Hey Folks!
Update v0.15.0.32 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.
This is a hotfix update to our "Fire in the Hold" update, which addresses NPC and pilot behaviors, docking issues, and emphysema, among other things.
Saves from v0.15.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.
Non-crew NPCs are no longer allowed to target items and people on the player's ships for recreation.
NPCs now occasionally restore their physiological needs when they travel off-map.
Characters blacking out from lack of sleep can no longer use chairs.
Moving between port and residential maps with a ship docked will no longer cause that ship to be missing.
Saving the game while police are performing a shakedown will no longer cause the police to get stuck undocking and redocking in a loop.
Chronic Emphysema is no longer caused by smoke inhalation.
Save files that had emphysema effects on characters will have this condition removed.
AI pilots around Ceres should get stuck calculating targets less often now.
Clicking ship names in the social PDA app should no longer cause null errors or strange NAV UIs to appear.
Using rescue/debug docking to cross regions in space should no longer leave recurring docking fees.
Leggings that lack pockets no longer allow accessing their inventory.
Several typo fixes in game data.
Perhaps one of the more welcome changes in this patch is to NPC behavior. For a while now, we've been tracking down the various ways NPCs end up on the player ship.
In this patch, we've thwarted a case where NPCs with both airlock and disembarking permissions ended up wandering onto the player ship to talk and use the amenities. Typically, this was LEO and maintenance staff, though there could be other NPCs with such permissions set.
As of this patch, they can no longer target player ship items for recreation unless they are part of the crew.
Another issue players report is excessive sitting, and we are gradually chipping away at the behaviors that lead to this. Today's patch includes an additional blocker from sitting when the NPC is blacking out from sleep deprivation.
And while we're on that topic, NPCs now have a new trick: restoring their physiological needs when they're not on-screen! Previously, they could only do this when they were active on-screen, and would be stat-frozen when off-screen.
Now, we give them a bit of relief every time they travel around off-screen, to simulate their self-care. This should result in fewer NPCs walking around like zombies from hunger, thirst, sleep deprivation, and similar issues.
This patch also includes a batch of fixes for nulls, missing ships, and strange NAV UIs due to errors. Thank you to the players who submitted save games and repro steps to help us find and fix them!
Another issue in the game was chronic emphysema. This was meant to be much more rare, from breathing acidic atmosphere around Venus for long periods.
However, with smoke now more common, this disease was running rampant. So we dialed down the effects a bit, and applied a save patcher to remove it from anyone who got it in error.
Police ships had a save error that lost track of their shakedown progress, which could lead to looping undocks. And Ceres naval ships would get stuck in a loop when calculating their target coordinates, causing the area to be littered with stuck ships. Both of these AI bugs should be fixed now.
And while debug docking (using the drop-down in NAV to teleport) isn't technically a supported way to fly around, some players really prefer it. And using it to teleport across the map could cause the game to think you were still docked at the old station, charging more fees each shift. This should be fixed now.
Finally, some typos in leggings and posters were causing weirdness when using those items.
As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!
Best,
Daniel Fedor
Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC