StarMade 0.174 Crafting Update

Hello Players,

another update is uploading now. Of course there has been further work on the universe, but it's something that needs a lot of fundamential ground work so it will take some more time.

Here are the new features and changes:

Crafting Update

Calbiri put in a lot of work to make crafting more enjoyable and more balanced. The essential system is still the same.

When putting raw resources into the capsule refinery you will now get 10 generic resources (alloyed metal mesh and crystal circuits depending on the raw type), as well as 5 capsules of the raw flavor. But the 5 extra capsules will only be made in the capsule refinery. In the personal refinery, you will just get the generics.
You can turn the capsules into generic resources in the micro factory, too, but depending on strategy it might be better to hold on to them, since they are needed in more advanced recipes.

The micro factory also can process scrap, which I will talk about in the next section.

There now are 3 types of factories: The basic which replaces the macro, which can make all essential block needed for survival, the standard factory which you can make from the basic, which has most of the ship building materials, and the advanced which makes all the effects and more advanced stuff in the game.

Please note that all placed factories/refineries consume power as long as they are switched on, even if there is nothing to produce.

Scrap Stations

All newly generated/spawned neutral stations will now be scrap. This means harvesting blocks will get you scrap, instead of the blocks themselves, which you can turn into generic resources. You can repair a scrap station by pressing M on a block of the station. This will turn all blocks into real blocks, but the price to repair is the price of all blocks in that station.
This is done to prevent the get-rich-quick method of stripping down space stations. They still have a lot of value, but it's much more balanced now. A trick is for example to strip a space station down to one block, and then repair it for cheap, to have a very cheap space station, since you only pay for one block.

IMPORTANT: Placing blocks on a not repaired scrap station will turn any block into scrap, so you will lose that block, unless you buy the station. Only newly generated Station are scrap station, so if you have build on them already, everything is like it was before on those.

 

Raw resource texture switch

As it was often pointed out, and also our own opinion, the overlay texture for metal looked more like crystal, and vice versa. These textures have now been switched around. We have planned that for some time, but we waited for the crafting update to do it, so it's all in one with the new system.

 

World Manager

You can now manage multiple universes (databases) in the same client. You can also import and export universes to share with other people. The button to do that is in the startup settings.

 

Multi Slots

Another change are multi slots. Those were harder to implement as I though, since there are so many cases of those slots interacting with other multi-slots, compatible multi-slots, other compatible single slots, incompatible single slots... you get the idea ^^

Basically these slots hold all shapes of the same type of block in one slot: Normal, wedge, penta, tetra, and corner. You can just drag them together to form a multislot, and right click them to take specific blocks out. To use in buildmode you can just scroll over them to select the block you need to build. This will make building a lot faster and more efficient, as the number of objects that can be in the hotbar at the same time rises to max 5 times what it was before.

 

Server Lockup fix

A bug that has been around for a very long time has been finally caught in the act. This bug caused servers to lock up, and all players to disconnect until a forced restart.

 

Other Bug Fixes

there were other fixes, too, but I will go in detail in the next update. As always, thanks to all the testers!

 

The next update will have something special (if everything goes well).
Keep voting in the station contest,
Thanks for playing StarMade,
- schema