Ahoy Cosmoteers!

The Steam Awards have started again, and this year Cosmoteer is eligible for the "Labor of Love" award. Please consider nominating Cosmoteer! (I've been working on Cosmoteer for over THIRTEEN YEARS! If that's not a Labor of Love, then what is??)

Thank you for your consideration! :)
Walt

Cosmoteer update 0.28.0 is now available! This update has significant quality-of-life improvements, Career mode improvements, balance changes, and bug fixes.

We're still working hard on more improvements as part of Career 2.0, but we wanted to get these fixes and improvements out to everyone sooner rather than later.

Enjoy!

Full patch notes:

• Built-In Ships:
  
  • Added 1 new Monolith combat ship: Degenbrecher
    
  • Added 2 new Cabal combat ships: Pherkad and Sadalsuud
    
  • Added 1 new Imperium combat ship: Sesostris
    
  • Added 2 new Fringe combat ships: Pugachev and Tarakanova
    
  • Miscellaneous updates to other existing ships.
• Balance:
  
  • Huge Thrusters and M.R.T.s now have a "ramp-down" time, meaning they can no longer reduce their thrust instantly. M.R.T.s have a much longer ramp-down than Huge Thrusters.
    
  • Increased M.R.T. thrust by 25%. (8000->10000)
    
  • If a Boost Thruster runs out of power, it now must be powered up fully before turning back on. (This applies regardless of whether it is in boost mode or not.)
    
  • Reduced the Boost Thruster's boost-mode power consumption per thrust force by 25%.
    
  • Reduced the Boost Thruster's passive power drain while in boost mode from 0.3/sec to 0.1/sec.
    
  • Reduced the Boost Thruster's battery capacity from 8 to 6.
    
  • Doubled storage capacity for Steel, Coils, Hypercoils, and Tristeel from 20 per tile to 40 per tile.
    
  • Increased Flak Array (formerly Flak Battery) ammo capacity from 52 to 92.
    
  • Decreased Tractor Beam force by 20%.
    
  • Reduced EMP launch cooldown from 6 seconds to 2 seconds.
• Ship & Crew A.I.:
  
  • Ship A.I. has been updated to account for the new thruster "ramp down" times and is now more accurately able to determine the optimal time at which to start decelerating in order to come to a stop at the desired destination.
    
  • Ships (especially ships with diagonal flight directions) should now strafe more intelligently and be less likely to overshoot their destination.
    
  • Crew should now waste less time shuffling resources around when emptying factories into undesignated storage tiles.
• Career:
  
  • If you find yourself in an unwinnable fight, you can now often surrender to the A.I. by paying them credits. Try hailing them. In some cases the A.I. may even hail you to demand your surrender. And in some cases the A.I. will simply never let you surrender.
    
  • Similarly, A.I.s will now sometimes be willing to surrender to you and will offer you credits in exchange for you sparing their lives. The A.I. may hail you to offer a surrender, but you can also try hailing them. And in some cases, the A.I. may prefer death over the dishonor of surrendering.
    
  • Breaking a surrender truce will cause you to lose fame and prevent other A.I. ships in the same star system from surrenduring to you.
    
  • The crew limit will now only be increased in batches when your fame levels up. (Instead of gradually increasing one crew at a time.) We think this is more intuitive for new players and feels better as an actual reward for leveling up fame.
    
  • Stations now have more rare resources, and the amount of rare resources will now scale with the size of the station.
    
  • When player-constructed parts are destroyed, they now drop 85% of their original construction resources (up from 50%). This drop rate is now unaffected by the chosen economic difficulty.
    
  • In the starting star system, a bounty is now guaranteed to spawn very close to the player's starting location.
• User Interface:
  
  • Floating resources that you haven't collected will now stay visible in the fog of war as little dots. Common resources will be dark gray, and rarer resources will be light yellow. (Career mode only.)
    
  • The icons for rare asteroids (carbon, gold, tritanium, and uranium) now have a yellow tint to indicate their increased value.
    
  • The icon for hyperium asteroids and storage tiles is now an "Hy" symbol to be consistent with the other asteroid icons.
    
  • Using the salvage tool and clicking (without dragging a box) on a junked ship or asteroid will now mark the whole ship or asteroid for salvaging and automatically move to be nearby it. Multiple such commands can be queued up by holding shift. Once salvaging and resource collection for each is complete, the ship will move on to the next.
    
  • Added a "Strip Mine/Salvage" toggle when right-clicking the pick-axe tool. When enabled, a whole asteroid or ship will be mined/salvaged even if some of its parts don't contain desirable resources.
    
  • Holding Shift to queue a ship command will no longer summon all crew and cancel all exterior jobs.
    
  • Salvages queued while a ship is "following" a junk ship or asteroid will no longer be automatically canceled when issuing another ship command.
    
  • Adjusting the game speed or paused state now takes effect instantly. (Except for audio pitch, which still changes over a fraction of a second.)
    
  • Arrows indicating the speed and direction at which a ship is traveling or rotating can now be turned on in the settings. By default they are only displayed when in Direct Control Mode, but they also can be turned on for all ships, all selected ships, or turned off altogether.
    
  • When adjusting a crew's name or appearance, it will now be automatically favorited. This can be disabled in the settings.
    
  • Hovering over a favorited crew will now display their name. (Even when not on the crew management screen.) This can be disabled in the settings.
    
  • Whenever a favorited crew dies or is abandoned, a message will now be displayed in the upper-left corner. This can be disabled in the settings.
    
  • Using the "Load Ship (Replace Existing)" feature and checking "Also Load Resource Assignments" will now clear all existing storage tile designations and supply assignments.
    
  • When a thruster is selected or hovered, a bar will now be displayed under the health bar that indicates the thruster's current thrust level.
    
  • Added a setting to disable flashing of invalid/damaged parts in the ship editor.
    
  • Ship breadcrumb trails in Career are now a bit easier to see inside clouds.
    
  • Renamed the "Oval" part/decal shape to "Ellipse".
    
  • Renamed the Flak Battery to "Flak Array".
    
  • Translation updates for all supported languages.
• Tutorials:
  
  • Added an initial "Welcome" popup that is automatically displayed and tells the new player how to read the tutorials.
    
  • The first camera tutorial now mentions that W.A.S.D. keys are an option for controlling the camera.
    
  • The initial combat tutorial will no longer be shown if an enemy is detected while the player is near a station.
    
  • Added a tutorial that briefly explains clouds and storms.
    
  • The repairs tutorial will now only be shown while the player is near a station.
    
  • The "Gathering & Salvaging Materials" and "Mining Asteroids" tutorials now mention the new whole-ship/asteroid salvage command.
• Tech:
  
  • Upgraded to Microsoft .NET 8. This may slightly improve overall performance. (We had previously upgraded to .NET 8 but had to roll back to 7 due to a bug. That bug has now been fixed.)
• Bug Fixes:
  
  • Crash in multiplayer Career if the "Add More Crew" dialog is open while jumping to a new star system.
    
  • Crash in Build & Battle if the "Add More Crew" dialog is open when returning to the build phase.
    
  • When loading a saved game, the thrust levels of M.R.T.s and any thrusters connected to engine rooms would be loaded at a lower level than when saved.
    
  • It is no longer possible to end the current game (or load or start a new game) while jumping to a new star sytem. (Doing so could cause crashes.)
    
  • Ships that were under construction were being unintentionally ignored by collision avoidance.
    
  • Ships that were rotating at high speed could sometimes "clip" through or into other ships or objects.
    
  • The recently-added "magic thrust" could cause ships to slowly oscillate around their intended destination.
    
  • The rails of non-operational Railguns weren't using their proper damaged sprites.
    
  • If any crew outside a ship were at "warning" distance and thus showing a red line and circle, then some or all of the circles around any closer crew would also be red.
    
  • The sensor array's dish rotation should no longer slowly desync from its audio beeps. (Or if it still does, it should now desync much more slowly.)
    
  • Log files were logging the default settings instead of the user's custom settings upon initial startup.
• Modding:
  
  • Added a built-in mod that increases the maximum number of players in co-op Career from 4 to 8.
    
  • Thruster components now support a 'SoftOperationalToggle' that when disabled will force the thruster to ramp-down to zero but not immediately stop all thrust.
    
  • Resources can now be given a 'Rarity'. If omitted, "common" will be assumed.
    
  • Part toggles now support an 'OnAlertSwitch' style.
    
  • Improved error messages when rules references are invalid.
    
  • InitHitLengthResetDelay had a bug allowing BeamEmitters to fire without consuming resources.
    
  • ValueTween should now work properly when its OnValue is less than its OffValue.
    
  • If a buffable value specifies a MinValue or MaxValue but isn't actually being buffed, then its default BaseValue will now still be clamped to within the range allowed by MinValue and MaxValue.
    
  • The number of decal layers can now be changed by mods. (See <cosmoteer.rules>/DecalLayers)
    
  • Ship angular damping can now be made dynamic depending on the ship's linear speed. (This is not currently/yet used in vanilla.)

Cosmoteer release candidate 0.28.0 is now available for testing! (To play this release candidate, you must opt in to test it. Please see this post for info on how to test release candidates.)

This release candidate has a ton of quality-of-life improvements, a few significant balance changes, and a handful of bug fixes.

We're still working hard at a bunch of upcoming improvements as part of Career 2.0, but we wanted to get these improvements out to everyone sooner rather than later.

Thanks for testing!

RC1:

• Built-In Ships:
  
  • Added 1 new Monolith combat ship: Degenbrecher
    
  • Added 2 new Cabal combat ships: Pherkad and Sadalsuud
    
  • Added 1 new Imperium combat ship: Sesostris
    
  • Added 2 new Fringe combat ships: Pugachev and Tarakanova
    
  • Miscellaneous updates to existing ships.
• Balance:
  
  • All thrusters larger than smalls (and boost thrusters in boost mode) now have a "ramp down" time, meaning they can no longer reduce their thrust instantly. The larger the thruster, the longer its ramp-down time.
    
  • Doubled storage capacity for Steel, Coils, Hypercoils, and Tristeel from 20 per tile to 40 per tile.
    
  • Increased Flak Array (formerly Flak Battery) ammo capacity from 52 to 92.
    
  • Decreased Tractor Beam force by 20%.
    
  • Reduced EMP launch cooldown from 6 seconds to 2 seconds.
• Ship & Crew A.I.:
  
  • Ship A.I. has been updated to account for the new thruster "ramp down" times and is now more accurately able to determine the optimal time at which to start decelerating in order to come to a stop at the desired destination.
    
  • Ships (especially ships with diagonal flight directions) should now strafe more intelligently and be less likely to overshoot their destination.
    
  • Crew should now waste less time shuffling resources around when emptying factories into undesignated storage tiles.
• Career:
  
  • If you find yourself in an unwinnable fight, you can now often surrender to the A.I. by paying them credits. Try hailing them. In some cases the A.I. may even hail you to demand your surrender. And in some cases the A.I. will simply never let you surrender.
    
  • Similarly, A.I.s will now sometimes be willing to surrender to you and will offer you credits in exchange for you sparing their lives. The A.I. may hail you to offer a surrender, but you can also try hailing them. And in some cases, the A.I. may prefer death over the dishonor of surrendering.
    
  • Breaking a surrender truce will cause you to lose fame and prevent other A.I. ships in the same star system from surrenduring to you.
    
  • The crew limit will now only be increased in batches when your fame levels up. (Instead of gradually increasing one crew at a time.) We think this is more intuitive for new players and feels better as an actual reward for leveling up fame.
    
  • Stations now have more rare resources, and the amount of rare resources will now scale with the size of the station.
    
  • When player-constructed parts are destroyed, they now drop 85% of their original construction resources (up from 50%). This drop rate is now unaffected by the chosen economic difficulty.
    
  • In the starting star system, a bounty is now guaranteed to spawn very close to the player's starting location.
• User Interface:
  
  • Floating resources that you haven't collected will now stay visible in the fog of war as little dots. Common resources will be dark gray, and rarer resources will be light yellow. (Career mode only.)
    
  • The icons for rare asteroids (carbon, gold, tritanium, and uranium) now have a yellow tint to indicate their increased value.
    
  • The icon for hyperium asteroids and storage tiles is now an "Hy" symbol to be consistent with the other asteroid icons.
    
  • Using the salvage tool and clicking (without dragging a box) on a junked ship or asteroid will now mark the whole ship or asteroid for salvaging and automatically move to be nearby it. Multiple such commands can be queued up by holding shift. Once salvaging and resource collection for each is complete, the ship will move on to the next.
    
  • Added a "Strip Mine/Salvage" toggle when right-clicking the pick-axe tool. When enabled, a whole asteroid or ship will be mined/salvaged even if some of its parts don't contain desirable resources.
    
  • Holding Shift to queue a ship command will no longer summon all crew and cancel all exterior jobs.
    
  • Salvages queued while a ship is "following" a junk ship or asteroid will no longer be automatically canceled when issuing another ship command.
    
  • Adjusting the game speed or paused state now takes effect instantly. (Except for audio pitch, which still changes over a fraction of a second.)
    
  • Arrows indicating the speed and direction at which a ship is traveling or rotating can now be turned on in the settings. By default they are only displayed when in Direct Control Mode, but they also can be turned on for all selected ships or turned off altogether.
    
  • When adjusting a crew's name or appearance, it will now be automatically favorited. This can be disabled in the settings.
    
  • Hovering over a favorited crew will now display their name. (Even when not on the crew management screen.) This can be disabled in the settings.
    
  • Whenever a favorited crew dies or is abandoned, a message will now be displayed in the upper-left corner. This can be disabled in the settings.
    
  • Using the "Load Ship (Replace Existing)" feature and checking "Also Load Resource Assignments" will now clear all existing storage tile designations and supply assignments.
    
  • When a thruster is selected or hovered, a bar will now be displayed under the health bar that indicates the thruster's current thrust level.
    
  • Added a setting to disable flashing of invalid/damaged parts in the ship editor.
    
  • Ship breadcrumb trails in Career are now a bit easier to see inside clouds.
    
  • Renamed the "Oval" part/decal shape to "Ellipse".
    
  • Renamed the Flak Battery to "Flak Array".
• Tutorials:
  
  • Added an initial "Welcome" popup that is automatically displayed and tells the new player how to read the tutorials.
    
  • The first camera tutorial now mentions that W.A.S.D. keys are an option for controlling the camera.
    
  • The initial combat tutorial will no longer be shown if an enemy is detected while the player is near a station.
    
  • Added a tutorial that briefly explains clouds and storms.
    
  • The repairs tutorial will now only be shown while the player is near a station.
    
  • The "Gathering & Salvaging Materials" and "Mining Asteroids" tutorials now mention the new whole-ship/asteroid salvage command.
• Tech:
  
  • Upgraded to Microsoft .NET 8. This may slightly improve overall performance. (We had previously upgraded to .NET 8 but had to roll back to 7 due to a bug. That bug has now been fixed.)
• Bug Fixes:
  
  • Crash in multiplayer Career if the "Add More Crew" dialog is open while jumping to a new star system.
    
  • Crash in Build & Battle if the "Add More Crew" dialog is open when returning to the build phase.
    
  • It is no longer possible to end the current game (or load or start a new game) while jumping to a new star sytem. (Doing so could cause crashes.)
    
  • Ships that were under construction were being unintentionally ignored by collision avoidance.
    
  • Ships that were rotating at high speed could sometimes "clip" through or into other ships or objects.
    
  • The rails of non-operational Railguns weren't using their proper damaged sprites.
    
  • If any crew outside a ship were at "warning" distance and thus showing a red line and circle, then some or all of the circles around any closer crew would also be red.
    
  • The sensor array's dish rotation should no longer slowly desync from its audio beeps. (Or if it still does, it should now desync much more slowly.)
    
  • Log files were logging the default settings instead of the user's custom settings upon initial startup.
• Modding:
  
  • Added a built-in mod that increases the maximum number of players in co-op Career from 4 to 8.
    
  • Thruster components now support a 'SoftOperationalToggle' that when disabled will force the thruster to ramp-down to zero but not immediately stop all thrust.
    
  • Resources can now be given a 'Rarity'. If omitted, "common" will be assumed.
    
  • Part toggles now support an 'OnAlertSwitch' style.
    
  • Improved error messages when rules references are invalid.
    
  • InitHitLengthResetDelay had a bug allowing BeamEmitters to fire without consuming resources.
    
  • ValueTween should now work properly when its OnValue is less than its OffValue.
    
  • If a buffable value specifies a MinValue or MaxValue but isn't actually being buffed, then its default BaseValue will now still be clamped to within the range allowed by MinValue and MaxValue.
    
  • The number of decal layers can now be changed by mods. (See <cosmoteer.rules>/DecalLayers)
    
  • Ship angular damping can now be made dynamic depending on the ship's linear speed. (This is not currently/yet used in vanilla.)

RC2:

• (Balance): Increased M.R.T. thrust by 25%. (8000->10000)
  
• (Balance): If a Boost Thruster runs out of power, it now must be powered up fully before turning back on. (This applies regardless of whether it is in boost mode or not.)
  
• (RC Balance): Halved ramp-down for Huge Thrusters.
  
• (RC Balance): Removed ramp-down from Standard, Large, and Boost thrusters.
  
• (Bugfix): When loading a saved game, the activation levels of M.R.T.s (and other thrusters if powered by engine rooms) would be loaded at a lower value than when saved.
  
• (Bugfix): The recently-added "magic thrust" could cause ships to slowly oscillate around their intended destination.
  
• (RC Bugfix): Crash when creating a new ship from scratch when using a mod that increases the number of decal layers.
  
• (RC Bugfix): It wasn't possible to click on a ship/asteroid icon with the updated salvage/mine tool to target it.

RC3:

• (U.I.): Added an option to show velocity arrows on all ships.
  
• (U.I.): Translation updates for all supported languages.
  
• (Balance): Reduced Boost Thruster's passive power drain while in boost mode from 0.3/sec to 0.1/sec.
  
• (Balance): Reduced Boost Thruster boost-mode power consumption per thrust force by 25%.
  
• (Balance): Reduced Boost Thruster battery capacity from 8 to 6.
  
• (RC Balance): Boost Thrusters now turn back on at the same power amount at which their final battery sprite is displayed.

Cosmoteer update 0.27.2 is now available! This update adds support for the Japanese language, plus it contains a handful of bug fixes, quality-of-life improvements, and other minor changes.

We're still working hard at a bunch of upcoming improvements as part of Career 2.0, but we wanted to get these fixes and improvements out to everyone sooner rather than later.

Enjoy!

Full patch notes:

• Built-In Ships:
  
  • Added 1 new Monolith combat ship: Tempest
    
  • Added 6 new Fringe ships: Blood Reaper, Brave One, Ice Cutter, Jaws, Poor Yorick, and Vulcan.
    
  • Miscellaneous updates to existing built-in ships.
• Multiplayer:
  
  • Asteroids can now be turned off by the host in Domination mode.
• Crew A.I.:
  
  • Crew will now automatically consolidate resource stacks in undesignated storage tiles to maximize the number of available free tiles.
    
  • Crew running low on O2 that can't access an airlock on their own ship will no longer try to use airlocks on other friendly ships if the other ship is moving.
    
  • Increased the default "operate" and "supply battery" priorities for Sensor Arrays to 9 and 8, respectively.
• User Interface:
  
  • Added a Japanese translation. (Please report any issues with the Japanese translation on our Discord, the Steam discussion boards, or using the in-game F11 feedback feature.)
    
  • The "Assists With Construction" toggle is now called "Construction Assistance" and it now has three modes: "Off", "My Ships Only" (the new default), and "All Allied Ships".
    
  • Players can now set a "Desired" amount for each type of resource. When set, this will give factories permission to produce up to that amount (or the resource limit, whichever is less) and will also be used when trading/transferring excess or needed resources.
    
  • Whenever a resource limit has been set, the capacity for that resource will now always be shown in orange. (In addition to the existing asterisk, which is still shown.)
    
  • Hovering the mouse cursor over the crew count in the ship designer will now show the number of operators.
    
  • In the ship designer, if a ship has negative command points, the negative number will now be shown in red.
    
  • Updated the screenshot in the fires tutorial to match the updated fire VFX.
• Performance:
  
  • Added an option to limit the framerate while Cosmoteer is in the background.
• Bug Fixes:
  
  • Crash that could occur when editing text (such as a ship's description) that has already reached its maximum length.
    
  • Projectiles could occasionally "phase" through ships and hit parts inside ships that they weren't supposed to be able to hit when another projectile destroyed the part that the first projectile would otherwise have hit. This seemed to be most common with nukes.
    
  • Crew being assisted by Manipulator Beams could sometimes "wobble" and overshoot their destination.
    
  • Very small fires weren't doing damage to their part, which made it impossible to put out the fire by repairing the part.
    
  • If the lead ship of a formation with 3 or more ships broke into multiple pieces, the positions of all of the follower ships would get changed to the same overlapping location.
    
  • If a Modular Rocket Thruster had some extenders with fuel pods and some without, the extenders with fuel pods would use more power than the extenders without.
    
  • Mining Lasers could cause a very high-pitch and annoying sound when playing on high game speeds.
    
  • The Mine Factory was unintentionally missing a "parts per mine" stat.
    
  • In some circumstances, the crew count displayed in blueprint mode could appear as a negative number.
    
  • Removing a resource limit that was already at least the available physical capacity wouldn't remove the asterisk (*) on the resource button in the resource management screen.
    
  • Dragging a box with the salvage/collect or Creative Mode selection tools while the camera is focused on a rotating ship would cause the origin point of the box to unintentionally rotate with the ship.
    
  • Rare errors loading some saved games.
• Modding:
  
  • Fixed ToggledComponents crash if any of its sub-components are ChainedTo another component defined later in the rules file.
    
  • Fixed crash when a ToggledComponents is hooked up to a blueprint-incompatible toggle even if IncludeInBlueprints is set to false.
    
  • MultiToggle and MultiValue now properly support ViaBuffs. (This was always intended to work but was previously bugged.)
    
  • MultiResourceStorage wasn't updating its resource count properly as ViaBuffs connections were added and removed.
    
  • ResourceStorageProxy and MultiResourceStorage components now support an optional 'LimitMaxResources' that, if set, will cause the component to act as if it can store no more than that amount of resources, even if the components it refers to can actually store more.
    
  • Identifiers in rules files can now contain dot (.) characters as long as the identifier isn't only dot characters.