Not Simon

2022 was a very busy year for the Stationeers team. We consolidated our Statiioneers team with our ICARUS team at the same location, allowing us to draw together our talent and experiences across both teams.

Multiplayer Our efforts last year culminated in the release of a major multiplayer refactor that solved a great deal of issues and substantially optimized the code. The game was still heavily reliant on a method of making network connections that was unreliable and not performant - so we developed that further (a variation of RakNet we call "RocketNet"). We released this late last year as well as removing DRM entirely from the game and also any requirement for the game to run on steam.

This has presented an issue for players who have difficulty making multiplayer connections due to Internal Address issuing problems, stemming from port forwarding challenges and IP exhaustion. We are currently working hard to reimplement Steam P2P to work with our new multiplayer,... Read more

• Dishes now release contacts from interrogation if the wattage requirement is no longer met, this addresses a missmatch of information between the contact UI and the interrogation popup.
  
• Fixed possible issue where contact manager could potentially crash.
  
• Added ability to read and write power setting for small and medium satellite.
  
• Fixed mismatched types for power setting when updating clients.

Trading Contact System When revisiting the trader contact mechanic, we really wanted to create an engaging system that would encourage engineering, automation and problem solving. In addition to finding traders, we’ll leverage this in the future to find destinations for your rockets, answer distress signals, and invite visitors to your station. The process of contacting contacts has been split into a few concepts.

Contacts Instead of dozens of contacts constantly spread around the sky, we’re moving to a more logic driven approach of having rules dictate when traders are available. As we transition from our older trader system, into the new one, we are providing the old traders as three separate tiers of contacts. These current contacts have increasing difficulties to contact and hang around for about 20 minutes before they leave and another one takes their place, so you’ll have to find the harder contacts if you want to check out many traders.

... Read more

Today we're doing a quick patch that brings a new low level multiplayer implementation. This change should mean that the network performance is better and connectivity should improve in some situations.
The larger issues around connecting to servers is an ongoing task that is actively being worked on.

Due to time constraints, we omitted the 3x1 hangar door from the previous update but we're taking this opportunity to add it.

Dismounting ladders had a bug caused by the changes to the movement controller and this has also been fixed.

The second trader update brings us a step closer to a more interesting, fun, and involved trading game loop. You can read about all the plans for trading in the previous blog post here.

Gas Trading


Leveraging the new modular landing pad we’ve made some big changes to how you buy gas from traders. With the new Gas Storage and Gas Connector modules you can now buy large quantities of gas from traders with ease. Traders will provide a range of gas mixes ... Read more

New Landing Pads


This new modular landing pad system is replacing the existing landing pad structure. To set up a new landing pad you will need to build a Landing Pad Center surrounded by the landing pad pieces. It needs to be at least 3x3 with a Data and Power module. There isn't currently any new functionality with the new system but you can read more about why we’ve done this and what is to come.

Hydroponics Player Feedback


We received a lot of feedback about the recent hydroponics changes, and one point that kept coming up was potatoes being too easy. While we wanted to keep an easy crop available for new players, the potatoes balance skipped out on too many mechanics. So ... Read more

This hot-fix fixes the missing plant analyzer cartridge recipe for the electronics printer and the missing plant analyzer cartridge thumbnail.

This week is all about gene manipulation. We’ve added the Genetics Stabilizer, Genetics Splicer, a new plant PDA cartridge, increased the impact of lighting conditions, as well as fixing a number of both new and historic bugs.

Genetics Stabilizer
There is now a stability value associated with each gene. Genes with a high stability value will mutate less when passed to the next generation. The Genetics Stabilizer has two modes which allow for the manipulation of these values. The first mode, stabilize, allows you to increase the stability of all the genes at the same time. The second mode, destabilize, decreases the stability of all genes, however it allows you to target a specific gene to be destabilized to a greater degree.

With proper usage of this appliance you should be able to target one or more genes to mutate at a high ra... Read more

Continuing to expand on last week's update, we've added some new features to how plants process light and made some quality of life changes to the plant tooltips. We've also focused on general big fixing.


Plant Light Changes
Sunlight and grow lights now both scale the amount of time the plant has received light for, based on their solar intensity. Sunny planets like Vulcan receive a 150% multiplier to time spent in light, while distant, cold planets like Mimas only receive 18% of the time spent in light. Plants grown solely from the sun on distant planets may become extremely stressed, and struggle to mature. Grow lights have been reduced to 80% intensity.



Fortunately, grow lights now cumulatively add light to plants in combination with the sun. Hydroponic setups with both exterior windows, and artificial lighti... Read more

In The Farming Update we've made some big changes to how plants grow, adding new challenges and rewards. These changes include slowing down the growth time, a new genetics game loop, more nuanced environmental impacts on the plants, and the introduction of perennial plants. We wanted to achieve a feeling of involvement with farming and a sense of reward for being attentive and providing the right conditions for your plants.

This update has taken longer than normal but has laid the foundations for the next few updates that will build upon these game loops and you can expect to see more content around hydroponics and food.

Increased Growth Time
Base growth times have been increased for all plants, some significantly. While potatoes remain an easy single day staple food, others, such as the Tomato and Pumpkin plants have a bas... Read more

This week we’re bringing you a range of performance improvements and bug fixes.

Performance There are two main performance improvements we have made, one is a rendering improvement that means the main thread is spending less time waiting for rendering tasks to complete. The second is to do with the prioritization of our many threaded tasks. Threads that are running non time sensitive tasks have now been moved to a lower priority allowing other tasks to be processed faster and improving the overall performance.

With these two changes combined, most players should see a modest performance improvement while players running larger bases should see a significant improvement.

Notes:

These changes were not more performant on dedicated servers so are not activated there.

Additionally we’ve added Legacy-CPU option to settings (not exposed in the main settings panel). This disables some multi-threading prio...

Read more

• Fixed Combustion Centrifuge still processing when not in final build state.
  
• Fixed Exiting a ladder can sometimes damage suit or Helmet.
  
• Fixed Centrifuge still operating when not in final buildState.
  
• Improved error message for when start ConditionData is invalid.
  
• Fixed Modifying a pipe network connected to a Medium Radiator could cause gas in the network to get deleted.
  
• Fixed DeepMiner does not return item kit when deconstructed.

The main focus this week is adding new mining mechanics which allows you to automate parts of late game mining. Along with the new miner we've reworked the centrifuge mechanic and added chute devices to give player chute networks far more utility.

This is the biggest update we've done in a while both in terms of new content as well as bug fixes and we're excited to be back in a place where we are able to push out updates like these!

Deep Miner


The Deep Miner is a device that you construct on the terrain surface and will drill to bedrock and start producing Dirty Ore. The Deep Miner will take some time to reach bedrock, depending on how deep it is, and will then produce approximately a stack of 10 Dirty Ore every 90 seconds.


Dirty Ore
Dirty Ores simply represent unprocessed pieces of unsorted ore... Read more

In this week's update, we've added two new sensors, iterated on the cryotube, made some adjustments to the sleepers, further simplification of settings, and updated Stationpedia Articles.

Sensors
There are two new sensors to track the presence of players. you can use this information in your logic setups to trigger different events. You can filter which players trigger the sensors by configuring their access variables using the access controller cartridge. The sensors will then only be triggered by a player who holds the correct Access Card.

The Occupancy Sensor is triggered when 1 or more players are in the same room as the sensor.

The Proximity Sensor is triggered when 1 or more players are within the range of the sensor. The range is configurable using the knob or via the ‘Setting’ logic variable.



... Read more

• Changed Reduced the amount of heat tank structures radiate by 50x. A tank now radiates heat in the same order of magnitude as a pipe network of the same volume.
  
• Changed Reduced the amount of heat tanks convect by 2x.
  
• Fixed Atmospherics Threads race condition that caused Thermal Radiation calculation to return incorrect results in certain scenarios. This caused a bug where Pipe atmospheres would sometimes rapidly radiate down to absolute zero (-273.1C) on the moon OR thermal radiation would stop working altogether. Thanks @Windsinger & @zkxs for helping us reproduce and solve this quickly.
  
• Changed Atmospheres in vacuums can no longer radiate to 0DegreesK.
  
• Fixed Hunger and Hydration not decreasing in single-player when not hosting.
  
• Fixed CleanUpPlayers Command deleting yourself if not hosting.
  
• Fixed LocalPlayer not showing up in scoreboard when in single-player.

... Read more

Thermodynamics The general speed of thermal transfer of atmospherics has been decreased, to allow players more time to experience the effects of heat moving throughout their stations. The internal atmospheres of devices and items now radiate energy down toward the planet's global atmosphere temperature. This effect is most pronounced in vacuum and is dampened when in a pressurized environment. Structures built into frames are also no longer fully insulated and will radiate heat down to the global atmosphere temperature.

We’ve listened to feedback and increased the Air Conditioner's operational temperature efficiency by roughly 20%(nearly doubling) around 600K-800K to allow it to work significantly better during the first stages of cooling the hot planets' atmospheres.



We’ve branched the radiator tech tree into Flat Pane... Read more

Fixed On bases with more than 1024 atmospheres servers could stop sending atmospherics updates to clients.

As we adapt to our new weekly content cadence, you'll see that some new features get spread over multiple updates. This change in pace has some big benefits. It allows us to make smaller iterations, get feedback faster, spread out balancing, and end up with a more refined final outcome. At the same time we're still chipping away at a lot of bugs, but you'll see updates containing more content again soon.

You may have noticed that we didn't release a patch last week. It was getting too close to the weekend and we wouldn't have been available to publish any hotfixes. Therefore, this patch includes all those changes and has given us extra time to spend on some rather large work for the next patch.

While our target is weekly updates, we're keeping it flexible for moments like this.

Upgraded Atmospheric Machines Continuing with the theme of recent updates, this week we’ve focused on more atmospherics changes.
Firstly we’ve upgraded the Air Conditioner, Electr... Read more

We had to make a change to the data structure for the server list so your servers will no longer be visible in the server browser until you update to the latest stable version.

This hot fix resolves the duplicate entries in the server list as well as the error spam happening for some players.

* Fixed Error Spam from furnace audio caused by incorrectly clamped values when furnace got very hot during a NoS burn.
* Fixed "time parameter is not a valid number" Error caused by a NaN value in the CleanBurnRate of inflamed atmospheres.
* H2Combustor can now empty, if turned on, without an input atmosphere.
* Fixed master server ping not always respecting ServerVisible
* Added 'suntime' command to change time of day
* Fixed sessionID not updating with provided sessionID from the master server
* Fixed bug where plants would never decay unless they are planted and in their final growth stage
* removed unused INetTransport interface
* Changed netw... Read more

* Fixed exception when using depart button with trader