- NPC factions now have a great deal more support, and in the nearby future will be populated on-the-fly with the birth of planets or when an existing faction is destroyed. Here is a funky image of the factions database's readout.
- Various bugfixes, tweaks and additions have been made, notably the ability to stop a hacking attempt and the ability to enter 'all' when crafting, this immediately transfers the required number of components from the highest quality components available to the tool.
- Scanning things, it actually gives you details about things in space now! (If you didn't already notice).
- Planets which are not hospitable, for example FA-1116. This little number is small, boring, and every inch of it's flatland-and-desert surface is covered in strong mineral acids and vents that jet the aforementioned acids everywhere. Luckily it didn't quite have the right conditions to generate oceans of mineral acids, but it's still horrid.
- Claimable machine gun nests with MG-128 heavy machine guns (formerly scout-class 'rat' gatling guns, when mounted on vehicles).
- Vehicle weapons which require ammo.
- Automated crafting workstations, which will pull components from their input hopper, assemble the product specified and put the finished product in the output hopper. This degree of automation should make lengthy processes such as starship construction or the mass-production of processed materials a lot easier.
- Non-sentient wildlife now age a lot faster, dying of old age within (approximately) one or two real life hours. This helps remove wildlife from rooms which should be purged, helping reduce database size and memory footprint further.
- Innate skills and bonus items given by background, the ranger background provides you with a Ranger Duster, an alright piece starter of torso armor for soaking physical damage and the Keen Eye innate skill which provides a +2 ToHit bonus and +5 to your maximum Clarity dice pool.
The Serial Killer background provides you with the Insane in the Membrane innate skill which provides a +1 ToHit bonus, a +1 Dodge bonus and +5 to your maximum Aggression dice pool.
The Lab Tech background provides the Lab Coat, an alright piece of starter torso armor for soaking energy, chemical and toxic damages.
- Moon phases, as 17-EGRET and 7-BLUEJAY both have two moons orbitting them, I decided to have the two moons have phase differences, adding a little flavor to existing moon phase messages displayed by the 'time' command (which I fixed, at some point in the last 2/3 months).
- Intelligent NPCs can now use weapons or armor. Whilst they will not wield weapons given to them, any NPC faction units or pirates will now spawn with weapons or armor with either 100% certainty or a chance of the item spawning. This is due to a spawn equipment support, and attack suggestion update I made a month ago which allows intelligent NPCs to spawn with weapons, armor and gadgets and hook into existing support for wielding the objects they spawn with, they will select weapons they are wielding before they use their standard attacks and will reload any ranged weapons that require ammo.
All in all, a productive month and a half, we're making strides towards our Alpha Stage-2 goals now, having nearly completely finished Stage-1 goals, expect good things in future.
