed version of org status to the SCORE command.

Organizations can now be renamed at some expense.

Added NOTICES to your metachannel communicators! These are messages pushed immediately to your communicator that will gently nag you once per hour until you read them (which you do by just looking at your communicator).

There are a few reasons for this, but the most basic one is that, in SC's original design, I envisioned that players would be spending nearly all of their time in ships and would be launching and landing again rather frequently. This is why several notifications (new mail, new news, etc.) occur when you land. These days, of course, the scope of the game has expanded somewhat, and we have many things to do that don't involve flying around at all. This means that things you would probably want to know about fairly immediately may sometimes go unnoticed for a great deal of time.

The first major new thing here is that receiving new mail will immediately send a notice to your communicator.

The second thing you'll notice quickly is that each civilian liaison now has the power to send notices to your communicator once per hour. This is to help organize meetings and other player-initiated events. This goes to pretty much everyone in your alliance, so please don't spam things. The interval will be increased if necessary.

More things will be added as needed! I may eventually roll things like new message board posts and new aggregator headlines into this as well, so that a well-informed player is not looking at a dozen different objects upon logging in.

A small bug with stopping a game of trade cycles has been fixed.

- RATS will no longer leave behind starship debris.

- Starship debris should be slightly more consistent in terms of size and value, and both numbers will now be relative to the size of the ship.

After many years, it has finally happened.

- Apartments and apartment landings now respond to the OPEN DOOR and CLOSE DOOR commands.

- An open door now counts as an invitation, and will allow visitors to freely enter your apartment without a resident having to go out and grab them.

- If your door is closed and you are a valid resident, you will automatically open and close the door going in or out of your apartment, rather than slamming into it (as amusing as that was).

We have altered PST to be the same as MST. We hope this simplifies things for everyone.

Introducing 'HELP COMMAND' for all your starship command needs! Or most of them at least. Also available through the web portal at http://moo.squidsoft.net:7779/help?Starship_Command_Reference

Players should no longer be able to "find" objects by playing a trash-can-rummaging guessing game!

Added felo upgrades (up to 1001 felo points worth of them) and fixed a few errors with how they were displayed when used.

Chow-fed soldiers should be somewhat less weakened now.

Added a new attribute to ship models. If you notice any oddities, particular your ship moving in an unusual manner, please send a report!

Fixed a bug that could interfere with using nomination and voting machines.

Fixed a bug where an infected ship's escape pod wouldn't work properly!

Bari mold will damage hull slightly less often now.

Fixed Bari spreader pods. Now they'll work properly! Yay!

Changed Bari movement habits on a ship somewhat.

Altered Bari Spreader behaviour.

Organizations now each get their very own message board!

This message board is, of course, completely in character.

The Announcements subforum can only be posted in by the founder or trustees. The General subforum is open to all members.

Recent advances in Jinu translation technology have fixed issues with some previously untranslated words.

You now are informed when your hair grows out.

Fixed an issue with Mutuality stations and courier ships.

Fixed an issue with ships carrying illegal goods and their related lack of protection.

Updated the Bounty Hunting helpfile to mention illegal starship modifications and that the navy doesn't protect you if the good is illegal in their space.

Removed seatbelts from the illegal mod list since it's just become a source of trolling. Might be revisited sometime, but only alongside a way to remove them.

Added the Messages to the Staff channel. MTTS ON/OFF/. It's opt-in, OOC, and basically for ideas/stuff that you would post on OOC/Messages to the Staff anyways. It is NOT a chat channel.

Introducing MAILING LISTS!

We have two mailing lists at the moment, and probably two forever.

- General: This will be to announce major huge game changes, mainly. It's opt-out because we're a bunch of jerks. But the real reason is, I plan to use this to notify inactive players once in a great while of what's new in the game and see if they come back. Active players will probably never see anything from this mailing list, unless something incredibly important happens that we can't announce in the game for some reason, but I'm not sure what that would be.

- Events: This will see a lot more use, so it is opt-in. Upon the first announcement of an event, the text of the announcement will be sent to your account's registered email address.

Type SUBSCRIPTIONS (or SUBS) to manage your mailing lists.

Added a thing to periodically remind people about upcoming events that I hope works like it is meant to. It should not bother you during space combat or ground combat.

Changed the event reminders on the web portal and on the login report to use the new system.

Mechanoid bloodlust has been tweaked for maximum efficiency.

Due to pressure from members of the Primate Appreciation Society and Lauren the Orangutan Reenactors Club, grunting and groaning is now available without going to the fuss of :.

Advanced engineering buffs now smile and say something nice instead of exploding when used in an unexpected way.

New general option: Acknowledge New Lines When Inputting Lines of Text. This means that when submitting multiple lines of input, like in a message board post, a new line will be acknowledged with an asterisk.

The SPELL command (typed by itself) can now spell words from the last 10 or so lines you've received from the game.

New general option allows for long menus to be columnized horizontally instead of vertically, which means the entries will end up listed sequentially for users of screen readers.

P.S. You'll notice there are already results. That's right, we've been secretly tracking everything you've been doing for the past four days before this was even implemented!

A little change to ship AI:

* Disarmed ships won't lock anymore.

Report any oddity, as always.

Pretty huge bug fix: Some players were allowed to gain points past their cap. This has been fixed.

Tweaked how the fancy dialogue system displays dialogue with emoticons. Realized that emoticons actually did not work at all. Fixed emoticons.

Made some changes to beacon drops in order to affect difficulty.

- Certain aspects of the encounter will depend upon the capabilities of the friendly ships involved (under the IC assumption that better operators will be sent after better ships).

- The beacon drop ship spawner is more conscious of enemy ship roles, and should spawn ships more intelligently and less overwhelmingly.

- Overall, beacon drop difficulty should be somewhat lower, particularly for less upgraded ships.

Felo are now far less likely to wander into places where they shouldn't be.

TESLATOWN

Some Teslatown changes designed to make grouping more common. TESLATOWN IS A GROUP ACTIVITY. I've said it dozens of times but nobody seems to believe it. Doing it alone or even treating it as Couples Night is not doing it right. You people are all insane for doing so many small solo sites.

- The more people you have in your group, the more you can potentially get from your site. In other words, a site's total value caps at a higher amount when you bring more people. This is actually not a change, but has been true almost since day one.

- Having more people in your group will increase profits in all circumstances.

- The total site value is no longer based on the lowest point participant's potential site value. Instead, all participants will have their potential site values added to the total regardless of how well point levels match up. For example: previously, if Guy #1 could get 30 bucks from a site and Guy #2 could get 100 bucks, when they grouped, the system would find the minimum and arrive at 30 * 2 = 60 for the site's final value. Now it'll arrive at 30 + 100 = 130.

- At the end of a mission, Teslabucks will not be distributed equally, but will be given out in proportion to each person's contribution to that site's total value. Taking the above example, if the mission ended up being worth 200 bucks, then previously Guy #1 and Guy #2 would each earn 100 bucks. But with a proportionate system, Guy #1 will get 46 bucks and Guy #2 will get 154 bucks. This is still good, of course, because with the new system, the low guy will not in practice actually earn any less while the higher guy is now finding the group site worthwhile.

The intended effect of this is simply to make it practical and worthwhile for players of all point levels to group together and each see better profits than they would ever get by themselves or even in smaller groups. It should be as simple as that.

GROUND MISSIONS

As decided at the forum last month, ground missions will now give fewer points but will reward many more credits.

Some liaison stuff:

Each terminal now allows the liaison to send communicator notices, which I thought I did before but somehow failed to accomplish.

Voting machines will now report numbers of voters in addition to percentages.

The industrial whip terminal will tell the leading alliance how far ahead they are.

Added a new newbie quest for industrial-minded new pilots to Accord Headquarters. A similar quest involving combat will appear soon.

Attention! The security levels of some sectors has changed! Additionally, lower security sectors, even in high security space will have more debris in them than higher security sectors. Conversely, this means that many high security sectors with debris now have less debris in them than they used to have!

Fixed an issue with post pruning not properly rebuilding the post index cache afterwards.

Navy responses are now more proportional to the hostile party.

Fixed a bug where Fringe local artifacts would count as alien artifacts.

Fixed a bug with prompted profiles and players who have not described themselves!

With nobody to watch them, holovids will turn themselves off out of loneliness and search for ice cream to cheer up.

I am going to rebalance salvage op payouts once and for all! But not today.

Interim change: Salvage ops have had a silly tendency to pay better the longer they go on, which is rather the opposite of what we'd prefer to encourage. This was an unintended effect of the change that capped payout for less experienced players. This has been changed so that certain appropriate payout caps are still in place, but the degree of payout should be unaffected by the length of the op. This means that efficiency is good!

This is temporary. Changes are planned to further alter how payout works, to ensure that all participants get predictable and appropriately proportionate pay. Also, we'll be looking at the defender's role and trying to strike a balance between too busy and too boring ops.

Standard torps are cheaper now. We found some behind the couch.

Felo points are now in the game. The current high scorer has 9 already!

Hopefully have fixed an issue wherein enemy battlesuits could spam their weapons before their roundtime took effect.

Made the NEWS command in ships menu-based for less WALL OF TEXT.

Fixed an exploit and a smaller minor issue in the new ATM cash converter.

Tagging now only works in Gamma-4 or higher security space.

Added illegal starship modifications. Currently, players can't get any of these, but if your ship happens to have one, you can be tagged for it by any upstart bounty hunter in places where it's illegal.

Added space markets to the coordinate rundown, because they weren't there before. Whoops!

Beware! Ships that are carrying contraband or are illegally modified are no longer a protected species.

Go-bots despair! You now need to manually go places, instead of using go with no arguments.

If there's a go-exit that you can't figure out the name for, REPORT it and we'll look into it.

Also, a very minor change: You can now READ message board readers. Mostly to make things slightly more intuitive for newbies.

Attempting to upgrade an asteroid mining drone into the type of asteroid mining drone that it already is should now abort probably. Either that or it'll summon The Dark Lord Satan. Net effect is positive regardless. Probably.

Hanging paintings has been updated to work with other things from this century.

Posters may now be hung on walls like paintings. Not sure why that wasn't already possible.

Fixed a bug which has been preventing some AI starship gunners from firing properly.

Moderately good news, everyone! By request, a second, optional wave of description details have been added to the game. You may choose from these, if you wish, by typing @DESC. Additionally, HELP DESCRIPTIONS has been added to document the character description system.

Players who aren't you and are incommunicado generally won't show up on @WHO anymore.

Revamped the hell out of the battlesuit store.

- Optimized some code and made the store menu literally a hundred times faster.

- Separated the menu into sections for less incredible spam. You can get to each section with the MENU command, or type BATTLESUITS/MODULES/WEAPONS/ABILITIES/ARMOR directly to just work with one part at a time.

- The MENU command will show you how many new items you have in each category initially. The "new" notification will disappear when you buy something or when you leave the outfitter.

- Added the INFO command to show your suit's status without the menu.

- Info now displays damage information for currently equipped weapons for comparison purposes.

- Added point requirements in various places, mostly to help players tell which suits are better.

Everything should work pretty much the same otherwise. Send a report if you notice any issues.

An exit in airforts has been messed up this whole time! That is now fixed.

Fixed an issue where a Gemini's destruction while it had battlesuits deployed would result in the permadeath of all characters aboard the enemy ship. Alas, too late for poor Joss.

Changed how certain NPC ship profiles have their threat rating calculated. Beacons at the mid-high end should be very slightly larger.

Changed beacons slightly so as to have a minimum response for the assembled fleet.

Minerals will now always be present in solo Teslatown sites, because it makes sense and because it fixes some errors that can occur otherwise. Minerals are sort of a "filler" item that tops off your total site value, so they need to be there.

Naval vessels now only disable interdictors in Alpha-1 security space.

Destination finders must be bolted to work properly.

Sectors will no longer spawn more than a few asteroids.

If you have a gemini in a ship's docking bay and enter the ship where the gemini is docked and your battlesuit is at the station, your battlesuit is automatically transferred into the gemini!

'Tor' is now the shortest allowable alias for 'torpedo'.

Feeding your felo bari meat from the megapod now counts as an exposure to bari.

Mail delivery has been made more worthwhile for new players, both in points and cash. The change to point values is retroactive. Enjoy!

Changes to the help system this morning:

Cadet-level and new players will be redirected to the HELP NEW file when they type just HELP. Players may type HELP INDEX at any time to see all help files.

Help files added:

New to the Game

Salvaging

Decoy Beacons

Teslaworld (mainly just moved from the old help database)

Fixed an issue that made battlesuit switching totally not work at all much of the time!

Newly born felo will now want to eat before mating.

More ground combat changes! I'm trying to make groups of mixed battlesuits both practical and desirable!

- Repairing now creates more enmity.

- Damage-dealing abilities now create more enmity.

- Detonators will cause more damage.

- Enemy weapons in general will cause more damage.

- The effect of medium and heavy armor is increased, meaning that using these will significantly decrease the amount of damage you take.

- And the most visible change to you: ALL TIER ONE BATTLESUITS ARE AVAILABLE TO YOU as long as your alliance has a non-aggression pact or better with the manufacturer alliance! That gives most of you a lot more choice as to what role you take in battle. So enjoy that.

Now, not to give away too much strategy, but all of these changes boil down to the idea that you want to mix up your suits, making sure to include at least 1) someone who can repair, 2) someone who can make the enemy focus on them and absorb damage, and 3) people who can do heavy damage to the enemy. Going as a group who all have the same suits will not be as successful.

Added a ROLEPLAYING help file for an introduction to roleplaying and general tips for roleplaying well. Even if you don't think you need to read this, chances are you do!

Added a Civilian Liaisons help file to explain the positions and publicize the current officeholders. You can assume the specifics are known ICly as general knowledge.

L-look at you, hacker. The RATS-core buyers will now take cores from containers, but you must be holding at least one core before they'll start taking them from you, just to make sure that you want to give them your cores.

Buy and sell prices will no longer change for marathon trade items for the duration of the event!

Fixed a display bug with felo nests.

More ground combat stuff. This is close to totally finished, at least for now.

- You are now notified when an enemy changes its target to you or another ally, with appropriate highlights if you use colors. This is affected by the 'target change' filter.

- The SQUAD command shows more information, including whether the squad member is currently being targeted by something, and their last action and how long ago it took place.

Fixed various candidacy issues. If any has voted already, you will have to vote again!

Two new things for customizing your appearance, if you're into that sort of thing!

Beauty shops (e.g. hair) now do coloring as well!

Piercing parlors have been added to all capital planets/stations. Building the same thing four times is not much fun, if you're curious.

Addressed some pressing Teslatown problems!

Solo mining sites will now always only have resources you are capable of detecting and extracting.

Group mining sites have no such restriction. They will work as before, with every resource you have the points to extract being present. However, sites with better resources are now actually more valuable!

Added the @SHOWDESC command to show your full description. This is basically an inventory of body paint, tattoos, piercings, and other things that might be covered up that you would be aware of.

Changed conquest calculations very slightly. It'll tend to prefer larger alliances more often than not, but only very slightly. Should only really be noticable in the first day or so of conquest.

Several more minor tweaks have been made to NPC damage and other components.

Fixed a bug wherein advanced engineering components did not check cooldown properly, allowing, for instance, two separate repair components to be used almost immediately after one another.

Cleaned up legacy code pertaining to entering new sectors, fixing a few bugs with INTRASECTOR ENGINE 2.0 (and actually INTRASECTOR ENGINE CATALYST 1.0 that were overlooked, though it's a moot issue at this point.) in the process.

Accelerator gates may have been horribly broken while trying to switch them over to the new system. Time will tell!

Fixed an issue with the League Navy's Kestrel Wing and the AEU Navy's Honour Guard.

AEU removed from the special application side list and League added to special application side list, for population balancing.

Implemented a new blueprint for plastics, electronics, sonics, and mercenary utility, in order to help the mercenary utility license be more useful.

Made some minor changes to the text filter. Primarily, if a sentence starts with a filtered word, it will be capitalized. Secondarily, certain cultures and accents may have an automatic filter.

General transmissions from the control rooms of starships now filter text properly.

Metafrequencies had a few bugs in filtering text properly. This has been fixed.

HOLOVISION PROGRAMMING has resumed!

First, the technical changes:

- Holovision system recoded from scratch.

- Old holovids have been updated to NEW holovisions without any player action being necessary.

- Holovids already sold in stores have been updated.

- Holovids are now available along with apartment furniture when designing a new apartment.

And the more important aspects of this:

- The holovision system will be used to deliver background and historical information about the game, within the game. It's a bit sparse right now, but several new shows are in progress and we've got many more planned. This is done mostly through the HoloHistory channel.

- The system will ALSO be used to deliver ongoing narratives about current events, especially events that players actually participate in, but also events that occur "off-screen" that will drive the plot. We're hoping this will make the game's plot easier for everyone to follow and keep up with, and it'll also let us keep up a narrative between events with player participation. This is done mostly through the ISNN channel.

- Added public holovids to pilot lounges FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE.

- Added the IGNORE command to holovids so you can avoid the spam of everyone else watching said holovid if you choose.

Echoes (that is, periodic flavor text) should no longer play in rooms with an activated holovid.

Switching holovids on and off will now be a simple toggle using the TURN command. To switch the channel or use the holovid as you did before, use the USE command.

Resolved an issue with the ignore function on holovids.

Fixed an issue with held holovids being rather...excited.

Forgot to mention this when I did it, but after looking at the drop rates for some RATS parts, requirements for blueprints that use said parts have been reduced.

There is now an EXPERIENCE (or EXP) command that will summarize your experience relative to the rest of your alliance, in a similar manner to KNOWLEDGE but in greater detail.

Your player rank no longer shows up in INFO, in our efforts to phase out TOPS LIST CLASSIC. Conveniently, this will make INFO generation much faster!

Fixed various unfortunate issues related to asteroid hauling that cropped up today.

RATS nests should show more variation in enemy types.

Fixed an issue with the message board system causing certain threads to not get a 'Re: '

New website feature in beta:

You can now access the game's message board system via the website. This feature is in beta and incomplete. Most immediately obvious is that it's read-only and there's no way to write a post. But given the difficulty of following threads like the massive PvP one, it seems like a good time to announce this anyway.

The message board is the first website feature that links specifically with your character. For this reason, you'll have to type WEBPIN in the game to generate a password that allows the website to link to your character. Use your character's full name and this webpin (NOT your account password) to log into your character on the website. You are responsible for your own security.

The address of the web message board is http://moo.squidsoft.net:7779/messageboard

The Ground Combat help file was once a confusing, outdated wall of text. Now it's gone! Instead, help files for battlesuits and aerial fortresses have been split off from it, and belong to a new Ground Combat help category. Future additions to the ground combat system will go into separate help files under this new category.

Improved help category matching.

Minors updates to the Asteroid Hauling and Asteroid Mining help files.

Added a medcenter to Teslatown for when poachers are mean to you.

Having detected just a touch of metagaming for votes, we have changed the voting machines to require a minimum level of recent activity. Anyone who is actually playing will be well above this threshold!

After observing the earn rate of artifacts for a few days, we've decided to increase their value to make the activity's income more in line with other 300-point activities.

Announcing a good-sized revision of ground combat! It's why we had no runs yesterday... and unfortunately why we'll have none tonight. However, I'm aiming for a run on Thursday evening, followed by more self-directed nest activities in the future.

- Many armor levels and a few new weapons added. You will now have something to add to your battlesuit at least every 50 points,even if it's just a slightly better weapon or an incremental armor improvement.

- Added 200 point abilities for Minidrones, Sonics, and Plasma.

- Set Light's 65 point ability to 200 points and added a new 65 point ability. If anyone already has that ability at a lower point level, they can keep it.

- Some abilities now require preparation time to use.

- Ability preparation can be interrupted by being hit, or by abilities specifically designed to interrupt.

- Removed obsolete code restricting number of participants based on mission difficulty for the purposes of determining the reward. With enemy scaling in place, all missions should be balanced for 4-6 participants and that number of people will receive the full reward.

- Nests will now vary, mostly in terms of enemy types.

- Enemies now have the ability to... use abilities.

- Added several new enemy types. Guess what they do!

- Added boss enemies. You'll have great fun with these!

The 'show only damaged components' option will now list one component per line rather than columnizing.

Made a fantastic change to behind-the-scenes gamebuilding stuff that will never directly affect you in any way, but rest assured it is fantastic.

Players who have opted out of the tops boards shouldn't take up a place in the INFO ranking or be able to see @tops-like boards.

Minimap sorta thing implemented. Off by default, you can turn it on with GEN-O. It may be a bit flakey at the moment, and it works off of @linelen. Post any questions/comments/suggestions to OOC/MttS.

Nomination machines are now fully armed and operational.

Changed some things in respect to which spaceports accept debris/asteroids and from whom in preparation for switching to the new system. You shouldn't notice any changes at the moment. Send a report if you find anything odd.

Added the STANDINGS command. For factions.

League and Fringe pilots will now get some default standing to the Accord.

The effect of a ship's hull size on hull damage absorption points and energy grid capacity is now clarified in the STATUS command!

Ground combat changes!

- Fixed an issue with ability use bypassing the energy check.

- Fixed an issue with flare, as it turns out, doing absolutely nothing.

- Increased enmity once again for repairing and damaging abilities. Basically, enemies should really hate "caster" types.

- Increased enmity from flare to compensate. Added extra enmity effects to certain other Light abilities.

- Redid scaling of higher tier suit HP and energy, along with enemy weapons.

- Boosted light armor slightly.

- Medical centers in airforts will now use synthesis supplies when treating someone.

- Limited battlesuit weapons to two per module, or only one for grenades and missiles. If you already have more than this, the limit will take effect the next time you add a weapon.

- Added an elkload of new weapons, with tradeoffs in damage, time to fire, ammo capacity, accuracy, and so on.

- Added info for weapons to the battlesuit outfitter menu.

- Added info for battlesuits to the battlesuit outfitter menu.

Another ground combat change: You are now warned in BIG RED LETTERS if you're launching in a mule and the fortress does not contain your battlesuit. If you then end up at a mission site still without your suit, this system will also automatically find you and punch you directly in your stupid face.

Last minute change! If you just land in a mule at the spaceport that has your battlesuit, it should transfer without you having to exit and re-enter.

Fixed some miscellaneous organization-related bugs.

Added Space Geography, Options, and Color help files, after seeing people search for these things in the help system to no avail.

Blacklisted couriers can now deliver to places that hate them. Without exploding. Hopefully. Give it a shot!