This updated contains changes to data and prefabs that will break some saves. Old rockets have also been removed and will no longer be present in your saves. We have created a branch that will be frozen pre this rocket update: prerocket
Rockets
Rockets are often considered a final goal in Stationeers. However, instead of designing them as an end game necessity, we’ve instead treated them as another system that weaves itself into all the other systems of the game. Rockets support building stations, and stations support building rockets.
Previously, the rockets were simple yet unforgiving. It was hard to tell what was happening, unless you already knew everything about rockets. You functionally had to build the best rocket system from the start, else your rocket was likely to be lost. Lastly, the old rockets flying were simplified down to a single number increasing and decreasing on the wall, which was ‘a bit’ of an oversimplification of space flight.
Rockets have become a new system for you to engineer. They are built from structural fuselages which house many internal parts. Fuel tanks must be manually positioned and plumbed. Similarly, placing batteries, cargo storage, pipes, wires, chute and many more devices is now a challenge for you to make decisions on. Will you choose an engine that slowly pulls its own fuel, or one that chugs more and more fuel as you pressurize your pipes toward bursting?
This is a massive update for the studio and our team, adding a ground-up rework of Rockets into the game. This not only provides fantastic new content for you to experience - but sets the stage for us to expand the game in a whole host of directions.
Times have been tough for many game studios lately and Stationeers is a very niche project. You - our players - are a very important part of our development, so please consider buying our supporter content DLC, leaving reviews, and helping spread the word about the game to people who might like it.
Despite all the challenges in the gaming industry, our studio hopes to continue to grow closer to our players, serve interesting niches and regularly update our games. While not a profitable project (our typical daily revenue including DLCs is around USD 800 gross, roughly 400 of which makes it to us), Stationeers is important to all of us in the studio. We hope that shows in the hard work we do with our updates, and we feel this one is no exception.
Not only does this update contain an entire new game around Rockets, it also contains a massive array of performance, usability, and general fixes. Our change log is so big that we can’t fit all of it in this post.
- CEO Dean Hall
International Uniforms Pack
This pack adds cosmetic uniforms featuring fifteen different international markings for wearing on characters in Stationeers.
Our DLC was made to provide a way for those who enjoy the project and want to further support it, and in return receive some simple new content. This content is not essential for the game. Consider purchasing this if you want to further provide support to its ongoing development.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2542990/Stationeers_International_Uniforms_Pack
Rocket Details
Rocket Control Motherboard
Devices on the rocket can be remotely accessed through the Rocket Control Motherboard. Specifically, the motherboard gets to traverse through the new datalinks. When an uplink/downlink pair is setup, the motherboard can access devices on the rockets and the rocket devices are made available on the uplink's network. This allows planetside logic devices to see rocketside devices on the networks, so traditional logic systems can still interact with rocket devices.
The Rocket Motherboard provides a visual representation of destinations to which rockets can travel. Each world has a uniquely authored map providing different locations and resources for rockets to obtain. When a destination is set, and the rocket engine is fired, rockets progress towards their destination. Scanners can be used to unlock new static destinations through the Chart action, instance new asteroids to visit by the Discovery action, or gather more information about a mining site via the Survey action. All these UI based actions and commands can also be activated via logic on the rocket avionics device.
Rockets act as a way for players to obtain resources and gasses. But Rockets now provide a framework for us to modify other aspects of the game. While not making the first cut of features for this release, we intend to add satellite deployments which can increase the number of traders who visit, contact bespoke traders, or even microwave remote power from space. We also want to ensure that traveling to other planets get enough attention, and isn't a side note. Traveling back and forth between worlds will be possible, but will require some significant changes to our save system.
Engines
Engine selection is important, as it dictates how efficiently you use fuel and how much thrust you can produce. The Pumped Gas Engine and Pumped Liquid Engine are the two simplest engines, pulling fuel directly from pipes and tanks. The Pressure Fed Gas Engine operates on gaseous fuel, and can produce the most thrust, but the fuel must be delivered to the engine at high pressures to be better than pumped engines. The Pressure Fed Liquid Engine can be the most fuel efficient, but managing liquid fuel flow via pressure can be incredibly challenging in such a dynamic environment.
Payloads
Miners and Scanners do the bulk of the work in space gameplay. Miners gather ore, and output it into chute networks for transport to Cargo Storage. Scanners are used in three ways to explore space, unlock new destinations, and gather information. Miners and Scanners have a head slot that must be occupied by a mining/scanning head, else the device will not function.
Infrastructure
Interfacing with the rocket on the launch mount is predominantly done through umbilicals. These consist of a main umbilical device placed inside of a launch tower. The umbilical can then connect onto an umbilical socket placed in the rocket. Variants exist for power, gas, liquids, and items. To allow better accessibility to the rocket during construction we’ve added several new stairwell variants, along with extendable access bridges.
Fuselages
We’ve added several cosmetic variants for the rocket fuselages, so that not all rockets have to look and feel the same. We took inspiration from the Mercury Redstone and Saturn V.
Rocket Control UI
We wanted to improve the accessibility of rockets, so that players who can't manually assemble a little-endian address in logic can still use rockets. The Rocket Motherboard has 3 main pages. The “Rocket” tab allows you to see and control devices, in a much more graphical way, which is important since when in space, you can't use your tablet to debug issues. The “Map” tab lets you see all of the locations you’ve explored, and see rockets moving around in space. The "Location" tab lets you see specific information about a location, if it has links to other locations, if it can spawn minable asteroids, or if it has resources to mine. It's also where you will start rocket actions, such as mining and scanning, which interact with the location.
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Traders
As well as rockets we've also given traders a little love, including adding lights and other visual improvements and cleaning up the assets to make them more performant. There has been a specific focus on improving tooltips on the traders, and they should now provide much better information about what you are buying and selling. There are also a lot of bug fixes focused on traders.
New Traders
The new traders consist of three types: a Consumable Trader, similar to a convenience store, selling items like duct tape, cereal bars, and other useful goods, a Liquid Trader, specializing in bulk quantities of liquids such as liquid nitrogen, liquid volatiles, and water, and an Appliance Trader, who sells appliances and purchases materials required for creating them.
New Data Structure
To support new functionality, we have revised the data structure for traders. There is now much more functionality for us to make unique traders. It’s also easier than ever to make new trader mods. This does means existing trader mods will need to be rewritten.
Care Packages
Traders will sometimes want to buy care packages that contain a specific set of items. These care packages can be created by filling a cardboard box with the required items. Sometimes traders will pay handsomely for these key supplies and allow for a good profit to be made.
Tool-tips
We've placed a significant emphasis on enhancing tooltips across all aspects of the game. Our goal is to display more comprehensive and accurate information, ensuring players have a better understanding of game-play and mechanics
Orbital Simulation
Our old skybox was based on what was effectively a "geocentric" world. The sun of the world would follow a predictable path in the sky, with only the angle of its rotation being configurable. Additionally objects in our skyboxes, such as the Earth in our Moon world, or Jupiter in our Europa world, were static objects in the sky.
As part of other prototypes and ongoing work at the studio, we developed an excellent way to model orbital mechanics using Kepler's laws of planetary motion. All skybox objects are now configured to be based on a real simulation, with planetary movement in the sky. Currently, this is mostly cosmetic but offers massive potential in the future for us to expand on our Rocketry update. For now though, the main impact will be on the apparent movement of the world sun. Your world now has its own orbit, so your suns' apparent motion will change throughout the orbit - giving you seasons which will affect solar irradiance.
Visually the results are stunning. Europa now shows a revised Jupiter with animated clouds and all the major Jovian moons. Saturn has also had a face lift.
World Data Changes
In line with the orbital simulation changes we have refactored how world data is stored. Previously, it could be defined as a 'template' and then used to initialize a world save. This was handy in that it allowed you to tweak a lot of settings in a save. but it also baked any bugs into your save and made synchronization and serialization in multiplayer very problematic. This was a source of a number of nasty desync bugs. So we have rationalized this together and firmed up how this works. To make a custom world you will need to make a mod. And this world data is loaded each time, not from your save but from the game data. These changes will break saves on old custom worlds.
World Difficulty Information
As part of the first steps of our future work to cleanup survival and game information in general, some substantial changes have been made to how we store and display difficulty settings. As before, these are fully moddable but we have also extended what can be included and changed in a difficulty setting. When starting a new world, the screen will show you information about that world, such as the atmospherics, storms, and any other important information.
When you select a difficulty, the new world screen will clearly show you the impact of that change. You can change the difficulty after loading with the 'difficulty' console command, followed by the name of the difficulty you want to select (case sensitive).
Performance Improvements
Occlusion
We've simplified our approach to occlusion to make it more constant and provide a significant performance improvement. Previously, the render distance was set individually for each object, leading to inconsistencies in how objects were displayed and shadowed across the game. To address this, we've shifted to a type-based system for determining render distances for both meshes and shadows. This means that objects of similar types now follow a uniform standard for visibility and shadow casting.
This refinement has substantially improved game performance, particularly in areas with complex structures. During our tests, we noticed a marked improvement in frame rates. For instance, a test map that previously achieved 30-35 fps on medium settings now smoothly runs at a full 60 fps on high settings without any noticeable frame drops, regardless of the viewing direction. This update is a game-changer for players with extensive stations, offering a smoother and more visually consistent experience.
Atmospherics
There were some instances where a very large number of atmospheres could be present in the world. We've made some changes around how world atmospheres equalize back to the global atmosphere meaning that if you ever see many thousands of world atmospheres they should quickly be reduced to a reasonable amount.
We need you!
Stationeers is a small niche project. We know times are tough and our project isn't for everyone. So if you like the work we do, we would love to encourage you to spread the word, grab our supporter DLCs, and watch Stationeers content creators on places like twitch and youtube. We want to keep developing this game for many years, well beyond any early access release and to do this we need your support
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/2624/Stationeers_Complete_the_Set/
A special thanks to Freeze for the extensive testing and feedback that they provided. It was more than helpful, it was essential feedback for getting this update out.
Change Log 0.2.4657.21547
Change LogWe do not filter or redact our patch notes so these patch notes include work we are doing on the rockets that are not yet available in the game.
