0.285.9 - Excavation Claim

Claim Beacons

Triskelion-Armstrong released a new series of B8 claim beacons earlier this week. These fully autonomous drones are able to oversee the area of the rings and provide a stable and secure waypoint for the excavation industry. Beacons are equipped with class-1 artificial intelligence that handles cryptographic protocols, secure broadcasts and beacon security itself. In event of beacon failure Triskelion-Amstrong guarantees replacement on-site.

Astrogation Charts Update

Recent ringwide scans revealed new residential and excavations stations established in the A-ring. Due to inaccuracy of telescopic surveys captains that encounter the stations are encouraged to disclose exact positions upon encounter.

Excavators Life

Sixth episode of “Excavators Life” is to premiere on Enceladus Entertainment Network. “The Research” tells a story of a young astrogeologist on a quest to uncover why her mundane research is attracting so much unusual attention.

Autopilot OTA updates

New OTA upgrade for autopilot software is distributed station-wide. Improved spatial awareness highly improves rotational accuracy of all ships, from small mining ships to cargo freighters. The upgrade is free of charge, and captains that took the liberty to tune their autopilot settings to overcome previous shortcomings are encouraged to revert to defaults.

New Stock

This quarter the resupply run from Earth brought in extra hardware available for sale at your local upgrade shop. There are a total of three new torches available for retrofit at very reasonable prices. Reserve yours today!

Pest Extermination Warning

Outside of new stock, recent resupply runs brought in new species of bugs. Following were exterminated by pest control:

• Tuning options for thrusters and torches were not respected outside of the tuning shop.
• Number of fixes to the conversation subsystem, including conversations not starting, conversations ending abruptly when other ships were in the area, crashes caused by talking to dead people and missing dialogue options.
• You could encounter a ship that you own and keep in the garage flying in the rings.
• Search and Rescue ships tried to pick up all ships they were friendly towards with no regard if they needed help. This led the S & R team to try and pick up your ship when you were helping them.
• Fixed a graphical glitch that caused the gamma slider to show psychedelic colors on Intel GPU cards.
• Gamma slider helper image was adjusted to be more useful on the bright side of the spectrum.
• Fixed thruster parameters for number of ships.
• Swapping in and out certain reaction control systems could make you lose money.
• Fixed display glitch of the mineral market that caused charts to cover the values.
• Fixed cutscene bug that could cause cargo pods and claim beacons to be shot away at sub-orbital velocities if you fast-forward through the initial animation.
• Actions applied by excavators now have an equal and opposite reaction.
• Patched microseismic scanner software won’t show minerals that are not present in ore chunks anymore.
• New audio system for the thrusters, removing number of audio glitches and improving overall audio of your thrusters firing.
• Number of math fixes to bugs that caused the game to behave slightly differently on lower framerates.
• Fixes to physics engine that could cause a small, fast moving object to embed inside a ship or station.
• New achievements to unlock.