Soft Progress Lock with Homunculus

[Kiro]

Deciding to be purposefully stupid, my friends and I tried out what would happen if you were to throw the psychic space baby out the airlock while in the middle of a hyperspace jump. It's about as bad as one would expect.

Obviously, nobody can go get it as you die instantly the second you step out the airlock yourself while inside of the jump zone. The ship is powered down completely so there’s very little functionality left. You can technically exit the hyperspace jump without the ship needing power, but when we did, the space baby had already been left behind, and we were floating there, dead in the water.

At this point, we took the only logical action we had left and turned on the override for the airlock and vented ourselves out into space. It would have been nice to be able to print a new baby somehow, maybe using biomass or something.

One player did report that when they respawned, a new psychic space baby actually had been printed suddenly, but we’d already restarted the session at that point and didn’t have the ability to test further. Seems odd that it only printed a new one out after we all died. Is it on a timer or something? Just curious, and thought I’d share this story of idiocy.

[Alreadyded]

That's hilarious. Thank you for your sacrifice.

[M200Chan]

+1 to this. I know I'm bumping, but this is a bigger softlock than anticipated.

If you don't have a destination vector set, you can't set one. You're trapped in warp forever.

[Katmorphous333]

The baby stays where it was once you get out of the void even though it can be hard to see its there, sometimes it can bounce off the ship and move a bit though. They also made it so when a player joins the session it spawns another baby, respawning does the same thing since you get out of the pod aswell. Cant deny it would be more convenient to just craft another one.

[M200Chan]

Originally posted by Katmorphous333:

respawning does the same thing since you get out of the pod aswell.

I haven't been able to verify this bit. Tested in a solo session, ejected the baby mid-warp, died, and the baby stayed outside the ship. Since I hadn't plotted an exit vector, the baby was stuck in the void where I couldn't reach it and I couldn't exit the void.

I wasn't able to spawn a new baby, despite my best efforts.

[M200Chan]

I don't mean to spam the thread, but I'm going to make one more message that just contains my further testing, since ripping the baby out of your spaceship does funky things.

If you eject the baby during the warp countdown, the ship doesn't warp but the fancy lines that you see persist. These can stack, so you can make it horrendously bright outside. Effects all end once you warp, so it's safe.

If you eject the baby while in warp, but before plotting a route on your map, you're dead in the water. You can't retrieve the baby (maybe the active ability with the grapple hook can, but I haven't tested this) and you can't use the map to exit warp.

If you eject the baby while in warp, but you've plotted a route on the map, you can exit warp and retrieve the baby. This makes the second case mentioned the only true softlock, but it's still easily executed, and hard to react to in time if you don't know what's up as a host, making trolling frigate games worryingly easy.

Under no circumstances did my death spawn another baby (I tried both force respawn and death-by-airlock-faialure), and I don't have anyone else to test with.

I also can't think of any other circumstances in which the baby can be ejected and the state of the game be changed (I've covered both entering and exiting warp), so I'm unsure of what else can be tested besides from "what if we did it with friends?"

[Natjur]

Pulling the Homunculus out should instantly drop you out of warp

[[HUTLIHUT] Dominika 🦐 QA 🦐]

Hi, we are aware of this possibility and will consider how to fix it. In the meanwhile please be more careful with the baby :((

[Katmorphous333]

Originally posted by HUTLIHUT Dominika 🦐 QA 🦐:

Hi, we are aware of this possibility and will consider how to fix it. In the meanwhile please be more careful with the baby :((

Why not just add 4 switches next to the baby that you got to turn in sync to remove the baby from the engine room?