It's been a quiet week or so and with some of the team taking extended breaks we were fairly light on the ground - but we made some good progress on the trading mechanic and have a few other surprises.

Interstellar Communications

One thing we've been working towards through early access is a way to give the end-game further meaning. You've mined everything valuable around your starting area. You've built an impressive base with all the requirements for survival comfortably taken care of. You've built redundancy and automation using all the tools at your disposal - what is there to do next? We've got several ideas for expanding on late game life, and Interstellar Communication touches on several of them.

As described several updates ago, we're working towards what we've dubbed the 'Trader Mechanic', but the final implementation will actually support far more than that.

In creative mode you can now spawn in construction kits for Satellite Dishes and a Communications Motherboard. A Communications Computer will display all of the contacts that could be reached by all Satellite Dishes on its network, and the signal strength to each. You can adjust the angle of your Satellite Dish in order to improve the signal to available contacts or find new ones. In time, you'll be able to use logic to streamline this process like on all the other devices in the game.

The next steps we'll be implementing will allow you to, given a sufficiently strong signal, initiate contact. This may just be for information (ie. reports from weather satellites) or to accept trade offers or visitors assuming you have a powered, connected and accessible landing pad (also currently available in Creative Mode).

As with all our new features, portions of the complete feature may be accessible while it is still a work in progress. We encourage you to try it out, report bugs and let us know what you think on Discord!

Alien Mushrooms

To demonstrate some of the flexibility of how some of the systems in Stationeers interact, we'd like to introduce the newest member of the botanist/atmospherics engineer toolkit - the Alien Mushroom. This functions in much the same way as existing plants, however instead of breathing in Carbon Dioxide and exhaling Oxygen, these will inhale Nitrous Oxide and exhale Nitrogen and Oxygen. This serves as a proof of concept for allowing us to easily change the gas mixtures inhaled and exhaled by plants, for which the next step will be to expose these values to mods.

Stationpedia Expansion

As promised, Rocket has continued to expand the Stationpedia to now include information on Alloys, and applied a few usability improvements as well. The color scheme has been changed again to improve the readibility of some elements, but may still be subject to change based on peoples feedback. It will also now automatically appear when beginning the tutorial or your first game. For those who have been asking about how to translate this, once more of the guide is complete we'll be making it available through the localization system so you'll be able to help translate it into your preferred language.

Version 0.2.1791.8240

• Added Alien Mushrooms. Alien Mushrooms breathes in Nitrous Oxide and breathes out Nitrogen and Oxygen. This is a first pass for plants breathing custom gas mixes.
• Added Alloy information and list to Stationpedia.
• Added Tutorial and new game Stationpedia will now popup with opacity set to none by default, to make it easiest to read it.
• Added second pass on Satellite Dish. Vertical and Horizontal can be set, in a similar way to the Solar Panel.
• Added first components of the systems supporting Interstellar Communication to creative mode.
• Added RatioNitrousOxide LogicType to logic-enabled atmospheric devices.
• Added Door Setting variable can now be set by Logic.
• Changed approximate checks on programmable chip from using |a - b| < e*max(|a|,|b|) to |a - b| < max(e*max(|a|,|b|), float.epsilon * 8) to avoid it wigging out when a or b are near 0.
• Changed GraphDisplay so that graph runs from left to right, and reduced wasted space on the plot by removing above/below the x-axis if no line is plotted there
• Tweaked and adjusted the layouts of the Settings screens so they're easier to read.
• Updated text input fields to now animate while hovering over them.
• Improved server messages. Server messages (shutdown notifications, server notices etc) now show up in the chat window as well.
• Fixed Doors not reset Setting to new Open state, so it assumed actions must be taken (Credit: Risu)
• Fixed Player State Window (top right) now displays temperature as "not a number"(NaN) when in a vacuum.
• Fixed Player State Window color values not being initialized, and only updating correctly on first change.
• Fixed Aliases being cleared on reset for IC Chips (Credit: Risu)
• Fixed Beta bug where NaN was displayed when below 0 celcius, not invalid temperature. Now displays Nil (localizable) correctly for invalid temperature, instead of 0 which it displayed previously.
• Fixed syntax highlighting bug in programmable chip editor that would cause things like `# O=k` to display tags, and `# 0=kelvin` to not be coloured correctly.
• Fixed a bug where players could use RTF markup to highlight their own code.
• Fixed the incorrect display on the computer monitor of IC source code.
• Fixed Rotated filter slots on the large gas filter so their label is visible.
• Fixed NullReference on generating terrain while flying faster than it could generate.
• Fixed a couple of null reference exceptions caused by the interim commit of the trading mechanics.
• Fixed Stationpedia window was not correctly initializing centered.
• Fixed an animation delay when hovering certain buttons in menus.
• Fixed occasional error for some players when populating Stationpedia data resulting in none of the text being loaded for any language. Will now display an error and continue loading normally.
• Fixed reagent coloring in help system was a dark purple that was nearly always hard to read. Has been replaced with magenta to help with reading.
• Fixed two matching filters show up as a warning (Credit: Risu).
• Fixed visual blueprint missing for Portable Solar.
• Fixed NitrousOxide filters were removing Nitrous Oxide from the input pipe correctly, but would add Water to the output instead of Nitrous Oxide.
• Fixed tutorial required player to keep Stationpedia window open at all times during microwave task. Now player only needs to open it, and if they want to have it closed during the rest of the task they can.
• Fixed WallCooler being an amazing heater in Europa. WallCooler efficiency drops as the temperature difference becomes too large. If the waste network becomes 100 degrees warmer than input, efficiency begins to drop until zero at 200 degrees.