04/30/14 Updates

I had been meaning to write up this post a few weeks ago but I was too busy making text. The most recent addition to our motley crew is Vega, who has actually made working text without crashing the MOO.

The majority of changes since the last post are as follows:

- Several new hackable 'secure' container types for randomly spawning in pirate encounter rooms.
- Gauss rifles are now far easier to make, and gauss pistols can be made too now.
- Some spooky action involving stat boosting gadgets was fixed.
- Armor no longer erroneously displays a weight carrying bonus of 0.0kg.
- Pirate scouts and ultralites have been fixed and no longer have their pilots go mysteriously missing.
- Pirate fighters now spawn in solar systems.
- Fighter, ultralight and scout class ships can now be produced on the experimental starship workstation.
- Some odd behavior regarding starship debris in space was fixed, sparse starship debris can now be collected with an asteroid mining module and is cleaned up with other junk in space after three or so hours.
- Junk in space is now more intelligently cleaned up on the three-hourly schedule, 'unstable fix' items can now be shot at in space but at any distance (this is a temporary workaround).
- Some new critters to meet and get your face torn off by.
- Adjustments and improvements to shield modules and shield terminals, now better shields will require more power, charge more stability per tick and have more max stability.
- Some organic materials are now edible and can be eaten raw, such as native berries or native fungus. These might give you a disease or a stomach upset rarely.
- Some new 'invisble' (no terrain messages to spam up the map) resources including native (and exotic) spices and herbs, exotic fungus and native tubers.
- A bunch of new food items, a few of which require the new scavengeable organic materials, some which can only be bought and some which even can only be crafted from certain fish. You want depth, we got depth.
- The maker block has been readjusted to make food, drink and other useful items rather than ice cream and assorted tacky junk you'd find in some 99 cent store (it still makes ice cream though).
- Injector logic was adjusted so it is no longer relying on one massive insane if statement to work out what you want to inject. You can now inject anyone following you, in your party or in your corp. Wild animals and robots cannot be injected regardless of the previous cases.
- Pirate kings in moon dungeons have been replaced by moon pirate officers, I plan to make pirate kings the big bads which only spawn on rare occasions or as a result of quest/mission activity.
- A new layer of world generation which produces volcanoes on the surface of a planet depending on the level of tectonic activity present.
- Underground Points of Interest now exist, these will act as large mineral veins, caverns or some other goodie, buried horror or event which will make digging interesting beyond finding a bunch of inert metal every tile. These will be expended and replaced on a daily basis.
- Fixed some odd behavior regarding linking robot handpads when they have no assigned robots, and old hand-e droids not actually being a claimable object.
- Code-locked doors which require you to enter a number between 1111 and 9999 to open the door, these will be accompanied by a mainframe/datapad/chip you have to hack or a pirate you have to steal a note from for the code.
- Kodak flashers (an object dating back to the really early days) now correctly emit messages to the room the user is in.
- Containers now have a dump command which can be used to dump the contents of one container into another, or just to dump the contents onto the floor.
- The player corpnet got a 'history' and 'who command, as well as the ability to be turned on and off.
- Buildings which utilise the On-Demand System to re-use their indoor rooms that can have vehicles loaded into them such as the Large Warehouse can now correctly have vehicles loaded into them.
- Colonist-driven automated harvesting/refining/production is in the works, you can see the work-in-progress input command in the governors office in a sector center.
- There is now a job board in the administrative lobby in central complex which shows all the jobs you can possibly perform and earn rewards for (and those you can't).
- Layer-based dungeons are in the works, these will involve making a 'layer-cake' dungeon formed of a set of floors which are one of multiple different variants of the floor, and can be rotated by 90, 180 or 270 degrees. Along with the new randomised encounter contents, this provides more depth and a novel challenge for players used to the static pirate dungeons.
- 8-pound shells and the 8-pounder main cannon are now 96mm shells and the 96mm main cannon now, the weight reference in the name was somewhat odd.
- Even more prefixes and descriptions for stat relics.
- Random material armor can now be passed a set of arguments during population which dictates the material, quality and thickness so now a full matching set of material armor can be populated at the same time. The stat bonuses and module capacity/modules will still be random though.
- Some refinements to the 'put' command which prevents you from putting your worn equipment and wielded weapons in a container.
- Refinements to the robot 'sell' command to consolidate all the selling into one action rather than queuing dozens of actions.

We've recently had a large spike in the number of players regularly on the game, nothing beats seeing a whole bunch of new dudes playing your game and sticking around and the added input from bug reports and suggestions is also speeding development along.
In other news, we had an outage today whilst our server was reportedly moved to a new datacenter.

Keep posted folks, there'll always be new changes to report.

4/2/14 updates changelog

Okama gamespheres are now available in the Central Gear Shop.
Missiles now leave craters.
Exosuits increase maximum weight capacity when worn.
Seeds found during exploration/discovery can be farmed with an agricultural pod (built from the structure tool).
The Theology skill has been upgraded:
* Cost reduced from 500 to 250 - taking 2.5 regular skill spaces.  It is an exclusive social skill and other skills cannot be taken with Theology (such as Musician or Consultant).
* PREACH - new command that can buff other players and creatures in the room.  10 minute cooldown.

* BLESS <robot or product (weapon, armor, building, vehicle, etc)> - restore 20 points of health to the target.  5 minute cooldown.
* Max HP Bonus: 5
* Aggression penalty: 2
* Max clarity bonus: 1
* Max stamina bonus: 1

Job added: preacher man (rolling double the difficulty check when preaching) - 24 hour cooldown.

Freak Background Status - updated 4/1/14

Freak is one the original backgrounds we've been wanting to add to Wayfar for a long time.  We've finally started completing some of the pieces.  As a freak, the player is wanted by law enforcement, and his or her goal is to locate and enter a heavily guarded lab in order to remove their warp powers - before they end up an experiment in the same lab, forever.

Freak powers:
* Warpstorm - 100%
   Unleash your psychic powers in an area around your target.  2 minute cooldown.

* Teleport - 25%
   Zap yourself to another tile on the same planet.  5 minute cooldown.
* Mind Ray - 0%
   Focus your mind on a single target to deal energy damage.  2 minute cooldown.

Freak objective:
Corporate lab - 10%
 * map complete